by J M Gregson
‘Timing?’ This was Hook, flicking over a new page in his notebook and making it clear that every word would be recorded and checked out.
Hapgood paused, took his time: Lambert suddenly had the feeling that he had rehearsed all this. ‘I can’t be sure. I must have come back here about seven. I used the microwave to heat a frozen dinner for one, so I didn’t take very long over it. I expect I was in the pub by about eight o’clock, but I couldn’t be certain. I was relaxing. I didn’t know at the time it would be important.’ The sentence they had heard so often before. That was because it was true, of course. But the story had come out just too glibly.
‘You stayed there until closing time?’
‘More or less. About half past ten, I think.’
‘No doubt you saw people you knew who could vouch for your presence there.’
If it was a challenge, it did not ruffle him. ‘One or two. I’m quite well known there.’ He reeled off three names, again just too quickly for the recollection to be spontaneous. But it would be a foolish man who had not reviewed his movements on that fateful evening.
Bert Hook wrote down the names laboriously, spreading the seconds to build the tension. Then he said, ‘What car do you drive, Mr Hapgood?’
Was there a snatch of breath before he replied? It might have been no more than the surprise of an innocent man at an unexpected question.
‘A Ford Sierra.’
‘Colour?’
‘Dark blue. Not metallic.’
Hook wrote down the words while Lambert studied the fresh young face intently. They stood up. Hapgood’s relief was evident. He even attempted a grotesque return to his manner at the outset of the interview. ‘Well, gentlemen, if I can be of any further help – ’
‘What do you know about Denise Freeman?’ Lambert spat the question like a poisoned dart. He was surprised at the hostility in his own voice.
Hapgood, rising to shepherd them off the premises, had turned towards the door, so that the light at last fell full upon his face. They watched the pale, epicene features fighting for control. The eyelids blinked three, four times in rapid succession, the small lips twitched twice before he managed to speak. His first words emerged as little more than a croak.
‘Why do you ask me about her?’
Both men watched him struggling for control, excited by a reaction far greater than either had anticipated.
There was a pause of no more than two seconds, which seemed much longer to all of them. Then Lambert said coldly, ‘Because she is a suspect, just as George Robson and Emily Godson are. As you are yourself. As Jane Davidson is.’ He watched Hapgood closely as he produced the last name. There was nothing like the reaction which Denise Freeman’s name had produced. For a moment then there had been real fear. For himself, or for the enigmatic widow? Lambert’s question had been provoked by his remembrance of a single, unreturned look Hapgood had directed to Denise Freeman across the coffin of the murdered man.
Hapgood might have blustered if he could have managed more control of himself. As it was, he was wise or fortunate enough to say nothing. Lambert, anxious to keep him reeling, to prevent the retreat into his legal right to say nothing, volunteered, ‘Mrs Freeman has provided us with an account of her whereabouts on the evening of the murder, as you have. As Sergeant Hook has just indicated to you, we look for witnesses to corroborate all such statements. So far, we have found none to substantiate Mrs Freeman’s story.’
Hapgood’s eyes flicked to Lambert’s face, then to Hook’s; he found no clue in either to help him. They saw fear in the bright blue eyes; the bright room seemed unnaturally silent.
‘Do you know of any reason why Mrs Freeman should kill her husband?’
Hapgood shook his head, dumb and miserable. Neither of them thought him altruistic enough for it to be a detached concern about an innocent woman.
‘Have you any idea where she was last Wednesday night?’
‘No!’ This time the response was loud, instinctive, an emotional reaction rather than a refusal of information. He must have realized how odd it sounded in the pause which followed. He swallowed hard, then said unsteadily, ‘I went to the pub as I said. I didn’t see Denise.’
‘I hadn’t suggested you did,’ said the Superintendent quietly. He wondered if Hapgood was too nervous now to realize how much he had given away in that single unguarded use of the Christian name. For the first time, Lambert was toying with the idea that these two had indeed been with each other at the time of the murder. Perhaps, indeed, at the scene of the murder. ‘Now, I must ask you this, Mr Hapgood. Have you anything further to tell us which might bear on the death of Stanley Freeman?’ He made it as simple and as unbending as he could, as though he were enunciating a formal charge.
