by Janet Neel
‘Oh, Robert.’
‘Don’t worry, my lovey, we’ll get through this, it’s all right. Did she tell Nigel she was in the club?’
‘No, she didn’t. She just told him she didn’t want to marry him and gave him back his ring.’
‘Why didn’t she tell him she was in the club?’
‘Oh, Robert, it was Alan Fraser she wanted. We may not like it, but there you are.’
Robert Vernon nodded, slowly. ‘She didn’t tell him, and she doesn’t seem to want him now – even though the favourite got scratched.’
‘Robert! The boy is dead.’
‘I’ve not forgotten. He wouldn’t marry her.’
‘Well, that was honest of him. She’s a rich woman: he could have gone climbing for the rest of his life without worrying about where the cash was coming from, and he wouldn’t do it.’
‘Stiff-necked bugger,’ her husband observed, as the phone rang. Robert Vernon picked it up and told his secretary he would take this one. ‘Mr McLeish? Sorry, excuse me, Chief Inspector. Yes, I know Sally rang you. She’s in bed, she’s not well enough to see anyone. Is it urgent? Are you treating this as murder?’
He listened to John McLeish’s succinct explanation of the autopsy results, unconsciously puffing out his cheeks as he did when he was bothered. ‘Bit of a coincidence, your being there then?’ he observed.
‘No.’ John McLeish had woken up that morning, clear that nothing would be gained by trying to suggest that his presence at the site was coincidental or on a friendly basis, and he now explained the reasons for his presence to Robert Vernon. He had been at the site of the murder as a policeman and it was appropriate to say so. Nor did this disclosure give the murderer an advantage. The fact that a link had been made in the official mind would put pressure on him, whoever he was.
‘I would like to see Miss Vernon as soon as possible: I need to talk to everyone who was at that table in the canteen. I understand if she can’t manage today.’
Robert Vernon grunted. ‘You need to talk to me and Dorothy as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘You may as well come round, and do us all, including Sally, but I’m not letting you talk to her unless I or her mother are with her, you understand? She’s not fit.’
‘I’ve got two interviews to do about one-thirty – I could come later?’
They fixed for five o’clock, and Robert Vernon put the phone down, scowling. He looked across at his wife. ‘I’m supposed to be at the DTI with that lad’s girlfriend and her boss at three o’clock. I’d better tell them I can’t do it.’
‘No, you go to that, Rob. Whatever’s coming, it won’t be helped by us sitting here worrying. I’m not doing that meeting on the Vernon Trust. Peter can chair that. He knows they’re not to decide who gets what today, anyway. I’ll stay with Sally. I’ll get her clothes sent over from her flat, and I’ll keep her away from the phone. You’d better get yourself ready and have some lunch.’
He nodded and kissed her, and she watched him out of the room, then returned to her daughter to tell her about the arrangement.
‘Was Dad still very angry?’
‘Yes, he was. Not with you.’
‘Alan didn’t rape me, you know.’
‘I know that, Sal. Your father still thinks you are his little girl. He has difficulty remembering you are twenty-six and have a life of your own.’
‘Why did he not mind when I was going to marry Nigel?’
‘Because he thinks he owns him.’
Sally Vernon, tears drying on her cheeks, stared at her mother who was tidying around the bed. Dorothy Vernon dropped a pile of Kleenex into the wastepaper basket and looked back at her. ‘Your father is wrong about Nigel, who has a mind of his own. He’d look after you. You could still have him, Sally, if you wanted. He’s a generous man, he’d take on the baby as well. You think on. Damn that phone …’
Dorothy Vernon vanished to answer it, leaving Sally Vernon wide-eyed with astonishment.
McLeish had a hasty lunch at his desk, still struggling with the perennial CI problem of ‘forming a squad’, or finding a team to work with. He had managed to drag Bruce Davidson away from another investigation that was just finishing; he had borrowed a room at Edgware Road; and he had persuaded them to release two detective constables to work with him, not of course full-time but along with everything else they were doing. It would be unreasonable to complain: two of Edgware Road’s uniformed constables were also deployed, one accompanying Mickey Hamilton and the other helping a sergeant and Detective Constable Woolner search the caravan that Alan Fraser had shared with Hamilton.
