Dead on Course

by J M Gregson

  ‘Did anyone see you come in to the Wye Castle?’

  ‘No. We parked and went straight up to our room.’

  ‘And you didn’t go out again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or see anyone else go?’

  ‘No. Superintendent, I think we have a right to know—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but you must take my word that this is no time to talk of rights. Please be good enough to tell Mr Nash that I’ll see him now. He’s waiting outside, I hope.’

  They left with dignity, despite his brusque dismissal. Hook recorded their last words carefully in his notebook. He thought them a highly devoted couple, capable of that intimacy which shuts out the rest of the world, or moulds it to their own purposes.

  The squalid history of homicide showed that such couples had often planned and executed murder.

  22

  Waiting had not improved the day for Tony Nash.

  He came in looking thoroughly anxious, despite his impeccable casual dress. His green sweater might have been enjoying its first outing; his darker green golf trousers were sharply creased. Lambert, who thought of golf attire as a means of using up clothes that were past their best, caught himself registering automatic disapproval of this tailor’s dummy. But Nash’s was an innocent enough vanity, if vanity indeed it was: a man did not have to be a murderer to indulge it.

  But the immaculate clothing was an inadequate disguise for the discomfort within it. Nash could not keep still. He threw one ankle immediately across his knee, in a caricature of relaxation, but his powerful arms and torso twitched in a series of small, uncontrolled movements. It was interesting to see the way tension took men. Sandy Munro had been frozen into immobility by it, his movements when he had to make them as jerky as a puppet’s. Tony Nash suffered almost an opposite reaction: striving to keep still, he could not control those small, involuntary physical movements which his too-active brain inflicted upon his body.

  Lambert was as brisk as he had been with the Munros. Ruffling the sheets of Nash’s original statement, he said, ‘You said when we spoke to you two days ago that you thought you were the last person known to have been with Harrington when he was alive. Do you stick by that?’

  Nash shifted on his chair as if it was too hot for him to remain in one position. ‘No. I—I heard someone else with him after I had left.’

  ‘So you lied to us. Will you now tell us why, please.’

  Lambert’s voice was quiet; ominously so, it must have seemed to Nash, who did not know that he was not the only one who had withheld the full truth. ‘I thought at the time it might have been Meg, you see.’ He seemed to think this explained his omission completely.

  ‘You had better tell us what you heard. And when.’

  ‘Just voices. A man’s and a woman’s. Having a hell of a bust-up. The man’s voice was Harrington’s. I thought at the time that the woman’s might have been Meg’s. I know now that it must have been Alison Munro’s.’

  ‘So you choose to tell us what you heard. No doubt if it didn’t suit you, you would still be withholding the information. Where were you when you heard this exchange?’

  ‘In the car park. I told you, I went out to make sure my car boot was—’

  ‘And what has now convinced you that the woman involved was Mrs Munro?’

  ‘I talked to Meg. Once it wasn’t her, it had to be Alison: she was the only other woman around.’ He ran his hand violently through his mane of yellow hair; he had thought that once he had confessed his original omission, things would have been simple enough for him.

  Lambert looked at him hard for a long, speculative moment. Nash thought he was searching for further concealments, but in fact Lambert was wondering exactly how far the personable Meg Peters had taken her trusting fiancé into her confidence. How much did he know of her past and the untidy tangle of her relationship with Harrington? Eventually Lambert said, ‘You told us that Mr Harrington was not a good employer. That he was exploiting you.’

  Nash nodded, white-faced. He had folded his arms now, in an attempt at physical control of his too-mobile upper body, but his fingers ran like a flute-player’s up and down his upper arms; Lambert remembered the mannerism from their earlier interview. ‘Have you any reason to think that other employees were treated harshly?’

  Nash found the question, with its temporary transfer of attention away from his own concerns, something of a relief. ‘Yes, I’m sure they were. I don’t know how, but I’m certain Sandy Munro was being exploited by Guy as much as I was. Sandy never says much, so I couldn’t give you any detail.’

