Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  ‘Almost. I had put the clubs away all right, but forgotten to lock the boot of the car.’

  ‘Make and model?’ said Hook, ballpoint poised.

  ‘Ford Granada. This year’s model.’ He looked puzzled by the question.

  Lambert knew the point well enough. But there was no discrepancy: the boot did indeed need locking, though it could be done by means of the car’s central locking system. Some cheaper and older cars had boots which locked automatically when the lid was put down. He said, ‘What would you estimate was the total time between the others leaving you with Harrington and your returning to your room?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. At the time, I obviously didn’t think it was important. Perhaps a quarter of an hour.’

  ‘Did you see anyone while you were in the car park?’

  ‘No. I expect Sandy Munro was well away, down towards the gate somewhere.’

  ‘And when you got back to your room, was Miss Peters already there?’

  Nash hesitated. ‘I met her at the door.’

  ‘Do you know where she had been?’

  ‘No. I presumed at the time she had been with Alison Munro. But I didn’t ask. There was no reason why it should have been important, at the time.’

  ‘No. I have to ask you formally now, Mr Nash, whether you have any thoughts about who might have brought about this death. Needless to say, we will respect your confidence.’

  ‘No.’ Nash looked thoroughly disturbed; perhaps he had not really contemplated head on the notion of murder by one of their group until that moment. Then, in a burst of confidence, he said, ‘I’m not at all sure that I’d tell you if I did.’

  Lambert gave him a sour smile. ‘That would be most unwise, Mr Nash. It would make you an accessory after the fact of murder. I must remind you that it is your duty to come to us immediately if anything occurs to you which might seem to have a bearing on this most serious of crimes.’

  Nash levered himself easily from the chair by the use of his powerful forearms, but he looked as chastened as a schoolboy as he was dismissed. Lambert was still gathering his thoughts and watching Hook complete his record of the interview in his round, careful hand when there was the most discreet of taps at the door.

  Sergeant Johnson, head of the Scene of Crime team, came almost apologetically into the room. ‘It’s Inspector Rushton’s day off. We’ve just had a message through from Forensic. I thought you’d like the news right away, as soon as you’d finished your interview.’ Johnson had got Lambert attacked and almost killed by his failure to pass on a vital message in the previous year[1]: he still addressed him as if in perpetual expectation of a reprimand.

  ‘Well?’ Lambert was disgusted with himself that he should be so pleased that it was not Rushton who had collected this news.

  ‘They’ve analysed the strips taken from the corpse’s clothing, along with other samples. There are fibres which indicate someone else has handled the body. Presumably the person who lifted it on to the wheelbarrow and moved it. The position of the fibres, on the lower back, indicates that someone—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fibres appear to be from the sweater worn on that evening by Sandy Munro.’

  13

  Detective-Inspector Christopher Rushton was one of the modern breed of husbands. He shared the household chores, changed nappies, and on his day off he sometimes even helped his wife with the shopping.

  He was also a policeman, and policemen are notoriously conservative animals. Rushton was sufficiently affected by his calling to be diffident about declaring his enlightenment in domestic matters. It was all very well to be acclaimed a pillar of the campaign against chauvinism among his wife’s friends, but the same qualities could declare him a wimp at Oldford CID headquarters, where the male ethos was still overwhelmingly predominant.

  Consequently, Rushton cast the occasional furtive glance over his shoulder as he pushed the slowly filling supermarket trolley between the avenues of tins and packets. None of his colleagues was apparent; even the store detectives did not recognise him these days, now that his exalted rank had lifted him so far above the petty, amateur crime of shoplifting.

  He watched the features of the checkout girl, scarcely more expressive than the electronic read-out on her till, then admired his wife’s small, expert hands, as they stowed the produce in her bags so much more quickly than his own larger and stronger ones. He pushed the trolley to the boot of the Sierra, unloaded the bags into the car, assessed the number of his Brownie points, and wondered what to do with the rest of his day off.

