by J M Gregson
As he put down the phone and stared at it moodily for a moment, Hook appeared in the doorway like the dutiful lieutenant he was.
‘Debbie Hall’s just arrived,’ he said. No appreciation of the lady’s ample charms showed now upon his rubicund features. For decent Bert Hook, the golf club which lay still like an accusation across the chair at the head of the table precluded any observation of that sort.
Lambert looked at his watch. 11.45. The morning was flying by. ‘Better show her in. And get DI Rushton to intercept Bill Birch as he arrives. Once he’s here, we’ll have all four of them in here, but I don’t want any exchange between them before then.’
‘Birch should be here any minute. He’s phoned in to the office and they’ve told him you want him here. Parsons is still in his office and Miss Hartford in the ladies’ lounge.’
‘Right. Once Bill Birch arrives, wheel them all in here. Come yourself, but I don’t want anyone else. I want to try something before the press conference, but without a room full of eager CID beavers. Listen hard and play it by ear. Speak if you feel it useful. Our usual arrangement.’ Lambert heard excitement entering his voice as he strove to be matter-of-fact. He could not miss the pleasure Hook tried ineffectively to conceal, as he nodded and turned away to set up this little drama.
In less than thirty seconds, he ushered in Debbie Hall, shut the door quietly behind her, and went away to await the arrival of Birch.
Debbie was demurely attired, in a two-piece suit of olive green and high-heeled shoes of matching leather. The cameo brooch at the throat of her high-necked blouse was the only ornamentation she carried. Her soft blonde curls were more regimented than usual, her lipstick carefully muted, her eyelids without make-up at all. As with many women of good figure, more formal dress seemed only to reinforce her voluptuous attractions, as if the discreet concealment of those splendid curves merely emphasized the amplitude within. Lambert was reminded of a family funeral nearly thirty years ago, when an aunt scarcely five years older than him had inflamed all the hot imaginings of adolescence in her modest navy blue outfit. And nothing could conceal those remarkable eyes of Debbie Hall: wide and blue, they seemed even now to see through to his psyche and be amused. He was glad to be relieved of their examination as he ushered her to a chair.
When he resumed his own, her eyes were fixed upon the object laid across the arms of the late Chairman’s seat beside him. They flicked for a moment to his, then back to the golf club — its shaft gleaming dully in the high, oak-panelled room; it was no more than four feet from her.
‘Coffee?’ said Lambert, as lightly as he could. ‘I’m sure we could soon rustle up —’
‘No thanks, John. I’ve had three cups in a pub in Aylesbury. Waiting for the customer who left a message on our answering machine but never turned up for the meeting he’d suggested.’ She was looking still at the golf club which had killed Michael Taylor.
She said very quietly, ‘That’s mine. Why is it here?’
‘I’ll tell you that in a moment. When did you last handle it?’ If she noticed his slight, deliberate searching for the word ‘handle’ she did not reveal it. She stared at the club a moment longer, until he wondered if she knew the origin of the russet stains about its blade and sole. Then she turned her attention back to him.
‘Only a few days ago. I was playing with Mary in a club match. I only found it was missing when I had my lesson here yesterday. I can’t think where I lost it. It’s easy enough to put a club down whilst you’re putting, but usually you remember where. But of course you’d know that. Anyway, someone usually hands them in, but this time that hadn’t happened; I asked in the pro’s shop.’ The torrent of words, too quickly delivered, was postponing the question they both knew had to come. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘It was found by a detective constable in the undergrowth behind the sixth green. It is almost certainly the instrument which killed Michael Taylor.’
He was watching her carefully. Was the start of horror, the widening of those brilliant blue eyes, a shade theatrical? He was not expert enough to decide. There was nothing histrionic about the low, taut voice in which she said, ‘Where? When?’
‘Within yards of where your club was found. At around 9.30 this morning.’
‘Poor Mike!’ It was all she said, but the colour had drained from her features. Her vivacious, attractive face changed in a few seconds to that of a woman sick with shock and fear, a transition which could only be so marked in one of her colouring. Eventually she said, ‘What next?’ He could not tell from her flat tone whether it was a rhetorical appeal to fate or a question to him about the way he proposed to proceed; he took the opportunity to interpret it as the latter.
