Killer Cases: A Lambert and Hook Detective Omnibus

by J M Gregson

  Lambert ignored the lame disclaimer and ventured, ‘I believe you hated him, Mr Goodman. Quite enough to wish him dead.’

  As he had intended, the man opposite him made the almost inevitable assumption. ‘I suppose the others told you that. All right, I suppose that’s fair enough. We got along on the surface, but that was all. I was quite glad when I looked into that hollow near the twelfth and saw him dead.’

  ‘And why did you hate him, Mr Goodman?’ Not for the first time, Hook noted the contrast in Lambert’s own style, between the esoteric line of inquiry he had tested earlier and the rapid series of more direct questions now.

  Goodman was ruffled by the change. ‘I —I did some work for him. I’m an architect, you know. An extension to his works. Guy took a long time to pay. We couldn’t—’

  ‘Are you saying that you felt strongly enough to wish a man dead over a disagreement about payment?’

  Goodman’s shoulders, which had earlier shrugged with the control of a mannered gesture, now twitched; Lambert could not be sure whether in anger or despair. ‘It sounds odd, I know. But somehow things just went from bad to worse.’

  This time it was Lambert who paused, letting the feebleness of this explanation hang between them for a moment. Then he said, ‘Harrington had a reputation as an unscrupulous ladies’ man, I believe.’ He was sure there must be a more direct and brutal modern term.

  But the effect on Goodman was startling enough. The blue-grey eyes, so benevolent in the persona he presented successfully to the world around him, widened in resentment. He said unsteadily, ‘I believe so. I wouldn’t know much about it.’

  His whole bearing gave the lie to that. Lambert said, ‘Forgive me, Mr Goodman, but this is a murder inquiry. I presume your wife knew Harrington.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For a number of years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have to ask you if there was at any time between them a relationship which went beyond mere friendship.’

  ‘Why do you “have to ask”?’ Goodman attempted irony, but it came out as almost a snarl.

  ‘Because sexual jealousy is behind a very high percentage of murders.’ As Goodman became more disturbed, his interlocutor grew more icily calm.

  ‘Anne never had an affair with Harrington. She hated him as much as I did. Now, are you satisfied?’

  Lambert made no attempt to answer a question he took to be rhetorical. Nor to remind Goodman that hatred was a passion not too far removed from love, once love went wrong. Instead he said, ‘And what about your own relationship with Mrs Harrington, Mr Goodman?’

  Goodman’s gasp made even the outwardly impassive Hook look up from his notes. He said, ‘I don’t have to answer this, you know.’

  ‘Indeed no, Mr Goodman. Your knowledge of the law would tell you that. But as a JP, you would no doubt be anxious to help the police with their inquiries into a serious crime.’ Lambert was as bland and assured as Goodman had been when he came into the room.

  Goodman made a wretched attempt to recover his former panache. ‘That is so, of course. You must forgive me; personal involvement in a murder inquiry seems to upset one’s normal standards.’ He smoothed his palms unnecessarily down the white fringe of hair at each side of his head. ‘Marie Harrington and I have known each other for years. We have been close friends—nothing more. Is that what you wanted to know?’

  ‘She seems to have been well aware of her husband’s sexual liaisons. Have you had occasion to consult with or assist her at any time in relation to his various affairs?’

  ‘No.’ The monosyllable came too quickly, too vehemently. ‘We’ve known each other for twenty years and more. Through good times and bad. I suppose I may have provided a shoulder to cry on at times. Nothing more. I can’t even remember, so it can’t be very significant!’

  Lambert was intrigued by the manner rather than the content of his replies. Goodman’s excitement during their recent exchanges convinced him there was something to be unearthed here, though whether it would prove of relevance to Harrington’s death only time would tell. He said, ‘Well, I shall need to see Mrs Harrington again.’ It sounded like a threat, but that situation was of Goodman’s making, not his. ‘I must ask you, as you might expect, whether you have any idea who might have killed Guy Harrington.’

