Who Saw Him Die?
J. M. Gregson
© Jim Gregson 1994
Jim Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1994 by Severn House.
This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
TOM
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
DICK
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
HARRY
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
TOM
Chapter One
When he got to the gate, he turned and looked back at the house.
It was an attractive place in the early spring sunshine. It had the solid, unambitious spaciousness of Edwardian style. For designers of domestic buildings, that was the last great era of confidence, when it seemed as if the British Empire would go on for ever and the opulence brought by its trade would last far into the future of its middle classes.
The brick soared rich and red, to gables which carried detailed ornamentation; labour was cheap and grateful to be used in the days before the war to end wars. The bay windows were both tall and wide, designed to be major features from within and without. The bedrooms above had windows which were more modest, but wide enough still to preserve the agreeable proportions of the whole. On the storey above these, the servants’ floor of the original design, the windows were meaner indeed, their triangular tops peeping furtively from the slates like novice nuns retired from the world. But they were plentiful enough to balance what had been built below, to play their part in the pattern of the architect’s design.
Land was cheap in 1904, so that this new industrialist’s house could be set in enough garden to allow that design its proper setting. The original London planes at the boundary had been felled in the 1970s to make way for a widening of the road, but cherry, acacia and laburnum were large enough beside the drive to give an appealing dignity and maturity to the garden which surrounded the house.
And the people he so resented had certainly improved the gardens: he had to admit that. Ten years ago, he had worried that the grounds which had once been such a pleasure to him were becoming a burden, as his own energies declined and gardeners became scarce and expensive. Now the lawns were mown in neat green bands, the edges trimmed, the beds hoed and weedless, the roses pruned and fed. Well, so they should be, he thought; it would be a crime if they weren’t. He smiled grimly at the appropriateness of that phrase.
Tom Harrison looked at the house he had bought so proudly thirty years ago. It had been his demonstration to himself and his family, as well as the world at large, that Harrison’s Machine Tools was a success. His wife had been alive then, and the children only hinting at the troubles of adolescence. It had seemed a world where nothing was impossible, where the purchase of the house marked just one more stage in his burgeoning success. When he reviewed his life now, it seemed to him to mark the beginning of his long decline.
It was ironic that the place should now look so attractive. The daffodils trumpeted the triumph of spring in the long border which ran across the front of the house. The gravel of the drive which looped away to the invisible garage was turning amber as the sun climbed higher above it. The new white gloss paint of the exterior gleamed against a bright blue sky. The old place could never have looked better in its long life. He knew it, and resented it. And in that moment of contemplation, a resolution formed.
Tom Harrison decided that he wanted to be rid of the place.
*
It was a thought which surprised him by the suddenness of its arrival. But it would surprise others more. That knowledge cheered him as he went to the car and installed himself stiffly within it. Even the seat belt he so hated failed to disrupt his satisfaction. This lasted throughout the drive to the golf club. He had had enough of being kind to criminals: let someone else take a turn.
He enjoyed driving. It was one of those contacts between man and machine on which he had been wont to expound as an engineer. Perhaps, for him, it was the last one which was now left. It was a day when nature was determined to be cheerful, so much so that it seemed churlish to resist her. The clouds danced high and mobile, more decorating the heavens than threatening change. The birds were busy in the hedgerows, the fields greening with new growth after the winter. Tom Harrison drove through the awakening country with a competence which gave him real pleasure.
Part of the pleasure was in the anticipation of the golf which lay at the end of the journey. He knew what to expect, for he played with partners chosen almost entirely from the same dozen men. Often, as this afternoon, with the same three companions in a regular four-ball. All of his dozen had now retired, some of them earlier than others. It was ten years now since he had accepted the offer for his business and sold up. He had received a good price; that was not the reason why so much of his life seemed to have gone sour since then.
“Hello Tom, you old bandit!” Bert, the other widower in his four, was always there early; he spent a large part of his time around the club nowadays. “Back to only one sweater, I think.” He strode cheerfully away towards the first tee. Tom assembled his electric trolley and made ready to follow. He had won last time, so he was ribbed about being a “bandit”. It meant nothing, beyond a pleasing bit of flattery about his skill; it was not too often nowadays that he played to his fourteen handicap.
It was a comfortable world, where they all knew the length of putt that should be given and the amount of banter which would be taken. The men he played with were his contemporaries; they understood the rules of behaviour which were never discussed. Most of them were old enough to have seen service at the end of the 1939-45 war. The few who were just too young for that had to make do with the first days of National Service for their military reminiscences.
