An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  When Liz Upson opened the door to them, Taggart was in the shadows at the back of the hall, as if he had been bent on flight through the rear of the house and then realised the futility of it. When Lambert snapped out, ‘You had much better come in here, Charlie Taggart!’ he turned, like a rangy dog that had been caught in an act of mischief, and moved hopelessly back into the room where they had glimpsed him at the window with his mistress.

  Lambert had decided in the taut silence of the car how he would play this. They would pin these two down with evidence in the next few days, however much they squirmed; he was confident of that. But it would make things much simpler if he could get them to admit the guilt and the detail out of their own mouths. With luck, they would assume he already held more than he had in the way of proof.

  Taggart at least looked like a man who knew the game was up. His dark eyes flashed a quick glance at them as they came into the full light of the bright room, then dropped to the carpet and remained there. The bushy, unruly eyebrows almost met across his brow as he strove unsuccessfully to become inscrutable.

  If Liz Upson knew this was to be the end, she gave no initial sign of it. She sat down upon the sofa, pulling the tall Taggart down beside her, then made a play of settling back into its comfortable depths. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure of this latest visit, gentlemen?’ she said. ‘I cannot think this is a social call, but I shall do the honours with the coffee whenever you demand it.’

  She managed an ironic smile, which she transferred from Lambert to Hook when she got no reaction from the superintendent. But this smile had not the confident condescension of her earlier ones, when she had mocked convention with her contemptuous dismissal of her newly dead husband.

  Lambert controlled the anger which suddenly surged through him. This woman had had the better of him and his colleagues for far too long. He said coldly, ‘We’re here because we’ve seen through your lies at last. Yours and those of the man sitting beside you!’

  She was cool, even now, when she must surely know it was almost over. Charlie Taggart’s mobile features had finally frozen into immobility with Lambert’s accusation, but she managed a shrug and an appropriate snigger as she said, ‘Really, you shouldn’t be so easily shocked, Mr Lambert! I made no bones from the first time I saw your sergeant here that I had no use for my husband, and no affection for him either. If Charlie and I chose to conceal our little affair from you, that’s our business, surely. It had nothing to do with Matt’s death.’ She reached her hand out and put it on the wrist of the man beside her, looked into his face with a quick smile of affection, as though by her touch she could inject into his body some of her own composure and bravado.

  ‘Your little affair, as you call it, had everything to do with your husband’s death. Without it, that murder might never have happened. A joint enterprise, as were your attempts to conceal it!’

  Lambert switched his gaze from the bold woman to the man struggling for control beside her. Taggart clutched her hand as it lay upon his wrist, grasped it indeed so hard that she winced a little with the force of his grip. He found his voice at last, but it rang unnaturally high as he said, ‘This is preposterous! I might not have told you about me and Liz, but surely you can understand that we didn’t want to start all the tongues wagging, with Matt gone missing. I’ve given you all the help I could from the start! That first day, when you came in to the university looking for information, I was the only one around to help you. Without me, you’d never have got started so quickly! Without me, you’d never have known — well, lots of things about Matt!’

  He threw the last phrase at them with a kind of desperate vagueness. Having found his voice at last, he had gone on for too long, expecting to be interrupted, feeling his words whirling out of control as he became more and more aware of the attention in those intense grey eyes and that long, lined face.

  When he was sure that Taggart was not going to volunteer any more, Lambert said icily, ‘We should never have known the time of Matthew Upson’s death, for a start.’

  Charlie Taggart’s mind would not work fast enough, when he wanted it to be at its most acute. He said limply, ‘I didn’t give you the time of Matt Upson’s death. How could —’

  ‘No. You gave us the time when you claimed he was last seen, and left us to work out the time of death for ourselves when the body was eventually found. You and your accomplice here.’

  Taggart glanced automatically into the face of the woman beside him, framed in its familiar fair hair, and failed to see the warning in it. He was seeing nothing very clearly now. He gathered himself and said with a desperate aggression, ‘I told you when I last saw Matt, that was all! In an innocent attempt to help your enquiries, I told you when I had last seen him! God, you must be desperate to be talking like this. I wish I’d never spoken to you, now!’

  ‘I doubt that, Mr Taggart. You spoke to us quite deliberately, in an attempt to lay a false trail. A successful attempt, I have to admit, for a time at least. You knew perfectly well what you were about. Indeed, you had planned the story carefully, with your fellow-killer here. It was necessary, if you were to divert attention from the time when Matthew Upson actually died to a time for which you both had perfectly good alibis.’

  Taggart failed to heed the warning pressure on his arm from the woman beside him: perhaps he did not even feel it. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! I saw Matt Upson on that Friday afternoon when he disappeared. About half-past three, as I told you. I remember, because I asked him to go for a drink when —’

  ‘You asked him nothing, because he was dead by then. At your hand, Mr Taggart. Shot through the head, in a copse on the western slopes of the Malverns. At around ten o’clock that morning.’

  Liz Upson pulled at his wrist more strongly, felt her hand shaken off, and was forced to speak. She said tersely, ‘Leave it, Charlie! Let them try to prove it.’

  But Taggart would not heed her warning. He was too excited, too threatened, to stop now. ‘I wasn’t the only one who saw him that afternoon! Jamie Lawson saw him, too. At three forty-five.’

