by J M Gregson
‘Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,’
quoted the woman beside him. This time the elocution was as English as the lines. It was the delivery of her schooldays, thirty years earlier.
The woman who sat with a road atlas on her knee was fifteen years younger than the driver; at first glance the difference looked greater. Her make-up was applied carefully but sparingly. She checked it now in the vanity mirror: it minimized the effect of the few crows’ feet that nowadays threatened the skin around the clear blue eyes, made the thin lips a little more generous, held at bay time’s work upon the neck.
‘“Rude” meaning in this case “untutored”,’ she said, mimicking the pedantic tones of an English mistress of those distant times. Miss Moss, she thought suddenly, recalling a name she had thought gone forever. Perhaps this region had that effect.
As if to destroy such illusions, a car appeared abruptly around the curve in front of them. It was in the middle of the road and going much too fast on the bend. It rocked crazily as the driver corrected its course, righted itself, passed them safely enough with a couple of feet to spare, and roared noisily out of their world.
‘Lunatic!’ said Henry T. Harben and his wife in unscripted unison. The unexpected agreement dissolved the moment of fear into laughter. He found his hand upon her arm in unconscious protection; both of them were glad to see it there.
‘Probably some youngster anxious to meet his girlfriend,’ said Henry. ‘I’m glad we weren’t any closer to that bend when he came round it.’
‘It’s the paraphernalia of modern living again,’ said Margaret Harben. ‘The swains who pursued their doxies here in times past were no doubt much less dangerous.’
‘Except to the doxies,’ said Henry, piloting the Rolls cautiously round the blind bend whence the car had appeared; the lane stretched empty and inviting for several hundred yards ahead of them.
‘I’m not even sure it was a man,’ said Margaret, wondering if this fairness was a kind of inverted feminism. ‘Whoever it was was crouched very low behind the wheel. Perhaps he or she didn’t want to be seen, driving like that. Ah, this could be it.’ She looked from the map on her knees to the high stone gateposts which rose before them. Her husband slowed the big car to a gentle halt beside the elaborate wrought iron of the open gates.
‘Lydon Hall,’ he confirmed with satisfaction. He could now read the gold leaf lettering on the gates, but he had recognized the imposing entrance from the brochure photograph. He eased the Rolls between the high posts of mellow Cotswold stone and stopped it on the gravel within to view the house.
It was worth the appraisal. This evening would have flattered many houses, but on Lydon Hall the golden twilight had a remarkable effect. The frontage was basically of dark red brick, but liberally laced with the honey-coloured stone characteristic of this area. In this light the building enhanced rather than impaired the landscape. The chimneys stretched towards the highest boughs of oak and beech behind the house, until from this distance they seemed to touch them.
It was an illusion of course. The trees were a good forty yards behind the house, but the long rays of the setting sun flattened perspective and made the house and its arboreal frame seem one design. Henry T. Harben did not consider himself an imaginative man, would indeed have been rather insulted by any suggestion that seemed to detract from his reputation as a hard-headed businessman. But for a moment he was moved, and not ashamed to be seen so.
‘I guess I see the attraction of living here now,’ he said quietly.
‘You can’t put a price on history,’ said Margaret as the Rolls moved forward. Gravel crunched unnaturally loud beneath the great wheels in the evening stillness.
‘That’s true,’ agreed Henry, glancing again at the high windows; they blazed briefly with brilliant fire as the last rays caught them with the car’s movement. ‘Tudor, I sup-pose. We didn’t have history then.’
Margaret smiled and put her hand lightly upon his wrist. He was two hundred years out, but there would be time enough for correction when his interest firmed into ownership. She had already made up her mind that this was the property for her, unless the interior had been ruined by some insensitive modern hand or the jaws of deathwatch beetle.
‘Sure is an interesting piece of real estate,’ said Henry, as they eased to a halt by a studded oak door that seemed designed to hold a siege at bay. He ignored his wife’s wince at the transatlantic idiom; it had been quite deliberate, a signal of his return to economic acumen after his moment of sentiment. Though his wife had her own shrewdnesses, he preferred to see her as unversed in the ways of a wicked commercial world, and he as her sturdy protector. As they sat for a moment and savoured the frontage of Lydon Hall, she looked across at him affectionately. No one else would consider her an ingenue, but if Henry wanted it that way she would go along with him. He was a good man, as well as a rich one; it was the second marriage for both of them, and she wasn’t going to let it fail for the sake of small, unimportant compromises. With the unspoken understanding of the well-matched couple, they stepped out of the Rolls and stood looking at the upper windows, where a wistaria which might have begun to climb a century earlier was dropping its last blooms.
‘Where is Stanley Freeman?’ Henry voiced the thoughts of both of them. The only sound was the last of the evening birdsong, the only visible movement their own.
‘Perhaps he’s been delayed,’ said Margaret. She wanted to go and look through one of the big windows, but her English reserve made it seem like spying. ‘Let’s walk round the outside and look at the grounds.’
