by J M Gregson
He was sure this time that there was fear in her face, as she looked suddenly full into his. She could not quite control the movement of those slim, ballerina’s arms. Her eyes moved from him to the attentive Hook, then up to the innocent sky, where white clouds cruised slow and high against the blue. Her eyes closed; her uplifted face, with its dark hair dropping away behind it like a schoolgirl’s, looked both serious and innocent. Her voice when it came was very low, but perfectly clear.
‘I’ve wondered about other women, of course. I don’t think there can be anything that would have led to murder, or I should have known about it.’ She said it with the unconscious arrogance of a superior intellect assessing an inferior one. ‘It’s someone in the firm. It must be.’
Or in the immediate family, thought Bert Hook as he shut his notebook.
She watched them go, standing calm and slender, her dress bright pink against the dark rectangle of the door behind her, as if she were posed for a painter. She stayed there until long after the big Vauxhall had disappeared, until its sound had purred softly away into silence.
She sat in an armchair for a full minute, wondering how effectively she had deceived her visitors about her movements on the night of the murder. Then she picked up the phone to ring Simon Hapgood.
Chapter 10
In the oldest industrial quarter of Gloucester, a woman stared at the sky.
It was the same sky that so brilliantly overmantled Denise Freeman’s manicured half-acre, but through the square north window with its broken sash, the blue was less brilliant and hopeful. The Victorian working conditions which had placed these mean terraces near to the factories and their twelve-hour days had long since gone, but Victorian grime clung obstinately, despite the spasmodic local improvements of landlord and local authority. Dusk seemed to arrive a little earlier here, as if the climate itself reminded the citizens that they had less reason to trust the future than others outside this shrinking area of decay.
The woman was five years younger than Denise Freeman; she looked five years older. Denise’s straight and lustrous black hair owed a little to bottled help, but the effect was complete and compelling. The peroxide used on this head was less comprehensive in its effects, so that there was tell-tale darkness at the roots and the occasional spot at the ends where a close observer might see blonde becoming grey. Perhaps the make-up on the face had been a little too thick, the eye-shadow a little too heavy. It was impossible to tell now. For the woman had been crying for a long time, not with the noisy, uncontrollable sobs that convulse and then pass, but with the slow, hopeless tears of despair.
On the high mantelpiece of the old fireplace, she looked again at the envelope in Stanley’s neat round writing. ‘Ms Margot Jones’. The title was a little joke between them, one of Stanley’s small pamperings she had enjoyed so much, her tiny link with the feminism which had passed her by without other trace. This month’s cheque was still inside: even through her grief, a practical voice within her gave ignoble thanks for that. An outsider would have seen Stanley Freeman’s recompense as mean enough for what the relationship gave him, but there was a certain delicacy in the method of payment. The money arrived like a regular allowance to a favoured, virtuous child, with no suggestion of the price for services rendered which might have been implied by cash exchanging hands at their meetings.
Like the wife she had never seen, this other woman of Stanley Freeman’s made tea, but in her case it was the dull ritual of the only therapy she could offer herself. She took the half-empty packet from the shelf in the tiny kitchenette, lit the gas under the aluminium kettle, dropped a tea-bag straight into the one mug which had no crack. For Stanley, she would have got out the pretty earthenware teapot, and cups and saucers; what was the use of bothering for one?
Two years they had had. Two years which began with a pick-up in a pub and developed to an affection, an easiness with each other, even to something like love. They had even begun to make small, tentative plans. She was learning to type on the machine he had brought as a write-off from work. He would get her a cottage in a small town away from here and she, with her new skills and his help, would find work, respectable work at last. She looked at the typewriter beneath the plastic cover, and the tears began again from the ducts she had thought must surely be dry.
The kettle spat steam and water for thirty seconds before she registered it. She poured the water into her beaker, tipped the last milk from the bottle, watched the first flecks of its souring float briefly on the top of the darkening water. Then she sat in the armchair to torment herself again with the evening edition of the local newspaper.
TRAGIC DEATH OF OLDFORD ESTATE AGENT. The headline was a little cramped, the item hurriedly accommodated in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page. The hard-pressed editor had not been able to obtain Stanley’s age, and would not guess at it in the case of a local luminary. The account mentioned that Stanley was childless, but left a widow. There was of course no mention of Margot. How could there be? Yet her absence from this brief account of his death seemed to diminish her place in his life, as if that had after all been only one more of the deceptions that had been practised so often upon her. She read again to the end. ‘Foul play is not suspected.’ The police release had not said anything so definite, but the eager young reporter had unearthed enough details of the apparent suicide for his editor to back this modest speculation. Next day’s edition would blaze murder in thick black headlines, but Margot Jones could not know that yet.