  ‘I believe George Goodman’s daughter worked for the firm for a time. Do you know of any reason she had to resent Harrington?’

  ‘Any reason why George should have killed Guy, you mean.’ Nash allowed himself a small, humourless smile at the speed with which he had picked up the line of reasoning. And indeed, it would be easy to underestimate his quick brain just because he seemed insensitive in some areas, thought Lambert.

  Nash said, ‘She was too remote from me for me to know anything like that. She was a junior in another department: I didn’t even know she was working for the firm until George told me on the golf course. Next thing I knew, she’d left. Not much for you there, I shouldn’t think. But I’m sure there were other senior staff as well as me with grievances, though I haven’t the detail. It’s not the sort of thing one broadcasts to one’s juniors.’

  Nash seemed to feel the need to assert his senior position in the firm, even in this crisis. Lambert said brutally, ‘And yet of recent months you have made no secret of your hatred for the owner of the firm, even before these juniors. Your fellow-workers report an extremity in your language, and a carelessness about concealment, that almost suggest paranoia.’

  Nash’s powerful torso shot forward and he came almost out of his seat. But his preliminary ‘Now look—’ dissolved as he realised to whom he was talking.

  Lambert said quickly. ‘Why did you cease to control a resentment which you had previously kept private? Had your employment situation changed?’

  Nash looked now like a man who had been hit. His face was flushed with the strain of a series of emotions. Another one took over as he said, ‘No… I suppose it was because of Meg. I’m going to marry her, Superintendent.’

  Like all lovers, he thought the simple statement carried a wealth of greater meanings. When the two large men opposite him failed to react as he expected, he said, ‘When I thought of the way Harrington had treated her, was still treating her, I sometimes couldn’t stand it. Meg said to forget it, but I could see sometimes how he was getting to her, and I wasn’t going to have it.’

  It was the quixotic, unfocused rage of the lover who sees no outlet for his temper but is determined to vent it. It was easy to see the potential for murder in him when he allowed his imagination to dwell on images of Harrington with his wife-to-be. Lambert wondered how much Nash knew about Meg Peters’s past. Did he know of her appearances in blue films? Perhaps more significantly, did Harrington?

  He decided it would be kinder to take that up with Miss Peters herself. There would be enough damage left among relationships after a murder investigation of this sort, without the police trampling on sensibilities more heavily than was necessary. Instead, he flashed at Nash unexpectedly, ‘Why were you so ruffled on the morning after the murder of Guy Harrington?’

  ‘Ruffled?’ He tried to play for time, to collect his resources. His too-revealing face whitened for a moment with anger, as he worked out that their source for this information must be George Goodman.

  Lambert said impatiently, ‘It’s a straightforward enough idea, surely. Are you denying that you seemed rather preoccupied, even before the discovery of the corpse?’

  ‘No. I suppose I was.’

  ‘Why?’ Lambert gave the impression that his patience was almost exhausted.

  ‘I hadn’t slept much.’ Perhaps it sounded lame, even in his own ears, for Nash went on quickly, ‘Meg and I
talked a long way into the night about what Guy had done to her. And—’

  ‘Did you leave your room again during the night?’

  He looked from one face to the other, finding no clue in either to what they knew. He must have decided they knew more than they did, for he said with an air of hopelessness, ‘All right, yes, I did. I don’t know who told you. I found Guy’s body on the gravel path beneath the roof where we had—’

  ‘When?’ Lambert used the monosyllable like a weapon.

  ‘I—I’m not sure. Perhaps forty minutes, fifty minutes after Meg and I had got back to our room. After what we’d been discussing, I felt the need for some fresh—’

  ‘He was quite dead then. You’re sure?’

  Nash nodded; his face had gone white now with the recollection. ‘I didn’t take his pulse, but I held my watch near his mouth. It didn’t mist up and I knew—’

  ‘How was he lying?’

  ‘Face down. Not the way he was when we found him on the golf course.’

  ‘You felt no call to do your duty and report his death?’

