[Lambert and Hook 21] - A Good Walk Spoiled

by J M Gregson

  Kennedy glanced round the room. ‘Can they still hear us? Will this place be bugged?’

  ‘No. They can’t do that.’

  ‘We both know who our man at Gloucester Chemicals is. He announced it at our last meeting.’

  ‘We know but they don’t. Keep shtum, Scott.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell them. I should never have told Cullis we had a man in those labs.’ It was a rare admission of weakness; Cohen’s impulse was to tell him it wasn’t the only occasion when he should have kept his mouth shut. Instead, he said, ‘Ben Paddon should never have told the meeting about where he worked: the fewer people who know about these things, the greater the security. But he’s done it now and he has to be protected. The only witness to your indiscretion about us having a mole in the labs is Richard Cullis himself, and he’s dead. If you now deny that you ever said anything about having a man under cover at Gloucester Chemicals, I don’t see that they can do a thing about it.’

  ‘Did Ben Paddon kill Cullis?’

  ‘I don’t know. Neither do you, and you don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss here, believe me. Try to forget even the man’s name. That’s the best way of convincing these buggers that you know nothing.’

  It didn’t take long to conclude matters when the interview was resumed and the tape was running again. In answer to Rushton’s renewed inquiry, Kennedy said woodenly, ‘I do not recall saying anything about an All God’s Creatures person in the Gloucester Chemicals factory.’

  Cohen came in quickly on the heels of this prepared sentence. ‘It seems probable that the late Mr Cullis was enlarging the exchange - embroidering it, as he no doubt did other words and actions of Mr Kennedy.’

  Bert Hook looked steadily into the eyes of the young man whose presence here seemed to him to represent a warning to anyone with sons approaching adolescence. ‘It’s rather late to start withholding information, Scott.’ He glanced for the first time at Cohen and did not trouble to conceal his disgust.

  Then he turned back to the wretched young man in front of him and spoke more formally. ‘You’ve already confirmed much of what Mr Cullis told us about his abduction, Mr Kennedy. You will be charged in court tomorrow morning with abduction and with threatening with an offensive weapon. I advise you to consider your position. If you do know of anything which might have a bearing on the death of Mr Richard Cullis, you should certainly reveal it. By doing so, you might protect yourself from the even more serious charges which will inevitably follow for anyone aiding and abetting a murderer.’

  Fifteen

  Lucy Dimmock received the phone call she was expecting whilst her husband was still in the house. It was eight twenty-five and they were just finishing their breakfast. The cool, impersonal female voice said that Chief Superintendent Lambert would like to talk with her informally about the death of Richard Cullis thirty-six hours earlier. He would come and see her at work or she could come into the station. It should not take very long.

  Lucy reviewed her options rapidly. ‘It’s difficult to ensure privacy at work: our premises aren’t extensive. But we can meet here. That way, we shan’t be disturbed.’ The calm voice told her that she already had the address and that the CID visitors wouldn’t need any guidance to find it. Lucy was a little disturbed to find she was to have more than one visitor.

  She waited until Jason left the house, then rang the office and told her partner that she wouldn’t be in until around midday. She did not give the reason, though she had no doubt that Lesley would divine a connection with the death which was already a local cause celebre. At least when you owned the business you could come and go as you pleased. She and Lesley ran a secretarial agency, supplying reliable temporary staff for emergencies and occasionally helping with more permanent appointments. They did not need extensive premises, but their success meant that the small office premises which a year ago they had thought would be more than adequate were already fully stretched.

  The CID men came exactly at half-past ten, the time she had arranged. She was already aware of the local reputation of Detective Chief Superintendent John Lambert, whom the press had taken to designating ‘the Gloucestershire super-sleuth’. She had seen both these men from a distance in the hours after the murder at Belmont, but at close quarters Lambert was older than she had expected from his dynamic reputation: a tall, lean, intense man who was immediately intimidating. She was pleased to find that the Detective Sergeant Hook who was going to take notes on this conversation was a pleasant, burly figure who seemed anxious only to reassure her about what was to come.

