by J M Gregson
‘That’s easy enough. I had a viewing at six-thirty. A Mr and Mrs Swanton – a semi near the centre of Oldford. They would confirm that; I don’t have their phone number but we’ll have it on file at the office. I got home at about seven-fifteen, I think.’ His wife nodded an eager confirmation. Robson had the air of a man being careful about serious matters. ‘We ate more or less straight away; Audrey had the meal ready.’ As his wife brushed her stray curl distractedly back towards its place, he brought his hands together and contemplated them. They were broad, short-fingered hands. Hands that could easily have restrained the arms of a dying Stanley Freeman: Robson held them up before him with finger-ends steepled together, as if displaying how steady they were at this key point in his story.
John Lambert’s wife Christine would have been appalled to see him in action at this moment. For he was enjoying his work, and she knew him well enough to know it, even when he scarcely realized it himself. He prompted his subject with, ‘And between eight and nine?’ If Robson guessed this was the crucial time, so be it: he would find out soon enough, and he was committed now to the account he had begun. Lambert was quite prepared to stoke the tension and study his reactions.
Robson was smiling. ‘You’ll need a statement from Fred here.’ The labrador, prone at Hook’s feet, lifted his head at the sound of his name. ‘I was up on the common with him as usual. Always between about eight and nine in the summer. We have to go earlier as the nights close in, of course.’ He leaned over towards Hook and fondled the dog’s ears, looking down at him indulgently. ‘He’s a one-man dog, is Fred.’
‘I presume Mrs Lambert can confirm the time you left and returned,’ said Lambert neutrally. It was the kind of alibi normally confined to the innocent: the guilty often contrived apparently watertight stories. This was more convincing than having spent the evening entirely at home with his wife; spouses’ evidence was always suspect, though it could not always be disproved. The diligent police checking which was integral to a murder inquiry would no doubt throw up someone who had conversed with Robson, or at least seen him on the common with the dog.
Hook was dutifully on cue as usual. When he asked, ‘Did you speak to anyone up there?’ Audrey Robson looked at him as if he had accused her man of lying.
Robson took it calmly enough, as a logical extension of his story. He pursed his lips and thought for a moment, then said, ‘Wednesday night. It’s difficult, because one night merges with another when you go up there all the time. I can’t remember actually speaking to anyone on Wednesday, though I may have done. The regular dog-walkers often have a chat up there: but it was a lovely evening – like tonight. We went right up on to the moor, I think. Wednesday is Audrey’s bridge day so Fred had been in for most of the day and was ready for a run. He was chasing rabbits; he never catches any but he enjoys the chase.’ Fred sat up and scratched, then put his head on his master’s knee and stretched out a large fawn paw, as if he had been offered the highest canine acclaim.
‘He was back here about nine,’ said Audrey Robson.
‘And then here for the rest of the evening. You can examine me on the telly programmes if you like.’
‘Except that he probably fell asleep as usual!’ said Audrey. Both of them seemed relaxed now, as if they knew they were past the most important time in the evening. George stood up, went across to the alcove by the fireplace, and picked up a handsome decanter.
‘Glass of port? Or do you have to say, “Sorry, sir, not on duty”?’
Lambert saw from the elaborate ormolu clock that it was twenty past nine: Robson must have come in at nine o’clock as he said he normally did. He said, ‘When we get beyond a twelve-hour day, the rules seem less important. Thank you very much. Sergeant Hook may dutifully refuse, being a puritanical beer drinker.’ Audrey Robson eased her elegant frame from the chair and insisted on fetching a can of bitter, as if glad of the release afforded by physical movement.
Hook studied the foaming tankard appreciatively, then solemnly intoned in defence of his choice,
‘Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.’
Lambert fought to control the descent of his lower jaw before his Sergeant’s urbane smile. He said rather desperately to his suspect-turned-host, ‘Lovely decanter.’
