Dead on Course (26 page)

Nash nodded, trying to appear as imperturbable as his questioners. But when dismissed, he left the room eagerly, even more nervous than when he had entered it.

Lambert made no attempt to prevent him from contacting his fiancée. He had no doubt that she would support Nash’s story where necessary.

23

Marie Harrington’s body was found at noon.

And elderly fisherman, near the centre of Hereford, was dozing in the midday sun, enjoying the peace of the river and the absence of his wife
’s nagging. The body drifted close to the bank without his noticing it. Undulating lightly with the gentle downstream motion, it nosed gently but insistently against his net at the edge of the water, like an old dog demanding attention.

The man was a pillar of the British Legion; he had seen death in plenty as a young man in the Western Desert. But that was half a century ago, and the wide, unseeing eyes and blood-tinged froth around the mouth of this corpse upset him. He was old-fashioned enough to be distressed more because it was a woman. He was greatly relieved when the police deposited him back with the wife he had been so anxious to escape two hours earlier.

Lambert was preparing to meet Meg Peters when DI Rushton brought him the news. ‘A drowning, pretty certainly, they say. Suicide, do you think, sir?’

‘
Murder, Chris. I’d stake my career, or what’s left of it, on that.’

‘
We’ll have to wait for the post-mortem to be sure. No obvious marks of violence on the body, but no doubt Dr Burgess will be able to tell us more in due course. It’s not so uncommon, of course, for a survivor to follow a deceased spouse out of the world while still depressed.’ Rushton had an unfortunate habit of appearing to instruct experienced officers.

‘
Not this spouse. I’ve never seen a widow facing the rest of her life more eagerly than the bereaved Mrs Harrington.’

‘
You think the two deaths are connected, then?’

‘
I’m sure they are. I was due to see her first thing this morning. I think she knew more than she had told us previously—possibly even the identity of her husband’s killer. Certainly that killer thought she must be removed before she could reveal anything to me.’

‘
What about the hotel where she was staying? Do they know who contacted her?’

‘
No. Not so far, anyway. She seems to have gone out at about ten thirty-five last night. In all probability, she never returned. Damn the Chief Constable and his press conferences! I’d have seen her yesterday, if I hadn’t had to hare off to Gloucester.’ He slammed the door of the filing cabinet violently shut. At that moment, he had no room for compassion for the dead woman. The policeman in him had taken over, and he had room only for the frustration stemming from the removal of a vital witness from the case.

It took Bert Hook, who came into the room as Rushton went out, to restore the human dimension to this death.
‘I feel as though I let her down,’ he said dully. ‘If I’d pressed harder yesterday… She seemed a nice woman.’ The very lameness of this made it a touching tribute.

‘
Oh, shut up, Bert!’ The Sergeant’s troubled face was like a rebuke to his callousness. Lambert would have his regrets for the woman—later, when there was time. At the moment, she was a woman who might have cleared up the mystery of her husband’s death by now, but had chosen to withhold the information, and paid for it with her life. ‘Didn’t she tell you anything, yesterday afternoon. Think, for God’s sake.’

Hook shook his head miserably.
‘Nothing that seemed significant. I’ve told you most of it already. She stone-walled. She didn’t know why Tony Nash was so open in his hatred of her husband. She thought Sandy Munro was “a poppet” with a nice wife. She didn’t even know that George Goodman’s daughter had worked for her husband, and couldn’t see any reason for him to want her husband out of the way. She obviously hadn’t much time for Meg Peters, but she assured me that she didn’t think she was connected with the death.’

‘
In other words, Bert, she went out of her way to assure you of everyone’s innocence. With an even-handedness which argues that she knew which one of them had murdered the husband she was glad to see removed, but wasn’t inclined to reveal it. Didn’t she seem defensive about any particular one, for God’s sake?’

‘
No. I could have pressed harder, but I’d only gone to make arrangements for you to see her this morning. I wouldn’t have seen her at all if she’d been answering the phone.’

‘
No, I know, Bert. It’s as well you got as much as you did out of her. If we can find the area where she was concealing something, we may be there. Did you check anything else with her?’

‘
Only her own whereabouts on the night of her husband’s death. She was with another man at the vital time, she says, back in Surrey. It should be easy enough to check. Perhaps we’d better.’ Hook knew well enough that the lover who worked with the wife to remove an unwanted husband was a common enough combination in homicide.

‘
In due course, if we have to. But I think our solution is somewhere here.’

‘
Here at present, John.’ Hook’s rare use of the chief’s forename marked the resumption of their normal easy working relationship. ‘But not for much longer. The group is due to break up and go home this afternoon.’

With events teeming fast upon each other, Lambert had all but forgotten what he had himself arranged three days earlier. In five hours the Wye Castle party would disperse.
‘We can’t hold them any longer, I’m afraid. Not even another night. I’m surprised we haven’t had lawyers brandished at us before now by someone. I suppose they all thought it might be construed as an admission of guilt.’

‘
And it’s not too unpleasant a place to be detained,’ said Hook, gazing through the picture window of the murder room at the azure sky and the green world beneath it. It was the nearest he would come to acknowledging the attractions of golf; he was looking loftily over the course to the panorama of woods and river beyond it. Far away towards the skyline, a tractor, too distant to be heard, crawled slowly uphill, a reminder of the normal world which seemed at the moment so far removed from them.

‘
Wheel in the dangerous Miss Peters,’ said his superintendent. His frustration and ill-temper were removed by the prospect of work and the peculiar concentration it demanded.