  Lucy took them into the drawing room and sat them down on the leather Chesterfield sofa. They looked at the oil paintings on the wall and at the silver in her cabinet; probably it was their habit to observe everything, but she found the way they took in every detail of their surroundings rather unnerving. ‘I collect silver,’ she explained with a nervous laugh. ‘I think the insurance is fully paid up and we updated the security system last year.’

  Lambert gave her a grim smile. ‘We aren’t here to check on your valuables, Mrs Dimmock. We are concerned with a much greater crime than burglary.’

  Lucy told herself to stop being overawed like an impressionable schoolgirl and behave like the shrewd businesswoman she was. ‘I obviously want to help in any way I can. But I shall be surprised if I can add anything to what Jason told you on Tuesday night. I’m sure he told you as much or more than I can. He pulled himself together faster than the rest of us - we were all in shock at the time.’

  ‘One person wasn’t. One person sitting very near to Mr Cullis knew exactly what was going to happen to him.’

  She looked into the long, grave face and decided that she did not much like the man. ‘Well, it wasn’t me, Mr Lambert! ’ She looked at Hook and found his attention upon his notebook. ‘That’s a formal denial, if you need one.’ Hook looked up at her and gave her a friendly smile. ‘We shall be interviewing everyone who was at that table, Mrs Dimmock, and getting them to sign statements in due course. It’s part of the routine. Perhaps someone will confess. As no one has done that so far, I expect everyone will deny committing the crime, just as you have. As DCS Lambert has said, it is almost certain that one of the people who sat with you will be lying, because we think Mr Cullis’s killer was at that table. It’s a disturbing thought for you, but one you can best dispel by being totally honest with us this morning.’

  ‘I’ve no intention of being anything but honest.’

  ‘Mrs Dimmock, how well did you know Mr Cullis?’ Lambert had the air of a man impatient with preliminaries.

  ‘I’d met him on social occasions. I’d never worked with him, like most of the other people at the table.’ She looked him boldly in the face.

  ‘That doesn’t really tell us how well you knew him, does it? Did you see him once a year? Two or three times a year? A dozen times a year? Did you know him just as your husband’s boss, or was there a closer acquaintance than that? Was there a real friendship between the two of you? Were you on first name terms?’ Lucy forced herself to smile. They had moved straight on to dangerous ground, but she told herself that she had expected that and prepared for it. ‘I met him as Jason’s boss, but he was a friendly and informal man, so we were soon on first-name terms. I suppose I must have known Richard and his wife for about three years.’ It was more or less what she had planned to tell them, though she hadn’t expected to be challenged so directly about it.

  She waited for a reaction, but Lambert merely nodded, with his head a little on one side, as if he expected more. She knew they would be talking to other people, so she must give them enough to be convincing and yet pick her way carefully. ‘We were certainly on first-name terms. I suppose we saw each other on average four or five times a year, but at irregular intervals, mostly in connection with company gatherings. The research scientists who work in the labs are quite a small group, so they and their wives get to know each other fairly well.’

  Lambert studied her with no hint o
f embarrassment. Thirty years of experience rather than anything specific in her tone or movement told him that this woman was holding something back, was proceeding with caution in answering a straightforward question. ‘Did you and the Cullises see much of each other?’

  Lucy smiled and relaxed a little. Here was an opportunity to divert attention from herself to another woman. ‘Not lately. You may already know that Richard and Alison Cullis had their problems.’ She smiled at the euphemism. ‘I should be surprised if they’d done much entertaining at home over the last two or three years.’

  ‘Mrs Cullis has already been very frank with us over the state of their relationship.’ Lambert looked around again at the large, well-furnished room, with its low window which looked down a large lawn to a shrub border beyond it, where the autumn crimson and gold of maple leaves dominated the quiet scene. ‘Mr Cullis hadn’t been in this house recently, then?’

