She’d thrown that in when he had least expected it, like a boxing punch when you were coming out of a clinch. That was a simile he’d used in one of his earliest poems. Funny it should come back to him now. He made a last attempt to get rid of this for good. ‘I’m not much good to you on that committee. I don’t understand properly how these things work.’
‘Oh, I think you underestimate yourself, Sam. I’ve been pleased with your contributions thus far. The important thing is that you’ve spoken up when you felt it was needed.’
‘But you don’t need me. You were the one who told Poncey Pete to get stuffed.’
‘I couldn’t have done that if you and Ros Barker hadn’t spoken up. The chair has to be neutral. You know that much about committees, I’m sure.’
‘Has to pretend to be neutral, you mean!’
‘Yes! There you are, you see! You know far more about committees and the way they operate than you said you did. And who’s going to speak up for poetry if you’re not there?’
She had divined correctly that there was an evangelical streak in him when it came to poetry. He often surprised himself by speaking up for it and trying to explain how it worked in all kinds of unlikely places. Perhaps it was not really so surprising; when it was the most important thing you did, you needed to justify yourself. And now he’d kept himself on that bloody committee, when he’d been determined to have done with it. He said dolefully, ‘All right. I’ll give it a go for a bit longer. Just until you get someone else more suitable.’
‘Splendid! You’ve been in touch with Mr Crompton?’
‘Bob? Yes. He’s definitely going to come. He says he’ll do his usual thing, read his usual poems, and see how they take it.’ Despite himself, he was absurdly pleased that the ogress had remembered Bob’s name.
‘That’s good. I’m really looking forward to a stimulating session. Hopefully Bob Crompton will find it useful as well.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Sam grimly.
He put down the phone and stared at it balefully for a moment. He wasn’t quite sure how this had happened. It was his first experience of what many servants of the nation had experienced over the years: the formidable Marjorie Dooks had secured a totally different outcome from that planned and anticipated by her colleagues.
‘I see you’ve booked your annual leave for the last two weeks in July.’
It was best to come at this obliquely, Chief Superintendent Lambert thought. Even people cutting your hair talked about your holidays. Bert Hook surely wouldn’t see any threat in such a dull and conventional conversational opening.
‘Yes. We’re still confined to school holidays with the boys.’ Bert played it back like a straight but unthreatening first ball, wondering what more dangerous deliveries his chief had in store for him.
‘Have you decided where you’re going yet?’
‘Yes. We’ve already booked the same cottage in north Cornwall which we had last year. You have to book early at that time of the year.’
They knew each other too well, these men. Like a lot of CID men, they were not good at small talk; perhaps that came from conducting too many interviews with known criminals, where you went straight for the throat and fought to close your metaphorical hands around it. When Bert Hook heard John Lambert opening with such an unthreatening enquiry, he was immediately on his guard rather than relaxed.
Consequently, when the older man said as casually as he could, ‘You’ll be around here at the end of May, then,’ he knew that some request or order he wasn’t going to like was in the offing.
‘Yes. I’ve a feeling in my water that we’ll be pretty busy around that time, though.’
‘No reason why we should be, is there, Bert?’
‘No obvious reason. A feeling in my water, as I said. A nudge from the instinct I’ve developed as a detective sergeant. The same instinct warns me that a man who is otherwise quite civilized is about to assert the brutalities of rank.’
‘You’re a sensitive soul, Bert.’
‘And flattery won’t work. Not that it isn’t welcome, of course.’
‘It’s a very small thing I have to ask of you, Bert.’
‘I like that “ask”. It implies that refusal is a possibility.’
‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll refuse this, Bert. This is something you’ll quite enjoy. A change from the dull round of petty crime and criminal faces.’
Bert said stubbornly, ‘It’s not such a dull round. Neither young thugs nor old lags are all the same as each other. Looking for the differences can be both instructive and useful.’ He was repeating the pious mantra he had voiced to a new DC earlier in the day, but he kept his face straight.
‘This is something you could do better than any other officer in the CID section, Bert.’
‘I doubt that.’
‘What other officer among us has recently obtained an Open University degree?’
Bert sighed. ‘I don’t see why that should line me up for shitty jobs.’
‘It makes you an intellectual, Bert. There aren’t many among us who can hold their own with the Gloucestershire intelligentsia.’ Lambert looked through the window of his office, weighing the thought. Then he nodded two or three times.
But Bert Hook knew his man too well. He looked at him suspiciously and said bluntly, ‘This is something that was offered to you, isn’t it?’
Lambert smiled ruefully. ‘It was a request addressed initially to me, yes. I was happy to think of someone more suitable for a most agreeable assignation.’
‘Very unselfish of you.’ Bert Hook sighed again, more elaborately. He’d rumbled what the chief was up to. That didn’t happen very often and he wanted to savour the moment. ‘What is the shitty job you’re trying to unload on to your unsuspecting junior?’
Lambert sighed in turn at this cynicism in his bagman. ‘It’s not at all shitty, Bert. It’s a compliment to be considered. It’s the Oldford Literary Festival.’ He rolled off the syllables reverently. ‘They’ve secured an eminent author of detective novels as one of their speakers. The organizer thinks it would be an excellent idea to have a real detective on the platform with him for the discussion which will follow his talk. Someone who could point out the differences between real crime and fictional crime.’
‘I agree with you on one thing. It seems an excellent idea.’
‘You do? Well, in that case, I’ll-’
‘An excellent idea that they should approach their local celebrity, Chief Superintendent Lambert, to fulfil that role. You’re the man they wanted, aren’t you?’
‘Well, that was the original suggestion, yes. But if I can offer them someone who is much more obviously suited to the task, I’m sure they’ll be happy to-’
‘It’s no go, John. It’s you they want. I’m sure our Chief Constable will endorse that view when you tell him about it.’
Lambert gazed through the window for a moment longer, then smiled wryly at his colleague and friend. ‘It was worth a try, Bert. And you’d have done it well.’
Bert shook his head decisively. ‘It’s you they want and you they should have, John.’
Lambert sighed. ‘Maybe there’ll be a serious crime to make my attendance impossible.’ He spoke without much hope. But police pessimism is not always justified.
In the sharp cold of the April frost, the man struggled beneath the straggly rhododendron. He was glad of his anorak and the thick polo-necked sweater he had put on beneath it, but nothing could keep his feet warm as he waited on the damp earth. It was a good twenty minutes before the car swung into the drive; it felt much longer than that to him.
Behind the wheel was a plump woman of around forty, bottle-blonde and carefully made up. She put on the hand brake and swung herself out of the car, gasping a curse as the cold hit her bare arms and the legs exposed beneath the absurdly short skirt. At least those legs were still good, thank God. She locked the car, the orange lights flashing bright and brief as she pressed the electronic button.