[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  The other man was more rotund and cheerful-looking: he did not look threatening at all. As if to confirm this, he paused as they came up the path and drew the taller man’s attention to the splendid multicoloured display of dahlias which ran up the long border beside the lawn. When she opened the door and gave them a guarded smile of welcome, Chief Superintendent Lambert introduced this man to her as Detective Sergeant Hook.

  Lambert apologized for intruding upon her grief so soon after her husband’s death and explained that they wouldn’t be here long, that it was a necessary part of the routine in a case like this. Alison nodded her acceptance of the intrusion almost peremptorily, shaking her head to terminate his apologies, finding herself calmer than she had expected to be in the hours when she had waited for them. She was almost impatient to be done with these preliminaries: she would have liked to put an end to what she felt was her hypocrisy, to come out and tell them what sort of man Richard had been.

  But that would neither be seemly nor good strategy. Alison said, ‘It’s murder, isn’t it?’

  Lambert studied her for a moment, no doubt estimating whether she was likely to break down in some sort of emotional outburst. ‘It is, yes. That was confirmed to me late this morning.’

  Alison nodded. The first hurdle had been negotiated. ‘I felt it was, from the start.’ She wondered if they expected her to be crying: was it more distressing for relatives when they found that someone had died like this, or was death just death, even if you had loved the dead one?

  ‘Why did you feel this was murder, Mrs Cullis?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that a few times today, but I haven’t come up with anything definite. Richard had no history of heart trouble, of course. As far as I know, he was a perfectly healthy man.’

  ‘As far as you know? Surely you would have known of any medical history, as his wife?’

  Alison thought she caught just the trace of a smile as the tall man said this. Lambert was perfectly polite, but she was finding the way he studied her disconcerting: he seemed to have been watching her every move and her every reaction since she had brought them into her dining room. People would never have done that in an ordinary social setting; intense study of a person’s face would have seemed rude. She supposed CID people did it all the time as part of their job.

  Alison said as lightly as she could, ‘Don’t they say that no one knows any human being completely? From the moment when we leave infancy, we all keep some part of ourselves back, even from those closest to us. But yes, you’re right, of course you are. I’m sure that if Richard had had any serious medical condition, I’d have known about it.’

  ‘That still wouldn’t explain why you immediately assumed that this death was a murder.’ For the first time, she felt tense. It seemed this wasn’t just routine, after all. She was being challenged here, despite the man’s quiet, reasonable manner. ‘I’m not sure I did. Not immediately.’

  ‘Our information is that you did, Mrs Cullis.’

  They’d talked to a lot of people, last night, but she hadn’t heard anything significant in the snatches she’d overheard. But this man had taken Jason Dimmock, the golfer who’d won the cup, to one side, hadn’t he? She scarcely knew Dimmock. Surely he couldn’t have tried to implicate her?

  Alison took a deep breath, forcing herself to speak calmly. ‘I think you’re right, that I did assume pretty quickly that someone had killed Richard. It might have been something to do with the atmosphere round that table when he fell forward on to the carpet. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who immediately assumed that he hadn’t died from natural causes.’

  ‘That is interesting, the more so now that we know that you were right. Do you think you led the other people to think that?’

  This tall, intense man was like a dog with a bone: a very polite, non-growling dog, but also a very persistent one. ‘No. I’m sure it was a mutual feeling. I don’t know why you should want to suggest that I was the leader in it.’

  A slight, almost apologetic, smile crept on to the long, lined face. ‘Probably because of your first words after he fell, Mrs Cullis.’

  Alison wanted to respond with a smile of her own, but found that she couldn’t muster one. ‘You’ll need to enlighten me, Mr Lambert. It may surprise you to know that I can’t recall exactly how I reacted to my husband’s death.’

  ‘Our information is that you said, “I think he’s dead. Someone should inform the police. And we’ll need a doctor.”’

  ‘So I was calm. Or appeared calm. I don’t think that is significant. ’

  ‘The calmness may not be, Mrs Cullis. DS Hook and I are more aware than most people that there are many different and entirely innocent responses to death. But when there is no immediate evidence of the cause of death, it is unusual, perhaps even unique, in our experience, for someone to suggest the police are required before they call for medical assistance. Almost before they can be sure that the man is indeed dead, in this case.’

  Alison felt the silence stretch as they waited for her reply. She could think of no immediate response. Instead, she said, ‘The wife is always the first suspect in a murder case, isn’t she?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Talking to the next of kin is standard procedure, as I think DI Rushton will have told you on the phone when he arranged this meeting. When there is a wife, we like to see her first, because she might know things about the dead man which others do not.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Things about his lifestyle, his personality, his habits. About the sort of enemies he might have had.’

  ‘But in this case you think I killed Richard. Simply because of something I said in a moment of extreme stress.’

  Lambert gave the slightest shake of his head, without taking those intense grey eyes off her face for an instant. ‘It is our duty to follow up these things. To ask for an explanation of anything we find unusual. We found your immediate reaction to your husband’s death unusual.’

