by J M Gregson
‘My predecessor said you’re the shrewdest copper he’s ever met. He said you let people talk themselves into trouble and he still doesn’t know quite how you do it.’
Good old Douglas Gibson. We had our differences, but he always did his best for me, when it mattered. As it did when he was speaking to his replacement as CC. Hope he’s enjoying his retirement and his painting in oils; Gibson never enjoyed his garden and his roses, as retired coppers are supposed to do. Lambert lifted his head and smiled. ‘That sounds a little too kind, even a little sentimental, though I’m grateful for Mr Gibson’s thoughts. I operate in the way which seems most efficient for my unit. I also enjoy myself much more operating that way, though one can’t speak publicly of enjoyment when the investigation of serious crimes is one’s concern.’
‘You enjoy what you’re good at, like most of us. In your case, that’s the direct business of investigation at the crime face.’
‘Fair description, sir. But I’m part of a team. I don’t neglect the coordination of an investigation and the efficient filing and cross-referencing of the huge amount of information that accrues round any major crime. Inspector Rushton is far more efficient in those things than I could ever be.’
‘And the doughty DS Hook is an efficient bagman for you, as you put yourself about among those involved in major crimes.’
This man really has done his homework. Treat him with due respect, Lambert. ‘DS Hook is a remarkable man, sir. He has twice refused to put himself forward for Detective Inspector rank because he enjoys his present work. That is unique in my experience: a man who recognizes that he is happy and efficient in his daily work and does not wish to jeopardize that for the sake of promotion. Hook completed an Open University degree last year, after five years of part-time study – one of the very few policemen who have done that. I like to think he complements whatever skills I have in dealing with the vast cross-section of humanity we encounter.’ He grinned. ‘Bert Hook is far shrewder than he looks, and that in itself is an advantage.’
‘Plainly, loyalty to your staff is one of your great virtues, John.’
He’s determined to use my first name whenever he can. Why on earth should I be so grudging and suspicious, when it’s probably well meant? But Lambert heard himself sounding priggish as he said, ‘I speak as I find, sir. And I confess I’ve been selfish, over the last few years. I’ve hand-picked staff who suit my way of working and set up my own team. If I tell you that they’re efficient in their roles, it’s no more than the truth.’
‘And I’m assuring you that I don’t propose to interfere with your methods. That’s one of the reasons for this morning’s meeting.’
‘As long as they continue to produce results, sir.’
Gordon Armstrong was not at all discomfited by this prickly reminder of what he’d said earlier. ‘That would apply to any system, surely, John? If it wasn’t producing results, we’d want to examine it and see what improvements we could introduce. I suppose that would be “hands-on” for a chief constable, wouldn’t it?’
Lambert grinned again and felt a little easier. The man had a sense of humour. Why had he assumed that a GSOH was surgically removed once you reached the higher echelons of the police service? ‘It would indeed, sir. I like to think I’d be studying my team even more intensively than you, if it came to that.’
‘I’m sure you would. What would you say is the greatest problem facing the modern police service, John? Or the CID section of it, if you prefer to confine yourself to that.’
A sudden switch, this. John Lambert had come here prepared to defend his methods and to receive bland assurances that they were acceptable. Now he was being asked for more general opinions. Was he being tested, or was his opinion genuinely sought? He said abruptly, ‘Corruption, sir.’
There were a couple of seconds of silence before Armstrong nodded and said quietly, ‘What sort of corruption, John?’
‘It’s not a new problem, sir. The service generally is much more honest and less corrupt than it was thirty years ago, when I was a young copper. The Met was a disgrace in those days. Things have been cleaned up. Some very good chief constables have had much to do with that.’ He smiled again; he was long past his blushing days, but offering compliments didn’t come easily to him. ‘But individual corruption still exists. Coppers under pressure still try to fabricate evidence, or at least shape what evidence exists to their own ends. And the press connive at what is now the easiest and most widespread of corruptions for a modern copper. Too many men and women are passing on information for money to the press and other media. The temptations are there all the time, because the rewards are good and the prospects of being detected seem smaller than they used to be.’
‘I agree with you on that. I want my senior staff to pass on the message that there will be zero tolerance of anyone releasing information for payment.’
‘I’ll certainly do that in the CID section, sir. Every copper who’s corrupt is damaging the rest of us. That’s one of the reasons why police officers are afraid to admit their occupation when they’re socializing nowadays. That’s much more pronounced than it was in my youth.’
‘I take note of what you say and endorse it. Zero tolerance: tell anyone who will listen. No, tell even those who don’t want to listen!’
Armstrong had the good sense to close their meeting when they were agreed on something they both felt strongly about. The old bugger had been neither as prickly nor as out of date as he’d feared. He watched the cups and biscuits being cleared away and prepared for his next meeting with a feeling of satisfaction which he hadn’t anticipated.
It had been good to talk to a senior man who was driven by a passionate aversion to crime and all its manifestations.
Sixty miles away from the Chief Constable and the most famous member of his staff, a woman of thirty-five was struggling with quite different problems.
