Murder at the Nineteenth (Lambert and Hook Detective series Book 1) Page 7

  He looked up again at the Captain, and caught him licking his lips and relaxing just a little; perhaps he thought the interview was over and he was about to be dismissed. Had he not been so obviously rattled, that might well have been so; Lambert was anxious to get the evidence of all members of the Committee about last night’s fateful twenty minutes as quickly as possible. When he had put the different accounts together, he would come back with more questions. But Michael Taylor was disconcerted, and thus vulnerable.

  ‘Did you like James Shepherd?’ Lambert asked suddenly. Taylor’s fresh face changed abruptly: his dismay showed as clearly as fear on the face of a child. This was certainly not a man who should plan murder. But thankfully for detection and the crime figures, murderers did not always come from the ranks of those best equipped for the task.

  ‘What’s that to you?’ A flash of temper. Good.

  ‘It has nothing to do with me personally. It has everything to do with me as the agent of a murder inquiry. Yesterday, I couldn’t have cared less about your private life or your relationship with the deceased. Today, I am interested in anything which might give me the smallest help in finding a violent killer.’

  It was a risk: he had spoken vigorously, even with distaste. His Chief Constable would certainly have disapproved of his tone. A different man from Taylor might have turned surly and uncommunicative. But he was not that sort of man. He plucked nervously at the gold watch upon his wrist; the colour drained from his too-revealing face; he looked suddenly older as he gazed down at the table; Lambert could see again the incipient bald patch he had never noticed before today.

  ‘I didn’t like him,’ Taylor said dully, ‘and he didn’t like me. I don’t know why he couldn’t have treated me better —’ He looked up: for an instant, his blue child’s eyes met Lambert’s with a hurt appeal against injustice. Then he remembered where he was and his voice trickled away into silence as he stared dully at the table. He was a schoolboy who had owned up to a minor crime and who now waited to be lectured and dismissed.

  This had to be explored, but he was not going to say much more without further prompting. ‘If in doubt, make ’em sweat,’ thought Lambert unkindly; he began the elaborate ritual of lighting his pipe. He set matches, pipe, pouch and ramming tool on the table in front of him, and began to fill and tamp the bowl of the briar with exaggerated thoroughness. Pure ham: Hook looked hard at his notes lest his face should reveal the thought, and Lambert was glad that Christine could not see him now. No one could demolish pretension like a wife. But it had worked before, and suddenly Taylor was watching the Superintendent with the fascination of a dog waiting upon its master. Towards the end of Lambert’s performance, he invited Taylor to play a minor role, and the Captain fumbled in his pocket and produced a gold cigarette case. He extracted and lit a French cigarette with the exaggerated care of a man trying to control his movements and conduct his own answering ritual, but his hands shook a lot, and the flickering flame of his lighter etched his nervousness upon the air.

  ‘Why didn’t he like you?’ Lambert reopened the conversation with studied casualness, apparently giving all his attention to the final mysteries of his pipe. He tried not to think about what Christine would say about his performance; schoolteachers lived in a healthy, open world, where such deceits could be reserved for amateur dramatics. Or so he chose to think. Under the weight of her puritan disapproval, he hardly produced his pipe at all at home now. His wife would have been aghast at the elaborate rite he made out of his performance here — and perhaps even pleased when it failed to work. Taylor was uncomfortable still, but on his guard. He drew upon his cigarette and affected a shrug which was just too theatrical to be convincing. He did not trust his voice enough to support the gesture with speech.

  Lambert puffed his pipe, hoping the man opposite him could not divine the indecision behind the smoke. It was not likely he would: the vain, shallow man before him smoked nervously, trying to keep his hands still and look calm. It would not take a lot to break him down completely, but he was the kind of man who would demand his solicitor and wrap himself in all the protective armour his money offered him. Lambert would take this on if he had to, but he was anxious to introduce nothing that would slow the pace of the inquiry.

