by J M Gregson
He drove through a village busy with its own concerns. The heat had kept things quieter than usual, but there were the usual quota of women pushing heavily laden trolleys from the area’s only supermarket, the usual two cars on the yellow lines outside Barclay’s Bank. A toddler waved a messily ravaged orange at him from her pushchair, and he wondered as usual that a world of such obvious innocence could surround the evil which was his concern.
There was nothing at the club to lighten his gloom. Members were gathered in quiet little groups at the other end of the car park, discussing the sensational news. They acknowledged his wave of recognition but made no attempt to inquire about his progress; murder could still the most curious of tongues for a while. Within the building, Detective-Sergeant North was waiting for him with a face which offered no prospect of relief. He had been directed to enter the dead man’s house and search it for revealing papers or other items.
North didn’t wait to be asked for his report. His news was brief, disgustingly so from his point of view, and he wanted it out. ‘Nothing,’ he said lugubriously. ‘I’ve been carefully through his bureau. Nothing but business papers, and precious few of those.’
‘Photographs?’
‘Three of his dead wife, framed and obvious to all. An album from his youth. Nothing faintly revealing.’
‘Relatives?’
‘His wife died many years ago. No children. There’s an older sister in Torquay.’
‘Have you made contact?’
‘By phone this morning.’ North permitted a flicker of self-satisfaction to cross his sallow features. ‘They weren’t close. The locals had already been in to break the news before I spoke to her, of course. She seemed shocked, but not heartbroken.’ It was a fair summary of everyone’s reaction so far. ‘The locals are going back to her this afternoon when she’s had time to compose herself. They’ll probe, of course, to find if she can name anyone she thinks might have had reason to kill him. I’ll be surprised if they come up with anything: she seemed to know very little about his life here, and not to want to know much. I gather she liked her sister-in-law rather better than her brother.’
‘Come on, Jim. Think about that house. Smell it out. Didn’t it say anything to you about Shepherd?’ North looked hard at the Superintendent and tried not to be thrown by the unexpected use of his Christian name. He hadn’t worked with Lambert before: as a young, recently installed DS, he wanted to come up with something if he could.
‘Not much,’ he said slowly. ‘In fact, the strongest impression about it was how little it said about its owner. It’s a rich man’s house, opulent without being showy. Everything of the best: a well-filled drinks cabinet, Bang and Olufsen electronics and so on. But somehow nothing seemed used. It was all too neat and clinical for a man living alone. Of course, he has a daily woman two mornings a week who keeps it like that, and a gardener five hours a week. I’m seeing both of them this afternoon but I don’t think they’ll add much. They didn’t see much of Shepherd; as you’d expect, he paid them regularly and handsomely.’ So they might even be the first people to be upset by this death, thought Lambert bitterly.
‘Answer-phone?’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ said North. ‘One call on it last night from his personal secretary to tell him about a changed appointment today. He must have wiped everything else before he went to the Committee meeting last night.’ Before he rang me, thought Lambert. He wondered for the tenth futile time what Shepherd had meant to tell him in the meeting which had never taken place: he must have had some inkling of danger.
‘Stay with him,’ said Lambert, trying to impart an enthusiasm he could not feel. ‘Try his bank, his solicitor, his work. The personal secretary might come up with something.’
‘Already arranged.’ This time DS North smiled openly, glad of the chance to emphasize his efficiency.
‘You said you’d spoken to the secretary on the phone. What’s she like?’
‘A formidable, efficient dragon of sixty, with four grown-up children and a husband a solicitor.’ He grinned wryly, because he knew the Superintendent’s thought had been the same as his own. A nubile Girl Friday might have undertaken an affair with her boss; pillow talk intimacies could offer invaluable leads to a man’s hopes and fears. Lambert felt yet another door clanging shut on James Shepherd, murder victim. Yet he was not anonymous: both the subjects questioned had confessed a dislike, which he fancied was in fact something much stronger than that.
Bert Hook had stood stolid but attentive through all this: North was a fellow-Sergeant, even though fifteen years his junior. Just when forgotten, he made one of his surprising interventions. ‘Did you try his dustbin?’