‘The other three people concerned are coming in for a discussion at twelve.’ If she thought the carefully neutral word was a euphemism, she gave no sign. ‘Debbie, I need to know where you were between 9 and 9.30 this morning.’
Now the blue eyes might have been made of coloured glass, so striking was the contrast between their lustre and the flat grey-white face in which they were set.
‘In my car,’ she said. ‘Alone. Driving to meet a man I cannot identify, who did not turn up.’ She spoke as if each phrase were a nail struck with a hammer.
‘Name?’ said Lambert.
‘Munro. He left a message on the answering machine at 8.55 today. A minute before I arrived.’
‘You didn’t ring him back?’
‘He didn’t leave a number. He asked me to meet him in the Brown Cow at Aylesbury. Normally I’d have wanted to discuss preliminary arrangements with him, but he’d mentioned a month’s work for four people: it would have been good business for us.’
Lambert rose and made his way quietly to the door. ‘I think your colleagues will have arrived by now, Debbie, so we’d better get together. For what it’s worth, no one seems to have a clear alibi for this morning. Odd, that.’
As he opened the heavy door, he looked back at her. Her full lips gave him a tight, uncharacteristic smile, in acknowledgement of the small comfort he had just offered her. Then her eyes switched back to the steady contemplation of her golf club, and the blood of Michael Taylor upon its blade.
Chapter 23
With Hook as usher, the surviving members of the Burnham Cross Golf Club Committee shuffled silently into the Murder Room. Lambert had seen the same disquiet amongst people enlisted for an identity parade, with the innocent uneasy that the unthinkable might happen and the wrong person be identified for a crime. This time the stakes were much higher. He was sure now of his murderer, but that person gave no helpful hint of demeanour as the chairs scraped noisily over the parquet floor.
He was gambling upon a confession. If necessary, he would take his killer in for prolonged questioning, whilst his team painstakingly assembled more evidence, but if he could secure an admission of guilt now much agony of mind and much police time would be saved. And possibly another life; he blamed himself again for not anticipating the morning’s bizarre and desperate despatch of Michael Taylor. The high tension caused by his melodramatic grouping of the suspects might produce useful evidence from the innocent. But above all he hoped the pressure upon the guilty would prove unbearable.
He was deliberately low-key in his introduction. ‘Sorry to have to bring you back into here. The Murder Room is almost the only place we can ensure privacy at the moment: you may have seen the preparations in the main lounge for the press conference which will be held at 1 p.m. today. I know you’ve all been hounded in various ways by the media over the last thirty-six hours. This morning’s events will only intensify that. Whatever our progress, whatever we are able to tell the newshounds at one, you will continue to be pursued for quotes: a resolute “No comment” is the best policy, as some of you have already discovered.’ Debbie Hall gave him a bleak little smile. But it was Bill Birch who had been looking increasingly puzzled through his introduction.
‘John, where is Mike Taylor?’ he said now.
&
nbsp; All around the huge table, there were gasps. The three other suspects looked sharply at Birch, then down at the grain of the oak before them. In answer to Lambert’s glance, Hook shook his head almost imperceptibly. After his restrained opening, the Superintendent was not sorry to have the screw of melodrama turned by someone else.
‘Michael Taylor was brutally beaten to death earlier this morning, Bill,’ he said quietly. ‘With a golf club which belonged to Debbie.’ He was glad the instrument had been removed now from its prominent position; the facts were brutal enough, without stage tricks to get in the way of what he planned. The eyes of all four suspects were now upon him, wide and expectant. He wondered how many of them knew about Birch’s golf shoes and the imprint of them found by Taylor’s body.
‘Where were you between 9 and 9.30 this morning?’ he said to Birch. The silence in the room made his voice sound heavy with menace. The Vice-Captain was immediately aware of the significance of the question, at the same time as he was beset with the inadequacy of his reply. ‘I was on the way to our warehouse in Wycombe,’ he said bleakly. ‘Alone, of course.’
‘Was this arranged yesterday?’ asked Lambert.
‘No. Someone had phoned this morning. Though who it was, no one seemed to know when I got there.’
