Watermarked (Lambert and Hook Detective series Book 7)

by Gregson, J M

  Interesting, that reaction. Most people, given the bare fact he had just released, would have jumped at foul play rather than suicide. But perhaps Laura Pritchard had contemplated suicide at some time, or even attempted it. ‘We’re not suggesting that, Mr Pritchard. There will be a Coroner’s Inquest in the next couple of days. But I have to tell you that we are treating your wife’s death as a suspicious one.’

  Pritchard looked at Lambert with his mouth open, frozen for a moment in shock. His cup was not quite straight, and a tiny rivulet of tea began to dribble unremarked into the saucer. Hook leaned forward almost apologetically and straightened it; Pritchard looked down at it stupidly. He said, ‘Murder? But who would want to…?’

  That at any rate was a standard reaction. Lambert said quietly, ‘At present, we’ve no idea. Mr Pritchard, I realize that this has come as a great shock to you, but we need your help. I’m sure that you will be as anxious as we are that the person who killed your wife is arrested as soon as possible. Do you feel up to answering a few questions?’

  Pritchard looked at him dazedly for a moment, as if he still could not comprehend the news. Then he said, ‘Yes. Of course I want to help.’ He looked round the small, hot room in bewilderment for a moment, as if taking it in for the first time. He seemed suddenly diminished from the dominant man they had collected at the barrier; he looked now like a confused child in search of a familiar face. He said abruptly, ‘Look, we’re all supposed to be going home in Charlie Baker’s car. We came together, you see, and parked in the long-term car park…’

  It was not necessarily insensitivity in him. Often in shock it was the small, practical things which took over, as though the mind seized on something it could deal with in order to turn away from the unthinkable. Hook said, ‘Your friends are having a cup of tea in the buffet. They’ll wait for half an hour; if we’re not through by then, we’ll see that you get home, Mr Pritchard. Or to wherever you want to go for tonight.’

  Jim Pritchard seemed puzzled at the suggestion that he might not want to go back to The Beeches. Lambert said, ‘Did your wife drive you to Mr Baker’s house on the morning you left for Spain?’

  ‘No. Charlie picked us all up from home, me first and then the others. We all live within a few miles of each other.’

  ‘Was your wife at home when you left?’

  ‘Yes. Originally I’d planned that she’d drive us to the airport in her car, but four of us and all our gear would have been too much of a squash. Charlie has a Range Rover, you see, and we piled everything into that.’

  ‘And that, of course, was the last time you saw your wife.’

  ‘Yes.’ For a moment he looked as if he was going to break down. The large teeth of his upper jaw pulled at his lower lip and he gripped his hands into two hard fists in his lap. Hook hastily removed the now empty cup and saucer from his knees.

  Lambert said, ‘This will seem a foolish question. But I want you to answer it carefully, because it’s a very important one. Are you aware of anyone who might have wanted to kill your wife?’

  Pritchard’s broad face clouded with concentration; it was so much that of a boy dutifully observing some adult command that Lambert wondered whether there was really much thought going on behind it. ‘No. Laura hadn’t —’ He stopped himself, and looked at them with a tight smile, as if waiting for a reaction. ‘I was going to say that she hadn’t an enemy in the world, but I expect everybody says that.’

  ‘Quite a few,’ said Lambert. His small, answering smile was like a bait to tempt a fish.

  ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t be true. Laura could be sharp. Not everyone liked her. But no one disliked her enough to kill her.’

  ‘But we don’t yet know whether the mind involved in this was entirely rational, you see, Mr Pritchard. Had your wife had any recent disputes or arguments that you are aware of?’

  ‘Not serious ones. She had a few words with the chap who does our gardening, I gather. I wasn’t there at the time. But I’m sure —’

  ‘What was the cause of that?’

  ‘Well, as I say, I wasn’t present; it was when I was at work. But while he’s willing enough and a good worker, he doesn’t know too much about gardening, and Laura does.’ He slipped into the present tense in a way that was entirely natural for a man not yet accustomed to his bereavement, and went on without apparently noticing it. If he was acting, he was doing it very well. ‘I think he pulled out some things as weeds which turned out to be seedlings Laura had left deliberately. But I’m not sure, you’d need to ask him. What I am sure about is that it wasn’t a killing matter — the lad didn’t even lose his job.’

