by J M Gregson
She watched him as he ate his sandwiches and scanned the newspaper headlines in their new conservatory. Scarcely half a stone heavier now as a grandfather than when she had first known him at twenty; greyer each year, lined increasingly about the eyes and mouth. She could not conceive of him doing anything other than the detection of serious crime. Once she had resented his single-mindedness, to the point where it had almost destroyed them as a pair; now she almost cosseted it.
She knew him well enough to know that even as he apparently relaxed with the sun on his face, his mind was busy already with the intricacies of his latest criminal puzzle. He left behind a cup still half full and a paper unopened.
Not for the first time, she wondered how such a man would endure retirement.
*
Lambert knew as soon as he saw Cyril Burgess that he was about to confirm murder. He had the bland smile, the annoying confidence of a magician who has performed a trick which is baffling to his audience but child’s play to one with his knowledge and expertise.
‘Do come through to the inner sanctum, John. You will not be disappointed, I think.’ He indicated the way with an expansive gesture of an arm clad in dark blue worsted; with his Savile Row tailoring and silver-haired urbanity, he always suggested to Lambert the consultant surgeon he might have been.
Burgess took his visitor past his lugubrious, disapproving assistant, with Lambert trying not to speculate about the nature of the russet smears which marred the front of the young man’s white overall. The Superintendent hoped he did not blench as he was taken to stand beside the body of the late Guy Harrington, almost as if the occupant of the slab was a patient who might be permitted visitors after a serious operation.
Lambert tried not to think about the huge incisions in the flesh beneath the sheet, but he had attended too many post-mortems to be in much doubt about them. Indeed, only his senior rank had enabled him to depute the police presence at this one to a hapless junior officer. He found this one of those occasions when the human brain and the human imagination refuse to remain inactive when commanded to.
Burgess brought out the notes he would later transform into an official report. ‘Stomach contents,’ he announced with relish.
‘Tell me, please, don’t show me,’ said Lambert apprehensively: he knew that the information was necessary to establish the time of death.
Burgess grinned at the familiar effect his work was having on the Superintendent. ‘A meal of steak, potatoes, calabrese and carrots, what appears to me to be sherry trifle, cheese and biscuits, was taken some time before death. Coffee, as usual, and a considerable quantity of alcohol—I’d say the best part of a bottle of wine, and perhaps five standard measures of spirits. Of course, the people at that meal had only to toddle to their rooms and fall into bed on the site—no need to bother about driving.’
Both of them knew the police could have found most of this from the people who had eaten and drunk with the dead man on the previous evening, but this was accurate and scientific and the Coroner’s Court would want to hear it. Lambert knew that Burgess liked to tease him by holding back the vital facts of his report as long as possible. He indulged him, in exchange for the unspoken assurance that he would not be asked to witness the internal organs of what lay before him beneath its sheet. ‘Time of death?’ he rapped, like one bringing an over-indulged child to heel.
‘My dear John, you always want precision where precision is least possible.’ Burgess pursed his lips, pretending to give careful consideration to a matter he had already decided for himself two hours earlier. ‘The body temperature said our friend had been dead for probably not less than twelve hours when I got him here. From the digestive state of the stomach contents, I’d say the meal was completed not less than three and not more than five hours before death. I imagine that puts us some time after the witching hour?’
‘Well after, I think. I understand they began what seems to have been a fairly leisurely meal at about eight. Probably they didn’t complete it before nine-thirty.’
‘Which would put death at somewhere between twelve-thirty and two a.m.’ Burgess rubbed his hands with satisfaction. ‘When all innocent citizens have entered the land of nod.
“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds—”’
‘Yes indeed!’ Lambert interrupted ungraciously. Burgess, weaned on the detective fiction of the ‘thirties, thought death ignoble if not accompanied by quotation. The CID man in Lambert made him add sourly, ‘I doubt whether our killer at the Wye Castle will make himself so quickly obvious as the perpetrator of that Scottish bloodbath. I take it this was murder?’ He gestured almost apologetically at the corpse between them.
‘Oh, I think so.’ The pathologist gave again his impression of the surgeon who has completed a neat and successful bit of work, but Lambert, an expert in Burgess-analysis, detected a faint whiff of uncertainty.
‘How did he die?’
‘From multiple injuries.’ Burgess made to draw back the sheet, but Lambert interposed firmly, holding it resolutely beneath the corpse’s chin. He felt the cold through the cotton. How quickly nature reduced a man to a carcase.
‘He was hit with something?’
Burgess shook his head regretfully. ‘Our old friend the blunt instrument? Not in this case, I fear. Though that might make the case too straightforward to be of real interest, of course.’ He brightened as always at the thought of complexity in death.
‘What, then?’ Lambert was irritated as he had determined not to be by the conversational minuet he had to undertake to get information from this man without the lurid visual aid of a disembowelled corpse.
Burgess gave up his attempt to remove the sheet, like one capitulating to the whim of a wilful child. ‘The injuries are commensurate with a fall from a height,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Depressed fracture of the skull, broken cervix, multiple internal damage and bleeding.’
