by J M Gregson
‘Human relationships?’
‘None to speak of. Kids seem to find him as gentle and attractive as animals do, but these days their mothers snatch them away from strange men. Understandable. Once or twice he’s been seen picking bilberries or blackberries with kids on the hills, perfectly innocently I’m sure. Usually he’s alone; he seems to avoid human contact whenever he can.’
‘Alcoholic?’
‘Difficult to say. Unless they cause trouble, we don’t see much of them.’
‘Meths?’
‘It’s possible. There’s no mention of him buying meths in the file, but he’s never given us much trouble, so we’ve never investigated him much.’
Lambert wondered why he was glad that this did not sound like the profile of a man who would commit premeditated violence. It could hardly be sympathy for that wild figure he had glimpsed so briefly in flight. Such a murderer would have provided a quick, tidy solution, the sort of efficient statistic beloved of Chief Constables. Was he genuinely sympathetic towards this rather tragic underdog? Or was he pleased to have a more complex crime to investigate, relishing the interlocking puzzle he might have to disconnect among those who had been closest to Stanley Freeman?
‘Will he be easy to interrogate, Jack?’
Johnson smiled: a daring reaction to a Superintendent, but his nickname had just been used again. ‘Sooner you than me, sir. Robertson says he’s got worse over the years. Just runs away when he can. How far his son’s death sent him over the edge into real madness is anyone’s guess. But he’s gone wilder since, probably lost all human contact. There’s one thing, sir.’ For the first time in their exchange, chirpy ‘Jack’ Johnson looked uncertain about how to proceed with his senior.
‘Well?’
‘Well, I don’t think I’d bring him in here to question him, sir. We had him in about a burglary two years ago – nothing to do with him, and I don’t think he’d seen anything. But he was like a frightened animal in a cage. He wouldn’t say a word.’
Lambert had already had the same thought, but he said, ‘Thanks. Where does he hang out?’
‘One place you know of. He seems to have been using that old summerhouse on the edge of the Lydon Hall grounds since the house was empty. I think in summer he sometimes just sleeps under the stars. But Robertson says there’s an old sheepcote, disused now, on the edge of the moor; he uses that sometimes. He comes into the town occasionally for supplies, but you might get more out of him on his own ground.’
Lambert walked thoughtfully to his own car, revolving how he might best approach a damaged mind about the most horrifying of human crimes. The man was connected with this death in some way, he was sure. He began to wonder about contacts between Wino Willy and his suspects.
Chapter 9
At precisely two o’clock, Denise Freeman watched the big Vauxhall ease through the gates and park discreetly beside her own car.
The two big men who came unhurriedly towards the house automatically took in their surroundings. Observation was by this time instinctive, but long experience had taught them not to deduce too much too early. They saw a long, low, modern bungalow; as they were not familiar with estate agency language, ‘ranch-style’ was not the adjective either of them would have used. Lambert saw with interest how the carefully trained wistaria was just beginning to frame the rectangular inset of the front door and its adjoining windows, how clematis clambered in abundance over climbing roses, how the circular bed in the front lawn combined geraniums, tagetes and lobelia in parkland precision. ‘Paid gardener,’ he muttered to Hook as a speculation.
His sergeant was peering into the large segment of rear garden visible past the side of the house. The swimming pool looked blue and inviting against the surrounding green, the garish red-hot pokers and more muted phlox looked like a backdrop from Ideal Home. ‘Not a vegetable in sight,’ he said with disgust.
Denise Freeman could not know she had made a bad beginning with Sergeant Hook. She opened the front door with a bright smile, moderated it a little in deference to her widowed status, and held out her hand to his chief. ‘Superintendent Lambert? Denise Freeman. Delighted to meet you.’
In the complex relationships of interviewer and interviewed, the shaking of hands did not normally figure, but Lambert took the proffered hand with only a momentary hesitation. It was small and warm, the grip firm enough to imply confidence, the contact brief enough to maintain a degree of formality. Perhaps the information he brought would shake this composure; or perhaps she already knew; the majority of homicides were still domestic.