He drove himself to Edgware Road, leaving the keys to the car with the sergeant on duty so that it could be moved round Edgware Road’s inadequate car-park as necessary. The sergeant told him Hamilton and the escorting Constable Andersen had already arrived and had been given lunch. Hamilton had been agitated about the time and was apparently due at another appointment, of critical importance, at four p.m. It was now two-thirty and he was asking if he could be taken there by police car – would DCI McLeish believe it?
Bruce Davidson was also present, as McLeish had asked. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see what’s to do. I know where he’s going, it is important – to him, anyway.’ A busy afternoon for Mr Hamilton, McLeish thought with interest, making a statement about Alan Fraser’s death to the police, then the key interview with the K6 sponsors.
‘Had you not better put off that interview?’ he asked, briskly, greeting Mickey Hamilton.
‘Why? So you can arrest me?’ Hamilton was wired for sound, as Perry would have said, pacing round the small interview room where he had been placed, very pale, hands pushed into his pockets.
‘You’re not in much of a state to take the sponsors on, are you?’
Hamilton stopped pacing and looked at him properly. ‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘You were there.’ Davidson had managed to settle himself on a chair with a notebook but both McLeish and Hamilton were still standing. All three listened to the echo of those monosyllables.
‘Was he frightened, did you think?’ Mickey asked painfully.
McLeish felt the aching pressure at the back of his neck again. ‘Not at the end. His back was broken. He had all he could do just to breathe, I don’t think he had time to be frightened.’
Mickey Hamilton stared at him, then sank into his chair and bent his head into his hands. McLeish recognized in his bones the weight that was pressing Mickey down. He sat down himself, shaken, and asked Davidson to organize some tea, remembering that Mickey had loved the dead man, even if it was not reciprocated.
‘He was my best mate,’ Hamilton said desperately, gulping for breath.
‘Cancel that fucking interview, Mickey,’ McLeish said involuntarily, feeling protective of the weeping man opposite him. Mickey pulled himself together with an enormous effort, then his face creased.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and put his head and arms on the desk and wept again. McLeish decided to sit it out, sending Davidson out again for sweet biscuits. As Mickey recovered, he urged the biscuits on him, waiting as he ate his way through the whole plateful.
‘I had better ring up and say I can’t see the committee today,’ Mickey said, with a sigh that came from his boots. ‘Can I use a phone? I’ll talk to Charlie Hutchinson, he’ll know by now about Alan, and he can explain.’
They let him go with a constable to find the phone, and when he came back he sank into his chair in the total relaxation that follows tears and the abandonment of all plans for action. McLeish took him gently through the background details: his age twenty-seven, the same as Alan Fraser, and four years older than Tristram who had been a new boy at Grantchester when Hamilton would have been one of the sixth-formers getting themselves into trouble. And after Grantchester the University of Southampton, where he had read medicine but which he had left without a degree to go on an ill-starred Everest expedition from which three climbers had been lost. He had never gone bac
k to complete his course and had made his living for the last six years doing some teaching and as a scaffolder.
McLeish, watching him carefully, explained that the autopsy result showed that Fraser had been drugged.
‘Well, I knew there must be something wrong – he just fell, none of us were anywhere near him,’ Mickey observed drearily, obviously exhausted. ‘What was it, do you know?’
‘Antihistamine – a huge dose.’
‘But he takes that, anyway.’ Mickey was apparently unaware of the implications.
‘Not at this time of year, surely?’ McLeish asked, familiar with Francesca’s sufferings.
‘Oh yes, September can be very bad if you have an allergy to mould – Alan often found himself weeping and sneezing. It was I who suggested he should see a doctor, and he found this allergy. I’ve known Alan since we were children, you see; my parents used to take me to Culdaig for holidays.’
‘What did he take?’
‘Trilumax. They don’t make you so dopey – I mean, they’ve got a benzedrine substitute in as well. I found them for him.’
