by J M Gregson
Lambert, staring through the window towards the park, knew from the sudden wave of perfume upon the heavy air that Debbie Hall had arrived. She motioned them to the armchairs and he was aware that, receiving them upon her own ground, she and not he controlled the preliminaries of the interview. He half-expected her to sit above them at the desk, in the obvious position of dominance; instead, she ordered tea on the intercom and disposed herself comfortably on the third armchair. Hook had waited for her to sit: now he backed two paces behind her like a faithful retainer and circled her chair on silent, footman’s feet to seat himself respectfully in the chair beside his Superintendent. Debbie crossed her ankles quietly, and riveted the Sergeant’s attention upon her nyloned calves. Lambert, assembling his papers on his knees whilst he collected his thoughts, coughed irritably. It was difficult enough trying to preserve the formalities of an investigation with people one knew, without one’s general factotum suddenly behaving like a moonsick calf.
He framed a slight, official opening smile — and found himself looking full into the most dazzling blue eyes he had ever seen. He had known Debbie Hall for about three years: he understood now her effect upon the relatively unprepared Bert Hook. With almost thirty years of police work behind him, the grizzled Sergeant was unmoved by the charms of girls like the one Michael Taylor had brought to the club in his Porsche. Debbie Hall’s warmth was natural, uncalculated, freely given, not a tool to exact the behaviour she wished to produce. As a consequence, it was the more devastating for those unfamiliar with it. Naturally outgoing, used to being the centre of attention, she was yet unaffected and generous. Lambert did not know her well, but no one in any gathering which contained her could be unaware of her presence. He had watched her before in social contexts, telling himself his interest in her effects was professional but wondering the while if it was the simple pleasure men take in watching an attractive and vivacious woman. He had not cared to discuss with Christine which of the two it might be: wives notoriously lacked objectivity in such matters.
Now for the first time he was himself exposed to the direct and concentrated effect of those wide blue eyes, at once uncomplicated and enigmatic, and the unconscious sensuality of the wide lips below. She had changed since her lesson at the golf club to a soft blue skirt and a sleeveless cream cotton blouse. This accentuated the corn-gold of her hair and the honeyed smoothness of her arms and neck. She was very lightly but quite carefully made up, so that Lambert wondered if this was the reason for her slight delay in joining them. As if in immediate rebuke of his cynicism, a small car started in the yard below the window and drove carefully through the gates: presumably the girl Debbie had just interviewed. She looked at him with the slightest of smiles, so that he had to work hard to banish the idea that she read his thoughts and was amused.
There was nothing stunning about her features: he concentrated for a moment upon her nose, which was flattish and insignificant. But those remarkable eyes seemed to make everything else unimportant; when they were turned full upon whoever had her attention, it was difficult to dwell on anything else.
‘It was good of you to come to see me here,’ she said. Lambert, mumbling his conventional line about wishing to disrupt people’s working patterns as little as possible, felt that she understood immediately his desire to see her in an environment away from the golf club. ‘I saw Michael Taylor driving in to be grilled as I left this morning,’ she said, ‘and I knew you’d already questioned David Parsons. I thought perhaps we would all be summoned there, to ensure that the murderer returned to the scene of his crime.’
‘Or her crime,’ returned Lambert drily, with what he hoped was an answering half-smile. He was aware that Debbie, without any apparent intention to do so, could soon begin to control an interview he should guide himself.
‘You think it could have been Mary Hartford or me.’ The full lips pursed, the proposition was weighed. ‘I suppose it’s possible, if either of us was silly enough or desperate enough. From your position, I suppose it looks almost as likely as anything else.’
If it was a prepared performance, it was a very skilled one. The two men were studying her intently; she was no doubt conscious of this, but she gave no sign of strain. It was true that there was something faintly brittle in her manner, and perhaps she talked to fill in a silence she felt uncomfortable, but that was behaviour one might expect of the innocent. Lambert was aware that Hook’s eyes had flickered briefly to him with the mention of Mary Hartford, wondering whether he would choose to reveal what they had learned about the Club’s Lady Captain. He should know better by now, his Superintendent thought fretfully.
‘I didn’t do it. But that sort of assurance is no use to you, is it? The other four would all tell you the same, no doubt. And one of us is lying.’ Only the tiny, involuntary shiver on the last thought suggested that she was not as calm as she appeared to be. Her awareness of the thoughts of others, her lack of egotism, were disconcerting as well as unusual. And she had coolly assumed from the start that only the Committee members were suspects, he noted. A shrewd assessment of the situation from the facts she knew? A murderer’s knowledge of the exact details of the time and place of the crime? Lambert looked into those candid blue eyes and felt again that far from learning anything he was revealing his own thought processes. He almost twitched when she seemed to be answering his thoughts with her next words.
‘I could have done it, I suppose. I left the Committee Room with Mary: we went to the ladies’ locker-room. I remember we stood side by side in front of the mirrors.’
Lambert remembered Mary Hartford’s early directness, ‘… The men went to relieve straining bladders, the women to repair the ravages of a humid evening.’ He hastened to get his next question in before Debbie could anticipate him again. ‘What happened after that?’
