*
Outside its network of small towns, the Cotswolds can be a quiet place in November. There are few winter tourists; by nine-thirty the rural workers have long been at work and the office staff have poured sleepily into their various centres. The lanes which trace their way through the low hills and wooded valleys are then almost deserted.
It was unusual at that time of day to see two cars arrive almost simultaneously on one of the most remote of these roads, an ancient highway which had carried the precious woolpacks which made first the monks and then the merchants of this area into medieval capitalists. A narrow road between hawthorn hedges, winding its way between the boundaries of farms which had guarded their independence jealously for centuries. The first car, a BMW, turned carefully off the lane into the cobbled area by a disused barn. Made superfluous by the spread of oil-seed rape over the English countryside in the ‘eighties, the building would no doubt become a desirable residence for someone with no connection with the land when in due course it became a ‘conversion’ in the ‘nineties. For the present, it made an ideal place for a meeting the participants wished to conceal. An aging Ford Cortina, arriving from the opposite direction, turned off the lane to join the BMW within two minutes.
An observer might have presumed a lovers’ meeting. And indeed, the man who emerged from the first car and the woman from the second were obviously familiar with each other. Though they were muffled against the cold of a raw and sunless morning, it was not difficult to see that the woman was the younger of the two. They checked nervously to confirm they were not observed, then set off away from the cultivated land, on a path which ran, carpeted with leaves, through a wood which still held enough foliage to cut out the gloomy sky above them.
They did not hold hands, though, this pair, even when they were secure from human gaze. Their talk was desultory and troubled, with long pauses between the exchanges. Their agony of mind was manifest; and understandable, for their theme was the darkest and oldest of crimes. A murder; and the murder of a father they remembered to have loved, whatever disagreements his latter days had brought to them.
Angela Harrison said, ‘Does the discovery of murder now invalidate the will?’
Her brother stole a sideways glance at the intense white face beside him. ‘No. The will stands, unless anyone can produce clear evidence of other intentions in Father. Of course, no murderer would be allowed to benefit by the will.’
Emotion pares speech to its essentials, shearing away the niceties in which we choose to dress it in less stressful times. For a few moments, the woman watched her feet turning aside the dead leaves like tiny ploughs; then she said, ‘Do you know who did it?’
This time David did not trouble to disguise his surprise as he looked directly at her: she did not raise her gaze from the leaves. Eventually he said, ‘No. It seems incredible. Perhaps it’s no one we know.’
She gave a weary smile, perhaps of contempt for his determined avoidance of reality. ‘That hardly seems likely. One assumes these policemen know what they’re about. What did they ask you?’
The words were spread over a hundred yards of their progress, but their directness again caught him off guard. But this time he made himself pause and think before he replied. ‘A lot of embarrassing things about my financial situation before Dad died.’
‘You must have expected that. Did you tell them about your row with Dad over the house?’
‘Yes. I volunteered the information. It seemed best.’ By this time, he had almost persuaded himself that he had offered freely the information which had been prised out of him. Through a gap in the trees, he watched a kestrel hang motionless for seconds on end over a neighbouring field, then drop like a stone on to some unseen prey. ‘They asked me about Dad’s plans to make a new will.’
‘Naturally. That was bound to interest them.’ Her calm, her cool detachment from anything other than her own thoughts, shocked him. For years she had been an indulgent sister, making excuses to others for his weaknesses, making small sacrifices of her own time and priorities to clear the paths he wished to tread. Now she seemed preoccupied with thoughts she did not trouble to reveal to him.
He said, ‘Margaret Lewis saw to Dad’s food in those last months.’
‘She saw to most things in the house. It doesn’t make her a murderer.’ In the undergrowth, some small animal fled unseen from their approach, the noise unnaturally loud in the stillness. There was no wind, but oak leaves drifted in a thin curtain before them as they reached a clearing. Angela said, ‘I won’t tell them the details of the new will Dad was planning. It might not do you any good with the police.’
