by J M Gregson
Lambert, looking at it with this thought, wondered if the patch of crimson around the knife had widened a little even since the discovery. He passed on the thought to the police surgeon as he arrived, but that veteran was as laconic as ever. ‘Death recent,’ he said grudgingly, revealing nothing. Dr Burgess spent information like a miser his money. ‘No rigor yet. Tell you more later. PM, of course. Do you want the stomach contents analysed?’ He might have been a husband reluctantly checking a shopping-list.
‘Hardly seems necessary. But yes, I suppose we’d better have the lot.’ Lambert was already thinking of officious coroners, even of hostile counsel. Thirty years of playing straight man to barristers with a taste for histrionics made you cautious.
The photographer was almost finished. Now the print officer moved to the furniture, covering table, chairs, mantelpiece with white dust, then moving cautiously in upon the clothing of the body. He treated the gruesome handle protruding from its dark stain as though it were some prize fish that might escape if it were not brought to shore with delicate skill. ‘Don’t forget the safe,’ said Lambert. Four white faces looked up at him from different parts of the room, their concentration broken for a moment. ‘No, sir, next on the agenda,’ was all the scene-of-crime officer said, but Lambert heard in his tone the resentment of the implication that they might miss anything so obvious. It made him realize he had spoken only because he felt superfluous at this stage.
In the steward’s quarters he found Vic Edwards trying to comfort a wife shivering with shock. He went wordlessly back into the bar, took two glasses from the neat rows and pressed the optic beneath the whisky bottle twice with each of them. He handed one to each of the shaken pair, insisting that Sue sipped from the glass she tried to refuse. She sipped twice with an air of distaste, then gulped like one determined to down unpleasant medicine. She coughed, brushed away a tear, burst into speech as the fire coursed through her chest. ‘Vic says —’ She couldn’t bring herself to repeat what Vic had told her about the scene in the Committee Room. ‘There’s a madman roaming about, and I’ve two children asleep upstairs!’ she burst out. Lambert pinpointed now the source of her terror and understood the fierceness of her fear.
‘I don’t think you need fear for your little ones,’ he said. In the quiet room his phrasing sounded remote, almost biblical; perhaps it was too long since his own children were small. ‘Whoever killed the Chairman had a specific victim in mind. He — or she — isn’t roaming about killing people at random.’
‘She?’ said Sue sharply. Her dark eyes looked straight into Lambert’s face for the first time and he saw with relief that curiosity was merging with apprehension.
‘We can’t rule out the possibility. And for what it’s worth, my feeling is that whoever did this is miles away from here by now. We’ll know better after the medicos have done their tests, of course, but my guess would be that Mr Shepherd was killed immediately after the meeting ended.’ At the limits of his peripheral vision, he caught Vic Edwards’s widening eyes, but he kept his gaze on the Steward’s wife. ‘The Chairman asked me to meet him here at ten-thirty. Yet he had not asked Vic to leave a door open or to direct me to the room he intended to use. It looks as if he was killed before he could make any arrangements of that sort.’
Sue relaxed visibly and took her husband’s hand. The nightmare vision of a mad axeman seeking out her children was banished. ‘Thank you,’ she said, whether to Lambert, her husband or the world at large being not quite clear.
‘My advice is to get to bed as quickly as you can, Vic,’ said Lambert. The steward nodded his thanks. ‘We’ll be as quiet as we can out there. I’ll make one more phone call and then be gone myself. A policeman will remain here all night, so you can feel quite safe.’ There was no call to tell them that this was to protect the evidence from any disturbance, to guard against the remote possibility of the deliberate removal of some clue by murderer or accomplice.
As he went back through the labyrinth of passages to the central part of the clubhouse, Lambert mused grimly upon the frightened pair behind him. The steward and his wife would need to be on any list of suspects he eventually compiled: they had access to the Committee Room, easy and unquestioned. What lay there must be protected until the morning, from them as from other person or persons unknown.
