by J M Gregson
As if she followed his thoughts, Denise Freeman said calmly, ‘That does not mean I killed him, or wanted him dead. It seems incredible that Stanley could be murdered. But as I said when you came, it seemed incredible to me that he should have killed himself. I don’t know which is worse.’ For a moment her voice broke and she seemed near tears, but she recovered so fast that he was left wondering if it was a contrived effect. ‘I hope you get whoever did this. And quickly. Stanley didn’t deserve this.’ There was bitterness now, probably against the killer, but possibly just the normal emptiness of the bereaved for the missed opportunities of the last, barren years. In all, she was remarkably composed in the circumstances. Calm enough for a murderer? Lambert saw Hook making the same cool assessment over his notebook: they had worked together too long for his thought processes not to be transparent to his chief.
Lambert said, ‘Thank you for being so open with us at this difficult time. You will find you did the wise thing. Now, can you tell us if Mr Freeman had a relationship with any member of his staff that might be thought abnormal?’
In his search for tact, his phrasing had become clumsy and he knew it. She glanced at him with what he could have sworn was amusement, then gave thought to her reply. ‘George Robson had his own reasons for resentment, which he’ll no doubt tell you about himself. I suspect Emily Godson had, too, but I wouldn’t know what they were’.
She paused, as if to estimate the effects she had made by these intriguing suggestions about the operations of Freeman Estates. Then she said, ‘I’m sure there was something between Stanley and Jane Davidson, but I couldn’t tell you what. I doubt whether he was bedding her, though it never pays to underestimate the naïvety of the young. But she seemed to have some hold over him.’
Even among widows who seemed to have much less regret for their husbands’ passing than Denise Freeman, Lambert had never met this degree of composure. He said, ‘What about your own movements after your husband had left?’
‘I was here until about a quarter to seven. I was in the garden for an hour or so, then I made myself a meal.’
‘You were alone throughout this time?’ It was not by any means a key period, but perhaps she did not know that.
‘Yes. There was a phone call from the office inquiring after Stanley. You could check on that.’
‘What time would that be?’
‘I couldn’t be certain. I should think about five.’
‘And who made the call?’
For a moment, she looked disconcerted. Perhaps she had not expected this level of detail in the questioning. A murderess of course would know how irrelevant this time was.
‘Simon Hapgood, I think.’ Strange, that: a woman as precise as she had been in her earlier replies would hardly be uncertain about the identity of a caller. Lambert waited for Hook to record the name laboriously before he went on. ‘And where did you go at a quarter to seven?’
‘Out for the evening. To the cinema in Tewkesbury.’ She looked at him boldly, almost as if she knew she was trying to establish an alibi. This was a classic one when someone was trying to cover a longish period of time: perhaps she knew that.
To disconcert her a little, he switched the questioner, so that he could concentrate on her reactions. ‘Sergeant Hook will need to record the detail of this.’ He gestured towards his subordinate, and Bert Hook took up the questioning without hesitation. He seemed deliberately ponderous; Lambert himself was never sure on these occasions whether it was his natural manner or the role of sedate country bobby he chose to play. Certainly it was an effective disguise for the shrewd brain within that stolid exterior.
‘Who accompanied you to the cinema, Mrs Freeman?’
‘No one.’
‘You went alone?’ Bert’s modest surprise made it sound like a moral outrage.
‘Yes. I often do. It’s years since I went with Stanley.’ And now you never will again. Three very different minds shared the same thought as Hook wrote.
‘You drove to Tewkesbury?’
‘Yes.’
‘And which street did you park in?’
‘In the public car park near the cinema. It’s free in the evenings.’ And much more difficult to check on than a street, where householders will often remember the colour and make of a car parked for a whole evening, especially in summer. Lambert thought that Denise Freeman appreciated this as fully as Bert Hook.
‘What car do you drive, Mrs Freeman?’
‘It’s a green Volvo.’ Green could easily be mistaken for blue against a low evening sun; Lambert toyed with the idea while she gave Hook the details of year and registration number. Many women would not have known these without checking: Denise Freeman was as effortlessly accurate as a well-prepared witness. He wondered if that was exactly what she was.
‘Did you see anyone who could confirm that you were in the cinema during the evening?’
Perhaps her negative came a little too quickly. But she was an intelligent woman, and might well by this time be anticipating the line of Hook’s methodical interrogation.
‘And the film you saw?’
‘The Last Emperor.’
She gave Hook in turn the starting time, the duration, the stars and a detailed résumé of the plot of the film. Lambert, listening and watching carefully, found it impossible to say whether or not this was a prepared performance. He was certain by the end of it that she had indeed seen the film. There was nothing as yet to prove that she had seen it on Wednesday night. But then the innocent were never looking at the time for people to substantiate their accounts.
Lambert, seeking to ruffle a calm that now seemed quite unnatural, said, ‘Your husband had taken valium in the hours before his death. Perhaps immediately before. There is no evidence in his medical records of it being prescribed for him.’ He left it there, hoping she would respond without more questions, and in a moment she did.