  Nash shook his head stubbornly, looking at the carpet between them as though it held some mystic code. ‘No. I was glad he was dead. At that moment, that was all I could feel.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone of your discovery?’

  ‘No. I might have told Meg, but she was asleep by that time. I sat in the bedroom armchair for a long time.’

  It was a strange picture: this strongly built man sitting in the darkness, hugging to himself his exultation in the death of his powerful enemy, senses reeling as he wondered who might have rid him of this scourge.

  ‘And you went out again soon after six next morning.’

  ‘Yes. I think I dozed for an hour or so, but I couldn’t sleep. I think I was hoping that someone would have discovered the body to save me reporting it, but I ran into George Goodman instead. He’d seen me through his window.’

  ‘Yes. And did he, like you, appear distraught?’

  Nash swallowed hard and took time to think: this time they could not object to that. It was an opportunity to inculpate the urbane architect, and all three of them were conscious of that. Eventually Nash shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. He said he hadn’t slept well, but he looked to me as trim as he usually does.’

  ‘And what about when you eventually found the body on the course? Did Goodman seem surprised to find it there?’

  Nash paused again. It was as if he saw the opportunity to lift suspicion from himself by incriminating Goodman, but his sense of fair play would not allow him to do so. ‘I really couldn’t say, Superintendent. George was shocked enough, I’m sure. He more or less took charge of things immediately—it was he who informed the police—but that was quite in character. I was too stunned myself to register anything very clearly. I’d been nerving myself to the discovery of the body while we were on the course, you see, thinking that surely one of the hotel staff must have found it by that time. Finding it in that hollow beside the twelfth was a real shock to me. I couldn’t work it out at all. Still can’t, for that matter.’

  Lambert said formally, as though reciting a legal formula, ‘Mr Nash, you have admitted withholding vital information earlier in this investigation. You have made no secret of the fact that you were glad to see Harrington lying dead; indeed, you said during our previous meeting that your first instinct was to protect his killer. I therefore ask you now whether you have any idea who killed Guy Harrington.’

  Nash paused just long enough, allowed the right troubled expression to steal across his face. If he was dissimulating, he did it well. ‘No, I haven’t. We’ve tried to discuss it among the group, you know. But the knowledge that one of us is probably responsible tends to get in the way.’ He gave them an ironic smile, and indeed the idea of a killer sitting down with innocent companions to a serious review of the facts surrounding a murder had a decided touch of black comedy. ‘Tell me, Superintendent, do you know who moved the body?’

  Lambert smiled and Hook, intervening nervously as if he feared his chief’s eccentric habits, said stiffly, ‘If we did, Mr Nash, we wouldn’t be able to discuss it with you.’

  Lambert said abruptly, ‘Have you spoken to Mrs Harrington since the death of her husband?’

  Nash looked surprised. ‘No. I saw her here on the day of the murder, and George Goodman told me that she’s still around, but—’

  ‘Would you tell us where you were between ten-thirty and midnight last night, please?’

  Nash was shaken. He wondered if Marie Harrington had said anything about him to Goodman when she had talked to him. ‘I —I was here, I think. Yes, that’s right.’

  Hook said quietly, ‘Are there witnesses to that, Mr Nash?’ The blank sheet of his notebook shone like an admonition towards rectitude as he paused with pen above it.

  ‘Only Meg. We—we were in bed by that time. It’s our last night here and we had been pretty disturbed previously by—’

  ‘You had retired, then, by half past ten?’ Hook was studiously impassive, having learned long since not to allow speculation about the bedroom activities of members of the public to show in his face or voice. ‘No doubt Miss Peters will confirm this for us in due course.’

  Nash nodded, trying to appear as imperturbable as his questioners. But when dismissed, he left the room eagerly, even more nervous than when he had entered it.

  Lambert made no attempt to prevent him from contacting his fiancée. He had no doubt that she would support Nash’s story where necessary.

  23

  Marie Harrington’s body was found at noon.

