[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  Anne Jackson had youth upon her side. Her light blue sweater and navy trousers sat pleasingly upon her trim figure. Rushton, who had noticed appreciative male appraisals as he signed in his visitor in the pro’s shop, glanced aggressively towards the car park, whence he thought he caught envious moans of suppressed desire from men depositing their clubs in car boots after their morning round. He was confronted by an impressive display of raised boot lids.

  ‘I expect everyone is taking shots from me as usual!’ sighed John Lambert, with mock dismay at his stature in the game. Tm playing off eight at the moment. It’s a hard life.’

  ‘You’ll have the luxury of shots from me today, John,’ said Anne Jackson, extracting a golf glove from the pocket of her bag and slipping it on to her small left hand. ‘I’m five, I’m afraid. And pretty rusty to boot, I fear, because of my studies in college, so I hope you’ll put up with me.’

  They looked at Rushton, who gave them the briefest of nods, trying hard to suppress a smile as he saw the amazement which even these practised faces could not suppress. Lambert glanced at Hook in a stunned silence as Anne Jackson stooped to select a ball from her bag. The five handicap was not a joke, then.

  They courteously invited Anne to play first, but she explained patiently that it was usual for the men to lead the way on the grounds of safety, their tees being a few yards behind the spots allotted to the weaker sex. Bert Hook found himself unusually nervous for some reason. He was pleased to get his drive away, low but running, and only just off the fairway on the right. Lambert hit one of his best, his usual fade bringing the ball back from the left into the very middle of the fairway. ‘He doesn’t miss many fairways, the chief!’ said Bert Hook loyally to the young woman waiting patiently beside them.

  Rushton, who was very anxious to do well in front of Anne on this first golfing outing together, endured the usual result of such ambition in this ridiculous game. His slow, deliberate back swing reversed itself into a desperate lunge in the downswing, and his scuffed ball travelled directly along the ground and no more than thirty yards from the tee.

  ‘Bad luck!’ muttered his opponents automatically, though all four of them knew that it was nothing of the sort: it was simply a dreadful shot, that common first-tee phenomenon.

  The first hole at Ross-on-Wye Golf Club is a shortish par four. Anne Jackson eyed the distant green and selected a 3-wood rather than a driver. Lambert raised his eyebrows, then nodded sagely. ‘Better safe than sorry. This is a tight driving hole. Making sure you’re at least on the fairway is good thinking here.’

  Anne stood behind her ball for a second, eyeing the line she had chosen. Then, without even a practice swing, she swung the club back and through the ball, smoothly and without any great apparent effort. The ball pitched ten yards beyond Lambert’s drive and ran another twenty.

  There was a collective gasp before the ritual ‘Good shot!’ from the three men. None of them, and least of all Chris Rushton, succeeded in keeping the astonishment out of their voices. Anne turned away from them and allowed herself a private smile as she returned the club to her bag. This was a male reaction to which she had become accustomed over the last few years.

  Rushton and Hook both played ruinous second shots and picked up. Lambert, with much concentration, bounced his second into the centre of the green and smiled his satisfaction. It availed him not. Anne Jackson pulled out her wedge and pitched her ball four feet from the flag with a minimum of fuss. It stopped dead, and after Lambert had completed his four, she rolled in the putt. One up.

  The three men all had shots on the second, and Bert Hook, by dint of an eight-foot putt, managed a five and a win. It was their last success of the day.

  Lambert had played with some excellent male players in his time, but never with a woman who struck the ball like this. Anne was consistently longer than her opponents and her partner; the two older men found this difficult to cope with, and not just from a purely golfing point of view. Chris Rushton, on the other hand, was delighted. His own erratic beginner’s golf mattered not a jot against the background of his partner’s excellence; indeed, by using the generous number of shots his fledgling handicap allotted to him, he even managed to win a couple of holes.

