by J M Gregson
He was nearly at the point where he would have to join the road. As he approached it, a black and white collie-type dog came joyfully to meet him. It escaped regularly from the council estate to join Willy in his free world of common and moor; they greeted each other as old friends.
The hawthorn here was in luxuriant summer growth. Any day now, the council lorry with its flail cutter would bring its swift, harsh discipline to the road side of the hedge, even in this scarcely used lane, but the common side would remain untouched. Willy walked quickly behind the dog, prodigal with his energy to prevent his heart from quailing. He took in almost everything, with darting glances which dwelt on no single object: not the wild flowers at the base of the hedge, nor the fast-moving banks of cloud that suddenly obscured the sun, nor even the horses in the field on the other side of the lane. Almost everything: he did not notice the car, rolling silently in neutral down the long slope behind him. The eyes followed him steadily wherever the gaps in the hawthorn allowed; the person whose fingers moved so delicately upon the steering-wheel had guessed now where Willy was going. And what he was about.
The lane was not wide where Willy joined it. The growth of the hedges meant that there was no room for pedestrians to the side of the tarmac surface. Willy chanted instructions to the happy, heedless dog which trotted beside him. ‘Always face approaching traffic,’ he said. ‘Keep your head up and your shoulders back and swing your arms.’ He was quoting his father forty years ago: it suddenly seemed much closer than that. A small red van did indeed come towards them, passing man and dog as they slowed, the driver waving a cheerful acknowledgement of their caution.
Willy gave the dog’s head a swift stroke, then strode boldly forward and quoted his father again. ‘Put some swank into it!’ he said. He swung his arms extravagantly high, up above his waist, until eventually he marched like a swift tin soldier and his hands swung as high as his shoulders, as he had seen his dead son’s hands swing as he watched him long ago through the railings of the school playground. He sang and he giggled. And the little dog laughed to see such fun.
He never even heard the car behind him. It came up with him where the road dropped narrow and steep between the high hedges. The dog’s acute ears caught the noise of its harsh acceleration and leapt sideways beneath the hedge, but Willy was singing too boisterously to catch the warning. He moved automatically sideways after the dog, lost his balance, made it easy for the ruthless driver.
He fell beneath the wheels as they leapt forward, his legs smashed like sticks beneath the offside ones, his head ground sickeningly on the edge of the road within a yard of the terrified dog. His last thought was of his dead son, his last sensation as he entered the darkness one of a vast relief.
The driver checked the front of the car before looking at the body. Wino Willy Harrison had been accommodating to the last. Falling beneath the wheels, he had not even damaged the front fender. Only the tyres had touched him. A brisk dash through the ford where this old lane neared the village would remove almost all trace of the episode. The driver did not need to approach too close to Willy’s shattered corpse to be sure that he could speak no more. The dog whined hopelessly for a moment beside the spatter of blood and brain upon the grass, then slunk through the hedge and was gone.
As the first heavy drops of rain began to fall, the car moved swiftly away.
Chapter 23
In the office of Freeman Estates, Superintendent and Sergeant sat looking at each other and feeling rather stupid.
Jane Davidson had been released to the limited comforts of the washroom, but Bert Hook was still bewildered by her melodramatic revelation. Even Lambert, who had trained himself over twenty years to be surprised by nothing, had to admit that it had not been what he expected.
‘Do you believe her?’ said Hook.
‘Yes, I think so. We’ll check it out, of course, but she’s no fool, our Miss Davidson, despite her school career. She knows we’ll check. And it fits the facts. It answers the questions about how she got the job and a car the others thought she didn’t warrant, and what it was that both she and her mother were concealing.’
‘Does it remove her from our list of suspects?’ Bert Hook, whose conjectures about what Miss Davidson had been hiding had run on other, more conventional, lines, was too shaken to think clearly yet. Or perhaps he had dropped into the flattering but unhelpful habit of letting his superintendent lead his thinking.
‘You know better than that, Bert. Over half of homicides are domestic. A high proportion of them are children killing fathers because of real or imagined grievances.’
