Bring Forth Your Dead (11 page)

‘You mean that he might have planned to cut Margaret Lewis out of his will because of her son’s transgressions?’

She came abruptly out of her trance and stared at him aggressively. ‘I mean it’s a possibility, no more. You invited me to speculate about the new will.’

‘Indeed I did. Because of the nature of this particular investigation, I have to encourage speculation among all those closely concerned at this stage. I need a picture of your father’s household at that time, a feeling of the atmosphere, which in this case I can only get at second hand.’ He wondered if she would pick up the implication he had intended: that he would be asking other people to speculate about her part in all this. He would have been interested in her reaction to that thought. But she seemed intent only upon developing the thesis upon which she had embarked.

‘I may be quite wrong. I’m only offering it as a possibility. I didn’t even consider it at the time. If I had, I’d have talked to Dad on Margaret’s behalf. She couldn’t afford to lose that house.’

Lambert said very quietly, ‘In the light of that, do you think she could have been tempted to kill your father? From what we know of the method so far, you must realise that she had the best opportunity.’

She gasped at the directness of that. She had remained physically very still throughout the interview even when she had been under stress. Now for the first time her hands clasped together and she could not prevent the fingers from kneading each other. He wondered if she were being tempted to try to divert his attention away from her brother. But her reply when it came was not quite what he had expected. ‘I can’t see Margaret Lewis murdering my father. But her son had been involved in one violent crime already. And whatever faults Andrew Lewis has, he’s very fond of Margaret. If he thought his mother was being robbed of what she had been promised, he might well have done anything to put things right.’

The grey-green eyes flashed wildly at him as she tossed her brown hair back, in a gesture which seemed curiously adolescent. Not many members of the public are invited to accuse someone of murder, and it was not surprising that the moment brought a febrile excitement even to a woman with her degree of control.

Lambert was left thinking of Walter Miller’s more tangible evidence, of the picture he had given of Andrew Lewis standing aghast when he was surprised with Edmund Craven’s medicine.

12

Bert Hook was in many respects a caricature of the village bobby of popular imagination. He was rubicund of countenance, deliberate of movement, slightly overweight now in his early forties.

It was easy to see him in the mind’s eye riding a heavy black police bike around the Cotswold hamlets of the ‘fifties, controlling the high-spirited youth of an earlier era with snippets of well-chosen advice. It took only a slightly greater leap of the imagination to see him directing fouler-mouthed contemporary adolescents with equal facility.

Facts as well as fancy were available to support this image of community pillar and servant. The off-duty Hook had dominated the village greens of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire on many summer afternoons, as fearsome opening bowler, sturdy hitter and surprisingly nimble mid-wicket. Never claiming to be more than a brisk military medium, Bert had made the best batsmen in the area hurry their shots. The days of the squire might be long gone, but many a stockbroker and estate agent returned to the office on Monday morning moving carefully with the tenderness of the weekend bruises.

Hook enjoyed the idea of himself as honest yeoman. When it suited him, he would add a deliberate gravity to his bearing, becoming ponderous in speech as well as manner. The public’s notion of what is usual being normally a generation behind the reality, Bert Hook was in the public view a thoroughly conventional, even reassuring, representative of the law. It was a quality that John Lambert, who had good reason to hold a very different view of the speed of thought and judgement of his subordinate, found useful on numerous occasions. There is nothing a criminal can do which will so quickly undermine his liberty as to underestimate a CID man. Most of them know it and are careful to avoid the error, but Bert Hook fooled them more often than anyone the Superintendent had ever come across.

And in one respect Bert Hook was rare among sergeants. He was prone to give the underdog the benefit of the doubt. Most policemen think that underdogs deserve to be exactly that; and it has to be said that the evidence they come across overwhelmingly supports their view. It was the only area where Bert was occasionally unpopular with his peers, whose experience of the seamier side of human nature convinced them in their more jaundiced moments that Bert should have been a social worker rather than a detective-sergeant.

When therefore Lambert discussed Andrew Lewis with him as they journeyed to interview him in Bristol, Hook was reluctant to accept the verdict of others without his own assessment of the youth. ‘If everyone with a history of teenage motoring offences was locked up, the prisons would be even more overcrowded than at the moment,’ he said.

