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

by J M Gregson

  ‘Nothing,’ he said dully. ‘I misunderstood you for a moment, that’s all.’ There was another pause. Far away in the men’s bar, a clock chimed, faint but regular.

  ‘Then I think you should tell us what you thought I meant,’ said Lambert quietly. Parsons shook his head. The thin lips were pale, but they stuck out in a surly pout; the grey eyes stared straight ahead. But for his breathing, which was still not quite controlled, the Secretary might have become a statue. Lambert, studying him closely, recognized the sullen obstinacy usually met only in the very young and the very old. At this moment, the most reasoned argument was going to batter in vain against a closed mind. It was a response to stress he had met before. He would return again to the raw nerve he had touched, but at this moment he would get nothing.

  He looked at his watch. 10.50. He had arranged to see Mary Hartford at eleven, during a break in her hospital duties. ‘Well, David, we’ll certainly need to talk further,’ he said.

  Whether or not it was meant as a dismissal, Parsons was only too ready to take it as one. His chair squealed back on the parquet floor and he was on his feet before he spoke. ‘I’ll be here,’ was all he said. His attempt at a smile as he went through the door was not a success.

  ‘Not like you to let him away at that point,’ Bert Hook said accusingly when they were alone. He had caught the scent of secrets as strongly as his chief.

  ‘He wasn’t for telling us any more, even if it had been in his own interests. And I have to see Mary Hartford,’ said Lambert, getting up.

  ‘And military records are easily available to a Super, pursuing a murder inquiry,’ said Hook.

  ‘Precisely. Put a call through to Army Records on my behalf and ask for his dossier. Must dash now.’

  He was preparing to face the oven heat of his own car when Hook came running into the car park, a sight which would have arrested even a less perceptive man than his Superintendent.

  ‘Call from CID section,’ panted the Sergeant. ‘Len Jackson, your Greens Committee Chairman. He wasn’t at the hotel in Nottingham where he said he’d be last night. And he hasn’t arrived at the firm he was supposed to visit this morning. Len Jackson has disappeared.’

  Chapter 6

  If Lambert felt a little nervous as he pulled up at Mary Hartford’s gate, it was not professional indecision. It was merely the wholly proper trepidation induced in the breast of any ordinary golfer about to interview a woman visited with the title of Lady Captain.

  Cherry Cottage was as trim and well presented as its owner. The flowering cherry at the gate which gave it its name was at the end of its spring glory, so that pink blossom lay as thickly upon the ground as upon its branches. Nothing else in the front garden was more than four feet high, save for the roses and clematis that climbed about the mellow brick of the cottage itself. Lambert’s swift but expert survey could nowhere find a weed, and the small lawns were so neatly edged that they might have been cut with scissors.

  The subject of his visit was waiting for him under the tiled porch, watching his appreciation of her garden with amused pride. ‘It’s not always like that,’ she called, tactfully announcing her presence to a trained eye that had in fact already noted it. ‘Old Fred was here yesterday. Nowadays I only tend the things I like. I thought we’d have coffee in the garden. It’s such a glorious morning and I shall be indoors for the rest of the day. And we shall be quite private enough for you to grill me unmercifully.’

  She led the way to a table dappled with the shade of an old apple tree in the rear garden, where a coffee pot and cups were already set. Perhaps she was used to having to put people at their ease. Only golfers might be intimidated by her Captaincy, but everyone tended to be in awe of Matron. Or Chief Nursing Officer, as he must now remember to call her.

  ‘Well, this is nice,’ he said conventionally, as he settled into his seat and watched her pour. It was.

  ‘But it’s taken an event like last night’s to bring you here,’ she said shrewdly, reminding him where he did not need reminding of the serious purpose of this meeting.

  Mary Hartford was not a woman to be caught off guard. Her hand was rock-steady as she handed him the china cup and saucer. Her soft dark hair was unflecked by grey; Lambert, a novice in such matters, thought it was not dyed. Not for the first time when interviewing a woman, he wished he could have his wife’s shrewd, reluctant, unprofessional opinion of what appearances might suggest.

