by J M Gregson
The superintendent turned briskly efficient. “Now. You said there was yet another man in the frame. A far more likely candidate than Hugh Pearson, I expect.”
“Yes, sir. Probably, sir. He’s a consultant at Brunton Royal Infirmary, sir.”
Tucker’s face fell, as Peach had known it would. A professional man, and a highly successful one at that, involved in serious crime? It always meant trouble: they knew how to pull strings, these professional men. “You’re sure he’s a real possibility?”
“Oh yes, sir!” Peach’s enthusiasm was in inverse ratio to Tucker’s dismay. “Good bit of detection work, actually. Only one mention of his name in the dead woman’s diary. That and his initials once or twice: R.J. But we’ve tracked him down. Matter of following through the CID procedures you’ve laid down for us in such detail. Careful groundwork and elimination. Paid off again.”
Tucker looked understandably puzzled. What Peach and his colleagues applied at Brunton CID was no more than standard police procedure – nothing to do with any directive from him. “And you say the man’s a consultant.”
“Yes, sir. A surgeon, actually. Richard Johnson. Has a national reputation, apparently. Be a pity if we have to lock him up, won’t it?”
Tucker shuddered. He could see hostile headlines already. “The sooner you can eliminate him from your inquiries the better. And do it quietly, for God’s sake. The man may be a popular local figure.”
“He is, sir, by all accounts. You may know him.” Peach suddenly slid a postcard-sized picture across the desk, like a conjurer producing a dove from his sleeve.
Tucker stared at it in astonishment. “He’s black,” he said dully.
“Yes, sir.” Perhaps it was Tucker’s amazing powers of observation which had secured him his present rank, Percy thought. “Apparently his origins are Caribbean, but he’s spent almost all his life in this country. Educated at Radford and London University. I expect he can use a knife and fork. He’s certainly adept with the surgical sort of knife, by all accounts.”
Tucker looked thoroughly unhappy. He was trying to reconcile the man’s color with the job he did, and finding it difficult. Imaginative leaps were not his forte. He sought for a statistic to fling at his DI, and clutched at the only one which swam across his vision.
“More than half the violent crime in some of our big cities is committed by blacks, you know, even when they represent a much smaller section of the population than that,” he said, desperately.
“Yes, sir. Of course, a high proportion of young blacks are unemployed and living in slum conditions.” Percy thought he might throw a fact of his own in to annoy his chief, though he couldn’t see what relevance this had to Richard Johnson, FRCS.
“I don’t want any left-wing political claptrap, Peach. Just stick to the point.” Tucker looked at his DI severely over the top of the gold-rimmed spectacles. “And handle this Johnson fellow with kid gloves. I don’t want the ethnic lobby round my neck, you know.”
Percy paused for a moment, savoring the picture of Tucker disappearing like Gordon at Khartoum under a welter of colored faces. “No, sir. I see, sir.” He stood up, regaining with that single movement his normal bouncing energy and eagerness. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, we’re just off to see the bugger now. I’ll bear in mind what you said about the predominance of his brethren in urban crime statistics. Might be a useful thing to quote at him, if he isn’t immediately cooperative. Rest assured, this Johnson fellow won’t get an easy ride from me!”
“No. No, that’s not what I said!” Tucker too was on his feet, but Peach was gone. The Head of CID called from his door at the back which was disappearing down the stairs, “Use some diplomacy, Peach, for once in your life!”
Percy smiled to himself as he reached the car park. He could have used the last twenty minutes to gather his thoughts for the coming interview with Johnson, rather than in baiting Tommy Bloody Tucker. But a person was allowed to indulge himself occasionally.
Hobbies are the things which distinguish man from the beasts around him.
Twenty
She was a protective secretary. She watched them as they entered her office with observant, resentful eyes, and greeted them with, “Mr Johnson is very busy. He always is.”
“So are we. And murder doesn’t wait,” said Percy Peach briskly.
“Neither does disease. And disease can be arrested, if it is attacked in time. The dead are in no hurry.”
