Error of Judgment

by Roy Lewis

  The car leapt at them and they jumped for their lives. He thought for a moment that he hit one of them but he had no time to be certain. He was in the road, tyres screaming as he took the corner and the milk float came around that corner, trundling away on the wrong side of the road, the driver almost ready to get out of his seat to deliver a crate to the grocer’s wife standing on the pavement.

  After the crash there was a quiet ticking noise, metal cooling; the white spreading stain of the milk ran across the pavement down into the gutter and the woman on the step of the grocer’s shop was screaming in a flat monotone. The car door was wrenched open and he looked up, dully; a white sleeve appeared and a fist took him heavily between the eyes and there was pain, and blood and at last nothing.

  It was old-fashioned smelling salts that brought him round. He was sitting on the pavement. Some men were discussing in desultory fashion how the car and the float should be moved; a policeman was talking to the driver of the milk float. A hand took his shoulder, shook him roughly.

  ‘William Lambert?’

  He looked up and the light hurt his eyes. The greyness of the afternoon had gone and there was a red flush in the sky, a yellow streak above the curling cloud. He was reminded of the yellow iris pods in the fen, splitting into long, drifting lobes, shedding their brown seeds.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in a strangled voice.

  ‘All right. Get up. Come on.’

  They took him to the police car and they said not a word throughout the drive. Not to him at least; they talked briefly among themselves, but directed no words to him. He was thankful. He just lay back and closed his eyes and forgot. Forgot everything. Rosemary. Joan. Sadruddin. The college. Everything. But there was no pleasure in it, just an empty river, and he knew that there were limits and boundaries to the safe shallows, and outside those limits, prowling like piranha, were the questions that would tear at him, shred his emotions, strip his nerves to an exposed state where he would be unable to speak for the pain and the anguish and the horror of it all.

  They took him to police headquarters at Sedleigh.

  * * *

  Inspector Crow stood over the man slumped in the chair in the interview room. The prisoner’s tie was pulled to one side, there was a tear in his jacket and reddish-brown bloodstains on his shirt collar. His eye and cheekbone, on the left side, were puffy and reddish in colour; the right side of his face bore the scratches Joan Lambert had spoken of and there was dried blood on his upper lip. Crow glanced at Wilson and asked,

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘None of our men, sir.’ Wilson was quick to dispel Crow’s doubts because he knew what could happen to a case if police enthusiasm got out of hand — or in the papers. ‘He tried to get away in his car — Jenkins was knocked down, but not injured, thank heaven, but as Lambert drove around the corner he was in a collision — with a milk float. I gather the driver wasn’t very happy about it and came right out of his cab, dragged Lambert out and hit him a couple of times before our boys got to him to stop it. He was from Belfast.’

  Wilson added the remark as though it explained everything.

  ‘Make sure that they get a statement from that driver; we don’t want allegations of police brutality or anything like that.’

  ‘The statement’s been taken, sir.’

  Crow nodded his satisfaction and stared at Lambert. The young man’s eyes were lowered; it was almost as though he were in a stupor. There was no report of drinking, however; perhaps he was just a bit dazed by the handling he’d received. It made no difference as far as Crow was concerned. He had questions of some urgency to ask.

  ‘Why did you try to run away, Lambert?’ There was a pause before the man in the chair stirred and sighed. He looked up, his eyes focusing upon the Inspector. He blinked as though he were hardly aware of his surroundings, or the reason why he should be here.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Why did you try to run away?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish!’

  Silence fell. Crow waited. They were not going to get far if Lambert argued everything. The man couldn’t deny this last incident with any hope of getting away with it: he’d been trying to escape all right. Perhaps he was still a bit dazed.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so, yes. Run away . . . I wasn’t, not at first, I just wanted to return to . . . to the hotel. You know.’

  ‘I don’t. Tell me.’

  Lambert shrugged. ‘What’s there to tell? It’s a mess. She’s dead.’

  ‘And you killed her!’

