by Gregson, J M
For Hook, who had two boisterous boys of his own, the room was saved from being over-tidy by the evidence of children. A small dress and some even smaller trousers were drying on the radiator beneath the window. A teddy bear with one ear almost detached leered cheerfully at them round the corner of the bookcase. A soft yellow ball had escaped to safety beneath the television set in the corner of the room.
Perhaps Joyce Warner had noticed the survey they thought so discreet. ‘You’re lucky to have the place so quiet. Tim’s in bed: he still has a sleep during the day,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been in long; I’ve been to see the solicitor.’ She had decided that there was no point in being mealy-mouthed in this interview. There was more chance of concealing what it was necessary to hide if you were frank about the things that carried no danger.
Lambert said, ‘Colemans, yes. Your mother’s solicitors. One of my officers was in there earlier, when you rang to make the appointment.’ He smiled, broadcasting what he hoped was an air of police omniscience — that was always a disturbing thing for suspects to wrestle with. ‘In cases where foul play is suspected, the terms of any will are one of the first things we have to check, of course.’
‘Of course. Shortbread, Sergeant?’ She handed the plate to Hook, as if the gesture was designed to demonstrate how steady her hand was in the face of this attack. It was a small, well-formed hand, and it seemed to symbolize the controlled neatness of the woman. ‘You will have discovered by now that I am a major beneficiary of that will.’ The dark eyes looked steadily at Lambert from the pale face with its frame of short, blue-black hair.
‘That is only what one might expect. Did you know the terms of your mother’s will before she died?’
‘Oh, yes. She discussed it with me a year or so ago, when she made it.’
‘Did it surprise you that she did not wish to leave more to her husband?’
‘No. She had talked the matter through with him. They had bought The Beeches together, and her share in that was worth a considerable amount. Even in these depressed markets, the house must be worth over three hundred thousand.’
‘And Mr Pritchard was happy with the arrangement?’
‘Mum gave me the impression that he found it perfectly acceptable. I can’t say that I’ve ever discussed it with Jim.’
‘And you didn’t think it in any way inequitable?’
She thought for a moment, wrinkling her forehead, pressing her straight lips into a thin curve. ‘No, I don’t think so. They had their separate lives and their separate fortunes when they decided to marry, and I suppose it seemed appropriate to me that the situation which applied before they met should be preserved. But then, I’m an interested party, aren’t I?’ She gave them a smile which was almost teasing. ‘And you’re asking me to consider a matter to which I hadn’t given much thought until yesterday. There was no reason to think that Mum might not have lived for years, and changed her will, if circumstances altered.’
It was a fair point, shrewdly timed. This was a highly competent woman, who could turn out to be a formidable opponent. Lambert said, ‘Do you like your stepfather, Mrs Warner?’
If he had hoped to catch her off guard by the sudden directness, he was disappointed. She gave the question the same serious consideration she had given his previous ones, and said, ‘I quite like him, yes. We have never had any kind of quarrel, and he has been — well, considerate about the situation at Warner Plastics.’
It was the first time her concern with her husband’s business fortunes had been mentioned. As with her mention of the solicitor, she had led the conversation there herself rather than waiting for her interrogators to raise the matter.
Lambert said, ‘Did Mr Pritchard offer any financial help?’
Joyce allowed herself a wide smile at the innocence of such a query. ‘No. It would have been more than his life was worth, living with Mum. I’m sure Mark has told you about her attitude to him. Anyone who helped Mark out would have had her to contend with.’
‘And her wrath would have been formidable? Forgive me, Mrs Warner, but the question is relevant: we have to build up the fullest possible picture of the victim in a murder inquiry.’
Joyce nodded, brushing away his disclaimer with a tiny gesture of her hand. ‘She would have been very angry with anyone who had offered to help Mark. I shouldn’t have liked to be in Jim’s position if he’d tried.’ She grinned, perhaps in affectionate recall of her mother’s formidable personality, perhaps at the thought of her stepfather’s discomfiture.
‘Are you aware of any serious disagreement between the two of them?’
‘Anything which would have led him to kill her, you mean?’ Her calmness was becoming disconcerting, especially to Bert Hook, as he strove to record her answers. Ladies who made such good shortbread should not have the coolness appropriate to a murderer.
But she seemed only anxious to clarify the issues, so that she could give full consideration to her replies. ‘No. They had different working lives, and different hobbies. For what it’s worth, Mark and I thought we detected a cooling in their relationship over the last year or so. No more than that. Neither of them mentioned any difficulties in their marriage to us.’
‘Would you have expected them to confide in you, if there were?’
Again, her small, regular features were lit for a moment by that disarming, unembarrassed smile. ‘A fair point. Jim Pritchard certainly wouldn’t have talked about such things to us. And we hardly ever saw him without Mum being with him, anyway. My mother might have said something to me when we were alone together, but I think she’d have had to be desperate. She knew that I don’t keep secrets from Mark, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to know about any personal difficulties she had.’