  She smiled away the directness of his question, trying to convince him that she had nothing to hide, that he was probing areas which would prove quite irrelevant to his investigation. ‘I think he was last here some years ago for some sort of business exchange with my husband. I think Richard visited most of the laboratory scientists at home after he had been appointed Director of Research and Development, to discuss their roles in the lab work. He could have seen them in his office, but I think he thought he’d find out more about his staff if he saw where they lived. But we have never entertained the Cullises here. All our meetings have been on what I suppose you would call neutral ground.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m sorry if we seem unnecessarily inquisitive, but you will probably understand that we need to establish exactly what sort of relationship Mr Cullis had with everyone who was around that table on Tuesday night.’ She was glad she was able to smile. ‘What you really mean is that we’re all suspects.’

  ‘If you like. We prefer to think in terms of eliminating people from our inquiry. Of people becoming non-suspects as a result of what they and other people tell us. The more honest people are, even about things they may find embarrassing, the more quickly we can complete that process.’

  ‘That sounds perfectly logical to me. My problem is that I haven’t anything useful to tell you, embarrassing or not.’

  Lambert looked at her without blinking for what seemed to Lucy a very long time. ‘Mrs Dimmock, who do you think killed Richard Cullis?’

  She almost flared out in anger and told them that detection was their job, that she didn’t know and didn’t care and wasn’t going to speculate. But she knew that it would not be wise to antagonize this man she now disliked, that this formidable, watchful presence would make an even more formidable enemy. Moreover, this was an opportunity to divert attention from what she was concealing to other aspects of the case, to other people who had had good reason to wish Richard Cullis off the scene. She said carefully, ‘I’m sure several people who were sitting at that table on Tuesday night are glad he’s gone.’

  Lambert nodded, as if that was the reply he had expected. ‘And why do you say that?’

  She took a moment to think, feeling for the first time that she was controlling the direction of these exchanges. ‘I don’t know how much you know about Richard’s lifestyle. It was - well, colourful.’

  ‘You mean he was a womanizer.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do. I’ve already told you that his marriage was struggling. I imagine that was the reason. I also think that men must make themselves a lot of enemies when they philander.’ She was glad she had come up with that rather old-fashioned word: it seemed somehow to distance herself nicely from the man.

  ‘Indeed. Cuckolded husbands are capable of violent reactions, in our experience.’

  Lambert responded with an old-fashioned word of his own, almost as if they were rallying across a net. For a moment of panic, Lucy saw Jason’s thunderous, hate-filled face and thought that Lambert must know about them, must be taunting her with what he had learned. But the moment passed and she picked up the rally. ‘You have far more experience of such things than I have, Mr Lambert. I bow to your superior knowledge.’

  ‘Our knowledge is general, yours is more specific. Which of the people at that table had suffered from Richard Cullis’s pursuit of women?’

  ‘You would need to ask them yourselves.’

  ‘Which we shall do. At the moment I’m asking you.’

  ‘You should ask Priscilla Godwin. She wasn’t speaking to Cullis during the meal. There was something between them. Hostility, I mean. Perhaps he’d had an affair with her and let her down. That’s the sort of thing he did, I believe. But apart from one or two things my husband’s told me, it’s all hearsay. I’ve already told you that I didn’t know Richard particularly well. I’m only speculating because you asked me to.’ She was almost coy, almost taunting them, now that the centre of interest had moved away from her. Lambert said suddenly, ‘You say you didn’t know him well, but I get the impression that you didn’t particularly like him. Had you any particular reason for that?’

  Lucy Dimmock paused for a moment, gathering her resources, wondering just how much she could afford to reveal. ‘I didn’t particularly like him or dislike him, Superintendent. I suppose that when I heard of his lifestyle, I felt for his wife, being a married woman myself. There may have been a certain female solidarity colouring my reactions. But I saw very little of Richard Cullis, so I can’t say I was very passionate about my disapproval of him.’