  The Secretary’s list had told him Mary Hartford was forty-nine: she looked several years younger as she sat quiet and confident in the scented seclusion she had so carefully created. She wore no hospital dress, but the crisp white blouse and grey skirt would have been in place anywhere. There was enough lace about the blouse, enough colour about the deep ruby of the brooch at her breast, to suggest femininity. The lightly tanned face had a very little makeup, perhaps applied with care to suggest its absence. The figure was trim enough to suggest the county tennis player she had once been, the features sharply attractive enough to make a chauvinist Superintendent wonder how she had managed to remain single. She was, he decided, one of the very few women who contrived to preserve elegance within the sensible shoes dictated by hospital routine.

  Lambert, striving to assess her state of mind whilst he took sugar and stirred his coffee with elaborate care, wondered uncomfortably how much she was aware of his scrutiny. ‘Well, fire away!’ she said, and sipped calmly at her own unsugared cup: she looked far more at home with the flowered china in her small, manicured fingers than he felt as he grasped the cup with his too large ones. The dark brown eyes looked into his with enough amusement to convince him that if he did not assert his role she would conduct the interview for him. In a different context, she must be as practised at questioning people as he was.

  ‘Would you start by telling me your movements at the end of the Committee meeting last night, please?’ he said. In reaching for his notebook and pad, he felt a relief which took him over twenty years back to his detective-constable days.

  ‘Certainly. I gathered up my papers and put them in my document case. The men rushed to empty straining bladders, the women to repair the ravages of a humid evening.’ Lambert was mildly shocked by this directness in a woman of her years, then remembered her medical background: this trim, attractive woman dealt in her small hospital with a steady stream of prostates and hysterectomies, no doubt in a cheerful and businesslike way.

  ‘The women in this case being you and Debbie Hall. You went to the ladies’ locker-room together?’ It sounded vaguely like an improper suggestion and he sensed a little amusement in her affirmative. ‘And where from there?’ he went on.

  ‘To the bar.’

  ‘But you didn’t arrive there together.’ It was a statement, and one which showed that he had questioned at least one other person about her movements. A quick intake of breath showed him she had appreciated the fact, but this time he did not look up into her face.

  ‘We didn’t quite leave the locker-room together either.’ He detected a tiny note of disapproval, but the voice was as steady as ever. ‘I went into the ladies’ lounge to check on the pairings for our medal competition on Tuesday. I must have arrived in the bar a couple of minutes after Debbie.’

  ‘Did anyone see you or speak to you in those two minutes?’

  For the first time, there was a pause before she answered. ‘You mean did I have access to James Shepherd without any witnesses?’

  Lambert smiled ruefully at her. It was exactly what he had been probing, but he was dismayed to find her following his train of thought so quickly. ‘If you like,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t, but I understand it’s necessary,’ came the precise reply. ‘I didn’t go back into the Committee Room or see Shepherd again alive.’

  ‘Or dead?’ said Lambert, instinctively and brutally. Perhaps he was nettled by her previous control. Now, for the first time, she was ruffled.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said; her voice had dropped a full octave and her e
yes no longer looked into his.

  Somewhere behind Lambert, a thrush poured out its full-throated, irrelevant song. Whilst she was thrown off-balance, he decided to throw in the one other small fact Parsons had released about her. ‘You will appreciate, Mary, that I will be questioning all the people at that meeting about their own behaviour and that of others. If that seems impertinent, you must remember that this is a murder inquiry. I have been told that you were very quiet in the bar after the meeting.’ He pretended to cull his memory, and produced a phrase as if it were the quotation it certainly was not. ‘“Monosyllabic and preoccupied”, I believe.’

  Now he did look at Mary Hartford, but she did not return his glance. She put her coffee cup back on the table with a steady hand, but he felt a great effort had gone into the movement. When she spoke, her voice was level, but he had the impression of the same determination and concentration; to his surprise, he felt admiration rising within him for the very control which was frustrating him.

