An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t know anything about this. The first thing I knew was when I heard it on Severn Radio yesterday.’

  Lambert pursed his lips, allowing the silence to press in further on the clearly alarmed Kennedy. Again there was a small child’s cry from the rear of the building. ‘Be a pity if you didn’t see anything of those children until they were adults — and even then, they wouldn’t want to know you when you came out.’ He decided they had got as far as they were going to get by bluff, which was all he had really been able to use. He was sure that this man had been supplying drugs to Lawson, as the Drugs Squad superintendent had told him, but even of that, they had no tangible proof as yet. He stood up. ‘Get yourself a lawyer, Mr Kennedy, and fast. You’re in deep trouble. One of your own, not one of Keith Sugden’s. You need someone who will tell you what’s the best course of action for you. And he’ll tell you what you already know: your best policy is to make a clean breast of things and get out as lightly as you can.’

  The clearly apprehensive Kennedy stuttered a repetition of his innocence. As Lambert left the room, he made a belated attempt to establish some sort of rapport with Bert Hook. ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before, Sergeant. I think I know where now… Did you used to go into schools to talk to adolescents?’

  Bert looked at him. ‘I used to talk to youngsters about the dangers of drugs, yes. About twelve years ago. I probably spoke to you. Pity you didn’t listen.’ He followed Lambert to the front door. Then, as his chief stepped off the single step and moved back to the car, Hook turned back to the pale face and the too-revealing brown eyes. ‘If you killed Jamie Lawson, we’ll be back to arrest you. If you didn’t and you survive this, get out of this game, lad. We’ll get you in the end. And if we don’t, the likes of Keith Sugden will. You’re not hard enough for them: once he finds that out, he’ll eliminate you, like a man swatting a fly. Get out while you can!’

  Simon Kennedy attempted a smile of contempt at the puniness of the CID before he shut the oak front door. It was wasted, because neither of the officers looked at him again.

  He went back into the empty room where he had spoken to them and slumped into his chair. Twenty minutes earlier, the murder of Jamie Lawson had seemed like the solution to a problem. Now, it seemed to be opening the trapdoor to a dark void beneath him. He sat for a long time with his head in his hands.

  Twelve

  The doctor was young. She looked about eighteen to Lambert’s jaded eye, but he knew she must be at least twenty-four. He had asked for the earliest possible appointment and said any doctor would do. So it was his own fault that he was stripping off his clothes at eight o’clock in a surgery which was only just warming up.

  The girl did not make any conversation whilst he was behind the screen. In a moment he stood awkwardly before her, stripped to the waist, trying not to think how much younger she looked than either of his own daughters. He flinched and giggled nervously at the coldness of her stethoscope as she sounded his chest and back; her serious air, which made him wonder how often she had done this before, how many other ageing bodies she had observed in their decline.

  ‘Breathe in and hold it, please,’ she said sharply, and he took the deepest breath he could, straining like a schoolboy to expand the chest beneath these slim, asexual fingers.

  She tapped his chest and his back and listened to her stethoscope, asked him questions about his diet, nodded her approval when he said he had given up smoking ten years and more ago. She took his blood pressure and muttered that it was satisfactory, almost as if that was a disappointment to her.

  Then she asked for a lot of detail about the severity of the pain and the exact times when it had occurred. She asked if his job involved him in a lot of stress and whether he sat behind a desk all day: he said no to both and she nodded several times. Then she looked at him with her head on one side for a second, like a bird assessing a not very attractive worm. He was torn between admiration of her thoroughness and a nagging fear that she might already be certain that this was something serious.

  John Lambert wasn’t used to being ill. It was a long time since he had presented himself to any doctor, and he realised that he had unconsciously been expecting some reassuring, dark-suited man of at least his own age. When she finally allowed him to get dressed, he fell to wondering whether this pretty, serious girl was nerving herself to tell him something awful when he emerged from behind the screen. The thought meant that he had difficulty fastening the buttons of his shirt.

