by J M Gregson
A GOOD WALK SPOILED
A Lambert and Hook Mystery
J M Gregson
A Good Walk Spoiled
A Lambert and Hook Mystery
When Richard Cullis’s life is threatened if he doesn’t cease animal testing at the labs where he is the director of research and he then collapses during a company golf tournament, murder is suspected, but who administered the poison? There are plenty of suspects, and DS Hook is called in to sift the truth from the lies.
This first large print edition published 2010
in Great Britain and the USA
by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, SMI IDF.
First world regular print edition published 2008 by
Severn House Publishers Ltd., London and New York.
Copyright © 2008 by J. M. Gregson.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gregson, J. M.
A good walk spoiled. - (A Lambert and Hook mystery)
1. Lambert, John (Fictitious character) - Fiction
2. Hook, Bert (Fictitious character) - Fiction
3. Police - England - Gloucestershire - Fiction
4. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series 823.9'14-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-7843-4
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
Table of Contents
Title Page
A Good Walk Spoiled
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four 4
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
One
‘Bloody ball! Bastard bloody ball!’ Priscilla Godwin found that all ladylike pretensions disappeared swiftly on the golf course. She watched the small white sphere run erratically over the grass, then turn determinedly to the right and disappear with its final roll into the muddy depths of a pond. ‘Bloody, bloody, bloody bastard ball'
Her voice rose towards a scream with each repetition, so that heads turned towards her from adjoining fairways. Experienced eyes divined swiftly what had happened: heads nodded sagely before returning to their own concerns. Routine golfing frustration: nothing to get really worried about. The poor woman would no doubt be all right in a day or two.
The three people who were playing with Priscilla knew that she was normally a quiet, reserved thirty-year-old. Even now, in the depths of her suffering, her vocabulary had not lapsed into the vehement obscenities which were familiar to her male companions: only the repetitions and the rising decibel level had marked the intensity of her frustration, the degree to which achievement had failed to meet with aspiration.
The four gathered to stare into the depths of the pond, watching the ripples spread out towards the irises on the far side of the water, as if concluding some unspoken golfing ritual. Priscilla stared malevolently at the spot where her ball had entered the pond. ‘Another ball gone. I’ll be lucky to complete the round at this rate. Oscar Wilde was right. Golf is nothing more than a good walk spoiled.’
Paul Young glanced sideways at her thunderous face. He knew that it was Mark Twain who had offered that observation, but it did not seem a good time to correct his golfing partner: she still held a five iron in her hand, and she might not miss the larger target of a human head. He said instead, ‘Leave this one to me, Pris. I’m almost on the green in two.’
Supercilious sod, thought Priscilla. Smug bastard. No wonder his wife had chosen to play with someone else. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Paul,’ she said, accurately but acidly.
Golf is a great game for cementing friendships.
The other female in the four looked up at the blue sky and flying white clouds. ‘This sure beats a day in the lab, whatever we score,’ she said cheerfully. Debbie Young was ten years older than Priscilla, with a round face which was still largely free of wrinkles, blue eyes, and blonde hair, which was now a little dishevelled by the wind. She was buxom rather than plump.
and the brown and white trousers and yellow sweater she wore emphasized the fact. Men who were not entirely dedicated to this ridiculous game liked to follow her down the fairway and enjoy certain compensations for their golfing trials.
‘Even bad golf beats work.’ The fourth member of the group stated that axiom firmly, like a bishop iterating an article of faith. Jason Dimmock was tall and lean. He had a handsome face, with a nose which had been bent minimally and interestingly by an adolescent rugby injury. He had been playing golf for only two years, having come to it at thirty-seven when he accepted that his days of serious cricket and tennis were numbered. Yet he was already the best golfer in the four.
Jason decided that it was time to get things moving again. He addressed his ball, which lay to the left of the pond, took a single look towards the green, and dispatched his ball there with a controlled shot and a minimum of fuss. ‘Good shot!’ said Priscilla Godwin, after a pause to gather the shreds of her sporting resources. ‘Looks like this hole will be between the two men.’ The sweet smile she directed at Debbie Young was not wholly benevolent.
The game proceeded. Priscilla Godwin, for no apparent reason, played a little better; her colleagues noted even minimal improvements and complimented her upon them, like diplomats nervously accepting every opportunity to avoid the disaster of open war. The two men fought each other steadily as the round progressed, the two women made occasional unexpected and unpredictable contributions to the struggle. Fierce contest was maintained beneath the brittle banter. Bodies strained every nerve and sinew to get that irritating white ball into a succession of holes which were much too small for the purpose.
