An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  Lambert said briskly, ‘This shouldn’t take very long,’ and had a premonition even as he pronounced the words that he would not be correct.

  James Lawson was slender, a trifle gangly. He wore the ubiquitous faded blue jeans which were the student uniform of the era. They were tight enough to emphasise his lean shanks and make his feet in their scuffed white trainers look larger than they were. His pale green T-shirt was old and had seen many washings, but it looked clean enough; it bore the name of a pop group of which Lambert had never heard. He was light skinned and fair haired, but his head had been shaved in the current fashion, and it was covered only with a very short yellow stubble; with his light blue eyes and the almost translucent skin on his cheekbones, he looked almost like an albino. Or someone who had been receiving chemotherapy for cancer, thought Hook, whose cousin had died of leukaemia in the previous year. People said the young could get away with anything, but fashion’s dictates could expose them as cruelly as their elders.

  ‘We can do this in your room if you think it would be more private,’ said Lambert with a smile.

  ‘No,’ said Lawson, a little too quickly, so that the swift monosyllable immediately attracted the interest of these experienced men. But perhaps his room was just untidy, his bed unmade. He said, ‘I’m up on the top floor. We’ll go into the television room. We won’t be disturbed there.’

  He led them into a deserted room with a huge screen at the front and lines of well-worn chairs in front of it, some of which had upholstery bulging through slits in their covering. The room had been cleaned that day, so that none of the previous night’s detritus remained. But the windows were shut and there was a smell of stale beer in the foetid room. There was another scent also which caught the nostrils of men, who recognised it immediately: the faint, sweet smell of cannabis.

  Lawson glanced sideways at them, then walked over to tug at the cords and open one of the high windows, which were the only means of light and ventilation in this specialist room. ‘I can’t help you much, you know,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long for me to tell you what I know.’

  ‘Maybe not. But your tutor has been murdered, and you will understand that we need to get as clear a picture as possible of his last hours in this world, if we are to have much chance of finding out who killed him.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think I can tell you very much, that’s all.’

  Methinks the young man doth protest too much, thought Bert Hook. Open University literature studies had made him prone to such quaint phrases, but he took care not to voice them among his colleagues at the station. He produced his notebook and said, ‘You were one of the last people to see Mr Upson. We need to have the details of that.’

  The fair-skinned, revealing young face looked immediately shifty. ‘It was on a Friday. Not last Friday, the one before that.’

  ‘So we understand. But we need your confirmation. I understand that you were seeing Mr Upson in connection with some deficiencies in your work.’

  ‘Yes. I — er, well, I’d let myself get behind, like.’

  Bert Hook, who had got up at five thirty for many months so as not to ‘get behind’ with his part-time studies with the OU, said innocently, ‘Pressure of student life got to you, did it?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Lawson didn’t seem to detect any irony. ‘I — well, I didn’t organise my work as well as I might have, according to Mr Upson. It’s one of the skills of academic life, you know.’

  Lambert said drily, ‘I’m sure it is. But one you didn’t have. Was Mr Upson helping you in your struggle to acquire it?’

  The young man looked thoroughly puzzled. ‘He was sympathetic, Mr Upson. He was trying to help me.’

  ‘And was his confidence justified? Did you produce the piece of work he had been waiting for when you had this last meeting with him?’

  ‘Well, no, I didn’t, actually! But I didn’t know then that it was going to be the last time we met, did I?’

  ‘I see. What is your position with regard to your studies now, then?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, really. I still haven’t produced my dissertation. I’ve got all the material ready for it, but I missed the date, you see.’

  ‘Which was?’

  The blue eyes dropped as he looked thoroughly shamefaced. He gave them a sheepish grin as he said, ‘March the thirty-first, actually.’

  There was something odd about this young man, but Lambert couldn’t quite work out what it was. He had continued to embarrass him about his work in the hope of pinning down what this was, but he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He decided it was time to let Lawson off the hook and said, ‘Well, we’re not here to talk about you. It’s Mr Upson we’re interested in, as you know. Think carefully now, Jamie. Did he seem to be in any way agitated when you saw him on that Friday?’

  ‘Friday afternoon, it was.’ Lawson spoke awkwardly, almost as if he expected the simple statement to be challenged.

  Hook said quietly, ‘What time was this, please?’

  ‘Three forty-five.’ It seemed unusually precise, coming from this ill-organised student. Lawson watched Hook write down the words in his clear, round hand.

  Lambert asked again, ‘Did you notice anything odd in his bearing?’

  Lawson paused for thought. ‘No, I don’t recall that he seemed any different from normal. The stress was on me, you know, and I wasn’t noticing him particularly, except that I wanted to see how severe he was going to be with me.’

  ‘I understand that. But we are speaking of a murder victim and you were one of the last people to see him alive. Did he seem to be worried about anything? Was he giving full attention to you and your problems, or was he abstracted, with his mind on something else?’