‘But usually on impulse.’ Bert Hook was chauvinist enough to reject the vision of a young girl clenching her father’s drunken wrists in a grip of iron as he struggled to remove the plastic bag which was asphyxiating him.
‘Agreed. But the Jane Davidson she chose to present to us in the first part of our interview would be quite capable of planning and executing this kind of killing, once she was convinced of its justice. Where do the Davidsons live?’
‘On the council estate.’
‘We’ll have to question Jane’s mother, but all the signs are that the eminent Mr Freeman neither acknowledged his daughter nor made financial provision for her mother. That seems like par for the course for him.’ He was thinking of Margot Jones and the life left to her. And his golfing metaphor was not accidental: he longed to be out of this claustrophobic office and the increasingly sordid Freeman Estates, breathing the clear air of his golf course and walking quietly between high trees.
‘Stanley Freeman has left a wife who is scarcely grieving and four employees who are glad he’s gone. The more I find out about him, the less I regret his passing. But no one’s going to get away with murder if we can help it.’ It sounded in his ears like a slogan, the kind of thing naïve young inspectors offered to hungry pressmen. ‘Sorry, Bert, I need to lash myself into action from time to time.’
‘At least one of these five is lying,’ said Hook, feeling the need of a truism himself to focus the discussion.
‘Probably two or three. Maybe all five. The problem is to distinguish the lies which connect with the murder from those people tell to protect their own secrets.’ Lambert shuffled his papers on the late Stanley Freeman’s big desk and prepared rather wearily to be objective. ‘Emily Godson and Jane Davidson have been given us accounts of their movements on the night of the murder, which we may suspect but have not so far disproved. Emily says she was with nutty Aunt Alice, Jane with her mother. Negative evidence supports their stories, in that we have not unearthed anyone who saw either of them, or their cars, anywhere else on that Wednesday night. Let’s put them aside for the moment. What about the others?’
Hook turned the pages of his notebook ponderously, indulging a mannerism: he knew well enough the facts he wanted, without referring to its contents. ‘George Robson was seen by three different people with his dog on the common in the important hour between eight and nine. He’s the only one who seems to be in the clear, thanks to Fred and his walks. I like Fred,’ said Bert Hook inconsequentially.
Lambert saw the golden labrador with his body across the Sergeant’s feet and his soft head in Bert’s large, friendly hands. The tadpole of an idea wriggled in the recesses of his mind, swam briefly, and disappeared again into the darkness. ‘What car does Robson drive?’
‘A red Sierra Ghia,’ said Hook instantly, too practised to be thrown by the apparent non sequiturs of his chief.
‘Which leads us,’ said Lambert, jumping a couple of sentences like an old married man in conversation with his wife, ‘to Simon Hapgood. Still no definite corroboration of when he arrived in the pub that night?’
‘Nothing definite. More sightings: none certain before nine o’clock. He seems to have been boisterous to draw attention to himself, and anxious to give the impression he’d been there for hours to anyone who met him.’ Hook wondered if he was being fair: he disliked the blond and extrovert Mr Hapgood, though he did no
t care to analyse his distaste in case it owed something to jealousy. But then his chief had always encouraged him to air his prejudices freely in these confidential exchanges. So he was quite bold in pointing out, ‘He drives a blue Sierra.’
‘Sergeant Hook, you sound quite smug about it. Nothing more definite from the Harbens about the blue car they saw, is there?’
‘No. They’ve been shown a brochure picture of a blue Sierra, but they couldn’t be sure. They saw the car against the low evening sun, and they were busy taking evading action. “A medium-sized dark blue car” is as far as they can go. Hapgood is the only one of our suspects with a blue car.’
Lambert spent thirty seconds in deep, frowning thought. Then he said, ‘For what it’s worth, which at this moment is precisely nothing, I don’t believe Mr Hapgood’s story. Let’s have him in again. He should be back here shortly. Meantime, what do you think of the grieving widow, beyond the fact that black suits her and she knows it?’