Suddenly he felt the old rush of gratitude mingled with guilt, the feeling he had known in childhood when his young sister covered some small sin for him. She had said nothing to their parents when she had come upon him smoking with his friends, or when he had raided the decanter in the dining-room, or when she had found the first dubious book in his satchel. He had never had to ask or plead: she had simply kept silent, and he had known that she would. It had given her, he supposed now, a kind of hold over him, but she had never exploited it. He said, ‘No, that might be as well.’ He did not think of thanking her. He never had.
‘I’ll be vague about the terms of the new will Dad was planning. If they ask me.’
‘Oh, they will. No doubt, as you said, the new terms would have cut me out. The Superintendent implied as much yesterday.’ He had the spoilt child’s tendency to turn routine practice into a personal attack upon himself.
If she noticed it, she gave no sign. Perhaps she had become too familiar with it over the years even to remark it now. He was too preoccupied with his own position to notice her nervousness. Her apparent calm was that of someone near to breaking-point. She kicked at the husk of a chestnut, revealing the rich, pristine shade of the kernel within, which would be transformed so quickly to a dull russet now that it had been exposed. Everything around them seemed to her to be dead or dying. She said, ‘What else did they ask you?’
‘There wasn’t a lot left by the time they’d finished implying what a bad lot I was. They asked about the people around Dad in those last months. Told me how he’d been poisoned systematically and cold-bloodedly by someone who must have planned the whole thing in advance.’ He was too thoroughly back in the previous day’s interview to notice her sudden intake of breath: it was the first time anyone had spoken to her about the details of the poisoning.
Suddenly he was desperate, almost panicking in that quiet place. ‘Angela, I think they’ve already made up their minds that I did it!’
If he hoped for reassurance, her response must have dismayed him. She looked at him for the first time since they had begun to walk. Her dark eyes were wide with trouble in the deep shade of the trees. ‘And did you, David?’ she said.
It was the first time since they were children that she had ever charged him with anything. Always in their youth, even when he was discovered in some obvious deceit, she had done no more than stand aside and let others offer the accusations and the retribution. He halted, stunned, but she walked on again, looking woodenly ahead of her after that one moment when she had stared him full in the face. Watching her rigid, hunched shoulders, he realised for the first time some of the strain she was under, some of the anxiety which had caused her to ask him to meet her out here. ‘No, of course I didn’t,’ he said, almost running until he was alongside her again. ‘I might be capable of a lot of things, but I could never have killed Dad. Surely you of all people believe that.’
This time it was she who stopped abruptly. ‘Yes,’ she said, with a little, secret half-smile. ‘Yes, I believe you. If the police don’t, I’ll do everything I can to convince them you had nothing to do with it.’
The path followed different woods in a wide horseshoe, so that they were not far now from their starting point. They emerged from the cover of the woods and walked for two hundred yards along the road to the derelict barn from which they had started
. After the deep shade, they felt suddenly exposed, though the sky’s grey was still unbroken. Angela Harrison looked up at the low cloud and sniffed the dampness.
She looked for a moment like a wild animal as she said, ‘I’m not going to tell the police. It might not be in our interests. But I think I know who did it.’
9
At the very moment when Edmund Craven’s children were agreeing to deceive them, Lambert and Hook were trying to give substance to the man who was as yet the most faceless of their suspects.
Walter Miller lived in a hamlet two miles outside Oldford. Even under the grey skies which seemed so menacing to that other pair in their remote assignation, Miller’s small house looked attractive. It was constructed in Cotswold stone: not the sprayed-on imitation of today, but the solid amber stone of a century ago. The front faced south, and on this sheltered aspect the climbing rose around the door was still producing rich pink blooms, whose brightness was accentuated by the grey sky.