‘No. Nothing. You must believe me.’ Hapgood tossed the golden hair back in his habitual gesture and attempted the look of appealing sincerity his nerves could not sustain. Lambert’s eyes never left his face.
‘We shall need to talk further,’ he said. ‘Probably after I’ve seen Mrs Freeman again. You won’t be leaving the area, will you, Mr Hapgood?’ It was more a directive than a question.
Hapgood shook his head miserably, then stood in the Georgian doorway until Lambert had reversed the Vauxhall and driven out of sight. Then he went hopelessly back inside and shut the front door carefully. He picked up the nearly spent cigarette, drew a last nervous comfort from it as he tapped out the digits on the phone.
It rang three, four times. As it was answered, he stubbed out the butt of the cigarette.
Chapter 20
The police station at Oldford was in a chronically over-crowded Victorian building. Plans were in hand to remedy the situation. Within two years, a disused primary school would be converted to allow the burgeoning force the space it needed. Crime has overtaken fecundity as a feature of rural England.
But serious crime was still mercifully rare here. This meant that the CID section was even more cramped than the rest. The murder room had been established in a terrapin building in the yard behind the station, the only place where the required resources could be concentrated efficiently. Eight days into the inquiry, Superintendent Lambert reviewed progress with DI Rushton and DS Hook.
The routine business of the investigation had continued steadily, the machinery of police routine forming a background to Lambert’s less predictable procedures. Here were stored the signed statements of the discoverers of the corpse and the people who had subsequently emerged as major suspects. Fingerprints from the drawing-room at Lydon Hall were filed alongside those of the suspects. In plastic bags were the minutiae of hairs, pins and clothing fibres, all meticulously labelled. Out of sight but even more carefully packaged were the shoes and clothes of the dead man, waiting for the recovery elsewhere of the tiniest fibres which might indicate a connection between murderer and victim on that fateful night. They were folded carefully, filed in plastic sheeting in the drawers of an old cabinet, out of sight lest they should distress close relatives. In another drawer were the plastic bag which had enclosed the corpse’s head and the suicide note found in the pocket, waiting to become in due course Exhibits A and B in court.
It would never do for a spouse to set eyes on such grisly reminders of the crime. Unless of course she was simply being confronted with her own evil deed. Lambert was dissatisfied with his picture of the widow of the late Stanley Freeman. He had checked the pages of the preliminary interviews, Hook’s notes on their own exchanges, and the findings from the subsequent checks he had ordered. His amour propre was disturbed: Denise Freeman had so far revealed to them little more than she had chosen to. He saw her in his mind’s eye, cool, dark and Gallic, her Mona Lisa smile seeming to suggest her superiority to the simple techniques of the English police. She had seemed both calm and ruthless in her assessments of others during their interview. She would make a good murderer, if she thought such desperate measures necessary. Or – and the thought which had been buried in the recesses of his mind suddenly
sprang clear – she was the kind of woman who could persuade men to kill for her.
‘Denise Freeman said that on the night of the murder she was at the cinema in Tewkesbury. Any corroboration yet?’ He thought of the widow’s cool, detailed account of The Last Emperor and its stars, so matter-of-fact and convincing as they had sat on her manicured lawns.
Rushton knew without looking at the reports of his detective-constables. ‘Nothing yet. There were two front of house staff and an usherette in the cinema: none of them remember her. The place was almost full.’ Of course. It would be for a popular film; this woman, if she was trying to deceive them, would no doubt have taken account of that.
‘Any of them male?’ A red-blooded man was more likely to remember those dark eyes and lustrous black tresses.
‘Only the house manager. He spent a lot of the evening checking takings.’
‘What about her car?’
‘A green Volvo. A better chance of someone seeing a car like that than a Ford or a Vauxhall. But no sighting recorded yet. Of course, she says she left it in the public car park.’