Lambert breathed the long sigh of one who begins to see the way clearing at last. ‘From an upper window?’
‘Or a roof. On to a hard surface. Possibly concrete, but more likely compacted gravel: there are numerous fragments of stone in the wounds. Death was instantaneous.’
Lambert reviewed in his mind’s eye the paths around the new residential blocks at the Wye Castle complex. They were paved. He said woodenly, as though feeding a cue to the main actor, ‘But he wasn’t found near a building.’
‘No. Hence the rather unattractive complexion.’ Burgess nodded at the near-black patches on the face of the dead man. ‘Which is repeated elsewhere on the front of the body. Mr Harrington had been lying face downwards for several hours after he died.’ He made again to remove the sheet, and found himself once more resisted by the Superintendent.
‘The body had been moved?’ Lambert had deduced so much for himself in the hollow beneath the ancient beech where Harrington had been found, but he sought automatically the official medical confirmation of it.
‘I’d stake my reputation on it,’ said Burgess happily, as if reading the mind of a policeman who was mapping out his legal ground. ‘But I couldn’t say how he was moved. There were no marks on the body to indicate that.’
Lambert walked over to the neat pile of clothes that were waiting to be labelled. He stooped his tall frame over the brown brogue shoes that stood beyond the clothes, as if waiting to be resumed by the feet that would never don them again. They were highly polished brown brogues, without a trace of scuffing. ‘He wasn’t dragged from the scene of death to where we found him. It would show on the shoes in this dry weather.’
‘Unless he was dragged by the feet,’ said Burgess, reluctant to reduce the possibilities at this early stage. For a moment he relished the vision of a silhouette against the moon at dead of night, dragging his victim stealthily across gravel and fairway to deposit him in the deep shadow of the great tree. It had the melodrama of grand opera; it was Sparafucile in Rigoletto.
>
Then Lambert spoke and the vision faded. ‘Surely not. There are no graze marks on the head either. Sorry, Cyril.’ He rarely used the older man’s Christian name: it was a respect for all men medical which had been bred into him in a working-class childhood, though he was scarcely conscious of it.
Burgess had known it was so really, for he had recorded in detail the state of the head, as of the rest of the corpse. The single large wound on the side of the head had been cleaned now, ready for viewing by distressed relatives; there were no other scratches upon the head or shoulders that would support his suggestion. He had merely allowed his taste for melodrama to overcome his sense of reality for a delicious moment. Somewhere within his sartorial rectitude, a trace of Dickens lurked. Balked of his sensational image, he tried his hand at detection. ‘A strong man, then, to carry this. He weighs two hundred and six pounds.’
Lambert did a swift, automatic computation. Almost fifteen stone; at least Burgess had not gone metric on him yet. ‘It would be nice to eliminate women and weaklings as easily as that. But he could have been transported on something. The Scene of Crime team are examining the area in detail at this moment.’
Burgess looked cast down. ‘Of course. A cart or something.’
‘Almost anything with wheels. If it’s still around, we’ll find it, in time.’ As he turned with relief away from the body, a thought occurred to him. ‘Couldn’t Harrington have simply fallen? You’ve just said he’d had quite a skinful.’
‘He might, I suppose. Though I fancy that this man was well used to his booze, and it was taken over quite a long period, with lots of food. And if it was a simple accident, why on earth should someone move him afterwards?’
Lambert had already had that very thought. And another, more intriguing one. With the possibilities of accident or suicide still present, why had all Harrington’s companions, the people who knew him well, assumed from the start that this was murder?
Chapter 9
Alison Munro stepped from the shower, gathered the soft whiteness of the bath towel carefully about her shoulders, and moved into the bedroom. She flicked the untrammelled black hair outside the towel with the swift, unconscious gesture that had not changed over twenty years, a movement which remained unfailingly sensual simply because it was so undesigned for that effect.
Sandy Munro, sitting in an armchair by the double bed with its Laura Ashley bedspread, registered the gesture with a swift shaft of poignant desire for which he was unprepared. He continued to stare resolutely at his paperback thriller; he had not turned a page in over ten minutes.
An absurd pantomime began. He sat unnaturally still while his wife moved slowly about the room and began to dress. Each ostentatiously ignored the other’s presence; each was acutely aware of the slightest nuance of gesture in the other.
He watched her in profile over the top of the pages he was not reading. As if in contempt of any hint of prudery, she turned wordlessly towards him as she dropped the towel and prepared to step into her clothes. Her flesh was firm still; only the tiny stretch marks of the pregnancies he had almost forgotten lined the white skin about her pelvis.
He tried hard to ignore what his senses were registering: his mind as usual refused to be so disciplined. Despite himself, he was acutely aware of the breasts, smooth and firm above the flat stomach, the long legs with the firmness about the thighs that came from years of controlling mettlesome horses, the dark bush between them that had filled him with such longing and excitement as a young man. With a startling rush of tenderness, he saw the small mole where her right leg met her pelvis, which even the tiniest bikini had always concealed, so that he thought of it as a symbol of their intimacy available only to him.
