As Lambert neared the first of the four wide stone steps which led up to the heavy oak door, he caught through the small leaded window beside it the dim amber of a single bulb at the back of the high Edwardian hall. He recognised the householder’s ritual warning to criminals that the place might be occupied, and smiled grimly in the darkness. This light, if it were the only one in the house, would invite rather than deter any burglar who knew his trade. It might be comforting for a householder re-entering a lonely house at night after an absence, but that would be the limit of its usefulness.
He rang the bell because he had to, but he knew as he did so that no one would come to this door to answer. The sound echoed, distant, but clear and sonorous in the enveloping silence of the house. No David Craven, then. Had he merely assumed that Lambert could not make the meeting after he had failed to confirm the time? Had he failed to appear from some more sinister cause? Lambert looked away to either side. There were other houses there, he knew, but he could neither see nor hear anything of them. They seemed like great ships that had changed their berths in the darkness; he had not thought the houses in the avenue were quite so far apart. No wonder this site had potential for a development of flats: he tested that mundane thought as if it could banish more sinister imaginings about this place and its absent owner.
He went around the side of the house to see if there were any lights at the back. There was a single outside light on the rear corner of the high brick house, but like the one at the front it was not switched on. The clear illumination of the ground around the house would have been a more powerful deterrent to any felon than that small gesture of indoor lighting. The thought made him wonder where Margaret Lewis was. Perhaps with her son? But she could be anywhere; with a friend or at a cinema. Her caretaker role in the house did not demand a twenty-four-hour presence; no doubt she would be back in due course. He admired her nerve in living alone here; in coming back to an empty house of this size late at night. As always, thoughts of admiration were tempered by the evil presence of murder unsolved: mettle of this sort would be admirable equipment for their killer.
There was no light in the rear rooms of the house. But, blazing unnaturally bright through the frosty night, there was a rectangle of light from a building at the bottom of the long garden. It was sixty yards away, through darkness made more absolute by the trees which overhung the path to it. This was the place which Edmund Craven had used as a studio for his amateur paintings, where latterly Andrew Lewis had repaired motorbikes and cars. Who could be there at this hour?
He called through the darkness towards the light. His uncertain ‘Is anyone there?’ brought back a memory of a poem he had learned at school, The Listeners. This silence, like De La Mare’s, stole softly back around him. He wondered whether to call again, and louder. Though he told himself he did not wish to intrude unannounced upon someone’s privacy, in reality he was back in his childhood, with the city child’s irrational fear of country darkness, which as a boy he could never admit. Then the thought of the neighbourhood watch schemes he knew operated in the area stilled his tongue; it would never do for a CID Superintendent to have to explain his presence here to staunch civilian guardians of the law. For an Englishman, embarrassment can be a more potent force even than fear.
As he set off down the frozen path, the thought that had been no more than a vague presentiment formed itself into words, with the irritating timing characteristic of such notions: he wished Bert Hook were here with him; that he had ignored David Craven’s instruction that he should come alone; that he had brought someone, anyone, with him here. Well, it was too late now: he thrust the instinct aside and stepped out resolutely into the darkness. It was the last of several wrong decisions.
Half way down the narrow line of paving stones which led towards the light, there was a small garden hut, which made the blackness to his right even more absolute. As he picked his way with eyes cast down to the grey surface which was the only guide he had to his route, he never saw the figure which emerged softly behind him from this deepest of darkness.
Perhaps he caught the rustle of a movement, or the pressure which a neighbouring human presence seems to place upon the cool night air. Something at any rate made him half turn, so that he caught the full force of the blow above his right temple. The mind of an active man works so quickly in a crisis that he was aware in the instant before he was hit both of his foolishness in coming here alone at night, and of the fact that he had not told even Christine of where he was.
Then the blackness around him exploded into a blinding white light and the pain crashed through a head that was surely too small to contain it. All sense had left him well before he hit the ground.
21
The strident chords of News at Ten crashed into Christine Lambert’s unwilling ears, insisting on what she would rather have ignored: that it was now ten o’clock on a freezing night and John was still not home.
There was nothing too unusual about that. But by now she would normally have heard from him; even his tardy sense of domestic responsibility normally prodded him to ring home before this time, especially now that his car had the phone that he had resisted as long as he could. Police wives are disciplined early to a routine of disappointed children and ruined meals. When John was in his twenties and still making his way in the force, it had been a severe blow to the status of a CID officer if his wife had the temerity to ring in to inquire about his whereabouts.
They had almost split up in those days over his allegiance to his work before his home. That seemed so long ago that the wife who had objected to his brusque dismissal of her feelings and her aspirations might have been a different woman. She realised as she watched the difficulties of other young wives that her situation had not been the uniquely bleak one it had seemed at the time, when her own career seemed discarded for ever and her conversation restricted to the vocabulary of her pre-school children. Only when she had got back into teaching a few years later had she discovered the perspective she needed for her marriage to prosper.
