Murder at the Nineteenth (Lambert and Hook Detective series Book 1)

by J M Gregson

  Murder at the Nineteenth

  J. M. Gregson

  © J. M. Gregson, 1989

  J. M. Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1989 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 1

  Lambert very nearly ignored the telephone. It bleeped, distant but insistent, an intrusion at a moment when he least wanted intrusion.

  He had been in the garden for no more than ten minutes at the end of a tedious day; on this still evening of heavy heat, the scents of late spring were at their incomparable best. He let the phone bleep ten, twelve, fifteen times. Then the habits of a working lifetime asserted themselves; he muttered a ritual curse, set down his secateurs, and trudged resignedly through the French windows to the source of his irritation.

  ‘Lambert,’ he growled.

  ‘Superintendent Lambert?’ A man’s voice he did not recognize. Educated, heavy, used to the telephone. ‘This is James Shepherd.’ A pause: he expected to be recognized. Lambert racked a reluctant brain. ‘Chairman of the Golf Club.’ Now there was the irritation of vanity deflated: this man expected to be recognized, especially when he gave his name. Well, it had been a long day.

  ‘I need to see you. Urgently.’

  ‘Now?’ Lambert heard even in his monosyllable the note of reluctance. Through the open doors the scents drifted intoxicatingly; all down the long garden the colours hung vivid in the last of the sun.

  ‘Not immediately,’ said Shepherd. ‘But this evening. We’re about to begin a short meeting of the Club Committee. Meet me after we’ve finished. Say ten-thirty. The others will be gone — the bar will close at ten.’

  No ‘please’; no ‘could you?’ A man used to being obeyed. Or a man frightened enough to forget the usual greasing of conversational wheels? The snatched, irregular breathing at the other end of the line was prompted by some strong emotion: a policeman’s instinct divined fear.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Lambert. He wrote ‘10.30 p.m.’ and circled it on the pad in front of him, following a routine that on this occasion was quite pointless. ‘I hope this doesn’t indicate a crisis for the Greens Committee!’ Lambert was Chairman of this, but whether his sally was an attempt at levity or a probe for information he was not sure himself.

  ‘Nothing to do with the Greens Committee,’ said Shepherd sharply, ‘I wish to hell it was!’ The phone banged down sharply. The last phrase would ring in Lambert’s mind all through the next day.

  Christine came back from her yoga class soon after ten. Her husband lowered his large frame into the driving-seat as soon as she slipped out. ‘The good policeman never sleeps,’ she intoned as he struggled to move back the seat. Though she had long since accepted the rigours of his occupation, she still went through the rituals of wifely protection. She had become more tender towards him as middle age began to threaten and he tired more quickly than he used to do. Heavy with rank and success he might be, but he was to her more vulnerable without the vigour of youth. It seemed inconceivable now that she could ever have thought of leaving him.

  ‘Wrong again, Mrs Lambert,’ he smiled. ‘You’re understandably confused by the number of hats I wear. It’s Golf Club business this time. I won’t be long.’

  He was wrong on both counts.

  *

  Even at this hour, he drove through the lanes with the windows right down. Through the heavy heat, the scent of hawthorn flower swirled between the hedges: no place like Britain on evenings like this. He wished Christine was with him for another dose of his propaganda against holidays abroad.

  In the dusk, the long, low bulk of the golf clubhouse seemed almost a part of that more ancient landscape in which it was set. Shepherd was right: by this hour, things were very quiet. Only two cars remained in the car park, the steward’s Ford by his flat and, in the Chairman’s reserved space at the other end of the tarmac, Shepherd’s Rolls-Royce, almost invisible in the deep shadow of the wall of the changing-rooms. The clubhouse and its many extensions were mostly one-storey. In the side of them which faced Lambert as he got out of his car there was not a light to be seen. Against the last of the light in a clear western sky, the long walls stood black, silent, almost sinister. As quiet as the grave, thought Lambert, as he wondered where to look for entry.

  The locker-room door was locked, as he expected. He walked under the archway which connected the professional’s shop to the rest of the buildings and went round to the back. Now he found himself deliberately trying to avoid any appearance of stealth, walking noisily, trying to announce to any unseen observer that he had an innocent and warranted purpose in this quiet place. Had he not been summoned here by the Chairman of the Club? He must not be caught in the felon’s crouch of popular imagination. He walked upright, dignified, aldermanic. If a Chief Superintendent was to be mistaken for a criminal, said his gait, let it be at least a fraudster rather than a common burglar.

  The rear of the complex of buildings seemed even more deserted than the front had been. He had always seen this area busy with the movement of golfers, so that the stillness now seemed eerie. It was too dark now for him to see the flagstick on the eighteenth green, but on the practice putting green beside the long verandah he could just make out the nearest of the holes with their short metal flags. Beyond these, the brook which skirted the eighteenth green caught the clear, soft light of a young moon, so that its motionless surface shone silver in the gloom.