Miss Williams smiled the superiority of this sentiment at the CID intruders. She had heard it voiced in the hospital, and it seemed appropriate now. She stood four-square before them, a sturdy crusader in a tweed skirt, a defender of the citadel where her icon resided, an acolyte who would sell herself willingly on his behalf. A worthy opponent, thought Percy, but one he mustn’t waste his fire on now. “Those murderers who aren’t caught within a week usually get away with it. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.”
“And we do have an appointment with Mr Johnson,” said Lucy Blake.
It was an argument Miss Williams, who lived her life around the great man’s appointments, could not refute. “I know. I spoke to you myself, last night. I’m just asking you to be as brief as possible, that’s all.”
The man she was trying to protect appeared at that moment in the door of his office, immaculately erect in a dark-blue suit, smiling his approval of her attempts at protection like a man commending a favorite watchdog.
“That’s all right, Patricia,” he said. “We mustn’t hold up the due processes of the law, must we?”
He led them into the big room beyond the mahogany door, which seemed impeccably tidy after the filing cabinets and the letters scattered over the surfaces of Miss Williams’ workplace. The bustle and hum of the busy hospital outside was shut away as Richard Johnson closed the heavy door behind them. The canal and the terraces of mean nineteenth-century houses built for the subjects of King Cotton were silent and unpeopled beyond the double glazing of the wide window; nothing moved in that industrial landscape. It was like a Lowrie print with added sunlight and without his stick people.
This was a room for quiet consultation, for serious reassurance and, on occasions, for the revelation of tragedy to those who sat helplessly awaiting it.
The central figure here was handsome, urbane, and yet not quite at ease. He seated them in chairs which faced the light, then sat opposite them in a matching armchair, carefully eschewing the swivel chair behind the protective desk. Peach studied him, allowing the tiny pause of preliminary embarrassment to stretch imperceptibly. This job made you good at assessing people’s ages, but he always found that difficult with black men, and prosperous black men were the most difficult of all. Their faces seemed to have fewer lines, and those lines were less revealing than those in similar white faces. Did that mean he was prejudiced? The simplest thoughts were politically incorrect nowadays: it was safest not to voice them.
He decided that Richard Johnson must be in his early forties. Although he looked younger, he could scarcely have reached this position of eminence and acquired his excellent reputation much earlier than that. So he was not that much older than the delectable and amorous Verna Hume. With his well-cut suit, his handsome, intelligent features, his wide and liquid brown eyes, he could well have been attractive to a discontented wife. A randy discontented wife, taking her pleasures wherever she found them, he reminded himself firmly: the world at large might choose to sentimentalize the dead, but detectives must not do so.
Johnson snatched a surreptitious look at the gold watch beneath his stiff white cuff.
“What can I do for you, Inspector?”
“You can tell me about Mrs Verna Hume, who was murdered at the weekend.”
Johnson smiled, a wide, forced smile, which displayed perfectly formed front teeth and no humor at all. “You must be under a misapprehension if you think I can tell you anything of value about Mrs Hume. I don’t know why—”
“Your initials were found in her diary,
Mr Johnson. There was more than one entry.” This was Lucy Blake, making the most of the few brief inscriptions they had found in the little book in the dead woman’s bedroom.
“Really?” But he wasn’t surprised, nor did his raised eyebrows convince them that he was. “Well, I’m sure you’ll understand that any exchanges between practitioner and patient are completely confidential. Just as—”
“Are you saying that Mrs Hume was a patient of yours, Mr Johnson?”
Lucy Blake’s wide eyes looked very green with the full daylight upon them. To Johnson, a man susceptible to young and beautiful female eyes, they seemed like pools luring him to destruction. He checked himself, then adopted the man-of-the-world expression he thought appropriate for the revelation, which he realized had always been inevitable. He was finding this acting a part far more difficult than he had anticipated. When he had planned his tactics beside his sleeping wife in the quiet, restless hours around dawn, he had convinced himself that it would be easy to deceive. People who are used to being believed often make that mistake.