She was not sure in truth how much she had changed from that young mother whose shrill insistence upon her rights had met a blank wall of resistance in her husband; perhaps she had merely added something to her. She had no delusions that John had changed. Mellowed, yes, but that did not imply change so much as a willingness to disguise the sharper edges of his determination. The adaptations had been hers, she recognised ruefully; she had grown to love his consistency, his very obstinacy. Nowadays, he behaved in the way he did to be true to himself rather than to satisfy colleagues above and below him. But she suspected he always had. The demands of a career had been a convenient constriction, used to justify what he would have done in any case.
Essentially, he had changed only in appearance from the slim, determined man who looked so distinguished in their wedding photographs. But age had brought the vulnerability he concealed so resolutely from all but her; the stiffness as he rolled from beds or armchairs, the rheumatism in the shoulders when he stood for any length of time, the first mutterings of enlarging prostate. She thought of these things now, and they brought with them an access of protective love that sent her resolutely to the phone.
She tried his car phone, as she had done an hour earlier: he never minded that. She rang the number of his office at CID, and found herself connected with the station sergeant at Oldford. They exchanged brief words about the progress of Sergeant Johnson’s daughter in higher education—Christine had taught her, years ago. Then she asked after the whereabouts of her husband.
There was a tiny pause while Johnson prepared his voice to conceal concern: he had expected Lambert to be home hours ago. Then he said, ‘He went out some time ago to see one of the people involved in this exhumation case, Mrs Lambert.’ He would not have given her the name of David Craven even if he had remembered it; as a uniformed sergeant, he was in any case too occupied with more mundane matters to follow the arcane proceedings of CID. He saw the clock on his left registering
22.19. Far too early for the regular influx of Friday night drunks; far too late for Superintendent Lambert. Danger bells rang in Johnson’s experienced head.
But his tone were carefully modulated, even cheerful, as he said, ‘I’ll try to find out where he is and ring you back.’ It was not his fault that he failed to deceive Christine Lambert, for she also was experienced in these matters. She stared at the phone for minutes after she had put it down.
When the volume of the television set increased as always for the adverts, she sprang across the room and turned it off as brutally as if they were a personal affront.
*
It was Rushton who found Lambert. When Johnson rang, he questioned him tersely and without comment about the Superintendent’s movements. He heard of DS Rogers’s note to his chief, of Lambert’s inquiry at the station sergeant’s desk as he left. There was a pause, just long enough for Johnson to divine that Rogers would be well advised to have a good story on the morrow. Then Rushton said, ‘You think the Super went to Tall Timbers alone?’ and Johnson caught the edge of surprise on his voice.
Rushton did not make that mistake himself. He arranged for two burly PCs in a patrol car to meet him at the house. Even his brief snap at the wife who cast her eyes to heaven at this abrupt end of his day off did not delay him. He was waiting in the wide gateway of the house when the men arrived; already he had checked that Margaret Lewis’s car was in the garage. She opened the door promptly when they rang, so that Rushton wondered whether she had been waiting for them.
He was terse to the point of rudeness in his questions, for they were asked on a rising tide of apprehension. No, she had not known of any arrangement for David Craven to meet Superintendent Lambert at Tall Timbers. No, she did not know of any reason why David should choose to meet him here. No, David had not rung her to tell her of the meeting. But she had been out of the house since three o’clock that afternoon, making preparations for her forthcoming move at her property in Burnham-on-Sea. No, as far as she knew, no one had seen her entering or leaving that house.
He left one of the PCs to search the house. He and the other constable took the two torches which were standard equipment for the patrol car and set about exploring the frozen grounds.
There was no light now in the empty studio at the end of the garden. They were almost upon the body when their torches threw up its awkward outline. Lambert lay upon his face, with one arm folded unnaturally beneath him and the other extended as though in supplication towards the small wooden shed upon his left. The blood, which had covered the left side of his face and formed an ugly pool against his cheek, gleamed black as their torches played across it. Their beams picked out each detail in turn as brilliantly and dramatically as spotlights in a theatre; all else was black in the deep shade of the cypresses, which overhung this place as though it were a neglected cemetery.
Rushton was convinced that this was indeed a corpse. He was conscious of his companion’s quick, uncontrolled breathing behind him as he knelt to feel for a pulse. The young constable must have attended worse scenes than this; but this had the sick excitement, the charnel house glamour, of a superintendent killed in the course of his duties. Rushton felt already the fury rising within him as he touched the icy skin of his chief’s forearm. No doubt this would be the young man’s first experience of that corporate anger that runs through a police force when a colleague is brutally killed.
Except that it might not. Not for the momenta anyway. Rushton’s probing fingers found a faint, slow pulse. ‘Ambulance. Fast! Then bring the blankets from the back of your car.’ He heard relief and exultation in his voice, and was glad to find them there. Alone now in the freezing darkness with the chief he had resented, he muttered to the senseless heap below him, ‘Hold on. Hold on, you old bugger, for God’s sake!’
