by J M Gregson
‘I wasn’t a free agent. Sandy works—worked—for Guy, as you know. I think you may also know that he wasn’t well treated. Several of what should have been his patents had been appropriated by Harrington. “Standard business practice,” he called it!’ She spat the phrase with a bitterness that was almost tangible. Her husband’s hand stole slowly across to cover hers, though his eyes never left Lambert’s face.
Alison Munro’s concentration was so fierce that she was startled by the touch; a little, involuntary shudder ran through her before she brought across her other hand to give her husband’s tight fingers a brief answering squeeze. She said, ‘I was foolish enough to think I could appeal to Guy’s better nature. He treated it as an offer to grab what he wanted. He said that if I became his mistress he would see that Sandy was suitably rewarded for his talents.’
‘And you refused.’ It was a statement, not a question. She glanced up, prepared to be offended, but found the same strangely neutral intensity in her inquisitor.
‘I refused. That only brought out the bully that was never far beneath the surface in Guy. He turned from persuasion to threats. If he hadn’t held all the cards, it would have been laughable. He was like an operatic villain.’
‘Scarpia, by the sound of it.’
She nodded, showing no sign of surprise that a detective should make such a reference, staring down gratefully at the reddish hairs on the back of the neat hand that still covered hers. ‘He threatened that he would sack Sandy. When I laughed in his face and said that a good engineer wouldn’t be out of work for long, he invited me to test that theory. He said that if I didn’t cooperate he’d make damned sure that Sandy never worked again.’
She suddenly twitched her head to look rather wildly at her husband. ‘It might have been rubbish, I don’t know. But he sounded very convincing. I believed him, for a time at least. I should have—’
‘What exactly was the subject of your final argument with Harrington?’ Lambert dragged her attention ruthlessly back from her own emotions to the facts of his investigation.
‘I went back to tell him to get lost, once and for all. He tried first to cajole and then to threaten me again, and suddenly I could stand it no longer. I screamed at him, I think. Anyway, I told him to do what the hell he wanted. But if Sandy suffered, he’d better look out for himself.’ It was the kind of airy, unsupported threat that policemen heard often. But coming so inappropriately from this coolly classic beauty, it sounded full of genuine menace.
‘Did you threaten to kill him?’
She looked at him with a sudden fear. ‘I may well have done. I certainly felt like it.’ She hesitated momentarily, then said, as though defending herself was a concession, ‘However, I didn’t murder him.’
‘Nevertheless, he was dead within half an hour of your final rejection of him.’
For the first time in their exchanges, Lambert allowed himself a pause. Even now, it was a brief one, and he made no reference to the notes in front of him. Nor did his eyes leave the woman’s face as he said, ‘Mr Munro, can you show me the sweater you were wearing on the day of the murder? It was a blue one, I think, with strands of white wool woven into the pattern.’
Sandy Munro looked shaken for a moment: whether by the request itself, the precision of Lambert’s description, or the suddenness of the transition from his wife’s last words with Harrington, it was impossible to say. Then he said, ‘Yes, I know the one. I wore it to play golf in the afternoon, as you say.’ He stood up, moving for once as jerkily as a puppet. ‘It should be in the wardrobe in our room, though I can’t think why—’
‘Don’t bother, Sandy. It isn’t there.’ His wife’s voice was like ice in the warm room. She spoke like one in a trance, her eyes staring straight ahead at the innocent sky outside. Then, with an effort that was obvious to them all, she wrenched her attention back to Lambert. ‘Why do you want it?’
‘I think you know that, Mrs Munro. Where is it?’
Her brain seemed to work with extra speed in this crisis, like a driver’s in the course of a road accident. It told her that there was no point in concealment, after all. ‘It doesn’t exist anymore. It went to the gardeners’ bonfire last night. I checked that it had gone completely at six o’clock this morning.’ Her eyes blazed with a desperate defiance.
‘And why did you do that?’ Lambert’s voice registered neither surprise nor emotion.
