Bring Forth Your Dead (6 page)

Craven said, ‘Perhaps it was. I could check my files if you think it’s important, but—’

‘It could be very important, Mr Craven.’ Lambert looked him boldly in the eye when he interrupted, studying his reactions without any attempt at concealment. ‘But you needn’t bother with your files. Our information is that the Planning Committee received your preliminary application for outline planning permission over eighteen months ago.’

Beyond several walls, a phone rang, faint and unanswered, its note clearly audible here because the comfortable office was so unnaturally silent. Hook thought of the noisy ebullience of their reception, while they waited for a reaction from the man who had thought to deceive them. They had caught him out, in what might be no more than a rather shameful commercial contrivance, but they would behave as though it were crucial to their investigation, in case the man by his reaction proved it to be so. They had trapped him by one of the few facts they had been able to check before they came here, and he had closed the trap himself by his shoddy attempts at evasion.

All this the three of them knew and weighed, while the silence hung unbroken for a long moment. When Craven eventually spoke, he stared fixedly at the top of his desk; he might have been one of those adolescents Bert Hook grilled in the tiny CID interview rooms, who stared at the scratched table which separated them from their tormentor as they lost all their surface arrogance and confessed their tawdry misdemeanours. ‘I needed the money. The property slump caught us rather overstretched. There seemed no harm in making preliminary inquiries…’ His words petered out and he made a small, hopeless gesture of the hands. For an instant as he turned them upwards, they seemed like those of a black man, so strong was the contrast between the deep brown of the backs and the pallor of the palms.

The fish was landed now. Hook admired as he had done so many times before the skill with which Lambert gutted it. With an admission made, the Superintendent became understanding, almost conciliatory: the trick, he knew, was to keep the man talking, rather than recalcitrant or dumb with shame. As long as he communicated, they might learn more yet. ‘Obviously, Mr Craven, you understand the significance of the timing for us, just as we can appreciate the importance for you of checking out planning possibilities at that particular moment. The importance for us stems from the fact I have indicated, that it was about eighteen months ago or a little later that one or more persons began to
implement plans to kill your father. What we have now to determine is whether those two events might be connected.’

‘I don’t think they are,’ Craven still did not look up. His words carried no certainty: they had the automatic, illogical defiance of an adolescent losing an argument.

‘They may not be. It is part of our business to seek connections between facts. The solutions to murder inquiries normally emerge when we find the connections which bear on the particular death. Working as we are in this case so long after the murder, it is more than usually difficult to unearth those facts which are likely to be significant.’ He spoke like a tutor taking an undergraduate through an intricate point of theory. ‘Who else in the group of people around your father knew that you were exploring the possibilities of the site of Tall Timbers?’

Now at last Craven looked up. It was a quick, fearful glance into his questioner’s eyes, where he discovered nothing. He had no idea how much Lambert knew; having been caught out once, he opted for honesty. ‘I didn’t tell them, but they found out.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes. Planning applications are published in the small print of the local rag. I don’t know who told whom, but someone spotted it and told the others.’

‘And it wasn’t popular?’

Craven gave a smile in which there was no mirth. ‘That’s an understatement. When I came into the house for my weekly visit, all hell broke loose around me.’

‘What was your father’s reaction?’

‘Does that really matter? The old man’s dead; can’t we let him rest in peace?’ The ludicrousness of that conventional sentiment in the face of an exhumation struck him too late; he signified with a small, hopeless shrug of the shoulders that his rhetoric needed no answer.
‘Dad hated the idea that I wouldn’t take over Tall Timbers when he was gone, though I think he knew enough to suspect I never would. The thought that it might actually be demolished to make way for new building hadn’t even occurred to him. He took it badly.’

