by J M Gregson
‘Very often, despite what you may think. But we are charged with investigating a brutal murder. That takes priority over everything else. Now: Harrington knew. How did he propose to use the information?’ Both of them presumed that the murder victim had used the knowledge unscrupulously and for his own ends. The investigation had taught the CID a lot about him, at any rate. The first rule in any inquiry was to find out as much as possible about the victim and his habits.
‘He used it to taunt me. No, more than that, to threaten me. At first he just enjoyed the power it gave him. Then, when he had discarded me, he used it to humiliate me. When he took up with Felicity Goodman, he liked to set her innocence against my record as a scarlet woman, or worse.’
‘Harrington had an affair with Goodman’s daughter?’ Hook made the question as low-key as he could, not even looking up from his notebook.
‘Briefly, yes. The poor girl had no idea what he was about, I’m sure. I scarcely knew her: I thought at the time he had seduced her merely to upset me with a virgin. She had some kind of breakdown I think. Marie Harrington could tell you about it—’
She stopped, her right hand thrust to her mouth in her first unconsidered movement since she had entered the room. Suddenly she was weeping, silently, without the retching sobs shock usually brought with it. ‘I’d forgotten she was dead… I think Marie felt a crazy kind of guilt for her husband. I know she visited the girl in hospital.’
Lambert brought her back gently but insistently to his query. ‘Did Harrington threaten to tell Tony Nash about the blue films?’
She was broken now, anxious only to explain herself, not resist them. ‘Yes. He taunted me with the threat. That was how he insulted me on the night of his death, when Tony took up the cudgels for me.’ There was a brief flash of pride in the last phrase, and they realised that the affection between this striking, experienced woman and the vain, rather shallow man she had chosen probably ran deeper than anything either of the parties had ever experienced before. ‘I don’t expect you to understand this, Superintendent, but Tony is rather old-fashioned in some respects. He will be shocked by the news of those films. I shall tell him in my own time, but I want to choose that time myself.’
Lambert privately thought that after the first shock, Nash was the sort of man who would be excited rather than repelled by the knowledge, but he kept his own counsel. This job was difficult enough without taking on its social worker aspects. He dismissed her rather abruptly, anxious to make use of her revelations in the limited time available before the group broke up and returned home.
She stood up awkwardly, surprised that her ordeal had been terminated so swiftly. Fumbling in her bag for a handkerchief, she said, ‘I suppose the thought that Guy might have revealed this to Tony gave me an added motive to kill him.’ It was unexpectedly conciliatory, almost as though she wished in the end to prolong the interview. Perhaps she wanted to repair some of the damage to her eye make-up before she rejoined her lover; she dabbed vigorously at her tears with a handkerchief too delicate for the task.
Lambert was almost drawn into the brutal rejoinder that if Nash knew—he half-suspected Harrington had told him after all in their final exchange after the party had broken up on the fatal night—it gave him too an added motive for murder. The violent thrusting of a man into the darkness from that roof was just the sort of crime to be produced by a red mist of fury following such a taunt.
Instead, the Superintendent held his peace, dismissing her with one of the standard injunctions of his trade about not revealing to others what she had told him. Then he went back to the filing cabinet he had slammed so vigorously when he heard the news of Marie Harrington’s drowning half an hour earlier.
Amid the masses of data which accrued in the days following a murder, there was usually some vital detail which needed to be pinpointed. It had taken a second, totally unnecessary death to identify this one.
He took out a file and extracted the phone numbers he needed.
Chapter 24
It was almost four o’clock. The group who had come to the Wye Castle so full of noisy hilarity were preparing to leave it in subdued mood.
All of them except one, that is. Even three days after his death, the baleful presence of Guy Harrington was still strong among them as they prepared to leave the scene of his murder. Inside the residential block, the door of his room remained securely locked, a blank reminder as they passed of the retribution his murder would bring for one of them. Outside it, Harrington’s black Jaguar with its double headlights surveyed them unblinkingly from the other end of the car park as they prepared to go. From deep within the murder room, John Lambert and Bert Hook, their frenzied series of phone calls at last completed, watched with interest.
