by J M Gregson
‘In due course, if we have to. But I think our solution is somewhere here.’
‘Here at present, John.’ Hook’s rare use of the chief’s forename marked the resumption of their normal easy working relationship. ‘But not for much longer. The group is due to break up and go home this afternoon.’
With events teeming fast upon each other, Lambert had all but forgotten what he had himself arranged three days earlier. In five hours the Wye Castle party would disperse. ‘We can’t hold them any longer, I’m afraid. Not even another night. I’m surprised we haven’t had lawyers brandished at us before now by someone. I suppose they all thought it might be construed as an admission of guilt.’
‘And it’s not too unpleasant a place to be detained,’ said Hook, gazing through the picture window of the murder room at the azure sky and the green world beneath it. It was the nearest he would come to acknowledging the attractions of golf; he was looking loftily over the course to the panorama of woods and river beyond it. Far away towards the skyline, a tractor, too distant to be heard, crawled slowly uphill, a reminder of the normal world which seemed at the moment so far removed from them.
‘Wheel in the dangerous Miss Peters,’ said his superintendent. His frustration and ill-temper were removed by the prospect of work and the peculiar concentration it demanded.
Meg Peters was a diverting enough figure in her own right. Her dark brown trews displayed her lower limbs to admirable effect. The russet blouse might have clashed with her lustrous dark red hair, but instead appeared to complement it perfectly. The slim gold chain deposited its gold cross naturally between the curves of her breasts, as if drawing discreet attention to what was decently hidden beneath the silk. If her husband-to-be had been conspicuously nervous, she exuded confidence.
It might, of course, be a carefully contrived mime: she was, after all, an actress. Lambert addressed himself to that. ‘At our last meeting, we mentioned your criminal record.’
The green eyes flashed her anger, but she kept perfect control. ‘Surely we can let that old business die. Or do you like to hound people for—’
‘No.’ It was as curt as a command to a straying animal, and it stopped her in her tracks just as effectively. ‘We don’t hound people, Miss Peters. But our task is made more difficult when people withhold information from us. It makes us suspicious—as it is our duty to be in cases of serious crime. And when we dig and find something which has been concealed, it naturally makes us wonder what else has been hidden from us.’
‘And what else do you claim to have found?’ She managed to give an edge of contempt to her question, as though she were in control of this. To that end, she kept her body apparently relaxed. But the upright position she adopted was not a natural one for her. She was no more than five feet from him, so that he could see the whitening of her knuckles as her fingers grasped the wooden arms of her chair.
‘We found that you had appeared in some highly questionable scenes in at least one blue film. And become as a result a prosecution witness in a court case.’
Now she was really shaken. For a moment the green eyes darkened and narrowed with hatred. She said nothing for a moment, getting control of her breathing as though it were a professional challenge to her to speak evenly. ‘What use do you propose to make of this information?’
‘None whatsoever. If you can convince us that it has nothing to do with these deaths.’
‘Deaths?’ If she had prior knowledge of the second one, she was not falling into the easy trap.
‘Mrs Harrington was found dead about half an hour ago.’
She gasped now, abandoning any effort at control of her shock. Or simulating an assumed surprise that she had practised in front of her mirror. ‘Murdered?’
‘I think so, Miss Peters. It’s interesting you should assume so as well.’
‘Marie wasn’t the type for suicide.’
‘Indeed.’ He didn’t pursue what that type might be. He had seen some unlikely suicides in the last twenty years, but he had no intention of discussing them with Meg Peters. ‘Did Guy Harrington know about your appearances in these dubious films?’
She said wearily, ‘They were a long time ago now. I was a young actress. In the business, you take anything to get work, when you start. Equity cards and all that. I was naïve enough then to believe the promises that blue movies would lead to other work. They didn’t, of course.’
Suddenly the hoarse croak of a magpie came unnaturally loud through the open window on her right; she twisted her head to the sound, and kept it there, as if scorning to see what Lambert’s reaction to her words might be. Her nose was perhaps a fraction too strong, but it was a dramatic and impressive profile against the light. Ironically in view of their present conversation, Lambert could see her as Shaw’s Saint Joan, chasing cowardly soldiers and pusillanimous monarchs before her.
He said, ‘I’m not interested in the morality of pornographic films. That’s been dealt with long ago, in other places, thank God. What I asked you is whether Harrington knew about them.’
She sighed. ‘He did. I don’t know how he found out. I gave up wondering about things like that a long time ago. Guy made it his business to find out things people didn’t want him to know.’
‘You didn’t tell him at the time when you were his mistress?’
She turned back full face to him with her eyes flashing anger from the pale features. ‘No. Surprising as it may seem to you, I wasn’t proud of that part of my life. I thought I’d put it behind me for ever. It’s taken the police to drag it out again.’ There was a curious combination of bitterness and resignation in her words; he wondered what unfortunate experiences she had had in the past with police coarseness; there were many officers who would glory in the reduction of a strikingly beautiful woman to the level of the prostitutes they arrested each week.
‘I gave you the chance to tell us yourself, Miss Peters, but you chose to attempt to hide it.’ She acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Does Tony Nash know about the films?’
