by J M Gregson
Clifford licked his lips and pulled at his tie. ‘You think a crime was committed last night, then?’ He was like a man who could not resist picking at a sore.
‘Almost certainly a most serious crime.’ Lambert watched the young man sweating and wondered if it was merely his youth which he found irritating. ‘Do you have a night porter on duty overnight?’
‘Not at present. One has been appointed and will be here from the beginning of June. Of course we haven’t been open very long and there are very few guests here at present. Ten days hence, we shall have the first of our large parties and—’
‘So there was no one in charge of security in the small hours?’
‘Not really. I live on the premises myself, of course, and I try to keep an eye on what is going on.’ He looked at the wall behind Lambert, measuring everything in terms of the impact it might have at head office.
‘And have you any idea what went on last night?’
‘Not really. Mr Harrington’s party stayed in the complex after they had eaten dinner in our restaurant. I could hear them—not that they were particularly noisy. And as I said, there are very few other guests to disturb at the moment. But with them being outside, the sound carries, and I could hear them in my flat, so that—’
‘They were outside?’ Lambert’s sharpness made Clifford start. Like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons, the Superintendent thought, wishing immediately that such phrases would cease to spring unbidden to his mind.
‘Yes.’ The Manager looked like a man who regretted conceding so much.
When a CID man sees discomfort in a subject, his inclination is to investigate the cause. ‘Where?’
Clifford clenched and unclenched his fists, quite unconsciously, it seemed. ‘I think they were on the flat roof a couple of storeys above where they had dined.’ He gave up the information reluctantly, like a man being made to talk about the weak area in a job application.
‘You’d better show me.’
Clifford looked thoroughly miserable, but he nodded and stood up without a word. He led the way through a maze of corridors and staircases, where new extensions jostled against the more spacious proportions of the old house. They emerged suddenly into the bright sun and stood blinking at a view over the tops of tall trees to the river below them.
Lambert realised immediately why Clifford had been embarrassed that visitors should be up here. There was a row of four-feet-high steel posts set into the stone parapet around the edge of the flat roof. Between them, a single series of wooden planks ran horizontally, no more than fifteen inches from the floor level. Lambert walked over to examine two of the steel posts, confirming what was already obvious to both of them as he fingered the bolts at the top. ‘Where are the other two levels of railing?’
Clifford tried to shrug the matter away, but managed only a rather ludicrous twitch. His too-vivid imagination projected him already into an investigation with the company safety officer. ‘They’re on order. The work should have been done by now. You know what builders are when the spring comes: they promise the earth to get the job, then when they have it you never see them. It was supposed to be part of our winter renovation programme: the old rails were removed because they were rotten.’ He talked too quickly, as if hoping a multitude of detail would make a feeble explanation more convincing.
‘So why were the public allowed access?’ said Lambert wearily. He wanted to get on with the investigation, not persecute this unfortunate fall guy, but these were necessary preliminaries.
‘They weren’t.’ Clifford went and looked outside the door they had just come through. He looked around for a moment and pounced upon a yellowing piece of card which lay face down on the carpet at the top of the stairs. He showed it without great hope to Lambert. Someone had scrawled in longhand with a green felt-tip, ‘Roof not open to visitors.’ The card looked as though it had been lying on the carpet for some time.
Lambert forbore to tell the Manager that the door to the roof should have been locked. They both knew that; no doubt if the Wye Castle had been fully staffed it would have been. Just as they knew that Clifford could have come up here and asked the party to leave the roof. If he hadn’t been tired, and they hadn’t seemed sensible, mature people. Lambert said, ‘How long were they up here?’
‘I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps a couple of hours. My flat is some distance away, at the back of the main building. I didn’t hear them after midnight, but I must have been asleep myself from about then.’
Lambert peered briefly over the edge of the roof, taking care not to touch that single, inadequate rail which marked its perimeter. Impossible to see anything from this height. He turned abruptly away and said, ‘This door had better be locked immediately, and the key given to the Scene of Crime team in our operations room.’
He followed Clifford back through the passages, treading carefully through the gloom over ground which was familiar territory to the younger man ahead of him. When they had reached ground level, Clifford said jerkily, ‘Will I be in trouble over that roof? The buck stops with me as manager, as usual.’
‘Impossible for me to say, I’m afraid. It’s not my department, but the coroner might have something to say.’
Clifford nodded abjectly, already seeing unwelcome headlines. He was unlucky, of course. People like him took risks all the time with public safety, and for the most part got away with them. Lambert, suddenly sorry for him, said, ‘Of course, if we are by then in the throes of a murder investigation, he might be excited enough to forget all about such things.’ He was not sure whether he was trying to offer comfort or test the reactions of the manager to the idea of homicide within his dominion.
Clifford stopped so quickly that the Superintendent almost ran into him. ‘You think this was murder?’ The sickly glamour of the notion touched his face with a new animation. It was the first official acknowledgement of the idea that had both excited and dismayed him.
‘It has to be a possibility. We should know by the end of the day.’