  It was Hook who solved his dilemma. Either he sensed his chief’s indecision or he took this silence as his cue. He played his one possible trump card with uncompromising directness. ‘What is your relationship with your wife?’ he said. The question came harshly, with a hint of impatience, from a quarter whence Taylor had least expected it, and it had an immediate effect. The fresh face flushed suddenly to the roots of the carefully coiffured yellow hair and the pale blue eyes widened with fear as well as anger. He stuttered into a ‘What the devil —’ but his voice was too shaken for him to trust it further and he trailed away into silence. There was a desperate air about him now, but he could turn stubborn and uncooperative: Lambert judged that it was the moment for the official clichés that might lure him into disclosures.

  ‘I’ll be quite frank with you. Sergeant Hook was given … an indication, that we should question you about this area. You must understand that in a murder inquiry all suggestions of this sort must be painstakingly checked out.’ Pompous. And deceitful. Hook had been doing no more than operating on his chief’s intuition. But the Captain’s reputation was a badly kept secret anyway. If Taylor in turn gave him any pointers about other suspects, he would protect him in the same way: nine-tenths of information of this kind proved irrelevant to the case, and there would be enough difficulties left behind in the club without enduring breaches among its Committee.

  Taylor looked at once furious and pathetic; the colour which had so lately flamed through his features was draining away. He looked full into the Superintendent’s face now, and Lambert prompted the pale, uncertain figure. ‘Let me give you a word of advice, Michael, about the way we proceed. We shall have to question the five members of the Committee present last night not only about themselves and their own affairs but about their fellow Committee-members. If we do not make an arrest within forty-eight hours, we shall question a much wider range of people at one further remove from the murder — people such as golf club members and the working associates of the five people at the centre of the investigation. There is not the slightest chance that you will be able to conceal large areas of your private life. Certainly it will make my work easier if you talk to me frankly now; I suggest to you that it will also be much easier for you.’

  ‘How far would it go?’ Taylor’s voice had a nervous hoarseness which made the listeners strain for his words even in that quiet room. The fish was hooked; Lambert tried not to sound eager as he worked patiently to land it.

  ‘I can make no promises about what will eventually be seen as relevant to the case. What I can say is that all statements or portions of statements which are not required for an eventual court case will be destroyed. If you are totally honest with me now, there should be only a minimal need for cross-checking your statements against the views of other people. If you withhold anything which might have a bearing on the crime — and you must see that until we have more information all personal secrets among the five people I have mentioned are of interest to me — we shall be bound to pursue it with others.’

  It was his longest speech of a busy morning. He knew from twenty years’ experience that it was genuinely good advice, but he was using his reassuring tone as much as the logic of what he said to coax the wavering Taylor into the revelation of a private life he already guessed at. Having finished his counsel, he puffed at his pipe and studied his victim — for that is what the Captain now appeared — with an impassivity which was assured rather than felt. There was pity within him for the increasingly wretched man who fidgeted before him. He also felt and deplored in himself the excitement he always experienced when a witness seemed about to talk about areas he had tried to conceal. Perhaps it was no more than the excitement of the angler about to net a well-play
ed fish; more likely, he thought sourly, it was the curiosity of the repellent urchin who turned over damp stones to see what lay beneath.

  Michael Taylor spoke without warning and without looking up from his cigarette. His tones were drained of emotion, heavy with the weary resignation of a man who finds himself in a corner and is not a natural fighter. For a wild moment, Lambert hoped he was listening to the beginning of a murderer’s confession.

  ‘You know my wife is a de Volke.’ It was a statement not a question. Lambert had not known. He had seen Taylor’s wife only once, at the Golf Club’s formal dinner-dance. He remembered her as severe, slightly older than her extrovert husband, glittering with what to him seemed an excess of costume jewellery. With a policeman’s shock, he realized now that the jewellery had been genuine and that the small, severe woman had sparkled under many thousands of pounds: the de Volkes owned some of the largest diamond deposits in South Africa.

