Murder at the Nineteenth (Lambert and Hook Detective series Book 1)

by J M Gregson

  Chapter 5

  Lambert put down the phone slowly and stared at the Secretary’s neatly written list of the Committee of Burnham Cross Golf Club. Was it really possible that the murderer had been so obliging as to leave a thumb-print on the handle of his chosen weapon? It would be scarcely less surprising than the perpetration of a killing by one of these highly respectable people.

  ‘I suppose we now have to presume our murderer is definitely one of these five,’ he said to Hook. The names stared up mockingly at him, each seeming equally impossible.

  ‘I’d be as certain of that as it’s possible to be of anything outside a family killing,’ said his Sergeant with some relish. He produced his notebook but scarcely needed to refer to it. ‘The Steward and his wife we’ve already eliminated. The only other people who live on the premises are George Dawson, the Head Greenkeeper, and his wife. They were out for the whole evening visiting friends. I’ve checked the friends out. There were two other couples there as well. Both of them have been contacted by phone and confirm the Dawsons’ presence until around midnight. The house they visited is six miles away; neither of them left the lounge for more than five minutes.’

  Something stirred in Lambert’s memory. Last night, and particularly the period before he discovered the murder, seemed now a long time away, but he dredged it up. ‘There was a light in the Dawsons’ house when I went round the back of the club at about 10.45,’ he said, ‘I remember seeing it put off.’

  ‘Time-switch,’ said Bert Hook, his broad face flickering for a moment with the pleasure of virtue unexpectedly exposed. ‘I’ve been in and seen it. Apparently the Club bought three of them last year to protect club property after break-ins. As you might expect, one has found its way to the Dawsons’ house by now.’

  Lambert looked down again at what he must now consider his list of suspects. ‘Two people on the Committee were missing last night. Len Jackson and Douglas Jordan. Better check them out.’

  Now Hook’s face glowed, his lips broadened in what in a lesser man might have been smugness. ‘Jordan is safely in Brazil, and telexed in from there last night to prove it. Jackson I haven’t yet located, but he was away from home on business in the Midlands. We’ve got the name of his hotel and Spencer’s checking it out now.’

  Lambert knew Len Jackson quite well. He was a quiet, rather intense man who took a lot of getting to know but repaid the trouble. He had a dry sense of humour, a lot of common sense and a refreshing tendency to see the best in people. Lambert had been surprised but delighted to see this rather retiring man installed as Chairman of the Greens Committee. It was scarcely the make-up of a killer; Lambert would be glad to see him eliminated from the periphery of the inquiry. But then who among these exemplary citizens on the list before him would have the temperament of a murderer? It was high time he began to find out.

  As if in response to this thought, there came a sharp rapping on the door of the Committee Room. It was precisely ten o’clock, and Colonel Parsons, Secretary of Burnham Cross Golf Club, presented himself for interview at the appointed time with a punctuality born of decades of military life. He stood erect and confident now, his equanimity restored as Lambert had anticipated by the activity on which he thrived. The Superintendent had done everything possible to make Parsons feel a stranger in the familiar oak-lined room which he had entered for one reason or another on most days in the last four years. The stenographer, examining his pencils at the special small table on one side, scarcely glanced up. The two detectives looked friendly enough, but their formal upright postures and the blank white pads in front of them were reminders that they were about their business. The Secretary seated himself a little awkwardly opposite the man he had known until now as an amiable member and a useful member of the Greens Committee The six feet of oak table which stretched between them marked a new, regulated relationship in which he was the stranger.

  Lambert saw a man used to command, to a brisk despatch of routine business, now a little awkward in a situation where he had to wait for others to make the running. Parsons had had a busy morning, dealing with golf club staff adapting to an emergency and acting as unofficial police secretary. In the face framed by greying temples, the colour had been largely restored; although Parsons still looked tired, it was possible again to deduce from the depth of tan that this was a man who had spent many years out of England and in less temperate climes.

