Making a Killing

by J M Gregson

  There was silence in the Murder Room while they weighed the possibilities. Anyone who knew the viewing had been postponed would have had half an hour to meet the unsuspecting Freeman, perhaps ply him with whisky to supplement the hip flask they had found in his car, complete the murder. Lambert wondered if the others felt the frisson of excitement he experienced now and had known before at key moments in investigations.

  ‘Who else knew?’

  ‘Jane thinks no one at Freeman Estates. Robson and Hapgood were both out with clients at the time of the phone call. That’s genuine enough: the viewings are booked down and we’ve checked them. Emily Godson was in the office but not around when Jane took the phone call – either making tea in the kitchen or out at the washroom. I hardly think a conspiracy between those two is likely: they’re like chalk and cheese.’

  ‘Jane knew herself, of course,’ said Lambert. ‘So far, she’s the only one who we know for certain had the knowledge and could have used it. Did she take any other steps to try to inform Stanley Freeman of the changed time?’

  ‘She left a note of the change on Freeman’s desk. As she says, she left messages in two places and couldn’t have done much more. At the time it seemed that the worst that could happen would be that if Freeman didn’t get the message he’d have to kick his heels and wait at Lydon Hall.’

  ‘Do we have the note?’

  Rushton shook his head. He was glad to be questioned in such detail; as in the case of Simon Hapgood, his thoroughness was being revealed.

  ‘No. George Robson says it wasn’t there when he cleared Freeman’s desk next day. We checked the waste-paper baskets and the dustbin outside. Nothing.’

  Lambert shut his eyes and thought hard. Three possibilities: first, Jane Davidson had not in fact left any note; second, Freeman had found it but still gone to Lydon Hall at around the original time, perhaps to an assignation with his killer; third, it had been removed by some person anxious to conceal the change from the murder victim. It could have course have been placed by Jane Davidson herself but removed after she had checked that Freeman had not been in to see it. According to her story, she was the one person who knew for certain of the changed time. Except that… He stopped that train of thought before it got still more convoluted.

  He thought of Jane Davidson at the funeral, standing stiff and motionless in her high-heeled shoes and high-necked black dress, red nails bright against the shiny black handbag. She had looked young and vulnerable, in need of a lead in graveside behaviour. But there had been more satisfaction than grief as she looked down at the coffin in its final pit.

  ‘Did Jane Davidson strike you as a murderer?’ And does that question sound as banal to you as it does to me, he thought, as soon as he had framed it.

  Apparently not, for Rushton was frowning his way to a considered reply. ‘Not immediately,’ he said eventually. ‘But she’s a hard young miss. A little older than she looks – twenty-four, I think. No father, used to looking out for herself. We didn’t turn up any motive, but both she and her mother seemed scared. As I told you, we felt they were hiding something, but we couldn’t find out what. It’s possible they’d agreed the story about her alibi, but we couldn’t shake them on it. Simple enough tale, of course. Jane washed her hair, Mrs Davidson made a cake, they both watched telly. Not much to trip them up there.’

  True enough, and by now they would be well rehearsed, if indeed they were lying. Rushton’s more objective investigations now supported Emily Godson’s view that Jane was hiding something about her relationship with Freeman. Lambert made a mental note to explore this when they saw young Miss Davidson.

  Suddenly, the phone shrilled at the far end of the room. It had done so twice before during their conference, yet this time DC Spencer felt all their eyes upon him as he answered.

  ‘Yes. Yes… It could be… Is he with you now? Wait a minute, the Superintendent is here in the murder room now.’ Finding Lambert at his side, he handed the phone to him. ‘It’s PC Standing from a patrol car, sir.’

  The uniformed PC at the other end of the line was suddenly nervous at this unexpected link with top brass. ‘It may be nothing at all, sir. I just thought we should ring in to the Murder Room.’

  ‘Quite. Well?’ The monosyllables scarcely calmed PC Standing.

