[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  He was watching her as earnestly as he had throughout their exchanges. And now, when she least expected it, he smiled. ‘Oh, I do, Becky Clegg. I have a much clearer idea of life in a home than you might think I have.’

  ‘There’s a clever pig, then.’

  ‘And you’ve been around since then. Lived in a squat, amongst other things.’

  ‘I’m not there now. I’m in a hostel. That’s until I get a pad with a friend.’

  ‘Good friend, is she?’

  At least he hadn’t assumed it was a boyfriend, as everyone else seemed to. ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Because if you pick the wrong person to set up house with now, Becky Clegg, you could end up in the clink. With nowhere to go when you got out.’

  She wondered how this old man who was part of the enemy could pinpoint her secret fears so precisely. She said roughly, ‘So, why should you care, pig?’

  She still couldn’t prise a hostile reaction from him, a bit of temper on which she might feed. He said calmly, ‘Because we already have little enough time to spend on serious criminals, without being distracted from the big boys by small-time riff-raff like you.’

  Becky Clegg felt very small. She found herself fighting an absurd impulse to please this big even-tempered man. She heard herself saying, apropos of nothing at all, ‘I don’t do drugs. Never have done.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Maybe there’s hope for you.’ Hook believed her: he had assessed the brightness of her eyes and the alertness of her mien as soon as he came into the room, before he decided that this cocksure, abrasive, vulnerable creature was still malleable and worth his efforts.

  ‘I’m getting it right.’

  ‘By stealing expensive watches?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have got myself caught.’

  ‘No, Becky, you shouldn’t have got yourself involved at all.’

  ‘I needed the money.’ She was going through the formalities of protest now. She had admitted to his accusation, at some moment which she would never be able to pin down.

  ‘Rubbish!’ Hook blazed into sudden genuine annoyance; it was the first time during the interview that he had lost his calm. The young man in uniform beside him, as well as the girl on the other side of the table, twitched with shock. ‘You’re not starving. You’ve got a roof over your head, even if it’s a hostel roof. Don’t parade that rubbish about need. You don’t know what need is, girl!’

  Hook’s Herefordshire burr came out more strongly as his emotion rose. It touched some chord within Becky’s subconscious, so that his outrage with her became more powerful than the logic of his words. She said abjectly, ‘What is it you want me to do?’

  ‘It’s what you want to do that’s important. Unless you want to get back on the right track, and want it more strongly than you’ve ever wanted anything, it won’t work. You’ll be back in here or some other nick, talking to someone who isn’t such a fool as me, and he’ll throw the book at you. And when I hear about it, I’ll cheer him on!’

  Becky Clegg fought back the tears. ‘I want to go straight. To keep out of trouble. I’ve got a job interview tomorrow.’ She could have said she had been stealing to get clothes for the interview; she had fully intended to offer that excuse in court, if it had come to it. Mitigating circumstances, they called it, and people on benches were more likely to be swayed by a contrite, pretty girl with her eyes cast down before them than by an inarticulate young man with tattoos. But she wouldn’t try things like that on this man.

  ‘Then for God’s sake go for it. And if you don’t get this job, go for the next one.’

  ‘I will. I’m getting other things going, too. With other people, outside the hostel. The kind of people you’d approve of.’ She tried to curl her lip on this sentence, but, for some reason she could not fathom, she wanted to convince this burly older man that she was trying to change her life.

  Bert Hook realized belatedly that he was breathing almost as unevenly as the young woman in front of him. He studied this girl, who so wanted to convince him, for a few more seconds, wondering how much of a fool he was and what weaknesses he was displaying to the young copper beside him. Then he said, ‘Give her a caution and send her on her way, Constable Jeffries.’ He turned back to the young woman opposite him as she finally burst into tears and waited until she was quiet before he said, ‘And as for you, madam, if I find you making a fool of me as well as yourself, you’ll regret it. Just remember, I don’t ever want to see you again, Ms Clegg!’