  Lambert noted with interest that they had a young male as gardener at The Beeches. And that he had had a dispute with the deceased. ‘Are you aware that your wife had any other enemies? Bear in mind that we are starting from the beginning in this, and things that seem insignificant at this stage may well turn out to be quite crucial. Were there any arguments within the family?’

  Pritchard stared for a moment into space, his dark eyes seeming as though they looked well beyond the plain cream walls of the small room. ‘I don’t know how much you know about us yet. I’ve been married to Laura for almost four years. It was a second marriage for both of us. Laura was divorced, and my first wife died eight years ago.’

  He paused for a long time. It was only when it was apparent that he was not going to continue that Lambert said, ‘Forgive me, Mr Pritchard, but in a murder investigation we need to get as full a picture as we can as quickly as we can. Was the marriage a happy one?’

  For the first time, Pritchard looked angry. His dark eyes narrowed and they heard his breath drawn in quickly through tightened lips. Then he controlled himself and spoke quietly, as if determined to keep his resentment under control. ‘Yes, I think so.’ He stopped again for a long moment and then said, like one determined to be honest, ‘Perhaps it wasn’t as passionate or as boisterous as both of us might have hoped at the outset. But it was happy enough, yes, for a contract made after the first bloom and optimism of youth had left us.’

  It was a little too elaborate, a little too considered a judgement for one compelled upon him in these circumstances. Lambert wondered if he was preparing the ground for what they were bound to find out from others in the course of their questionings. Lambert said, ‘Had you children from your previous marriages?’

  ‘I have one boy in Australia. He’s twenty-nine now. He came to the wedding, but we haven’t seen him since. Laura had a son and a daughter. The son’s in London — we hardly ever see him.’

  Hook said, ‘We haven’t had a reply from his phone number yet.’

  ‘No. He may have left that place.’ Pritchard showed no surprise that they should have that number, though they had got it from the book in his house. ‘Laura liked her daughter, but she thought she could have had a better son-in-law. She wasn’t very keen on Mark Warner.’

  ‘Any reason for that?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘I’m trying to be fair.’ Whether to the dead woman or to her son-in-law, it wasn’t clear. ‘There was a clash of temperaments, I think. Mark was a bit full of his business success at the time when we married, and Laura thought him rather a brash young man for Joyce. In the last couple of years, Mark’s business has got into trouble, and I think he might have asked Joyce to persuade her mother to help.’

  ‘But you aren’t sure of it?’

  ‘No.’ He looked full into Lambert’s face. ‘I said our marriage was successful, and I think it was. But we had our separate lives in many ways. I spend most of the day at work. Laura owns a secretarial agency in Worcester, but she’s handed a lot of the day to day stuff over to a manager, so that she doesn’t have to be there full time. Even our hobbies are different. Laura doesn’t play golf, and I spend a lot of time at the club. She sings in the Cathedral Choir, and that takes up quite a lot of her time.’ He had slipped back into the present tense, again without seeming to notice.

  ‘Thank you. This may be pa
inful, but it is helpful to us. Except where the killer is obvious or confesses, as in most domestic homicides, we begin by building up the fullest picture we can of the victim and her habits. How often did Mrs Pritchard attend the choir activities?’

  ‘At least once a week. Sometimes two or three times, when they had a performance coming up. It was always pretty hectic at around this time and into the summer, as the Three Choirs Festival got closer.’

  Lambert shrank from the thought of sifting through a choir to find who had known this woman closely. Why couldn’t she have been in a folk trio or a string quartet? But he showed nothing in his expression — Pritchard saw only a long, concerned face beneath observant grey eyes and plentiful grizzled hair. ‘You say that your son-in-law might have asked your wife for money in the last year. Perhaps through your daughter.’

  ‘My step-daughter, yes.’

