by J M Gregson
‘He’s the wrong age for an EXIT death. Early fifties.’
‘What about incurable diseases?’ said Hook. They both knew ill health could make age irrelevant.
Lambert shrugged. ‘No mention in the note. None known of, as yet.’
Hook registered that ‘as yet’ with a little thrill of pleasurable anticipation. Lambert was going to take this further.
His chief was looking at Rushton’s report again. ‘Despite his note, there’s no marital break-up that we’re aware of. No financial trouble mentioned here.’
‘I think the business is prosperous. There’d be something wrong if an estate agency wasn’t, these days.’
Lambert caught the bitterness of raw envy; it was an unusual note from Hook, but he welcomed the evidence of humanity in his subordinates. He said, ‘Any previous suicide attempts?’
Hook knew the area and its gossip better than most. He had been a village bobby for years before he became a CID man, and had never forsaken the habits and awarenesses he had found useful then. ‘Not that I’ve heard of,’ he said.
Lambert picked up the external phone and dialled a number he knew by heart. ‘Burgess?’
‘Dr Burgess is conducting a post-mortem examination and cannot be disturbed. Can I take a message?’ Lambert recognized the stiffly formal tones of the pathologist’s assistant.
‘That’s Mr Binns, isn’t it? This is Superintendent Lambert at CID. Just ask Dr Burgess to ring me back when he pauses for a moment in the abattoir, will you?’
He heard Binns, a humourless thirty-year-old, tutting disapprovingly. Morticians tended to be touchy about their trade. Binns put the phone down and Lambert heard his footsteps clicking away over the marble floor, towards the mutilated cadaver over which his chief bent. He pictured that worthy with apron smeared with gore and formaldehyde, hands and forearms covered in blood.
Rather to his surprise, when the phone was taken up again he heard the fruity tones of Burgess himself.
‘Yes, John. What challenge have you to offer us?’
‘Nothing exciting, I’m afraid. I was rather hoping you could give me something of interest.’
‘In respect of what?’
Not whom, Lambert noticed, but what. Burgess was ruthlessly realistic about his subjects.
‘Stanley Freeman. A suicide, apparently.’
‘I like that “apparently”,’ said Burgess with relish. ‘It offers possibilities. I haven’t cut him up yet. What should I look for?’
‘Nothing in particular. I was just ringing to see if you could confirm a routine EXIT-type departure. He had a plastic bag over his head.’
‘So I have observed,’ said Burgess drily, ‘but I haven’t yet investigated the worthy Mr Freeman. You can put that down to the miracles of modern technology. We’ve two road-death cadavers in here that I was getting on with. Routine stuff, but then I thought the unfortunate Stanley was just that, until I got your phone call.’
‘He may be,’ said Lambert hastily. For some reason, he was anxious not to raise the hopes of the sensation-hungry pathologist.
‘You don’t let me down too often. Look, I’m just finishing the second of the road deaths. Binns can do the report. I’ll move straight on to the diverting Mr Freeman, now that I’m assured of your interest. Come over if you like. It’s delicious to find you playing a hunch.’ Burgess knew how Americanisms irritated the Superintendent.
‘You’re putting him on your table now?’
‘Within twenty minutes. Just the thing to give you an appetite for lunch!’ Lambert fancied he caught Binns’s disapproving sigh in the background.
‘Right. I’ll be there very shortly,’ he said. As soon as he had put the phone down, he wondered why.
As he drove the four miles to the mortuary, the elements seemed to mock any suggestion of malevolent overtones to Freeman’s death. High white clouds danced across a light blue sky in a warm breeze, fluttering summer dresses against female thighs as he drove past the supermarket and out into the country beyond. Any death of this kind was a tragedy: on a day like this, it was difficult to imagine it was a sinister tragedy.
By the time he reached the mortuary, Freeman’s body had been slid from its drawer and lifted on to the dissection table. Lambert was called through by Burgess into the room which was almost an operating theatre, with its scrubbed surfaces and channels in the floor to carry away blood. Here the object was not to retrieve life or enhance it, but to analyse the reasons for its departure. All was unemotional, analytical, unhurried: the dead can always wait.