  Alison saw a way out of this. ‘All right. I accept it was unusual. But Richard led an unusual life. You are probably already aware that he had enemies: I certainly was. When he collapsed for no apparent reason, I must have assumed that one of them was responsible.’

  ‘You say that we must be aware that he had enemies. At this early stage, we know little about our victim. Perhaps you can—’

  ‘You know that he was accused of rape. That he was interviewed last week in connection with that.’

  ‘Yes, we do. I interviewed him myself about the allegation. Perhaps I should tell you that at the time of his death the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to bring a rape case against him.’

  Lambert watched her carefully, wondering if this information might be of solace to her, wondering whether, in the onset of guilt which normally follows the death of someone close, it would be a comfort to know that her husband was not to be accused of what many people find the most despicable of crimes.

  He had his answer very quickly. Her features twisted into a sneer of derision and she said, ‘He bought himself the best lawyers, I expect. Richard Cullis would, once he knew it mattered. I suppose your people were frightened off.’ She might have been a cynical policeman decrying the shortcomings of the legal system, so exactly did she echo the C1D reaction to the failure to proceed with a case which had cost them much labour.

  Lambert said. ‘You consider that your husband was capable of rape?’

  ‘I know that he was capable of most things, Superintendent Lambert. I know among other things that he couldn’t keep his prick in his trousers for any length of time. It surprises me that he would be foolish enough to land himself with a rape case - I did not think he would have been stupid enough to lay himself open to a charge like that. Richard was a bastard, but not usually a stupid bastard.’ She repeated the harsh word as if she enjoyed saying it.

  ‘Did you know that the woman who had accused him of raping her was sitting at the table with you last night?’

&
nbsp; ‘I divined that during the evening. Priscilla Godwin. I’ve met her a couple of times, as I’ve met most of the people who work in the research laboratories in Richard’s section. Until very recently, I was in and out of the place quite frequently: he liked to preserve the fiction of a happy marriage to his staff. I’d met Miss Godwin, but I hardly knew her. She wasn’t near me at the table and I didn’t have to speak to her last night. I’m glad of that, because I’ve no idea what I would have said to her. I expect I would have offered her my sympathy, which she probably wouldn’t have welcomed.’

  A wife would normally have wondered about how this other woman had got herself involved with her husband. Even if she accepted that in the end he had attempted an ugly attack, she would have speculated about what kind of relationship there had been before that attack and how much encouragement he had received from the woman concerned. But it was already clear to them that Alison Cullis was no ordinary wife.

  It was Bert Hook who now said to her, ‘It is helpful to us to find a wife who makes no secret of her enmity towards her husband.’

  Alison glanced at his broad-featured, open face and relaxed a little: this didn’t look like a man capable of setting traps. She allowed herself a small, rather grim smile. ‘I don’t enjoy hypocrisy and I don’t suppose you do. In any case, I expect you’ll quickly find out just how much I despised Richard, when you talk to other people who were at the table last night. Detection is your business, and that won’t be difficult detection.’

  Hook gave her an answering smile. ‘It is much better to be honest, I agree. We see people who are not honest with us getting themselves into all sorts of difficulties. Mrs Cullis, you have made no secret of your dislike for your husband. Just now you said that you despised him. That sounds like a marriage which is past redemption. Were you planning a divorce?’

  ‘No.’ She paused for a moment on the negative, marshalling her thoughts to it, wondering why she had said this. The denial had been instinctive; perhaps it was the habits of childhood religion which had spoken for her. ‘Richard didn’t want a divorce. He said he was still in love with me, that we could “reassemble the parts”. That was the phrase he used.’ For the first time, Alison felt a sudden, unexpected pang of regret that the man was dead, that he would not be able to make one more appeal to her. To shut out that shaft of weakness, she said waspishly, ‘Divorce wouldn’t have suited Richard’s image as a member of the board at Gloucester Chemicals. He was very conscious of that image.’

  Hook studied her for a moment with his head a little on one side, as intently as his chief had done before him. She found it even more disturbing in this comfortable, unthreatening face. Eventually he said, ‘Wasn’t that a rather out-of-date attitude, Mrs Cullis? There are many prominent and highly successful industrialists who have been divorced.’

  He was right, of course. She had taken a false step in asserting that. It would be safer as well as more honest to concentrate on her own background. ‘I am a practising Catholic, Sergeant Hook. Some people think that is a rather out-of-date Church.’ She allowed herself a rueful smile, to show Hook that he had not caught her out and that she was not ruffled. ‘My Church does not approve of divorce. Some people think that attitude is unrealistic in the twenty-first century. Others think that it is an example of moral canons which cannot be changed. When I married and made solemn vows, I married for life.’

  That at any rate was true, she told herself. She had intended that, all those years ago, in what now seemed a different world: it was the experience of marriage with Richard Cullis which had changed her view. She tried not to think of that dark, high-vaulted church with the candles winking in the shadows, where she thought she had resolved to break her ties with Richard. Then an idea struck her and she voiced it before she could prevent herself from doing so. ‘This gives me a motive for killing him, doesn’t it? Murder might have been the only way out of a marriage that had failed. ’

  Hook smiled at her. In that moment, he was his old reassuring, disarming self. ‘Most people, including those with religious scruples, would consider murder a greater sin than divorce.’