  The doctor was writing at her desk when he emerged fully clothed and sat down on the chair opposite her. This was what people must feel like when he interviewed them, he thought, as he speculated nervously about what would come next. She had put on a pair of glasses with small round lenses to write, but they didn’t make her look any older. He waited a second or two, watching the small hand scribbling furiously. Almost against his will, he said anxiously, ‘I expect it’s nothing serious. Bit of a waste of your time really, but my wife said I should come and have it checked out, you see!’

  She put down her pen carefully, like a sixth-former finishing an exam, and gave him the first real smile she had allowed herself since he came into the room. ‘Your wife was quite right, Mr Lambert. Persistent chest pain should never be ignored. You seem to be in generally good health, for a man of your age.’ She made him sound like a senior citizen, he thought. He realised then that she was speaking slowly and clearly, like a woman making sure she got through to a geriatric. ‘I’ll make arrangements for an ECG at the hospital. You haven’t had an electro-cardiac examination before, have you?’

  ‘No. Just routine police health checks. They’ve always said that I was in rude health.’ Again that nervous giggle was out before he could suppress it.

  ‘There isn’t a long delay on ECGs. They’ll call you in the next few days, I should think. I’ve marked it as urgent.’

  Urgent! He must be at serious risk, if he was being rushed through the National Health Service system like this! He’d be in intensive care by weekend. Rushed off for a bypass operation. For a heart transplant, maybe. If it wasn’t already too late for that.

  He became aware that this attractive, unlined angel of death had taken her glasses off, was standing smiling behind the desk which looked so much too big for her, waiting to dismiss him. ‘Just routine, Mr Lambert. Nothing serious, in all probability, as you say. But it’s always as well to have these things checked out.’

  He walked carefully past the rows of curious eyes in the waiting room, installed himself into the driving seat of his car with elaborate care. He didn’t want that pain coming on again.

  *

  Four hours later, Lambert got out of the car and levered himself painfully upright after the long drive to Yorkshire.

  ‘You look like an arthritic heron,’ said Bert Hook, watching his passenger easing his long legs cautiously back into movement.

  ‘And when did you last see an arthritic heron?’ said Lambert grumpily. ‘No respect for rank, that’s the trouble with the modern police force! Anyway, you hardly look like the lithe young fast bowler who used to frighten batsmen around the Minor Counties circuit.’

  ‘That’s why I’m reduced to golf,’ returned Bert with feeling. ‘Bloody stupid game for geriatrics, golf is!’

  ‘People like Tiger Woods, you mean?’

  They looked around them, taking in their surroundings with the automatic observation of policemen, having acquired the habit twenty years and more earlier on the beat. This was a very different world from the one they had visited on the previous evening to interview Simon Kennedy.

  There were rows of solid houses in smoke-blackened stone, and even the newer terraces and semi-detached brick houses were crammed close together. Perhaps on the outskirts of the town there were isolated examples of spacious modern residences like Kennedy’s mock-Tudor detached house, but if so they were well away from the spot where they stood, which was within half a mile of the centre of the small town. Here
there was still the odd mill chimney, probably no longer functional, which bespoke the older industrial heritage of wool, and the days when the workers had perforce to live close to the gates of the factories and mills which dominated their lives.

  The Rees house was one of a row of these older stone houses. It was not one of the humblest, for it had a tiny front garden, which blazed with busy Lizzies. No one disturbed the neat green curtains at the windows, but someone must have noted their arrival, for the blue-painted front door with its brass knocker was opened before they could knock. A grey-haired woman in a pinafore said, ‘I’m glad you’re not in uniform; they talk about visits from policemen, around here. You’d best come in. Dad’s waiting for you in the parlour.’

  ‘Dad’ proved to be her husband, Harold Rees, the owner of the three-year-old black Vauxhall Vectra which had been seen twice around the western base of the Malverns on the day when Matthew Upson had been killed there. He was a heavy, stocky man, dark skinned and dark haired, a retired miner who somehow looked as though he had adapted to life beneath the ground.