‘He already has a conviction for GBH,’ Lambert pointed out.

‘As an accessory, so far as I can see,’ said Hook.

Lambert grinned. He wondered how much Hook’s attitude was a reaction to Detective-Inspector Rushton, who had produced the police computer information on Margaret Lewis’s son like a magician triumphantly brandishing his final rabbit. ‘Apparently he fled in a stolen car when the local uniformed men tried to bring him in for us to question.’

Bert Hook considered this carefully, while the russet foliage flowed past the window of the Vauxhall in a steady stream. Finally he said, ‘It’s a long step from stealing cars to planning and executing a murder like this.’

‘That’s true enough, certainly. But we know he was around at the time, and that his mother thought it prudent to conceal that presence from us.’

‘Mothers tend to be over-protective when it’s not always necessary. Don’t forget she’s the only parent he has.’

Lambert, who knew that that was one more than Bert had been able to count on, did not take up that. He said, ‘Angela Harrison said he was very attached to that one parent. In her view, he might well have killed for her if her interests were being threatened.’

‘Purely hypothetical, you’d say to me, if I offered you anything like that!’ said his Sergeant indignantly.

‘Indeed I would. Interesting, though; Mrs Harrison didn’t try to implicate anyone else.’

‘Considering two of the other possibilities were herself and her own brother, that’s not very surprising,’ said Hook, with something as near to sarcasm as he thought it polite for a sergeant to risk with a superintendent.

Lambert braked to let in a driver who had been determined to overtake them even as the road narrowed, using an expression his wife had spent years eliminating from his vocabulary. ‘According to Walter Miller, he was caught with his hand in Edmund Craven’s medicine cabinet five days before the old man’s death.’

Hood paused over his reply to this. Lambert as usual had got it right from memory: Bert had checked his notes to be sure of Miller’s wording during the first stages of their journey. Eventually he said rather lamely, ‘There may be a perfectly innocent explanation of that.’

Lambert smiled, acknowledging his small victory in the argument. ‘There may be indeed, Bert. If there is, young  Andrew apparently was not prepared to volunteer it to Mr Miller or anyone else at the time.’

Bert thought of saying that they didn’t yet know how he had been asked, decided it sounded too much like that police
bête
noire
the defence counsel, and elected to change the line of discussion. He said abruptly, ‘My money’s still on David Craven.’

‘I thought it just might be. I could see him rubbing you up the wrong way—it’s no good looking hurt, Bert, you’re not yet as inscrutable as you would like to be. And long may it remain so, say I. If it cheers you up, I would have to agree that there are things which point very directly towards him as a murderer. From what we hear of his business dealings, from the bank and others as well as what he admits himself, he had been both unscrupulous and unsuccessful in the years before his father’s death. That is often a fatal combination: it leads to desperation. And both of us know by now that desperation is the one common element in a whole range of different murders.’

There was silence as each reviewed in his mind’s eye the desperation of the men and women they had seen driven to this darkest of crimes, from women and children driven to terminal violence by years of abuse, through the kaleidoscope of what the French dramatise as ‘crimes of passion’, to those killings where men have found themselves in the ultimate corner after playing for and losing big financial stakes. Was Edmund Craven’s only son going to be one to place in this last category?

Hook said, ‘It looks as though David Craven was to be the chief loser in the will that never was. He as much as admitted so himself.’

‘Yes. That will worries me. No one is admitting to more than surmise about the way the old man planned to change things, but I’m sure at least one person knew something more definite; and maybe more than one.’

‘David Craven?’

‘Possibly. Especially if the chief changes concerned him. But according to what he and everyone else says, relationships between himself and his father were strained in those last months, after the old man found that his son planned to dispose of the house. From what we have been able to piece together about the atmosphere in Tall Timbers in the weeks during which old Craven was poisoned, it seems more likely that he would discuss his plans with his daughter or Margaret Lewis.’

‘Or even Walter Miller,’ said Hook reluctantly: he did not really want to move away from his suspicions of David Craven. ‘Edmund Craven had known him longer than anyone; he was the only contemporary he had to talk to. And sometimes there are advantages in having someone to talk to about a will who is not a significant beneficiary.’

‘Detachment. Mmm. I wonder if Mr Miller was quite as detached as he gave us to believe.’