  Jamie nodded slowly, his young, mobile features suddenly full of concentration, as if he, like others before him. felt the charnel-house glamour of murder, the oldest and darkest of crimes. ‘No. As far as I can remember it, Matt was pretty normal, pretty much the way I’d seen him before. But as I said, it was deadly serious for me, with my university future at stake, so I was concerned with that and my own emotions.’

  Lambert sighed. ‘All right. Tell us what was said about your own situation.’

  Lawson looked confused, even shifty. Perhaps it was just embarrassment that his sorry tale was going to tumble out again before these impassive strangers, who could hardly be expected to be sympathetic to an errant student. ‘Matt — Mr Upson, that is — told me I’d been a fool to get myself in this situation, and a bigger fool not to heed his warnings to dig myself out of it. He couldn’t allow me any more time for my dissertation and the matter would now be out of his hands. I would appear in the official lists as a failure, because the necessary work had not been submitted.’

  ‘So that is the end of the matter? Your studies are about to be terminated?’

  Jamie hesitated, then said almost apologetically. ‘Not quite. There is an appeals procedure. Matt said he was now donning his other hat, as my tutor, and advising me what to do. I was to complete the dissertation over the vacation and present myself as a penitent to the appeals panel at the end of September. That was his phrase. He said he thought there was a good chance that they would say that it should be assessed, and that if it was then found satisfactory, I would probably be allowed to enter my final year studies.’

  He spoke the words as though quoting from a book; he had obviously memorised the advice from his tutor. Lambert wondered how far this nuisance of a student merited all this attention, but that was not their concern. There was something eluding him about this rather pathetic paleface with the shaven head and the hunted air, but he was getting no nearer to divining what it was. He said, ‘Think carefully, please, Jamie. Even though you were a student and he was a tutor, you have inhabited the same working environment for the last two years as a man who has now been murdered. I ask you this in confidence: do you know of any person or persons who might have wished him ill?’

  ‘No.’ The reply cam
e a little too promptly, from a man who could hardly wait for the question to be completed.

  Lambert let the eager monosyllable hang in the air for a moment, emphasising its haste, looking steadily into the pale blue eyes until they eventually fell. ‘Do you know of any activity of Mr Upson’s, inside or outside the university, which might be connected with his death?’

  Lawson glanced from one to another of the watchful faces in front of him and then dropped his gaze to the floor again, all within a single second. He said stubbornly, as if repeating a formula, ‘No. I was just a student and he was just my personal tutor. I didn’t see a lot of Mr Upson.’

  They left him standing alone on the wide, shallow steps of the high brick building, an isolated, anxious figure. It was a scene both of them were to recall many times in the weeks which followed.

  *

  The action at the coroner’s court was brief and to the point. The retired police sergeant who acted as coroner’s officer had thought there might be some chance of an open verdict, since there must be a possibility of suicide with a man shot through the temple at point-blank range. Matthew John Upson would not have been the first man to seek out a lonely part of the Malverns to end the agony of a life which seemed to have nothing but pain in store.

  But no weapon had been found by the body. And though it was possible that someone had removed the weapon without reporting the discovery of the body, Cyril Burgess’s report about the angle of the shot was taken as conclusive evidence that this man had not died by his own hand.

  The coroner, a bluff man with a military moustache and much experience of death, directed the jury firmly towards a verdict of murder, by person or persons unknown. The whole proceedings, including identification evidence by Liz Upson and the pathologist’s report, took no longer than twenty-five minutes.

  The coroner offered his sympathy to the grieving widow, followed by an assurance that he was confident that the police would be both vigorous and successful in their pursuit of whoever had done this.

  The body was not released for burial.

  *

  One woman felt it had been a mistake to attend the inquest. This was not the place for a mistress, whether current or discarded. She could only draw attention to herself, when she could not afford to do that.

  Clare Booth had told herself she owed it to Matt to be present at this last secular rite of passage, to hear how these strangers thought of the man she had loved.

  But as she sat at the back of the court, listening to the dispassionate tones of the official witnesses who had not known Matt and the quiet, controlled evidence of the wife who had known him all too well, she realised that it was curiosity rather than compassion that had drawn her here. She wanted to hear the grave processes of the law in operation, wanted above all to find out how much the police had found out about Matt, about his death, and about who might have killed him.

  She was disappointed. The law proceeded briskly but coolly, in an attempt to spare the feelings of those closest to the bereaved. Clare had never met the austere, dignified old lady in black, who sat still as marble, attentive as a bright-eyed bird, throughout the proceedings, but she knew at a glance that this figure of genuine grief must be Matt’s mother. Clare felt she was the only person in that high, quiet room apart from herself who really mourned this passing.

  As for the police, they gave nothing away, beyond the brief information in reply to a question from the coroner that an early arrest was not in prospect. And she didn’t know the ways of the police: perhaps even that was a smokescreen, to put a leading suspect off his guard.