  It was an unpleasant shock when his wife said, ‘What are you going to do with yourself for the next hour?’ He must have looked blank, for she said, ‘You haven’t forgotten my appointment at the Health Centre, have you?’

  Of course he had, though he remembered swiftly enough now. She was engaging in preventive medicine at the ‘Well Woman Clinic’. Her mother was staying with them, looking after Kirstie for the morning; her presence in the house partly explained his presence here, though he had argued more worthy and altruistic motives. He said with a grin, ‘Would I forget, Anne?’ Then, on impulse and before she could offer an opinion, ‘I thought I might have a look round the Cathedral for a while.’

  If she was surprised, she gave no sign of it. He walked through some of the older streets of Hereford until the Cathedral rose unexpectedly before him, like a great ship in dock. Matins was long over, and the cool quiet of the place enveloped him; the nave was like a vast, civilised cave. He raised his eyes to the great tower that he knew was one of the features of the building and tried to recall what he had read of this place in the book he had at home. He remembered that the west front had collapsed a couple of centuries ago and that the restoration was not approved by modern pundits: little else would come back to him at first.

  If Bert Hook was doing an Open University degree, the DI who directed him had better look to his academic laurels: he resolved at least to bring himself up to date on his local cathedral. It was no hardship: this was a pleasant enough place to be on a May morning. He sat on a bench, felt the serenity of nine centuries in the silent stones which soared above him, and was glad he had come here. He fell to calculating whether he had yet become an agnostic, decided he was still C. of E. with severe reservations, and wondered how much ground lay between these two theological positions.

  There were not many people about to disturb his spiritual deliberations. The tourist season was not yet at its height, and the first great publicity impact of the 1989 controversy over the proposed sale of the cathedral’s Mappa Mundi was over. He looked at the vaulted roof, so impossibly high above him; a line about singing masons building roofs of gold came back to him he knew not whence.

  He was gratified: this place was conducive to the recovery of such long-forgotten, disregarded things. There was after all much more to life than being a policeman, even a successful one. He sat very still. And eventually from the recesses of Christopher Rushton’s mind there crept the remembrance that the Lady Chapel was one of the oldest parts of this ancient building.

  He was ludicrously pleased by the rediscovery of this simple and unremarkable fact. His brain cells were still present in plenty and doing their job. He looked automatically towards the entrance to the Lady Chapel.

  And became in an instant a policeman again.

  There was a woman there whom he had seen before. A tall woman; fiftyish; about a hundred and thirty pounds; with plentiful, well coiffured grey hair. Despite her height, her navy leather shoes had quite high heels; her dark blue dress was soberly but expensively cut, its elegance complemented by the small handbag she carried on her left forearm.

  He thought he had seen her only once before: probably in a professional rather than a social context. His mind ran through the cases he was currently concerned with. There were no more than three: this was the advantage of being ‘concerned only with serious crime’. That was the way his wife’s mother always introduced him, explaining
away the presence of a policeman in the family. He smiled wryly, hearing her apologetic tones in his head.

  In the same instant, he knew the woman. He had glimpsed her only briefly and never spoken to her. But he felt he should instantly have placed her: for years, he had driven himself to promotion by being unforgiving with himself, until it had now become a habit. He had seen her with that supercilious sod Lambert, walking round the golf course at the Wye Castle. It was typical of the Super, who sometimes seemed to break the rules just for the sake of doing so, that he should have allowed her to identify the body on site.

  For this woman was, or had been, Mrs Guy Harrington. Marie Harrington, he had better say, if his image as enlightened man was to be preserved. He remembered making a mental note to emphasise the second syllable of that ‘Marie’. The sober colours of her dress might pass for mourning, he supposed: he was no expert in these things. But she carried no badge of bereavement, and her bearing was not that of a heartbroken widow. She moved a few paces across the front of the Lady Chapel, then back again to her first position, staring at the stained glass with unseeing eyes.

