An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  Burgess shook his head sadly. ‘Beware academic snobbery, John. Still, I don’t suppose they have gaudy nights or college feasts in the new University of Gloucestershire: they wouldn’t have the cellars for such things. Nor can they even manage a decent murder on the back stairs at dead of night, it seems.’ He sighed heavily and turned his attention back to the real and less perfect world. ‘Your man was in excellent health. All major organs in good condition. No reason why he shouldn’t have made his three score years and ten and gone on after that. Except that someone chose to put a bullet into his brain!’ The last thought seemed to restore his normal bonhomie.

  Lambert thought how strange it was that the men and women who cut up corpses for a living should, in his now considerable experience, be habitually cheerful about their trade. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that he was killed somewhere else and dumped in the bracken at the bottom of the Malverns. The place where he was found is within seventy yards of a quiet road.’

  Burgess shook his head. ‘You have too melodramatic an imagination, John. I’ve always said so. You must stick to the facts, you know.’

  Lambert said through clenched teeth, ‘And the facts are?’

  ‘Well, one of the facts is that he was almost certainly killed where he was found. There is no bruising on arms and legs which would indicate that he was lugged about immediately after death and delivered from a van at dead of night by heavily hooded figures, though I know that your taste for Gothic horror would welcome such a picture. I think he fell where he was shot and died immediately.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ah! There you pose a question which may be difficult, nay impossible, to answer with complete accuracy.’

  ‘You can’t help us?’ Lambert made as if to stand up, knowing that Cyril Burgess would not lightly relinquish his contact with a juicy murder.

  ‘I didn’t say that, did I? I merely said I couldn’t offer complete accuracy. When did he disappear?’

  ‘On Friday the eleventh of June. The last sighting of him so far recorded is almost exactly eleven days before he was found on Monday evening.’

  Burgess frowned thoughtfully. ‘Eleven days and ten nights, to be strictly accurate. I’d say he died very shortly after your last sighting. In my opinion, that cadaver in there had been dead for around ten days when those lads found it on Monday evening.’ He smiled happily at his audience of one, with the air of a magician who had just produced a large rabbit from a small hat.

  Lambert stared at him. The time of death was a key thing in any investigation, and he had anticipated great difficulties in establishing it with a corpse which had lain undiscovered for an indefinite period. ‘How certain are you of that?’

  ‘Not certain enough to swear to it in court. Not yet. Call it informed opinion, if you like. It’s the maggots, you see. Interesting little chaps, maggots.’

  ‘They look well fed, then?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll show you if you like,’ said Burgess, making as if to move out into the area where Lambert could still hear the faint sound of water running over stainless steel, washing away the detritus of corpse dismemberment.

  The Superintendent held up a hasty hand, as Burgess had known he would.

  ‘No use being squeamish about these things,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, in this case you’re lucky. We’ve only had the odd light shower in the period since he disappeared, and a high and fairly constant run of June temperatures. I’ve sent a sample of our wee maggot friends over to the forensic entomologist at Chepstow by special messenger, and I shall be surprised if he doesn’t confirm my view.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Your man had probably been dead for around ten days when I got at his remains yesterday. I’m expecting the expert at Chepstow to say between nine and twelve days, and you’d have to allow something like those margins for the report to be safe in court.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘And Upson was seen on the Friday afternoon of the day he disappeared. So we know that he was alive just a little over ten days before the body was found.’

  Burgess was delighted to be allowed into the business of detection. He said triumphantly, ‘So it looks as if he was killed within twenty-four hours of that moment. Quite possibly, on that same evening.’

  Lambert nodded his satisfaction. It was the first real narrowing of the search he had been offered.

  As he reached the door of Burgess’s office, he paused and turned awkwardly towards his old acquaintance. ‘I’ve had a bit of pain down the left-hand side of my chest lately, Cyril. Not likely to be anything serious, is it?’