‘Will this take long?’ she said. Her smile implied that she would be patient, but they must not impinge too harshly upon the privacy of grief.
‘It might. It all depends how much you can tell us. I think we should sit down somewhere.’ They were still standing in the hall; if he was going to give her an unpleasant shock, he didn’t want her fainting upon them. But at this moment she looked a very controlled lady.
‘I thought we might sit in the garden. It’s warm enough. Would you like some tea?’ Lambert assented, trying not to see Bert Hook’s ill-concealed gratification behind their hostess. Hook had never been known to refuse a cup of tea, and his axiom of ‘the bourgeois the better’ would add to the delight of this context. Coffee from the Crown’s silver jug this morning, and now tea here: criminal investigation was looking up.
Denise Freeman led them through the bungalow to where a crazy-paved patio overlooked lawn, pool, manicured garden and oak trees beyond. Lambert was puzzled by the vaguely familiar air of a spot he had never seen before. Then he realized it was a small-scale, modernized version of the more grandiose view from the terrace at the rear of Lydon Hall, where he had stood on the previous day, speculating about murder and its possible witness in the arboretum.
Here there were cups, saucers and plates upon a solid wooden table. So she had planned this, half-expecting a prolonged exchange and seeking to keep its social context as low-key as possible. They seated themselves on garden furniture more opulent than many lounge suites and prepared for the ceremony of tea. Bert Hook had already decided that the china was more ‘refined’ than even the Crown’s. It was a favourite adjective of his, pronounced with a curl of the lip: ‘refinement’ had been held out to a ’fifties Barnardo’s boy as the ultimate in morality.
He was not disappointed by Denise Freeman’s arrival with silver tea service. The dark pink sleeveless dress set off the slim brown arms and calves to perfection, as she had known it would. It was modestly buttoned to the neck. The neat lace trimmings and simple low-heeled sandals were elegant yet unpretentious. With tray in hand, she looked to Bert Hook very ladylike. It was an adjective that did not prevent him from reserving his judgements: his upbringing had brought him into contact with many ladies who had given him hard times.
‘Is this usual? I already spoke to a policewoman on the night Stanley died.’ With only the slight hesitation over tenses to suggest that English was not her first language, Denise broached the question which had worried her in the hours since she had taken Hook’s phone call and accepted this meeting.
‘Yes. The Coroner’s Officer collects the body and arranges for the next of kin to be informed.’ Lambert was in no hurry to dispense information. Once foul play is established, spouses are always prime suspects, whether as direct agents of death or accessories; he was content to study this one carefully. Was she anticipating his disclosure? She seemed to be prepared for something, but that might be no more than the reaction of an intelligent woman to a visit from the CID. Even to an eye trained to spot disclosures, her body language gave nothing away. Her hand as she poured the tea was firm enough, her voice steady as the poise of her head as she handed the delicate crockery into the large, careful hands of her visitors. For a woman suddenly widowed, she seemed unnaturally calm, but this kind of control was not an unusual reaction in those confronting official functionaries in the days after bereavement; sometimes people did not feel the full imp
act of death until after the funeral.
‘I should begin by offering our sympathy, and apologizing for intruding at a time like this,’ said Lambert.
The wide, still lips permitted themselves a small smile. ‘Thank you. And why do you?’ she said.
‘What do you know about your husband’s death?’
‘That his body was found at Lydon Hall on the night before last. That his suicide appeared to have been planned carefully.’ The word ‘suicide’ dropped from her lips naturally enough, with no hesitation, and rather less emotion than most widows would have shown.
‘What can you tell us about your husband’s movements on that night?’
