Making a Killing

by J M Gregson

  ‘How did Miss Godson get on with Mr Freeman?’ asked Lambert innocently.

  ‘She hated him,’ the girl said, promptly and with relish: she plainly felt she owed the firm’s other woman no favours.

  ‘Enough to kill him?’ said Lambert. ‘That’s what Sergeant Hook and I are interested in.’

  Jane Davidson showed shock, then the beginnings of a delicious excitement at the notion. She wiped her cheek with a tiny flowered handkerchief, then looked down at the smeared eye-shadow. Then she said reluctantly, ‘No. Freeman had done something to hurt her, I’m sure, but I don’t know what. But old Emily wouldn’t kill him. She wouldn’t have the bottle.’

  ‘“Bottle” is a difficult thing to estimate, Jane,’ said Lambert, reflecting that ‘old Emily’ was probably several years his junior. It was the first time he had used the receptionist’s Christian name; perhaps now, with pretence stripped away, she was reminding him of his own daughter. ‘All kinds of people acquire courage for a little while when they are desperate enough.’ She nodded thoughtfully, stubbing out the last of the cigarette she had long forgotten in the big glass ashtray.

  Lambert put aside his file on Jane Davidson and looked hard at her. ‘Do you know of a man called Wino Willy?’ he said.

  Her eyes as she looked at him were full of strong emotions. He thought he caught fear and anger; then her face relaxed into an unexpected tenderness. Her voice very quiet, she said, ‘I knew him as Mr Harrison. He was always very kind to me.’

  ‘I believe you knew his son quite well at one time.’

  Now there was a fierce pride as she said, ‘Andrew. Yes, we were very close. He was a bit older than me but we got on well. I think perhaps if he hadn’t – ’ She couldn’t finish. If Lambert hadn’t had years of experience, he would have been tempted to reach out to the small white hand which clenched itself into a fist and pressed itself against her thigh.

  Instead, he said gently, ‘Do you still see Mr Harrison?’

  She took a long time to reply, as if she were coming to a decision. ‘Just occasionally,’ she said. ‘It used to be more often, but I think I only upset him. As a matter of fact, I saw him on the night before the murder.’

  Another of his suspects in touch with the enigmatic figure on the moor just before the murder: Lambert scarcely knew whether he was elated or not. He had a feeling that the increased complexity, the extra dimension which he was adding to the killing of Stanley Freeman, would eventually point the solution, but as yet he could not see how. He said lamely, ‘How did he seem?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘As usual, I suppose. I took a friend’s dog which had an infected paw. He bound it up with some herbs against the wound. While he was concentrating on that, he seemed quite normal. Like a mother with her baby.’ Perhaps she surprised herself with the simile, for she stopped and seemed near to tears again at the recollection. ‘As soon as he’d finished, he danced away from me as wild as ever. I couldn’t get through to him; I might have been a total stranger.’

  Lambert, who had for a few moments on the moor felt himself in touch with that ravaged mind, caught something of the tragedy she felt in her last phrase. Well, at least the dog would make it easy to verify the facts of her story. It might of course have been a carefully chosen excuse to visit Willy: their former relationship suggested Jane would have a closer contact than almost anyone with the man who was now Wino Willy.

  She was relaxed now, nervously drained but relieved by the thought that her ordeal was almost over. It was a good moment to play a trump card in this strange game which was the staple diet of detection. Lambert’s voice was carefully even as he said, ‘And what about your own relationship with Stanley Freeman?’

  He watched the scarlet nails fasten on the butt of the cigarette she had already discarded, then grind it on and on, until it was dry shreds in the glass bowl. Her voice when it came was dry-throated and low, as if it belonged to a much older woman. All she said was, ‘I didn’t like him,’ but the croaking delivery shocked all three of them.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ Lambert was still as a snake. The brown eyes widened with fear, sunk in hollows which seemed darker in the young face.

