Death of an Expert Witness (8 page)

He thought that the time had perhaps come to do something about Lorrimer. And he had, after all, his own private reason for taking on the job. It was a small personal obligation,
and to date it hadn’t particularly fretted what he supposed other people called conscience. But Susan Bradley’s call had reminded him. He listened. The footsteps were familiar. Well, it was a coincidence, but better now than later. Moving to the door he called at the retreating back: “Lorrimer. I want a word with you.”

Lorrimer came and stood inside the door, tall, unsmiling in his carefully buttoned white coat, and regarded Middlemass with his dark, wary eyes. Middlemass made himself look into them, and then turned his glance away. The irises had seemed to dilate into black pools of despair. It was not an emotion he felt competent to deal with, and he felt discomforted. What on earth was eating the poor devil?

He said, carefully casual: “Look, Lorrimer, lay off Bradley will you? I know he’s not exactly God’s gift to forensic science, but he’s a conscientious plodder and you’re not going to stimulate either his brain or his speed by bullying the poor little beast. So cut it out.”

“Are you telling me how to manage my staff?” Lorrimer’s voice was perfectly controlled, but the pulse at the side of his temple had begun to beat visibly. Middlemass found it difficult not to fix his eyes on it.

“That’s right, mate. This member of your staff anyway. I know damn well what you’re up to and I don’t like it. So stow it.”

“Is this meant to be some kind of a threat?”

“More friendly warning, reasonably friendly anyway. I don’t pretend to like you, and I wouldn’t have served under you if the Home Office had been daft enough to appoint you Director of this Lab. But I admit that what you do in your own department isn’t normally my business, only this happens to be an exception. I know what’s going on, I don’t like it, and I’m making it my business to see that it stops.”

“I didn’t realize that you had this tender regard for Bradley. But of course, Susan Bradley must have phoned you. He wouldn’t have the guts to speak for himself. Did she telephone you, Middlemass?”

Middlemass ignored the question. He said: “I haven’t any particular regard for Bradley. But I did have a certain regard for Peter Ennalls, if you can remember him.”

“Ennalls drowned himself because his fiancée threw him over and he’d had a mental breakdown. He left a note explaining his action and it was read out at the inquest. Both things happened months after he’d left the Southern Laboratory; neither had anything to do with me.”

“What happened while he was at the Lab had a hell of a lot to do with you. He was a pleasant, rather ordinary lad with two good ‘A’ levels and an unaccountable wish to become a forensic biologist when he had the bad luck to begin to work under you. As it happens, he was my wife’s cousin. I was the one who recommended him to try for the job. So I have a certain interest, you could say a certain responsibility.”

Lorrimer said: “He never said that he was related to your wife. But I can’t see what difference it makes. He was totally unsuited for the job. A forensic biologist who can’t work accurately under pressure is no use to me or the Service and he’d better get out. We’ve no room for passengers. That’s what I propose to tell Bradley.”

“Then you’d better have second thoughts.”

“And how are you going to make me?”

It was extraordinary that lips so tight could produce any sound, that Lorrimer’s voice, high and distorted, could have forced itself through the vocal cords without splitting them.

“I shall make it plain to Howarth that you and I can’t serve in the same Lab. He won’t exactly welcome that. Trouble
between senior staff is the last complication he wants just now. So he’ll suggest to Establishment Department that one of us gets a transfer before we have the added complication of moving into a new Lab. I’m banking on Howarth—and Estabs come to that—concluding that it’s easier to find a forensic biologist than a document examiner.”

Middlemass surprised himself. None of this rigmarole had occurred to him before he spoke. Not that it was unreasonable. There wasn’t another document examiner of his calibre in the Service and Howarth knew it. If he categorically refused to work in the same Laboratory as Lorrimer, one of them would have to go. The quarrel wouldn’t do either of them any good with the Establishment Department, but he thought he knew which one it would harm most.

Lorrimer said: “You helped stop me getting the directorship, now you want to drive me out of the Lab.”

“Personally I don’t care a damn whether you’re here or not. But just lay off bullying Bradley.”

“If I were prepared to take advice about the way I run my department from anyone, it wouldn’t be a third-rate paper fetishist with a second-rate degree, who doesn’t know the difference between scientific proof and intuition.”

