by J M Gregson
‘If I had, I shouldn’t be able to tell you.’ They looked each other full in the face for the first time since they had left the ivy-clad hotel, and smiled. Perhaps they were both glad that the identification had been completed.
She looked at the ground, panting a little as they climbed the steep slope and skirted the eighteenth green. If she saw faces she knew peering at her covertly from the lounge in the residential block, she gave no sign of it. She said calmly, ‘You may have deduced by now that I had no great love for my husband, Mr Lambert. You may as well know that I hated him. I don’t feel as shocked by his death as you expected I should—perhaps I feel now that I’ve been half-expecting it for years.’
Lambert walked several yards on before he said, ‘As I’m going to be in charge of what looks likely to be a murder inquiry, I should turn your question round upon you. Have you any idea who might have killed your husband?’
She picked a small wisp of dry grass from her severe navy skirt, studying it as though it affected her reply. They had reached the car park now. She stopped and turned to face him. ‘I’m afraid I have no idea. But you have a wide field. Guy had not many friends and a lot of enemies. I can think of many people who hated him enough to kill him.’
Chapter 7
When Lambert made his first contact with the group of people with whom Harrington had spent his final evening, the widow’s parting thought rang still in his brain.
The members of what had once been a relaxed holiday party were gathered in the lounge that had now become the centre of police operations. The death was still not officially confirmed as a homicide; in all essential respects it was being treated as one. The group which had assembled so happily for dinner some seventeen hours earlier carried signs of the tension now inevitable for them.
Once Lambert had introduced himself and Hook, an awkward silence fell upon them, as if each member looked to the others to make a move. It was Tony Nash who eventually said rather lamely, ‘We were here on a golfing holiday, but none of us feels like playing now.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Lambert. ‘Nevertheless, it would help our inquiries if you could remain here for a while.’
Nash looked sullen but uncertain. He glanced round the others, and Lambert divined that they had not concerted their thoughts and their opposition during the morning. He found that interesting. Now it was Meg Peters who said indignantly, ‘That is out of the question!’
Sergeant Hook said in his best NCO manner, ‘You are probably aware that we cannot require your presence here. Nevertheless, it would assist our work enormously. Obviously you had earmarked this time: the Manager tells us that you are booked in here for another two nights at least.’
‘But surely you can see that circumstances have changed. There is nothing to keep us here now.’ Miss Peters tossed her dark red hair imperiously and turned her green eyes full upon Bert Hook’s. She did not like policemen, perhaps because they were rarely in a position to respond to her charms.
It was Lambert who said drily, ‘Nothing except the good citizen’s normal desire to see justice efficiently executed.’
If the woman was piqued to find the reply coming from a different quarter, she did not show it. She turned unhurriedly to the Superintendent, weighing the argument before she said, ‘Now you’re applying a little blackmail. If we wish to get on with our own concerns, we’re accused of obstructing your inquiries. The next stage is to regard our exits as bringing suspicion on ourselves.’
Lambert assessed her. She sat with her head turned slightly upwards, so that the strong nose jutted aggressively at him beneath a white brow that was furrowed with indignation. He said with a small smile, ‘You assume, then, that this death was not accidental.’
It was said so lightly that they were left uncertain as to whether Meg Peters had fallen into some kind of trap. Eventually it was George Goodman who said, ‘You will understand that we have been kept in the dark all morning about the death of our friend. Are we to assume he was murdered? No one has seen fit to tell us yet.’
‘That is because we are not certain yet about the cause of death. All I can tell you is that we have been given reason to suspect foul play. Later in the day, when I have seen the pathologist again, I may be able to tell you more.’ It was not easy to make the old bromides sound fresh, but most of them nodded as if they found his words reassuring. He thought that at the end of a long morning’s wait they found any sort of information a minor comfort; the innocent ones, that is.
‘May we ask what reason you have to suspect foul play?’ Goodman was a JP. He knew enough of the law to be aware of his rights, enough of police procedure to know that he had little chance of a straight answer to his question. Unless, of course, it suited these men to give him one.
