Dead on Course (19 page)

‘
Expect away,’ said Hook sourly. ‘I look forward to the day when you will cease to give me your selection of “wise saws and modern instances”, but I suppose I shall be equally disappointed.’

‘
I hope all this education isn’t going to make you uppity with your elders and betters.’ Lambert felt suddenly cheered by the familiarity of his surroundings; trundling the old Vauxhall through the edge of the Cotswolds on a late spring morning with Bert Hook at his side, it seemed that they could not be as far from a solution as he had felt when he rose an hour earlier. There had been a sharp shower just after dawn, but the sun was already climbing against a clear sky and the hawthorn seemed new-washed for their inspection. Nothing evil could triumph on a day like this.

It was a sentimental view, of course: an illusion which later events would comprehensively shatter.

*

The detective as individual superman is largely a creation of fiction.

Lambert would be aware by the end of the morning that his team had unearthed at least as much as he had about the participants in the drama that was unfolding at Wye Castle Golf and Country Club. Each man and woman knew the job assigned to them; co-ordinating their discoveries, which was the purpose of this meeting, was a key process in the conduct of a murder inquiry. Each year, the capacity of a Superintendent to act as an intelligent maverick was a little diminished, his importance as a leader of a team a little increased.

In the Murder Room, DI Rushton had already set out the chairs for their meeting. In front of each seat, there were several sheets of blank paper on the edge of the table. For all the world as if they were attending a conference about selling paint, not catching criminals, thought Bert Hook.

The patient accumulation and organisation of material by a large group of officers becomes ever more important as technology advances. The importance of routine police work was nowhere better illustrated than in their first subject of discussion that morning. Lambert said, speaking like a committee chairman, ‘We’ll go through each of our suspects in turn, I think, feeding in the forensic and other evidence as we go along. I’ve now interviewed all the people in the golfing party of which Harrington was a member, following up the initial statements they gave to members of this team. I have a feeling we need to add one name to these suspects: that of Marie Harrington, the victim’s widow. I spoke to her, as most of you know, when she turned up and insisted on identifying the body, but I haven’t conducted any formal interview with her, and I don’t think anyone else has.’ He looked around the table; heads shook in unison.

Rushton said,
‘We have the report from the CID in Surrey of her movements on the night of the murder. She was at a dinner with friends, which broke up at about ten-thirty. She had her own car, so that they can’t be sure of her moments after that. But she indicated that she was going home.’

‘
Was she occupying the house on her own?’

‘
Yes. So she has no witness to her movements until the next morning. The postman says she took the mail from him on the doorstep in her dressing-gown.’ He consulted the telex in front of him. ‘That was at approximately eight thirty-five.’

‘
And she must have heard about the death shortly after that.’

‘
At nine-thirty. The WPC says she took it calmly.’

From what Lambert had seen, that was probably an understatement. He thought of her spare, erect figure, the strong features beneath the impeccably groomed grey hair. And the grey eyes beneath that hair, which had mocked his clumsy attempts at compassion for a grieving widow.

Rushton, saving the most intriguing fact until the end, said, ‘There was one interesting thing. The CID sergeant checked with the neighbours. One of them—nosy cow, but probably reliable, he thinks—says she thinks she heard Marie Harrington putting her car in the garage at about two-thirty a.m.’

The men round the table were silent, each occupied with the same arithmetic. Lambert remembered her words
‘It’s not much over a hundred miles, you know!’ in explanation of her unexpected arrival at the Wye Castle. Between ten-thirty and two-thirty, she could have driven to the Wye Castle, thrust her husband over the parapet to his death, and returned home. She would have used the M4 and the A40: good roads, quiet enough at that time of night. Allow her half, perhaps three-quarters of an hour at the hotel; it could have been done that way. And almost without suspicion: without a nosy neighbour, she would not even have been under consideration. Lambert had been thinking of her until now as at most an accessory, not the executioner.

‘
But why be back here by twelve o’clock the next day?’ he said, looking round the table. ‘Wouldn’t you keep a low profile if you’d got rid of your husband with a ready-made group of suspects around him?’

Unexpectedly, it was Hook who made a suggestion based on a psychological conjecture.
‘I don’t believe that old rubbish about murderers feeling a compulsion to return to the scene of the crime. But many people who kill are hyperactive, at any rate around the time of the homicide. However ill-advised it may be, they prefer to know what is going on rather than to sit quietly at home wondering whether they’ve got away with it, waiting for the knock at the door which tells them they’ve been rumbled.’

Lambert considered the idea.
‘She certainly had a strange kind of energy when she arrived here. She was anxious to know whether we were treating the death as a murder, almost pleased when she found we were. And she insisted on identifying the corpse there and then, at the point where we had discovered it.’ There were other explanations as well as the one Hook had suggested for Marie Harrington’s behaviour on that day, but her actions could scarcely be described as rational, much less normal.

Rushton said,
‘She’s still in this area. Presumably at the hotel where she told us she’d be staying overnight after she’d identified the corpse.’

Lambert nodded thoughtfully.
‘I rather gathered she intended to stay around here until after the inquest. Incidentally, the Coroner plans to open the inquest the day after tomorrow. Do we know whether Marie Harrington has been in touch with any of our five at the Wye Castle?’

It was DI Rushton
’s moment. ‘Indeed she has, sir. I saw it happen, quite by chance. I was in the Cathedral at Hereford on my day off yesterday.’ He paused for an instant, as if such behaviour might be thought eccentric enough in a policeman to need explanation. ‘I saw her there and watched for a few minutes. She met George Goodman.’

‘
By chance?’

‘
I don’t think so. She was in the Lady Chapel, and she waited for him to arrive. I’m sure they met by arrangement.’