Almost before they could use the highly polished brass knocker, the door was opened by a trim, alert woman in a spotless skirt and blouse, who had obviously witnessed their approach up the long path which wound through cottage pinks along the edge of the narrow front garden. ‘Superintendent Lambert?’ It made a change to have the public initiate the introductions. ‘And you must be Sergeant Hook.’ Bert found himself absurdly pleased to be so remembered and acknowledged; usually he was no more than an addendum to his leader. His gratification was increased when he found china crockery laid out on the low oak table in the lounge and caught the appealing scent of coffee from somewhere beyond. They sat carefully on the comfortable chintz-covered chairs, watched the reflected flames of the fire in the stone fireplace flickering in the brasses around it, and tried to resist the comfort which threatened to steal over their mental reflexes.
Mrs Miller brought her husband back with their coffee, then left them to their conference. He was less neat, more slow-moving, than his wife, but he fitted easily into the ambience of this most agreeable house. He was older than his wife: if he had fought alongside Craven in Hitler’s war, he could scarcely be less than seventy, and Lambert recalled that Margaret Lewis had implied that he was an exact contemporary of the dead man. He was over six feet, with broad shoulders which had begun to stoop only a little with age. Though his hair was almost white, it was still thick and healthy. His brown eyes assessed his interlocutors shrewdly as he said, ‘The news that Edmund’s death was homicide was a hell of a shock to me, Superintendent.’
The village, the garden, the house, even the spouse of this man, were so English that his accent surprised them far more than it should have done. The words came in a pleasant North American drawl, which added to the relaxation which was all about them. With the perversity encouraged by his calling, Lambert wondered whether the pleasant snugness of it all was designed to conceal an anxiety in his subject. An unworthy thought, perhaps, but it was well to remind himself that for the present this man remained a suspect in a particularly ruthless murder case.
Lambert said, ‘I can understand that, Mr Miller. You will appreciate from this delayed investigation that it was a surprise to the police too. And everyone I have seen so far has expressed the same sort of astonishment. Nevertheless, someone did murder Mr Craven, which means almost certainly that at least one of the people I have already seen, or will see before the end of today, is lying.’
Miller nodded, looked into the fire, stirred sugar slowly into his coffee. ‘And have you come up with any ideas about who that person might be?’
Lambert afforded him the tiny, conspiratorial smile which acknowledges that this will be an exchange between intelligent men. ‘You wouldn’t expect me to reveal it if I had, Mr Miller. Let’s just say that I am beginning to get a slightly clearer picture of the victim and the people who surrounded him in his last few months.’ The impressive head turned back to him, the brown eyes weighed the statement carefully, but the broad, thin lips framed no words. Yet Lambert knew as clearly as if they had spoken that Miller was speculating on what the others had said about him: it had been an effort of will for him not to ask. Lambert would not tell him that Margaret Lewis and David Craven had both seemed far too preoccupied with their own situations to tell him anything about the mysterious old friend of the dead man who came once a week to play chess: not even his country of birth, the Superintendent thought wryly. All the implications were that neither of them regarded Miller as a serious suspect; but there was no reason why he should be told this yet. Lambert said carefully, ‘Do you know how Edmund Craven was killed, Mr Miller?’”
The American shook his head slowly. ‘No. No one has said anything to me about it. As I say, when your Sergeant here rang up about it, it was a hell of a shock.’ It was the second time he had used exactly that phrase. A prepared reaction? Perhaps, but his surprise at the notion of murder might be no less genuine for that.
‘Mr Craven was poisoned.’
It was impossible to deduce from Miller’s face whether his slight surprise was feigned or not. He said very quietly, ‘I guessed it had to be that.’
‘I understand you knew him for many years.’
‘Almost fifty of them. We go—went—back to the early years of the war. We first met at the end of ‘forty-two when we were both flying Mustangs.’
‘In this country, Mr Miller?’
Miller smiled: it was the first, oblique, reference to his origins. Even after all this time, he was used to the insular English making it their first query when he was introduced. ‘In the States. Ed came over there on an eight-week training course. We were together on and off for the rest of the war. Most of that was in Europe. It was Ed who introduced me to Dorothy—my wife who let you in just now. After the war, I got a job in England and settled here. I went back to Philadelphia, every year until my parents died, but we haven’t even been over there now for six or seven years.’