There was a long pause whilst everyone in the room weighed the implications of this and Lambert waited for any revealing sign from his murderer. Even a movement of the head would have reassured him, but there was none.
‘I want to go back to the murder of James Shepherd in this room,’ he said. The little rustle of movement around him marked a transfer, not a release, of the tension. ‘I now have a pretty clear idea what happened. The Chairman was killed in the five-minute period before you all met for drinks in the bar.’ His murderer’s eyes were no wider than anyone else’s at these confident assertions. Only Mary Hartford’s face showed something like relief: it seemed as though her story might be believed. He acknowledged the look with the tiniest of smiles.
‘Miss Hartford in fact discovered the body and checked the death just before she went into the bar.’ This time he was sure that everyone’s surprise was genuine.
‘No wonder you were quiet in the bar,’ said Debbie Hall, in a voice which barely carried beyond her neighbour. She moved her hand six inches to grasp Mary Hartford’s slim white fist beside her.
‘You accept Miss Hartford’s story?’ It was David Parsons, precise and formal even now.
‘Oh yes. She confesses to blood upon her cuff, and Bill Birch noticed it. Of course, it was possible that Miss Hartford had not merely discovered a murder, but actually committed one. Indeed, in checking the death, she inadvertently left a thumbprint upon the handle of the knife in Shepherd’s chest.’ This time there was an involuntary movement of astonishment from his murderer. ‘I am glad our killer did not know that, Mary, when he was trying to implicate you yesterday,’ Lambert continued imperturbably.
‘Miss Hartford concealed her discovery of the body from me when I saw her. One other person as well as the murderer told me a lie, and that a clumsy one. It was Michael Taylor. He told me he spent some three minutes in the gents’ locker-room after, rather than before, you met for drinks. Yet Bill Birch was in the locker-room with him before you all met up in the lounge. Plainly Michael Taylor wanted to account for the time after he had been in the bar. The most obvious deduction would have been that he had committed the murder himself, and I think he realized that eventually. He was killed this morning because he was about to tell me exactly what he did in those vital few minutes after the drinks.’ There was absolute silence in the hot room. It was Hook, sturdily concealing his ignorance of his chief’s thought-processes, who eventually coughed. In another context, it would have been comic: four intense pairs of eyes flashed across to him, then back to the Superintendent, as if worked by a switch.
‘I think the murderer was the last person among you to leave the club,’ said Lambert. ‘He had already removed Shepherd’s “black box” of incriminating material from the wall-safe, but he had to cover his traces and move the keys. The door of this room was unlocked when you came in and found the body, Mary. Probably it was still so when Michael Taylor discovered murderer and body together after the drinks. When I came to the club a little while later, every door around here was locked. The murderer waited to see you all off the premises, checked that no clue was obvious, and shut up everything before leaving with the incriminating documents taken from the safe. The Chairman had arranged to meet me at the club at 10.30. That was bad luck for the murderer. Had I not searched the building with Vic Edwards, the body would almost certainly not have been discovered until next morning.’
Bill Birch had looked increasingly disturbed through all this. Now he burst out, ‘But I was last to leave. I told you. I saw Mike Taylor rush off —’
‘No, Bill.’ It was Mary Hartford, grim but calm. ‘You and I were last together. We called to each other in the darkness across the car park. We drove out almost together.’
‘But you were not the last to leave,’ said Lambert quietly.
‘I think we were,’ said Birch stubbornly.
‘I know you do.’ Lambert was implacable, but it was not Birch that he was watching closely. ‘You’re almost right, but not quite. Miss Hall had gone, and you saw Michael Taylor leave. But what Miss Hartford said was —’ he made an elaborate play of consulting his notes, but he knew well enough the exact words he would quote — ‘“David Parsons left first, I think. When I came out, his car had gone. His reserved space is next to the Lady Captain’s, so I noticed.”’
Now his murderer was alerted. Now at last David Parsons’ eyes blazed with the tell-tale fury he had hoped to bring out. Lambert tried not to betray his own excitement as he went on evenly, ‘You assumed because the Secretary’s reserved space was empty that he had already left. But David Parsons had not used his space. He was parked in the darkness at the other end of the car park.’
