An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘Bastard bloody game!’ said Bert Hook, ‘Bastard, bastard, bloody STUPID game!’ He beat the turf with his 5-iron and considered dispatching it after his golf ball into the undergrowth. Then he trudged on morosely, feeling the blood pounding in his head, a balanced, equable man, reduced by the trials of this slow, quiet game to a murderous lunatic.

  John Lambert affected not to hear him. He had had a stab or two of that chest pain again, on the first hole, but it had gone now. He must concentrate on helping Bert, who was quite new to the boons of this wonderful game. ‘Great way to unwind after a trying week, this,’ he said reflectively, ‘just a quiet two-ball as a superb evening moves towards dusk.’ He played a smooth 8-iron and smiled appreciatively as it bounced at the front of the sixth green and rolled gently towards the flag.

  He’ll be telling me about rhythm next, thought Bert darkly.

  ‘You don’t seem to have your rhythm right tonight, Bert,’ said Lambert. ‘I should concentrate on that, if I were you.’

  Hook looked round. There was no one in sight, for it had been after seven o’clock when Lambert had enticed him out for what he had called ‘a quiet nine holes’. He could kill the man quietly — perhaps beat him to death with his favourite 7-iron, the only club he knew he would not miss with — and be away. But experience told him that the circumstantial evidence would point strongly to him. And if he was tried by a non-golfing judge, even his plea of the mitigating circumstances of Lambert’s insufferable air of superiority on the course might not be given its proper weight. He contented himself with a glare of molten hatred at the back of his companion and trudged miserably after him.

  Lambert expostulated on the virtues of the softly hit 8-iron he had just produced before asking with an air of bafflement what had happened to Hook’s ball. ‘Out of bounds!’ growled Bert through clenched teeth. ‘Again! Bastard, bloody stupid FUCKING game!’

  Uniquely among policemen, Bert Hook had never been heard to use the f-word at work. Now he was reduced to it by a game we are regularly assured is a wonderful source of relaxation and a means of reducing tension in men of his age. Lambert shook his head sadly. ‘You’re still hitting at the ball instead of swinging,’ he said sagely. ‘Keep trying, and it will come, all of a sudden.’

  ‘Like diarrhoea. And just about as useful.’ Bert stared sourly at Lambert’s ball, refusing to be cheered even when a short putt ran round the rim of the hole and stayed out.

  But the goddess of golf changes her affiliations as readily as the most promiscuous trollop. Bert was able to play his favourite 7-iron at the short seventh, and his unbelieving eyes saw the ball roll to within a foot of the hole for a certain two. Lambert could not keep the astonishment out of his ‘Good shot!’ but Bert walked to the green with a new tread, the modest gait of a man who did these things all the time and expected no less.

  On the long eighth, John Lambert slashed his ball wildly right into the trees. ‘That was a shank!’ he said, staring down unbelievingly at his club.

  ‘Yes. It’s been threatening for some time,’ said Bert loftily. ‘You’ve been getting too close to the ball. Try watching the ball extra closely. But try to stay relaxed.’ He had to turn his head away from his opponent on the last phrase, so that the smile he could not control would not be visible.

  He won the hole, of course. And then he won the ninth, when Lambert fluffed a chip from just off the green, allowing the novice Hook to shake his head sadly and offer a little more advice. ‘You decelerated the club as you came into the ball. It’s a very common fault. Everyone does it, at times.’

  Lambert stared at him suspiciously, since it was the advice he had offered to Bert the previous week, returned to him word for word. But Bert had his back to him, returning his putter carefully to his bag after winning the hole. Incredibly.

  Lambert had lost the last three holes and they were all square after the nine holes he had proposed. ‘The light’s holding and it’s quiet. We’ll play on to thirteen,’ he said grimly.

  Bert didn’t argue. He moved swiftly to the tenth and dispatched a long, straight drive between the tunnel of trees to the distant fairway. ‘Sorry I didn’t speak, John. I was anxious not to lose my rhythm,’ he said.

