[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  ‘It wasn’t a problem for me to come here, Jacky. We’ve no serial killers or major bank robbers operating in Oldford at the moment.’ It had been an instinctive, spontaneous reaction on his part to rush to comfort her in her distress; he hadn’t even told Christine, because he hadn’t planned it.

  Father and daughter smiled weakly at each other. She turned and led him back through the hall into the low-ceilinged living room. They sat down opposite each other; he on the edge of a sofa and she on a chair opposite him, as if to relax would be a denial of the situation, a kind of treachery to the emotions neither of them was able to deal with.

  Lambert looked round at the neat, cool room and then at his daughter, tentatively, almost shyly, as if they were strangers feeling their way into a tricky situation and a new relationship. Jacqueline said abruptly, Til get us coffee. It won’t take a minute,’ and fled from him into the kitchen.

  The room with its old oak furniture was as tidy as if this were a show house. Too tidy, too wanting in human dishevelment. It lacked a half-read newspaper, a crumpled cushion, a letter waiting attention. It lacked a man; to be precise, it lacked all the tiresome trivia of a husband.

  Lambert had never liked Jason, his son-in-law, and he knew that that wasn’t going to make things easier now. He wasn’t good at picking his way in conversation; CID interrogations demanded skills, but the skills of a more direct approach. Jacky brought coffee and biscuits into the room on a tray, set it on the low table, and sat down on the sofa beside him. He could see in her careful movement the intense concentration of the ten-year-old who had once brought him breakfast in his bed on his birthday.

  They postponed all contact whilst she conducted the ceremony of the coffee, offering him milk and sugar and then a biscuit as carefully as if she was enacting some ancient religious rite. He said stupidly, ‘You seem to be coping.’

  She smiled wryly. ‘I was always good at coping, Dad.’

  Suddenly, she burst into tears and hurled herself against his chest. Her howling was the more bleak and terrible in the quietness of that old room, which had seen so many other lives and so many other human crises. He held her, awkwardly at first, then more firmly and tenderly as both of them relaxed. Her collapse had shattered the tensions between them.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it, love?’ He thought about the traumas of his own marriage at around the time of her birth. He remembered with a distressing vividness the day when Christine had walked out on him and he had thought it was over, the day he could never recall to this child of his who was now a grown woman with her own trauma.

  Jacky couldn’t speak. She nodded hard against her father’s chest, wanting to feel the smell of him; the warm, intimate, comforting smell she remembered from her childhood, smelling instead only the scents of the washing machine on the clean shirt, the front of which was now sodden with her tears. She hid her face there for long minutes, shutting out the world which had gone so putrid.

  Eventually she prised herself away, made herself look up gratefully into the familiar long, lined, concerned face, and said, ‘You could have done without this, couldn’t you, Dad?’

  For the first time, they smiled at each other. ‘We could all have done without it, love. Life doesn’t always give you a choice, though, does it?’

  ‘It didn’t this time! At least, bloody Jason didn’t.’ Anger was a relief: she wished she had the energy for more of it, but the long hours without sleep hadn’t left her much of that.

  Lambert knew he had to be careful, even at this moment when he wanted to be most spontaneous. He cursed his son-in-law for that as well as everything else. ‘Is it final, do you think?’

  She wept again, when she had thought that she had no more tears left. She snatched at a moment when her breathing settled to say, ‘It’s final, Dad. He’s got another woman.’ John Lambert knew that that wasn’t always final, knew also that this wasn’t the moment to voice that thought. ‘Perhaps you should come and stay with us for a few days. Your mum would like that, but it’s up to you. Whatever you think would be best, love.’

  She nodded determinedly and he could see her again in the childhood which seemed so close to him and so distant to her. He could see in her determined face the slim girl with plaits, sitting recounting her first day at secondary school.