Tom Harrison did not have that strain of English puritanism which said that what was comfortable must be bad for him in the long run. He had aged more than seven years since his wife had died. He now preferred the company of people who endorsed his opinions and his prejudices rather than that of those who might challenge them. He was lapsing into a comfortable conservatism, developing a conditioned reflex to any radical suggestion.
Of all this he was largely unconscious. Without a wife at his side to point these trends out to him, to guy his occasional small pomposities, he drifted aimlessly towards a rigidity which had not been a characteristic of his younger days. In a few years, his responses would be atrophied beyond recovery, unless something occurred to arrest the process.
He enjoyed his afternoon, winning again and bringing cheerful mutterings about his handicap from all but his partner. There were eight of their usual gang around today; they had the club bar to themselves as they gathered after their round at four o’clock. He thought of Belloc�
�s
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.
For a moment there was a coldness about his heart with the thought, for it reminded him of his sixty-nine years, and brought a vision of an increasingly lonely old age before him.
Amidst the joyous camaraderie, he slipped in his habitual complaint about the way his son was using his house. He got the expected sympathetic response, the usual condemnation of do-gooders and their misapprehensions about the realities of human nature. But views soon became generalised into a collective diatribe about the insensitivities of young people in general and children in particular to the feelings of their elders and betters. Tom did not say anything about his thought that he might get rid of the house.
He drove back carefully, knowing he was well within the legal limit. His prostate as well as the breathalyser limited his consumption these days. Halfway home, a new Cavalier overtook his Rover near the top of a hill. He had to brake sharply to let the wall of shiny blue metal slide in front of him and back to its own side of the road. “Bloody young fool!” he roared to himself.
But the moment could not disturb his equanimity. Indeed, it gave him a certain satisfaction, which came not just from the expertise with which he had anticipated the incident and handled the Rover. He was older and wiser than the man with white shirt sleeves and tousled hair who had just invited disaster in his company car; and he was out of the rat-race, as he and the men he had just left invariably put it when they congratulated themselves on their situations.
Secretly, he believed it was much more difficult to build a business like his now than when he had fed the post-war boom in engineering. But he would never have confessed so much to his son; he hardly acknowledged it even to himself. As the first cool breeze of the April evening made him close the driver’s window, he speculated a little about the pressures on the man who was disappearing rapidly ahead of him in the blue Cavalier. Tom Harrison was not inhumane.
But as he turned carefully into the gravel drive of the big house, steering the Rover with accustomed skill on a path exactly central between the two high stone gate-pillars, his resolution returned. He would get rid of the place.
That would teach Trevor to ignore his wishes.
Chapter Two
Tom Harrison rarely got the chance of doing important things nowadays. It was a long time since he had done anything which would seriously affect the lives of others as well as himself. He was buoyed by the prospect of action, lifted with the satisfaction of a decision taken.
When he went into the house, his feeling of well-being was consolidated. He made his way through the utility room he still called a wash-house. The kitchen was deserted, but in the big room next to it he found what he was looking for. When he had bought the house, the agent had called this a breakfast room, but it was a useful all-purpose area, which his daughter-in-law now called a family room. Tom wondered idly how many rooms in this house still retained their original designations.
Two small faces looked up from their toys when he entered the family room, and were lit immediately by that spontaneous, uncalculating pleasure which pleases more than the best-turned compliment. Five-year-old Tim simply ran to him and held up his arms.
Tom sat in the battered armchair he had had since he was married forty years ago and took the boy on his knee. Tim snuggled against his shoulder, smiled contentedly, and put his thumb into his mouth. He had been at the infant school for two terms now, but he still came home tired at the end of the day. He might well fall asleep in a couple of minutes. Tom removed the thumb, knowing it would creep back in a few seconds; he would not remove it a second time.
“You didn’t come to meet us today, Gan.” Lisa could form her words now with absolute clarity; she always spoke carefully of her “Grandad” to her teacher. But she retained the “Gan” of her lisping toddler days for him. Perhaps it was a female gene stirring, anxious even at this early stage to please.
“No, chuck. I was playing golf today.” The school was no more than two hundred yards down a safe road. He had met her nearly every day when she first went there. It was not really necessary now, but he still went to meet the two of them quite often.
She picked up the doll he had bought her for Christmas and came over to climb on to the arm of his chair. He put his finger on his lips and nodded at the seraphic Tim, curled now like a sleeping animal against his chest with eyes tight shut. She began to tell him about her day. The teacher was reading them a book called Tom’s Midnight Garden, which fascinated her, though he had never heard of it.
