Killer Cases: A Lambert and Hook Detective Omnibus

by J M Gregson

  Lambert could not have said whether it was the question-mark which made him read the report so carefully. Probably not: he always took sudden death seriously, even in the most straightforward of situations. Suicide, it seemed, though the suggestion of the assistance of the EXIT organization would mean they would have to check if anyone else beyond the deceased was involved. A routine death, perhaps: except for family, friends and working associates who were left to pick up the pieces. But such things were the concern of the social services, not the CID.

  With his experience, Lambert could piece together the scene around the body from Rushton’s terse official account. ‘There was a smell of drink about the corpse. I expect the PM to confirm the source as internal,’ the Inspector had typed. Lambert pictured him smelling the clothing of the corpse to make sure liquor had not been poured over it after death; this clumsy ploy was a giveaway rather than a deception, but fortunately many criminals seemed still not to realize this. ‘There were six tablets (valium?) in right-hand trouser pocket: perhaps the bulk of the packet had been swallowed.’ No need for even the cautious Rushton to mention the PM again here. Curious though that there should be any tablets left at all if the man had overdosed; suicides who meant business usually took the lot. He read on: there was no obvious evidence of violence upon the body, no onset of rigor mortis at the time of this first, superficial examination.

  The end of the report interested him more than all the rest. ‘Death was apparently by asphyxiation. There was a polythene bag over the head but a cursory examination revealed no evidence that it had been held there forcibly against the wishes of the deceased. In the left-hand jacket pocket was a suicide note (no addressee or address). The circumstances indicate an EXIT suicide.’

  Lambert frowned. He did not disagree with the conclusion; though Rushton had not said so, it must have been the opinion of the police surgeon on the spot. But the idea of suicide to a formula and by arrangement still disturbed him. He did not disagree on moral grounds with the EXIT organization’s slogan of ‘Death with Dignity’. It seemed an honest reaction to one of the age’s great dilemmas, that of people living beyond the age where life was enjoyable. Indeed, Christine had warned him not to become boring on the subject in company, as he was wont to do when the spectre of his own senility swam across his horizon.

  The increase of these deaths in his professional work disturbed him. The world of crime was depressing enough without the intrusion of loneliness, physical decay and black despair that were normally the province of medical men. Suicides they had always had, of course, but usually they were easily confirmed as such and the police contact with them was minimal. EXIT deaths could involve a mysterious assistant, in sympathy with the aims of the association but necessarily anonymous if he or she were to remain outside the action of the law, as it stood at present.

  It was one of those difficult areas for senior policemen where there was uncertainty about the attitudes of coroners. Some took a sympathetic, perhaps a forward-looking, view; others felt that the law should be applied in full draconian severity to anyone who assisted in the death of another, whatever the motive. It meant that CM men were unsure how fiercely they should pursue such agents. Most took the view that unless and until the law was changed, they should seek out EXIT enthusiasts who translated their zeal into action, and leave the law to decide what to do with them. It was the only logical way for a force which represented the law to operate, but it ignored the fact that policemen had their own ideas, even their own sensitivities, about moral decisions, which could lead to individual anguish even as they moved successfully to defend the law.

  Lambert picked up the internal phone and spoke to the WPC deep in the basement which the public never saw. ‘The Freeman suicide at Lydon Hall. You have the contents of the pockets down there? Send them up, please.’

  Within two minutes there was a discreet tap at his door. He was surprised to see the solid figure of Detective-Sergeant Hook, standing awkwardly with what looked like a shoe-box under his left arm and a cup and saucer in his right hand.

  ‘Your coffee,’ he offered as explanation. ‘I intercepted it on the way in.’ He set the coffee carefully on the desk beside the pile of reports, and the box precisely in front of Lambert.

  ‘After you had earlier intercepted this box, I suppose,’ said Lambert with amusement. ‘Oh, all right, Bert, better get yourself a coffee and join me. But I don’t expect we’ll find anything of great interest.’

