Bring Forth Your Dead (9 page)

11

For a woman who had recently inherited four hundred thousand pounds, Angela Harrison lived in modest circumstances.

The semi-detached ‘thirties house was too close to its neighbour to have a garage; a parking-space had been paved in front of its cream front door. There was more privacy at the back of the house; it had a narrow rear garden which ran down to a disused canal that was covered in emerald weed. Hook surveyed this garden from the living-room window, estimating with an expert’s eye the lines of Brussels sprouts and spring cabbage which dominated the vegetable plot in this winter season. It occupied over half of the land behind the house: the Sergeant approved this evidence of husbandry in an age he found frivolous in its preference for the herbaceous border.

It was a quiet place in the late morning, with children at school and many of the houses shut against the world. After the lofty remoteness of Edmund Craven’s Edwardian mansion and the confident comfort of Walter Miller’s older village house, this was a meaner place, with its cramped hall and through lounge. Yet a comfortable enough place a better spot than most people could choose to settle, even in England, Hook reminded himself automatically. Such thoughts came unprompted to a man who had been a Barnardo’s boy, who still congratulated himself each night upon the privacy and independence afforded him by his own modest modern house. To Bert, his mortgage was not the millstone that he heard his neighbours talk about, but a talisman of his success in a world where these things had to be won.

Lambert would not have recognised Craven’s daughter from the photographs of her in childhood and adolescence which they had seen at Tall Timbers. The records which Hook and the team in the murder room at CID had begun to compile for him told him that she was thirty-six: he would have taken her for a year or two older than that. Her face had the strong, regular bone-structure which recalled the handsome young woman of those aging photographs. And with the thought came the knowledge of why he had probed Walter Miller about Edmund Craven’s relationship with his grandchildren: nowhere in Craven’s house had he seen a picture which included those children, or even his daughter after she became a mother. Unusual, curious even, though his detective’s mind made the reservation that such things might always have been removed by some other, unknown hand after the old man’s death.

Angela Harrison had unusual grey-green eyes; her face was framed by dark brown hair. Lambert thought inconsequentially that she must once have been as blond as his own
daughter, and he saw for an instant the happy laughter of early childhood and lost innocence upon the sober features before him. The vertical lines which ran between her eyes and down from the corners of her mouth were etched a little more deeply than they should have been. But the face was vigorous, not defeated; if it held a certain wary vigilance, Lambert could see her in a different context from this as a striking woman, dominating the company. Striking, not beautiful, just as in her youth she had been handsome rather than pretty; did the words represent anything more than a male presumption, and an individual one at that?

‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ he said to Bert Hook as his Sergeant contemplated the vegetable plot; Angela Harrison had gone into the hall to answer a phone call before they could even begin.

‘No, sir?’ said Bert. He wondered what Shakespeare would have made of photofit pictures: he had never seen anyone but the blackest villains in those. ‘Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ He did not know that his cliché was a quotation, or he might have avoided it. The only quotation he really approved was the one embracing detection’s code words of observation and deduction, and that only because Holmes had been immortalised for him by his boyhood reading in the Barnardo’s library. Even the derision of the CID for fictional amateurs had not been able to eliminate the watchwords of the old junkie for his loyal adherent; were they not the very
raison
d’être
of the CID?

So Bert and his chief looked round now at the room hastily tidied for their visit, noting the children’s books in the corner, the old typewriter upon the scratched oak table, the sideboard with its crowded collection of family photographs, the tiled fireplace which might be in demand for its rarity if its ‘thirties design of three blending shades of green could be preserved for a few more years. John Lambert, looking at the paraphernalia of a busy, unexceptional life that was everywhere revealed, thought how little the poor, which these days included the struggling genteel, could conceal of themselves.

There was little trace here of the man of this house: he wondered whether he had one of the small bedrooms upstairs to stow the materials of his life, or whether he kept them at his place of work. He recalled Walter Miller’s speculation that the struggling professional artist might have been envious of old Craven’s spacious studio facilities. For the rest, much of the life of this small family was on show here, as it would not have been in a larger house where they had room to spread themselves and conceal the evidence from curious eyes like his.

Bert Hook looked at the swimming certificates, the cut-down golf clubs, the books on birds and football, the old mongrel dog with its chin obstinately in his hand, and thought that there could be happiness in a place like this. Not more than in a place like Tall Timbers; Bert, who had endured a superfluity of such sentiments from a series of well-meaning house-mothers in two homes, was sturdily resistant to such Victorian platitudes, which he saw as designed to keep upwardly mobile individuals like him in his place. He had only learned two days ago that that was what he was; he was waiting for the moment of maximum effect to visit the phrase upon his chief, in the secure knowledge that the Superintendent would be duly appalled by it.

‘I’m sorry about that. Do sit down.’ Angela Harrison was back with them, tall and slim, with a natural poise which made her dominate the narrow room, striving to seem at her ease in a situation where it would hardly be natural for her to be so. She had dressed to receive them, in a formal grey suit which was beautifully pressed, but sufficiently out of fashion for even a Superintendent with the sketchiest knowledge of such things to realise that it must be some years old. She sat opposite them on the suite with its fading loose covers, skirt pulled demurely over the knees of her long legs. ‘I know now about my father. It seems incredible, but I have to accept it.’ She looked at him unblinkingly, a small smile fixed upon the wide lips. Her expression made Lambert think for a reason he could not define that this still-young face had seen much suffering, and came through it. He wondered how much pain her father’s death and its present ramifications had brought to her.

‘You understand, then, that we have to be interested initially in those people who had regular access to your father during the last six months or so of his life.’