  When Lambert pulled his drive savagely into the trees on the left, he thought he would maintain his dignity by refusing to sink to the lurid language of his sergeant. He moved down the fairway in silent fulmination. It was left to Hook to comment. The normally taciturn figure found it difficult to hold his peace on the golf course. ‘Stupid bloody, game, isn’t it?’ he consoled Lambert. ‘As I said earlier.’

  The sun was now well set. Lambert insisted on him holing a two-footer for the extended match in the gloom of the thirteenth green. Bert bought him a pint and discoursed to the steward on the excellence of his game and the fallibilities of his superintendent’s. He had forgotten all about the cares of the working week, he said: that was one of the advantages of this game. It could be trying at times, but you had to stay with it, keep your patience, wait for things to happen. Talent would out eventually, if you gave it free rein.

  Lambert offered a selection of monosyllables and moved rapidly to a second pint. That pain in his chest had been there again when they started. And then it had disappeared, just as Bert was becoming unbearable.

  When he got home and sat in a darkening room with the television flickering like a magic lantern in the corner, he was quiet for a long time. Then he said to Christine, ‘Your suggestion that I should introduce Bert Hook to golf. I’m not sure it was such a good idea.’

  Ten

  The ground was becoming parched. There had been no measurable rain now for sixteen days, and in these longest days of the year the sun was beginning to dry flowerbeds and brown closely mown grass.

  But it had been a still night, and the heavy dew of the early morning disguised the dryness that lay beneath it. When John Lambert walked in his garden at seven o’clock, most plants seemed still full of the lush growth of spring. It was surprising how often he found himself out here at this time in the morning when he had a puzzling case. On winter mornings, when the clouds hung low and it was scarcely light, he could hardly understand why he came to the furthest reach of the plot, except that he was conscious of a superstitious drive to take the forces of evil as far away as possible from his family, even when he was doing no more than thinking about them.

  This morning, he felt only a straightforward relief after a troubled night. He had woken up at three o’ clock with the pain in his chest again, and slept but fitfully after that. It was a Saturday, and all the world seemed asleep save him. He could hear the lambs which were now almost sheep calling invisibly through the still air from fields which must have been a mile away.

  But there was a blessed absence of even a distant hum of motor traffic, that sound which is a perpetual accompaniment to modern life for so many. He picked up a few tiny apples which had fallen from his trees with the June drop, then removed the first side-shoots from the dahlias, which had sprung up so fast in the last ten days. Then he dallied pleasantly, removing the odd dead flower and passing as slowly as he could among the roses, whose scent was sharp and clean in this earliest and best part of a summer day.

  Christine was in a housecoat in the kitchen when he dawdled his way back into the bungalow. ‘You should be resting,’ he admonished, in what had become a ritual since her heart bypass operation six months earlier.

  ‘“A normal life”, the medics said,’ she reminded him, ‘and normal has always involved ministering to your every need, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a Saturday. You should be having a lie-in. And anyway, there’s not much in the way of ministering to be done, since you cut out bacon and egg and proper milk for the cereals.’ The old grumble, which both of them had long since ceased to take seriously. He doubted if he could manage the bacon and egg and fried bread he had consumed with such relish as a young DC, even if it was presented to him now. He wondered if others conducted the prolonged
minuet of marriage with similar backings and advancings, whose Pinteresque undertones were undetected by any save the participants.

  His musings were interrupted by a phone call from the station sergeant at Oldford. ‘That student you went to see yesterday afternoon at the University of Gloucestershire, sir. Wasn’t his name Lawson?’

  ‘Jamie Lawson, yes.’ After his deliberate slowness of the last hour, Lambert was suddenly impatient.

  ‘He’s dead, sir. Just been found. Hanged himself in his room, apparently.’