In his misery, David Craven felt a need to explain, when he might have been better to say no more. ‘Dad came from humble origins. His father was a professional cricketer—like H. G. Wells’s father,’ he added inconsequentially. ‘I believe Gran
ddad, who was dead before I was born, played with Jack Hobbs and Frank Woolley.’ For a moment, Bert Hook, a sterling club seamer himself for many a year, saw David Craven as a boy on the playing fields of some Greyfriars replica, pleading for a little vicarious glory among his peers, recounting this accident of antecedence which surfaced even now as he strove for sympathy. ‘He worked hard to educate Dad as a surveyor. Dad grew up in a terraced Victorian cottage in Bristol: his mother took in washing when times were hard during the winter. To him, Tall Timbers was a proof that he had made it in life, a guarantee of prosperity. He lived in the house long enough to grow to love it; he couldn’t understand that his son should not feel that way about it.’

‘So he was annoyed.’ Lambert pulled him gently back to the present. ‘Did he threaten to do anything about his annoyance?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Our information from Alfred Arkwright is that he planned to change his will.’

‘He did. And not in my favour. Under the terms of the new will, I believe Tall Timbers would no longer have come to me.’

It was so open an admission, and the speaker looked so wretched, that it sounded for a moment like the prelude to a full confession. But Craven said no more. He had about him now the sort of relief that sits eventually upon people who have been discovered in deceit and forced to abandon it.

If he was indeed guilty of that ancient, primitive horror, the murder of a father by his firstborn son, they were not going to hear it from his own lips.

6

It was a relief to leave Craven’s office and the raw red building which held it. It was not a persuasive advertisement for the architecture of the nineteen-nineties, being essentially a large brick box with a series of identical smaller boxes within it. Unless the sun illuminated its south face, it was difficult to know from the outside which side of the building confronted you; within it, only memory could determine for you which floor you were on. The net effect was to make you long for the ornamental excesses of those other and naughtier ‘nineties of a hundred years earlier. Lambert and Hook breathed deeply of the warm autumn air, looking with unconscious relief towards the beeches the planners had decreed should be left standing at the edge of the car park to preside over two thousand square metres of tarmac.

‘Do you think he did it?’ said Lambert when they were safely cocooned in the Vauxhall.

‘He couldn’t have. His grandfather was a county cricketer,’ said Bert Hook resolutely.

‘You think the genes are that strong? It’s a long time ago.’

Bert, having set up his chief, launched into the only verse he had ever willingly learnt by heart:

For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host,

As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, to and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

‘Written when even Jack Hobbs was a young lad. Somehow, I doubt whether in these insensitive times even clear documentary evidence of a grandfather at Lord’s would be accepted as irrefutable proof of innocence. Still, this is at least proof of sensitivity in my Sergeant, which I shall release to the tabloids in its full glory when the next bent copper hits the headlines.’

He was cheerful as he shaded his eyes against the sun. The case was beginning to acquire shape: a more appealing shape than he had anticipated it showing at this stage. He reserved judgment yet on whether David Craven was their murderer, but he had told them much—even more than he realised he had. It promised to be an intriguing case, and at this moment he had no doubt that he would meet its challenge. He hummed a little as he shaded his eyes against the low sun, which at this time of the day gilded even the most mundane Cotswold buildings with a brief glory. He had at that moment nothing but satisfaction in the thought of locking someone away for life.

It was well after five o’clock when they parked outside Oldford’s National Westminster Bank. Bank staff do not depart from home when the doors close to the public at half past three, as many uncharitable citizens still fondly believe, but at this hour only the manager was waiting to receive them. Privacy of this kind is an encouragement towards confidences; bank managers even more than solicitors choose sometimes to regard their customers’ secrets as though they were those of the confessional. But on this occasion there could be no reticence; this like other barricades must fall to murder.

George Taylor, the manager, knew it. He had given them difficulties on other occasions, even in cases of suspected fraud, but he had his records waiting for them now. Sober and a little nervous, he showed the frisson of excitement which contact with even the periphery of a murder inquiry brought to the honest citizen. ‘Both Craven’s children bank with us,’ he said. ‘So does Walter Miller, though I can’t see the relevance of his account to your investigation.’

