Making a Killing Read online

  Making a Killing

  J. M. Gregson

  © J.M. Gregson 2014

  J.M. Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1990 by Collins Crime as For Sale with Corpse.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Extract from Body Politic by J. M. Gregson

  Chapter 1

  ‘Bastard!’ said Simon Hapgood. He moved the mouthpiece of the telephone a foot from his face, to give it the full benefit of his glare of resentment. ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’ He banged the phone back into its cradle.

  Emily Godson looked at him with disapproval. She had a face framed for disapproval, and she used it frequently. Now the corners of her mouth turned downwards a little further than usual; her grey eyes gazed over the frames of her large tinted glasses, across the clear expanse of her desk and the more cluttered surface of Hapgood’s desk, to the furious features of the man beyond.

  ‘That’s very young executive!’ she said with satisfaction. ‘And who is getting the benefit of your slanderous tongue this time?’ She knew perfectly well, of course. Secretly, she applauded the sentiment. Had Hapgood been braver, she might even have sympathized openly, but she was aware that the line had been dead before these final expletives.

  ‘Who do you think?’ said Hapgood sourly. ‘Lord High and Mighty Freeman, of course. He’s made an appointment for a viewing of Milton Farm at six-thirty this evening. An appointment which I have to keep, naturally. Bastard!’ The word was becoming tedious, even to him.

  ‘He who plays the piper…’ said Emily Godson primly.

  ‘Calls the bleeding tune. I know, I know. Freeman makes me more aware of it all the time. I’ll swing for the bastard before I’ve done.’

  ‘You can’t, nowadays.’ This was Jane Davidson, the young receptionist; she sounded disappointed at the thought. ‘The most you’d get is life. You’d probably be out in about eight years with good conduct. Almost worth it to be rid of that old bugger.’ She invested the last word with a proper vehemence, then resumed the painting of her nails, well aware that both actions would infuriate Miss Godson, who regarded the girl over her glasses with the disapproval of an old-fashioned schoolmarm. When the phone shrilled in front of her, Jane let it ring twice before she reached lazily towards it. When she finally spoke, her tones were full of honeyed courtesy.

  ‘Freeman Estates. Can I help you?’ Bright, professional, the way the secretarial school had taught her in their brief contact with each other. She retained the formula, and her inflections never varied. Even Emily Godson could find no fault here. ‘No, Mr Freeman is not available, I’m afraid. May I ask who was dealing with the property? Ah. Well, Mr Robson is out doing a valuation at the moment. I think Mr Hapgood might be available. Would you like to speak to – ? No, I see. No. Well, thank you for ringing. I’ll tell Mr Robson as soon as he comes in. Yes, indeed.’

  She put down the phone and poked out a small pink tongue at it. ‘Silly cow!’ she said reflectively, and gave her complete concentration to the tiny brush and her nail varnish. Ignoring the attention of her colleagues in the quiet office, she maintained a contented silence about her exchange on the phone.

  Eventually Emily Godson said with pointed asperity, ‘Might the Senior Negotiator know who was calling?’ The title had been conceded to her with reluctance in deference to her twenty years of service to the firm. She knew the winding lanes and varied property of this rural area better than anyone, but her employers deferred to the notion in the trade that ‘Purchasers prefer to deal with a man.’ And Emily, with her resolute lack of humour, her relegation of imagination to off-duty hours, her reluctance to smile in victory or defeat, seemed to do her best to reinforce this popular prejudice. Still, with marriages splitting up at a record rate even in Gloucestershire, there were many women now looking for small properties, and in these often bitter circumstances it did no harm to the firm to have a woman available to handle such transactions sympathetically. Stanley Freeman had accepted this idea, once his enthusiastic deputy George Robson had given it his support.

