by J M Gregson
The end of the cottage adjacent to its single door was well ablaze and the flames were crackling hungrily around the tinder-dry leaves in the surrounding undergrowth. Fortunately, the fire-engine had been able to push its way down the overgrown track to the edge of the little clearing that still surrounded the old building. As Lambert and Hook arrived upon the noisy scene, the first hose began to play upon the blaze.
There was a fierce hiss of steam from the undergrowth. Fortunately, the trees in their proud new growth were full of sap; only a few bushes and saplings at the base of larger trees would perish. From the tiny building, there was a sudden belch of steam and smoke, as if a dragon had been trapped within it; Hook thought again of his son. Long after all flames had died, the firemen continued to play their hoses upon the cottage, moving cautiously nearer until eventually they crouched beneath the low, collapsed doorway and peered into the smoking darkness. It was a single-storey building; the roof had perished at this end but remained intact elsewhere.
‘Good thing we were called so promptly,’ said the Fire Officer when he had finally given the order to douse the hoses. ‘No loss of life certainly, and not much real damage, I fancy.’
‘The building is presently disused,’ said David Parsons. Lambert could think of no one but Parsons who would have used the word ‘disused’, which seemed to belong to written English. Perhaps he was quoting one of his own reports on the club’s assets. A black fragment settled softly upon the forearm of the Secretary’s suit and he removed it fastidiously. Secretary and Captain cautiously circled the smouldering hovel; their members watched the firemen reassembling their implements upon the engine.
There was an acrid smell of burnt plaster and decayed wallpaper mingling with the damp smoke. For a nightmare moment, Lambert was back in the blitz, waking as an infant with his grandmother’s dead arm across his chest, and fire, water and this same smell all about him. If Hell existed, he had known since that moment that it would smell like this. He steeled himself to go if necessary through that black opening into the smoking hovel: a Superintendent could not indulge in the fears of childhood.
It was the Fire Officer who revived interest in an incident that seemed to have run its course. He spoke in a low voice to Lambert, but the tall trees which surrounded the tiny clearing seemed to confine the sound, so that the words were audible to most of the cluster of people who surrounded the little ruined building. ‘It’s arson, I think, Superintendent,’ said the fireman. His words were almost apologetic, as if he hated to disturb the peace his men had so recently restored to this sylvan scene. ‘There were oily rags just through the porch in the main room, and the ends of the timber that had been built in a pyramid over them. Probably just kids. Anyone bent on real destruction would have built his pyre more centrally: the back room’s hardly damaged.’
He spoke almost apologetically, as if wishing to play down the sensation of his announcement. For him, this was a minor incident, with no danger to life and no serious damage; there was satisfaction in the fact that his team had responded quickly and efficiently to the alarm. The deliberate nature of the fire was an irritation, but almost certainly stemmed from the minor vandalism with which they perpetually contended nowadays: there could surely be no motive of insurance or revenge in firing this quiet little dwelling in the woods. And now that he had reported it to this senior police officer who was so usefully present, it need be no further concern of his. He had no knowledge, of course, that the rather drawn Superintendent and his more rubicund Sergeant were busy with a concern greater than petty crime.
The circle of watchers, which had been on the point of breaking up, moved forward at the Fire Officer’s words. For these golfers, curiosity and the possibility of spicing their eye-witness accounts with an element of drama were stronger even than the desire to resume play on the course. As the firemen fell back, the dozen spectators crowded round the dark rectangle that was all that remained of the doorway to the small stone building. The last wisps of black smoke billowed softly from the jagged aperture the flames had carved in the old roof.
‘Stand back, please. This could be a police matter. Though no doubt our friend is right that this was started by kids or yobbos.’ It was David Parsons who had spoken, effortlessly donning the mantle of command which nowadays stemmed only from his post of Club Secretary. For a moment Lambert was ridiculously grateful to him for accepting the opprobrium such seemingly officious conduct must surely bring. And for dragging him back from his private childhood nightmare.