Lambert said, ‘Forgive me, but you have all been in touch with this business for rather longer than I have—I was in court for most of the morning.’ He looked into the shrewd blue eyes of his questioner, searching his brain for Rushton’s descriptions of the people in this key group. There was no mistaking the episcopal bearing of this man. ‘You, I assume, are Mr Goodman. I understand you discovered Mr Harrington’s body.’
‘Yes. With Mr Nash here.’ Goodman introduced Lambert and Hook to the other four members of the group. All of them, male and female, were aware as he did so that the man who would have taken this function upon himself yesterday had been violently removed from their midst. They did not resent Goodman’s assumption of the role: they were glad indeed that someone had taken a general initiative in answering the police. Yet both of the women found his avuncular manner an irritation.
Lambert said, ‘I’ve seen the spot where you found him. Did you think at the time that the death had a natural explanation?’
Goodman and Nash looked at each other. Each had assumed from the outset that someone had killed Harrington. For a moment they struggled with their own thoughts. Then Tony Nash said, ‘There was a lot of dried blood on the side of his face.’ He sounded like a schoolboy caught breaking the rules and trying to defend his action.
‘Yes. Was the blood already dry and nearly black when you found him?’ Lambert knew the answer; his interest was in the reactions of this group to the details of the death. There was a sudden, sick excitement in the air: he felt that the people around him realised that the murderer, if murder this was, was probably in this room. And as he took covert notice of the responses around him, he was aware of his own excitement too. The old adrenalin as the manhunt began: after twenty years he was still not sure whether it was a thing of shame or a necessary adjunct of his calling.
Nash and Goodman were looking at each other again: though both knew the answer to Lambert’s straightforward question, each seemed afraid of saying the wrong thing, as if a hasty word might incriminate him or others. It was a familiar first reaction to involvement in a murder investigation, but the Superintendent saw no reason to enlighten them about that. Creative tension, the social psychologist had called it at the last course his betters had thought it appropriate for him to attend. He was not sure whether to be gratified or dismayed by the discovery that what he had done instinctively over the years conformed with the latest theories of criminology.
Goodman said, ‘It was almost black. He had been dead for some time.’
‘Did you touch the corpse?’
Again the quick, confirmatory look at each other. Then, not quite together, so that the effect was almost comic, ‘No.’
‘You had no idea, then, of the surface temperature of the body at the time?’
Goodman gave a little shudder and said, ‘Look, Superintendent, is this really necessary? I imagine it must be very upsetting for the ladies in particular…’
Lambert looked round the five taut faces. He fancied that the two women were not altogether pleased to be distinguished as the weaker vessels in this way. ‘Not strictly necessary, no. I am interested in why you should have assumed that your friend had not died naturally. Was there anything else about
the body that struck you as odd?’
The other three were watching Nash and Goodman now with interest and expectation. There was no visible sign of the distress which Goodman had suggested they might be feeling. For the first time, Nash, brushing a strand of yellow hair clear of his right eye, spoke without an interrogatory glance at Goodman. ‘Yes. He was lying—oddly.’
This time it was the two detectives who looked at each other, enjoying a little, not entirely innocent, collusion: they knew perfectly well what the man meant. Hook said, ‘Oddly?’
‘Yes. He was on his back, across the top of a mound. He could hardly have fallen like that, I think.’ Nash seemed to have made this deduction only now, unless he was acting his puzzlement rather well. The audience was scrutinising him closely.
Lambert said, ‘Well, you may well be right.’ He had no wish to communicate his own thoughts on the matter at this stage, though the image of that boxer splayed unconscious across the bottom rope of a ring came vividly back to him. The Welshman, Joe Erskine, he thought: the memories of adolescence were often more reliable than later ones.
