Killer Cases: A Lambert and Hook Detective Omnibus

by J M Gregson

  ‘I know. We’re about to go through it again.’ He looked at her grimly and drew the first flash of anger from those small brown eyes. Then she took a deep breath and sighed heavily, measuring out her ennui in her respiration.

  ‘I was at home, all evening. End of story.’ She eased her chair back, stretched nylon-clad legs before her so that both she and her interrogators could study them the better.

  ‘Witnesses?’ intoned Bert Hook impassively. Lambert was not sure whether he was supporting his chief or breaking the spell of those shapely extensions.

  ‘My mother. As you already know very well. That’s all.’ She folded her arms, swung the swivel chair a little, and stared at the ceiling. It was a caricature of the young executive at home in these surroundings; Lambert thought suddenly of Simon Hapgood. The difference was that Jane Davidson’s pose drew attention to her high, firm breasts, which her movement strained against the thin lemon cotton of her blouse. Bert Hook met this interesting profile when he looked up from his note-taking. Lambert, who was determined to offer no smiles, carefully avoided his sergeant’s face.

  He said, ‘Your neighbour saw you come in. She could not be sure whether you went out again or not.’ He was turning the notion on its head, but she was quick enough to spot it.

  ‘You mean she didn’t see me go out. That’s because I didn’t. Old Ma Bellingham doesn’t miss much. Nosy old cow.’

  ‘So your mother is your only witness?’

  ‘So my mother’s a liar? So how many witnesses have you got who saw me anywhere else?’ The woman knew her rights. Perhaps she had been over the strengths of her story many times before in her own mind; perhaps, he thought ruefully, she merely realized that he could not trap her because she was telling the truth.

  She reached languidly for her bag, placed it on her lap, extracted from its depths a packet of tipped cigarettes. She neither offered the packet to them nor asked if they objected to her smoking. She found a butane lighter, gazed full into Lambert’s eyes as she lit the cigarette, and blew the first cloud of smoke gently into the air between them. Lambert had given up cigarettes two years ago and lately at Christine’s insistence very nearly relinquished his pipe. The familiar sharp smell in his nostrils was a small torture, made more acute by the fancy that the girl knew exactly the stress she was imposing.

  In another place, he might have dashed the cigarette from her fingers and bidden her harshly not to smoke. But she had been charged with no offence. In the hoary but convenient phrase, she was helping police with their inquiries. Voluntarily, as a good citizen should. In the respectable working-class world where John Lambert had been brought up in the postwar years, young ladies did not paint their nails, and still less did they smoke. Since then, he had questioned a thousand sluts and whores and worse, quickly building a thick skin and a protective detachment. Now he found the prejudices ingrained in childhood as difficult for a grizzled policeman to discard as for others. He would have been surprised but scarcely gratified to find that placid Bert Hook would also like to have spanked this girl: the pleasure involved in the fantasy could scarcely be reconciled with CID objectivity.

  ‘How did you get the job at Freeman Estates?’ said Lambert. It was only pique that made him frame the question like that. Had he not been nettled by her appearance and bearing, he would merely have taken her through her time with the firm, trying to build up a picture of relationships with colleagues. As it was, he made it sound as if she could not have got the post merely on her merits. It was a departure from his own rules. And paradoxically, it struck home.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have it? I’m good at it,’ she almost shouted. The brown eyes, half shut with contempt for most of their initial exchange, were wide now with alarm.

  It was Lambert’s turn to be deliberately unhurried. He sorted through the papers in the file on the desk in front of him until he came to the photocopy of her application for the post. He glanced from her neat, small handwriting to the drawn face a few feet in front of him, dwelling on what he read, accentuating its significance in the sure knowledge that she would not recall exactly what she had set down here years earlier.

  ‘You came here with very few qualifications. English Language and one other O-level.’

  ‘I didn’t work at school,’ she muttered, flashing him a look of hate.