‘It’s the American influence,’ explained a smiling Lambert to North. ‘Young Sergeants like Bert are always alert for the latest ideas. In this throwaway age, transatlantic tycoons reveal themselves through the contents of their dustbins —’
‘Trashcans,’ said Hook imperturbably.
‘Now there’s a lovely attitude,’ said his Superintendent.
‘The dustbin bags were collected at nine this morning,’ said North smoothly, anxious to cut short a double act which threatened to exclude him.
‘So much for the sociological approach,’ said Lambert. ‘Now, Bert, go and see Vic Edwards in the bar and order us some of the Club’s best sandwiches. If you amend your ways and cut out these transatlantic expletives, I might even run to a couple of halves of bitter.’
‘That will need to be after you’ve seen Michael Taylor.’
‘You got him to come here?’ said Lambert. He liked the notion of interviewing Taylor where the crime had taken place.
‘Easily,’ said Hook. ‘He said that as Captain he’d planned to pop into the Club anyway to see the Secretary and discuss the situation, so it was quite convenient. He’s due here in two minutes.’ Hook went off to order lunch and North departed to continue his unrewarding research into the private life of James Shepherd, OBE, Captain of Industry, Golf Club Chairman, and murder victim.
In the midday sun, the panelled Committee Room was hot and airless. Lambert stood on a chair and managed to open the single high window above the frosted glass of the bay. As he did so, Michael Taylor drove into the Captain’s space in the car park with a noisy flourish. In the passenger seat of his gleaming red sports car, the blonde girl looked as though she had been installed to complete the decor for a TV commercial, so that he half-expected Taylor to spring from the car and extol the virtues of some male toiletry. Instead, he spoke to the girl in low tones, gestured towards the Club, and extracted a putter and balls from the boot of the car; from his perch, Lambert saw a small bald spot on the crown of his head that he had never noticed before.
The girl was directed towards the putting green, evidently with the suggestion that she should occupy herself there until Taylor was finished with Lambert. It was a proposition for which she evinced no obvious enthusiasm, but she did not look as though enthusiasm was her strong suit. Lambert, striving to accommodate himself to the habits of a new generation, had not yet attuned himself to attractive girls chewing gum. She was young, slight, less ample in every curve and gesture than the delicious Debbie Hall whom Lambert and Hook had lately appreciated from that same putting green. Taylor seemed to find her satisfactory enough; he despatched her with a final friendly tap on her right buttock, a gesture recorded by the Superintendent with professional detachment.
When Lambert met him at the door of the Club, he was watching the tightly stretched denim on the girl’s rear as it disappeared from sight. ‘Got to keep the secretary bird happy!’ he said breezily, but with a hint of apology; Lambert dismissed unworthy queries about typing and shorthand speeds from his mind as being irrelevant to this inquiry. ‘Mind if I pop in first to see David Parsons?’ said Taylor. ‘I’ve a couple of queries to sort out about men’s invitation day and —’
‘I’d prefer that we got our interview over first,’ said Lambert, more curtly than he had intended. ‘I�
�ve a tight schedule if I’m to see everyone involved today.’ It was true, but the real reason was that he wanted to prevent any possible collusion between his witnesses before the coming interview. If Taylor divined that, well and good. He wasn’t averse to a little increase in tension at this point. To that end, he gave the Captain a quick tour of his club, ostensibly to let him see what the police were doing about what Hook called ‘the nuts and bolts’ of the inquiry.
