Bring Forth Your Dead (18 page)

He had spoken as sternly as if addressing a recalcitrant child. It had the effect of checking any lurch towards hysteria. She said stiffly, knowing that her views could hardly carry much weight in this atmosphere of objectivity, ‘I’m sure Walter had nothing but the best intentions.’ She caught Lambert’s eye, for the first time in many minutes, and they exchanged small smiles at the formality of her words.

He said drily, ‘Very probably not. I have to ask you if you ever saw him open one of those boxes of chocolates before he took it to Tall Timbers.’

‘Never,’ she said quickly. ‘I never even saw him take them out of their paper bags. I’m sure he never tampered with them. Does that leave him in the clear?’

‘I’m sure that your husband is far too intelligent a man to let you see him doctoring chocolates, if that is what he intended to do. But we have to ask. Sergeant Hook will record the negative fact that you saw nothing suspicious, alongside the hundreds of other facts which he and the rest of our team are assembling. Sooner or later, the facts which are the significant ones will form themselves into some kind of pattern.’ That at any rate was the way it was supposed to work. Even when it did, it was easier to see the process in retrospect than at the time.

She said naïvely, ‘Does this make Walter your leading suspect, then? I didn’t know about the chocolates, and I’ve now given you a motive for him.’ She looked at him bleakly, and he realised she was doing little more than thinking aloud. She had brought them here to voice the suspicions about her husband that she could no longer contain. Now, when he seemed threatened, she would have died to save
him. It was not unusual; marriage was a strange institution, particularly when it endured as long as this one had.

Lambert did not look at Hook as he said, ‘Every one of the five people who had access to Edmund Craven in the crucial period has a motive, Mrs Miller. If motive alone was enough to prompt a killing, half the spouses in Britain would be lying dead. That is why we have to assemble all the facts we can. If we had known this was murder at the time it occurred, the Home Office pathologist would no doubt have been able to confirm or eliminate those chocolates as an instrument of death. As it is, we have to take into account every possibility. One of those, of course, is that those chocolates could have been used by someone other than your husband to kill the victim.’

He was merely trying to be fair; perhaps, indeed, this time it was he who was thinking aloud. But she took it as a comfort, and gave him a look that was a request for enlargement and explanation. Feeling he was offering her a little hope in exchange for her revelations about her past, he said, ‘For what it’s worth, the scene of crime team found a hypodermic syringe in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom where Mr Craven spent his last months. It would have been the ideal instrument for anyone wishing to inject a solution of arsenic into the chocolates your husband took to him. Any of the other four suspects, as well as your husband, could have used it.’

As if she knew how far he had stepped outside the code by which they operated, she said softly, ‘Thank you, Superintendent Lambert. That puts things into perspective for me.

‘There are also many methods other than chocolate by which arsenic could have been administered.’ He stood up. ‘Thank you for telling us about your relationship with the late Mr Craven. No doubt you will be in touch with us again if anything occurs to you which might seem of even marginal relevance.’

Because he knew he had said more than he should have done, in an attempt to offer her what reassurance he could, he was trying to conclude formally. She herself offered the
final sentiment, the platitude to complete his little homily, as she showed them out. ‘Yes. The sooner you make your arrest, the sooner the innocent will be able to resume their normal lives.’

She stood beneath the lamp on the stone porch, watching them go as politely as if they had been old friends. A long-haired black cat with a white front picked its way past them in the snow, dainty even in its distaste for the frost-sequined surface, then darted swiftly into the house before the door could shut upon this icy world. They waved a brief, unaccustomed farewell from the gate, both hoping that for Dorothy Miller at least the nightmare would lift rather than close in.

20

There were not many people about in the CID section at the station. The digital clock over the door of the murder room showed 18.37. It took Lambert a few moments to remember that this was Friday: when the working days got beyond twelve hours, he found now that he rather lost count of their passing.

