Bring Forth Your Dead (8 page)

And Miller did give his response much thought. He stood up, smiling a little at Bert Hook’s earnest yeoman features and his ball-pen poised above the page. Then he walked across to the mullioned stone window and looked down the garden for a moment before he spoke. His face was grave with the responsibility of his evidence when he turned back to them, ‘Both the children were affectionate towards their father before they were married. Angela resented the way Ed treated her mother when she was a teenager, but I’ve no doubt she got over that years ago. She was kindness itself to her Dad in his last months.

‘I’m not quite as sure about Ed’s son. David was married and divorced years ago. Nice girl; no children.’ He sounded as though he were enunciating the priorities of his generation. ‘I’ve no doubt Edmund was difficult at times in the last few years. But so was David—and how! Sometimes it seems children are just sent to try us.’ He looked into the fire with a sad smile, so that they wondered for a moment what crosses his own children had heaped upon him.

Lambert, anxious to encourage this revelatory vein in their subject, said gently, ‘We heard something of David’s financial problems from his own lips. I believe his father was planning to revise his will.’

‘So I understood from Edmund in those last days. I think it was more a matter of cutting someone out than making small amendments.’

‘David?’

‘So I assumed. You will understand that I didn’t wish to get involved between father and children. I told him so. I said he should discuss his intentions with them.’

‘And did he?’

Miller paused. ‘I’m trying to recollect things from over a year ago: things that at the time I tried to dismiss as not being my concern. I think Edmund indicated without putting it in so many words that he had discussed it with the people affected.’

Lambert said, ‘As you probably know, no new will was ever made, although we know that one was intended. We obviously have to investigate whether the person who murdered Edmund Craven was trying to forestall a new will. David has already admitted that his father found out about his plans for Tall Timbers and was distressed by them. It would be logical to reflect that in a new will.’

Miller looked troubled. ‘David isn’t my favourite man, by any means. But I don’t want to see him locked up for life.’

Lambert said sternly, ‘If he isn’t guilty, he won’t be. You must realise that it’s your duty to reveal to us anything else that you know.’

Miller nodded miserably. ‘All I know is that he was in trouble financially. He had been, on and off, for years: perhaps Ed indulged him too much when he was younger. The will came as a Godsend to him.’

‘And you think a new will would have cut him out?’

‘I don’t know that.’ His face set stubbornly on the sentiment.

‘Neither do we, Mr Miller. We shall make it our business to find out if we possibly can.’ Lambert waited, but there was as he expected no further reaction from the American. ‘Can you tell us any more about old Mr Craven’s relationships with his daughter?’

Walter Miller grimaced wryly. ‘I was born in the year before “old Mr Craven”, Superintendent.’ Then he smiled more openly, in the relief of moving to a subject on which he could enthuse more happily. ‘He liked Angela, and she liked him, right up to the end. She made arrangements for someone to look after her children on quite a few days during the summer holidays, so that she could be with her father in that last summer.’ Hook looked up sharply at his chief, more sharply than he had meant to do: this was the key period in the poisoning, some two months before Craven’s death.

Perhaps Miller caught the look and divined their thinking, for his face filled with horror and he hastened on. ‘They’d always been close, as father and daughter often are. I think David was closer to his mother—he certainly seemed to lose his way rather after Joan died. Anyway, Angela loved her father. She almost made herself ill by her concern for him and her determination to be near him as he weakened—’

He broke off, aghast again at the implications of what he had intended as words to reinforce her innocence.

Lambert said gently, ‘Until this business is cleared up, the best feelings and actions in all those around the deceased will be subject to this wretchedly warped interpretation. Murder has that effect, I’m afraid. Now, what can you tell me about Mr Craven’s relationship with his grandchildren?’

Miller looked startled by the sudden shift of subject, which was quite deliberate on the part of his interlocutor. But he gave due thought to his reply; perhaps it was a relief to switch away from the children he had known for so many years to the next generation, with whom he was less involved. ‘Ed was delighted when they were born, and very fond of them as toddlers. As he got older, he spoke of them to me less and less. He withdrew into himself in the last year or two, I’m afraid. He didn’t mention them much.’