Lambert slowed the car and they watched three small rabbits starting away through the hedge on their right, wondering if they were old enough to survive the winter and its predators. Then Hook said firmly, ‘I liked him.’ He wondered if his chief’s dislike of transatlantic intrusions upon the language extended to human representatives of the United States. ‘He’s been in this country for a long time now, you know,’ he admonished, as if he were gently chiding the entrenched prejudice of the elderly.

‘Yes. He seemed only too anxious to forget the past and dwell in the present. Unusual in one of his years. I wonder what he was hiding.’ Hook recognised from experience this wilful tendency towards the arcane in his chief. He was quite clear what his reaction should be. Any tendency to play the fictional Great Detective should be actively discouraged in senior policemen—the disease was unknown below the rank of inspector.

Hook passed hastily on to a different subject. ‘I liked both the women,’ he said abruptly.

‘Ah,’ said his chief, ‘Is this that haughty, gallant, gay Lothario?” ‘

The Sergeant decided to ignore such impenetrable flippancy. ‘Everyone seems to think Margaret Lewis served the old boy well. That’s not necessarily typical of housekeepers.’

‘It’s probably true that she was diligent in her service to old Craven. But you must allow that your views are probably coloured by the many descendants of Mrs Squeers you met in your distant youth.’

‘
Not so many. And not so distant,’ returned the Sergeant steadily.

‘Mrs Lewis is personable. And highly competent, I’m sure. And deceptive, when it suits her: she conveniently left out any mention of her son in our conversation. They’re all qualities which
would be useful to someone planning a murder like this. We shall have to talk to her again in due course.’

‘Why do you think she concealed her son’s presence in the house at the time of the murder? She must have known that someone was sure to tell us about Andrew sooner or later.’ Unconsciously, Hook already knew and used the boy’s first name, as few CID men would have done in the case of a youth with a record.

They were on a straight stretch of road, so that Lambert could permit himself the small movement of the arms that had to do duty as a shoulder shrug. ‘It would be interesting to know. Perhaps no more than the instinct of a mother to protect her suspect chicken. Perhaps the wish to warn him that we were pursuing a murder investigation. Perhaps, if they had planned the murder together, the chance to confer about their stories to make sure they tallied. Perhaps we’ll have a better idea after we’ve seen her son.’

That thought seemed to close the file for the moment on Margaret Lewis. With the day almost over, the sun had made a belated appearance over the estuary of the Severn on their right. They watched it silvering the great reaches of wet sand that stretched for miles here at low tide. When the vista passed from them behind a drab green winter meadow, it was as though someone had turned off
an electric bulb. Bert Hook felt his spirits falling with the light. He said unwillingly, ‘What did you think of Angela Harrison?’

Lambert took so long to reply that his sergeant thought for a moment that he was going to be ignored. ‘That she was the centre of a happy and united family. I suppose that if I think that without seeing either her husband or her
children, she must be a pretty strong personality. All the signs are that she was also a good daughter to Edmund Craven in trying circumstances. Other people say so: that’s always interesting when someone has inherited money, because that’s when jealousy tends to take over and people find faults they never saw before.’

‘You liked her too, then.’ Hook made it a statement, not a question: he was still professionally sensitive about the way he had been picked up about his liking for the two women.

‘Yes, I did. But she lied to us on at least one occasion. And I’m afraid she wouldn’t be the first admirable person to commit murder. Certainly not the first likeable one: I think you and I would probably have quite liked Crippen and one or two others.’

They were running into the town now. The last two of a ragged crowd of schoolboys newly released from education scampered belatedly across the zebra crossing behind their fellows and offered a fleeting V-sign to the occupants of the aging Vauxhall. Hook, attempting a lofty indifference which was difficult from a level below the provocation, wished that his chief would at least occasionally use a police vehicle with the appropriate markings of authority. He said dolefully, ‘I wish it wasn’t all so long ago. I feel I can’t be certain of anything about anyone yet. It’s a murky pool.’

As they drove into the police station car park, Lambert was still toying with the conventional metaphor. ‘A pool into which a murderer threw a stone. The ripples are still moving out from it, even at this stage. We’ve caught a few of them: we must trace them back to their centre.’

They went slowly into the big modern building to meet their fifth suspect.