Back in the high hall outside, garish cherubs beamed down incongruously from the painted ceiling. The girl at the reception desk, who seemed to be enjoying the novelty of the situation much more than her boss, was waiting for Lambert to emerge from the Manager’s office. ‘There’s a lady who insists on seeing you, Superintendent,’ she said. It was part of her training to get titles right from the start.
Perhaps she saw the beginnings of his negative reaction: it was a conditioned reflex in him to suspect journalistic invasion wherever there was a whiff of sensation. She opened the door to a small anteroom before he could deny her and said, ‘I put the lady in here.’
The woman who rose as he entered was tall and composed. Lambert, trained by long usage to make such assessments automatically, thought her about fifty. Her navy blue jacket and dress were severe, but becoming on her spare, erect figure. Her curls of grey hair were impeccably groomed. Only the hollows beneath the grey eyes gave any evidence of strain.
She said with the hint of a smile, ‘I thought you might wish to see the widow immediately. I’m Marie Harrington.’
Chapter 6
She put the emphasis on the second syllable, pronouncing the name as ‘Maree’s
Perhaps that suggested the elegance which was Lambert’s first impression of her. With his face composed to an appropriate solicitude, he wondered how near at hand was the WPC who should be dealing with this: the officer at the gate would never have directed the woman to him. He already felt at a disadvantage through coming later than he would have wished to an investigation already under way; he needed a distraught widow now like a hole in the head. Not a very tactful simile, he warned himself.
He stuttered, ‘I’m sorry about all this… There was no need for you to rush here immediately, you know… Nothing you can do… They should have told you that.’ Hearing his retreat behind the ubiquitous ‘they’, he felt both foolish and inadequate. He had dealt with this situation many times in the past; now he was th
rown of balance by its unexpectedness, and annoyed with himself as a result.
Marie Harrington let him flounder through his explanations without interruption. The neat grey curls framed an intelligent face above a high, unlined neck. She said, ‘The police came round at nine-thirty this morning. They said there was no need for me to do anything immediately, but I felt I must come. It’s not much over a hundred miles, you know.’ She was composed, perfectly organised in her thoughts and their expression. Absurdly, he felt that it was she who was helping him over the difficulties of the meeting, when the reverse should so obviously have been true.
‘No. But there’s nothing you can do here.’ He looked round, as if expecting some kind of help or inspiration from the polished panelling. ‘You should have been met by a woman constable—given a cup of tea and whatever information we can give you at this stage…’
‘I came straight in here and went to the desk. None of your people was at fault: the men at the gate didn’t direct me here.’ She was smiling at him now.
He said stiffly, ‘But you shouldn’t be here, I’m afraid. Not at the moment.’
‘I thought I had to identify the body. They told me that at home.’
‘In due course. Not now.’ He thought of the scene on the golf course, of the corpse being examined minutely for clues, treated as the thing it had become; of that thing being slid into a plastic bag and loaded without ceremony into the plain van. There was no place for a widow in that scene.
‘I should prefer to identify Guy now, Superintendent. I promise you I shall not embarrass you.’
It was a moment to be firm but compassionate. He tried to muster the right expression. ‘I’m afraid that is out of the question, Mrs Harrington. You must understand that after a death of this kind there are certain procedures—’
‘A death of which kind, Superintendent?’ He could have sworn she was gently mocking him, had that not been impossible in these circumstances.
‘Mrs Harrington, I have to tell you that it does not seem at the moment that your husband died from natural causes—’
‘Was he murdered?’ She introduced the word he had been carefully avoiding with a hint of impatience.
‘That I cannot say. We are at the early stages of our investigation. But we cannot rule out foul play at the moment.’ He was glad that Burgess was not here to witness his discomfiture, which was driving him into the very clichés the pathologist would have loved to hear.
Marie Harrington looked at him coolly for a moment. Her face was drawn, but the lines as her eyes creased a little were of humour rather than strain. ‘So you think he was murdered.’
‘I didn’t say that. The Coroner has been informed of the facts. There will be a post-mortem examination. After that we may be able to tell you a little more about the circumstances of your husband’s death.’ He wished he knew exactly how much of those circumstances had been revealed by that faceless policeman in Surrey who had been charged with delivering the news of the death to the widow. He could not see a young constable being able to withhold much from this woman. He added rather desperately, ‘That will he the time for you to identify your husband’s body.’
‘When he’s been neatly sewn up and presented for viewing to the grieving relatives.’ She smiled openly at him now, and he responded with a weak grin of his own; it seemed safer than speaking when he could think of nothing useful to mitigate the starkness of the picture she was painting.
She clasped her hands on her lap. She wore no nail varnish, and but one ring; it had a single large emerald, and was not on her wedding finger. She said, ‘Mr Lambert, it might help things along a little if I tell you frankly that I shall not be grieving overmuch.’
It was delivered as dispassionately as if she had been announcing the time of a train. He had attended deaths before where he had suspected that spouses were not stricken with sorrow, but never one where a wife had so scorned to dissimulate.
