[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  The Home Office pathology laboratory at Chepstow: that itself was no doubt significant. Lambert glanced at the man waiting for him in the anteroom, then made the standard detective’s plea to the pathologist. ‘This man was threatened by All God’s Creatures very recently. His death will be all over the media very quickly. We need to establish the cause of death as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll emphasize that. With any luck, he’ll be on the slab first thing tomorrow. Will you be attending the PM yourself?’

  There was the first smile since his evening had been disrupted upon the man’s lips: for a man who had been attending them for thirty years, John Lambert was notoriously squeamish about the blood, gore, and scents of postmortem examinations. Stomach contents were usually of great interest to the chief superintendent, but not at first hand.

  Lambert said gruffly, ‘One of my officers will certainly be there,’ and watched the pathologist make his departure.

  He turned to the man beside him. ‘Do you think this death was from natural causes, Mr Dimmock?’

  The man was tall and lean: late thirties, Lambert’s experienced eye told him. He had narrow, watchful brown eyes and a nose distorted a little, probably by some adolescent sporting injury, so that from this angle he seemed for a moment to be observing the police procedures with a slight, detached contempt. He was still carrying his winner’s silver cup rather absurdly in his left hand, holding it a little behind him, as if anxious to conceal it. Before he answered Lambert’s question, he set it down on the carpet near the door, as though it was necessary for him to divest himself of his trophy to give the police queries his full attention.

  He looked coolly into Lambert’s grey eyes and said, ‘Natural causes? I’ve no reason to think otherwise. But I’m a scientist. I suppose you could say that I was trained a long time ago to keep an open mind until I have all the necessary facts at my disposal.’

  ‘I understand that all the people at your table were scientists.’

  ‘That is correct, I think. I understand that even Mrs Cullis knows something of science, though she is not a trained professional.’

  He picked his words very carefully, thought Lambert. With a kind of prim efficiency, like a man eating cherries with a knife and fork. The precise enunciation came oddly from a man with the hard, spare frame of an athlete. ‘But the rest of you are practising scientists?’

  ‘Very much so. Most of us work in the laboratories at Gloucester Chemicals. Apart from Mr Cullis, who was in charge of research and development but had long since ceased to practise.’ Lambert was sure he caught a whiff of disapproval in the phrasing, but he did not want to follow that up now. He wanted an answer to the single question which had been troubling him since he had known of this death, though subsidiary queries must precede it.

  ‘Mr Dimmock, I have been told that Mr Cullis did not show signs of distress earlier in the meal. Is that correct?’

  ‘I wasn’t watching him closely, of course, but I certainly saw no evidence of discomfort. Indeed, it was only just before he died that he delivered the final speech of the evening. It was no doubt a prepared effort, but he delivered it perfectly competently.’

  This fellow definitely hadn’t liked Cullis; there was not even the conventional warmth accorded to a dead man in the period immediately after his decease. ‘This would be only seconds before his death?’

  ‘Yes. He sat down and there was the usual polite applause for his speech. I think we were all getting ready to go, because Richard’s speech plainly marked the end of what had been quite a long day. Then he simply slumped forward without a word and fell where you found him beside the table.’ Dimmock looked at Lambert, who said nothing, and decided something further was expected of him. ‘I don’t think any of us could believe what had happened for a moment. Then someone felt for a pulse and we decided that he was dead.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Who was it who felt for his pulse? Debbie Young, I think. I couldn’t be absolutely sure.’ Both of them knew that this precise man was in fact very sure indeed. Lambert would have liked to shock him out of his assurance, but knew that it would not be easy to do so. ‘Mr Dimmock, one thing puzzles me about this. Most people’s instinctive reaction to a sudden collapse of this kind would assume it had a natural cause. A heart attack, for instance?’

  He was right about Jason Dimmock’s self-control: the man did not appear to be shaken at all by his question. ‘It’s an interesting point, that. I’m sure we all thought for an instant that it was a heart attack. But only for an instant. We are all scientists, of course: that probably had a lot to do with it.’

  Lambert shook his head. ‘Even scientists would look for the most usual solution first. Statistically, the overwhelming probability was some sort of cardiac arrest.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right.’ Dimmock nodded slowly, and looked for a moment as if he would like to enter into a debate about the matter. Then he said, ‘I suppose our thinking was probably coloured by the reaction of the person who got to the fallen man first. After Debbie had felt for his pulse, I mean.’

  ‘And what was that person’s reaction?’ Dimmock frowned, as if it was important to him to get this exactly right. ‘I believe she said, “I think he’s dead. Someone should inform the police. And we’ll need a doctor.” ’

  ‘The phrases came in that order?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure they did.’ Dimmock made a show of reluctance to cast this shadow over his fellow-diner. ‘But I don’t think the order of words is significant, do you? The lady was speaking in shock. At that moment, I’m sure we were all in very severe shock.’

  ‘You think the natural impulse when you bend over a stricken man is to think of the police before medical attention?’

  Jason Dimmock smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in this situation before, have I?’ He made a show of dismay. ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything against the person concerned, Mr Lambert. It could have been any one of us who reacted like that, in the shock of the moment. I feel that there is a danger of you making more of this than I intended.’

