by J M Gregson
As Lambert turned back to the house, the first livid fork of lightning rent the sky above the greenhouse and the thunder rumbled ominously up the valley. By the time he reached the door, heavy drops of rain were exploding on the gravel.
Chapter 19
The storm raged through most of the night. Christine Lambert slept little, but her exhausted husband was less disturbed.
He woke once to a Wagnerian clamour, with lightning illuminating the room with flashes recurrent enough for an old movie. Later in the night, he cried out with a child’s fear, and she knew he was back in the blitz amidst the crash of falling walls and the death of his grandparents. She clasped his arm, soothing the trembling middle-aged man as softly as she would one of the children she taught by day. Soon the trembling ceased; he never woke.
In the early-morning sunlight, the world seemed washed by the storm. The humidity was gone, and the air at the kitchen door was fresh and stimulating; the birds had postponed their dawn chorus until the thunder had rumbled away, so that now the garden was alive with their song. ‘No bacon and eggs, I suppose,’ Lambert said glumly as he came to the table, but he tackled his muesli and bran with considerable relish.
Even the local paper could not spoil his breakfast. ‘Brutal Murder at Local Golf Club,’ trumpeted the headline across the front page. There were the ritual comments about Shepherd’s pre-eminence in business and golf club affairs. David Parsons had said that his Chairman would be ‘much missed’, but it would be difficult for a Secretary to say much less. Old George Williams had had to contact one or two former captains to get anything more fulsome about the deceased. Then came, ‘The murder investigation is being master-minded by Detective Superintendent John Lambert, himself a long-standing member of the golf club. Superintendent Lambert has headed many successful murder teams and is something of a local celebrity, but at the time of going to press he remained tight-lipped and baffled about this sensational crime.’
Lambert practised his tight-lipped baffled look on the back of his cereal spoon, but the distortion ruined the effect, so he returned to George’s deathless prose. ‘A shaken Michael Taylor, the current Captain of the Burnham Cross Golf Club, refused to comment and the Lady Captain, Mary Hartford, was occupied with her duties as Senior Nursing Officer at our local hospital. Debbie Hall, the attractive Social Functions Secretary at the Golf Club, said that the killing had come as a complete shock and no one had any idea who could have perpetrated the crime.’
‘Pretty dull bricks from precious little straw,’ muttered Lambert with satisfaction, and moved to his second cup of tea. Christine, who had watched his perusal of the paper with some apprehension from the kitchen, thought it safe to emerge with fresh toast.
It took Cyril Garner to disturb his calm. The Chief Constable rang as he was finishing his breakfast and said gloomily, ‘You’ve seen the papers?’
‘Only the local rag,’ said Lambert, with a cheerfulness which was the nearest thing to a licensed insolence which was available to him.
‘The nationals have picked it up. They’ve been on to me already this morning. Wanting to know if we’re near an arrest yet and so on. I’ve stonewalled, but I can’t go on for ever.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Garner that he hoped for an arrest before long, but he thought better of it just in time. He didn’t want to conduct his tenuous theory through the Chief Constable’s maze at this point. He outlined Mary Hartford’s story as succinctly as he could. Garner sounded disappointed as he asked, ‘Do you believe her?’
‘It’s possible,’ said Lambert evasively. ‘She’s very well respected as Matron at the Hospital.’ He used the out-of-date title as deliberate shorthand, knowing it would impress his socially conscious Chief.
Garner countered with triumphant finality, ‘Well, I’ve arranged a Press Conference for one p.m. at the Golf Club. It will keep these press boys at bay and show them what we’re about. You can report to me beforehand; I’ll be down at twelve-thirty or so.’
‘Damn!’ said Lambert, when he was sure his Chief had rung off. But he said it fairly cheerfully: he had been expecting a Press Conference since the case began.
He had reached the garage when Christine called him back for the second, more intriguing phone call. The voice at the other end of the line sounded distraught. ‘John? It’s Michael Taylor here. I must see you!’
