[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  ‘Would he go as far as murder?’ said Rushton, making a note to enter on this man’s file.

  ‘Remains to be seen,’ said Lambert tersely. ‘Bert and I are seeing him this morning. Paddon is clearly a naturally secretive young man - successfully secretive. He’s managed to watch and observe in the research labs at Gloucester Chemicals for two years without being exposed as an animal rights mole. That’s why the local group’s been so well informed about developments there. We know that there’s a dangerously violent element within the movement. It wasn’t long ago that they dug up the body of an elderly lady and treated it appallingly in a warped attempt to make some sort of point. The local group is numerous and strong: we’ve already seen them kidnap Cullis because they saw him as a figurehead; to people like that, murder might be the next logical step. All fanatics are capable of murder, especially when they think they are acting not for themselves but a cause. Martyrdom is a very persuasive concept, for people who combine quiet, undistinguished lives with blazing beliefs. Almost all terrorists are fanatics.’

  It was a long speech for Lambert, who usually left much unsaid with his experienced CID colleagues. Perhaps he had been clarifying his own thoughts as he spoke. There were a few seconds of silence before Hook said, ‘Perhaps we may know a little more after we’ve seen Paddon again and confronted him with what we now know about him.’

  Ben Paddon took Lambert and Hook into the office room at the end of the labs where they had seen Jason Dimmock.

  The movements of his long body seemed even more jerky and uncoordinated than when they had seen him in his flat: the man was plainly nervous. He acknowledged this with his first abrupt statement to them. ‘Pris spoke to me this morning. I know that she told you about my All God’s Creatures membership.’

  ‘Which you carefully concealed from us when we met on Friday,’ Lambert pointed out.

  ‘She should never have told you. I spoke to her in confidence.’

  ‘On the contrary, she did exactly the right thing. In a murder investigation, anyone who conceals information about a suspect runs the risk of becoming an accessory after the fact.’

  ‘So I’m a murder suspect, now, am I?’

  ‘You have made yourself one, by concealing information. You deliberately hid your association with the movement, both from our officers a few weeks ago and from DS Hook and me on Friday.’

  ‘In that case, I insist on having my lawyer present for this conversation.’ Paddon walked over to the door of the storeroom at the back of the office and flung it open with a stage magician’s gesture. The man standing within the cramped space emerged with an air of embarrassment, holding a document case in front of his chest as if it were a necessary shield. It was Tim Cohen.

  The brash young man whom Lambert had dispatched from his house three days earlier now studiously avoided eye contact with him. Cohen announced stiffly to the filing cabinets behind the superintendent, ‘I must remind you that Mr Paddon is a citizen who is voluntarily assisting you with your inquiry. He has been charged with nothing: he is not under arrest.’

  ‘If he is not cooperative this morning, he may very well find himself under arrest, on suspicion of murder. If he is not guilty of that crime, he would do well to give us all the assistance he can, in view of what he has concealed from us in the last few days.’ Lambert gave Paddon a sour smile and added without looking at Cohen, ‘I am sure that would be your advice to him as his legal consultant.’

  Cohen weighed this for a moment, then nodded quickly. ‘Mr Paddon is innocent of this crime. He has nothing to fear.’ He made himself smile. ‘The most you could accuse him of is wasting police time, and I’m sure you wouldn’t wish to dissipate the resources of the police machine on such a minor charge. It would make you look rather silly.’

  Cohen still wouldn’t look at John Lambert. He directed his supercilious smile at Hook, who said with some relish, ‘I’m not sure the public would think concealing information during a murder hunt was a minor offence. Any more than I’m sure they’d approve of a lawyer who tried to divert us from the truth.’ He turned to Paddon. ‘Why did you conceal your All God’s Creatures affiliations when our officers questioned you about the matter last week?’

  ‘I saw no reason to reveal views which are my own concern.’

  ‘You didn’t just conceal things. You lied quite deliberately about the matter.’