She stared at the familiar phrase. It meant suicide, didn’t it? For a bleak moment, she wished worldly-wise Stanley was at her shoulder to confirm her interpretation. So he had done this on Wednesday night, when he should have been coming back to her. But he couldn’t have. Wouldn’t have. Not on the night he kept for her. She could not accept that Stanley could have committed suicide. A heart attack perhaps: sometimes in her bad moments she had thought that their world might end in that. But he would not top himself; not on their night together, certainly. Suddenly, it was very important to her that he could not have killed himself. If he had done that when he should have been coming to her, then all of it had been false, and she was back in the nightmare he had gently dispersed for her over the last few months. Sipping the scalding tea, she found it tainted with salt tears.
It was there in print: it must be so. Then in her misery there came back to her a picture she had thought long since lost. It was of the father who had left them in Swansea, years before she changed Maggie to Margot and moved out herself. He was saying, as she remembered now he often did, that you could not believe everything you read in the papers. It had meant nothing to a child, like the rest of his drink-laden diatribes. Now it came back to her like a biblical pronouncement. That must be it. The newspaper, unthinkably, was wrong. She rocked herself backwards and forwards, cradling the beaker close to her breast.
She must put it right. The thought became a palliative for her grief. In the two hours of her steady, silent tears, she had confronted the abyss. Before Stanley, she had lived through a series of desperate affairs, each offering brief hope of a lasting attachment, each shorter than the last. Stanley, finding her in a pub, had thought her an easy prospect. After that first, clumsy coupling, there had emerged from their dual loneliness an affection which had massaged a slow confidence back into both of them. Now he was gone, and the path was opening again to drinking, to the joyless sex which was the only currency she could offer, perhaps to eventual prostitution.
She could not formulate the words even in her thoughts, but the notion sat in her consciousness like a sullen dog and would not he ignored. She must explain that Stanley had been coming to see her last night. That because of that, he could never have committed suicide. It was her grasp upon integrity.
Her first thought was to visit the newspaper. Then even she realized that this could not be right. It would have to be the police. She had never in her life gone voluntarily to them. To do so now in the extreme of her distres
s and physical collapse took a courage which women from a different background would never comprehend. It took an hour to nerve, herself to go. An hour of fear, but an hour in which she became more sure what she must do. She owed it to Stanley: to their relationship.
She found the gin bottle in the bottom of the wardrobe. It had only been a quarter full, and she had almost finished it while she waited for Stanley on Wednesday. It was curious now to think that she had been only disappointed, not fearful, as the possibility that he could not come back to her grew into a certainty. There was a bare half-inch in the bottom of the bottle; she finished it now with the tonic she had so carefully preserved for Stanley. Then she washed herself carefully and put on the green two-piece costume Stanley had paid for and so admired. She brushed her hair vigorously, the first energetic movement she had made since she had come in with the paper and read the news.
In the mirror, she saw a drawn face which seemed to belong to someone older and more tragic than Margot Jones could ever be. She wanted to go without make-up to the police station, for all the obscure memories of puberty and adolescence were insisting that this was respectable. But the lined face, still puffed from weeping, seemed too vulnerable and revealing. She put a light base on the white cheeks, trying to rub a little life into them so that the colouring would not seem so obstinately artificial. She put on lipstick, a little more than she intended, changing the face in the mirror a little nearer to the mask she had hoped to avoid. In the second drawer of the battered tallboy, she sought the gloves she had not worn for years, those childhood guarantees of respectability. There was only one there. She did not possess a hat.
She crept quietly downstairs, not wanting the landlady to know her errand; she could not know that the old woman had been questioned thoroughly earlier in the day. In the dingy hail, she took a last deep breath, then made for the outside world and the terrors of authority. Her hand was six inches from the handle of the front door when the knocker crashed harshly on the outside, not two feet from her face. The noise was clattering still in her head when she opened the door.
She stepped back instinctively, flinching hefore the dark blue uniform, its buttons unnaturally bright after the gloom within. The constable took in the stained, flowered wall-paper, the scratched brown paint, the hall carpet fraying into holes, the smell of old cabbage and older dog. Delicacy would bring no returns from the people here, he decided.
‘Margaret Jones?’ She nodded dumbly. ‘We’re contacting the associates of a Stanley Gordon Freeman. We have reason to believe you may be able to help us.’
She had never known that ridiculous middle name. For an absurd moment before she remembered, she thought she would tease him with it when they met again.
The policeman stepped inside the door and she retreated before him, nodding fearfully. Was it an offence to change Margaret to Margot, she wondered.
He caught the gin upon her breath. ‘You’d better tell us everything you can. You can talk to us here or come to the station, it’s up to you,’ he said aggressively. He was due off in twenty minutes.
It was the first time she had realized that he was not alone. She looked from the white car with its blue trim to the house windows with their faces which did not trouble to conceal themselves. Then she turned hopelessly back upstairs, transformed from volunteer to police quarry.
Even her one small bravery had been denied to her.
Chapter 11
Audrey Robson looked through the new double glazing, down the long back garden, to the gate where George had recently disappeared. Was he feeling as guilty as she did? She had seen no sign of it.