Lambert fell automatically into tones of professional calm. ‘Fine, Michael: I need to see you again anyway. I’m off to the murder room at the Golf Club this very minute. Any time this morning would —’
‘No! Not there. Not at the clubhouse.’ The staccato delivery crackled down the line like gunfire.
‘It’s where our murder room is, Michael.’
‘Near there, then. Not in the clubhouse.’
‘All right then. You name the place.’
Suddenly Lambert sensed a crisis and willed the frightened voice at the other end of the wire not to cut him off. It had become important that this nervous fish did not escape into the deeper pool beyond his net.
A pause, then the irregular breath of excited distress. ‘On the course. Behind the sixth green. It’s quiet there. Come alone, in half an hour. I’ve things to tell you.’
Despite the deliberately controlled reaction of long experience, Lambert felt his own pulse quicken at the prospect. ‘Fine. I’ll be there, Michael. Can you give me any idea —’ But the Captain was gone; Taylor had put the phone down even before the Superintendent accepted the arrangement. Lambert was left staring stupidly at the phone and wondering. A confession? A beguiling thought, but he doubted it. Vital evidence? Much more possible; one of his first tasks today had been to question Taylor about why he had lied about his movements after the Committee Meeting. He wondered as he drove through the lanes whether what Taylor had to say would support the case he had begun to assemble in his own mind. Evidence was what he needed.
Hook was already in the murder room when he arrived, compiling a more formal account of Mary Hartford’s story from the notes he had made on the previous evening. ‘Do that in the car,’ said Lambert. He explained what they were about as he drove up the narrow unpaved road which led through the course to the parking-ground by the tenth tee. This was an alternative starting point used by members when the course was crowded, as on Saturday and Sunday mornings. From here, he could cut across to the meeting-place assigned to him by the Captain: the sixth green was within two hundred yards of this upper parking-ground.
Hook remained reluctantly in the car as Lambert observed Taylor’s repeated instruction to come alone. He had chosen a quiet place indeed, where no human eye was likely to observe them at this hour, and Lambert had to quell the unbidden thought that he might be wandering this verdant Elysium with a murderer.
After the night’s storm, the ground was sodden in a few places, but the gravelly subsoil would soon absorb the surface water; among inland courses, this was as dry as any in England. As the thunder had rolled reluctantly away, the temperature had risen towards that of the last few days, though the weather did not seem settled. At a point where three giant sweet chestnuts formed a huge natural suntrap, the grass steamed gently under a brilliant sun and the wet vegetation smelt almost tropical in its warm dampness. The birds chirruped their shrill approval as they moved to feed the young in their nests. Otherwise it was almost eerily quiet. And there was no sign of Michael Taylor.
Lambert stood on the edge of the sixth green and looked in the direction of the invisible clubhouse. This was the way the Captain must come, for his car had not been parked on the upper parking-ground. Lambert had thought he would be already here, for he had seen the red sports car at the clubhouse when he called there to collect Hook. He strolled round the semi-circle behind the green with a proprietorial air, inspecting the eight rhododendrons he had planted with the Greenkeeper at the end of the winter. They had not only taken, but flowered quite well. Now, as he pulled off the dead flowerheads, he saw plenty of light green sprigs of ne
w growth, and indulged in that delicious smugness peculiar to horticultural success.
He looked at his watch. Taylor was ten minutes overdue. Annoying, on a day which would inevitably be crowded without such diversions. He cursed both his dilatory Captain and Cyril Garner’s press conference, for they had encroached upon each end of his morning. Reluctantly, he went a further ten yards beyond the rhododendrons to inspect the young copper beech they had planted at the same time.
Initially, it was the sound which puzzled him. A quiet one, which at first he could not place. A murmur of flies. Early in the season for that. Perhaps the damp and the heat upon its heels had brought them out. He moved a step or two further, and the murmur became a more insistent buzzing. Bluebottles. He saw them in a thick column ahead of him as he struggled clumsily through the brambles. Perhaps a stoat had left a half-eaten rabbit here; he moved cautiously.