Even in the police force, the British weekend claimed its obeisance. The routine office work was put away; he realised now why there were fewer policemen and fewer lighted offices than he had been expecting. He dismissed Bert Hook to set up his Christmas tree with the nine-year-old twins who were eagerly awaiting him. Then he sat for a few moments at his quiet desk, briefly indulging himself with nostalgia, remembering the wide-eyed girls who had once helped him to decorate his own trees, but were now grown up and gone. Then he reflected on how strong a presence children were in this case. That only son whom Edmund Craven had foolishly indulged over the years, who had been so anxious to get his hands on the lucrative site of his father’s house; that daughter who had resented the dead man’s treatment of her mother and her own children; Margaret Lewis and her son, each passionately defensive of the other’s interests.

These musings prompted him to ring his wife, to tell her that he would be home within the hour. As he reached for the phone, his eyes roamed over the various notes upon a desk he had not seen for two days, and the impulse was forgotten.

Rushton had reluctantly taken a day off, assured by his chief that this case was unlikely to reach its resolution in his absence. Lambert found as usual that it was easier to appreciate the DI’s efficiency without his presence. The notes of their conference in the murder room earlier in the week were neatly typed in a folder, the follow-up inquiries they had agreed upon had been pursued and were neatly summarised, with Rushton’s own intelligent comments added where appropriate.

The other notes on his desk emphasised negatively how well organised, how much in bureaucratic control of his team, DI Rushton was. Compared with his briefings, the rest were thoughtless, even occasionally imprecise. It was the last of them which was the only one of any importance. It was scrawled as if the writer had been anxious to resume some other duty; as if he had failed to appreciate the significance it might have in a murder investigation. “16.23 hours. Message from Mr David Craven’s secretary. He would like to see Superintendent Lambert. No one else will do. He suggests 19.30 hours at Tall Timbers. Tried to contact you, sir, to pass on the message, but there was no reply from your car phone.’

It was signed by the young detective-sergeant who had been added to the team to take part in his first murder investigation. For a moment, Lambert wondered unworthily if Rushton had chosen him merely to underline his own qualities of precision and persistence. Then he dismissed the thought: Rushton might not want competition, but he was secure enough not to be threatened by it. And he was too good a policeman to import sloppiness deliberately into his team.

The DS should have recognised the potential of Craven’s
request: it was almost always significant when a leading suspect in an inquiry actually asked to meet its leader. He should have made sure he got in touch with his chief, not left a note on his desk after a single unsuccessful effort to speak to him by phone. At 4.23 Lambert and Hook had been with Dorothy Miller, but at any time since then the car phone would have made contact. The station sergeant would have gone on trying the number, if only he had been asked. Lambert hoped wearily that this was not more evidence of the old divisions between the CID and the uniformed men which he had striven so hard to eliminate.

He looked back to Rushton’s notes on each of the suspects and tried the number given for David Craven. As he had expected, there was no reply; presumably it was a work number. He studied the note again, as if the scrawled words could themselves give a clue to what David Craven wanted to say. None of the CID team was around, though he could have raised whoever he wanted quite quickly by the phone which dominated policemen’s lives. He wanted Bert Hook, but the picture of the Sergeant with the boys who had come to him relatively late in life obtruded itself sentimentally upon his thoughts. Because he wanted no one else, he told himself obstinately that Craven’s message suggested he would talk only to him, that a third party might impede communication.

He tried to ring Christine to tell her he would be home within the hour. The line rang engaged: probably Caroline was ringing her mother from Nottingham, as she often did on Fridays. No matter; the call had been motivated by no more than the tiny pricking of a long-subdued conscience. He would be home soon for the meal that had no doubt been ready for some time, able to say now that he had tried to make contact and found the line engaged. He checked with the station sergeant on the way out that Detective-Sergeant Rogers had not asked that he should be contacted with the message from David Craven, went into the night wondering whether the bollocking should be a ritual one from Rushton or a more private word from himself.

Tall Timbers looked more massive and isolated in the
freezing moonlight. With only the square black outline visible against the stars, its air of leisured Edwardian comfort was removed. The windows which gave the house its design as a place for human shelter were removed from the silhouette, so that the shape seemed to rear itself like a massive blind presence above him, menacing, anonymous, shutting out the stars, even the blue-black night itself, as he went towards it.

