Error of Judgment

by Roy Lewis

  ‘Don’t know, sir. Could be something to do with the students and their problems at the college. But—’

  ‘But it’s a coincidence. Yes . . . I’d better go to see Fanshaw—’

  ‘He’s unconscious, sir. Head injuries quite nasty. It’ll be some hours, they reckon, before he’ll be able to help us at all.’

  Crow was suddenly angry. He had liked Fanshaw, and there was the possibility that the man had been playing detective and had suffered as a result. If that was the case, however, it meant that a connection between the Harland murder, Lambert, and Fanshaw’s injuries would be difficult to establish, for Lambert was in prison. He could not possibly have been responsible for Fanshaw’s situation. On the other hand Crow still had an open mind about young Lambert’s involvement in murder.

  ‘I think we’d better check this one out,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Gates is already going through Fanshaw’s clothing . . . just in case, sir.’

  ‘Good. We’ll get out to his home and do a bit of rooting around. If Fanshaw has been playing detective and has turned up something of interest it may well be at his home.’

  ‘Unless the man who attacked him got there first.’

  It was a thought that had lain at the back of Crow’s mind also, and he decided to go out to the bungalow with Wilson immediately. They stopped at the hospital to collect Fanshaw’s keys and received the information that he was still unconscious, and would be too weak to see anyone for purposes of questioning for at least another twenty-four hours. They drove on to the bungalow at Arnleigh, across the Down.

  There was no sign of any forced entry and everything inside was clean and tidy. While Wilson walked across the road to speak with the woman who cleaned for Fanshaw, Crow looked around the sitting-room, without really knowing what he was looking for. Fanshaw had telephoned, Fanshaw had been beaten, this was all he had, but he could not afford to ignore the possibility of a link with the Harland case.

  Wilson returned to say that Mrs Palin had no information of any assistance to them and Crow nodded; he hadn’t supposed she would be able to help them.

  He prowled out of the sitting-room and into Fanshaw’s office. It was a small room, one corner of which was taken up by a six-foot-high grey metal filing cabinet. Beside the cabinet was an old desk of Victorian construction, fluted and whorled at its edges with ornate carving, and in the other corner near the window stood a cupboard, also six feet high, also grey gunmetal in colour. Standard departmental issue, he had no doubt. He stood in the middle of the room touching the chair in front of the desk. The wall behind him was lined with books, a catholic collection ranging from the strictly educational to the mildly pornographic accountancy, law, politics, business practice, banking. Apuleius and Boccaccio, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer.

  He turned his attention to the desk. It was adorned with a reading lamp of superior Japanese manufacture, a desk pen set and a vast array of papers, somewhat scattered. Crow sat down at the desk and proceeded to sort them into some semblance of order. First he removed the pile of pamphlets and placed them on the floor beside the desk and then he shuffled the papers into rough piles, as Wilson came in.

  ‘I’m going to take a preliminary look through these papers myself. We’ll also need to know what’s in some of these drawers, if nothing obvious comes out of my search. Are Gates and Framwell still at Burton?’

  ‘Dealing with the Peters files, sir.’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to draft a couple more constables in. What have you got there?’

  Wilson was stooping, picking something up from the floor. It was cream in colour, paper covered, and published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  ‘Official Diary.’

  ‘Take a look inside.’

  ‘Two weeks to the page. Appointments noted in pencil. He’s got something down for yesterday afternoon — the Branch college. And someone’s name down for last evening. I can’t read his handwriting too well . . .’

  ‘Let me see.’ Crow took the book from Wilson and inspected the scrawl closely. After a moment he made it out. Perhaps he’d been expecting to see it. ‘Peters. Dr Antony Peters.’

  ‘If he had an appointment with Peters last night, it must have been before Fanshaw went to the Deercliffe Hall.’

  ‘No. Peters cancelled that appointment. He didn’t see Fanshaw last night.’

  ‘If he had, perhaps Fanshaw wouldn’t have gone to Deercliffe Hall.’

  ‘But he didn’t see him. I suppose.’

  The unexpected thought hung in the air between them like a palpable thing, disturbing in its intensity.

  ‘We still don’t know what it is that Fanshaw had to tell us, sir,’ Wilson said after a short silence. Crow nodded and turned back to the desk.

  ‘Take the filing cupboard,’ he said, and started sifting through the papers. For over an hour they worked without speaking. Most of the papers on the desk were educational in content; many bore departmental headings, and related to approval of advanced courses at colleges of further education; others concerned arrangements for meetings, advisory committees, requests to give talks, preparation of surveys. There were a few official files; they were marked CONFIDENTIAL in two cases but this did not inhibit Crow from reading them. The second file he read gave him what he wanted.

  ‘This is why Fanshaw will have gone to Deercliffe Hall,’ he said, and passed the file to Wilson. ‘Student politics.’

  ‘I don’t see how this relates to the Harland killing, sir.’

  ‘Nor do I, yet, if it does at all.’

  Crow continued sifting through the papers, but there was nothing of consequence; he glanced up and saw that Wilson was rapidly reaching the same conclusion about the filing cupboard.