  In an era of informal dress and drip-dry convenience, Parsons maintained a standard which was not that of his own generation but the one before that. Under the lightweight grey suit his shirt was stiffly starched, his grey and red tie had a small, neat knot. The heat, which had already caused Lambert and Hook to drape their discarded jackets over the backs of chairs, had merely prompted Parsons to forgo the waistcoat he wore for most of the year. A small gold tie-pin flouted the modern fashion; matching gold cufflinks gleamed as he folded his arms. Lambert should have felt at an advantage with his informal, comfortable dress and posture; instead, he felt uncomfortable, as if he were about to be reprimanded for his presumption in discarding his jacket. This room, with its overtones of ’thirties stiffness, and the unmistakably military presence opposite him cast him back a quarter of a century to his National Service days, so that he had to resist an impulse to check the fastening of his shirt buttons.

  He had been surprised to notice as Parsons came in that he wore suede shoes, as if making a concession not to the fashion of the day but to that of perhaps five years previously. Yet these clothes, Lambert felt suddenly, were worn almost like a uniform, as a defence against a world which demanded individuality: this was a man who had practised for thirty years the virtues of disciplined anonymity within a system which took care of its acolytes.

  For the man within this sartorial conformity was less certain of himself than his dress implied. The well-manicured hands which emerged from those immaculate white cuffs trembled slightly; Lambert let his glance dwell upon them, and Parsons withdrew them awkwardly to his lap beneath the table’s edge. The tired grey eyes were sunk deep within the tanned face, their pouches hinting at hours of worry. They met but could not hold Lambert’s gaze, darted from him to the impassive Hook, to the pads in front of these quiet, patient men.

  ‘Colonel Parsons — by the way, you still use the military title?’ said Lambert.

  ‘The Chairman likes — liked — me to use it.’ There was a flicker of a grim, nervous smile at the correction, a quick glance at the chalk outline to his right which lay like a gross cartoon upon the parquet floor. ‘He mentioned it when I was appointed and put it on the club notepaper. Of course, to the members I’m just David, and I never ask for the title. Breweries and bank managers seem to like it. My wife says our daily help loves to use it …’

  He was going on too long, a shade too apologetically, about what had been little more than an aside from Lambert. Probably it was no more than a normal nervous reaction: people often talked too much when put under the police microscope. But there might just be something here; out of the corner of his eye Lambert saw Hook make a brief note on his virgin pad. He noticed with amusement that all Hook had written was Parsons’s full name: he had merely noted the nervous pulse which Lambert himself had caught and chosen to stress it a little by a pretended note, this wily old fox in stolid policeman’s clothes. Parsons caught the movement as he was meant to, and Lambert saw a fleeting anxiety in those too-mobile grey eyes. He would return to military matters later in the interview.

  ‘Right, David,’ he resumed. ‘You will understand how important it is that we get from you every detail you can recall of the events surrounding this murder. It’s particularly vital that you give us the fullest possible picture of your own movements and those of everyone else with whom you had any contact in the period following the end of last night’s meeting.’

  ‘Of course.’ The phrase did not come as clearly as the Secretary intended and he cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘I don’t know how much you know of
the evidence we have gathered already, last night and this morning. It has been mostly routine work, but successful in so far as it has eliminated many people as possible suspects. I should tell you, I think, that it now looks almost certain that Mr Shepherd’s murderer is one of the five people who sat round this table with him last night.’

  Parsons gave a little start of excitement, a shudder of horror, at the disclosure. He must have expected it, but this was a normal reaction. For all his experience, Lambert himself had felt the same frisson of excitement at the realization. Within the invisible lines of social interchange, he knew these five people tolerably well. One of them had hidden the black night of the soul under a friendly exterior and stabbed a defenceless man with the violent energy of hatred. He pressed on with the interview. ‘Now. The meeting broke up at what time last night?’

  ‘9.50. I noted it. Time for one quick one before the bar shut at ten.’

