by J M Gregson
Lambert nodded, encouraging her to enlarge on this. When she did not do so, he said gravely, ‘You will be aware by now that we are in the early stages of a murder investigation. It is therefore important both that I ask you this, and that you consider the question seriously. Did you see anything in the attitude or the behaviour of the other three people at this meeting which would suggest a hostility, a hatred, if you like? Anything which would be strong enough to impel one, or perhaps more than one, of them to kill Mr Keane?’
Her pulse seemed to stop for a moment at the directness of the question, then resume with a rapid throbbing in her head, as if making up for its suspension. ‘No. I didn’t see anything like that. Not in any of them.’ She wanted to offer him something, anything, to ease this intolerable burden of suspicion she felt descending upon herself, but there was nothing for her here, surely. She couldn’t see that either of those subservient men or the overwrought, housebound Moira Yates would have had anything to do with Raymond’s brutal dispatch from the world.
‘What car do you drive, Miss Renwick?’
‘A black Fiesta Sport 1600.’
‘A hatchback?’
‘Yes.’
She watched the burly sergeant make a careful note of the details. But the CID men seemed prepared to leave it at that. Perhaps, after all, they were not so anxious to trap her as she had thought. It was Hook who now said, ‘Did you see anyone else in this last weekend you spent with Mr Keane?’
It was a lifeline, of sorts. She didn’t want to implicate anyone else, but she was realizing now if she was to protect herself in a murder investigation someone else might suffer. Somebody must have killed Raymond, and the police were eventually going to fasten on to one person, she supposed; a prime suspect, didn’t they call it? She said slowly, her words sounding unnaturally clear in her own ears, ‘We had one visitor. Raymond’s business partner, Christopher Hampson.’
Her tone of voice rather than the words warned Lambert that this could be important. ‘Was this a social visit, Miss Renwick?’
‘No. No, I’m afraid Mr Hampson was rather upset.’
‘He had an argument with Mr Keane?’
‘Yes. Quite a violent one, as a matter of fact.’ She felt the chill of her treachery, but she had to protect herself. And if Chris was innocent, it was up to him to look after himself, wasn’t it?
‘What did they argue about, Miss Renwick?’ Lambert’s voice was studiously quiet; he did not want her shying away from this now.
‘About the business. I gathered it wasn’t doing very well. Raymond had given me the impression it was forging ahead; perhaps he genuinely thought that things were better than they were. Anyway, Chris Hampson thought he should have been contributing more and took him to task about it. I wished I hadn’t been there—I shouldn’t have been. But I hadn’t known it was going to blow up as it did.’
‘Quite. And did they resolve things?’
Zoe took a deep breath, allowing the regret for what she had to say to seep into her voice. ‘No. Raymond wasn’t very understanding. I didn’t like what I saw of him that day.’ It was the nearest she had come to referring to her own cooling passion. She was tempted for a moment to enlarge upon the bully she had seen in Raymond that day, upon the ruthless contempt for a man who had helped to build his fortune for him. She wanted to justify herself, to show how mistaken had been Raymond’s attempts to impress her with his swaggering, with his brutal treatment of his partner’s attempts to secure a fair hearing.
Instead, she went on quickly, damningly, ‘There were high words between the two of them. And they didn’t resolve anything; Raymond was very high-handed with him. And Chris Hampson was furious. He went off in quite a huff.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘There can be no doubt it’s murder, John. And no doubt how he died.’ Cyril Burgess, MB, ChB, spoke with considerable satisfaction.
A pathologist’s job can become very humdrum. It is nowadays largely confined to the routine of post-mortems on patients who have died blameless deaths in hospital, but have, for reasons of the law of the land, to have postmortem examinations conducted upon them. Burgess relished a juicy murder more than most, not just because of the break in routine, but because he was an avid reader of what Lambert saw as outdated and romantic detective fiction.
