Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, she was on edge. She must surely have expected this, but it had made her nervous for the first time. ‘We sat together on the roof of this building for quite a long time after the meal was over. I had a brandy: someone was passing round a half-bottle—Guy, I think. It was a beautiful, moonlit night, as you may remember. It was still quite warm at around midnight. It must have been quite late when we broke up; I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I couldn’t be sure of the time.’

  She was talking quickly, rushing on inconsequentially, postponing the moment she knew was inevitable. Lambert said, ‘And where did you go yourself at that point?’

  ‘Well, I wandered round for a little while before going to bed. Perhaps we’d all drunk a little too much.’

  Lambert doubted if that was true in her case. He said, ‘I believe your husband went for a walk on his own. You chose not to go with him?’

  She flashed him a look of fierce suspicion, as if she thought he was trying to trap her. Then she relaxed; but it was a conscious effort. He could see her working at it, like someone concentrating on releasing muscle tension at the beginning of a yoga class. She said ‘No. I didn’t want to be with Sandy then. I felt rather—confused. I suppose when I think about it now that I really had had a little too much to drink.’ Her little giggle sounded as false in her own ears as it did to the men studying her. It could have been explained as simple embarrassment, but she had shown no previous signs of being easily discomposed by the confession of a social peccadillo.

  ‘Where did you go, Mrs Munro?’

  The simple question became suddenly important, the atmosphere highly charged. Probably it was because they all recognised at the same moment that a woman who was not normally evasive, who perhaps even scorned to be so, was trying to disguise the truth. Alison Munro brushed a tress of dark hair impatiently back from her cheek, as though it had let her down by coming adrift at this point. She said, ‘I really don’t remember, Superintendent Lambert. I shouldn’t like Sergeant Hook to record what wasn’t true.’ It was a brave attempt at her former ironies, but no more than that.

  Lambert said quietly, ‘So you are saying that you cannot account for your movements at the time when Guy Harrington was very probably being killed.’

  ‘Guy was not killed during that period, Mr Lambert.’ She spoke with such conviction that she startled the two experienced men. ‘For what it’s worth, I didn’t go far. I think I wandered around the outside of the old house and then along the paths among the newer building blocks before I went back to our room.’

  ‘Did anyone see you? You can understand, I am sure, that we should like to have your movements confirmed.’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ The reply came too promptly from someone who should have been looking for corroboration of her story; perhaps she knew that such confirmation was not possible.

  Lambert, who had already decided he did not believe her, pressed as hard as he dared with a witness who was still a citizen voluntarily helping the police to pursue their inquiries. He said, ‘So you did not speak to anyone in this period between when the group broke up and you returned to your room?’

  ‘No.’ Again the reply came so hard on the heels of his question that there was scarcely a pause between. Then she said more deliberately, ‘If I had done, he’d be able to confirm my story, wouldn’t he?’

  Lambert wondered if there was anything to be deduced from the fact that she should assume it would be a male she might have met. She had a point, of course: he was going to check with the others in her party, so that if she had met one of them it should come out in due course. Unless both of them wished to conceal it. He said, ‘Did you speak with your husband when you got back to your room?’

  The dark eyes bored into his, the striking features which framed them seeming paler than ever. He was professionally inscrutable, exuding a calm he did not feel. Alison Munro said, ‘No, I don’t think so. Sandy was in bed and probably asleep. He gets of very quickly.’

  She looked down at the fraying edge of the carpet to her right, desperately wishing that she had been able to compare notes with her husband before this meeting.

  She was sure already that she had made the wrong reply to this last, crucial question.

  11

  WEDNESDAY

  ‘Any news from Jacqui?’ John Lambert was pleased to get his question in before Christine could inform him. Usually when he was on a case he forgot even his favourite daughter.

  ‘Not a lot. She saw the gynaecologist yesterday. The baby had turned himself over again and they put that right. Otherwise, everything is as it should be. About a fortnight, they think.’

  As he had anticipated, she was absurdly pleased that he had asked without being prompted; he felt a shaft of guilt that his omissions should be so manifest. Yet he cared deeply about the progress of Jacqui’s pregnancy. It was the old wall he erected between work and home. Other people, even other policemen, managed things better. He was well aware how he had almost broken their marriage twenty years earlier: neither he nor Christine ever spoke of those days now. The stubborn, stone-faced young Inspector and the lonely woman who had shrilled her resentment at him might have been two other people, removed now from their lives.

  ‘You’ll make a good grandfather, once you’ve got used to the idea again.’ As usual, she sensed his difficulty. He felt despite the grey hairs and crows’ feet he saw in the bathroom mirror each morning that he was still at the height of his powers. It seemed no time at all since he had held seven-year-old Jacqui and her sister upon his knee to watch the television serials at Sunday tea-times. Last year Caroline had made him a grandfather; now Jacqueline was about to do so again.

  He wondered if there were children involved in the death at the Wye Castle. None had surfaced yet, but people were capable of violent and irrational actions where their children were involved. He had seen such passions often enough in his work; he felt more in himself than he cared to acknowledge of that primitive, disturbing extremism which could strike at a man pursuing the interests of his children.