It was as well he did. For it would never have done for a Superintendent to tread clumsily upon a body. Lambert recognized the expensive sweater Michael Taylor had worn on the previous day. Without it, immediate identification would have been difficult. The Captain lay face downwards. An inch or so of the carefully waved blond hair on the left of the head was undisturbed. The rest of the crown and the whole of the right side of the face were a pulpy mass of blood and bone, where blow after savage blow had been rained upon them.
Lambert stood over what had so recently been a man, paralysed for a moment by shock and revulsion. And the bluebottles resumed their feast upon the shattered skull.
Chapter 20
Lambert looked up from the horror before him to the mighty trees above his head. He caught no watching eye, but the disturbing thought persisted that a violent, perhaps an unhinged, killer could not be far away. As he hurried back to his car, he was glad the public could not see one of its senior police representatives so disturbed by this idea.
Bert Hook was immersed in his tabloid newspaper’s reaction to the case. ‘Golf Club Chief’s Violent Murder’ barked the headline. A subsidiary heading, above a fuzzy old photograph of Debbie Hall, ran, ‘Blonde Dance Secretary Hints at Sex Scandal’. Debbie’s refusal to comment had been flexibly interpreted. Lambert wasted a fleeting moment wondering what this organ of enlightenment would make of the scene he had just left.
For the first time ever, he was glad of the car-phone which modern technology had forced upon him. Within minutes, the Serious Crime squad had been alerted. The scene of crime team, the fingerprints officer, the photographer, the five detective constables who would comb the undergrowth around the murder spot, would be here as quickly as the ambulance, whose only function would be to remove in due course the gory mortal remains of Michael Taylor.
Listening to his own voice as it gave the terse commands and the directions which would pinpoint the spot on the course for these professional reinforcements, Lambert thought it that of a stranger. It had the harsh impersonal tone of an automaton. It made him realize how much his discovery behind the sixth green had shaken him. Thirty-six hours earlier, the murder of James Shepherd had removed a man whose passing none so far regretted. The CID could make no distinctions in murder: that was the job of the courts. Lambert would use all his powers to discover Shepherd’s murderer, but when that professional task was accomplished he might have sympathy for the killer. The violent dispatch of Michael Taylor was another matter. The late Captain of Burnham Cross Golf Club was flawed, weak, even perhaps pathetic. But his sins were venial: there could be no motive for his brutal despatch other than the desperate need of Shepherd’s killer to protect himself. Michael Taylor’s nervousness yesterday, his abject collapse under questioning, had not been occasioned by his guilt. He had simply known more than was good for him about the murderer.
Violence bred violence. Once murder was undertaken, the culprit was driven to desperate means to protect himself. Had Lambert heeded the lessons of experience, he might have protected this second victim. Hook, watching his chief sideways, waited for the orders he had not dared to invite during the Superintendent’s furious concentration upon the car phone. When Lambert regarded that instrument balefully and muttered, ‘Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill,’ his Sergeant knew better than to reveal his knowledge that this flawed philosophy was Macbeth’s. ‘O’ levels did not entitle a man to such contributions; quotations were an indulgence best left to Chief Inspectors and above, especially in circumstances such as these.
Lambert said slowly, ‘Ring Mary Hartford, Debbie Hall and Bill Birch.’ He extracted a golf club diary from the door pocket of the Vauxhall. ‘All members’ phone numbers are in there. Check what they’ve been doing in the last hour. Don’t mention our second murder, of course.’
Hook looked pained that he should be thought capable of such clumsiness. ‘What about David Parsons?’ he said.
‘Tell the murder room at the clubhouse to alert him. He’ll need to guide our colleagues to the exact spot. And I’d better be there to meet them. I’ll see Parsons.’ Lambert eased his long legs out of the car again, sniffing air that seemed less welcoming than when he had set out for his rendezvous with Taylor half an hour earlier. He came to a small decision. ‘Ask those three to come to the murder room before our press conference. Say midday. If we’re no further forward, they can hear what Our Leader has to say to the media. Without being sighted by the newshounds, of course.’
