Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  ‘Well, almost a row, really.’ Munro, having made the initial breach in their .collective silence, looked miserably for someone else to complete the capitulation.

  Meg Peters studied him calmly for a moment, her head slightly on one side, her remarkable red hair glinting in the strong light of the middle of the day. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether she was angry about his statement. Then she turned to Lambert and said, ‘There was a little spat between Tony and Guy, that’s all.’

  Lambert said, ‘Guy being Mr Harrington, I presume, and Tony—’

  ‘Mr Nash.’ There was a tinge of impatience in the words, edging the annoyance now evident in the set of her head.

  Lambert, totally unruffled, studied her for a moment before turning without haste to the youngest man in the room. ‘What was the subject of this little disagreement, Mr Nash?’

  ‘Nothing really, Superintendent.’ Nash’s smile was as ineffective as his words in dismissing the importance of the incident. He tried to shrug his broad shoulders free of the hunched tenseness which had beset them since his argument with the dead man had been mentioned. Then he looked round the room and found nothing to help him. The silence stretched; Lambert and Hook watched him steadily with expectant, interrogatory smiles. He said uncertainly, ‘Guy said something about Meg to which I took exception, that’s all. But he apologised and it was all forgotten before the evening was over.’

  Lambert looked from Nash to the others, wondering if anyone was prepared to go further. Meg Peters met his eye arrogantly, parading her refusal to give him more detail like a badge of defiance. Goodman and Munro nodded, confirming Nash’s low-key verdict on the episode.

  It was Alison Munro who said, ‘You must realise that the wine had been flowing fairly freely at the end of a day in the fresh air, Mr Lambert.’ With her unforced smile framed by her sculpted dark hair, she was like an elder sister excusing boyish horseplay, and Lambert saw Nash resenting it even as she supported his dismissal of the row as trivial.

  Lambert said, ‘Well, if any of you thinks that there was a more lasting resentment, there will be ample opportunity for us to explore the matter together when I talk to you in a more private context. In the meantime, thank you for your cooperation.’ He moved to the door, ignoring the fact that the cooperation he assumed had not yet been volunteered by the group. ‘My advice to you is that you go on enjoying the golfing and other facilities of this place as fully as is possible in these distressing circumstances. I look forward to seeing each of you privately in due course.’

  Sandy Munro wondered if he knew how much of a threat that sounded. He turned his thin face hard upon the carpet to conceal his relief as Lambert and Hook left the room. Even as he turned to the others to apologise for the small revelation he had made, he knew that he had concealed a greater knowledge from the police. And that others in the room had concealed things too.

  And that one of them was his wife.

  8

  ‘Home for lunch. This almost amounts to dereliction of duty.’ Christine came and stood at Lambert’s shoulder as he sniffed at the first of the roses, a Climbing Ena Harkness on the south-facing wall outside the kitchen.

  She was slim and alert, with dark, close-cut hair. In her tartan blouse and blue jeans, she looked trim and tidy even after a morning in the garden. She was almost a foot shorter than him as he smiled down at her and said, ‘Home was on my way to the pathology lab.’ He had more sense than to tell her that he had forgotten that she would be in the house rather than in school because of what he still thought of as the Whit holiday.

  ‘A corpse, then. I have to be a detective myself to piece together what you’re up to.’

  ‘A killing at the Wye Castle. That new country club outside Hereford.’

  ‘In pursuit of robbery?’

  ‘Possibly. I don’t think so. I’ll know more when I’ve seen Burgess and get the results of his PM.’

  ‘A light lunch, then.’ She was amused always by his delicate stomach in the face of the pathologist’s robust black humour. He watched her small hands making cheese and tomato sandwiches with what seemed to him amazing dexterity and speed. She did not like being watched, but had long since decided it was easier to endure it than to protest. She said instead, ‘Is Bert Hook with you on the case?’

  ‘He will be. We’ve hardly started yet. The body was found early this morning. By two of the suspects, apparently.’

  ‘I saw Eleanor Hook last week at the parent-teachers evening. Young Kevin will be in my class next year.’

