by J M Gregson
An Academic Death
J. M. Gregson
© J. M. Gregson 2001
J. M. Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2001 by Severn House.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
To Michael and Christine,
who finally got married whilst
this was being written
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
One
‘I don’t care if I never see the bastard again!’
The woman sat with her arms folded and her chin out, challenging the man on the other side of the desk to dispute her view.
Detective Sergeant Bert Hook studied her calmly, refusing to be hurried into any hasty response. She was no more than thirty-five, his experienced eye told him, running a little from the buxom to the squat. She had blue eyes and a shock of gold-blonde hair, which fell a little over her left eye with the vehemence of her assertion. She brushed it away impatiently, as if she feared that Hook would do something underhand whilst he was hidden from her full vision. Bert eventually said, ‘Do you have any reason to think that your husband might be in trouble, Mrs Upson?’
‘No. If he fell down the bog, he’d come up with a five-pound note, that one! He’s always been a jammy bugger, Matt has.’
‘Yet you thought you should come and tell us that he had gone.’
‘Yes. Thought you were supposed to report a missing person, didn’t I? Look, if you don’t want to know, that’s all right with me! I just wish I hadn’t wasted my time coming in here!’ She unfolded her arms and set them by her sides, gave him a more intense version of the glare he had become accustomed to since the desk sergeant had brought her into CID.
Yet she didn’t stand up, didn’t give any other sign of wanting to be on her way. Mrs Elizabeth Upson wanted this desertion to be registered, he reckoned. Bert allowed a smile to spread slowly over his large, weather-beaten face. ‘It’s usual to report a missing person, yes. But you should know that if people are adults, we can’t force them to return, not against their will. Of course, we can point out that they have family responsibilities and suchlike, but if they don’t choose to come back and honour them there’s nothing —’
‘I don’t want the bastard back! I thought I’d made that clear. I might refuse to have him, even if he came.’
Bert was playing his usual game of pretending to be obtuse. Many people had underestimated the intelligence behind that impassive, bovine face in the fourteen years he had spent in CID, and a large proportion of them had suffered in consequence. He was more interested at present in the attitude of this woman than in the routine details of the missing person she was reporting, and the impatience he was inducing in her was making her reveal more of herself than she had purposed when she came into the police station at Oldford.
He studied her impassively for a moment, watching the colour heightening in her cheeks, listening to her breathing as she strove to make it more even. Then he repeated with infuriating slowness the information he had already recorded on the pad in front of him. ‘Matthew John Upson. Aged thirty-seven. Height five feet ten inches. Weight just over seventy-six kilograms.’ He looked into the flushed face on the other side of the desk. ‘That’s your twelve stones, you see. We have to record weight in metric, now.’
‘I’m well aware of metric measures, Sergeant Hook. I’d have given it to you in kilos, if you’d asked me at the time.’
‘Good, good.’ Her whole tone had changed once the anger overlaying her absent husband had been diverted. She was asserting now that despite the epithets she might choose for her absent husband, she was not to be lightly dismissed: this was an articulate, middle-class woman. But Hook took her back to the missing man. ‘How long has he been missing, Mrs Upson?’
‘Since last Friday morning. He went out of the house and never came back.’
‘Four days, then. Three nights. Did he give any indication that he intended to go away for a time? Did he pack any clothes, for instance?’
‘No. I’ve checked that. All the clothes except the ones he went out in are still in the house. So is his shaving kit.’
Intelligent and perspicacious, Mrs Upson, decided Bert. Probably she was telling the truth. If so, Upson hadn’t intended to go. Or hadn’t meant anyone to suspect what he was planning: the two could be very different. ‘Did he appear distressed or agitated in the days before he disappeared, Mrs Upson?’
She sighed — an angry, petulant sigh rather than one of resignation. ‘No more than usual. I’d have told you if he had.’
‘I have to ask you this. Can you think of any reason why Mr Upson should have wanted to leave his home? On a permanent basis, I mean.’
She folded her arms again, accentuating the line of her substantial bust by the action. ‘You mean did he have another woman lined up, don’t you? Well, at least you’re getting round to some proper questions at last, I suppose. The answer’s no. He’d had a few flings over the years. I shouldn’t think any of them would have been stupid enough to take him on.’
Nor he to set up another partnership, perhaps, if he thought the first attempt was a fair guide. A phrase about once bitten twice shy swam disconcertingly into Bert’s mind in the face of this formidable female. He said instead, ‘How would you describe your own relationship with your husband, Mrs Upson?’
She set herself, almost as if this was the question she had been waiting for, as if she were a markswoman aligning her sights. Then she said vigorously, ‘He was an arsehole. Sergeant Hook. An arsehole, pure and simple!’