The watchers shrugged and turned away with no more than the odd murmur of disappointment. By the time the fire-engine had eased its way off the scene, reversing cautiously down the overgrown track which it had recently covered so speedily, there were only four figures by the blackened stones. The smoke had ceased to rise. Secretary and Captain looked at Superintendent and Sergeant, uncertain whether the rights of property took precedence over police procedure in this situation.
‘Lead on, Macduff,’ said Lambert, forcing a grim little smile. Parsons and Taylor stooped under the smouldering lintel and moved gingerly into the ruin. Hook mused upon the possibilities of literary learning, grimaced, and followed his chief into the darkness.
At first they could see very little. The smoke had blackened windows already grimy with disuse. As his eyes gradually adjusted, Hook saw how the flames had devoured the exposed beams of what must once have been a tiny parlour, entered directly by the front door which had just ceased to exist. The hole in the roof which gave him the light to see this was directly above the point where the fire had been started and had roared to its destructive peak. A few charred sticks remained in a tell-tale circle around the source of the fire; the firemen’s hoses had scattered shreds of rag beyond the sticks. Had the fire raged for another ten minutes unchecked, the source would probably never have been evident. As it was, Hook agreed with the Fire Officer’s diagnosis: almost certainly mischievous kids. Or mindless young vandals: the distinction was not sometimes as obvious as the public thought.
The other three now moved through a charred but largely undamaged door to what must long ago have been the single bedroom of the original labourer’s cottage. Hook followed them — and stopped as they had done in astonishment. The place not only had been but was a bedroom. The double bed against the far wall occupied half the small floor space. Its linen and blankets were crisp and clean apart from the smuts of fire-damage. The musty carpet had been charred and the paint blistered around the door by the flames and smoke. There was a single broken pane in the window, and water on the floor and walls from the firemen’s hoses. Otherwise the room might have been in current use. Hook’s gaze followed Lambert’s to the quartz clock on the bedside table. The second hand crawled slowly around its small white face. The time it showed was three minutes to two. Hook, glancing automatically at his police issue watch, confirmed what he already knew, that this was exactly right.
There was a strange, inappropriate odour mingling with the acrid smells of burnt wood and wet fabric that hung in the room. Hook sniffed and remained puzzled. It was Michael Taylor, more practised in the scents of the boudoir, who placed it for him. ‘It’s perfume!’ he said in astonishment. He picked up the photograph which stood in its neat silver frame on the single windowsill of the tiny room. Hook heard the mutters of astonishment as the three men in front of him bent over the photograph and held it in the light from the tiny window.
Then, for the first time in five minutes, he heard his chief’s voice, firm, authoritative, but tinged nevertheless with shock. ‘We’d better get out. This place will need to be investigated with proper lights.’ The Secretary and Captain moved meekly outside, only too glad to be clear of a room which now filled them with unease. It was Taylor who used the term ‘love-nest’ and confirmed to Hook’s dawning senses the purpose for which the room must have been used.
In the clear summer light outside, Lambert passed the photograph to Hook. A man and a woman, arms affectionately around each other
’s waists, smiled conventionally at the camera. It was only when Lambert saw Hook’s blank incomprehension that he realized that his Sergeant had seen neither of the subjects before. He pointed to the man. ‘James Shepherd, deceased,’ he said tersely. It was not a very recent photograph, despite the new frame; Shepherd looked perhaps ten years younger.
The woman in the picture was younger also, but her features had altered little over the intervening years. Hook looked from the picture to his Superintendent’s face. Lambert’s voice, which might have been triumphant, was troubled, even distressed.
‘It’s Mary Hartford,’ he said.
Chapter 10
Lambert strode away like a man in a fury. Hook, struggling in his wake, gave up the attempt to match his chief’s pace and marched at the military medium he thought appropriate to a veteran cricketer. Behind him, the Captain and Secretary of Burnham Cross Golf Club formed a third and distinct rank in this straggling procession to their clubhouse.
