by J M Gregson
‘You’re obviously not a morning person,’ said George. ‘I don’t think I am, any more.’ They walked without further exchange around the edge of the bowling green, watching the dew sparkling as the low sun began to burn it off. Nash, versed in the ways of the city, checked automatically that his car had not been stolen overnight. The movement gave Goodman an idea. Their clubs were in the cars. ‘What about a few holes before breakfast?’ he said.
Nash was lighting a cigarette and he half-expected him to refuse. Instead, the younger man accepted the suggestion eagerly. He looked exhausted, as though he had slept even less than Goodman, but he was full of a feverish energy which sought outlet in movement. In three minutes, they had their bags and trolleys out of the cars and were standing by the first tee.
The course stretched appealingly before them, waiting to be conquered. Not a soul was in sight; there was just enough light breeze to flutter the distant flags and remind them that it was still not long after six. Their opening drives were well struck and bounced appealingly over the generous width of the first fairway. The world seemed a pleasing place, and they quite privileged within it.
It could not last, of course. It did not take long for fallibility to creep into their play, and they played their usual quota of shots from rough and sand as they went along. But on a morning like this, playing without hindrance at their own brisk pace, it mattered less than usual. The only loud noise in their first hour was the call of a skein of wild geese over their heads at the highest part of the course. The two men watched the geese until they were almost invisible, studied for a moment the distant tower of the cathedral at Hereford as it emerged from the morning haze, and congratulated themselves upon their presence here at such an hour.
As they played the eighth, two other residents crept sleepily on to the adjacent first tee, looking in awe at these two free-striding Titans who had been so far in front of what they had thought an early rising. Then there came the sound of the green keeper’s tractor moving from its shed within a copse of cedars; it must have been half a mile away, but it sounded unnaturally near in the prevailing silence. Soon they reached the part of the course that ran above the river, and a group of eight glistening black Labrador puppies provided them with much free entertainment as they ran in and out of the water on the far bank, shaking themselves enthusiastically around their philosophical owner.
Tony Nash was the only smoker in the party of six. He must have worked his way through the bulk of a packet over their first nine holes; George Goodman had not realised that he was so heavy an addict. He twitted Tony about it as they went, with the cheerful self-righteousness of the reformed sinner; he had not touched tobacco now for seven years.
Despite his smoker’s pallor and his unusually unkempt appearance, Nash was striking the ball quite well. They agreed that they would play to the twelfth, conveniently near the clubhouse, and adjourn for breakfast. Tony Nash looked forward to the bacon and eggs and the feeling of complacent virtue he would enjoy when eating among those who had not yet set foot outside on such a morning.
The shout came as they were completing the eleventh. Away to their left, beneath the shadow of a huge beech, a young green keeper waved at them a frantic, unsteady arm. He stood on the edge of a small hollow in the ground, which had been an ancient dewpond before the area was drained to make the course. He had moved there to empty his cuttings after mowing the adjacent green: the mower box still dangled awkwardly from his left hand while he gesticulated with his right.
They covered the hundred and fifty yards to the spot at no great speed, for the ground was uneven and they were beginning to feel the need of food to revive their flagging energies.
And indeed, haste could have had no effect upon the thing that awaited them. They took in the young man’s white face, the limbs uncoordinated with shock, the voice that would not form words as he tried to explain his distress.
Behind him, invisible until they entered the hollow, the body lay awkwardly across a small mound, like a boxer splayed unconscious across the bottom rope of a ring. It lay face upward, and that face was unnaturally dark, almost black in places: But it was the eyes which caught and held the attention. Wide and dark, with the pupils fully dilated, they stared unseeingly at the bright sun. Neither Goodman nor Nash felt any urge to move forward and close them.
Guy Harrington was very dead indeed.
Chapter 4
‘Bloody golfers! What else can you expect from them but trouble?’ Sergeant Hook spoke with gloomy satisfaction, as if a single outburst of foul play among the patrons of the Wye Castle justified all his formidable prejudice against this absurd game.
John Lambert drove the big Vauxhall carefully up the long drive and looked enviously at the placid green acres of undulating fairways beside him. Unlike the cricket enthusiast beside him, he played golf, and this was a morning to coax out even the rustiest swing. The sun was high now; they felt its warmth on their backs, even through the jackets of their suits, as they walked between the high walls of the hotel and the new residential lodges.
They had no difficulty in identifying the place. Already the screens had been erected around the hollow where the body had been discovered. The Scene of Crime team were being briefed by Detective-Sergeant Johnson; in the face of a Superintendent arriving to take formal control of the case, they parted like the Red Sea to allow him entry to the enclosure of death.
Lambert had been in court; he was later arriving here than he would have liked. He had an illogical, egocentric suspicion that he could spot something others might miss if he could be at the scene before hundreds of other feet trampled the area. The young PC with the clipboard looked anxiously towards the Scene of Crime Officer at the approach of top brass. Morris nodded and he recorded Lambert and Hook beneath the other names on his list, his careful hand shaking only a little as he wrote. If suggestive footprints or fingerprints were found around the body, theirs as well as others’ would need to be eliminated.
