Mortal Taste

by J M Gregson

  There was a vivid sliver of crescent moon, quite low in the sky, and the stars sparkled as brightly as he had ever seen them. He felt very insignificant; his problems disappeared for a moment in the face of the futility of his very existence. There was not a movement in the huge oak trees to his left. The autumn colour was late this year, and there was no leaf fall beneath the canopies of branches. The trees were still ‘those green-robed senators of mighty woods’ which poor consumptive John Keats had registered almost two centuries ago.

  John Lambert had lived twice as long as Keats already, and what had he to show for it? A few murderers put away, a few hundred villains locked up for a few years. It was an achievement of sorts, he supposed, but when the waters closed over him, his ripples would not last for very long.

  ‘John?’ Hook’s voice from the doors of the clubhouse was barely audible.

  Lambert turned hastily back towards the clubhouse. The interruption of his private reverie was unexpected but not unwelcome. He moved rapidly through the car park. ‘I’m here, Bert. Enjoying a little solitude.’

  ‘There was a call for you on the steward’s phone. I explained that we couldn’t use our mobiles in the clubhouse.’

  Lambert’s pulse quickened. This could only be serious crime, if someone from the CID section had sought them out here. ‘What was it, Bert?’ He was conscious of trying not to sound too eager.

  ‘Some kids have found a body. Hidden under bushes in a park in Cheltenham. They think it’s the headmaster of a big comprehensive school. He’s been missing all day.’

  ‘Suspicious?’ But he already knew the answer to that.

  Hook nodded, his face serious in the dim amber light from the open door of the clubhouse. ‘Shot through the head, apparently. But not a suicide.’

  Lambert didn’t ask any more. There would be plenty of time for questions and speculation, in due course. In the meantime, he had his murder. Some poor fellow he had never known had been shot through the head. By person or persons as yet unknown.

  Superintendent Lambert tried not to feel exultant as he went back to his car.

  Seven

  Christine Lambert found that her husband, who had been uncharacteristically lethargic of late, had finished his breakfast and was preparing to leave the bungalow when she came into the kitchen.

  She glanced at the clock: it was still twenty minutes short of eight o’clock. She said, ‘I thought you were winding down a little in your last few months. Getting ready for a life of leisure.’

  ‘There’s been a homicide in Cheltenham. At least, I’m assured it’s a homicide.’ He wondered if he sounded too satisfied with the news.

  His wife nodded. ‘The duty sergeant rang here last night. I told him you were playing golf at the Worcestershire.’ Her voice was neutral now: years ago, she would have been full of resentment, hating the job whenever it interfered with his home life. Now, with the end of his career in sight, she was pleased to see him so animated again.

  Twenty years ago, when they had had two young children and their marriage had been sailing perilously close to the rocks, John had made the situation worse. He had hugged the job to himself, offering few explanations for his lengthy absences from home, anxious to make his mark and build a career in CID work. Nowadays, in a profession notorious for its high divorce rates, the Lamberts’ marriage seemed rock-steady and enduring to the youngsters in the service. Only under pressure, when he saw a young colleague with domestic troubles, would John Lambert reveal how near the partnership had been to coming apart.

  He said, ‘I didn’t waken you when I came in last night. The post-match celebrations went on for rather a long time, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Did you win, you and Bert?’

  It was evidence of the way his mind had switched to his new preoccupation that he had to think hard about it. Yesterday seemed part of a different world. ‘We lost, I’m afraid. I think I may have been a bit hard on poor old Bert. He didn’t play very well.’

  ‘I should think he’s best left to his own devices, Bert. He’s the kind of man who has to work things out for himself.’ For a woman who had never played the game, who had never seen the two men together on a golf course, she was amazingly accurate. But she had been a gifted and perceptive teacher for thirty years. More important, she had known John Lambert for just as long.

  ‘You may well be right.’

  Lambert wondered whether he was concealing his impatience to be away. He was not.

  Christine smiled as she turned away and fiddled with the toaster. ‘You’d better get going. Murders not solved in the first week usually remain unsolved. I remember some things you tell me, you see.’

  He said, ‘I’ll ring you if I’m going to be late,’ and went gratefully out to his old Vauxhall Senator in the garage. They had never been a couple who kissed each other goodbye in the mornings.

  Christine watched him turn the car in front of the bungalow and then drive briskly away. She made sure he was safely out of sight before she shook her head resignedly over the temperament of her husband.

  There wasn’t as yet much news on the death when Lambert arrived in the CID section at Oldford police station. The identity of the victim had been confirmed on the previous evening. A female officer had taken the widow to identify the body at the morgue in Cheltenham. Jane Logan had been shown the half of the face that was relatively undamaged, with the rest of what remained of the head carefully shrouded in layers of cotton sheet. She had signed the papers to confirm that this was what remained of Peter Logan, then collapsed in something very near to hysterics.

  That was entirely understandable. Mrs Logan was now at home with her daughter. The doctor had given them both a sedative. The pathologist would be conducting the official post-mortem in the presence of a police officer first thing this morning.