‘Because I thought you might come looking for it.’
‘You were correct in that. Mrs Munro, destroying evidence can be a very serious matter. Courts have been known to take it as an admission of guilt.’
Sandy Munro had sat down again, heavily, like a boxer dumped on the canvas by a stunning blow. Alison stretched out her hand and linked her fingers through his unresisting ones. Her face was very white within its neat helmet of black hair, but she said nothing.
It was Lambert who eventually broke a silence which seemed to have stretched far beyond the few seconds which was the reality. ‘Mrs Munro, I do not have time to probe delicately after the truth. We are investigating a murder; for all we know, two murders.’ He saw both their faces fix in horror upon his, but he did not even check. ‘I will tell you frankly that I do not think that your husband killed Guy Harrington. I do believe, however, that he moved the body, which could certainly make him an accessory after the fact. I think that you also believe that. Perhaps, indeed, you know that.’
Alison Munro looked wildly from her husband to the two detectives, her senses for once in her life reeling in disarray.
It was Bert Hook who prompted quietly, ‘The forensic boys will probably be able to get all they want from the remains of that bonfire, Mrs Munro. I’m sure carbon analysis techniques will be able to identify a particular type of wool, even among the ashes. That’s all they need, you see: they already have the sweater fibres found on the corpse.’
Perhaps his low-key, reassuring tones were what was needed. But it was not Alison but Sandy Munro who looked at him almost gratefully and said, ‘All right, yes. I moved Harrington’s body.’
He stopped then: perhaps in his naïvety he thought the simple acknowledgement would be enough. Lambert said, ‘You lied to us also, Mr Munro. Quite comprehensively.’ Hook wondered for a moment if he was about to charge one of them with murder. Instead Lambert said only, ‘You had better give us a proper account of your movements on the night of the murder now.’
Munro took a deep breath, like a child about to embark upon a full confession of some shameful escapade. ‘After the party broke up, I went for a walk, as I told you.’
‘Exactly as you told us?’
‘Yes. I walked on my own down to the main gates of the complex. It’s about three-quarters of a mile. I remember I went and stood on the green nearest to the gates in the moonlight for a moment or two.’
‘You told us that your wife was already in bed and almost asleep when you got back to your room. That wasn’t true, was it?’
Munro shook his head miserably, looking again like a child who has been found out. For a normally straightforward man, confessions of dishonesty, or worse, did not come easily. ‘No. She wasna there at all.’ Under stress, his Fifeshire accent thickened a little.
‘Did that seem significant to you?’
‘Not at the time. It did later.’
‘You’d heard her rowing with Harrington, hadn’t you?’ Munro suddenly shook his head roughly, as if trying to clear it of confusions. ‘I didna know it was her, not then. But I had heard angry voices, yes. A man’s and a woman’s.’
‘Yet you didn’t think Alison was involved?’
‘Not at the time I didn’t. I thought it was Harrington and Meg Peters. When Alison wasn’t in the room, I didn’t know what to think. When she came in and went to bed without a word to me, I got to thinking it could have been her.’
‘So you got up again,’ prompted Hook gently. He wondered if they were on the way to a full confession, found himself hoping unprofessionally that they wer
e not.
‘Yes. I couldn’t sleep. I spoke to Alison, but she seemed to be asleep. I think now that she was only pretending.’ They glanced at each other; she gave him a tiny, acknowledging smile. ‘I got up and put some clothes on to go for a walk round.’
‘At what time?’ Hook’s ballpoint was poised like a recording angel’s over his notebook.
‘I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps an hour after I’d gone to bed. Half past one, say, or a little after.’ He spoke like one who anticipated that precision here might be important. Perhaps he saw himself giving this evidence in court in due course.
It was Lambert who said, ‘And you found Harrington’s body?’
‘Yes. On the gravel path below the roof where we’d been sitting earlier.’ His voice was low enough for them to have to strain after it in the quiet room.