  ‘We’re at Lydon Hall, sir. The scene of crime people said there was no point in leaving anyone here permanently, but we drive in and round the house as part of our routine until further notice.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, we’ve just met someone. Round the back, in the woods. He’s a kind of – ’

  ‘Wino Willy.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You know him?’ Relief at not having to attempt a description.

  ‘I know him. Sergeant Hook and I interviewed him,’ said Lambert, wondering if that wild oral pas de deux on the moor could be dignified as anything so formal.

  ‘It was you he wanted to see,’ said PC Standing, understanding Willy’s nonsense at last. He would not tell the Superintendent that Willy had asked for the Headmaster.

  ‘Do you have him there?’ said Lambert.

  ‘No, sir. We tried to get him into the car, but he ran off into the woods.’

  Despite his excitement, Lambert was glad Willy had not been manhandled. But he knew he must get to him; if Willy had tried to contact him he was prepared to speak now. And he was involved in this crime somewhere. All the suspects knew him, except possibly Simon Hapgood. George Robson must see him often on his daily walks with Fred on common and moor. Denise Freeman had known him well in the past and perhaps kept in contact. Emily Godson took him supplies of food and had been up to his lair three days before the murder. Jane Davidson had been close to the only son whose death had pitched Willy’s mind into the abyss. And Willy, he was sure, knew things about this death. Had almost told him things.

  PC Standing was struggling with the most difficult part of his message. ‘He – he said to tell you something, sir. It was in odd words – I couldn’t make sense of it.’

  ‘A quotation?’ Suddenly Lambert knew this was crucial.

  ‘Yes, sir, it probably was. I can’t remember the actual words.’

  ‘Try, Standing, unless you want to remain a PC for the next twenty years.’

  Standing put his hand over the phone, consulted his colleague. When he came back to them he said hesitantly, ‘Something about murder and a tongue, sir. And an organ…’ His voice tailed away as he realized how feeble it sounded.

  But he had given Lambert enough. The Superintendent could see Willy before him, hair wildly dishevelled, clothes in rags, eyes alight with pleasure as he offered the words of another sinewy mind that had gone astray. Willy, like that other beguiling riddler, was mad but north-north-west: this lover of nature would certainly know a hawk from a handsaw. And Lambert had the quotation ‘“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ,”’ he said.

  ‘That’s it, sir,’ said PC Standing, with surprise and admiration. He did not know that Willy had picked up the phrase with which he had concluded that headlong exchange on the moor, to signify that now he wished to speak.

  Lambert was exultant. Wino Willy was going to give him his murderer.

  Chapter 21

  ‘Have you found who did it yet?’ said Jane Davidson as she sat down.

  Perhaps it was just nervous bravado. Lambert was used to all kinds of reactions from those involved in serious crime inquiries.

  ‘We have our ideas,’ he said evenly. He afforded her the briefest smile possible at the outset of an interview.

  He had arranged to see her in Stanley Freeman’s old office. George Robson, the new incumbent, was out for the morning and had encouraged the use of this inner sanctum, which was almost sound-proof. Lambert sat at the big desk in what must have been Freeman’s swivel chair, with Hook impassive as a Buddha on his left. They saw no sign of discomfort in their subject. Miss Davidson disposed herself unhurriedly in the comfortable chair opposite
the Superintendent, placed her handbag on the corner of the desk, experimentally crossed and uncrossed her legs, settled eventually into the attitude she chose. A phrase Lambert thought to have forgotten years ago came back to him: in his days of National Service, drill sergeants would have called this ‘dumb insolence’. He watched her steadily; he could outsmart her easily enough at this game, where experience and rank were crushing attributes.

  ‘You will appreciate that in a murder inquiry we have to investigate the backgrounds and movements of all those close to the deceased,’ he said.

  ‘If you like,’ said Jane Davidson.