  He recognised her resolute adherence to the world outside his work, which he now realised was one of her most valuable qualities. ‘It seems no time since he was born.’ Bert had married quite late and very happily. ‘Old Bert will be forty-four now.’

  ‘Very nearly as old as old John Lambert,’ she said drily. ‘Eleanor tells me he’s started on an Open University degree.’

  Lambert started to grin, then adjusted his features to neutrality just in time, as she slid the knife through the last sandwich and glanced sharply into his face. Patronising the uneducated was the ultimate sin in Christine’s short list. ‘You mean old Bert’s going to start answering back?’

  ‘With any luck, yes. He might even start correcting your quotations: he’s reading Humanities.’

  Lambert, secretly delighted, pondered the implications of this new development for the CID double act that had baffled friend and foe alike over the years of their association. Hook’s deadpan straight man had always concealed hidden depths; would he now begin to answer his chief’s wilder literary sallies, or even, heaven forbid, offer his own initiatives in the area? Rank still had its privileges, which surely must be preserved, for the sake of discipline in the force.

  He ate his sandwiches and considered the possibilities offered by a Barnardo’s boy with a degree. It was material for D. H. Lawrence; but wasn’t Lawrence on his way down again in the literary leagues of academia? He said to Christine, ‘You’d enjoy rooting among the psyches of our main suspects at the Wye Castle. Pampered products of private education, to a man, I should think.’

  Christine Lambert sturdily refused to contemplate the smaller classes and easier pastures of private schools. He was proud of her, immensely touched when, as often happened, people he came across paid unprompted tributes to her skills and persuasiveness as a teacher. He wondered why he should still find it so difficult to tell her so, why he preferred to tease her about her aspirations and her unstinting support of the underprivileged young. He saw enough of the results of deprivation to understand the importance of her work, even when she seemed sometimes to be swimming against an irresistible tide.

  She watched him as he ate his sandwiches and scanned the newspaper headlines in their new conservatory. Scarcely half a stone heavier now as a grandfather than when she had first known him at twenty; greyer each year, lined increasingly about the eyes and mouth. She could not conceive of him doing anything other than the detection of serious crime. Once she had resented his single-mindedness, to the point where it had almost destroyed them as a pair; now she almost cosseted it.

  She knew him well enough to know that even as he apparently relaxed with the sun on his face, his mind was busy already with the intricacies of his latest criminal puzzle. He left behind a cup still half full and a paper unopened.

  Not for the first time, she wondered how such a man would endure retirement.

  *

  Lambert knew as soon as he saw Cyril Burgess that he was about to confirm murder. He had the bland smile, the annoying confidence of a magician who has performed a trick which is baffling to his audience but child’s play to one with his knowledge and expertise.

  ‘Do come through to the inner sanctum, John. You will not be disappointed, I think.’ He indicated the way with an expansive gesture of an arm clad in dark blue worsted; with his Savile Row tailoring and silver-haired urbanity, he always suggested to Lambert the consultant surgeon he might have been.


  Burgess took his visitor past his lugubrious, disapproving assistant, with Lambert trying not to speculate about the nature of the russet smears which marred the front of the young man’s white overall. The Superintendent hoped he did not blench as he was taken to stand beside the body of the late Guy Harrington, almost as if the occupant of the slab was a patient who might be permitted visitors after a serious operation.

  Lambert tried not to think about the huge incisions in the flesh beneath the sheet, but he had attended too many post-mortems to be in much doubt about them. Indeed, only his senior rank had enabled him to depute the police presence at this one to a hapless junior officer. He found this one of those occasions when the human brain and the human imagination refuse to remain inactive when commanded to.

  Burgess brought out the notes he would later transform into an official report. ‘Stomach contents,’ he announced with relish.

  ‘Tell me, please, don’t show me,’ said Lambert apprehensively: he knew that the information was necessary to establish the time of death.