  As he left the interview room without a backward glance, Bert Hook did not realize quite how quickly he would meet Becky Clegg again.

  Three

  Chief Superintendent Lambert was restless. He had despatched his figures to the Regional Crime Division for the quarterly compilation of the Serious Crime Statistics before lunch and was on top of his paperwork. For once, he didn’t have to give a written explanation to account for his overtime budget in the Oldford CID section. Serious crime in his area was thin upon the ground at present.

  And that, shamefully, was the reason for his inability to settle, for his roaming around the station in search of interest, for his almost fretful concentration upon the details of the unremarkable crimes that were being reported. After thirty years in the police service, twenty-three of them in CID, John Lambert knew himself better than most of us do. The absence of a juicy murder, or a complicated fraud, or a serious gang robbery left him a little at a loss. Fretting. Frankly, a little bored, if he was honest. By mid-afternoon, he was even turning his thoughts towards the retirement which he knew could not be delayed for ever.

  There was relief around the station at Oldford when he went home earlier than usual. The old boy might be universally respected as a detective - even those who thought his methods were outdated had to give grudging recognition to the results he achieved - but he made everyone nervous when he began to involve himself in the more minor avenues of crime.

  Christine Lambert knew her husband even better than he knew himself. She was a schoolteacher, now only working part-time after a heart bypass a couple of years earlier. But she was still used to dealing with difficult children.

  She sent John into the garden when he came home unexpectedly early, because she knew that was the best method of alleviating the minor tensions which came to him with inactivity. ‘I can see you’re wondering what to do with yourself. If you’re in your planning mood, decide on the plants you want to move during the winter and the places where they should be replanted. If you’re feeling more energetic, you can dig over some of the vegetable patch before the frosts come.’

  The popular press might choose to build John up as a superman during his occasional high-profile cases, but he was a conventional man in many respects. The concern of senior British coppers for their roses has become almost a cliche, but only because it is so often borne out by the facts. Lambert was no exception. As he wandered over the lawn alongside his rose beds, he was delighted to see them still carrying so much flower after the long summer heat, and congratulated himself on the disease-free growth and sturdy habit of his most recent purchase.

  He spent a vigorous twenty minutes in his vegetable patch in the early autumn dusk, turning the soil a spit deep with his spade, settling into a steady rhythm and enjoying the physical exertion of work with a purpose.

  Christine watched him from the window, glad that the tall, lean man was still capable of such effort, thinking of the men who had turned this earth in much the same way for centuries before him. In the end, she could scarcely see him in the gloom, and only the occasional shadowy movement showed her that he was still there, working steadily towards the end of the patch he had designated for his efforts.

  When he came in healthily tired, she sat him in his familiar armchair and brought him a beer. ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire.’

  John said, ‘I’m all right for up to half an hour; I couldn’t dig for much longer nowadays! The spring cabbages are looking good.’ He found himself rejoicing in th
e simple, innocent banality of a man in control of his garden.

  Then he began to speak in a desultory, relaxed fashion about things at work, and she asked him the odd question to keep him talking. It was trivial stuff, but she was delighted to hear it, because at one time she had been excluded completely from his work. The young, intense CID officer had shut her out of his concerns; she had never known when she would see him, and when he had come home he had been silent about what he had been concerned with for so many hours. He had never been a womanizer, and she hadn’t worried about that, but he had shut her out so completely from his thoughts and his successes that their marriage, which young officers now saw as so secure, had almost drifted on to the rocks.

  It was as they were eating their evening meal that Lambert said, ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened to Bert Hook.’

  ‘He’s been offered a part in Hamlet.’ Christine cut up her quiche calmly, as if the precision of her knife was the most important thing in her life at that moment. But when she glanced up and saw the astonishment on John’s face, she couldn’t repress a giggle, and he saw for a moment the pretty young girl he had pursued so keenly when they were both twenty. ‘I saw Eleanor in the supermarket at lunch time. She was full of this overbearing woman who’d been round and almost dragooned Bert into the production.’