‘Yes. Five of us.’ He thought wryly that he should have come to her first: she would not have allowed him to overlook Andrew Lewis. He was still embarrassed about that. ‘I know all of them quite well. I have to face the fact that one of them killed my father.’

Not ‘one of us’, Lambert noticed: there was nothing odd about the reaction in a daughter, but she had carefully picked out the words which excluded herself from suspicion. He said, ‘I presume you know how?’

She nodded. ‘I can’t think who would have been cruel enough to poison Dad systematically over the weeks like that.’ So she knew the details and wasn’t going to shirk them now. She had talked to someone he had already seen, plainly. Not Walter Miller, unless by telephone: he had come almost straight from there, after he had set in motion the machinery to trace Andrew Lewis. In that case, either Margaret Lewis or David Craven had been in contact with her; he had no idea at this moment which was the more likely. It was inevitable during murder investigations that people should exchange notes about the direction of his inquiries; he had long accepted the fact. But it was often interesting to know who had been talking to whom. He dismissed the alternative speculation that Angela Craven had conferred with no one, but given herself away by her knowledge: murderers who planned as carefully as this one did not make such elementary errors. She added with sudden vehemence, ‘I hope you get the person who did it.’

‘We shall, Mrs Harrison. I can promise you that.’ The Chief Constable would have been proud of him. It was one of that luminary’s dictums that his officers should always exude confidence to the public. ‘May I ask who gave you the detail of your father’s murder, Mrs Harrison?’

She looked down at the old dog, poking him affectionately with her foot as he threatened to investigate areas polite dogs leave untouched in public. Then she said, ‘It was David who told me that Father had been killed by means of arsenic given in several doses to secure a cumulative effect.’ It was a clinical enough description for him to be reminded for an instant of Burgess in his pathology lab. It was strange to hear a daughter speaking thus about the death of a father; but murder and the shock it brought affected the innocent as well as the guilty in a multitude of different ways, which were rarely easy to forecast. Even more than with all the others, he wished he had seen this cool, enigmatic woman immediately after the death rather than thirteen months later. She said, ‘Beyond that, I know nothing of what you call the detail of the murder. Perhaps you can enlighten me.’

Lambert wondered if the smile with which he tried to ease the atmosphere was in bad taste; probably.
‘Touché
, Mrs Harrison. As yet, we have no more knowledge of the murder than the method you have outlined, and you are right to underline the fact that that gives us depressingly little detail. We do not know yet whether the arsenic was administered through your father’s food or by other means. We do not know exactly when the fatal dosages were given. I have to tell you that until someone tells us such things, we are not likely to discover them for ourselves at this distance in time.’

‘And do you think someone will conveniently volunteer this information to you?’ She was mocking him now; whether humorously or bitterly, he could not be sure. Irony twinkled in the grey-green eyes, bringing a new attractiveness to the long face, with its lines of dignified suffering.

‘“Volunteer” would not be the right word, Mrs Harrison. But I expect us to assemble most of these facts in due course. Sometimes we only get the full picture after we have made an arrest, of course.’ It sounded like a threat, and he knew he was a little nettled. But a threat could be the right tactic, even to a grieving daughter. He must bear in mind always that she was a murder suspect: no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.

‘You will understand that I have to be interested in the relationship of all the people in any sort of contact with your father, both with him and with each other.’

‘With each other?’ Her surprise was so sharp that he wondered what she had to conceal here.

‘There is a strong incidence of collusion in cases like this. That opens up not only the possibility of a killing by one of the five in immediate contact with the deceased, but of a murder planned by someone outside that group, who used one of them to gain access to his victim.’

‘I see.’ Her eyes caught the daylight and were green for a moment as she looked past, gazing through the window to the rectangle of grey winter sky and the world of speculation. Her fingers drummed silently on the broad arm of her low chair while she weighed the idea and found she had to accept it. ‘I loved my father very much, Superintendent Lambert. I think anyone you question will confirm that.’

‘Indeed, they already have. I have been told, for instance, of your solicitude for him in the last months of his decline.’

She looked at him sharply, searching for any trace of irony or menace in the words. Although he was sure she was aware of the notion, she had scorned to arrange things so that they faced the light while she sat with her back to it. Lambert, remaining impassive, could see each move of those strong features; he recognised an opponent worthy of respect in this macabre game they had begun. Or an ally: only time would tell him that. She said, ‘I went regularly to Tall Timbers during the weeks of Dad’s decline, yes. I was concerned about him. With good reason, it now seems.’

He nodded. ‘You may in the process have seen things which could be helpful to us now. Things which assume importance only now that we know a murder was committed.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that already. But it’s a long time ago.’

‘And the memory plays tricks, for all of us. It will be difficult, for instance, for you to place events in their correct time sequence.’

She smiled grimly. ‘In books, someone often keeps a diary, which turns out to be very convenient for people like you.’

‘We’ve got a scene of crime team going carefully through
Tall Timbers. I’m afraid they won’t come up with anything as useful as that.’

‘Or anything else at this distance in time, surely?’ She had voiced his own thoughts; but the due processes had to be observed. He was pleased that she was behaving as though they were on the same side in this.

‘You know that arsenic was used?’

‘Yes. Margaret Lewis told me.’

‘Can you recall anyone trying to obtain arsenic, or any behaviour which would now strike you as suspicious in that respect?’

‘
No. Whoever used it might have had it for years, of course. It doesn’t deteriorate much. And it is present in some relatively innocent things; several garden insecticides contained it, before we all went green.’ She must have caught the look of speculation on Bert Hook’s face, for she said, ‘I used to work in a pharmacy many years ago, before I was married. I never qualified formally—Dad didn’t approve of education for women.’ This time her smile was bitter.