  Ben decided to play the only card he had left. ‘My job was at stake.’

  ‘You’re a member of a group which has broken the law of the land on numerous occasions. A group which has perpetrated serious violence and boasted that it would do more. One of these enlightened thinkers kidnapped a member of the public who had offered them no aggression, Richard Cullis. They boasted to him of the man they had working under his direction in the labs at Gloucester Chemicals. Richard Cullis is now dead. You need to explain to us not only why you lied to us about your views on animal testing but why we should not consider you a prime suspect for murder.’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’

  ‘So convince me.’

  ‘My client doesn’t have to do that, DS Hook,’ said Tim Cohen smoothly. ‘Innocent until proven guilty is fortunately still one of the principles on which our law functions.’

  ‘So convince us you’re innocent, Mr Paddon.’ Hook’s eyes had never switched from Paddon’s face to Cohen’s.

  ‘He doesn’t need to do that. He merely has to—’

  ‘Mr Paddon will no doubt speak for himself. He is here, as you pointed out, to help us with our inquiry.’

  Ben had not been prepared for this aggression from such an unexpected source. He said almost wonderingly, ‘I don’t approve of the testing carried out on animals at Gloucester Chemicals. I’ve been watching things happen for too long, biding my time and waiting for the opportunity to make some big gesture about it which would draw the public’s attention to what goes on there. But I didn’t want Cullis to be kidnapped. That only drew attention to my situation at work, especially when that idiot Scott Kennedy boasted that we had someone under cover in the research laboratories.’

  Hook nodded, shrugging away his aggression, dropping into his favourite role of the understanding older man. ‘So you thought you must act quickly. You got yourself involved in the golf day, because you saw that it would give you the opportunity to get close to Richard Cullis, alongside other people who would be as suspect as you of causing his death. And you took advantage of that opportunity to kill him last Tuesday night. You made the “big gesture” you just mentioned.’

  ‘I didn’t. I didn’t kill him. It was someone else who put that ricin in his food.’ Ben thought hopelessly that however often he repeated that idea he would not convince them. Hook’s account of his thinking in the lead-up to this death was so accurate that Ben’s phrases didn’t even convince himself.

  He could think of nothing else to add in the pause before Lambert said quietly, ‘Do you have access to ricin, Mr Paddon?’

  ‘Yes. But everyone who works on research and development does. Everyone at that table on Tuesday could have got hold of it, either directly or through a partner.’

  ‘So who killed Richard Cullis?’

  Ben felt a surge of hope that they were even allowing the possibility of someone other than him having done this. He’d had visions of them leading him out of here, past dozens of curious eyes, and pushing him with head bowed into the back of the police car. He felt an absurd urge to help them with their work, to get himself off the hook by presenting them with a better candidate for murder. ‘Alison Cullis. She hated Richard. He’d raped Pris Godwin only a few days earlier. I reckon Alison had found out about it and it was the last straw.’

  Lambert looked with distaste at the animated, excited face. ‘That’s a motive. Have you a shred of evidence to support it? Have you a single fact to offer us in support of your accusation?’

  ‘Well, no. Not really. But you asked me who had done it, and I thought she was the most likely candidate.’<
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  ‘More likely than the woman who spent Saturday night in your bed? More likely than the victim of this rape?’

  Ben tried to make his racing mind work as quickly and clearly as it usually did. Pris had shopped him, hadn’t she? She had blown his cover, revealed to them things which he had told her in confidence. She didn’t deserve to be protected. But perhaps she’d been put under pressure by these ruthless men, who were so much more formidable than he’d expected. The memory of his night with Pris, of what they had started and what he wanted to continue, held him back. ‘Priscilla didn’t do it. She’s not the type.’ How trite that sounded! What a fool he would be, if it emerged that she had been stringing him along! He heard the doubt in his voice as he said, ‘Pris would have told me if she’d done it.’