  ‘No, Mr Taggart, he didn’t. Jamie Lawson told us he’d seen Upson at that time, because you threatened him or bribed him in some way. But he didn’t see him then, did he? He’d have told us the truth soon enough, once we put him under a little pressure. You knew that. That is why he had to die, isn’t it? To preserve the fiction that he had seen Upson alive on that Friday afternoon. He agreed to tell us what must have seemed to him a small lie on your behalf, and it cost him his life.’

  Liz Taggart spoke urgently, trying to prevent her lover from wandering deeper into this morass. ‘Don’t say anything, Charlie! They’re whistling in the dark. They haven’t a scrap of proof!’

  Lambert turned his attention to her. Her face was flushed with a desperate defiance. She brushed a strand of blonde hair angrily away from her temple, as if it might distract her from the contest. He said coldly, ‘You had some lies of your own for us, hadn’t you? Your husband didn’t have a licence for the pistol that killed him, because he never held a firearm at all. Either you or Mr Taggart here brought that pistol to the scene of the murder. I doubt that Matthew Upson had ever seen it before it was used to shoot him through the head on that Friday morning. You drove him out to that deserted spot in the Malverns and then one of you shot him cold-bloodedly through the temple.’

  It was a hideous attempt at gallantry which finally cracked Taggart’s shaken resolve. He blurted out, ‘It wasn’t Liz! She would never have shot him. I brought the pistol. I was the one who killed him!’

  He stopped aghast, breathing heavily in the silence which followed. His attempt to shield her brought no thanks from the woman beside him. Liz Upson did not even glance at him as she hissed through clenched teeth, ‘You fool, Charlie! You stupid, blundering fool!’

  He looked at her, stunned, as if he could not believe these words were coming from the lips which had muttered so many tendernesses into his ear. Lamber
t took advantage of his disorder to say, ‘And Jamie Lawson had to die, to protect your story of having seen Upson alive that afternoon. He was the only other person who claimed to have seen him alive as late as that. You knew he wouldn’t stick to his story, once we were able to press him.’

  Taggart spoke with a curious, distant disgust. ‘He was useless, that kid. Up to his eyes in heroin, most of the time. We should never have used him. But he was easy, once I agreed I’d support his case to stay on his course.’

  ‘Pity you did. It meant he lost his life at twenty. And all for nothing, in the end.’

  ‘He’s no loss to the world. He was selling coke around the campus. The world is better off without the likes of Jamie Lawson.’

  For an instant, Taggart’s face showed the ruthlessness which underlay the coolly planned murder of Matthew Upson and the callous dispatch of the student who had pushed his drugs on the campus. Lambert said, ‘I’ve no doubt a DNA test will prove your presence in Lawson’s room on the night he died. There were fibres from someone else’s clothing on the body and hairs from another head upon the chair you rigged for his fall.’

  ‘He was too far gone to resist. Out of his head on coke, the young fool!’ muttered Taggart. He appeared to think the boy’s weakness meant that he had deserved his fate; Lambert had seen enough murderers to find this suspension of the normal moral code familiar.

  At a nod from his superintendent, Hook stepped forward and pronounced the formal words of arrest over the guilty pair. Lambert stayed with them whilst Hook went outside and beckoned Mark Whitwell to drive forward and assist in the transfer of the pair to the cells at Oldford.

  Liz Upson had dismissed Charlie Taggart from the moment when he stumbled into confession. She stared straight ahead of her, with a haughty disdain, which might in other circumstances have had something splendid about it.

  Bert Hook, coming back from the street outside into that oppressive room, hoped that she might have been looking at the photographs of her children upon the top of the television cabinet. He said quietly, ‘I’ve radioed for a woman police constable. The children will be taken care of, when they come home.’

  It seemed to take her a moment to realise that he was speaking to her. She nodded sharply two or three times. ‘Will they be taken into care?’

  ‘That’s not a police matter. They’ll be well looked after.’ Bert was glad that he had not seen these two children, not many years younger than his own two boisterous boys. He would not be able to picture their bewildered, anguished faces when he lay awake in the quiet hours of the night.

  DC Whitwell had radioed for reinforcements and Taggart was taken away with a policeman on each side of him in the marked police car. His white face looked back briefly at the woman who had killed with him as he was driven away. If she saw him, she did not acknowledge it. She sat beside Hook without saying a word on her journey towards a life sentence.

  *

  The steeply rising ridge of the Malverns towered above Lambert as he drove back along the B4232 towards Oldford, passing very near the point where the discovery of Upson’s body had set this case in train.

  Normally he felt a surge of exultation at the arrest which marked the successful conclusion of a murder hunt. This time there was nothing; nothing but the bleak emptiness of that second death, which might have been prevented if only he had been quicker to see through the cloud of lies which had obfuscated the first.

  He knew that it wasn’t only his fault, that there were others as well as he who had accepted the murderers’ version of events too easily. It was the kind of consolation he had offered often enough to other officers, but couldn’t accept for himself. Perhaps, as retirement loomed closer with each passing year, age was affecting the precision of his thinking.

  As he turned the old Vauxhall Senator towards home that night, he felt the familiar sharp pain down the left-hand side of his chest. He smiled, as though welcoming an old friend. Only a touch of fibrositis.

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