by J M Gregson
He did not do it of course. Heaven knows what the world would do if its Superintendents began to behave in that manner. And, as he sat and coldly reminded himself that this might well be a murderess, she did indeed smile. Not quite the smile he had wanted to restore the face’s lost beauty. It was too rueful for that: not far from Wino Willy’s bitter smile when he had mocked him with rosemary for remembrance.
‘Michael doesn’t live here any more,’ she said. Then she briefly shook her head; perhaps to her as to him it sounded like the title of a play. ‘He went to New Zealand ten years and more ago.’ It was very quiet now. Outside, a robin hopped along one of the neat lines of plants in search of food. None of the three spoke; all of them sensed the woman was about to make some revelation about herself.
‘Mother left him this cottage,’ she said. She glanced at them almost apologetically, as if she should have produced something more dramatic. ‘Mike is divorced. He needs the money from this place to make a settlement with his wife and keep his farm in New Zealand. Very soon now. He’s relying on me to tell him when the market’s right to sell this cottage.’ She forced a bitter-sweet smile at the memory of it. She had been born here, had grown here to womanhood, had cherished this cottage and garden for the best part of five decades. That unexpected riot of colour in the weed-free garden, this sensibly modernized interior, were her doing; they contained something of her, perhaps more than she cared to admit.
It was Bert Hook, who had not owned a home of his own for the first thirty-six years of his life, who was most aware of the emotion under these quiet statements. ‘Why?’ he said indignantly. ‘Why would your mother do that?’ He ignored John Lambert’s admonitory glance, telling him he was moving into areas which should be beyond their concern. And as had happened before when staid Bert Hook acted instinctively, there were unexpected dividends. Emily Godson, leaping to the defence of her dead mother, revealed in the next few minutes what might have taken days of inquiry.
‘Mother never thought I’d have to move. Mike was doing well and was apparently happily married. The idea was that I’d live here for life – or as long as I wanted to. She thought Mike might eventually want to come back here. I think she hoped he would. Anyway, she thought she’d left me quite secure financially. She left me what little money she had and also – ’ She stopped, aghast at where she had been led in defence of the mother who was still so definitely with her in this house.
‘Also…?’ said Hook gently. Emily Godson picked a small piece of dried grass of her skirt, tugged the left sleeve of her blue woollen cardigan a centimetre lower on her wrist, and acknowledged that she could not stop now.
‘There was another property, where my aunt lives – my mother’s elder sister. Mum left that to her, with the clear understanding that it would come to me at her death.’
‘Understanding?’ It was the first time Lambert had spoken for five minutes. He had never expected to sound like Alfred Arkwright. Emily looked at him caustically; these were questions she had asked herself ad nauseam over the last few months.
‘Mother didn’t understand the law and its necessities. Why should she? Dad used to handle all that sort of thing. And Aunt Alice knew all about it and understood. She was my favourite aunt.’ Suddenly this formidable professional woman was near to tears. At this moment, a spotless brown and white cat strolled down the flagged path in the rear garden, elegant, leisurely, too dignified for the petty human concerns within the house. All three of them were glad to observe its progress and wait for Emily to regain control.
‘She still is my favourite aunt,’ said Emily, as if shocked at the disloyalty in her use of the past tense. ‘It’s just that Mother knew nothing about the problems of senile dementia. And still less about the people around who might take advantage of it.’
‘We are talking about 3, Acacia Avenue, I think,’ said Lambert quietly. He had seen where this was leading for some time. He told himself his excitement could not be as unworthy as it felt. They were about to find out more about both the dead man and one of his suspects: this thrill of anticipation was a necessary adjunct of efficient detection.
Emily was not offended, as he had half-expected. She seemed no more than mildly surprised that he knew. ‘It’s a modern detached bungalow,’ she said, falling automatically into the jargon of her profession. ‘More valuable than this. Mum thought she was looking after me carefully. If Aunt Alice hadn’t – ’ Abruptly, she was weeping as the suffering and anxiety she had hugged to herself for months fell out. Again Lambert had to resist the impulse to touch her, to put the arm round the shoulders that such moments seemed to need. The proprieties of objective investigation must be preserved. He suddenly realized the unbending Miss Godson was longing to throw herself weeping on the breast of the mother she had lost. Hook gathered the crockery carefully together on the tray; any activity was better than this embarrassing detachment.
When Emily resumed, she dropped her sentences in a flat monotone which only emphasized how brittle was the control she had won back. ‘Aunt Alice isn’t really fit to be on her own any longer, but she doesn’t want to move. A home help goes in each morning and I go round every evening. I was there on the Wednesday night that Freeman was killed.’
Automatically, Lambert clocked up the questions. How accurately did she know the time of the death? How much was the word of a senile relative worth in the establishment of an alibi?
If Emily knew she had forestalled questions for the moment by pressing on with her account, she gave no sign of it, for she spoke almost like one under hypnosis. ‘We never know quite what we’ll find when we go into the bungalow.’ There came an unexpected flashing smile at some recollection of humour amid the tragedy, but she did not enlighten them about the incident. ‘She’s quite harmless, childlike and rather sweet. And not responsible for her actions. Three months ago, she signed the bungalow away to someone else. He’d been round to see her with flowers and cakes. Just three times. It’s often those closest who suffer as the mind begins to go, you know.’ She offered the last observation as if recounting a detached case history, but the tears sprang anew.
