[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  As she saw his pleasure, her own fragile wellbeing was affected. ‘I’m nervous because of what you know happened to me. Ben, I’ll stay, but don’t expect much. I won’t be very good. And please understand that it won’t be your fault if I can’t...’

  He put both arms round her now, held her against him for a moment, whilst both their brains raced. At length he said softly, ‘It will be all right, Pris.’

  It was much later, when they lay relaxed in his bed, that she told him all about Richard Cullis. He listened without interrupting, staring at the ceiling of his room. Then, without talk and with a minimum of fuss, they made love, and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  In the morning, Ben brought beakers of tea to the bed and they watched the day brightening beyond the cotton curtains of his bedroom. For both of them, the world beyond those curtains seemed less threatening than it had done on the previous day, but they were in no hurry to rejoin it. She told him more about herself than she had told anyone else for years and he listened with an earnest appreciation of the privilege she was according him.

  It was then that Ben quietly told her about himself.

  John Lambert eyed his daughter warily over the top of the Sunday paper.

  Jacky had stayed the night with them, as she had done periodically since the break-up of her marriage and the departure of her husband. It was good for you to have an unchanging welcome when your world and your confidence had been battered; Christine Lambert understood this as clearly as Jacky herself, though neither of them had ever framed the thought in words.

  Mothers and daughters are almost always close in times of crisis. Yet in this household, Jacky had always chosen her father when she felt the need to confide. Even as a teenager, she had sometimes done that rarest and most difficult of adolescent things: she had asked her father for advice. Now he wondered if the bond between them had been shattered by what he had done on Thursday night. He had in effect thrown the man she had brought here out of the house; Jacky was far too intelligent to see it as anything other than that.

  She looked at him with that half-humorous, half-serious, expression with which she had always introduced her intimacies to him. ‘What did you think of Tim Cohen, Dad?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that? Your feelings are far more important than mine.’

  ‘Ah, but I was in first. Do tell!’ She used the phrases which might have come from her many years earlier, when she had been young enough to sit on his knee and test him with a barrage of childish questions: the old tricks are the best ones, with parents who love you.

  ‘He’s a well-qualified young man, who will no doubt have a successful career,’ John Lambert said carefully.

  ‘You didn’t like him, then.’ There was a humorous triumph in the way she so effortlessly cut through his cautious phrases.

  ‘I didn’t think he was right for you.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  Her father noted the edge entering her voice with the challenge. ‘Do you like lawyers?’

  ‘Do you always answer a question with a question? Is that part of the CID technique taught on courses?’

  He didn’t think any of his techniques were taught on courses. His first maxim would be to get yourself a Bert Hook, and he was sure that wouldn’t feature in any of the manuals. You were supposed to direct investigations from behind a desk nowadays, but he had also acquired a Chris Rushton to coordinate the masses of information for him. He put the sports section of the newspaper down on the table and said doggedly, ‘I think he’ll be successful. I didn’t take to him as a partner for you, but you must make the decision on that, as I think you’re telling me.’

  She looked at him very seriously for a moment. Then her face cracked into a broad smile and she said, ‘Relax, Dad. He’s not my type. I wouldn’t even have brought him here, if Mum hadn’t been so anxious to see him.’ Lambert’s long, lined face looked suddenly ten years younger as he smiled. ‘You young minx! You enjoy winding me up.’

  ‘Always did, Dad. It’s not as easy as it used to be, but I can still do it.’

  ‘I’m sure to meet Tim Cohen professionally, you know. He acts as legal adviser to All God’s Creatures, who are quite strong around here. I don’t know if he’s got any strong convictions about hunting or animal drug-testing himself.’

  ‘He hasn’t.’

  He was encouraged by her prompt, slightly contemptuous dismissal of that thought. It made him ask the question he knew he should avoid but could not resist. ‘Did Cohen offer you drugs?’

  There was a long pause before she decided that she must answer him. ‘He asked if I used coke. I suppose you could call that an offer. It’s one of the reasons why I decided not to pursue things with him.’

  ‘He was taking coke here. I walked in on him taking a snort.’

  She looked at him hard for a moment, then burst into giggles. ‘So that’s why he shot away so quickly on Thursday night. There’s no way he’ll want to see me again, after that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t just let it go.’ He didn’t want to tell her that his first reactions had been those of a protective father, not a senior policeman.

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t. You’ve saved me the small embarrassment of refusing any future invitations from Tim. There won’t be any.’ Jacky spent the morning in the family home before going back to her ancient cottage. Christine Lambert wondered what shared secret made father and daughter so at ease with each other.

  Priscilla Godwin relished the autumn sun and the glorious autumn leaf shades as she drove the few miles from Ben Paddon’s flat to her own. There was still warmth in the sun. On impulse, she slid open the sunroof of her small car, a facility she rarely used, and enjoyed the breeze in her hair. There was no need to cocoon herself away from the world on a day like this.

  She crossed a bridge over the Wye, glimpsing its waters flowing placidly at the end of an October when it had hardly rained. She had not been so happy for months, not since well before the episode with Richard Cullis. That was how she could and would regard it: an episode, unsavoury but now completed, not a trauma that was going to ruin the rest of her life.

