by J M Gregson
She looked at him like one who did not see the point of the question. ‘A brown Ford Escort, usually.’
‘Usually?’
‘Well, almost invariably. Freeman always insisted they were pool cars; there are duplicate keys in the office. There are tax advantages, apparently. I always thought it was one of his ways of reminding us who was boss.’
Lambert said, ‘Think carefully before you answer this, Miss Godson. Do you know of anyone who would have wished to kill Stanley Freeman?’
There were no histrionics. She did as she was bid and considered her reply carefully; for so long that he prompted her with, ‘I shall ask others the same question in relation to you.’
She smiled that small, cramped smile that he would so like to have seen enlarged. Then she said, ‘There is no one I can see as a murderer. None of us liked him. Sometimes I thought that his wife hated him, at others that she merely despised him. George Robson is highly competent and highly frustrated in his work: I presume that can be an explosive mixture. I don’t like Mr Hapgood and I wouldn’t trust him, even with the petty cash, but I don’t see him as a murderer.’
There was a silence while all three of them weighed what she had said. They all knew there was one name she had not mentioned. She looked up into Lambert’s face to check that he was still waiting, then put the tea she had not touched carefully back on the table. Eventually she said, ‘There was something between Jane Davidson and Freeman that I didn’t understand. I think he had some hold over her or she over him. But I don’t profess to understand the young.’ Her face resumed its lines of disapproval at the thought, as if she was preparing to raise again the barriers she had lowered for a time.
Denise Freeman had said something similar about the receptionist at Freeman Estates: Lambert filed away this second suggestion of mystery. For the rest, Emily Godson’s assessments might almost have come from one of his subordinates in a dispassionate summary of their suspects. For a moment, he was filled with respect as well as sympathy for the sturdy spirit beneath this spinsterish exterior.
Then, her calmness making the import of the words more shocking, Emily said, ‘I’m glad he’s dead. I could have killed him myself.’
Bert Hook twitched his surprise, despite his experience. Even hardened detective-sergeants can be caught of guard in that eerie moment when someone voices their very thoughts.
Chapter 17
Acacia Avenue was a cul-de-sac of modern bungalows. Hook peered at the street map and tried to decipher the lettering as Lambert swung the big Vauxhall through new building developments. If he had to hold the print any further away, his arms would not be long enough. ‘Should be the next left, I think,’ he said without conviction.
It was a quiet little close. From the end of it, a footpath by a tranquil stream took one to the centre of Oldford in less than five minutes. Perhaps Emily Godson’s mother had thought her daughter would find this a more convenient as well as a more valuable residence than the old cottage as the years advanced.
Aunt Alice’s smiling face was at the window when they parked, as if she was as anxious as they were to establish her niece’s alibi for the night of the murder. They refused more tea and prevailed upon her to sit down with them on the comfortable chintz suite in the light and airy lounge. Everything was very neat: perhaps the home help had not long been gone. Alice Franklyn had the wide bright eyes and perpetual smile, the too-mobile hands, of a hyperactive child. Her cardigan, buttoned askew down its entire length, and a strand of grey hair wildly adrift of the rest hinted that all might not be well within that benign and venerable head.
‘What a beautiful bungalow!’ said Hook conventionally as they sat down.
‘Mary bought it. Clever girl, Mary,’ said the fey old lady. She rocked a little with mirth. They managed to establish that Mary was her sister and Emily Godson’s mother. She spoke as though addressing her remarks not to them but to some imaginary person in the kitchen beyond, with whom she was sharing an innocent conspiracy. With difficulty, they steered the conversation towards Emily.
‘Good girl, Emily. Comes round here to eat my cakes. Naughty, sometimes, but she’s a good girl.’ She leant towards them, close and confidential. ‘Stanley knows. Stanley keeps her in order.’ Suddenly she cackled with laughter, loud, strident and threatening. For a few seconds, she was transformed from child to witch. It was eerie and other-worldly, with the menace of the unknown behind it. In that moment, Bert Hook understood why an ignorant and superstitious peasantry would stoop to ducking-stools.