‘Golfing prize,’ said Robson as he returned it to the shelf, and the Superintendent, a struggling golfer himself, tried not to give too much respect to this Hercules who had scaled the cut-glass heights he might never conquer. It was a fine port; he savoured the effects of the wall-lights upon the rich crimson in his glass.
Then he said, ‘I have to ask you, Mr Robson, if you can think of anyone who might have had a reason to kill Mr Freeman.’
Audrey Robson looked at her husband in alarm, but George was as calm as he had been throughout. After a few seconds he said, ‘I wouldn’t describe Stanley as a popular man. Rather the reverse, in fact. That doesn’t mean I suspect anyone of killing him.’ He sipped his port, watching the sparkling effect of light breaking in myriad facets off the cut glass on to his fingers, as if demonstrating anew how steady those fingers were.
Lambert, wanting suddenly to break that composure, asked bluntly, ‘What were your own relationships with the deceased?’ Robson seemed unshaken, but his wife gasped, her wide grey eyes shocked at such directness.
‘He treated George abominably!’ she said, her voice rising with anger at the recollection. She was too involved to notice her husband’s admonitory glance. ‘He’s exploited George for years, and done less and less himself. Old Austin Freeman must have turned in his grave!’ Belatedly, she saw her husband’s face. Lambert waited, knowing the matter could not be left thus.
George Robson looked down at the dog dozing at his feet and sighed. ‘Austin Freeman was Stanley’s father and the founder of the firm. I joined in nineteen-sixty. At that time, my public school background seemed to help.’
‘George is a Harrovian,’ said Audrey Robson. She tried to make it a neutral, explanatory statement, but the pride and wonder of it still seeped in after all these years. When young George Robson had driven into her remote valley in the Dales, he had seemed as exotic to the people there as any sheikh. And he had carried her off just as effectively in his MG. Sergeant Hook, sitting beside this romantic figure with a face of stone, looked into his beer and controlled as best he could the racing emotions of a Barnardo’s boy.
‘My father had a double DFC and had only just left the RAF when I went to Harrow. Those things counted in the years just after the war,’ said Robson. Hook warmed to a man who seemed to be apologizing for his schooling. ‘I was in the firm for two years before Stanley arrived, and the elder Mr Freeman was kind about my work.’
‘You carried the firm as he got older,’ interrupted his wife, resentful of his British understatement.
Robson said, ‘All right, Audrey,’ with a stillness which did not conceal its authority. Lambert thought her a woman not often silenced, but she did not speak again until her husband had finished.
‘Fifteen years ago, Austin took Stanley and me into his office one morning and told us he was leaving the firm between us. I think he had already told his son, because Stanley seemed to accept it readily enough. I was delighted to be rewarded for my work.’ For the first time since he had joined them, George Robson looked embarrassed.
There was a lengthy pause. Lambert said, ‘Perhaps I should tell you that I shall be seeing Stanley Freeman’s solicitor tomorrow. It’s standard practice when foul play is suspected.’
Robson smiled ruefully. ‘Austin Freeman never made it official. At least, no record of his wishes was ever discovered. He died suddenly of a heart attack a month later without making a new will. The old one had been made years earlier when I was starting work as what we would now call a junior negotiator. It left the family business to Stanley as the only child.’
Audrey Robson chewed her lower lip and kept silent. It was Hook who said, ‘And Stanley Freeman didn�
��t honour the gentleman’s agreement?’
Robson’s voice remained low, but now even his polished delivery could not conceal the bitterness. ‘Stanley said he did not regard a verbal agreement as binding. He stuck to the original will. As a sop, he made a will leaving the business to me in the event of his decease, with Denise as a sleeping partner. It hardly seemed relevant, as he was three or four years younger than me and we were both in our thirties. We went on as before, with me on a slightly better salary.’
There was silence for several seconds in the comfortable, conventional room, which seemed a strange setting for this tale of old treacheries. When Fred rolled on to his side and gave the low, satisfied grunt which was the prelude to sleep, it rose unnaturally loud. They had heard only one side of the story: dead men can never defend themselves. But there was certainly enough resentment simmering in the room to motivate a killing.