  She told herself that a thirty-year-old woman should not be humming like a self-satisfied teenager after her first night of sex. This was surely an adolescent overreaction, this feeling that all was now well with the world, that she could make it spin to her wishes, rather than being whirled round helplessly on an alien planet. This rebuke did not affect her mood at all. All was indeed well with the world, now that Cullis was out of it and Ben Paddon emphatically within it.

  She would pursue a new and intriguing relationship with this naive but sensitive young man who seemed so ready and able to attune himself to the needs of her mind and her body. Where this would lead her, she was not quite sure, but she found that she could even welcome that uncertainty. In the weeks to come, she would no longer have to drive herself through the motions of existence at home and at work. Life was back there before her, waiting to be explored.

  Even the flat she had recently dreaded to enter had no fears for her, in this mood and on this bright morning. She opened the windows to let in the midday sunshine. Priscilla decided that she would make herself a snack and then sit down with the Sunday paper she had bought on the way home. It seemed a long time since she had allowed herself such innocent indulgence.

  She went to the phone to check if there were any messages. The impersonal voice told her that Chief Superintendent Lambert would like to see her as soon as possible, in connection with his investigation of the suspicious death of Mr Richard Cullis.

  Twenty-One

  It was Sunday afternoon. Paul Young’s son was playing football with the local club’s junior side. Normally he would have liked it if his daughter had also been out with her friends, because he liked to have his wife to himself for an hour or two. In the days before the death of Richard Cullis, they had even sometimes made love on afternoons like this. Debbie had laughed with him, and teas
ed him, and taken him up to the bedroom, and said that it was good sometimes to feel like a mistress rather than a wife.

  Yet since that death a curtain had fallen between them. It was not a curtain of silence: they still spoke, and strangers who were not familiar with their normal exchanges might scarcely have registered that anything serious was wrong. Yet they were guarded with each other, so guarded that laughter and warmth and love seemed to have deserted them. The children had noticed it; even those teenagers so preoccupied with their developing selves had noticed it. An air of mutual suspicion hung over the husband and wife who were normally so close. They watched each other and wondered, knowing the strength of their feelings against the dead man, knowing that love as well as hate can sometimes lead to violence.

  Paul Young, stacking the crockery into the dishwasher after Sunday lunch, was glad today that his daughter was in the house, glad of the cheerful cacophony of music from the room above his head. He moved around the kitchen slowly, wondering what other household chores he could find to avoid contact with his wife.

  He heard the unexpected sound of voices in the hall. One of them was Debbie’s, but he could not distinguish a single word of the conversation because of the noise from upstairs.

  Then the kitchen door opened and Debbie said with a bright, false smile, ‘We have a visitor, Paul.’ He wiped his hands hurriedly on the kitchen towel and followed her into the hall. ‘Alison Cullis has popped in to see us.’ She gave him the full name, as if she feared he would not recognize the woman behind her with the pale oval face and the attractive dark hair. ‘Do take Alison into the sitting room and I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  Paul did not quite know what to say, so he called up the stairs to his invisible daughter, ‘Turn that down, will you, Zoe? We can hardly hear ourselves think down here.’ He waited until the volume minimally decreased, then shrugged the word ‘Teenagers!’ at his visitor and led her into the sitting room.

  His visitor seemed nearly as embarrassed to be here as he was to receive her. She said, ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything. I probably shouldn’t be here, but you get to thinking all kind of strange thoughts when you’re in that big house on your own.’

  ‘You’re very welcome!’ said Paul, as heartily as he could. Suddenly, he found that he meant it. He’d always liked what little he’d seen of Alison Cullis in the past, and anyone married to that monster Richard deserved every sympathy. And she was surely right: being isolated in that big house after a partner’s death must be an eerie experience, leading to a sense of isolation, even if you’d long since ceased to love the man who had died. The widow had a strange sort of serenity about her, but it must be a very odd feeling, sitting in that house and wondering who had killed your husband.

  As if she read his thoughts, Alison said, ‘I’ve been wondering how the police are getting on with their investigation. They didn’t tell me much about it when I saw them: I suppose you wouldn’t expect them to. I expect you two exchange notes with other people at Gloucester Chemicals about what the police have said. I haven’t got anyone to exchange notes with.’

  ‘Actually, I’m not there any more. I’ve been busy finding myself a new job.’

  She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Richard sacked you, didn’t he? I’d forgotten about that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t your doing, was it? And he might have done me a favour: I wasn’t cut out for sales and I think I’ll be much happier in a different sort of work.’ Paul wondered if Cullis had aired his dismissal to other people as well as his wife, whether his humiliation had been common knowledge at the works. He was glad when Debbie came in with the tea and some of her home-made cake.

  Alison looked up at his wife and said, ‘It’s good of you to invite me into your house like this, after what Richard did to you.’ Her smile was as wide and as brittle as Debbie’s own.