  To Lambert’s surprise, there was no light visible in the clubhouse buildings on this side either. A small rectangle of soft orange at the extreme end of the dark mass was the only illumination; after an instant’s computation, he recognized this as the kitchen of the steward’s flat. For a moment, he wondered if Shepherd had forgotten their meeting after all: then he remembered the Chairman’s car standing still in its allotted space at the front of the building.

  There was a simple explanation, of course. Shepherd must be chatting with the steward in the privacy of his domestic quarters. Somehow, it did not seem his style: Lambert could see the Chairman chatting amiably enough to the steward across the men’s bar, where master-servant relationships could be comfortably preserved, but scarcely venturing into the servant’s own territory for social intercourse. Yet that, it seemed, was where Shepherd must be: Lambert felt a pinprick of irritation: having called him out at this hour, the Chairman should have been looking out for him when he arrived.

  He took a deep breath and marched boldly through the darkness, still anxious to assert in his bearing his right to be out here at this hour. He knocked boldly at the door of the steward’s flat. But when the door finally half-opened his voice was muted and apologetic. He could distinguish no features of the figure silhouetted against the suddenly bright light. Only the outline of the hair told him that it was fe
male.

  ‘Sue? It’s John Lambert. Sorry to bother you so late, but the Chairman asked me to meet him at the club and I can’t find him.’

  ‘Come in, Mr Lambert.’ The soft West Country burr, the cheerful light of the kitchen, were welcome relief from the dark silence outside.

  ‘I thought Mr Shepherd might be chatting to Vic in your place,’ he said. Her face showed that she thought that as unlikely an occurrence as he had. ‘I can’t find him anywhere else and there don’t seem to be any lights on.’ He sounded to himself like a young constable.

  ‘Vic,’ she called through to the further recesses of the flat. After a moment, her husband appeared, apologetic in a dark blue dressing-gown. ‘Vic, Mr Lambert’s looking for Mr Shepherd. He arranged to meet him here.’

  Her husband shook his head. ‘It’s not like the Chairman, but he must have forgotten you, Mr Lambert,’ said the steward. He looked oddly discomforted to be caught outside his normal working habitat and dress. ‘I checked everywhere was locked up and all the lights were out not ten minutes ago and he wasn’t about then. He had a meeting until about a quarter to ten. But I shut the bar at ten and they all went soon afterwards. He must have forgotten you, I’m afraid.’ His patient addition of detail derived from long, polite dealings with a public who might have been expected to deduce such things for themselves.

  ‘You may be right, Vic. But he only arranged the meeting earlier this evening. And his car’s still outside. I suppose it’s possible he got a lift home with someone else, but …’

  ‘Never known him do that before.’ The steward filled the gap Lambert had hopefully left in the conversation. ‘Look, I think we’d better just check the premises and then ring his house to make sure he’s got home.’ Lambert was happy to find Vic Edwards suggesting exactly the course of action he had already decided upon. The steward brought his keys and led the Superintendent through a maze of passages, kitchens and fire doors, until they reached familiar territory in the club’s main lounge.

  The glasses had been cleared from the tables, but the furniture in the big room lay as it had done at the end of a quiet evening. They checked the men’s bar, the snooker-room, the locker-rooms, the showers, even the ladies’ lounge. All of them had for Lambert that extra stillness of communal rooms usually noisily occupied.

  ‘Where else?’ said the patient Vic Edwards. He had never believed the Chairman was still on the premises, and each new empty room seemed to give him a little extra satisfaction. ‘Do we try the pro’s shop, the trolley-room or the ladies’ locker-rooms? I’ve got the keys to all of them.’ He rattled them interrogatively while Lambert looked out into the darkness. As if to emphasize the futility of their quest, the only light in the greenkeeper’s cottage a hundred yards away was suddenly extinguished.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll bother with those, Vic,’ he said. ‘Now that we’ve gone so far, we’d better just check the Committee Room. Then we’ll call it a day.’

  The Committee Room was in the oldest part of the clubhouse, being part of the original mansion from which all else had grown. The steward had to open the Secretary’s office to get the single big mortice key for the heavy oak door. Lambert, unlike most members, had seen the interior of this holy of holies, for his Greens Committee met here. With its oak panelling, its huge table and heavy chairs, the room always seemed to him to be frozen in the ’thirties; the impression was reinforced by the yellowing but evocative photographs of Jones, Hagen and Cotton playing at the club in that decade.

  In the sudden harsh light this room seemed at first as empty as the others through which they had passed. They might have turned and left, had not Lambert noticed that the door of the small wall-safe in the far corner of the room was slightly open.

  It was only when they moved around the big table to investigate the safe that they saw what lay upon the floor. James Shepherd, OBE, Chairman of Burnham Cross Golf Club, lay spreadeagled by the empty fireplace. His jacket was open; in the centre of the immaculate white shirt beneath it, the handle of a heavy knife protruded from an irregular patch of crimson.

  Lambert’s first, uninvited, thought was that the ’thirties room had acquired a ’thirties murder.