  Jane Davidson studied her nails for one, two, three seconds, holding her hand at arm’s length to estimate the effects of her labours. When Emily Godson was at school it would have been called impudence: no doubt in these progressive days such concepts had been abandoned, thought the Senior Negotiator as she seethed silently. ‘Mrs Jackson from Walnut Cottage again,’ said Jane when she judged she could hold the moment no longer. ‘You’re well out of it, Emily. I was protecting you when I offered her Simon. She wants to know why we haven’t screwed an offer out of anyone for her nineteen-fifties grot yet.’

  Emily winced, despite her determination to preserve a sphinxlike dignity: Walnut Cottage was a charming, chintzy arbour which she would have loved to be able to afford for herself. The receptionist registered the reaction, marking up another tiny triumph for herself in the bitchery stakes; she was becoming quite adept at this game. ‘Mrs Jackson wouldn’t deal with anyone except George.’

  ‘Mr Robson,’ corrected Emily, before her brain could stop her tongue.

  ‘He said I was to call him George when the public aren’t around,’ said Jane with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Last night it was, or the night before.’ She gazed into the middle distance, as if pinpointing the moment was the key problem in her day.

  So they’d been in the pub again after work. Really, you’d think that at fifty-six George Robson would have more sense. Male menopause, of course. Very tiresome for the rest of the firm, though. And bad for morale all round if a painted floozy like Jane Davidson could get her own way merely by massaging an ageing male ego. If that was all she massaged. Emily bent her head over her letters and tried to banish images of such unwelcome bawdry. Fortunately, the telephone rang again at that moment and Jane was away, fluting mellifluous answers to an inquiry, taking the name and address of the caller as if they were the most important things in her life. Reluctantly, Emily admitted to herself that the infuriating Miss Davidson was very good at this aspect of her job.

  Simon Hopgood had watched and enjoyed the spat between the two women. Though the senior boys had boasted of non-existent holiday conquests, they had seen little of women in action at his minor public school. Nor in the stockbroking firm and the financial services group he had failed in before he brought his talents into estate agency. In the twelve years since he had left school, he had learned a fair amount about the minds and bodies of women, but that was outside work. To see two of them with claws out was an interesting and illuminating experience, even an exciting one when he was not their target. Now he felt it was time to assert himself, with all the confidence of his two years’ standing in the firm.

  ‘Lunch for me,’ he said decisively, with the briefest of nods at the electric clock above the filing cabinets. He slipped on his jacket and made for the door. ‘If anyone wants me in the next hour, I shall be in the George and Dragon, sampling the dragon’s cottage pie and selecting
my winners.’

  ‘You have an appointment at one forty-five, don’t forget,’ said Emily Godson, patting the iron-grey hair at the nape of her neck and not even deigning to look up. From her, a friendly reminder sounded like a rebuke.

  Simon checked his tie and the lift of his dark-gold hair in the plate glass of the window. ‘I shan’t,’ he said with dignity, ‘though with Joe Stalin Freeman organizing my evenings I’ll soon be working a fifteen-hour day!’ There was no harm in a little martyrdom; nor in directing attention away from what he proposed for the later part of that evening.

  Then he was through the door and moving erect and nonchalant down the High Street, his bright blue eyes studiously avoiding looking back at the office. Jane Davidson watched him pass with a calculating eye. He was becoming less of a wimp as he found his feet in the world: perhaps he might even be worthy of her renewed attention, in due course.

  *

  In his home, Stanley Freeman was no Joseph Stalin.

  To his wife’s elaborate fugue of abuse, he produced a counterpoint of sullen resentment, but there was little doubt who controlled the exchanges. Stanley marvelled at the detail of invective available to a woman not operating in her first language.

  Denise Freeman’s dark eyes looked across the broad expanse of Regency dining table and disliked what they saw. Indeed, she wondered what she could ever have seen in this short-legged, pot-bellied man, whose high-domed eminence had been transformed so quickly into baldness over the last few years. The too-light green trousers, the multi-coloured leisure shirt, even the gold-rimmed glasses, seemed vulgar, where once she might have found them dashing. If, as she suspected, they were chosen for another woman, then she had very low taste.

