by J M Gregson
‘Splendid! You’ve been in touch with Mr Crompton?’
‘Bob? Yes. He’s definitely going to come. He says he’ll do his usual thing, read his usual poems, and see how they take it.’ Despite himself, he was absurdly pleased that the ogress had remembered Bob’s name.
‘That’s good. I’m really looking forward to a stimulating session. Hopefully Bob Crompton will find it useful as well.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Sam grimly.
He put down the phone and stared at it balefully for a moment. He wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. It was his first experience of what many servants of the nation had experienced over the years: the formidable Marjorie Dooks had secured a totally different outcome from that planned and anticipated by her colleagues.
‘I see you’ve booked your annual leave for the last two weeks in July.’
It was best to come at this obliquely, Chief Superintendent Lambert thought. Even people cutting your hair talked about your holidays. Bert Hook surely wouldn’t see any threat in such a dull and conventional conversational opening.
‘Yes. We’re still confined to school holidays with the boys.’ Bert played it back like a straight but unthreatening first ball, wondering what more dangerous deliveries his chief had in store for him.
‘Have you decided where you’re going yet?’
‘Yes. We’ve already booked the same cottage in north Cornwall which we had last year. You have to book early at that time of the year.’
They knew each other too well, these men. Like a lot of CID men, they were not good at small talk; perhaps that came from conducting too many interviews with known criminals, where you went straight for the throat and fought to close your metaphorical hands around it. When Bert Hook heard John Lambert opening with such an unthreatening enquiry, he was immediately on his guard rather than relaxed.
Consequently, when the older man said as casually as he could, ‘You’ll be around here at the end of May, then,’ he knew that some request or order he wasn’t going to like was in the offing.
‘Yes. I’ve a feeling in my water that we’ll be pretty busy around that time, though.’
‘No reason why we should be, is there, Bert?’
‘No obvious reason. A feeling in my water, as I said. A nudge from the instinct I’ve developed as a detective sergeant. The same instinct warns me that a man who is otherwise quite civilized is about to assert the brutalities of rank.’
‘You’re a sensitive soul, Bert.’
‘And flattery won’t work. Not that it isn’t welcome, of course.’
‘It’s a very small thing I have to ask of you, Bert.’
‘I like that “ask”. It implies that refusal is a possibility.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll refuse this, Bert. This is something you’ll quite enjoy. A change from the dull round of petty crime and criminal faces.’
Bert said stubbornly, ‘It’s not such a dull round. Neither young thugs nor old lags are all the same as each other. Looking for the differences can be both instructive and useful.’ He was repeating the pious mantra he had voiced to a new DC earlier in the day, but he kept his face straight.
‘This is something you could do better than any other officer in the CID section, Bert.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘What other officer among us has recently obtained an Open University degree?’
Bert sighed. ‘I don’t see why that should line me up for shitty jobs.’
‘It makes you an intellectual, Bert. There aren’t many among us who can hold their own with the Gloucestershire intelligentsia.’ Lambert looked through the window of his office, weighing the thought. Then he nodded two or three times.
But Bert Hook knew his man too well. He looked at him suspiciously and said bluntly, ‘This is something that was offered to you, isn’t it?’
Lambert smiled ruefully. ‘It was a request addressed initially to me, yes. I was happy to think of someone more suitable for a most agreeable assignation.’
‘Very unselfish of you.’ Bert Hook sighed again, more elaborately. He’d rumbled what the chief was up to. That didn’t happen very often and he wanted to savour the moment. ‘What is the shitty job you’re trying to unload on to your unsuspecting junior?’
Lambert sighed in turn at this cynicism in his bagman. ‘It’s not at all shitty, Bert. It’s a compliment to be considered. It’s the Oldford Literary Festival.’ He rolled off the syllables reverently. ‘They’ve secured an eminent author of detective novels as one of their speakers. The organizer thinks it would be an excellent idea to have a real detective on the platform with him for the discussion which will follow his talk. Someone who could point out the differences between real crime and fictional crime.’
‘I agree with you on one thing. It seems an excellent idea.’
‘You do? Well, in that case, I’ll-’
‘An excellent idea that they should approach their local celebrity, Chief Superintendent Lambert, to fulfil that role. You’re the man they wanted, aren’t you?’
‘Well, that was the original suggestion, yes. But if I can offer them someone who is much more obviously suited to the task, I’m sure they’ll be happy to-’
‘It’s no go, John. It’s you they want. I’m sure our Chief Constable will endorse that view when you tell him about it.’
Lambert gazed through the window for a moment longer, then smiled wryly at his colleague and friend. ‘It was worth a try, Bert. And you’d have done it well.’
Bert shook his head decisively. ‘It’s you they want and you they should have, John.’
Lambert sighed. ‘Maybe there’ll be a serious crime to make my attendance impossible.’ He spoke without much hope. But police pessimism is not always justified.