Lambert looked at his watch and sank wearily into the office chair to make his last phone call of the night. The Club Secretary’s phone rang eight times before he responded. His voice was that of a man caught between full consciousness and that deep rest we enjoy an hour into the night.
‘Burnham Cross 3210. Parsons.’
‘David, it’s John Lambert. I’m at the Golf Club. It’s five to one and I apologize, but I had to ring you. David, I’m afraid Mr Shepherd is dead.’ He waited, every nerve alert for any sound from the other end of the line that might be significant.
‘Dead?’ said Parsons dully.
‘Murdered. At the Club. In the Committee Room. Earlier tonight.’ Lambert poured the details into the mouthpiece, hoping the sudden flood of brutal facts might produce some reaction that might be useful from the shocked recipient.
‘But … I was with him tonight … We had a meeting …’
If David Parsons had known anything, his performance as he received the news was perfect, with just the right degree of bafflement, just the right reluctance to accept reality, which is characteristic of the innocent. Of course, thought Lambert with a grim and rueful smile, in all probability he was innocent.
‘Do you want me to come down there now?’
Lambert had considered this. ‘No. There really isn’t much more to be done. But I’ll want to see you first thing in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep myself now, but I’ll be down to see you at the Club by nine at the latest. I’ll be needing quite a lot of information from you.’ Had he meant it to sound like a vague threat? If so, there was no reaction.
‘Of course.’ Then, belatedly: ‘This is terrible!’
Lambert was left hoping that some among those he must question would react more revealingly.
It was a relief to be outside beneath the brilliant canopy of stars. He had never seen a clearer moon than the bright crescent above the professional’s shop. Breathing deeply of the still night air, he cleansed his nostrils of the scents of death and evil he had left within the clubhouse.
A slight sound behind him made him turn. Shepherd’s body was being transferred at last to the ambulance which had awaited it for two hours. The head and hands were sheathed in plastic and protruded beyond the sheet which convention demanded even at dead of night. But the knife protruded still from the corpse’s chest, so that the sheet draped itself in a cone about the handle. As the body was tilted to accommodate it without disturbing the knife, the head was turned towards Lambert. The last Lambert saw of James Shepherd was a pair of open, unseeing eyes, grotesquely enlarged by the clear plastic. Then the doors closed quietly and the ambulance eased away.
It was those eyes he had to banish before he could get to sleep. Christine stirred but did not wake as he crept into bed. Inevitably, he reviewed the events of the evening. Something he could not quite pin down seemed to differentiate this from other deaths he had dealt with in a long career. Just before he sank into the relief of sleep, he realized the tiny thing that seemed unusual. He had broken the news of Shepherd’s death to four people who had known him well: the Steward and his wife, his own Chief Constable, and David Parsons. All had been shaken with the terror that sudden death always brought.
But not one had expressed regret at his passing.
Chapter 3
‘Don’t keep watching me!’ Lambert growled unreasonably. Christine was not even in the same room. She stole surreptitious glances at her husband from the kitchen while the coffee bubbled beside her. They were part solicitude, part natural curiosity about the night’s bizarre crime: John as usual had told her the barest possible details. She switched on the radio with an abrupt gesture of impatienc
e; a union leader stressed the modesty of his stance to an uncaring world.
When she took the coffee-pot through to the table to refill his cup, his chair was thrust back and the room was empty. The toast was unfinished, the knife clouded with the marmalade it had never spread. Beneath the flowering cherry by the front gate, she caught the merest glimpse of the disappearing number plate of his car. ‘Like the Marie Celeste,’ she said, surveying the trim little dining-room. Some husbands kiss their wives when they leave in the mornings. Lambert never had, never would, though the bond now was deep enough between them.
Lambert had to remind himself as he drove beneath the fresh emerald of new leaves of the macabre business which awaited him. He wound down the window and drew deep on the clean morning air; it was going to be hot again. ‘Not like Shakespeare,’ he said aloud to himself. In the bard, murders of kings and emperors compelled a decent obeisance from nature, so that violent weather presaged such deaths. Even an industrial mogul might have been given a few routine rolls of thunder by old Will. ‘“When beggars die there are no comets seen,”’ he reminded himself as he turned into the short private lane which led to Burnham Cross Golf Club.
