Dead on Course (20 page)

There was silence round the table: it was the first most of them had heard of this. Then Rushton said,
‘It may be that Meg Peters herself is not a reliable witness. She’s the only one of our suspects with a record.’

‘
I know that. Chris.’ Lambert was pleased with himself for using Rushton’s first name, he thought quite deftly. ‘We’ll need to sort out the truth of the matter very carefully. But if what Meg Peters says is true, Alison Munro was the last person we know of to date who was with Harrington; and she was quarrelling with him.’

There was silence around the table. All these men had a clear picture of Alison Munro
’s dark hair and strong, English beauty. He fancied that none of them until this moment had seriously entertained her as their murderer. He said, ‘What about Tony Nash?’

Rushton said,
‘We haven’t turned up a lot that’s new about him. Except that he made no secret of his hatred of Harrington over these last months, even at work. Not the wisest of tactics to go round slagging off the boss, I’d have thought, and Nash never did it until recently. But he’s been virulent about it since about Easter; even taken to saying things about getting even with him, apparently.’

Lambert could see Nash as a choleric man, but the decline in control in recent weeks was interesting.
‘Anything else?’

‘
Yes. One small but interesting fact. Nash wasn’t originally in the party to come here this week. Someone else dropped out and he almost forced his way in. The others were glad enough to have him, but worried that his vehement hatred of Harrington might surface and destroy the party. But they say he was determined to come.’

‘
Determined to have the opportunity to get at Harrington, do you think? It’s possible. Munro says that Harrington himself came into the party late, which means that Nash may have joined the group only after he learned his boss was to be part of it. They quarrelled openly on the evening of the murder, and according to George Goodman, Nash was abroad early on the morning after, looking thoroughly disturbed and dishevelled. According to the others, he isn’t habitually an early riser, but on that morning he was out before half past six.’ Lambert was gratified to see Rushton looking puzzled. ‘I discovered that in my formal interview with Goodman late yesterday afternoon. After I had unearthed various interesting details of our suspects’ habits in the more informal context of the golf course yesterday,’ he explained loftily to the table at large.

Rushton
’s deadpan face gave nothing away; he thought eccentric was a polite epithet for a superintendent who played golf with the leading suspects in a murder investigation, but he was too well versed in the rule-book to reveal his disapproval in front of subordinates. He said, ‘What did you make of George Goodman, sir?’

Lambert smiled. He had been wondering exactly what he made of George Goodman ever since the conclusion of his interview with him on the previous day.
‘That he isn’t the self-satisfied bourgeois he pretends to be. But exactly what he is, I’m not sure. His account of the period when Harrington was murdered has no witness. But, as he said with considered naïvety himself, as he occupies a single room here, we could hardly expect a convenient demonstration of his innocence. There is more to Mr Goodman than he cares to reveal, I’m quite sure, but whether that more includes a man capable of violent murder, I’m not yet certain.’ He looked round the table. ‘What have your various researches turned up?’

Rushton looked a little impatiently at the typewritten summary in front of him. He had some dec
idedly interesting material to reveal, but not about George Goodman. ‘Not much. No obvious close connections with the victim. He didn’t have a working association, like Nash and Munro. He did occasional small planning jobs for Harrington—works extensions and the like. Harrington seems to have been slow to pay on a couple of occasions, but there is no evidence that they fell out seriously about it. There is a minimum of correspondence in Harrington’s files about it.’

‘
You’re sure there’s no real acrimony? Goodman claimed when I spoke to him yesterday that there was. He admitted to real ill-feeling between himself and Harrington, and gave a dispute over plans he had drawn for Goodman as the cause. It didn’t seem a very strong reason at the time.’

‘
No trace in writing of any bust-up between the two. Of course, there has been no access to Goodman’s files. But no one at Harrington’s factory suggested there’d been any argument over the architectural work that Goodman did for Harrington.’

‘
Was there anything more personal, then? Had Harrington got his paws on Goodman’s wife? Or even Goodman on Harrington’s—I’m sure there’s a spot or two of the old Adam beneath that saintly exterior.’

Rushton frowned at the sheet in front of him. He was less happy with speculations about emotional attachments than with the clear facts of contracts and money.
‘Nothing that we’ve been able to turn up. Harrington had a go at lots of women, including our Miss Peters, but—’

‘
Did Mrs Goodman ever work for him?’

‘
No. She hasn’t worked anywhere except in her husband’s office since they were married thirty years ago.’

‘
What about Marie Harrington? Did you dig up any associations between her and Goodman?’

‘
Only of the kind that are probably quite innocent. They’ve known each other for twenty years, but the kind of social exchange they’ve had has mostly involved Mrs Goodman as well. Of course, most of what I’m reporting has been gathered by CID in Surrey, so in that sense it’s second-hand information.’

Lambert heard Rushton making the reservation without rancour; at the same age,
he might well have done it himself. It was the old detective’s nightmare of overlooking some key factor that would later seem obvious to all, the obsessive need to check the authenticity of every piece of information before it became part of the framework of the case.

It looked as if the picture of Goodman
’s happy, unexceptional family life was proof against the diggings of a team trained to be sceptical about such things. The probing of the surface tissue of his existence had produced nothing that was not benign. Whether because he wanted to round off this family unit of Trollopean simplicity, or because he was unable to accept Goodman’s portrait of himself without a final check, he said, ‘Have the Goodmans any children?’