*
Rushton rang Christine Lambert as the tail-lights of the ambulance disappeared. He had never met her; he plunged quickly into his story, anxious to get it out and add the platitudes of consolation before she could interrupt him with hysterics. She said nothing at all. When she was sure he had finished, she said, like a mother speaking of a forgetful child, ‘Did he have his overcoat? He so often leaves it in the car when he gets out, however cold it is.’ It was shock, he supposed. But it was not, after all, as inconsequential an inquiry as it sounded: Lambert would probably have died of shock and exposure some time ago without that coat.
Rushton paused for a moment; then, reluctantly, he dialled Bert Hook’s home number. Then he went grimly through the hall of the house to the high drawing-room, with its furniture labelled with lot numbers for the forthcoming auction. There was a damp, acrid smell from the bars of an electric fire which had not been used for some time; the room felt to him oppressively hot after the icy night he had left. He began to take a statement from a white-faced Margaret Lewis.
*
Whatever its deficiencies of manpower and administration, the National Health Service is still superb in cases of emergency. The private schemes, which suck out the powerful and articulate voices which might secure the resources it needs, cannot compete with it here.
Within two hours of the reception of Lambert’s muffled form at the hospital, he had received three pints of blood, had his cranium surveyed from multiple angles in the scanner, been connected to drip feed and cardiac monitor. He had also been stripped, washed and wrapped in the ubiquitous hospital gown. The ugly wound above his temple had been stitched and dressed with a huge absorbent pad, which looked like some gross appendage to the inert form when it was returned to the room in the intensive care unit.
When Christine and Bert Hook were allowed eventually to come and sit in forced intimacy in the small space on the side of the bed which was not occupied by machinery, the overwhelming impression was of clinical whiteness. The still form beneath the immaculate sheets seemed to have no life beyond the bandages and machines. The hands which lay upon those sheets, the motionless face upon the pillow, seemed scarcely less white than their surroundings.
Christine Lambert watched the slow movement of the liquid in the central venous line to her husband’s throat, listened despite herself to the hypnotically macabre breathing of the ventilator on her left, wondered whether she should be cheered or depressed by the tiny agitation of the elephant tubing leading to the grey lips. The bed and what was in it seemed wholly controlled by tubes and the machines to which they were attached. The thought grew and would not be rejected: what was in the bed was not a man but a form which existed in some temporary limbo between life and death, whose status would be quietly changed when the machines ceased to operate.
Bert Hook said for the fourth time in the last hour, ‘I should have been with him. He should never have gone alone.’
Christine Lambert thought: He should be comforting me, not blaming himself. All that policemen are concerned with is self, self, self. And then she thought as she glanced at him across the bed: I am glad that he is concerned. His anguish should itself be my comfort. Better that he should be upset over John than offering me platitudes about him being in the best hands.
After a few minutes, Hook said, ‘He was a good boss. The best.’ He looked at the still hands upon the sheets, not at her. She noted the past tense without resenting it. Perhaps Hook was more shocked than she, who had always expected this. At least he had not said, ‘He was a good policeman.’
When the sister in her blue uniform came briskly into the room, wearing the cheerful smile she had donned at the door, her very energy seemed a breach of taste. She looked at the little cameo around the bed and said, ‘He’s holding his own, you know. He’s in the best hands, now.’ She wondered why the wife smiled bleakly at the phrase, as if acknowledging a private joke.
She took her to see Mr Hall. Sitting on a hard chair in the surgeon’s office, Christine looked at the pile of files on his desk and tried to resist the feeling that even at this moment she must not take too much of his time. She was unnaturally calm, anxious only that he sho
uld keep nothing from her. She was conscious that he was studying her carefully as he introduced himself and explained his function, as though she were being assessed for a job. Apparently she was successful: he plunged without preliminaries into explanation.
‘Has anyone spoken to you about the extent of your husband’s injuries?’ She shook her head almost imperceptibly; she had the absurd suspicion that speech would make the damage more extensive. ‘The only one that matters is the blow to the head. We’ve X-rayed his wrist, because he fell upon it very awkwardly, but I’m almost certain there’s nothing more than a sprain there. The head injury is serious, I’m afraid.’
She found her voice at last; it seemed he expected to be prompted. ‘How serious?’
‘Time will tell. I’m not being evasive: I don’t have the full results of all our tests yet. He has rude health and a thick skull on his side.’ He was glad that he had tried the tough little joke. He only ventured it with those who looked strong; he was rewarded on this occasion by a tiny, acknowledging smile. ‘Blows to the head are far more serious than is generally supposed. I blame Hollywood. People in Western saloons get up and fight on after cracks on the head that would often prove fatal. The biggest danger is a subdural haemorrhage inside the skull, but he seems to have avoided that.’
Bring Forth Your Dead Page 19