Resignedly, Lambert donned a disposable white paper overall and overshoes. Much as he might mumble about resembling an astronaut instead of the detective he had been when he joined the CID twenty years ago, he knew the strange accoutrements would prevent him from contaminating the area with his own fibres and dust.
He watched the police photographer take the last of his pictures of the body in situ. Then he moved down the narrow path between the white plastic tapes to inspect what had recently been Guy Harrington. He looked down at the corpse dispassionately, too well versed in the appearances of death to flinch from those wide, unseeing eyes that would never blink again. There was an old superstition that the eyes of the dead retained the image of the last thing they had seen in life. If only that were so! He stood for a moment without speaking, watching the careful movements of the silver-haired man who crouched beside the corpse.
‘Here before you, for once, John.’ It was the first moment when Lambert knew that the pathologist was aware of his presence. ‘Very interesting.’
Lambert sighed: he knew exactly what those words presaged. ‘Natural causes?’ he inquired, without any feeling of hope. He had already seen the great patch of blood from temple to neck on the left side of the head, almost black now that it had been dried to a thick crust by sun and breeze. Tiny specks of gravel were trapped amid the congealed gore, peeping out of the sticky surface like nuts on the top of a fruit cake. Wisps of dried grass, trapped in the wound as it dried, moved gently in response to the light wind; an insect crawled unchecked over the matted hair. So soon did a living man, who had yesterday responded to the world around him, become an object with less volition than a fly.
‘Oh, I doubt this one is natural causes!’ said Burgess with relish. He rebuttoned the single shirt button he had gingerly undone on the thing beneath him. He intoned in the manner of what he took to be an official police announcement, ‘Foul play is certainly suspected.’ He rose from his preliminary examination of the remains and turned the blandest of smiles on Lambert.
He was an erect figure still, despite being now around sixty. He looked round the twenty or so people within earshot to check that there were no relatives or media representatives, then said in his most bloodthirsty manner, ‘I shall be more certain when I have cut him up on my friendly slab.’
Lambert thought he could scarcely imagine a place less friendly than the mortician’s workshop where Burgess was in his element. It had the abattoir accompaniments of the operating theatre—the gleaming instruments of incision, the sterile metres of stainless steel, the channels to sluice away streams of blood without the hope of prolonging life which was the hospital’s ultimate redemption. Burgess had dabbled with surgery in his youth; Lambert recalled his contention that only pathology had afforded him the un-hurried conditions, the chance to pursue and confirm his findings, which his tidy scientist’s mind demanded. The dead felt no pain, and they were never in a hurry.
Lambert looked around at the men beginning to comb the area systematically, the photographer putting away his equipment, the plain van easing its way slowly over the turf from where the road ended by the clubhouse. He was the centre, the controller, of all this activity. That was a situation that would have been reserved for his fantasies when he set out on the paths of detection. There was enough of the old Adam in him for him to savour the thought.
He could never voice it, not even at home; especially not at home. Christine, to whom ambition and status were the most ridiculous of human pretensions, would mock him mercilessly for it. He looked down again at the thing which had provoked all this activity. ‘Beaten to death with your old favourite the blunt instrument?’ he said.
Burgess was not at all put out by the Superintendent’s view that he read far too much crime fiction. He pursed his lips, deliberately prolonging the moment he had looked forward to. ‘It’s possible. Unlikely though, I’d say. Be able to tell better when you let me get his clothes off and take a proper look at him. Would you like me to thicken the plot a little for you, even at this early stage?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. But I presume you have a complication to report.’
‘You could call it that, I, suppose. You’re more prosaic than I am: I prefer to see it as a thickening of the plot. You noticed the blackening of the face and the palms, no doubt?’
Lambert nodded. He had assumed bruising until now, though perhaps he should have known better. Because suddenly he knew what Burgess was going to say.
‘I won’t hazard a guess about the cause of death yet. That wound on the side of the head looks nasty. But it wouldn’t kill a man, of itself. I think there are fractures, but I didn’t want to remove any clothing until you and your team had finished here. The really interesting thing is that blueing of the skin on the face and forehead; I’ve just stolen a look at the chest and the same effect is quite clear there. For some considerable time after he died, this chap was lying face downwards.’
Bert Hook, who was less squeamish about these things than his chief, looked at the corpse and the ground around it with renewed interest. ‘So someone came back and turned him over, several hours after his death?’ He looked for the outline of a corpse in the rough grass of the hollow, began calculations about the heaviness of the overnight dew.
‘Or dumped him here after he had been killed somewhere else,’ said Lambert. The three of them turned automatically to look over the heads of the bent figures who were systematically combing the area around them. The old house was in bright sunlight now, with high white clouds moving slowly above it, but from two hundred feet below, its ivy-clad gothic elevations still suggested hidden horrors and sinister passions.
