Bring Forth Your Dead

by Gregson, J. M.

  ‘Yes. It probably has nothing to do with the case—in fact I’m sure it hasn’t, but you will need to be convinced of that, I suppose.’ She stared miserably into the fire, whose cheerful flames danced in faint reflection across her pallid features. Then she plucked her soft woollen cardigan unnecessarily about her shoulders and transferred her gaze to the hearth. ‘It happened a long time ago. It’s just that I didn’t like Walter concealing it from you.’

  When she seemed to find it difficult to go on, Hook accepted Lambert’s nod and said gently, ‘We are anxious to find out all we could about old Mr Craven. The more one can find out about a murder victim, the clearer the possibilities become about the possible killer. It was especially difficult for us to get a picture of the victim in this case, where the crime was already thirteen months old. So we were pleased to be able to talk to Mr Miller about Edmund Craven’s life when his wife was still alive.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That is when he held something back.’ She was tight-lipped and drawn, even after Hook’s emollient contribution. On the low wall at the end of the garden a robin surveyed the white winter landscape and chirped briefly at the great red orb of the setting sun, as if posing for an early Christmas card. There would be a hard frost on this still, clear night. ‘He was trying to protect me. He shouldn’t have done. You see, what he tried to hide gives him a motive for murder.’

  For a moment, Lambert’s mind was unworthily preoccupied with the ramifications of the law and the implications of a wife’s evidence against her spouse. Then he said, ‘We can make no promise, but we are as discreet as we can be about old affairs of the heart.’ It was curious how often clichés floated to the surface in situations like these; and strange how often they were effective. ‘Unless they have a direct bearing on the case, there is rarely any need for these things to come out in court.’ He thought sourly of how often nowadays the cheque-books of the tabloids brought forth lurid stories which had no such relevance, once a murderer had been convicted and acquired an abattoir glamour.

  She nodded, without looking at him. Then, suddenly, the words tumbled out, almost without punctuation, as if an invisible check had been abruptly removed. ‘Ed Craven and I had an affair, Superintendent. It was nearly thirty years ago now. It lasted almost a year. Then Walter found out.’

  Lambert felt Hook stiffen slightly beside him. They were such old hands by now that neither of them betrayed anything in their faces. They had been caught out when their experience should have protected them. Picking up the significant facts, they had made the wrong deductions. Walter Miller had certainly been disturbed by the mention of wives, had ensured that Edmund Craven only came to the house when Dorothy was out, had been pleased when the infirmity of Craven ensured that they could meet only at Tall Timbers. They had been right to suspect a sexual liaison in those far-off days, but they had picked the wrong pair, discounting the possibilities of the man who had faded and died against those of the one who had been such a vigorous physical presence before them.

  A curious phrase in the will of Edmund Craven came back to Lambert in Alfred Arkwright’s dry tones. Walter Miller, in being allocated Craven’s war memorabilia, had been called ‘my old friend of many years, with whom I have shared so much’. Including, it now seemed, a wife. Lambert heard himself saying rather foolishly, ‘That’s a long time ago now.’ He felt as if he were offering comfort in the confessional rather than establishing the facts in a murder inquiry.

  ‘Yes. I think Walter wanted to protect me as well as himself when he didn’t tell you about it.’ Now that she had made her revelation, her relief made her a little more relaxed.

  Perhaps she had never talked about this before, even to a woman friend. Lambert thought for a moment of the company director he had interviewed a few days ago in a fraud investigation, who had said without a hint of embarrassment of a woman who was involved, ‘We were lovers, of course, for a few months, but that was all over quite quickly,’ as if emotional life could be terminated as cleanly as a set of accounts. He said quietly, ‘Thank you for telling us this, Mrs Miller. Probably, as you say, it has no bearing on the case.’