Then she was back to innocence again, smiling in childish conspiracy as Lambert guided her back towards Emily’s visits. Hook felt a great sympathy, overlaid with the panic of one floundering out of his depth. Lambert could not dismiss thoughts of Alice in Wonderland as he strove to make sense of this modern namesake.
‘So Emily comes here most evenings. Now, Alice, I want you to think very hard.’ He tried not to think what sort of witness she would make: it would never come to that, surely. ‘Can you remember last Wednesday evening? Take your time, now.’
The strange figure before him rocked back and forth on the settee several times, her furrowed brow simulating the thought he had instructed her to give to this intriguing puzzle. The broad smile never left the old, innocent face, the blue eyes glittered with the fun of superior knowledge as she looked up at the glass of the light fitting above them. She was like a child in possession of some immense secret, which in its revelation would make all these petty questions seem quite ludicrous.
‘Oh yes, she was here,’ she said. Her smile grew even broader at the recollection. Hook began to relax, Lambert smiled encouragement and wondered how to move on to specific times. Then Alice Franklyn went on, anxious to leave them in no doubt. ‘She was here with her mother and her brother Michael. We had a nice family evening.’ She folded her arms and hugged herself with the pleasure of the recollection. Then she began to check the carpet all round her feet with elaborate care.
In a rare moment of fantasy, stolid Bert Hook wondered if she could see the shattered pieces of her niece’s alibi lying there.
Chapter 18
‘Did you ever know Willy Harrison?’ said Lambert to his wife. He studied the steam rising from the huge cup he always insisted on at breakfast, then looked beyond it to the blackbird he could see swaying gently on a rose in the back garden.
Christine wondered that a man should adopt a front so determinedly non-committal with his wife, making the partner of his bed a stranger over the breakfast table. She decided not to be insulted, for she understood far more clearly than he did himself the reason for this reserve, this awkwardness in what could have been a routine exchange. Lambert had a reluctance to talk about his work at home which amounted almost to a phobia, so that when as now he wished to draw upon some area of her knowledge, his manner had an obliquity more appropriate to the questioning of a stranger. Perhaps it went back to those near-forgotten days when they had almost split up, when she so resented his profession that she forbade it entry across her threshold, as some houseproud women forbid their husbands’ muddy boots.
She watched him studiously avoiding her eye, resolutely studying the back garden in the morning sun, and felt a surge of tenderness for the gaucherie beneath the grey hairs. She said, ‘He was Jim Harrison then. We began teaching together in the same year. That was in my grammar school days, of course.’ She had re-trained for primary school teaching when she went back to work as their children grew. ‘It seems an age ago now.’
She studied her husband’s carefully assumed indifference with amusement that contained a nugget of irritation. He looked from blackbird to greenhouse, to the rowan tree at the far corner of the garden, but never at her. He waited for her to enlarge upon the subject of his question, and eventually she was drawn into his little game as she knew she would be. ‘He was a good teacher, one of the very best. He knew kids instinctively – I don’t think much of it came from training.’ She paused, poured tea into her sma
ll cup, and said, ‘I didn’t like his wife.’
The abrupt disclosure made him glance at her at last, and they caught each other in their grins. For the first time, John Lambert realized the technique he had been using on his wife, and she caught the moment. Where twenty years ago there would have been mutual recriminations, there was now mutual amusement.
‘She left him eventually,’ said Lambert.
‘I know. By that time I was pregnant with Sue and had left the school. One did, in those days.’ For a moment, Lambert caught the scent of regret that she had not been around to console Jim Harrison when he needed her. Their own marriage had been shaky at just that time…
He concentrated on the material of his investigation. ‘He was very depressed at the time of his divorce. Did he look round for consolation?’
