by J M Gregson
She crept quietly downstairs, not wanting the landlady to know her errand; she could not know that the old woman had been questioned thoroughly earlier in the day. In the dingy hail, she took a last deep breath, then made for the outside world and the terrors of authority. Her hand was six inches from the handle of the front door when the knocker crashed harshly on the outside, not two feet from her face. The noise was clattering still in her head when she opened the door.
She stepped back instinctively, flinching before the dark blue uniform, its buttons unnaturally bright after the gloom within. The constable took in the stained, flowered wall-paper, the scratched brown paint, the hall carpet fraying into holes, the smell of old cabbage and older dog. Delicacy would bring no returns from the people here, he decided.
‘Margaret Jones?’ She nodded dumbly. ‘We’re contacting the associates of a Stanley Gordon Freeman. We have reason to believe you may be able to help us.’
She had never known that ridiculous middle name. For an absurd moment before she remembered, she thought she would tease him with it when they met again.
The policeman stepped inside the door and she retreated before him, nodding fearfully. Was it an offence to change Margaret to Margot, she wondered.
He caught the gin upon her breath. ‘You’d better tell us everything you can. You can talk to us here or come to the station, it’s up to you,’ he said aggressively. He was due off in twenty minutes.
It was the first time she had realized that he was not alone. She looked from the white car with its blue trim to the house windows with their faces which did not trouble to conceal themselves. Then she turned hopelessly back upstairs, transformed from volunteer to police quarry.
Even her one small bravery had been denied to her.
Chapter 11
Audrey Robson looked through the new double glazing, down the long back garden, to the gate where George had recently disappeared. Was he feeling as guilty as she did? She had seen no sign of it.
She had tried many times in the last two days to be sorry about Stanley Freeman’s death. Unsuccessfully. Phrases she had thought forgotten had come strangely back to her. And with the phrases there had returned each time a strange, a ludicrous image of herself, with strong adolescent bosom flattened for much of the play beneath a breastplate, playing Bolingbroke in Richard II. It must be thirty-five years ago now, long before these enlightened days when boys were brought in to play men’s parts in school plays. She had stood sturdily, feet astride on the rickety stage of the Girls’ High School, her height and rich contralto securing for her the masculine roles she secretly desired.
When Richard’s murderer had stood before her expecting reward in the last scene of their severely cut version, she had struck a pious attitude and declaimed,
They love not poison that do poison need,
Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murderer, love him murdered.
All through the day these half-forgotten words had come insistently back to her, until they had formed a mocking chorus to all the dutiful pangs of regret she had tried to feel. Stanley Freeman was no Richard of Bordeaux; he was a despicable little crook who had frustrated George for twenty years, that was all. And through George, her. She could not get away from the fact that in that time she had often wished him dead. Ever since that initial treachery all those years ago…
She set the last dish upon the drainer, peeled off her rubber gloves, and inspected her hands at the window in the last rays of the setting sun. It was a flattering, old-master light, gilding everything in roseate warmth, disguising from its low angle the wrinkles a more brilliant illumination would have revealed. But they were good hands, not so very different from those which had struck stage attitudes all those years ago. The pale pink varnish on the long nails looked in this glowing light exactly as it had in the advertisement.
She went into the lounge at the front of the house. It was darker here, but she resisted artificial light as the dusk seemed to creep prematurely over the heavy furniture. Perhaps it was just a psychological reluctance to admit the departure of another summer day. More likely it was a long-thrown effect from her childhood on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. There, the soft light of the oil lamps had been allowed only in the last of the twilight, and early starts on long summer days had meant that the lamps were only a prelude to retiring for the night. Light there was not for reading: on a farm that was the worst form of sloth. ‘Sitting there with a book in your hand wasting time again, my girl!’ they’d say, and she’d start as guiltily as if indulging some solitary vice.
Well, she had moved away a long time ago from that world of exploitation and small, grudgingly conceded privileges; and good riddance to it. George had his faults, but he had taken her away from all that. Cosseted her, in the early years. He never begrudged her good clothes, even now: she looked down at the leather shoes, comfortable despite their heels, and tried not to be proud of the sleek limbs beneath the nylon. In North Yorkshire, those shapely legs would have been channelled with varicose veins by now. It was part of her reaction to those long, lonely trudges to schools and school buses that she rarely walked nowadays, and never stood when she could sit. She liked the dog, but was content to feed him and occasionally fuss him. It was George who walked him, especially in the evenings. Where once he had grumbled, even shamed her into taking her turn, for months now he had accepted the ritual of the evening walk with resignation, even enjoyment.
She supposed it had become a release from the frustrations of the day’s work and Stanley Freeman’s petty incivilities. Now, with Freeman’s death, there might open a new era of increased prosperity and increased satisfaction. Walking Fred might become a relaxed, contrasting part of a nicely balanced day. She might even accompany them occasionally, on evenings like this. She folded her arms beneath the russet cashmere, hugged herself, and tried not to feel the warm, animal satisfaction of a child who has secured some small triumph and thinks the world is hers. Freeman had cheated, and cheated badly. He could not expect to be lamented now. She sank into the heavy flowered cushions and savoured for long minutes the fact that they had done with him for ever.
