Mortal Taste

by J M Gregson

  ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt. Good old F.D.R. Bit of a lad himself, you know, old F.D.R. was. Got things done, though, didn’t he?’

  The last phrase rang ominously in his head. He decided to ignore it. ‘What do I say when they question me?’

  ‘Just play it straight. Tell them nothing. They’ve no reason to suspect you of murder, have they?’

  ‘No, I suppose not. But where do I say I was on Monday night when he was being killed?’

  ‘There you go already, saying more than you need to say. How do you know he was killed on Monday night?’

  ‘The paper said so, I think.’

  ‘You think? Hell, that’s no good! Just don’t give anything away. Let them make the statements, give you the information. You say yes, no, I don’t know. Play schtum. Hell, it’s easy enough, isn’t it?’

  ‘It sounds it, when you put it like that. But you’re not going to be in the hot seat, are you?’

  ‘And neither are you. You mustn’t even think of it like that. You’re just one of fifty-odd members of the teaching staff being routinely questioned. The more boring you can make it, the less you’ll stand out and the quicker they’ll give up.’

  ‘All right. I’ll do my best.’

  ‘You’ll do more than that. You’ll make sure they think there’s nothing worth following up.’ The threat in the voice was unmistakable now as it tried to stiffen the resolve of the listener. ‘There’s more than you will suffer, you know, if they get interested in our activities. And some of us wouldn’t be very pleased with you if you let us down.’

  ‘All right.’ He stopped himself just in time from saying again that he would do his best. He was suddenly anxious to terminate the conversation he had initiated himself. ‘As you say, it shouldn’t be too difficult, if I’m careful.’

  ‘Don’t get too clever. Don’t try to send them down false trails. You’d like to be helpful, but you know nothing.’

  The voice was itself suddenly worried, anxious to guide him along the paths which would keep all of them out of trouble. But it was too late for that. He had had all the advice he could take. He made a hurried thanks and rang off.

  He looked stupidly at the phone for a full minute. He still hadn’t solved the problem of what he was going to say if the police asked where he’d been on Monday night. Nevertheless, he should be safe enough, if he was careful, he told himself unconvincingly.

  He would need to be at his most alert tomorrow. But he wondered whether he could risk two of his sleeping pills tonight.

  Nine

  There was a fulsome obituary of Peter Logan in The Times on Thursday morning. In the past, that august organ had noted the passing of head teachers only when they had reigned in the great private schools of the land. Now, rejoicing in his new egalitarian clothes, the Times writer eulogized the contribution Peter Logan had made to the enrichment of thousands of Gloucestershire lives.

  . . . No one had heard of Cheltenham’s Greenwood Comprehensive school when Peter Logan went there ten years ago. Operating almost in the shadow of two great and famous private educational institutions, Logan set about building up a school which would embody all that was best in modern education.

  His guiding principle was the simple but noble one of enabling each child that came into his school to develop fully whatever potential lay within him or her. Sometimes that potential would be obvious, sometimes it would have to be discovered by sensitive teachers and carefully nurtured.

  The result of this philosophy was that the achievements of many of Greenwood’s pupils surprised their teachers, their fond parents, and not least themselves. When Logan took over, his school was in effect one of those secondary modern schools which have been given a slightly wider intake area and designated a comprehensive. It had some 400 pupils, none of whom stayed on beyond the age of sixteen. A small number transferred after GCSEs to a sixth-form college or into further education.

  Logan lobbied for and secured his own sixth form. Last year well over a hundred of Greenwood’s leavers went into higher education. The school’s sixth form now has over 200 members pursuing a vast range of courses. It has risen from obscurity to become a national model for secondary school development. Unlike some educationists, Logan welcomed the advent of the controversial ‘league tables’ to measure the progress of schools, and saw his beloved Greenwood rise steadily towards the top layers of achievement . . .

  There was much more in the same vein, but little which gave Lambert, reading the piece over his early breakfast, any clue to those darker elements of human existence which might have brought Logan close to the violence which had so abruptly terminated this life of achievement. Apart from the initial brief account of Logan’s humble childhood and student career, the obituary was a record of public achievement rather than of private strengths and frailties. That was how these things should be, he supposed gloomily, but it wasn’t a lot of help to policemen who had never known the man.

  He took his mug of tea out into the garden, wandering round the roses and the last of the dahlias, scarcely seeing the blooms he had been watching so closely last week, before Logan’s death had pitched him into the world of education, of which he felt he knew so little.

  He said as much to Christine when he went back into the bungalow. ‘You know more than most,’ she grinned at him. ‘You’ve heard me moaning enough about class sizes over the last few years.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell me what his staff thought about Peter Logan.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘No doubt they bitched about him in private. The great man taking all the plaudits whilst they did all the work. The man at the top more concerned with public relations than with the problems of his staff. Talking expansively about the school to people outside whilst ignoring the fact that three of his staff were on maternity leave and the supply teachers weren’t up to it. That sort of thing.’

