A Little Learning

by J M Gregson

  At four o’clock, as the first rain began to fall from the now cloudy skies and the early November dusk moved towards darkness, the chaplain emerged from the library, turned up his collar, and strolled quickly along the path beneath the trees and past the Director’s house. There were still two police cars in front of the double garage, and plastic tape on an improvised fence, cutting off access to the house itself and the area around it.

  The Reverend Matthews took this in, but he did not stop, despite the cloak of near-darkness. He walked on, to his deserted wooden chaplaincy at the edge of the site. He climbed into his car and drove slowly home to his small modern vicarage, beside the tall, blackened stone church which was now much too big for its congregation.

  He felt safe once he had shut the door of the vicarage behind him, here in his small, modern, private world. He went into his study and picked up the phone there. He exchanged terse greetings, then said, ‘The police are still in there. There’s every sign they’ll be back tomorrow. I’m sure they won’t find anything. But the best thing you can do is to keep well away.’

  Seven

  Peach enjoyed the drive to Kendal. The M6 north of Preston becomes ever more attractive as it runs towards Scotland. Most of the heavy traffic has turned off for Manchester, Liverpool and the numerous smaller industrial towns of north-west England: the horrendous reputation of the M6 for roadworks and traffic hold-ups is confined to the area between Birmingham and Preston.

  Except for weekends, when holiday traffic pours towards the Lake District, the section which runs past Lancaster and towards the southern end of the Lakes is a pleasant drive. And all the more pleasant with Lucy Blake at your side, thought Percy contentedly. He wondered how long it would be before Tommy Bloody Tucker tumbled to what the rest of the station already knew: that Percy and Lucy were ‘an item’. Probably the silly old sod wouldn’t even have met the term yet, thought Percy Peach with satisfaction.

  He eased the Scorpio up to eighty, the speed at which he reckoned he was safe from exciting the interest of the motorway traffic police, and slid his hand over Lucy’s. A moment later, he gave her thigh an affectionate squeeze. ‘Don’t handle the goods in transit, please,’ said Lucy. ‘Keep both your hands on the wheel and both your brain cells on the matter in hand!’

  Percy thought of saying that he would have concentrated completely on the matter in hand, if only she had allowed that hand free range. Instead, he sighed and said, ‘Sound upset, did she, our Mrs Director?’

  ‘I didn’t speak to her. I spoke to her mother when I arranged our visit. She sounded very upset.’

  Mothers-in-law weren’t supposed to be upset by the death of their daughter’s spouse, thought Percy. He was sure that the mother of the woman he had divorced seven years ago would greet his own death with unabashed glee. They drove past the turnings to Blackpool and then Morecambe, Lancashire holiday towns where the seaside-postcard legend of the mother-in-law, which was now so politically incorrect, had been fostered.

  Percy favoured most things which were politically incorrect. But he liked Lucy’s mum, a sprightly, cricket-loving lady of sixty-seven, the only woman he had ever met who had recognized that the man the police service universally knew as ‘Percy’ had actually been named after the late, great Denis Charles Scott Compton, the laughing cavalier of cricket. He almost missed his motorway exit through wondering if the feisty Agnes Blake might eventually become his mother-in-law: very dangerous ground, that.

  The house they wanted was to the north of the pleasant old town of Kendal, almost in the Lake District National Park. They caught the impressive outline of the Langdale Pikes and the southern fells of Lakeland as the road climbed a knoll before dropping into a village in the shelter of the hill. The house was detached, not large but solid and foursquare, built of grey-blue Lakeland stone at the turn of the nineteenth century. The orange berries of pyracantha blazed bright against the wall by the front door.

  They had rather expected the owner of the house to admit them, but the woman who opened the door before they could even touch the bell was no older than her mid-forties. She was tall and erect, with neatly cut ash-blonde hair and a turquoise lambswool sweater above a well-cut grey skirt. She held out a hand to each of them in turn, waved aside their identification cards, and said, ‘I’m Ruth Carter. You want to see me, I believe. Please come inside.’

  Lucy Blake caught a glimpse of an older woman, smiling wanly at them from beneath dishevelled hair from the doorway of a kitchen at the end of the hall, but Mrs Carter took them into a sitting room at the front of the house without introducing them to anyone else. She said by way of information, ‘My mother now lives here on her own — my father died six years ago, only a year after they’d retired here from Manchester.’

  Lucy said, ‘I spoke to her on the phone. She sounded quite upset by what has happened. Not unnaturally.’

  Ruth Carter nodded. ‘George’s death has hit her hard. She was very fond of him.’ She paused, then added almost reluctantly, ‘He was very good to her, in his own way, was George. It’s natural she should be upset, as you say. I’d prefer it if you didn’t speak to her, unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

  Peach said, ‘I don’t see why we should bother your mother. Not at this stage, anyway.’ It implied a lot of things, that last phrase, to the attentive listener. Principal among them was the thought that if Ruth Carter cooperated as fully as she should, her mother could be left alone. ‘This is just routine, Mrs Carter. As we didn’t know your husband, we have to build up a picture of him for ourselves from those who lived their lives around him. Speed is important: that is why we have to intrude upon your grief so quickly. I apologize for that.’

