by J M Gregson
‘You’re suggesting that his death might be sexually motivated?’
‘I’ve no idea how he died. I suppose it’s possible that sex might have had nothing to do with it. But you should bear in mind as you try to discover what sort of man he was that he was essentially homosexual.’
TEN
Whilst DS Northcott and DC Murphy were learning whatever they could from the dead man’s wife in Cheshire, two other people who had known him much more recently were discussing Alfred Norbury in the Brunton public library.
Dick Fosdyke looked up from the single note he had made on the sheet in front of him. ‘You’re not normally here on a Thursday.’
‘And a good morning to you too. Nice to see you,’ said Sharon Burgess resentfully.
‘Sorry. My mind was elsewhere and I wasn’t expecting to see you here. It’s a bit late after you’ve prompted me, but good to see you, Sharon.’ He forced a smile as he had forced her forename. He still wasn’t quite easy with that, though he couldn’t think why. Mrs Burgess was a generation older than him, but that had no bearing on such things nowadays.
‘You’ve heard?’
‘Heard what?’ He thought he knew what she was going to say, but some sort of superstition made him reluctant to voice it himself.
‘Alfred Norbury’s dead. I went round to Wellington Street before I came in here. They’ve cordoned off the area in front of his house. His car’s there, I think, but you can’t see it. It’s all screened off with canvas.’
‘He won’t be in it.’ It was out before he could stop the words. He’d no idea why he’d said it.
She looked at him curiously. ‘You didn’t know him, did you?’
‘No. Well, not before Monday night.’ He looked down at the blank sheet in front of him. ‘I think I’d heard of him. He was quite a local character, I gather.’
Sharon Burgess glanced round the library, which was busy. ‘I said I’d give them an hour, but I’m not on the official rota for today. We could go for coffee now, if you like. It would be a bit more private than here.’
She thought he would say that he needed the time for his drawing, since he didn’t seem to have made even a start on his cartoon for the day. But he said immediately, ‘Yes, let’s do that. We might need to compare notes about Alfred Norbury.’
Enid Frott had determined to be calm and get this over with quickly, but she was surprisingly nervous when she opened the door to the CID man.
‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘You’re hardly late: five minutes. Visitors rarely come at the time I suggest. Some of them even think it more polite to be a little late.’
‘But this isn’t a social call, Ms Frott. It’s more efficient to be on time, in professional matters. I expect you found that in your working life. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Peach.’
He was smaller than she would have expected, but vital, with a fringe of dark hair around a bald pate. Late thirties, she thought, although baldness usually made people look older. Not at all the sort of build and appearance she’d anticipated in a senior detective, but he seemed to exude energy and alertness as he followed her into the sitting room of her flat. He accepted her offer of coffee.
He seemed the sort of man who would genuinely take pride in being punctual. She wondered if he’d accepted coffee simply so that he could have a good look round the room where she spent so much of her life, without her present. Even if she was right, there was nothing she could do about that.
He looked at her steadily as she brought him the coffee; refused biscuits; watched her as she sat down opposite him as if her every move might be telling him something. She’d been determined to leave it to him to make the moves, but because he’d already made her nervous she heard herself saying, ‘I thought you usually operated in twos.’
‘Very often, yes. My normal sidekick is out in Cheshire, talking to the murder victim’s wife.’
‘Alfred Norbury is a murder victim?’
‘Purely my opinion, at the moment. Be confirmed officially by the end of the day. Either that or I’ll look a fool.’ He didn’t seem to feel threatened by that prospect. He stretched his legs out and inspected the highly polished toecaps of his black Oxford shoes. ‘I’m on my own because I don’t feel the need for anyone to record what you’re going to say or to provide a witness in the case of any disagreements about what we’ve said. I can come back with someone else if you don’t feel easy with that. This is an informal chat with a citizen doing her duty and providing the senior officer investigating a crime with whatever information she can.’ He beamed at her, his dark eyes as alight with mischief as those of an impish boy.
Enid made herself smile. ‘I’m quite happy to see you on your own. But why do I feel so threatened? Why do I feel as though I need to watch everything I say to you?’
He beamed as if she had accorded him great pleasure. ‘I can’t explain that, Ms Frott. It almost sounds as if you feel you have something to hide, doesn’t it? Which of course it would be my duty to investigate, as a conscientious CID officer.’
‘I’ve nothing to hide.’ She sat primly on the edge of her seat, wondering how she could feel so defensive in her own home.
‘That’s good to hear. Although I suppose I should point out that professionally nothing would give me greater satisfaction than a swift confession and a swift solution to the problems of this case. My chief superintendent, the man in charge of Brunton CID, is much preoccupied with our clear-up rates for senior crimes and very anxious that we should not fritter away public money on police overtime.’
‘Would that be Chief Superintendent Tucker?’ She was glad to throw in the name. Perhaps the fact that she had met his superior would keep this bouncy little man in check.
‘You know the man?’
‘I have a slight acquaintance with him. I have met him and his wife socially.’