  ‘Who was that person, Mr Dimmock? You’ve already told us that it was a woman.’

  ‘Yes. Debbie Young felt for his pulse, as I said. But the person who said we should send for the police was his wife. Alison Cullis.’

  Twelve

  Bert Hook was up soon after six the next morning. He was determined to put in at least an hour with his books, as a partial compensation for the time he had lost on the previous evening when greater things intervened.

  This was the time when the brain was at its best. This period of stillness when most of the world was still asleep was not only the best time for original thinking but the easiest time for concentration. The medieval monks in their monasteries had known that; they had set aside the hours between five and seven to do their best work and their best thinking.

  It didn’t work today for Bert Hook. He found himself thinking about the monks at Tintem Abbey, reconstructing in his mind those stone cells where they had once worked quietly and contentedly. That wasn’t concentration, was it? That wasn’t helping to penetrate the mysteries of George Eliot and the later nineteenth-century novel. The image which kept returning to his mind was not that of the Mill on the Floss but that of the corpse with the startled expression on the floor of the big dining room at Belmont.

  DS Hook was relieved when the noisy descent of his boys signalled that his period of study was at an end.

  When he arrived in the Oldford CID section, he found Chris Rushton already busy at his computer. ‘John’s gone out to Chepstow,’ the detective inspector called, when he noticed Bert’s arrival. It had taken Rushton years to bring himself to call the chief superintendent by his first name, as Lambert demanded in their private exchanges, but he seemed now to be able to do it without being too self-conscious. ‘I’m opening files on all the people who were at the table with the deceased. They were the nearest but according to John apparently not the dearest of
Richard Cullis.’

  ‘We’re not even sure this is murder yet,’

  ‘Hook reminded him sourly. Efficient young bugger with his computer files, his team coordination and his searches for previous criminal records. Hadn’t this cheerfully alert young devil got an inefficient or a lazy bone in his body?

  Yet Hook, like Lambert and the pathologist and all the other professionals who had been at Belmont last night, was already privately sure that this was murder. A curious assumption, among people who had trained themselves to keep an open mind to every possibility. Perhaps they had picked up something from the people who had sat with the dead man at his final meal, who all seemed to have tacitly accepted from the start that foul play was involved.

  Rushton said, ‘The Gloucester Citizen and local radio have already been on the phone. The press officer’s dealing with them at the moment.’

  ‘He typed ‘Deborah Young’ into his PC, looked at his monitor with satisfaction, and began another file.

  Hook, caught in the phony-war situation where he wanted to get on with things but could do nothing until murder had been declared, went into the canteen and got himself coffee and a flapjack. Once the inner man was happy, he’d check that the formal machinery of a murder inquiry was in place and ready to go. Assuming, of course, that that efficient young sod Rushton hadn’t already done it.

  At the Home Office forensic laboratory in Chepstow, Lambert was trying to be patient. The staff there had made the examination of the corpse of Richard Cullis their top priority, and he was grateful for that. They’d come up with some interesting results, so the least he could do was listen to a short dissertation on their findings. You need to know about these technical details, even at this advanced stage of your career, he told himself firmly. If nothing else, you will be able to impress your uppity junior officers by retelling nonchalantly what you learned here.

  At quite an early stage of the dissection, the post-mortem had excited interest even among the hardened professionals of forensic crime, who had seen most forms of death before. The man speaking his findings into the mouthpiece fastened to his head had suddenly suspended operations and paged one of his colleagues, a balding man whose long face seemed even longer under his domed forehead. The two had conferred in low tones, excluding the laymen like surgeons confronting some complication in an already delicate operation. The difference here was that the thing beneath their trained fingers was beyond saving: there was no need for haste, no obstacle to the most thorough cutting of muscle and tissue. Corpses have no defences against men and women determined to discover whatever is peculiar to a particular case.

  It was this second forensic scientist, Dennis Bryden, who now sat in an office with Lambert. He did not seat himself behind the desk, but lifted himself instead to sit on the edge of it, swinging his feet gently beneath it and looking down on Lambert as if he were an expectant student. It was a pose which one might have expected of a younger man with a younger audience. Lambert thought a man of sixty with a long, cadaverous face and very little hair left above it looked slightly ridiculous swinging his legs beneath him as an aid to thought.

  His informant was conscious of none of this. Bryden was an academic, working in an environment where he wrote a lot of reports but got few opportunities to address a live audience, even of one person. ‘It’s an interesting one, this,’

  ‘he informed his audience with satisfaction.

  ‘I thought it might be,’

  ‘said Lambert drily. ‘In what way interesting?’

  Bryden smiled the superior smile of the man with knowledge. ‘How much do you know about poisons?’

  Lambert felt again like a student whose ignorance was being probed. ‘I know that it’s not a usual method of killing. I know that there are many fewer poisonings than the public imagines there are. I know that of nineteen thousand murders in America which occurred in a particular year, only twenty-eight were caused by poisoning.’

  Bryden nodded his encouragement to this promising learner. ‘That figure, of course, does not include cases in which poisoning was never suspected. We shall never know how many of those there were. I suppose it is my job to ensure that there are very few of those in Britain.’