Though she should have expected it, the suddenness of the question caught her of guard. Her cheeks flared as if her face had been slapped, and she was suddenly more vulnerable than they had ever seen her. ‘No. I suppose you’re going to tell him… Do you people ever consider the harm you do?’
‘Very often, despite what you may think. But we are charged with investigating a brutal murder. That takes priority over everything else. Now: Harrington knew. How did he propose to use the information?’ Both of them presumed that the murder victim had used the knowledge unscrupulously and for his own ends. The investigation had taught the CID a lot about him, at any rate. The first rule in any inquiry was to find out as much as possible about the victim and his habits.
‘He used it to taunt me. No, more than that, to threaten me. At first he just enjoyed the power it gave him. Then, when he had discarded me, he used it to humiliate me. When he took up with Felicity Goodman, he liked to set her innocence against my record as a scarlet woman, or worse.’
‘Harrington had an affair with Goodman’s daughter?’ Hook made the question as low-key as he could, not even looking up from his notebook.
‘Briefly, yes. The poor girl had no idea what he was about, I’m sure. I scarcely knew her: I thought at the time he had seduced her merely to upset me with a virgin. She had some kind of breakdown I think. Marie Harrington could tell you about it—’
She stopped, her right hand thrust to her mouth in her first unconsidered movement since she had entered the room. Suddenly she was weeping, silently, without the retching sobs shock usually brought with it. ‘I’d forgotten she was dead… I think Marie felt a crazy kind of guilt for her husband. I know she visited the girl in hospital.’
Lambert brought her back gently but insistently to his query. ‘Did Harrington threaten to tell Tony Nash about the blue films?’
She was broken now, anxious only to explain herself, not resist them. ‘Yes. He taunted me with the threat. That w
as how he insulted me on the night of his death, when Tony took up the cudgels for me.’ There was a brief flash of pride in the last phrase, and they realised that the affection between this striking, experienced woman and the vain, rather shallow man she had chosen probably ran deeper than anything either of the parties had ever experienced before. ‘I don’t expect you to understand this, Superintendent, but Tony is rather old-fashioned in some respects. He will be shocked by the news of those films. I shall tell him in my own time, but I want to choose that time myself.’
Lambert privately thought that after the first shock, Nash was the sort of man who would be excited rather than repelled by the knowledge, but he kept his own counsel. This job was difficult enough without taking on its social worker aspects. He dismissed her rather abruptly, anxious to make use of her revelations in the limited time available before the group broke up and returned home.
She stood up awkwardly, surprised that her ordeal had been terminated so swiftly. Fumbling in her bag for a handkerchief, she said, ‘I suppose the thought that Guy might have revealed this to Tony gave me an added motive to kill him.’ It was unexpectedly conciliatory, almost as though she wished in the end to prolong the interview. Perhaps she wanted to repair some of the damage to her eye make-up before she rejoined her lover; she dabbed vigorously at her tears with a handkerchief too delicate for the task.
Lambert was almost drawn into the brutal rejoinder that if Nash knew—he half-suspected Harrington had told him after all in their final exchange after the party had broken up on the fatal night—it gave him too an added motive for murder. The violent thrusting of a man into the darkness from that roof was just the sort of crime to be produced by a red mist of fury following such a taunt.
Instead, the Superintendent held his peace, dismissing her with one of the standard injunctions of his trade about not revealing to others what she had told him. Then he went back to the filing cabinet he had slammed so vigorously when he heard the news of Marie Harrington’s drowning half an hour earlier.
Amid the masses of data which accrued in the days following a murder, there was usually some vital detail which needed to be pinpointed. It had taken a second, totally unnecessary death to identify this one.
He took out a file and extracted the phone numbers he needed.
24
It was almost four o’clock. The group who had come to the Wye Castle so full of noisy hilarity were preparing to leave it in subdued mood.
All of them except one, that is. Even three days after his death, the baleful presence of Guy Harrington was still strong among them as they prepared to leave the scene of his murder. Inside the residential block, the door of his room remained securely locked, a blank reminder as they passed of the retribution his murder would bring for one of them. Outside it, Harrington’s black Jaguar with its double headlights surveyed them unblinkingly from the other end of the car park as they prepared to go. From deep within the murder room, John Lambert and Bert Hook, their frenzied series of phone calls at last completed, watched with interest.
The Munros studiously avoided contemplation of the car as they loaded their bags systematically into their Vauxhall Carlton. Sandy hurried indoors as soon as the boot lid was down, but Alison took a defiant, unhurried look around her before she disappeared. She cast her dark eyes upwards at the new-leaved splendour of the mighty oaks and the burgeoning candelabra of the chestnut flowers, as if by doing so she could lift herself above the sordid events of the last few days.
Meg Peters loaded a series of smallish bags into the back seat of Tony Nash’s car. Then Nash brought out their expensive suitcases and stowed them carefully around his golf clubs and trolley in the boot. He looked apprehensively towards the murder room, but the CID men were too far within the room to be visible from outside. Meg Peters brought her last package, a dress still in its carrier from the Hereford store, and placed it reverently among the rest of her packing within the car.