  It sounded so like the police world that he knew that it cheered him a little. People were much the same, wherever they worked, and he had got to know quite a lot about people in the last thirty years. Perhaps it was the seamier side of human nature that he had explored most thoroughly, but that was the side he would need now, if he was to answer the Times leader’s plea for ‘justice for this educational hero cut down in his prime.’

  He was reassured to find that the machinery of the investigation was humming busily when he got into the CID section at Oldford. DI Chris Rushton was already feeding a steady stream of information into his computer. Six officers would be taking preliminary statements in the school throughout the day. Uniformed officers had already on the previous evening begun a house to house inquiry in the streets around the park where Logan had died. The full PM report would be delivered within the hour.

  Although his natural inclination was to be out and about, Lambert was cheered a little just to be at the centre of things for a few minutes. Somewhere from this mass of information and ant-like activity something significant must surely emerge.

  Dennis Ingram, the Conference Organizer at the University of Birmingham, led an exacting but rather dull life. The variations in his working day were not normally exciting ones. His work did not demand a vivid imagination. So when his personal assistant told him that there was a policeman wanting to speak to him urgently, he nodded resignedly, seeing this as just another chore to be added to an already crowded day.

  When he found that he was a part, however peripheral, of a murder investigation, Dennis was secretly delighted. Even in an increasingly violent world, the word ‘murder’ still carries a unique, grisly glamour. To be questioned about the movements of a man who had given an address to the great and the good in education in the main conference room at the beginning of the week gave a frisson of excitement to a humdrum Thursday morning. Especially now that he knew that the man had never reached home on that Monday evening.

  He was a little disappointed in the representative of the law sent to see him, a stolid man with a weather-beaten country face who introduced himse
lf as Detective Sergeant Hook. Perhaps this was a man more used to putting nervous interviewees at their ease than generating excitement, Dennis thought, as Hook took him calmly through an account of the previous Monday’s conference which made it seem very pedestrian.

  It was the questioning at the end of this, where Hook concentrated upon the central figure in the investigation, which made Dennis think later that he might after all have contributed something to the case.

  ‘So you were at the back of the hall throughout Mr Logan’s morning address to the conference members?’ said Hook when he had a picture of the day.

  ‘I popped in and out at the back of the hall, actually. I wanted to check that the arrangements for lunch were running smoothly. But I was there for most of Mr Logan’s address. “Trends in Secondary Education” was the title. I found it quite interesting, really, because he was a very good speaker.’

  ‘And did he seem at all nervous? I’m thinking of before and after the lecture, rather than during the actual address.’

  ‘No. I met him when he arrived and showed him to the rooms we were using, and I mingled with the conference members when they had a glass of wine before lunch. He seemed happy and outgoing on both occasions – certainly not nervous.’ Ingram delivered his phrases with a prim precision, as if he was choosing his words carefully for a court of law; perhaps that is what he envisaged as the eventual outcome of this.

  ‘And you say you didn’t see him during the afternoon.’

  ‘No. Most of that was spent in small groups, discussing issues raised earlier in the day. Then the conference members came back together for a plenary session at four fifteen, after a break for a cup of tea. I didn’t see Mr Logan at all during the afternoon. But I saw him before it began.’ Dennis produced the information with a modest flourish; he had been waiting for this moment.

  Hook didn’t mind people playing up the drama a little, so long as they told all they knew. He asked patiently, ‘Before the afternoon sessions?’

  ‘Yes. I was relaxing after lunch; to tell you the truth, I was rather relieved that everything seemed to be going so well. I went out into the gardens behind the dining room for a breath of fresh air. It was a bright day for late September, and I sat down for a couple of minutes on one of the benches. I remember thinking that we wouldn’t get many more opportunities this year to sit in a warm sun.’

  ‘And that is when you spoke to Mr Logan?’

  ‘I didn’t actually speak to him, no.’ Ingram’s disappointment was evident in his face. ‘He was at the other side of the gardens and I don’t think he even noticed me. But I did see what he was doing.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He made a call on his mobile phone. We don’t permit the use of them in the conference centre, but people often slip outside to use them.’

  ‘Did you hear what he said?’

  Ingram was torn between being aghast that someone would even consider that he might eavesdrop and mortification that he could not offer key evidence in a murder hunt.

  Mortification won. He said, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear anything he said. As I said, he was at the other side of the gardens.’

  ‘Did he make one call or several?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  Hook made a note of that in his clear, round hand. Probably just a routine call in a busy headmaster’s day. But it would have been interesting to know to whom Logan had been speaking. The school hadn’t had a call from him, and Jane Logan hadn’t mentioned any calls from her husband during their brief meeting with her last night. ‘And you didn’t see him again during the day?’

  ‘No. Well, not until the conference was over, anyway.’

  Hook concealed his irritation. ‘But you talked with him then?’

  ‘No. It was in the evening. The rest of my staff had gone home, but we had another, smaller gathering in the Conference Centre the next day. I was just checking that everything was in place as it should be before I went home.’

  Hook nodded. ‘Anal’ they called it nowadays; twenty years and more ago, when he had joined the police service, it would have been ‘conscientious’. ‘So what time would this be?’