  Her husband smiled. ‘Bert isn’t good with women like that: middle-class ladies with a high decibel level and a cutting edge.’

  ‘Eleanor said he was relying on you to keep him out of it.’

  ‘Whereas Chris Rushton and I pitched him straight into it.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘We gave him every reason why he should participate. Well, almost every reason. The only one we left out is the innocent but ecstatic pleasure it would give to us and to everyone else at the station.’

  ‘You can’t be so cruel!’ But she knew he could, even as she said it. Men were merciless when it came to their fun.

  ‘Be very good for Bert, we thought. It will bring out his hidden depths. He’ll be a splendid Polonius.’

  ‘Polonius! That’s a big part, and an important one.’

  ‘I think Bert realizes that. If he doesn’t we’ll make him well aware of it in the weeks to come.’ John Lambert took an appreciative sip of the glass of red wine he allowed himself because it was good for his heart.

  Two hours later the phone chirped insistently. John Lambert was dozing comfortably in front of the television under the combined effects of fresh air, exercise, good food and alcohol. ‘That will be Caroline,’ said Christine confidently as she went to answer it.

  Christine was at the phone in the hall for a quarter of an hour and more so her husband decided that it must indeed be their elder daughter. He always wondered what women found to talk about on the phone; he used it himself merely as an instrument for conveying or receiving information, as clearly and as succinctly as possible.

  A glance at his wife’s face as she came back into the room told him immediately that something was wrong. ‘Is it one of the children?’ he asked.

  ‘No. It wasn’t Caroline at all. It was Jacky.’ For a reason she could not herself explain, she always gave their elder daughter her full name, whereas Jacqueline was always shortened to Jacky.

  ‘But something’s up, isn’t it? What’s wrong?’

  Christine sat down carefully, staring unseeingly ahead of her, feeling for the familiar chair behind her with her hands as if she was in a strange place. She said in a low voice, ‘Jacky said she’s getting divorced.’

  To Bert Hook’s inexperienced eye, the Mettlesham Village Hall didn’t look like the sort of place where you would put on Hamlet.

  It had a smallish stage with rather rickety and uneven flooring and tiny dressing rooms on each side of it. It was a wooden building with ‘No Smoking’ notices prominently displayed on every vertical surface. With skilful packing and minimum concern for human comfort, Hook computed that it might hold a maximum of four hundred people.

  The shabby setting strengthened his conviction that this enterprise would be aborted long before the end of its gestation. All might yet be well, he thought. Then Maggie Dalrymple arrived and his heart sank swiftly into the trainers he had donned as his gesture to the drama.

  That formidable lady looked trimmer and more attractive in jeans and trainers than in the full skirts of her councillor and JP mode. ‘Good evening, Polonius,’ she said impishly. Bert decided that impish might be more terrifying than serious where this woman was concerned.

  Fortunately, the man sitting with his head over the text looked up at that point and said defensively, ‘Nothing is settled, as yet. No roles have been cast, apart perhaps from the principle one.’

  He was a man in his mid-fifties, Hook’s practised eye told him, with plentiful, neatly waved grey hair and small observant blue eyes. He came forward and offered his hand. ‘You must be the Detective Sergeant Hook of whom I’ve heard great things. Terry Logan, putative director of this dubious enterprise.’

  Bert liked that word ‘dubious’. It suggested to him that salvation might still be available, despite John Lambert, despite Chris Rushton. Despite even the redoubtable Mrs Dalrymple.

  He began to frame a disclaimer which dwelt on his lack of theatrical experience, but his plans were interrupted by the arrival of a striking young man with fair hair and lithe, easy movements, who seemed from the moment he entered the shabby hall to be effortlessly the centre of attention. He was smooth-skinned without looking effeminate, and had a nose which was a fraction too long for classical perfection. But he had very large eyes, of a blue which was lighter and much more dazzling than those of Terry Logan. He seemed to know almost everyone in the hall. For he nodded to them affably before he came over to smile into the face of Bert Hook. ‘Polonius, by the mass! It must be he.’ He shook Bert’s hand firmly and informed him that his name was Michael Carey.