For a moment the two of them stood close together in silent contemplation of the murder victim’s car, as if ridding themselves in that moment of the final hold the dead man held over them. Then, like two young lovers finding each other for the first time, they linked hands and moved back into the apartment block without a backward glance. A men’s four-ball on the way to the first tee, unconscious of police observation, gestured their envy of Tony Nash in unmistakable fashion, then went in search of the lesser delights of golf.
George Goodman was more leisured about his preparations for departure than any of the others. He had but a single large bag to stow in the capacious Rover. Having deposited it, he sauntered for a moment around the car park, making no attempt to avoid the black Jaguar in its isolated position at the top. Indeed, he strolled up to the car and walked along the side of it, a benevolent smile suffusing his features as he took his farewell of the man none of them had loved and most of them had hated.
Then he picked his way through the first creamy fallings of chestnut blossom to take a last look at the golf course and the river below, winding blue and slow beneath the sun towards the spot where Marie Harrington had met her death. His bearing was so dignified, his manner so august, that Hook half-expected him to confer an episcopal blessing upon the scene before he left it. Instead, he turned and walked with the same measured tread back towards his room; the benign smile he had worn throughout was still upon his lips as he disappeared.
The manager of the Wye Castle could scarcely disguise his relief at the return to normality which the departure of these guests would confirm. After the day of the murder and the removal of the body, the course had been open to those golfers who came simply to play, and they had come in their normal numbers, pausing only to register the police presence in the apartment blocks before they tackled the problems of the course.
But residents had been forbidden, apart from the five who were being so intensively investigated by the police. The hotel group’s regional director had been most reluctant to adjust the manager’s sales targets to take account of this. Now the restrictions had been lifted; from tomorrow, the Wye Castle Hotel and Country Club would be back to normal. Bookings might even increase, with the dubious glamour conferred on the place by a brutal murder; after the recent publicity, the manager was hopeful that considerable numbers of the kind of people who slowed their cars to look at road accidents might book in with him.
Perhaps because he felt guilty that he should be so delighted to see them go, he had laid on a farewell afternoon tea for the five who had been his only guests for the last three days. The service was attentive, for the staff were delighted to be working again after their enforced inactivity. The cakes and scones were freshly baked, the jam made on the premises, the china delicately patterned. The room, with patio doors opening on to a terrace overlooking the bowling green, the eighteenth hole and the river, was as pleasant as any in the whole of the Wye Castle’s extensive range.
Yet the conversation was stilted, with long pauses between sporadic sentences. If the manager who danced such dutiful attendance was in reality anxious to see them gone, the five gave the impression that only the uncertain glue of politeness held them together. They too were anxious to be away from this pleasantest of spots as soon as decency would allow. They had had enough of public exchanges, and were eager now for the cocoons of comfort and privacy afforded to them by their cars.
This awkward gathering received the entry of Lambert and Hook almost as a relief. To the five people trying so unsuccessfully to enjoy themselves, the policemen seemed at first to bring an end of term air to the gathering, like masters who had been sternly unbending while conducting classes, but were now relaxing as their charges prepared to depart. Hook saw no reason to disillusion the little gathering too quickly, especially when George Goodman hastened forward with a plate of thickly buttered scones.
‘Do share in our final little indulgence together, gentlemen,’ he said. The Sergeant took a scone and put it carefully on the small plate Meg Peters pushed towards him
.
It was Lambert, refusing tea and cake absently, almost rudely, who changed the atmosphere from nervous hilarity to something much more tense. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about your daughter?’ he said abruptly.
For an instant, it was not even clear whom he was addressing. Then George Goodman put down the cakes with a clatter that rang loud in the suddenly silent room. He said with a last attempt to retain his genial exterior, ‘If you mean me, Superintendent, I—’
‘Of course I mean you.’ Lambert’s voice was harsh. It was the second murder, the one he felt he might have prevented, which sprang before him now, thrusting away the sympathy he might otherwise have felt for the man. ‘Did you really think you could keep your daughter permanently hidden?’
Goodman sat down awkwardly, like one fearing a faint but not quite sure of where the chair was behind him. ‘I don’t want her brought into this,’ he said dully.
Lambert said more gently, ‘Harrington seduced her, didn’t he?’ The old-fashioned word seemed justified in this case.
There was a moment when the silence in the room seemed a tangible thing, likely to harm any of them who broke it. Except the central figure, sitting on the edge of his armchair with head bent and the white fringe of tonsorial hair more than ever apparent. Eventually he said, without facing his questioner, ‘Yes. He had her, then laughed about it.’
He looked up then, and his drained and haggard face shocked his friends so much that two of them shrank involuntarily back in their seats. ‘Felicity is what the doctors call “retarded”, Superintendent. Nothing visible, you understand, but “not suitable for normal schooling”. She is “dependent on a loving home environment”.’ His bitterness against what life had dealt him made him put the series of phrases into inverted commas, as an emphasis on the grim reality that lay behind the anodyne words.