  ‘I think I’d like that. I’ll need to sort a few things out first. At least having your own business makes things easier when this happens.’ She felt a sob rising again, and fought it back with determination. Jacky supplied temporary office staff of every type, from cleaners to computer operators to personal assistants. Her usual effortless efficiency seemed at this moment to belong to someone else entirely.

  She clenched her teeth and set her jaw firmly. She could do this. Bloody Jason wasn’t going to make her into a whining wimp. She’d show him and the rest of the world. ‘I’ll make a few phone calls and get things moving. There’s a factory office in Oxford beset by an outbreak of flu. I’ll sort that and be over at your place tonight.’ She’d almost said ‘home’. That wouldn’t be the emancipated and independent woman at all, would it?

  Lambert knew when to accept a small victory and get out. He patted her on the shoulder when he got to the door and said,

  ‘You’ve got a lot of support, you know. We’ll sort it.’

  Jacky managed a smile. ‘See you later, then, Dad. And thanks for coming.’ She watched him walk down the path, stooping a little, and then turn to wave shyly at her from the gate. She’d never expected this visit, would have told him not to come, if he’d phoned first.

  Now she felt immeasurably grateful to him.

  Jack Dawes shut the door truculently on the two young police officers and made a triumphant V-sign at the back of it.

  He went back into the living room and set his DVD player to work, but he could not concentrate. After the heady excitement of frustrating those two young pigs, he felt curiously deflated. Anticlimax, they called it. He remembered that from school, recalled putting his hand up and giving it as the answer to some woman who had been surprised that he knew it. He’d enjoyed some of the books they’d read, and, even now, he surprised himself sometimes by his ability to remember odd bits of the poetry he had so despised at the time.

  The teachers had wanted him to stay on, had told his mother that it could be the making of him, but he’d been determined to leave and get himself among the money.

  There was the odd moment when he regretted that decision, but he thrust those moments firmly away. Still, he’d been good in the plays. Everyone had said that. There were times when he quite missed the excitement and the applause and the praise which had been heaped upon him then. Childish things, he told himself: he had real and greater excitements in his life now.

  His mother brought him a cup of coffee, sat down opposite him, and said, Tm on late shift at the supermarket. You’ll have to get yourself something tonight.’

  ‘No problem. I can always go to the chippy.’

  ‘You go there too much. You should get some proper food into you.’ She sat down opposite him, as she did not usually do. Jack felt a sudden shaft of tenderness for the pretty, ageing, rather vacuous face. His mother looked very tired. She sipped her coffee for a moment, dunked her ginger biscuit into it, seemingly without any consciousness of what she was doing. Then she said, ‘You won’t get away with it for ever, you know.’

  ‘I’m all right, Mum. Don’t you worry about me. I know what I’m doing.’ But he wondered as he uttered the automatic phrases just how true they were.

  ‘And that Mr Joussef is an old man. There’s no need for you to go roughing him up. It’s not right.’ She couldn’t remember when she had last tried to moralize to him: not since he was very small, she thought.

  Jack stirred uneasily in his armchair. This was far too near to his own secret thoughts for comfort. ‘He wasn’t really roughed up much. Anyway, as you told the fuzz, I wasn’t even there.’ He tried to make a joke of it with a wink and a conspiratorial laugh, but sh
e refused to be diverted.

  ‘You’re going the right way to get into serious trouble, Jack. You need to get yourself in with a better crowd.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You need to do something respectable.’ She wasn’t sure quite what she meant, but she’d worked on the phrase in the steamy kitchen before she came in to him.

  ‘It takes time to get a job, Mum.’

  ‘It does when you’ve been in and out of trouble like you have.’ That was very daring for her, but she felt bolder because he hadn’t immediately put her down when she’d scolded him. ‘You were a clever boy at school, Jack Dawes, cleverer than you’d ever admit. You could have stayed on and got yourself a good job.’

  He smiled at the earnest, vulgar, loving face. ‘I didn’t do much work at school. I was good in the plays, though, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You were the best, son. The best. I can still see you all padded out as that pompous frog.’