He looked at her sympathetically, like a man about to offer his condolences after a tragic revelation. But he said nothing. After a pause he offered briskly, ‘I need you to tell me everything you know about Alfred Norbury. The man, his character, his habits, his friends, his enemies. Particularly his enemies, perhaps. But assume I know nothing. Treat me as the ignorant but eager policeman I am.’ He beamed at her and folded his arms, as if preparing for a long session.
‘It’s difficult for me to know where to start in response to that. I didn’t know Alfred Norbury as well as you seem to think I did.’
Again that infuriating grin, as if he knew the subtleties behind her simple words and understood everything she was trying to conceal. ‘You could start by telling me when you last saw the man who is now the subject of a post-mortem.’
He made her denials sound sinister; he was surely using everything he could to disturb her. Enid tried not to picture the body she had known, which was now on the slab – tried to thrust aside the vision of the dismemberment which might be going on at this very moment. ‘Monday night. I last saw Alfred on Monday night.’
‘As recently as that?’ The black eyebrows arched high beneath the bald head, as if her reply was evidence that she had been on far more intimate terms with a murder victim than she had so far admitted. ‘The exact time of death is still to be established, but that may be less than twenty-four hours before he was brutally killed.’ Peach inched forward on to the edge of his seat. ‘You may very well be the last person to have seen the victim alive, Ms Frott. Such people are always of great interest to us when there are suspicious deaths – but I expect you already know that.’
She tried hard to answer his irritating smile with one of her own, to show how little he was worrying her. But she found she could not do that. ‘I wasn’t alone when I saw him on Monday night.’
He looked disappointed, then nodded a couple of times. ‘Perhaps you’d better tell me all about it.’
Enid wanted to say that she’d always intended to tell him, that he wasn’t wringing the information from her unwilling lips, as his attitude seemed to imply. �
�Alfred came here along with four other people. We drank wine, exchanged views. It was a relaxed and civilized social occasion.’
‘I see. I see also certain implications. If this was a relaxed and civilized social occasion, you must all have known each other before Monday night. Was this some sort of party? Had the six of you met before on other occasions? Remember that I need to discover all that I can about a murder victim who died very shortly after you had exchanged these views and enjoyed this social exchange.’
He had her on the back foot again. It would appear that what she now had to tell him had been dragged from her unwilling lips when she would otherwise have concealed it. ‘We didn’t all know each other. Sharon Burgess and I already knew Alfred. And obviously the young man he brought here with him already knew him. As far as I know, the other two people who were present had not met Alfred before.’
‘As far as you know. I see.’ He nodded, as if committing to his memory some key revelation she had made. ‘And did your party go well?’
‘It wasn’t exactly a party. It wasn’t purely a social occasion, I suppose.’ Again she was annoyed with herself, because it came out like an admission.
‘I see. So please tell me exactly why Mr Norbury was in this room on Monday evening.’
‘We were thinking of forming a book club.’
‘A book club?’
He was like Lady Bracknell with that famous handbag. He made it sound an outrageous and highly reprehensible idea. ‘Yes. The idea is that you all read the same book and then discuss it. It’s supposed to add to the pleasures of reading.’
‘I know what a book club is, Ms Frott. My wife has even made tentative moves towards starting one and suggested to me that I should participate. I don’t think I shall do that.’
He contrived to make it seem as if she had insulted him as an idiot and yet at the same time made book clubs seem irregular and outlandish associations – something like those gatherings where people exchanged child porn materials, she thought. ‘Well that’s what it was. The first meeting of a book club. The preliminary meeting, if you like.’
‘If you like, Ms Frott. I am entirely in your hands on this. But I would appreciate it if you gave me as full an account as possible of what took place at this preliminary meeting. With special reference to Mr Norbury, for obvious reasons. We’re lucky it was so recent, aren’t we? It means that a woman with your background will have excellent recall of it.’
She wondered exactly how much of her background he knew. She wanted to ask him about that and about how he had gathered the information, but no doubt he would treat it as an evasion. She took a deep breath. ‘It was the first time we had all met together. We didn’t all know one another. A fair amount of wine was consumed. Wine helps to grease the social wheels on occasions like that.’
‘It does, doesn’t it? And one can always get a taxi home if one’s over the limit. Not too difficult, on a Monday evening.’
‘As it happened, most people lived within walking distance of here. That’s one of the advantages of living near the centre of a small town. I think only Mrs Burgess came by car, and I’m sure she was careful about her alcohol consumption.’
‘Are you, indeed? But of course you’d be in a fortunate position yourself, as host. You’d be able to drink as much as you liked and simply collapse into bed when they’d all gone.’ He stared at the wall behind her, as if speculating about the secrets of the bedroom beyond it. Then he said suddenly, as though trying to catch her out, ‘Who invited Mr Norbury to join the group?’
She should have anticipated this, she thought. But then she might have anticipated lots of things, if she’d only known that she was going to be confronted by this extraordinary man, who contrived to suggest that she was trying to deceive him at every turn, whilst remaining on the surface scrupulously polite. ‘I did.’ It came out like an admission, of course, instead of merely an innocent fact. ‘The book club was my idea in the first place, so I felt entitled to invite Alfred.’
