by Gregson, J M
Lambert went back downstairs and into the lounge. He picked up the biggest photograph of the three on the sideboard. It showed a man of about fifty with a woman who looked a little younger. These were presumably Laura Pritchard and her husband. The couple were formally dressed, he in a dark suit with a rose on his lapel and she in a two-piece with a straight skirt. There was a church in the background and they were holding themselves stiffly, their smiles a touch embarrassed, as people were when they were made to wait for a photograph with others around them.
He realized that what he had supposed from a distance to be an informal picture was almost certainly a photograph taken at a wedding. But whose? Was it Laura Pritchard who was being married? If so, it was almost certainly a second wedding for her; they already knew of the existence of a daughter and a son. Statistically, this picture was most likely to have been taken at the wedding of one of these children. But if so, the man with his arm round the dead woman might be a brother or a brother-in-law as easily as a husband.
He looked hard at the face of the woman. She had carefully waved light brown hair framing her face, but for this formal occasion the arrangement spoke more of her coiffeur’s skills than of her own taste. The photographer had made her wait a little too long for his shutter, so that her smile had a glassy concentration. But she looked happy enough. Her round face was almost unlined, and the eyes were creased in what looked like genuine amusement and pleasure. Her nose was a touch small; it was a pretty rather than a classically beautiful face. The straight lines of her suit emphasized rather than disguised a good figure.
She stood erect, a little over average height; her high heels brought the top of her elegantly arranged hair almost level with that of the man next to her. She had her right arm beneath his, and her left one rather stiffly at her side, as if the photographer had told her to put it there and made her a little self-conscious. Studying the picture, Lambert was suddenly sure that she had had both hands clasped together around the man’s elbow a moment earlier, but had felt or been told that the gesture was a little too proprietorial.
He looked for a moment at her feet, small and elegant beneath calves and ankles which were improved by the high heels, and tried not to think about the image his brain retained from the post-mortem table a couple of hours earlier, when those ankles were blackened by the bruising of the ropes and the feet half removed by the attentions of the creatures of the Severn.
The man in the picture was a possible murderer, as was anyone who had been in contact with the dead woman, until they could prove otherwise. His dark hair was turning grey, and receding into a baldness that was not unbecoming, adding as it did to his air of distinction. He held himself erect; he was probably about five feet ten or eleven, and quite heavily built — there was plenty of white-shirted chest visible between the lapels of his dark blue jacket. But the formality of both his dress and his pose concealed more than it revealed. It was not as though he had chosen to stand like that, Lambert realized glumly. His smile was a commanded smile, and he had the air of a man suffering a picture he knew must be taken rather than a volunteer for the album.
He did not even look at the woman next to him, but stood almost to attention with his hands straight at his sides, as if the woman who had her hand lightly beneath his elbow was no more than an appendage to a picture of him. But nothing of arrogance or indifference could be deduced from that. Many men were awkward with the formal photographs at weddings, especially if they had to hold a smile amid the raillery of their fellows. This man might have turned laughing to his partner as soon as the photographer had signified that he was released from duty. Fashions in wedding apparel change but slowly and there was no indication of how long it was since this picture had been taken.
The other photographs in the room were just as conventional. There was one of a serious-looking young man against the background of an old building; it looked as if it had been taken in a college, but there were no degree robes to indicate final examinations. Beside it was a picture of a young woman holding a shawled baby in her arms at what was probably a christening ceremony — there was another, more modern church in the background of this picture.
Hook appeared at the door of the French window; he had been looking around the immaculate gardens. ‘The lawns have been cut in the last forty-eight hours,’ he said. ‘If the gardener comes two or three times a week, he might be able to tell us how long the place has been empty. There’s no sign of any struggle in the garden.’
There were two cars in the big brick double garage, a blue Jaguar and a Vauxhall Astra. There was a bill for a full service lying face upwards on the front passenger seat of the Jaguar. Lambert glanced at the mileage recorded for the time of the service, then at the mileage at the bottom of the speedometer. They were within six miles of each other: presumably the distance between the garage and this house. He said to Hook, ‘How far from here to the nearest point on the river?’
‘I’d have to look at the Ordnance Survey to be sure. Not less than seven or eight miles I’d say, even by the shortest route.’ So Laura Pritchard’s body had not taken its last journey in this Jaguar. It was beginning to look as if she had not been murdered here. But they must be sure. And in any case, they would have to start the investigation from here.
Lambert said, ‘Better tell Rushton to get the Scene of Crime boys to go over the house. We might at least learn something more about the victim and the people she knew.’
While Hook went to the other side of the house and used his radio, he looked dutifully round the garage. There was a work-bench at the far end, and the wall was covered with tools and materials on shelves and hooks. Among them were several coils of rope and thick wire.
But there would be similar things in several hundred garages within twenty miles of The Beeches.
*
The mortal remains of Laura Pritchard had been tidied up by the time Mark Warner arrived to inspect them.
