[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  He liked days like this, when a large group took over the course for a whole day. You had only one master to answer to, not a series of people with different requirements and different temperaments to fit into their day. This chap Richard Cullis, who had conducted most of the negotiations and made the preliminary arrangements, seemed to be pleased with what had been provided for his group. The manager knew that the weather was going to be his ally.

  The Wye, flowing blue and serene beside the lower sections of the golf course, was at its very best on this cloudless autumn day, as the heavy dew burned slowly off the fairways and greens. The majestic trees were still virtually in full leaf; these were their most glorious weeks of the year and this one of their most glorious days. There was scarcely a breath of wind, so that the leaves hung motionless in their developing shades of orange and gold.

  Even in such idyllic surroundings, this is still an imperfect world. There is still golf to mar the sublimity of the setting. ‘A good walk spoiled’:

  Priscilla Godwin knew now that it was Mark Twain who had called it that. She decided on this day of brilliant sun that anyone who walks beside a golf course will hear ample support for Twain’s view. The benign autumn morning was rent by imprecations which combined the blasphemous with the obscene.

  And the men seemed to be very nearly as bad as her own sex. Only a marginally greater emphasis on the scatological distinguished male from female in this battle against a common foe.

  The enemy was the golf course and it was unrelenting. No sooner had you given yourself hope with a lucky putt than the trees swallowed your next drive. When you did get the ball away well from the tee, you found that not only had a pond which you had never seen swallowed it, but that you were forbidden to cross the perimeter of the offending water to retrieve your ball because you might damage some rare and delicate flora or fauna.

  Yet Priscilla Godwin, not normally noted for her patience on any golf course, today took all this in her steady and unexpectedly affable stride. She had been delighted to walk straight past Richard Cullis in the reception area of the hotel, ignoring his greeting and snubbing him with considerable élan in front of an audience. She knew she would not see him on the course, for he had taken care to place her group well away from his. A day like this and a setting like this put even rape into perspective, she told herself firmly. There were people lying in hospital who would love to be playing indifferent golf at Belmont. So get on with it, girl, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Cullis hasn’t got away with it: he’ll find that you have your own way to take revenge, in due course.

  One of her two companions on the course was the gangly youth she had known for several years in the labs but had scarcely spoken to before. Once his shyness disappeared, as it quickly did in the face of the common stresses of golf, she found Ben Paddon an agreeable companion. They laughed together over their mistakes, only the more amused when they heard semantic explosions from golfers on adjoining fairways who had not got the sport into perspective as they had.

  And Paddon, who should have been unable to coordinate the movements of his long and seemingly unathletic limbs, was a surprisingly proficient golfer. He hit the ball high and generally straight; moreover, he had the good grace to seem as surprised as she was when she totted up his points for nine holes and saw how well he was scoring. He was three years younger than Priscilla, but he was intelligent and modest, two qualities she had always liked in men. More importantly, he could hardly have made a greater contrast with Richard Cullis. Ben was very diffident; he seemed to take a smile and a word of encouragement from her as a welcome windfall, rather than his right. He complimented her shyly upon her unexpectedly good chip which ran to within two feet of the flag on the twelfth.

  ‘You should call me Pris,’ she said to him firmly on the fourteenth.

  Alison Cullis was not playing good golf, but she was philosophical about that. She had other things in mind: she was looking around the golf course and wondering which one of these women Richard had raped; wondering indeed if that unfortunate woman was here at all. He had said nothing to her about the police interview, but the rumour factory being what it is, she had soon known that something serious was going on.

  A phone call to Richard’s PA about the police interviews had discovered that unfortunate woman thinking the wife must know much more than she did. She had unwittingly revealed the fact of the police visit to Richard. A second call to the Sapphire Unit at Oldford had revealed nothing more than that officers had been in touch with her husband, but that was enough: Alison knew exactly what Sapphire Units dealt with. Her husband had refused to say anything when she had confronted him. Richard was going to regret that very soon, as he was going to regret so many other things in this marriage that was over.

  Alison Cullis played a delicate eight iron from the elevated tee at the very short tenth hole. She watched it pitch quite near to the flag, accepted the compliments of her companions, and congratulated herself that she felt so completely in control of herself.

  Against his better judgement, Paul Young had been persuaded by his wife to attend the golf day after all. He was not enjoying it much, though he repeatedly agreed with his companions that they were all lucky to be out here on such a splendid day. Everyone in the clubhouse and the hotel areas had been carefully polite to him before they began, as you would expect with a man who had lately been made redundant. But it was a surface politeness: they would be happy when he was gone and they no longer had to endure the embarrassment of his presence. In truth, he would be glad himself: he knew he had no real aptitude for sales and he fancied that his sacking was probably justified. He wouldn’t have been here without his wife’s insistence.

  He loved Debbie, had loved her since their last days in the sixth form at school. He loved her brilliance as a scientist, loved the fact that her own job in the labs at Gloucester Chemicals could never have been in jeopardy. In truth, he lived a little in the shadow not only of his wife’s talents but of her will. She was a formidable woman, Debbie, Paul thought admiringly. He whacked away an unusually solid three wood and watched it rise, appealingly distant against the blue sky. He congratulated himself once again upon his choice of life partner.

