Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1)

by Gregson, J. M.

  He now volunteered, “I’m hoping to get a job in car sales.” Any job in which one wore good clothes and did not get one’s hands dirty rated highly among the prisoners who had been his companions for four years. Yet of the people here, only Fred Hogan was much impressed by the idea. “At least it may mean I get my own wheels in due course.” A little sneer of triumph played briefly about his vulpine mouth: none of the others could expect a car.

  Trevor nodded at Harry Bradshaw, the only one of the four still to report. Harry said, “Early days, as you say. But I’m quite pleased. I’ve been offered an evening class to teach by the WEA. There’s the possibility of another one if the tutor they’ve engaged isn’t fit: he’s in hospital at the moment. At least it’s employment in the field I used to work in; I’m luckier than most.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve any chance of full-time work back in a school,” said Dick Courtney. This time he hardly troubled to keep the spite out of his voice. Bradshaw was the only ex-convict who was better educated than he was, and he was very conscious of it. Moreover, from the desultory conversations they had had in the evenings, he thought this quiet man rather despised his own aspirations, though he had never said so openly.

  Bradshaw looked at him quietly, weighing the insolence both of them knew lay behind Courtney’s comment. “I don’t know how local authorities would react to a murderer,” he said. He enjoyed the little frisson of excitement that ran round the room with his use of the word. It had taken him years to get used to the idea of himself as a killer. He might as well have a little fun with the dramatic impact of the word now.

  He looked round the circle of faces, amused to see all eyes cast down in such unison, relishing the fact that not even Trevor could find an emollient cliché this time. Then he said, “It might give the people who appoint teachers a problem, but I’m certainly not on any official black list: I’m not a child-molester or a stealer of dinner money, you see. Just a murderer.”

  Trevor Harrison, still looking shocked at Bradshaw’s open admission of the killing of his wife, did not enjoy this grim little irony. Finding words at last, he said, to the company at large rather than to Harry, “A domestic killing scarcely counts as murder in the normal sense.”

  Bradshaw shrugged. “The jury rejected Manslaughter, remember. However, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be employed in adult education, which is my real interest now.”

  Fred Hogan, anxious to be of practical help to a man who had been kind to him, said, “You needn’t declare your crimes when you’re trying to get work.”

  Harry Bradshaw smiled. “With the kind of application forms I have to fill in, Fred, a gap of five years in your experience tends to invite questions.”

  “Anyway, it’s good to hear that things are looking promising. I might even join your course on the English Civil War myself, if you’ll have me!” said Ros Harrison. Her voice was too brittle to convey the friendliness she intended. The nervous giggle at the end of her words trickled away to the recesses of the silent room, until she wished someone would come in with a thought which would make hers seem less false. No one did.

  Ros was more disturbed than anyone else in the room by the image of gentle Harry Bradshaw with his hands clasped brutally round a woman’s neck, crushing the life from the terrified eyes above them. She was more than ever anxious now to get on to what she thought was the main business of the evening. She threw an urgent, beseeching look at her husband at the head of the big table.

  And for once, Trevor took his cue promptly. “I have brought the plans of the proposed extension I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I can now show you some of the detail.” He went over to the overhead projector which Harry Bradshaw had helped him set up at the end of the big room before the meeting. Using the transparency of the plans he had prepared in advance, he showed them various aspects of the proposal and discoursed a little on how the extension would help men like them.

  His exposition was not very effective, and there were moments when Bradshaw longed to take over and point out the most interesting features of the plans which were now illuminated for them on the screen. But in truth, the quality of the talk mattered little, because, with the possible exception of Fred Hogan, all of the men in the room hoped to be gone from here long before the building work even began.

  All of them, however, were brought up short by the piece of news Trevor saved until the end. “I have to tell you,” he said heavily, “that my father is against the extension. From the little you have seen of him, you might perhaps have anticipated that.” He smiled wryly at Fred Hogan, in recognition of the confrontation between the little man and his father earlier in the week. Then his face turned deadly serious.

  “We would have fought his opposition, and I think we would have won in the end. But I have to tell you that he has told me today that he intends to sell this house.”

  This time he had the shocked reaction he intended. They were all directly affected by this, as they had not been by plans for building after they had left the place. Fred Hogan had been scheming to stay here as long as he could. Long-term plans were a novelty for him, but he had vague ideas of staying permanently at Ros’s side in this house which was so much grander than anywhere he had lived in his life, of making himself more and more useful, until he became indispensable.

  Harry Bradshaw needed the base to establish a new life more than any of them: lodgings for a man with a murder conviction were almost impossible, even when he had built up enough money to pay for them. And more than he would have been prepared to admit, he had felt himself responding to the therapy of a friendly family around him after five bleak prison years.

  Dick Courtney, stripped of his bravado, was as disturbed as any of them. He knew how much he needed Westhaven — not for long, he hoped, but for that vital period until he had devised something better for himself. He was not yet as confident of his prospects as he pretended to be within the security of these unthreatening walls.

  And Michael Ashby, much as he hated the job at Colley’s, knew that he must use both the post and his life in this house as stepping stones to better things.