Burgess looked back at the man at the centre of this mystery. The corpse had that look of superiority which seemed often to descend upon victims of violence, as if they were full of knowledge they could never now reveal. ‘I’d guess at something not far off fifteen stone,’ he said. ‘It would take a strong man to carry him here.’
‘Or two determined women. Or some form of transport,’ said Lambert. He looked at the smooth green turf between them and the residential complex. ‘The ground is always hard when you’re looking for signs of wheel tracks.’ But if anyone had come that way with a dead weight as heavy as the one beside them, he would surely have left some trace.
He took a last look at the body of Guy Harrington, splayed so awkwardly across the hump of turf; his stomach pointing at the sky in a pose he could not have held for long in life. If he had been dumped rather than fallen here, this odd disposition of the limbs was explained. It was the last time he would see him thus, and he left the site with a familiar regret, as if unlimited time to himself here would tell him things about this death which would otherwise take much hard digging among the living. It was no more than a superstition, to which a rational man could not even admit. He went over to the driver of the waiting van. ‘You can remove him as soon as the Scene of Crime Officer is satisfied,’ he said.
The three men walked silently back towards the lodges, each busy with his own thoughts. Detective-Inspector Rushton, Lambert’s deputy, was waiting for them there. ‘Murder Room here, sir? There’s plenty of accommodation—the place is much less than half full at present.’
Lambert nodded. ‘It looks as though he didn’t die where he was found. Make sure the whole area around the house is searched thoroughly before the public are allowed back.’
Rushton said with satisfaction, ‘Already in hand, sir. If he died here, we should know where by the end of the day. By the looks of him, there should be blood somewhere.’
Lambert found himself wishing Rushton were not so consistently ahead of him. It was petty: the DI was efficient and enthusiastic, and he had already been here for three hours. He said more sharply than he intended, ‘And look for something on which the corpse might have been transported. If we’re right that the body has been moved, I doubt whether he was taken out there on someone’s shoulders.’
Rushton said, ‘I’ve already cordoned off the cars. The Scene of Crime team will have someone on to them within the hour.’
‘A car is the obvious thing, but a lot depends on where he died. I doubt whether you’d get a car round the river side of the buildings without leaving obvious evidence. Anything with wheels needs investigating.’ With difficulty, he refrained from adding, ‘But of course you’re aware of all that.’ Serious crime teams knew their business; it was a sign of old age to need to dot too many i’s. Instead, he said, ‘I understand he was here with a golfing party. They’ll need to be kept around.’
‘I’ve already seen them. They’re booked in for another two nights. They were ready to pack up and go home, but I told them we’d need them around for some time. I think they’re going to stay on as booked.’ Rushton as always was full of his own efficiency. Lambert, prepared to use it as usual, felt guilty that he should so resent the man’s manner. Perhaps it was his fault: if there were more warmth between them, Rushton would not feel so continually obliged to demonstrate his own competence, like a newly appointed school prefect.
He said, ‘If the place is so empty, perhaps we could clear one of the new residential sections completely for our use. I’ll see the Manager.’ It would not be too difficult: once the owners accepted the inevitability of a police presence, they would be ready enough to isolate it as far as possible from their own customers.
He looked across a gravelled courtyard to the picture window of what seemed to be a lounge. Anxious faces, male and female, stared back at him from behind the glass. Presumably the golfing party from which the dead man had so abruptly departed. In spite of himself, his pulses quickened a little at the prospect of beginning his investigation among them.
‘I’ll go and see the Manager myself and arrange our set-up,’ he said. It was as though he was deferring a pleasure until humdrum routine matters had been attended to. Already he had abandoned thoughts of a willing confession.
People willing to proclaim their guilt came forward in those first emotional hours after the murder: the man out the
re had already been dead too long for that.
Chapter 5
In the hall of the old building, he took possession of the hotel register which was kept at the desk. It would be necessary to interview everyone who had been in the vicinity at the time of the murder: staff, guests, casual visitors who called for a drink and found themselves caught up in the potential drama and more usual tedium of a murder investigation.
Every movement would need to be checked, every story examined, every witness to innocent movements sought out. Elimination was the most usual form of progress in the early stages, slow but certain, focusing attention hopefully upon the two or three people with both opportunity and reason to kill. Except that it was rarely as tidy as that.
The Manager was young, harassed, thrown out of his stride by violent death, as more resilient men than he had been before him. Lambert found him on the phone to head office, absurdly anxious to reassure them that this affair was none of his making, that it could not have been foreseen. He assented dumbly to Lambert’s arrangements for a Murder Room and the questioning of suspects, brightening a little at the thought that this business had a solution and his troubles might after all be finite. There were only four people staying in the newest red brick complex of rooms, which overlooked the eighteenth green. They agreed that the four should be moved to lodges at the other end of the development, so that the police could have the space and privacy they would need as the investigation developed and the evidence accumulated.
Lambert said, ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Clifford. I appreciate that these arrangements will mean a considerable amount of work, but I can assure you they are very necessary. The Scene of Crime team will disturb your guests much less this way.’