He licked his lips, forced them into a reluctant smile and admitted, “No. She wasn’t a patient. My limited meetings with Mrs Hume were of a purely social nature.”
Peach looked stern, noting how it accentuated the other man’s discomfort and relishing this moment of breakthrough. “We shall get through this much more quickly if you are completely honest, Mr Johnson. When did you first meet Mrs Hume?”
Richard had never heard her called by this formal title until this morning. It made his Verna seem like a different person. But she wasn’t his Verna: he must stop thinking of her like that.
“It must have been about four months ago, I think. I couldn’t be exact.” Only four months! How his life had been changed in that time! But again, he mustn’t recall it, even to himself: all that was finished now.
Peach’s small black eyes watched him steadily, like a ferret waiting for a rabbit to make a false move. “I see. And where did this first meeting take place?”
Richard Johnson had no false bedside manner: that sort of medicine had disappeared with his generation. His smile when he spoke to his patients was warm, genuine, caring; it took over his face without his even thinking about it. Now, when he tried to force that same smile, it would not come.
“Look, Inspector, I’m not proud of some things I’ve done. Not many people can be completely open about the whole of their lives. Do I have your assurance that what I now have to tell you will be kept confidential?”
It was a familiar plea. Usually, it meant men wanted their wives to be kept in the dark about philandering. And usually Peach did his best to meet it, though he often wrested a little more cooperation in return. But this was a murder investigation, with its own set of unwritten rules.
He said, “We shall do what we can, if what we find is not relevant to our inquiries. But there can be no guarantees.”
Peach savored that formal language as he dropped it stiffly from his tongue; turning the screw on professional men was not always as easy as this. But a restless prick made a man vulnerable; Percy thought he might put that in his book of wise sayings. It was the kind of aphorism they should have in Readers’ Digest but didn’t.
“Yes. Well, this isn’t relevant to your investigation. You’ll find that out soon enough.”
Again, Johnson found his normally ready smile elusive as the two pairs of eyes watched him intently. He realized suddenly that he had not been studied so steadily and unemotionally since he had been quizzed for part two of his FRCS twelve years ago. He still remembered that as an unnerving experience; but it had been a professional examination on his own ground, whereas in this bizarre game the opposition set the rules.
Peach smiled at last, a little wearily, making Johnson feel that he had heard all this before, that he saw through every petty subterfuge his victims might be unwise enough to attempt. “Where did you meet Mrs Hume for the first time?”
“It was at the Northern Ritz. That’s a nightclub in Bolton Road.”
“Yes. I know where it is, Mr Johnson.” It was a tawdry set-up in a converted cinema, offering mild striptease, a ‘floor show’ with third-rate comedians and singers, and cheap champagne at enormous prices. A place where the mildly criminal, the tawdry rich and the easily deceived could be found in almost equal numbers. Peach guessed that Johnson would be in the last category. Strange how the highly intelligent could sometimes have no common sense at all. In his experience, they deceived themselves much more easily than less gifted people. “Did you arrange to meet Mrs Hume there?”
“Oh no!” For a moment, Johnson was aghast at the idea of a deliberate assignation. Then he smiled, genuinely for the first time, and at his own expense. These distinctions could hardly be important in the middle of a murder inquiry. “We met by chance. I went there to unwind after a busy day. Verna was with a party of about half a dozen people. We danced. And that was all we did, that first time.”
Peach let the last phrase hang for a moment in the air, watching it rise like an invisible smoke ring towards the ceiling. Then he said, “But you arranged to meet again.”
“Yes.”
“And the relationship developed,” Percy searched for a diplomatic phrase, “became more intense.”
“Yes.”
“You slept together.”
“Yes. Not as often as we’d have liked, but yes.”
Not as often as you’d have liked, anyway, thought Percy. For an unguarded moment, Johnson had been almost like a young lover, proud of his conquest, anxious to assert the depth of the emotion. Interesting. “Where did you meet, Mr Johnson?”