She was taking every opportunity to emphasize how close a marriage she enjoyed, as her husband had earlier. Not for the first time, Lambert wondered if more than one person had been involved in this crime — when a body had to be transported, two people made things much easier. He said, ‘So you don’t think Mr Pritchard was involved in any way in the murder of his wife?’
Again she gave them that wry, slightly ironic smile: it was almost a mannerism now. ‘He was away, wasn’t he? Anyway, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Jim has it in him to be a murderer.’
It was Lambert who smiled now: he had heard that confident opinion expressed too often to take much account of it. He said, ‘When did you last see your mother, Mrs Warner?’
She had her answer ready. Again, she delivered it with no obvious sign of distress. ‘It was on the Thursday before she died. Two days before Jim went off on his golfing holiday. I went over to The Beeches on that afternoon. We had tea together, in the conservatory at the back of the house. I was there for about an hour.’
‘Thank you for being so precise.’ He was carefully neutral, lest she should suspect a criticism.
She said only, ‘I knew you would want to know, so I thought about it before you came.’
Perhaps Lambert was a little nettled by her equanimity. He said abruptly, ‘Where is your brother, Mrs Warner?’
This time the sudden switch of tack did rattle her. Her face flushed before she said, ‘Peter had nothing to do with this. Why are you even asking about him?’
‘He is a main beneficiary of the will, as you are. Until we can speak to him, we shall certainly be interested in him. The more elusive he is, the more interested we shall become. We may in due course be able to eliminate him from the inquiry, but only if we can talk to him and verify his movements at the time of the murder.’
He wondered if she realized how vague they still were about the exact timing of this death. The Severn had done the work the killer had planned that it should on the corpse; they could not yet be certain about the day of the death, let alone the hour. Perhaps the house-to-house investigative team would throw up some sightings of the victim, and even of those who had been near to her when she died.
Her brow was wrinkled again in that oddl
y attractive accompaniment to her thoughts. ‘Peter’s in London. He isn’t on the phone there.’
‘But you have an address?’
‘No. He — he moves about.’
Lambert had heard on his way here that a man thought to be Peter Brooke had been brought into a station in London. He would keep that news to himself, unless he found a moment where it might be useful here. ‘But he is in touch with you.’
He had made it a statement, and she accepted it as such. ‘Not regularly. He rings me up from time to time.’
‘And he comes down here. To see you and his mother.’
‘From time to time, yes.’
Her reluctance gratified him: he took it as a sign of vulnerability. ‘And when was the last time?’
‘Oh, quite some time ago now.’ Her hasty vagueness was a contrast to her earlier precision, and he let her words hang for a moment in the air between them, until she found the evasion embarrassing. ‘It must have been about a month before — before Jim Pritchard went off on holiday.’
‘And what was the purpose of that visit?’
‘Oh, nothing in particular. Peter tends to turn up when the mood takes him. It isn’t often for any particular purpose.’
‘A social visit, then. He came here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he went to The Beeches?’
‘No. Not that I know of. I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘But he saw your mother.’ He made it a statement again; the sudden edginess in her manner had convinced him of the fact.
‘Yes. He saw her here.’ She put up a hand to check on her hair, though not a strand was out of place.
‘Did he ask her for money?’
For the first time, she let her annoyance show. ‘No, he did not. He didn’t see her for more than twenty minutes. And he would never have asked her for money.’
‘Because he did not need it, or because she would not have helped him?’ Her neat, oval face had set sullenly. When she did not answer, he said, ‘Was Peter on good terms with his mother, Mrs Warner?’
‘Good enough, yes. He was always closer to his father.’ She spoke now as if she grudged them every word.
‘And his father is dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did Peter resent your mother’s second marriage?’
‘You’d better ask him that yourself. If you can find him.’ It was the first moment of pique she had permitted herself, and she curtailed it immediately.
Lambert said, ‘We will. Possibly later today.’ He was already regretting his dispatch of Detective Inspector Rushton to the capital to see the brother of this cool young woman. But one could not be everywhere: that was why murder investigations were team efforts. He saw that his confidence had shocked her, and was gratified; probably she had thought it would take the police machine longer to locate her mysterious brother.
They were standing up and she was relaxing, in the impression that their meeting was over when Lambert said, ‘Who do you think killed your mother, Mrs Warner?’ The Chief Constable wouldn’t have liked that direct approach with a grieving daughter, but he had not seen many overt signs of grief here.
Joyce Warner was neither ruffled nor offended by the question. She said, ‘I’ve thought about it, of course. I’m sure it wouldn’t be anyone in the immediate family. Mum had friends and acquaintances we don’t even know; that’s been especially true over the last few years. But my guess is that she was killed by someone she didn’t even know herself.’
Husband and wife had offered the same proposal for a murderer. Lambert recalled Mark Warner’s, ‘Isn’t it possible that some stranger, someone she knew scarcely or not at all herself, killed her?’
It was a very convenient hypothesis for both of them.
