Watermarked (Lambert and Hook Detective series Book 7)

by Gregson, J M

  ‘A number of things. Your alibi was laid on a little too thickly. Leaving the service bill with the car mileage on the front seat of your Jaguar showed that it had not been used to transport the body. But it was so convenient and obvious that it looked a little suspicious. And once forensic showed us that your wife’s car had been used to transport the corpse, you were always the likeliest person to have used it — once we could prove that you were around at the time when the murder was committed. You were driving your wife’s car on the Friday before you went away: no doubt you killed her that night.’

  ‘Yes. And disposed of her. The bitch!’ His hatred rang out for the first time. It was a relief to him to abandon dissimulation. Bert Hook put a restraining hand on Sue Hendry, but she made no move towards the man who had killed the person she had loved.

  Lambert, playing his fish carefully, let a moment elapse before he said simply, ‘Why, Mr Pritchard?’

  The man in the armchair looked up at him blankly. It seemed he could not believe anyone would need telling what was so clearly self-evident. ‘Because she was about to go off with this little red-haired cow, of course! Going to bed with her. Setting up house with her.’

  ‘And you thought that enough reason for murder?’

  ‘She was going to announce that she preferred a woman to me. She was out to make me a laughing stock!’

  For a man of Pritchard’s temperament and social milieu, that was probably the most important consideration of all. Lambert could imagine the sensational whispers running round that bastion of traditional prejudices, Pritchard’s golf club. He fed him another suggestion. ‘So you planned to make it look as if you were out of the country when it happened.’

  Pritchard nodded, almost smiled. ‘She’d already written the notes for the milkman and the cleaner. I gave them to Smith and arranged for him to put them out when he came on the Monday. The milkman left double milk for the weekend on the Saturday. All Smith had to do was to pour it away, wash the bottles, and put them out with the note early on Monday morning.’

  ‘And to say that he’d seen Peter Brooke here then?’

  ‘No. He put that in off his own bat. I know he saw him here on the Friday, so I expect he thought he’d include that as part of his day’s gardening on the Monday.’ He shook his head over such initiative, for all the world like a man lamenting the quality of modern domestic staff. He looked up at Lambert. ‘Why didn’t you believe that Laura was still alive on the Monday, as Smith told you?’

  ‘Police procedures have their uses. The house-to-house inquiries turned up no one else in the village who had seen your wife after Friday. And although you didn’t know it, Laura had arranged to meet Miss Hendry here once you had gone on Saturday. If Laura had been alive, she would almost surely have let her know about any change of plan.’

  Pritchard, who had been treating a murder investigation as if it had been no more than the story of a missed train, now flashed a look of molten hatred at the woman on the other side of the fireplace. It was returned with interest. It was Pritchard who eventually dropped his eyes; he said in a flat, defeated voice, ‘I should never have used that black bastard. He wasn’t up to it.’

  ‘Fortunately, not many people are up to murder. How did you get him out to the barn to kill him?’

  Pritchard made no attempt now to deny this second killing. ‘I said he could have the rest of his money. I think he was suspicious, but he came. He said he didn’t want anything more to do with it — claimed he hadn’t realized that there was to be a murder involved. He was going to tell you about our little arrangement. He still didn’t seem to realize that it was I who had killed her. I told you, he wasn’t too bright.’

  ‘And you threatened him with your Smith and Wesson?’

  Pritchard showed no surprise that they should know the details of his firearm. His apparent acceptance now of their omniscience was making him talk quite freely. ‘Yes. I couldn’t remember whether there would be anything for him to stand on in that barn, so I took my own stool. I was going to burn it later this afternoon.’ He looked at the surface of the stool’s seat, at the tell-tale scratches in the blue paint, where Everton Smith’s boots had kicked desperately in their last search for a foothold. ‘I made him climb on to the stool and put the rope round his neck. He still thought at first that I was just trying to scare him, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the mouth of the gun. He was right to be scared, I suppose: I’d have shot him if I’d needed to. But I preferred to make it look like suicide if I could.’

  His hand had strayed unconsciously towards the right-hand pocket of his jacket as he spoke. Lambert, acutely vigilant against any sudden move by the man in the chair, reached with deliberate slowness to that pocket and extracted the pistol on which Pritchard’s hand had almost come to rest. Pritchard merely nodded as it passed across his vision and into the polythene bag which Hook produced like a conjuror to receive it.

  The killer smiled at the remembrance of the boy’s naivety and his own cunning. ‘I told him then about how I’d killed Laura; how I’d weighted the body and dumped it in the river within a few yards of where we were. That was the moment when he realized what I planned to do with him. I kicked the stool away then. It was all over very quickly.’

  He was like a vet offering consolation to a bereaved pet owner.

  There was the sound of a vehicle drawing up outside. The police car brought the first noise for a long time from outside that claustrophobic old room. Pritchard looked up at the superintendent, almost in appeal, as if he wanted this wrapped up before others intruded upon the scene. Lambert said, ‘You were always the likeliest source of Smith’s sudden wealth. You were the only one who had had much previous contact with him. You were also the only one of our suspects with a firearm licence. That seemed significant once we were sure that Smith hadn’t killed himself willingly; he must have been threatened with something to make him climb on to that stool.’

  Pritchard offered no resistance as he was led out to the car between the two uniformed men. They took a length of picture cord from him. He looked at it dully in the policeman’s hands as they drove away, as if he comprehended for the first time that even a third murder would not have made him safe.

  *

  Sue Hendry had been carried through the exchanges by her passionate hatred of the man who had killed her lover. With his departure, she was suddenly near to collapse. Lambert said, ‘I’m sorry I had to put you through that. We needed him to talk before he put himself in the hands of a clever lawyer.’

  She nodded. ‘I want him convicted even more than you do.’

  ‘Why did he come here?’

  ‘I rang him at lunch-time. I thought it must be him from the start, but I couldn’t see how he could have done it. I suppose I wanted it to be him, but I wasn’t certain until I heard about the gardener boy being killed. Then I thought like you that he was the only one who would have done that. I made the mistake of ringing him up to see what he had to say about Everton Smith’s death. He was round here within half an hour.’

  Hook said, ‘There was no reply when I tried to get through. Presumably he didn’t let you answer the phone.’

  ‘No. He made me ring the office to say I couldn’t get in. Then, once he had me afraid, he seemed to enjoy playing cat and mouse with me.’ Suddenly she was in tears. ‘I didn’t know about Laura being killed before he left for Spain, but I was sure he’d done it.’

  They were therapeutic tears. She insisted she was fit to go into the office now, and rang in to say she was coming. Lambert decided that action would be the best medicine; no good would come of her sitting alone in the room where she had come so near to death. They followed her car slowly down the drive from her cottage and out on to the lane, watching her accelerate slowly back into the busy life that was to be her salvation.

  As the old Vauxhall moved steadily over the rolling green landscape towards the CID room at Oldford, Superintendent and Sergeant caught the familiar sight of the Severn snaking bel
ow them, blue and tranquil for the most part, silvered on one huge bend by the high June sun. The great river had run this way long before men came to use its waters and stain it with their blood. It would no doubt be here another million years after this latest evil in the human world.

  The concerns of man seemed very small against this natural backdrop. And that to Lambert was a sort of consolation.

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