Two detective constables were checking painstakingly through every room in the club for any scrap of material which might be significant; they had reached the lounge. The larger of the two, who were on the floor in their shirt sleeves, was placing a hairpin he had just retrieved with tweezers on to a plate which already held several similar trophies. He moved with elaborate care, too immersed in his task by now to see any incongruity in the picture he presented. Michael Taylor hastened to assure them that he was Club Captain, with the capital letters evident in his diction, but the constable addressed his report directly to Lambert. ‘Nearly finished in here, sir. We did the Secretary’s office whilst he was in with you, as you said. We’ve done the little room next door, too — the girl says it’s the Treasurer’s office. There’s a locked filing cabinet in there, but you said to leave all documents to you in any case. We’ve got the front bar, the snooker-room and the ladies’ lounge to do yet. The forensic boys will be going over all the carpets with fibre-optic lamps this afternoon. We’ll get into the changing-rooms and the showers then. You did say we could keep the whole of the club closed all day? People keep trying to get in there.’
‘Please do, please do.’ Michael Taylor, anxious to assert his Captain’s predominance, rushed in, but it was Lambert’s nod that the policemen waited for. As they made their way back towards the Committee Room, Taylor maintained a barrage of breezy small talk designed to preserve the normal relationship on this ground of Captain and club member. Lambert grunted monosyllables, wrapped himself within his profession, and waited.
Possibly it was Taylor’s attitude that suggested the move he made when they reached what was now the Murder Room. Whilst Taylor went in as bidden, he called Bert Hook for a moment into the corridor. ‘I don’t know our Captain very well, Bert,’ said Lambert in low tones, ‘but rumour has it that he has a difficult wife. I pass it on for what it’s worth, which may be absolutely nothing. Usual technique in the interview — come in without invitation from me as and when you think it useful.’
The Committee Room seemed dark and oppressive after the brilliance of the day outside. Michael Taylor plainly felt this, for he had been silenced by his return to this room, with its sinister chalk outline in the lightest part and the stenographer waiting impersonal and expectant in the nimbus of his desk-light at the darkest extreme of oak panelling. He had to be asked to sit down opposite Lambert and Hook; when he did so, he could not take his eyes off the murder weapon. Hook had followed his Chief’s suggestion and placed the heavy knife with its long blade exactly midway on the six feet of table between Taylor and Lambert. It was a cheap dramatic trick, but effective. The Captain stared with gruesome intensity at the knife; Lambert shuffled his papers and did not hurry his first question.
Despite Taylor’s rather ineffective efforts to assert his position as Captain in his own club, there was no doubt now who controlled the situation. The transformation of the imposing Committee Room into a Murder Room, the heavy presence in a professional setting of the Superintendent he had previously known only as an unassuming member, the macabre artefact on the table before him, all had their effects on Michael Taylor. There was a nervous eagerness about his replies as Lambert took him unhurriedly through the routine opening questions about his movements on the previous night.
‘I left the room as soon as the meeting was over. I went to the bar with Bill Birch. We were talking about first team matches and selecting teams —’
‘Straight to the bar?’
‘Yes, I think so. We’d arranged to talk before the meeting.’
‘Who was in the room when you left?’
‘Well, Debbie Hall and Mary Hartford left with us, though they didn’t go straight to the bar. That left behind David Parsons — he was looking up some financial figures and I was only too glad to leave him to it. And the Chairman of course, poor devil!’
It was the first time anyone had expressed sympathy for the late James Shepherd. Even now, it came only as the last, brittle breeziness of an assumed confidence. Taylor was trying to deal in the clichés of the persona he strove to fit, and the attempt was becoming more desperate as he failed to draw a response from Lambert and Hook which would put him at his ease.
‘We had just one drink before the bar closed, then left.’ Taylor had continued his evidence unprompted, like a man anxious to conclude an unpleasant experience as quickly as possible. Or a man who had rehearsed his story and wanted to deliver it before he forgot his lines.
‘But you didn’t leave directly.’ Lambert was chancing his arm: neither of his previous witnesses had said this, but neither had mentioned seeing Taylor go straight from the bar to his car, and Mary Hartford was almost certain she had seen Taylor’s car leaving after an interval of five minutes or so. The Captain’s eyes widened.