  She was looking at her watch when the man arrived to meet her. They exchanged brief, tight smiles and moved away into the deserted Lady Chapel. As Rushton moved softly over cool stone to observe them, they sat together in a pew towards the front of this ancient place of devotion. They had not touched each other throughout these movements.

  If it had taken the Inspector’s trained mind a moment to place the woman, his recognition of the man who had come her to meet her was instantaneous. As indeed it should have been, for he had taken a first, brief statement from him as the discoverer of a body scarcely more than twenty-four hours earlier.

  George Goodman seemed to fit naturally into this place, in his clerical grey suit and shining black shoes. His white hair encircled his tanned bald head in a way that seemed reassuringly traditional, even when viewed from the rear. Thus might a Victorian burgher have sat a hundred years earlier. Thus, with suit exchanged for a habit, might a medieval monk have meditated and prayed when peasants peered in at this place and marvelled at a new architectural wonder of the world.

  Except that Goodman was not praying. Of that Rushton was sure, though he could detect no syllable of what passed between the pair. Their exchanges were sporadic, terse and urgent, between prolonged silences. For a long time, Marie Harrington did not look at the man beside her. Then she turned quite suddenly to look at him, staring hard at his face from a distance of no more than two feet. After a moment, she placed a small white hand gently on top of the back of his larger one.

  Goodman did not respond: he remained staring fixedly at the altar ahead. Through the tawdry nineteenth-century stained glass which had been mistakenly added to the chapel, a shaft of sunlight threw a sudden iridescence upon the pair. For a moment they were frozen like a detail from an old master on a religious theme. Then the clouds returned, and their moment of transient, unconscious glory passed like a vision in a storm.

  The only witness of it glided softly behind one of the vast pillars of the nave as the little tableau began to disintegrate. George Goodman and Marie Harrington moved swiftly out through the north door. Their watcher followed, discreetly distant, through the narrow streets around the Cathedral and into the more modern and populous part of the town. In the car park, they were swallowed into Goodman’s dark blue Rover. Then the vehicle moved swiftly and almost silently from his sight and out of the town.

  Detective-Inspector Rushton, on his day off, had had his attention pulled back to the investigation he had left behind him. Policemen, as he was fond of reminding his junior staff, are never off duty. He told himself that the rendezvous he had seen might have nothing to do with the death at the Wye Castle.

  But he did not really believe himself.

  14

  While Rushton was watching the meeting in Hereford Cathedral, his chief was pursuing the investigation more officially three miles outside the city at the Wye Castle.

  Meg Peters had a considerable presence. Bert Hook, pen poised over a pristine page of his notebook, reckoned himself something of an expert in these things, and was prepared to concede that to her immediately. She came into the room without that instant of diffidence which was natural for most people in this situation. When the two CID men rose politely, it was for a moment as if they were the subordinates, awaiting an audience which had been graciously granted to them.

  She was poised and unhurried, yet business-like. She looked round the room and took the only chair which was obvious for her without its being indicated, as though she had made a choice among alternatives. She tossed her brilliant red hair as she sank gracefully down, and her musky perfume seemed to sweep in waves across the room to challenge their masculinity. Hook thought he had never known an innocent monosyllable invested with so much challenge as her opening ‘Well?’

  Lambert was unhurried, knowing that in any contest of wills he had all the key cards in his hand. He shuffled the papers in front of him on the desk, reflecting that he had beneath his fingers the power to humiliate this woman, if it should prove necessary. He said, ‘You are human enough to have talked to the others, I’m sure, Miss Peters. So you will have a good idea what we are about and how we proceed.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Guy Harrington.’ She crossed her legs as though the gesture were the formal opening move in some physical contest. Black nylon knees glinted appealingly.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘And I don’t know who did.’

  ‘Indeed. Well, I suppose you may have saved us quite a lot of time by driving straight at questions we might have approached less directly.’