  *

  Detective Inspector Chris Rushton sometimes thought the hours like this were the best of all. It was still not nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and he was alone in the Murder Room. There was ample time to digest all the information being brought in from the twenty-eight uniformed and CID officers now involved in the Upson investigation, then to assign it and cross-reference it on his computer files. The chief wouldn’t be in for a while yet, if at all; Superintendent Lambert was certain to go out to the university campus, where that student bloke who had been pushing drugs had now topped himself. Rushton made himself a big mug of coffee and sat down contentedly before his computer.

  It was while checking the house-to-house reports and the statistics from the beat cars active in the area of the Malvern Hills on the day of Upson’s death that he came up with something interesting. It showed the benefits of his cross-referencing system, because it was only when he set the information from car sightings beside that from the enquiries made on the site at the University of Gloucestershire that something interesting popped up.

  He had no great hopes from the car sightings. The period involved was not precise enough to offer anything significant. Officers had been asked to inform CID about any non-local cars seen between ten in the morning and midnight on 11 June around the minor road which ran along the western base of the Malverns. This was where Upson’s body had lain, but because the corpse had not been discovered until ten days later, it had not been possible at the outset of the investigation to be more precise about the time of death.

  It now seemed likely that Upson had not died until the late afternoon or evening, so Rushton was giving particular attention to the later sightings. The car which caught his attention was one of several which had been seen more than once in the area during the day. Most of these had been eliminated as belonging to people who were going about their normal Friday business. This one had caught a young PC’s attention because of a prominent sticker indicating support for the Dewsbury rugby league team, an unlikely slogan to glimpse in the Malverns.

  The registration number showed that the car, a three-year-old black Vauxhall Vectra, had begun life in Yorkshire. Nothing very odd in that: cars changed ownership and moved around the country. But the check with the DVLA at Swansea showed that this car had changed hands only once, and that change had been in the same town where it had originally been registered. The second and presumably present owner was a Harold Rees of Ossett, near Dewsbury, in Yorkshire.

  It was at this point that Rushton’s cross-referencing came triumphantly into its own. The information about the black Vectra was part of a mass of detail which in the old days might have overwhelmed a murder case team, causing them to miss a tiny but significant connection. But when Chris now fed in another mass of apparently unrelated information, that gathered by the officers who had been assembling the details of all Upson’s students at the University of Gloucestershire, he cross-referenced it, and found a surprising link.

  This was a first-year history student named Kerry Rees, whose home was in Ossett, near Wakefield, in Yorkshire. Her course work had been eminently satisfactory for most of the year, though it was too early for any results of the first-year examinations she had just completed. Kerry Rees had finished her programme for the year and gone back to Yorkshire.

  But arrangements had already been completed at the time of Upson’s death for Kerry to suspend her course for a year. The reason was that she was currently pregnant and did not feel she could continue to study effectively through the months of the pregnancy and those after the birth. She had refused any suggestion of a termination.

  There was no record of who the father might be.

  *

  Around the entrance to the hall of residence, a ragged line of students stood in near silence, whispering occasionally to each other, keeping a respectful distance from the glass double doors, watching the comings and goings of the vehicles and the people who had an official connection with this death.

  In the little cube of a room on the top floor which had been Jamie Lawson’s home for the last year, the Scene of Crime team had almost finished its work when a grim-faced John Lambert arrived. They had cut down the body, which lay face down on the floor, mercifully obscuring the rigid and tortured face which Lambert remembered in vivid young life on the previous afternoon.

  Sergeant Jack Johnson, veteran of many an operation such as this and Lambert’s long-time colleague at Oldford, took in his anguish at a glance. ‘You couldn’t have known it would come to this, John.’

  ‘I should have foreseen it when I spoke to him yesterday. He was upset then. I left him to stew in his own juice until his brain cleared. Thought it would bring him to his senses.’ He smiled mirthlessly at the bitter irony of that, as he stared down at the senseless form on the floor of the room. In the top branches of the ancient oak outside, unexpectedly close to them, a rook cawed harshly, as if in mockery of this tangled world of man.