‘And of course she conveniently went nowhere except to the cinema. No snack, no drinks?’
Rushton shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s a long film, which would occupy most of the evening. And she was a woman on her own.’ Both reasons why she should not dally in Tewkesbury, certainly. The fact that no one could so far confirm her alibi might not be significant: no one had seen her elsewhere either. Somehow, she did not seem the kind of woman who would habitually visit the cinema alone, as she claimed. Had she been with anyone else on that Wednesday evening?
‘What progress on George Robson’s story?’
‘More to report there.’ Rushton was glad to have something more positive as evidence of the team’s industry. ‘He was seen up on the common that night with his dog.’
Lambert should have been relieved to find one at least of his suspects being eliminated. In fact, he had been remembering the way he had seen Robson eyeing Denise Freeman at the funeral, and toying with a lurid hypothesis involving them as joint murderers. Reluctantly, he abandoned the notion.
‘What exactly did he say to us about his movements, Bert?’ he asked Hook. Rushton, anxious to give chapter and verse to his findings, was left to cool his heels while the Sergeant thumbed ponderously to the right page in his notes, then enunciated his summary as clearly as if he was in court. ‘He was up on the common with Fred, the labrador. He says he always is between eight and nine in the summer. He couldn’t remember actually speaking to anyone on that night, though he often does. He and Fred went right up on to the moor because the dog had been in all day. Fred was chasing rabbits, but he never catches any,’ he ended inconsequentially.
‘That tallies with our witnesses,’ said Rushton, his tone just edging his impatience with the delay. He was young for a detective-inspector, still without a grey hair, his face almost unlined; he played things carefully by the book, but knew when and how the book could help him. Before too long, thought Lambert, I shall be out to grass and replaced by someone like him. He tried to welcome the idea, failed, and was irked by his own pettiness.
Rushton thumbed through his own pages, arriving at the right one much more quickly than Hook, speaking with no more than an occasional confirmatory glance downwards. He was on top of this, his demeanour said.
‘DC Sampson has found three people who saw him up there. None of them actually spoke to him, because he was too far away, but they waved and Robson waved back. They all know Fred, because he’s a character among dogs, apparently. Among other things, a right randy bugger. Two of our sightings had bitches.’ How straightforwardly these things were arranged in the canine world; if the couplings and aspirations of the human participants in this case were only so manifest, all might swiftly be illuminated. ‘Fred went away with his master up on to the moor, diverting his energy into chasing the wildlife as Robson said.’
‘What was Robson wearing?’
‘Old trilby, green wellies, sports jacket. The gear he always wears for walking the dog: we’ve checked it out.’ Rushton was glad to have been asked, and thus allowed to demonstrate the diligence of the work he was orchestrating.
‘Wellies on a summer evening?’ said Hook.
‘Dog-walkers tend to stick to what is comfortable, summer and winter,’ said Rushton, who had a dog himself. ‘It seems to be what Robson always wears; we saw the clothes at his house.’ Lambert nodded, recalling Robson dressed exactly thus when he returned to his house with Fred to find them waiting to interview him.
‘What about Emily Godson?’ he said. To Rushton, who had expected some recognition of his efficient dismissal of Robson from their list of possible murderers, it seemed almost a snub. He took a deep breath before reporting what Lambert already knew. ‘She says she was at the house of her aunt, Alice Franklyn. DC Pearson says her aunt supports this, but that it wouldn’t stand up in court.’ Rushton looked at his notes in some puzzlement.
‘DC Pearson shows a mastery of understatement that could take him to high rank,’ said Lambert with a dry smile.
‘Bert and I found her quite charming, but as nutty as a Brazilian barmcake. Emily could have used her for that very reason if she was desperate. For what it’s worth, I think Emily is bright enough to arrange a more reliable alibi if she was our killer.’
‘Has she a wide circle of friends, sir?’ said Rushton. He felt as if he was trying to retrieve lost ground. His Superintendent left the reply to Bert Hook, with the benefits of his local knowledge.