Or so he had always imagined: some devil now planted that thought in his mind. Even as he thrust it angrily away, he knew it would return.
When he spoke, it was as if the words burst out against his will, surprising him as well as her by their abruptness. ‘We don’t have secrets.’ Four words only, yet still the unevenness of delivery was noticeable.
‘Not normally, no.’ The tension had built between them over their silence; she spoke quietly, trying to give the impression of control, but she did not trust herself with more than the single phrase.
‘Then why now?’ The words came harsh and quick, the monosyllables hammering at the roof of his mouth, the blood rushing to the roots of the hair she remembered as bright red in his youth, but which was now dulled with the first saltings of grey. She saw it and was moved, but the emotion caught at her tongue and made it even more difficult for her to speak.
Her lingerie was almost white, with the faintest green tinge which became apparent only as she moved into the darker part of the room; the delicate lace edging seemed designed to invite the caress he could not give as he sat nailed to his chair. She slid into the white linen dress with its squares and circles of dark green, shutting herself off from the vulnerability that had held him rigid, declaring herself inaccessible.
As she sat on the stool at the dressing-table, both hands went again to the back of her neck in that unconsciously sensuous gesture, checking that the hair fell loose and clear of her dress. Nowadays her hair was shorter and it was scarcely necessary, but he found its evocation of times past only the more moving for that. He felt a sense of hopelessness: normally when he felt uncertainty in any relationship, he turned to her for guidance. This time the darkness lay between the two of them, and she could not diffuse it for him.
He looked at her face in the mirror. To a stranger, it would have had its normal quiet, unaggressive beauty. The dark eyes above the high cheekbones were as wide and limpid as ever; the firm chin was set at its usual confident angle. Only the lips, thin and pale with strain, showed her consciousness of the question that lay between them. As he watched, their eyes met in the mirror. Her look in that instant had a mute, almost desperate appeal, a look so rare in her that it almost made him gasp. But he could not respond to what he recognised so clearly, and in an instant her eyes dropped and she picked up her hairbrush.
He watched the vigorous buffeting she gave to the lustrous cascade of hair at the neck, feeling with her the release that came with physical action, unable to find any such outlet for his own tension. He had not moved since she came into the room. Now he said as though the words were wrung from his lips by torture, ‘I have to know.’
She did not look at him again in the mirror. She finished brushing her hair, put down the brush, and looked at it miserably for a moment. Then, almost imperceptibly, she shook her head, as if she were determining her own dilemma rather than answering the husband who sat so taut behind her.
The knock at the door made both of them start with shock, so immersed were they in their own contest of will and spirit. Then she whirled upon the stool and their eyes caught and held each other at last, wide with alarm at the interruption. In this at least he could take command. The external noise freed him at last from his rigidity; he felt the physical deliverance as he rose and went to the door.
‘I’m afraid we need to ask you a few questions about last night. I trust it’s convenient?’ Lambert was at his most urbane, but he had the air of a man who would proceed with his business whether it was convenient or not to his hearers. His head was barely clear of the lintel of the door, so that he seemed to tower over Munro, who now stepped back a pace as he glanced automatically at his wife.
The Superintendent was slim enough, despite his height, so that they could both see the rubicund presence of Detective-Sergeant Hook standing four square behind him. He should have been a reassuring figure as he followed his leader with cat-like Gilbertian tread into the room and shut the door carefully behind them. But with the unresolved tension lying between them, the Munros found the pair brought only menace into the room.
If Lambert sensed that he had interrupted something, he gave no sign as he went breezily into his standard patter. ‘You are not legally obliged to say anything, of course, but the good citizen is no
rmally only too anxious to assist in upholding the law.’ He paused, wondering why Munro should be quite so put out by his presence: he must have expected to be questioned. Had these two been in the middle of a row? ‘Perhaps I should tell you that it seems certain now that a serious crime has been committed.’
Munro licked his lips and hesitated. It was his wife who said, ‘You’re quite sure, then, that Guy was murdered?’ This was ground they had already covered when he had met the golfing party together earlier in the day. She might have been just breaking the conversational ice, but he sensed she was temporising, playing for a little time while she organised her thoughts.
‘That will be a decision for the Coroner’s Court in due course, Mrs Munro. But yes, our pathologist seems reasonably sure from his examination that Mr Harrington did not die from natural causes. Whether the death was a result of suicide, manslaughter or murder remains to be seen.’
‘Or accident.’ Sandy Munro found his voice at last—and discovered himself almost shouting. He said apologetically, ‘Presumably Guy could simply have fallen to his death?’
He must have heard his wife’s sharp intake of breath, for his head jerked towards her with a look of fear. In the long moment that Lambert allowed to stretch among them, the Scotsman still did not seem to grasp the mistake he had made. It was Hook who said eventually, ‘You think that’s how he died then, Mr Munro? A fall?’
‘But surely you told us earlier in the day that he had fallen from the roof garden of the hotel during the night. I’m sure you did.’ Bluster was not the right response, and Munro was in any case not a natural blusterer.