That was the mortician’s euphemism for depositing the organs which had been investigated back within the shell of the trunk and sewing that casing hastily together. It was always a little easier to reassemble the head of a woman, for the hair enabled the repairer to disguise the line where the top of the skull had been removed to examine the brain.
The work had been assigned to Binns, Cyril Burgess’s young and lugubrious laboratory assistant. He surveyed his efforts with some satisfaction and decided that he had done the best job that was possible with the materials assigned to him. That did not mean that what was under the sheet was in any way a pretty sight. Binns wondered what those old cheats at the funeral parlour would be able to achieve on this one, with their embalming fluid, perfumes and cosmetics. It would be interesting to see; but see he never would. People would consider that morbid.
Binns sometimes thought he never would understand human behaviour: it was probably as well that his calling ensured that he spent most of his day working with cadavers.
Mark Warner, driving into the almost empty car park of the mortuary in the late afternoon, was beset with his own problems. The chief of these was a feeling of guilt: he could not thrust down the exultation which had been rising in him throughout the journey. He had never been very close to his mother-in-law. There had been no open quarrel, but that had been because he had shied away from one.
He had always felt that she would have preferred someone better for her daughter — a professional man, perhaps. He knew that she had been dismayed when he went back to the shop floor after a university education, even though it was his own shop floor and he had been for several years very successful. She had seemed almost gratified by his recent setbacks: now she was to be the unwitting instrument in the rescue of Warner Plastics.
But he was also troubled by something more immediate and more absurd. It was none the less disturbing for being quite trivial. He had realized only in the last mile of his journey that he was coming here to identify his mother-in-law. And with that thought, every music hall cliché of the s
ituation had crowded in upon him. He was a man who in normal circumstances could never remember jokes. Now it seemed that every comedian’s sally he had ever heard on the subject of mothers-in-law came vividly back to him. He ended up giggling nervously as he parked the big BMW, not from amusement at the jokes but at the black humour of his own situation.
Mark did not understand very much about shock.
He introduced himself to Binns, who seemed to be the only man still in the building, without really looking at him. That was just as well, for in his present state of emotion, there would have been a danger of him laughing outright. With his long, pale, melancholy face, his gaunt wrists that poked out from the too-short sleeves of his green overalls, his nervous habit of delivering every sentence in a monotone, Binns was every inch the stage straight man for abattoir humour.
His sense of propriety denied him any trace of a smile, even to welcome those who had come to complete the grim task of viewing the remains of relatives. He filled in a form and said to Warner, ‘You have to sign this at the bottom to confirm the identification.’
Mark leaned forward, reaching for the pen.
‘Afterwards,’ said Binns. He rose and led the way through a door behind his office without any further preamble.
Binns was not after all the only man on the premises. A policeman appeared silently at Warner’s side, deferential and considerate. Mark was not quite sure whence he had come, nor why he was there. Then he realized that his presence must mean that the police suspected that there was foul play involved in this death. Mark thought automatically of that phrase, avoiding the more brutal word it was meant to disguise. Murder. He wondered how much of this they had revealed to Joyce.
It was only when Binns had unlocked the small square door and eased the body out from its steel box on silent runners that he remembered the need to warn this visitor. ‘I’m — I’m afraid she isn’t all she might be, sir. She’d been in the water a long time when she was found, you see, and there — there was certain damage to the remains.’
His sigh made it sound like a complaint about the mortician’s lot. He stood with both hands on the cloth which covered the corpse, waiting for the signal to go ahead. Having arrived at this point, Mark suddenly wanted to delay the moment of confrontation with the features he fancied he could already see in outline beneath the sheet. Suppose that this body which they had fished out of the river was not after all Mrs Pritchard? How would he react then? If this was not the face he was expecting to see, the response expected of him would be one of relief. Yet he felt sure he would show disappointment. He would feel like a man thrown a lifeline who then finds it withdrawn before he can grasp it.
In that cold room, he was aware of his palms hot and damp again, as they had been earlier in the day in the bank manager’s office. Even the policeman and this strange fellow who had brought him into the place seemed to be looking at him curiously. But surely they must see all kinds of reactions in here.
Mark said, in a curiously hoarse voice that sounded in his ears like someone else’s, ‘OK. I’m ready.’
He should have heeded Binns’s warning. He was not prepared for the missing eye, nor for the damage done to the cheek beneath the socket by a creature he tried not to envisage at its work. Binns had done his best to conceal things with the damp hair, but he had had to drape it in opposite directions to cover the marks of the autopsy work on the skull and the earlier ravages of nature. The hair gave a curious, doll-like look to the damaged head, as though some destructive child had made a clumsy attempt to conceal her mischief from her parents.
But at least it was Laura Pritchard. There was enough of the face left for Mark Warner to be quite sure of that. He took a deep breath and said steadily, ‘Yes. That is Mrs Pritchard.’ Then he went back into the office and signed the form to confirm it.
Mark wondered what else he should say to show the proper degree of concern. He said a little desperately, ‘She wasn’t — interfered with, was she? Sexually, I mean?’
