by J M Gregson
‘But why be back here by twelve o’clock the next day?’ he said, looking round the table. ‘Wouldn’t you keep a low profile if you’d got rid of your husband with a ready-made group of suspects around him?’
Unexpectedly, it was Hook who made a suggestion based on a psychological conjecture. ‘I don’t believe that old rubbish about murderers feeling a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime. But many people who kill are hyperactive, at any rate around the time of the homicide. However ill-advised it may be, they prefer to know what is going on rather than to sit quietly at home wondering whether they’ve got away with it, waiting for the knock at the door which tells them they’ve been rumbled.’
Lambert considered the idea. ‘She certainly had a strange kind of energy when she arrived here. She was anxious to know whether we were treating the death as a murder, almost pleased when she found we were. And she insisted on identifying the corpse there and then, at the point where we had discovered it.’ There were other explanations as well as the one Hook had suggested for Marie Harrington’s behaviour on that day, but her actions could scarcely be described as rational, much less normal.
Rushton said, ‘She’s still in this area. Presumably at the hotel where she told us she’d be staying overnight after she’d identified the corpse.’
Lambert nodded thoughtfully. ‘I rather gathered she intended to stay around here until after the inquest. Incidentally, the Coroner plans to open the inquest the day after tomorrow. Do we know whether Marie Harrington has been in touch with any of our five at the Wye Castle?’
It was DI Rushton’s moment. ‘Indeed she has, sir. I saw it happen, quite by chance. I was in the Cathedral at Hereford on my day off yesterday.’ He paused for an instant, as if such behaviour might be thought eccentric enough in a policeman to need explanation. ‘I saw her there and watched for a few minutes. She met George Goodman.’
‘By chance?’
‘I don’t think so. She was in the Lady Chapel, and she waited for him to arrive. I’m sure they met by arrangement.’
‘Did she see you?’
‘No. I’m pretty certain neither of them did. They sat together for a few minutes towards the front of the Chapel. They spoke to each other, but I couldn’t catch anything they said. I thought it better not to let them know I was around.’ He stopped, recalling that curious moment when the pair had been frozen like a detail from an old master against the stained glass.
‘Did they leave the Cathedral together?’
‘Yes. I followed them to the car park. They drove away in Goodman’s Rover.’
There was a silence round the table. The professionals were recreating the scene, trying to assess its significance. Rushton, who was pleased to display his vigilance even during off-duty time to the chief, wished now that he had rung in yesterday about the incident. In the present silence, it seemed more significant than it had done at the time.
Lambert said, ‘Did they appear to be lovers?’
‘No. I’ve thought about that since. They hardly touched each other, as far as I could see. She seemed to put her hand briefly on his when they met, but that was all. I couldn’t detect any reaction from him. Perhaps the Cathedral inhibited them: I’ve no idea how they behaved in the car after they’d driven out of the city.’ It was the policeman’s automatic caveat, coming from the early years they had all endured of flashing torches into darkened cars while patrolling the beat.
Of course, thought Lambert, people still had occasion to meet after affairs had run cold. There was no saying that the magisterial Goodman and the elegant widow Harrington had not consorted together more hotly in the past. But it was of interest only if it bore on the events of the last few days. He said, ‘I shall need to see Marie Harrington again. It will be interesting to see if she confesses to yesterday’s meeting. I interviewed Goodman yesterday afternoon, and he said nothing about it, though I broached his relationship with Marie Harrington with him directly. Interesting... Right: let’s move on to the Munros.’
It was Rushton as Deputy who had assumed the role of the marshal of various findings. ‘The most interesting thing we’ve come up with is the forensic material. Harrington died almost instantaneously after a fall on to the gravel path from the roof where the group had been drinking earlier: a height of something over sixty feet. There is worsted from his trousers on the edge of the parapet. He was certainly dead before he was moved.’
Automatically, he was rehearsing the details which would be necessary for the Coroner to ‘open’ the inquest and adjourn it under Section 20 of the Coroners’ Acts. It would be a five-minute process, but all these facts would have to stand up eventually to examination by a Defence Counsel in the High Court; the team were patient with him through his mental checking of their work, hearing it transformed through his calm tones into evidence.
‘The body was moved in the wheelbarrow? We’re certain of that?’
‘Yes. There are fibres from the back of Harrington’s jacket on the front of the barrow above the wheel, and from the back of his trouser legs on the bit between the shafts. It won’t be important, but if we had to we could establish the position of the body in the barrow while it was being transported.’
They were silent, picturing Harrington’s last journey at dead of night, the corpse still warm, the head and feet dancing with each movement of the single wheel over the uneven earth. Lambert moved to the aspect of that journey that really excited them as detectives. ‘And the fibres from what we think is Munro’s sweater. Where exactly were they found?’
‘On the body. On the back of the jacket, to either side of Harrington’s shoulder-blades, on the backs of his trousers, and on the heel of one of the shoes. We’ll need the sweater, of course, but once we have it, Forensic are quite confident their evidence will stand up in court.’
‘It may not need to. I’m seeing Munro after we’ve finished here. I’ll get the sweater from him then. I doubt whether he’ll hold out against evidence like that: I don’t see him denying that he moved the body. Are there any prints?’