The Superintendent was already on the phone when Hook arrived in the murder room, sweating and breathless. ‘Unavailable?’ Lambert repeated the word into the instrument as though it were an obscenity. ‘This is Superintendent Lambert, CID. I’m in charge of a murder investigation. You had better tell me exactly where Miss Hartford is at this moment.’ Lambert very rarely pulled rank to secure cooperation. When he did, experienced men read it as a danger signal. Bert Hook was very experienced: he snatched his pad and pencil, sank into a chair, and gave his total concentration to securing a low profile.
There was a pause. Lambert regarded the telephone with extreme distaste and Hook found his notes on their interview with Michael Taylor utterly absorbing. Then the cool voice on the other end of the line resumed. ‘Miss Hartford has just gone into theatre.’ So sucks to you, Superintendent: the voice resumed the air of cool superiority it had briefly forsaken.
‘Into theatre? Surely that isn’t usual for a Matron?’ Lambert, shaken by his findings in the fire-damaged cottage, looked more uncertain than Hook had ever seen him.
‘We are a small, rather informal hospital, Superintendent.’ The hospital administrator, provided with an impeccable and impenetrable placing for his Senior Nursing Officer, was beginning to enjoy the situation. ‘Miss Hartford, unlike some of her colleagues in larger hospitals, has always been anxious to maintain direct contact with the work we do here. Whenever possible, she undertakes a session as theatre sister. I’m afraid it would be quite impossible for us to disturb her there.’ Even Hook, on the other side of the room, caught the triumphant rectitude of this last statement.
‘Of course not. Even insensitive policemen wouldn’t want that,’ said Lambert drily. ‘You won’t know of course when the theatre session will finish. Perhaps you would make sure she contacts us here as soon as she is available. Burnham Cross 4210; the phone will be manned even if I am not here myself.’
‘It is, as you say, quite impossible to say when Miss Hartford will be finished in theatre. Three operations are scheduled and one can’t forecast exact timings.’ The officious voice, secure of its ground, was not to be deprived of its moment of bureaucratic patronage. ‘Miss Hartford will of course be very tired. Theatre sessions are taxing affairs and come on top of her other duties. I’ll give her your message but —’
‘Just make sure she knows I want her to get in touch. She’ll ring,’ said Lambert tersely. He put down the phone and stared at it before he said ‘Damn!’ Very quietly, but with real feeling, thought Bert Hook, studying his pad with intensity and trying to look like one of the room’s ’thirties fittings. He had a sudden disturbing image of this woman he had never seen, poised with bloodsoaked hands over an anaesthetized body on the operating table. Now she was an angel of mercy; had she last night crouched in this very room with hands more guiltily red, over another body? He stole an involuntary glance at the chalk outline beyond the big table and was glad he was not normally so inconveniently imaginative.
Lambert caught the movement and looked at his Sergeant for the first time since they had stared together at the faded photograph of Mary Hartford with James Shepherd. ‘All right, Bert, you can surface again,’ he said with the briefest of smiles. ‘We can’t see Mary Hartford for three or four hours. What do we do in the meantime?’
Hook ignored the question, sensing where Lambert’s mind really was. ‘Did she do it?’ he asked simply. It was so much an amateur’s question, so much the voice of Joe Public, that Lambert had to laugh.
‘I don’t know, Bert. If you’re asking if I feel she did it, I’d say no. But she’s highly intelligent, highly competent, and on her own admission she didn’t like Shepherd. Now there’s this photograph, found in what appears to be a lovers’ meeting-place. At best she has withheld information; at worst she has deliberately tried to deceive me.’
‘At best, there may be a perfectly innocent explanation,’ said Hook dutifully. Lambert wondered if his prejudices were showing so obviously these days. Some part of him obstinately refused to consider Mary Hartford a serious suspect, whilst the rest of him followed thirty years’ training in straining for objectivity in assessment. Bert Hook had read the situation too easily for his comfort; probably, as often before, he had merely underestimated the insights of his florid, stolid subordinate. He shrugged, deliberately trying to free mind and body of the tensions he felt about the case. ‘We shall have to see her again, obviously. Until then, there’s no point in speculation.’