‘They were probably mine,’ she said. ‘I haven’t used them for months.’ Not since before Simon, she thought. ‘Stanley took one or two of them, occasionally. I think he thought I didn’t know.’ She was genuinely distressed with the bleakness of it all, but she showed nothing beyond a small tightening of the muscles around her mouth.
Lambert watched Hook recording the detail, wondering if she would show any more obvious emotion when all this came out at the inquest. Then he switched his ground again. ‘What do you know of a man called Wino Willy?’
This time he had certainly surprised her. He found himself wishing the coal-black eyes were just a little lighter, for he had the idea he might then have distinguished between bewilderment and alarm in them, as he could not do now. He had expected a blank ignorance of Willy’s existence, perhaps because her tight self-possession seemed so much the antithesis of his disintegration, but she said, ‘Yes, I know him. Or used to. When I came here and was struggling with the language, he was one of the few people who spoke fluent French. It is quite a long time ago.’ She stared out at the end of the garden, recalling a different world. ‘He even knew and liked Racine,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘Not many English do.’
‘“Je l’ai trop aimé pour ne le point haïr,”’ said Lambert before he could stop himself. It was pure vanity, and he regretted it immediately.
She looked at him and said, ‘Yes. “I have loved him too much not to hate him a little.” Andromaque. Not what I would have expected from a British policeman. Even a Superintendent.’
Lambert caught Hook enjoying his discomfiture and hastened to end an interview that had almost run its course. ‘Have you seen Willy recently?’
She hesitated a moment before she said, ‘Only in the distance on the common sometimes. He still knows me, I think.’ Perhaps for her, too, there was a small, illogical vanity, in the thought that that ravaged personality should still register her presence when it had obliterated others.
Lambert said, ‘We appreciate that this must be a great strain for you, Mrs Freeman, at a time like this. Thank you for being so helpful.�
� She seemed calm enough again, too calm perhaps for a grieving widow. She was looking at him keenly now, trying to detect any irony in his last words. ‘Perhaps you can appreciate that we are now investigating the most serious of all crimes, so that your information is vital to us. I have to ask you now if you can think of anyone who might have reason to harm your husband.’
He was sure this time that there was fear in her face, as she looked suddenly full into his. She could not quite control the movement of those slim, ballerina’s arms. Her eyes moved from him to the attentive Hook, then up to the innocent sky, where white clouds cruised slow and high against the blue. Her eyes closed; her uplifted face, with its dark hair dropping away behind it like a schoolgirl’s, looked both serious and innocent. Her voice when it came was very low, but perfectly clear.
‘I’ve wondered about other women, of course. I don’t think there can be anything that would have led to murder, or I should have known about it.’ She said it with the unconscious arrogance of a superior intellect assessing an inferior one. ‘It’s someone in the firm. It must be.’
Or in the immediate family, thought Bert Hook as he shut his notebook.
She watched them go, standing calm and slender, her dress bright pink against the dark rectangle of the door behind her, as if she were posed for a painter. She stayed there until long after the big Vauxhall had disappeared, until its sound had purred softly away into silence.
She sat in an armchair for a full minute, wondering how effectively she had deceived her visitors about her movements on the night of the murder. Then she picked up the phone to ring Simon Hapgood.
Chapter 10
In the oldest industrial quarter of Gloucester, a woman stared at the sky.
It was the same sky that so brilliantly overmantled Denise Freeman’s manicured half-acre, but through the square north window with its broken sash, the blue was less brilliant and hopeful. The Victorian working conditions which had placed these mean terraces near to the factories and their twelve-hour days had long since gone, but Victorian grime clung obstinately, despite the spasmodic local improvements of landlord and local authority. Dusk seemed to arrive a little earlier here, as if the climate itself reminded the citizens that they had less reason to trust the future than others outside this shrinking area of decay.
The woman was five years younger than Denise Freeman; she looked five years older. Denise’s straight and lustrous black hair owed a little to bottled help, but the effect was complete and compelling. The peroxide used on this head was less comprehensive in its effects, so that there was tell-tale darkness at the roots and the occasional spot at the ends where a close observer might see blonde becoming grey. Perhaps the make-up on the face had been a little too thick, the eye-shadow a little too heavy. It was impossible to tell now. For the woman had been crying for a long time, not with the noisy, uncontrollable sobs that convulse and then pass, but with the slow, hopeless tears of despair.
On the high mantelpiece of the old fireplace, she looked again at the envelope in Stanley’s neat round writing. ‘Ms Margot Jones’. The title was a little joke between them, one of Stanley’s small pamperings she had enjoyed so much, her tiny link with the feminism which had passed her by without other trace. This month’s cheque was still inside: even through her grief, a practical voice within her gave ignoble thanks for that. An outsider would have seen Stanley Freeman’s recompense as mean enough for what the relationship gave him, but there was a certain delicacy in the method of payment. The money arrived like a regular allowance to a favoured, virtuous child, with no suggestion of the price for services rendered which might have been implied by cash exchanging hands at their meetings.
