Thread of Evidence

by Frank Smith

  Paget held up a hand and stopped Lambert in mid-sentence. “Hold on there for a minute,” he told him. “What was that about your uncle?”

  “Jack Bolen. You asked about—”

  “You mean that you and the Bolens are related?”

  Keith Lambert sat back and looked at him. “You didn’t know that?” he said.

  “No one thought to mention it to me.”

  “I see. Well, then, I’d better explain. Jim Bolen and I are— were—cousins. Jim’s father, Jack Bolen, was my mother’s brother. My father, who died some years ago, was Sam Lambert. He started this firm in the late thirties, built it up from scratch, and did very well. Jack Bolen apprenticed as a cabinet-maker under his father, our mutual grandfather, but with the advent of assembly-line furniture, cabinet-making was a dying business in the fifties, so Jack came to work for my father as a carpenter.”

  Lambert sipped his tea. “Jack resented the fact that my father had done so well during and after the war. You see, Dad lost a foot in an accident when he was young, so he was unfit for military service. But he was a hard worker, and he had a lot of drive. So by the time the building boom came along at the beginning of the fifties, he was well positioned to expand. He made a lot of money, and that did not sit well with my Uncle Jack.

  “Jack was a chronic whiner, always complaining about the job, the equipment, anything and everything. The truth is, he was boneidle, but he seemed to think that because he was my mother’s brother, he should be given preferential treatment. In fact, it was only because he was my mother’s brother that Dad kept him on at all.

  “Anyway, all that is somewhat beside the point. On this particular day, as I said, we were working on the scaffold on the top floor of the new town hall. I was new to the job at the time and I was afraid of heights, still am, for that matter, and my Uncle Jack knew that. He used to taunt me with it and call me a sissy. He’d wait until I stepped off the ladder and was walking along the planks, then jump up and down on them to make them bounce. I’ll admit I was terrified. I used to dread working with him.”

  There was a grim set to Lambert’s mouth as he continued.

  “He’d dare me to do things. Like swinging out around one of the uprights on the scaffold four stories up, holding on with just one hand, and dare me to prove I wasn’t a sissy by doing the same.”

  Lambert grimaced. “There were days when I was physically sick,” he said quietly. “God, it was awful.” He passed a hand across his brow. “Unfortunately for Jack, he did it once too often, lost his grip and fell. Broke his back on a pile of bricks in the yard below.”

  Lambert drained his cup and refilled it, then topped up Paget’s cup as well without asking if he wanted more.

  “My cousin Jim was fifteen at the time. He’d just started working for us the month before, and he was devastated. He’d always doted on his father, and he believed everything Jack had told him, including what a thoroughly bad lot the Lamberts were. Jack told him my father had stayed behind and profited from the war, while he was away fighting for King and Country, the implication being that Dad had somehow wangled his way out of being called up rather than being declared medically unfit because of the loss of his foot. In fact, Jack was in the Royal Corps of Signals and the farthest he ever got from home was Brora in Scotland. Jack also claimed the reason he wasn’t made a foreman was because my father had it in for him, while in fact he would use every excuse in the book to avoid work; the scaffold was unsafe, the hoist wasn’t working properly, he’d strained his back. Dad threatened to sack him on a number of occasions, but my mother always intervened and persuaded Dad to keep him on.”

  “But why would Jim Bolen come to work for a firm that his father was always running down?”

  Lambert shrugged. “It was the sixties. The first boom was over, and the truth of the matter is we were the only firm in town even considering taking anyone on.”

  “So you and young Jim were virtually the same age,” said Paget. “How did you get on?”

  “We didn’t; at least, not then. Jim happened to be on another job when the accident happened, but as I said, he believed everything his father told him. So, when Jack was killed, Jim had to find someone to blame. He blamed me and my father, but especially me. I was the only one on the scaffold when it happened, and apparently Jack used to make fun of me at home, saying that I was always stumbling about on the scaffold, that I was scared stiff—which was true—and that I’d nearly had him off several times due to my clumsiness—which wasn’t true.”

  “You must have given evidence at the coroner’s inquest,” Paget said. “Wasn’t what happened made clear?”

  Keith Lambert looked down at the desk. “I told them he fell,” he said quietly. “I said he tripped and fell.” He looked up at Paget again. “In spite of everything, my mother did not want Jack’s family to have to face the truth about him. She said they wouldn’t believe it for a start, and they would think that I had invented the story out of vindictiveness. So I said he tripped and fell.”

  Paget shook his head in disbelief. “Are you telling me that Jim Bolen actually carried those grievances forward to this day?” he said.

  Lambert leaned forward across the desk. “Let me tell you exactly what Jim Bolen did,” he said earnestly. He paused for a moment, eyes fixed on a distant point as if peering into the past. “After the inquest, Jim was very bitter. He accused my father of using his influence at the inquest to have a verdict of accidental death brought in; he claimed that his father had complained for weeks about the scaffold being unsafe, and nothing had been done about it. But the site was inspected immediately following the accident, and no fault was found with the safety aspects of the scaffold.