  ‘There is no need. I appreciate what you have to do. I wouldn’t want to impede your work in any way.’

  ‘That’s very understanding of you. We shall be as brief as we can.’

  He’s less at his ease with middle-class women than with yobs most people would run a mile from, thought Lucy with amusement. If this wife had resisted, had given him something to bite on, he’d have been at her with his usual aggression, but he was fencing for an opening here, wondering how to get her on the back foot before he began the routine questions.

  Or perhaps she was being a little too harsh on Percy: he could be surprisingly tender-hearted when he met real suffering, though he would never have admitted it. Perhaps he was treading carefully over a widow’s pain. Except that to Lucy, Ruth Carter did not seem to be tortured with grief. Her oval face was white and strained, as you might have expected, with little or no make-up beneath the rather attractive waves of soft blonde hair. But she seemed perfectly composed as she invited them to sit on the sofa and then sat down opposite them in a heavy armchair; she was even calm enough to be watchful about her actions and her words, in Lucy’s view. But even though she was only twenty-seven, Lucy had already seen enough to know that grief took many forms, that those who displayed it most obviously were not always those who felt it most deeply.

  Ruth Carter said, ‘You mentioned that you were part of a large team when you rang, DS Blake. Am I to assume that this is now a murder inquiry?’

  It was Peach who answered her. ‘Officially we must wait for the verdict of the Coroner’s Court on that, Mrs Carter. But we believe it was murder, and we are proceeding on that assumption.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  She must surely have known. It had been included in the radio bulletins. And she would certainly have asked the WPC who came here to break the news at eight o’clock this morning for the details. ‘He was shot through the back of the head at close range.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been suicide?’

  ‘No. The angle of the shot rules that out, in my opinion and that of the doctors who examined him.’ He was carefully neutral. Most people found suicide a worse fact than murder in someone close to them, but there were no absolutes in the awful stresses brought by a sudden death. ‘I shall be able to tell you more about the type of fir
earm involved in a few days.’

  ‘It wouldn’t mean much to me. I know nothing about guns.’

  ‘Your husband didn’t possess one?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  It was an answer which revealed rather more than she intended when she made it. If she genuinely didn’t know whether or not her husband possessed a firearm, it meant at the very least that the two had some secrets from each other. Ruth Carter appeared to be careful in her replies, anxious not to give away more than she had to. But she might of course be merely numbed with shock by the suddenness of this death, feeling the first resentment at the stripping away of the layers of privacy which was now inevitable.

  ‘Had he any interest or expertise in firearms?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘And when did you last see him, Mrs Carter?’

  The blue eyes narrowed a little, making the small lines around them more noticeable. But if she realized the question registered her as a suspect in this death, she gave no sign of it. ‘When I left the house on Friday afternoon to drive up here. About two thirty, that would have been. Because George wasn’t coming with me, I was able to get away early, so as to drive here in daylight and get ahead of the weekenders. The M6 north is always busy on a Friday evening with the second-homers. Even in November.’

  Peach nodded. ‘Would your husband normally have come with you?’

  There was the faintest of hesitations before she replied, ‘Yes, more often than not he would. He liked my mother, and she him.’

  ‘And why didn’t he come with you on this occasion?’ She looked at him sharply, and he said evenly, ‘We have to piece together what happened in the last hours of his life if we are to discover exactly how he was killed; you must see that.’

  ‘He said he had too much work to do this weekend to get away.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you any idea what it was that detained him?’

  ‘No. The UEL has only been operating for fifteen months. There is a constant accumulation of small problems. Many of them are minor administrative details. But they take time.’

  She spoke as though repeating a formula, and they knew that she had used those words before, perhaps many times.

  ‘How long were you married to him, Mrs Carter?’

  ‘Twenty-three years. We met when we were students, married when I was twenty-two. He was two years older than me.’

  ‘Please understand that I have to ask this, in the case of a violent death. How happy was your marriage at the time of his death?’

  She had been picking off the routine questions swiftly and efficiently, as though ticking them off on a list of what she had expected. Now she looked angry for a moment, though she raised no objection to the question. There was an obvious effort of will as she said, ‘It was as happy as most marriages, I suppose. We had our ups and downs, like everyone else.’ It was the first cliché she had allowed herself, and a quick, unexpected flash of contempt burst into her sallow face, either at the thought itself or the lameness of her language.

  Peach said, ‘You can do better than that, I hope. Was there any serious trouble between you in these last few months? Did you have a quarrel before you left him on Friday?’

  ‘No!’ This time the denial came too quickly and too vehemently. Then Ruth Carter eased herself back a little into the armchair, forcing herself to take time. She looked like a woman who hated to display emotion, but whether this was habitual or a piece of caution applied to this particular situation they could not tell. She crossed her long legs for the first time, and Lucy Blake was surprised to see that they looked like those of a much younger woman.