  She was a good two inches taller than her husband, slim as she had been when they met in Lyon a quarter of a century earlier, elegant in simple white blouse and dark blue trousers. Where her husband’s remaining fringe of hair was almost white about his temples, her raven tresses were as unflecked with grey as ever they had been; even Stanley was ignorant of the small helping hand they needed now from a bottle.

  ‘So where were you?’ she said. Her assumed weariness concealed a natural sharpness; beneath the drooping lids of her eyes, Denise Freeman observed her husband closely, and with distaste.

  ‘Last night?’ He attempted an indifference he could not sustain. ‘Oh, working, I expect.’

  Her look of smouldering contempt warned him he would need to do better than this. He tried to hold the silence between them, but her will was so much stronger than his that he eventually had to speak.

  ‘I had a drink.’

  ‘Or two, or three.’

  ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘No.’ She studied the vase of flowers she was arranging, added an extra stem of alstromeria at the back. ‘In Oldford, was this?’

  Stanley Freeman, autocratic deployer of labour and intransigent head of Freeman Estates, felt like a novice mouse in the clutches of a highly experienced cat.

  ‘In Gloucester.’

  ‘Ah. Alone, of course?’ The curl of her lips reinforced the disdain in her voice.

  ‘With no one you know.’ He was drawn on despite his better judgement.

  ‘No. I wouldn’t move in her circles.’

  ‘You wouldn’t move in his.’ There was a sudden flash of defiance as Stanley looked his wife full in the face and attempted to match her scorn. But he could not equal the cool contempt in her dark pupils, and his eyes fell to his knees as he slumped on to one of the mahogany stand-chairs by the table. He twisted the wide band of gold automatically on his thick finger; his lips set like those of a sullen child.

  Denise Freeman wondered how she could ever have been so eager to marry him, even those many years before. Looking at the features puffed with drink and smoking, the stocky, overweight frame with its unattractive paunch, the seedy flashiness of her husband’s clothes, she wondered how far she had moved on from the slim, bronzed French girl whose dark good looks had been so suited by bridal white. Compared with Stanley, she had worn well – but what a comparison! She must beware of the discontent she saw so often about her mouth nowadays: no woman was improved by it, however understandable its causes.

  She set her face into a determined, experimental smile, estimating its effect in the mirror. She would not think about what she proposed for the evening until her husband was safely off the premises. Stanley, looking up suddenly into her face, felt laughter would bounce off those brilliant white teeth as if they were icicles. She was like a toothpaste commercial which had gone wrong. Perhaps the intrusion of such an image into his normally unimaginative mind upset his judgement, for he made the mistake of resuming their dialogue.

  ‘He’s a car dealer in Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know him. Wouldn’t want to.’

  ‘No.’ She set the flowers on top of the cocktail cabinet, moved them an inch left, studied them anew.

  ‘It was business.’ He was drawn on by her monosyllables as surely as any tickled trout. ‘I’m trying to set up a deal for the pool of cars. To part-exchange the five of them in a month or two.’

  ‘Six, with mine. If you still insist on one for your receptionist, who doesn’t merit one.’

  ‘It doesn’t cost much. I like to treat her like the rest.’

  It was an old argument between them. No receptionist before Jane Davidson had been afforded a company car, and she patently did not need one in the business as the others did.

  Denise extracted a small dahlia she thought superfluous to her arrangement, then crushed it slowly in her small right fist. Both pairs of eyes watched the knuckles whiten as her fingers squeezed and the flower disappeared, then saw the crushed ball of red drop unrecognizable into the flower trug with the other waste. It grew a little there, raising the odd twisted petal aloft before it rolled sideways and lay still; it was like the death-throes of some small mammal. She examined the faint crimson stain the flower had left on the insides of her fingers; he had to force himself to speak.