‘Neither do I, at the moment,’ said Lambert patiently. He had almost forgotten about Edmund Craven’s old friend. ‘It may be that none of the accounts will throw up anything
of great interest to us. But we are assembling all the facts we can in the early stages of an inquiry, and the financial ones may well be important. Don’t underestimate your importance in the world, George: it grows all the time.’ Lambert knew they were going through the preliminaries of salving Taylor’s conscience about the disclosure of information about his clients: his reluctance was no more than a banker’s Pavlovian reaction, but Lambert would play out the little ritual if it did not take too long.

He played golf occasionally with George Taylor: it was one of the benefits of a small community that one had a passing or better acquaintance with many of the people one met in the course of duty. It led to a kind of trust, never mentioned and rarely betrayed. And as Oldford was not big enough to support more than two banks, he could get what DI Rushton called the financial profile of three of his four present suspects from Taylor. Unless Margaret Lewis confined herself to a building society, she would be with Barclay’s across the road; he had already set Rushton to check what he anticipated would be her unexceptional financial profile.

Taylor said, ‘If you’re agreeable, we’ll dispense with Walter Miller first, since I don’t think you’ll find much of interest there.’ He was right: the account could hardly have been more unexceptional. They looked carefully at the months before and after the murder of Edward Craven, in the hope of finding large deposits or payments. There was nothing to excite them; it was a routine chart of a well-organised retirement, with the inflow of a small war pension and a larger insurance company pension, and the outgoings of community charges, water, electricity and telephone. They could even identify clearly the deposit of exactly one thousand pounds in the week after Craven’s will was admitted to probate. Miller’s small legacy had been neither urgently required nor quickly spent. Lambert had to remind himself that a careful murderer would present himself exactly thus; it would not do to dismiss from all consideration a man they had still to see on the morrow. There are other reasons for murder as well as avarice.’

‘Angela Harrison,’ Taylor announced as he turned to his next file. After a moment’s hesitation, Bert Hook wrote the name carefully at the top of a new page: he had forgotten the married name of Edmund Craven’s daughter. George Taylor was able to help them with the interpretation of a file that at first sight looked as unexceptional as Miller’s. In his anxiety to help, to become even for a little while involved in the hunt for a murderer, he forgot all the scruples which normally guided his actions. Perhaps it flattered him that he was able to display his professional expertise in guiding them so easily through the maze of figures and pointing out the things which should intrigue them. ‘The interesting thing overall is what a modest account this is before Angela’s father died.’ He did a few swift calculations from the pages of computer print-out. ‘Until less than a year ago—to be precise, until Edmund Craven’s will was admitted to probate—the Harrisons were living on nine thousand a year or thereabouts. Not much, these days, for a family of four. They went carefully, as they had to; sometimes they were just in the red at the end of a month, but never for very long.’

Lambert considered this picture of genteel, respectable poverty, fascinated that pictures of a family he had never seen could be so vividly presented by a few pages of dull-looking figures. ‘What happens after she collects her legacy?’

‘Nothing very dramatic, but more is spent, as you might expect. There was a fairly modest holiday abroad this year: the payment was made in one instalment in June. Expenditure generally shows a considerable rise, but only from the very low base we were talking about just now. Most of Angela’s four hundred thousand pound legacy went into unit trusts and bonds; she came in to ask for advice as soon as the money was paid in to her account.’

Lambert thought of the relief years ago when he became an Inspector and they celebrated by buying shoes for all their three children at once. ‘Edmund Craven made no direct provision for his grandchildren in the will. Was he not fond of them?’

‘That I wouldn’t know, John. Our dealings with the whole family have been entirely financial, and usually conducted at a distance. Edmund could have supported his grandchildren while he was alive, of course. Small disbursements wouldn’t show up in the account. But none of the Cravens came in to see me much—except David, of course, as things grew worse.’