‘
Did she see you?’

‘
No. I’m pretty certain neither of them did. They sat together for a few minutes towards the front of the Chapel. They spoke to each other, but I couldn’t catch anything they said. I thought it better not to let them know I was around.’ He stopped, recalling that curious moment when the pair had been frozen like a detail from an old master against the stained glass.

‘
Did they leave the Cathedral together?’

‘
Yes. I followed them to the car park. They drove away in Goodman’s Rover.’

There was a silence round the table. The professionals were recreating the scene, trying to assess its significance. Rushton, who was pleased to display his vigilance even during off-duty time to the chief, wished now that he had rung in yesterday about the incident. In the present silence, it seemed more significant than it had done at the time.

Lambert said, ‘Did they appear to be lovers?’

‘
No. I’ve thought about that since. They hardly touched each other, as far as I could see. She seemed to put her hand briefly on his when they met, but that was all. I couldn’t detect any reaction from him. Perhaps the Cathedral inhibited them: I’ve no idea how they behaved in the car after they’d driven out of the city.’ It was the policeman’s automatic caveat, coming from the early years they had all endured of flashing torches into darkened cars while patrolling the beat.

Of course, thought Lambert, people still had occasion to meet after affairs had run
cold. There was no saying that the magisterial Goodman and the elegant widow Harrington had not consorted together more hotly in the past. But it was of interest only if it bore on the events of the last few days. He said, ‘I shall need to see Marie Harrington again. It will be interesting to see if she confesses to yesterday’s meeting. I interviewed Goodman yesterday afternoon, and he said nothing about it, though I broached his relationship with Marie Harrington with him directly. Interesting... Right: let’s move on to the Munros.’

It was Rushton as Deputy who had a
ssumed the role of the marshal of various findings. ‘The most interesting thing we’ve come up with is the forensic material. Harrington died almost instantaneously after a fall on to the gravel path from the roof where the group had been drinking earlier: a height of something over sixty feet. There is worsted from his trousers on the edge of the parapet. He was certainly dead before he was moved.’

Automatically, he was rehearsing the details which would be necessary for the Coroner to
‘open’ the inquest and adjourn it under Section 20 of the Coroners’ Acts. It would be a five-minute process, but all these facts would have to stand up eventually to examination by a Defence Counsel in the High Court; the team were patient with him through his mental checking of their work, hearing it transformed through his calm tones into evidence.

‘
The body was moved in the wheelbarrow? We’re certain of that?’

‘
Yes. There are fibres from the back of Harrington’s jacket on the front of the barrow above the wheel, and from the back of his trouser legs on the bit between the shafts. It won’t be important, but if we had to we could establish the position of the body in the barrow while it was being transported.’

They were silent, picturing Harrington
’s last journey at dead of night, the corpse still warm, the head and feet dancing with each movement of the single wheel over the uneven earth. Lambert moved to the aspect of that journey that really excited them as detectives. ‘And the fibres from what we think is Munro’s sweater. Where exactly were they found?’

‘
On the body. On the back of the jacket, to either side of Harrington’s shoulder-blades, on the backs of his trousers, and on the heel of one of the shoes. We’ll need the sweater, of course, but once we have it, Forensic are quite confident their evidence will stand up in court.’

‘
It may not need to. I’m seeing Munro after we’ve finished here. I’ll get the sweater from him then. I doubt whether he’ll hold out against evidence like that: I don’t see him denying that he moved the body. Are there any prints?’

Rushton looked down at the forensic report, checking a detail he did not quite understand.
‘None, sir. The left hand was gloved: the right wasn’t, but he seems to have wrapped something round it—possibly a handkerchief or a piece of towelling, they think in the labs. Seems odd that a man should wear one glove.’

Lambert smiled.
‘Not to a golfer it doesn’t. Munro has played for forty years. Probably he had a golfing glove in the pocket of the trousers he was wearing when he moved the body. Golf gloves are only worn singly, on the left hand in the case of a right-handed player. He must have put on the clothes he had worn earlier in the day for golf to move the body: he wasn’t wearing the sweater during the evening.’

‘
Things look pretty black for Munro, then.’ This was Sergeant Johnson, the uniformed man who headed the Scene of Crime team. He brightened at the thought that they were near to an arrest; his weekend’s fishing might yet be saved.

Lambert weighed the matter.
‘At the moment they do, yes. I’ve little doubt that he moved that body—I don’t go very much on the idea of someone else wearing his sweater to incriminate him, though we’ve all known stranger things. The fact that he moved the body doesn’t automatically mean that he killed Harrington, of course. But he lied to me when I interviewed him. Clumsily. Whether he was trying to protect himself, his wife or some third party I hope to find out when I see him.’

‘
What about Mrs Munro?’ said Rushton. He had taken the initial statement from the striking, dark-haired Alison himself, and found it hard going.

‘
She told us that her husband was in bed and probably asleep when she got back to the room on the night of the murder. That, I think, was a lie, but we shall know for certain before long. She’ll have compared notes with her husband, and be aware that their stories conflict. There’s something else too. Bert, would you read out her exact words about what she did on that night after the party broke up and left the roof, please?’

Hook flicked over a page.
‘She said, “I wandered round for a little while before going to bed. Perhaps we’d all drunk a little too much.”’

‘
Pretty lame, you’ll agree,’ said Lambert. ‘We let her get away with it because I was anxious to see what she had to say about her husband. And because I knew I had other people to see who might give me more information about Alison Munro’s movements in that crucial twenty minutes. Sure enough, we had an interesting contribution from Meg Peters. She says that Alison Munro went back to the roof garden; that she heard her having what she called “a hell of a row” with Harrington after Tony Nash had left him.’