by J M Gregson
‘You think it’s suicide?’ said Lambert. Something told him it wasn’t, but for a wild moment he hoped Harding had found something to support the idea. A message to someone, perhaps, or a previous threat to end it all in this way. He knew nothing of Keane other than the public pronouncements of the man, and from that suicide did not seem likely.
George Harding gave him a rueful smile. ‘It’s the most likely thing statistically, as you know. But no, I doubt it, as you obviously do, John. It’s early days, but there doesn’t appear to be any note, either at his flat in London or in his cottage down here.’ He picked up a sheet from the folder in front of him. ‘And his mother said he was, “cheerful and looking forward to his Christmas,” when he left her. That was four days ago, of course, when our MP was merely a missing person.’
He sighed, wondering if the tall man opposite him was thinking as he was of the impact of today’s news on that resolute old lady. Harding liked Lambert, even though most police wiseacres had forecast that there would be clashes between the new CC and his senior CID superintendent. Those who had thought that Lambert was a throwback to an earlier age and would be treated accordingly had forgotten that he was that most indispensable of police personnel, a thief-taker. Chief Constables were dependent for their reputations upon the successes of such men. Whatever their own skills in negotiating the minefields of public accountability, they needed the statistics of success to back them.
Harding looked at this shrewd, grizzled officer. ‘You’ll be in charge, of course, John.’
Lambert said, ‘It will be high profile, sir. Assuming that it’s going to be a murder investigation, that is.’
Harding nodded. He knew what Lambert was getting at. ‘Don’t worry about that aspect. I’ll handle all the public statements, the press conferences, the television and the local radio. I may want you beside me on occasions, if this runs on for any length of time.’ It was his way of saying that he was not shutting the superintendent out, not anxious to take all the credit for himself from a successful outcome.
He was assuming success, when that was anything but certain. But the men at the top had to do that: it was part of leadership. One of the things they taught you at management courses for senior police personnel. Harding would have done it anyway; optimism came naturally to him, and was one of the foundations of his success.
‘Can I have my usual team?’ said Lambert. He forgot the ‘sir’ as quickly as he always did, as his mind ran ahead to the first steps he must take. It meant no disrespect, was merely part of his impatience to get to grips with the realities of detection. He did not allow his subordinates to ‘sir’ him as they worked, except on suitably public occasions.
Harding smiled at him. ‘And operate in your usual manner, I suppose you mean?’ They grinned at each other, the years falling away; for a moment they were both young coppers, eager to bring in a result. Lambert was unusual in his unwillingness to mount an investigation from CID headquarters, to run a team from his desk with only occasional sorties into the world outside.
As the phone shrilled on his desk, Harding ignored it long enough to say, ‘Yes, you go out and get the smell of the case, John. As long as you bring home the bacon, I don’t care how it’s done.’ He would have added the rider, ‘Within the law, of course,’ to most of his thrusting younger officers, but it was not necessary with this man. Lambert did not cut corners when it came to getting his evidence. That was taken for granted, and it was a major source of the building trust between the two men.
Then the Chief Constable picked up the phone and listened gravely to the voice which spoke animatedly on the other end of the line. He nodded twice, then said, ‘Right. Superintendent Lambert will be in charge of the case. Pass all information to him—he’ll keep me briefed. The murder room will be set up here in Oldford.’
It was the first time the word had been used. He stared hard at the instrument for a moment after he had put it down, then looked into the long, attentive face opposite him. ‘You were right, John, of course. The pathologist made the usual noises about waiting for the PM, but he’s pretty sure even out by that pool that the body was dumped there. That Keane didn’t die by drowning.’
It took Lambert thirty minutes to drive the old Vauxhall Senator to the pond where all that remained of Raymond Keane had been discovered. He did not hurry, for he had Bert Hook beside him, and they discussed the little they already knew of the missing person that had suddenly become a murder case.
There was a pale winter sun behind a thin cover of white cloud, so that the landscape of the southern Cotswolds took on an impressionist look, with the bare tops of the forest trees shimmering in a haze against the winter sky. The streams in the bottoms of the gentle valleys appeared and reappeared like silvered ribbons, catching and losing the light as the car climbed and dropped over the slopes. The M5 was well behind them now, and they had left the main road to Stroud. There were few other vehicles visible in this area of agriculture and forestry. Most of the ploughing had been completed in autumn, so that they saw not a single tractor crawling over the arable areas. As always, this seemed a quiet place for evil to be abroad.
It would have been easy to miss the place altogether, had it not been for the bright-yellow plastic ribbons and the single police vehicle. The plastic had been used to cordon off a rough rectangle extending from the lane to an area around the pond itself. The ambulance bearing the mortal remains of Raymond Keane was leaving as Lambert’s old Vauxhall arrived. Although it had been obvious from its appearance that this had been a corpse for many days, the police had still had to wait for death to be formally confirmed by their doctor.
‘There’s no doubt that it was in fact Keane?’ said Lambert to Sergeant Jack Johnson, the experienced Scene-of-Crime officer.