He drew the sheet back in a manner which made Lambert recoil in anticipation, but took it only as far as the upper torso. ‘Our revered MP wasn’t drowned at all,’ he said by way of introduction. Lambert knew better than to protest that he had never thought he was. ‘There has been no blood-tinged froth from the mouth or nose,’ said Burgess, indicating these blameless orifices with the tip of his gold-cased ballpen. ‘There is plenty of “washerwoman’s skin” and gooseflesh on the belly and the legs, but they are merely the results of prolonged immersion.’
Lambert put up with the magisterial style rather than risk revelations of the ravages Burgess had wrought on the hidden body in the interests of scientific investigation. The detective constable who had attended the postmortem—one of the tasks Lambert was only too happy to delegate—was now on his way back to the station, leaving Burgess to address the superintendent. Lambert felt a rare empathy with Queen Victoria: Burgess, like Gladstone, seemed on these occasions to make an audience of one into a public meeting.
The pathologist indicated a thin purple-black line around the neck of the corpse. ‘This is how Randy Ray met his death.’ The mark on the throat had been apparent from the moment when the corpse had been lifted from the pond, but they needed this official confirmation for the inquest. Plus whatever else this ponderous instructor was able to give them. ‘He died from strangulation with a ligature of some kind. A thin cord rather than a wire: there was the odd thread still trapped in the wound. And he died quickly, not from asphyxia, but from vagal inhibition—heart stoppage technically, from pressure on the carotid arteries in the neck. I should say he was dead within less than thirty seconds: very efficient job.’ Burgess, fingering the key point on the dead white neck, spoke like one professional appreciating the craftsmanship of another.
‘Was there much strength needed for this?’
‘No. Force applied scientifically, that’s all.’ Burgess spoke with satisfaction: he knew what Lambert had been thinking.
‘We can’t rule out a woman, then?’
‘You couldn’t rule out an eight-year-old!’ said Burgess happily. ‘Though he might have had to stand on a chair. I’d say Keane was attacked from behind and caught unawares. Someone garrotted him with a cord. Even a slight woman could certainly have done it, especially if she had a stick to wind tight at the end of the cord. The plot thickens!’ the silver-haired tormentor said delightedly, and Lambert thought he was going to rub his hands together like a stage witch.
Instead, Burgess said seriously, ‘You’re going to want a time of death, and I’m afraid I can’t be of much help there. He’s been in the water too long for me to be precise, though it’s been so cold that there hasn’t been much degeneration. I’d give a guess—or what you would call an expert opinion—that he’s been dead for more than one week and less than two. I couldn’t be much more precise than that in court.’
‘That’s more helpful than you think,’ said Lambert. ‘We know he was alive at least until Christmas Eve. You’re telling us that in all probability he was dead by December the twenty-seventh.’
‘In all probability,’ said Burgess mournfully, articulating the phrase as though practising it for delivery in due course to a defence counsel.
‘For once we can probably be more precise than you about time of death. He was under the ice during that deep frost which began on Christmas Eve; he only surfaced with the thaw. I doubt whether he would have gone through the ice later than Boxing Day: it would have been too thick. The forensic boys are working on it, but I reckon the body was dumped in that pool by the end of Boxing Day at the latest. My garden pool is smaller than the one where he was found, but it had three inches of ice on
the top of it by then. I broke it for the fish.’
‘The wonders of detection,’ murmured Burgess in mock awe. He turned back to the row of metal dishes beside the corpse. ‘Nothing interesting from stomach contents. Your man had eaten what was probably a light meal some hours before he died: the processes of digestion were quite advanced, but that and the time which has passed since death means that I can give you no account of what food was involved. There’s one interesting thing, though. I showed your officer the evidence.’
‘Then there’s no need to show it to me, Cyril,’ said Lambert firmly, as Burgess threatened to lift the sheet.