The Munros studiously avoided contemplation of the car as they loaded their bags systematically into their Vauxhall Carlton. Sandy hurried indoors as soon as the boot lid was down, but Alison took a defiant, unhurried look around her before she disappeared. She cast her dark eyes upwards at the new-leaved splendour of the mighty oaks and the burgeoning candelabra of the chestnut flowers, as if by doing so she could lift herself above the sordid events of the last few days.
Meg Peters loaded a series of smallish bags into the back seat of Tony Nash’s car. Then Nash brought out their expensive suitcases and stowed them carefully around his golf clubs and trolley in the boot. He looked apprehensively towards the murder room, but the CID men were too far within the room to be visible from outside. Meg Peters brought her last package, a dress still in its carrier from the Hereford store, and placed it reverently among the rest of her packing within the car.
For a moment the two of them stood close together in silent contemplation of the murder victim’s car, as if ridding themselves in that moment of the final hold the dead man held over them. Then, like two young lovers finding each other for the first time, they linked hands and moved back into the apartment block without a backward glance. A men’s four-ball on the way to the first tee, unconscious of police observation, gestured their envy of Tony Nash in unmistakable fashion, then went in search of the lesser delights of golf.
George Goodman was more leisured about his preparations for departure than any of the others. He had but a single large bag to stow in the capacious Rover. Having deposited it, he sauntered for a moment around the car park, making no attempt to avoid the black Jaguar in its isolated position at the top. Indeed, he strolled up to the car and walked along the side of it, a benevolent smile suffusing his features as he took his farewell of the man none of them had loved and most of them had hated.
Then he picked his way through the first creamy fallings of chestnut blossom to take a last look at the golf course and the river below, winding blue and slow beneath the sun towards the spot where Marie Harrington had met her death. His bearing was so dignified, his manner so august, that Hook half-expected him to confer an episcopal blessing upon the scene before he left it. Instead, he turned and walked with the same measured tread back towards his room; the benign smile he had worn throughout was still upon his lips as he disappeared.
The manager of the Wye Castle could scarcely disguise his relief at the return to normality which the departure of these guests would confirm. After the day of the murder and the removal of the body, the course had been open to those golfers who came simply to play, and they had come in their normal numbers, pausing only to register the police presence in the apartment blocks before they tackled the problems of the course.
But residents had been forbidden, apart from the five who were being so intensively investigated by the police. The hotel group’s regional director had been most reluctant to adjust the manager’s sales targets to take account of this. Now the restrictions had been lifted; from tomorrow, the Wye Castle Hotel and Country Club would be back to normal. Bookings might even increase, with the dubious glamour conferred on the place by a brutal murder; after the recent publicity, the manager was hopeful that considerable numbers of the kind of people w
ho slowed their cars to look at road accidents might book in with him.
Perhaps because he felt guilty that he should be so delighted to see them go, he had laid on a farewell afternoon tea for the five who had been his only guests for the last three days. The service was attentive, for the staff were delighted to be working again after their enforced inactivity. The cakes and scones were freshly baked, the jam made on the premises, the china delicately patterned. The room, with patio doors opening on to a terrace overlooking the bowling green, the eighteenth hole and the river, was as pleasant as any in the whole of the Wye Castle’s extensive range.
Yet the conversation was stilted, with long pauses between sporadic sentences. If the manager who danced such dutiful attendance was in reality anxious to see them gone, the five gave the impression that only the uncertain glue of politeness held them together. They too were anxious to be away from this pleasantest of spots as soon as decency would allow. They had had enough of public exchanges, and were eager now for the cocoons of comfort and privacy afforded to them by their cars.