‘Not to my mind. The clothes conform to the ones his mother described him as wearing when he left her house on Christmas Eve.’
Lambert nodded. ‘We’d better get the formal identification completed as soon as possible. Is there anyone other than his mother we can use?’
‘He was divorced. First wife hasn’t seen him for four years, she says. Apparently there was a second wife in the offing. But there’s a sister. She might be the best bet. He wasn’t a very pretty sight when he came out of the water, though you and I have seen worse.’
Lambert turned to Hook. ‘Can you contact the sister, please, Bert? And you’d better attend at the morgue with her when she does the identification.’ Most murderers came from within the family, even when the victim was a public man. He had no great hopes in this case, but it would be standard procedure to study the bereaved woman’s reactions.
Lambert looked back from the black surface of the pond down the forty yards to the road. Already what had been overgrown was now a track flattened by the feet of the investigators, even though the hefty police feet were clothed in the regulation plastic bags to avoid direct contact with the ground. Johnson anticipated his question. ‘Presumably the body was dumped from a vehicle. But there were no wheel tracks when we got here. Probably indicates that he was brought here during that period of hard frost, when the ground was like iron.’
That could have been any time during the period from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day. So the killer already had fortune on his side. Or hers: Lambert made the detective’s automatic reservation. But perhaps this murderer had not been lucky, and had calculated things to take account of the conditions; it never did to underestimate an opponent. ‘We’ll know more about how he was brought here when the autopsy has given us some idea of the method and time of death. But I expect you’re right. No sole prints either, then?’
Not so far. We’ve eliminated those of the man who found him. Elderly gent out walking his dog. Gave him quite a shock, I expect.’
*
Raymond Keane’s sister Katherine agreed to identify the body. And to come at once. ‘It will be better for Mother if all doubts are removed immediately,’ she said.
Bert Hook was glad of he
r calmness on the phone. He was glad too that she agreed to come so quickly. It meant she would be able to see the body before they cut it up for the postmortem; they did a good job of sewing people up for the relatives these days, but he was not sure what the effects of decomposition would be on such restoration. Death was still a grim, unrelenting business, for those who had been close to the deceased. They were presented with less gore, fewer of the smells of human decay, than in the old days, but clinical advances sometimes only made human tragedy more poignant.
She met him at the mortuary. She wore a dark imitation fur coat; a small black hat sat precariously on an abundance of black hair which was not used to accommodating hats. She came dressed as for a winter funeral, thought Hook. She was composed, her black-gloved hands clutching a leather handbag without any feverish movement. Her face was very white, and the skin beneath her eyes was puffy, making the pupils seem smaller within their sockets. ‘You should call me Kate,’ she said.
Hook thought that would be irrelevant. He said, ‘He’s been in the water for some days: we don’t know yet exactly how many.’
‘A river?’
‘No. A pond. And it’s been frozen over for most of that time.’
She nodded. ‘The flesh isn’t much damaged, then?’
He realized that she had been preparing herself for the flesh being gnawed by rats or fish. Perhaps he should have said more on the phone. ‘No, nothing like that. The face is a little—a little puffed up, that’s all.’ Like yours, but a lot worse, he wanted to say. He was shaken by a surge of sympathy for this woman he did not know, would probably never know.
He stood behind her as the assistant took her to the corpse in its steel box. She took a deep breath, breathed out with her eyes closed, then nodded briefly to the man, and he drew back the sheet to expose the head beneath it.
There was a sharp, rasping sound as she snatched in air. So her last image of the elder brother who had teased her, protected her, advised her, infuriated her, and just occasionally filled her with admiration would be of this smooth, inflated skin, stretched like a bloated white stocking over the features she knew so well. Raymond’s brown eyes were closed, and she was grateful for that. Someone had combed back the hair while it was still sodden, so that it clung to the scalp, looking less thick than it had in life.
‘That’s my brother,’ Kate said, and the attendant replaced the sheet quickly, as if anxious the vulnerability of that distended face should be protected as swiftly as possible.
The warm little waiting room outside was deserted. Hook completed the formalities of the official identification sheet, assessing with a practised eye how brittle the calmness of this seemingly self-possessed woman might be. ‘If you could answer a few questions now, it would mean we did not have to disturb you at home,’ he said quietly.
She looked up into his face for the first time, registering the rubicund, concerned features. Like the village bobby they used to have when she was a child, she thought inconsequentially. ‘I should prefer that,’ she said. ‘I have young children at home, you see. I wouldn’t want them to be affected by this.’
‘It won’t take long. First of all, I have to tell you that we suspect foul play in this matter. We shall know more certainly by the end of the day, but even at this stage—’
‘Raymond was killed. You can be sure of that, Sergeant. He wasn’t the type to commit suicide.’
This calm acceptance of murder was unusual; most people recoiled from the darkest of crimes. Perhaps she found the waste of suicide, with its disturbing implications for the rest of the family, less acceptable even than murder. Hook said, ‘We need to establish who were the last people to see him. To build up a picture of—’
‘Last persons apart from the one who killed him, you mean, of course.’ She was disturbingly abrupt in her correction. ‘I don’t know of anyone who saw him after my mother. That was at around three thirty p.m. on Christmas Eve, apparently.’