  Anne made the occasional mistake, which only served to underline the near-perfection of the rest of her play. She had three birdies, which allowed her to play one below her handicap of five, and she and an increasingly complacent Chris Rushton won the match by five and four. They were back in the clubhouse before the early autumn dusk, enjoying the tea and toasted teacakes provided for them by a subdued but impressed John Lambert.

  Anne Jackson looked at her watch. ‘I must get away. I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’ve work to prepare for my class tomorrow. Golf is very simple compared with keeping thirty eight- year-olds interested!’

  She left rather an awed silence behind her, with Chris Rushton still basking happily in the reflected glow of her glory. A rather dazed Bert Hook said eventually, fairly sure that he was not merely talking about golf, ‘You’ve got a gem there, young Chris. If you’ve any sense you’ll stick with Anne Jackson. That’s if she’s daft enough to have you.’

  Rushton reflected on the fact that, at thirty-two and having reached Inspector rank, he was still ‘young Chris’ to these two old hands. Perhaps that was a good thing. He said modestly, ‘I’ll have to improve my golf.’

  ‘It was great to play with her,’ said Lambert eventually. He found, slightly to his surprise, that this was true. He’d really enjoyed watching someone play this tantalizing game as it ought to be played. He was shaken but impressed.

  Moreover, they’d all three of them had to concentrate for three hours on the matter in hand, in the sunshine of a glorious autumn afternoon. They would surely return to the case with renewed insights on Monday morning. A little shell-shocked, but refreshed.

  He tried to sound convincing as he announced the idea to his fellow officers.

  Twenty

  As the chastened John Lambert and Bert Hook returned from the golf club to their families on that Sunday evening, four other couples were preoccupied with the events of the preceding Wednesday night, when the seemingly universally unlamented Terry Logan had met his end.

  Margaret Dalrymple had made one of her best curries, in an attempt to placate her husband for the information she had been forced to divulge to the police. After fillet steak, beef curry was Andrew’s favourite dish. She went to some trouble to furnish the table with all the trimmings he liked. You didn’t drink claret with curry, he said, so she’d set two cans of lager beside his favourite tankard on the table.

  Andrew seemed to be in a good mood. He complimented her on the excellence of the curry and noted how much trouble she had taken with the meal and the table.

  Maggie tried hard to relax, to set the tone she needed for this exchange. ‘We should do this more often,’ she said, gesturing vaguely at the gleaming silver cutlery and the glasses. ‘It’s too easy to sit in front of the television, when there are only two of you. And I know that I’m out far too much, with my committees and my work on the Bench.’ She shook her head over her wifely neglect and added coquettishly, ‘You deserve better than a slut like me.’

  At forty-nine and with a build which was stately rather than delicate, Margaret was not well equipped to play the coquette. But Andrew Dalrymple did not notice that. ‘You could never be a slut, Maggie. But if you want to play the slut for a little while, that’s fine with me!’

  The forty-nine-year-old Juliet raised her glass of tomato juice and winked over the top of it at her portly, fifty-two-year-old Romeo. To most outside observers, it would have looked ridiculous, but there was a genuine warmth between the two which overrode appearances. They had been through a lot together over the years, survived the crises of infidelity on both sides and emerged as a tighter partnership than ever. With that bugger Logan out of the way, we can move on serenely from here, thought Andrew.

  She read most of that in his f
ace as she studied him across their table. Because of her affair with Logan five years ago, she normally made no mention of her former lover: it was like walking on broken glass to mention him to Andrew. But now she said daringly, Tm glad Terry is out of the way. Glad he’s dead. He wasn’t a good man, was he?’

  ‘He was a bastard, as far as I’m concerned. But you’d hardly expect me to be objective, after I found he’d been slipping a length to my wife, would you?’

  All his old hate and bitterness came out in the coarse phrase. For a moment she cursed herself for mentioning the name of the dead man. She reached across and put her hand on top of his. ‘I’m sorry, Andrew. I can’t say how sorry. But all that was over a long time ago. I can see now that Terry was a danger to almost everyone around him - certainly to anyone who got close to him.’

