An Academic Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘But — but I didn’t…’ The words wouldn’t come as Simon’s head reeled. In this world, even a denial that he had killed the boy might be taken as weakness, not strength.

  And now, when he most wanted to be interrupted, Minter calmly watched him and said nothing, as if he saw into his very soul and enjoyed the tumult there. Simon’s racing brain wondered again whether Minter had been sent to kill him, whether he would be swiftly eliminated here, in this quiet shop which was the front for his criminal activities, and his body not discovered until the next morning. There would be an awful irony about the building which had been used to hide the real source of his income being used now to hide his body.

  When Minter spoke at last, his ice-cool words cut into Simon’s racing thoughts. They brought a kind of reassurance, as if the man had seen these thoughts and been irritated that they should be so far from the mark. ‘I’m a messenger today, that’s all. That’s not my real work, but I’m happy to carry the occasional message.’

  Simon forced himself to look for a moment into the dark pupils which seemed to see so much. The man was little older than he was, yet he felt a world of experience away. Simon wanted to assure him that he knew what his real work was, to recognise the standing that a professional killer should have. Instead, he could only stutter, ‘Yes, I see. And — and what is your message?’

  Minter studied him for a moment. He was as motionless as marble, but Simon could see the vein in his temple, as though it had been carved there as an exercise by a master sculptor. ‘You’re finished, Mr Kennedy. Get out while you can. Destroy all the evidence that you were ever connected with the trade. That is the message your masters required me to deliver.’

  He had spoken throughout of ‘your’ not ‘our’ masters, Simon thought inconsequentially. As if he was asserting his position as a man on the outside. A man who sold his services but could not be permanently bought. Successful murder brought its own cache, its own massive self-assurance. Simon said dully, ‘But I haven’t done anything. It’s not my fault that —’

  ‘It’s your fault that the police are fishing around at the university. Your fault that your masters are having to close down the operation there.’ Minter was suddenly impatient with the naivety of this pretender to criminal rank.

  ‘But — but it wasn’t me who killed Jamie Lawson.’

  ‘So you say. It doesn’t really matter.’ Minter had delivered his message and was anxious to be away. Small talk wasn’t his way. Neither was explaining himself or others to the small fry on the edge of the criminal world. He wasn’t used to being used as a messenger and he didn’t like it. But he knew that the men at the top of the pile would want to know whether Kennedy had accepted this. The man had no alternative, but that didn’t seem to have dawned on him yet.

  Simon saw himself reduced to penury, flung from his promising position on the ladder of crime to the hard ground beneath. Panic took over as the full implications of this visit belatedly hit him. ‘This isn’t fair. We’re better with Lawson out of the way, anyway. He was a security risk to the operation and —’

  ‘Not your decision. Not even one of your pushers. You should have referred upwards, let the right people decide about things like that.’ Patience was a quality not normally required of Minter; it was wearing dangerously thin.

  ‘But I didn’t —’

  ‘That’s it, then. Find yourself something else to do.’ Minter stood up, moved away a little from Kennedy, but did not take his eyes off him. It was a habit of his trade and it stayed with him, even though he knew this man was no danger to him.

  ‘But I can’t! My whole lifestyle is dependent on the network I’ve developed round here. I’ve been living up to it. There’ll be more business next year, once this affair has blown over. We’re developing the distribution networks in Cheltenham and Gloucester now. And the new university’s going to grow every year — and there’s three months before we get busy with the new intake. I can recruit a whole new network of pushers, if that’s what’s needed. Everyone’s going to forget about this little hiccup if we lie low for a while. By October —’

  ‘By October, you’ll be history, Kennedy!’ It was the first time Minter had raised his voice, and there was a new, unmistakably vicious note in it.

  ‘But you don’t understand! Surely I deserve —’

  ‘You deserve nothing, Kennedy. You don’t get second chances, in this business.’