‘No gall-stones or kidney-stones,’ said Burgess breezily. He set the kidneys beside the stomach and intestine he had already removed. Lambert swallowed hard. He had played this game before. Burgess would try to induce the fit of nausea he regarded as characteristic of amateurs in matters of death; Lambert would maintain an outwardly phlegmatic air through the butchery. He hoped.
‘There are gowns and wellingtons in that cupboard in the corner if you want a closer look at this,’ Burgess offered with relish.
‘I’ve more respect for your laundry bill in these times of public spending cuts,’ countered Lambert. He watched Burgess extract expertly the dessertspoonful or so of blood he needed from the left leg. The pathologist added a drop of liquid from a bottle and handed the sample to Binns to label. ‘What is it you add?’ asked Lambert, drawn into the question despite himself by this measured performance.
‘Citrate solution. To prevent clotting,’ explained Burgess. Lambert realized suddenly that this eagerness to show off his craft came from a man who operated in lonely isolation for most of his working life. He tried not to watch as various organs were slid unceremoniously into a plastic sack, ready for reinsertion into the outer case of Stanley Freeman. The stomach and kidneys were retained for analysis.
‘Nothing remarkable to report as yet, I suppose,’ said the Superintendent, trying not to look at the jelly-like tremble on the kidneys as Binns took them away.
Burgess had obviously been waiting for the question. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ he said with studied casualness. He looked blandly at Lambert, but failed to lure him into further questions. ‘Just come over here,’ he said.
Lambert moved to his side. He tried not to look too closely at what had once been a man and was now unseamed from navel to chin as comprehensively as any victim of Macbeth’s. But Burgess this time was not interested in internal rummaging. He lifted the arms from the body. Across the wrists, raw red marks were already beginning to turn black with the inexorable processes of decomposition.
‘The man on the spot should have seen those,’ said Lambert stupidly.
Burgess shook his head. ‘They were under the sleeves,’ he said. ‘And the shirt cuffs were buttoned.’ He tried but totally failed to keep the excitement out of his next phrases. ‘Those wrists were either held very hard or tied at the moment of death. I’ll tell you which in due course. You’re looking for a murderer, Superintendent.’
Chapter 4
In the bright light of noon, Lydon Hall had not the almost unreal beauty which had entranced the Harbens on the previous evening.
In the perfect peace of an English sunset, with the chime of a distant church clock drifting through the still air, the old house had seemed caught in a time warp, with nothing visible from the gate which might not have been seen a century, even two centuries, earlier. When Lambert turned his Vauxhall betweeen those same high stone posts, the illusion had gone.
There were, for instance, two police vehicles drawn up on the gravel forecourt. And the great oak front door, so securely closed upon the Harbens when they had come by appointment to view the house, was now wide open, so that the rectangular cave of darkness seemed to invite attention and investigation. As Lambert walked up the drive, the police radio in one of the cars blared with sudden harshness; a uniformed PC in blue shirtsleeves came hurriedly round the side of the house to answer it and explain what he was about. He argued on the radio with his sergeant at the
station, who was no doubt irritated to find his staff diverted from more routine activities to join a hastily assembled scene-of-crime team. Lambert for his part was glad to see them here so promptly: it was barely half an hour since he had phoned in from the mortuary.
If the evidence of human activity had removed the ethereal charm the Harbens had seen in the Hall, it still presented an attractive enough picture. The sun had not the unwinking red glow of evening which so heightened every other colour, but it shone cheerfully enough between cotton-wool clouds. The higher sun restored a proper perspective, so that the topmost branches of beech and oak, swaying in the freshening breeze, resumed their real position well beyond the high brick chimneys.