  ‘Think carefully. What happened after that is crucial. Who left the room first? In particular, when did the Chairman leave and where did he go?’ Lambert expected the Secretary to pause and reflect, but Parsons needed no time to tease out an answer from his memory: he had obviously anticipated the question.

  ‘Mary Hartford and Debbie Hall disappeared together. Presumably to the ladies’ locker-room, because they came into the bar — separately — about five minutes later.’

  ‘You say separately. Who arrived first?’

  ‘Debbie Hall.’

  ‘And how long after her did Mary Hartford appear?’

  ‘About two minutes.’ Again no hesitation. Lambert fancied the Secretary was shrewd enough to appreciate the implications. It seemed each of the women had had enough time alone to commit the killing. But then to come to the bar and behave normally amidst the innocent?

  ‘You will understand that I have to ask you the kind of question I now put to you. Indeed, I shall ask it of others in relation to you. Now, would you say from your previous knowledge that both of these ladies were behaving normally in that short period in the bar?’

  For the first time in this series of questions there was a pause. Quite an interval; long enough for Hook to look up from his notes and join Lambert in his study of Parsons’s long, lined face.

  ‘My knowledge of the female psyche isn’t extensive enough to be confident about what would be normal.’ The little joke didn’t come off, the nervous giggle fell false into the intense seriousness of the room. ‘Perhaps Debbie Hall was a little more talkative than usual. But then Debbie’s always … lively.’ His searching for the word made it sound an insult.

  ‘And Mary Hartford?’ prompted Lambert. Again the interlocutors waited unhelpfully, far too experienced to relieve embarrassment with reassuring small-talk: a man might reveal more about himself as well as others if this kind of stress was maintained.

  ‘She was quiet. Very quiet, I suppose. Just said yes or no if anyone spoke to her. But you can’t think she …’ The voice faltered away into silence as his listeners assessed him and his thoughts.

  ‘We certainly shan’t be forming any conclusions at the moment.’ Lambert spoke only when it was apparent that Parsons was not going to go on without prompting. ‘What about the rest of the Committee?’

  Parsons looked like a man back on ground he had prepared. ‘Michael Taylor and Bill Birch picked up their papers and left as soon as we had finished,’ he said. ‘Whether they went to the Gents’ or the bar I wouldn’t know, but they were in the bar by the time I arrived, because as Captain and Vice-Captain they were talking about first team matches.’ Lambert nodded and looked down at his list. Needlessly, for he knew perfectly well that only Parsons himself had not been covered, but he wanted to give the Secretary time to volunteer any further, unprompted thoughts on Taylor and Birch. None came.

  ‘And you?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I checked through my notes of the meeting to make sure I had everything needed for the minutes — I don’t take shorthand. Then I went to the bar.’

  ‘How long was that after the end of the meeting?’

  ‘It’s difficult to be precise. Three minutes. Four at the outside.’ Pretty precise, thought Lambert, for a man who had no idea then that precise timing would be important. But Parsons had spent thirty years of military life developing habits of precision.

  ‘What about the deceased?’ he asked heavily.

  ‘The Chairman went and opened the wall-safe and seemed to be checking some papers in there. He was still at the safe when I left.’

  ‘You had no conversation with him?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  Parsons’s reply came just too quickly, was just too clipped and insistent, to tone with his previous responses. Suddenly he was defensive, obstinate rather than helpful as he had been thus far. Neither of them had referred to James Shepherd by name. Lambert had lapsed into the quasi-legal ‘the deceased’ and Parsons had retreated behind ‘the Chairman’. Shepherd’s heavy, dominating personality was being diminished to anonymity. Or perhaps both were concealing a dislike which could no longer be expressed with decency. Parsons must have felt this sudden shift in atmosphere as they arrived at his own relationship with the Chairman. Even as Lambert wrote ‘Probably disliked Shepherd’ as his first note beneath the Secretary’s name, Parsons felt compelled to fill the uneasy pause with a confession.