  Burgess managed somehow to follow a cheerful grin with a shake of the head which was quite grave. ‘Too long since I was in medical practice for me to venture an opinion, John. Cadavers are my field, not living tissue. You can cut dead bodies up as much as you want, until you find the answer. Too much speculation for my liking, when you can’t cut in deep and find out!’ He looked at Lambert’s torso as if he would have loved to cut deeply into it at that very moment. ‘But you know as well as I do that chest pains might be serious. Better see your GP and have it checked out, hadn’t you? Probably something o’ nothing, but you can’t take chances with tickers.’

  His heart! John Lambert was sure it missed a beat with the mere suggestion that it might be damaged. He swallowed hard and said, ‘I’ll do that, then. It’s probably no more than a touch of indigestion!’

  But he knew that in thirty years of grabbing food whenever he could he had never suffered from indigestion.

  *

  It was almost midday now, but Liz Upson appeared cool, despite the summer heat. She stood looking at them for only an instant when she opened the door. Then, before Lambert could introduce himself, she said, ‘You’d better come in,’ and led Detective Sergeant Hook and the Superintendent into a comfortably furnished lounge.

  The room was very tidy — surprisingly so, thought Hook, in view of the presence of two young children in the house. His own boisterous boys, the product of a late and happy marriage, rarely allowed a room to stay neat for longer than a few minutes. Patio doors gave a view of a long garden, a vista of neat grass with gracefully curving edges and the colour of blue hydrangeas and yellow and pink roses to attract the eye beyond the green.

  The occupant of the property seemed as serene as the place itself. Liz Upson’s abundant blonde hair was held back by a single band. She wore a full-length navy blue dress, which made her look slimmer than Bert remembered her from her visit to the station but still hinted as she moved at the curves beneath it. The navy leather of her shoes completed an outfit appropriate for mourning, but there was no trace of tears around the vigilant blue eyes.

  Lambert said formally, ‘I’m sorry we have to intrude upon you at a time like this, but you will understand that in the case of a suspicious death it is our duty to make certain enquiries as quickly as possible.’

  She said firmly, ‘I understand. I’m glad you came when the children were at school,’ and they knew in that moment that she had been waiting for this, that she wanted to have the inevitable exchange over and done with. Nothing suspicious in that, thought Bert: the innocent as well as the guilty often feel like that, as they struggle back towards real life from the shock of sudden death.

  But Mrs Upson had dressed carefully in dark clothes, and the curtains at the front of the house were drawn; was the woman who had insisted that her missing husband was ‘an arsehole’ now going to play the grieving widow? As if she were following his thought processes, Liz Upson added, ‘There is no need to handle me with kid gloves, Superintendent. Sergeant Hook knows exactly what I thought of my husband.’

  ‘I’m grateful for your frankness. Can you tell me, then, when you last saw your husband alive?’

  He didn’t stress the last word, and if she felt any implications in it, she chose to ignore them. ‘Certainly. He left the house after breakfast on Friday the eleventh of June. So about half-past eight on that day.’

  Lambert smiled. �
�You are commendably precise.’

  She gave him a small answering smile, and he became conscious that this woman might be an opponent worthy of his best efforts. ‘It’s information I have given before, when I reported Matt as what you called a missing person.’

  ‘Yes. You left it until three and a half days after his disappearance to report him missing. Was that not rather a long time for an anxious wife?’

  This time the smile was less fleeting, as if it was there to emphasise her confidence. ‘It would have been, for an anxious wife, yes. But I was not anxious about him. As I indicated to Sergeant Hook at our meeting last week, I was not close to Matt.’ Her blue eyes twinkled and her smile became dazzling as she turned it upon Bert’s broad features, as if her scatological contempt for her husband on that occasion had become an amusing joke between them, and now a joke against herself with this death.