  “Jim quit his job, of course, and we heard no more about him until a couple of months later, when he came to the house one evening and asked to see my father. He was a different person. He said that he’d had time to think, that he realized how wrong he’d been, and he asked if he could have his job back. My father wanted nothing to do with him, but my mother persuaded him to give Jim another chance.

  “So he did. And Jim worked like a Trojan. As I said earlier, he was clever and quick to learn and, unlike his father, never afraid of work. Even Dad was forced to admit that Jim was one of the best apprentices he’d ever had. He went into a bit of a slump when his mother died a year later, but that only lasted about a month and he was right back at it again, working as hard as ever. He wanted to know everything and work on every aspect of the job.” Lambert smiled ruefully. “It’s funny, but it was only the other day that he told me why he came back all those years ago. He was planning even then to destroy me and this company, and he didn’t care if it took him a lifetime to do it.

  “But back then, Jim was a very likeable person, quite unlike his father, and I admired him. I didn’t have much confidence in my own abilities in those days, but he did. He’d tackle anything. He was well liked, especially by the girls. He was always the centre of attention. I envied him. Really, I did.

  “He left the firm when he was twenty-one. Dad tried to get him to stay on, but Jim said he wanted to start up on his own. He said he’d scraped some money together, and he and his brother were going jobbing. Harry had been working at the cement works at Thurling until then, but he left his job and went to work with Jim.”

  Lambert picked up his cup, tasted it, but the tea had gone cold, and he set it aside.

  Bitterness entered his voice as he continued. “They did well right from the start, and I for one wished them well. It never occurred to me then that Jim harboured any ill feeling toward me, even when he took Laura away from me. It never dawned on me that it was all part of his master plan. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that until the other day either, when Laura told me herself.”

  “Mrs. Bolen?”

  Lambert nodded. “That’s right. We were engaged. Had been for more than a year when she met Jim.” He gave a shrug of resignation. “I suppose I’m as much to blame as he was for what
happened. I was cautious, serious and … well, dull, I suppose, whereas Jim was like a breath of fresh air. I know it’s trite to say, but he swept her off her feet. Within three months of their meeting, they were married.” Lambert’s mouth twisted into a grim smile. “They were married in May, and John, their eldest, was born in December, so that may have had something to do with it.”

  “You’re saying that he deliberately set out to take your fiancée away from you as part of some grand design to destroy you, Mr. Lambert?”

  Lambert smiled. “Sounds incredible, doesn’t it,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have believed it myself if Laura hadn’t told me. Even she didn’t know until he threw it in her face the other day.” Lambert shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. “All those wasted years,” he said softly. “Can you imagine what that’s done to Laura? How she must feel, knowing that the only reason Jim married her was to score off me? And the damnable thing is, I think she loved him. In spite of everything she’s had to put up with from him over the years, she still loved him. God!”

  Lambert’s eyes blazed.

  “You kept in touch with Mrs. Bolen, then, during this time?”

  “No, well, not really. This is not a large town, so it was inevitable that we should run into each other from time to time, but for the most part we avoided each other. Because of the business we were in, Jim and I sometimes found ourselves at the same table, and we were civil to each other, but even that wore thin as time went by and it became obvious that Jim was playing a cutthroat game.”

  Lambert sat back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. “And he was winning,” he said frankly. “These past two or three years have not been good. He’s underbid us on almost every major job—not by much, but just enough to tilt the scales in his favour, and I don’t mind admitting it has hurt us. I’ve had to lay people off.”

  “I’m told you approached Mrs. Bolen with a proposal that the two firms should go into this Ockrington project together. Is that right, Mr. Lambert?”

  Lambert sat back and regarded Paget with thoughtful eyes. “So you’ve heard about Ockrington,” he said. “Did Laura tell you?”

  “I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

  Lambert nodded. “Fair enough,” he said equably. “Actually, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing on my part. I happened to go into a tea-shop in Shrewsbury one afternoon, and Laura was sitting there alone. I’m not sure what prompted me to do it, but I asked her if I could talk to her, and she invited me to sit down. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to say when I sat down, but once I’d started, I simply told her the truth as I saw it. I told her that if Jim continued on the way he was going, he would certainly create problems for us, land being as hard to come by as it is, but he would utterly destroy Bolen Brothers in the process. Whereas, if we went into the project together, we could both do very well out of it.”

  “What was her response?”

  “Frankly, I was surprised,” said Lambert. “Laura agreed with me. She said that she and John and Harry had all tried to talk Jim out of the Ockrington deal, because the firm simply did not have the financing to carry it through to the point where they would begin to see a decent return on investment. She was intrigued by the idea of joining forces, and she promised to try to get Jim to see reason.”

  “But he wasn’t to be persuaded.”

  “He went crazy! He told her if she ever spoke to me again, she could forget about coming back.”

  “Obviously, she did speak to you again.”