‘That person was Stanley Freeman?’ said Lambert. It seemed cruel to wring every detail from her distress, when Arkwright had already given them the clue.
She nodded, not shocked that he should know. ‘Stanley had heard about her from me. He offered to ease the burden for me by going to sit with her occasionally in the evenings. That was when she signed the bungalow away. It wasn’t Aunt Alice’s fault. Ten years ago she’d have seen through him straight away and sent him packing.’ She was as anxious to defend her aunt as she had been her mother a few minutes earlier. ‘It’s age that does it,’ she said bleakly, as the tears coursed down her cheeks and dropped unheeded on to her white blouse. For a moment she contemplated that most inexorable of enemies, lying in patient wait for her.
‘I think you should contact Arkwright and Sons in Oldford,’ said Lambert. ‘You may find some good news about 3, Acacia Avenue.’
She was so little cheered by the news that he felt cheated. Then he realized that she was exhausted. This parade of emotions by one who had practised containment and self-sufficiency for years had drained her more than it would have done others.
‘He said he’d arranged things so that I would get the place back if he died before me,’ she said, so quietly that they had to strain to catch her words even in that low, silent room. ‘I didn’t believe him.’ She acknowledged with a sombre smile the knowledge that in this at least she had misjudged him.
Lambert wondered whether he believed her. It was Hook who said after a pause, ‘What car do you drive, Miss Godson?’
She looked at him like one who did not see the point of the question. ‘A brown Ford Escort, usually.’
‘Usually?’
‘Well, almost invariably. Freeman always insisted they were pool cars; there are duplicate keys in the office. There are tax advantages, apparently. I always thought it was one of his ways of rem
inding us who was boss.’
Lambert said, ‘Think carefully before you answer this, Miss Godson. Do you know of anyone who would have wished to kill Stanley Freeman?’
There were no histrionics. She did as she was bid and considered her reply carefully; for so long that he prompted her with, ‘I shall ask others the same question in relation to you.’
She smiled that small, cramped smile that he would so like to have seen enlarged. Then she said, ‘There is no one I can see as a murderer. None of us liked him. Sometimes I thought that his wife hated him, at others that she merely despised him. George Robson is highly competent and highly frustrated in his work: I presume that can be an explosive mixture. I don’t like Mr Hapgood and I wouldn’t trust him, even with the petty cash, but I don’t see him as a murderer.’
There was a silence while all three of them weighed what she had said. They all knew there was one name she had not mentioned. She looked up into Lambert’s face to check that he was still waiting, then put the tea she had not touched carefully back on the table. Eventually she said, ‘There was something between Jane Davidson and Freeman that I didn’t understand. I think he had some hold over her or she over him. But I don’t profess to understand the young.’ Her face resumed its lines of disapproval at the thought, as if she was preparing to raise again the barriers she had lowered for a time.
Denise Freeman had said something similar about the receptionist at Freeman Estates: Lambert filed away this second suggestion of mystery. For the rest, Emily Godson’s assessments might almost have come from one of his subordinates in a dispassionate summary of their suspects. For a moment, he was filled with respect as well as sympathy for the sturdy spirit beneath this spinsterish exterior.
Then, her calmness making the import of the words more shocking, Emily said, ‘I’m glad he’s dead. I could have killed him myself.’
Bert Hook twitched his surprise, despite his experience. Even hardened detective-sergeants can be caught of guard in that eerie moment when someone voices their very thoughts.
Chapter 17
Acacia Avenue was a cul-de-sac of modern bungalows. Hook peered at the street map and tried to decipher the lettering as Lambert swung the big Vauxhall through new building developments. If he had to hold the print any further away, his arms would not be long enough. ‘Should be the next left, I think,’ he said without conviction.
It was a quiet little close. From the end of it, a footpath by a tranquil stream took one to the centre of Oldford in less than five minutes. Perhaps Emily Godson’s mother had thought her daughter would find this a more convenient as well as a more valuable residence than the old cottage as the years advanced.
Aunt Alice’s smiling face was at the window when they parked, as if she was as anxious as they were to establish her niece’s alibi for the night of the murder. They refused more tea and prevailed upon her to sit down with them on the comfortable chintz suite in the light and airy lounge. Everything was very neat: perhaps the home help had not long been gone. Alice Franklyn had the wide bright eyes and perpetual smile, the too-mobile hands, of a hyperactive child. Her cardigan, buttoned askew down its entire length, and a strand of grey hair wildly adrift of the rest hinted that all might not be well within that benign and venerable head.
‘What a beautiful bungalow!’ said Hook conventionally as they sat down.
‘Mary bought it. Clever girl, Mary,’ said the fey old lady. She rocked a little with mirth. They managed to establish that Mary was her sister and Emily Godson’s mother. She spoke as though addressing her remarks not to them but to some imaginary person in the kitchen beyond, with whom she was sharing an innocent conspiracy. With difficulty, they steered the conversation towards Emily.