Hook was not deceived. ‘Do you think we’re nearer to an arrest?’ he said. Lambert in his chastened mood was serious and communicative. He said quietly, ‘I think I know who did it. Proving it may be much more difficult.’ He had almost told Hook his murderer. Perhaps the fact that such knowledge had already cost one man his death made him cautious at the point of revelation; or perhaps it was the less worthy consideration that he might be absurdly wrong.
The police cars and the ambulance arrived together, directed by David Parsons, who even in this crisis was careful to select the route where vehicles might least damage his course. The Secretary descended grim-faced from the first of the two police vehicles and stood on one side whilst Lambert organized the disposition of the police teams and led them beneath the trees to their grim work. The column of flies rose and dispersed itself before the CID men, who waved them away distastefully and inched cautiously forward as Lambert called, ‘Move carefully — there will be footprints.’
He was relieved to see Dr Burgess coming forward eagerly from the second police car. ‘Glad you could come so promptly,’ he said, as they moved towards the body together.
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ said the white-haired man with unconcealed relish. ‘You don’t provide me with interesting cadavers very often in Burnham Cross.’ He stopped without hesitation over the thing that others were treating with revulsion. ‘Messy!’ was all he said as his venerable, elegant fingers began the preliminary examination of the late Captain of the Golf Club. Lambert watched him for a moment, then turned to supervise the positioning of the tapes which were being strung to cordon off the murder area and mark the limits of the team’s detailed investigation of the scene.
The heat was almost back to the level of the previous day, and after the overnight deluge the atmosphere was even more humid. Away to their left, where the sun had just climbed high enough to beat on the edge of the sodden fairway, steam rose, thin and slow, for a few feet above the ground. The growth of lush vegetation seemed almost visible around them, an illusion fostered by the competitive outbursts of birdsong, echoing amidst the tall trees in what seemed an unnatural intensity over the heads of the busy crime squad. Beside him, a shaken voice muttered ‘Poor devil! Poor silly devil!’ and he turned to see the moist grey eyes of David Parsons staring past him towards the mortal remains of Michael Taylor, now hidden behind the broad backs of policemen.
Lambert said, ‘There’s no more you can do here, David. Thank you for guiding in the ambulance and our cars.’ The Secretary nodded. Despite his pallor and his shaken preoccupation with the body, he was the only man around
who looked comfortable in this Turkish bath heat. He wore jacket and tie as usual; as he accepted his dismissal and turned away, he looked down in distaste for two or three seconds at his highly polished brown shoes, whose patina was flecked with the splashes of mud inseparable from this scene. Lambert watched the first fifty yards of his walk back to the clubhouse and the sanctuary of his office. He saw the first signs of age he had noticed in the normally erect military figure. The shoulders drooped a little now, the brisk military march at which he normally moved about his business was diminished to an exhausted trudge. He did not look back.
Burgess knelt by the body on the mat he had brought from his car. His forehead almost touched the ground beside the shattered skull, as if he were taking part in some obscure ceremony of death. He would not disturb the body until it was carried to the path, lab., where thorough investigation could take place. But he knew Lambert would want any preliminary opinions he could offer now. Despite a crustiness that was only half humorous, he felt the pull of teamwork in the face of this most desperate of crimes. When Lambert rejoined him, he was rising stiffly to his feet and wiping his hands automatically on the little towel he carried in his bag. He glanced sideways at the expectant Superintendent and shrugged.
‘You can see most of it,’ he said. ‘He’s been bludgeoned repeatedly with a sharp metal instrument; not more than an hour ago.’
‘Murder weapon?’
‘Something distinctive, certainly. The skull’s been almost sliced away in layers … You look as though you have an idea.’
Lambert hadn’t wished to prompt, but in the long run it would not matter: the detailed post-mortem would reveal all. ‘A golf club?’ he said.