Their steps rang unnaturally loud in the stillness as they skirted the high walls. There were sunken rose gardens at the back of the house, full of bloom, with the colours brilliant in the twilight. No sun crept in here now, for the house shaded this area from the last beams. There was a yew hedge beyond the roses. Between this and the trees, now revealed in their full majesty, was a perfect lawn. Though the house was empty, this had been mown and clipped at the edges, perhaps earlier that day. The wide, regular bands of green left by the mower gave the deserted place an air of the Mary Celeste in the silence. Whether or not because of the onset of nightfall, Margaret Harben suddenly shivered.
‘Freeman is careless of his time for a man trying to sell a place at this price,’ said her husband. Even in this peaceful atmosphere, he was irked a little by bad business practice.
‘If he doesn’t come quickly, the last of the light will be gone before we get inside,’ said his wife. She walked across the broad stone paving stones of the terrace, which ran across the entire width of the back of the house, to the big double French windows. As she peered in, careless now of decorum, the door moved silently under her gentlest of touches. She put her fingers on the handle and the door swung fully open. Involuntarily, they both looked behind them for any sign of life in the acre or so they could see. There was none. They looked interrogatively at each other, then back to the dark void beyond the gaping door. This was even more like the Mary Celeste.
‘Should we go in and look around?’ said Henry. It was a rhetorical question: neither of them could resist the invitation of the open door.
‘That’s what we came for,’ said his wife. Her taut little smile could not disguise her sudden nervousness at these unaccountable circumstances. They went through the doors and into the old house.
The drawing-room where they found themselves was furnished with a spare elegance. Armchairs with tapestry covers flanked what looked like an Adam fireplace. There were two standard lamps, neither of them switched on, an empty magazine rack, a chaise-longue with delicately carved back and legs, a Regency side-table and bookcase. The wood panelling on the walls made the room seem even darker, so that at first they could distinguish little of this detail.
Margaret Harben crossed cautiously to the door at the far side of the room and switched on the light beside it. ‘Can we afford it?’ she said ex
citedly. She knew the answer, but wanted to hear Henry affirm it. She stopped when she saw her husband’s profile, rigid with shock.
Then she looked past him, to see what he had seen. In the chair by the fireplace was a figure she could not at first comprehend. For an instant, the polythene bag on the lifeless wide-eyed head brought back absurdly the doll she had bought a month earlier for her small niece. But these eyes were no doll’s eyes. They were wide with a final, desperate horror. And these lips, thrown wide against the polythene as the face fought a last brief battle for breath, were no doll’s lips.
The late Stanley Freeman had not after all failed their rendevous.
Chapter 3
Within twelve hours of its discovery, Stanley Freeman’s death was well on the way to becoming a mere official statistic.
When Chief Superintendent Lambert arrived at his desk that morning, the death did not even take prime place among the papers which awaited him. He came upon it third down in the pile of official reports and reminders from his subordinates. The report was typed neatly and conscientiously by DI Rushton. A piece of scrap paper was attached by a paper clip to denote its unofficial status. Across it Rushton had written, ‘Looks like another EXIT suicide?’ The question-mark was small and at some remove from the phrase, as if it had been added in caution. The bald statement might be embarrassing to a rising detective-inspector if events proved him wrong; a question-mark transformed a prediction into a more speculative sally, in case hindsight should prove this necessary.
Lambert could not have said whether it was the question-mark which made him read the report so carefully. Probably not: he always took sudden death seriously, even in the most straightforward of situations. Suicide, it seemed, though the suggestion of the assistance of the EXIT organization would mean they would have to check if anyone else beyond the deceased was involved. A routine death, perhaps: except for family, friends and working associates who were left to pick up the pieces. But such things were the concern of the social services, not the CID.
With his experience, Lambert could piece together the scene around the body from Rushton’s terse official account. ‘There was a smell of drink about the corpse. I expect the PM to confirm the source as internal,’ the Inspector had typed. Lambert pictured him smelling the clothing of the corpse to make sure liquor had not been poured over it after death; this clumsy ploy was a giveaway rather than a deception, but fortunately many criminals seemed still not to realize this. ‘There were six tablets (valium?) in right-hand trouser pocket: perhaps the bulk of the packet had been swallowed.’ No need for even the cautious Rushton to mention the PM again here. Curious though that there should be any tablets left at all if the man had overdosed; suicides who meant business usually took the lot. He read on: there was no obvious evidence of violence upon the body, no onset of rigor mortis at the time of this first, superficial examination.
The end of the report interested him more than all the rest. ‘Death was apparently by asphyxiation. There was a polythene bag over the head but a cursory examination revealed no evidence that it had been held there forcibly against the wishes of the deceased. In the left-hand jacket pocket was a suicide note (no addressee or address). The circumstances indicate an EXIT suicide.’
Lambert frowned. He did not disagree with the conclusion; though Rushton had not said so, it must have been the opinion of the police surgeon on the spot. But the idea of suicide to a formula and by arrangement still disturbed him. He did not disagree on moral grounds with the EXIT organization’s slogan of ‘Death with Dignity’. It seemed an honest reaction to one of the age’s great dilemmas, that of people living beyond the age where life was enjoyable. Indeed, Christine had warned him not to become boring on the subject in company, as he was wont to do when the spectre of his own senility swam across his horizon.