  ‘No doubt. That doesn’t explain why an employer would reward your indolence.’ He was aware of Hook watching him: this wasn’t at all his usual style. How far it was professional scenting of a weakness, how far a personal spite against a young woman who had got under his skin, he could not be sure himself. But he had opened a breach in her defences and he was driving through it as vigorously as he could, aware of his excitement but not his motive.

  ‘I took a course.’ She was almost a sullen schoolgirl as the shell of sophistication cracked around her. She still had her handbag on her knees, but now her fingers twisted and untwisted through the handle.

  ‘Correction. You began a course. A secretarial course at the College of Further Education. Shorthand, Typewriting, Office Practice; all of which might have been valuable at Freeman Estates. Except that you only lasted a month on the course.’

  ‘I got the chance of a job.’

  ‘Really!’ The cynicism as his lips curled the word was like a slap across the face. He did not like himself much, but he knew he was through the shell to the soft, unguarded interior. He thought of DI Rushton’s words, ‘We didn’t turn up any motive, but both she and her mother seemed scared. We felt they were hiding something, but we couldn’t find out what.’

  He said quietly, ‘Strange that in the middle of a recession as we were then, you should get a job here with minimal qualifications, while girls with six O-levels remained unemployed. Perhaps we’d better talk to your mother: she might be more cooperative.’ Again there was that look of fear on the face that had lately been so hard and confident.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she said wretchedly. She sat bolt upright now, the calves she had recently displayed so boldly tucked back under her seat, her shoulders hunched forward, as though to minimize the effect of the breasts she had shown to such advantage. Lambert remembered that she had no father, that she lived alone with a mother she helped to support. He should have hated his job, but the sense of a small triumph was stronger. If he softened his attitude, it was merely another tactic.

  ‘All I’m anxious to do is to get as full a picture as possible of what goes on at Freeman Estates. Of what went on before the cold-blooded murder of your principal.’ A small shiver shook the humped shoulders at his last phrase, but she did not look up at him. ‘I need to know about your relationships with the other members of the firm. What about Simon Hapgood?’

  She looked up at him in surprise. ‘What about him?’ She seemed for a moment puzzled but relieved, as if she had expected his questioning to take a different tack. ‘I went out with him once or twice. If he can’t get his hand straight up your skirt, he’s not interested. He didn’t get up mine. He’s not concerned with me.’

  ‘Then who?’ said Lambert gently.

  ‘Don’t know. Not interested,’ she said, just too quickly. Her mouth set in the sullen pout of childhood, and he realized he would get nothing further here. She looked close to exhaustion; he saw now how much of a pretence her earlier attitude had involved. She must have been dreading this further probing into what Rushton and his DCs had failed to discover. He recalled his wife’s view that Jane Davidson was ‘a good girl when you get through to her’ and wondered how long ago she had formed that view. He had been pressing hard on a girl from what the social workers would call ‘a deprived background’. Well, it was an unfortunate fact of police life that many serious criminals came from ‘deprived backgrounds’.

  ‘What about George Robson?’ he asked after a pause. She relaxed a little further, attempted to smile. ‘Mr Robson is all right. Randy old bugger, but a gentleman!’ Apparently she did not consider this a paradox: Lambert decided he liked her
for that. ‘The firm is going to be a lot happier place, now he’s in here.’ She looked round approvingly at the trappings of office, the big mahogany desk, the internal and external telephones, the blotting-pad and desk inkstand that was never used. ‘Miss Godson won’t be able to order me about like dirt now,’ she said with satisfaction.

  ‘How did Miss Godson get on with Mr Freeman?’ asked Lambert innocently.

  ‘She hated him,’ the girl said, promptly and with relish: she plainly felt she owed the firm’s other woman no favours.

  ‘Enough to kill him?’ said Lambert. ‘That’s what Sergeant Hook and I are interested in.’

  Jane Davidson showed shock, then the beginnings of a delicious excitement at the notion. She wiped her cheek with a tiny flowered handkerchief, then looked down at the smeared eye-shadow. Then she said reluctantly, ‘No. Freeman had done something to hurt her, I’m sure, but I don’t know what. But old Emily wouldn’t kill him. She wouldn’t have the bottle.’