  There are all kinds of reaction to the brutal business of murder, and Lambert was well aware that her lightness might be no more than a cloak for hysteria lurking beneath it. Nevertheless, he found her bearing an irritant: her calmness seemed to be wresting away an initiative that should be his in this questioning. He said, ‘Are you saying that you weren’t surprised when he didn’t return on that Friday evening?’

  She gave the question due consideration before she answered it, emphasising again how composed she was. ‘Not unduly, no. I thought he might have given us a phone call, but it wasn’t unusual for him to ignore such things.’

  ‘“Us” being you and the children?’

  ‘Yes. Who else?’ She looked him steadily in the face, her blue eyes full of challenge.

  ‘I’ve no idea. I trust you would tell me if there was anyone else involved.’

  ‘Of course I would, Superintendent.’ This time the smile definitely had an element of mockery. ‘There was no one else here on that evening. You can check with the children if you like. But I hope you won’t find it necessary to involve them.’

  ‘So do I, Mrs Upson.’

  ‘They’ll miss their father for a while, but they’ll get over it. He hasn’t been around much for them in the last couple of years.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  She shrugged. ‘You’ll need to ask other people rather than me about that. I’m afraid. I’d lost interest in Matt’s doings.’

  ‘In your view the marriage was over.’

  She thought for a moment again. ‘In my view, it was. I wanted him out of the place. Out of my life, for good.’

  ‘And now he is.’

  It was a low blow, but she took it without complaint. ‘Yes. And I’m glad of it. I told Sergeant Hook here as much, before it happened. I’m not going to indulge in hypocrisy, now that it has.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s highly commendable. There are other ways out of marriage than the death of a partner, however.’

  She looked sharply into his eyes again, and for a moment Lambert hoped she was going to respond to his scarcely veiled insult. Anger, like other emotions, can be more revealing than calm. Instead she said, ‘Divorce, you mean. Oh, I should have got round to it, in due course. But that bitch of a mother of his is a Roman Catholic, always going on about the indissolubility of the marriage bond. And Matt himself wouldn’t agree to a divorce by mutual consent. He was frightened of losing his kids, he said. He’d have had access, of course, but that wasn’t enough for him.’

  Lambert switched his tack suddenly, hoping to catch her off guard. ‘So where did you think he was on that weekend after he went missing, when you chose not to report his disappearance?’

  She recognised the tactic and was not ruffled by it. ‘With a woman, probably. Don’t ask me to name one. I’d long since lost interest in his bedroom or any other activities.’ For an instant, her contempt and loathing for the dead man sprang into her face with the words.

  ‘But there were other women?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t know or care who they were.’

  For an instant, he was tempted to mention Clare Booth, the colleague at work with whom Charlie Taggart had said Upson had enjoyed a lasting relationship. But it might be more hurtful than she pretended. She had denied all knowledge of such associations, so she wasn’t going to help him. Lambert sighed inwardly. If Upson had been a womaniser, as she implied, there would be a whole range of associations and intrigues to be unravelled in the search for his killer. Charlie Taggart had more or less confirmed that. He preferred monks to Casanovas as murder victims, any time, but there were precious few monks on offer.

  He said abruptly, ‘Did you kill your husband, Mrs Upson?’

  For a moment, he thought she was about to laugh contemptuously in his face. Then she said, with the first hint of strain, ‘No, I didn’t. I suppose you had to ask, but you have your answer.’

  ‘Then have you any idea who else might have put a bullet into his head? Think carefully before you answer, please.’

  Beneath the dark silk, her bosom rose and fell sharply, but they knew it was anger rather than any softer emotion which moved her. Eventually she said evenly, ‘No, I haven’t. I’d tell you if I did. I wouldn’t have wanted the father of my children to die like that, even if I no longer wished to live with him. I’ve thought furiously in the last twenty-four hours about who might have done this, as you might imagine, but I haven’t come up with a single name. What I told you earlier is quite true: I haven’t any clear idea of the people he has been associating with in the last two or three years.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I shall ask you to go on thinking about the matter. If anything, however small, strikes you as odd, please get in touch with me or DI Rushton at Oldford CID immediately.’ She nodded gravely. ‘Did your husband possess a firearm, Mrs Upson?’