  Jason Dimmock was playing well, but he had far more complex feelings about his wife than Paul Young. He rifled a long iron two hundred yards to the edge of the twelfth green and acknowledged the praise of the two strangers playing with him. This par five hole runs beside the river for the whole of its length; Jason strolled along and gazed thoughtfully into its depths, watching the small eddies in the water and the flies which fluttered over its surface in this final heat of the year.

  His companions were far less competent than he was; he had ample time for rumination before they arrived at the green. Lucy, who had seemed to him a little preoccupied and quiet in the early stages of the day, was playing thirty minutes behind him, but the configuration of the course meant that she would be quite near him at this point. He pretended not to notice his wife leaving the tenth green above him as he studied the line of his putt, but he knew from the distant laughter that she was more relaxed now than at the beginning of their day.

  Jason Dimmock took an uncharacteristic three putts and was not relaxed at all.

  There is something very satisfying about being pleasantly fatigued in convivial company and having a drink in your hand.

  The sun drops early behind the Welsh mountains in October, even during an Indian summer. But the eighteen holes of the golf tournament were well over before it disappeared. Even the players at the back of the field were showered and changed and pleasantly perfumed by six o’clock. The day was still warm and cloudless, but the blue of the sky was getting ever deeper and the first bright stars of evening were about to appear. Many people stood or sat and chatted on the terrace outside the Belmont hotel and clubhouse, sensing that there would be few more days in the year when you could relax outside without a coat.

  The Wye played its part below them, its wa
ters darkening to blue-black as the light dropped away. On the long, straight reach of water below the hotel, the surface was still enough in the breathless air to reflect the sky above it. The water was undisturbed save for the occasional trout leaping after an evening fly. A few minutes earlier, a woman with five black Labrador dogs had come to the water’s edge on the opposite bank, and there had been excited canine barking and splashing as they had twisted and plunged into the river after sticks. But now all was calm again. With the course now empty of golfers, fishermen were the only human presence by the river, and they were so still and difficult to detect that they might have been part of the landscape.

  The company was paying for all the drinks, so naturally the bar was extremely well patronized. By the time the crowd moved slowly into the dining room with the announcement of the meal, there was much noisy hilarity. With the early evening thus already pleasantly lubricated, it would have been difficult for the meal to fail. It did not do so.

  Both the roast beef and the alternative salmon were expertly prepared and served. The vegetables were plentiful and freshly cooked, rather than the sad collection which has often been waiting too long for diners in such circumstances. The wine flowed freely, so that those who had taken the precaution of coming as passengers congratulated themselves and solemnly warned their drivers not to overindulge. The decibel level rose steadily, the golfing stories became more outrageous, and the laughter became more uninhibited.

  With just a very few exceptions, a good time was being had by all.

  The tables had been allocated according to the divisions at work, so that the diners could relax with people they worked alongside and compare notes on the golfing disasters and triumphs of the day. The table where the laboratory staff were sitting together was the only one where there were any obvious tensions, though with the general hilarity and noise in the big dining room this was scarcely noticed.

  Richard Cullis had taken care to place himself at the opposite end of the table from Priscilla Godwin, who ignored him completely and engaged in close conversation with Ben Paddon, her golfing companion of the earlier part of the day. Paul Young was being determinedly cheerful, an effort helped considerably by his consumption of alcohol. His wife was keeping a wary eye upon him whilst conducting a desultory conversation with Jason and Lucy Dimmock on her left. Alison Cullis made valiant attempts to join in the general mirth, though her responses to her husband were consistently monosyllabic and dismissive.

  There were prizes, of course, and the rule that no person was to receive more than one meant that they were widely distributed. There was copious but polite applause for Jason Dimmock, who had produced the best scratch score of the day, then rather more surprised and enthusiastic cheers for Ben Paddon’s winning of the handicap section. Few people in the firm at large knew Ben, but his gauche, blushing acceptance of his trophy and the clumsy movements of his gawky frame, which seemed to belie his sporting achievement, brought him much acclaim.

  The cheering became more raucous as unexpected winners were called up to claim the lesser prizes. The last man up, a plump and elderly receiver of the booby prize for the worst score, made a good job of the conventional speech of thanks to the organizer, then complimented the course and catering staff of Belmont Golf and Country Club as the providers of perfect weather, a fine golf course, and excellent fare to conclude the day.

  Richard Cullis made the modest, deprecatory speech he had planned for this moment. He concluded with the triumphant announcement that, subject to the board’s agreement, he was sure that after the great success of today, the Gloucester Chemicals Golf Day would become an annual event.

  There was a final great cheer and he sat down amidst much applause. People were preparing to depart, exchanging their final jokes and farewells, when the commotion came from the research and development table.