  Simon knew it was over. But the panic was still upon him, making him foolish, forcing him to make appeals to this unrelenting man, who he knew in any case could not reprieve him, since he was merely a messenger. ‘But what am I to do? My whole life for the last three years has been —’

  Minter looked round the dingy shop, looked beyond Kennedy to the thin row of suits and dresses in their polythene covers, waiting to be collected by the public. ‘Your affair, not mine, chum. Develop your dry-cleaning business, I should think.’ He sounded as if he thought that quite a reasonable joke, but he did not smile. That was not his way.

  ‘But they surely can’t think… Not for a minor —’

  ‘Death is never minor. That is why some people are paid good sums to make sure it’s achieved properly.’

  Minter turned at the door, and to Simon’s inflamed imagination, he had something of the devil about him now. ‘Don’t even think of endangering the security of the operation, will you? Your death would be much more efficient than Lawson’s if you did.’

  Simon Kennedy found himself unable to move for long minutes after Minter had left him. The murder of Jamie Lawson, like the earlier one of Matthew Upson, had seemed a logical development at the time, bringing a kind of release for him. He had not reckoned on this reaction from higher up the organisation.

  *

  An hour after Minter had concluded his brief and telling visit to Simon Kennedy, Superintendent Lambert and DS Hook joined DI Rushton for an exchange of views at Oldford CID.

  The summer sky was darkening quickly as heavy black clouds built in the west. There would be a storm before morning, probably well before midnight. At quarter past seven on a Monday evening the Murder Room was quiet, which was one reason why Lambert had chosen this time. He found himself suddenly exhausted after the drive back from Yorkshire, another reminder of advancing years. One of his great strengths as a young detective had been that he never felt fatigue. He had been renowned for his spartan endurance of all kinds of weather and all kinds of hours; now he moved gingerly, fearful of that sharp stab of pain in his chest which was the reminder of his mortality. His armchair at home and his king-sized double bed seemed suddenly enormously attractive.

  Rushton had the results of the post-mortem examination of Jamie Lawson’s body. The young man had been garrotted with a rope some ten millimetres in diameter, which had then been attached to a beam to make it look as if he had hanged himself. The angle and nature of the wounds in the neck indicated that he had clearly been dead before he was attached to the beam.

  ‘So he was taken from behind in his own room, presumably by someone who had come there for that specific purpose, since he seems to have brought the rope with him.’

  There was silence for a moment as the three of them pictured the scene in that small student room, late on Friday night in an almost residential block. Then, as if to anticipate the inevitable question, Rushton added quietly, ‘The few students still resident in the hostel and the site warden have now all been questioned. Not many of them were around on Friday evening, before eleven o’clock: it’s a night when most people are out enjoying themselves, not studying in their rooms. No one saw a stranger on Lawson’s floor; for that matter, no one saw anyone at all, stranger or friend. The killer chose his time well.’

  Lambert sighed. It wasn’t surprising. Even when they had visited the student accommodation blocks in broad daylight on Saturday morning, they had carried the air of a site moving from full occupation into vacation. He said, ‘You said “he”. Can we at least rule out a woman from our susp
icions?’

  Rushton shook his head. ‘It would have been perfectly possible for a woman to kill by the method used, especially as it seems the boy was taken unawares. And Forensics point out that if the rope was thrown over the beam to haul up the corpse, as the scratches in the dust indicate it was, a woman could have used the leverage to haul the body into the position in which it was found.’

  Hook looked at Lambert sharply: he hadn’t even considered a woman for the murder. ‘You’re thinking of Clare Booth?’

  Lambert said with a touch of irritation, ‘I’m not thinking of anyone. I was just trying to eliminate half the people in the country from the investigation. But all right, Bert, yes. We’ve not been able to clear Clare Booth of Upson’s murder yet, and you felt yourself that the woman was holding something back when we saw her.’

  Bert thought of that long-limbed, attractive woman, of her neat cottage, so attractively furnished with antiques, of the handsome Burmese cat, Henry, who had settled on his lap and purred so contentedly. It seemed an unlikely setting for a murderess, for someone who had mercilessly garrotted a hapless student. He said reluctantly, ‘Clare Booth knows her way around the university site, I suppose. She’d know when there wouldn’t be many students around to see her.’