  It was not until Carey transferred his attention elsewhere that Bert Hook realized that another man had entered the room whilst this twenty-four-year-old sun had thrown the hall into temporary eclipse. He was a slight, observant, balding man of around fifty, with brown, humorous eyes, which seemed to miss nothing and to be sardonically amused by what they saw. The kind of man you’d want as a witness to a crime, Bert decided: a man who would give you a confident and detailed account of whatever he had seen. His name was Ian Proudfoot; rather unexpectedly, it emerged in the next half hour, the plan was to cast him as the villain king, Claudius. The part which Bert in his fantasies had secretly desired for himself.

  Terry Logan said, ‘We’re only here for a read-through tonight. Although Maggie tells me that she hopes someone may arrive later, we presently have no Ophelia and no Laertes. No matter: I’ll read in whatever bits are necessary. I just want us to get the feel of the thing and decide whether we really wish to proceed with what by any standards is a highly ambitious project. We’ll begin with the first court scene, where we don’t need an Ophelia and I can read in Laertes’ lines. Remember that we’ve already learned in that nervous opening scene on the battlements that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. That feeling runs through this brilliantly clothed court scene, where only Hamlet remains obstinately in the black of mourning.’

  Bert Hook kept his head firmly down over his copy of the text, waiting with trepidation for the first lines of Polonius. But even in the midst of his preoccupation with his own problems, he could not escape one startling revelation. Mrs Dalrymple was right about their Hamlet: Michael Carey was good, very good.

  Ian Proudfoot had a grasp of Claudius, masterly and avuncular by turns, and Bert was suddenly glad that his own pretensions were not being exposed in the part.

  Maggie Dalrymple was unexpectedly competent as the Queen, at once vapid and overconfident that her son Hamlet could be won round to the new regime. Typecasting, Bert thought bitchily to himself; but he knew he was probably allowing his natural resentment of the woman and her overbearing ways to sway hi
m.

  As the scene proceeded, what became ever clearer was that they had a potential star in the name part. Even with his head bowed in concentration, Bert could not escape the excellence of Michael Carey. The young man caught every nuance of Hamlet’s bitter jibes against the man who had stolen his father’s throne, of his transference of his hatred of his mother to the whole of womankind, of the combination of melancholy and frustration and danger in this complex hero.

  All too soon the King was asking, ‘What says Polonius?’ and Bert was into his first intricate lines. And, such is the perversity of human nature, he found that when the moment came he wanted to impress. Having been determined before the evening began that he would display wooden incompetence and be rid of this trying assignment, he now strove to show that he could handle it.

  Perhaps it was just that he hadn’t the bottle to make a public fool of himself, but there was something more than that, he thought. Since he had heard the brilliance of Michael Carey and the brisk and unexpected assurance of the others, he wanted to be involved in this. Bert Hook might have been identified by these people as a natural for that tedious old wiseacre Polonius, but it was a part that needed playing, that could draw that heady mixture of laughter and sympathy from an audience. Bert Hook was excited.

  He got through his few lines with reasonable competence, breathing a silent sigh of relief when they were over, feeling his heart pounding in the quiet room as he had not known it pound for years. Not since he had come out as a tail-end batsman for Herefordshire in his last season in Minor Counties cricket, to face a young fast bowler who would later play for England.

  Such reflections were rudely interrupted when the director briskly gave instructions at the end of the scene. ‘Right. Now I’d like us to move forward and look at Act Two, Scene Two, please.’ Bert turned the pages won- deringly and found that it was the scene in which Hamlet’s apparent madness was discussed and Polonius had more lines than anyone. Blind panic overtook him for a moment; his brain swam and he missed Terry Logan’s brief introduction to the reading of the scene.