  Was there a significance in the promptness of that correction? ‘And was your wife sympathetic to this request?’

  Pritchard shrugged his wide shoulders, which had lifted a little as he talked, as if the concentration this exchange was demanding of him was itself an aid in managing his grief. ‘The short answer is that I don’t know; we never even discussed it. But I can tell you exactly what her response would have been. There is no way Laura would have helped Mark Warner, even if he had made his request through her daughter.’

  ‘What were your own relationships with your stepdaughter and her husband, Mr Pritchard?’

  Again he weighed the question, as if determined to be as objective as possible. ‘I liked Joyce from the start. But they have their own young family and they live a good twenty miles away. And as I’ve indicated, Laura and I have — had — busy lives of our own. We’ve only been married four years; I feel I haven’t got to know Joyce as well as I should have liked to.’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘I understand Mark Warner. I sympathize with him. He has a good business which is being destroyed through no fault of his own, but because he tried to expand at the beginning of this damned recession.’

  It sounded like a prepared, slightly defensive statement. Perhaps he had made it before, in different circumstances. To his murdered wife, perhaps?

  Lambert said, ‘I understand that. But how did you feel towards Mr Warner personally?’

  Pritchard looked a little puzzled. Then he said, ‘I suppose I have always considered him as a businessman, because I’m one myself, though in a totally different field. He seems a pleasant young man, but I feel I hardly know him outside his working context. He appears to be a perfectly adequate husband and father. He didn’t get on with Laura, as I’ve said, so I didn’t see a great deal of him. And our leisure interests don’t coincide.’

  In other words, thought Bert Hook, busy with his notebook, the poor sod doesn’t play golf. One up in Bert’s book, that put Mark Warner. His chief’s predilection for the game was one of the few things Bert did not approve about Lambert. The sergeant said, as if anxious to complete his record, ‘Can you give us the address of this gardener you mentioned? The one who had had a dispute of some kind with your wife.’

  ‘Oh, that was nothing that would lead to murder, I’m sure, Sergeant.’ As if he realized that he was a little too much in control of himself for a bereaved husband, Pritchard shuddered suddenly, as a small, tearless sob shook his frame. They left him to recover without comment, and he said lamely, ‘But no doubt you know your business.’

  Lambert said, not unkindly, ‘We have our procedures, at any rate, sir. Generally they work fairly well. Do you have your gardener’s address?’

  ‘Er, no, I can’t recall it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Would this be his phone number?’

  Pritchard looked down at the scrap of card with the number in Hook’s round figures. ‘Yes, I’m almost certain that’s it.’ Again he showed no surprise that they should have such information.

  Lambert said, ‘One thing we need to establish is when your wife was last seen alive. Do you know of any arrangements she had made to go away from home while you were abroad?’

  Pritchard looked surprised. ‘No. She was staying at The Beeches. She might have gone out somewhere for the day, but… Have you any reason to think she went away?’

  Hook, at a nod from his superintendent, said, ‘She cancelled the milk, sir. From Monday.’

  Pritchard shook his head, as though trying to clear it in the interests of recall. ‘That surprises me, I must admit. Perhaps she just found that she had too much over the weekend, once she was left on her own. Not that I drink much milk.’ He made it sound like an illegal substance.

  Hook said, ‘But then you would probably put, “No milk today”, rather than “No milk until further notice”, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose you would, yes.’

  The man was suddenly flat, almost exhausted. It was often the way emotional upset affected people. They asked a little more about the shadowy figure of the dead woman’s son in London, but he could tell them very little. A dropout, he thought, though well enough educated. Laura had talked very little of him, even to her husband. The boy’s name was Peter Brooke, from her previous marriage. They got the impression that he knew a little more than he was prepared to reveal at present.

  Then they let him go. They watched discreetly as he joined his holiday companions in the reception lounge. The airport staff who had deposited the travellers there had not thought it their business to tell them about Laura Pritchard’s death, so that it was Pritchard himself who had to tell them the reason for the delay.