Bert resisted the line about arseholes, like the truth, being rarely pure and never simple. There was a time and a place for everything. He bent over his pad, recording that the home relationship was not happy. Mentally, he noted the more significant fact that she was already speaking of him as in the past. Shouldn’t she have said, ‘He’s had a few flings over the years’ rather than ‘He’d had’ and ‘He is an arsehole’ rather than ‘He was’? Aloud, he said, ‘Thank you for being so frank. Can you think of anywhere where your husband might have gone?’
‘No. That’s why I’m here. He’s not at his mother’s. He’s not at his sister’s. I can’t think where else he might have gone.’
‘What about close friends?’
‘He hasn’t got any. Not any that would be stupid enough to take him in, anyway.’
Bert smiled the reassurance he normally offered in such cases. ‘We’ll add Mr Upson to our missing persons register. But you’ll probably get a phone call or a postcard in the next few days. Then you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.’
Liz Upson stood up. ‘No fuss, Sergeant. I just thought you ought to know he was gone. Thought I was supposed to register the fact. And for the record, I won’t be pleased to hear from him. Arsehole I said, and Arsehole I meant.’ She spoke the word with a capital letter, and it seemed to give her a peculiar satisfaction. It was as though she had lighted upon a succinct summary of her missing husband, and was determined to fix it in her memory by repetition.
‘We’ll need a recent photograph.’
She nodded, reached into
her bag, produced a clear colour photograph, handed it across the desk. Bert Hook registered her beautifully manicured fingers with the CID man’s automatic talent for detail, noted again the contrast between how carefully she had prepared herself for this visit and the immoderate language she had used about the missing man, and then looked down at the photograph. A man with dark, thick hair over a square face, staring directly at the camera with only the slightest of smiles beneath a long upper lip. It looked like an enlarged version of a passport photograph. ‘This will do very nicely. If you hear anything of his whereabouts, please don’t forget to let us know. People often do, in their relief.’
She looked at him contemptuously, and he thought there was going to be a renewed vituperation of the man in the photograph. But perhaps she realised belatedly that she had already told this man more about herself than she had planned, and she merely nodded curtly.
Hook guided her out through the labyrinth of Oldford CID. She strode back into the outside world without a backward glance, paused for a moment when the sun hit her face, seeming to relish the late-afternoon June warmth. She carried the air of a woman who had completed another task in a busy day. She moved well. Bert, who was built on generous lines himself and was of a charitable disposition, decided that Mrs Upson was buxom, after all, rather than plump. Her summer dress clung to all the right places. From the rear as well as the front, she was a shapely woman. And from this distance you could almost forget her bitter tongue, which seemed in any case to be confined to the subject of her husband. Bert stood in contemplation at the station entrance until she disappeared. It was a pity he wouldn’t see much more of those ample curves.
But DS Hook had no idea how well he would get to know the formidable Mrs Upson in the weeks to come.
Two
Matthew John Upson was duly entered into the Oldford police files as a MISPA. Within hours, he was on the national computer lists as a missing person; moreover, he was recorded as a man who had disappeared without any apparent intention of doing so.
But in the Britain of the twenty-first century, many thousands of people disappear each year. The problem is one of numbers and police time. Unless there are suspicious circumstances about the disappearance or the person involved is a minor, it is an economic fact of police life that not much time can be given to searching for people who are suddenly absent from their previous residences. A few disappearances have tragic or sensational consequences, which are invariably well publicised and intriguing to the public — Lord Lucan has passed from the realms of popular curiosity into those of popular humour.
But most people who disappear have their own reasons for doing so. Only a tiny minority are criminals. The majority of the rest eventually resurface, though not necessarily in the same spot where they disappeared beneath the waves. There is not much point in devoting scarce resources to investigating these sudden absences.
Unless, that is, someone has reason to think there is something sinister about them.
Matthew Upson’s disappearance had been reported by one woman and been dutifully entered into the files of bureaucracy. It was in the system, and there it might have remained undisturbed almost indefinitely if it had followed the usual pattern. But then, three days later, on Thursday the 17th of June, another woman came forward and protested that this particular disappearance did indeed have something about it which she thought highly suspicious.
The woman had a considerable presence. But police stations are used to those, and are more than usually proof against their impact. This lady’s air of patrician command might not have carried her far without the accusations she brought with it. Matthew Upson’s sudden disappearance might have some odd circumstances surrounding it, she maintained. It might even be, she contended, that there had been foul play involved in it.
The police machine is formidable, but not inflexible. The woman who carried these suspicions was Mrs Rosemary Upson, the mother of the missing man. And within twenty minutes of her arrival at Oldford police station she was ushered into the office of Superintendent John Lambert, head of the CID section, where her allegations might receive appropriately weighty consideration.
Lambert had a copy of the bald facts of the computer entry before him on his desk. He went through the details of the time and circumstances of the disappearance with his visitor, noting her air of determination and her increasing impatience as she confirmed them. Then he said, ‘I believe you think there is something more that we should know about this matter, Mrs Upson.’