  Lambert said dully, ‘One of the parents will have to do an identification. Have they been informed?’ He was going through a ritual, searching for a routine to follow in the attempt to allay his own pain.

  Johnson nodded. ‘Parent. There’s only one. His mother. The marriage broke up years ago, apparently.’

  They were silent for a moment, thinking of the pain to be brought into the life of this anonymous woman, who probably knew nothing of her son’s lifestyle here and the death it had brought him to. Lambert wondered how he could have missed the signs, how the normally sensitive Bert Hook could have failed to notice the depth of the distress that had led to this. And they had gone off to play golf, at the very time, perhaps, when… He wanted to shout that aloud, to relieve the pain of his guilt by making it public. He understood in that moment the relief which Catholics might find in the confessional.

  The civilian photographer signified that he had taken all the pictures he needed and departed quietly. Johnson walked over to supervise the man dusting the single window sill with white fingerprint powder, more to break the tension with Lambert than because his attention was needed. Lambert stared unseeing at the familiar activities going on around him, his mind back with the interview in this room on the previous day, wondering what he might have done to prevent this tragic consequence.

  If he hadn’t been in such a hurry because he was late for his meeting with Charlie Taggart he might have noticed the depths of the boy’s distress, might have appreciated the wretchedness and desperation which was closing in upon him.

  He forced himself back to the present. ‘When did he do it, Jack? Early this morning?’ He was torturing himself now, picturing the boy’s misery building through a sleepless night, until there seemed no way to end his misery save the desperate method he had adopted.

  Johnson shook his head without turning round. ‘He died last night, John. He was stone cold when we got here at eight.’

  Had he not been so preoccupied with his own distress, Lambert would have known from the clipped monosyllables that the grizzled Johnson was concealing something, waiting for it to be drawn forth by questions, as if to volunteer it would be in some way indecorous.

  ‘The police surgeon’s been?’ For the first time he could remember in his career, Lambert was speaking for the sake of it, trying desperately to get his own emotions back under control so that he could proceed rationally. He knew perfectly well that the police surgeon would already have been here. However obvious death might be, however cold this
young corpse might have been when found, death had to be confirmed with an official signature. That was the first part of the very routine he was striving to re-establish for himself.

  Johnson turned at last. ‘Yes. He’s in the room next door, as a matter of fact. I think he was planning to write a note for you.’

  Lambert looked at him for a moment, then glanced sourly at the fingerprint powder on chairs, desk, drawers and wardrobe. ‘Fat lot of good that will be. But I suppose you have to go through the motions.’

  Johnson’s face was troubled. He did not smile back. Instead, he said insistently, ‘I think you should have a word with the police surgeon, next door.’

  Lambert took a last look at the shape which had yesterday been Jamie Lawson and turned abruptly away.

  The doctor was a young man, not more than thirty. He was sitting at the student desk and contemplating his report. Lambert was surprised how hoarse his own voice sounded as he said, ‘I’m told he did this last night. Not long after I left him, then.’

  The doctor didn’t have a lot of experience, but he recognised the sound of someone who wanted to punish himself. He said formally, ‘Death certainly occurred some time before midnight, yes. Perhaps the post-mortem will give you something more precise.’

  Lambert shrugged. ‘It hardly matters with a suicide. The point is that I should have realised —’

  ‘There’s one thing you should know right away, Superintendent. This wasn’t a suicide.’

  Lambert heard himself repeating the words stupidly, as he had heard many a shocked relative do in the past. ‘Not a suicide?’ Then came a sort of relief as his brain resumed its normal mode, his mind clicked into operation like a machine that had been jammed. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Absolutely sure. That boy next door was dead when whoever did this strung him up.’

  Eleven

  The Drugs Squad has more autonomy than any other section of the police service. It needs it, for it is fighting the biggest criminal empires in the modern world, as challenging to the law and far more widespread than the American gangster networks of the twenties and thirties. When it is fighting such forces, the law needs a flexible and swift-moving army, able to use the appropriate tactics for a particular situation.