‘Mary went into the ladies’ lounge. I think to check the results of our Spring Meeting.’
‘And you went to the bar.’ For the first time since they had entered the room, she hesitated. He caught the movement of Bert Hook as he leaned forward in anticipation. Lambert studied Debbie’s face intently: it was easy at last because for the first time those eyes had left his. She was staring at the carpet between them. But for the life of him, he couldn’t make out whether she was concerned about her own safety or Mary Hartford’s; it was quite clear from her cool assessment of the situation thus far that she would be aware that she was removing Mary’s alibi as well as her own when she said she had left the Lady Captain alone in the ladies’ lounge.
Lambert let the silence hang between them for two or three long seconds, no more. Then he turned the screw of tension a little more. ‘You finished the evening with a drink in the bar, I believe. Presumably you went straight there from the locker-room?’ Usually, he would have asked her to relate her own movements rather than leading her, but he wanted to remind her that there were other statements as well as hers, even that the key statement would be the one which failed to tally with the others: perhaps he was a little nettled by her composure thus far. By accident, it was the right question: her eyes came straight back to his with what he thought was a little flash of fear. Her answer, though, was direct. And not the one he had expected.
‘No. Not directly. I tried to ring Len.’
This time Bert Hook wrote diligently on his pad and did not move a muscle. ‘Better, Bert,’ thought Lambert with approval; it would never do if stolid Bert Hook began to reveal his excitement during an interview.
‘This would be Len Jackson?’ said Lambert impassively. He remembered Mary Hartford’s sudden assertion at the end of her interview that Len Jackson could not have killed Shepherd, and her terse direction when he asked why not to ‘ask Debbie Hall’. Well, they had checked out Len anyway, and he could not have killed Shepherd. He thought suddenly, irrelevantly, that if Mary Hartford was a killer it was strange conduct in a murderer to be so ready to exonerate another suspect. But Debbie was going on.
‘Didn’t you know about Len a
nd me?’ Wide-eyed frankness, a look of genuine surprise, no embarrassment; even a suggestion of irritation that she should have to go over ground she had assumed was familiar.
‘Len and I have been lovers for three years.’ It had the matter-of-fact, passionless exactitude of a sentence uttered in court and prepared hours earlier with a lawyer’s advice. ‘I knew you’d seen Michael Taylor. I thought he would have told you all about this.’ It was dismissive, contemptuous. Lambert saw no reason to tell her that Taylor had been so preoccupied with his own miseries that he had not as yet talked about anyone else.
Debbie Hall seemed to have taken a decision. She looked at the floor in front of her and kept her eyes there as she began to speak: Lambert felt rather as if a camera which looked through his eyes and into his mind had been switched off. ‘I attract men. It has been a fact of life for me since I was fifteen and I suppose I’ve learned to cope with it by now; certainly to live with it, at any rate.’ She took a deep breath and paused to choose her next words, without looking up. The curves of her breasts beneath the cream blouse moved gently, as if to reinforce what she was saying.
‘Most women would love to be sought as I have been sought, and still am. In fact, it makes life bloody complicated. The easiest protection is to pretend you are experienced, worldly-wise and as hard as nails. Perhaps you become all of these things if you go on pretending hard enough for long enough. I’ve been pretending for a long time now. I was married, disastrously, at twenty-one and divorced at twenty-six. I still don’t volunteer that readily, since every half-baked Casanova in sight thinks you’re randy as hell and dying to tear his trousers off as soon as you can get him in private.’ There was a surge of bitterness in the tone and the sardonic smile, but the eyes didn’t leave the floor and the matter-of-fact, analytical style was resumed immediately.
‘There have been men since then. Two of them were serious. I lived with the first for almost two years before he walked out. The second is Len. I suppose that, if I were as hard as most people think I am and as hard as this self-protective shell I’ve grown about myself says I should be, I would never have got seriously involved with him. He has a wife and two children; they live half a mile from my flat. That breaks two of the rules to start with: never play with married men and always play away.’ She paused, as if wondering again how to phrase the next idea. She stared still at the carpet, like one looking for shapes in a fire. For a moment, her fingers drummed lightly and silently on the arm of her chair as she considered her words, but there were no white knuckles, no sudden clenching of the hands, to betray tension.
‘I don’t think I was playing from the start: certainly it’s been very serious for a long time. A year ago we tried to end the whole thing; I went off to a job in Leicester and Len played happy families. For a month we made no contact: that was the agreement. The argument was that only a clean break would work. I’ve had a few hairy times in my life, but I think that month was the worst I have known. Of course, I presumed Len was coping whilst I tried to adjust to life without him. After four weeks I arrived home from work one night to find him on my doorstep. From that night onwards we have been committed to each other.
‘Len is getting a divorce. He was racked with guilt for a year until he reached the decision; I tried not to pressurize him whilst providing a steady income for some manufacturer of sleeping pills. His marriage was on the rocks when he met me, but I suspect it would merely have stayed there without any divorce if I hadn’t arrived. Marriages often do, you know, usually because people offer “for the sake of the children” as a reason for their lack of courage to confront reality. In six months, Len’s divorce will be final and we shall marry. Strange how two people who have been severely mauled by the institution are so ready to rush into marriage again. I suppose we both think we’re older and wiser. But it will work.’