James Shepherd, though, had been no beggar. As if to remind Lambert of the fact, the maroon Rolls-Royce stood, massive in its isolation, in the Chairman’s space in the car park. To a Superintendent whose mind was wrestling still with blank verse, it looked like some great dumb beast patiently awaiting the return of a master who had gone away for ever.
Lambert was immediately reassured by a more mundane image. He saw as he parked the broad back of CID Sergeant Bert Hook, the assistant he had commandeered on his Chief’s authority. The Sergeant was adjusting a blackboard on an old-fashioned easel by the main entrance. Chalked in his careful capitals were the words: ‘Clubhouse closed all day due to sudden emergency. Course open.’
It was barely half past eight but already Hook had implemented his Superintendent’s first suggestion: Lambert was enough of a golfer himself to know how even the most curious of the breed could be diverted by the heady prospect of play.
Hook’s rubicund face, tongue moving in sympathy with his hand as he underlined ‘Clubhouse closed’ was a picture of concentration. He was five years Lambert’s junior, but his ponderous gait and demeanour made him seem often the older of the two. His village bobby exterior concealed a shrewd and active brain; people usually underestimated him, a factor Lambert could turn to advantage. He called, ‘Well done, Bert,’ as he passed, and was foolishly pleased as the Sergeant’s face filled with a childish glow of welcome.
The first rosebuds were almost in flower in the sheltered bed by the double oak front doors. Lambert sniffed them appreciatively, passed briskly within, then checked his step with a mild access of guilt. He was arriving here with a livelier relish for the scent of death than he had the previous evening for a routine meeting. He knew now what he was about: however macabre the business of the day, he was operating within the machinery of a police investigation, with colleagues trained as he was to the impersonal pursuit of facts. There was a problem here, but a problem it was his business and his skill to solve. And perhaps his pleasure? That was more questionable.
‘“’Tis my vocation, Hal. ’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation,”’ he said to Hook behind him.
‘No, sir.’ The Sergeant was firmly uncomprehending but totally unruffled.
‘But would Falstaff spring to a corpse quite so readily?’ persisted Lambert.
‘Very likely, sir,’ Hook stonewalled impassively. He blamed graduate entry for these literary pretensions in a senior officer who had been sound for years. But then his wife could testify that he blamed graduate entry for most of his life’s small tribulations.
The uniformed constable stationed unobtrusively in the entrance hall had listened to this incomprehensible exchange between his seniors with increasing concern. He introduced himself with nervous stiffness when bidden; probably it was the first time he had had occasion to report to anyone as exalted as a Superintendent.
There was a gentle cough, scarcely more than a clearing of the throat, behind them. ‘What can I do to help?’ The voice tailed away at the end of the question: the Secretary was uncertain whether to use his normal ‘John’ in addressing the Chairman of the Greens Committee or the ‘Superintendent’ which the presence of lower ranks in a working situation might require.
There were not many people to whom Lambert had to look up, but David Parsons was one of them. He stood in the doorway of his office with his eyes a good two inches above Lambert’s. ‘That’s good of you, David. I’m going to need quite a lot of information and assistance, I’m afraid. I’ll be with you in a moment.’ Parsons acknowledged the polite dismissal that was intended by withdrawing into his office, and Lambert turned back to Hook. ‘Bert, would you take statements from Vic Edwards and his wife while I instal myself here?’
‘The Steward?’ said Hook. Of course, he knew no names yet; Lambert had to remind himself that this familiar territory would be strange ground to the rest of his team.
‘Sorry, yes. Take PC Spencer with you. You can lock the doors, lad,’ said Lambert as the youngster hesitated to leave his post. ‘Better listening hard to Sergeant Hook than being a waxwork in the entrance hall. It’s called the “efficient utilization of labour”.’ He’d known that week’s course on ‘Management in the Public Services’ would come in useful somewhere.