  He picked up Bert Hook on his way to the murder room at the Wye Castle; the Sergeant lived in a village which could be included on a route to the hotel by using some of the myriad lanes of the area. The big car had to run slowly for a mile or so behind a farm tractor, on a road where packs of wool had plodded six centuries earlier at the direction of the first British capitalists.

  Was their victim a descendant of that entrepreneurial line which began with the Cistercians in their monasteries? It was a depressing thought: from what they had learned already from his wife and friends, Guy Harrington seemed a markedly less benevolent operator of economic power than those monks who had filled the valleys with sheep and sucked in the gold of Europe to pay for their wool. The exploitation of capital seemed to have a very different philosophical basis in the nineteen-nineties.

  The tractor turned at last into a field and Lambert moved thankfully out of second gear. He broke the silence that had prevailed between the two big men since their initial greetings with ‘Any ideas yet about a murderer?’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ said Hook, so promptly that he must have been anticipating the question. Then, as if he thought this cheerful denial unbecoming in one of his profession, he said, ‘The Munros are trying to hide something, but whether it’s murder or not I wouldn’t be sure.’ He glanced sideways at his chief, but found as he expected that there were to be no great revelations from him at this stage.

  ‘The key thing is obviously what happened in the two hours after the group broke up. Both Munros have already lied to us about that—how extensively remains to be seen. I wonder which one of them really returned to their room first.’

  ‘Alison Munro didn’t seem to me a woman who would lie habitually.’ Hook stared steadily away from Lambert and through his side window at a cloud of starlings wheeling round an ineffective scarecrow: he had been ridiculed too often in the past for his susceptibility to dark eyes and soft contours. />
  Lambert gave a sideways glance of amusement at the profile so resolutely turned towards the fields. ‘But she is married, Bert. Remember, “Though women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.” Marriage can make a liar out of an honest woman.’

  Hook tried not to look triumphant: he had identified the source of the Superintendent’s quotation, for Lambert had used it on him before. He said calmly, ‘I don’t think Byron can claim to be the best authority on wedlock.’ The starlings twittered a celebratory chorus for his coup as they passed within thirty yards of them; he wound his window right down to allow them maximum effect.

  ‘If the Open University is going to remove all sense of decorum, I shall have you transferred,’ said Lambert indignantly. ‘You’ll be correcting my little gems next.’

  ‘Isn’t it Byron who speaks of the critic who had “just enough of learning to misquote”?’ said Hook. This time he could not contain his smile, which broke in full glory over his rubicund features. Wedlock, despite his chief’s view, was a most useful institution; was it not his wife who had directed him to the book reviews in the Observer, whence he had quarried this useful nugget?

  There was less evidence of melodrama at the Wye Castle Hotel and Leisure Complex than on the previous day. The manager watched their arrival with anxious eyes, then went back to hopping nervously among staff who, like him, had too little to do in the absence of new guests. Outside the lodges which housed the murder room, there was but a single white police vehicle announcing its presence. But the CID men, levering themselves out of Lambert’s ageing Vauxhall, recognised several unmarked vehicles which belonged to their team.

  The clouds were high, but they raced on a brisk breeze above the ivy-clad crenellations. They walked beneath the high wall whence Guy Harrington had fallen to his death. Lambert was not sure whether he wished to tune his mind to detection by visiting the spot where he was sure Harrington had died, or whether he merely wished to savour the view over the Wye which the hotel used so prominently in its brochure. Probably, he thought, the latter, for the panorama they came upon so suddenly at the corner of the old building was both spectacular and uplifting.

  They were probably two hundred feet above the river, which wound its way in a leisurely horseshoe through the rich green base of the valley, as it had done for thousands of years. It was a stretch which might have been designed to illustrate the fascination of water in a view. At the extremes to right and left, where the river curved in wide reaches until it disappeared beneath trees, its deep blue was so undisturbed that it might almost have been static. But at its nearest point, where it squeezed the golf course to its narrowest width below the professional’s shop, the waters rushed in a gentle turbulence over an ancient and long-disused ford, so that the water whitened and sparkled in the bright sun. It was near enough and their surroundings were quiet enough for them to catch that most ancient and beguiling sound known to the ears of men: the sound of water swirling and chuckling over stones.

  Beyond the quadrangles of residences was a bowling green where a sprinkler made miniature rainbows against the sun. Here three men sat on a bench with their backs to the buildings, looking over the edge of the green to the beauty of the river and its valley. Lambert recognised the natural tonsure of George Goodman easily, then from closer quarters the grey-flecked ginger of Sandy Munro and the longer golden locks of Tony Nash.

  One of the by-products of a murder inquiry is to make those who are investigated feel sensitive about innocent actions which they feel will be observed and misinterpreted. Lambert, wondering now if the earnest colloquy of these three men carried sinister implications, realised that the corresponding strain in those who investigated was to suspect conspiracy where harmless and desultory conversation was probably all that existed.