  ‘Ten to seven.’ The reply came promptly: Ingram had suddenly realized that he might have been almost the last person to see Peter Logan alive. He could see himself making this statement in a crowded court.

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No. I waved to him across the car park, that was all. He was getting into his car as I came out. I followed him out in my own car and drove behind him until our routes diverged.’

  ‘Do you think he was going somewhere local?’

  ‘No. He was within a mile of the M5 when I turned off. I expect he’d let the rush-hour traffic get away before he left. He’d have been back home in Cheltenham by eight to half past.’

  Except he wasn’t, thought Bert Hook. And his wife hadn’t been expecting him until ten thirty or eleven. Or so she said.

  Superintendent Lambert wasn’t in the station when the man asked to speak to him. But as soon as he claimed he knew something about the death of Peter Logan, he was ushered straight in to see Detective Inspector Rushton. Murder opens doors faster than a skeleton key.

  He was about thirty, with hair which he seemed to have forgotten to comb and clothes which made him look as if he had been dressed by a mother with other things on her mind. He had a wild look in his eye, which made Chris Rushton fear the worst; this could be one of those weirdos whom every high-profile murder brings into police stations up and down the land. He was almost certainly on drugs; he would probably be confessing in the next five minutes.

  Chris decided to interview him in the open CID section, with other officers coming and going around them. It would be easier to get rid of him from here than from an interview room when he proved a useless distraction from the business in hand. And there is always a possibility that nutters will turn violent when they sense you aren’t taking them seriously.

  Whilst Rushton’s spirit sank within him, he was icily polite on the surface. ‘I’m told you have information connected with the death of Peter Logan. We are grateful for anything the public can offer, at this early stage of the investigation. But you will appreciate how busy we are.’ He gestured vaguely at the hum of activity around him, and received a gratifying nod of acceptance from the man in front of him. ‘You’d better sit down for a moment.’

  ‘It won’t take long. I thought you ought to know.’

  Chris pulled a pad out in front of him. He normally worked straight on to a computer now, but people like this were often quelled by a blank sheet of paper, by the sight of their wilder ramblings being recorded and preserved. ‘Name?’

  ‘Darcy. Darcy Simpson.’ He watched Rushton hesitate over the first name and said, ‘I don’t usually bother with any apostrophes. It’s my mother’s fault, you see. She was a Jane Austen fan.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  The mobile, too expressive features registered disappointment, then confusion. ‘Nothing, at the moment, I suppose. I worked on a building site, last month.’ Darcy Simpson looked at the inspector to see if he was impressed by that, as he obviously was himself. ‘I trained as a teacher of art, taught in a school for a while. But that’s years ago now.’ He gazed unseeingly at the wall behind Rushton, as if he saw for a moment another man in another life.

  Rushton took down a few more details. At least he had an address. Rushton told him not to leave it without letting them know where he was going. Might as well play it by the book. Chris was a great one for the police book: it had elevated him to an Inspector’s rank when he was scarcely past thirty, though he suspected it had cost him his marriage at the same time.

  The routine of detection said that at this stage of a case you had to consider the unlikely as carefully as the probable. It was still possible DI Rushton would prove to be the officer who had drawn out the key information in the case from this man, the officer who had spotted the possibilities in an unlikely so
urce. He finished his writing at the bottom of the sheet and looked up again at the unpromising figure in front of him. Only just possible.

  ‘So you think you can help us find who killed Mr Peter Logan. You knew him, did you?’

  ‘No, I never met him.’

  Rushton’s faint hopes fell still further. ‘Mr Simpson, we’re really very busy with this investigation—’

  ‘But I know someone on his staff. Someone who teaches there.’

  ‘There are over fifty teachers at Greenwood Comprehensive School. Unless you’ve got good reason to think that—’

  ‘Tamsin Phillips. Teaches history. I used to live with her.’ Simpson was becoming more and more excited.

  Rushton wondered how he was going to calm him, then get rid of him. Other officers were already watching them curiously. He wasn’t good with nutters, never had been. Perhaps he should have chosen somewhere more private for this exchange, after all. He tried to find a soothing tone. ‘That is very interesting, I’m sure, but I fail to see that it has any bearing on—’

  ‘I think she killed him. Tamsin Phillips.’ His eyes flashed wildly.

  ‘Now that is a very serious accusation to make, Mr Simpson. Darcy. I think you should consider—’

  ‘She’s been carrying on with him, you know. With Logan. They’ve been at it for months.’

  Chris Rushton’s interest quickened a little, despite himself. ‘This is a very serious accusation to make, Darcy. And unless you think it has any bearing on Mr Logan’s death, you shouldn’t really—’

  ‘She’s well capable of violence, Tamsin Phillips is. Well capable of killing, when she’s roused.’

  ‘Really? Well, my advice to you—’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you? Well let me tell you, years ago, she did this to me!’ He leapt from his chair and pulled his shirt up with both hands, until it almost obscured his excited face.

  But it wasn’t Darcy Simpson’s face that DI Rushton and the rest of the people in the CID section at that moment were looking at. It was the livid purple knife scar extending from the centre of his chest to the left side of his abdomen.