[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  ‘She would. I do the rotas for the volunteers who staff that shop. I collect clothes and other items like china locally. I take lots of things in there.’ She could not see quite where this was going, but she had a feeling of impending disaster. She had told that too-observant Bert Hook that it was Andrew who had set up their Hamlet. Now no doubt she had provided the enemy with some damning piece of evidence against him. If only Andrew had told her what he had done, she could have protected him, could have organized things to save him. She had always been good at organization.

  Those steely grey eyes of John Lambert seemed to her to see everything she was thinking. He now said inexorably, ‘The items you deposited at the shop included a pair of your husband’s shoes. These contain minimal traces of blood and gravel. I have no doubt forensic examination will confirm that the blood is that of Terence Logan and the gravel that of the car park behind Mettlesham Village Hall. I believe that these are the shoes Andrew was wearing when he slit the throat of Terence Logan.’

  She started, then glanced suddenly and accusingly at Andrew. Why had he done this dreadful thing? And why hadn’t he told her he’d done it, so that she could have arranged things differently?

  He did not look at her. Instead, he said dully, as if speaking to someone other than the three in the room, ‘My mother would never tolerate waste. She said it was a sin to waste anything. She was a teenager during the war, you see. The knife is at the bottom of the Severn. I should have sent the shoes after it. But they were too good to throw away.’

  Maggie said sadly, accusingly, pathetically, ‘You said you weren’t going to use those shoes again. You didn’t tell me why. I took them in to the charity shop with some dresses of mine.’

  Lambert felt the searing pathos of her helplessness, of her retreat into small, useless things. He said calmly, ‘I expect our forensic laboratory will find traces of Logan’s blood upon them. There will certainly be something we can match with the surface of the car park in Mettlesham.’

  But all four of them in the room knew that this was an irrelevance now, that Andrew Dalrymple was not going to deny the crime.

  ‘Why, Andrew?’ his wife asked in a hollow voice. ‘Terry Logan was no threat to you any more. I hated him.’

  Her hands were on top of the gleaming polished mahogany now, and Andrew took the right one into his left, as hesitantly as an inexperienced lover making a first move. ‘You kept photographs, Maggie. Pictures of you and him together. In your drawer in the dressing table.’

  She did not know what to say. She could have said that the pictures meant nothing, but she wasn’t even sure if that was true. And whatever she said could have no meaning now, in the face of this overwhelming thing which he had done. She said hopelessly, ‘It was just a bit of my life which I didn’t want to throw away. It had nothing to do with us.’

  It was Hook who stood up and came round the big table to utter the formal words of arrest. Polonius rising from the dead, she thought, with a searing recollection of that Queen in Hamlet which she would never play.

  They didn’t handcuff him to take him out to the car. There was no need for that final indignity, for Andrew Dalrymple had no energy left with which to resist them.

  He stopped in the doorway, looked down at his wife, who was still staring hopelessly at the dark surface of the table. ‘Maggie has always been a pillar of the law. She knew nothing of this. She has no connection at all with this death.’

  It was the last thing he was able to offer to the woman he loved.