The non-golfers who proceeded with caution across the footpath which crossed the course thought how pleasant it must be for men and women to relax and take exercise in this carefree and undemanding fashion on a sunny summer afternoon. One wonders what hope there can be for peace among the peoples of the world when such fundamental misapprehensions are rife among people from the same nation.
Few people can maintain blinding, bloodcurdling anger for longer than a few minutes at a time, and Miss Godwin was no exception. After the crisis of the pond, she became gradually quieter, until she was eventually a little embarrassed by her outburst. She was consoled by a volley of curses from her partner on the sixteenth, occasioned by nothing more damaging than a four-putt. ‘It’s not the end of the world, Paul, is it?’ she said cheerfully, with that combination of logic and bonhomie which can cause apoplexy among serious golfers.
Paul Young did not reply, but she expected no response. His thunderous glare into the middle distance was exactly what she would have expected from a committed golfer. She found it comforting, rather in the way that people now accept the news of a moderate overdraft as an assurance of an unchanging world.
Priscilla even managed to win the last hole, with the help of her handicap and her fir
st long putt of the day. The match was over by then, but this small, irrelevant triumph gave her the irrational glow of happiness which is familiar to all practitioners of the game.
They showered in their respective changing rooms, feeling the bad golf wash away from them in the warm jets, watching the imprecations and the tensions swirl away into the oblivion beyond the plugholes. Changed and with drinks in front of them, they sat outside on the veranda and enjoyed the sunset, whilst watching fellow-golfers struggling towards the eighteenth green with patronizing smiles and the charity which stems from alcohol and a pleasant fatigue.
It is not the best time to make balanced judgements or take responsible decisions. That became apparent when Debbie Young said slowly, ‘I enjoyed it today. Perhaps we should have a group outing from the firm. Get everyone together who plays golf and make a day of it. Perhaps even stay a couple of nights somewhere and have two or three rounds.’
She expected that someone, probably one of the men, would immediately pour very cold water on such a proposition. But no one did. Priscilla Godwin said that a golfing break might be too ambitious, that they’d get a much better turnout for a one-day competition with a meal to follow. She spoke about the value of bonding exercises, and confessed that she for one found that she tended to become cocooned in her own sphere of work activity, so that she would welcome a day of mixing informally with other people who did very different jobs.
Three people who earlier in the day might have ridiculed such naivety nodded sagely and took sips of their drinks. They were all intelligent people, but this was the wrong time of the day and the wrong place for intelligence.
Indeed, it was the best golfer among the four, Jason Dimmock, who eventually nodded and said, ‘A company golf day sounds like quite a good idea to me.’
In fairness to him, it must be said that he could have had no idea at the time of the consequences of this innocent proposal.
Two
Gloucester Chemicals was a good place to work. Most people agreed that if you had to earn your living somewhere, you could do a lot worse. When the British talent for understatement is taken into account, this means that most people felt they were lucky to work there, though few of them would have dreamed of putting it as strongly as that.
It was a prosperous firm, for a start. Forty years earlier, the founders had hoped for a modest but consistent success in the world of pharmaceuticals. They had done much better than that. The burgeoning British National Health Service had vastly increased the demand for a great variety of medical drugs. This lucrative but highly competitive market was made for young men with chemistry degrees and an entrepreneurial bent. They had prospered, resisted takeover bids from the big boys like Glaxo and Beechams, diversified, and floated the company on the stock market during the boom times of the nineties.
One of the key events in the company history had been the acquisition of government contracts in 2000. It seemed appropriate that the new millennium should mark the transition of a company which had begun in a deserted warehouse by the River Severn to a large factory with extensive laboratory facilities on the new industrial estate three miles away.
In national and international terms, Gloucester Chemicals was still a small firm, with a workforce of under three hundred and a profits-per-worker ratio which was among the highest in the world. In this field where new products were the very lifeblood of a firm, a very high proportion of profits was ploughed back into research and development. The laboratories were regarded by everyone who worked in the establishment as the centre of the company. Each year two or three of the brightest of new graduates enlivened and invigorated the work on new products on which the company depended for its prosperity.
Priscilla Godwin had been one of these herself only seven years earlier, arriving with her doctorate proudly brandished and possessing what she now saw as a touching naivety about the world of business and its strange but sometimes exciting practices. Cambridge had been good fun as well as hard work, full of sexual and other excitements after the restrictive world of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. But she considered now that the ancient university had been the ivory tower which her less fortunate contemporaries had warned her it would be, as far as the hard lessons of life went.
A series of affairs both fortunate and unfortunate, with two in particular much more lifechanging than the others, had left her at thirty both wiser and more cautious. She told herself sturdily that she would not have lived her life differently, that a few scars were necessary to the rounded and effective twenty-first-century woman which she was sure she had now become.