  ‘Mr Toad. Of Toad Hall. I was only thirteen, then.’ He smiled reminiscently at the thought of the laughs they’d had together in the cast, at the laughs they had brought tumbling down the school hall from the audience.

  ‘You should do that acting again. Get yourself in with a better crowd.’

  There might just be something in that, Jack Dawes thought after she’d gone.

  Five

  ‘You look tired.’ Angela Proudfoot told her husband. She made it sound almost like an accusation.

  ‘I’ve had a busy day, that’s all.’

  ‘You should delegate more work to your staff. You always used to say that delegation was the secret of management.’ She was a flat-faced, querulous woman who had devoted herself to her family and felt at a loss now that the last of them had just gone off to university.

  Ian Proudfoot was very conscious of being for the first time in years the centre of his wife’s attention. It was proving a very mixed blessing. ‘Being a branch manager isn’t at all what it was when I began in the bank,’ he said patiently. ‘You don’t lock yourself away in your office and concentrate upon the important clients. There are constant directives from head office and you have much less room for manoeuvre and much less independence than managers used to have.’ Ian sounded resentful and he was: if he’d known all those years ago that the job he’d set his sights on would be like this, he’d have chosen a different career.

  ‘Well, you look tired. I’m telling you because no one else will. You’re getting older. You can’t pretend you’re Peter Pan for ever.’

  With his dark, thinning hair, his prominent nose and his furrowed brow, Ian Proudfoot looked a pretty unlikely Peter Pan. He knew what was coming next, but he couldn’t see any way of averting a familiar conversation. He said wearily, ‘I’m only fifty.’

  ‘Nearly fifty-one.’ Angela was almost two years older than him and the mention of age was always a sensitive point with her. ‘The age when you should be sitting quietly by your own fireside on winter evenings. Watching the telly and giving your wife a bit of company.’

  ‘I’m not keen on television. Not the programmes you enjoy,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Doesn’t mean you have to go off with that lot.’ Angela gave her full venom to the last two words.

  He ignored the implied slur on the company he kept. ‘You know I’ve always enjoyed amateur dramatics. And a man needs a hobby. I heard you telling Mrs Frobisher that the other day.’

  ‘Not one that takes him out getting colds and disease in winter, when he should be sitting cosily in his own house. I was talking about do-it-yourself and things like that.’ She knew that she wasn’t going to win this argument, but she was driven on into the familiar rituals of marital dissension. The little spat must be played out to its conclusion and the points tallied for future occasions.

  ‘This project is more interesting than most.’ Although he knew in his heart that he would fail, he tried to take the vinegar from her face and replace it with a little of his own enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a go at Shakespeare, and I’ve never had the chance before.’

  ‘Shakespeare!’ She tried to infuse all of her contempt into the two long syllables, and made a fair fist of it.

  ‘Our greatest writer, Angela, and by common consent the world’s greatest. Not many people ever get the chance to speak his lines. It’s a rare privilege, if you look at it that way.’

  ‘It’s all right for schoolboys and schoolgirls.’ Angela was conscious that two of her children had enjoyed great success in school productions. ‘Unless you’re good enough to be a professional, that’s where it should end.’

  Perhaps he could have been a professional if he hadn’t followed his father into the bank. That was one of the fantasies Ian Proudfoot liked to indulge in during the quiet hours of the night when his wife snored gently beside him. He’d had some good reviews, down the years, in a wide range of roles. He knew he had talent. How much talent, he would never know, for it had never been tested in the hard school of the professional stage, where even good actors were often ‘resting’ for long periods. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the fortitude to survive in that difficult world, but he wished now that he’d given it a try.

  He allowed a little of his excitement to show as he said, ‘We’ve got some good people. If we can bring this off, it will be the biggest thing the Mettlesham Players have ever achieved.’