  Burgess grinned at the familiar effect his work was having on the Superintendent. ‘A meal of steak, potatoes, calabrese and carrots, what appears to me to be sherry trifle, cheese and biscuits, was taken some time before death. Coffee, as usual, and a considerable quantity of alcohol—I’d say the best part of a bottle of wine, and perhaps five standard measures of spirits. Of course, the people at that meal had only to toddle to their rooms and fall into bed on the site—no need to bother about driving.’

  Both of them knew the police could have found most of this from the people who had eaten and drunk with the dead man on the previous evening, but this was accurate and scientific and the Coroner’s Court would want to hear it. Lambert knew that Burgess liked to tease him by holding back the vital facts of his report as long as possible. He indulged him, in exchange for the unspoken assurance that he would not be asked to witness the internal organs of what lay before him beneath its sheet. ‘Time of death?’ he rapped, like one bringing an over-indulged child to heel.

  ‘My dear John, you always want precision where precision is least possible.’ Burgess pursed his lips, pretending to give careful consideration to a matter he had already decided for himself two hours earlier. ‘The body temperature said our friend had been dead for probably not less than twelve hours when I got him here. From the digestive state of the stomach contents, I’d say the meal was completed not less than three and not more than five hours before death. I imagine that puts us some time after the witching hour?’

  ‘Well after, I think. I understand they began what seems to have been a fairly leisurely meal at about eight. Probably they didn’t complete it before nine-thirty.’

  ‘Which would put death at somewhere between twelve-thirty and two a.m.’ Burgess rubbed his hands with satisfaction. ‘When all innocent citizens have entered the land of nod.

  “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds—”’

  ‘Yes indeed!’ Lambert interrupted ungraciously. Burgess, weaned on the detective fiction of the ‘thirties, thought death ignoble if not accompanied by quotation. The CID man in Lambert made him add sourly, ‘I doubt whether our killer at the Wye Castle will make himself so quickly obvious as the perpetrator of that Scottish bloodbath. I take it this was murder?’ He gestured almost apologetically at the corpse between them.

  ‘Oh, I think so.’ The pathologist gave again his impression of the surgeon who has completed a neat and successful bit of work, but Lambert, an expert in Burgess-analysis, detected a faint whiff of uncertainty.

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘From multiple injuries.’ Burgess made to draw back the sheet, but Lambert interposed firmly, holding it resolutely beneath the corpse’s chin. He felt the cold through the cotton. How quickly nature reduced a man to a carcase.

  ‘He was hit with something?’

  Burgess shook his head regretfully. ‘Our old friend the blunt instrument? Not in this case, I fear. Though that might make the case too straightforward to be of real interest, of course.’ He brightened as always at the thought of complexity in death.

  ‘What, then?’ Lambert was irritated as he had determined not to be by the conversational minuet he had to undertake to get information from this man without the lurid visual aid of a disembowelled corpse.

  Burgess gave up his attempt to remove the sheet, like one capitulating to the whim of a wilful child. ‘The injuries are commensurate with a fall from a height,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Depressed fracture of the skull, broken cervix, multiple internal damage and bleeding.’

  Lambert breathed the long sigh of one who begins to see the way clearing at last. ‘From an upper window?’

  ‘Or a roof. On to a hard surface. Possibly concrete, but more likely compacted gravel: there are numerous fragments of stone in the wounds. Death was instantaneous.’

  Lambert reviewed in his mind’s eye the paths around the new residential blocks at the Wye Castle complex. They were paved. He said woodenly, as though feeding a cue to the main actor, ‘But he wasn’t found near a building.’

  ‘No. Hence the rather unattractive complexion.’ Burgess nodded at the near-black patches on the face of the dead man. ‘Which is repeated elsewhere on the front of the body. Mr Harrington had been lying face downwards for several hours after he died.’ He made again to remove the sheet, and found himself once more resisted by the Superintendent.

  ‘The body had been moved?’ Lambert had deduced so much for himself in the hollow beneath the ancient beech where Harrington had been found, but he sought automatically the official medical confirmation of it.

  ‘I’d stake my reputation on it,’ said Burgess happily, as if reading the mind of a policeman who was mapping out his legal ground. ‘But I couldn’t say how he was moved. There were no marks on the body to indicate that.’