McLeish glanced at Davidson who nodded in confirmation that those were the pills that the caravan searchers had found. He made a note to tell Forensic to compare whatever Alan had been given with Trilumax. He then glanced up, to find Hamilton looking sick.
‘I can read upside down,’ he said, in explanation. ‘All teachers can.’
‘Sorry. Like civil servants.’
‘What was the drug in?’
‘I haven’t had a full report yet. But he probably took it within a couple of hours of his death. You all ate your tea together, didn’t you?’
Mickey’s head came up and he stared at McLeish, wordlessly.
‘Will you go through what happened for me? Who was there, who arrived when, what they ate, everything?’
Mickey sat still, watching him, the brown eyes very alert in the swollen face. ‘The stuff comes as a pill and it tastes bitter, I do know that. But Alan takes – took – a lot of sugar in tea or coffee, he said it was how he got his energy. It must have been in the sugar.’
McLeish said that it was a possibility, but other people probably took sugar, too.
‘He was perfectly all right for an hour at least after tea – we were going like the clappers. Then we stopped for a breather.’ Mickey focused in the region of McLeish’s tie, eyes narrowed as he remembered. ‘Then we started again, and Alan fell about twenty minutes later. Just before six.’
‘That’s right. I was meeting him then.’
‘I just can’t remember how long the stuff takes to work. It’s quick if you take it with liquid.’
‘It was a very substantial dose,’ McLeish observed, then thought about it. If it were quick-acting, then it seemed unlikely that Alan Fraser had taken it with his meal. The gap would have been too long. ‘Do you eat or drink anything except in the canteen?’
‘We all have thermoses, and drink from those when we have a breather. We buy pots of tea in the canteen, and fill the thermoses from those.’ Mickey’s voice died away and they looked at each other.
‘We’ve found a thermos,’ McLeish said grimly.
‘His is – was – blue and white. We all have different colours to save getting them mixed up. We all take different things in our tea – I mean milk and sugar, of course.’
‘When did Alan finish his thermos, then – how long after tea?’
‘He didn’t drink it all. We don’t – oh Christ, I mean we didn’t. We have a stop every hour and we’d another two hours to go before the real canteen stop. So he wouldn’t have finished it.’
‘Did you actually see if he did?’
‘No. No, I suppose he might have done, but then he wouldn’t have had anything left for the real break. And Alan wouldn’t have done that. He’s a mountaineer – you don’t finish all your rations when you can’t easily get more.’
Now that has to be right, McLeish thought respectfully. The thermos had been picked up, practically empty and without its top, when the area had been searched. McLeish had assumed it had fallen with Fraser and lost its top.
‘Did he screw the top back on?’ he asked Hamilton.
‘Well, he would normally. I didn’t notice particularly.’
McLeish, for a brief moment, contemplated wearily the labour induced in sending members of the uniformed branch seventy feet up a scaffold to drop thermoses, their tops screwed on more or less thoroughly to see what would happen. More important for the moment was the question of how the lethal tea had got into the thermos. The murderer would have had to know Fraser’s habits well; would have had to know that he would take a drink after an hour or so, at a time when he was high up on a scaffold. Moreover, he would have needed to know that Alan would then take only one cup, so a large amount of the drug would have to be put in. He felt the familiar momentary prickle of the scalp and considered Mickey Hamilton carefully. There was a good clear brain there; he had got very quickly to the actual poisoning method – unless of course he had known already, and with precision, how it was done.
‘When did he fill his thermos?’
‘When we all did. We get a pot of tea, a jug of boiling water and a jug of milk in the canteen. We help ourselves to what we want and we fill our thermoses at the end of tea. As you know, tea was a bit different yesterday because of the Royal Walkabout. There were two pots going, and I expect everything got a bit mixed up.’
McLeish looked at him thoughtfully, trying to envisage the scene, and did his best to extract an account of the thermos-filling activity. Two points were clear from Hamilton: that the four scaffolders, Bill Vernon and Nigel Makin had all filled their thermoses from the same pot of tea, and that later they had topped them up with boiling water.