  “Yes. Laura and I met several times. She didn’t know what to do. She said there was no reasoning with Jim, that destroying me was the only thing he talked about, and he seemed oblivious to the consequences. For example, he had assured Harry that he would do nothing without Harry’s approval, then packed him off to Canada to see his new grandchild and went full steam ahead.

  “I couldn’t ask Laura to do more, so I decided to tackle Jim myself. And that,” Lambert concluded bitterly, “was a big mistake.”

  “This was last Friday?”

  “That’s right. Laura told me that Jim would be working at the house that day, so I went round just after lunch. Laura was there and she answered the door and let me in. She took me along to Jim’s study where he was working, then left the room. I half expected him to throw me out as soon as he saw me, and I was surprised when he invited me to sit down.”

  “He didn’t know you were coming?”

  “No. I might never have made it inside the door if he had. But he surprised me. He was very civil. He let me have my say, and I actually believed that I was getting through to him. When I’d finished, he sat back in his chair and asked me if I knew why he had come back to work for my father all those years ago. I said I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, so he told me. ‘I came back,’ he said, ‘to learn everything I could about the building trade so that I could destroy you and your firm for killing my father, even if it took me the rest of my life. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Now get out of my house and stay out!’”

  “What happened after that?”

  Lambert’s lips compressed into a thin line and his face grew dark. “I didn’t know until later, when Laura telephoned after she left the hospital,” he said. “If I’d only realized at the time …” He fell silent, brooding.

  “Realized what?” Paget prompted.

  “What the bastard was capable of,” said Lambert hotly. “He didn’t have the guts to tackle me, so he took it out on Laura. She tried to reason with him, but it was useless. That’s when he told her he’d only married her because she’d been engaged to me. Told her he’d never loved her, that all she was to him was—” Lambert broke off and took a deep breath. “Let’s just say it’s something I don’t care to repeat. Then he hit her. Knocked her down and told her to get out.

  “Laura telephoned me from Harry’s house and told me what had happened,” he continued. “I wanted her to call the police and bring charges against Bolen, but she refused. But she did say she had telephoned Harry in Vancouver to tell him what was going on, and he was flying back as soon as he could get a flight out.”

  He shook his head sadly and regarded Paget with troubled eyes. “I went round to see her that evening. I told her I felt responsible for what had happened, but Laura said I’d only been the trigger, that it had been building up for a long time. She said she’d known for years that Jim didn’t love her, and she’d blamed herself for not trying hard enough to be a good wife to him, because, in spite of everything, she still loved him.

  “What she hadn’t known, of course, was his real reason for marrying her in the first place, and when he flung that in her face it really hurt.”

  And Keith Lambert, thought Paget, was still in love with Laura. It was there in the man’s voice and in his eyes. He’d said that Laura still loved her husband, but wasn’t it more likely that Laura Bolen would hate her husband? Perhaps even enough to kill him? And what about Lambert himself? Paget put that question to him.

  Keith Lambert regarded Paget steadily. “Of course I hated the man,” he said. “Hated him for what he’d done to Laura, hated him for what he’d done to me and the firm. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “But you must admit that his death makes things much easier for you. I assume Bolen Brothers will be withdrawing their bid, leaving only yours to be considered.”

  “Quite right,” said Lambert. He didn’t seem particularly perturbed by the thrust of Paget’s questions.

  “So, where were you on Saturday evening, Mr. Lambert? Let’s say between the hours of ten and midnight?”

  “I was here in this office, as a matter of fact. I can’t prove it, but this is where I was. Thinking about the Ockrington project and going over all the figures—and trying to decide which of my staff was feeding Bolen the details of our bid.”

  “You believe someone is doing that?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Lambert said. “At first, I thought that they were just that much sharper t
han we were, but when it started happening on every major bid, I realized something was wrong. Bidding on large jobs is difficult and complicated at the best of times, and many times estimates have to be based on guesswork. Trying to decide whether the price of cement, steel, timber, and everything else that goes into a project will remain stable over the next year is extremely difficult, to say nothing of labour costs, so you do the best you can and hope you’ve left enough of a cushion to make a profit.

  “But when your main competitor brings in a bid that is consistently two or three percent lower than yours, you begin to wonder how he is arriving at his estimates. The answer, of course, is that he knows ahead of time what your bid is going to be.”

  “I see.” Paget thought of Douglas Underwood. It would explain his Sunday-morning visits to Bolen’s hotel room. And if Underwood had been supplying Bolen with information on a regular basis, Bolen might well have been calling Underwood for some sort of clarification.

  “And did you come to a conclusion?” he asked.

  Lambert scowled. “It has to be coming from someone involved in the estimating process itself,” he said, “and someone fairly senior at that, because they are the only ones who see the final submission. As for who it is … Let’s just say I have my suspicions.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Stella Green pulled the covers over her head and tried to shut out the sound of banging on her door. It couldn’t be the rent; that wasn’t due until the end of the week. It couldn’t be Leo, either. He was away on a job. So who the hell was banging on her door at ten o’clock of a Monday morning?

  She pulled the covers away from her face, half raised herself in bed and yelled, “Sod off!” then buried herself once again beneath the covers.