  ‘I can change your car if you like. I thought you were happy with the Renault.’ At least he was diverting the talk from his drinking companion. ‘I wouldn’t get the same part-exchange on that as the Fords.’

  ‘Better than Harry Bloxham at Granger’s, was he, your new man?’ It was delivered with a carefully casual air. Only the small, mirthless smile showed her triumph. They always dealt with Granger’s. He had forgotten she knew Harry Bloxham.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said desperately. She did not reply. Both of them had known from the start that he was lying. Both of them knew now that his lying had been exposed. The exchange had reached its natural conclusion.

  As Stanley drove his Granada quietly through the lanes, his hands trembled and he was glad of the automatic gear-box. Things couldn’t go on like this. He slipped one of his wife’s valium tablets into his mouth: his need was clearly greater than hers. It took time for him to re-establish his image as the autocrat of the office, even in his own mind. When he parked, he was tempted towards the hip-flask, but it was too early yet for liquor; that would come later in the day.

  *

  If Freeman had known he was observed, he might have been more circumspect. As it was, he drew himself up to his full height and checked that the back of his leisure shirt was securely in his trousers: he should be wearing tie and jacket in the office, but he had been too anxious to get out of the house to think of changing. It would be, ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ for his staff again.

  Four eyes watched him unblinkingly as he tidied his unsuitable clothing and took a long deep breath. Had Freeman not been preoccupied with his own problems, he would have seen his Deputy Managing Director, parked only three spaces beyond him in the small public car park. George Robson watched him curiously from the front seat of his Sierra, noting his chief’s unease and speculating upon the reasons for it. Perhaps Stanley had been feeling the sharp edge of Denise’s tongue again. Well, serve him right if he had, the slob. Why he should negle
ct his well-preserved French spouse was a constant mystery to George. Those long legs, those slim, active hips, those sun-tanned shoulders, those dark, bedroom eyes… Verbal speculation gave way to visual fantasies that needed no words to frame them.

  A foot behind George Robson’s greying head, two soft brown eyes watched Stanley Freeman’s retreating back with even greater intensity. Their gaze had been fixed unbroken upon the owner of Freeman Estates ever since he had parked the dark blue Granada. As he paused before striding away, there came from three inches behind those eyes a low, valedictory growl.

  ‘Easy, Fred,’ said George Robson, and the Labrador immediately detached his eyes from the retreating figure and licked the back of his master’s neck; it was as if some spell had been abruptly broken, returning him to a life of movement and affections. George wondered if he had communicated his own dislike of his chief to the dog, for Fred was normally the most amiable of beasts.

  ‘Some of us have work to do,’ said Robson heavily: the dog would not recognize the disgruntled cliché as readily as his wife and staff. He eased the Sierra into gear and moved slowly out of the car park to meet his client. Fred sat erect as a dowager on the back seat, examining modern suburb and ancient grassland with equal interest.

  And George Robson, not for the first time, mused as he drove on how pleasant life would be if Stanley Freeman were removed from it.

  Chapter 2

  In the evening, the showers passed away eastwards and the sky cleared to a sharp blue, which deepened as the sun sank. On such a summer evening, there are few pleasanter places than England, and within England few pleasanter areas than rural Gloucestershire.

  The car moved so quietly that it scarcely disturbed the peace of its surroundings. It was a Rolls-Royce, beige to most eyes, but to the man who had devised its advertising material oyster metallic. It purred through this lush green country like a large contented animal, past farmlands whence yeomen had gone to Agincourt and cricket fields where W.G. had played a century ago. The man drove carefully. He was not used to roads as winding and narrow as these. And there was no need to hurry: they had put back the appointment to nine to make sure he would not be late, but now it seemed they had ample time. He slowed almost to a halt so as to savour the silhouette of a village church against the sun’s dying fire. When a man reached sixty, beauty seemed perpetually tinged with reminders of mortality. ‘That churchyard could tell some tales,’ he said as they glided past it. The idiom was his wife’s, but the accent was North American.