As usual, the pathologist’s sense of drama had made him save his most interesting revelation until the last. ‘I said this fellow wasn’t drowned. More important, he probably wasn’t killed at the place where he was found. The body had lain for quite some time on its back before it was moved. There is hypostasis on his shoulders, buttocks, thighs and calves, clearly visible even after those days in the water.’ Lambert saw the blackening of the flesh beneath the shoulder blades, even on the limited area of the corpse visible to him. ‘The blood sinks to the lowest point in the flesh in the hours after the heart stops beating: simple gravity,’ said Burgess, resuming his instructional vein to a man who knew all about hypostasis.
‘How long did he lie before he was moved?’
Burgess shrugged, relishing the feeling of being involved in a murder enquiry, as he always did. ‘Very difficult to say at this distance. But the marks are very definite. I’d say this corpse probably lay for at least a day before it was moved, but I could only make it an opinion in court.’
‘I’d like you to give that opinion in the Coroner’s Court, though. There won’t be any defence lawyer there to grill you.’
‘No problem about that. But why should it be important there, John?’
Despite his mannerisms, Burgess was that most useful of scientific men, a man prepared to speculate, to add his own thoughts as well as his expertise to the work he did for the police. That was why Lambert was now prepared to indulge his old friend with an explanation. ‘The fact that he was killed elsewhere is significant for several reasons. One of them is that that pool is quite remote. Whoever dumped Keane in it had to get him there. Almost certainly in a vehicle. Once that is accepted, I shall be able to examine the cars of all those who were close to the late Raymond Keane in the days before he died.’
*
Christine Lambert was ready some time before she saw the old Vauxhall Senator swing through the gates and ease up the gravel drive.
As she watched her husband turn in the little circle in front of the garage and leave the bonnet facing towards the gate, she put on her best burgundy winter coat. No point in saving things, now. But she mustn’t make that kind of half-serious joke to John: it would only upset him. Even now, as frightened as you were, you had to think of others and how they might react. She fought down an urge to scream; it passed as abruptly as it arrived.
She watched John lever himself heavily out of the car, his movements stiffer than they used to be, the long back taking more time to straighten as he turned towards the front door of their bungalow. Through the new double glazing, she could not hear the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel as she always had heard it in the old days. That made him seem further away as he strode silently towards her. Then he looked up at the big lounge window where he knew she would be standing, and gave her a quick, anxious smile. She was suddenly very sorry for him.
‘I see you’re all packed,’ he said when he came into the lounge. He picked up the small holdall from the chair where she had set it down. She wanted to say, ‘I’ll carry my own bag. I’m not an invalid yet, you know. I’m still whole.’ Instead, she said brightly, ‘The bed’s all ready for me. They rang through from the hospital to confirm it. Quite early. About nine o’clock, I suppose.’
He recognized the rapid, inconsequential phrases of someone very nervous. He had seen it often enough before. But not in this context. And not from this sensible wife and mother, whom he had seen so often comforting his children and who now needed her own comfort. Because he did not know what to say, he said, ‘I’ll put this in the car,’ and took her bag rapidly back whence he had come, though he knew he could easily have taken it out with her: it was all the baggage they had.
She was still standing at the window, watching his movements with a pale smile, as he returned. He said from the hall, ‘Shall I make you a coffee?’
‘No. I had one not long ago. I’m ready to go, when you are.’
‘No point in delay, I suppose.’ He put his arm round her shoulders, walked clumsily with her away from the window to the door of the room, and then took her in his arms. They kissed briefly, then held each other for a long, still moment, until he fancied he could hear her heart beating, even through the thick coat. They did not often touch each other during the day; never kissed as they parted in the mornings or met again in the evenings. ‘We’ll get through this, as we’ve got through other things,’ he said to the top of her head.
I will, you mean, she thought. She wanted to be selfish, to ask how he could possibly know how it felt, to shout down his arrogance in assuming that this could ever be a joint thing. Instead, she said, ‘Of course we shall. We’ve been very lucky with illness, over the years. Something was bound to come up, sooner or later.’ And hit me, of course, not you.