  He nodded, seemingly calmed by her assurances. But he needed more. He ran a hand across his receding hairline. ‘You didn’t take that part in Hamlet because you wanted to get back with him?’

  ‘No. I told you I didn’t. I wanted a good part in a Shakespeare play. Wanted you to be proud of me - no, that’s not fair. I did want that, but most of all I wanted to play the Queen in Hamlet. I knew I’d never get another chance. I just wanted to show off, you see! I told you I was a slut.’

  He knew he should leave it at that, but he couldn’t manage it. He toyed with the handle of his tankard and, like a man picking at a healing scab, said, ‘Everyone says he was a good director.’

  ‘He was. Very good. But that’s the only reason why I went anywhere near him.’ She looked earnestly at Andrew across the table, willing him to believe her. He gave her a small, uncertain smile and she responded with a much wider one of her own. Then she took the plunge and said, ‘I had to tell them that you weren’t here when I got in from the rehearsal on Wednesday night.’

  ‘Why? Why did you tell them that, for God’s sake?’

  His face flared with anger and she thought for an instant that she had misjudged the moment. She said hastily, ‘I had no choice, Andrew. They seemed already to know about it. They have a big team on the case and they’ve been talking to all and sundry. They’d already found out that I’d concealed my affair with Terry from them. I couldn’t afford to be caught out in more lies.’

  ‘Why? Why couldn’t you support me?’ His eyes had that wild, uncontrolled look which filled her with fear: the look she had seen in them four years ago when he had found out about the affair, when she had feared that he was going to strike her.

  She said hastily, ‘Andrew, they now regard me as a leading suspect for this killing. Can’t you see that? They’d found out about my affair with a murder victim, they knew that he was the one who had ended it and that I had been very bitter about that. They thought I was the wronged woman taking revenge. They even put those arguments to me.’

  He was breathing heavily, staring at his empty plate, as if he expected some message to appear on it, like biblical words upon Belshazzar’s wall. Finally he nodded, reluctantly accepting the logic of what she said. As if the words were torn from him against his will, he said harshly, ‘And did you? Kill the bastard, I mean.’

  She made herself take a deep breath. It was going to be all right now. ‘No. I might have felt like cutting his throat, but I didn’t.’

  He ran his fingers twice round the edge of his tankard slowly. Then he forced a smile that took a long time to spread across the whole of his features. He looked up at her. ‘That’s good then. We can move on from here.’

  ‘Yes. Of course we can, and that’s what we should do.’ She wanted to be out of here and into the kitchen, putting a decisive end to this scene she had feared, spooning out the dessert, releasing her tension in such innocent everyday actions. Instead, she said quietly, ‘Where were you on Wednesday night Andrew?’

  It could not have been more than a couple of seconds before he replied, but to her it seemed to stretch into minutes. ‘I went out to a pub. Maggie, I know it sounds stupid, but I found I couldn’t sit quietly on my own in the house whilst you were out there with that man.’

  ‘I was at a rehearsal for a play. With lots of other people. I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. The last thing I would have wanted was to be alone with a man who’d treated me as Logan had.’

  ‘I know. But when you’re left on your own in the house your mind plays tricks with you. It’s like when you lie awake during the night and all your problems seem much bigger than they are.’

  She’d experienced that often enough, especially during the months after her affair with Terry Logan had been so brutally terminated. ‘Which pub was it, Andrew?’

  ‘One in Gloucester. Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s just that the police might want to know. It could give you an alibi, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so, if I need one. It wasn’t busy: I’m sure the landlord would remember me. But the police don’t think I killed Logan.’ His mouth set in a sullen line, as if he could make it so by sheer determination.

  Becky Clegg had expected Jack Dawes to live in a better place than this. With his thin, sharp-featured, handsome face, he was a glamorous, dangerous figure in that strange half-life they had led on the edge of the law. Dawes commanded unthinking loyalty from his less intelligent followers. He had always seemed to her to know so much more than she did about their world of violence and petty, unthinking, lucrative crime.