Lydon Hall, with its carefully swept gravel drive and well-tended acres of garden, presented a scene of pleasant, privileged England. It was difficult to take seriously the idea that the head of Freeman Estates had been lured here on a perfect summer evening for the express purpose of killing him. That person or persons unknown had carried out a premeditated, cold-blooded scheme, not only to murder but to conceal the crime as suicide.
The full post-mortem report would no doubt reveal exactly where Stanley Freeman had been killed: it was possible but unlikely that the murder had been committed somewhere else and the body merely deposited here. PMs had their uses, Lambert told his slowly recovering stomach; he should even be grateful for the lively interest of the bloodthirsty Malcolm Burgess, MB, ChB.
He walked beneath the highstone arch of the front door, through the lofty panelled hall which the Harbens had never reached, into the drawing-room where their visit had been so brutally curtailed. The photographer had already finished his work; with the body removed, there was not much for him to record. The scene-of-crime sergeant was writing down the results of his usual meticulous measurings, which would take him longer than usual in a room this size. Lambert looked across to the French windows where the Harbens had entered, visualizing as best he could the scene in the twilight. The armchair with its macabre burden must have been in near-darkness: it was a good seven paces from the French window.
Two constables were covering the floor meticulously with the fibre-optics scanner. In a clean dish, they had already assembled a needle, a safety-pin, a fivepenny piece, a toffee paper: probably no more than the normal detritus of a large room, but time would tell if any of these had been dropped last night, whether by victim or killer. Or of course by the Harbens: too often these things lost all significance after looking promising.
His attention quickened when he saw quantities of golden hair in a second dish. ‘Almost certainly dog hairs I should think, sir, from the length and the quantity,’ the constable warned him gloomily.
‘Never mind, we’ll have them examined. A dog here last night could be quite significant.’ Both of them knew that the likelihood was that these hairs were the residue of some previous canine occupant, but the house had been regularly cleaned while it was empty.
When Lambert had been a boy eating his meals, he had always saved his favourite thing upon the plate until the last. He was aware as he now moved to the chair where the body had rested that he had saved the most interesting object in the room until last, in exactly the same way. How those imaginative psychologists who seemed to be produced at will by defence lawyers would have loved the analogy.
Bert Hook, who had arrived separately direct from the station, was looking at the back of the chair through a magnifying-glass. ‘Well?’ said his chief. He eschewed all references to Holmes and Watson; they would be tired levities to the scene-of-crime team, whose very business was observation and deduction.
‘Some threads here.’ Hook pointed to where a tiny snag in the two-hundred-year-old wood had caught a minute sliver of material; the naked eye would have noticed nothing. It was half way up the back of the chair. ‘Probably from Freeman’s jacket. I’ve no doubt he was found leaning back against the chair.’ Hook knew his chief well: undue optimism would always be doused. ‘There are some different ones on the leg. They might be a bit more promising.’ In due course, they would be removed with elaborate care, meticulously labelled, preserved for a while like some priceless vintage brandy. All on the off-chance that they might be evidence in court, with their history subject to the destructive attentions of an acute defence counsel.
Lambert went out on to the wide flagged terrace whence the Harbens had entered. He was drawn to the sunken rose gardens, persuading himself that to explore these was not after all such an indulgence; might there not be clues to last night’s events here as easily as anywhere else? The roses were planted in twelves, with each variety allotted a separate bed; it was the way the books advised you to plant to secure maximum effect, but enthusiasts like him were never able to apply it in their modest and crowded plots. They were well tended, no doubt professionally, with no sign of black spot or mildew and much lush and healthy growth. He wandered along the crazy paving between the beds until he reached the neatly clipped yew hedge which enclosed the rose garden. Then he drew himself reluctantly from the waves of scent wafting across this sunken area and went round the far side of the house, the only one the Harbens had not viewed in their peregrinations of the previous night.