  It was Ashby who voiced the question for them all. “Can he do this?”

  Trevor sighed. “I’m afraid he can. He and I own Westhaven jointly under the terms of my mother’s will. Either of us is allowed to sell — I don’t think Mum envisaged that Dad would ever want to. And I’m afraid there is no way I could buy him out, even if he would sell to me.”

  There was a silence in the room which Fred Hogan could almost feel. It was he who eventually said, “How soon?”

  Trevor would have liked to wrap it up, but there was no way. “He proposes to ring an agent in the morning.”

  Chapter Nine

  Later that same Sunday evening, Tom Harrison sat alone in his den.

  The television transmission of the final round of the American Masters golf at Augusta was to go on until one in the morning, and he had installed himself in front of the set with his whisky and water. Yet he scarcely saw the evolving drama he had anticipated so eagerly. He drank steadily, but felt no nearer to that dulling of the senses which would bring relief.

  He was to leave Westhaven. That one stunning fact seemed to drive out all other interests, to disturb his concentration on anything for more than a moment or two. He had assumed that he would end his days in the old place, with its multitude of memories and associations. It was big, he knew, but he could afford the maintenance. And when Trevor and his family had moved in to share it with him, that had seemed to seal his residence for as long as he drew breath. Indeed he remembered boasting to anyone who would listen that he would only leave the place feet first.

  Now he was to go: the estate agent was to come at ten in the morning. On Tuesday, he was going to look at a selection of modern bungalows that it seemed might meet his needs. It had all been very rapid. Like a decision taken during his working days, indeed: he had always prided himself on the fact that once Tom Harrison had
made up his mind, things moved fast.

  He had rejected Ros’s gentle suggestion that perhaps he was moving too fast, accelerating a decision that had been taken in a fit of pique so that it would be too late to reverse it. Trevor had been strangely quiet all week, scarcely attempting to sway him from his decision after their initial argument. He wondered if Ros had told her husband of Michael Ashby’s assault. That was how he thought of it still, however much she chose to play it down.

  The technicolour images flickered across his vision, the cameras panned round the vistas of magnolias and azaleas at Augusta, without much of it registering in his mind. The new champion stood smiling and awkward in his green blazer before Tom even realised the Masters was over. The carriage clock on top of the television set showed that it was ten past one in the morning, hours past his normal bedtime. Yet he scarcely felt tired.

  He undressed slowly, feeling the heavy quiet of the old house around him; it seemed still with the disappointment of his disloyalty, as if it had human feelings. He dismissed such fanciful notions. He was surprised how little whisky was left in the bottle; perhaps after all he had drunk rather too much. At least the water jug was empty: his head might not be too bad in the morning.

  He lay for twenty minutes trying to read his book. Usually, that got him off to sleep nicely, but tonight he could no more concentrate on the print than on the television pictures earlier. Eventually he put the book aside and lay upon his back, looking pensively at the ceiling. He thought of his wife, and of what she would have wished for their children. She had always been closer to Trevor than he had: while she had been alive, there had been no problems.

  Perhaps, after all, he should have a final discussion with Trevor before he put Westhaven on the market. His son was very committed to these ex-convicts. And the children might have to move schools if they did not find a new house in the area. For the first time, he acknowledged to himself how important it was for him to retain his relationship with his grandchildren. He had not really considered until now that he might lose touch with them if they lived in a different house.

  There might perhaps be a solution which would be acceptable to all of them: his son and daughter-in-law, the children, even those jailbirds whose presence here he was so reluctant to accept. And of course, to himself: it was a relief to acknowledge that even selfish considerations might warrant a rethinking of his decision to sell the house.

  He would talk to Trevor and Ros first thing in the morning. It was a comforting resolution: he fell into a sound sleep within minutes of arriving at it.

  But he slept for less than an hour. He had drunk far more than he normally allowed himself, and his bladder brought him insistently out of a heavy slumber. He dragged on his thick woollen dressing gown and made for the door, not bothering to tie the cord as he realised the urgency of his problem. Vaguely, he wondered why the low wattage bulb which normally lit the landing throughout the night had been switched off. But he knew the way about his own house well enough; he could find the bathroom without assistance. The darkness merely slowed him when he had most need to hurry.

  He made it all right. He leaned gratefully against the wall above the lavatory with his head against his forearm, while his prostate dictated the pace of the lengthy evacuation of his bladder. In the time for reflection this allowed, he thought drowsily that perhaps after all he would accede to Ros’s suggestion of an en-suite bathroom within his quarters.

  He flushed the cistern and washed his hands perfunctorily. As he turned to put out the bathroom light, he staggered a little, and had to lean against the frame of the door for a moment to recover. He grinned the secret grin of the happily inebriated man who is safely alone; there was life in the old dog yet.

  But that life was not to be there for many seconds longer. As he trod with exaggerated care along the landing, he felt two hands in the small of his back, just beneath his shoulder blades. Before his befuddled state allowed him to recognise that they were really there, he was hurtling down the long staircase, his legs and arms clawing frantically at the cold darkness.