  The Chief Constable, Douglas Gibson, came in half an hour after John Lambert and called him up to his office. He wanted to talk about the new case but he began on a more personal note. ‘I applied for an extension to your service, as you know, John.’

  Lambert knew what was coming with that use of his forename. He had always got on well with the CC, who had indulged his Chief Superintendent’s old-fashioned approach, recognizing him as a man who got results and put villains away. But Gibson was a formal man, as far as exchanges with his staff went. He was trying to sugar the pill with that ‘John’. He went on quickly, ‘It seems it’s no dice, I’m afraid. I’ve heard nothing in writing as yet, but the bureaucratic grapevine tells me that my request will be refused.’

  ‘Thank you for keeping me in touch, sir. I didn’t expect anything else. If they made one exception, they’d have pressure to make hundreds.’ Lambert noticed that he had retreated into using that convenient and anonymous ‘they’.

  ‘I expect they would. But I still think they should exercise a little discrimination about particular officers. I made out a very good case on the basis of the last ten years.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult. I’ll reiterate my feelings, but I’m afraid it looks as though you must prepare yourself for retirement.’

  Lambert smiled. ‘I’ve been doing that, sir.’ He didn’t go in for rank much; he even forbade his own team to call him ‘sir’, except in formal settings. But somehow it seemed right on this occasion, as a means of putting an embarrassed CC at his ease. ‘The roses are looking pretty good.’ That traditional symbol of a copper’s contented retirement. He sought desperately for something a little more original, and failed. ‘I suppose I’ll have no excuse for not playing better golf, when I’m able to play whenever I want to.’

  Gibson shot him a wry, understanding smile. ‘I hear you’re pretty useful at the game already. Meantime, you’ve got a violent death to deal with.’

  It was a signal that the CC was done with the awkward apologies about retirement. John Lambert as well as Douglas Gibson felt more at ease with an immediate problem. ‘Yes, sir. I’m going out to look at the sce
ne of the crime now. We should have the essentials of the PM findings by the end of the morning and the full written report by the end of the day.’

  Gibson nodded. He had stood up and walked over to the window of his room whilst Lambert was speaking. He was looking out at the Gloucestershire landscape as he said, ‘It’s high-profile, John. “Sensational Death of a Highly Successful and Much-Loved Headmaster”. You can hear the capitals as I say it. The nationals have already been on to me. I’ve given them a steady “No comment” so far, partly because I’ve bugger-all to tell them anyway. But I’ve had to agree to a media briefing at four o’clock this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you want me there?’

  Gibson was tempted. The self-effacing Lambert had acquired a reputation over the years, and showing him to the newshounds might mitigate the fact that he had little else that was useful to offer them. But he knew that Lambert hated sitting in front of cameras and journalists, and was well aware that he would be more usefully employed at the heart of the investigation than in a public relations exercise. ‘No. I’ll tell them our local super-sleuth is on the job! That may keep them at bay until we have something more tangible to offer them.’

  Gibson stayed looking out of the window after Lambert had gone. He watched his Chief Superintendent and the more rotund DS Hook come out and drive away in the police Mondeo, eager as young CID novices to rejoin the hunt. He allowed himself an affectionate smile as he went back to his desk.

  The Chief Constable would miss his Chief Superintendent when he lost him. Not for personal reasons, though he had grown to like as well as to admire the man. It was Lambert’s expertise he would miss most. Douglas Gibson was a thief-taker still at heart, despite many years away from active police work. The Chief Constable wanted villains behind bars, and John Lambert had done more to put them there, more to improve the number of arrests for serious crime, than anyone else on this particular patch of England.

  Gibson drafted a final letter pleading that Lambert should be made an exception to the retirement regulations. It wouldn’t work; those faceless bureaucrats in London would have their way, but he would have done his best.

  Meantime, he hoped fervently that John Lambert would win through on this last case.

  There were a few curious onlookers around the point in the park where Peter Logan’s body had been found, but not many.

  This was partly because the uniformed constable guarding the scene from prying eyes was moving them on conscientiously, but rather more because there was nothing of interest to be seen. The copse of trees was cordoned off as an area of criminal investigation by the usual lengths of blue and white plastic tape, but what little activity there was within the rectangle was masked by the rather stunted trees.

  Sergeant Jack Johnson, the SOC officer, was pleased to see Lambert picking his way into the cordoned area with the obligatory plastic bags over his shoes. Once the Superintendent had been and gone, he could pack up his equipment and take away his team and the scanty evidence they had gathered at the scene.

  ‘There isn’t much here, John. We’ve bagged everything we’ve found, but most of it is probably just the detritus of a modern public park and nothing to do with this killing. The photographer’s already finished and gone.’

  Lambert nodded, glancing automatically at the plastic bags at the edge of the area cordoned off. He saw a couple of beer cans, several ancient ice-cream or iced-lolly sticks, an array of carefully collected fibres which would probably prove irrelevant. A PC was putting a used condom into a bag at this moment. As he held it at arm’s length with his tweezers, his young features filled with an almost comic distaste. ‘Don’t be so bloody squeamish, lad,’ said Johnson in his old soldier’s voice. ‘You’re lucky, handling it like that. Some poor sod at forensic’s going to have to investigate the contents before he can chuck it away.’