  Hook’s countenance flushed with pleasure, as open and immediate as any schoolboy’s. He was back so quickly with his coffee that Lambert suspected he had anticipated the invitation when he brought in the Superintendent’s cup. ‘Sergeants don’t rate saucers,’ he explained cheerfully, as he set his thick mug down carefully on the outer edge of the desk.

  ‘Quite right, too. You’d only drink out of them,’ said Lambert as he took the lid off the box. They were old companions, at ease with each other, each respecting the other’s strengths.

  Both now peered at the contents of the box. This moment always seemed to Lambert an intrusion, almost a violation. He took up the bunch of car and other keys extracted from Stanley Freeman’s trousers, and said, ‘“And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and little things a’ didn’t wish seen, anyone will see.”’ He could never work out why it was that Hook brought out his weakness for literary references.

  ‘Quotacious again,’ said Hook severely. It was a favourite word of his; he maintained that if it did not exist, then it certainly should do.

  ‘Old Mother Cuxsom and Hardy’s peasant chorus,’ said Lambert, instructing expansively.

  ‘I thought that was an attempt at a Wessex accent,’ said Hook. He looked into the box to see what else lay there with a countenance as inscrutable now as it had been open with excitement a few minutes earlier. Lambert was often not quite sure who was educating who in these exchanges, and Hook was delighted that it should remain so.

  There were some loose money; an unused handkerchief; a wallet with credit cards, treasury notes and driving licence; pens. An unopened contraceptive packet looked by its rather dog-eared condition as if it had been carried about for some time.

  ‘Ready for a quick bit on the side,’ said Hook.

  ‘Prepared for all eventualities,’ said Lambert in dignified reproof. ‘It’s the approved condition since AIDS arrived. But if we deduce anything from it, Watson, it is the picture of an optimist, not a man overcome by life to the extent of ending it.’

  He extracted the notepaper from the envelope at the end of the box with tweezers; he could see by the vestiges of powder that both had already been tested for fingerprints, but training had long ago translated itself into habit. He read the note, then passed it to Hook, who scrutinized the typed words:

  ‘I can’t go on any longer. My marriage seems finished. Life generally is too much for me. Forgive me, Denise. Forgive me, colleagues. It’s no one’s fault.’

  Stanley Freeman’s signature ended the note with a bold flourish. Both men were silent for a moment. They had met death hundreds of times in twenty years of CID work. It wasn’t death that stilled them. It was the thought of these banalities as the final communication of a tormented soul passing into the unknown.

  Hook looked at the two ballpoint pens which had been in the corpse’s pockets. ‘Not signed with either of these,’ he said.

  Lambert nodded; the signature had been made with ink and presumably a fountain pen. ‘Not necessarily significant. He could have prepared his note in the office or at home.’ The note was on the headed notepaper of Freeman Estates.

  ‘Presumably Denise is the wife,’ said Hook. Lambert nodded: he had not known Freeman, and at this moment he was glad of it. He fastened on the fact that had been nagging at him since he first looked at Rushton’s report of the death.

  ‘He’s the wrong age for an EXIT death. Early fifties.’

  ‘What about incurable diseases?’ said Hook. They both knew
ill health could make age irrelevant.

  Lambert shrugged. ‘No mention in the note. None known of, as yet.’

  Hook registered that ‘as yet’ with a little thrill of pleasurable anticipation. Lambert was going to take this further.

  His chief was looking at Rushton’s report again. ‘Despite his note, there’s no marital break-up that we’re aware of. No financial trouble mentioned here.’

  ‘I think the business is prosperous. There’d be something wrong if an estate agency wasn’t, these days.’

  Lambert caught the bitterness of raw envy; it was an unusual note from Hook, but he welcomed the evidence of humanity in his subordinates. He said, ‘Any previous suicide attempts?’

  Hook knew the area and its gossip better than most. He had been a village bobby for years before he became a CID man, and had never forsaken the habits and awarenesses he had found useful then. ‘Not that I’ve heard of,’ he said.

  Lambert picked up the external phone and dialled a number he knew by heart. ‘Burgess?’