  Again that sudden glance into his face; again the measuring of an opponent who might be worthy of her brain and her tongue; again the acknowledgement of a sudden switch of ground. She smiled, enjoying the surprise she thought her reply was going to give this grave, intelligent arm of the law. ‘He did, yes. A pistol. I never handled it myself, and I wouldn’t let him show it to the children.’

  ‘Do you know the make of pistol?’

  ‘No. I have no interest in such things.’

  ‘Can you show us where he kept it?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ‘I can, yes. I went through my husband’s pockets yesterday, and found his desk keys.’

  She led them through a spacious hall and into a small room which looked out on to the front garden. The curtains were drawn in here, in observance of the formalities of mourning that they had noted at the front of the house when they arrived, but she pulled the rope and swept them vigorously clear of the window. Sunlight flooded in, revealing a book-lined study and a wide mahogany desk with a green-leather top beneath the window. ‘I’ve never been allowed to penetrate the mysteries of his desk, but I know he kept the gun in the bottom right-hand drawer.’

  She tried three of the various keys on the ring before she found the one which fitted, then, with a due sense of drama, slowly drew open the small drawer.

  It was completely empty.

  The lining of the drawer stared up at them like a mocking face. At Lambert’s bidding, she unlocked the other drawers of the desk, but none contained the weapon. As she shut the last one, she said quietly, ‘I suppose Matt must have taken it with him on that Friday morning. Perhaps he knew he was going to face some sort of danger.’

  On that dark thought, they moved back into the hall, whilst she reiterated that she had no idea where the threat to her husband might have come from.

  Liz Upson stood upon the step of the house for a moment after the detectives had got back into their car, watching them put on their seat belts and drive away, as if she wished to be assured that their presence had been removed from her world and that of her children before she shut the door on the world outside.

  She made herself a sandwich for lunch and sat down with a pot of tea in front of the television and the one o’clock news. She didn�
��t feel a need for anything stronger to drink, for the adrenaline of the interview was pulsing still through her veins. It was like her days of amateur dramatics in those far-off times before her marriage, when you had to wind down after a performance.

  He was a shrewd bloke, that Lambert, she thought. Almost lived up to the press’s reports of him. But she’d been a match for him. She’d almost enjoyed it, at times. She’d carried off the business of the gun pretty well. A useful diversionary tactic, that.

  Six

  The university halls of residence were almost deserted on this bright afternoon. Some students were sweating in examinations; some had finished and departed for the summer. Those who were left were either pursuing frenetic and belated revision in the libraries or seeking outdoor shade from the baking sun. Bert Hook thought longingly of the placid reaches of the Severn, lined with broad oaks, which were within a mile of here. Then he looked up at the high brick frontage of the four-storey building and followed Lambert through its entrance.

  The man they had come to see was waiting for them in one of the chairs round the low tables which dotted the marble floor of the entrance area. It was the one large space in a building that was built primarily to house as many people as possible; despite its present deserted state, it was easy to envisage it as a meeting place, crowded with students drinking coffee, at the busier times of the academic year. Today, only the distant throb of pop music from somewhere above reminded them that there were some students still in residence.

  The single figure in this broad space rose nervously as they came through the doors. ‘You must be the CID people. I’m James Lawson,’ he said. He held out a long-fingered hand as he came towards them, then decided abruptly that handshakes were not the thing for this occasion and thrust it awkwardly behind his back.

  Lawson looked anxiously around him as Lambert introduced himself and his detective sergeant: the filth were not welcome in student culture, and he would not be popular for bringing them here. In the clichés of the young intelligentsia, the police were people who framed the weak and ignored or encouraged the criminally strong. He nodded absently as Lambert gave him their names, then added inconsequentially, ‘Most people call me Jamie.’