‘She’s lived in the area all her life, and worked at Freeman Estates for over thirty years. She must know most of the locals. I doubt whether she has many really close friends among them, though.’
Rushton tried not to sound too eager. ‘It’s possible, then, that she hadn’t too many options in framing an alibi. We’re saying that the story that she was with her aunt isn’t worth a lot. From where she stands, it may simply look impossible to disprove.’
Lambert felt he was being corrected on an obvious point: suspects did not have to prove their innocence. He wondered if his vague desire to discomfort Rushton came from anything more than resentment of his relative youth. ‘All right. In our terms, Emily Godson goes down at present as having no satisfactory alibi.’ How gruff and grudging he sounded. He was glad Christine could not see him managing his team: schoolteachers were too ready with applications of amateur psychology. ‘What about young Mr Hapgood?’
‘Not quite so young as he appears at first sight, sir. Simon Hapgood is thirty. We’ve been digging a little.’ Rushton was back in his stride now. From widely divergent sources, they had built a better background to the recently promoted Senior Negotiator than any of the others. They had listened to gossip, examined his application form for his original post with Freeman Estates, enlisted the Sussex CID to enquire discreetly into his previous career.
‘Hapgood left his public school without taking A-levels, under something of a cloud. The head, now retired, says he was “not a good influence” on the other boys. He hinted at homosexuality, but there is no subsequent record of it. Either it was a stage in adolescence, or what he was expelled for was more a combination of factors.’
‘Drugs?’ said Lambert. He was aware that Rushton was making a meal of this, and absurdly delighted to see him deflated by the anticipation of his next revelation. This was an efficient colleague he was needling: he tried unsuccessfully to feel guilty.
‘Indeed yes, sir. Hapgood was bound over at Hastings eighteen months later. Possession of cannabis and LSD. No suggestion of trafficking. Arrested at a party.’ He offered each detail as if making a plea of mitigation in court. Rushton, for all his consciousness of rank, was not much older than Hapgood. Perhaps attitudes to the drug culture were conditioned by age as well as occupation. ‘He seems to have learned his lesson, in that respect, anyway. There is no subsequent connection with hard drugs.’ Lambert thought of Hapgood’s trembling hands as they caressed a ci
garette in the final stages of their meeting; perhaps it was just that his drug dependence now was legal.
Rushton went on with his carefully gleaned information before there could be any more inspired guesses from his chief. ‘After a series of jobs in small firms, possibly obtained by his father’s influence in the area, Hapgood had three years with a firm of stockbrokers in Brighton.’
‘Why did he leave?’ Failure was always more interesting to policemen than success.
‘He left under a cloud.’ Rushton ruefully acknowledged that he had been anticipated again. ‘There were some rather dubious share-dealings on his own account and a suggestion that he was unloading dubious shares from one client to another. He was warned, and apparently desisted. What finally sent him on his way was an attempt at what the broking fraternity call “insider dealing”: using confidential information for personal profit at the expense of the public. The Fraud Squad spend untold hours on it in the City at the moment, as you know. Hapgood was a boy in a man’s world, attempting to use a London contact to get in on the act.’
‘And no doubt he got caught while the big lads got away. Was there a prosecution?’ said Lambert, knowing the answer even as he spoke. The people who screamed for convictions were often the last to pursue prosecutions when it was inconvenient.
‘No, sir. He was sacked, but as usual the firm said there wasn’t enough evidence for a court case. Which means, of course, that they’re an old-established firm who wouldn’t want that kind of publicity and a loss of confidence among colonels retiring with their gratuities.’ Superintendent and Inspector were united at last in their moment of ritual resentment against an uncaring public. It enabled Rushton to continue with greater relaxation.
‘Hapgood moved to a rather dubious financial services firm in Hampshire, who have since gone out of business. He was plugging speculative investments at high rates of interest. He seems to have pushed things a bit too far even among those chancers, because he was sent on his way just before they packed up.’