‘Have you any idea why? Was there any family disagreement?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. He just talked about them less, and I’m afraid I didn’t press him.’ Miller looked uncomfortable, but it seemed rather at his own social omissions that at anything he was concealing. Lambert thought that like most men he would be interested in his own grandchildren, but find those of his friends a bore. He had probably never thought to ask about the Craven grandchildren, never noticed their gradual disappearance from his friend’s conversation. Now he felt guilty about this neglect of his stricken companion. ‘They were at Ed’s funeral. I remember them being quite upset. I suppose Angela thought Ed would have liked them to be there; she made all the funeral arrangements. I think David was too embarrassed—frightened of looking a hypocrite. His plans for the house were becoming more public, and there were those of us at the funeral who thought he had hastened his father’s death.’ Miller stopped aghast. ‘I guess I didn’t mean—’

‘I know just what you meant, Mr Miller,’ said Lambert with a grim smile. It was interesting to see how Walter Miller’s transatlantic origins surfaced under stress among idioms which had for the most part become very English.

‘What about Angela’s husband. Did Mr Craven like his son-in-law?’

‘No.’ The response was surprisingly prompt and certain. ‘I don’t know exactly why. Ed tended to get annoyed if Michael was even mentioned, and he never raised him himself. I kept off the subject.’

‘How long did this hostility between them go back?’

This time Miller did have to think. ‘I don’t think Ed was keen on him even before the marriage, but they were polite enough then. Michael Harrison is a Roman Catholic, of course, and Ed certainly didn’t like that.’ Miller looked up at the faces of the detectives and caught doubt there that this could be the source nowadays of any serious enmity. ‘Religion meant more to my generation than yours. Especially to the British: Americans are used to being a mongrel race. Ed was a staunch Anglican of the old school and certainly not ecumenical. He stopped going to church in Oldford when there was a move towards joint services. And he wouldn’t have the vicar in to see him in those last years when he stopped going out much. He became more bigoted, I think, and those of us who might have felt differently from him just kept off the subject of religion. I’m afraid not many of us become more charitable in our views as we get older.’ He stared into the fire, contemplating the increasing bleakness of the years which lay ahead.

Bert Hook thought that he would be protected as long as that trim, bright woman who had shown them in remained at his elbow. No woman who made such excellent ginger-bread could be other than a benign and liberal influence. He said gently, preparing to turn to a new subject in his notes, ‘You know of no other reason why there should be enmity between Michael Harrison and Edmund Craven?’ He was thinking of the second circle of suspects they would have to move to if their first investigation proved fruitless. Perhaps it was no more than a demonstration to his chief of his alertness: he had already half-decided that their task was to find the necessary evidence to convict David Craven of the murder of his father.

‘No. Ed used to do a little painting in the studio he made at the back of the garden of Tall Timbers. He asked Michael Harrison for his opinion and Michael was rather scathing; I think he might have been a little jealous that Ed had facilities as an amateur that were far better than those he enjoyed himself as a professional. Anyway, Ed took the criticism badly. But perhaps I’ve overstressed the enmity between them. They didn’t see each other much in the last few years, and for all I know Michael Harrison may not have borne any resentment—I’m afraid I hardly know him myself. And after all, his family has done well enough out of Ed’s estate for him to be grateful now.’

It was an attempt to defend the memory of his old friend and Lambert liked him for it. He said, ‘What about Mrs Lewis?’

‘Margaret couldn’t do enough for Ed as he got weaker.’ Again he glanced at both of them quickly to see if they caught the unwittingly sinister implication of his words; this time they were both impassive. ‘I’m glad Ed left her the house in Burnham-on-Sea. She deserves to be looked after. She kept house impeccably for Ed after Joan died, and she became more and more of a friend rather than an employee towards the end.’

Lambert was interested in this outsider’s view of Margaret Lewis, as a counter-balance to the hostility David Craven had not troubled to conceal. He said gently, ‘She looked after Mr Craven’s food and medicines?’

The implication of the question was obvious. Miller said calmly, ‘Yes. I’ve thought about that myself. But unless you are telling me that daily access was necessary, any of us had the opportunity to poison Ed. My money certainly wouldn’t be on Margaret Lewis.’

‘Thank you for being so frank with us, Mr Miller.’ Lambert had risen. He was already impatiently anticipating their meeting with Angela Harrison. ‘Needless to say, your views on the other three people who were close to Mr Craven in those last days will be kept strictly confidential.’ He watched the thrush flitting swiftly from sight in the hushes, wondering if it could have caught his movement through the thick glass.