Meg Peters was a diverting enough figure in her own right. Her dark brown trews displayed her lower limbs to admirable effect. The russet blouse might have clashed with her lustrous dark red ha
ir, but instead appeared to complement it perfectly. The slim gold chain deposited its gold cross naturally between the curves of her breasts, as if drawing discreet attention to what was decently hidden beneath the silk. If her husband-to-be had been conspicuously nervous, she exuded confidence.

It might, of course, be a carefully contrived mime: she was, after all, an actress. Lambert addressed himself to that.
‘At our last meeting, we mentioned your criminal record.’

The green eyes flashed her anger, but she kept perfect control.
‘Surely we can let that old business die. Or do you like to hound people for—’

‘
No.’ It was as curt as a command to a straying animal, and it stopped her in her tracks just as effectively. ‘We don’t hound people, Miss Peters. But our task is made more difficult when people withhold information from us. It makes us suspicious—as it is our duty to be in cases of serious crime. And when we dig and find something which has been concealed, it naturally makes us wonder what else has been hidden from us.’

‘
And what else do you claim to have found?’ She managed to give an edge of contempt to her question, as though she were in control of this. To that end, she kept her body apparently relaxed. But the upright position she adopted was not a natural one for her. She was no more than five feet from him, so that he could see the whitening of her knuckles as her fingers grasped the wooden arms of her chair.

‘
We found that you had appeared in some highly questionable scenes in at least one blue film. And become as a result a prosecution witness in a court case.’

Now she was really shaken. For a moment the green eyes darkened and narrowed with hatred. She said nothing for a moment, getting control of her breathing as though it were a professional challenge to her to speak evenly.
‘What use do you propose to make of this information?’

‘
None whatsoever. If you can convince us that it has nothing to do with these deaths.’

‘
Deaths?’ If she had prior knowledge of the second one, she was not falling into the easy trap.

‘
Mrs Harrington was found dead about half an hour ago.’

She gasped now, abandoning any effort at control of her shock. Or simulating an assumed surprise that she had practised in front of her mirror.
‘Murdered?’

‘
I think so, Miss Peters. It’s interesting you should assume so as well.’

‘
Marie wasn’t the type for suicide.’

‘
Indeed.’ He didn’t pursue what that type might be. He had seen some unlikely suicides in the last twenty years, but he had no intention of discussing them with Meg Peters. ‘Did Guy Harrington know about your appearances in these dubious films?’

She said wearily,
‘They were a long time ago now. I was a young actress. In the business, you take anything to get work, when you start. Equity cards and all that. I was naïve enough then to believe the promises that blue movies would lead to other work. They didn’t, of course.’

Suddenly the hoarse croak of a magpie came unnaturally loud through the open window on her right; she twisted her head to the sound, and kept it there, as if scorning to see what Lambert
’s reaction to her words might be. Her nose was perhaps a fraction too strong, but it was a dramatic and impressive profile against the light. Ironically in view of their present conversation, Lambert could see her as Shaw’s Saint Joan, chasing cowardly soldiers and pusillanimous monarchs before her.

He said,
‘I’m not interested in the morality of pornographic films. That’s been dealt with long ago, in other places, thank God. What I asked you is whether Harrington knew about them.’

She sighed.
‘He did. I don’t know how he found out. I gave up wondering about things like that a long time ago. Guy made it his business to find out things people didn’t want him to know.’

‘
You didn’t tell him at the time when you were his mistress?’

She turned back full face to him with her eyes flashing anger from the pale features.
‘No. Surprising as it may seem to you, I wasn’t proud of that part of my life. I thought I’d put it behind me for ever. It’s taken the police to drag it out again.’ There was a curious combination of bitterness and resignation in her words; he wondered what unfortunate experiences she had had in the past with police coarseness; there were many officers who would glory in the reduction of a strikingly beautiful woman to the level of the prostitutes they arrested each week.

‘
I gave you the chance to tell us yourself, Miss Peters, but you chose to attempt to hide it.’ She acknowledged the point with a curt nod. ‘Does Tony Nash know about the films?’

Though she should have expected it, the suddenness of the question caught her of guard. Her cheeks flared as if her face had been sla
pped, and she was suddenly more vulnerable than they had ever seen her. ‘No. I suppose you’re going to tell him… Do you people ever consider the harm you do?’

‘
Very often, despite what you may think. But we are charged with investigating a brutal murder. That takes priority over everything else. Now: Harrington knew. How did he propose to use the information?’ Both of them presumed that the murder victim had used the knowledge unscrupulously and for his own ends. The investigation had taught the CID a lot about
him
, at any rate. The first rule in any inquiry was to find out as much as possible about the victim and his habits.

‘
He used it to taunt me. No, more than that, to threaten me. At first he just enjoyed the power it gave him. Then, when he had discarded me, he used it to humiliate me. When he took up with Felicity Goodman, he liked to set her innocence against my record as a scarlet woman, or worse.’

‘
Harrington had an affair with Goodman’s daughter?’ Hook made the question as low-key as he could, not even looking up from his notebook.

‘
Briefly, yes. The poor girl had no idea what he was about, I’m sure. I scarcely knew her: I thought at the time he had seduced her merely to upset me with a virgin. She had some kind of breakdown I think. Marie Harrington could tell you about it—’

She stopped, her right hand thrust to her mouth in her first unconsidered movement since she had entered the room. Suddenly she was weeping, silently, without the retching sobs shock usually brought with it.
‘I’d forgotten she was dead… I think Marie felt a crazy kind of guilt for her husband. I know she visited the girl in hospital.’