  Taylor was going on. ‘I married her at nineteen.’ A pause, then a drooping of the wide shoulders, a confession of what he refused to confront most of the time himself, ‘All this — comes from her.’ He looked round automatically for evidence of ‘all this’ and found himself without tangible indications of what he meant. The dark, impersonal room enclosed him; his tormentors studied him impassively across the big oak table; the knife lay like an accusation between them. Numbly, he tapped the gold cigarette case he had set down before him. Lambert nodded his understanding and waited expectantly.

  ‘My firm is run on her money. She lets me play with my tinpot advertising agency, she says, as long as I don’t step too far out of line. I can have drink, cars, business jaunts, women — so long as I don’t actually go to bed with them.’ A bitter half-smile, a hint of emotion amidst the enveloping self-abasement. ‘Ten years ago, when I was thirty-two, I kicked over the traces and left. In three weeks, I was back. I’d got used to wealth. The wage I got as an unqualified accountant wouldn’t have kept me in clothes. My wife took me back and laughed at me. From then on we’ve both known where we stood.’ There was no self-pity, only a contempt for himself so absolute that now it was his listeners who were uncomfortable. Taylor stubbed his cigarette out slowly and watched the thin thread of smoke that rose from the butt. He was emotionally exhausted, unconscious for a moment of his surroundings and the occasion.

  It was Lambert now who had to remind him of that occasion. ‘And James Shepherd knew of this situation?’ he said gently. Taylor seemed to bring his thoughts back from a long way away, to focus with difficulty on Lambert and Hook. Numbed by his self-denigration, he answered without any attempt at the jaunty confidence he had pretended at the outset of their exchanges; he spoke now as if the revelation was a relief. ‘That bastard knew everything that went on around here. It was his hobby. He knew my wife; he knew the accounts of my firm; he knew just how much she put in each year to keep it going. He seemed to know just when I was in the office and when I was elsewhere. Once he taunted me that he was going to take over my company and integrate it into his. I don’t suppose he would ever have wanted a struggling little advertising agency that made a loss in real terms, but he enjoyed watching me squirm under the threat.’

  Again the self-humiliation was so obvious that it was frightening. Taylor was staring fixedly at the spot where Shepherd had last stood. Neither Lambert nor Hook dared to intervene and there was a long pause in the airless room before the Captain eventually looked back to them. Again he seemed to have to force himself back to an awareness of their presence and the circumstances in which he spoke. ‘There have been women,’ he said without the semblance of a smile. ‘Probably you know that.’ Lambert gave him the tiniest nod, pushing him forward rather than signifying agreement; a pretended omniscience is part of any detective’s stock-in-trade. ‘Some of them were in the Golf Club. Two of them were serious. My wife didn’t know. Shepherd did. I suppose it was easy for him to find out. When he wanted to be, he could be quite a charmer himself, and no doubt other women were prepared to talk to him. Anyway, whenever he wanted to watch me squirm, he told me how much he liked my wife — and how he was sure she would like to hear about my friendships with women here. On the night I was installed as Captain, he did it in front of other people.’

  His voice had trailed away almost to nothing again, and he stopped altogether with the misery of that memory. Lambert recalled the jaunty, beautifully presented image of an extrovert Captain, breezily at home with all men, which Michael Taylor had briefly presented on his arrival today. That was his normal persona with the members, and seeing him but infrequently and in large gatherings, most of them probably accepted it. The image he strove so hard to create was more important to Taylor than it would have been to most people. The destruction of that image in his moment of triumph must have been for him a terrible moment. Had this culmination of years of torment from his Chairman driven him to desperate and violent retribution?

  Taylor raised his pale blue eyes and looked the Superintendent full in the face with an effort that was physically apparent. But he had abnegated his self-respect too completely to sustain the effort. His gaze fell back to the murder weapon, and now it seemed to afford him not fear but a grim satisfaction. He turned the gold cigarette case over in his hands, but he was looking still at the knife when he said evenly, ‘I didn’t kill Shepherd. At this moment, I wish I had.’