  It pumped adrenalin into Lambert and he showed more signs of interest in his surroundings.

  ‘Me? I killed her? You’re mad! Kill her — I loved her!’

  ‘You were also married. And you killed her, when she told you she was pregnant.’

  ‘What?’ Lambert sat up in his chair, his eyes round in disbelief, his mouth gaping. ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘You’ll be telling me now that you didn’t know she was pregnant. You’ll be telling me that you never even touched her.’ Crow stood up and away from the desk and pushed his hands in his pockets. ‘Come on. Let’s have the whole sorry tale.’

  ‘But it’s true! I didn’t know she was pregnant — honestly, I didn’t know. It’s possible she didn’t know either — I’m sure she’d have told me.’

  ‘Perhaps she’d have told you that night she died,’ Crow suggested casually.

  ‘I don’t know. She did sound nervous when she . . .’

  Lambert’s voice died away disconsolately and he stared at Crow with a curiously reproachful expression in his eyes. But this wasn’t a game and there were no rules, and no kindnesses and no fair play. This was a murder enquiry.

  ‘You were going to say that she sounded nervous when she agreed to meet you that night.’

  Lambert stared at the floor.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t going to say that at all.’

  ‘All right. What were you going to say?’

  Lambert shook his head. Crow glanced at Wilson and gestured for the papers the sergeant was holding. Wilson handed them across and Crow read them once more quickly, before addressing Lambert again.

  ‘It’s no good, you know. We’ve got it all here, your pitiful attempts to lay a false trail. You told your wife you were going to an advisory committee meeting in London. There was no such meeting, in fact. You said you caught the ten o’clock train from London; only five people got off that train at Sedleigh, and the ticket collector is prepared to swear that none of them was a youngish man answering your description. In the course of time we’ll probably be able to get all five passengers to come forward. I’ve no doubt there won’t be a single taxi driver able to support your claim that you took a taxi home from the station. So you weren’t in London, and you have been carrying on with the Harland girl and she had told her friend that she had a date that night. The girl was to cover up for her while she met you, went off to your love-nest again. So don’t try to tell me you didn’t meet her. And don’t try to tell me she didn’t inform you of her pregnancy.’

  ‘All right, all right, all right! I had arranged to meet her; we were to go to the hotel! But she didn’t turn up. And I didn’t know she was pregnant.’

  The vehemence of the outburst could have denoted an innocent man; it could equally have denoted a panic-stricken killer who felt the walls closing in on him. There was no way of telling which was the truth. Yet. Crow went behind his desk and sat down, motioning to Wilson to take a seat also.

  ‘All right, Lambert, you’d better tell us all about it.’

  ‘About . . . about Rosemary and me?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Lambert licked his lips and twisted one hand into his jacket pocket. His eyes failed to meet Crow’s. He was a distressed, unhappy man who seemed to have lost his foothold on life, and was slipping he knew not where. Crow waited.

  ‘I hardly know where to sta
rt,’ Lambert said. ‘It’s not simple, you see. I could give you facts, but it’s more than facts. Rosemary and me, well, it all started not just because we were two people who were physically attracted to each other. I mean, it wasn’t as simple as that. We both needed something, we both wanted something that we weren’t even aware of before we met each other. And then, suddenly, there it was. And there we were . . . I’m not explaining this very well.’

  ‘I’m trying to follow,’ Crow said drily. ‘If you deal in facts only, perhaps we’ll get somewhere. To start with, where did you meet her, and when did the romance start?’

  Lambert’s chubby face crumpled and he seemed almost about to burst into tears, but he pulled himself together with an effort.

  ‘I met her at college; I danced with her at a college function, the first term she was at Burton. We were both attracted, but nothing really happened until I met her in the car park last autumn, as I was coming away. We began to talk . . .’ His eyes came up to Crow’s, appealingly. ‘She was an only child you see, and she was shy, even though her poise and her carriage led people to believe otherwise. And I, well, Joan — my wife — and I, we hadn’t been hitting it off and . . .’