Chapter Ten
Along roads flanked with the rich greens of early summer, the big Vauxhall moved at the sedate pace which signified that its driver was thinking.
But it was the passenger, Bert Hook, apparently immersed in a consideration of the oaks of Herefordshire, who eventually said, ‘There is something odd about the Warners.’
Lambert grinned. ‘But what? There’s something odd about most of us, Bert. The question is whether the Warners’ oddness is connected with homicide.’
‘They’re hiding something — both of them are, I’m sure.’
‘You’re probably right. But is it connected with our murder? And are they both hiding the same thing, or entirely different things?’
Bert decided that if the chief was going to be gnomic, he had better stonewall. ‘We’ll need to come back to them when we have more facts from elsewhere,’ he said firmly.
Lambert recognized a defensive conclusion which he had often used himself. ‘Yes. There is an annoying scarcity of facts in this case.’ There usually was when a body was discovered so long after death, and both of them knew it. ‘I spoke to Chris Rushton last night. On the information which had come in then from forensic and the house-to-house teams, we still haven’t established any satisfactory time of death.’
As usual, Lambert was breaking the unwritten rules of police procedure in using his detective inspector — Rushton — to collate the mass of information pouring into the Murder Room from his team, whilst he kept in direct touch with the investigation himself. The superintendent was regarded in the force as an eccentric, a survival of an older generation, whose methods were tolerated because he got results. Results are always the best defence of any deviation from the norm in a conservative organization like the police. Even his new chief constable, George Harding, seemed prepared to accept the way Lambert operated, when many had expected him to reject it.
‘When was Laura Pritchard last seen alive?’ asked Hook. A younger officer might not have cared to show such ignorance of the case. Hook knew his value, and the man he was addressing also knew it. He knew too that Bert had been busy with his Open University studies in his limited spare time: ‘keeping crime in perspective’ as Lambert called it.
‘So far, we can only put it as late as the Saturday when Jim Pritchard left for his golfing holiday,’ said Lambert. ‘She seems to have left a note for her cleaning lady on the Tuesday, but there is no sighting of her on that day as yet.’
‘Pritchard seems to be the only one in the clear,’ said Hook.
‘Yes. And even that needs confirmation. He says he left her alive and well, but so far we haven’t actually got statements from people who saw her after he’d left. Even the fellow golfers who went with him on the holiday don’t recall seeing anything of Mrs Pritchard when they picked him up.’
‘No? Wouldn’t a wife normally have waved him off if she wasn’t going to see him for ten days?’
‘Probably. But we already have some evidence that Laura Pritchard wasn’t a normal wife, if indeed there is such a creature. And they did leave very early in the morning. She might not have been up and dressed.’
‘What about Everton Smith?’ Hook raised the name with the air of a man who knew he must, to preserve his professional impartiality. He had a predilection towards the underdog which was the source of much amusement among his fellow CID operators. In their collective opinion, the underdog was much the most likely candidate for most crimes, and they could quote statistics to support that view.
‘He’s the only one so far from outside the family whom we know had contact with the victim at around the time of her death. And we know he’d had a heated argument with her a month or two earlier.’ Lambert kept his gaze on the road; it was impossible to tell from his long, unmoving face whether or not he was teasing his sergeant.
Hook said doggedly, ‘But there must be other people like him, people we simply haven’t found yet.’
‘Be interesting to know where Everton’s getting his money from. His unemployment cheques haven’t paid for that bike and its insurance. Not on top of his other living expenses.’
‘So he’s exploiting the black economy, like a million others. It doesn’t make him a murderer.’
Lambert grinned. ‘It might make him communicative, though, when we put the pressure on him. I feel young Mr Smith has more to tell us yet.’
‘And so, no doubt, have the people Laura Pritchard employed,’ said Hook defensively.
They were on their way to see those people now. Brooke Office Services — Mrs Pritchard had obviously chosen to keep the business in her previous name — operated in Worcester. The office was some fifteen miles from her home, and perhaps the same distance from the spot where her body had been discovered in the Severn.
They had moved out of Herefordshire and into Worcestershire now. Neither of these men acknowledged the unhistorical yoking together of the two counties in the unseemly local government reclassifications of the ’sixties. As Bert Hook pointed out to anyone who would listen, the reorganization didn’t even make sense in cricketing terms. He looked at the brooding escarpment of the Malvern Hills on his left, and over beyond Lambert to where the Severn could be glimpsed on the other side of the old Vauxhall.
The great river wound its way through flat country here, in a series of huge curves which glinted silver in the bright late-morning light. Hook thought of the damaged corpse which had been the starting point of this investigation, winding its slow way round those bends in the water, lodging against submerged obstructions, then resuming its grisly progress as the current or the wind freed it to move again.
‘Love, lust and lolly,’ said Bert reflectively, enunciating the three favourite coppers’ motives; one or more of them was said to underlie every serious crime. ‘We’ve only got lolly as a possibility in this one.’