  Or her guard. The bulky man in the grey suit who had sat silent and observant throughout the proceedings in the coroner’s court followed her down the steps outside and spoke quietly to her before she could go to her car. ‘Ms Clare Booth? I’m Detective Sergeant Hook. My superintendent is in charge of the investigation into Matthew Upson’s death. He’d like to put a few questions to you. As soon as possible, please.’

  *

  There were others who were interested in the findings of the coroner’s court, but they were not foolish enough to draw attention to themselves by attending, nor even by sending a minion to report back.

  There were not going to be any surprises in the verdict. It was always unlikely that the coroner would accept that Upson had died by his own hand when there was no weapon present. The verdict of murder by person or persons unknown didn’t bring any cold thrill to the man who read of the verdict in the Gloucester Citizen behind closed doors on that Thursday night. This man had seen many deaths in his time, a number of them violent; in the vast majority of these cases, no arrest had been made.

  Gangland killings are notoriously the most difficult for the police to solve, and both they and the criminal fraternity know it. Contrary to popular opinion, the police are not content to ignore such deaths, happy to see villains eliminate villains and leave the world with a little less trouble in it. Police chiefs resent the view that criminal bosses should be a law unto themselves, beyond the reach of those whose job it is to make sure that the law of the land is the one that obtains for all. The police know that if they acknowledge that anyone, however powerful, can take the law into his own hands and get away with it, anarchy is not far away.

  This man read the few paragraphs in the evening paper, allowed himself a grim smile, then summoned two of the lieutenants of his dark army. ‘They’ll have searched his house. Upson swore there was nothing there to connect him with us, and he must have been right, or we’d have heard from them by now. You went through his room in the university?’

  ‘Yes. Last week, when he was just a missing person. Lance did it. No one saw him.’

  The thickset man behind the big desk smiled. He had known it would be so. He had given his orders to that effect. But even people like him needed reassurance. Or needed to double-check, he told himself: you didn’t build an empire like his without being thorough, and attention to detail was part of being thorough. He nodded. ‘What about the people he had working for him?’

  ‘They know the score. The ones we can still use are being assigned to other couriers. One or two we won’t be able to use. It’s going to be quiet anyway, until October.’

  He nodded. The killing had been at a good time, in that respect. Other than a few locals, the students would have to get their supplies from elsewhere, over the summer. And at the end of September, there would be a new crop of youngsters, a thousand and more new possibilities for his lucrative and well-organised trade. A growth industry, despite the pious pronouncements of governments and their repeated and feeble attempts at control.

  But you didn’t succeed without vigilance. ‘Did you check that Minter is available?’

  ‘Yes. I used the contact number. His coded message said Minter was ready for hire. He’d like three days’ notice and all the detail you can give him.’ Even this man spoke Minter’s name with a little awe. Contract killers might be merely the tools of the barons of this evil trade, but they commanded high prices, and money always compels respect in the world of crime.

  ‘Right. Keep your ears and your eyes open. If the police get too close to any of his contacts, we’ll need to eliminate them.’

  It was always best to speak of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ when it came to the letting of blood. It implicated others, encouraged the rule of silence.

  Seven

  Not many people nowadays can afford to live in houses constructed from the Cotswold stone which was once the dominant building material of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. Surprisingly, Clare Booth, a humble lecturer in what had now become the University of Gloucestershire, was one of them.

  It was in fact a modest enough residence, not far from the centre of Oldford. A nineteenth-century primary school had been replaced with a proud new modern building, large enough to accommodate the growing numbers of children in the prosperous small town. An enterprising developer had bought the original school and converted it into four small houses, each
with two parking spaces in what had once been the playground. Clare lived with her handsome Burmese cat Henry in the end one of what the agent had inevitably called ‘Character residences with all the advantages of thoroughly modern interiors’.

  On the evening of Thursday 24 June, she sat looking out of the attractive stone-mullioned window, awaiting the arrival of the CID and trying not to feel nervous about it. She told herself that she would be honest wherever she felt she could be. That was surely the best policy. ‘Don’t get too friendly, Henry,’ she warned the cat as the two large shadows fell across the glass of the front door. ‘They’re not friends, these chaps, they’re here on business.’

  She found it unnerving that they got down to that business with hardly a sentence of small talk. It was a perfect summer evening, and the crimson blaze of the sunset was framed by the tall stone window of her sitting room, almost as if it had been designed for that very purpose, but these two men commented neither on this natural beauty nor upon the dark gleam of her antique furniture, which usually brought admiring comments from those setting foot for the first time into her house.

  Yet they did not seem unfriendly, these two. It was the powerfully built sergeant who had spoken to her after the inquest, and his leaner and even taller superintendent. They were both older than her and gave an impression of being far more in touch with the world and its evils. Well, that was natural enough, she supposed: their job must bring them into touch with the worst side of humanity. Henry ignored her injunction and jumped up on to the sofa beside Detective Sergeant Hook; within two minutes he was stretching luxuriously on the ample police lap, nuzzling his ears against the notebook above his head and purring loudly.