When he went into David Parsons’s small office he moved the waiting chair so that the Secretary rather than he faced the bright morning light. Ex-Colonel Parsons looked drawn and shaken, despite a night’s rest and the time to assimilate the tragedy. For the first time in the four years Lambert had known him, he looked like a man in his late fifties. The lean frame drooped a little, and some of the grey of his thinning hair seemed to have seeped into the tanned cheeks. Did his sensitivity do him credit, or was this a curious reaction in a man who must have seen violent death many times in a military career of almost thirty years? Parsons had better be probed fairly quickly, before the busy routine of a golf club secretary’s life reasserted itself and rehabilitated him.
‘I’ve got to be a nuisance, I’m afraid, David,’ said Lambert. ‘Perhaps even more than you anticipated. We’ve decided to set up a murder room here.’ The royal plural was an occupational hazard for Superintendents. ‘That means clearing a room exclusively for our use and closing off that section of the clubhouse for as long as is necessary.’
‘Which hopefully won’t be very long,’ said Parsons with a brave attempt at a smile. ‘When and where?’ Lambert could see now the Adjutant he had been for so long, efficient, unquestioning, glad to be of such obvious use at the centre of organization.
‘Immediately. In the Committee Room,’ said Lambert firmly. It had not taken him long to decide upon this. Because of its size, its privacy and the soundproof nature of its thick panelled walls, the room was eminently suitable. And although the notion had melodramatic overtones, he knew that the possibility of questioning a suspect within that quiet room where murder had been committed appealed to him. The perpetrator of last night’s dark deed would need to be nerveless indeed to re-enter that individual and rather claustrophobic room without suffering a tremor.
‘Do you need Golf Club permission?’ said Parsons. ‘I could ring …’ He hesitated, embarrassed at his gaffe, and Lambert filled the space for him with a grim little joke.
‘The Chairman will hardly object, David. No, we don’t need permission. If anyone gives you any trouble, tell them I requisitioned the room and refer them to me. Even the byzantine sensitivities of golf club officialdom can scarcely be allowed to impede homicide investigations.’ Beneath his light manner, he was watching the Secretary closely, but learning nothing. Parsons seemed unruffled by the news that a murder room was to be set up within yards of his office, an arrangement that would keep him under permanent surveillance in the days to come. His eyes were thoughtful, even cautious, but with no mo
re than the concern appropriate in one making the necessary arrangements to clear up the distressing and sensational mystery which had so disturbed his work-pattern. He had seen the Superintendent previously only as a club golfer, resolutely detached from his work. Now he was watching him at work for the first time, and Lambert felt that even as he tried to sound out the state and working of David Parsons’s mind he was being assessed himself. If the Secretary had no hand in the murder, he would be a shrewd support in the investigation, providing much of the information he would have to dig for without such inside help. If on the other hand he was the murderer or an accomplice, his nerve and resource would make him difficult to corner. He might look shaken, but there was no trace of fear now in his speech or bearing.
‘You can have my extension phone,’ said the Secretary.
‘No need,’ said Lambert. ‘We’re getting another line put in now. Be installed within the hour. Standard procedure in these cases: British Telecom know the drill,’ he said quickly. They both knew that anyone in the Secretary’s office could have overheard police calls under the arrangement Parsons had proposed.
‘It seems then that there’s nothing I can do to help,’ said the Secretary with a hint of pique. Perhaps he heard the note himself, for he immediately said by way of conciliation, ‘I suppose this must be routine stuff for you. You must have handled scores of murders.’
‘Not so very many,’ said Lambert drily, ‘and none of them quite like this’. He could not carry on this little bout of cat-and-mouse any longer. Soon he would sit down opposite this cool military presence for a formal interview, but not just yet. There were urgent things to be done first.
‘You’re wrong, though, David. There are things you can do to help.’ He looked round the Secretary’s office. There were grey filing cabinets, a computer blinking mindlessly, a large desk. The notes of last night’s meeting in the Secretary’s neat longhand lay scattered across the desk. Everything as it should be in an office innocent of the violent event twelve feet beyond its far wall.