‘So it wasn’t in the pot, or you would all have been affected,’ McLeish suggested. ‘Do you all take milk and sugar?’ He watched as the bones in Hamilton’s face tightened.
‘I don’t, but Alan did, and both the Doolans. We all take milk. The sugar is on the tables and there were two bowls on this one because it was a big table. I’ve no idea who used which bowl. We had a milk jug given to us, but we ran out, so Mrs Vernon passed their jug up and Alan topped up with that.’
Oh dearie me, McLeish thought, echoing, as he did when harassed, his good-tempered father, it’s going to be one of those! The canteen had, of course, washed everything up after tea, well before Fraser had fallen from the tower. ‘Do you fill your thermoses after every meal?’
‘Yes. We rinse them under a tap to clean them if we remember, before filling them up again. It’s pretty basic on a site, very like being on an expedition. You look after your feet and you eat enough and you don’t let yourself get dehydrated, but you don’t bother much with the niceties. I don’t suppose Alan had rinsed his out since lunch – he just took the top off and let it air while we were having tea.’
‘Where was it standing?’
‘Oh, in the middle of the table, where all ours were.’
McLeish contemplated him, unspeaking, and Hamilton looked back, replaying his own words in his mind.
‘Yes, I suppose anyone could have dropped something in.’
McLeish took him patiently through the events of yesterday’s tea. Mickey was an excellent observer who had taken a real malicious pleasure in the site-management’s discomfiture, but all that emerged was that in the general mêlée of anxious passing of plates and pouring of tea it would have been possible for anyone at that table who was well prepared to drop a dose of antihistamine into either the sugar, the jug of milk, or any of the four thermoses standing waiting to be filled.
The field, therefore, still contained all six people who had been in Scotland and at tea: Robert, Dorothy, Bill and Sally Vernon, Hamilton himself, and Nigel Makin. No obvious candidate having emerged from contemplation of the probable method, McLeish then returned to the question of motive. Mindful of his earliest mentor, who had said that once you’d got away from the murders committed by nutter
s where there were no rules, in ninety per cent of all other murder cases it was dead obvious from Day One who had done it. It was usually a member of the family or near offer, which was what you’d expect, given what family life was like. The remaining ten per cent were done by clever buggers who wanted something badly, and you had to work at who’d got what out of the murder and you’d find your man that way. McLeish had suspected then and confirmed subsequently that this thesis needed some expansion, that people wanted the damnedest things which you would never be able to guess. But it wasn’t a bad way to start. What had Mickey Hamilton wanted that would be achieved by this death? He sat thinking for a minute, well aware that the younger man was becoming increasingly uneasy as the silence stretched.
‘I could just as easily have been selected for K6 as Alan, you know,’ Mickey said. ‘I do have more experience on snow and ice. Alan himself said so to Francesca. You heard him, you were there.’
McLeish leant forward, alert. ‘Alan was better known, though. Might have been more useful to the expedition in that sense, mightn’t he?’
‘He wasn’t fit. His ribs were still giving trouble after that fall, although he was pretending he was all right.’ The resentment in Mickey’s tone was unmistakable.
‘Your arm’s not too good either, though, is it?’ McLeish pointed out, and Mickey’s involuntary, instantly checked movement to pull the shoulder back said it all.
McLeish watched him, trying to judge this man; it might be very important to know how concerned Mickey had been about the nine-year-old incidents at Grantchester. Investigation had shown that they had been fully as lurid as Perry had suggested, and moreover that Mickey had been one of eight senior boys most heavily implicated. Had any of the parents of the younger boys involved been willing to have their children give evidence, indeed, he would have had a criminal record. The difficulty for the parents had been not only the potential publicity but the fact that, as the local force had duly remarked, it would have been difficult to suggest the boys had been in any way coerced. Would the sponsors of this trip mind that Mickey was gay, or did he have to conceal that, too? McLeish felt himself in a dilemma; but for his relationship with Francesca and Perry he would not have known of this incident in Mickey’s past.