  ‘Did he die here?’ said Lambert. The first and most important of the preliminary questions. If the corpse had been brought here and dumped after death, there would be a vehicle to search out, a possibility of bloodstains and other evidence from within it that might nail down a conviction quickly.

  ‘He was almost certainly killed here, the pathologist thought. He had a good look before he allowed the corpse to be put in the meat wagon. Blood and other bodily matter found at the base of that tree apparently confirm that the shooting was here.’

  Lambert and Hook looked automatically at the base of the stunted birch. ‘Other bodily matter’. Brains, sinew, shattered bone. What had once made the thing which had been taken from here a man.

  Johnson said, ‘He might just have been moved a little, so that the bushes covered him more effectively. He’d been dead for around twenty-four hours when he was found last night, the pathologist reckoned. But I’ve spent a good hour with the team around the entrance to the park where you came in. There’s no sign that anything was dragged or carried through there.’

  Lambert nodded. If Jack Johnson said nothing had come that way, then nothing had. He transferred his attention automatically back to the small, intimate cave of vegetation where they stood, trying to envisage exactly what had happened here. There was a moment of heavy silence before Hook said, ‘It looks as if he arranged to meet someone here.’

  But what would a successful, highly respected headmaster be doing meeting someone with a gun in a place like this? It was Johnson who voiced an even more chilling alternative. ‘He might have been coerced to come here, of course. Someone might have decided in advance that this was a good place for a killing, might have brought him here in his car at gunpoint, or even forced him to drive himself here. His car was parked by the entrance. Forensic have taken it away to examine it.’

  Lambert said, ‘We’ll need to find out if he’d any reason to be in the area of his own accord.’ As usual, he was thinking practically, wondering where the resources of a large murder team might best be deployed. They would need house to house enquiries throughout the quiet roads around the park. Someone might have seen something in the darkness of that early autumn night; someone might be able to suggest a reason why Logan would have come here willingly.

  Johnson interrupted his thoughts. ‘He was shot at point-blank range. Through the back of his head.’

  ‘What with?’

  ‘No details of the weapon yet. Forensic might come up with something after the PM, I suppose, but there wasn’t much of the head left to study. They did suggest that the entry wound indicated that there’d probably been a silencer on the murder weapon.’

  ‘You haven’t found the bullet?’

  The SOC sergeant shook his head sadly. ‘No sign of it in the SOC area. The top back of the head had gone completely. I’d guess a pistol was placed against the back of his head and fired with a slight elevation. The bullet may have continued onwards and upwards. Anyway, I’m satisfied it isn’t anywhere in the immediate vicinity. We’ve looked hard enough.’

  Hook looked at the ground in front of them, at the flattening of the sparse grass which indicated where the body had been found, at the sinister staining around the bole of the tree. ‘How tall was he?’

  He didn’t need to explain the basis of his question to the old hands around him. Jack Johnson shook his head and said with a mirthless smile, ‘He was over six feet, Bert. His assailant may have been only a little shorter. I’m afraid you can’t assume it was a woman, or a resentful kid from his school.’

  Lambert looked up at the quiet semi-detached houses by the park as they left. He had a curious sensation that he had sometimes experienced before that their killer was watching their efforts, was smiling mockingly at their minimal progress. But the houses might have been unoccupied; their fronts looked square and unhelpful, their windows were as blank and unfocussed as blind eyes. There was no twitching of a curtain to indicate a curious watcher, no sign of the nosey parker who might have witnessed useful things thirty-six hours earlier.

  Lambert had the feeling already that this was going to be a complex case.

&n
bsp; Eight

  There was a curious air of subdued excitement hanging over Greenwood Comprehensive School.

  Lambert and Hook felt it as soon as they got out of the police Mondeo in the staff car park. The weather was warm for the last day of September, but there had been no sun for several hours and the atmosphere was heavy under low cloud. There was not much movement evident in the place during the last hour of the school day, but a febrile, almost guilty, expectation hung over everyone who greeted them. The staff and the students of Greenwood were still absorbing the unthinkable tidings of their leader’s death. Now they were waiting to see how the police would go about exposing his killers.

  A tall woman with blonde hair met them before they could reach the Secretary’s office. ‘Pat Dean, Deputy Head,’ she said tersely. ‘Thank you for your phone call. Needless to say, we’re all still very shocked. Needless to say also, we want you to find out who killed Peter, as quickly as possible.’ She said this while taking them into the privacy of her office, as though even that short journey must be filled with assurances of support.

  When they were sitting on the armchairs in her room, she said guiltily, ‘I can organize some tea. It’s just that – well, as you can imagine, it’s been a rather disjointed few hours.’ The acknowledgement of that seemed almost a relief to her, and they divined that she had lurched from crisis to crisis in the organization of this fraught school day.

  Lambert was as anxious as she was to get things under way. ‘No tea, thanks. We’ll need to speak to all your staff, as quickly as we can. It will probably be necessary to have at least a collective word with your sixth-formers. Depending on the progress and the direction of the investigation, we may have to come back into the school, to follow up statements from different individuals.’