Miller said simply ‘Four.’ For a man dropping a bombshell, he seemed completely unaware of his effect. He reassembled the empty cups and plates carefully on the big tray and said, ‘If you really asked me to put my money on someone, he would be the one I would choose. Unfortunately for Margaret.’ Hook looked at him carefully to see if he knew he was talking in riddles, and decided that he did not.

Lambert felt very foolish as he said, ‘We were not aware that there were more than four people with easy access to the deceased.’ It at least had the virtue of honesty; he noticed how he lapsed into officialese in his uncertainty. His mind was working through a furious retrospect, he realised that he had taken Margaret Lewis’s list of those who were residents or regular visitors to the house at the time without further check. David Craven had been too occupied with incriminating himself and then denying guilt to concern himself with others.

Walter Miller was genuinely puzzled. ‘I didn’t try to deceive you. I was expecting you to come to him.’

‘No, Mr Miller. You didn’t try to deceive us.’ But someone had: Margaret Lewis. ‘Who is the person we have so far omitted?’

‘The one who had already shown he could be violent. The one who hated Ed and made no bones about it. The one whom I found with his hand in Ed’s medicine cabinet in the bathroom five days before Ed died.’

He was not meaning to keep them in suspense. He had been waiting to tell them this. And they had apparently almost forgotten to ask him: it was inexplicable.

Lambert said heavily, insistently, ‘Who, Mr Miller?’

‘Why, Margaret Lewis’s son, of course!’

10

The PC was feeling aggressive. He had just had an almighty rollicking from the station sergeant and the injustice of it rankled. Policemen not being saints, his reaction was to take
it out on the first suitably vulnerable member of the public it was his duty to police.

He got out of the Panda car and pulled his leather gloves on slowly as he strolled across the quiet suburban road. There was a raw breeze sweeping in from the sea, but the temperature had nothing to do with the gesture: he had seen older policemen smooth the leather over their knuckles in this way when they had been menacing groups of young toughs in the centre of Bristol. Here the gesture was wholly wasted as a token of menace because the subject of the constable’s attention remained unconscious of his presence.

Though he made sure that his shoes rasped on the tarmac, the denim-clad legs did not react, the torso remained invisible beneath the long black bonnet. A Lotus, PC Davies noticed; envy did not make him more conciliatory. ‘Out here, lad. And fast!’ he said.

The boy was four inches shorter than the constable, even when he stood upright. There was a smear of oil across his cheek. More important, there was fear in his light blue eyes. And when he said, ‘What do you want?’ the fear sneaked into his voice.

Perhaps PC Davies mistook fear for guilt. If he was to bring him in for CID questioning, the boy was almost certainly suspected of some offence. ‘I want you, lad. And I want you now. Get into the car.’ He gestured with his head towards the white police Fiesta behind him, without turning his head. He was keeping his eye on the spanner in the boy’s hand. If it moved at all, he would be in first: effecting an arrest in the face of an offensive weapon would look good on a record that was so far undistinguished.

‘What for? I haven’t done nothing.’ The fear was there again in the voice as the boy put down the bonnet carefully, making no movement that could be construed as aggressive. Fear meant weakness, and the constable felt stronger all the time in this situation where he held all the real weapons. He thought that the boy had probably been in spots like this before, and lost.

‘That’s what you say. You might change your mind when the Super gets at you. You going to waste any more of my time?’ He rubbed the palm of his left hand over his clenched right fist beneath the gloves. The youth was thin and pale: he must be the lighter of the two by three or four stones. From the corner of his eye, the constable watched the big, gleaming spanner.

‘All right. Let me lock this car up.’ The thin shoulders dropped, the spanner was placed on the floor of the car and PC Davies half-turned towards his own vehicle. He had won the little contest of
machismo
he had set up for himself. The youth leaned across the car towards the far door, with a gleam of contempt in the eyes PC Davies could no longer see. This policeman who had been so anxious to throw his weight about was not as clever as he pretended: he had not even realised that the modern Lotus was bound to have central locking.