  ‘No. I could never have killed him.’ The voice was so low they had to strain to hear it. Faintly through the thick walls, they caught the sound of the telephone in the outer office, which Jane Davidson would normally have answered. Emily Godson, who had taken over her duties for the duration of this interview, must have answered it, but they caught nothing of her voice.

  ‘What car do you drive, Miss Davidson?’ said Lambert quietly.

  ‘A white Fiesta.’

  ‘A company car?’ Lambert, who knew the answers here, was checking her reactions.

  ‘Yes. Part of the pool, in case anyone is objecting.’ She was watching him warily, trying to find where this led and who had objected to her possession of the car. But she did not look threatened.

  He switched directly back to her relationship with the dead man. ‘It was quite clear earlier that there was something odd about your original appointment here.’ She nodded dumbly, signifying her acquiescence now, not trusting herself to speak. ‘I have to advise you that your best policy if you are not involved in this murder is to be perfectly frank with us. The innocent have nothing to fear; any confidences which have nothing to do with the case will be respected.’ He went on with the soothing phrases, pouring them like medication over the hunched figure opposite him.

  Jane Davidson sat with her handbag pressed against her like a shield, the handkerchief clutched in one of the small white fists as the tears ran unheeded down her face. She looked at the edge of the desk in front of her, not at the two men who had brought her to this disclosure.

  Then she said dully, ‘Stanley Freeman was my father.’

  Chapter 22

  It came nearer, its sharp brown eye fixed unblinkingly on the man it had known for months. And Willy, so tremulous in any human arena, sat quiet as stone. The bird hopped between Willy’s large feet, removed the ants with tongue swifter than a striking snake’s, and looked up into the lined face above him. Willy looked back at the bird and said nothing, though his throat purred a scarcely audible welcome. The sleek crimson head investigated his right boot in detail, found it wanting, and looked to the tall oaks and the sky beyond them. The bird hopped unhurriedly away, then rose and wheeled in undulating flight into the wood. Willy heard its call like derisive laughter behind him.

  His mind was deciding for the first time in years upon a plan of action. For a long time he had moved as instinctively and thoughtlessly as the wild creatures around him, his course motivated by the same needs of food and shelter that they felt. But not as freely as them: he was a man still. Weighed down now by a burden he had thought to have escaped from for ever, he wrestled with what he had once called conscience. A notion unknown to birds and beasts.

  He knew now that he should have restricted himself to those birds and beasts, for human contact was not to be trusted. This human had brought him food and drink and proposed a monster jape. He remembered the very phrase: like Billy Bunter and those boys who had never existed. But it was not a jape, and now that it had gone wrong he must tell. When he had gone down to the house and told the woman this morning, she had yelled at him to be quiet and fled from him. He could hear her screams still; they had rung in his ears long after he had come away.

  But he would tell the man who had come to him on the moor. He would put it right. That man knew what a piece of work is man. ‘“How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in action how like an angel!”’ Willy found himself tossing the ironic phrases to the empty sky, while the green woodpecker mocked his inaction from the shadowy depths behind him. And in that moment he knew what he must do

  He had thought to wait until the man came to him again on the moor. But that might take days, and in that time…

  Willy stood, grew tall, buttoned his ragged coat. It was not cold, but he was gathering his resources and hi
s resolution about him. Only he knew the courage this was taking him, though Lambert would later divine it. For Wino Willy was going back by his own resolution into the world of men. Of buildings, crowded with the humanity that scared him more than bombs. Of sniggers, and sly smiles, and assurances that could not be trusted. Of japes that led to death. He kicked the tree-stump he had sat on, feeling the pain on his instep as a reassurance of the reality of his humanity. Then he set off, before his resolution could fail.

  And so while Lambert questioned the associates of Stanley Freeman, the man who knew his murderer moved towards him. He kept to the common as long as he could, working his way parallel to the straggling hawthorn hedge which marked its boundary. He chattered to the blackbirds and thrushes which sang around him, scolded the pair of magpies which sailed in like aircraft from the field below. His tall, tatterdemalion figure looked like a modern Pied Piper against the skyline as he whistled and chattered his way along, but no birds or mammals followed his erratic course as he moved towards the world of men. He did not see the human eyes that watched him from the road beyond the hedge.