Into the silence, Lambert dropped an apparently inconsequential question, bringing their thoughts back abruptly to the present. ‘What car do you drive, Mr Robson?’
If the man was surprised, he gave no sign of it. He said, ‘A red Ford Sierra Ghia. It’s in the garage now if you want to see it.’ Lambert wondered why he was so anxious to show them what he could not think was important in the inquiry. Unless for some reason he knew it was. Perhaps he was merely anxious to get away from the embarrassment of his personal situation at Freeman Estates.
Lambert said, ‘You realize this is now a murder inquiry. The initial suspects are those close to the victim, including yourself.’ He ignored Audrey Robson’s taut face as he watched her husband’s cool nod. ‘No one is accused. We proceed by elimination. If we clear Mr Freeman’s relations and working associates, we shall move on to a wider, secondary circle of people who had contact with the victim.’
‘I hope you have to do that in this case,’ said Robson. The smile he attempted was neither wide nor relaxed.
‘And I have to hope we find the killer in Mr Freeman’s immediate circle.’ Lambert spoke evenly, but with an answering smile: these two men understood each other now, whatever the facts he would eventually unearth. ‘It gets more difficult as we move outwards. As you probably appreciate, I am asking you if you know of anyone in the firm who could expect to profit from this death.’
‘Anyone else, you mean,’ said Robson grimly. ‘Well, Stanley didn’t have many friends, as I said. We carried him in the business most of the time. He was competent enough when he wanted to be, and more than that sometimes, especially when it came to new housing developments. He was quite good on big sales, where people liked to deal with the head of the firm; that’s why he was handling Lydon Hall completely on his own. But too often he wasn’t around when we needed him. In their different ways, Emily Godson, Simon Hapgood, even Jane Davidson all resented him. He never went out of his way to soothe ruffled feathers, and in small firms grievances sometimes accumulate into hatreds. That doesn’t mean I can see any of them killing him.’
Lambert noticed that Robson had excluded no one from suspicion, despite his final disclaimer. He stood up to indicate that the interview was at an end, watched the dog rise and stretch, stroked its head reflectively. Hook, who had watched the technique before, waited for the last key question, which would come when the subjects were off guard, in the belief that the serious business was over.
Lambert had taken a step towards the door before he said, ‘What about Denise Freeman?’
Robson glanced at his wife before answering. Was it possible lust lurked beneath this urbane exterior? The dark, lithe Denise Freeman, almost the physical antithesis of Audrey Robson, might arouse lubricious imaginings in many men. If George Robson entertained them, he would do well to conceal them from his unswervingly supportive wife.
‘She wasn’t close to her husband. That doesn’t mean she killed him.’
‘Not close?’ Lambert was proud of the obtuseness he simulated sometimes as a professional tool.
Robson must have been as conscious as the detectives of his wife’s appraisal of his words as he picked them out. ‘It didn’t seem to me a particularly good marriage over the last few years. They were cool with each other; occasionally they bickered in public. Lately I think they went their own ways.’
That phrase usually meant affairs: there was much to learn yet about the dead Stanley and his very much alive wife.
They were on the front doorstep, preparing to descend the four broad stone steps to the path down the front garden, when Lambert asked, ‘This will Stanley Freeman made years ago. Has it ever been replaced?’
Robson made no attempt to dissimulate. He had spoken that afternoon to the firm’s solicitors whom he had known for thirty years, and found all he needed to know from a series of embarrassed denials. He looked past them, while scents drifted up from flowers invisible in the late summer darkness, and said, ‘Denise will be a sleeping partner, taking a small percentage of profits. Otherwise, Freeman Estates passes to me now.’
His nervous little laugh echoed in their ears all the way down the unlit path.