  ‘Hamlet.’ Angela Proudfoot sniffed derisively through her small nose. ‘You people don’t live in the real world.’

  ‘But Shakespeare did. He knows more about the human heart and the human mind than anyone who ever lived, and he can put it into words as no one else can.’ Ian Proudfoot realized that his zeal would only make his sceptical wife more scathing. He sought for something which might gain her support. ‘It’s a very good part. One of the very best.’ He knew that she liked to boast among her friends about his successes, however much she derided them to him.

  ‘What part?’

  ‘Claudius. The King of Denmark. He’s usurped the throne, and all through the play he’s trying to—’

  ‘What happens to him at the end?’

  ‘He gets killed. He’s a villain, you see, a “smiling, damned villain”, as Hamlet calls him, and he gets run through with a poisoned rapier.’ It sounded silly when he said it like that. He wanted to tell her about the mighty intellectual exchanges of the play, about the political skills displayed by Claudius, but that would only put her off. She wouldn’t like him being a villain. He said lamely, ‘More or less everyone gets killed at the end of Hamlet. ’

  Angela sniffed again, then shook her head sadly at this new evidence of immaturity in her husband. She tried another tack. ‘I thought you didn’t like that Terry Logan.’

  ‘He’s a good director. Personal differences don’t come into it.’ Ian set his face into a mask of inscrutability.

  ‘Even differences as deep as the ones between you and him?’ Angela sensed a weakness here.

  ‘There are a lot of other people involved in a Shakespeare production as well as Logan. There won’t be any embarrassing personal exchanges. I expect we shall hardly speak to each other, except to discuss how certain scenes should be played.’ Ian Proudfoot had been over this in his own mind, and was determined that it should be thus. He said stubbornly, ‘I told you, Logan’s a good director, and that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Good director my backside!’ Angela relished this rare lapse into the vulgarity which she only permitted herself with this recalcitrant husband. ‘You go off and play your childish games, if you must, but if you ask me, this sounds a particularly daft one. I don’t think it will ever get on stage!’

  Angela Proudfoot did not have a good record of success with her predictions. No one could possibly have foreseen how sensationally this one would be proved right.

  Detective Inspector Chris Rushton was beginning to feel relaxed and easy with his new girlfriend. It was not before time. They had been dating each other for three months.

  It was just as well that Anne Jackson lik
ed his diffidence. It was one of the qualities which had attracted her to the tall, darkhaired man when they had come across each other in the unpromising context of a murder investigation. He didn’t seem to realize how handsome he was or how many women would have been quite happy to mother him back into confidence after the trials and stresses of his divorce. Chris didn’t seem to realize how attractive that old-fashioned virtue of modesty was in a modern man.

  ‘Kirsty’s coming to see me again on Sunday,’ he said suddenly, as if it was a confession he needed to have out in the open quickly. ‘I’ll quite understand if you don’t want to be involved, but it will mean that—’

  ‘I’ll be delighted to be there,’ Anne said quickly. She’d got on quite well with Chris’s five-year-old daughter on the only previous time she’d seen her. She was glad now that she was the eldest of three: it meant that she wasn’t completely hopeless with young children. And she liked watching Chris with his daughter: these were the hours when he forgot all about the impression he was creating and was completely natural with his child. He was an unaffected, effortless father; had Anne Jackson read a little more romantic fiction and a little less Hardy, she would have been indulging a secret vision of this handsome man with the very dark brown hair as the future father of her own brood.

  ‘You don’t have to, if you’d rather not, you know. I’m quite happy to have her on my own.’

  She put her hand on top of his and said, ‘Kirsty is a delightful kid and I’d be delighted to see her again. Besides, we’re in the midst of child psychology in my teacher training course.’ She didn’t tell him that it was another step towards the intimacy with him that she increasingly desired, perhaps because she didn’t want to acknowledge that even to herself.

  He smiled, happily relaxed. ‘Old Bert Hook’s going to be in a play.’