  ‘I don’t, always,’ said Lambert heavily. ‘It’s my job, that’s all.’ It was the way he used to pick up his daughter in the worst period of her adolescence. He looked down at his notes: this girl was the same age as that daughter, who was now expecting her second child. Jane Davidson was a young woman, with experience of life and its passions, not a fractious child. Youth had energy, and the ruthlessness that often came from a tendency to think in blacks and whites, rather than shades of grey. He resolved to think of her as a potential murderer. Or at least an accessory to murder.

  ‘Where were you on the night of this killing?’ The abruptness made it sound almost an accusation; he would waste no further time on tact and explanations.

  ‘I was at home. Look, I’ve been through all this.’ She picked up Freeman’s letter-opener, a small silver stiletto, and studied it, her crimson nails like gouts of blood upon its glittering surface.

  ‘I know. We’re about to go through it again.’ He looked at her grimly and drew the first flash of anger from those small brown eyes. Then she took a deep breath and sighed heavily, measuring out her ennui in her respiration.

  ‘I was at home, all evening. End of story.’ She eased her chair back, stretched nylon-clad legs before her so that both she and her interrogators could study them the better.

  ‘Witnesses?’ intoned Bert Hook impassively. Lambert was not sure whether he was supporting his chief or breaking the spell of those shapely extensions.

  ‘My mother. As you already know very well. That’s all.’ She folded her arms, swung the swivel chair a little, and stared at the ceiling. It was a caricature of the young executive at home in these surroundings; Lambert thought suddenly of Simon Hapgood. The difference was that Jane Davidson’s pose drew attention to her high, firm breasts, which her movement strained against the thin lemon cotton of her blouse. Bert Hook met this interesting profile when he looked up from his note-taking. Lambert, who was determined to offer no smiles, carefully avoided his sergeant’s face.

  He said, ‘Your neighbour saw you come in. She could not be sure whether you went out again or not.’ He was turning the notion on its head, but she was quick enough to spot it.

  ‘You mean she didn’t see me go out. That’s because I didn’t. Old Ma Bellingham doesn’t miss much. Nosy old cow.’

  ‘So your mother is your only witness?’

  ‘So my mother’s a liar? So how many witnesses have you got who saw me anywhere else?’ The woman knew her rights. Perhaps she had been over the strengths of her story many times before in her own mind; perhaps, he thought ruefully, she merely realized that he could not trap her because she was telling the truth.

  She reached languidly for her bag, placed it on her lap, extracted from its depths a packet of tipped cigarettes. She neither offered the packet to them nor asked if they objected to her smoking. She found a butane lighter, gazed full into Lambert’s eyes as she lit the cigarette, and blew the first cloud of smoke gently into the air between them. Lambert had given up cigarettes two years ago and lately at Christine’s insistence very nearly relinquished his pipe. The familiar sharp smell in his nostrils was a small torture, made more acute by the fancy that the girl knew exactly the stress she was imposing.

  In another place, he might have dashed the cigarette from her fingers and bidden her harshly not to smoke. But she had been charged with no offence. In the hoary but convenient phrase, she was helping police with their inquiries. Voluntarily, as a good citizen should. In the respectable working-class world where John Lambert had been brought up in the postwar years, young ladies did not paint their nails, and still less did they smoke. Since then, he had questioned a thousand sluts and whores and worse, quickly building a thick skin and a protective detachment. Now he found the prejudices ingrained in childhood as difficult for a grizzled policeman to discard as for others. He would have been surprised but scarcely gratified to find that placid Bert Hook would also like to have spanked this girl: the pleasure involved in the fantasy could scarcely be reconciled with CID objectivity.

  ‘How did you get the job at Freeman Estates?’ said Lambert. It was only pique that made him frame the question like that. Had he not been nettled by her appearance and bearing, he would merely have taken her through her time with the firm, trying to build up a picture of relationships with colleagues. As it was, he made it sound as if she could not have got the post merely on her merits. It was a departure from his own rules. And paradoxically, it struck home.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have it? I’m good at it,’ she almost shouted. The brown eyes, half shut with contempt for most of their initial exchange, were wide now with alarm.