For a moment, he thought the consultant was going to wax indignant, protest about the invasion of his privacy.
Then, with a little sigh, Johnson said, “Wherever we could. At her house, when we knew her husband was safely out of the way. In motels. In the back of my car, when there was no other way. We managed an occasional night away from here, in the Lake District. Just twice we did that, actually.”
For a moment, Richard Johnson’s dark face was riven with the passion and the pity of it. So much it had meant, so much he had promised himself would come from it. And now it was over; Verna was dead and waiting to be put in the earth. Or worse: for the first time, he contemplated the idea that the perfect body he had explored so fervently might be burnt, and its ashes scattered to the heedless winds.
“And this relationship was still alive at the time when Mrs Hume was murdered?”
Johnson’s dark, handsome features winced a little at the word. Then he nodded, almost eagerly, his brown eyes upon Peach’s face. “That is correct.”
Lucy Blake, her gold ballpoint poised over her notebook, said, “And when did you last see Mrs Hume, Mr Johnson?”
Johnson paused, appearing to give due weight and attention to his reply. It was a mistake, for they all knew that he must have considered his answer to this stock question many times before. “It would have been on the Monday night of last week. Five or six days before she died, I suppose.” He was carefully ignorant of the exact time of the death, they noticed; it was perhaps a little too elaborate. “We saw each other for an hour or so in the early evening.”
Peach studied the ceiling again for a moment. “Was there any dispute between you? Then or on any previous occasion?”
“No. Far from it! We were getting on very well!” The little nervous laugh, which bounced against the last word was a strange sound. It was also a highly inappropriate one for a man who, by his own account, should now be desolated by this death.
Peach allowed himself a moment of surprise; Lucy Blake raised a startled face from her notebook right on cue.
Percy said slowly, “Presumably you’re going to tell us you didn’t kill Mrs Hume. Have you any idea who might have done so?”
“No. I wish I did. I – I didn’t know most of the people she mixed with, you know. We didn’t meet all that often. Probably it averaged out at about once a week, I suppose.”
>
Once he was released from talking about his own feelings for Verna, he dropped back into the caution he had intended to use to the CID throughout this meeting. The man who had seemed eager only a moment ago to assert the depth of his passion now seemed anxious to distance himself from the dead woman, thought Percy. But drawer-droppers often had that confusing effect on men, especially when they looked as delectable as the late Verna Hume.
“Where were you last Saturday night, Mr Johnson?”
He took his time, appearing to puzzle a little over a straightforward answer. “I was at home with my wife, Inspector Peach.”
“And the children?”
“No. They were out.”
“But your wife will confirm that you were at home all evening, no doubt.” Percy managed to slide a little cynicism into the neutral statement. Wives who provided their spouses with alibis were an occupational hazard in CID work. But usually, it was for breaking and entering, or the odd bit of GBH, not homicide.
“Yes, I’m sure she will. But Carmen knows nothing about my relationship with Verna Hume, and I’d like it to stay that way.”
“That may not be possible, Mr Johnson.”
“No. But I’m asking you not to reveal it unless it is absolutely unavoidable. It would harm my marriage. And my marriage and my family are important to me, you see.” Richard thought to himself that this was the one bit that had come out exactly as he had prepared it in those restless hours of the night.
Lucy Blake thought, he’s saying now that Verna was just a bit on the side. A bit of fumbling and tumbling. The wives always win, in the end. Aloud, she said, “The hospital says you came in here that night.”
He was shaken by that. Not by the fact, which could surely only be in his favor, but by the thoroughness of their checking. Someone must have spoken to the night sister, already.
“Yes, I popped in for a few minutes. There was a patient I wanted to check on. A young man who’d had a bone marrow transplant on the Friday. He was running a temperature, you see. But it turned out he was stable. He’s doing fine now. Sitting up today.” He found himself wanting to enlarge on this, to draw attention to his care and his competence in the complex world in which he worked.