  ‘But you see, from your point of view, it might have.’ Having finally brought herself to speak, she was determined that all should be made clear. ‘Walter is a passionate man, Superintendent.’ A trace of perverse pride came through in the assertion, and they saw her for a moment as a young woman who could break hearts, perhaps even cause men to kill. ‘He swore he would kill Ed for what he had done. At the time he meant it; he tormented me by saying that he would wait until the time was right, until the opportunity presented itself. I think he forgave me a long time ago. I’m not sure he ever forgave Ed. Ed Craven, like Walter, was quite a bit older than me, and that allowed Walter to throw the blame almost entirely on to him, as the years passed and the breach healed between the two of us. The fact that they had been friends for twenty years before it happened, had come through most of the war together as comrades, made it much worse for Walter.’

  She turned her palms fractionally upwards, allowed her rigid shoulders the tiny shrug which was another stage in their relaxation, and said, ‘I still don’t understand the male code in such matters. Walter was good to Ed in those last years. They enjoyed each other’s company and for most of the time their friendship seemed fully restored. But Walter seemed to have separated off his resentment. It was almost as though he had it locked in a box and took it out from time to time to treasure in private, like a miser with his money. Perhaps I was the only one who saw how that hatred still burned.’

  She looked into the fire again. The flames were brighter now upon her face as the day died, and the brown eyes sunk deep enough in their sockets to be invisible. Though she had said her piece now, it was a visage grey with apprehension. What she feared was that her husband, that handsome, passionate man with his relaxed transatlantic drawl, who nowadays took such affectionate care of her, had carried out his threat after all these years and murdered his old friend. That for thirteen months and more she had shared her bed and her life with a murderer. And even now, when she had brought herself at last to speak, there was not the complete relief she had hoped for; she realised as clearly as the men sitting opposite her that they could offer her no real reassurance for the moment. No reassurance, that is, which would be of any value when she lay awake in the long hours of darkness beside that soundly sleeping presence, fighting the doubts that had seemed so small by day.

  Lambert guessed all this, but to offer her comfort at this stage would have run counter to the whole process of detection. He watched her in silence for a moment. Then, timing his question with a clinical efficiency which ruthlessly cut across his sympathy for the woman, he said, ‘I understand that your husband took a box of chocolate each week on his visits to Tall Timbers?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at him blankly, failing at first to see any implication in his question.

  ‘For how long before Mr Craven’s death did he do this?’

  She thought hard, still untroubled by any sinister implication, still genuinely anxious to be helpful. ‘It’s difficult to be certain. What began as an occasional treat became a regular thing over a few months. That was as Ed’s health failed and he became almost housebound. I should think Walter began to take them every week about six months before Ed died.’ Now, belatedly, she caught her breath and, looked at him in horror. ‘You can’t think—? Poisoned chocolates! Surely that’s a bad joke from the nineteen-thirties?’

  Lambert said, ‘From much earlier than that. Christiana Edmunds was killing people with poisoned chocolates in Brighton as long ago as 1870.’ Burgess would have been proud of him for that, he thought.

  As an attempt to defuse an emotional situation, however, it was a notable failure. He saw her fear turning to outrage and said hastily, ‘We don’t think anything yet, Mrs Miller. We’re assembling facts. One of them is that Edmund Craven died as a result of ingesting arsenic, in several stages. A second one is that one of the best ways of
disguising arsenic is to combine it with some strong, sweet taste: chocolate is obviously an ideal medium. A third is that we now find that chocolates were taken each week into the house where Craven was murdered. You will agree, I think, that this constitutes a line of inquiry which it is part of our duty to pursue.’

  He had spoken as sternly as if addressing a recalcitrant child. It had the effect of checking any lurch towards hysteria. She said stiffly, knowing that her views could hardly carry much weight in this atmosphere of objectivity, ‘I’m sure Walter had nothing but the best intentions.’ She caught Lambert’s eye, for the first time in many minutes, and they exchanged small smiles at the formality of her words.

  He said drily, ‘Very probably not. I have to ask you if you ever saw him open one of those boxes of chocolates before he took it to Tall Timbers.’

  ‘Never,’ she said quickly. ‘I never even saw him take them out of their paper bags. I’m sure he never tampered with them. Does that leave him in the clear?’