‘Let me put you in the picture about the way we plan to operate. I hope to know more of the details of this death before the day is out. If, as we all seem at the moment to be anticipating, Mr Harrington did not die from natural causes, we shall have to ascertain exactly how he did die. It goes without saying that as the people who were with him in his last hours, you will all be key witnesses in any investigation. Sergeant Hook and I will need to see you all individually in due course.’
‘As murder suspects.’ It was Alison Munro’s first contribution since they had arrived. Sitting with long legs crossed in dark blue trews, she looked the most relaxed person in the room. Her dark eyes were quite impenetrable with the light behind her, but her wide mouth edged upwards with something very like mischief.
‘Not necessarily. There are other explanations of unnatural death. Suicide, for instance, though I have to say I consider that unlikely in this case. Manslaughter, perhaps; though that might be a matter for lawyers to argue out rather than policemen.’
Alison toyed thoughtfully with a small gold ball-point pen, her slim fingers as elegant as its delicately tooled surface. ‘Is there a possibility that anyone other than the people in this room was involved?’
‘You’re rather jumping the gun in your presumptions, Mrs Munro.’ He noticed her little, involuntary start at the use of her name; possibly she recognised that the effort he had made to remember it signified her status as a suspect. ‘But yes, of course the culprit you are presuming may be someone you don’t even know. One of the things our team is busy with at the moment is checking exactly who was in the vicinity last night. Staff, visitors, anyone else who was in the area of the Wye Castle without good reason.’ It was true, of course: it was the boring background to every investigation, which the media generally chose to ignore.
Secretly, he hoped this gathering contained his killer; moving out to the second and much wider range of suspects often meant crimes went unsolved. ‘While I have you all together, let me ask you if there was anything you noticed last night which might be significant in relation to Mr Harrington’s death.’
There was silence. A silence in which the group looked at the carpet rather than each other. A significant silence, perhaps. He let it hang, and Hook knew him far too well by now to intervene.
It was the man in the room who was least at home with words who eventually found the silence unbearable. Sandy Munro said abruptly, speaking to his friends rather than the policemen, ‘There was a bit of an argument at dinner.’
Lambert, professionally calm, apparently unaware of the looks of startled resentment at this unexpected disclosure, said, ‘What sort of argument?’
‘Well, almost a row, really.’ Munro, having made the initial breach in their .collective silence, looked miserably for someone else to complete the capitulation.
Meg Peters studied him calmly for a moment, her head slightly on one side, her remarkable red hair glinting in the strong light of the middle of the day. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether she was angry about his statement. Then she turned to Lambert and said, ‘There was a little spat between Tony and Guy, that’s all.’
Lambert said, ‘Guy being Mr Harrington, I presume, and Tony—’
‘Mr Nash.’ There was a tinge of impatience in the words, edging the annoyance now evident in the set of her head.
Lambert, totally unruffled, studied her for a moment before turning without haste to the youngest man in the room. ‘What was the subject of this little disagreement, Mr Nash?’
‘Nothing really, Superintendent.’ Nash’s smile was as ineffective as his words in dismissing the importance of the incident. He tried to shrug his broad shoulders free of the hunched tenseness which had beset them since his argument with the dead man had been mentioned. Then he looked round the room and found nothing to help him. The silence stretched; Lambert and Hook watched him steadily with expectant, interrogatory smiles. He said uncertainly, ‘Guy said something about Meg to which I took exception, that’s all. But he apologised and it was all forgotten before the evening was over.’
Lambert looked from Nash to the others, wondering if anyone was prepared to go further. Meg Peters met his eye arrogantly, parading her refusal to give him more detail like a badge of defiance. Goodman and Munro nodded, confirming Nash’s low-key verdict on the episode.
It was Alison Munro who said, ‘You must realise that the wine had been flowing fairly freely at the end of a day in the fresh air, Mr Lambert.’ With her unforced smile framed by her sculpted dark hair, she was like an elder sister excusing boyish horseplay, and Lambert saw Nash resenting it even as she supported his dismissal of the row as trivial.
