Malice Aforethought (15 page)

Bert tried. The ball sliced away to the right. ‘Aaaah!’ said Lambert with deep satisfaction. Hook thought Archimedes had probably made that noise, immediately before ‘Eureka’. Lambert said, ‘Everyone does that!’ as if that might be some sort of consolation. ‘You’ve lined your feet up straight, but not your shoulders. Shoulders are the difficult part.’

They would be, thought Hook. Lambert twisted his torso until the offending items were on the line he wanted. Bert found that he could no longer see the ball.

‘You can drop your right shoulder a little, if you like,’ said Lambert, as though offering a special treat. Then, as Hook was ready to hit the next ball, he yelled, Tut for goodness’ sake keep your left arm straight! That should be built into your swing by now — I shouldn’t need to tell you that.’

Bert considered giving his teacher the look of smouldering contempt he had reserved for favoured batsmen in his cricketing days. But he was a patient man; he reminded himself that the chief was under stress, that this exercise was meant to be therapy for him. Quite what it would be for Bert was another matter. He dispatched his next shot with an awful sense of déjà vu. It was a horrid top, stinging his fingers on that cold afternoon.

‘Your HEAD moved!’ said Lambert triumphantly.

‘Course it bloody did, thought Hook. After you’d moved me into that Quasimodo stance, it was either that or a broken neck. He said brightly, ‘Yes, it did, John. I felt it go myself.’

‘Well, then, you know what to do,’ said Lambert sternly. There followed a rapid series of adjustments, after each of which Hook continued to produce the offending slice. Lambert moved the ball back in Bert’s stance, then forward in a revised stance. He moved his right shoulder up, then down. He moved his right knee in, then out. He’ll have me doing the Hokey-kokey before he lets me go, thought Hook desperately. Another ball rolled away into the long grass beneath the trees on the right of the practice ground. He perceived a dim hope: he might eventually run out of practice balls.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ sighed Lambert. ‘You’re gripping the club like a rheumatic limpet. For goodness’ sake loosen up! Grip it as if it is an injured bird you’re caressing. Or as lightly as if you were handling your own—’

‘All right, I’ve got the message!’ snarled Hook. Therapy, he said to himself. Therapy. The man needs this diversion. Therapy: that’s why you’re here.

A moment later, his 5-iron, held now with the tenderest of loving care, flew from his grasp and landed twenty yards away in light mud. Hook, detaching himself from the balletic follow-through on which his mentor had insisted, set off at a trot after the errant club. ‘Losing my footing!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Balls all gone!’ he added when he reached the 5-iron. He picked it up nimbly, his ample frame scarcely breaking stride as he moved away from Lambert. ‘Enough for today!’ he shouted, as he put more distance between him and his fount of golfing knowledge. He did not slow to a walk until he reached the safety of the car park.

Lambert reflected that for a man in the final stages of an Open University degree, Bert Hook was not very articulate. Still, no doubt he was grateful for an old hand’s time and patience on the practice ground.

***

Zoe Ross drove even more slowly once she reached the A438. She did not want to get to the Hare and Hounds, perhaps to hear clearly that sinister muffled voice which had used the phone to summon her to the place. In the daylight, she had been able to laugh away her fears. Now, on this cold, clear but moonless night, this journey seemed foolhardy in the extreme.

Yet she felt like the rabbit hypnotised by the stoat. The man seemed to know something about how Ted had died, and the police didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, as far as she could tell. If they had that oaf Aubrey Bass in the frame for it, they couldn’t be very near to finding the real murderer. She shivered at that word, despite the warmth in her hard-top MG.

When the cheerful orange lights of the old pub appeared out of the darkness, she was frightened, not relieved. She had planned to park in front of it, where she could see and be seen, but she realised now that the building’s front was almost on the road, that the only safe parking was in the area the sign indicated at the rear. She almost accelerated away and drove on. Yet she knew that even if she did that, she would return. She could not face a long night and the working hours of the next day waiting for that muffled voice to renew its contact with her.

She had hoped that the car park at the rear of the pub would be illuminated. It was not. After the brightness of the frontage, the inky blackness here was the more marked. Her headlights threw up only two other cars, at the far end of the gravelled yard. Seven thirty was a quiet time, after the people who called in for a drink on their way home from work had gone, before most of the evening drinkers had arrived. She wondered as she switched off her headlights whether the time had been chosen for that reason.

The man she was meeting must already be inside the old inn. She had hesitated for so long that she was now ten minutes late. She thought she would look at his car before she went in. She might even take the number, in case he was as unpleasant as he sounded on the phone. She wasn’t used to being spoken to like that, and she didn’t like it. And she hadn’t yet found out how much he knew about Ted’s death.

The cold hit her as soon as she slid her legs out of the car. Perhaps she should have worn trousers for this, but she had had no time to change after work. She heard a single footstep, but before she was fully upright from the low car the scarf was round her neck and the bag was over her head.

From being a child, she had felt a terror of having her head covered, a blind panic even when joking friends threw a coat over it. She felt that if she couldn’t see, then in a few moments she wouldn’t be able to hear, and immediately after that she wouldn’t be able to breathe. She had always lashed out and screamed in those childish days, furious beyond all reason at the laughing children around her who had reduced her to such weakness.

