[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  ‘You’ve been the best.’ He took into his arms the body which was running a little to seed, which men like him must once have found so desirable, and he was suddenly full of an uncomplicated love for her, alongside the guilt for himself and the things he did to her.

  It was one of those moments when he was surprised by tenderness, and as usual it did not last long. He said roughly, ‘You won’t be bothered by Logan again. He’s wiped from the face of the earth!’ He could feel her body stiffening beneath his hands with each word he spoke.

  She pulled herself away from him, looking up anxiously into the sharp, unlined features which she knew so well and could read so little. ‘You didn’t kill him, did you, Jack?’

  He grinned down at her, that wolfish, alien grin which had come between them in the last year or two. For a moment, she feared that he was going to tell her again that she should ask no questions and be told no lies. But he looked down into the dark roots of the blonde hair and the anxious, vapid, loving face and was beset with pity as sharp as a physical pain.

  He knew that he must reassure her, that that was partly what he had come back to the house to do. He had lost that urge, as the febrile excitement and the desire to taunt and hurt her had taken him over. He said as firmly as he could, ‘No, I didn’t kill him, Mum. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that!’ Then he ran his hand through the dry yellow hair, bending her head so that she could not look at him, and tried to make a joke of the preposterous idea.

  It was nearly one o’clock. He stayed to eat with her, trying to calm himself and think clearly. She bisected a pork pie from the fridge and put tomatoes with it. She cut several thin slices from the good loaf she had got from the bakery on the previous evening and spread them with butter. Then she watched him eat, trying to get the pleasure from it which she had derived from seeing him feed well when he was an infant. She wasn’t hungry herself, though she forced a little down to try to keep up with him. She couldn’t eat all of her pork pie and he took it eagerly when she offered it, clearing his plate with that swift, animal speed which he always had when he was excited by life outside this house.

  He downed his mug of tea at the end of it, then said, ‘That was good, Mum. You know how to keep a lad happy!’

  But despite the phrasing, it was the ritual, automatic thanks of a stranger, and she knew it. In spite of her knowledge of how he would react, she found herself saying, ‘You should keep up with your better friends and get rid of the bad ones, Jack. I only want the best for you.’

  As always, he shied away from her pleading. ‘I have to be off now. I shouldn’t have stayed as long as this.’

  Sally wanted to ask him where he was going, but she knew that it would be a mistake, that he would only shut her even further out. ‘I want you to get a proper job,’ she said weakly, ‘the way we said. You’re a bright boy, Jack, and I don’t like seeing others leaving you behind.’

  ‘You don’t mind seeing Terry Logan lying dead, though, do you?’ His laugh was a harsh, alien sound in her ears. ‘I bet you’ve been listening to the news all morning. Can’t get enough of it, can you, the thought of him being out of your life?’ His eyes glittered with a febrile passion.

  She was frightened again by his aggression and his excitement. She said quietly, trying to calm him, ‘Logan was out of my life a long time ago. Jack.’

  Jack Dawes was annoyed by that. She should have been more grateful to him for the sentiment. But he needed her. He forced himself to be calm, to bathe her again in that affectionate smile he knew she could not resist. He gripped her shoulders, kneading the soft flesh at the top of her arms with his strong fingers. ‘Just in case the cops ask you, I was in here by eleven o’clock last night. A boy’s best friend is his mum, eh?’

  Ian Proudfoot led the two big men into the manager’s office.

  ‘We’ll be private in here,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the few perks of being a branch manager - there don’t seem to be many others left nowadays.’ He heard the little laugh with which he followed that complaint, and knew in that moment that he was very nervous.

  Lambert went quickly through the formalities of introducing himself, then turned to Bert. ‘I believe that you already know Detective Sergeant Hook.’

  ‘Bert and I have already suffered together on the boards, yes!’ He checked his smile as he remembered why they were here. ‘Though I don’t know whether the production will proceed, now that we lack a director.’

  ‘I should have thought it unlikely, with a murderer hiding himself in the cast,’ said Lambert acerbically.

  ‘I can’t get my head round that one, as the youngsters say.’ Ian Proudfoot glanced at the twelve-year-old photograph of himself and his children which he kept on his desk and thought how quickly the years had passed, how quickly he had aged. ‘It seems inconceivable to me that anyone who was rehearsing Hamlet in that village hall last night could have committed murder. We seemed to be a happy bunch. And it was such a good start to the most exciting project most of us have ever had the chance to put on stage.’ This man seemed more concerned with the loss of his dream than with brutal murder. But Lambert did not show his irritation. ‘How long had you known Terry Logan?’

  ‘Terry and I go back quite a long way. It’s difficult to be certain how far.’

  ‘Try.’

  Ian felt the hostility in this quiet, watchful man. He was used to being in control in his own office, but this tall man with the intense grey eyes and the absence of any polite small talk seemed to have taken it over. ‘I suppose it must be twenty years since I first met Terry.’

  ‘Tell us precisely where and when, please.’ He knew the exact answers to both those questions. But he wasn’t going to be too accurate: it would argue an unhealthy preoccupation with the man and his movements.