It felt awkward, but it was probably the right inquiry, for Binns seemed to be half expecting it. He said, ‘I understand not, sir.’
Binns was not a man for conversational niceties, so Mark was able to get away to the car almost immediately. He sat there for a few minutes, gathering his thoughts. It was the first pause for reflection he had given himself since he had heard the news.
The police Panda car was already disappearing; it had been left discreetly on the other side of the mortuary, away from the public parking spaces. Mark watched Binns come out and drive away in his ageing Fiesta, studiously avoiding any look towards the BMW lest he embarrass a relative who might be disturbed by the experience he had undergone. It was the mortician’s first concession towards diplomacy.
Mark sat undisturbed for a little while longer. In a few minutes, he must be on his own way, but there was no real urgency. Joyce would know in her heart by now that her mother was dead; there was no harm in letting the news sink in before he returned home. It was important that when he got there, he should be suitably grave and sympathetic towards her grief. As he turned the key and started the engine, he hastily put on the car radio. Any programme would suffice to drown that curious, unnerving sound, which he had thought for a moment could not be coming from him.
It was the sound of hysterical laughter.
Chapter Six
The man in the photograph with Laura Pritchard was indeed her husband.
Lambert knew that as soon as he saw the party coming from the plane. There were four of them, made into an obvious group by the golf clubs they had just collected from the carousel with the rest of their luggage. Pritchard was the dominant one, making some joke which Lambert and Hook could not hear as they waited at the barrier, turning to see the reactions of the smiling men alongside him. He had grown a two-inch wide black moustache since the photograph was taken, and his hair had receded a little further, but otherwise he was an animated version of the man frozen into self-conscious stillness by the photographer at the wedding.
‘Mr James Pritchard? We’re police officers, sir. We need to have a word with you.’
‘What’ve you been up to, Jim? I told you you were being watched with that barmaid!’ said one of his companions, and the others greeted the standard joke with the standard guffaws. They were self-consciously cheerful; no doubt they had made a determined attack upon the charter flight’s duty-free drinks.
Lambert said, ‘Would you come with us please, Mr Pritchard?’ and led him away to the interview room set aside for him by the airport police. Hook walked alongside Pritchard and studied him closely as they followed Lambert, looking for any initial signs that waiting detectives were half expected by the dead woman’s spouse. Pritchard passed that preliminary examination — he seemed genuinely puzzled by their presence.
He dropped his golf clubs and his suitcase awkwardly into the limited space, then sat on one of the upright chairs which were all the room afforded in the way of seating. Lambert and Hook sat facing him, no more than five feet away. Both interviewers and their subject found themselves without the protection which a desk always seems to afford. Lambert, studiously low-key, said, ‘I’m afraid we have bad news for you. It’s your wife, Mr Pritchard.’
‘Is she ill? Has there been some kind of accident?’ They were watching him unashamedly. Ordinary people might have turned away, from embarrassment or a wish to respect the man’s privacy at the moment of this announcement. But these were policemen, engaged in what they were already sure was a murder investigation, and this man might well know more than he ought to do about his wife’s death.
In this small, windowless cell, he was like a specimen under a microscope, and they might never have so good an opportunity to study his behaviour under stress. His clothes carried the smoke of the aeroplane into the small room; he and his friends had been confined in the ever-shrinking section for those who indulged. But there was no sweat apparent upon him. They could smell the whisky on his breath, but there was n
o sign now that his senses were blunted by alcohol. Lambert said quietly, ‘I’m afraid your wife is dead.’
Pritchard’s dark eyes widened. The line which ran up into his forehead from the top of his nose grew deeper. He uncrossed his knees and clasped his hands upon his lap. If he had expected this news, he had prepared himself well, for he certainly appeared shocked by it. He said stupidly, ‘Are you sure?’ And then, realizing the banality of that question before they could answer it, ‘How did it happen? Was it a road accident? She’d had her car serviced not long before I went away —’
‘It wasn’t a road accident, Mr Pritchard. Her body was found in the river Severn two days ago.’
‘Drowned? But she never went near open water. She was quite a strong swimmer, but even when we were on holiday she would only swim in the hotel pool.’
A waitress in the airport livery came rather self-consciously into the room with a brown tray and the three cups of tea that Lambert had arranged she should bring. No one said anything until she had left; the few seconds seemed to stretch out to a much longer interval.
They watched James Pritchard balancing his saucer carefully on his knees, opening the little packet of white sugar and putting half of it carefully into the cup, for all the world as if he had just been told that his wife had a cold. His hands shook a little — Lambert realized with irritation that these reactions would fit a bereaved husband in shock as easily as a murderer who knew he was under scrutiny.
When the door had shut behind their waitress and they were alone again, he said, ‘Your wife did not drown, Mr Pritchard. She was already dead when she went into the water.’
‘But — look, Mr Lambert, if you’re trying to say that Laura committed suicide, you’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s never —’