The increase of these deaths in his professional work disturbed him. The world of crime was depressing enough without the intrusion of loneliness, physical decay and black despair that were normally the province of medical men. Suicides they had always had, of course, but usually they were easily confirmed as such and the police contact with them was minimal. EXIT deaths could involve a mysterious assistant, in sympathy with the aims of the association but necessarily anonymous if he or she were to remain outside the action of the law, as it stood at present.
It was one of those difficult areas for senior policemen where there was uncertainty about the attitudes of coroners. Some took a sympathetic, perhaps a forward-looking, view; others felt that the law should be applied in full draconian severity to anyone who assisted in the death of another, whatever the motive. It meant that CM men were unsure how fiercely they should pursue such agents. Most took the view that unless and until the law was changed, they should seek out EXIT enthusiasts who translated their zeal into action, and leave the law to decide what to do with them. It was the only logical way for a force which represented the law to operate, but it ignored the fact that policemen had their own ideas, even their own sensitivities, about moral decisions, which could lead to individual anguish even as they moved successfully to defend the law.
Lambert picked up the internal phone and spoke to the WPC deep in the basement which the public never saw. ‘The Freeman suicide at Lydon Hall. You have the contents of the pockets down there? Send them up, please.’
Within two minutes there was a discreet tap at his door. He was surprised to see the solid figure of Detective-Sergeant Hook, standing awkwardly with what looked like a shoe-box under his left arm and a cup and saucer in his right hand.
‘Your coffee,’ he offered as explanation. ‘I intercepted it on the way in.’ He set the coffee carefully on the desk beside the pile of reports, and the box precisely in front of Lambert.
‘After you had earlier intercepted this box, I suppose,’ said Lambert with amusement. ‘Oh, all right, Bert, better get yourself a coffee and join me. But I don’t expect we’ll find anything of great interest.’
Hook’s countenance flushed with pleasure, as open and immediate as any schoolboy’s. He was back so quickly with his coffee that Lambert suspected he had anticipated the invitation when he brought in the Superintendent’s cup. ‘Sergeants don’t rate saucers,’ he explained cheerfully, as he set his thick mug down carefully on the outer edge of the desk.
‘Quite right, too. You’d only drink out of them,’ said Lambert as he took the lid off the box. They were old companions, at ease with each other, each respecting the other’s strengths.
Both now peered at the contents of the box. This moment always seemed to Lambert an intrusion, almost a violation. He took up the bunch of car and other keys extracted from Stanley Freeman’s trousers, and said, ‘“And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and little things a’ didn’t wish seen, anyone will see.”’ He could never work out why it was that Hook brought out his weakness for literary references.
‘Quotacious again,’ said Hook severely. It was a favourite word of his; he maintained that if it did not exist, then it certainly should do.
‘Old Mother Cuxsom and Hardy’s peasant chorus,’ said Lambert, instructing expansively.
‘I thought that was an attempt at a Wessex accent,’ said Hook. He looked into the box to see what else lay there with a countenance as inscrutable now as it had been open with excitement a few minutes earlier. Lambert was often not quite sure who was educating who in these exchanges, and Hook was delighted that it should remain so.
There were some loose money; an unused handkerchief; a wallet with credit cards, treasury notes and driving licence; pens. An unopened contraceptive packet looked by its rather dog-eared condition as if it had been carried about for some time.
‘Ready for a quick bit on the side,’ said Hook.
‘Prepared for all eventualities,’ said Lambert in dignified reproof. ‘It’s the approved condition since AIDS arrived. But if we deduce anything from it, Watson, it is the picture of an optimist, not a man overcome by life to
the extent of ending it.’
He extracted the notepaper from the envelope at the end of the box with tweezers; he could see by the vestiges of powder that both had already been tested for fingerprints, but training had long ago translated itself into habit. He read the note, then passed it to Hook, who scrutinized the typed words:
‘I can’t go on any longer. My marriage seems finished. Life generally is too much for me. Forgive me, Denise. Forgive me, colleagues. It’s no one’s fault.’
Stanley Freeman’s signature ended the note with a bold flourish. Both men were silent for a moment. They had met death hundreds of times in twenty years of CID work. It wasn’t death that stilled them. It was the thought of these banalities as the final communication of a tormented soul passing into the unknown.
Hook looked at the two ballpoint pens which had been in the corpse’s pockets. ‘Not signed with either of these,’ he said.
Lambert nodded; the signature had been made with ink and presumably a fountain pen. ‘Not necessarily significant. He could have prepared his note in the office or at home.’ The note was on the headed notepaper of Freeman Estates.
‘Presumably Denise is the wife,’ said Hook. Lambert nodded: he had not known Freeman, and at this moment he was glad of it. He fastened on the fact that had been nagging at him since he first looked at Rushton’s report of the death.