‘Proof?’ Parsons spat the single word across the table like a missile.
‘None, as yet. But then we haven’t looked.’
‘Merely a theory, then!’ Parsons attempted the contemptuous dismissal of an absurd notion, but he was too shaken for it to come off. Lambert pressed on smoothly; now that his man had been disturbed, he must have no time to recover.
‘This Committee Room does not have a Yale lock, which anyone could release. It still has its original, heavy key, which is necessary to lock it. That key is held by the Secretary.’
‘In his office, where anyone could pick it up!’ said Parsons. But his voice cracked, so that a reasonable objection suddenly sounded preposterous.
‘Perhaps,’ said Lambert. ‘Except that you were in your office yourself for as long as the key was there. You put it back after everyone had left. Vic Edwards was able to collect it to open the door for me.’ The last part of this was speculation, delivered with the confidence of fact. Parsons’s distress convinced him it was true enough, and he pressed on to an even bolder conjecture.
‘Now, the break-in to Mr Shepherd’s car, in broad daylight. A key was used, so the culprit was probably the murderer, since the Chairman’s keys had been removed from his body. It’s a little like the Hound of the Baskervilles.’
It was Hook who looked wide-eyed at him now, astonished at the levity of fiction at such a moment. But it was Mary Hartford who said slowly, ‘The thing about the hound was that it didn’t bark at the crucial point, because it knew the murderer.
‘Exactly,’ said Lambert inexorably. He thought he should have anticipated that this meticulous, shrewd woman would be a devotee of detective fiction: probably only a sense of decorum in this place prevented her from developing the idea through Chesterton’s postman. He pressed on hastily to his own exposition: ‘It seemed strange that in a large car park, with golfers getting ready for play — don’t forget that though the clubhouse was closed the course was open — no one should notice a break-in to the Chairman’s Rolls-Royce.
Of course, the one person who wouldn’t be remarked is the Secretary, whom everyone assumes is going about his normal business. When he had opened the car with the key he had secured the night before, he went back to his office and raised the alarm himself from there.’
‘This is ridiculous!’ said David Parsons. He articulated the four syllables of the word as carefully as if he were in committee.
‘But why break in at all?’ said Bill Birch. Lambert was relieved that none of them seemed concerned to defend the Secretary.
‘Not to remove anything. That could have been easily accomplished in the darkness after you had left the night before. David already had the press-cuttings about his court-martial in Cyprus: they had been in the wall-safe. The objective was to put something into the car, not take it out. Debbie Hall’s grey handbag was planted under the front passenger seat. Perhaps David thought it was Mary Hartford’s bag when he acquired it: the two ladies were at the same meeting.’ He had caught Parsons’s start at the mention of Debbie Hall as the owner of the bag; now the Secretary’s sudden look of fury confirmed the thought that had only occurred to him as he spoke.
‘The charade of the break-in was only to draw our attention to the presence of the handbag. It was a mistake: we’d have searched the car anyway and found it. It could have been quietly placed there without the brouhaha of a break-in.’ Mary Hartford and David Parsons stared wide-eyed at each other, she with dawning horror, he with a blazing defiance; Lambert was glad of the table between them, for he had to stoke these fires further yet.
‘Now to the fire in the greenkeeper’s cottage. It may have been started with Michael Taylor’s connivance: we shall never know, unless David Parsons chooses to tell us. But that doesn’t matter. The whole thing was designed to draw attention to Miss Hartford’s association some years ago with James Shepherd. It was elaborate, but apparently foolproof: if the fire brigade, called by Michael Taylor, arrived in time to prevent complete destruction, we should find an apparent love-nest, with only Mary Hartford able to deny its existence. If the cottage burnt out completely, it would be an incident unconnected with the death of Shepherd, with our murderer no worse off. The revelation on the same afternoon of Miss Hartford’s thumbprint on the handle of the murder knife was a wonderful piece of luck for the murderer. At four o’clock yesterday, there was a pretty damning case against our Lady Captain.’ He gave Mary Hartford a grim little smile, reinforcing his use of the past tense. Bert Hook, who had been so keen to arrest that elegant lady on the previous evening, had the good grace to redden slowly in the background.