  ‘And you seduced her.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that! We were in love!’

  ‘You started to take her to a hotel.’

  ‘How did you discover the hotel? I didn’t expect you to come there today and find me—’

  ‘Your sentiment overrode your judgment, Lambert. Tucked in a pocket in a coat of yours at home was a receipted account for one of your nights at the hotel. Mr and Mrs Lambert. But your wife had never been there.’

  ‘I took Rosemary there,’ Lambert agreed miserably. ‘We were in love.’

  ‘You said that. So why did you push her down the stairs?’

  ‘Push her? What do you mean?’

  ‘We’ve now completed our investigation at Burton. The scene-of-crime unit discovered a smear of blood on the stair-rail. The rest had been wiped away. We can now assume that Rosemary Harland was pushed from the top of the stairs; that she struck her head on the rail, and broke her neck; that her killer dragged her, hid the body in the lift and placed one of the gloves he used in Peters’s office and the other in his car. We think that she was killed by her lover—’

  ‘I tell you I didn’t kill her! I agree we had arranged to meet that night and it was supposed to be for eight, at the George Hotel car park. She was working late, and she told me that she might not be able to get away even then. It was something to do with examination papers — she was helping the office staff with their processing, or something. So when she didn’t come at eight, and eight-thirty, I wasn’t unduly worried. I guessed she’d been delayed. It wasn’t until nine or nine-fifteen that I decided I’d better go and look for her. I went up to Burton and got there at nine-thirty or thereabouts; there were lights on in the Administration block so I thought she might still be there. I didn’t worry too much, and I didn’t go in because I had arranged a stand-in for my lecture and I didn’t want to be seen on the premises when I was supposed to be at a meeting in London.’

  ‘How long did you stay outside?’

  ‘Only about ten minutes. I suddenly realised I was being silly. I’d arranged to meet her at the George; we could have passed on my way up to Burton. So I hared back to the George to see if she’d arrived in the meanwhile. She hadn’t. I hung around there, in the car park, until ten-thirty. I knew then she wasn’t coming.’

  ‘You didn’t get home until much later.’

  ‘I had to keep the pretence up, that I was in London, I mean. I couldn’t go home too early, or Joan would have been suspicious.’ Crow frowned and ran a hand over his bald head.

  ‘So you say she never told you she was pregnant, you didn’t see her that night, you didn’t kill her. . . I suppose the first you heard about it all was next morning?’

  ‘At the college. We . . . we all heard the news.’

  ‘Tell me this, Mr Lambert. You were Rosemary’s lover, you’d arranged to meet her that evening, you were expecting to go to your usual hotel — and then, next morning after your disappointment at not seeing her, you suddenly discover she’s dead. I find it rather curious that I’ve received no report of your shock. I mean, you loved her! Your wife noticed no change in your demeanour; the other members of staff, the office, no one, it would seem, noticed any change in you at all. What’s the reason for that, Mr Lambert? Are you just a hard man or a man capable of restraining his emotions, or was it just that you already knew she was dead because you killed her?’

  ‘You keep saying that!’ Lambert jumped to his feet and Wilson rose also, quickly, to place one warning hand on the young man’s shoulder. Lambert cast a distraught glance at the sergeant and then subsided, sat down in his chair again. ‘You keep saying that, but it’s not true. I can’t explain, I can’t answer the questions you raise. The fact is I was more than shocked; I was numb with disbelief. I couldn’t understand it, I just couldn’t understand or believe it. I went through the day somehow, but automatically — you know? I wasn’t aware what I was doing, and you’ll remember classes were cancelled anyway and I just sat with the others in the common room and they chatted in blasted sepulchral tones but I didn’t really hear them. I was just numb.’

  ‘Your wife noticed nothing when you got home.’

  ‘Joan has come to notice very little about me during the last year.’ There was a bitter note in his voice. ‘I discovered the reason why the other night, when I came home unexpectedly.’