  ‘Dr Burgess is conducting a post-mortem examination and cannot be disturbed. Can I take a message?’ Lambert recognized the stiffly formal tones of the pathologist’s assistant.

  ‘That’s Mr Binns, isn’t it? This is Superintendent Lambert at CID. Just ask Dr Burgess to ring me back when he pauses for a moment in the abattoir, will you?’

  He heard Binns, a humourless thirty-year-old, tutting disapprovingly. Morticians tended to be touchy about their trade. Binns put the phone down and Lambert heard his footsteps clicking away over the marble floor, towards the mutilated cadaver over which his chief bent. He pictured that worthy with apron smeared with gore and formaldehyde, hands and forearms covered in blood.

  Rather to his surprise, when the phone was taken up again he heard the fruity tones of Burgess himself.

  ‘Yes, John. What challenge have you to offer us?’

  ‘Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I was rather hoping you could give me something of interest.’

  ‘In respect of what?’

  Not whom, Lambert noticed, but what. Burgess was ruthlessly realistic about his subjects.

  ‘Stanley Freeman. A suicide, apparently.’

  ‘I like that “apparently”,’ said Burgess with relish. ‘It offers possibilities. I haven’t cut him up yet. What should I look for?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. I was just ringing to see if you could confirm a routine EXIT-type departure. He had a plastic bag over his head.’

  ‘So I have observed,’ said Burgess drily, ‘but I haven’t yet investigated the worthy Mr Freeman. You can put that down to the miracles of modern technology. We’ve two road-death cadavers in here that I was getting on with. Routine stuff, but then I thought the unfortunate Stanley was just that, until I got your phone call.’

  ‘He may be,’ said Lambert hastily. For some reason, he was anxious not to raise the hopes of the sensation-hungry pathologist.

  ‘You don’t let me down too often. Look, I’m just finishing the second of the road deaths. Binns can do the report. I’ll move straight on to the diverting Mr Freeman, now that I’m assured of your interest. Come over if you like. It’s delicious to find you playing a hunch.’ Burgess knew how Americanisms irritated the Superintendent.

  ‘You’re putting him on your table now?’

  ‘Within twenty minutes. Just the thing to give you an appetite for lunch!’ Lambert fancied he caught Binns’s disapproving sigh in the background.

  ‘Right. I’ll be there very shortly,’ he said. As soon as he had put the phone down, he wondered why.

  As he drove the four miles to the mortuary, the elements seemed to mock any suggestion of malevolent overtones to Freeman’s death. High white clouds danced across a light blue sky in a warm breeze, fluttering summer dresses against female thighs as he drove past the supermarket and out into the country beyond. Any death of this kind was a tragedy: on a day like this, it was difficult to imagine it was a sinister tragedy.

  By the time he reached the mortuary, Freeman’s body had been slid from its drawer and lifted on to the dissection table. Lambert was called through by Burgess into the room which was almost an operating theatre, with its scrubbed surfaces and channels in the floor to carry away blood. Here the object was not to retrieve life or enhance it, but to analyse the reasons for its departure. All was unemotional, analytical, unhurried: the dead can always wait.

  ‘No gall-stones or kidney-stones,’ said Burgess breezily. He set the kidneys beside the stomach and intestine he had already removed. Lambert swallowed hard. He had played this game before. Burgess would try to induce the fit of nausea he regarded as characteristic of amateurs in matters of death; Lambert would maintain an outwardly phlegmatic air through the butchery. He hoped.

  ‘There are gowns and wellingtons in that cupboard in the corner if you want a closer look at this,’ Burgess offered with relish.

  ‘I’ve more respect for your laundry bill in these times of public spending cuts,’ countered Lambert. He watched Burgess extract expertly the dessertspoonful or so of blood he needed from the left leg. The pathologist added a drop of liquid from a bottle and handed the sample to Binns to label. ‘What is it you add?’ asked Lambert, drawn into the question despite himself by this measured performance.