  Goodman was at ease again, with what to others had seemed the most solemn of questions. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I’ve thought about it, of course, but I haven’t come up with anything useful. I suppose you are still convinced it was one of our group?’

  Lambert afforded him a thin smile. ‘Convinced would be too strong a word. But we’ve eliminated a variety of other possibilities, so that it remains the likeliest solution.’ He had almost said ‘scenario’: it must be the effect of late-night reading of criminologist symposium papers. He saw no reason to relay to Goodman the view that Marie Harrington must be added to their group as a leading suspect.

  A few minutes later George Goodman sat in the blessed privacy of his own room. His head was in his hands. Presently, he lowered them to grip the arms of his chair, while he stared unblinkingly ahead. To an observer glancing casually through the window, he would have appeared as sleekly self-assured as ever.

  But his features showed the strain he could not reveal to the world.

  Chapter 17

  THURSDAY

  ‘Eat some breakfast, John, for goodness’ sake!’ Christine Lambert watched the toast going cold and hard and knew that it would be left again. The case must be at a difficult stage: it was the only time when her husband forgot to eat.

  ‘Where’s the bacon and egg, then?’ Lambert snatched up his knife in mock eagerness. It was a running joke between them that she had cut out all his favourite dishes with her campaign against cholesterol.

  ‘I’ve told you, you can have a grill in the evenings, once a week. Get your toast and marmalade, and drink that tea before it’s cold.’ She watched him make a dutiful effort, knowing that as soon as she took her eyes off him his mind would be back on the conference he was to hold with his team that morning. In desperation she said, ‘I’ve booked that week in Cyprus at the autumn half-term.’

  ‘Good,’ said her husband, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. They both knew he would have to be prised away from England when the time came. For the moment, Christine was content to have fed in the news without any violent reaction; at least his preoccupations with the case allowed that. She made her ritual admonition about locking the doors when he left—for a senior policeman he was ludicrously lax about security—and left for school.

  Her husband remembered as soon as she had gone that he had forgotten to ask about his daughter’s progress. No doubt Christine would have rung Jacqui last night to get the latest progress on the pregnancy, while he was still studying the material accumulating in the murder room at the Wye Castle. Well, no doubt he would have heard the news, if there was any. But he wished he had remembered to ask; twenty-five years of marriage had at least developed that tiny twinge of conscience in him.

  It was a rather bleary-eyed Bert Hook that he picked up twenty minutes later. The Open University late night and early morning broadcasting times were taking their toll, even on a student still full of the excitement higher education brings to those who come to it late. ‘Now that I’m picking up a student,’ said Lambert, ‘I expect a “shining morning face”.’

  ‘Expect away,’ said Hook sourly. ‘I look forward to the day when you will cease to give me your selection of “wise saws and modern instances”, but I suppose I shall be equally disappointed.’

  ‘I hope all this education isn’t going to make you uppity with your elders and betters.’ Lambert felt suddenly cheered by the familiarity of his surroundings; trundling the old Vauxhall through the edge of the Cotswolds on a late spring morning with Bert Hook at his side, it seemed that they could not be as far from a solution as he had felt when he rose an hour earlier. There had been a sharp shower just after dawn, but the sun wa
s already climbing against a clear sky and the hawthorn seemed new-washed for their inspection. Nothing evil could triumph on a day like this.

  It was a sentimental view, of course: an illusion which later events would comprehensively shatter.

  *

  The detective as individual superman is largely a creation of fiction.

  Lambert would be aware by the end of the morning that his team had unearthed at least as much as he had about the participants in the drama that was unfolding at Wye Castle Golf and Country Club. Each man and woman knew the job assigned to them; co-ordinating their discoveries, which was the purpose of this meeting, was a key process in the conduct of a murder inquiry. Each year, the capacity of a Superintendent to act as an intelligent maverick was a little diminished, his importance as a leader of a team a little increased.