  ‘“Bottle” is a difficult thing to estimate, Jane,’ said Lambert, reflecting that ‘old Emily’ was probably several years his junior. It was the first time he had used the receptionist’s Christian name; perhaps now, with pretence stripped away, she was reminding him of his own daughter. ‘All kinds of people acquire courage for a little while when they are desperate enough.’ She nodded thoughtfully, stubbing out the last of the cigarette she had long forgotten in the big glass ashtray.

  Lambert put aside his file on Jane Davidson and looked hard at her. ‘Do you know of a man called Wino Willy?’ he said.

  Her eyes as she looked at him were full of strong emotions. He thought he caught fear and anger; then her face relaxed into an unexpected tenderness. Her voice very quiet, she said, ‘I knew him as Mr Harrison. He was always very kind to me.’

  ‘I believe you knew his son quite well at one time.’

  Now there was a fierce pride as she said, ‘Andrew. Yes, we were very close. He was a bit older than me but we got on well. I think perhaps if he hadn’t – ’ She couldn’t finish. If Lambert hadn’t had years of experience, he would have been tempted to reach out to the small white hand which clenched itself into a fist and pressed itself against her thigh.

  Instead, he said gently, ‘Do you still see Mr Harrison?’

  She took a long time to reply, as if she were coming to a decision. ‘Just occasionally,’ she said. ‘It used to be more often, but I think I only upset him. As a matter of fact, I saw him on the night before the murder.’

  Another of his suspects in touch with the enigmatic figure on the moor just before the murder: Lambert scarcely knew whether he was elated or not. He had a feeling that the increased complexity, the extra dimension which he was adding to the killing of Stanley Freeman, would eventually point the solution, but as yet he could not see how. He said lamely, ‘How did he seem?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘As usual, I suppose. I took a friend’s dog which had an infected paw. He bound it up with some herbs against the wound. While he was concentrating on that, he seemed quite normal. Like a mother with her baby.’ Perhaps she surprised herself with the simile, for she stopped and seemed near to tears again at the recollection. ‘As soon as he’d finished, he danced away from me as wild as ever. I couldn’t get through to him; I might have been a total stranger.’

  Lambert, who had for a few moments on the moor felt himself in touch with that ravaged mind, caught something of the tragedy she felt in her last phrase. Well, at least the dog would make it easy to verify the facts of her story. It might of course have been a carefully chosen excuse to visit Willy: their former relationship suggested Jane would have a closer contact than almost anyone with the man who was now Wino Willy.

  She was relaxed now, nervously drained but relieved by the thought that her ordeal was almost over. It was a good moment to play a trump card in this strange game which was the staple diet of detection. Lambert’s voice was carefully even as he said, ‘And what about your own relationship with Stanley Freeman?’

  He watched the scarlet nails fasten on the butt of the cigarette she had already discarded, then grind it on and on, until it was dry shreds in the glass bowl. Her voice when it came was dry-throated and low, as if it belonged to a much older woman. All she said was, ‘I didn’t like him,’ but the croaking delivery shocked all three of them.

  ‘Did you kill him?’ Lambert was still as a snake. The brown eyes widened with fear, sunk in hollows which seemed darker in the young face.

  ‘No. I could never have killed him.’ The voice was so low they had to strain to hear it. Faintly through the thick walls, they caught the sound of the telephone in the outer office, which Jane Davidson would normally have answered. Emily Godson, who had taken over her duties for the duration of this interview, must have answered it, but they caught nothing of her voice.

  ‘What car do you drive, Miss Davidson?’ said Lambert quietly.

  ‘A white Fiesta.’

  ‘A company car?’ Lambert, who knew the answers here, was checking her reactions.

  ‘Yes. Part of the pool, in case anyone is objecting.’ She was watching him warily, trying to find where this led and who had objected to her possession of the car. But she did not look threatened.