  It was Lambert’s turn to be deliberately unhurried. He sorted through the papers in the file on the desk in front of him until he came to the photocopy of her application for the post. He glanced from her neat, small handwriting to the drawn face a few feet in front of him, dwelling on what he read, accentuating its significance in the sure knowledge that she would not recall exactly what she had set down here years earlier.

  ‘You came here with very few qualifications. English Language and one other O-level.’

  ‘I didn’t work at school,’ she muttered, flashing him a look of hate.

  ‘No doubt. That doesn’t explain why an employer would reward your indolence.’ He was aware of Hook watching him: this wasn’t at all his usual style. How far it was professional scenting of a weakness, how far a personal spite against a young woman who had got under his skin, he could not be sure himself. But he had opened a breach in her defences and he was driving through it as vigorously as he could, aware of his excitement but not his motive.

  ‘I took a course.’ She was almost a sullen schoolgirl as the shell of sophistication cracked around her. She still had her handbag on her knees, but now her fingers twisted and untwisted through the handle.

  ‘Correction. You began a course. A secretarial course at the College of Further Education. Shorthand, Typewriting, Office Practice; all of which might have been valuable at Freeman Estates. Except that you only lasted a month on the course.’

  ‘I got the chance of a job.’

  ‘Really!’ The cynicism as his lips curled the word was like a slap across the face. He did not like himself much, but he knew he was through the shell to the soft, unguarded interior. He thought of DI Rushton’s words, ‘We didn’t turn up any motive, but both she and her mother seemed scared. We felt they were hiding something, but we couldn’t find out what.’

  He said quietly, ‘Strange that in the middle of a recession as we were then, you should get a job here with minimal qualifications, while girls with six O-levels remained unemployed. Perhaps we’d better talk to your mother: she might be more cooperative.’ Again there was that look of fear on the face that had lately been so hard and confident.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she said wretchedly. She sat bolt upright now, the calves she had recently displayed so boldly tucked back under her seat, her shoulders hunched forward, as though to minimize the effect of the breasts she had shown to such advantage. Lambert remembered that she had no father, that she lived alone with a mother she helped to support. He should have hated his job, but the sense of a small triumph was stronger. If he softened his attitude, it was merely another tactic.

  ‘All I’m anxious to do is to get as full a picture as possible of what goes on at Freeman Estates. Of w
hat went on before the cold-blooded murder of your principal.’ A small shiver shook the humped shoulders at his last phrase, but she did not look up at him. ‘I need to know about your relationships with the other members of the firm. What about Simon Hapgood?’

  She looked up at him in surprise. ‘What about him?’ She seemed for a moment puzzled but relieved, as if she had expected his questioning to take a different tack. ‘I went out with him once or twice. If he can’t get his hand straight up your skirt, he’s not interested. He didn’t get up mine. He’s not concerned with me.’

  ‘Then who?’ said Lambert gently.

  ‘Don’t know. Not interested,’ she said, just too quickly. Her mouth set in the sullen pout of childhood, and he realized he would get nothing further here. She looked close to exhaustion; he saw now how much of a pretence her earlier attitude had involved. She must have been dreading this further probing into what Rushton and his DCs had failed to discover. He recalled his wife’s view that Jane Davidson was ‘a good girl when you get through to her’ and wondered how long ago she had formed that view. He had been pressing hard on a girl from what the social workers would call ‘a deprived background’. Well, it was an unfortunate fact of police life that many serious criminals came from ‘deprived backgrounds’.

  ‘What about George Robson?’ he asked after a pause. She relaxed a little further, attempted to smile. ‘Mr Robson is all right. Randy old bugger, but a gentleman!’ Apparently she did not consider this a paradox: Lambert decided he liked her for that. ‘The firm is going to be a lot happier place, now he’s in here.’ She looked round approvingly at the trappings of office, the big mahogany desk, the internal and external telephones, the blotting-pad and desk inkstand that was never used. ‘Miss Godson won’t be able to order me about like dirt now,’ she said with satisfaction.