  She smiled back at him. He didn’t seem at all like any of the few policemen she had met in her life. ‘Those people include me, Sergeant Hook. When you live with someone and things go wrong, you can cheerfully contemplate murder at times. But it is never a serious proposition. On purely rational grounds - and I think I am a rational person, despite my religious preferences - one would have to reject that solution to one’s troubles. As you have just suggested, murder is a very serious crime, whereas divorce is permitted by the law of the land - indeed, sometimes even encouraged, it seems to some of us.’

  Alison was relishing this little exchange with a man who seemed to be on her side, enjoying demonstrating that her brain was working even under the stress of interview. It was the man she was not looking at who now said quietly and evenly, ‘Who do you think killed your husband, Mrs Cullis?’

  She was almost tempted into the flip reply that it was their job and not hers to decide that. But as she transferred her attention to the long, lined face and the unblinking grey eyes, she thought better of it. ‘I don’t know. I suspect Richard had many enemies among those who worked with him. You hear of people who make friends easily. Richard was the sort of man who made enemies easily.’

  It was a little too glib, Lambert thought. It smacked of a prepared statement. At this moment, he did not like this woman he had never met before today. Perhaps he was prejudiced, he thought. He preferred grief in a widow, even when the deceased husband did not really merit it. Perhaps his bias against her self-control was largely a CID man’s reaction: people who were in the grip of any sort of emotion were always more vulnerable as interviewees. Anger or jealousy, love or hate, invariably upset their judgement when they were being questioned. It was always embarrassing to have to press for answers from a wife stricken with grief on the day after her husband’s death, but it was usually productive: you learned more than you did from someone as composed and aware of herself as this woman.

  Yet he could not say that she seemed dishonest. She had made no real secret of the fact that she had thoroughly disliked, even despised, her husband; she had even acknowledged that she expected to be treated as a suspect in the initial stages of their investigation. Lambert wondered if he was trying to needle her a little as he said, ‘So it’s your opinion that the people who worked with Richard might have had reasons to kill him. But couldn’t this also have been a crime of passion?’

  Alison was a little shocked at his directness, at his daring to suggest that some other woman might have been sufficiently involved with Richard to want to kill him. But she had a sense that she was winning this little contest. ‘It could indeed. There’d be me for one. I’ve already indicated that I was thoroughly pissed off with the man. Perhaps I should now tell you formally that I didn’t kill him.’

  She glanced at Hook making notes in his notebook, then gave Lambert a small, slightly mocking, smile. ‘There was of course another woman sitting at the table who had a reason to commit what you call a “crime passionnel”. The woman whom he had recently raped. You tell me that there was to be no prosecution, but my money would be on the woman in the case to be telling the truth about it. And once she knew he was going to get away with it, the sense of injustice was no doubt very great. I would certainly have felt murderous intent, in her place.’

  ‘Ms Godwin will be questioned in due course, along with the other people at your table last night, as you would no doubt expect. Do you know of anyone else who might have been emotionally involved with your husband?’

  ‘No. But as I told you earlier, I have not given much heed to his movements in the last few months.’

  There was no need for her to sound so satisfied about that, Lambert thought. He said more stiffly than he intended, ‘Is there any other person who you think could be responsible for this death?’

  Alison paused, confident now that they must be near
the end and that she had acquitted herself well. ‘No, I don’t think so. Those All God’s Creatures idiots had threatened him, but they weren’t near him when he died, were they, so I don’t see how it could have been one of them.’

  ‘We shall certainly be investigating that line. At the moment, as you indicate, it seems that whatever their intentions, the animal rights protesters can scarcely have had the opportunity to harm Mr Cullis.’ He stood up. ‘For the moment, that is all, Mrs Cullis. If you think of anything at all which might have a bearing on this case, you should get in touch with us immediately.’ He handed her his card with the Oldford CID number on it. ‘With apologies again for our intrusion, we shall now leave you alone with your grief.’

  Alison wondered if he intended an irony in that last sentence, but it was delivered so evenly that she could not be certain. She made herself tea when they had gone and sat with her hands round the china beaker in her favourite armchair, finding both the drink and the familiar, enclosing feel of the chair surprisingly comforting. It had gone well, she decided. It had largely followed the lines she had expected and she had been able to give them only what she had planned.

  One thing rather surprised her about herself. She had stuck to the line that she had never had any intention of divorcing Richard. Now she wondered why she had done that. It had come naturally to her lips, even when she knew that she had given serious thought to divorce. Her initial intention had been to disguise the degree of acrimony between herself and Richard, so as to diminish the suspicion which must always attach to the spouse when a man is murdered.

  But when it had come to it, she had not troubled to minimize that acrimony. She didn’t really regret that. It would have felt like a betrayal of herself to pretend that she had been close to her husband, that she had been devastated by his death. And the real state of their relationship would surely come out when they questioned others. But she could reasonably have pretended to be at least in shock, to be fragile, even devastated, by the suddenness of Richard’s removal from her life.