Elfrida was a stupid name. She’d always thought that, even when she’d been a child and little semi-circles of adults had assured her that it wasn’t. ‘You’re so lucky to have a name that’s different!’ they’d cooed at her. But when you were a child, you didn’t want to be different. You wanted to be just like the rest. That way, they’d accept you and you wouldn’t be noticed. You could watch the rest and think whatever you liked about them, so long as you weren’t being noticed.
She’d tried making the best of it during her first year at university, when it had seemed fashionable to be different. She’d tried to spread the myth that Elfrida was unusual and thus interesting, that it gave her a start on others when it came to being noticed. But her heart had never been in that. She hadn’t been sure how much she wanted to be noticed, even in the ever-changing cavalcade of student life. Then, towards the end of that first year, she’d heard three of her contemporaries mocking both her pretensions and her name, whilst she was closeted in the washroom. She’d promptly abandoned forever the pretence of liking her name.
She’d tried ‘Fred’ for a while. It had worked fine with the people who knew her. They’d accepted it and used it, after a week or two. But it led to tiresome explanations every time you met new people, and you couldn’t use it on job applications when you came to the end of your degree and your teacher training. And some of the men apparently thought she was a lesbian, because she called herself Fred. She couldn’t have that, so Fred had to go.
She was sitting in the staff room at the comprehensive school, worrying about her name when she should have been marking books. She’d come here for one term as a supply teacher, but they’d made her permanent, when the woman who had been on maternity leave had finally confirmed that she didn’t wish to return. The new mum had said all along that she wasn’t coming back, but the crazy system didn’t allow the powers that be to accept that. She had the right to change her mind until the last minute, whilst her former pupils suffered at the hands of a succession of supply teachers.
Except that in this case they hadn’t suffered. They’d had Elfri
da Potts, and after the normal classroom trials of strength at the beginning of term, she’d asserted her control of her classes and achieved progress. More progress than they’d been making under pregnant Mrs Grieves, as far as Elfrida was able to divine from their exercise books and the few comments they volunteered. In her view, history could be either a lively experience or ‘dead boring’, the description most of her classes had volunteered to her during her first week at St Wilfred’s.
Elfrida was doing her very best to give class 3B a lively experience on this Monday afternoon, when the temperature was far too low for May and the clouds scudded low and threatening past the windows. Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, has gone down in history as ‘the mare of Flanders’. So she was no looker: Elfrida quelled lively discussion on that topic from the male section of the class. But how did it feel for a foreign lady who had only a few phrases of English to be deposited in an alien land as a mere marriage pawn in a political game she did not understand? What did Anne feel after her rejection by Henry and her consignment to affluent obscurity in this strange country? How would you feel if that happened to you?
Mrs Potts sternly diverted an attempted discussion on whether the ageing English monarch could ‘still get it up’ and how much his new spouse’s disappointing appearance might have contributed to that. She concentrated on the relative opulence in which Anne was allowed to live after her humiliations at court. She managed to draw from her class a good twenty minutes of lively exchanges and initiate some real learning. Without realizing it, her charges discovered a good deal of what life was like in sixteenth-century England for the various levels of society below the aristocracy.
At the end of the day, the teacher was left with a feeling of modest satisfaction. She knew by now that the teaching experience will rarely be perfect and that its successes will almost invariably have limitations. But now she had other, more personal concerns to occupy her. She told herself firmly that she was thirty-five, not nineteen, and that she should control the excitement she felt coursing through her veins.
That must be literally the case, because she felt her pulses racing as she sat in the staff room, crouching dutifully over some fifth-form essays and waiting for the rest of the staff to leave. She wondered again if her name would affect her relationship with him. Elfrida was bad enough, but she’d made it much worse when she’d married George Potts. It was all right for George, stuck away for weeks on the oil rigs. Your name was the least of your problems there. No doubt you lived for the money and the good times which came between the periods of intensive work.
But Potts made the Elfrida much worse. Elfrida Potts. It sounded like a name from a kids’ comic. It would sit well alongside Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace and Pansy Potter. Hopefully Wayne wouldn’t be as conscious of her name as she was. Hopefully she’d set his hormones racing so fast that he wouldn’t give a bugger about names. She was pretty sure hers were racing, along with her pulse. That must be a good start. But she needed privacy, if she was really to enjoy this. Go home to your wives and your loved ones, you teachers, for God’s sake. And leave those of us with hormones to get on with it.
Mercifully, most of them took their work home with them rather than lingering over it in the staff room, as she had pretended to do. There were only two other cars in the staff car park when she put her case in the boot of the small blue Peugeot at quarter past five. They belonged to two older blokes who were running after-school clubs. The men wouldn’t even see her leaving – and why should they be interested if they did? No need to become paranoid; that was a guaranteed method of drawing attention to yourself and your actions.
The lane which ran past the top of the corporation park. That’s where they’d arranged to meet. Beside the third big tree past the gates, rather than at the gates themselves; he’d laughed at her when she’d stressed how important it was to be discreet about this. But she had a lot more to lose than he had. She hadn’t said that to him, but she hoped he realized it.