The dark eyes flashed to Lambert’s face, but he was ready for her; he had done this too often for his impassivity to be disturbed. She was looking at the table as she replied, ‘Almost nothing. He didn’t tell me about his appointments.’ It was curious: the bitterness with which she spoke was overlaid with regret by the end of the sentence. She brushed a fly angrily away as it threatened to land on her saucer, as if banishing with it any display of weakness.
‘When was the last time you saw him?’ He hesitated a little over the end of the question before omitting the last, brutal word.
But she understood and added it for him. ‘Alive, you mean? I identified the body at nine o’clock yesterday morning.’ Again there was a strange combination, the harshness of the statement delivered with a tenderness that was a strange setting for it. It was the apparently contradictory emotions which interested Lambert. Someone dissimulating in these circumstances might well act out either grief or indifference, but they would hardly go for a combination of the two. In his experience, those wishing to deceive went hard for a single effect. He cast aside compassionate tact in favour of more directness.
‘Yes, Mrs Freeman. I need to know when you last saw your husband alive.’ As if noting the change of mood, Bert Hook flicked over the last page of his notebook and prepared to record the detail. She glanced sideways at him for a moment, and Lambert saw more clearly the dark patches beneath the eyes, the beginnings of crows’ feet at their sides. It might have been a moment of fear; but in the shock which follows bereavement, any small invasion of privacy can be a source of resentment and alarm. Innocence as well as guilt has its secrets, and strives to protect them.
She turned her attention back to Lambert with a quick, impatient jerk of her head, so that the neat switch of jet-black hair swung briefly behind her neck. Before she spoke, he knew she had had enough of this preliminary fencing.
‘I am not used to the ways of the British police. But I don’t think it can be usual for the wife – the widow – to be visited and questioned by a Superintendent.’ She realized with a spurt of surprise that she was using Simon Hapgood’s view of things. But she gave nothing away; if the trace of a French accent touched her pronunciation of Lambert’s rank, she could not after all have been expected to have used the word much in the past. ‘What exactly is going on?’
Lambert sighed a little, gathering his resources. He would watch her like a hawk, learning whatever he could from her reactions, but the revelation of murder to a wife was not a moment to savour. Always assuming, of course, that it would come as a surprise.
‘Mrs Freeman, did your husband give you any reason to suppose he might be planning to take his own life?’
He had her attention now, her eyes widening slowly in a whitening face. She was ahead of him.
‘None at all.’
‘Suicide without previous threats to call attention to distress is unusual, though not unknown. Your husband had no serious disease? Or fear of any disease?’
She shook her head, anxious now for him to get to the fact that she had already guessed at.
‘Business worries?’ He tried not to notice the affluence all around them as he spoke and she rejected the preposterous idea. He was not sure whether he was prolonging the moment through a desire to allow her the time to assimilate brutal fact, or from some baser desire to study her reactions, to assess in these long seconds of stress how genuine was her surprise.
‘You may or may not be familiar with an organization called EXIT. It exists to help people who wish to end their own lives. Usually in cases of incurable illness, where people wish to avoid long periods of what they see as hopeless medication.’
She nodded, impatient to get to the end. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, she was imagining that he was about to reveal the identity of her husband’s murderer. If so, he would have given a good deal to know who she thought was guilty; for a moment, her face was sick with apprehension.
She said, ‘I don’t think my husband was a member of EXIT. He never mentioned it.’
‘And you can think of no one who might have helped him to kill himself in this way?’
‘Superintendent, this is ridiculous.’ This time there was no trace of accent on the word; perhaps her impatience carried her forward, like a stammerer who loses his impediment with increased animation. ‘Stanley wasn’t that sort of man. The one thing that amazed me about his death is that he should have taken his own life.’
Lambert finished drinking his tea, set the delicate china carefully back on the garden table, and braced himself for his disclosure. She had given no sign of being devastated by her husband’s death, so that he could not think his revelation would cause her too much anguish. Unless, of course, she had killed him herself, in which case the sudden knowledge that the police were aware of the crime would be most unwelcome.
