Authors: J.M. Gregson
She
shrugged. ‘I’m sure he was as surprised as Moira’s brother by the way she behaved. By the energy she showed. By the effortless way she embarrassed Raymond and me.’ She managed a little smile at her own expense at the memory, then looked Lambert full in the face, for the first time since much earlier in the interview. ‘I’m sure that neither of the men had wanted the meeting. That was apparent to me when we arrived. They were prepared to be hostile to Raymond. To throw him out of the house, if he upset Moira. That was totally unnecessary. She was well able to take care of herself.’
Lambert
nodded, encouraging her to enlarge on this. When she did not do so, he said gravely, ‘You will be aware by now that we are in the early stages of a murder investigation. It is therefore important both that I ask you this, and that you consider the question seriously. Did you see anything in the attitude or the behaviour of the other three people at this meeting which would suggest a hostility, a hatred, if you like? Anything which would be strong enough to impel one, or perhaps more than one, of them to kill Mr Keane?’
Her
pulse seemed to stop for a moment at the directness of the question, then resume with a rapid throbbing in her head, as if making up for its suspension. ‘No. I didn’t see anything like that. Not in any of them.’ She wanted to offer him something, anything, to ease this intolerable burden of suspicion she felt descending upon herself, but there was nothing for her here, surely. She couldn’t see that either of those subservient men or the overwrought, housebound Moira Yates would have had anything to do with Raymond’s brutal dispatch from the world.
‘
What car do you drive, Miss Renwick?’
‘
A black Fiesta Sport 1600.’
‘
A hatchback?’
‘
Yes.’
She
watched the burly sergeant make a careful note of the details. But the CID men seemed prepared to leave it at that. Perhaps, after all, they were not so anxious to trap her as she had thought. It was Hook who now said, ‘Did you see anyone else in this last weekend you spent with Mr Keane?’
It
was a lifeline, of sorts. She didn’t want to implicate anyone else, but she was realizing now if she was to protect herself in a murder investigation someone else might suffer. Somebody must have killed Raymond, and the police were eventually going to fasten on to one person, she supposed; a prime suspect, didn’t they call it? She said slowly, her words sounding unnaturally clear in her own ears, ‘We had one visitor. Raymond’s business partner, Christopher Hampson.’
Her
tone of voice rather than the words warned Lambert that this could be important. ‘Was this a social visit, Miss Renwick?’
‘
No. No, I’m afraid Mr Hampson was rather upset.’
‘
He had an argument with Mr Keane?’
‘
Yes. Quite a violent one, as a matter of fact.’ She felt the chill of her treachery, but she had to protect herself. And if Chris was innocent, it was up to him to look after himself, wasn’t it?
‘
What did they argue about, Miss Renwick?’ Lambert’s voice was studiously quiet; he did not want her shying away from this now.
‘
About the business. I gathered it wasn’t doing very well. Raymond had given me the impression it was forging ahead; perhaps he genuinely thought that things were better than they were. Anyway, Chris Hampson thought he should have been contributing more and took him to task about it. I wished I hadn’t been there—I shouldn’t have been. But I hadn’t known it was going to blow up as it did.’
‘
Quite. And did they resolve things?’
Zoe
took a deep breath, allowing the regret for what she had to say to seep into her voice. ‘No. Raymond wasn’t very understanding. I didn’t like what I saw of him that day.’ It was the nearest she had come to referring to her own cooling passion. She was tempted for a moment to enlarge upon the bully she had seen in Raymond that day, upon the ruthless contempt for a man who had helped to build his fortune for him. She wanted to justify herself, to show how mistaken had been Raymond’s attempts to impress her with his swaggering, with his brutal treatment of his partner’s attempts to secure a fair hearing.
Instead,
she went on quickly, damningly, ‘There were high words between the two of them. And they didn’t resolve anything; Raymond was very high-handed with him. And Chris Hampson was furious. He went off in quite a huff.’
‘There can be no doubt it’s murder, John. And no doubt how he died.’ Cyril Burgess, MB, ChB, spoke with considerable satisfaction.
A
pathologist’s job can become very humdrum. It is nowadays largely confined to the routine of post-mortems on patients who have died blameless deaths in hospital, but have, for reasons of the law of the land, to have postmortem examinations conducted upon them. Burgess relished a juicy murder more than most, not just because of the break in routine, but because he was an avid reader of what Lambert saw as outdated and romantic detective fiction.
He
drew the sheet back in a manner which made Lambert recoil in anticipation, but took it only as far as the upper torso. ‘Our revered MP wasn’t drowned at all,’ he said by way of introduction. Lambert knew better than to protest that he had never thought he was. ‘There has been no blood-tinged froth from the mouth or nose,’ said Burgess, indicating these blameless orifices with the tip of his gold-cased ballpen. ‘There is plenty of “washerwoman’s skin” and gooseflesh on the belly and the legs, but they are merely the results of prolonged immersion.’
Lambert
put up with the magisterial style rather than risk revelations of the ravages Burgess had wrought on the hidden body in the interests of scientific investigation. The detective constable who had attended the postmortem—one of the tasks Lambert was only too happy to delegate—was now on his way back to the station, leaving Burgess to address the superintendent. Lambert felt a rare empathy with Queen Victoria: Burgess, like Gladstone, seemed on these occasions to make an audience of one into a public meeting.
The
pathologist indicated a thin purple-black line around the neck of the corpse. ‘This is how Randy Ray met his death.’ The mark on the throat had been apparent from the moment when the corpse had been lifted from the pond, but they needed this official confirmation for the inquest. Plus whatever else this ponderous instructor was able to give them. ‘He died from strangulation with a ligature of some kind. A thin cord rather than a wire: there was the odd thread still trapped in the wound. And he died quickly, not from asphyxia, but from vagal inhibition—heart stoppage technically, from pressure on the carotid arteries in the neck. I should say he was dead within less than thirty seconds: very efficient job.’ Burgess, fingering the key point on the dead white neck, spoke like one professional appreciating the craftsmanship of another.