Now it seemed as if all those past episodes had been a preparation for her real death, here in this profound darkness, at the hands of this anonymous assailant who neither laughed nor spoke. She threw her hands out behind her, grasped the powerful forearms which held her captive, but was easily shaken off. The scarf tightened round her throat, crushing her breath as it rose to her throat to scream, stifling her feeble resistance.

And then, when she thought it could get no worse, he began to hit her. Systematically, with the back of his strong hands, again and again, across her face beneath the bag. She felt her nose go, felt the salt blood which had been pounding in her ears running now into her mouth, raised her hands to try to protect her eyes. As she lost consciousness, she prayed that death would be quick, that she wouldn’t fight as she stifled beneath this awful bag, in case that would mean that these blows went on. Her last, ridiculous hope was that he wouldn’t make too horrible a mess of her face, because that would upset her mother when she saw her in the coffin.

The man stopped hitting her when he felt the body relax. There was no need to risk a murder rap, however remote the chances of discovery might be. He laid the slender frame down carefully, almost tenderly, beside the new MG, then drove swiftly away.

Fifteen

For a moment Lambert was puzzled by the bird screaming into his dream. Then he realised that it was the phone shrilling beside the bed.

‘How is she?’ It was Hook, presuming on long acquaintance to ring before eight in the morning.

‘Christine’s fine. Well,
they
said fine: I suppose all that means is that she’s come through the surgery. She was still un-conscious when I went in last night; they had her in a room on her own at the end of the ward. She had tubes and drips and electric monitors all around her. But they said that’s normal after major heart surgery.’

‘That’s really good news, John. Eleanor will be delighted. I don’t suppose you got much sleep last night.’

‘As a matter of fact, I slept very well. I was still asleep when you rang.’ He suddenly felt very guilty. ‘I must be an insensitive sod.’

‘Relief, that’s all it would be. Not surprising, either… Well, I’ll leave you to get on with it — just wanted to know how she was, that’s all.’

It was Hook’s hesitations which made his chief say sharply, ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Is it something to do with the Giles case?’

‘Well, yes, but you don’t need to worry about it. You’ve got quite enough to—’

‘Come on, Bert. What is it?’

‘Zoe Ross. She was attacked last night. In the car park of the Hare and Hounds, out on the Ledbury-Hereford road.’

‘How badly is she hurt?’

‘We don’t have a full report yet. She’s unconscious, but we’ve got a WPC at her bedside. The hospital said the injuries were nasty, but not life-threatening. She’s in Hereford General.’

Where Christine was. Perhaps she had even been brought in whilst he was there last night. He said dully, ‘I thought Zoe Ross was supposed to be under surveillance.’

‘Our man followed her car in his. When she drove into the pub car park, he waited five minutes before he followed her.’ It was standard procedure. Wait to see if she drove straight out again. Once it was safe to assume she had gone into the pub, follow her after a safe interval, so that she would not suspect that she was being followed.

‘You say she was attacked in the car park. Who found her?’

‘Our bloke did. He was just turning in to the Hare and Hounds when a car came out past him and drove away quickly. It’s a narrow entry and he was too close to the car to get its number at the front, I’m afraid. He thinks the bulb over the rear number plate wasn’t on. A black or a dark blue Escort Ghia, he says.’

‘Common as muck. Probably stolen. And probably dumped last night.’ Lambert didn’t trouble to disguise his disgust.

‘Yes. DC Cox knows that. If it happened as he says, there isn’t a lot he could have done about it.’ Hook, as usual, was prepared to give a young officer the benefit of the doubt. ‘He found the girl he had been tailing unconscious beside her own MG. It looks as though the bastard in the Escort threw a bag over Zoe Ross’s head as she got out of the low seat and then beat her systematically about the head. As yet, we have no idea why.’

Lambert looked at his watch. It was two minutes to eight. ‘I’ll be in CID in an hour, Bert. I’ve a call to make on the way in, but it won’t take long.’

He rang the hospital, got the morning bulletin from the ward sister who had taken over at six. Mrs Christine Lambert was conscious, had taken a little liquid — had drunk most of a cup of hospital tea, actually, so she must be recovering! He might see her later that morning if he wished, just for a few minutes, but she wasn’t to be overtaxed at this stage.

Lambert said he would be there between eleven and twelve. He tried not to think how conveniently that would suit his schedule for the day, now that there was that other patient he wanted to see in Hereford General Hospital.

***

Tommy Brick, the burglar who had admitted to breaking and entering Colin Pitman’s garage on the night of Saturday, November 10th, was a sharp-featured whippet of a man. His small and wiry body might have been designed for squeezing through small spaces. Tommy, who was now over fifty, with a sallow skin and thinning grey hair, had in his time squeezed through a good few pantry and toilet windows which householders had thought too small for the human frame.