There was a rather neglected Victorian conservatory here. A rampant vine dangled numerous bunches of untended adolescent grapes. There were few other plants upon the peeling white staging, and the massive pipes of the heating system looked as if they had not operated for years; no doubt the antiquated coke boiler was too expensive to use now, in terms of both fuel and labour. Beyond the conservatory, between its glass gable and the higher wall of the house itself, a car was parked. It was a dark blue Granada. It could not have been there long, for there was no covering of dust, no scattering of leaves or twigs upon the roof. It was presumably the car in which the dead man had arrived for his fatal rendezvous. So murderer and victim had arrived in separate cars, unless the killer had been cool enough to leave this lonely spot on foot.
As he watched, sergeant and constable arrived from the scene-of-crime team with their box of fingerprint powder and began a systematic examination of the car. Lest he should be thought to be checking unnecessarily on routine procedures, Lambert hastened to retrieve Bert Hook from the drawing-room from which the investigation radiated. They strolled past rose garden and yew hedge, into the arboretum which covered the last acres of the property. Here they trod on springy pine cones and dry leaves, amid the sentinels which had overlooked Lydon Hall in the days when sixteen servants and five gardeners ministered to the needs of the owners. They climbed the gentle slope to where a Canadian redwood rose higher than all around it. Lambert prepared himself to muse upon the transience of man and the pettiness of his aspirations.
‘What was that?’ It was Hook’s sharp inquiry which startled his superior from his reverie. The Sergeant was looking towards the furthest point of the estate, where a small building could just be glimpsed through the foliage of the trees from this vantage-point.
At first, Lambert saw nothing beyond the gentle movement of foliage and the flittings of blackbird and thrush. Then he caught through the leafy screen the movement of a form too large for any woodland animal.
The shape, suggested rather than clearly revealed, was perhaps a hundred yards away, but their route to it, following the unofficial tracks marked out by the small mammals who frequented the area, was probably twice as long. By the time they arrived breathless at the point where they had seen it, their quarry was out of sight. When they ran to the straggling barbed wire fence which marked the boundary between the estate and the pasture land beside it, they glimpsed a tatterdemalion figure, moving swiftly across the rise of the hill a quarter of a mile beyond them. His trousers flapped in the breeze; the long coat he wore, even on a day like this, must have been of light material, for it streamed out behind him as he ran. He moved swiftly but unevenly, reeling slightly as he reached the crest of the hill. Once there, he turned, brandished his cloth cap for a moment in a wild Cossack defia
nce, and disappeared.
Hook, puffing like an overtaxed steam-engine, recognized the futility of pursuit before his chief did. They went back into the grounds of the Hall to investigate the small building they had rushed past in pursuit of this strange quarry. It was not the eighteenth-century folly Lambert had half-envisaged. It was a wooden building, no more in fact than a pleasant and elaborate summerhouse, constructed on the spot in the days when labour was cheap and the estate probably had its own carpenter. Its sturdy construction suggested it had been designed for a secure and unchanging world, and Lambert judged it no later than Edwardian. It had sides of unplaned logs and a neatly thatched roof protected by wire netting from bird damage, which had probably neither received nor needed attention since the time it was built.
For the place was dry enough inside. There was a wide seat by a dusty window at the far side, where ladies in long dresses had no doubt rested long ago in the midst of afternoon perambulations. Now the seat had upon it an old blanket with two or three ragged holes, and a faded and greasy cushion. There was also a small pile of newspapers. Lambert walked over and picked up the top one; it was scarcely a week old.
In the middle of the room was a table with a mug, a spoon and a bottle of water. Lambert picked up the small tin beyond these. The label was vaguely familiar: it took him back many years to his childhood, which was the last time he could remember seeing condensed milk. The last few slices of a brown loaf were showing the first spots of mildew in their plastic bag; there was an unopened packet of soup beneath them.
Lambert caught the glint of light on something beneath the edge of the blanket, where it overhung the side of the bench. He walked over and found three empty wine bottles. He sniffed each in turn. There was the sour smell of dead wine, but no suggestion of methylated spirits. It meant nothing: the meths drinker usually carried a flask or smaller bottle about his maltreated person. A pair of nearly new boots, too good for their surroundings, were almost hidden beneath a newspaper in the darkest corner of the room.