  He switched directly back to her relationship with the dead man. ‘It was quite clear earlier that there was something odd about your original appointment here.’ She nodded dumbly, signifying her acquiescence now, not trusting herself to speak. ‘I have to advise you that your best policy if you are not involved in this murder is to be perfectly frank with us. The innocent have nothing to fear; any confidences which have nothing to do with the case will be respected.’ He went on with the soothing phrases, pouring them like medication over the hunched figure opposite him.

  Jane Davidson sat with her handbag pressed against her like a shield, the handkerchief clutched in one of the small white fists as the tears ran unheeded down her face. She looked at the edge of the desk in front of her, not at the two men who had brought her to this disclosure.

  Then she said dully, ‘Stanley Freeman was my father.’

  Chapter 22

  It came nearer, its sharp brown eye fixed unblinkingly on the man it had known for months. And Willy, so tremulous in any human arena, sat quiet as stone. The bird hopped between Willy’s large feet, removed the ants with tongue swifter than a striking snake’s, and looked up into the lined face above him. Willy looked back at the bird and said nothing, though his throat purred a scarcely audible welcome. The sleek crimson head investigated his right boot in detail, found it wanting, and looked to the tall oaks and the sky beyond them. The bird hopped unhurriedly away, then rose and wheeled in undulating flight into the wood. Willy heard its call like derisive laughter behind him.

  His mind was deciding for the first time in years upon a plan of action. For a long time he had moved as instinctively and thoughtlessly as the wild creatures around him, his course motivated by the same needs of food and shelter that they felt. But not as freely as them: he was a man still. Weighed down now by a burden he had thought to have escaped from for ever, he wrestled with what he had once called conscience. A notion unknown to birds and beasts.

  He knew now that he should have restricted himself to those birds and beasts, for human contact was not to be trusted. This human had brought him food and drink and proposed a monster jape. He remembered the very phrase: like Billy Bunter and those boys who had never existed. But it was not a jape, and now that it had gone wrong he must tell. When he had gone down to the house and told the woman this morning, she had yelled at him to be quiet and fled from him. He could hear her screams still; they had rung in his ears long after he had come away.

  But he would tell the man who had come to him on the moor. He would put it right. That man knew what a piece of work is man. ‘“How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in action how like an angel!”’ Willy found himself tossing the ironic phrases to the empty sky, while the green woodpecker mocked his
inaction from the shadowy depths behind him. And in that moment he knew what he must do

  He had thought to wait until the man came to him again on the moor. But that might take days, and in that time…

  Willy stood, grew tall, buttoned his ragged coat. It was not cold, but he was gathering his resources and his resolution about him. Only he knew the courage this was taking him, though Lambert would later divine it. For Wino Willy was going back by his own resolution into the world of men. Of buildings, crowded with the humanity that scared him more than bombs. Of sniggers, and sly smiles, and assurances that could not be trusted. Of japes that led to death. He kicked the tree-stump he had sat on, feeling the pain on his instep as a reassurance of the reality of his humanity. Then he set off, before his resolution could fail.

  And so while Lambert questioned the associates of Stanley Freeman, the man who knew his murderer moved towards him. He kept to the common as long as he could, working his way parallel to the straggling hawthorn hedge which marked its boundary. He chattered to the blackbirds and thrushes which sang around him, scolded the pair of magpies which sailed in like aircraft from the field below. His tall, tatterdemalion figure looked like a modern Pied Piper against the skyline as he whistled and chattered his way along, but no birds or mammals followed his erratic course as he moved towards the world of men. He did not see the human eyes that watched him from the road beyond the hedge.

  The common was his territory. He knew every clump of prickly gorse, every tiny knoll of ground, each of the three peaty hollows where black water lurked to soak the unwary. He could move surefootedly across here, even on moonless nights, as occasionally he did when dark visions and darker memories made sleep impossible. He was frightened, but determined now; the excitement rose like a drug to give him courage. The spires and roofs of Oldford came into view. He was doing the right thing. It was a sensation he had not known for years and his flesh prickled at it.