Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  Burgess looked back at the man at the centre of this mystery. The corpse had that look of superiority which seemed often to descend upon victims of violence, as if they were full of knowledge they could never now reveal. ‘I’d guess at something not far off fifteen stone,’ he said. ‘It would take a strong man to carry him here.’

  ‘Or two determined women. Or some form of transport,’ said Lambert. He looked at the smooth green turf between them and the residential complex. ‘The ground is always hard when you’re looking for signs of wheel tracks.’ But if anyone had come that way with a dead weight as heavy as the one beside them, he would surely have left some trace.

  He took a last look at the body of Guy Harrington, splayed so awkwardly across the hump of turf; his stomach pointing at the sky in a pose he could not have held for long in life. If he had been dumped rather than fallen here, this odd disposition of the limbs was explained. It was the last time he would see him thus, and he left the site with a familiar regret, as if unlimited time to himself here would tell him things about this death which would otherwise take much hard digging among the living. It was no more than a superstition, to which a rational man could not even admit. He went over to the driver of the waiting van. ‘You can remove him as soon as the Scene of Crime Officer is satisfied,’ he said.

  The three men walked silently back towards the lodges, each busy with his own thoughts. Detective-Inspector Rushton, Lambert’s deputy, was waiting for them there. ‘Murder Room here, sir? There’s plenty of accommodation—the place is much less than half full at present.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘It looks as though he didn’t die where he was found. Make sure the whole area around the house is searched thoroughly before the public are allowed back.’

  Rushton said with satisfaction, ‘Already in hand, sir. If he died here, we should know where by the end of the day. By the looks of him, there should be blood somewhere.’

  Lambert found himself wishing Rushton were not so consistently ahead of him. It was petty: the DI was efficient and enthusiastic, and he had already been here for three hours. He said more sharply than he intended, ‘And look for something on which the corpse might have been transported. If we’re right that the body has been moved, I doubt whether he was taken out there on someone’s shoulders.’

  Rushton said, ‘I’ve already cordoned off the cars. The Scene of Crime team will have someone on to them within the hour.’

  ‘A car is the obvious thing, but a lot depends on where he died. I doubt whether you’d get a car round the river side of the buildings without leaving obvious evidence. Anything with wheels needs investigating.’ With difficulty, he refrained from adding, ‘But of course you’re aware of all that.’ Serious crime teams knew their business; it was a sign of old age to need to dot too many i’s. Instead, he said, ‘I understand he was here with a golfing party. They’ll need to be kept around.’

  ‘I’ve already seen them. They’re booked in for another two nights. They were ready to pack up and go home, but I told them we’d need them around for some time. I think they’re going to stay on as booked.’ Rushton as always was full of his own efficiency. Lambert, prepared to use it as usual, felt guilty that he should so resent the man’s manner. Perhaps it was his fault: if there were more warmth between them, Rushton would not feel so continually obliged to demonstrate his own competence, like a newly appointed school prefect.

  He said, ‘If the place is so empty, perhaps we could clear one of the new residential sections completely for our use. I’ll see the Manager.’ It would not be too difficult: once the owners accepted the inevitability of a police presence, they would be ready enough to isolate it as far as possible from their own customers.

  He looked across a gravelled courtyard to the picture window of what seemed to be a lounge. Anxious faces, male and female, stared back at him from behind the glass. Presumably the golfing party from which the dead man had so abruptly departed. In spite of himself, his pulses quickened a little at the prospect of beginning his investigation among them.

  ‘I’ll go and see the Manager myself and arrange our set-up,’ he said. It was as though he was deferring a pleasure until humdrum routine matters had been attended to. Already he had abandoned thoughts of a willing confession.

  People willing to proclaim their guilt came forward in those first emotional hours after the murder: the man out there had already been dead too long for that.

  5

  In the hall of the old building, he took possession of the hotel register which was kept at the desk. It would be necessary to interview everyone who had been in the vicinity at the time of the murder: staff, guests, casual visitors who called for a drink and found themselves caught up in the potential drama and more usual tedium of a murder investigation.

  Every movement would need to be checked, every story examined, every witness to innocent movements sought out. Elimination was the most usual form of progress in the early stages, slow but certain, focusing attention hopefully upon the two or three people with both opportunity and reason to kill. Except that it was rarely as tidy as that.

  The Manager was young, harassed, thrown out of his stride by violent death, as more resilient men than he had been before him. Lambert found him on the phone to head office, absurdly anxious to reassure them that this affair was none of his making, that it could not have been foreseen. He assented dumbly to Lambert’s arrangements for a Murder Room and the questioning of suspects, brightening a little at the thought that this business had a solution and his troubles might after all be finite. There were only four people staying in the newest red brick complex of rooms, which overlooked the eighteenth green. They agreed that the four should be moved to lodges at the other end of the development, so that the police could have the space and privacy they would need as the investigation developed and the evidence accumulated.

  Lambert said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Clifford. I appreciate that these arrangements will mean a considerable amount of work, but I can assure you they are very necessary. The Scene of Crime team will disturb your guests much less this way.’