She had tried many times in the last two days to be sorry about Stanley Freeman’s death. Unsuccessfully. Phrases she had thought forgotten had come strangely back to her. And with the phrases there had returned each time a strange, a ludicrous image of herself, with strong adolescent bosom flattened for much of the play beneath a breastplate, playing Bolingbroke in Richard II. It must be thirty-five years ago now, long before these enlightened days when boys were brought in to play men’s parts in school plays. She had stood sturdily, feet astride on the rickety stage of the Girls’ High School, her height and rich contralto securing for her the masculine roles she secretly desired.
When Richard’s murderer had stood before her expecting reward in the last scene of their severely cut version, she had struck a pious attitude and declaimed,
They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
All through the day these half-forgotten words had come insistently back to her, until they had formed a mocking chorus to all the dutiful pangs of regret she had tried to feel. Stanley Freeman was no Richard of Bordeaux; he was a despicable little crook who had frustrated George for twenty years, that was all. And through George, her. She could not get away from the fact that in that time she had often wished him dead. Ever since that initial treachery all those years ago…
She set the last dish upon the drainer, peeled off her rubber gloves, and inspected her hands at the window in the last rays of the setting sun. It was a flattering, old-master light, gilding everything in roseate warmth, disguising from its low angle the wrinkles a more brilliant illumination would have revealed. But they were good hands, not so very different from those which had struck stage attitudes all those years ago. The pale pink varnish on the long nails looked in this glowing light exactly as it had in the advertisement.
She went into the lounge at the front of the house. It was darker here, but she resisted artificial light as the dusk seemed to creep prematurely over the heavy furniture. Perhaps it was just a psychological reluctance to admit the departure of another summer day. More likely it was a long-thrown effect from her childhood on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. There, the soft light of the oil lamps had been allowed only in the last of the twilight, and early starts on long summer days had meant that the lamps were only a prelude to retiring for the night. Light there was not for reading: on a farm that was the worst form of sloth. ‘Sitting there with a book in your hand wasting time again, my girl!’ they’d say, and she’d start as guiltily as if indulging some solitary vice.
Well, she had moved away a long time ago from that world of exploitation and small, grudgingly conceded privileges; and good riddance to it. George had his faults, but he had taken her away from all that. Cosseted her, in the early years. He never begrudged her good clothes, even now: she looked down at the leather shoes, comfortable despite their heels, and tried not to be proud of the sleek limbs beneath the nylon. In North Yorkshire, those shapely legs would have been channelled with varicose veins by now. It was part of her reaction to those long, lonely trudges to schools and school buses that she rarely walked nowadays, and never stood when she could sit. She liked the dog, but was content to feed him and occasionally fuss him. It was George who walked him, especially in the evenings. Where once he had grumbled, even shamed her into taking her turn, for months now he had accepted the ritual of the evening walk with resignation, even enjoyment.
She supposed it had become a release from the frustrations of the day’s work and Stanley Freeman’s petty incivilities. Now, with Freeman’s death, there might open a new era of increased prosperity and increased satisfaction. Walking Fred might become a relaxed, contrasting part of a nicely balanced day. She might even accompany them occasionally, on evenings like this. She folded her arms beneath the russet cashmere, hugged herself, and tried not to feel the warm, animal satisfaction of a child who has secured some small triumph and thinks the world is hers. Freeman had cheated, and cheated badly. He could not expect to be lamented now. She sank into the heavy flowered cushions and savoured for long minutes the fact that they had done with him for ever.
The clear northern sky moved towards indigo; the room had a soft gloom that seemed a conspirator to her mood. Her sign as she eventually rose to put the lights on was one of pure contentment. She w
ent first to draw the curtains, another habit coming across the long decades from childhood. It was as she pulled the cord and the curtains slid quietly around the big bay that she saw the men.
All sun had gone now; the sober-suited figures, coming steadily up the long path through the front garden, seemed sinister in their silent advance. She had to control an absurd instinct to hide, to pretend that the lightless house was unoccupied. Perhaps that was also a childish legacy.
She went into the spacious hall and firmly switched on the light. When she opened the door, the light behind her illuminated the features of the men, but made all beyond them seem darker. She could scarcely make out the garden; only the sombre outline of the big hawthorn at the gate registered as her pupils strove to focus.
The nearer man was tall and lean, well over six feet. He had dark hair, which crinkled into grey at the temples, and blue, incongruously humorous eyes. ‘Mrs Robson? I’m Superintendent Lambert,’ he said. He turned towards the slightly shorter and more rotund figure at his side. ‘This is Sergeant Hook, who rang your husband earlier.’ The Sergeant gave her a small, ceremonial smile: she felt both of them assessing her.
‘You’d best come in,’ she said, and the Yorkshire she had thought long left behind came leaping out in the words. The men, filling the doorway as they stepped forward, seemed to her like angels of death.
The tall one explained their visit as they walked through a hall which now seemed to her empty, not spacious. Perhaps it was only the guilty feelings she had indulged all day which made his words seem so ominous.