Rushton looked down at the forensic report, checking a detail he did not quite understand. ‘None, sir. The left hand was gloved: the right wasn’t, but he seems to have wrapped something round it—possibly a handkerchief or a piece of towelling, they think in the labs. Seems odd that a man should wear one glove.’
Lambert smiled. ‘Not to a golfer it doesn’t. Munro has played for forty years. Probably he had a golfing glove in the pocket of the trousers he was wearing when he moved the body. Golf gloves are only worn singly, on the left hand in the case of a right-handed player. He must have put on the clothes he had worn earlier in the day for golf to move the body: he wasn’t wearing the sweater during the evening.’
‘Things look pretty black for Munro, then.’ This was Sergeant Johnson, the uniformed man who headed the Scene of Crime team. He brightened at the thought that they were near to an arrest; his weekend’s fishing might yet be saved.
Lambert weighed the matter. ‘At the moment they do, yes. I’ve little doubt that he moved that body—I don’t go very much on the idea of someone else wearing his sweater to incriminate him, though we’ve all known stranger things. The fact that he moved the body doesn’t automatically mean that he killed Harrington, of course. But he lied to me when I interviewed him. Clumsily. Whether he was trying to protect himself, his wife or some third party I hope to find out when I see him.’
‘What about Mrs Munro?’ said Rushton. He had taken the initial statement from the striking, dark-haired Alison himself, and found it hard going.
‘She told us that her husband was in bed and probably asleep when she got back to the room on the night of the murder. That, I think, was a lie, but we shall know for certain before long. She’ll have compared notes with her husband, and be aware that their stories conflict. There’s something else too. Bert, would you read out her exact words about what she did on that night after the party broke up and left the roof, please?’
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nbsp; Hook flicked over a page. ‘She said, “I wandered round for a little while before going to bed. Perhaps we’d all drunk a little too much.”’
‘Pretty lame, you’ll agree,’ said Lambert. ‘We let her get away with it because I was anxious to see what she had to say about her husband. And because I knew I had other people to see who might give me more information about Alison Munro’s movements in that crucial twenty minutes. Sure enough, we had an interesting contribution from Meg Peters. She says that Alison Munro went back to the roof garden; that she heard her having what she called “a hell of a row” with Harrington after Tony Nash had left him.’
There was silence round the table: it was the first most of them had heard of this. Then Rushton said, ‘It may be that Meg Peters herself is not a reliable witness. She’s the only one of our suspects with a record.’
‘I know that. Chris.’ Lambert was pleased with himself for using Rushton’s first name, he thought quite deftly. ‘We’ll need to sort out the truth of the matter very carefully. But if what Meg Peters says is true, Alison Munro was the last person we know of to date who was with Harrington; and she was quarrelling with him.’
There was silence around the table. All these men had a clear picture of Alison Munro’s dark hair and strong, English beauty. He fancied that none of them until this moment had seriously entertained her as their murderer. He said, ‘What about Tony Nash?’
Rushton said, ‘We haven’t turned up a lot that’s new about him. Except that he made no secret of his hatred of Harrington over these last months, even at work. Not the wisest of tactics to go round slagging off the boss, I’d have thought, and Nash never did it until recently. But he’s been virulent about it since about Easter; even taken to saying things about getting even with him, apparently.’
Lambert could see Nash as a choleric man, but the decline in control in recent weeks was interesting. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes. One small but interesting fact. Nash wasn’t originally in the party to come here this week. Someone else dropped out and he almost forced his way in. The others were glad enough to have him, but worried that his vehement hatred of Harrington might surface and destroy the party. But they say he was determined to come.’
‘Determined to have the opportunity to get at Harrington, do you think? It’s possible. Munro says that Harrington himself came into the party late, which means that Nash may have joined the group only after he learned his boss was to be part of it. They quarrelled openly on the evening of the murder, and according to George Goodman, Nash was abroad early on the morning after, looking thoroughly disturbed and dishevelled. According to the others, he isn’t habitually an early riser, but on that morning he was out before half past six.’ Lambert was gratified to see Rushton looking puzzled. ‘I discovered that in my formal interview with Goodman late yesterday afternoon. After I had unearthed various interesting details of our suspects’ habits in the more informal context of the golf course yesterday,’ he explained loftily to the table at large.
Rushton’s deadpan face gave nothing away; he thought eccentric was a polite epithet for a superintendent who played golf with the leading suspects in a murder investigation, but he was too well versed in the rule-book to reveal his disapproval in front of subordinates. He said, ‘What did you make of George Goodman, sir?’
Lambert smiled. He had been wondering exactly what he made of George Goodman ever since the conclusion of his interview with him on the previous day. ‘That he isn’t the self-satisfied bourgeois he pretends to be. But exactly what he is, I’m not sure. His account of the period when Harrington was murdered has no witness. But, as he said with considered naïvety himself, as he occupies a single room here, we could hardly expect a convenient demonstration of his innocence. There is more to Mr Goodman than he cares to reveal, I’m quite sure, but whether that more includes a man capable of violent murder, I’m not yet certain.’ He looked round the table. ‘What have your various researches turned up?’