  Lambert walked over to the neat pile of clothes that were waiting to be labelled. He stooped his tall frame over the brown brogue shoes that stood beyond the clothes, as if waiting to be resumed by the feet that would never don them again. They were highly polished brown brogues, without a trace of scuffing. ‘He wasn’t dragged from the scene of death to where we found him. It would show on the shoes in this dry weather.’

  ‘Unless he was dragged by the feet,’ said Burgess, reluctant to reduce the possibilities at this early stage. For a moment he relished the vision of a silhouette against the moon at dead of night, dragging his victim stealthily across gravel and fairway to deposit him in the deep shadow of the great tree. It had the melodrama of grand opera; it was Sparafucile in Rigoletto.

  Then Lambert spoke and the vision faded. ‘Surely not. There are no graze marks on the head either. Sorry, Cyril.’ He rarely used the older man’s Christian name: it was a respect for all men medical which had been bred into him in a working-class childhood, though he was scarcely conscious of it.

  Burgess had known it was so really, for he had recorded in detail the state of the head, as of the rest of the corpse. The single large wound on the side of the head had been cleaned now, ready for viewing by distressed relatives; there were no other scratches upon the head or shoulders that would support his suggestion. He had merely allowed his taste for melodrama to overcome his sense of reality for a delicious moment. Somewhere within his sartorial rectitude, a trace of Dickens lurked. Balked of his sensational image, he tried his hand at detection. ‘A strong man, then, to carry this. He weighs two hundred and six pounds.’

  Lambert did a swift, automatic computation. Almost fifteen stone; at least Burgess had not gone metric on him yet. ‘It would be nice to eliminate women and weaklings as easily as that. But he could have been transported on something. The Scene of Crime team are examining the area in detail at this moment.’

  Burgess looked cast down. ‘Of course. A cart or something.’

  ‘Almost anything with wheels. If it’s still around, we’ll find it, in tim
e.’ As he turned with relief away from the body, a thought occurred to him. ‘Couldn’t Harrington have simply fallen? You’ve just said he’d had quite a skinful.’

  ‘He might, I suppose. Though I fancy that this man was well used to his booze, and it was taken over quite a long period, with lots of food. And if it was a simple accident, why on earth should someone move him afterwards?’

  Lambert had already had that very thought. And another, more intriguing one. With the possibilities of accident or suicide still present, why had all Harrington’s companions, the people who knew him well, assumed from the start that this was murder?

  9

  Alison Munro stepped from the shower, gathered the soft whiteness of the bath towel carefully about her shoulders, and moved into the bedroom. She flicked the untrammelled black hair outside the towel with the swift, unconscious gesture that had not changed over twenty years, a movement which remained unfailingly sensual simply because it was so undesigned for that effect.

  Sandy Munro, sitting in an armchair by the double bed with its Laura Ashley bedspread, registered the gesture with a swift shaft of poignant desire for which he was unprepared. He continued to stare resolutely at his paperback thriller; he had not turned a page in over ten minutes.

  An absurd pantomime began. He sat unnaturally still while his wife moved slowly about the room and began to dress. Each ostentatiously ignored the other’s presence; each was acutely aware of the slightest nuance of gesture in the other.

  He watched her in profile over the top of the pages he was not reading. As if in contempt of any hint of prudery, she turned wordlessly towards him as she dropped the towel and prepared to step into her clothes. Her flesh was firm still; only the tiny stretch marks of the pregnancies he had almost forgotten lined the white skin about her pelvis.

  He tried hard to ignore what his senses were registering: his mind as usual refused to be so disciplined. Despite himself, he was acutely aware of the breasts, smooth and firm above the flat stomach, the long legs with the firmness about the thighs that came from years of controlling mettlesome horses, the dark bush between them that had filled him with such longing and excitement as a young man. With a startling rush of tenderness, he saw the small mole where her right leg met her pelvis, which even the tiniest bikini had always concealed, so that he thought of it as a symbol of their intimacy available only to him.