  ‘Mostly stationery.’

  Which left them nowhere. Frustration gripped Crow. There had been occasions when he had badly wanted to clear up a case, when he’d felt a personal desire to take a man into custody, but this was different. Fanshaw had been on the point of telling Crow something, and now he was lying in hospital, unconscious, with a battered head.

  Rosemary Harland had died of a broken neck.

  ‘Fanshaw had something to show me — surely he’d keep it here, in his office, among his working papers.’

  It was wishful thinking but even as he admitted it to himself his glance fell upon the pile of pamphlets that he had placed upon the floor to one side of the desk. He picked them up, flicked through them and discovered that one of them was a Burton Polytechnic prospectus.

  There was a piece of folded paper placed between the pages dealing with staffing arrangements at the college. Newspaper. Crow closed the book and unfolded the piece of newspaper. It was a cutting. There was a photograph. He stared at it.

  Wilson took up a position at his left shoulder, looking at the photograph, but Crow was hardly aware of the movement. His mind was spinning, sheering away from the track it had been following all morning. He had become obsessed with Peters in many respects, obsessed with his dislike of the man and the possible motivations and past action of the rector of Burton Polytechnic. Perhaps this accounted for his failure to pay sufficient attention to other matters. Lambert was in custody, Peters didn’t move far without his solicitor, but Robert Fanshaw had been attacked last night, outside a student meeting.

  And there was a photograph, a newspaper cutting in Crow’s possession. It showed a group of young people, standing outside Burton polytechnic. Two of the faces were familiar to Crow.

  Without a word he stabbed his finger at one of the people in the print and looked enquiringly at Wilson. The Yorkshireman nodded with a solemn face.

  ‘We traced her, late last night, sir. Didn’t follow it up until I’d seen you. Then this thing came up and there was no time.’

  ‘There’s time now,’ Crow said coldly.

  * * *

  Esktop Hill had at one time been regarded as the fashionable area in Sedleigh. When the town had grown with the advent of light industry and the op
ening of the engineering works to the south, property on Esktop Hill had been expensive and much sought after. But most of the houses were large, and draughty and in need of repair, and during the forties and early fifties there was a mass middle-class exodus from Esktop Hill to the more favourably designed, modern and ‘executive-type’ buildings on the north boundary of Sedleigh and the villages beyond, like Arnleigh and Fenleigh. The big houses had decayed, their Georgian and Victorian and Edwardian fronts had peeled, and occasional broken windows had appeared while the gardens became festooned with weeds and thick undergrowth. A new population had moved in. At the bottom of Esktop Hill two derelict houses had been occupied for a while by squatters; a Pakistani family and two West Indian families had rented accommodation half way up; but the top of the hill had retained certain genteel individuals who sighed about the declining standards of the area.

  Then suddenly it changed. The late nineteen-fifties brought the property developers back and the rooms were ripped out, the kitchens and lavatories gutted and the houses at the top of the hill became rehabilitated. The middle-classes did not move back because the hill suddenly became too expensive for them, as property values rocketed. The Pakistani family moved without any trouble after a discreet payment was made to them; the West Indian families moved eventually, but only after an action had been brought by them against the owners for intimidation under the new Race Relations Act. By that time the Hill was firmly upper middle-class and a breath of relief sighed and eddied around the splendid gardens and fountains and high-ceilinged rooms when the area became ‘white’ again.

  The legal battle over Hilltop House continued, however.

  It was a scar upon the face of the hill, it was a disgrace, something ought to be done about it. But nothing could be done. The situation was quite simple: when land values had been low a group of University students had created a trust, under the direction of one astute law student, and had bought Hilltop House to be held in perpetuity as a student residence. At that time eight students had lived there, and the number had since dropped to six, all of whom were now student members of Burton Polytechnic, since the University had moved to more spacious surroundings fifteen miles away, taking the students with it. The boom in the fifties and sixties changed the face of the hill but did nothing to affect Hilltop House because the trust deed had been drawn up too well by the law student; in his inexperience he’d rendered it virtually unbreakable — at least, it could be broken, perhaps, but only at considerable expense. The remaining trustee lived in the United States, was a wealthy engineer, and remained distantly philanthropic about the whole thing. He wouldn’t go to the bother of putting up the rent and he wasn’t sufficiently interested in the property to improve it. So it festered, a suppurating sore on the face of the hill, while the students cheerfully misused it and the accommodations officer was inclined to strike it off her list. But there were always students prepared to live there and the residents of the hill let the whole thing rankle inside them, airing their grievance in an emasculated way at futile Esktop Hill Residents Association meetings, once a month, Fridays, seven forty-five p.m.

  When Wilson opened the car door for Crow to struggle out there was a cold, unsummer-like wind blowing straight up the hill, throwing into some confusion the wild rhododendrons in the long front garden, and lifting a fluttering curtain at one of the windows of the big, unpainted house with its frowning false shutters and great snarling mouth of a doorway. Crow made his way up the broken drive with Wilson.