  Paul wondered for a moment what she meant, but Debbie was so obsessed with the injustice in being passed over for Cullis that she responded immediately. ‘It’s not your fault, is it? I shouldn’t think you had any more time for Richard’s dirty tricks than we have.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Alison’s dark eyes glittered with the sincerity of her hatred. ‘He was a rotten husband. I don’t have to disguise that any longer, do I? I expect you could cheerfully have killed him, after what he did to the two of you.’ Paul was taken aback by this vehemence in a widow, but Debbie accepted it as natural. ‘You’ve hit the nail right on the head there, Alison.’ She handed a slice of fruit cake to her guest, then took a small, fierce bite at her own piece. ‘I shan’t be at all sorry if the police don’t feel able to arrest anyone for this. They don’t seem to be making much progress.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me. I agree with you, Richard had it coming to him and I hope whoever did it gets away with it.’ Alison nodded calmly, as if she were merely confirming her agreement on some small point of fashion.

  Paul Young, a fundamentally decent and conventional man, was shocked by this feverish compact between the two women in his sitting room. He found that the muted sound of pop music from his daughter’s bedroom was now a reassuring assertion of normality in a world which seemed in danger of running out of control. He was more than ever disturbed by an awful intuition of his wife’s guilt. Was the woman who shared his bed and his children the demented perpetrator of the death of this man who had so unbalanced her judgement? Paul was trying to convince himself rather than the women as he said diffidently, ‘It must be difficult for the police. Everyone at that table on Tuesday night seems to have had a reason to wish ill upon Richard.’

  ‘To kill him, you mean.’ Debbie was like Lady Macbeth in her contemptuous dismissal of his evasion.

  ‘He was bedding Lucy Dimmock, you know.’ Alison Cullis sipped her tea with quiet satisfaction, like one of the women she had known as a child announcing a minor piece of parish gossip.

  Debbie nodded her satisfaction. ‘I always suspected that. They were too discreet about it for me to be certain.’ She refilled Alison’s cup, then waved the teapot vaguely over the full one, which her appalled husband had not touched. ‘Was it still going on when he died?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was months ago that I caught him out making a telephone call. I’d ceased to care about what he was up to long before Tuesday night.’

  Debbie pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘It’s my guess that he ditched Lucy a while back. But I think Jason Dimmock had found out about it. He used to be quite thick with Richard at one time, but they were hardly speaking at the time of this death.’

  ‘So either of them could have done it, couldn’t they? The rejected mistress and the wronged husband.’ The thought seemed to give Alison Cullis considerable satisfaction. ‘I never knew Lucy very well, but she struck me as a resourceful lady. ’ There was a hint of bitterness in the phrase, as if she felt a belated resentment of the woman who had betrayed her, even with this despised husband.

  Debbie said, ‘Jason wouldn’t take kindly to an affair like that. He’s well capable of planning that sort of murder.’ It was the first time the word had been mentioned.

  Paul caught a whiff of his wife’s lingering resentment for Dimmock: she had regarded it as a betrayal when Jason had offered friendship to the man who had taken what she had always seen as her post. He said rather feebly, ‘I expect the police are well aware of these things, by now.’

  As if she took that as a dismissal, Alison Cullis glanced at her watch and said, ‘Well, I must be off. Thanks for entertaining the harmless ramblings of a confused woman. I feel much better now, really I do. As I say, it’s lonely sitting in a big house on your own and wondering quite what’s happening outside it.’ In the hall, she looked up towards the bedroom and the invisible presence behind the noise, as if registering it for the first time. She said bleakly, ‘I wish we’d had children. At least I’d have been left with something then, wouldn’t I?’

  They watched her car until it disappeared at the end of their cul-de-sac. ‘That was an odd
visit,’ said Paul.

  ‘I’m glad she came,’ said Debbie firmly.

  Paul looked directly at her for the first time in minutes. She seemed to him to have a strange excitement in her eyes. He said slowly, ‘I burned your diary yesterday.’

  ‘Did you? Why did you do that?’

  He had thought she would be bewildered, would ask him which diary he meant, but she had known immediately. ‘I burned it with the garden rubbish. It’s gone now. I didn’t think it was a good idea to have the record of how you hated Cullis over the last few months hanging around the place. Not with a police murder investigation going on.’

  He willed her to laugh at him, to declare that it was an absurd overreaction. Even anger would have been welcome. But Debbie nodded and said, ‘You’re probably right.’

  Priscilla Godwin’s first reaction to the phone message from Oldford CID was to ignore it for the moment and enjoy the rest of a day which had started so well. She could easily say that she had been out for the whole of Sunday and not picked up the request for an interview until late in the evening. Then she decided that she had much better have this meeting as soon as possible: she wouldn’t get much sleep if she left it until Monday.

  Before her resolution could falter, she picked up the phone and said that she was available for the rest of the day, though she didn’t suppose they would want to speak to her on a Sunday afternoon. Within minutes, the phone rang and the calm female voice told her that Chief Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook would visit her at three o’clock.

  The CID top brass, then. She had seen them after the murder and in the labs, heard other people talking about their meetings with the man whom the local press called the ‘supersleuth’. Now she wished she had listened a little harder to their impressions. She watched from the window of her flat as he climbed a little stiffly out of his old Vauxhall Senator, then looked up at the sky and around at the buildings rising above him, as if he could gather fragments of information even from bricks and glass and tarmac.