  Rushton pressed four keys on the keyboard of his computer, brought up a different file and a new page of information. ‘She’s been questioned about her whereabouts on Friday night, like all the others we have in the frame for Upson’s murder. She has no satisfactory alibi. She says she was at home watching the telly and reading. There is no one available to confirm that. Apparently a neighbour saw the light on in her sitting room, but she could easily have left it on when she went out.’ He turned back to Lambert, pleased to have been able to demonstrate the efficiency of his information storage system.

  Hook said, ‘But what motive could she possibly have for killing Jamie Lawson?’

  ‘Maybe he knew something about the first murder that she didn’t want him to reveal. Perhaps she found out we were going to see him on the following morning and decided she had to shut his mouth.’ Rushton looked almost apologetic as he said it, more because of the melodramatic turn of phrase than for the idea itself.

  Lambert shook his head wearily. ‘We don’t even know that the two murders are connected yet. It just seems probable, with so many of the people we have questioned knowing both victims. But we may be looking for two quite separate killers.’

  Rushton said, ‘I can’t think that Lawson’s killing isn’t connected with drugs. He’d been exposed as a supplier, and you were about to question him in detail on the Saturday morning. Someone stepped in to prevent him talking to you.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘In the light of the evidence we have, that’s certainly the likeliest explanation. All I’m saying is that until we know that for certain, we mustn’t close our minds to other possibilities.’

  There was often a tension between Bert Hook, who had years ago refused promotion to the rank of inspector and obstinately remained a detective sergeant, and the more orthodox Chris Rushton, who was determined to rise as high as possible in the service. Bert now welcomed the chance to agree with the younger man. ‘I can’t think that these two killings aren’t connected. And if they are, the connection must surely be drugs in some way. Upson was supplying drugs, and making big money from it. One of his pushers was Lawson. I think someone higher up the scale has had both of them killed. Upson for a reason we haven’t yet discovered — possibly just rivalry within the organisation, or a feeling he was getting too big for his boots. Lawson because he was likely to tell us stuff they didn’t want revealed.’

  The three of them were silent, gazing at the almost hypnotic monitor screen of Rushton’s computer as it stared its information at them. What Hook had said was perfectly logical, overwhelmingly the most likely scenario. But it depressed them more than any other possible solution. The drugs industry, with its deployment of contract killers to eliminate its victims, was the least likely source to yield them an arrest. The vast majority of unsolved murders in modern Britain are gangland killings, many of them performed coldly and efficiently by these hired hands whose business is swift, anonymous death.

  As if he sought to dismiss their gloom by changing the subject, Rushton said, ‘What about the man you saw today? This Harold Rees. Were you able to eliminate him from the case?’ He pressed more buttons, bringing up the page headed by the ex-miner’s name.

  Hook looked expectantly at Lambert, who shook his head and said, ‘No. Rees remains in the frame. He’s the very opposite in most respects of the other possibility we’ve just been thinking about, the contract killer. Emotional, not planning anything very carefully, but capable of the passionate rage which is the key factor in a lot of killings. Especially if he thought he was protecting or avenging his only daughter.’

  Lambert frowned, thinking of his own daughters, of the things he might have done in the heat of passion if he thought they had been wronged, if someone had attacked them, raped them. He would have been more instinctive, more violent in his reaction, even than in defence of his wife, he thought. The father-daughter relationship, growing from when you dandled a tiny, helpless bundle on your knees, defied analysis. It had seemed particularly powerful in Rees. And he had only one daughter.

  Lambert felt a need to justify himself with facts, with something more analytical than his thoughts on the man’s emotional make-up. So he added, ‘On his own admission, Harold Rees was wandering around the area where Matthew Upson was killed for most of the day on which he died. He was in his car and alone for most of that day. He says that Upson failed to meet him in Ledbury, as arranged, and that when he went to the university site, he couldn’t find him. But both Charlie Taggart and Jamie Lawson saw Upson at the university on that afternoon. If Rees was as determined to find him as he says he was, it seems odd that he didn’t locate him. Rees could well have found him, had some kind of row with him, taken him to the Malverns in his car, and killed him there. He wouldn’t have needed a weapon, because we know Upson was killed with his own pistol.’