The clear northern sky moved towards indigo; the room had a soft gloom that seemed a conspirator to her mood. Her sign as she eventually rose to put the lights on was one of pure contentment. She went first to draw the curtains, another habit coming across the long decades from childhood. It was as she pulled the cord and the curtains slid quietly around the big bay that she saw the men.
All sun had gone now; the sober-suited figures, coming steadily up the long path through the front garden, seemed sinister in their silent advance. She had to control an absurd instinct to hide, to pretend that the lightless house was unoccupied. Perhaps that was also a childish legacy.
She went into the spacious hall and firmly switched on the light. When she opened the door, the light behind her illuminated the features of the men, but made all beyond them seem darker. She could scarcely make out the garden; only the sombre outline of the big hawthorn at the gate registered as her pupils strove to focus.
The nearer man was tall and lean, well over six feet. He had dark hair, which crinkled into grey at the temples, and blue, incongruously humorous eyes. ‘Mrs Robson? I’m Superintendent Lambert,’ he said. He turned towards the slightly shorter and more rotund figure at his side. ‘This is Sergeant Hook, who rang your husband earlier.’ The Sergeant gave her a small, ceremonial smile: she felt both of them assessing her.
‘You’d best come in,’ she said, and the Yorkshire she had thought long left behind came leaping out in the words. The men, filling the doorway as they stepped forward, seemed to her like angels of death.
The tall one explained their visit as they walked through a hall which now seemed to her empty, not spacious. Perhaps it was only the guilty feelings she had indulged all day which made his words seem so ominous.
For all he said was, ‘It’s about Stanley Freeman. We’re in
vestigating the circumstances of his death.’
Chapter 12
They sat in armchairs big enough to accommodate even their frames with room to spare. It was a comfortable room, slightly old-fashioned perhaps, with its huge, heavy suite, Indian carpet and big tiled fireplace. And none the worse for that thought Bert Hook, still resentful that the Superintendent had refused their third offer of refreshment in the day. He looked past the etchings of nineteenth-century Whitby to the oak corner cupboard with its gleaming brass fittings, and speculated upon its contents.
‘It’s most unlike George to forget an appointment,’ said Audrey Robson as she rejoined them. She carried herself well, walking with poise to the vacant settee between them, as if she were making a stage entrance. Lambert wondered if she had paused outside the door for a moment, gathering her resources to make this effect. The soft cashmere caressed rather than concealed the still shapely breasts, the plaid skirt was modestly long, but her carriage depended on legs he would have had to describe as shapely rather than sturdy: if professionally called upon, of course. She must be around fifty, but she remained attractive without fighting the years. Her carefully coiffured hair was silver, almost white, an agreeable frame for her strong features. It set off the rather large nose and high cheekbones, and deepened the colour of the widely set grey eyes. In the brief interval when she had left the policemen alone, she had applied the lightest of make-up. So her surprise when they arrived had been genuine: she had not been expecting them.
‘George is on the common with Fred,’ she said. For a moment, the unwelcome possibility of another suspect flashed through their minds. Perhaps she saw it, for she said with a little smile, ‘Fred’s our dog. George walks him on the common nearly every night at this time. You’re privileged he arranged to meet you now. But perhaps you’re a little early?’
By this time, it was twenty minutes past the appointed time, but to say so explicitly seemed a criticism. They chatted awkwardly, with Lambert carefully preserving his news that the death was murder until he had Robson present. He began to wish he had accepted the offer of yet more tea. Policemen’s small talk is notoriously ineffective, principally because their audiences, waiting for the large talk they know is the real purpose, refuse to join in the game. When Hook gallantly enlarged upon the virtues of housing plots large enough to accommodate decent kitchen gardens, Mrs Robson’s polite, half-amused agreements were not the returns to keep a conversational rally going. All three of them were glad to hear the sounds of movement in the rear section of the house. The hiatus was terminated abruptly by the arrival in their midst of a golden labrador. He burst open the unlatched door, circled with whirling tail among the visitors he assumed had come to see him, checked expertly for evidence of food and was disappointed. He had the unerring eye of his breed for a soft touch, for he settled eventually by Bert Hook, set his chin upon the Sergeant’s sturdy knee, and fixed soft brown eyes unblinkingly upon the rubicund face above him. ‘There’s a conversation-stopper!’ said Lambert, pleased to imply that they had been in the middle of an animated exchange.
George Robson stood apologetically in the doorway behind him, battered trilby in hand, green anorak unzipped, gumboots unmuddied on this balmy evening. ‘Terribly sorry,’ he said breathlessly. ‘I forgot completely about our appointment until Fred and I were way up beyond the common.’
‘I told them it wasn’t like you,’ said the wife. ‘Everything else, including my birthday, but never a business appointment!’ Hook, stroking Fred, wondered if she would emerge as one of those middle-aged women charitable towards all human nature except their husbands. It was a side-effect of monogamy which CID investigations seemed often to illustrate, and Hook, who had married late and regarded himself as a novice to the state, found it disturbing. Mrs Robson was looking at her husband with her head slightly on one side, as if estimating the progress of a garden plant and finding it barely satisfactory. Bert was too inexperienced to divine the deeper current of affection, which ran beneath with no surface sign of its existence.