  ‘The Chairman and I didn’t get on so well. He appointed me four years ago and I think he was satisfied with my work. But we didn’t talk much, except about the business of the Club of course …’ He petered out lamely, as if aware of the danger of moving from saying too little to saying too much. ‘You appear, then, to have been the last person to see James Shepherd alive,’ said Lambert. He enunciated it like a formal charge, allowing the implications to sink into the context of Parsons’s expressed dislike for his Chairman. On this occasion he won no trick in the macabre little game of cat and mouse. Perhaps Parsons had been awaiting the expression of this thought.

  ‘Apart of course from his murderer!’ he said evenly.

  Lambert afforded him a grim little smile, as if acknowledging his nerve. ‘The murder weapon,’ he went on. ‘Had you seen it before?’

  ‘What was the murder weapon?’ asked the Secretary steadily. Lambert realized that he could not have seen the knife used to kill Shepherd — unless of course he had used it himself. ‘Sorry, David, that wasn’t supposed to be a trap. It was, in the pathologist’s description, “a heavy knife, probably military in origin”, and it had a seven-inch blade.’

  ‘That would be Mr Shepherd’s own instrument. He always had it laid out before him at our main Committee and other meetings, along with pen and paper. As a paper-knife, I suppose.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t need a paper-knife during meetings.’

  ‘He didn’t need the other things either. The Secretary takes the minutes. My impression was that he used these things when he chaired his Company meetings, and thought them part of a Chairman’s equipment. Susan or I always laid them out ready for him when there was a meeting of the full Committee.’

  ‘Where was the knife kept, then?’

  ‘In the drawer beneath the table with the pen and ink stand.’

  Lambert took Parsons through the rest of his movements after the meeting. After they had all met up for drinks in the bar, he had gone briefly back to his office, provided some statistics for Michael Taylor, and left the club at the same time as the Captain. He thought Bill Birch, who had seen him leave his office, would vouch for this.

  Lambert explained that he would be checking out this account with the recollections of the other Committee members. ‘But you would understand that,’ he said, leaning back with the air of one about to conclude a routine working exchange. ‘You must have had some experience of courts martial yourself in your army years, so you will appreciate the need for meticulous cross-checking of evidence.’

  It was merely a means of returning to the area he had decided to probe earlier in the interview. It produced a react
ion that was quite unexpected. Parsons’s eyes blazed wide and astonished; the tight, thin-lipped mouth lurched briefly open. Lambert was already watching his man, but Bert Hook and even the stenographer at the other end of the room looked up involuntarily as they caught the Secretary’s sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Parsons. His voice was harsh, forced through lips which quivered with excitement and fear. Across the big table, questioner and witness stared at each other for a moment with open hostility. Lambert was surprised by the strength of his own reaction to the enmity blazing suddenly opposite him.

  ‘I merely meant, Colonel Parsons —’ how far away seemed the ‘David’ he had used successfully earlier — ‘that you must almost certainly have appeared as a witness, perhaps even as defending or prosecuting officer, in at least one and probably several military trials. As the procedures used for gathering and presenting evidence are similar to those used by the civil police, you might be expected to be familiar with those procedures, and to understand the kind of evidence we have to gather.’ It was heavy-handed, even pompous, but intentionally so, as an attempt to sting Parsons into revelation.

  The Secretary glared at him for a moment as if challenging his honesty, then dropped his eyes to the table. There was something here; Lambert moved in quickly. ‘What did you think I meant?’ he challenged.

  Parsons said nothing. He stared at the table in front of him for what seemed a long time. The watchers saw that the hands which met in front of him gripped each other very hard, for the knuckles were a glossy white. Lambert thought, ‘Come on, you poor sod. There’s no way we’re going to make it easy for you. You’re going to speak first,’ and tried not to enjoy the sickly excitement of the tension.

  Parsons eventually raised his eyes and tried to look steadily at the Superintendent. His eyes flickered briefly to the impassive but equally implacable Hook, then back to the table. He had to make two attempts to speak, for the words stuck in a dry throat the first time.