  ‘It was probably in amateur dramatics. We were both of us great enthusiasts. I think Terry had been in the professional theatre for a couple of years in his youth.’ Ian tried not to sound jealous of that. ‘He had private means, of course. He could afford to take chances with his life.’

  ‘Which you couldn’t?’

  ‘Oh, I never really considered trying to become a professional.’ A lie, and a clumsy and a needless one; he was losing the calm he had been determined to keep. ‘I was planning marriage and a career in banking at the time when Terry was indulging himself with a venture into rep. And shortly after that, I had a young family to think about. In any case, I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been good enough to be a professional.’

  The lightness of his tone was a little forced and Hook was an expert on tones after thirty years of questioning people. ‘So, united by this common interest in the stage, you became good friends with Terry Logan.’

  ‘No!’ He knew that the monosyllable was too loud and too insistent, but it was out before he knew it was coming. ‘I had family concerns, as you know. My wife has never been as enthusiastic about amateur dramatics as I am.’ That’s a whopping understatement, but it shows I’m getting back my control, he thought. ‘It’s a very time-consuming hobby. When you have a young family, you have to ration out your leisure time carefully.’

  ‘You’re saying that you weren’t a close friend of Logan’s?’ Lambert asked.

  ‘That’s it! I met him quite a lot off and on over the years, but we were never particularly close. We had completely different lifestyles for one thing. He was a bachelor with private means and lots of time on his hands, whilst for a long time I was watching every penny and very busy with work and family.’

  ‘Did your wife know him?’

  ‘No.’ He wondered if the negative had again come a little too promptly. ‘Not really,’ he said. This was new to him: in his professional life as a bank branch manager he didn’t have to think much about the effects he was making on people. ‘Angela has no interest in the theatre, as I said. We didn’t meet up with Terry socially; so when she met him at all it would be at parties after productions, which I’m afraid are usually more enjoy
able for those who have been involved than for their spouses and partners. Insofar as she knew him at all, she probably resented him as a figure from a world which was taking up too much of my time.’

  ‘Did you have any professional dealings with him?’

  The question had come suddenly, when he was busy trying to distance himself from Logan. He told himself that he had always expected it, had prepared himself to answer it. Perhaps he wasn’t as good at remembering lines as he had been in his youth, for the precise phrases he had devised wouldn’t come to him now. ‘I think he was once a customer of the bank, but that was before my time. Perhaps he transferred his funds when he heard I was becoming manager of the local branch. Many people don’t like to bank with someone who knows them, because they don’t like them knowing the details of their financial background. But I can’t be sure about that, and I wouldn’t like to indulge in speculation.’ That was better: those were a couple of the phrases he’d prepared for this. He gave them a deprecating smile.

  Lambert had a response for that. ‘And who do you think killed Mr Logan?’The question flew like an arrow across the bank manager’s big desk, the more effective for its almost casual delivery.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ian fumbled for something stronger. ‘I’ve no idea. You can’t expect me to have any idea.’

  ‘On the contrary, I think you wouldn’t be human if you hadn’t been speculating about exactly that ever since you heard of this death.’

  When Ian Proudfoot looked for some relief from Bert Hook, the DS merely reinforced the logic of this with a small smile and the slightest affirmatory shrug of his broad shoulders. Then Bert said thoughtfully, ‘Unless you killed him yourself, of course, Ian. In which case you’d have had no need of speculation; you’d have been much more concerned to cover your tracks.’

  This was unexpected from the calm and unthreatening man whom he had been thinking of as a friend. Ian glared at him, but he produced nothing but a lame, ‘I trust that’s a joke.’

  Hook flicked to a new page in his notebook and said, ‘We’ll need you to account for your movements last night.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. You were with me for most of the evening. Are you going to provide a record of your own movements?’

  ‘If it is required of me, of course I shall. You were with me until just after nine o’clock, by my reckoning. Please tell us your movements after that.’

  Ian knew that he must not be rattled. Apart from any other implications, he wouldn’t want to give them the satisfaction of that. ‘As you know, I wasn’t required for the final section of the rehearsal. I left Terry Logan alone in Mettlesham Village Hall with you and the two young people.’ He enjoyed saying that.

  Hook nodded, taking an irritatingly long time to record this in his round hand. ‘What then?’

  ‘I left the hall, opened my car, and drove carefully home. I must have arrived there by half past nine or just after that.’ He spoke slowly and with exaggerated clarity, like one instructing a child.

  Hook nodded, not troubling to look up from his notes. ‘Presumably there is someone who can confirm this?’

  ‘Angela, my wife, will confirm it.’ She owed him that much at least, however bitchy she’d been about him going out last night.

  Again it seemed to take Hook an inordinate number of seconds to make a note of the time and the name. Then he looked up and smiled brightly. ‘You still haven’t responded to Chief Superintendent Lambert’s inquiry about who you think might have committed this appalling crime.’

  Ian almost snapped at Hook that he wouldn’t think it so appalling if he’d known Logan as well as he had. Then he realized what a mistake that would have been, undoing all his previous attempts to distance himself from the dead man. This Bert Hook was much more dangerous than you would conclude from his village-bobby exterior.