  Sometimes inebriation saves a man, allowing him to fall with muscles relaxed as a baby’s. But it cannot help a man who falls as awkwardly as Tom Harrison did. With his unfastened dressing gown flying wildly around him, he turned sideways as he fell through the darkness, so that his head twisted awfully against his neck when at last it hit the edge of a stair. His last thought was that his son would never know that he had changed his mind.

  His assailant flashed a torch briefly over the heap at the bottom of the stairs, checking that no breath came through the lips so brutally stilled. It was a scarcely necessary precaution. The grotesque disposition of the body was enough to confirm that Tom Harrison was dead.

  DICK

  Chapter Ten

  It was Ros Harrison who discovered the body.

  In the silent house, Tom Harrison plunged to his death with a hideous crash, made the more portentous by the utter silence which poured back into the dark cave of the hall after that single terrifying impact. The noise woke most of the people in the house, but Ros, her reflexes still those of a mother alert to the small sounds of children in distress, was more instantly awake than any of them.

  Her dressing gown and slippers lay beside her bed as a matter of habit. Her door was some thirty yards from Tom’s, but she was at the top of the stairs, at the spot whence he had fallen, within sixty seconds of that awful sound. The light she had switched on as she came seemed white, almost garish after the darkness whence she had sprung, so that the figure at the foot of the stairs seemed two-dimensional, like a chalk outline of a corpse drawn by police rather than the thing itself.

  Even as she paused in that moment of horror, Ros knew that this was a corpse: no living man lay with his head bent back at an angle like that. She moved swiftly down the staircase, feeling her actions motivated by some outside agency rather than her own volition. She felt for the pulse in the neck that she knew would not be there. A small trickle of blood ran from Tom’s nostril; she watched it as though mesmerised, as if she could expect it to congeal before her eyes now that he was dead. Instead, it ran slowly across the grey stubble of the dead cheek until it reached the indentation by the ear, where it began to gather in a tiny pool.

  “Is he dead?” The words from the familiar voice shocked her into movement. She rose to her feet as she turned towards the speaker. Trevor stood at the top of the stairs, his beard dark against the white of the nightshirt he now wore habitually in bed, his dressing gown not tied, posed like a pre-Raphaelite Christ above her.

  Suddenly she was furious that he should be frozen there at the top of the stairs. Why did he not come to her, when his dead father lay bleeding at her feet? “Get an ambulance. Quickly!” The last word was almost a scream, a release for herself as much as a spur to action.

  Trevor moved then as if he had been lashed. He was immensely relieved to have been ordered into a role which took him away from that still figure on the parquet floor of the hall. He moved swiftly to the phone in their room, despising himself that he should be thus inadequate. To the operator’s calm, almost bored, “Emergency. Which service, please?” he could respond with the swift efficiency he had so lacked on the landing. He rapped out the urgency of the need and the address in a clear voice, without the difficulty in breathing he had felt until now. Was his role always to be at one remove from the action? Was he always to be the instrument of aid, rather than aid itself?

  In the hall, Ros moved Tom’s dressing gown to cover him decently. Once she had confirmed his death, an irrational revulsion prevented her from touching the limbs which could not move themselves. To do so would have been a violation of the code which had made physical contact so difficult between them when he had been alive. She knelt beside the body for a long moment, wondering what her next move should be.

  She saw the shabby slippers at her side before she registered any noise. Fred Hogan stood looking at her rather than at the thing at her feet, as
if anxious only in his concern for her. “Can I do anything to help?” he said. He seemed to take the death for granted, for he made no move to help old Tom.

  She looked at him, glad of his concern for her, wanting to comfort him as she had not been able to comfort her husband. “He’s dead, Fred. Trevor’s phoning for an ambulance, but it won’t be any good.”

  Fred Hogan wore an old gaberdine mack to preserve the decencies: he had never owned a dressing gown in his life, never seen the need for a garment with such a limited use. He had not put in his teeth, so that the two yellowing stumps of canines were all she could see at the top of his mouth. His face was grey and his thin hair poked in stray wisps round the edges of the nightcap he had taken to wearing during the last few weeks. Ros was in shock now. Fred looked to her like a garden gnome at the end of a bad winter, and she wanted to laugh.

  Fred would have been aghast at that thought. He was confused by an emotion that was the more bewildering to him because it was unfamiliar. Ros’s kindness to him, his feeling of belonging in this house, had brought a disproportionate reaction from a man starved of affection throughout his life. He wanted now to put his arms round those slim, competent shoulders, to feel her vulnerable, needing his protection, as he had seen it happen in films. Instead, he said lamely, “I’ll make some tea,” and went into the kitchen.

  Trevor came and stood in the hall beside his wife. She looked into the strained white face and shook her head. He looked down with a face like stone at the dead face of his father, with its long trickle of blood. Then he turned abruptly and went up the staircase down which the living man had hurtled into eternity. He paused briefly at the top with his hand on the banister, as if forcing himself to visualise the moment and origin of this fatal accident. Without looking again at Ros, he disappeared along the landing.