  ‘I wish I could share your confidence,’ said Lambert drily. ‘Don’t leave the area without giving us the details of your movements, please, Mr Paddon.’ He gave Tim Cohen a long, assessing look before he left the room.

  Cohen shut the office door carefully. ‘They can’t touch you for anything you said today,’ he told his shaken client, with more assurance than he felt.

  Ben put his hands together in front of him on the desk and realized that they were shaking. He couldn’t remember that ever happening to him before. ‘I didn’t think Pris would have told them,’ he said dully.

  ‘People do what they need to do to protect themselves. They’re cleverer than you think they are, these plods.’

  Ben nodded. ‘You weren’t much use.’

  ‘I did what I could.’ Tim didn’t want to tell Paddon how much he’d been shaken by the presence of Chief Superintendent Lambert, the man from whose house he had recently been forced to beat such an ignominious retreat. He told Ben to keep a low profile, to contact him immediately if he felt the need of his services. ‘If the firm wants to get rid of you, tell them you haven’t broken the law. You may have concealed your animal rights sympathies, but tell them your private opinions are your affair and not theirs. Is that understood?’

  ‘I lied about it at interview,’ said Ben dully. ‘That’s a long time ago. Some of the people involved won’t be around any longer, and the ones who are still here probably won’t remember.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to work here any longer. Not if everyone in the labs knows about my beliefs.’

  ‘That’s up to you. But do what I said and you’ll be able to leave on your own terms, not theirs.’

  Cohen got out as quickly as he could. He’d been happy to divert Paddon on the lesser issue of his position at Gloucester Chemicals. He didn’t want him coming out with a confession of murder. The English legal system didn’t allow you to defend people if you knew for certain they were guilty.

  Twenty-Three

  On the following morning, the weather was fine and clear, but a white frost sparkled on the lawn outside John Lambert’s bungalow as he backed out the car. He drove east, peering into a sun which was low and dazzling beneath a brilliant blue sky. He picked Bert Hook up after a few miles, but they did not speak as they drove towards Cheltenham. It was a benefit of working together for so many years that each was content to let the other pursue his own train of thought.

  The big house in the suburbs looked even more imposing with the clear morning light upon its front elevation. But the flowers on the dahlias alongside the long drive, which had been so colourful on their last visit, now hung black and limp after the winter’s first frost. The leaves of the maples still made their brilliant crimson show, but they carpeted the ground beneath the plants, which had been stripped bare by the night’s cold.

  Alison Cullis had the big front door open before Hook had finished ringing the bell. She stood above the big men at the top of the three steps, bathing them in a smile of false welcome, looking beyond them to the deserted road and the other big houses on the other side of it, where there was no sign of life. ‘It won’t be long now before winter is here! ’ she said clearly over their heads, directing her words towards the leafless maples in the border beyond the lawn, as if she was enunciating an important line in a play.

  She took them into her sitting room, as she had taken Father Driscoll before them when he had come to offer her the solaces of Holy Mother Church. These were also important visitors, though they had not the trappings of childhood reverence you gave to a priest. But she offered them the same hospitality she had offered Father Driscoll: they refused the coffee and shortbread rather curtly, she felt. She gave them her brittle smile again and said, ‘It will be a week ago tonight that Richard died.’

  ‘That he was murdered, yes.’

  The Lambert man had corrected her like a schoolmaster. She said a little waspishly, ‘That’s right, yes. Have you found out who killed him yet?’

  ‘I believe we have, yes.’ The lawyers would have tut-tutted and said that he hadn’t sufficient evidence for a case yet, but Lambert didn’t think that this woman was going to conduct the long ritual of denial.

  ‘He had a lot of enemies. We discussed that last time you were here.’

  ‘But only one who killed him. How did you get hold of the ricin, Mrs Cullis?’

  ‘Me? Oh, you must be desperate, Superintendent! I’m the one who isn’t a scientist, remember?’