‘So you and Craven remained friends throughout these years?’
‘Indeed we did. I was up in Derbyshire for ten years, but we always kept in touch. I became a naturalised British citizen in 1960. When I began working in Gloucester, we moved here and we’ve seen each other weekly ever since.’
‘This would be when Mr Craven’s wife was still alive?’ said Hook.
As often happened, a contribution from Bert seemed to throw the interviewee a little off balance for a moment. Perhaps it was no more than the surprise value of a question from that taciturn quarter, but Miller looked ruffled for the first time as he said, ‘Yes. She and Dorothy were good friends.’
‘And Craven knew both of them for even longer than you, I presume?’ Lambert was wondering vaguely whether there was a possibility that he should add Dorothy Miller to his list of suspects. At the moment, she did not seem to have had the regular access to Craven which represented opportunity, but if she had worked with or through her husband…
‘Yes. The four of us got on well together. I liked Ed’s wife, Joan. It was a tragedy when she died and left him alone.’ Miller’s speech had become for the moment a series of terse statements. Hitherto, he had been expensive and leisured in his delivery, in what Lambert realised he regarded as a typical transatlantic manner. Now the manner of his delivery interested Lambert more than the unexceptional content. Had there been something in the relationship between the American and Craven’s wife which could now embarrass him?
He remembered that curious expression Alfred Arkwright had read from Craven’s will, describing Miller as ‘my old friend of many years, with whom I have shared so much’. Was there an ironic, posthumous barb embedded there? Then an old, half-forgotten phrase from his childhood came back to Lambert: ‘Over-fed, over-sexed and over here,’ was how the jaundiced, rationed British had described the influx of American servicemen in those war years. Miller was a handsome and striking figure still, in his well-cut blue airman’s uniform, he must have been a glamorous figure in those Spartan times. Suppose that his charisma had been carried into the
post-war years, that the woman now long dead had found it difficult to resist, even after her marriage to Edmund Craven…
It was a beguiling scenario, but much too hypothetical yet for the taste of a grizzled detective. Far too much to build on to a passing embarrassment in his present subject; in any case, it was difficult to see why a possible conquest of Mrs Craven should be followed by the murder of her husband fourteen years after her death. Like a physician probing an area where he has discovered pain, Lambert asked, ‘Did the four of you ever stay at Mr Craven’s holiday home in Burnham-on-Sea?’
‘Yes. I think we did. Angela came with us a little, but the other children were grown up by then.’
‘You got on well with Mrs Craven?’
‘Yes, I did. Ed didn’t always treat her as well as he should have done, but she survived. Superintendent, are you sure this is relevant to your present inquiries?’
‘Almost certainly it isn’t, Mr Miller. But you must appreciate our position. We are trying to build up a picture of a dead man and a complex network of relationships, working over a year after his death. Murder is a unique crime, not just in its magnitude but in the fact that it is the only serious criminal offence where the victim is never available for questioning. If Craven were here, I expect he would have some interesting ideas on who might want to kill him. We have to try to find out those things without him, and in this particular case without much of the evidence that must have been around immediately after his death.’
Perhaps Miller took it as an apology. He said, ‘I appreciate that. I don’t envy you your task. It’s just that it upsets me a little that we should seem to be disturbing the peace of a kind and generous lady who died of cancer fourteen years and more ago.’
Lambert noted the adjectives Miller chose; probably he meant them to be conventionally approving as far as his own admiration for the lady went, but sceptical detectives are always interested in the epithet ‘generous’ when it is applied to a lady’s favours. He said, ‘Good taste is one of the first casualties of our inquiries. I’m afraid. Let’s move to the present then, and those who are still around us. I understand you visited Edmund Craven each week to play chess with him during those last fateful months.’
Bring Forth Your Dead Page 7