This awkward gathering received the entry of Lambert and Hook almost as a relief. To the five people trying so unsuccessfully to enjoy themselves, the policemen seemed at first to bring an end of term air to the gathering, like masters who had been sternly unbending while conducting classes, but were now relaxing as their charges prepared to depart. Hook saw no reason to disillusion the little gathering too quickly, especially when George Goodman hastened forward with a plate of thickly buttered scones.
‘Do share in our final little indulgence together, gentlemen,’ he said. The Sergeant took a scone and put it carefully on the small plate Meg Peters pushed towards him.
It was Lambert, refusing tea and cake absently, almost rudely, who changed the atmosphere from nervous hilarity to something much more tense. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your daughter?’ he said abruptly.
For an instant, it was not even clear whom he was addressing. Then George Goodman put down the cakes with a clatter that rang loud in the suddenly silent room. He said with a last attempt to retain his genial exterior, ‘If you mean me, Superintendent, I—’
‘Of course I mean you.’ Lambert’s voice was harsh. It was the second murder, the one he felt he might have prevented, which sprang before him now, thrusting away the sympathy he might otherwise have felt for the man. ‘Did you really think you could keep your daughter permanently hidden?’
Goodman sat down awkwardly, like one fearing a faint but not quite sure of where the chair was behind him. ‘I don’t want her brought into this,’ he said dully.
Lambert said more gently, ‘Harrington seduced her, didn’t he?’ The old-fashioned word seemed justified in this case.
There was a moment when the silence in the room seemed a tangible thing, likely to harm any of them who broke it. Except the central figure, sitting on the edge of his armchair with head bent and the white fringe of tonsorial hair more than ever apparent. Eventually he said, without facing his questioner, ‘Yes. He had her, then laughed about it.’
He looked up then, and his drained and haggard face shocked his friends so much that two of them shrank involuntarily back in their seats. ‘Felicity is what the doctors call “retarded”, Superintendent. Nothing visible, you understand, but “not suitable for normal schooling”. She is “dependent on a loving home environment”.’ His bitterness against what life had dealt him made him put the series of phrases into inverted commas, as an emphasis on the grim reality that lay behind the anodyne words.
‘I thought Harrington was doing me a favour when he provided her with part-time work in his office. Perhaps he was, at first. He liked everyone to be under some kind of obligation to him; maybe there was nothing worse than that in the gesture.’
He stopped for so long that even Lambert, always patient in the course of a confession, had to prompt him with, ‘But it didn’t stop there?’
‘No. She didn’t do much more than make tea and coffee and run little errands around the works. Harrington’s secretary was teaching her to file, and she liked that. But I don’t suppose she’d ever have been able to do it on her own.’ There was something horrible about the way he spoke of the girl continually in the past tense. ‘She seemed to know that Guy had given her a chance she had to take. Anyway, she liked him. And one night when she was the only one left in his office…’ He thrust his face into his hands; a moment later, they heard him weeping.
Lambert said, ‘Where is your daughter now, Mr Goodman?’
‘In a mental home. A “hospital for the treatment of psychiatric disorders”.’ Again he put the euphemism between bitter quotation marks. ‘There was an abortion, you see. The bastard couldn’t even take care of that!’ His voice rose to a shout on the thought, and it seemed he might not be able to go any further.
But his tone became calm, even tender, as he returned to the tortured girl. ‘She comes home occasionally, but she has to go back. She wouldn’t harm a kitten, but they can’t get her stable, you see.’ They felt his wretchedness and distress, and the greater evil they now knew was to come. ‘Did you plan to kill Harrington this week?’ For a moment, Lambert’s tone was that of the nurse.
Goodman looked at him now, seeming to register the surroundings which had disappeared from him as he relived his trauma. ‘Not consciously. But I’d said I’d get him. He should have taken me seriously.’ The schoolboy boast rang horridly genuine; his habitual benevolent smile was replaced by a vulpine sneer of triumph. ‘It struck me on Monday night that this was the perfect time to do it, the one time when there were other people around with a wish to kill him. Tony’s little tiff at dinner brought that out clearly enough.’