  Hook frowned. He had liked the blunt, clumsy Harold Rees and the family they had visited in that tight little stone house in Yorkshire. But he knew that not all murderers were contemptible. Harold Rees was the kind of man who would commit a single, awful, violent attack in the heat of emotion and perpetrate no other crime in his life. There were several men like that serving lengthy custodial sentences in the prisons of the land. He said, ‘But can we connect him with the killing of Jamie Lawson two weeks later?’

  Lambert smiled at Hook’s earnestness, following his train of thought in wanting to defend that likeable bear of a man they had seen earlier in the day. ‘Almost certainly not. But as we agreed earlier, the two deaths may not be directly connected. It’s possible that Upson’s death merely set off a train of events, probably in the drugs world, which later necessitated the murder of Jamie Lawson.’

  Rushton, who had not seen any of the suspects and was thus not entrammelled by his own reactions to them, said suddenly, ‘What about the girl herself? Kerry Rees.’

  Lambert considered this. ‘The wronged lover, the girl left pregnant and alone by the man she thought was going to divorce his wife and marry her? I doubt it, in this case. We all know it’s happened before, and assuming the murder was committed in the hours after Upson was last seen by Taggart and Jamie Lawson, it’s just possible she had the opportunity. She says she was out with friends in the evening, and we’ve checked that she was: her fellow students confirm that she was with them from seven o’clock onwards.’

  He smiled at Rushton, who had turned up just that information on his computer and was surprised that John Lambert, with the wealth of information any case like this threw up, could remember the detail so accurately. ‘Kerry Rees could have taken Upson out to the Malverns and killed him and been back with her friends by seven, but it seems highly unlikely. She has a driving licence, but no car of her own. She’d have neede
d to borrow a vehicle to get him there.’

  Rushton said with a little spurt of excitement, ‘She could have done it with her father. He was down here all that day with his car, as you said.’

  Lambert shook his head. ‘She was in an exam that afternoon. And if Harold Rees killed Upson, it was to avenge his daughter, or in a fit of rage at the man’s refusal to take her seriously. He wouldn’t have involved Kerry in any way in a violent crime: he’s far too protective of her.’

  Rushton nodded reluctantly. He was loath to accept anything that was based on an assessment of character rather than solid fact, but the chief was far better than he was at assessing such things, and though Lambert would have rejected the idea himself as unscientific, he had a good record of intuitive deduction, when facts were scarce. Chris said, ‘What about the wife? She went out of her way to tell us how much she hated her husband.’

  Lambert pursed his lips, trying not to sound pedantic as he said, ‘She seems to have had nothing but contempt for him — that’s not quite the same thing as hatred. But she’s in the clear from the time when Upson was last seen by Taggart and Lawson until midnight on that Friday. Unless he wasn’t killed until the next day, it seems that we have to rule Liz Upson out. And if she wasn’t involved in her husband’s killing, it’s difficult to connect her with Jamie Lawson’s death. There’s no evidence that she’d ever met the lad.’

  Rushton continued his mental crossing off of possibilities. ‘What about the last person to have seen the deceased alive?’ He spoke the phrase as if quoting from a manual, and it is true of course that the last person known to have been with a murder victim always arouses police interest and has to be eliminated from suspicion.

  ‘Well, the last person we know of seems to be Jamie Lawson, who’s now dead himself. Immediately after Upson had left Charlie Taggart.’ Lambert smiled a little at the recollection of the pallid face beneath the black, undisciplined eyebrows, as Taggart struggled with a hangover at the time of their first meeting in the deserted Senior Common Room. ‘Nothing to connect Taggart with either of the deaths. Other members of staff have confirmed that he was a friend of Matthew Upson’s. He seems to have been just that. Possibly, as he told us, they weren’t quite as close in the last couple of years as they’d once been, but no one knows of any serious disagreement between the two of them.’