  The common was his territory. He knew every clump of prickly gorse, every tiny knoll of ground, each of the three peaty hollows where black water lurked to soak the unwary. He could move surefootedly across here, even on moonless nights, as occasionally he did when dark visions and darker memories made sleep impossible. He was frightened, but determined now; the excitement rose like a drug to give him courage. The spires and roofs of Oldford came into view. He was doing the right thing. It was a sensation he had not known for years and his flesh prickled at it.

  He was nearly at the point where he would have to join the road. As he approached it, a black and white collie-type dog came joyfully to meet him. It escaped regularly from the council estate to join Willy in his free world of common and moor; they greeted each other as old friends.

  The hawthorn here was in luxuriant summer growth. Any day now, the council lorry with its flail cutter would bring its swift, harsh discipline to the road side of the hedge, even in this scarcely used lane, but the common side would remain untouched. Willy walked quickly behind the dog, prodigal with his energy to prevent his heart from quailing. He took in almost everything, with darting glances which dwelt on no single object: not the wild flowers at the base of the hedge, nor the fast-moving banks of cloud that suddenly obscured the sun, nor even the horses in the field on the other side of the lane. Almost everything: he did not notice the car, rolling silently in neutral down the long slope behind him. The eyes followed him steadily wherever the gaps in the hawthorn allowed; the person whose fingers moved so delicately upon the steering-wheel had guessed now where Willy was going. And what he was about.

  The lane was not wide where Willy joined it. The growth of the hedges meant that there was no room for pedestrians to the side of the tarmac surface. Willy chanted instructions to the happy, heedless dog which trotted beside him. ‘Always face approaching traffic,’ he said. ‘Keep your head up and your shoulders back and swing your arms.’ He was quoting his father forty years ago: it suddenly seemed much closer than that. A small red van did indeed come towards them, passing man and dog as they slowed, the driver waving a cheerful acknowledgement of their caution.

  Willy gave the dog’s head a swift stroke, then strode boldly forward and quoted his father again. ‘Put some swank into it!’ he said. He swung his arms extravagantly high, up above his waist, until eventually he marched like a swift tin soldier and his hands swung as high as his shoulders, as he had seen his dead son’s hands swing as he watched him long ago through the railings of the school playground. He sang and he giggled. And the little dog laughed to see such fun.

  He never even heard the car behind him. It came up with him where the road dropped narrow and steep between the high hedges. The dog’s acute ears caught the noise of its harsh acceleration and leapt sideways beneath the hedge, but Willy was singing too boisterously to catch the warning. He moved automatically sideways after the dog, lost his balance, made it easy for the ruthless driver.

  He fell beneath the wheels as they leapt forward, his legs smashed like sticks beneath the offside ones, his head ground sickeningly on the edge of the road within a yard of the terrified dog. His last thought was of his dead son, his last sensation as he entered the darkness one of a vast relief.

  The driver checked the front of the car before looking at the body. Wino Willy Harrison had been accommodating to the last. Falling beneath the wheels, he had not even damaged the front fender. Only the tyres had touched him. A brisk dash through the ford where this old lane neared the village would remove almost all trace of the episode. The driver did not need to approach too close to Willy’s shattered corpse to be sure that he could speak no more. The dog whined hopelessly for a moment beside the spatter of blood and brain upon the grass, then slunk through the hedge and was gone.

  As the first heavy drops of rain began to fall, the car moved swiftly away.

  Chapter 23

  In the office of Freeman Estates, Superintendent and Sergeant sat looking at each other and feeling rather stupid.

  Jane Davidson had been released to the limited comforts of the washroom, but Bert Hook was still bewildered by her melodramatic revelation. Even Lambert, who had trained himself over twenty years to be surprised by nothing, had to admit that it had not been what he expected.

  ‘Do you believe her?’ said Hook.