  Ian said stiffly, ‘You were right when you pointed out that it would be natural for me to speculate about who might have done this. I have been doing just that in what few spare moments I have had during the day. But I have to tell you that I can offer you nothing useful. At this moment, I am as baffled as you seem to be yourselves.’ He looked from one to the other of his questioners with a thin little smile, enjoying delivering this small barb of his own.

  ‘We know virtually nothing yet about our murder victim,’ Lambert said. ‘No doubt you are anxious to see his murderer arrested quickly.’

  Ian hoped that was an assumption, not a question. He knew exactly what he thought about this death, knew also that he mustn’t let them see his satisfaction that Logan had been removed from the world for ever. He said tersely, ‘Of course. That goes without saying.’

  ‘Then tell us about him. Tell us about the sort of man he was. Tell us above all about the enemies he had.’

  ‘I didn’t know him well. But I take your point that I knew him better than you. My children passed through his hands at the school. He taught some English in the lower school. But his main interest was drama. He ... he was unusual for a teacher, in having private means. He wasn’t much interested in promotion or in what others thought of him, I think. That gave him a certain independence. He certainly wasn’t a typical teacher.’

  Lambert, whose wife had been a teacher and still did part-time work in schools, wondered quite what a typical teacher might be.

  ‘All right. But what were the consequences of this? How might it have a bearing on his death?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. But I think his sexual preferences might have made him a few enemies. As far as I know, he’s never been married. But he’s had a string of women over the years. Some fairly serious, some more casual.’ Ian realized that he was speaking as if the man were still alive. Well, that was all right: probably a lot of people did that, after a sudden death. He was doing the right thing.

  Lambert watched him closely, then gave him a wry smile. ‘People of that kind usually acquire enemies. Were any of the people who were with you last night sexually involved with him?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ said Ian stiffly. He wasn’t going to fall into the trap of pointing the finger at others, just to divert attention from himself. He hesitated. ‘You will understand that this is mostly hearsay. I don’t enjoy spreading gossip about a dead man.’

  Lambert thought that he had been very content to do just that. But he gave his stock response. ‘In a murder inquiry, we encourage speculation. It need go no further, if it proves to have no bearing on our investigation.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it. In the light of that assurance, perhaps I should add that I’ve heard ... well, rumours.’ He looked as if he wanted to be prompted, but they said nothing and he had to press on himself. ‘I believe there were men as well as women, but I can’t offer chapter and verse.’

  He looked thoroughly uncomfortable, but his body language indicated that he had wanted them to have this information. They pressed him for details, but he said he could give them none. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t even have voiced the idea,’ he said unconvincingly as they prepared to leave.

  The CID men were back in their car and a mile away from Ian Proudfoot before Hook said, ‘He was holding something back, despite what he told us about Logan. Something about himself and his own relationship with the man.’

  ‘I agree. We’ll be back to see him again, when we’ve talked to other people and got a fuller picture,’ said Lambert grimly. ‘In the meantime, he’s given us a problem with what he has told us about our murder victim. A man who can’t keep it in his trousers usually makes a lot of enemies. A bisexual Lothario is going to have made even more.’181

  Twelve

  Michael Carey didn’t let his excitement affect his work. He was rather proud of that.

  A holiday camp which now called itself a leisure park had asked the firm for some advertising material and Michael was roughing out some possibilities for them. He enjoyed playing with nineteen thirties advertising posters from railway stations. If you were clever, you could at once gently send them up a
nd evoke a little nostalgia for the more relaxed days of the past.

  He moved things about rapidly on his computer screen, amusing himself as well as throwing up some interesting possibilities for the commission. If their designs for this were accepted, his boss had said it could lead to lucrative future contracts. He hadn’t mentioned the death at Mettlesham. He hadn’t yet associated his bright young worker with the rehearsal which had preceded the murder and Michael chose not to enlighten him. As the day went on, he hugged his excitement to himself like a delicious secret, wondering how long it would be before any one of the thirty other people in the building connected him with the sensational events of the previous night.

  Michael was called to the phone at lunch time, but it wasn’t the police, as he had half- expected it to be. Perhaps they were taking time to find where he worked and lived: that was one of the advantages of keeping yourself to yourself. Being a bit of a loner had a lot to be said for it.

  He recognized the voice on the other end of the line immediately. It said nervously, ‘I’ve just heard about this death at Mettlesham.’

  ‘Yes. Bit of excitement, isn’t it? Plenty of deaths in Hamlet, but we weren’t anticipating a real one.’

  ‘Is it Logan?’

  ‘I believe it is. Just been announced on local radio, the girls in the office tell me.’

  A long pause; he could hear uneven breathing for several seconds. Then the voice said, ‘Are you involved, Mike?’

  He considered the question for a moment, enjoying his calm in the face of the other’s discomfort. ‘Of course I’m involved. I was at the rehearsal immediately before it happened.’

  ‘You know I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Ah! You meant did I kill him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, did you? God knows, from what little you’ve told me, you’ve ample reason to wish him out of the way.’