“Grandad’s name is Tom,” he told her, and she looked at him with wide, round eyes, as though it were the most remarkable fact she had come across in a day crowded with incident. “Grandad had lots of adventures when he was a boy. Not quite like the Tom in your story, but —”
“Were you a boy once, Gan?”
He looked at her, but it was not a joke. This was a startling, even a preposterous, notion for her. He looked into the unlined but deadly serious face ten inches from his own, saw it full of enquiry, and burst out laughing. And because she felt the bond between them stronger than ever, she laughed with him a second or two later, without knowing the reason why.
Her puzzled giggles set him going anew, so that the two of them rocked for almost a minute with a hilarity they could not have explained adequately to anyone else. He watched Tim undulating on his lap without wakening, and found even that bouncing little body a source of merriment. With his right arm crooked awkwardly around the boy, he stretched his left one around Lisa and held her against him, so that they felt the laughter shaking each other’s sides.
The noise of their enjoyment prevented either of them noticing the arrival in the room of the children’s mother. “Some people are enjoying themselves!” she said from the doorway. She spoke quickly, so that her father-in-law would not think himself unfairly observed.
“Lisa wants to know if I was ever a boy!” he explained. “She thinks I sprang into the world as a fully formed Grandad, with grey hairs and arthritis.”
Ros Harrison smiled at the pair across the length of the big room. “Of course he was, silly girl,” she said affectionately. Tom and Lisa stopped laughing now, their joyous intimacy for the moment at an end. Ros came across and removed her son’s thumb firmly from his mouth. A tiny trickle of saliva ran down his chin, but he did not waken. “He won’t sleep tonight if he dozes for too long now,” she said. But she did not attempt to waken him; she stood looking down at the small face as it turned slowly against Tom’s chest, the miniature, pliable nose almost flattening as it did so.
Her face softened as she looked at the child, reminding Tom again what an attractive woman she could be when she relaxed. She was tall, with dark, curly hair which she kept short. Her eyes were dark enough to look black as the twilight made its first effect upon the room. Her fawn sweater and brown cords were worn but clean; they announced that the wearer had work to do rather than leisure to enjoy.
“The meal won’t be very late tonight,” she said. She would have liked to call him Tom, but she feared he might resent it. Most of the time, she just spoke to him like this, without any title at all. If she needed to address him by name, she called him Mr Harrison, even after ten years. He would have liked her to call him Dad, but she never did. Ridiculously, it was not a thing either of them ever raised for discussion: that would have acknowledged that there was a problem.
“Well, I won’t need to dress for it with your crew,” he said acidly.
He regretted it immediately. He had meant it to emerge as a light and innocent jest, a friendly bit of banter between them, of the type he had been used to exchange with his own daughter in this house. Instead, it sounded bitter, as if he were opening yet again an argument they had tacitly agreed to abandon.
And that was how she took it. She smiled wearily and said, “It isn’t easy when you come out of prison, you know. No one wants to know you, except your family, and s
ometimes not even them.” He raised his hands in a gesture of submission, even apology. As he still had an arm round each child, the effect was awkward, even comic. Certainly his meaning was not clear, for his daughter-in-law seemed to think he was rejecting what she said.
“I wonder if you’ve ever tried to put yourself in the place of an ex-prisoner, Mr Harrison. Ever thought of what it feels like when people won’t even consider you for jobs you could do standing on your head.” She spoke heatedly, the colour flushing her sallow cheeks.
Tom wondered how he was to get out of this. As usual when he tried to extricate himself quietly, he prolonged the argument. “I know what you mean. You mustn’t think I’m totally insensitive. It’s just that I don’t see why we should be the instruments of support. Surely the state —”
“The state doesn’t give any real help. Someone else has to. We can’t all turn our backs on the real world.” Now she had implied a criticism of him; this time it was she who regretted an impulsive reaction, a phrasing which carried more weight than she had intended. She pursed her lips impatiently; she had neither the time nor the inclination to get involved in this now.
She caught the enquiry in Lisa’s upturned face. The girl hadn’t the faintest idea what the argument was, but she had picked up the nuance of a dispute between two people she loved.
“Time for you two to get ready for your tea,” said Ros. She took Tim from his grandfather and placed the sleeping child carefully with his head over her shoulder, like a baby who has to be winded. As she shepherded Lisa before her, the boy’s eyes opened from his sleep. He stared at Tom over his mother’s back with large round eyes, without at first understanding where he was or whom he saw. He looked for a moment like a retarded child. Then with consciousness his senses returned; as the three of them left the room, he raised his palm in a tiny, automatic wave of farewell.
Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1) Page 1