In the sharp cold of the April frost, the man struggled beneath the straggly rhododendron. He was glad of his anorak and the thick polo-necked sweater he had put on beneath it, but nothing could keep his feet warm as he waited on the damp earth. It was a good twenty minutes before the car swung into the drive; it felt much longer than that to him.
Behind the wheel was a plump woman of around forty, bottle-blonde and carefully made up. She put on the hand brake and swung herself out of the car, gasping a curse as the cold hit her bare arms and the legs exposed beneath the absurdly short skirt. At least those legs were still good, thank God. She locked the car, the orange lights flashing bright and brief as she pressed the electronic button.
She was turning away from the car when he shot her. The single bullet through the temple would have been enough, but he blasted another one through the back of her head as she lay at his feet. Professional killers left nothing to chance. The soft noise of the bullets sounded loud in the thin air, even with the silencer on. But there was no sign of a response from any of the new houses in the quiet close. He was away from the scene and back at his car within two minutes, having seen not a soul. .
Sue Charles stared at the computer screen for a moment, then glanced at the clock and set about logging off. Sufficient for today. She liked to have something to polish when she came back to her latest book in the morning. If she added a few telling details to make the killing more convincing, it would help to ease her into the new working day. Then she could go on to develop plot and character and do more original and creative things.
When you’d been doing this for thirty years, you knew what worked for you and what didn’t in the writing process. She had a variety of little tricks to prevent her writing from becoming stale. This was one of them; the process of polishing eased you into the difficult business of trying to create something new each day.
She extracted the supermarket meal for one from the fridge and slid it into the oven. It never seemed worth spending time on preparing and cooking food when you were only catering for one. And everyone said how much better these ready-prepared meals were than they had been ten years ago. Most of them were quite tasty. Especially if you had a couple of glasses of wine wi
th them.
She grinned wryly to herself. She found herself making these excuses to be a slattern nearly every day now, when there was really no need for them. She’d only herself to answer to, hadn’t she? Speaking of which — she went and looked at herself in the hall mirror. She’d found a couple of days ago that she hadn’t combed her hair all day; it had been flying untidy and unchecked at seven in the evening.
It was all right today. The grey tresses were disciplined, with only a few strands daring to leave their ranks. She couldn’t understand this fashion among the youngsters for irregular partings; it seemed to destroy the whole idea of dividing your hair in a certain way. But there were many things she didn’t understand and almost as many of which she didn’t approve about modern life. As a writer, she knew she mustn’t get out of touch with the generations behind her. The radio and the television were a great help, she supposed. She tried hard to listen to all the latest news and keep an open mind about what was happening and what other people said about it.
Sue Charles didn’t think she was becoming a recluse, but she was uncomfortably aware that most recluses probably thought that.
She had been a widow for almost four years now. Most people thought she had coped very well with her new status. Her work must have been a great help, everyone told her. She supposed it had, but she missed having George around when she was writing more than people knew. He had read each chapter as she wrote, correcting typing errors and making occasional tentative suggestions about character and plot. The house never felt emptier, nor writing a lonelier craft, than when she finished a chapter, breathed a sigh of relief, and realized anew that there was now no one to show it to if she printed it off.
She had been more prepared for her husband’s death than many of the widows she knew. When you married a man twelve years older than you, you were vaguely aware throughout the marriage that the odds were that you would eventually bury your husband. That had been George’s phrase, and she was still acutely conscious of those moments when she had stood at the graveside and looked down at the coffin with its neat gold plate in the pit below her. She recalled even the feel of the ridiculous little scoop with which she had sprinkled the damp earth at the priest’s invitation, watching the earth fall on the English oak. She remembered that odd mixture of relief and irritation which her husband’s religion had always brought to her; half consoling ancient rites and half mumbo-jumbo.
All the funerals she had attended since then had been cremations, as hers would be, many of them with humanist conductors. She was grateful for that, for she wanted no echoes of George’s passing. She was grateful, too, to her publishers, who still wanted her work in a recession, who continued to celebrate her modest success with equally modest contracts for new detective novels. It still gave her a secret thrill after all these years to add the bright new cover of the latest Sue Charles whodunit to the shelves set aside for her work in her book-lined study.
There was a clatter of cat flap in the utility room that adjoined the kitchen. She knew every familiar sound and what it meant in this bungalow. Losing your partner was like losing some peculiar extra sense, she sometimes thought. The other ones, particularly sight and hearing, became more alert to the seasons in the garden and to the small sounds around the house than they had ever been before.
Roland, her nine-year-old neutered cat, inspected the contents of his bowl and found them unsatisfactory. He walked across the kitchen, stared at Sue accusingly for fifteen seconds, and then strode away into the sitting room with tail erect and disapproval bristling in his every movement. It was good to have an animal in the house, though a cat wasn’t the companion that a dog was. But she didn’t like small dogs, and she didn’t think she had the time or the energy to cope with the sort of boisterous Labrador she and George had always enjoyed when they were younger.