Chapter 13
The weather held for the funeral. The dappled shade of the trees round the old churchyard scarcely moved on the bright, still morning. The slow ritual of interment gave Stanley Freeman a dignity he had rarely been afforded in life.
It was Denise Freeman who had decided upon a burial rather than a cremation. They had been married long ago in a Catholic church, and Stanley had been made to promise that the children they had never had would be brought up in that faith. She no longer attended regularly herself, but the influence of those unsmiling French nuns of her childhood, with their faces of ancient parchment, was with her still, long after she had thought it dead. Mumbo-jumbo she might assert it all to be, in the spacious and brilliant drawing-rooms of her friends, but some superstitions were better respected than ignored.
It was cool in the small stone church. She wished the funeral men would not shuffle their feet as they brought the coffin down the aisle. With its polished brass fittings, its inscribed plate, its single large wreath, the coffin brought its usual moment of breathless silence, as the thought of its contents forced itself upon even the most sluggish of imaginations.
Denise Freeman’s imagination was scarcely sluggish. The occasion crystallized the strange, unexpected mixture of emotions she had felt since they had brought to her the news of Stanley’s death. There was regret for what might have been, deeper than she had ever thought to feel. There was guilt for attempts left unmade and deceits carefully organized. There was uncertainty about her immediate plans, disconcerting to one used to making decisions and projecting her certainties to those around her. There was elation at her freedom from a marriage which had long ceased to work. But over all, most disturbing because least expected, there was a numbing loneliness about the future which stretched before her, a feeling of solitariness which threatened to descend into panic.
‘Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my prayer.’ The priest intoned the ancient words, happy to retreat from the uneasy platitude of consolation in an age which did not believe. His tiny congregation struggled raggedly to make the half-forgotten responses; only the three elderly women at the back who attended all the services were confident of their words. Denise was glad Stanley’s old mother had gone before him: she would have been the only one in the church who felt crippling, undiluted grief.
When they moved outside to the graveyard, there was one other such, but Denise neither saw nor knew her.
The undertaker’s men shouldered the coffin with practised ease, moving without a stumble over the uneven paths between the green mounds. Behind them, the widow headed the pathetically diminished procession of mourners. She was the only relative to witness the end of the Freeman line, for Stanley’s cousins had declined the long journey from the North. Now George Robson even detached his wife from the group; after their whispered colloquy, Audrey remained in the porch of the church.
So Freeman was followed
to his last resting place only by his wife and his employees. The sombre formal garb which was their concession to mourning did not sit easily on all of them, and their modernity was an odd contrast to the priest who accompanied them, in his white alb and purple stole. He swung his stoup of holy water on its chain as the five gathered with him by the grave. And Stanley Freeman’s murderer looked with the others into the pit which had been dug to receive his remains.
They stood on the strips of plastic grass which fringed the grave. Denise resented this ersatz turf. It seemed so unnecessary on this dry, bright morning; no doubt it was standard practice. Across the grave she watched the shining black shoes of Simon Hapgood; she had not once looked into his face.
Simon, though, was watching her and wondering what she felt behind her tearless exterior. He was white with the drama of the occasion, filled as he watched the coffin descend with emotions he could not analyse about the man he had cuckolded so cheerfully in life. His light colouring accentuated his paleness; with his smartly cut dark blue suit, his gold-pinned black tie and white cuffs, he could not dismiss the feeling that he must make a wholly appropriate effect at this moment. He wished Denise Freeman would look at him. But he supposed they were playing a scene for watching eyes.
Beside him, Emily Godson, veteran of many funerals, tried not to become preoccupied with the speck of damp clay that had tumbled from the diggings and attached itself obstinately to the black patent leather of her left shoe. She was quiet, controlled, her mien as correct as the charcoal grey of her costume as she watched the ropes lowering the coffin into its last deep cavity. Only a close observer would have seen the strain about her mouth and neck, or the gleam of guilty triumph in her downcast eyes. And none was close enough for that.