Hook liked that ‘we’: however modest and unambitious the front he presented, it was nice to be involved as an equal; however incurious he sometimes chose to appear, he was eager to meet this trim, efficient, female mandarin, whom his chief so patently hoped was not guilty.
‘What next?’ he said, as he saw Lambert checking times on the sheet before him.
‘What would you like?’ said the Superintendent, with a determined return to his normal manner.
‘To visit Debbie Hall,’ said Hook without hesitation. ‘Your wishes shall be answered. You cynical sergeants should note how responsive the senior officer of the ’eighties is to your slightest preference. We are due to call upon the fair creature in twenty minutes.’
‘Yes. I arranged it this morning,’ said Hook. Lambert flashed a baleful look at the top of his Sergeant’s head; Hook had suddenly found his notes irresistible again.
‘Alert DC Spencer to the manning of the phone and the needs of the murder room in our absence. DI Rushton should be here shortly to take over.’
Whilst Hook went to instruct his young colleague, Lambert climbed upon a chair to try to open the high leaded windows to their maximum. With a struggle, he managed to open the reluctant section another inch, a concession it had not made for many years. From his unintended vantage point, he found himself looking down on a subdued Michael Taylor, not six yards away at the wheel of the red Porsche. He was talking quietly to the vapid blonde girl; she chewed still, looking at the Captain with neither curiosity nor affection. Lambert wondered where she had been during the traumas of Taylor’s interview and the excitements of the fire. She seemed to have no great capacity for excitement.
Suddenly, Lambert felt very sorry for Taylor. He looked smaller and paler than when he had arrived, despite his physical re-establishment within the trappings of success. As he started the powerful engine, he looked up at the club he supposedly commanded, and was suddenly staring into the Superintendent’s elevated face. Lambert, his bulk precariously balanced on the leather chair, felt like an inefficient spy; he had to resist a ridiculous urge to call out and explain that he was only opening the window. Taylor had been attempting a return to panache, with his arm on the back of the seat behind the girl as he prepared to reverse. This was now destroyed: the car lurched back unevenly. Despite the throaty roar of its engine, the Porsche departed from the club without any of the flamboyance of its arrival two hours earlier.
‘All set, sir.’ Hook had materialized behind his chief on silent size eleven feet.
‘Right,’ sa
id Lambert, descending with a brave attempt at athleticism from the chair, but knowing that his impassive Sergeant had heard the cracking of his knees. ‘Now to the face that launched a thousand ships.’
‘Regatta Queen as well as golfer, is she?’ said Hook as he gathered his papers.
‘… “And burnt the topless towers of Ilium,”’ added the Superintendent firmly.
‘Hmm. Statistically, arson is not a crime which commonly links with murder,’ Hook asserted relentlessly, as they passed a bewildered DC Spencer in the corridor.
‘But in this case it could be, as we’ve just seen.’ Lambert, if he had not scored a victory, felt he had terminated a surrealist exchange with an unexpected neatness.
In his office near the front door, David Parsons was sturdily resisting the probings of the press. George Williams, retired Fleet Street sports hack who now ran a golf page in the local weekly, was rejuvenated by the scent of a scoop. He was a member of the Club; this, more than his seventy-three years and venerable head of white hair, meant that the Secretary had at least to see him.
‘At least tell me who found the body,’ George pleaded with Parsons. ‘Were there female hysterics?’
‘No comment, George,’ said David Parsons. There was a hint of desperation breaking through his patient denials: plainly this was only the latest of many.
‘I can’t say “A spokesman refused to comment” for everything, David. Give us a break. The big boys will be down soon; you’re better in my gentle old hands, as the actress said to —’
‘I found the body, George.’ The old Welshman turned eagerly to discover who this publicity-hungry ingenue could be — and found himself looking into the amused, experienced eyes of Superintendent Lambert. ‘No further news for you yet. You can say the police are treating the case as one of murder.’