‘And you chose to move it. You had better tell us why.’
‘I’d decided by that time that it was Alison I’d heard with Guy. When I found his body, I suppose I assumed for a moment that she’d pushed him off the roof.’
‘A theory which has yet to be disproved,’ said Lambert drily. ‘What did you hope to achieve by moving the corpse?’
Munro looked at his wife; she gave his hand a brief, encouraging squeeze, but neither of them smiled as he went on. ‘My brain wasn’t working very clearly. I think I felt that others beside myself must have heard the row between Alison and Guy. As you say they did. I thought that if I moved the body out on to the course and it wasn’t found until the next day, almost anyone might have done it.’
‘So you hauled him into the wheelbarrow and trundled him down the fairway. And left traces of your clothing fibres on both the wheelbarrow and the corpse’s clothes. Not very clever.’
‘If I were more used to murder, maybe I’d think of these things!’ In the relief at having his confession out, Munro showed a flash of his normal spirit.
Lambert turned his attention back to Alison. ‘Did you kill Harrington?’
‘No.’ She looked as if at that moment she would have liked to kill Lambert.
‘Can you give us any proof that you did not?’
‘No. I thought the idea of English law was that one was innocent until—’
‘Have you any idea who did kill him?’
‘No.’
He looked at them coldly for a moment. ‘Both of you lied quite deliberately to us about your movements at the time of Harrington’s death. I advise you therefore to be very careful as to your answer to this question. Where were you between ten-thirty and midnight last night?’
They looked at each other; shock and fear were in their faces. Whether it was the consternation of the innocent drawn into evil they could not comprehend or the guilty appalled that their malice had been pinpointed, it was impossible to say. Alison said, ‘May we ask why you wish to know?’
Lambert shook his head even as she spoke. ‘Not at present. Well?’
She answered without looking at her husband. ‘We went out into Hereford at about nine. We both felt a need to get away from here. To be among people we did not know and would never see again. We had a drink in a pub. I can’t remember the name; it was near the big bridge over the river.’
Hook wrote it down carefully. It could be checked, with a little leg-work by the team. Most customers would remember Alison Munro. He said, ‘What time did you leave there?’
She looked at her husband. Sandy Munro said, ‘Before last orders. About half past ten, I suppose.’
Lambert said, ‘And where did you go from there?’ Munro looked at him as if he suspected a trick question.
‘Straight back here. We must have been in our room within fifteen minutes, at most.’
‘Did anyone see you come in to the Wye Castle?’
‘No. We parked and went straight up to our room.’
‘And you didn’t go out again?’
‘No.’
‘Or see anyone else go?’
‘No. Superintendent, I think we have a right to know—’
‘I’m sorry, but you must take my word that this is no time to talk of rights. Please be good enough to tell Mr Nash that I’ll see him now. He’s waiting outside, I hope.’
They left with dignity, despite his brusque dismissal. Hook recorded their last words carefully in his notebook. He thought them a highly devoted couple, capable of that intimacy which shuts out the rest of the world, or moulds it to their own purposes.
The squalid history of homicide showed that such couples had often planned and executed murder.
Chapter 22
Waiting had not improved the day for Tony Nash.
He came in looking thoroughly anxious, despite his impeccable casual dress. His green sweater might have been enjoying its first outing; his darker green golf trousers were sharply creased. Lambert, who thought of golf attire as a means of using up clothes that were past their best, caught himself registering automatic disapproval of this tailor’s dummy. But Nash’s was an innocent enough vanity, if vanity indeed it was: a man did not have to be a murderer to indulge it.
But the immaculate clothing was an inadequate disguise for the discomfort within it. Nash could not keep still. He threw one ankle immediately across his knee, in a caricature of relaxation, but his powerful arms and torso twitched in a series of small, uncontrolled movements. It was interesting to see the way tension took men. Sandy Munro had been frozen into immobility by it, his movements when he had to make them as jerky as a puppet’s. Tony Nash suffered almost an opposite reaction: striving to keep still, he could not control those small, involuntary physical movements which his too-active brain inflicted upon his body.