‘Of course. So did you invite all of the people who were here on Monday night?’
‘No. The club was originally my idea, as I said, but I’d put it to Sharon Burgess and she was enthusiastic about it. So we had a preliminary meeting at her house and discussed a few names – people we thought might be suitable. It was all very tentative – neither of us had been involved in anything like this before.’
For some extraordinary reason, it came out as defensive. It was as if she was having to defend her involvement in something secret and dubious, rather than an innocent literary experiment. Peach had steepled his hands and put his fingertips together now, and was nodding slowly, as if he considered a book club highly suspicious. ‘I take it you and Mrs Burgess must be old friends.’
‘Not really.’ She sighed. ‘I used to work for her husband’s company, Burgess Electronics. I was his PA for several years. Then, when he retired, I was in charge of all the office services at the firm.’
He nodded, frowning a little, as if this competence and responsibility in her was something he had to digest and commit to memory. Then he shook his head briefly; it seemed there was something here which was still puzzling him. ‘You say you and Mrs Burgess were not friends. But you must surely have known each other for many years?’
‘Yes. I was simply saying that we weren’t close friends. We didn’t meet regularly. As a matter of fact, I hadn’t seen her for quite some time before I attended her husband’s funeral. Frank was much older than both of us.’
Had the man raised those expressive eyebrows again when she used the name Frank, or was she merely imagining all sorts of sinister things now? ‘We got on well at the reception after the funeral. That’s when I mentioned my idea of a book club. Sharon was enthusiastic about it. As a matter of fact, it might never have got off the ground, if she hadn’t rung me to remind me of my suggestion a couple of weeks after the funeral.’
‘So you met at her house to discuss how to begin.’
‘Yes. Neither of us had been members of book clubs before, so we wanted to compare our thoughts on how to proceed. It was pretty straightforward really, as far as that went. We decided that we would meet about once a month and that, once we were established, any suggestions for additional members should be approved by everyone. But obviously to get the thing going, Sharon and I had to decide who our first members were going to be. We were quite relaxed about it.’
She remembered that strange, spiky meeting at the Burgess house, where the two women had watched each other closely and sized each other up for the future. What would Sharon say about it, if he questioned her like this? Peach looked as if he was filing away everything she said within that remarkable head; she had no doubt that he possessed a formidable memory. ‘So you agreed on the six people who attended the first meeting on Monday night.’
‘Not quite. It wasn’t as formal as that. We agreed the date for the first meeting and one or two names. But we kept in touch by phone, so that we both knew whom we were expecting on Monday. Apart from one of the six.’
‘And who was that?’
‘A young man called Jamie Norris.’ She found that she was relieved to be able to talk about this. It would surely take the man’s intense scrutiny away from her. ‘Alfred brought him along to the meeting. The rest of us didn’t know him. But none of us objected. He seemed a pleasant young man who was interested in books and writing, and we were happy to take Alfred’s recommendation. Sharon and I had already agreed that we wanted a balance of the sexes, if we could achieve that – there are far more women than men who are interested in book clubs. And Jamie was young: we’d agreed also that we wanted a healthy mixture of young and old, because we thought we’d get livelier discussions that way.’
She was talking too much. Perhaps that came from the simple relief of diverting attention away from herself. She expected Peach to pursue the matter of this rather strange young man who had turned up without warning alongside the man who was now dead. When he didn’t offer any q
uestions, she blurted out, ‘I think Norris was a protégé of Alfred’s. Mr Norbury liked to foster creativity.’
Peach nodded. She expected him to enquire about how Norbury sponsored and attempted to develop young talent. Instead, he said, ‘You said earlier that it was you who invited Alfred Norbury to be part of the group. Why did you want him there?’
‘Because I thought he would be an interesting and stimulating member of our group.’
‘I see. What kind of man was he?’
She forced a smile, trying to simulate a calm which she had long since ceased to feel. ‘I used the word “stimulating” and I think everyone who knew Alfred would accept that. He could also be abrasive – well, downright rude at times, I suppose. But I was prepared to take that and I convinced Sharon Burgess that we should have him.’
‘She knew him?’
‘Yes. We all go back quite a long way. Neither of us had ever been a bosom pal of Alfred’s but we both knew he was well-read and would provide us with some interesting ideas. Some outrageous ones too, no doubt, but that would be part of the fun. In my view, you need people like Alfred in a group to get things going.’
He leant forward in what was almost a tiny bow towards her. ‘I might like to be in a group set up by you, Ms Frott. I don’t think it would ever be uninteresting.
She managed a rather melancholy smile of acknowledgement. ‘Thank you. I don’t think the one we initiated on Monday night will be going anywhere now.’
‘I expect I shall meet all of the surviving members in the next day or two. Unless we have a quick solution, that is. Which of them do you think might have killed Mr Norbury?’