  Goodman’s first words might have been designed to underline how ridiculous were such assumptions. He was the first to see Lambert and Hook. He called, ‘Good morning, gentlemen!’ and came forward to receive them like a genial host. ‘This is a pleasant place to be incarcerated, is it not?’ He gestured with a wide arm at the natural glories behind him. ‘I can understand that you should wish us to see out the time we had booked here, and of course we are only too anxious to see this matter cleared up.’

  Lambert had remained noncommittal for as long as possible: it was always interesting to ascertain whether suspects would reveal things about their state of mind by talking too much, even when their matter was trivial. He said with a smile, ‘We find that respectable citizens like you are always anxious to help.’

  ‘Do you think it was murder?’ Tony Nash spat the question like one weary of insincere exchanges. After Goodman’s half-humorous circumlocutions, his directness seemed the more stark. His right hand grasped his left forearm unnaturally hard, as if it was the only way he could keep his limbs still. The stance make Lambert alter his plans for his first interview of the day.

  ‘I’m afraid certain things about this death point that way. You wouldn’t expect me to go into detail. You’ll hear what they are clearly enough at the inquest, I expect. As one of the discoverers of the corpse, you’ll be asked to give evidence, of course.’

  There was no need yet to tell them that Harrington had crashed to his death on the gravel; there was always the chance that guilty men might betray themselves by revealing knowledge they should not have. But he thought wryly that all his suspects were intelligent enough to make the obvious deductions from the elaborately cordoned areas around the house.

  Nash looked very tense at the thought of the inquest. It was Goodman who said, like a tactful man changing a delicate subject, ‘We’ve just decided that as we have to be here, we might as well play golf, as we intended to do before this tragedy. Unfortunately, we now find ourselves one short of the four-ball we expected to play. We can play three, of course, but I’m afraid we should always be conscious then of our missing colleague. I don’t suppose you would have the time or the inclination to join us for a game some time, Superintendent? Your Inspector told us you were a single figure man.’

  Goodman managed the deprecating smile very well. As a JP, it said, he was thoroughly at home with policemen and police procedure. He would demonstrate to those less acquainted with these things that the innocent had nothing to fear. What gave him away were the startled glances which his two companions could not control. This was his initiative alone, not a joint one.

  Lambert was for a moment as disconcerted as they were. At once amused and aghast, he found himself picturing the faces of Bert Hook and Christopher Rushton if he played. Not to mention that of the Chief Constable if he came to hear of it, as he undoubtedly would. It was unthinkable that he should accept the invitation.

  ‘I should be delighted,’ he said. ‘If the circumstances of the investigation permit it.’ He noted with satisfaction the dismay of Nash and Munro, even perhaps a fleeting surprise on the urbane features of Goodman that his bluff should be called so promptly. He did not dare to glance at Hook. ‘Not this morning, though. Perhaps I might join you for a game this afternoon, if my schedule will allow it?’

  ‘That would be admirable, Superintendent.’ If Goodman’s equilibrium had indeed been shaken, there was no sign of it when he spoke. ‘We’ll play a few holes on our own this morning, then hope to see you on the tee at, shall we say, two-fifteen?’

  ‘I shall look forward to that,’ said Lambert, drawn into the conventional courtesies even in these bizarre circumstances. ‘But I’m afraid I must deprive you of Mr Nash for a while: I need to check his recollection of events on the night of the death.’

  Nash must have known this would come sooner or later, but he looked thoroughly miserable about it, like a man answering the summons he has long expected to the dentist’s chair. It was left to Goodman to answer suavely, ‘Of course, of course. We shall look forward to your company this afternoon, Mr Lambert, if duties permit.’

  ‘I should be ready for you in about a quarter of an hour, Mr Nash,’ said Lambert. He turned swi
ftly on his heel and left them; Bert Hook followed him with what he hoped was a deadpan face. This ridiculous game clearly upset the judgement of people who should know much better by now. Ahead of him, Lambert was nursing the thought that it would be interesting to study the interactions of those three in a supposedly relaxed context; he wondered how far that was a rationalisation of his impulsive acceptance of Goodman’s invitation.

  He was well on his way to the Murder Room before he noticed Sergeant Johnson, who was in charge of the Scene of Crime team. The officer had that indefinable air of importance which stiffens the back of men charged with news. He was standing by the corner of a long, single-storey brick building which must once have been stables but now accommodated a variety of golf-course machinery and other implements. Lambert went over to examine the object which was the source of his restrained excitement.

  It was a heavy wooden wheelbarrow, with a steel rim on its single heavy wheel. Probably fifty years old and dating from the days of the private estate, its sturdy workmanship proclaimed that it was good for many years of service yet. But it had now fulfilled its single dramatic function in this long working life.

  For Johnson said, ‘This is the means employed to move the body, sir.’ He was already anticipating the convoluted phrasing of the courtroom. ‘The wheel fits the only tracks found within twenty yards of the body. And forensic have just confirmed that the fibres we found at each end of this came from the back of Harrington’s cardigan and trousers.’