‘I can’t remember,’ he said sullenly. Then, more aggressively, ‘None of us thought at the time we were going to have to account for —’
‘One of you did. At least one.’ Lambert’s words stopped Taylor as abruptly as if he had switched off a radio. ‘James Shepherd was brutally murdered in the twenty minutes which followed the end of your meeting. The Secretary tells me that you left this room immediately after the meeting: if Bill Birch confirms your movements up to the time when you all met up in the bar, we have accounted for perhaps the first ten of those twenty minutes. Can you now detail to me your movements in the next five? Think carefully for as long as you like. It may be important to others as well as to yourself.’
Taylor was shaken by this blunt approach, as Lambert had intended him to be. The detectives studied him closely, watching his surface confidence ooze away as he obeyed the injunction to think hard before speaking. He was blond, fresh-faced, handsome in an obvious way. His present discomfort was the more noticeable because he obviously paid great attention to the detail of his appearance. He was expensively dressed in fashionably casual clothes, his informality being a striking contrast to the old-fashioned decorum of Parsons, who had sat in the same chair two hours earlier. His fawn trousers and crisp green shirt had not yet been affected by the heat of the day and his cravat had been arranged with meticulous care to its every fold. Lambert wondered if he had changed specially into this golf club uniform before he left work to come here. This was a man to whom clothes were important: he noted the fact with relish, for he had a well-researched theory that men who paid great attention to their dress were weak under pressure.
Taylor looked like an ageing juvenile lead in a bad play, about to say, ‘By Jove, I could use a drink!’ Probably he could: Lambert congratulated himself on the quite accidental placing of the Captain at this point in the day’s programme. The Club’s bar might be due to open, but the Superintendent had ambushed his man before he could patronize it.
‘I went to the Gents’,’ said Taylor dully. ‘After the bar, I mean. Then out to my car and away.’
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’ The answer was a little too quick for a man for whom witnesses meant an alibi.
‘How long did this take?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps three or four minutes. How long does it take? I had a pee, washed my hands, combed my hair.’ Lambert realized suddenly that the large and regular waves of blond hair which Taylor now stroked automatically were probably the contours of a permanent wave.
‘No doubt Bill Birch will be able to confirm the first part of your story.’ Lambert stressed ‘first’ just strongly enough to add an ominous note to the obvious query about the rest. He wrote carefully upon his pad. He thoug
ht to himself, ‘Careful, you’re disliking this spurious sod more and more.’ There came back to him across twenty years and more a maxim promulgated to him by his Aberdonian CID chief when he was a new detective-constable: ‘Detectives who indulge in personal preferences among witnesses will find they inhibit thorough investigation.’ Curious how the stresses of an investigation revived memories long dead. He could even hear the careful Caledonian enunciation of the syllables, though he had not thought about his mentor for years.
‘I doubt whether anyone saw me after I left the bar.’ Taylor licked dry lips; his self-control, brittle from the outset, was slipping away under their steady but gentle pressure. The Bond-type figure who had roared in with his girl in the red sports car, more a piece of self-deception than an established image with others, had already almost gone. He had drained away through pin-pricks of self-doubt rather than any great emotional outburst: shaken, not stirred, thought Lambert, a whimsicality he wished he could visit upon the stolid Hook.
‘There was no one in the locker-room when I was there. I didn’t see anyone in the car park when I went out. Damn it all, there’s no reason why I should have! We’re talking about five minutes altogether.’
‘Quite,’ said Lambert quietly. ‘And the minimum time for someone to re-enter the Committee Room, kill Mr Shepherd with a weapon conveniently at hand, and shut the door carefully as he left is no more than one of those minutes. In two, he could empty the wall-safe as well.’
Taylor’s eyes, riveted on the knife between them for so long, flicked up over Lambert’s shoulder, to where the wall-safe gaped still half open as it had been found after the murder. The Superintendent did not move at all; when Taylor’s eyes came back to his face, he found the same unblinking scrutiny. Eventually, Lambert looked down and made a note on his pad to check with all club members. Someone might have been in or around the car park in the twilight; golfers walked their dogs, even on summer evenings their wives, as well as using the course. They could have seen Taylor without his noticing them: no reason why an innocent man should be searching for witnesses at that time. Laborious telephone and leg work for some young DC over the next few days.