‘Good girl, Emily. Comes round here to eat my cakes. Naughty, sometimes, but she’s a good girl.’ She leant towards them, close and confidential. ‘Stanley knows. Stanley keeps her in order.’ Suddenly she cackled with laughter, loud, strident and threatening. For a few seconds, she was transformed from child to witch. It was eerie and other-worldly, with the menace of the unknown behind it. In that moment, Bert Hook understood why an ignorant and superstitious peasantry would stoop to ducking-stools.
Then she was back to innocence again, smiling in childish conspiracy as Lambert guided her back towards Emily’s visits. Hook felt a great sympathy, overlaid with the panic of one floundering out of his depth. Lambert could not dismiss thoughts of Alice in Wonderland as he strove to make sense of this modern namesake.
‘So Emily comes here most evenings. Now, Alice, I want you to think very hard.’ He tried not to think what sort of witness she would make: it would never come to that, surely. ‘Can you remember last Wednesday evening? Take your time, now.’
The strange figure before him rocked back and forth on the settee several times, her furrowed brow simulating the thought he had instructed her to give to this intriguing puzzle. The broad smile never left the old, innocent face, the blue eyes glittered with the fun of superior knowledge as she looked up at the glass of the light fitting above them. She was like a child in possession of some immense secret, which in its revelation would make all these petty questions seem quite ludicrous.
‘Oh yes, she was here,’ she said. Her smile grew even broader at the recollection. Hook began to relax, Lambert smiled encouragement and wondered how to move on to specific times. Then Alice Franklyn went on, anxious to leave them in no doubt. ‘She was here with her mother and her brother Michael. We had a nice family evening.’ She folded her arms and hugged herself with the pleasure of the recollection. Then she began to check the carpet all round her feet with elaborate care.
In a rare moment of fantasy, stolid Bert Hook wondered if she could see the shattered pieces of her niece’s alibi lying there.
Chapter 18
‘Did you ever know Willy Harrison?’ said Lambert to his wife. He studied the steam rising from the huge cup he always insisted on at breakfast, then looked beyond it to the blackbird he could see swaying gently on a rose in the back garden.
Christine wondered that a man should adopt a front so determinedly non-committal with his wife, making the partner of his bed a stranger over the breakfast table. She decided not to be insulted, for she understood far more clearly than he did himself the reason for this reserve, this awkwardness in what could have been a routine exchange. Lambert had a reluctance to talk about his work at home which amounted almost to a phobia, so that when as now he wished to draw upon some area of her knowledge, his manner had an obliquity more appropriate to the questioning of a stranger. Perhaps it went back to those near-forgotten days when they had almost split up, when she so resented his profession that she forbade it entry across her threshold, as some houseproud women forbid their husbands’ muddy boots.
She watched him studiously avoiding her eye, resolutely studying the back garden in the morning sun, and felt a surge of tenderness for the gaucherie beneath the grey hairs. She said, ‘He was Jim Harrison then. We began teaching together in the same year. That was in my grammar school days, of course.’ She had re-trained for primary school teaching when she went back to work as their children grew. ‘It seems an age ago now.’
She studied her husband’s carefully assumed indifference with amusement that contained a nugget of irritation. He looked from blackbird to greenhouse, to the rowan tree at the far corner of the garden, but never at her. He waited for her to enlarge upon the subject of his question, and eventually she was drawn into his little game as she knew she would be. ‘He was a good teacher, one of the very best. He knew kids instinctively – I don’t think much of it came from training.’ She paused, poured tea into her small cup, and said, ‘I didn’t like his wife.’
The abrupt disclosure made him glance at her at last, and they caught each other in their grins. For the first time, John Lambert realized the technique he had been using on his wife, and she caught the moment. Where twenty years ago there would have been mutual recriminations, there was now mutual amuseme
nt.
‘She left him eventually,’ said Lambert.
‘I know. By that time I was pregnant with Sue and had left the school. One did, in those days.’ For a moment, Lambert caught the scent of regret that she had not been around to console Jim Harrison when he needed her. Their own marriage had been shaky at just that time…
He concentrated on the material of his investigation. ‘He was very depressed at the time of his divorce. Did he look round for consolation?’
If Christine Lambert thought the question in any way applied to herself, she gave no sign. She thought seriously with pursed lips before she said, ‘I don’t think so. Perhaps if he had done he wouldn’t have had such a breakdown. There were plenty willing. He was an attractive man and a good teacher. You’d be surprised how attractive a combination that can be for young women.’ Now it was she who looked down the garden, to where the same blackbird perched now on a mound of juniper to voice his full-throated diversion. Her neat brown hair, without a trace of grey yet, framed a profile which had the composure of a Renaissance Madonna. It was impossible to tell from her half-smile whether she was covering a small embarrassment or parodying her husband’s recent attitude. Perhaps she merely disguised a great sadness. Just when he thought she had finished, she said, ‘Emily Godson was one of them.’