by J M Gregson
It was delivered as dispassionately as if she had been announcing the time of a train. He had attended deaths before where he had suspected that spouses were not stricken with sorrow, but never one where a wife had so scorned to dissimulate.
‘That is not my concern. Unless of course it is connected with the death.’
‘Which it is not.’
‘No. We shall need to have an account of your movements in the last few days in due course.’ The human mind works so quickly that notions of a contract killing organised by this composed intruder flashed for a moment before him.
If he had intended his words to be any sort of threat to her, he would have been disappointed by her reaction. She said with scarcely a pause, ‘That you are welcome to have whenever you want it. In the meantime, I may as well get on with the identification of his body.’
‘As I have said, I regret that that is not possible at the present moment.’
‘Why? That is what I have driven here to do.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But there are certain procedures which cannot be overridden—’
‘Mr Lambert, is there anything in law which demands that I identify my husband in a mortuary?’
He felt that she knew the answer to that as well as he did. ‘No, but—’
‘Is it not indeed in everyone’s interest that this first formality is completed as quickly as possible?’
‘I suppose so, but—’
‘Then let us go out there and get it over with.’
He made a last attempt to protect her from what they would find. ‘Please believe me, Mrs Harrington, when I say that I am not merely being awkward, or retreating behind police bureaucracy. Close relatives are invariably in shock after a sudden death, often more than they realise. It is for their sake, not ours, that we establish procedures to protect them.’
‘In that case, let me go and identify my husband. I can assure you that it is for my own sake that I want to get this thing over. This is the end of one section of my life. I would prefer to see it terminated as soon as possible.’ She was as calm as if she were arranging a shopping expedition or a business appointment.
He looked at her for a moment, then stood up. He said, ‘As you say, there is no regulation which prevents you from identifying the body now. As long as you understand that I advised you against it.’ He moved towards the door, feeling even as he did so how churlish his surrender sounded. Behind him, she said, ‘I’ll even sign a statement to that effect if you feel you need to be indemnified,’ and he knew without looking that she was smiling at his awkwardness.
Lambert found an embarrassed WPC in the hall and sent her ahead to warn the people around the body of the widow’s approach. Then he strolled slowly towards the spot himself, covertly studying the woman at his side as they went. Her heels were too high for walking over grass, but she moved carefully, without any serious loss of elegance. Under the bright sun, the small enclosure seemed in the distance innocent enough, but apprehensive faces peered at them over the screens as they approached.
The body had been sheathed in plastic and eased on to a stretcher; the van was standing with back doors open ready to receive it. Lambert said with a final nervousness, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
The woman beside him did not even reply. She stood still to survey the scene for a moment, taking in the circle of anxious men, gathered around the static central figure as if awaiting some religious rite. Then she went slowly forward, and the uniformed man at the head of the corpse drew back the plastic.
In the sudden, absolute silence, everyone heard the dry catch in Marie Harrington’s throat and the uneven breathing which followed it; Lambert was curiously restored by this reassertion of the conventional. She recoiled involuntarily at what had been revealed, and he looked back to check on the presence of the WPC who had followed them discreetly from the old house.
But then the widow moved calmly forward, stood in straight-backed silence and studied the face below her. Lambert was glad to see that the head was laid so that the dark wound which blackened one side of it was downwards and almost concealed. Small residual patches of powder from the fingerprint officer dotted the blue wool on the corpse’s shoulders.
She looked for a long moment, bidding farewell to the man who had been her husband: Lambert wondered in what terms that silent adieu was couched. Then she turned away from the corpse and looked the Superintendent full in the face. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That is my husband, Guy Harrington.’
Her face beneath the neatly coiffured grey hair had gone very white. Her hands at her sides trembled a little. She took a deep breath and set off towards the clubhouse. She was as erect as she had been throughout, but her shoulders now were stiffly held. Each of the circle around the body knew that she would not look back. In her unsuitable shoes, she shortened her steps, but moved quite steadily, as though she was unwilling to concede to the onlookers any sign that she was disturbed.
On the other side of the river, scarcely sixty yards away from them, a Jersey cow lifted its head and regarded them with huge brown eyes. It bellowed a long mournful moo, which echoed down the valley and emphasised the stillness of the place. As Lambert and the widow moved away, it stopped its chewing and stood motionless, staring with those timeless eyes, as if it comprehended this death, and its insignificance amid the cosmic scheme.
When they were about a hundred yards removed from the enclosure and the little tableau they had left was cautiously resuming movement, she said, ‘Why the Sellotape on his clothing?’
‘To pick up any hairs or clothing fibres from his killer,’ said Lambert. It was the first time he had acknowledged openly to her in his own speech that he thought this a murder. ‘The strips will be examined under a microscope in the lab and any suspicious material will be picked off for further investigation.’
‘Do you know how he was killed?’
‘Not yet. Perhaps by the end of the day we shall.’ He did not tell her about the body being moved: to his relief she did not ask him about the blue-black blotching of the facial skin which had suggested the idea to them. He wondered anew whether she could be in some way involved in this death.