The engine roared into life in the same instant that the driver’s door slammed shut. By the time the constable realised what was happening, his prey had almost escaped. The throaty roar of the Lotus’s sports engine jeered at his astonished face as the coupe leapt smoothly away. By the time his hasty, clumsy fingers had turned the key of the Fiesta, the low black shape had rounded the corner a hundred yards away. By the time he turned that corner himself, the Lotus was almost out of sight. His man was gone. Reluctantly, he radioed the news and turned back towards the Station. Another bloody rollicking.

Not many drivers are foolish enough to take on the traffic police. They are among the best drivers in the land, in vehicles tuned and serviced to guarantee safe handling at high speeds. But fear makes people behave foolishly, and the young man in the Lotus was now filled with that rising, irrational fear which sharpens reflexes but makes the normal processes of reason cease to function. As the police Rover turned on its siren and eased on to the road behind him, he gunned the accelerator pedal and panicked. Very foolish.

He turned on to the coast road, where the black ribbon of tarmac ran straight for long patches and the turbo-charged 2.2 litres might tell in his favour. And for a time it
did. His acceleration was superior to the Rover’s; he wound it up quickly and watched the white car and its blue flashing light growing smaller in his mirror. It was a good thing he had finished servicing the car before his unwelcome visitor arrived. He wondered grimly if the owner would approve of the road test now in progress. He passed a middle-aged man in a red Sierra as if he were stationary, catching a sideways glimpse of the driver’s face, vivid with astonished outrage.

The sergeant strapped firmly into the passenger seat of the police Rover watched their quarry as the needle crept past the hundred mark and their speed reached the point where the siren seemed to be behind rather than above them. ‘That kid can drive,’ he said, with the reluctant admiration of one expert for another. It was true, and it was a relief. Too many of the men they chased—it was always men, and often in stolen vehicles—drove like madmen once they knew they were pursued by the police. The constant nightmare was a chase ending in a crash in which innocent lives would be lost through the criminal negligence of the quarry. It was a nightmare which occasionally came true, resulting in official inquiries, where the implication could be that the police pursuers had harried the guilty driver into his reckless actions.

This pursuit did not seem likely to end like that. When the bends began to occur on this coastal road, which ran without hedges or fences along its undulating route, the youth used the full width of the road, often almost touching the verge on his right to minimize the degree of curve. But he did so only when the contours permitted him to see that there was no vehicle coming towards him in the other direction. And he used his gears like a champion rally driver, making sure that his speed never slackened more than it had to. The driver of the police vehicle had experience on his side, and all the advantages of a system with huge resources. So long as he kept the Lotus in sight, they would get him eventually. There was no need for heroics, with the risks they involved. He was twelve years older than PC Davies, and felt no need to prove himself. His companion radioed to his colleagues in the traffic police for help, while he strove only to keep within range of the flying Lotus.

The youth was a strange mixture of absolute concentration and blind terror. As always when he drove fast in a car like this, there was the feeling of man and machine operating as one, of moving in a more rarefied world than the tawdry one he existed in for the rest of his life, of a misery of this better world and its rules. Yet he knew he should not have fled. The sight of the uniform, of the arrogance it gave to a face not much older than his own, had upset his judgement and made him forget the promises he had made to himself and others.

And he knew he would not succeed. He was not even sure what he was trying to do. His flight had been the reaction of a frightened animal. He had no idea of where he was going, no goal which would represent safety for him. And he was not stupid: he knew that the resources ranged against him would have to win in the end. Today would shatter the life he had been building. The human brain works with astonishing speed in a crisis, but inconsequently. As the youth’s speed approached two miles a minute on the last long straight stretch of the road above the sea, he was wondering how to explain to the man who had trusted him to service this beautiful car exactly why he had used it as he had.

They were coming now to the outskirts of Weston-
Super-Mare. At this speed, the first houses leapt at them with startling speed, as if they had an independent motion of their own. The youth saw an identical police Rover coming out from the town with flashing lights to meet him, and knew in that moment that the pack would hunt him down in the labyrinth of streets they knew so much better than he. He swung away from the sea and the approaching car on a left fork in the road, the only way he could take. Already they were controlling his movements: the world of high speed, where he had felt in control, was behind him now. As if to reinforce the notion, the first red-circled 40 signs flashed past him and red brick walls closed out the sky.

The Rover which had followed him from the start closed
up behind him on this road, its siren clearing a safe path for it through the thin traffic. The sergeant radioed the details of their position and movements to his colleagues; his eyes never left the tail of the black Lotus. Both he and the driver knew that the only way their prey could escape them now was to double back somehow on to the way he had come.