She had been making her own enquiries, clearly. But Keane had been a missing person for a week before he became a murder victim and Hook became involved in this. He wrote the time in his notebook in his clear, round hand, giving himself a moment to think, deciding that there was no point in being oblique with this organized, almost impatient sister of the victim. ‘Where was he going?’
‘To his cottage. We already told that to the constable who came to see us when we reported him missing.’
He ignored her rebuke. ‘Was he planning to meet someone there?’
‘Yes. His fiancée. Or the woman who was to become his fiancée: I’m not sure it had been formally announced.’
So she wasn’t quite as close to this brother as he had thought her to be up to now, thought Hook. Or at least, she wasn’t quite up to date on the latest developments. ‘What is this lady’s name?’ he said.
‘Zoe. Zoe Renwick.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘Just once. She’s attractive. And well organized. Just the wife for a coming man in parliament, I’d have thought.’ She ticked off the statements as though they were a list; Hook realized for the first time what her outward calmness was costing her. ‘Have you and this Miss Renwick been in contact since Christmas Eve?’
‘No. At least I haven’t. My mother managed to contact her on Boxing Day, and found that she hadn’t been down to the cottage after all.’ She looked at him in surprise, as if giving him the credit for prompting an idea she should have thought of for herself. ‘It seems odd we haven’t heard from her since then, doesn’t it? You’d have thought she would have been as anxious to know where Raymond had got to as we were.’
Bert Hook put away his notebook, thanking her for her help. He too thought that it was indeed very odd.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘It’s years since I came to London,’ said Lambert, as they followed the tide of grey-green winter coats towards the ticket barrier.
‘The last time I drew into Paddington, it was behind a steam engine. A big green one,’ said Bert Hook.
Lambert looked at him sharply. He was not always sure when his staid subordinate was pulling his leg, nowadays. It was just about possible, he supposed, if his sergeant had last come here as a small boy. Bert was a countryman, sure of his Gloucestershire roots; he had developed a consciousness of the ways of the larger world outside without needing to go much into it.
They took a taxi to Westminster. Even through the glass, the world between the streets of high buildings seemed to Lambert a noisy and alien place. That other self who had grown up here, who had been a city child on the bomb sites of post-war London, seemed a person he had known but almost forgotten, who had lived in a different land. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ he murmured softly, almost to himself, and was irritated when Hook, looking out of his own window at the crawling traffic, said, ‘L. P. Hartley.’
‘You wouldn’t have known that at one time,’ Lambert said. ‘You’re supposed to indulge your superintendent, build up his sense of superiority.’ He was tempted to mention golf, but decided to save such retaliation for another, more telling moment. He had a feeling they would need some light relief in the days to come.
Raymond Keane’s parliamentary research assistant was waiting for them when they arrived. ‘Despina Mottershead,’ she said, holding out a thin hand with a nervous smile. She had dark straight hair and very large spectacles, which gave her the look of a startled owl.
It emerged quickly that she was genuinely upset by the news of Keane’s death. She would lose her job with his going, Hook supposed, but he fancied her distress ran a little deeper than that. Clearly she was starry-eyed about the deceased man; he wondered how far Keane had reciprocated her feelings. He might have slept with her, or he might not even have noticed her. It was always one of the difficulties that you could never see a dead man from his own point of view, but only from those of a succession of other people.
Lambert eventually said, ‘You told the press when he was mis
sing that you thought he might be abroad. What was the basis of that thought?’
She looked both embarrassed and apprehensive. ‘I didn’t really say that. The reporter said perhaps Mr Keane might be living it up on the Riviera. I said I didn’t think he would be; and then he said had I any reason to think he might not have gone abroad. And of course I hadn’t. I didn’t really know where he might be if—’
‘And the paper twisted it to suggest you thought he was abroad. I shouldn’t worry too much about that.’ Lambert spoke with the resignation of one who had been misquoted often enough himself. ‘In any case, that’s all irrelevant, now that Mr Keane’s been found.’
‘Yes. I can’t understand who—’ Her fist was suddenly at her mouth and she was fighting for control. Hook looked up at her from his notes, automatically estimating her emotions; policemen are professional cynics. But this time there was no doubt about it: the tears which now started into her eyes were genuine.
Lambert said gently, ‘You’ve anticipated my most important question. Do you know of anyone who hated Mr Keane? Hated him enough to kill him?’
‘No. No, I don’t!’ She fought for the control she felt she should possess: as a twenty-three-year-old; as a history graduate; as a new woman; as a person with a responsible job in the mother of parliaments.
To Lambert, who had daughters of his own, she looked behind her big, misting lenses more and more like a brave schoolgirl. ‘You did research for him when he needed information, I believe.’
‘Yes. Most of it isn’t research as most people would understand the word. He gets letters and complaints from his constituents and the like. I follow them up for him, getting answers from various governmental departments and sometimes from other sources. I’m just a time-saver, really, in most of my work.’