  ‘I’m sure that your husband is far too intelligent a man to let you see him doctoring chocolates, if that is what he intended to do. But we have to ask. Sergeant Hook will record the negative fact that you saw nothing suspicious, alongside the hundreds of other facts which he and the rest of our team are assembling. Sooner or later, the facts which are the significant ones will form themselves into some kind of pattern.’ That at any rate was the way it was supposed to work. Even when it did, it was easier to see the process in retrospect than at the time.

  She said naïvely, ‘Does this make Walter your leading suspect, then? I didn’t know about the chocolates, and I’ve now given you a motive for him.’ She looked at him bleakly, and he realised she was doing little more than thinking aloud. She had brought them here to voice the suspicions about her husband that she could no longer contain. Now, when he seemed threatened, she would have died to save him. It was not unusual; marriage was a strange institution, particularly when it endured as long as this one had.

  Lambert did not look at Hook as he said, ‘Every one of the five people who had access to Edmund Craven in the crucial period has a motive, Mrs Miller. If motive alone was enough to prompt a killing, half the spouses in Britain would be lying dead. That is why we have to assemble all the facts we can. If we had known this was murder at the time it occurred, the Home Office pathologist would no doubt have been able to confirm or eliminate those chocolates as an instrument of death. As it is, we have to take into account every possibility. One of those, of course, is that those chocolates could have been used by someone other than your husband to kill the victim.’

  He was merely trying to be fair; perhaps, indeed, this time it was he who was thinking aloud. But she took it as a comfort, and gave him a look that was a request for enlargement and explanation. Feeling he was offering her a little hope in exchange for her revelations about her past, he said, ‘For what it’s worth, the scene of crime team found a hypodermic syringe in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom where Mr Craven spent his last months. It would have been the ideal instrument for anyone wishing to inject a solution of arsenic into the chocolates your husband took to him. Any of the other four suspects, as well as your husband, could have used it.’

  As if she knew how far he had stepped outside the code by which they operated, she said softly, ‘Thank you, Superintendent Lambert. That puts things into perspective for me.

  ‘There are also many methods other than chocolate by which arsenic could have been administered.’ He stood up. ‘Thank you for telling us about your relationship with the late Mr Craven. No doubt you will be in touch with us again if anything occurs to you which might seem of even marginal relevance.’

  Because he knew he had said more than he should have done, in an attempt to offer her what reassurance he could, he was trying to conclude formally. She herself offered the final sentiment, the platitude to complete his little homily, as she showed them out. ‘Yes. The sooner you make your arrest, the sooner the innocent will be able to resume their normal lives.’

  She stood beneath the lamp on the stone porch, watching them go as politely as if they had been old friends. A long-haired black cat with a white front picked its way past them in the snow, dainty even in its distaste for the frost-sequined surface, then darted swiftly into the house before the door could shut upon this icy world. They waved a brief, unaccustomed farewell from the gate, both hoping that for Dorothy Miller at least the nightmare would lift rather than close in.

  20

  There were not many people about in the CID section at the station. The digital clock over the door of the murder room showed 18.37. It took Lambert a few moments to remember that this was Friday: when the working days got beyond twelve hours, he found now that he rather lost count of their passing.

  Even in the police force, the British weekend claimed its obeisance. The routine office work was put away; he realised now why there were fewer policemen and fewer lighted offices than he had been expecting. He dismissed Bert Hook to set up his Christmas tree with the nine-year-old twins who were eagerly awaiting him. Then he sat for a few moments at his quiet desk, briefly indulging himself with nostalgia, remembering the wide-eyed girls who had once helped him to decorate his own trees, but were now grown up and gone. Then he reflected on how strong a presence children were in this case. That only son whom Edmund Craven had foolishly indulged over the years, who had been so anxious to get his hands on the lucrative site of his father’s house; that daughter who had resented the dead man’s treatment of her mother and her own children; Margaret Lewis and her son, each passionately defensive of the other’s interests.

  These musings prompted him to ring his wife, to tell her that he would be home within the hour. As he reached for the phone, his eyes roamed over the various notes upon a desk he had not seen for two days, and the impulse was forgotten.