  ‘You’re also the one who knew before he hit the floor that it was murder. The one who called for the police before even thinking of a doctor. ’

  For the first time, she was looking at them and not at some indeterminate area beyond them. ‘This is old ground, Mr Lambert. I explained that last time you were here.’

  ‘You didn’t, Mrs Cullis. You provided no answer at all to the question. You merely said that your husband had a lot of enemies round that table.’

  ‘Which was true.’

  ‘Of course it was. But it was nevertheless an evasion. You also neglected to emphasize to us essential features which were in your favour: I found that quite significant. In retrospect, it seemed that only someone who knew she was guilty would have made such an omission.’

  Alison tried to be haughtily dismissive. ‘And what were these mysterious “essential features” which I so conspicuously failed to use?’

  ‘You never asserted to us that you were the only person at that table who was not a scientist. Nor that you were the only person without obvious access to the poison involved in this death.’

  ‘Self-evident, Superintendent.’

  ‘Maybe. I would have expected someone who asserted to us at the time that she was a suspect to point out things which were in her favour.’

  ‘I took an interest in my husband’s work, in the early days. We were not always bitter enemies.’ Her eyes were gazing past them again, out over the garden and the trees, towards the sheep dotted on the hill beyond them, recalling another time and another world, where things had been so different.

  ‘And you had access to the laboratories and what went on there. You went in and out of the place.’

  She looked at him as if re-registering his presence. ‘I didn’t need that. Richard brought things home.’

  It was the first acceptance of guilt, the beginning of a confession. It was Hook who now said gently, encouragingly, ‘We were told that by people who worked in the labs.’ By Ben Paddon, that gentle, mistaken, unthreatening figure who had unwittingly revealed so much about his fellow suspects.

  ‘He was a cruel man, Richard. Of course, you know that by now. But you may not know how cruel.’

  ‘How cruel, Mrs Cullis?’ Hook was as soothing as a therapist.

  Alison looked into the weather-beaten, understanding, persuasive face and wondered why confession to this man should be easy. So much easier than it had been over those many years when she had knelt in the private cells of church confessionals and struggled to recite her sins to those anonymous men in cassocks behind the screens. ‘Richard brought home ricin. Months ago, I’m not sure when. Threatened me with it, when I taxed him with his women. Said he could dispatch me with it whenever he chose, th
at so long as the body wasn’t discovered for a few hours no one would know what had killed me.’

  ‘He threatened you?’

  ‘He didn’t mean to kill me. He just wanted me in his power. Wanted to see me squirm. Richard enjoyed watching me squirm. He said I was a helpless worm and he would tread on me whenever he chose.’

  She paused, seeming to revel for a moment in her pain and humiliation. Hook sought for words, however banal, which might prompt her. ‘From what you say, he was indeed a cruel man.’

  She nodded several times, as if it was important for her to confirm this to herself. Then the CID men saw that slyness, that delusion of her own cunning, which they had seen before in murderers. ‘He was sadistic. Over the years, he got worse. But this time I was a match for him.’ She leant forward confidentially towards Hook. ‘I went into the study when he was out with his latest floozy, didn’t I? Took a little of his precious ricin. He never knew that when he returned it to the labs.’

  ‘But you didn’t use it immediately.’

  ‘No. I bided my time. Gave him the chance to mend his ways. There is always hope for those who repent, you know.’ She was plainly reciting some tenet of faith from her youth, but it was not clear whether she was thinking at that moment of her victim or herself. ‘But he got worse. The final straw was when he raped someone. He went too far then, didn’t he?’ She looked at Hook with her dark eyes widening moistly in an appeal on behalf of all her sex.

  ‘And the day at Belmont gave you your opportunity.’

  She nodded, eagerly accepting this appreciation of her actions. ‘He set it up himself. “Hoist with his own petard”, you might say. That’s Shakespeare, you know.’