Free Bring Forth Your Dead by J. M. Gregson

clients: his reluctance was no more than a banker’s Pavlovian reaction, but Lambert would play out the little ritual if it did not take too long.
    He played golf occasionally with George Taylor: it was one of the benefits of a small community that one had a passing or better acquaintance with many of the people one met in the course of duty. It led to a kind of trust, never mentioned and rarely betrayed. And as Oldford was not big enough to support more than two banks, he could get what DI Rushton called the financial profile of three of his four present suspects from Taylor. Unless Margaret Lewis confined herself to a building society, she would be with Barclay’s across the road; he had already set Rushton to check what he anticipated would be her unexceptional financial profile.
    Taylor said, ‘If you’re agreeable, we’ll dispense with Walter Miller first, since I don’t think you’ll find much of interest there.’ He was right: the account could hardly have been more unexceptional. They looked carefully at the months before and after the murder of Edward Craven, in the hope of finding large deposits or payments. There was nothing to excite them; it was a routine chart of a well-organised retirement, with the inflow of a small war pension and a larger insurance company pension, and the outgoings of community charges, water, electricity and telephone. They could even identify clearly the deposit of exactly one thousand pounds in the week after Craven’s will was admitted to probate. Miller’s small legacy had been neither urgently required nor quickly spent. Lambert had to remind himself that a careful murderer would present himself exactly thus; it would not do to dismiss from all consideration a man they had still to see on the morrow. There are other reasons for murder as well as avarice.’
    ‘Angela Harrison,’ Taylor announced as he turned to his next file. After a moment’s hesitation, Bert Hook wrote the name carefully at the top of a new page: he had forgotten the married name of Edmund Craven’s daughter. George Taylor was able to help them with the interpretation of a file that at first sight looked as unexceptional as Miller’s. In his anxiety to help, to become even for a little while involved in the hunt for a murderer, he forgot all the scruples which normally guided his actions. Perhaps it flattered him that he was able to display his professional expertise in guiding them so easily through the maze of figures and pointing out the things which should intrigue them. ‘The interesting thing overall is what a modest account this is before Angela’s father died.’ He did a few swift calculations from the pages of computer print-out. ‘Until less than a year ago—to be precise, until Edmund Craven’s will was admitted to probate—the Harrisons were living on nine thousand a year or thereabouts. Not much, these days, for a family of four. They went carefully, as they had to; sometimes they were just in the red at the end of a month, but never for very long.’
    Lambert considered this picture of genteel, respectable poverty, fascinated that pictures of a family he had never seen could be so vividly presented by a few pages of dull-looking figures. ‘What happens after she collects her legacy?’
    ‘Nothing very dramatic, but more is spent, as you might expect. There was a fairly modest holiday abroad this year: the payment was made in one instalment in June. Expenditure generally shows a considerable rise, but only from the very low base we were talking about just now. Most of Angela’s four hundred thousand pound legacy went into unit trusts and bonds; she came in to ask for advice as soon as the money was paid in to her account.’
    Lambert thought of the relief years ago when he became an Inspector and they celebrated by buying shoes for all their three children at once. ‘Edmund Craven made no direct provision for his grandchildren in the will. Was he not fond of them?’
    ‘That I