As if she read his thoughts, she said, ‘Have you any idea yet who might have killed him?’
‘If I had, I shouldn’t be able to tell you.’ They looked each other full in the face for the first time since they had left the ivy-clad hotel, and smiled. Perhaps they were both glad that the identification had been completed.
She looked at the ground, panting a little as they climbed the steep slope and skirted the eighteenth green. If she saw faces she knew peering at her covertly from the lounge in the residential block, she gave no sign of it. She said calmly, ‘You may have deduced by now that I had no great love for my husband, Mr Lambert. You may as well know that I hated him. I don’t feel as shocked by his death as you expected I should—perhaps I feel now that I’ve been half-expecting it for years.’
Lambert walked several yards on before he said, ‘As I’m going to be in charge of what looks likely to be a murder inquiry, I should turn your question round upon you. Have you any idea who might have killed your husband?’
She picked a small wisp of dry grass from her severe navy skirt, studying it as though it affected her reply. They had reached the car park now. She stopped and turned to face him. ‘I’m afraid I have no idea. But you have a wide field. Guy had not many friends and a lot of enemies. I can think of many people who hated him enough to kill him.’
7
When Lambert made his first contact with the group of people with whom Harrington had spent his final evening, the widow’s parting thought rang still in his brain.
The members of what had once been a relaxed holiday party were gathered in the lounge that had now become the centre of police operations. The death was still not officially confirmed as a homicide; in all essential respects it was being treated as one. The group which had assembled so happily for dinner some seventeen hour
s earlier carried signs of the tension now inevitable for them.
Once Lambert had introduced himself and Hook, an awkward silence fell upon them, as if each member looked to the others to make a move. It was Tony Nash who eventually said rather lamely, ‘We were here on a golfing holiday, but none of us feels like playing now.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Lambert. ‘Nevertheless, it would help our inquiries if you could remain here for a while.’
Nash looked sullen but uncertain. He glanced round the others, and Lambert divined that they had not concerted their thoughts and their opposition during the morning. He found that interesting. Now it was Meg Peters who said indignantly, ‘That is out of the question!’
Sergeant Hook said in his best NCO manner, ‘You are probably aware that we cannot require your presence here. Nevertheless, it would assist our work enormously. Obviously you had earmarked this time: the Manager tells us that you are booked in here for another two nights at least.’
‘But surely you can see that circumstances have changed. There is nothing to keep us here now.’ Miss Peters tossed her dark red hair imperiously and turned her green eyes full upon Bert Hook’s. She did not like policemen, perhaps because they were rarely in a position to respond to her charms.
It was Lambert who said drily, ‘Nothing except the good citizen’s normal desire to see justice efficiently executed.’
If the woman was piqued to find the reply coming from a different quarter, she did not show it. She turned unhurriedly to the Superintendent, weighing the argument before she said, ‘Now you’re applying a little blackmail. If we wish to get on with our own concerns, we’re accused of obstructing your inquiries. The next stage is to regard our exits as bringing suspicion on ourselves.’
Lambert assessed her. She sat with her head turned slightly upwards, so that the strong nose jutted aggressively at him beneath a white brow that was furrowed with indignation. He said with a small smile, ‘You assume, then, that this death was not accidental.’
It was said so lightly that they were left uncertain as to whether Meg Peters had fallen into some kind of trap. Eventually it was George Goodman who said, ‘You will understand that we have been kept in the dark all morning about the death of our friend. Are we to assume he was murdered? No one has seen fit to tell us yet.’
‘That is because we are not certain yet about the cause of death. All I can tell you is that we have been given reason to suspect foul play. Later in the day, when I have seen the pathologist again, I may be able to tell you more.’ It was not easy to make the old bromides sound fresh, but most of them nodded as if they found his words reassuring. He thought that at the end of a long morning’s wait they found any sort of information a minor comfort; the innocent ones, that is.
‘May we ask what reason you have to suspect foul play?’ Goodman was a JP. He knew enough of the law to be aware of his rights, enough of police procedure to know that he had little chance of a straight answer to his question. Unless, of course, it suited these men to give him one.
Lambert said, ‘Forgive me, but you have all been in touch with this business for rather longer than I have—I was in court for most of the morning.’ He looked into the shrewd blue eyes of his questioner, searching his brain for Rushton’s descriptions of the people in this key group. There was no mistaking the episcopal bearing of this man. ‘You, I assume, are Mr Goodman. I understand you discovered Mr Harrington’s body.’
‘Yes. With Mr Nash here.’ Goodman introduced Lambert and Hook to the other four members of the group. All of them, male and female, were aware as he did so that the man who would have taken this function upon himself yesterday had been violently removed from their midst. They did not resent Goodman’s assumption of the role: they were glad indeed that someone had taken a general initiative in answering the police. Yet both of the women found his avuncular manner an irritation.
Lambert said, ‘I’ve seen the spot where you found him. Did you think at the time that the death had a natural explanation?’