Lambert saw Hook look up involuntarily from his notes. He had not pressed David Craven on the details of this, since he knew he was coming straight on here. ‘George, I must tell you in confidence that the detail of David’s financial position two years to eighteen months ago might be quite vital to our inquiry.’

Taylor shrugged. ‘There is not too much to tell. Most bank managers could recount similar stories to you. David Craven saw some of the big boys in the City making fortunes from property. In the two years before 1988 even small builders were making a killing: the housing market was rising so fast that they were often able to add thirty thousand to the selling price on which they had costed by the time the houses were finished. One of our customers is now a millionaire on the strength of a single estate of twenty-eight houses he built and sold in that period. David Craven saw what was going on more clearly than most, as an architect. He decided to become a developer and land speculator himself.’

Bert Hook, who had not liked Craven, expected to be told of some dramatic dissipation or corruption when he asked, ‘But the situation you describe sounds like a licence to print money for those in on it. How did Craven come unstuck?’

Taylor smiled the wry smile of a man who has seen much of the follies of men. ‘As with any investment, timing is vital. Craven bought land at the high prices of 1988, much of it with borrowed money. Then he ran into the property slump of the years which followed. In those circumstances, the big national builders sit on their land banks and wait for things to recover. Building land has been a good investment ever since 1945, but not always as immediately as
most people think. Craven’s land wasn’t always well-chosen: he tended to gamble on planning permission, which wasn’t always forthcoming as people in the Cotswolds became more sensitive about conservation and more hostile to second homes. Anyway, he didn’t have time to wait: he was operating on borrowed money and interest rates kept rising. As things got worse, he made investments that were more and more speculative, more and more dependent on the rapid recovery of the property market that did not materialise.’

Lambert nodded. The police saw plenty of the mentality involved, though the degree of disaster varied widely. The transition from investor to speculator to gambler could be very rapid, as most followers of the turf who thought they had found a system could testify. ‘The important thing for us is the timing. Can you tell us what Craven’s situation was about eighteen months ago?’

Taylor flicked open the file. ‘In a word, desperate. His creditors were closing in. I got permission from head office to extend his overdraft, but only for a few months at most.’ He paused. He was a humane man, whatever disgruntled loan-applicants might think, and he had never been in this situation before. ‘I —I feel as though I’m slipping the noose around someone’s neck!’ he said.

Lambert smiled; he felt like a doctor applying his bedside manner. ‘Unless that’s just a metaphor, it’s a bit out of date, you know. In any case, what you’re going to tell us is probably circumstantial evidence, though it’s a popular myth that no one is ever convicted on that alone. But certainly any conviction will not be made solely upon what you are about to tell us; we shall need to prepare a much fuller case before we even charge someone.’

Thus reassured, Taylor licked his lips and said quietly, ‘Things came to a head about three months later. I had him in to see me in August with an ultimatum from head office. He wasn’t even meeting the interest on his loans.’

He pushed across a copy of the letter he had signed himself to summon Craven to a meeting. It was no more than three sentences of terse, impersonal prose. Lambert
took note only of the date: August 27th, six weeks before Edmund Craven’s death. ‘What happened at that meeting, George?’

Taylor took a deep breath in an unsuccessful attempt to steady his voice. ‘I put the situation clearly before him. Things were out of my hands now. Unless he could reduce his overdraft substantially in the next two weeks, he would be facing bankruptcy proceedings. He told me, as he had told me before, that he had substantial expectations from his father’s will. I was a little impatient, I think, because I had heard the story before and he did not seem to appreciate the urgency of the situation. I told him it might be true, but it was an uncertain, long-term situation which was no solution to his present problems.’

‘And what did he say to that?’ Lambert would not have spoken if Taylor had not dried up again. He felt his question toll like a bell; felt that he knew what must be coming as the conclusion of this tale.

Taylor said, ‘He told me that there would not be long to wait. That his father was dying. That he would be dead within weeks.’