  ‘Citrate solution. To prevent clotting,’ explained Burgess. Lambert realized suddenly that this eagerness to show off his craft came from a man who operated in lonely isolation for most of his working life. He tried not to watch as various organs were slid unceremoniously into a plastic sack, ready for reinsertion into the outer case of Stanley Freeman. The stomach and kidneys were retained for analysis.

  ‘Nothing remarkable to report as yet, I suppose,’ said the Superintendent, trying not to look at the jelly-like tremble on the kidneys as Binns took them away.

  Burgess had obviously been waiting for the question. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ he said with studied casualness. He looked blandly at Lambert, but failed to lure him into further questions. ‘Just come over here,’ he said.

  Lambert moved to his side. He tried not to look too closely at what had once been a man and was now unseamed from navel to chin as comprehensively as any victim of Macbeth’s. But Burgess this time was not interested in internal rummaging. He lifted the arms from the body. Across the wrists, raw red marks were already beginning to turn black with the inexorable processes of decomposition.

  ‘The man on the spot should have seen those,’ said Lambert stupidly.

  Burgess shook his head. ‘They were under the sleeves,’ he said. ‘And the shirt cuffs were buttoned.’ He tried but totally failed to keep the excitement out of his next phrases. ‘Those wrists were either held very hard or tied at the moment of death. I’ll tell you which in due course. You’re looking for a murderer, Superintendent.’

  Chapter 4

  In the bright light of noon, Lydon Hall had not the almost unreal beauty which had entranced the Harbens on the previous evening.

  In the perfect peace of an English sunset, with the chime of a distant church clock drifting through the still air, the old house had seemed caught in a time warp, with nothing visible from the gate which might not have been seen a century, even two centuries, earlier. When Lambert turned his Vauxhall betweeen those same high stone posts, the illusion had gone.

  There were, for instance, two police vehicles drawn up on the gravel forecourt. And the great oak front door, so securely closed upon the Harbens when they had come by appointment to view the house, was now wide open, so that the rectangular cave of darkness seemed to invite attention and investigation. As Lambert walked up the drive, the police radio in one of the cars blared with sudden harshness; a uniformed PC in blue shirtsleeves came hurriedly round the side of the house to answer it and explain what he was about. He argued on the radio with his sergeant at the station, who was no doubt irritated to find his staff diverted from more routine activities to join a hastily assembled scene-of-crime team. Lambert for his part
was glad to see them here so promptly: it was barely half an hour since he had phoned in from the mortuary.

  If the evidence of human activity had removed the ethereal charm the Harbens had seen in the Hall, it still presented an attractive enough picture. The sun had not the unwinking red glow of evening which so heightened every other colour, but it shone cheerfully enough between cotton-wool clouds. The higher sun restored a proper perspective, so that the topmost branches of beech and oak, swaying in the freshening breeze, resumed their real position well beyond the high brick chimneys.

  Lydon Hall, with its carefully swept gravel drive and well-tended acres of garden, presented a scene of pleasant, privileged England. It was difficult to take seriously the idea that the head of Freeman Estates had been lured here on a perfect summer evening for the express purpose of killing him. That person or persons unknown had carried out a premeditated, cold-blooded scheme, not only to murder but to conceal the crime as suicide.

  The full post-mortem report would no doubt reveal exactly where Stanley Freeman had been killed: it was possible but unlikely that the murder had been committed somewhere else and the body merely deposited here. PMs had their uses, Lambert told his slowly recovering stomach; he should even be grateful for the lively interest of the bloodthirsty Malcolm Burgess, MB, ChB.

  He walked beneath the highstone arch of the front door, through the lofty panelled hall which the Harbens had never reached, into the drawing-room where their visit had been so brutally curtailed. The photographer had already finished his work; with the body removed, there was not much for him to record. The scene-of-crime sergeant was writing down the results of his usual meticulous measurings, which would take him longer than usual in a room this size. Lambert looked across to the French windows where the Harbens had entered, visualizing as best he could the scene in the twilight. The armchair with its macabre burden must have been in near-darkness: it was a good seven paces from the French window.