  Richard Cullis did not even rise from his chair. Instead, he gave a small grunt and opened his eyes very wide in panic for two seconds at most. He half rose, then fell sideways to the floor, with no more than a sigh of distress.

  His form twitched for a moment on the carpet, hidden from most of the people in the room by the table where he had been sitting for the last hour and a half. He ended flat on his back, with his sightless eyes directed at the ceiling. Only those closest to him realized that he was dead.

  Eleven

  Detective Sergeant Bert Hook organized his leisure time very carefully. You had to do that, when you were in the final stages of study for an Open University degree.

  He had this Tuesday evening minutely planned. Half an hour with the boys after dinner, collecting their news, offering unsolicited advice on their homework. His thoughts on batting and bowling technique would be rejected even more brusquely than usual, now that the football season had irrefutably taken over; he would have to wait for the winter tour of New Zealand to revive cricket conversations. This would leave him two hours for his studies: with his final examinations looming, he should now be confining himself to revision, but he had still not completed the syllabus. Then there would be a final hour of relaxation with Eleanor and possibly the television, if there was anything worth watching. Then a drink and bed. It was an unexciting but wholly satisfying schedule, he thought.

  Eleanor answered the phone. That was their evening arrangement: Bert’s precious study time must be disturbed only by the most urgent of concerns.

  This was apparently one of them.

  Eleanor handed him the portable phone and said simply, ‘It’s John Lambert.’ In the unspoken codes of husband and wife, that meant she accepted this was something that needed his immediate attention and could not wait until the following working day.

  Bert heard his chief superintendent’s familiar tones in his ear. As usual, there were no preliminaries, no small talk. ‘We have a possible suspicious death, Bert. At Belmont Golf and Country Club. It may be no more than a heart attack, but if it isn’t, it needs immediate investigation. I can handle it without you if—’

  ‘I’ll be there. It’s no more than six miles from here.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up, then. I have to come almost past your house.’

  It was settled as quickly as that. Bert set the books back unopened on his desk, trying to regret the time lost for his studies. But he felt only that adrenaline surge which is familiar to all CID men when there is the prospect of the greatest crime of all to investigate. He seized his new blue anorak from the back of the door, called a quick explanation to Eleanor, and was gone.

  The hunter had scented prey.

  At Belmont, the big dining room had been cleared and the scene of crime cordoned off. The corpse lay where it had fallen. The police doctor had certified the man as dead, that absurd but necessary piece of ritual which is part of the legal safeguards against corruption.

  The mortal remains of Richard Cullis looked sombre but untainted: there was no visible evidence of attack. The photographer had already photographed an unremarkable scene from every angle he could think of. The civilian scene of crime officer was sketching a table plan, detailing who had sat in each chair on the dead man’s table from the place tags which were still in place on the cloth. Two of his assistants crawled methodically about the floor with tweezers, laboriously gathering each hair, each alien fibre, each small piece of detritus, which had fallen on to the carpet around the table where the dead man had been seated for his final meal.

  ‘This is probably all irrelevant,’ the SOCO said to Lambert as he and Hook came into the room. ‘If this is natural causes, none of this will matter. Let’s hope it is. If it isn’t, you’ve got a mishmash of stuff in those plastic bags.’ He gestured sourly towards the efforts of his staff. ‘There’ll be stuff from God knows how many of the eighty-three people who were eating in this room, plus the waitresses, plus whatever wasn’t vacuumed up efficiently after yesterday’s use of this room. I don’t envy you trying to sift through that lot!’

  ‘Forensic will do the sifting,’ said Lambert tersely. �
�We might know what’s relevant when we’ve questioned a few people and lined up possible suspects. Or we might decide the poor chap’s collapse was from natural causes and go back to our peaceful lives of burglaries and fraud and domestic violence.’

  The pathologist arrived at that moment. He was in evening dress and a thoroughly bad temper, having been extracted from a function he was enjoying. Lambert left him to it and went out into the reception area of the building, where uniformed police were conducting brief preliminary questionings of all the eighty-three people who had been transformed by this event from happy golfers into subdued and resentful people who wanted only to get away to their homes and their beds.

  Lambert recognized that he could not keep a gathering of this size together for very long. He announced that anyone who had seen anything he or she thought unusual in the evening’s proceedings should speak to Detective Sergeant Hook. The rest, once they had given their names and addresses to the uniformed officers, could depart, apart from the people who had been sitting on Mr Cullis’s table. The calmest of these appeared to be a man call Jason Dimmock. For humanitarian reasons, Lambert selected him rather than the widow to go back with him into the anteroom next to where the corpse lay.

  The pathologist had become professional rather than irritable from the moment when he knelt beside the body. He looked up at the returning Lambert and said, ‘There’s no visible cause of death. This may still be natural causes.’ He realized that Lambert would be preoccupied with the people who had seen this death and decided that he would not indulge in further speculation. ‘I’ve got the body temperatures I need from here. I don’t want to disturb the clothing any more than is necessary. You can get the meat wagon in and remove him as soon as you like. I think this one should go to Chepstow.’