  Then she folded her arms, so that they could see the slim wedding and engagement rings on the finger of her left hand, and said, ‘Look, I understand why you have to ask these questions, but I can’t be of much help. I can’t compare our marriage with others, give it some sort of rating, because you don’t know how other people are getting on unless they choose to tell you. We had been together twenty-three years, raised two children, and there was no question of a divorce. That should tell you something. We got on reasonably well — perhaps better than that.’

  And perhaps much worse, thought Percy Peach. But you’re not for telling us that. He said, ‘Did your husband seem at all disturbed when you left him?’

  ‘No. Perfectly normal. He went out of the house and back into college at two o’clock, saying that he’d see me on Monday. Things were exactly as usual, as far as I can recall.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, another unwelcome question, probably. But obviously a necessary one, in these circumstances. We need to know of any enemies your husband may have had.’

  She smiled, with a touch of real amusement. ‘My husband had made his way through the academic rat race to a post many people would covet. You make enemies along the way, inevitably.’

  ‘Serious enemies?’

  ‘More serious than the people who think we live in ivory towers would ever credit, Inspector. People who think they have a grievance can be both extremely petty and extremely vicious, at times. But I don’t know of anyone who might have nurtured enough resentment to shoot George through the head.’

  Peach nodded. ‘I may need to speak to you again, in due course. When we know rather more about the circumstances of this death.’ He tried to make it sound a little like a threat, but he was no more successful than previously in breaking through the defences of this composed, rather impressive woman.

  Lucy Blake looked up from the notes she had been taking and said quietly, ‘You say you met as students.’

  ‘Yes. We really got together when I was in my last year and George was doing an MA.’

  ‘So you probably had an academic career of your own.’

  It looked for a moment as if she would reject this line of enquiry. Then, perhaps accepting the question because it came from a woman, Ruth Carter said, ‘I did, for a few years, yes. I had a better degree than George, as a matter of fact. Then I gave up serious academic work to raise my children. Most people still did that, you know, twenty years ago.’ There was an edge of contempt, and perhaps too of regret for the years gone and the opportunities missed, as she looked at this serious-faced girl with the greenish eyes and the lustrous chestnut hair who was pursuing a career of her own.

  The reaction didn’t prevent DS Blake from persisting. ‘So you haven’t been teaching anywhere, these last few years?’

  ‘I’ve done a couple of evenings of history teaching for the WEA for several years, now. I enjoy that. Adults who are keen to learn and stuff that’s worth teaching!’ Her sudden animation made them wonder how she estimated her husband’s work and the steps he had taken to secure his elevated post. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been wondering whether to go back into a full-time post in higher education.’

  ‘Thank you. It may seem to be of no relevance to you at this stage, but we need the fullest possible picture of the household where a murder victim existed.’

  Peach stood up. ‘As I said, we shall probably need to see you again. If you think of anything which may help our investigation, however trivial, please get in touch with me immediately at Brunton CID section.’

  ‘When can I return home, Inspector?’

  He hesitated. ‘It would be best if you could leave it until Wednesday morning, if that’s possible. And — well, if you can arrange it, you should have someone with you when you go back there, I think.’

  She gave them that small, composed smile which they now knew well. ‘Thank you for thinking of that. I shall make appropriate arrangements.’

  Peach would have given quite a lot to know what they might be.

  As she took them out through the hall, the woman they had seen briefly in the doorway of the kitchen as they came into the house was waiting for them. Her face was stained with tears, her flying grey hair a contrast to her daughter’s neatly arranged ash-blonde waves as she said, ‘He was very good to me, wa
s George. Good as my own son. Make sure you get whoever did this to him, won’t you?’

  Ruth Carter, a good half a foot taller than her mother, quickly put her arm round the trembling shoulders and led her firmly away. But the picture of that distraught elderly woman stayed in both their minds as they drove back to the motorway.

  It was the only instance of raw, painful grief for the dead man they had seen so far.

  Eight

  The death of the Director of the UEL had surprisingly little immediate effect on the activities of the university. The sensational event was a source of intense speculation among the academic and other staff, but only a few found that their working day was much changed.

  The students were affected even less by the passing of a figurehead who was necessarily quite remote from their everyday life and concerns. The teaching timetable went ahead as usual on the Monday when the news of the death broke. Despite a lively interest in the comings and goings of the police, only a few of their immediate contemporaries were even aware of the part that Paul Barnes and Gary Pilkington had played in the discovery of the corpse of Dr Claptrap Carter, their sometime Director.

  There were many theories of how the great man had died, and some lurid rumours which were quite without foundation were circulating on the campus by the time that the day’s teaching finished in late afternoon. But the death did not otherwise affect the lives of the students, who had their own concerns of lectures, tutorials, lab sessions and assignments to occupy them. It was difficult to feel much grief for a man you had never known apart from his rather risible public performances.