The taunt was too absurd to puncture Middlemass’s secure self-esteem. But at least it warranted a retort. He found that he was getting angry. And suddenly he saw light. He said: “Look, mate, if you can’t make it in bed, if she isn’t finding you quite up to the mark, don’t take your frustration out on the rest of us. Remember Chesterfield’s advice. The expense is exorbitant, the position ridiculous, and the pleasure transitory.”

The result astounded him. Lorrimer gave a strangled cry and lunged out. Middlemass’s reaction was both instinctive and deeply satisfying. He shot out his right arm and landed
a punch on Lorrimer’s nose. There was a second’s astonished silence in which the two men regarded each other. Then the blood spurted and Lorrimer tottered and fell forward. Middlemass caught him by the shoulders and felt the weight of his head against his chest. He thought: “My God, he’s going to faint.” He was aware of a tangle of emotion, surprise at himself, boyish gratification, pity and an impulse to laugh. He said: “Are you all right?”

Lorrimer tore himself from his grasp and stood upright. He fumbled for his handkerchief and held it to his nose. The red stain grew. Looking down, Middlemass saw Lorrimer’s blood spreading on his white overall, decorative as a rose. He said: “Since we’re engaging in histrionics, I believe your response ought now to be ‘By God, you swine, you’ll pay for this.’ ”

He was astounded by the sudden blaze of hate in the black eyes.

Lorrimer’s voice came to him muffled by the handkerchief. “You will pay for it.”

And then he was gone. Middlemass was suddenly aware of Mrs. Bidwell, the Laboratory cleaner, standing by the door, eyes large and excited behind her ridiculous upswept diamanté spectacles.

“Nice goings-on, I don’t think. Senior staff fighting each other. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

“Oh, we are, Mrs. Bidwell. We are.” Slowly Middlemass eased his long arms from his overall. He handed it to her. “Drop this in the soiled linen, will you.”

“Now you know very well, Mr. Middlemass, that I don’t go into the gents’ cloakroom, not in working hours. You put it in the basket yourself. And if you want a clean one now, you know where to find it. I’m putting out no more clean linen until tomorrow. Fighting, indeed. I might have known that
Dr. Lorrimer would be mixed up in it. But he’s not a gentleman you’d expect to find using his fists. Wouldn’t have the guts, that would be my view. But he’s been odd in his manner these last few days, no doubt about that. You heard about that spot of bother in the front hall, I suppose? He practically pushed those kids of Dr. Kerrison’s out of the door. All they were doing was waiting for their dad. No harm in that, I suppose. There’s a very nasty atmosphere in this Lab recently, and if a certain gentleman doesn’t take a hold of himself there’ll be a mischief done, you mark my words.”

It was nearly five o’clock and dark before Detective Inspector Doyle got back to his home in the village four miles to the north of Cambridge. He had tried to telephone his wife once, but without success: the line was engaged. Another of her interminable, secretive and expensive telephone calls to one of her old nursing friends, he thought, and, duly satisfied, made no further attempt. The wrought-iron gate, as usual, was open and he parked in front of the house. It wasn’t worth garaging the car for a couple of hours, which was all the time he could allow himself.

Scoope House hardly looked its best in the late afternoon of a dark November evening. No wonder that the agents hadn’t recently sent anyone to view. It was a bad time of the year. The house was, he thought, a monument to miscalculation. He had bought it for less than seventeen thousand and had spent five thousand on it to date, expecting to sell it for at least forty. But that was before the recession had upset the calculations of more expert speculators than he. Now, with the property market sluggish, there was nothing to do but
wait. He could afford to hang on to the house until the market quickened. He wasn’t sure that he would be given a chance to hold on to his wife. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to. The marriage, too, had been a miscalculation, but given the circumstances of the time, an understandable one. He wasted no time on regrets.

The two tall oblongs of light from the first-floor drawing-room window should have been a welcoming promise of warmth and comfort. Instead they were vaguely menacing; Maureen was at home. But where else, she would have argued, was there for her to go in this dreary East Anglian village on a dull November evening?