  Lambert and Hook could see the group clearly enough from fifty yards away: behind the huge sheets of plain glass, the shadowless artificial light showed them as clearly as tropical fish. The three of them mimed their shock and concern at the news he brought them, then moved clumsily forward to offer consolation, hesitant like most British males at the prospect of physical contact with a man. One of them managed an ill-coordinated hug; the other two pumped Pritchard’s hand in turn, their vigour showing how glad they were to discover a physical gesture within the bounds of their convention.

  The only man who seemed to know how to behave without embarrassment in the situation was Jim Pritchard himself. But then he had known about this death longer than the others. Half an hour longer, at least.

  Chapter Seven

  As Everton Smith moved out of the Social Security office, he felt the elation coursing through his veins.

  He hated the smell of the place. It was not just the smell of crowded and dubiously washed humanity, he decided. There was also the suffocating smell of failure and fractured hopes hanging about the place; even the copious crystals of ammonia in the stark toilets could never prevail over these.

  He’d had a long wait, as usual, and he’d never been any good at waiting; he hadn’t the patience. And he’d got the usual stupid questions from the bored woman behind the desk. It wasn’t worse for him because he was black — that pimply whitey behind him had had the same treatment. Perhaps the woman had been directed to ask the same series of questions of everyone; perhaps she had to do it to keep her own job.

  And he had got his Giro in the end, as he had known he must. There was no work to be had by lads like him anywhere round here at present. Anywhere in the Midlands; anywhere in the country, from all he could tell. Not legitimate work, anyway, though there was a kind of employment for those who looked hard. The black economy, they called it. It had taken him a while to realize that the term had nothing to do with the colour of his skin. And that stupid woman with her questions hadn’t even got near to it.

  But now he had his Giro, and he was free of that place, with its smells and its hypocrisy, for another couple of weeks. He sniffed the city air as if it were the purest Alpine breeze. Soon he would be on his bike, master of himself and his destiny; at least for those precious minutes when it took all his concentration and marshalled all his sharp young skills.

  He picked it up from the tight little cul-de-sac which e
nded against the high blank wall of the warehouse. No one had come back to the cars which flanked it like shabby bodyguards; he was relieved about that. They had been parked just far enough apart to leave him room to put his big machine in between them, but if one of the owners had come back and tried to move out, his precious bike could have been damaged. Tipped over off its stand, he shouldn’t wonder — he glanced quickly at the ageing Datsun with its trimming of rust, which was within a foot of the gleaming white of his petrol tank. The car had a cheap child’s car seat leaning rather drunkenly from the back seat — probably a woman driver, he decided. Lucky he’d got back before the silly cow bounced her old rust-bucket into his machine.

  The Honda 750 African twin started first time, as always. The noise bounced off the high brick wall behind it, sounding in the confined space loud as an aeroplane engine. He twisted the throttle a few times before he let the clutch in, just to savour that smooth snarl of soaring decibels. He saw people looking at him disapprovingly from the end of the cul-de-sac, sixty yards away, before they hurried on. No older people wanted to tangle with young blacks nowadays. They left that to the gangs of young whites.

  Everton let the engine idle for a moment, listening to the smooth four-stroke tick-over before his helmet shut out the note and he placed his gauntleted hands carefully, exactly, on the handlebar grips. He moved carefully to the end of the street and turned confidently into the stream of traffic. This bike deserved to be driven responsibly and well, and Everton Smith was the man to do it.

  The one-way system meant he had to move in the wrong direction for a time, but he enjoyed showing his skills and road awareness in the traffic. Now that the Social Security had been outwitted again, he was a model citizen. He grinned at the surprise and pleasure on an elderly driver’s face when he gave way to him at a roundabout. They were all right, the wrinklies, once you got to know them: sometimes he thought he liked them better than anyone.

  He was using his courtesy to delay the moment of arrival at the dual carriageway, like a connoisseur savouring his preparations for the consumption of a fine wine. Even on the big roundabout, with the high green trunk road signs above him, he eased the Honda gently into its roadline, proud of the fact that he didn’t need to use his brakes at all.