  ‘Did you get the names of the residents?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. It’s rather difficult — the population is a shifting one, and though the students at Burton have a list which is supposed to control the users of the house, I gather that in fact the premises are handed on from one group to another. It’s a very loose sort of arrangement.’

  ‘You could say the same thing about the door too,’ Crow observed, pointing to it as it moved in the wind.

  ‘They keep open house, sir,’ Wilson added sententiously. ‘We traced the girl, largely through luck. Mr Woods couldn’t help us but later on saw his daughter, yesterday afternoon — she’d returned home briefly for some things and there was a blazing row. She wouldn’t tell him where she was going but he followed her ‘bus in his car and saw her go up the hill. He wasn’t sure where she was going, but we sent a policewoman up to the house last night and sure enough, she was there.’

  ‘Let’s hope she’s still there.’

  They made their way past some broken milk bottles and a ginger cat and when they knocked at the door on the first floor Sally Woods opened it to them. She wore a man’s sweater, dark green in colour, and a pair of baggy corduroy trousers, rolled up at her ankles. Her hair was in disarray and she obviously didn’t give a damn. Neither did Crow. He pushed straight past her and walked into the room. He looked around him impassively, but the girl must have instinctively recognized the distaste he felt.

  ‘Nobody asked you to come!’

  He turned to look at the girl. She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring defiantly at him, and he shrugged.

  ‘No. That’s right — we weren’t asked.’

  ‘Well, what the hell do you want?’

  ‘Just a few questions.’

  ‘You asked enough last time!’

  ‘They weren’t the right questions, were they?’

  He’d been watching her eyes, carefully, and perhaps his attention had become too obvious for she suddenly turned and threw herself with an angry bouncing on the settee.

  It gave off the sound of tortured springs.

  ‘Aw, go to hell,’ she said.

  Crow watched her carefully. He didn’t think that she was anything but normal at the moment; there was no sign of euphoria, nor of acute depression nor nervous tension. She seemed angry at their presence, a little discomfited, but no more. All this meant little, nevertheless.

  ‘I’m not asking for co-operation,’ he said. ‘I don’t need it. I’ll get the answers from you the easy way, or the hard way down at the station. Either way I’ll get them. You choose.’

  There was an iron in his tone that got through to her, convinced her that it would be best to listen and answer.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Her glance and voice were matched in their surliness. ‘I suppose it’s still about Rosemary.’

  ‘In a way. But last time, like I said, I asked the wrong questions. I asked about Rosemary. I should have asked about you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said you phoned the Harlands early that night. How early?’

  ‘Around six, I think.’

  ‘You told them she was staying with you that night, and you told me she didn’t in fact do so. That was true. But what time did you get home that night?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘You did go out after you phoned, didn’t you? I’d assumed that you stayed at home, when Rosemary was at the Polytechnic, but I should have asked you the question. You did go out, didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s easily checked. We can ask your parents.’

  There was no reply. Crow waited but there was no reaction from the girl. He decided to try another tack.

  ‘You were very friendly with Rosemary Harland, weren’t you?’

  ‘You know that.’

  ‘Did she look much like you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Same colouring?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But about the same build, roughly, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I suppose so. But I don’t see—’

  ‘And like many girls of your age I suppose you occasionally exchanged clothes, you know, minor items that took the others’ fancy from time to time.’

  ‘No, we didn’t do that.’

  ‘But you borrowed her raincoat didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes, I did on one occasion but . . .’ Her voice died away and she stared at her hands. ‘What do you ask that for?’


  ‘Where did you go, the night you borrowed her coat?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Try. It was raining, I suppose, and you borrowed the coat from her and you went somewhere. Dancing?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Drinking? Smoking?’

  The girl’s hand quivered, then was still. Slowly she sat upright on the sagging settee.

  ‘I’ve told you. I borrowed it once, when it was raining, as you say, but it was a long time ago and I can’t remember anything about it. Except that it was raining.’

  Crow put his hands inside his jacket pocket and drew out the folded newspaper cutting.

  ‘Who were you with when you went out that night?’

  ‘When I wore the coat? How the hell can I remember? If I don’t recall the night itself what would make me recall—’

  ‘Who were you out with the night Rosemary died?’

  ‘I . . . I didn’t say I was out.’

  ‘It was with the same man, wasn’t it? The man you went out with the night you wore her coat?’

  ‘Questions, questions, what the hell are you getting at? What’s this all about. What are you trying to get me to say?’

  She was frightened and she was nervous and her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. The corduroy trousers swirled absurdly around her knees and the sweater sagged on her shoulders and she looked very lost, very young. Rosemary Harland had been young too.

  ‘Rosemary is dead. She was murdered. And you haven’t told me where you were that night.’

  ‘These questions about the coat, I don’t understand, you’re mixing them up with what I was doing the night Rosemary was killed and I’m getting all confused.’

  ‘Then let me put things more clearly. We found traces of drugs in Rosemary’s coat. She could have been using drugs; I’d assumed she was. But now I doubt it. I’m more inclined to think you might have experimented with them. Their presence in the coat pocket might be explained by the fact that you’d borrowed it. What I want to know is — who were you with when you wore it?’