The small, frightened child that was inside the middle-aged adult wanted again to scream, to indulge in girlish hysterics, to be lifted into huge, enveloping adult arms and comforted. To be told, perhaps, that this was nothing more than a bad dream and that she was now returning to the safe, normal world. Christine murmured into the warm cotton which covered John’s chest, ‘We’d better be going, I suppose.’
The hospital was not at all like the one where he had gone to interview Zoe Renwick. There were few carpets here, and much more noise. They had to wait behind two other people to register their presence at the desk, and there was much mysterious bustle in the corridors they walked to get to the women’s surgical wards.
But the sister and the nurses were welcoming when they got there. This was a commonplace, everyday case to them, and the fact that Christine was to be an ordinary patient in an ordinary ward had its own compensations. John Lambert found himself wishing that everyone wouldn’t be so determinedly bright and cheerful, but he knew that was unfair.
The sister said, ‘We shall want you to take away your wife’s clothes, Mr Lambert, but you can do that this evening, if you’re planning to visit then.’ It was a polite dismissal, and he was cravenly glad of it.
Christine said as he hesitated in front of her, ‘Get off with you! You know you’re quite indispensable to the Oldford CID: I don’t want a crime wave on my account!’
The sister followed him a little way beyond her office, to say to him discreetly, ‘Your wife will be operated on by Mr Robertson tomorrow morning, all being well, Mr Lambert.’
That seemed like a contradiction in terms. He looked up at the windows of her ward when he reached the car park, but there was no sign of Christine’s face. There were so many panes in that huge slab of wall that he was not even confident that he had selected the right ones.
As she undressed behind the screen, Christine Lambert said, ‘They’re nothing but big babies, these men, aren’t they? We’re better without them in a crisis.’
*
There were two police cars outside the thatched cottage of Raymond Keane. A WPC and a young constable who looked scarcely old enough to be in uniform were on their knees in the lounge. They had tweezers and small metal dishes in their hands as they covered the fitted carpet slowly and methodically, collecting hairs, threads of material, a stray paperclip, anything that might bring a suggestion from the silent room of what had gone on there. Scene-of-Crime work was ninety-five per cent unrewarding, but highly necessary for the sake of that other five per cent. A man had been found guilty of murder when a stray toenail clippi
ng proved he had been where he denied he had ever set his guilty foot. SOC officers constantly reminded their teams of that case.
Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson had done this work for years, and he did not allow his subordinates to cut any corners. He was using different officers here from those who had combed the oozing winter ground around the pool in the woods, to ensure that concentration did not lapse through boredom or familiarity. Lambert said, without greeting him, as he came into the house, ‘You’ve finished your work where the body was found?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve put a copy of the written report in your tray in the murder room at the station. We—’
‘Never mind the paper. Tell me what you found. If anything.’
It was unusually abrupt. Lambert was normally brisk but polite, always appreciative of work meticulously conducted. It was one of the things which made his teams work long hours without much complaint when there was a serious crime. Today he looked white and drawn. Johnson wondered if he was suffering from the virulent flu which had caused so many absences this winter. Well, he could be rude, if he liked, without check. Superintendent’s prerogative. ‘We didn’t turn up much, sir. The clothing has gone to forensic, but I doubt if they’ll find much of interest on it. It’s been in the water for days, after all, and—’
‘I know that, don’t I? And if anything comes, it will come from the lab, so don’t waste my time with bullshit. Anything from the rest of the area? Or did you just waste a full day’s time?’
‘There wasn’t much. The ground had been frozen, so no wheel tracks. All footprints were eliminated as being made after the body was found, when the ground was softening up. We found an old ballpen, trodden into the ground and broken in two. There was a glove by the roadside. They’ve been bagged and retained, but in my view they predate the crime by months or even years.’ Johnson spoke quickly, lest he be cut off again for stating the obvious. ‘We found two things, but we’ve no method of knowing whether they had anything to do with the crime.’