Rushton looked a little impatiently at the typewritten summary in front of him. He had some decidedly interesting material to reveal, but not about George Goodman. ‘Not much. No obvious close connections with the victim. He didn’t have a working association, like Nash and Munro. He did occasional small planning jobs for Harrington—works extensions and the like. Harrington seems to have been slow to pay on a couple of occasions, but there is no evidence that they fell out seriously about it. There is a minimum of correspondence in Harrington’s files about it.’
‘You’re sure there’s no real acrimony? Goodman claimed when I spoke to him yesterday that there was. He admitted to real ill-feeling between himself and Harrington, and gave a dispute over plans he had drawn for Goodman as the cause. It didn’t seem a very strong reason at the time.’
‘No trace in writing of any bust-up between the two. Of course, there has been no access to Goodman’s files. But no one at Harrington’s factory suggested there’d been any argument over the architectural work that Goodman did for Harrington.’
‘Was there anything more personal, then? Had Harrington got his paws on Goodman’s wife? Or even Goodman on Harrington’s—I’m sure there’s a spot or two of the old Adam beneath that saintly exterior.’
Rushton frowned at the sheet in front of him. He was less happy with speculations about emotional attachments than with the clear facts of contracts and money. ‘Nothing that we’ve been able to turn up. Harrington had a go at lots of women, including our Miss Peters, but—’
‘Did Mrs Goodman ever work for him?’
‘No. She hasn’t worked anywhere except in her husband’s office since they were married thirty years ago.’
‘What about Marie Harrington? Did you dig up any associations between her and Goodman?’
‘Only of the kind that are probably quite innocent. They’ve known each other for twenty years, but the kind of social exchange they’ve had has mostly involved Mrs Goodman as well. Of course, most of what I’m reporting has been gathered by CID in Surrey, so in that sense it’s second-hand information.’
Lambert heard Rushton making the reservation without rancour; at the same age, he might well have done it himself. It was the old detective’s nightmare of overlooking some key factor that would later seem obvious to all, the obsessive need to check the authenticity of every piece of information before it became part of the framework of the case.
It looked as if the picture of Goodman’s happy, unexceptional family life was proof against the diggings of a team trained to be sceptical about such things. The probing of the surface tissue of his existence had produced nothing that was not benign. Whether because he wanted to round off this family unit of Trollopean simplicity, or because he was unable to accept Goodman’s portrait of himself without a final check, he said, ‘Have the Goodmans any children?’
Rushton was glad to be prompted towards a demonstration of the thoroughness of his documentation; he wished now he had not just reminded the chief that most of the work had been done by another force. ‘Two. The elder is a boy. Qualified now as a solicitor, working up in Cheshire. The other is a girl.’ He looked down at the telex; information had come in thick and fast, so that he hadn’t been able to analyse it as he liked to do. Perhaps after all he shouldn’t have taken his day off this week. ‘Privately educated, didn’t go on to higher education like her brother. Actually worked for Harrington’s firm for about a year.’ He paused: it was the first time he had seen this.
‘How long ago?’ Lambert’s tone was studiously neutral. No point in bawling anyone out: this was no more than one fact in a plethora of information that had to be sifted and organised. Probably, in any case, it meant no more than any one of a hundred others.
‘Two years. She left of her own accord, apparently. She seems to have been no more than a junior employee.’ Rushton turned over a sheet. ‘I don’t think anyone in Surrey has actually interviewed Mrs Goodman. Or the daughter herself, for that matter. Do you want me to organise it?’
‘No. I’ll go over there myself if necessary. It needs someone who can put things together with what’s happening here. If we don’t get to the root of this in the next two days, there may be several people we need to see over there.’ There was silence around the table, as they reviewed the depressing prospect of the net widening, of routine legwork over a wider area, taking in ever more people, following leads that seemed ever less likely. All of them knew that most of those murders unsolved after a week remained unsolved, however long the files stayed officially open.
Rushton said, ‘We’ve been able to come up with rather more on Meg Peters than on Goodman—or anyone else, for that matter.’
There was a stirring of interest around the table: Ms Peters was the most striking and memorable face among the group who had surrounded Guy Harrington. Scandal attaching to glamour has an additional flavour, and policemen, chauvinist or otherwise, are human, despite some contemporary opinion.
Rushton said, ‘The conviction for cannabis possession you already knew about, sir. But two years after that there was another court appearance, though not in the dock. A company called Abbeydale Films was prosecuted for making and selling obscene material: blue films. Usual sort of thing—bedroom romps which were too explicit to be ignored once a few complaints came in. A grubby little company by the sound of it, and a fairly routine case. But they made the mistake of pleading not guilty. Which meant that witnesses were called by the prosecution. Three men and a girl. The girl was one Margaret Eileen Peters. No photographs, lads, unfortunately.’
‘Meg Peters wasn’t charged with anything?’
‘No. She appeared in court for perhaps two minutes, by the sound of it. Gave evidence that she’d performed what was required of her under direction, rather than contributed any improvisations of her own. It was twelve years ago.’