  ‘It may well have been so,’ she said quietly. ‘I’d had a full day at the hospital, a quick sandwich, and a long evening meeting at the Golf Club. I didn’t feel exactly chirpy. But I didn’t kill James Shepherd.’

  ‘Nor has anyone accused you of killing him,’ said Lambert, just as quietly. ‘What can you tell me about the movements of the other people involved?’ She shook her head dumbly. ‘One of them is a murderer, Mary,’ he reminded her. This time she nodded, but it was a few seconds before she trusted her voice again. When it came, her tone was as even as ever — too even, perhaps, because the words came almost in a monotone, which told its own tale of tension.

  ‘Debbie and I you know about. After I had been to check on the Medal competition I told you about, I passed the door of the Committee Room again. It was open, but I couldn’t see inside. I heard David Parsons saying something about finance. I suppose Shepherd was in there too, because he wasn’t in the bar when I got there. I didn’t hear him.’

  She had not once retreated behind ‘the Chairman’ in her references to the dead man. Now her blunt, unadorned use of his surname under stress suggested unmistakably that she had had no great love for him. Lambert closed his notebook, waited for the relaxation he hoped this gesture might bring, and then asked simply, ‘Did you like James Shepherd?’

  ‘No.’ The uncompromising monosyllable came much more promptly than he had expected. It was followed by a long pause, during which he waited with an impassivity he could not feel. He wished the robin at the edge of his vision would not hop so persistently nearer: it was within two feet of his large black shoe.

  ‘But I wasn’t alone in that. And I didn’t kill him.’ For the first time in minutes, the brown eyes looked full into his; they were full now of entreaty, not amusement. At this moment when he least wanted it, there came into his mind the pathologist’s words when he had asked about knowledge of armed combat in relation to Shepherd’s mortal wound, ‘… a bit of medical knowledge would do as well or better.’ He looked again at those clean, efficient, beautifully manicured hands.

  ‘When did you leave?’ he said after another long pause. His own voice sounded to him more unnatural than the suspect’s.

  ‘I couldn’t be precise about the time, but it must have been soon after ten, because the bar had shut. We had one drink and left.’

  ‘“We” being?’

  ‘Debbie Hall, Michael Taylor, Bill Birch, David Parsons and myself. David Parsons left first, I think: when I came out, his car had gone. His reserved space is next to the Lady Captain’s, so I noticed.’

  ‘Did the rest of you leave all together?’ asked Lambert hopefully.

  ‘Almost, but not quite. I don’t think any of us had our Committee files in the bar, so we went our separate ways to collect them. I went back to the ladies’ lounge and made a note of the prizewinners in our spring competition, because I’ve to present the prizes on our next ladies’ day. I may have been, oh, perhaps five minutes.’

  Was she striving deliberately to be casual? She must realize the possibilities of those five minutes. Lambert stretched the moment with an elaborate note. ‘Were you last away from the car park then?’ he asked.

  ‘I really couldn’t say. It didn’t seem important at the time, of course.’

  He was sure now that she was striving to be matter-of-fact. ‘Think, Mary. It could be crucial.’ To you. To someone else, perhaps. She hesitated, and from brisk Mary Hartford the hesitation was an admission that there was something more.

  At length she said, ‘A car roared away noisily as I came out. I couldn’t see it, but I’m almost sure it was Michael Taylor’s sports car. But there was someone still in the car park,’ she said, looking at the cups between them. The robin had hopped to the biscuit beneath the table.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It was Bill Birch. It was almost dark but we called good night to each other.’ The silence hung like a tangible thing between them, investing this simple fact with more weight than it should have carried.

  ‘Were you two last away?’

  ‘I think so.’ It was scarcely audible. Two sharp minds on opposite sides of the garden table were busy with the implications and possibilities.

  Lambert put away his notebook. ‘There has been one other unusual incident since the murder,’ he said. ‘You will know Mr Shepherd’s car?’