The lasagne was almost ready now. The timer bell pinged on the cooker and she set the cutlery on the tray ready to take into the sitting room and the TV. Sloppy, but everyone did it, her friends told her, so there was no need to feel guilty. She was putting the salt and pepper pots on the tray when she heard a sound from the hall which she did not immediately recognize. Then she decided she knew what it was: the soft fall of a letter or single sheet on to the matt beside the front door. Not the heavy clunk of the postman, which usually denoted nothing more than the latest batch of junk mail. It was far too late for that, in any case, almost seven o’clock, with the sun gone behind the hill and twilight creeping in. Probably the latest leaflet from the pizza shop that had recently opened in Oldford, she decided. It was one of the little games she played with herself to offset disappointment, deciding just what the latest thing to come through her letter box might be.
She picked up the envelope as she carried her tray through to the sitting room. Addressed to her personally, so unlikely to be junk mail. Perhaps a friend who hadn’t wanted to disturb her. She felt a sudden irritation that the deliverer hadn’t stopped to exchange a word or two.
There was but a single sheet inside the envelope. The message was simple and stark.
RESIGN NOW FROM THE FESTIVAL COMMITTEE IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN ALIVE
FIVE
Peter Preston was in the midst of a trying day. They seemed to him to happen with increasing frequency as he grew older.
He tried the number again, with no great hope of success. But this time it was answered and a curt voice said, ‘Hilary James here. How can I help you?’
‘And who is Hilary James?’ He tried to keep the tone light and the impatience out of his voice.
‘I am Mr Carter’s secretary. Whom am I addressing?’
‘My name is Peter Preston. I knew Denzil in the days before he could afford to employ the services of a secretary.’
A pause whilst she scribbled the name on her telephone pad. ‘I see. And what is the purpose of your call, Mr Preston?’
‘I shall reveal that to Denzil. Please put me through to him.’
‘I cannot do that. Mr Carter does not have a phone in his study. He prefers to have no disturbance whilst he is working.’
‘Good old Denzil. I approve of that. Nevertheless, please tell him that I wish to speak to him.’
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr Preston. Mr Carter makes it a rule that he will not be disturbed during working hours.’
‘Again, I approve. And again, I must ask you to tell Denzil that Peter Preston wishes to speak to him. I am sure that he will make an exception for an old friend.’
‘That would be most irregular. Mr Carter does not take kindly to interruptions.’
But he had caught the instant of hesitation in her voice. It was time to be firm with this wretched woman. ‘He will take kindly to this one. I assume your time is valuable, as mine certainly is. Please don’t waste any more of either and tell your employer that I am on the line.’
There was a pause before the secretary said, ‘This is highly irregular and against my instructions. Hold the line, please, whilst I see whether Mr Carter wishes to speak to you.’
Preston tapped his fingers on the desk impatiently as the phone was put down and he heard the faint sound of departing footsteps. ‘Stroppy cow!’ he muttered to himself with feeling. Sometimes the modern invective he so despised could be a useful outlet. The seconds stretched into minutes. He hoped the woman was being firmly put in her place.
There was the sound of the phone being picked up and he said, ‘Sorry to disturb you at your desk, Denzil, but I-’
‘Mr Preston, this is Mr Carter’s secretary again. I’m afraid Mr Carter is far too busy at present to interrupt his work. What is it that you wished to speak to him about?’
His instinct was to say tersely that his business was no concern of hers, but something told him belatedly to be cautious. He said stiffly, ‘It is a personal matter, which I should have much preferred to discuss with Mr Carter rather than an intermediary. I am speaking from Oldford in Gloucestershire. We run a small but prestigious literary festival
in the town, in which I am a prime mover. My old friend Denzil Carter has agreed to come and speak about his plays and the processes of their construction; I shall be chairing that session. I merely wish to finalize the details of this visit with Denzil himself.’
‘I see. Mr Carter said that this proposed visit might be the subject of your phone call.’
‘Yes. I hope you see now why I needed to speak to Denzil personally.’
‘Indeed. But I have to tell you that Mr Carter’s recollection of the arrangements made is rather different from yours, Mr Preston. He says that you made a tentative approach and that he gave you no firm guarantee of his attendance.’
‘Ms James, I can assure you that-’
‘Mr Carter is adamant that he gave you no definite undertaking to speak at your festival. Indeed, he says he warned you that the pressure of his commitments in the second half of May would probably make it impossible.’
Peter Preston knew that although he was furious he must think quickly. He was nothing like as good at that as he had once been. ‘This is why I needed to speak to Denzil personally, you see. An arrangement between friends is always vague, but this one is underpinned by the regard we have built up for each other over the years. I’m sure this could be resolved in a few minutes if I could just be allowed to-’
‘Mr Carter’s instructions were to inform you that pressure of work and the engagements he has already committed himself to at the time of your festival mean that he is now certain that he will not be able to undertake this visit to Oldford. He asks me to remind you that he informed you at the time of your original approach that this would be the likely outcome.’
‘But this is preposterous! I’m sure the misunderstanding could be resolved very quickly if you would only-’