  Clifford licked his lips and pulled at his tie. ‘You think a crime was committed last night, then?’ He was like a man who could not resist picking at a sore.

  ‘Almost certainly a most serious crime.’ Lambert watched the young man sweating and wondered if it was merely his youth which he found irritating. ‘Do you have a night porter on duty overnight?’

  ‘Not at present. One has been appointed and will be here from the beginning of June. Of course we haven’t been open very long and there are very few guests here at present. Ten days hence, we shall have the first of our large parties and—’

  ‘So there was no one in charge of security in the small hours?’

  ‘Not really. I live on the premises myself, of course, and I try to keep an eye on what is going on.’ He looked at the wall behind Lambert, measuring everything in terms of the impact it might have at head office.

  ‘And have you any idea what went on last night?’

  ‘Not really. Mr Harrington’s party stayed in the complex after they had eaten dinner in our restaurant. I could hear them—not that they were particularly noisy. And as I said, there are very few other guests to disturb at the moment. But with them being outside, the sound carries, and I could hear them in my flat, so that—’

  ‘They were outside?’ Lambert’s sharpness made Clifford start. Like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons, the Superintendent thought, wishing immediately that such phrases would cease to spring unbidden to his mind.

  ‘Yes.’ The Manager looked like a man who regretted conceding so much.

  When a CID man sees discomfort in a subject, his inclination is to investigate the cause. ‘Where?’

  Clifford clenched and unclenched his fists, quite unconsciously, it seemed. ‘I think they were on the flat roof a couple of storeys above where they had dined.’ He gave up the information reluctantly, like a man being made to talk
about the weak area in a job application.

  ‘You’d better show me.’

  Clifford looked thoroughly miserable, but he nodded and stood up without a word. He led the way through a maze of corridors and staircases, where new extensions jostled against the more spacious proportions of the old house. They emerged suddenly into the bright sun and stood blinking at a view over the tops of tall trees to the river below them.

  Lambert realised immediately why Clifford had been embarrassed that visitors should be up here. There was a row of four-feet-high steel posts set into the stone parapet around the edge of the flat roof. Between them, a single series of wooden planks ran horizontally, no more than fifteen inches from the floor level. Lambert walked over to examine two of the steel posts, confirming what was already obvious to both of them as he fingered the bolts at the top. ‘Where are the other two levels of railing?’

  Clifford tried to shrug the matter away, but managed only a rather ludicrous twitch. His too-vivid imagination projected him already into an investigation with the company safety officer. ‘They’re on order. The work should have been done by now. You know what builders are when the spring comes: they promise the earth to get the job, then when they have it you never see them. It was supposed to be part of our winter renovation programme: the old rails were removed because they were rotten.’ He talked too quickly, as if hoping a multitude of detail would make a feeble explanation more convincing.

  ‘So why were the public allowed access?’ said Lambert wearily. He wanted to get on with the investigation, not persecute this unfortunate fall guy, but these were necessary preliminaries.

  ‘They weren’t.’ Clifford went and looked outside the door they had just come through. He looked around for a moment and pounced upon a yellowing piece of card which lay face down on the carpet at the top of the stairs. He showed it without great hope to Lambert. Someone had scrawled in longhand with a green felt-tip, ‘Roof not open to visitors.’ The card looked as though it had been lying on the carpet for some time.

  Lambert forbore to tell the Manager that the door to the roof should have been locked. They both knew that; no doubt if the Wye Castle had been fully staffed it would have been. Just as they knew that Clifford could have come up here and asked the party to leave the roof. If he hadn’t been tired, and they hadn’t seemed sensible, mature people. Lambert said, ‘How long were they up here?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps a couple of hours. My flat is some distance away, at the back of the main building. I didn’t hear them after midnight, but I must have been asleep myself from about then.’

  Lambert peered briefly over the edge of the roof, taking care not to touch that single, inadequate rail which marked its perimeter. Impossible to see anything from this height. He turned abruptly away and said, ‘This door had better be locked immediately, and the key given to the Scene of Crime team in our operations room.’

  He followed Clifford back through the passages, treading carefully through the gloom over ground which was familiar territory to the younger man ahead of him. When they had reached ground level, Clifford said jerkily, ‘Will I be in trouble over that roof? The buck stops with me as manager, as usual.’

  ‘Impossible for me to say, I’m afraid. It’s not my department, but the coroner might have something to say.’

  Clifford nodded abjectly, already seeing unwelcome headlines. He was unlucky, of course. People like him took risks all the time with public safety, and for the most part got away with them. Lambert, suddenly sorry for him, said, ‘Of course, if we are by then in the throes of a murder investigation, he might be excited enough to forget all about such things.’ He was not sure whether he was trying to offer comfort or test the reactions of the manager to the idea of homicide within his dominion.

  Clifford stopped so quickly that the Superintendent almost ran into him. ‘You think this was murder?’ The sickly glamour of the notion touched his face with a new animation. It was the first official acknowledgement of the idea that had both excited and dismayed him.