But now he had pleaded guilty to five burglaries. When he opened the paint-blistered door of his house in Gloucester and peered blearily at Lambert’s identification, he had the downcast look of a defeated old pro. ‘What do
you
want?’ he said ill-humouredly. ‘You know I’ve held up my hand and I’m going to the Quarter Sessions. This is ‘arrassment, this is.’

Lambert grinned and nodded. He looked at the four-inch gap which is all that Brick had permitted him when he opened the door. ‘It might well turn into persecution if you don’t let me in, Tommy. Ruin your reputation, won’t it, if you’re seen with a Superintendent on your doorstep?’

It was a persuasive argument. Brick opened the door, looked suspiciously up and down the short, empty street of mean Victorian houses, and turned back into the house. He wore a vest and striped pyjama trousers. He had never owned a dressing gown, and as his slippers shuffled away from Lambert, the split in the seat of his pyjamas revealed thin buttocks, which winked alarmingly away from the policeman and into the living room. Tommy switched on the single bar of an electric fire and crouched over it. He repeated, as if it were the recurring chorus of his song of protest. ‘This is ‘arrassment, this is. I already made a statement for that poncy bugger Rushton.’

‘Of course you did, Tommy. I read it with interest. Quite an interesting document, with the details of your different activities. But as it happens, it doesn’t contain all the information I need. You’re in a position to help us with our enquiries into another case, you see. It’s fair to say that Tommy Brick has never been quite so important.’

‘I’m not grassing on anybody. Tommy Brick ain’t no grass. You can ‘arrass me all you like but I won’t grass.’ His mouth set into the sullen refusal of a child.

And indeed the simple code of small criminals was not unlike the schoolboy reluctance to snitch on classmates, thought Lambert. He said calmly, ‘You’ll talk to me about this one, Tommy. Someone’s going to get a murder rap at the end of it.’

A sharp intake of breath between the long rabbit teeth, a widening of the rheumy grey eyes. Despite himself, Tommy was impressed by a crime that was way beyond his experience and aspirations. ‘I thought it were funny, a superintendent coming after
me
,
’
he said. Whatever his declared and automatic hatred of the pigs, there was something very near to pride in his voice. He had the attention of a very big pig indeed. And with the mention of murder, they both knew that he was going to talk; he was way out of his league here, and playing away.

Lambert took him through the half-hour he had spent in that Saturday night darkness around the big, stone-built house of Colin Pitman. Within minutes, Brick, rubbing his hands to spread the warmth from the electric fire and leaning towards this opponent from the other side of the law, was speaking like a confidant. ‘People spend fortunes getting their houses alarmed, then forget all about their garages. There can be a lot of valuable stuff in garages, these days. Course, the garage at that place was well away from the house — I reckon it’s what used to be the stables, in the old days. But that’s all the more reason for having it alarmed. You could do that garage over even if there was someone at home.’

‘Which there wasn’t, on that Saturday night when you were there.’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Course I am.’ He looked offended for a moment, as though his professional expertise had been questioned. ‘I went all round the place, and there wasn’t a light showing anywhere. Not even the light of a television. And the curtains was open, so I could see. There was some nice stuff in there, but I could see the alarm was on. It’s one of the latest electronic ones, wired directly through to the station, I should think. Some places you can rely on twenty minutes before your lot show, but at Pitman’s house in Malvern, the local cop shop’s just round the corner.’

‘You’re sure the curtains were open, even in the living rooms?’

‘Everywhere. Even in the downstairs khazi.’ This was apparently the height of impropriety, for a person of Brick’s delicate sensibilities.

Lambert took him through the items he had taken from the garage. The little man looked shifty again: perhaps he had taken other small items, beyond those found in this house when the police searched it, and had disposed of those before his persecutors caught up with him. But that did not concern Lambert. He simply wanted to know whether a single, larger item had been in the garage when Brick had forced the side door and entered it.

It had. Tommy Brick had fancied stealing it with the rest of his booty. But the removal of it had been beyond him, he said regretfully. Lambert had the answer he had expected.

***

Superintendent Lambert arrived in the Murder Room in the Oldford CID section ten minutes later than the nine o’clock he had forecast. He found the place filled with a quiet excitement, most of which radiated from the immaculate figure of DI Rushton.

‘We’ve found the Escort Ghia used in the attack on Zoe Ross last night.’

‘We?’

‘Well, uniform found it, actually. It was dumped in Ross-on-Wye last night. Down by the river, to the south of the town.’

‘Fingerprint boys on it now?’

‘Yes.’

‘They won’t find anything.’ Lambert felt an unworthy need to deflate the spruce and self-satisfied young Inspector. ‘If the man was a professional, as he probably was, he’d be wearing gloves from the moment he took the car to the moment he dumped it.’

‘I expect he did. But we’ve had a stroke of luck. One of our doughty Herefordshire citizens did his duty. He was on his way to his local, the Wilton Arms, when he saw this fellow leave the car. He didn’t lock it, which is what caught our witness’s attention. Then he walked to the Wilton Arms himself, closely followed by our curious civilian.’

‘Perhaps he wasn’t such a professional, after all.’ The first move after you’d dumped a car was usually to get the hell out of the area, as fast as you could.