  Her demeanour implied that she thought that she had done just that. Her green eyes were wary: she had come into the room expecting to use anger as a weapon, but found no obvious target for it yet.

  ‘Well what’s the point of all this if you believe what I say?’

  Lambert pursed his lips, a mannerism he did not often indulge in, then leaned back in his chair, letting the silence stretch as he affected to collect his thoughts. He was aware of how irritated she was by the pause, as he would have been himself in the same circumstances. He had every intention of getting her rattled, having decided in advance that she was far more likely to be useful and revelatory in such a state.

  When he spoke, his tone was deliberately off-hand. ‘For one thing, I haven’t said that I do believe what you say yet. A moment’s thought will tell you that we can’t simply go around accepting every simple statement of innocence people make to us. Otherwise, the proportion of serious criminals we bring to justice would be much smaller and our salaries rightly much reduced.’

  His smile was bland, friendly, almost apologetic. She thought him quite insufferable; her brows contracted and the two lines between them became furrows of resentment. The fingers of her right hand twisted for a moment through the slim gold bracelet on her wrist. ‘Don’t play games with me, Superintendent, please. Why should you disbelieve me, more than anyone else?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t said I do, Miss Peters. But since you ask, there is a reason why most criminal investigators would treat your statements with more suspicion than those of the other people I have so far seen.’

  ‘And what is that reason?’ She scarcely cared to conceal her anger now. Most men consider a quick temper an attraction in redheads, perhaps as an indication of other passions swift to kindle. The human brain being the perplexing instrument that it is, Lambert found himself wondering disconcertingly how fired he might be by this woman in those other contexts. Fortunately she could not see his thoughts and reduce his eroticism to ashes with her swift contempt.

  He picked up a sheet of paper and affected to study the details he already knew by heart. Then he looked steadily across his desk at the woman whose green eyes smouldered with scarcely contained hostility. ‘Perhaps you are not aware that whenever we are investigating a serious crime we check the previous criminal history of those close t
o it. To put it bluntly, we see if any of those concerned have what you will have heard policemen call “form”, Miss Peters.’

  He looked at her interrogatively to see if she wished to comment; he was carefully, offensively polite as he prepared the stiletto. She was pallid now beneath the Titian waves, for she must have known what was coming. As carefully as a man pronouncing a legal formula, Lambert said, ‘I have to tell you that you are the only one of your group who has a previous criminal conviction.’

  Hook had needed to record nothing yet. Watching from his position two yards away from his chief, he thought Lambert sounded like the old recording of Prime Minister Chamberlain breaking the news of war in 1939. Meg Peters looked as shocked as the listeners who had needed to digest that momentous news. She licked lips that seemed suddenly garish against her pallor. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, in relation to Harrington.’ She managed to invest the three syllables of the name with venomous contempt.

  Lambert said, ‘It may not do. I’m speaking generally rather than specifically, of course, but any statistician would tell you there is quite a high correlation between previous convictions and later, more serious offences. Criminal records are one of the best starting points we have in many investigations.’

  ‘Even when the crime is quite different and much more serious?’

  ‘Even when the crime is murder, Miss Peters.’ She gasped at the word, realising he had enunciated the very noun she had been reluctant to acknowledge herself. Without her recognising quite how it had happened, their positions were now reversed: Lambert was direct and aggressive after his earlier circumlocutions, and she seemed evasive by comparison.

  As if to emphasise her position, he said coolly, ‘As a matter of fact, there is a fairly high correlation between convictions for drug offences and subsequent serious crime.’

  It was the first mention of the nature of her offence. She glanced for the first time at Hook, wondering how much this silent recorder had known. He might previously have been a statue, for all the attention she had given him, and he took care now to present his best sculptured impassivity. She looked suddenly tired as she said sullenly, ‘It was only for cannabis. And it was a long time ago.’