Lambert was as brisk as he had been with the Munros. Ruffling the sheets of Nash’s original statement, he said, ‘You said when we spoke to you two days ago that you thought you were the last person known to have been with Harrington when he was alive. Do you stick by that?’
Nash shifted on his chair as if it was too hot for him to remain in one position. ‘No. I—I heard someone else with him after I had left.’
‘So you lied to us. Will you now tell us why, please.’
Lambert’s voice was quiet; ominously so, it must have seemed to Nash, who did not know that he was not the only one who had withheld the full truth. ‘I thought at the time it might have been Meg, you see.’ He seemed to think this explained his omission completely.
‘You had better tell us what you heard. And when.’
‘Just voices. A man’s and a woman’s. Having a hell of a bust-up. The man’s voice was Harrington’s. I thought at the time that the woman’s might have been Meg’s. I know now that it must have been Alison Munro’s.’
‘So you choose to tell us what you heard. No doubt if it didn’t suit you, you would still be withholding the information. Where were you when you heard this exchange?’
‘In the car park. I told you, I went out to make sure my car boot was—’
‘And what has now convinced you that the woman involved was Mrs Munro?’
‘I talked to Meg. Once it wasn’t her, it had to be Alison: she was the only other woman around.’ He ran his hand violently through his mane of yellow hair; he had thought that once he had confessed his original omission, things would have been simple enough for him.
Lambert looked at him hard for a long, speculative moment. Nash thought he was searching for further concealments, but in fact Lambert was wondering exactly how far the personable Meg Peters had taken her trusting fiancé into her confidence. How much did he know of her past and the untidy tangle of her relationship with Harrington? Eventually Lambert said, ‘You told us that Mr Harrington was not a good employer. That he was exploiting you.’
Nash nodded, white-faced. He had folded his arms now, in an attempt at physical control of his too-mobile upper body, but his fingers ran like a flute-player’s up and down his upper arms; Lambert remembered the mannerism from their earlier interview. ‘Have you any reason to think that other employees were treated ha
rshly?’
Nash found the question, with its temporary transfer of attention away from his own concerns, something of a relief. ‘Yes, I’m sure they were. I don’t know how, but I’m certain Sandy Munro was being exploited by Guy as much as I was. Sandy never says much, so I couldn’t give you any detail.’
‘I believe George Goodman’s daughter worked for the firm for a time. Do you know of any reason she had to resent Harrington?’
‘Any reason why George should have killed Guy, you mean.’ Nash allowed himself a small, humourless smile at the speed with which he had picked up the line of reasoning. And indeed, it would be easy to underestimate his quick brain just because he seemed insensitive in some areas, thought Lambert.
Nash said, ‘She was too remote from me for me to know anything like that. She was a junior in another department: I didn’t even know she was working for the firm until George told me on the golf course. Next thing I knew, she’d left. Not much for you there, I shouldn’t think. But I’m sure there were other senior staff as well as me with grievances, though I haven’t the detail. It’s not the sort of thing one broadcasts to one’s juniors.’
Nash seemed to feel the need to assert his senior position in the firm, even in this crisis. Lambert said brutally, ‘And yet of recent months you have made no secret of your hatred for the owner of the firm, even before these juniors. Your fellow-workers report an extremity in your language, and a carelessness about concealment, that almost suggest paranoia.’
Nash’s powerful torso shot forward and he came almost out of his seat. But his preliminary ‘Now look—’ dissolved as he realised to whom he was talking.
Lambert said quickly. ‘Why did you cease to control a resentment which you had previously kept private? Had your employment situation changed?’
Nash looked now like a man who had been hit. His face was flushed with the strain of a series of emotions. Another one took over as he said, ‘No… I suppose it was because of Meg. I’m going to marry her, Superintendent.’