If Christine Lambert thought the question in any way applied to herself, she gave no sign. She thought seriously with pursed lips before she said, ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps if he had done he wouldn’t have had such a breakdown. There were plenty willing. He was an attractive man and a good teacher. You’d be surprised how attractive a combination that can be for young women.’ Now it was she who looked down the garden, to where the same blackbird perched now on a mound of juniper to voice his full-throated diversion. Her neat brown hair, without a trace of grey yet, framed a profile which had the composure of a Renaissance Madonna. It was impossible to tell from her half-smile whether she was covering a small embarrassment or parodying her husband’s recent attitude. Perhaps she merely disguised a great sadness. Just when he thought she had finished, she said, ‘Emily Godson was one of them.’
After a few seconds of silence, she could not resist turning to examine the effects of her bombshell upon her husband. He said ruefully, ‘You know I am investigating the staff of Freeman Estates, then?’
‘Of course I do.’ Her smile was the nearest thing to a verbal caress. Neither of them used ‘dear’ in their conversations, still less ‘darling’. ‘I’d have to be pretty stupid not to, with Stanley Freeman’s death the local sensation and everyone probing me about your progress.’
‘It was murder.’ For him that was a revelation, but she dismissed it as an insult to her intelligence.
‘I guessed that from your continued interest; and I do sometimes read the papers. You may think that Emily Godson is on the way to becoming an old maid, but when Jim Harrison was disintegrating into Wino Willy she was an attractive woman.’
Lambert rallied before the feminist resentment he felt was imminent. ‘On the contrary, I think she’s an attractive woman still. If she finds it difficult to show herself as one, it may be because she’s cared for a dying mother and a senile aunt better than any man could have.’
Christine inspected him wryly, her head on one side. He felt he had just about passed. She said, ‘No doubt. Anyway, Emily was quite sweet on Jim, without eliciting a lot of response. Perhaps she still is. She was up on the moor last Sunday near Willy’s hideout.’
If she knew she had tossed in a second grenade, she gave no sign. She was spreading marmalade thinly across a small piece of toast, with a concentration which argued it was her sole concern in the world. Lambert registered that she had known of Willy’s remote lair on the moor when he himself had not. Perhaps he should ask her for information more regularly. ‘Did you actually see her with Willy?’
‘No. For all I know, Willy might not have been around himself. I didn’t go right up there: I was with Jacqui and the dog.’ Their second daughter had a high-spirited golden retriever that needed watching when there were sheep about. Christine hesitated, then decided to offer, ‘I rather think Emily takes him food sometimes: I’ve seen her up there with a shopping-bag, looking embarrassed.’
It might be no more than that: another kindly impulse from a woman who preferred to disguise her humanity. Perhaps offered this time with the residual warmth of an old flame. She had not mentioned it to him. But why should she have? He had not raised the subject of Wino Willy with her. The important thing was that he now knew she had some kind of contact with that strange injured mind up there which he was more than ever convinced had something to do with this death. What might a man who cared so little for his own future not do to repay old emotional debts?
Christine watched his conjecture with distaste. She put crockery noisily on the tray and said, ‘I shall be late if I’m not quick. Corpses may wait patiently for superintendents, but thirty-three small people will cause all kinds of mayhem if Mrs Lambert is late.’
‘I’ll do that,’ said her husband, removing the tray with a grandiloquent sweep. ‘Before you go, do you know any of these names?’
She looked quickly down his list of suspects as she picked up her car keys. There was shock in her eyes as she glanced sharply into his face, for she was quite shrewd enough to know why he was interested in these people. And one of them she did know. ‘Jane Davidson. I taught her when she was ten, and I’ve kept some track of her movements since then.’
‘Why would that be?’
She shrugged. ‘Jane was a bit of a problem girl. One-parent family; not much money around.’
‘She wasn’t the girl you used to take our kids’ shoes in for?’ He realized that her simple goodness, her determination to help lame dogs, which had once annoyed him, now filled him with tenderness in its recollection.