‘
Was there much strength needed for this?’
‘
No. Force applied scientifically, that’s all.’ Burgess spoke with satisfaction: he knew what Lambert had been thinking.
‘
We can’t rule out a woman, then?’
‘
You couldn’t rule out an eight-year-old!’ said Burgess happily. ‘Though he might have had to stand on a chair. I’d say Keane was attacked from behind and caught unawares. Someone garrotted him with a cord. Even a slight woman could certainly have done it, especially if she had a stick to wind tight at the end of the cord. The plot thickens!’ the silver-haired tormentor said delightedly, and Lambert thought he was going to rub his hands together like a stage witch.
Instead,
Burgess said seriously, ‘You’re going to want a time of death, and I’m afraid I can’t be of much help there. He’s been in the water too long for me to be precise, though it’s been so cold that there hasn’t been much degeneration. I’d give a guess—or what you would call an expert opinion—that he’s been dead for more than one week and less than two. I couldn’t be much more precise than that in court.’
‘
That’s more helpful than you think,’ said Lambert. ‘We know he was alive at least until Christmas Eve. You’re telling us that in all probability he was dead by December the twenty-seventh.’
‘
In all probability,’ said Burgess mournfully, articulating the phrase as though practising it for delivery in due course to a defence counsel.
‘F
or once we can probably be more precise than you about time of death. He was under the ice during that deep frost which began on Christmas Eve; he only surfaced with the thaw. I doubt whether he would have gone through the ice later than Boxing Day: it would have been too thick. The forensic boys are working on it, but I reckon the body was dumped in that pool by the end of Boxing Day at the latest. My garden pool is smaller than the one where he was found, but it had three inches of ice on the top of it by then. I broke it for the fish.’
‘
The wonders of detection,’ murmured Burgess in mock awe. He turned back to the row of metal dishes beside the corpse. ‘Nothing interesting from stomach contents. Your man had eaten what was probably a light meal some hours before he died: the processes of digestion were quite advanced, but that and the time which has passed since death means that I can give you no account of what food was involved. There’s one interesting thing, though. I showed your officer the evidence.’
‘
Then there’s no need to show it to me, Cyril,’ said Lambert firmly, as Burgess threatened to lift the sheet.
As
usual, the pathologist’s sense of drama had made him save his most interesting revelation until the last. ‘I said this fellow wasn’t drowned. More important, he probably wasn’t killed at the place where he was found. The body had lain for quite some time on its back before it was moved. There is hypostasis on his shoulders, buttocks, thighs and calves, clearly visible even after those days in the water.’ Lambert saw the blackening of the flesh beneath the shoulder blades, even on the limited area of the corpse visible to him. ‘The blood sinks to the lowest point in the flesh in the hours after the heart stops beating: simple gravity,’ said Burgess, resuming his instructional vein to a man who knew all about hypostasis.
‘
How long did he lie before he was moved?’
Burgess
shrugged, relishing the feeling of being involved in a murder enquiry, as he always did. ‘Very difficult to say at this distance. But the marks are very definite. I’d say this corpse probably lay for at least a day before it was moved, but I could only make it an opinion in court.’
‘
I’d like you to give that opinion in the Coroner’s Court, though. There won’t be any defence lawyer there to grill you.’
‘
No problem about that. But why should it be important there, John?’
Despite
his mannerisms, Burgess was that most useful of scientific men, a man prepared to speculate, to add his own thoughts as well as his expertise to the work he did for the police. That was why Lambert was now prepared to indulge his old friend with an explanation. ‘The fact that he was killed elsewhere is significant for several reasons. One of them is that that pool is quite remote. Whoever dumped Keane in it had to get him there. Almost certainly in a vehicle. Once that is accepted, I shall be able to examine the cars of all those who were close to the late Raymond Keane in the days before he died.’
*
Christine Lambert was ready some time before she saw the old Vauxhall Senator swing through the gates and ease up the gravel drive.
As
she watched her husband turn in the little circle in front of the garage and leave the bonnet facing towards the gate, she put on her best burgundy winter coat. No point in saving things, now. But she mustn’t make that kind of half-serious joke to John: it would only upset him. Even now, as frightened as you were, you had to think of others and how they might react. She fought down an urge to scream; it passed as abruptly as it arrived.
She
watched John lever himself heavily out of the car, his movements stiffer than they used to be, the long back taking more time to straighten as he turned towards the front door of their bungalow. Through the new double glazing, she could not hear the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel as she always had heard it in the old days. That made him seem further away as he strode silently towards her. Then he looked up at the big lounge window where he knew she would be standing, and gave her a quick, anxious smile. She was suddenly very sorry for him.
‘
I see you’re all packed,’ he said when he came into the lounge. He picked up the small holdall from the chair where she had set it down. She wanted to say, ‘I’ll carry my own bag. I’m not an invalid yet, you know. I’m still whole.’ Instead, she said brightly, ‘The bed’s all ready for me. They rang through from the hospital to confirm it. Quite early. About nine o’clock, I suppose.’
He
recognized the rapid, inconsequential phrases of someone very nervous. He had seen it often enough before. But not in this context. And not from this sensible wife and mother, whom he had seen so often comforting his children and who now needed her own comfort. Because he did not know what to say, he said, ‘I’ll put this in the car,’ and took her bag rapidly back whence he had come, though he knew he could easily have taken it out with her: it was all the baggage they had.