‘That is not my concern. Unless of course it is connected with the death.’
‘Which it is not.’
‘No. We shall need to have an account of your movements in the last few days in due course.’ The human mind works so quickly that notions of a contract killing organised by this composed intruder flashed for a moment before him.
If he had intended his words to be any sort of threat to her, he would have been disappointed by her reaction. She said with scarcely a pause, ‘That you are welcome to have whenever you want it. In the meantime, I may as well get on with the identification of his body.’
‘As I have said, I regret that that is not possible at the present moment.’
‘Why? That is what I have driven here to do.’
‘I’m sorry about that. But there are certain procedures which cannot be overridden—’
‘Mr Lambert, is there anything in law which demands that I identify my husband in a mortuary?’
He felt that she knew the answer to that as well as he did. ‘No, but—’
‘Is it not indeed in everyone’s interest that this first formality is completed as quickly as possible?’
‘I suppose so, but—’
‘Then let us go out there and get it over with.’
He made a last attempt to protect her from what they would find. ‘Please believe me, Mrs Harrington, when I say that I am not merely being awkward, or retreating behind police bureaucracy. Close relatives are invariably in shock after a sudden death, often more than they realise. It is for their sake, not ours, that we establish procedures to protect them.’
‘In that case, let me go and identify my husband. I can assure you that it is for my own sake that I want to get this thing over. This is the end of one section of my life. I would prefer to see it terminated as soon as possible.’ She was as calm as if she were arranging a shopping expedition or a business appointment.
He looked at her for a moment, then stood up. He said, ‘As you say, there is no regulation which prevents you from identifying the body now. As long as you understand that I advised you against it.’ He moved towards the door, feeling even as he did so how churlish his surrender sounded. Behind him, she said, ‘I’ll even sign a statement to that effect if you feel you need to be indemnified,’ and he knew without looking that she was smiling at his awkwardness.
Lambert found an embarrassed WPC in the hall and sent her ahead to warn the people around the body of the widow’s approach. Then he strolled slowly towards the spot himself, covertly studying the woman at his side as they went. Her heels were too high for walking over grass, but she moved carefully, without any serious loss of elegance. Under the bright sun, the small enclosure seemed in the distance innocent enough, but apprehensive faces peered at them over the screens as they approached.
The body had been sheathed in plastic and eased on to a stretcher; the van was standing with back doors open ready to receive it. Lambert said with a final nervousness, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
The woman beside him did not even reply. She stood still to survey the scene for a moment, taking in the circle of anxious men, gathered around the static central figure as if awaiting some religious rite. Then she went slowly forward, and the uniformed man at the head of the corpse drew back the plastic.
In the sudden, absolute silence, everyone heard the dry catch in Marie Harrington’s throat and the uneven breathing which followed it; Lambert was curiously restored by this reassertion of the conventional. She recoiled involuntarily at what had been revealed, and he looked back to check on the presence of the WPC who had followed them discreetly from the old house.
But then the widow moved calmly forward, stood in straight-backed silence and studied the face below her. Lambert was glad to see that the head was laid so that the dark wound which blackened one side of it was downwards and almost concealed. Small residual patches of powder from the fingerprint officer dotted the blue wool on the corpse’s shoulders.
She looked for a long moment, bidding farewell to the man who had been her h
usband: Lambert wondered in what terms that silent adieu was couched. Then she turned away from the corpse and looked the Superintendent full in the face. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That is my husband, Guy Harrington.’
Her face beneath the neatly coiffured grey hair had gone very white. Her hands at her sides trembled a little. She took a deep breath and set off towards the clubhouse. She was as erect as she had been throughout, but her shoulders now were stiffly held. Each of the circle around the body knew that she would not look back. In her unsuitable shoes, she shortened her steps, but moved quite steadily, as though she was unwilling to concede to the onlookers any sign that she was disturbed.
On the other side of the river, scarcely sixty yards away from them, a Jersey cow lifted its head and regarded them with huge brown eyes. It bellowed a long mournful moo, which echoed down the valley and emphasised the stillness of the place. As Lambert and the widow moved away, it stopped its chewing and stood motionless, staring with those timeless eyes, as if it comprehended this death, and its insignificance amid the cosmic scheme.
When they were about a hundred yards removed from the enclosure and the little tableau they had left was cautiously resuming movement, she said, ‘Why the Sellotape on his clothing?’
‘To pick up any hairs or clothing fibres from his killer,’ said Lambert. It was the first time he had acknowledged openly to her in his own speech that he thought this a murder. ‘The strips will be examined under a microscope in the lab and any suspicious material will be picked off for further investigation.’
‘Do you know how he was killed?’
‘Not yet. Perhaps by the end of the day we shall.’ He did not tell her about the body being moved: to his relief she did not ask him about the blue-black blotching of the facial skin which had suggested the idea to them. He wondered anew whether she could be in some way involved in this death.
As if she read his thoughts, she said, ‘Have you any idea yet who might have killed him?’