  ‘Yes, I think so. We’ll check it out, of course, but she’s no fool, our Miss Davidson, despite her school career. She knows we’ll check. And it fits the facts. It answers the questions about how she got the job and a car the others thought she didn’t warrant, and what it was that both she and her mother were concealing.’

  ‘Does it remove her from our list of suspects?’ Bert Hook, whose conjectures about what Miss Davidson had been hiding had run on other, more conventional, lines, was too shaken to think clearly yet. Or perhaps he had dropped into the flattering but unhelpful habit of letting his superintendent lead his thinking.

  ‘You know better than that, Bert. Over half of homicides are domestic. A high proportion of them are children killing fathers because of real or imagined grievances.’

  ‘But usually on impulse.’ Bert Hook was chauvinist enough to reject the vision of a young girl clenching her father’s drunken wrists in a grip of iron as he struggled to remove the plastic bag which was asphyxiating him.

  ‘Agreed. But the Jane Davidson she chose to present to us in the first part of our interview would be quite capable of planning and executing this kind of killing, once she was convinced of its justice. Where do the Davidsons live?’

  ‘On the council estate.’

  ‘We’ll have to question Jane’s mother, but all the signs are that the eminent Mr Freeman neither acknowledged his daughter nor made financial provision for her mother. That seems like par for the course for him.’ He was thinking of Margot Jones and the life left to her. And his golfing metaphor was not accidental: he longed to be out of this claustrophobic office and the increasingly sordid Freeman Estates, breathing the clear air of his golf course and walking quietly between high trees.

  ‘Stanley Freeman has left a wife who is scarcely grieving and four employees who are glad he’s gone. The more I find out about him, the less I regret his passing. But no one’s going to get away with murder if we can help it.’ It sounded in his ears like a slogan, the kind of thing naïve young inspectors offered to hungry pressmen. ‘Sorry, Bert, I need to lash myself into action from time to time.’

  ‘At least one of these five is lying,’ said Hook, feeling the need of a truism himself to focus the discussion.

  ‘Probably two or three. Maybe all five. The problem is to distinguish the lies which connect with the murder from those people tell to protect their own secrets.’ Lambert shuffled his papers on the late Stanley Freeman’s big desk and prepared rather wearily to be objective. ‘Emily Godson and Jane Davidson have been given us accounts of th
eir movements on the night of the murder, which we may suspect but have not so far disproved. Emily says she was with nutty Aunt Alice, Jane with her mother. Negative evidence supports their stories, in that we have not unearthed anyone who saw either of them, or their cars, anywhere else on that Wednesday night. Let’s put them aside for the moment. What about the others?’

  Hook turned the pages of his notebook ponderously, indulging a mannerism: he knew well enough the facts he wanted, without referring to its contents. ‘George Robson was seen by three different people with his dog on the common in the important hour between eight and nine. He’s the only one who seems to be in the clear, thanks to Fred and his walks. I like Fred,’ said Bert Hook inconsequentially.

  Lambert saw the golden labrador with his body across the Sergeant’s feet and his soft head in Bert’s large, friendly hands. The tadpole of an idea wriggled in the recesses of his mind, swam briefly, and disappeared again into the darkness. ‘What car does Robson drive?’

  ‘A red Sierra Ghia,’ said Hook instantly, too practised to be thrown by the apparent non sequiturs of his chief.

  ‘Which leads us,’ said Lambert, jumping a couple of sentences like an old married man in conversation with his wife, ‘to Simon Hapgood. Still no definite corroboration of when he arrived in the pub that night?’

  ‘Nothing definite. More sightings: none certain before nine o’clock. He seems to have been boisterous to draw attention to himself, and anxious to give the impression he’d been there for hours to anyone who met him.’ Hook wondered if he was being fair: he disliked the blond and extrovert Mr Hapgood, though he did not care to analyse his distaste in case it owed something to jealousy. But then his chief had always encouraged him to air his prejudices freely in these confidential exchanges. So he was quite bold in pointing out, ‘He drives a blue Sierra.’