  In the Murder Room, DI Rushton had already set out the chairs for their meeting. In front of each seat, there were several sheets of blank paper on the edge of the table. For all the world as if they were attending a conference about selling paint, not catching criminals, thought Bert Hook.

  The patient accumulation and organisation of material by a large group of officers becomes ever more important as technology advances. The importance of routine police work was nowhere better illustrated than in their first subject of discussion that morning. Lambert said, speaking like a committee chairman, ‘We’ll go through each of our suspects in turn, I think, feeding in the forensic and other evidence as we go along. I’ve now interviewed all the people in the golfing party of which Harrington was a member, following up the initial statements they gave to members of this team. I have a feeling we need to add one name to these suspects: that of Marie Harrington, the victim’s widow. I spoke to her, as most of you know, when she turned up and insisted on identifying the body, but I haven’t conducted any formal interview with her, and I don’t think anyone else has.’ He looked around the table; heads shook in unison.

  Rushton said, ‘We have the report from the CID in Surrey of her movements on the night of the murder. She was at a dinner with friends, which broke up at about ten-thirty. She had her own car, so that they can’t be sure of her moments after that. But she indicated that she was going home.’

  ‘Was she occupying the house on her own?’

  ‘Yes. So she has no witness to her movements until the next morning. The postman says she took the mail from him on the doorstep in her dressing-gown.’ He consulted the telex in front of him. ‘That was at approximately eight thirty-five.’

  ‘And she must have heard about the death shortly after that.’

  ‘At nine-thirty. The WPC says she took it calmly.’

  From what Lambert had seen, that was probably an understatement. He thought of her spare, erect figure, the strong features beneath the impeccably groomed grey hair. And the grey eyes beneath that hair, which had mocked his clumsy attempts at compassion for a grieving widow.

  Rushton, saving the most intriguing fact until the end, said, ‘There was one interesting thing. The CID sergeant checked with the neighbours. One of them—nosy cow, but probably reliable, he thinks—says she thinks she heard Marie Harrington putting her car in the garage at about two-thirty a.m.’

  The men round the table were silent, each occupied with the same arithmetic. Lambert remembered her words ‘It’s not much over a hundred miles, you know!’ in explanation of her unexpected arrival at the Wye Castle. Between ten-thirty and two-thirty, she could have driven to the Wye Castle, thrust her husband over the parapet to his death, and returned home. She would have used the M4 and the A40: good roads, quiet enough at that time of night. Allow her half, perhaps three-quarters of an hour at the hotel; it could have been done that way. And almost without suspicion: without a nosy neighbour, she would not even have been under consideration. Lambert had been thinking of her until now as at most an accessory, not the executioner.

  ‘But why be back here by twelve o’clock the next day?’ he said, looking round the table. ‘Wouldn’t you keep a low profile if you’d got rid of your husband with a ready-made group of suspects around him?’

  Unexpectedly, it was Hook who made a suggestion based on a psychological conjecture. ‘I don’t believe that old rubbish about murderers feeling a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime. But many people who kill are hyperactive, at any rate around the time of the homicide. However ill-advised it may be, they prefer to know what is going on rather than to sit quietly at home wondering whether they’ve got away with it, waiting for the knock at the door which tells them they’ve been rumbled.’

  Lambert considered the idea. ‘She certainly had a strange kind of energy when she arrived here. She was anxious to know whether we were treating the death as a murder, almost pleased when she found we were. And she insisted on identifying the corpse there and then, at the point where we had discovered it.’ There were other explanations as well as the one Hook had suggested for Marie Harrington’s behaviour on that day, but her actions could scarcely be described as rational, much less normal.

  Rushton said, ‘She’s still in this area. Presumably at the hotel where she told us she’d be staying overnight after she’d identified the corpse.’

  Lambert nodded thoughtfully. ‘I rather gathered she intended to stay around here until after the inquest. Incidentally, the Coroner plans to open the inquest the day after tomorrow. Do we know whether Marie Harrington has been in touch with any of our five at the Wye Castle?’