The illusion of a great beast, denied its sight and turning dangerous, was reinforced by the bulldozer which loomed suddenly against the skyline on his left, like some primeval monster which had lumbered from its cave to attack the house. Already, two of the massive oaks that gave this place its name had fallen victim to it: even on this frosty night, Lambert could catch the acrid smell of roots and soil exposed to the air for the first time in a hundred years. The tearing apart of the site and the house, so bitterly opposed by Edmund Craven, had been initiated now by his son. To his left reared the machine which was the violent instrument of change; to his tight, the massive, helpless house, the
dinosaur of the twentieth century.

As Lambert neared the first of the four wide stone steps
which led up to the heavy oak door, he caught through the small leaded window beside it the dim amber of a single bulb at the back of the high Edwardian hall. He recognised the householder’s ritual warning to criminals that the place might be occupied, and smiled grimly in the darkness. This light, if it were the only one in the house, would invite rather than deter any burglar who knew his trade. It might be comforting for a householder re-entering a lonely house at night after an absence, but that would be the limit of its usefulness.

He rang the bell because he had to, but he knew as he did so that no one would come to this door to answer. The sound echoed, distant, but clear and sonorous in the enveloping silence of the house. No David Craven, then. Had he merely assumed that Lambert could not make the meeting after he had failed to confirm the time? Had he failed to appear from some more sinister cause? Lambert
looked away to either side. There were other houses there, he knew, but he could neither see nor hear anything of them. They seemed like great ships that had changed their berths in the darkness; he had not thought the houses in the avenue were quite so far apart. No wonder this site had potential for a development of flats: he tested that mundane thought as if it could banish more sinister imaginings about this place and its absent owner.

He went around the side of the house to see if there were any lights at the back. There was a single outside light on the rear corner of the high brick house, but like the one at the front it was not switched on. The clear illumination of the ground around the house would have been a more powerful deterrent to any felon than that small gesture of indoor lighting. The thought made him wonder where Margaret Lewis was. Perhaps with her son? But she could be anywhere; with a friend or at a cinema. Her caretaker role in the house did not demand a twenty-four-hour presence; no doubt she would be back in due course. He admired her nerve in living alone here; in coming back to an empty house of this size late at night. As always, thoughts of admiration were tempered by the evil presence of murder unsolved: mettle of this sort would be admirable equipment for their killer.

There was no light in the rear rooms of the house. But, blazing unnaturally bright through the frosty night, there was a rectangle of light from a building at the bottom of the long garden. It was sixty yards away, through darkness made more absolute by the trees which overhung the path to it. This was the place which Edmund Craven had used as a studio for his amateur paintings, where latterly Andrew Lewis had repaired motorbikes and cars. Who could be there at this hour?

He called through the darkness towards the light. His uncertain ‘Is anyone there?’ brought back a memory of a poem he had learned at school,
The
Listeners
. This silence, like De La Mare’s, stole softly back around him. He wondered whether to call again, and louder. Though he told himself he did not wish to intrude unannounced upon someone’s privacy, in reality he was back in his childhood, with the city child’s irrational fear of country darkness, which as a boy he could never admit. Then the thought of the neighbourhood watch schemes he knew operated in the area stilled his tongue; it would never do for a CID Superintendent to have to explain his presence here to staunch civilian guardians of the law. For an Englishman, embarrassment can be a more potent force even than fear.

As he set off down the frozen path, the thought that had been no more than a vague presentiment formed itself into words, with the irritating timing characteristic of such notions: he wished Bert Hook were here with him; that he had ignored David Craven’s instruction that he should come alone; that he had brought someone, anyone, with him here. Well, it was too late now: he thrust the instinct aside and stepped out resolutely into the darkness. It was the last of several wrong decisions.

Half way down the narrow line of paving stones which led towards the light, there was a small garden hut, which made the blackness to his right even more absolute. As he picked his way with eyes cast down to the grey surface which was the only guide he had to his route, he never saw the figure which emerged softly behind him from this deepest of darkness.

Perhaps he caught the rustle of a movement, or the pressure which a neighbouring human presence seems to place upon the cool night air. Something at any rate made him half turn, so that he caught the full force of the blow above his right temple. The mind of an active man works so quickly in a crisis that he was aware in the instant before he was hit both of his foolishness in coming here alone at night, and of the fact that he had not told even Christine of where he was.

Then the blackness around him exploded into a blinding white light and the pain crashed through a head that was surely too small to contain it. All sense had left him well before he hit the ground.