  ‘The maroon Rolls-Royce,’ she said quietly. She was looking at the table again now, but for an instant the cool brown eyes had widened with what might have been fear.

  ‘It was broken into by someone this morning. It could of course be unconnected with the murder, but that would be a remarkable coincidence —’

  ‘In broad daylight?’

  ‘Yes. At about half past nine this morning.’

  ‘Did they have a key?’

  This woman should have been a detective: these were the first aspects of the affair that had struck Lambert. ‘It seems so, unless the car was left open. There’s no evidence of the door being forced.’

  ‘He never left it unlocked. Whoever did it had a key.’ For a moment she was following her own train of thought. He watched her curiously, until she saw him and came back to him with a little start. With a grim smile she said, ‘At least I have an alibi for that. I was on my ward rounds from nine to ten: about fifty people could vouch for me.’

  ‘That would seem to be quite enough,’ smiled Lambert. It was silly, but it should be much easier to eliminate his suspects from the car entry than the murder. And if the two were connected …

  He rose to go. ‘There isn’t anything else I should know, is there?’ he said. ‘I need hardly tell you that in a murder inquiry it would be foolish to try to protect your friends. The most effective way to safeguard the innocent in these cases is to reveal the guilty.’ Pompous, obvious, but he would have to say something similar to all of them.

  ‘I understand that,’ she said. She had the air of someone who had assessed all this before she saw him. She had said all she was going to say, he knew. The two professionals stood facing each other across the coffee cups in that most English of settings. They liked each other, these two physical opposites: she trim, attractive, demure, but all steel within; he tall, reassuring, becoming dishevelled as the day’s humidity rose steadily.

  She followed him down to the low wooden gate. ‘I’ll no doubt need to come back to you when I’ve seen the others,’ he said. If the prospect worried her, she gave no sign of it to Lambert.

  ‘Of course,’ she said with a smile. ‘You know where to find me.’ She gestured towards the hospital; he could just see its red roof, not more than a hundred and fifty yards away. At the very last, he suddenly stepped outside routine and played a card instinctively.

  ‘One strange thing. Len Jackson seems to have disappeared. He’s on the Committee, though he’d given prior notice that he would not be at your meeting last night. I don’t suppose you —’

  ‘Len Jackson isn’t your murderer,’ she interrupted decisively. He waited, but she said
nothing further. She was animated now, anxious even, but not with fear for herself.

  ‘Why do you say that, Mary?’ She was thinking hard about the question before he had the words out. She shook her head, colouring a little for the first time in the interview.

  ‘Ask Debbie Hall,’ she said.

  Chapter 7

  It was less than two miles back to the golf club and the murder room. Lambert wished it was further, for he needed time to organize his thoughts. He had narrowed the field of possible killers, seen two of his five suspects, collected some other important facts. It was fair progress with still a little of his first morning left. Yet he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was further from an arrest than he had been when he started.

  He drove through a village busy with its own concerns. The heat had kept things quieter than usual, but there were the usual quota of women pushing heavily laden trolleys from the area’s only supermarket, the usual two cars on the yellow lines outside Barclay’s Bank. A toddler waved a messily ravaged orange at him from her pushchair, and he wondered as usual that a world of such obvious innocence could surround the evil which was his concern.

  There was nothing at the club to lighten his gloom. Members were gathered in quiet little groups at the other end of the car park, discussing the sensational news. They acknowledged his wave of recognition but made no attempt to inquire about his progress; murder could still the most curious of tongues for a while. Within the building, Detective-Sergeant North was waiting for him with a face which offered no prospect of relief. He had been directed to enter the dead man’s house and search it for revealing papers or other items.

  North didn’t wait to be asked for his report. His news was brief, disgustingly so from his point of view, and he wanted it out. ‘Nothing,’ he said lugubriously. ‘I’ve been carefully through his bureau. Nothing but business papers, and precious few of those.’

  ‘Photographs?’

  ‘Three of his dead wife, framed and obvious to all. An album from his youth. Nothing faintly revealing.’