Bert Hook started a little guiltily from his picture of’ Denise Freeman at the graveside. She had worn her mourning like an elegant uniform, and uniforms on women always turned him on; even stolid sergeants were allowed their not-so-innocent fantasies.
‘What did she stand to gain?’ he said, daring to answer a superintendent with a question of his own.
Lambert shrugged. ‘Freedom, Bert. She’d had enough of the contemptible Stanley. She doesn’t get the business, but she gets a salary from it, and everything else. Plus her freedom to live how she wants. And with whom she wants, perhaps.’
Silence. They indulged their own thoughts about the chic Mrs Freeman. Eventually, Lambert speculated on whether these pauses were longer in the case of attractive females than corpulent men. Then he told himself he must beware of this philosophic vein.
‘She drives a green Volvo,’ said Bert Hook.
‘Which might be mistaken for blue against the evening sun. I saw it. And no one seems to have seen it in the car park at Tewkesbury. Nor did anyone notice the scarcely anonymous Denise in or around the cinema.’
‘I think she’s lying,’ said Hook. It sounded like sycophancy, a mere attempt to follow his superior’s thinking and anticipate its conclusion. In fact, he had just made up his own mind, and was surprised to hear himself voicing his thoughts almost as they formed.
Lambert looked at him with a quick little smile: sometimes there was still something very boyish in his sergeant. ‘So do I. What puzzles me is that I think if she’d planned to murder her husband, she’d have organized something much better than a visit to the cinema as an alibi. Compared with the thought that went into the murder itself, it all seems rather improvised.’
Suddenly, the middle of the three phones in front of him bleeped, loud as a trapped bird in the quiet room. Lambert picked it up automatically: he had left the number with the murder room. Rushton’s voice was urgent. Lambert made him wait while Hook went to the door and opened it a fraction to check that Emily Godson was not listening at the reception desk, where she still sat. She was not: so there was a direct outside line from Freeman’s office. A fact which held its own interest.
‘Go ahead,’ said Lambert to his Inspector.
‘Denise Freeman, sir. We’ve come up with a sighting of her in Tewkesbury.’
‘Where?’
‘In the cinema. At the interval. She was sitting where she said, in the circle.’
‘Reliable?’
‘Oh, I think so, sir. It’s a distant friend of Mrs Freeman’s. She was sitting on the other side of the cinema, so she didn’t speak to her, but she saw her when the lights were up, both before the main film and immediately after it.’
Lambert flirted with the idea of a distant friend being brought in by Denise Freeman to support her story, but found it unlikely.
Rushton had saved his real news for last, treasuring his titbit as long as possible. He said, trying ineffectively to conceal his satisfaction, ‘There’s just one thing wrong with it, sir. This wasn’t on the Wednesday night when the murder was committed. It was on the previous Monday.’
Chapter 24
Simon Hapgood was in earnest, low-toned conversation with Jane Davidson at the reception desk. Bert Hook’s size elevens approached noiselessly to within eight feet before the Sergeant’s voice, investing the innocent words with quiet menace, said, ‘The Superintendent would like a few words with you now, Mr Hapgood.’
Backs, Hook decided, could be more revealing than he had ever allowed. He watched Hapgood’s shoulders rise in tension beneath the immaculately cut gold hair. When the man turned with broad, toothpaste smile, the Sergeant knew how much effort had gone into forming the lips into this caricature of relaxation. And when Hapgood twirled his car keys on his fingers and said, ‘By all means, Officer,’ Hook thought that from close range he could detect fear in the cold blue eyes.
It was still there a moment later, when Hapgood looked at the Superintendent across the mahogany desk of his dead employer. Lambert was buoyant. The case had begun to move; his mind grew sharper with the thought. With confidence came an irritation with the pretensions and the deceptions of Simon Hapgood. It was time this dubious young man learned not to take on the big battalions.
He said without preamble, ‘I won’t waste time. Further information has come to light.’ About Jane Davidson and Denise Freeman, not you, but you don’t know that. So start squirming. ‘I advise you to think carefully. Have you anything to add to your statement about your movements on the night of Stanley Freeman’s murder?’