Goodman and Nash looked at each other. Each had assumed from the outset that someone had killed Harrington. For a moment they struggled with their own thoughts. Then Tony Nash said, ‘There was a lot of dried blood on the side of his face.’ He sounded like a schoolboy caught breaking the rules and trying to defend his action.
‘Yes. Was the blood already dry and nearly black when you found him?’ Lambert knew the answer; his interest was in the reactions of this group to the details of the death. There was a sudden, sick excitement in the air: he felt that the people around him realised that the murderer, if murder this was, was probably in this room. And as he took covert notice of the responses around him, he was aware of his own excitement too. The old adrenalin as the manhunt began: after twenty years he was still not sure whether it was a thing of shame or a necessary adjunct of his calling.
Nash and Goodman were looking at each other again: though both knew the answer to Lambert’s straightforward question, each seemed afraid of saying the wrong thing, as if a hasty word might incriminate him or others. It was a familiar first reaction to involvement in a murder investigation, but the Superintendent saw no reason to enlighten them about that. Creative tension, the social psychologist had called it at the last course his betters had thought it appropriate for him to attend. He was not sure whether to be gratified or dismayed by the discovery that what he had done instinctively over the years conformed with the latest theories of criminology.
Goodman said, ‘It was almost black. He had been dead for some time.’
‘Did you touch the corpse?’
Again the quick, confirmatory look at each other. Then, not quite together, so that the effect was almost comic, ‘No.’
‘You had no idea, then, of the surface temperature of the body at the time?’
Goodman gave a little shudder and said, ‘Look, Superintendent, is this really necessary? I imagine it must be very upsetting for the ladies in particular…’
Lambert looked round the five taut faces. He fancied that the two women were not altogether pleased to be distinguished as the weaker vessels in this way. ‘Not strictly necessary, no. I am interested in why you should have assumed that your friend had not died naturally. Was there anything else about the body that struck you as odd?’
The other three were watching Nash and Goodman now with interest and expectation. There was no visible sign of the distress which Goodman had suggested they might be feeling. For the first time, Nash, brushing a strand of yellow hair clear of his right eye, spoke without an interrogatory glance at Goodman. ‘Yes. He was lying—oddly.’
This time it was the two detectives who looked at each other, enjoying a little, not entirely innocent, collusion: they knew perfectly well what the man meant. Hook said, ‘Oddly?’
‘Yes. He was on his back, across the top of a mound. He could hardly have fallen like that, I think.’ Nash seemed to have made this deduction only now, unless he was acting his puzzlement rather well. The audience was scrutinising him closely.
Lambert said, ‘Well, you may well be right.’ He had no wish to communicate his own thoughts on the matter at this stage, though the image of that boxer splayed unconscious across the bottom rope of a ring came vividly back to him. The Welshman, Joe Erskine, he thought: the memories of adolescence were often more reliable than later ones.
‘Let me put you in the picture about the way we plan to operate. I hope to know more of the details of this death before the day is out. If, as we all seem at the moment to be anticipating, Mr Harrington did not die from natural causes, we shall have to ascertain exactly how he did die. It goes without saying that as the people who were with him in his last hours, you will all be key witnesses in any investigation. Sergeant Hook and I will need to see you all individually in due course.’
‘As murder suspects.’ It was Alison Munro’s first contribution since they had arrived. Sitting with long legs crossed in dark blue trews, she looked the most relaxed person in
the room. Her dark eyes were quite impenetrable with the light behind her, but her wide mouth edged upwards with something very like mischief.
‘Not necessarily. There are other explanations of unnatural death. Suicide, for instance, though I have to say I consider that unlikely in this case. Manslaughter, perhaps; though that might be a matter for lawyers to argue out rather than policemen.’
Alison toyed thoughtfully with a small gold ball-point pen, her slim fingers as elegant as its delicately tooled surface. ‘Is there a possibility that anyone other than the people in this room was involved?’
‘You’re rather jumping the gun in your presumptions, Mrs Munro.’ He noticed her little, involuntary start at the use of her name; possibly she recognised that the effort he had made to remember it signified her status as a suspect. ‘But yes, of course the culprit you are presuming may be someone you don’t even know. One of the things our team is busy with at the moment is checking exactly who was in the vicinity last night. Staff, visitors, anyone else who was in the area of the Wye Castle without good reason.’ It was true, of course: it was the boring background to every investigation, which the media generally chose to ignore.
Secretly, he hoped this gathering contained his killer; moving out to the second and much wider range of suspects often meant crimes went unsolved. ‘While I have you all together, let me ask you if there was anything you noticed last night which might be significant in relation to Mr Harrington’s death.’
There was silence. A silence in which the group looked at the carpet rather than each other. A significant silence, perhaps. He let it hang, and Hook knew him far too well by now to intervene.
It was the man in the room who was least at home with words who eventually found the silence unbearable. Sandy Munro said abruptly, speaking to his friends rather than the policemen, ‘There was a bit of an argument at dinner.’
Lambert, professionally calm, apparently unaware of the looks of startled resentment at this unexpected disclosure, said, ‘What sort of argument?’