George Robson, having divested himself of his outer garments, subsided into an armchair beside Hook, still panting a little. Lambert reflected that it was as well that he had the dog to give him exercise, for his strong frame was everywhere running a little to fat. Robson was certainly not gross; indeed, he was physically still a powerful man. His wrists and forearms were as strong as a manual worker’s, and his deep chest gave him a barrel-like torso. There was an early suggestion of blood pressure in the colour of cheeks that were just too full. Though his small features had no longer the precision of youth, he remained a good-looking man.
‘Would you like me to withdraw and leave you alone?’ Audrey Robson sounded as though she was recalling them to business after the diversions of Fred. She did not trouble to conceal her pleasure when Lambert said there was no need. Hook was well enough versed in the irregular ways of his chief to raise not even a figurative eyebrow. Wives added another dimension to a husband’s portrait, often stripping away the very image the subject was trying to create for himself. Robson sat looking relaxed and untroubled. His spouse’s intelligent, unguarded presence might well test the role. If role it was.
‘When did you hear of Stanley Freeman’s death?’ Lambert began. He would take them through all the preliminaries, studying reactions: neither of them seemed very distressed, and that in itself was interesting.
‘Late on Wednesday night. We were getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was Denise Freeman about Stanley’s suicide.’ Did Robson assert the word with just a touch of self-conscious stress? Lambert allowed a pause to stretch after it, but it was impossible to deduce whether it was a murderer testing the ground or an innocent using the word without subterfuge.
Audrey Robson broke the silence, as if it was painful to her. ‘It was twenty past eleven. I had the clock in my hands, adjusting the alarm for an early start in the morning.’
Her husband did not even look at her. He said, ‘The police had just left Mrs Freeman’s house.’
‘She sounded upset?’ Lambert wanted to see how he would react to the deliberately foolish question.
‘Of course she did. Wouldn’t your wife sound upset, if a policewoman had just been telling her how you killed yourself?’ Again the assertion of suicide, again dropped perfectly naturally. Lambert could hardly ask yet if Denise Freeman had sounded like a murderess, which would have been the only real point of his question. It was time to release a little more information.
‘Mr and Mrs Robson, what I have to tell you now may distress you. We are fairly certain that Stanley Freeman did not kill himself.’ His linguistic instincts rebelled against the imprecision of that ‘fairly certain’, but it was his professional skills which had chosen the expression. Sooner or later, he would be questioning a murderer: perhaps he was doing so at this moment. He would do everything possible to keep his subjects feeling their way, so that he could observe the process; there was always the chance of a false step.
Here there was none. The Robsons looked at each other in amazement. Between them, Lambert saw their wedding photograph on top of the television set. If they no longer looked the striking couple of a quarter of a century ago, they had nevertheless worn well. Young beauty has an openness and a vulnerability about it. The Robsons now had the poise and watchfulness of experience. It would not be easy to draw from this intelligent and supportive couple anything they did not want to reveal.
Audrey Robson said dully as the news sank in, ‘You mean he was murdered.’
George, suitably shocked, said accusingly, ‘When you asked me if Denise was upset, you wanted to know whether she sounded like a killer.’
Lambert shrugged away the distasteful necessities of his vocation. ‘If you like, but it’s a little melodramatic. Once a death becomes a murder inquiry, any reaction is interesting, especially from the next of kin. People in shock are unguarded. If, for example, Mrs Freeman had revealed that she had been half-expecting something of this kind, th
at would be significant in itself. It might also mean she had some thoughts on who planned this death.’
‘It was planned?’ said Audrey Robson numbly. Her husband glanced sharply at her.
‘Oh yes. This death was not the result of sudden, impulsive violence. It was premeditated, even ingenious.’ He was firm and definite, looking for evidence of fear as he firmed up the story. But he told no more than he needed to: they would know the place of the death, but he had revealed neither the time nor the method. He watched the Robsons for any evidence of more knowledge than they should have. He felt his pulse quickening, his senses at their most acute as he confronted the enigma familiar now from so many investigations: was this the perfectly innocent exchange it so far seemed, or an elaborate game of ploy and counter-ploy with a murderer on his guard?
Robson was calm enough to try now a touch of irony. He said, ‘Denise seemed shocked but quiet. Remember I only heard her on the phone. I don’t know how a murderer should sound.’ He had not ruled out the possibility of Denise Freeman as murderer, had indeed brought the question back into focus after his wife’s distraction.
Lambert said formally, ‘I have to ask you, Mr Robson, as I shall ask everyone close to the deceased, to give me an account of your movements on Wednesday night.’
As Hook flicked to a new page of his notebook, Audrey Robson looked horrified. The reality of a murder inquiry was beginning to bite: a lock of the neat silver hair had somehow escaped and hung down over her left eye, looking quite wild against the exactness of the rest. Her fingers trembled just enough to draw attention to the delicate pink of her nails. When she turned protectively towards her husband, he chose to seem oblivious of the concern he must have remarked in her as he accounted for his movements on the night of the murder.