‘Mrs Freeman, I have to tell you that we are now inclined to the view that your husband’s death was murder.’
‘Inclined to the view?’ In this moment of stress, she picked up half-ironically the very periphrasis he had despised in himself. He caught Hook looking at her curiously, trying to assess whether this was the illogicality of shock or a deliberate evasion of that darkest of crimes which had followed the phrase.
‘Let us say that we are convinced that Mr Freeman was murdered by person or persons as yet unknown, and will produce evidence to that effect at the inquest. We are now in the first stages of a murder inquiry. That is why we have come to see you now, as next of kin to the deceased.’
‘And chief suspect!’ she said, very quietly. She put the empty teacups tidily upon the tray, as if testing for herself how steadily she could move. There was no vibration, from crockery or teaspoons. Lambert’s close scrutiny gave him no clue as to whether the news of murder came as a surprise or not to her. Hook had already marked her down as ‘Very cool under fire’.
‘We don’t have suspects,’ said Lambert, with a smile to offer the reassurance she did not seem to need. ‘We assemble whatever facts we can from those nearest the crime.’ It was a summary of his advice to young CID men.
‘Or we suspect everyone,’ said Denise Freeman with a dry smile.
‘That is sometimes how the public sees it,’ acknowledged Lambert with an answering smile. He knew he must beware of the respect that always became a temptation when he met intellects wishing to cross swords with his own. ‘The simplest procedure for us is usually to eliminate as suspects all those people who could not have committed the crime. Often they can show that they were in a different place at the time of the murder.’
‘Those who have an alibi,’ she said.
‘If you like,’ he smiled. ‘It’s not a legal concept, but it will serve.’
‘What time was Stanley killed?’ It was the first time she had voiced the thought, and he caught a moment of abhorrence and regret, genuine unless she was the subtlest of actresses.
‘That I cannot tell you at present. We know when the body was found. The post-mortem will give us further information.’
‘Stomach contents,’ she said with a shudder. She was looking, grey-faced and unseeing, at a sparrow on the edge of the pool. For a moment, he thought she was going to be sick with the nausea of her husband’s mutilation.
He said unhelpfully, because he could think of nothing else, ‘You know about
post-mortems?’
‘A little. A long time ago, I used to be a biochemist.’
‘When we have questioned everyone, I think we shall be able to pinpoint the time of the crime quite exactly.’ He was glad she was too upset for the moment to press him on that ‘everyone’: he had no intention of revealing the present paucity of witnesses. ‘What I need to know now is where you were for the whole of Wednesday evening.’
Bert Hook, who had made a covert note about her knowledge of chemistry, now flicked over a page of his notebook ostentatiously. Whether or not she was a grieving widow, she was now a murder suspect. If the thought made her a little nervous, that could be to the advantage of her interrogators.
She said calmly, ‘Starting when?’
‘When did you last see Mr Freeman?’
‘About three in the afternoon.’ The reply came so promptly that she must have given it prior thought; but it would be strange if she had not.
‘Do you know where he ate his evening meal?’
Her dark eyes flashed back a quick, hostile look. Perhaps she knew his information must come from the post-mortem and the ignominious investigation of her husband’s stomach; or perhaps she felt some implication about their domestic arrangements.
‘No. Stanley ate out. He often did.’ One could derive a world of speculation from the manner of the curt understatement; Lambert did not have to, for she chose to go on unprompted. ‘Superintendent, if you are going to question Stanley’s employees, you will no doubt find this out anyway. Ours was not a perfect marriage. Stanley and I have not been close for years.’ Lambert had met the phrase so often: it covered arrangements which ranged from an active but joyless marital bed, through separate rooms, to a malevolent mutual hostility which surprised only in that it could be contained within four walls. If the Freernans’ marriage proved relevant to the case, much sordid detail might tumble out in due course; for the moment, he was content to record the beginnings of a motive.