  ‘It has to be a possibility. We should know by the end of the day.’

  Back in the high hall outside, garish cherubs beamed down incongruously from the painted ceiling. The girl at the reception desk, who seemed to be enjoying the novelty of the situation much more than her boss, was waiting for Lambert to emerge from the Manager’s office. ‘There’s a lady who insists on seeing you, Superintendent,’ she said. It was part of her training to get titles right from the start.

  Perhaps she saw the beginnings of his negative reaction: it was a conditioned reflex in him to suspect journalistic invasion wherever there was a whiff of sensation. She opened the door to a small anteroom before he could deny her and said, ‘I put the lady in here.’

  The woman who rose as he entered was tall and composed. Lambert, trained by long usage to make such assessments automatically, thought her about fifty. Her navy blue jacket and dress were severe, but becoming on her spare, erect figure. Her curls of grey hair were impeccably groomed. Only the hollows beneath the grey eyes gave any evidence of strain.

  She said with the hint of a smile, ‘I thought you might wish to see the widow immediately. I’m Marie Harrington.’

  6

  She put the emphasis on the second syllable, pronouncing the name as ‘Maree’s

  Perhaps that suggested the elegance which was Lambert’s first impression of her. With his face composed to an appropriate solicitude, he wondered how near at hand was the WPC who should be dealing with this: the officer at the gate would never have directed the woman to him. He already felt at a disadvantage through coming later than he would have wished to an investigation already under way; he needed a distraught widow now like a hole in the head. Not a very tactful simile, he warned himself.

  He stuttered, ‘I’m sorry about all this… There was no need for you to rush here immediately, you know… Nothing you can do… They should have told you that.’ Hearing his retreat behind the ubiquitous ‘they’, he felt both foolish and inadequate. He had dealt with this situation many times in the past; now he was thrown of balance by its unexpectedness, and annoyed with himself as a result.

  Marie Harrington let him flounder through his explanations without interruption. The neat grey curls framed an intelligent face above a high, unlined neck. She said, ‘The police came round at nine-thirty this morning. They said there was no need for me to do anything immediately, but I felt I must come. It’s not much over a hundred miles, you know.’ She was composed, perfectly organised in her thoughts and their expression. Absurdly, he felt that it was she who was helping him over the difficulties of the meeting, when the reverse should so obviously have been true.

  ‘No. But there’s nothing you can do here.’ He looked round, as if expecting some kind of help or inspiration from the polished panelling. ‘You should have been met by a woman constable—given a cup of tea and whatever information we can give you at this stage…’

  ‘I came straight in here and went to the desk. None of your people was at fault: the men at the gate didn’t direct me here.’ She was smiling at him now.

  He said stiffly, ‘But you shouldn’t be here, I’m afraid. Not at the moment.’

  ‘I thought I had to identify the body. They told me that at home.’

  ‘In due course. Not now.’ He thought of the scene on the golf course, of the corpse being examined minutely for clues, treated as the thing it had become; of that thing being slid into a plastic bag and loaded without ceremony into the plain van. There was no place for a widow in that scene.

  ‘I should prefer to identify Guy now, Superintendent. I promise you I shall not embarrass you.’

  It was a moment to be firm but compassionate. He tried to muster the right expression. ‘I’m afraid that is out of the question, Mrs Harrington. You must understand that after a death of this kind there are certain procedures—’

  ‘A death of which kind, Superintendent?’ He could have sworn she was gently mocking him
, had that not been impossible in these circumstances.

  ‘Mrs Harrington, I have to tell you that it does not seem at the moment that your husband died from natural causes—’

  ‘Was he murdered?’ She introduced the word he had been carefully avoiding with a hint of impatience.

  ‘That I cannot say. We are at the early stages of our investigation. But we cannot rule out foul play at the moment.’ He was glad that Burgess was not here to witness his discomfiture, which was driving him into the very clichés the pathologist would have loved to hear.

  Marie Harrington looked at him coolly for a moment. Her face was drawn, but the lines as her eyes creased a little were of humour rather than strain. ‘So you think he was murdered.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. The Coroner has been informed of the facts. There will be a post-mortem examination. After that we may be able to tell you a little more about the circumstances of your husband’s death.’ He wished he knew exactly how much of those circumstances had been revealed by that faceless policeman in Surrey who had been charged with delivering the news of the death to the widow. He could not see a young constable being able to withhold much from this woman. He added rather desperately, ‘That will he the time for you to identify your husband’s body.’

  ‘When he’s been neatly sewn up and presented for viewing to the grieving relatives.’ She smiled openly at him now, and he responded with a weak grin of his own; it seemed safer than speaking when he could think of nothing useful to mitigate the starkness of the picture she was painting.

  She clasped her hands on her lap. She wore no nail varnish, and but one ring; it had a single large emerald, and was not on her wedding finger. She said, ‘Mr Lambert, it might help things along a little if I tell you frankly that I shall not be grieving overmuch.’