She looked into the long face, noting the lines of experience around the grey, observant eyes and the mouth with its slight smile of encouragement. She had heard of this man and his reputation in solving the serious crimes of the area: this was the man she had been determined she would see. She was slightly surprised that she had got into his office to see him without needing to be more fierce in her demands.
Rosemary Upson said quietly, ‘I don’t believe that Matthew has simply disappeared, Superintendent Lambert. I think something has happened to my son.’
She had thought that he would try to reassure her. that he would mouth the platitudes she had heard from others and assure her that her son would turn up unhurt. Instead, he studied her for a moment and then said, ‘Are you telling me that you think your son may be dead?’
‘Yes. Just that.’ She felt her skin tingling around the base of her neck as she said the words: it was the first time she had voiced the thought so baldly.
Again that brief interval when he studied her and weighed her words, forcing her to do the same. Then he said calmly, ‘And why do you think that this might be so, Mrs Upson?’
She had expected to be challenged, even gently ridiculed. She had been prepared to shout at unresponsive faces, to thump desks if necessary. This calm acceptance was somehow more disturbing. She tried to organise her thoughts rationally. ‘The way in which he disappeared. It was so — well, so sudden and unexpected.’
Lambert smiled at her. ‘Lots of people choose to depart like that, Mrs Upson. They have a vast variety of reasons for doing it. Only in a tiny minority of cases have they died.’
It was the first gesture towards anything like comfort that he had offered her. But it emerged not as comfort but as an invitation to justify her fears. She said determinedly, ‘I saw him the day before it happened. Last Thursday. I’d have known if he was planning to disappear of his own accord.’
‘That depends upon what your son was planning and why. He might have needed to deceive you along with the rest, even if he didn’t wish to do that.’
She smiled grimly. ‘I am his mother, Mr Lambert. Have been for the last thirty-seven years. I’d have known.’
Such was the depth of her own certainty that Lambert found himself believing her, against all the inclinations of his own years of experience, of hearing such assertions from parents. He said, not unkindly, indeed with a quickening of interest, ‘Is there anything you can offer me which is more than a mother’s intuition?’
She could not believe how calm she was now. She was sitting here trying to convince a senior detective that her son was lying dead somewhere, yet she was coolly marshalling her thoughts, wondering how she might best persuade him. Some of her poise was coming, she was sure, from this calm, unemotional figure on the other side of the big desk, so obviously prepared to take her seriously, so ready to listen to her worst fears about her son.
She took a deep breath and said, ‘Matthew and I have always been very close. I haven’t approved of everything he’s done over the last few years, I haven’t liked some of the people he has associated with. I don’t deny that he has taken to concealing some parts of his life from me. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t remained very close, Superintendent. I’d have known if he was planning to disappear from my life, even temporarily. He wouldn’t have wanted me worried. And even if I’m wrong about that, even if you think these are no more than a fond mother’s ramblings, that he wouldn’t have told me what he was planning, I
assure you that I would have picked up something of his intentions, whether he had said anything openly or not.’
She finished this breathless, for she had poured it out swiftly, fearful of an interruption, apprehensive that he would point out the thinness of her arguments. Instead, he studied her for that now familiar instant of silence before he said, ‘Let’s be quite clear about this, Mrs Upson, because what you’re saying has very serious implications. You believe that your son has not disappeared from his home and his work voluntarily; that some person or persons have removed him from the scene against his will, and for their own purposes.’
She nodded, thankful of the pause his words had afforded her to make her breathing more even. ‘Exactly that. I’ll go further. I very much fear that he has been permanently removed from the scene. I shall be surprised if he is found alive.’ She listened to herself as she spoke, and was surprised how calm she sounded.
‘You don’t think it is possible that he is merely being held somewhere against his will?’
She felt a curious kind of relief in his quiet questions. She had expected to be treated as a hysterical female, called upon to justify herself, soothed and sent away to recover her equilibrium. Yet he seemed to be not only taking her seriously but prepared to push things forward, perhaps to escalate the investigation of Matthew’s disappearance. ‘It’s possible, I suppose. But I can’t see why anyone would do that. No one’s going to rescue my son with a ransom, so that couldn’t be the motive. I think some people wish to silence him, and his permanent silence can only be secured in one way.’
Her voice, which had kept an unnatural calmness for so long, quavered on the last phrase, and she felt the first hot tears pressing round her eyeballs.
Lambert felt a surge of compassion he would not show for this woman of over seventy, proud, even patrician in her bearing, who had probably never set foot in a police station before, who had no doubt had to force herself to come here on this mission for her son. He said quietly, ‘You’ll need to give me some details of the people you feel might be dangerous to him, Mrs Upson. We’ll treat them as confidential, of course. I only hope that you will prove to be way off-key in your thoughts about this.’