  ‘That was when you attacked her?’

  ‘She was in bed with a bloody Arab!’ Crow stared at the man. He couldn’t be certain which of the two facts had really made Lambert angry — the fact that his wife had taken a lover, or the fact that the lover was an Arab and a student to boot. Lambert could hardly complain if she had taken a lover, for he himself had been conducting an affair with Rosemary Harland, so it had to be the knowledge he was sharing his wife with a coloured student that had driven him to a violent frenzy.

  ‘You went straight to the hotel the night you left home?’

  ‘After I caught Joan? Yes. I went to pieces, I felt horrible. It was another shock, you know, coming after Rosemary’s death. I felt as though my whole world was crumbling — that sounds theatrical, I know, but my marriage and my love had both been destroyed, all at once. I ran out, I got the car, I drove around, slept in the car that night and next day I went to . . . to our hotel. I was there for two days. Until your policemen came.’

  A strained silence fell as the two policemen stared at the lecturer in the chair.

  ‘Tell me,’ Crow asked curiously, ‘if you loved Miss Harland, why didn’t you leave your wife?’

  Lambert stared at him. He was silent for several seconds. Then his glance fell away and he shrugged despondently.

  ‘We talked about it; I would have done eventually. But it wasn’t the appropriate time. Rosemary . . . she wasn’t twenty-one yet and her parents, they’re very middle-class, you know, and her mother has a weak heart. Rosemary didn’t want to distress her. And there was Joan’s thesis, as well—’

  ‘What?’

  Lambert had a hangdog look about him as he shook his head.

  ‘Well, Joan was busy with her thesis and it was a difficult time for her and I didn’t think it was the occasion to worry her . . .’ His voice died away as Crow stared in bafflement at Wilson. The sergeant didn’t meet his eye.

  ‘So the reason why you didn’t leave your wife was that she was doing a thesis?’

  Crow shook his head sadly.

  ‘Can I go?’ Lambert asked pathetically, after a short silence.

  ‘You’re not serious! Charge him, Wilson, you’ve got enough on him to throw him in the cells, after that fracas at the hotel. That’ll do for a start. We can get on with the murder stuff later.’

  ‘You mean you still think I did it, that I killed Rosemary?’

  Crow wrinkled his nose in distaste as though
he were confronted by a plate of fish in an advanced state of decomposition. ‘It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.’

  When the stocky Yorkshire sergeant returned a few minutes later he wore a doubtful expression on his craggy face.

  ‘We’ve charged him with assault and battery, driving without due care and attention, obstructing the police in the execution of their duty and if those charges don’t hold him in the cells for a while we could try attempted murder too. He drove that car straight at the boys.’

  ‘That should be enough. So why are you looking so damned miserable?’

  ‘If I may say so, sir, I think we’ll have trouble making the murder of the Harland girl stick with Lambert.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well, if he didn’t know she was pregnant — and we’d have to show that he did — and if there’s no physical evidence to link him with the college that night, it’s not going to be easy. He doesn’t have a key to the premises, like the Heads of Faculty and the Rector do. How could he have got in and out?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s a resourceful man. You’re telling me nothing I haven’t recognized, Wilson. There’s a strong chance he did do it, but I know it isn’t going to be easy to prove it. But when the hell is it easy, anyway?’

  He leaned back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head, to stare morosely at the ceiling. He had Rosemary Harland’s lover, who might possibly have wanted her out of the way if he knew she was pregnant, and if he wanted to keep his wife — and if he could have got into the building to kill her. Too many ‘ifs’ for comfort. Then he had the five men who had had access to the building — Stevens, Redman, Carliss, Svensson and West — but who seemed to have no motive to kill the girl. Unless one of them also had been Rosemary’s lover. An unlikely contingency, and he could imagine the violent protest that would have come from Lambert had he suggested the possibility. But then, every lover was the same, he would always feel that he and he alone provided the functional and emotional centre of his mistress’s life.