  ‘He nodded sagely, as if accepting a welcome thought.

  Lambert, striving to drag his man back from the general to the particular, said a little desperately, ‘I know something about arsenic and strychnine and prussic acid. Apart from that, very little.’

  ‘This isn’t one of those,’

  ‘said Dennis Bryden with satisfaction.

  Lambert sighed mentally. ‘Let’s begin at the beginning. You’re telling me that the corpse who was cut up this morning was poisoned.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes, that’s what I’m saying. When you’ve known it yourself for a couple of hours, you tend to assume that everyone else knows.

  That’s why I’ve been asked to speak to you, Mr Lambert. Whatever the pathologist may suspect, confirmation depends on the knowledge and skills of the toxicologist. That’s me: that’s why I was called in.’

  ‘I’m strictly an ignorant layman here. Give me the cause of death in the simplest terms, will you? I need to know all I can, since it is obviously going to affect how we proceed from here.’

  ‘Yes. Well, this is one of the newer poisons. You remember Georgi Markov?’

  Surprisingly enough, Lambert did. ‘Wasn’t he the man assassinated by a Bulgarian Secret Service agent in London?’

  ‘That’s the chap. 1978. Doesn’t seem like thirty years ago, does it?’

  ‘Indeed it doesn’t.’

  ‘Lambert remained outwardly affable, but his heart was sinking. Wasn’t this the so-called perfect poison? Well, this clever if slightly irritating boffin seemed to have tracked it down. ‘You’re saying that ricin is what killed Cullis? Isn’t it supposed to be untraceable?’

  ‘Not yet, I’m not. And there’s no such thing as an “untraceable” poison.’

  ‘The man in his sixties chuckled at his own ingenuity like a clever schoolboy. ‘The principal problem facing the modem toxicologist is what to look for. There are hundreds of poisonous substances, and more appearing on the scene with each passing year. Ricin is a constituent of the fibre of the castor bean. Markov was assassinated by means of a ricin-filled pellet fired from the tip of a modified umbrella. That caught the public imagination, because it might have come straight out of James Bond. In this case, the method of administration of the poison was not so sensational.’

  ‘Bryden showed his first sign of disappointment.

  ‘But you think ricin was the method used.’

  ‘Privately, I’m sure that this man died from ricin or some poison very like it. But I couldn’t yet go into court and swear that I’m certain. We’ve retained the brain, the lungs, and the stomach for analysis; during the next few hours I hope to be able to give you definite details of the substance and of the quantities involved. It’s very difficult, but that’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘Dennis Bryden rubbed his hands together in eager anticipation of problems to be solved.

  Lambert repeated through clenched teeth, ‘But you think this man died from ricin.’

  ‘That or something very similar. I’m sure we shall be able to give you more details very quickly. We have all kinds of tools at our disposal here, including chromatography and mass spectrometry. Not that these will necessarily be the methods of choice in this case.’

  ‘Lambert said grimly, ‘I’m glad you feel that you will be able to confirm it. How was the poison administered in this case?’

  ‘Ah! Interesting, that. It is at its most swiftly lethal when injected, as in the case of Markov. But we found no signs of injection on this corpse. Nevertheless, death would have been almost equally swift by other methods. Ricin is one of the most lethal poisons known to man.’

  ‘Bryden nodded his satisfaction that a case involving it should cross his path like this.

  Lambert forced himself to remain pol
ite as he said, ‘So how was it administered in this case?’

  ‘Dennis Bryden pursed his lips, then threw his hands suddenly wide in a startling gesture. ‘Impossible to say! It could have been inhaled through an aerosol spray, but it is much more effective when ingested internally.’

  ‘You think it was added to his food.’

  ‘That seems the likeliest method, wouldn’t you think?’

  ‘I would, yes.’

  Bryden leant forward confidentially, a difficult feat for a man perched on the edge of a desk. ‘Mustn’t teach you to do your job, Superintendent. But it seems this must considerably ease your task of detection. Ricin is a rare poison. Not many people would have access to it. Probably only one, indeed. Find that person, and you have your killer, eh?’

  Lambert smiled grimly. ‘You’ve obviously been given no details of the people at last night’s gathering, Mr Bryden. The dinner tables were made up on the basis of the sectors where people worked in the firm at Gloucester Chemicals. Cullis was sitting on the research and development table. With the exception of the dead man’s wife, everyone sitting round that table was a scientist. Most of them were engaged in work in the research laboratories. I fancy that every one of them would have not only known about ricin but had access to it.’

  Thirteen

  Alison Cullis stood a little way back from the front window of the big detached house on the outskirts of Cheltenham, so that she could study the arrival of these visitors without being observed herself.

  They did not look too threatening. A tall, rather gaunt man, with plentiful greying hair, looking older than she had expected. This must be the Chief Superintendent Lambert, whom the local papers had made into something of a police celebrity over the last few years. Alison could remember one or two of his more dramatic cases, though she had never expected to meet him, let alone be interviewed by him. She supposed that an interview was what was to come, though they had not used that term when they had phoned to arrange the visit.