He did not even look at Harrington’s former sales manager as he went on. ‘I went back after we’d broken up for the night. Alison was having the devil of a row with Guy about him trying to put his hand up her skirt.’ This time he did look at the person he mentioned. ‘If my poor little Felicity had only been able to treat the bugger as you did…’ The tears started anew. Alison Munro went and knelt beside him, taking a murderer’s hand into hers as if it had been that of a harmless infant. Goodman stared down dully at his carefully manicured fingers, scarcely longer than Alison’s own, as if he wondered that they could have wrought such things.
His voice as he went on came now in a low monotone, as if he were determined to complete this before exhaustion claimed him. ‘He laughed at me when I mentioned Felicity. Said something about all being fair in love and war. Then he turned away and looked out over the valley: I remember thinking how brilliant the stars were behind his head. Perhaps he was a bit drunk. I waited until he was turning back to me and put both hands against his chest. He went over the edge without even a shout… I’m glad he’s dead. I’d do it again, if I had the chance.’ Even on this last assertion, he did not raise his voice above that awful uniformity.
There was nothing but sympathy for him in the room.
Each of his four companions was glad that his victim was dead; not one of them would at that moment have raised a finger to bring him back.
It was Lambert who recalled him resolutely to different moral ground. ‘Why Marie Harrington?’ he said gruffly.
There were gasps around the room. All of them had heard of the second death; probably most of them had not until this moment connected it with Goodman. For a moment Goodman looked again as if he was not quite sure where the question had come from. Then he said, ‘She knew. She would have given me away.’
No attempt this time to excuse the crime in moral terms, to offer any excuse for the darkest of all human crimes. Lambert was struck once again by the brutalising effect of violence, so that a man who had wrestled for months with his personal agony before the first killing could offer no explanation of the second beyond the fact that the woman was a danger to his security.
As if to reinforce this view, Goodman said slowly, ‘How did you know I’d killed her? Did she tell you about Felicity before I got to her?’ The
re was still no hint of remorse: this time the whole room picked up that chill message.
Lambert said, ‘No. Sergeant Hook saw her yesterday afternoon, but she tried to protect you. She pretended she didn’t even know about your daughter. That was what pointed us towards you, in the end. When I talked to other people after her death, I found that Mrs Harrington not only knew Felicity but had been kind to her. That suggested that she had been covering up for you. We found out all about your daughter by contacting your wife and others in Surrey.’
Goodman looked bleakly round the faces of his friends, wondering which one had unwittingly given him away. For the first time she could remember, Meg Peters was grateful to the police for the anonymity Lambert had conferred upon her unconscious revelation.
At a nod from Lambert, Bert Hook stepped forward and formally arrested George Albert Goodman for the murder of Guy Harrington. The ritual of the words brought a kind of order to a room full of racing emotions. Goodman was taken away under guard. None of them said much, but none of them felt held any longer in that net of silence in which the revelation of Goodman’s crimes had for a while enmeshed them. It was Sandy Munro who asked in his soft Fife tones, ‘What will happen to him now?’
Lambert said, ‘He will be charged and tried. What happens to him then is fortunately not my concern.’ It was stiff and unsympathetic, but he was thinking of the unforgivable killing of Marie Harrington. Policemen were not automatons, even when the law demanded that they should be. He had liked the honest, spirited widow whose life had been so ruthlessly terminated. He would not readily forgive Goodman for that killing. No doubt the psychiatrists would get busy on a plea of diminished responsibility. At that moment, he was glad that his duties ended with the arrest. Five minutes after Goodman had been driven away between two officers in the back of the white police Rover, his erstwhile companions left the Wye Castle. The Munros and the couple shortly to become the Nashes were of very different temperaments and backgrounds, but they felt united by the touch of tragedy as never before. The Munros had already been cautioned: later they would be charged as accessories after the fact, though the charge might never come to court.