Like the wife she had never seen, this other woman of Stanley Freeman’s made tea, but in her case it was the dull ritual of the only therapy she could offer herself. She took the half-empty packet from the shelf in the tiny kitchenette, lit the gas under the aluminium kettle, dropped a tea-bag straight into the one mug which had no crack. For Stanley, she would have got out the pretty earthenware teapot, and cups and saucers; what was the use of bothering for one?
Two years they had had. Two years which began with a pick-up in a pub and developed to an affection, an easiness with each other, even to something like love. They had even begun to make small, tentative plans. She was learning to type on the machine he had brought as a write-off from work. He would get her a cottage in a small town away from here and she, with her new skills and his help, would find work, respectable work at last. She looked at the typewriter beneath the plastic cover, and the tears began again from the ducts she had thought must surely be dry.
The kettle spat steam and water for thirty seconds before she registered it. She poured the water into her beaker, tipped the last milk from the bottle, watched the first flecks of its souring float briefly on the top of the darkening water. Then she sat in the armchair to torment herself again with the evening edition of the local newspaper.
TRAGIC DEATH OF OLDFORD ESTATE AGENT. The headline was a little cramped, the item hurriedly accommodated in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page. The hard-pressed editor had not been able to obtain Stanley’s age, and would not guess at it in the case of a local luminary. The account mentioned that Stanley was childless, but left a widow. There was of course no mention of Margot. How could there be? Yet her absence from this brief account of his death seemed to diminish her place in his life, as if that had after all been only one more of the deceptions that had been practised so often upon her. She read again to the end. ‘Foul play is not suspected.’ The police release had not said anything so definite, but the eager young reporter had unearthed enough details of the apparent suicide for his editor to back this modest speculation. Next day’s edition would blaze murder in thick black headlines, but Margot Jones could not know that yet.
She stared at the familiar phrase. It meant suicide, didn’t it? For a bleak moment, she wished worldly-wise Stanley was at her shoulder to confirm her interpretation. So he had done this on Wednesday night, when he should have been coming back to her. But he couldn’t have. Wouldn’t have. Not on the night he kept for her. She could not accept that Stanley could have committed suicide. A heart attack perhaps: sometimes in her bad moments she had thought that their world might end in that. But he would not top himself; not on their night together, certainly. Suddenly, it was very important to her that he could not have killed himself. If he had done that when he should have been coming to her, then all of it had been false, and she was back in the nightmare he had gently dispersed for her over the last few months. Sipping the scalding tea, she found it tainted with salt tears.
It was there in print: it must be so. Then in her misery there came back to her a picture she had thought long since lost. It was of the father who had left them in Swansea, years before she changed Maggie to Margot and moved out herself. He was saying, as she remembered now he often did, that you could not believe everything you read in the papers. It had meant nothing to a child, like the rest of his drink-laden diatribes. Now it came back to her like a biblical pronouncement. That must be it. The newspaper, unthinkably, was wrong. She rocked herself backwards and forwards, cradling the beaker close to her breast.
She must put it right. The thought became a palliative for her grief. In the two hours of her steady, silent tears, she had confronted the abyss. Before Stanley, she had lived through a series of desperate affairs, each offering brief hope of a lasting attachment, each shorter than the last. Stanley, finding her in a pub, had thought her an easy prospect. After that first, clumsy coupling, there had emerged from their dual loneliness an affection which had massaged a slow confidence back into both of them. Now he was gone, and the path was opening again to drinking, to the joyless sex which was the only currency she could offer, perhaps to eventual prostitution.
She could not formulate the words even in her thoughts, but the notion sat in her consciousness like a sullen dog and would not he ignored. She must explain that Stanl
ey had been coming to see her last night. That because of that, he could never have committed suicide. It was her grasp upon integrity.
Her first thought was to visit the newspaper. Then even she realized that this could not be right. It would have to be the police. She had never in her life gone voluntarily to them. To do so now in the extreme of her distress and physical collapse took a courage which women from a different background would never comprehend. It took an hour to nerve, herself to go. An hour of fear, but an hour in which she became more sure what she must do. She owed it to Stanley: to their relationship.
She found the gin bottle in the bottom of the wardrobe. It had only been a quarter full, and she had almost finished it while she waited for Stanley on Wednesday. It was curious now to think that she had been only disappointed, not fearful, as the possibility that he could not come back to her grew into a certainty. There was a bare half-inch in the bottom of the bottle; she finished it now with the tonic she had so carefully preserved for Stanley. Then she washed herself carefully and put on the green two-piece costume Stanley had paid for and so admired. She brushed her hair vigorously, the first energetic movement she had made since she had come in with the paper and read the news.
In the mirror, she saw a drawn face which seemed to belong to someone older and more tragic than Margot Jones could ever be. She wanted to go without make-up to the police station, for all the obscure memories of puberty and adolescence were insisting that this was respectable. But the lined face, still puffed from weeping, seemed too vulnerable and revealing. She put a light base on the white cheeks, trying to rub a little life into them so that the colouring would not seem so obstinately artificial. She put on lipstick, a little more than she intended, changing the face in the mirror a little nearer to the mask she had hoped to avoid. In the second drawer of the battered tallboy, she sought the gloves she had not worn for years, those childhood guarantees of respectability. There was only one there. She did not possess a hat.