  Chapter 8

  Taylor seemed on the point of physical as well as mental exhaustion. They would get little more from him at this point. Lambert made a few notes, anticipating glumly the interview he would need to have with Mrs Taylor if they did not find their killer quickly. When he asked Taylor to consider whether he could offer anything useful about his fellow Committee members, the Captain looked at him without comprehension: he was plainly too immersed in his personal shame and distress to be capable of such reflection. Moreover, as he had just indicated he had no interest at present in helping to unmask a murderer of whom he thoroughly approved. Lambert made an appointment to see him at his office the next day to pursue Taylor’s thoughts about his golf club colleagues when he might be more rational. Then he dismissed him thankfully.

  It was not until the door closed behind the wretched Taylor that he realized how tense he had become during the interview. Both he and Hook stood up and moved over to the big bay. ‘Sometimes I hate this job,’ said Lambert heavily. Yet he was expressing what he thought he should feel rather than what he actually did; not far beneath his surface regret was the knowledge that they had broken Taylor down more easily, made him reveal his thoughts more completely, than they could realistically have hoped. This guilty exultation was tempered by the thought that they were no nearer to finding a murderer.

  Bert Hook had not the complication of emotions that beset his chief. ‘Personally, I hope it’s that miserable little sod and not poor old Parsons,’ he said, ‘but I can’t see him having the guts for murder.’ Lambert looked down into his Sergeant’s heavy, experienced features with surprise. Plainly Hook shared neither his pity for Taylor nor his compunction about their success. Of course, he had not seen as Lambert had that other Taylor, with his cheery dominance of the first tee and the nineteenth hole on Sunday mornings. But there were other reasons why he dismissed Taylor so readily: his contempt was that of the man who has worked very hard for everything he has achieved, who expects and copes with setbacks. Bert Hook was a Barnardo’s boy and proud of it, though he never mentioned it. Taylor was to him one to whom the good things of life had been presented free, but who crumbled as soon as the going became rough. His abject performance in the last hour touched no chord of sympathy in Bert Hook, who saw a man who would treat him and the police with cavalier disdain in a different situation. Probably Hook’s vision was the clearer one; certainly it was the more practical one for the investigation. Lambert, who saw in Taylor a limited personality in a situation which had years ago passed beyond him, wondered uncomfortably if he was becoming soft at the core under the weight of rank and age.

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nbsp; ‘Time for those sandwiches,’ he said, suddenly anxious to escape the case for a while. The discreet tap at the door seemed right on cue, but it was not Vic Edwards with lunch as he had hoped, but CID Sergeant Harding with his fingerprint equipment.

  ‘All right to take the Secretary’s dabs now, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘You might well get the Captain’s as well if you’re quick,’ said Lambert, and led the Sergeant with his trays and powders along the few yards of corridor to Parsons’s room. Behind the door there were raised voices: he discerned Taylor’s excited tenor and Parsons’s lower, insistent intermissions, but he could make out no words; he cursed the solid oak doors of this oldest part of the clubhouse. He knocked, entered, and took in the scene at a glance. The bottle of whisky stood open upon the desk, but only a single glass was visible, clasped in both hands by the Captain as he sat at Parsons’s desk. The Secretary stood over him as Lambert’s entry froze them in a guilty tableau. Taylor, perhaps emboldened by the whisky, flashed him an unguarded glance in which hate mingled with fear. Parsons deliberately looked at Sergeant Harding behind him rather than at the Superintendent. Though Lambert might never know what they had been discussing, he was sure it was not Golf Club business.

  ‘Ah, good. Two birds with one stone here for you, Sergeant Harding,’ he said, He avoided the bad taste of including the word ‘kill’ in the cliché, but brooked no argument about the fingerprinting. Taylor glanced quickly up at Parsons, then acquiesced along with the Secretary in the process.

  When Lambert went back to the murder room, Hook was concluding a phone call. ‘Very good, sir … Helpful of you to call … No, indeed. Er, you do realize that we’ll need to check? Yes, thank you again for ringing in. Goodbye, sir.’