The youth knew it too. He was looking for a turning which might allow him to rejoin the coast road by following a rough square. His mind raced ahead to where he could then go if he was successful. Not back to his own place, obviously. He began to evolve a vague, crazy plan to take the Lotus back to its owner and ask for his protection against the persecution of the law.

Disaster on the roads often comes from the most unexpected quarter. The traffic police were aware of that. They looked upon old ladies in Morris Minors with different eyes from other men. Perhaps they would have been just marginally more prepared for the actions of this one than the youth. She came out of the drive of a big house on his right, hidden by high privet hedges until she was almost on the road. And when she approached that road, she looked only briefly to her right, towards the centre of the town, where she was used to seeing vehicles. Not at all to her left, where the youth and his police pursuers were bearing down upon her at a speed she had never approached in her life. Slowly, inexorably, she pulled across the road and into the path of the Lotus.

The police driver was still a hundred yards behind the black coupe when these events began to unfold in apparent slow motion before him. Unusually in modern policemen under thirty, he was a regular churchgoer, but he snarled an involuntary ‘Jesus Christ!’ as he drove his right foot on to the brake pedal.

The youth had just spotted a turning he thought might offer possibilities when the wall of light green metal moved into his vision on his right. The Lotus had brakes befitting a car of its performance, and his reaction could not have been faster. But there was no question of his stopping in the distance between the two cars. he stood on the brakes, felt his weight thrown fully on to that desperate right foot as the car responded instantly and his body continued forward, even had time as he went into the skid to regret that he had never had the chance to fasten his safety-belt.

Still the small green car came on, and still the tiny white-haired figure did not look at the car hurtling towards her. The youth, gripping the steering-wheel with a strength he had not known he possessed, turned the car automatically into the skid as the tyres screamed
agonisingly and the tired old eyes, turning belatedly upon him, seemed to widen until they filled the whole face. The Lotus slid up to the green metal wall, like a ship coming too rapidly to berth. Then, miraculously, as the Morris straightened on to its appointed path along the road, the black coupe, wheels still locked, responded to the efforts of the man at the wheel and swung away, up on to the deserted pavement, passing between the old green Morris and a low garden wall with three inches to spare on each side, as if it were an arrow shot from a bow instead of a car that was still not under control.

As the elderly driver of the Morris slewed her car sideways into an appropriately geriatric emergency stop, the Lotus rocked crazily between its front bumper and a concrete lamp standard and was back on the road. In almost the same instant, the police Rover passed the green Morris more conventionally on the right and dropped in behind its quarry.

The youth turned left, and the sergeant in the passenger seat of the Rover shouted ‘Gotcha, mate!’ through lips that were still dry. For the driver of the Lotus, still bringing his crazily bucking charge under control, had had no chance to see the red bar that denoted a cul-de-sac on the sign above him.

It would in truth have made little difference if he had. For the youth, with mind reeling from the carnage that should have been, was in no condition to elude them now. He was too good a driver to deceive himself that skill alone had saved him and the woman he might have killed; he knew that luck had been heavily on his side. And the
knowledge shook him. He drove down the lane watching his own hands trembling on the wheel. When he came to the great slab of the factory wall and found that there was no way out, it was almost a relief.

When the traffic policemen opened the driver’s door of the Lotus and ordered him out, he found that his legs would hardly support him. They spread him against the side of the Rover, with his arms splayed thinly across the roof, to search him: he had, after all, fled from the police, and they did not know why he was required by the CID of a neighbouring force. He might just have a weapon, or drugs. And the adrenalin was high in them too, from the chase and the crash that had seemed inevitable.

When they found nothing in the pockets of the tight, thin jeans, the sergeant said, ‘Right lad, you’re nicked. Get into the back of the car.’ He did not speak too roughly, for he was still full of the relief of the accident avoided and the skill this boy had shown at the wheel. And their quarry no longer held any threat; he was going to go quietly, in the phrase they heard so often since the advent of TV cops.

The sergeant, who had seen far too much drama and tragedy on the roads, knew as the youth did not that it was a normal enough reaction to shock. As they took Andrew Lewis back past the Morris Minor he had so nearly hit, he was silently weeping.