Hapgood licked dry lips and tried to think. Thoughts came, but they were the thoughts of a mind in panic; incoherent, disorganized, leading to no useful conclusion. He forced a smile, swallowed, said, ‘I don’t think so. I came home, had a light meal – ’
‘We are familiar with your account, there is no need to repeat it,’ said Lambert, eyes relentlessly on the callow face. The renewed catalogue of Hapgood’s movements might bring a calm he was not going to allow. ‘I ask you again, do you wish to make any variation in that story?’
‘No.’ The blue eyes looked not at his tormentor but past him, over his shoulder, to the framed certificates on the wall beyond the drinks cabinet. Lambert was suddenly reminded of a Luftwaffe pilot, with blond hair and empty blue eyes above blue uniform. As a very small boy, he had seen such a man led from his crashed plane, dazed and fearful; he did not know whether this image was a memory of that moment or of the myriad layers of film and television which now overlaid it. Nor could he have said how far it affected his attitude to Hapgood at this point. His next move determined the course of the interview.
‘Mr Hapgood, you were not in the Stonemasons’ Arms at eight o’clock, as you claim. You were seen there all right, by numerous witnesses: all after nine p.m.’
‘I was there earlier than that. On my own. The pub doesn’t fill up until quite late on Wednesdays.’
Lambert let him go on until his words petered out. Each phrase came with less conviction, until the voice died almost to a whine. Hapgood rearranged the red tie on the brilliant white shirt, tried to find the end of it of absorbing interest, found his eyes drawn back inexorably to the Superintendent’s sphinxlike face. Lambert, more certain now than if he had concrete evidence in his hands, closed his trap. He could see himself from without, like an actor speaking someone else’s lines, utterly confident of the outcome because Hapgood’s responses too were now fixed.
‘You arrived at the Stonemasons’ Arms and parked your blue Sierra at just about nine p.m. You entered through the outside toilets, arriving in the pub as if you were in fact returning from there.’ It was an old trick of petty crooks in city pubs, in his days as a detective-constable twenty years and more ago.
Hapgood was only a petty crook in executive’s clothing. He swallowed twice before he could speak, the blood draining from his fresh, unlined face until it looked like parchment. In a strange, old man’s voice, he said, ‘I – I didn’t kill Freeman.’
There was a long pause
, the detectives, in no hurry now, waited for him to elaborate. Perhaps, if he could have trusted his voice, he would have done so. Perhaps the habits of deceit he had lived by prevented a willing disclosure of the truth, even when, like them, he realized it was now inevitable.
Hook glanced at his chief, received an assent that would have been invisible to those outside their circle, and said harshly, ‘You’re going to have to convince us of that. Having lied to the police for over a week, you’ll have to work hard.’
The pale blue eyes looked from one unyielding face to the other in front of him. Then, as the handsome head nodded a hopeless acknowledgement, the gaze fell to the carpet between the Italian leather shoes. Hapgood’s mouth had become a thin white slit; still he did not speak.
Lambert switched instinctively from stick to carrot in an effort to keep his man’s tongue moving while his mind reeled. ‘You may smoke if you like. While you do, I should consider your position.’ In the ambience they had created, this perfectly sound advice became a threat.
Hapgood produced packet and lighter, selected a cigarette, lit it at the second attempt. He watched his hands with a fascination that was almost comic, as if they belonged to someone else. Belatedly, he remembered his audience, offered the packet, and received two solemn refusals. His movements were almost in slow motion, as he strove for the relaxation which would not come. Eventually he succeeded in lighting his cigarette, then watched the flame of the lighter for a moment. In the heavy silence, they caught the note of Jane Davidson’s voice from the switchboard, the tone cheerful, emollient, efficient as she dealt with a caller. It seemed to come from another and more innocent world.
‘You aren’t the only one to lie about your movements,’ said Lambert eventually, probing for a reaction, suggesting as he had done throughout that he knew more than he did.