  It was his wife who introduced him as a retired miner, and he dismissed her after the minimum of introductory pleasantries. He looked after her as she shut the door carefully and shook his head. ‘Redundant, not retired,’ he said shortly, as he motioned to the two easy chairs in the crowded, comfortable room. ‘Shoved out, ten years ago. I was. There’s no pits left round here now. Been shut ten years and more. Most of ’em didn’t even put up a fight. Put money in some people’s hands and they lose their brains. Those youngsters saw a few thousands in redundancy money and didn’t look more than six months ahead. Some of them are still without work.’

  Each successive statement was delivered like an accusation. He stumped stiffly to the sofa opposite them and sat down heavily, his left leg held out awkward and straight before him. Catching Hook’s glance, drawn automatically to that limb, he said with more pride than resentment, ‘Pit accident, 1981. We were living over at Barnsley, then. They gave me a job on the surface and a couple of thousand compensation. I’d have been better being libelled than crippled, wouldn’t I? Leastways, I would if I’d been Jeffrey bloody Archer!’

  Somehow, they got the impression that Harold Rees might not be a Conservative voter. Lambert said, ‘You have a daughter, Kerry Rees? Student at the University of Gloucestershire?’

  ‘Ay, what if I have?’

  ‘You were in that area, I believe, on Friday the eleventh of June.’

  A pause, then, ‘Aye. That was the day.’

  ‘Will you tell us why you were there, please?’

  ‘That’s my business. Private business.’

  ‘Not any more it isn’t, Mr Rees. We’re here in connection with a murder investigation. There can’t be any private business, when it becomes involved in our enquiries.’

  Rees glared at them from beneath his heavy black eyebrows: despite the fact that he must have been over sixty, he reminded Lambert with his aggressive jutting of the head and his bristling demeanour of drawings of nineteenth-century barefist pugilists, the men for whom the Queensberry Rules had eventually been invented. But he did not reject their argument. Instead, he said, ‘It’s that bugger Upson, isn’t it? The one who’s been murdered. I read about it. Well, serves the bugger right, as far as I’m concerned! I’d like to have killed him myself.’

  ‘But you’re saying you didn’t?’

  ‘I’ve said nowt yet, have I? But seeing as how you seem to be asking, no, I didn’t. Might have, though, if I’d got hold of the bugger on that Friday.’

  ‘Perhaps you can see, then, why we have to ask you to account for yourself. Matthew Upson died on that Friday. And your car was seen in the area.’

  The broad forehead furrowed in a deep frown. ‘Nay, you can’t have me for that. He died a lot later’n that Friday. A week at least — perhaps more’n a week.’

  ‘No, Mr Rees. His body was not discovered until ten days after his death. But we now know that he died on the day you were seen in the area. He died, in fact, very near the spot where your car was seen on two occasions.’

  Rees stared at them for a moment as the implications of this for him sank in. Then he said inconsequentially, ‘I know that area quite well. My father was Welsh, you see. Moved from the Rhondda to the Yorkshire coalfield when I was a lad, didn’t he? Thought the prospects were better up here.’ He smiled sourly at the bitter irony of that thought now.

  ‘Why were you in the Malverns on that day, Mr Rees?’

  ‘Stopped there in the morning to think, didn’t I? I’d driven nigh on two hundred miles. And I went into Malvern for a bit of lunch. Not that I wanted much, with what I had on my mind. But I remembered the town from years ago, see? I knew it when I was a lad, and I took Rosemary for a holiday there, years ago. Before our Kerry was born, that was.’ For a second or two, his dark eyes glistened with the happiness of a time long gone.

  Bert Hook looked up from his notes and said quietly, ‘We know about Kerry, Mr Rees — about her condition. I mean.’

  It was the right phrase to use with Harold Rees, thought Lambert. Other, more aggressive coppers would have used some phrase like ‘in the club’ and inflamed this old-fashioned man with their coarseness about his only daughter. But Bert’s carefully chosen and rather antiquated phrase hit the right note for Rees. He looked at Hook’s comfortable, concerned face and nodded. ‘It was him I was down there to see. I expect you know that, too.’