Rushton was glad
to be prompted towards a demonstration of the thoroughness of his documentation; he wished now he had not just reminded the chief that most of the work had been done by another force. ‘Two. The elder is a boy. Qualified now as a solicitor, working up in Cheshire. The other is a girl.’ He looked down at the telex; information had come in thick and fast, so that he hadn’t been able to analyse it as he liked to do. Perhaps after all he shouldn’t have taken his day off this week. ‘Privately educated, didn’t go on to higher education like her brother. Actually worked for Harrington’s firm for about a year.’ He paused: it was the first time he had seen this.

‘
How long ago?’ Lambert’s tone was studiously neutral. No point in bawling anyone out: this was no more than one fact in a plethora of information that had to be sifted and organised. Probably, in any case, it meant no more than any one of a hundred others.

‘
Two years. She left of her own accord, apparently. She seems to have been no more than a junior employee.’ Rushton turned over a sheet. ‘I don’t think anyone in Surrey has actually interviewed Mrs Goodman. Or the daughter herself, for that matter. Do you want me to organise it?’

‘
No. I’ll go over there myself if necessary. It needs someone who can put things together with what’s happening here. If we don’t get to the root of this in the next two days, there may be several people we need to see over there.’ There was silence around the table, as they reviewed the depressing prospect of the net widening, of routine legwork over a wider area, taking in ever more people, following leads that seemed ever less likely. All of them knew that most of those murders unsolved after a week remained unsolved, however long the files stayed officially open.

Rushton said,
‘We’ve been able to come up with rather more on Meg Peters than on Goodman—or anyone else, for that matter.’

There was a stirring of interest around the table: Ms Peters was the most striking and memorable face among the group who had surrounded Guy Harrington. Scandal
attaching to glamour has an additional flavour, and policemen, chauvinist or otherwise, are human, despite some contemporary opinion.

Rushton said,
‘The conviction for cannabis possession you already knew about, sir. But two years after that there was another court appearance, though not in the dock. A company called Abbeydale Films was prosecuted for making and selling obscene material: blue films. Usual sort of thing—bedroom romps which were too explicit to be ignored once a few complaints came in. A grubby little company by the sound of it, and a fairly routine case. But they made the mistake of pleading not guilty. Which meant that witnesses were called by the prosecution. Three men and a girl. The girl was one Margaret Eileen Peters. No photographs, lads, unfortunately.’

‘
Meg Peters wasn’t charged with anything?’

‘
No. She appeared in court for perhaps two minutes, by the sound of it. Gave evidence that she’d performed what was required of her under direction, rather than contributed any improvisations of her own. It was twelve years ago.’

‘
Did you find any overt connection with this case?’

‘
No. The company was prosecuted and went out of business. Or changed its name and found another place to operate.’

Lambert frowned, pondering the unanswerable question: had this titillating bit of information anything to do with a murder committed twelve years later? Or should it be consigned with the other ninety-five per cent of CID research to the tray marked irrelevant? Any detective who could spot that right five per cent quickly was assured of long-term success.
‘Any suggestion from your work on the dead man that he knew about Meg Peters’s work in blue films?’

‘
No, sir. But we’d be lucky if that showed up anywhere on paper. And we haven’t had the chance to question anyone about it; the information only came through this morning.’

‘
I’ll see Miss Peters myself. Harrington knew about her drugs conviction. It will be interesting to know whether he knew about this. And whether anyone else in the group who came here this week knew.’

Lambert adjourned the conference once he ascertained none of the group had any more ideas to float. It had run longer than he planned, and left him with much to do. He didn
’t mind that: it was to point the way forward that such meetings were held. The Munros had to be challenged about several issues, particularly Sandy’s moving of the body. The small but possibly significant connection of Goodman’s daughter with the dead man had to be checked out.

Nash
’s determination to be here this week, when he was not in the original party, needed to be investigated, alongside his perturbed state on the morning after the murder. So did Meg Peters’s participation in an unsavoury industry, and whether any or all of the golfing party knew of it. He needed to be clear about Marie Harrington’s possible involvement in the murder, and her views on several of the other issues now raised. He paused for thought there: he had the feeling that the cool and unconventional widow of the victim might be the catalyst in the final stages of this investigation.

He was being drawn towards a late lunch by a resolute Bert Hook when the phone rang.
‘Chief Constable for you, Superintendent,’ said the DC who took the call on the murder room line, suitably awed by the voice of divinity.

The CC was as urbane as ever, and as difficult to turn aside from the course he had determined for his staff.
‘I’ve arranged a press conference for four o’clock in Gloucester,’ he said. ‘I need you there, John. I’ve held them of as long as I could. We need the PR. They’re making my life hell about those child abductions. We need a—a diversion. Yes, I admit it.’

‘
But, sir, this case is just—’

‘
No buts, John. Your cases are always at a crucial stage when there is any interruption. We have to carry the public with us and this is part of it. Bring young Rushton with you. He’s always good at telling them about the labours of Hercules that go on behind the scenes. Not many of them print it, I know, but it impresses them with the work being done and keeps them off our backs.’

‘
I can’t keep my leading suspects here much longer, sir. Perhaps one more night is as much—’

‘
Sorry, John, we must have you. Surrey isn’t a million miles away, if they do have to leave the scene of the crime.’ He sounded curiously like Marie Harrington, the intelligent, sardonic woman he had been planning to see that afternoon.

Then the CC went on inexorably,
‘I think the TV cameras for Central South will probably be there.’ In the face of such a media presence, Lambert knew further argument was useless.

18

A mile away from the Wye Castle, Marie Harrington was becoming tired of her hotel room.