She had finished tea, and the tray was still at her side. The milk bottle, with its crushed top pressed back, a single mug, sliced bread spilling out of its wrapper, a slab of butter on a greasy dish, a bought fruit cake in its unopened carton. He felt the customary surge of irritation, but said nothing. Once when he had remonstrated at her sluttishness she had shrugged: “Who sees, who cares?” He saw and he cared, but it had been many months since he had counted with her.

He said: “I’m taking a couple of hours’ kip. Wake me at seven, will you?”

“You mean we aren’t going to the Chevisham concert?”

“For God’s sake, Maureen, you were yelling yesterday that you couldn’t be bothered with it. Kids’ stuff. Remember?”

“It’s not exactly The Talk of the Town, but at least we were going out. Out! Out of this dump. Together for a change. It was something to dress up for. And you said we’d have dinner afterwards at the Chinese restaurant at Ely.”

“Sorry. I couldn’t know I’d be on a murder case.”

“When will you be back? If there’s any point in asking?”

“God knows. I’m picking up Sergeant Beale. There are still
one or two people we’ve got to see who were at the Muddington dance, notably a lad called Barry Taylor who has some explaining to do. Depending on what we get out of him, I may want to drop in on the husband again.”

“That’ll please you, won’t it, keeping him in a muck sweat. Is that why you became a cop—because you like frightening people?”

“That’s about as stupid as saying you became a nurse because you get a kick out of emptying bedpans.”

He flung himself in a chair and closed his eyes, giving way to sleep. He saw again the boy’s terrified face, smelt again the sweat of fear. But he’d stood up well to that first interview, hindered rather than helped by the presence of his solicitor, who had never seen his client before and had made it painfully apparent that he would prefer never to see him again. He had stuck to his story, that they’d quarrelled at the dance and he had left early. That she hadn’t arrived home by one o’clock. That he’d gone out to look for her on the road and across the clunch pit field, returning alone half an hour later. That he’d seen no one and hadn’t been anywhere near the clunch pit or the derelict car. It was a good story, simple, unelaborated, possibly even true except in that one essential. But, with luck, the Lab report on her blood and the stain on his jacket cuff, the minute traces of sandy soil and dust from the car on his shoes, would be ready by Friday. If Lorrimer worked late tonight—and he usually did—the blood analysis might even be available by tomorrow. And then would come the elaborations, the inconsistencies, and finally the truth.

She said: “Who else was at the scene?”

It was something, he thought, that she had bothered to ask. He said sleepily: “Lorrimer, of course. He never misses a murder scene. Doesn’t trust any of us to know our jobs, I suppose.

We had the usual half-hour hanging about for Kerrison. That maddened Lorrimer, of course. He’s done all the work at the scene—all anyone can do—and then he has to cool his heels with the rest of us, waiting for God’s gift to forensic pathology to come screaming up with a police escort and break the news to us that what we all thought was a corpse is—surprise, surprise—indeed a corpse, and that we can safely move the body.”

“The forensic pathologist does more than that.”

“Of course he does. But not all that much more, not at the actual scene. His job comes later.”

He added: “Sorry I couldn’t ring. I did try but you were engaged.”

“I expect that was Daddy. His offer still stands, the job of Security Officer in the Organization. But he can’t wait much longer. If you don’t accept by the end of the month, then he’ll advertise.”

Oh God, he thought, not that again. “I wish your dear Daddy wouldn’t talk about the Organization. It makes the family business sound like the Mafia. If it were, I might be tempted to join. What Daddy’s got are three cheap, shabby shops selling cheap, shabby suits to cheap, shabby fools who wouldn’t recognize a decent cloth if it were shoved down their throats. I might’ve considered coming into the business if dear Daddy hadn’t already got Big Brother as a co-director, ready to take over from him, and if he didn’t make it so plain that he only tolerates me because I’m your husband. But I’m damned if I’m going to fart around like a pansy floor-walker watching that no poor sod nicks the Y-fronts, even if I am dignified with the name security officer. I’m staying here.”

“Where you’ve got such useful contacts.”

And what exactly, he wondered, did she mean by that? He’d been careful not to tell her anything, but she wasn’t altogether
a fool. She could have guessed. He said: “Where I’ve got a job. You knew what you were taking on when you married me.”