  Rushton had reluctantly taken a day off, assured by his chief that this case was unlikely to reach its resolution in his absence. Lambert found as usual that it was easier to appreciate the DI’s efficiency without his presence. The notes of their conference in the murder room earlier in the week were neatly typed in a folder, the follow-up inquiries they had agreed upon had been pursued and were neatly summarised, with Rushton’s own intelligent comments added where appropriate.

  The other notes on his desk emphasised negatively how well organised, how much in bureaucratic control of his team, DI Rushton was. Compared with his briefings, the rest were thoughtless, even occasionally imprecise. It was the last of them which was the only one of any importance. It was scrawled as if the writer had been anxious to resume some other duty; as if he had failed to appreciate the significance it might have in a murder investigation. “16.23 hours. Message from Mr David Craven’s secretary. He would like to see Superintendent Lambert. No one else will do. He suggests 19.30 hours at Tall Timbers. Tried to contact you, sir, to pass on the message, but there was no reply from your car phone.’

  It was signed by the young detective-sergeant who had been added to the team to take part in his first murder investigation. For a moment, Lambert wondered unworthily if Rushton had chosen him merely to underline his own qualities of precision and persistence. Then he dismissed the thought: Rushton might not want competition, but he was secure enough not to be threatened by it. And he was too good a policeman to import sloppiness deliberately into his team.

  The DS should have recognised the potential of Craven’s request: it was almost always significant when a leading suspect in an inquiry actually asked to meet its leader. He should have made sure he got in touch with his chief, not left a note on his desk after a single unsuccessful effort to speak to him by phone. At 4.23 Lambert and Hook had been with Dorothy Miller, but at any time since then the car phone would have made contact. The station sergeant would have gone on trying the number, if only he had been asked. Lambert hoped wearily that this was not more evidence of the old divisions between the CID and the uniformed men which he had striven so hard to
eliminate.

  He looked back to Rushton’s notes on each of the suspects and tried the number given for David Craven. As he had expected, there was no reply; presumably it was a work number. He studied the note again, as if the scrawled words could themselves give a clue to what David Craven wanted to say. None of the CID team was around, though he could have raised whoever he wanted quite quickly by the phone which dominated policemen’s lives. He wanted Bert Hook, but the picture of the Sergeant with the boys who had come to him relatively late in life obtruded itself sentimentally upon his thoughts. Because he wanted no one else, he told himself obstinately that Craven’s message suggested he would talk only to him, that a third party might impede communication.

  He tried to ring Christine to tell her he would be home within the hour. The line rang engaged: probably Caroline was ringing her mother from Nottingham, as she often did on Fridays. No matter; the call had been motivated by no more than the tiny pricking of a long-subdued conscience. He would be home soon for the meal that had no doubt been ready for some time, able to say now that he had tried to make contact and found the line engaged. He checked with the station sergeant on the way out that Detective-Sergeant Rogers had not asked that he should be contacted with the message from David Craven, went into the night wondering whether the bollocking should be a ritual one from Rushton or a more private word from himself.

  Tall Timbers looked more massive and isolated in the freezing moonlight. With only the square black outline visible against the stars, its air of leisured Edwardian comfort was removed. The windows which gave the house its design as a place for human shelter were removed from the silhouette, so that the shape seemed to rear itself like a massive blind presence above him, menacing, anonymous, shutting out the stars, even the blue-black night itself, as he went towards it.

  The illusion of a great beast, denied its sight and turning dangerous, was reinforced by the bulldozer which loomed suddenly against the skyline on his left, like some primeval monster which had lumbered from its cave to attack the house. Already, two of the massive oaks that gave this place its name had fallen victim to it: even on this frosty night, Lambert could catch the acrid smell of roots and soil exposed to the air for the first time in a hundred years. The tearing apart of the site and the house, so bitterly opposed by Edmund Craven, had been initiated now by his son. To his left reared the machine which was the violent instrument of change; to his tight, the massive, helpless house, the dinosaur of the twentieth century.