Christine shook her head. ‘No, nothing as bad as that with Jane. She was an able girl, but too disturbed to make the most of herself. She didn’t do as well as she should have done when she got to secondary school. She’s a good girl when you get through to her, but very stubborn. I must go!’
He watched her reverse her small white car down the drive with practised efficiency. She was between the high gateposts when she stopped and beckoned him urgently to her; no inspector would have dared to make such an imperious gesture. Lambert leapt forward like a sprinter.
‘Good!’ said Christine appreciatively. ‘I didn’t know you could still move so fast.’
‘I “started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons”,’ quoted Lambert breathlessly.
‘Save those games for Sergeant Hook,’ she said with mock-severity. She was trying to use banter to lighten the impact of what she was going to say. ‘What I stopped my chariot to tell you was that I think Jane Davidson was very sweet on Willy Harrison’s son a few years ago. Right up to the time he was killed in that car crash. Whether she’s still in touch with Willy now or not, I don’t know. It should be easy enough to check.’
It should indeed. A chastened Superintendent determined not to neglect such obvious sources of information in future.
Chapter 19
‘A desirable small modern detached residence in a sought-after area,’ said Hook. He felt he was getting the hang of this estate agency business.
‘With distant views of the rolling Cotswold Hills,’ suggested Lambert, gesturing towards the strip of landscape visible between the roofs of the houses on the opposite side of the road. ‘A peaceful ambience where today’s young executive might relax after the stresses of a crowded working day.’ This was getting near to police prejudice. He assembled his features into careful neutrality as the electric bell-chime reverberated behind the mock-Georgian portico.
Simon Hapgood came forward with hand outstretched and wide, professional smile, the move he had practised on several hundred prospective clients of Freeman Estates. Only the eyes, light blue, brilliant and wary, were untouched by any sign of pleasure.
‘Do sit down,’ he said, gesturing with wide-flung arm at the leather Chesterfield sofa in the neat, uncluttered lounge. They placed their large feet carefully on the parquet floor between the two white goatskin rugs. Hapgood tossed his deep-gold hair back from his eyes in what seemed a habitual gesture. Then he positioned himself carefully opposite them in a brass-studded armchair, and so that the light was directly behind him.
‘I’m sorry I had to postpone our meeting yesterday; we had to change our plans,’ said Lambert. H
e wondered how much this young man knew of Emily Godson and the strange half-world of her ageing aunt.
‘No sweat,’ said Hapgood automatically: Lambert hoped his wince was not physical. The young man placed his right ankle carefully across his left knee in a gesture designed to show how relaxed he felt. Bert Hook made the mental note of ‘public school’ which was his own form of bias, resolving to check out this presumption later. He would have been surprised to know that Lambert, so cool and neutral on the surface, was having to resist a hope that this handsome, slightly effete young man would turn out to be their killer.
‘How long have you been with Freeman Estates?’ he began, without further preparation.
‘Two years. Just over,’ said Hapgood. He looked at his watch, decided it was too early yet to suppress a yawn; this was stuff he’d already been over in the preliminary inquiries.
‘You’re happy with the firm?’
‘I think I’ve been quite successful,’ said Hapgood; his smile revealed the full glory of his dentistry.
‘I said happy, though.’ Lambert’s smile just stopped short of mimicry of Hapgood’s dazzling effort.
‘I think I’ve settled in quite well.’ Lambert waited patiently, letting his silence this time make the point. Hapgood was certainly not as comfortable as he pretended. A more confident opponent would have left it at that and forced further prompting. Perhaps it was Hook’s deliberately elaborate recording of his words that rattled him into going on. ‘What’s happiness, after all? It’s a job, a job I think I do well. I know the property market round here. I’m good at selling. In a more go-ahead firm, I’d be doing even better.’ He stopped with a nervous little laugh. His desire to push himself must be habitual by now, if he chose to indulge it even in this context.
Lambert was carefully ignorant as he said, ‘You don’t think Freeman Estates has moved with the times?’