  Chapter 2

  In the moment of grand guignol discovery as they stood over the body, the roles of the two men were suddenly reversed. Vic Edwards, unflappable steward of Burnham Cross Golf Club, stared wide-eyed at the grisly scene and strove to collect his shattered calm. When he turned to the man he had been conducting with patient tolerance through the empty club, his face was ashen, his voice unsteady with shock.

  ‘Do we ring 999?’ he said. Then, as the realization dawned that he was looking into the face of a Police Superintendent, there came an involuntary nervous titter that was near to hysteria. ‘Sorry, Mr Lambert!’ He turned half away from the corpse and stared hard at the picture of Henry Cotton. Lambert realized that he had probably never seen violent death before. He moved across to the steward, carefully skirting the table on the side away from the body.

  ‘I’ll do the ringing, Vic. Better go and tell Sue. Sit with her and I’ll be through to see you presently.’ He led the steward out of the room and through the labyrinth which would take him back to his own quarters, putting on a series of lights as they went. Lambert took his arm and guided him like an elderly invalid instead of the man ten years his junior he had been only minutes earlier.

  He switched on the light in the secretary’s room and sat down at the desk. He rang the police surgeon, then the CID room where he spent so much of his life. It was impossible to shock either the world-weary medic or the Inspector who took his call. An obscure professionalism made both of them treat murder as routine, though the departure of a local dignitary raised a little well-dissimulated curiosity. There was even a little black humour about the occurrence of such a dark deed at their Chief Superintendent’s golf club.

  Lambert looked at his watch; it was now approaching midnight. He stared at the phone for a full minute, then reluctantly took up the instrument and pressed the digits. The ringing tone sounded only twice at the other end of the line. ‘Garner,’ the voice said, gruffly neutral despite the hour: Chief Constables were professionally cautious about their responses until they knew who was phoning them.

  ‘Lambert here, sir. Sorry to disturb you at this hour but there’s been a death which I thought you should hear about from me rather than anyone else. Almost certainly murder.’ That ‘almost certainly’ forced from Lambert a grim, involuntary smile. He thought of what lay in the room next door and had so recently been a man: the eyes frozen wide with surprise; the right arm flung wide upon the floor, the left bent half beneath the heavy trunk; the shirt around the squat hilt of the heavy knife wet with still-fresh blood. There were questions from the rasping, breathy voice at the other end of the phone. As Lambert had expected, Garner’s first thoughts were of public reaction and press sensationalism rather than the machinery of investigation. The Chief quizzed him about how many people already knew and how he proposed to break the news to the world at large.

  ‘It’s bizarre,’ he said in seeming conclusion, ‘Jim Shepherd was a member of my lodge.’ Lambert considered the notion that a Masonic imprint should give some extra indemnity against murder. Then his Chief’s tone became businesslike again. ‘You’ll take charge of the investigation, of course, John. Set up a murder room if you need to, grab yourself an inspector and a CID sergeant and anyone else you need. The quicker we have an arrest the better.’ He was thinking in terms of headlines and PR again; he rang off before his Chief Superintendent could argue. Lambert had known it was almost inevitable that he would be assigned to the case, but he stared sourly at the phone before he banged it back into its cradle.

  By this time, there were muffled sounds from the other side of the wall. Lambert went back into the Committee Room to find much activity. Two young constables were taking measurements, while the police photographer selected his angles and went about his work with relish. ‘This is t
he kind of thing that made me take up this job when I read about it in books,’ he said, chewing vigorously on his antismoking gum as he balanced precariously on a chair above the corpse. ‘Not quite as good as the body in the library I’ve always wanted, but the nearest a sinner like me is likely to get.’ The fingerprint officer had already finished his work upon the lifeless hands and was preparing to encase them in protective plastic. Soon the body would lose its last connections with humanity and become evidence, tagged, documented, registered along with the rest.

  Lambert, looking at it with this thought, wondered if the patch of crimson around the knife had widened a little even since the discovery. He passed on the thought to the police surgeon as he arrived, but that veteran was as laconic as ever. ‘Death recent,’ he said grudgingly, revealing nothing. Dr Burgess spent information like a miser his money. ‘No rigor yet. Tell you more later. PM, of course. Do you want the stomach contents analysed?’ He might have been a husband reluctantly checking a shopping-list.

  ‘Hardly seems necessary. But yes, I suppose we’d better have the lot.’ Lambert was already thinking of officious coroners, even of hostile counsel. Thirty years of playing straight man to barristers with a taste for histrionics made you cautious.

  The photographer was almost finished. Now the print officer moved to the furniture, covering table, chairs, mantelpiece with white dust, then moving cautiously in upon the clothing of the body. He treated the gruesome handle protruding from its dark stain as though it were some prize fish that might escape if it were not brought to shore with delicate skill. ‘Don’t forget the safe,’ said Lambert. Four white faces looked up at him from different parts of the room, their concentration broken for a moment. ‘No, sir, next on the agenda,’ was all the scene-of-crime officer said, but Lambert heard in his tone the resentment of the implication that they might miss anything so obvious. It made him realize he had spoken only because he felt superfluous at this stage.