  Now she realized that he had pretended, just as she had. Pretended to be harder than he was. Jack had seemed to her invulnerable, a man who knew all about drugs and thieving, knew just how to surround himself with the thugs who could provide him with muscle. She looked round this shabby, stuffy flat, with its peeling paint on the window frames, its wallpaper hanging off the ceiling in one corner of the room, its thin cotton curtains which did not quite meet when he drew them. Becky realized now that there was no more luxury and even less glamour in the place where Jack Dawes slept at nights than there had been in the grotty flat which she herself had recently vacated.

  She found this comforting rather than disappointing.

  Perhaps he noticed her scrutiny, because he said defensively, ‘Mum likes it here. I said we should get somewhere better, but she says it’s convenient for the town and the shops. She didn’t mention the pubs. That’s probably where she is now.’

  He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, thinking how pretty Becky looked as she sat on the stained sofa with its fading orange cover. He tried not to contrast the bright, kittenish beauty beneath her very dark hair with the more bloated round face of his mother who usually sat there.

  Conscience stirred within him with that thought. He said, loyally but with a hint of apology, ‘She’s been good to me, my mum. She’s not had an easy life. I ... I try to look after her, when I can.’

  ‘No need to be defensive. I’m glad that you help her. I wish I knew where my mum is. I’d like to feel I wanted to look after her, but I feel nothing.’

  ‘We can go out if you want.’ He was suddenly embarrassed by what he saw as his weakness and was anxious to change the subject.

  ‘No hurry, is there? It’s nice to have the place to ourselves. And you’ve no need to apologize for it: I’ve been in a lot worse! It’s ... well, it’s homely, I suppose.’ She brought out clumsily the word which had been a favourite with her aunt in her childhood. A white lie was surely permissible when you were still feeling your way in a relationship.

  He grinned at her, delighted with her uncertainty, and went and sat beside her on the sofa. He put his arm round her, drew her to him and kissed her, first gently and then with increasing passion, as he felt her respond. He slid his hand beneath her sweater, felt the firmness of her breasts, the flatness of her stomach. He slid his hands down to her thighs, then upwards with increasing urgency towards her crotch and those areas of delight which were suddenly of supreme importance to him.

  ‘Not yet, randy Jack Dawes!’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Not whilst your mum might come in at a
ny minute!’ He pulled away obediently, and she was glad to see no rancour in his face when she smiled up into it. She enjoyed the feeling of control it gave her, the feeling of steering this relationship along at the pace which suited her. She said with a grin, ‘I don’t fancy meeting your mum for the first time with my knickers in my hand!’

  He grinned at that image. He was pleased that this bright, sharply intelligent girl seemed to want to meet the mother he had concealed from his contemporaries for so long. He kissed her again briefly, then sat upright on the sofa, still with his arm round her shoulders.

  Voicing the words against his will, he said, ‘Do you think the fuzz believed us at the station?’

  Becky wondered how he had come back so surely to the thing which would not leave her own mind. Her teenage reading of romantic fiction told her that this meeting of minds meant they must be compatible. Reality told her that he had simply voiced the most important question in both their lives. She said carefully, ‘Who knows? We’ve both got records as far as they’re concerned. I want to go straight, when this is out of the way, but you can’t expect the pigs to believe that.’ Jack stared straight ahead of him, noticing for the first time how much dust had accumulated on the screen of the silent television set. ‘I want to do that. Go straight, I mean, like you. When bloody Terry Logan is finally out of the way!’ It was the first time he had confessed that to anyone. Mum would be pleased, he thought, and then immediately castigated himself for such a wimpish consideration.

  Becky squeezed his hand, then said, ‘It took you a long time to find me on Wednesday night. I didn’t realize that I’d wandered so far away from the hall.’

  Jack wondered once again exactly where this restless, attractive girl had been at the moment when Logan had died. But all he said was, ‘Yes. There were no street lights and I didn’t want to go shouting your name around Mettlesham, at that hour of the night.’