  Lambert smiled. ‘No, Mr Rees, we didn’t. But that’s what we’re here to find out about. Tell us, please.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. I had an appointment to see him at one o’clock, in the Red Lion at Ledbury.’

  ‘Who made this arrangement?’

  ‘He did. He said it would be better if we met somewhere away from the university site. Too bloody right it would!’ Rees had the air of a man who had been baulked of his prey by the man’s untimely death. But as with that other and very different suspect, Liz Upson, they had to take into account that his open contempt for the man might now seem the best front for a murderer. This solid, physical man, who seemed to exude a potential for violence, could hardly have simulated any liking for the man he had so patently loathed.

  Lambert said, ‘Matthew Upson was the father of your daughter’s child, wasn’t he, Mr Rees?’

  ‘Aye. And I wanted to know what he were going to do about it, didn’t I? You don’t put a girl up the duff and walk away from it.’ He spat the coarse phrase that he would have objected to on other lips as part of his contempt for the man who had wronged his daughter.

  ‘And what did he have to say for himself?’

  ‘Bugger all. He never turned up.’

  ‘So what did you do then?’

  Harold Rees looked hard into Lambert’s lined, observant face, wondering how much those grey eyes already knew of his movements on that day. Then he said impatiently, ‘I waited until two. When he hadn’t shown up then, I went to the university, didn’t I? Well, he’d had time enough to find me, if he’d wanted to. Found where his room was, when I’d asked around a bit. He wasn’t there either.’

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘I asked a few people, but no one seemed to know where he might be. The students were all on examinations, and there weren’t many lecturers about. I’d have gone to his home address, but I didn’t have that. I think I drove around a bit, then went back to Ledbury and the Red Lion, to see if they’d seen anything of him. They hadn’t.’

  ‘You didn’t try to see your daughter?’

  He shook his heavy head. ‘No. Kerry was on exams that afternoon. That’s why I’d chosen that day to meet her bloody tutor. She didn’t know anything about it, at the time.’ There was a sudden urge to protect his daughter, as if she might be contaminated by any suspicion that fell on him.

  ‘But she knows now?’

  He nodded. His involuntary glance at the ceiling told them that the girl was upstairs in the house.

  Lambert regarded hi
m steadily for a moment. ‘Mr Rees, it seems that Matthew Upson was on the university site that afternoon, but rather later than when you were looking for him. One of his students saw him at around three forty-five on that day, and a fellow tutor saw him briefly just before that.’

  ‘Pity I didn’t wait, then. I never saw the bugger.’

  ‘Mr Rees, did you in fact see him and take him out from there to the place where he was killed?’

  ‘No. Course I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you meet him eventually in the Red Lion at Ledbury — or anywhere else for that matter — and take him to the isolated spot on the Malverns where he died?’

  ‘No. I’ve told you I didn’t. I don’t even know where he died.’

  ‘But you’ve already said you know the area well.’

  ‘Not that well. And what would I have killed him with? I don’t have a gun.’

  ‘You remember how he was killed, then?’

  ‘The newspapers said. And the television. And I was interested. I’m not going to forget how that bugger died, am I?’

  ‘Obviously not. As you have said, you had good enough reason to wish him dead. Did you pull the trigger on that pistol, Mr Rees?’

  ‘No. I told you. I don’t have any pistol.’ Rees stared defiantly into those grey eyes, which seemed to him to be looking into his very soul.

  ‘It seems that Matthew Upson was killed by his own pistol, Mr Rees. Possibly drawn in self-protection and then turned upon him by some assailant.’

  Harold Rees was not without imagination. He saw the scene put before him all too vividly. The two men struggling violently among the waist-high bracken of the Malvern slopes, the grunting of effort on both sides, the sudden violence of the shot, and the silence which crept back into the rural scene as one man lay dead upon the ground. For the first time since they had sat down, he found it difficult to breath. The old trouble was with him, the coal-dust rattling in his lungs, as he said, ‘I didn’t do it. I might have done, if I’d got my hands on him and he’d tried to laugh off what he’d done with Kerry. But I didn’t.’