She had to tell herself that a little more often and a little more insistently than should have been strictly necessary. She valued her freedom, and a few scars were surely a small price to pay for independence.
Five days after the golf outing, Priscilla was working late in the lab. She wanted to conclude her recording of the latest of a series of experiments. Writing came harder than science for Priscilla. She liked to have privacy to concentrate upon her sentences and her syntax. There was a skill in making complex scientific information readable and easily understood: she had read enough turgid and inconclusive accounts herself to realize that. She could write crisp sentences, but she needed to concentrate to do it properly.
If her desire to present things in a decent and orderly fashion gained her a reputation for conscientiousness, that would be a useful byproduct of her industry. You might feel threatened sometimes by these bright young minds who joined you each year, but if you could show the people who ran the company that you were industrious and diligent, that might well be noticed. Miss Godwin had learned quite a lot about the way the world worked in her years at Gloucester Chemicals.
People who worked in the rest of the firm thought that lab work was glamorous, that you lived your life continuously at the forefront of technology, waiting for the Eureka moment of the next breakthrough. It wasn’t like that at all, thought Priscilla ruefully, as she dutifully recorded the negative outcomes of her latest work. Most of the research was routine stuff, investigating the possible side effects of promising developments, checking out the safety factors on the newest drugs, devising the necessary final tests on mice and rats before new treatments were released for human use.
There were small but important discoveries, even the occasional revolutionary new drug treatment which everyone dreamed of. But these were usually the result of patient team-work over many months, rather than individual brilliance. Indeed, one of the principles of the lab was that you shared new thoughts and new initiatives with those around you. The ‘Einstein moment’ was a joke among working scientists, including even those with the most original minds and the most creative ideas. If many of the people who worked in the labs had a secret fantasy of emulating Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, they kept such visions strictly to themselves.
Priscilla Godwin was completing the record of her latest mundane findings when Richard Cullis came into the office she shared with three others at the end of the laboratory. He glanced round the deserted area and said heavily and obviously, ‘So the dedicated researcher works on alone, whilst others depart to the concerns of ordinary life!’
Priscilla smiled up at him and said something deprecating. She couldn’t set aside a certain satisfaction that the boss had come in here and found her exceeding the calls of duty to complete her work. Richard Cullis was a bronzed, fit man of forty-four. He had a BSc in chemistry, but boasted that he had long since forgotten all he had ever learned about science. He had made his way in sales, rising to become sales manager on the back of the firm’s successful drugs programme. He would admit to his intimates when he was feeling charitable that it had been easy in those years: a succession of effective new drugs had left clients eager to buy, so that his main problems had been the welcome ones of ensuring a smooth supply chain.
Two years ago, Richard had taken advantage of the firm’s expansion to become a member of the board. He was now Directo
r of Research and Development, which put him officially in charge of the laboratories. His job, as he told anyone willing to listen, was to translate scientific initiatives into working products. He was a link between the research which was the heartbeat of the firm and the commercial concerns of the high street.
Cullis reminded shareholders who wished to maximize gains that the prosperity of the firm lay in research and the continual supply of new products which it would bring. He reminded those people in the labs who liked to see themselves as unworldly boffins that profit was what drove things forward, that without it there would not be the constant updating of facilities and personnel which was the basis of laboratory development.
Richard Cullis was good at banging heads together and making people face reality.
He came across and peered over Priscilla Godwin’s shoulder at what she had written. She caught a faint, musky scent from him and wondered whether it was aftershave or some other, more mysterious, male addition. She was suddenly embarrassed at the paucity of her findings, at the humdrum quality of this negative write-up. Cullis must feel that she was giving herself airs and graces, staying behind to record dull stuff like this.
‘It’s just routine,’ she said apologetically to the man whose breath she could feel on the side of her neck. ‘Nothing exciting, but it has to be done, to save other people from going off down blind alleys.’
‘I know the form,’ he said, coming round to where she could see him. ‘You can leave me standing on the technical stuff, but I still remember the way we operate, the way all science operates. Throw lots of pebbles and wait patiently for the one that hits the target.’
Priscilla smiled. She had heard the analogy many times. Now she heard herself voicing her usual corrective. ‘We hope that what we already know helps us at least to cast the pebbles in the right direction.’
He smiled at her, but said nothing. Probably he had heard this modification before, perhaps even used it himself when explaining their activities to the members of the board who did not have scientific backgrounds. He walked over to one of the other benches, glanced at a page of figures which one of their new bright young men had left there, picked up the ballpen which lay across the sheet, pressed and repressed the top of it to bring out and recess the writing-point, as if this were an aid to thought for him.