  And elderly fisherman, near the centre of Hereford, was dozing in the midday sun, enjoying the peace of the river and the absence of his wife’s nagging. The body drifted close to the bank without his noticing it. Undulating lightly with the gentle downstream motion, it nosed gently but insistently against his net at the edge of the water, like an old dog demanding attention.

  The man was a pillar of the British Legion; he had seen death in plenty as a young man in the Western Desert. But that was half a century ago, and the wide, unseeing eyes and blood-tinged froth around the mouth of this corpse upset him. He was old-fashioned enough to be distressed more because it was a woman. He was greatly relieved when the police deposited him back with the wife he had been so anxious to escape two hours earlier.

  Lambert was preparing to meet Meg Peters when DI Rushton brought him the news. ‘A drowning, pretty certainly, they say. Suicide, do you think, sir?’

  ‘Murder, Chris. I’d stake my career, or what’s left of it, on that.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to be sure. No obvious marks of violence on the body, but no doubt Dr Burgess will be able to tell us more in due course. It’s not so uncommon, of course, for a survivor to follow a deceased spouse out of the world while still depressed.’ Rushton had an unfortunate habit of appearing to instruct experienced officers.

  ‘Not this spouse. I’ve never seen a widow facing the rest of her life more eagerly than the bereaved Mrs Harrington.’

  ‘You think the two deaths are connected, then?’

  ‘I’m sure they are. I was due to see her first thing this morning. I think she knew more than she had told us previously—possibly even the identity of her husband’s killer. Certainly that killer thought she must be removed before she could reveal anything to me.’

  ‘What about the hotel where she was staying? Do they know who contacted her?’

  ‘No. Not so far, anyway. She seems to have gone out at about ten thirty-five last night. In all probability, she never returned. Damn the Chief Constable and his press conferences! I’d have seen her yesterday, if I hadn’t had to hare off to Gloucester.’ He slammed the door of the filing cabinet violently shut. At that moment, he had no room for compassion for the dead woman. The policeman in him had taken over, and he had room only for the frustration stemming from the removal of a vital witness from the case.

  It took Bert Hook
, who came into the room as Rushton went out, to restore the human dimension to this death. ‘I feel as though I let her down,’ he said dully. ‘If I’d pressed harder yesterday… She seemed a nice woman.’ The very lameness of this made it a touching tribute.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Bert!’ The Sergeant’s troubled face was like a rebuke to his callousness. Lambert would have his regrets for the woman—later, when there was time. At the moment, she was a woman who might have cleared up the mystery of her husband’s death by now, but had chosen to withhold the information, and paid for it with her life. ‘Didn’t she tell you anything, yesterday afternoon. Think, for God’s sake.’

  Hook shook his head miserably. ‘Nothing that seemed significant. I’ve told you most of it already. She stone-walled. She didn’t know why Tony Nash was so open in his hatred of her husband. She thought Sandy Munro was “a poppet” with a nice wife. She didn’t even know that George Goodman’s daughter had worked for her husband, and couldn’t see any reason for him to want her husband out of the way. She obviously hadn’t much time for Meg Peters, but she assured me that she didn’t think she was connected with the death.’

  ‘In other words, Bert, she went out of her way to assure you of everyone’s innocence. With an even-handedness which argues that she knew which one of them had murdered the husband she was glad to see removed, but wasn’t inclined to reveal it. Didn’t she seem defensive about any particular one, for God’s sake?’

  ‘No. I could have pressed harder, but I’d only gone to make arrangements for you to see her this morning. I wouldn’t have seen her at all if she’d been answering the phone.’

  ‘No, I know, Bert. It’s as well you got as much as you did out of her. If we can find the area where she was concealing something, we may be there. Did you check anything else with her?’

  ‘Only her own whereabouts on the night of her husband’s death. She was with another man at the vital time, she says, back in Surrey. It should be easy enough to check. Perhaps we’d better.’ Hook knew well enough that the lover who worked with the wife to remove an unwanted husband was a common enough combination in homicide.