With this final bold and unexpected sentence, she raised her eyes and fixed them again upon Lambert, with a defiance that was none the less robust for its touch of humour. Neither he nor Hook had spoken for a long time; the lines of the interview had been determined by its subject. Lambert felt that the argument was about to pass into sociological and philosophical areas if he did not arrest it. When he now attempted a gentle nudge back into the central ground of the inquiry, it sounded to him jarringly banal.
‘Thank you, Debbie, for filling in the picture. It’s much better and less embarrassing for us than having to dig these things out. I have to ask you if you think all this could have a bearing on this inquiry.’
‘If I sat where you are it could.’ She replied so quickly and decisively that it was clear she had weighed the issue carefully herself before the interview. Lambert said nothing, but as he raised his eyebrows quizzically he leaned forward expectantly. It was a movement that was almost a professional tic, for out of the corner of his right eye he noticed Hook making the same movement in unison. Like two bloody hippos attempting formation dancing, he thought, and knew from Debbie’s smile that she had noticed their concerted eagerness to encourage.
He reached into his pocket for his pipe, then left it where it was, lest this alert, underestimated woman should see through his smoker’s pantomime of deliberation. ‘What was your relationship with the deceased?’ he asked; thrown off balance, he hoped the stuffiness with which the question was framed would mask the desperation of ideas from which it sprang.
It was a lucky bull’s eye, which probably preserved his reputation for shrewdness with Debbie Hall.
‘I was coming to that,’ she said. ‘Probably you know most of it. If you don’t, you will certainly be told, so it might as well be by me.’ Lambert grunted a non-committal acknowledgement, content to accept an omniscience he did not possess if it served his purpose. ‘James Shepherd was my employer for three years immediately after my divorce.’ She paused for so long that the two large, patient men opposite her began to fear that she was closing up on them. Neither attempted to break the heavy silence; a scream of delight from a child on a distant swing rang unnaturally loud through the open window behind them. Debbie Hall, for once immersed in herself, was searching again for precise words in which to express difficult facts; and again she eventually found them.
‘For a time I was his personal assistant. I was also almost but not quite his mistress.’ Lambert tried to thrust from his mind the salacious speculations this curious phrase evoked, the visions of tumbled couches and what witnesses in court called ‘heavy petting’. Fortunately for him, those all-divining blue eyes were no longer trained upon his, so that his unworthy conjectures passed unnoticed as he resolutely regarded the wall beyond those ample and appealing curves.
‘Shepherd was quite capable of charm when he wanted to exercise it. It took me a while to realize that it was the charm of a snake before it strikes. If you had asked me which member of that Committee could have knifed someone in cold blood and quietly joined the rest of us for a drink, I would have said James Shepherd. I suspect several others would say the same. I suppose it is because someone hated him as desperately as I did that he was killed.’
This intense statement coincided with the resolution in Lambert’s brain of a puzzle that had been nagging there since Debbie Hall joined them. There was some connection with events earlier in this tumbling day that he had not been able to make. Now, in the moment of maximum concentration upon Debbie’s uncompromising words, it came to him when he least expected it. It was the distinctive perfume which had announced to them Ms Hall’s considerable presence in this room: he had smelt it earlier in the day. Not much more than an hour earlier. When he had been looking at a photograph of Shepherd with his arm round the waist of Mary Hartford. It had been the scent that was stronger than all the odours of fire, damage and decay. In the bedroom of that fire-damaged cottage, the perfume upon those crisp sheets had been that of Debbie Hall.
Chapter 12
For the moment, Lambert thrust this stunning new fact to the back of his mind. It would be time enough to weigh all the evidenc
e when he had Debbie Hall’s account of last night’s events.
She was the fourth person that day to declare a hatred for Shepherd. The others had been victims of emotional outbursts, releasing under the stress of examination what they had planned to conceal. But a cool brain operated beneath the sex-symbol exterior of the woman who spoke now. It had planned in outline the whole of the statement she was now making. There was something eerily inappropriate about the whole performance. Had she been tiresomely juvenile, a creature of heaving bosom, fluttering eyelids and easy tears, Lambert would have dealt easily with her. A touch of hardness from him, a few hints of weary impatience, and any attempt at secrecy would have dropped away with the artificiality of her manner. As it was, she was conducting her own interview, but paradoxically revealing just what he wanted to know.
At least, that appeared to be the case. It occurred to him uncomfortably that the coolness of this approach matched that of the murderer on the previous evening. The maxim that if one wished to lie one should tell the truth wherever possible, concealing the important pimple of dishonesty within a mountain of demonstrable truth, seemed to be appreciated by far too many modern criminals. For the moment, he was out of his depth. Watch, listen, record, digest afterwards, he told himself: the advice he gave to aspiring CID men at training courses. He had not often felt so inadequate as he did now, gripping his ball-pen sweatily and frowning at the pad in front of him with what he hoped was a competent air.