  She looked at the two men with her head tilted a little backwards, her black hair framing her intelligent, interested, face, making her wide dark eyes seem even larger. Despite her confidence, there was something curiously brittle about her, as if she were challenging them and expecting at any moment to be defeated. Lambert gave the briefest of nods to Hook, who said, ‘I believe you are a university graduate, Mrs Dimmock.’

  ‘I have a chemistry degree. I do not use it in my present work.’

  ‘But you understand your husband’s work at Gloucester Chemicals.’

  ‘I retain enough from my university days to follow what he is about there, yes. We’re lucky in that he can talk to me about his work.’

  ‘So you have a knowledge of poisons?’

  She understood now where this was going. For a moment, she wondered if she could disclaim all knowledge of what had killed Cullis. Then she decided she had gone too far for that. ‘I know quite a lot about toxic substances, Sergeant Hook. As a matter of fact, it used to be a special interest of mine, some years ago.’

  ‘You know about ricin, then.’

  She smiled, perfectly at ease with herself and them now that she had determined what to say. ‘The sensational assassination of Georgi Markov in 1978 ensured that everyone with an interest in poisons knows about ricin. There is no simple analytical test for it, I believe: you have to diagnose its presence from certain symptoms in the victim.’ She paused, then let enlightenment glow on her face. ‘Was it ricin that killed Richard Cullis?’

  ‘That is the conclusion of the pathologists, yes. I think tests have become a little more sophisticated in the thirty years since Markov’s death. But you would know more about that than either of us ignorant CID men, I’m sure.’ Hook gave her a wide, encouraging smile, and she divined in that moment that he was more dangerous to her than she had thought him to be. She beamed back at him. ‘This is really quite exciting, isn’t it? Professionally speaking, I mean. If someone who runs a secretarial agency may be allowed to have a professional interest in poisons.’

  ‘You know that ricin is produced in the laboratories where your husband works.’

  It was delivered as a statement, not a question, and she could hardly deny it, having confessed to discussing Jason’s work with him at home. ‘Yes, I do. I understand that government contracts demand some very dangerous substances are produced and stored in those laboratories.’

  ‘So your husband would obviously have had access to ricin. What about you, Mrs Dimmock?’

  She smiled at him,
feeling the adrenalin raising her acuity, positively enjoying this little game she was playing with them. ‘This is rather exciting, isn’t it? You must forgive me, gentlemen: you’ve no doubt been involved in lots of murder investigations, but this is my first one. Jason doesn’t often bring anything like that home, though he does have his own little experimental workshop in the attic of our house. But I suppose if we were in it together, I could have got him to supply me with ricin, couldn’t I?’

  Lambert was not smiling. He said tersely, ‘Did you or did you not have access to this poison, Mrs Dimmock?’

  ‘Not at home, no. But I have been into the laboratories to meet my husband there - not frequently, but often enough for me to have access, I suppose. Other people are going to tell you this, so there’s no use me denying it. And as I’ve already indicated, I know enough about the subject to know exactly what I was looking for.’ She nodded a couple of times to herself, as if checking on her facts. ‘Perhaps I should now deny formally that I have ever had any contact with ricin.’

  Lambert did not answer the bright smile with which she tried to convey the ridiculous nature of that idea. ‘Someone who sat at that table with you on Tuesday night had ensured that Richard Cullis was going to die, probably by planting ricin in his food or drink. You appear to be telling us that in the day and a half since the man’s death, you have had no thoughts as to who that might be.’

  ‘No. I have thought about it. I have some knowledge of poisons, as you have already established. But apart from my husband, I do not have detailed knowledge of the lives of the people who sat with me. Still less do I know about their relationships with the man who was killed.’

  ‘Yet you have already indicated that you thought Ms Godwin saw him as an enemy.’