Lambert said, ‘Well, if any of you thinks that there was a more lasting resentment, there will be ample opportunity for us to explore the matter together when I talk to you in a more private context. In the meantime, thank you for your cooperation.’ He moved to the door, ignoring the fact that the cooperation he assumed had not yet been volunteered by the group. ‘My advice to you is that you go on enjoying the golfing and other facilities of this place as fully as is possible in these distressing circumstances. I look forward to seeing each of you privately in due course.’
Sandy Munro wondered if he knew how much of a threat that sounded. He turned his thin face hard upon the carpet to conceal his relief as Lambert and Hook left the room. Even as he turned to the others to apologise for the small revelation he had made, he knew that he had concealed a greater knowledge from the police. And that others in the room had concealed things too.
And that one of them was his wife.
Chapter 8
‘Home for lunch. This almost amounts to dereliction of duty.’ Christine came and stood at Lambert’s shoulder as he sniffed at the first of the roses, a Climbing Ena Harkness on the south-facing wall outside the kitchen.
She was slim and alert, with dark, close-cut hair. In her tartan blouse and blue jeans, she looked trim and tidy even after a morning in the garden. She was almost a foot shorter than him as he smiled down at her and said, ‘Home was on my way to the pathology lab.’ He had more sense than to tell her that he had forgotten that she would be in the house rather than in school because of what he still thought of as the Whit holiday.
‘A corpse, then. I have to be a detective myself to piece together what you’re up to.’
‘A killing at the Wye Castle. That new country club outside Hereford.’
‘In pursuit of robbery?’
‘Possibly. I don’t think so. I’ll know more when I’ve seen Burgess and get the results of his PM.’
‘A light lunch, then.’ She was amused always by his delicate stomach in the face of the pathologist’s robust black humour. He watched her small hands making cheese and tomato sandwiches with what seemed to him amazing dexterity and speed. She did not like being watched, but had long since decided it was easier to endur
e it than to protest. She said instead, ‘Is Bert Hook with you on the case?’
‘He will be. We’ve hardly started yet. The body was found early this morning. By two of the suspects, apparently.’
‘I saw Eleanor Hook last week at the parent-teachers evening. Young Kevin will be in my class next year.’
He recognised her resolute adherence to the world outside his work, which he now realised was one of her most valuable qualities. ‘It seems no time since he was born.’ Bert had married quite late and very happily. ‘Old Bert will be forty-four now.’
‘Very nearly as old as old John Lambert,’ she said drily. ‘Eleanor tells me he’s started on an Open University degree.’
Lambert started to grin, then adjusted his features to neutrality just in time, as she slid the knife through the last sandwich and glanced sharply into his face. Patronising the uneducated was the ultimate sin in Christine’s short list. ‘You mean old Bert’s going to start answering back?’
‘With any luck, yes. He might even start correcting your quotations: he’s reading Humanities.’
Lambert, secretly delighted, pondered the implications of this new development for the CID double act that had baffled friend and foe alike over the years of their association. Hook’s deadpan straight man had always concealed hidden depths; would he now begin to answer his chief’s wilder literary sallies, or even, heaven forbid, offer his own initiatives in the area? Rank still had its privileges, which surely must be preserved, for the sake of discipline in the force.
He ate his sandwiches and considered the possibilities offered by a Barnardo’s boy with a degree. It was material for D. H. Lawrence; but wasn’t Lawrence on his way down again in the literary leagues of academia? He said to Christine, ‘You’d enjoy rooting among the psyches of our main suspects at the Wye Castle. Pampered products of private education, to a man, I should think.’
Christine Lambert sturdily refused to contemplate the smaller classes and easier pastures of private schools. He was proud of her, immensely touched when, as often happened, people he came across paid unprompted tributes to her skills and persuasiveness as a teacher. He wondered why he should still find it so difficult to tell her so, why he preferred to tease her about her aspirations and her unstinting support of the underprivileged young. He saw enough of the results of deprivation to understand the importance of her work, even when she seemed sometimes to be swimming against an irresistible tide.