She was scared that he wouldn’t be there, that she’d have to wait and be conspicuous in her bright blue car. She’d always liked the colour until now. But tonight it seemed garish and far too noticeable in this quiet place. But he was there, bless him. Waiting for her, transferring his weight from one foot to the other and pretending to stare into the park on the other side of the big oak tree.
He was in the car almost before she had slid it to the kerb beside him. She glanced behind them, saw no one on this quiet road, and drew him swiftly to her. He kissed her more expertly than she had thought he would, his tongue hard and exploratory against her teeth, his hands caressing her shoulder blades and pressing her willing torso against his. She wanted the embrace to go on and on, but she pulled away from him after a long, exquisite moment. ‘That was good!’ she said breathlessly, wondering if she could check for any observers without offending him.
He smiled and said, as if he couldn’t believe this, ‘Mrs Potts!’
‘It’s Freda here!’
She wanted to kiss him again, to feel the uneven, breathless intimacy of him. He’d cleaned his teeth for her. And his body was very excited. She ran her hand down the inside of his thigh, feeling the warmth of the flesh beneath the thin denim of his jeans. Then she grasped his erect and very excited member, exulting in the gasp she heard from him at the move. No need to worry about her name here. His hormones were rampant and she was in charge of them.
Hormones dictated everything, in a boy of sixteen.
It was late in the day before Bert Hook got the chance to speak with Lambert alone. ‘Did you put the Chief Constable right on things?’
‘On a few things. I told him DS Hook was a bloody nuisance. An egghead who refused to become a DI.’
‘Do I look like an egghead?’
The burly Hook held his arms wide in mute appeal. His features had the ruddy and weather-beaten hue of an outdoor man. His powerful physique had struck fear into the hearts of many a batsman as he had turned at the end of his pace-bowler’s run. He looked like the archetypal village bobby, open to all, reliable as an oak in small matters, slow-moving and slow-thinking.
‘That’s just it, Bert. You present yourself as a thicko and yet you’re subtle as a fox underneath. Dangerous man for a CC – he might even see you as a mole in his organization, not a fox. It’s only fair that I should warn him against men like you.’
‘Did he say that you should be pensioned off and digging your garden?’
‘Not in so many words. He gave me coffee in china cups, so I was naturally suspicious. But he seems to be prepared to let us proceed as we’ve done in the past. So long as we produce results.’
‘They all say that. It’s like a nervous tic, with the top men. They have to say that to cover themselves. It’s in case they want to bollock you and change the system, when they’ve got their feet securely under the table.’
‘There you go again, thinking for yourself, offering your opinions. I’m not sure the latest manual allows a DS to do that. It’s just as well I told Gordon Armstrong all about you.’
‘And it’s just as well that I know that a humble DS is far beneath the vision of a CC. He’ll be much more worried about the super-sleuth in his cupboard.’ Hook gave his chief a wide, bland smile, knowing just how much he hated the tabloid expression.
‘Have you anything of CID interest, Bert, or have you just come in here to annoy me?’
Hook’s yeoman brow was suddenly furrowed. ‘Probably not. I expect you’ll tell me to go away and sort out my own small problems, whilst you get on with major frauds and serial killers.’
Lambert sighed elaborately. ‘Let’s have it, Bert.’
‘A neighbour of mine came in to see me on Saturday morning. The way neighbours do, when they’re worried. Eleanor says the woman’s not normally an alarmist, but I scarcely know her. She’s called Lisa Ramsbottom, but we can’t really hold that against her.’
‘And what is it that’s worrying the non-alarmist Mrs Ramsbot
tom? I’m assuming that she’s a wife; that she volunteered herself for this surname.’
‘She is indeed – so she may be a masochist. She says she’s received death threats. I gave her the usual guff about anonymous threats usually coming from mistaken jokers, who have cruel minds but not the courage to reveal who they are.’
‘And she didn’t react well to that, or you wouldn’t be in my office telling me about her now.’
‘She said she was still worried. There’s been more than one threat, apparently. She has a daughter and a husband. She’s worried about them as well as herself.’
‘As we would be ourselves, in the same circumstances.’
‘Yes. They have a weekend retreat in one of these leisure parks. It seems most of the threats have been delivered there.’
‘Where is this?’
‘Somewhere up near Leominster, I think. In the northernmost tip of our patch. On the very edge of civilization – very nearly in Wales.’
‘I forgot to tell the new CC that you were a raving racist. But I do think you should investigate, Bert. Get to know the northernmost tip of our patch.’
Lisa Ramsbottom had already invited him up there for a visit. There was a lake and a bowling green and a nine-hole golf course on the complex. He wasn’t going to tell Lambert that. Bert sighed deeply. ‘If I have to, I have to.’
THREE
‘You’re welcome to spend a day at Twin Lakes whenever you like. I told you that.’ Lisa Ramsbottom wished she’d had time to look in the mirror before she’d invited Bert Hook from next-door-but-one into her house. She’d whipped her pinafore off when the bell had rung, but she’d had time for nothing more. She was sure that she looked a mess.