  It was DI Rushton’s moment. ‘Indeed she has, sir. I saw it happen, quite by chance. I was in the Cathedral at Hereford on my day off yesterday.’ He paused for an instant, as if such behaviour might be thought eccentric enough in a policeman to need explanation. ‘I saw her there and watched for a few minutes. She met George Goodman.’

  ‘By chance?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She was in the Lady Chapel, and she waited for him to arrive. I’m sure they met by arrangement.’

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘No. I’m pretty certain neither of them did. They sat together for a few minutes towards the front of the Chapel. They spoke to each other, but I couldn’t catch anything they said. I thought it better not to let them know I was around.’ He stopped, recalling that curious moment when the pair had been frozen like a detail from an old master against the stained glass.

  ‘Did they leave the Cathedral together?’

  ‘Yes. I followed them to the car park. They drove away in Goodman’s Rover.’

  There was a silence round the table. The professionals were recreating the scene, trying to assess its significance. Rushton, who was pleased to display his vigilance even during off-duty time to the chief, wished now that he had rung in yesterday about the incident. In the present silence, it seemed more significant than it had done at the time.

  Lambert said, ‘Did they appear to be lovers?’

  ‘No. I’ve thought about that since. They hardly touched each other, as far as I could see. She seemed to put her hand briefly on his when they met, but that was all. I couldn’t detect any reaction from him. Perhaps the Cathedral inhibited them: I’ve no idea how they behaved in the car after they’d driven out of the city.’ It was the policeman’s automatic caveat, coming from the early years they had all endured of flashing torches into darkened cars while patrolling the beat.

  Of course, thought Lambert, people still had occasion to meet after affairs had run cold. There was no saying that the magisterial Goodman and the elegant widow Harrington had not consorted together more hotly in the past. But it was of interest only if it bore on the events of the last few days. He said, ‘I shall need to see Marie Harrington again. It will be interesting to see if she confesses to yesterday’s meeting. I interviewed Goodman yesterday afternoon, and he said nothing about it, though I broached his relationship with Marie Harrington with him directly. Interesting... Right: let’s move on to the Munros.’

  It was Rushton as Deputy who had assumed the role of the marshal of various finding
s. ‘The most interesting thing we’ve come up with is the forensic material. Harrington died almost instantaneously after a fall on to the gravel path from the roof where the group had been drinking earlier: a height of something over sixty feet. There is worsted from his trousers on the edge of the parapet. He was certainly dead before he was moved.’

  Automatically, he was rehearsing the details which would be necessary for the Coroner to ‘open’ the inquest and adjourn it under Section 20 of the Coroners’ Acts. It would be a five-minute process, but all these facts would have to stand up eventually to examination by a Defence Counsel in the High Court; the team were patient with him through his mental checking of their work, hearing it transformed through his calm tones into evidence.

  ‘The body was moved in the wheelbarrow? We’re certain of that?’

  ‘Yes. There are fibres from the back of Harrington’s jacket on the front of the barrow above the wheel, and from the back of his trouser legs on the bit between the shafts. It won’t be important, but if we had to we could establish the position of the body in the barrow while it was being transported.’

  They were silent, picturing Harrington’s last journey at dead of night, the corpse still warm, the head and feet dancing with each movement of the single wheel over the uneven earth. Lambert moved to the aspect of that journey that really excited them as detectives. ‘And the fibres from what we think is Munro’s sweater. Where exactly were they found?’

  ‘On the body. On the back of the jacket, to either side of Harrington’s shoulder-blades, on the backs of his trousers, and on the heel of one of the shoes. We’ll need the sweater, of course, but once we have it, Forensic are quite confident their evidence will stand up in court.’

  ‘It may not need to. I’m seeing Munro after we’ve finished here. I’ll get the sweater from him then. I doubt whether he’ll hold out against evidence like that: I don’t see him denying that he moved the body. Are there any prints?’