Body Politic (10 page)

Even
Chief Constables cannot expect to know the moment when events will take such decisions out of their hands.

*

It was good to be out in the fresh air. Detective Sergeant Bert Hook sniffed it appreciatively. The British climate was as perverse as ever; on this second day of January, when winter should have been at its hardest, there was a hazy blue sky and a most unseasonable mildness. Over the edge of the Forest of Dean, May Hill was clearly visible; you would have a good view of the seven counties from there today.

Hook
rejoiced to be out on a day like this, especially after a morning in court where a key witness had failed to appear and the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to pursue the case. It must be therapeutic to be out in the fresh air, even for this futile activity. ‘Blow the cobwebs away nicely, this will,’ Lambert had promised as they stepped out of the car, ‘and we can always count it as your belated lunch hour.’

Hook
smiled sourly, turning the bright steel five-iron speculatively in his large, strong hands. ‘I suppose golf at least gets you out into the countryside. Didn’t someone call it a good walk spoiled?’

‘
Mark Twain. Who seemed otherwise a nicely rounded human being. Mind you, on the driving range, you don’t get the good walk that homespun humorist offered you as consolation. But it’s a start.’

‘
And a finish, as far as I’m concerned!’ said Hook firmly. ‘Remember, I’m here under severe protest, and only because you made it one of your daft conditions.’

‘
Give us your money, lad. I’m not paying as well as instructing.’ Lambert took the coins from Hook and slipped them into the machine, watched the forty golf balls tumble into the basket below, and then put coins of his own in for another basketful. Might as well have a little practice himself, if he had to be here to oversee the novice golfer beside him.

Hook,
maintaining his gruff exterior, followed the superintendent along the row of covered stalls to the furthest and most private of them. He was pleased to see that there were only three other people striking balls, two of them women, and that the five feet high wooden divisions between the booths would give a decent degree of privacy to his initial efforts in this ridiculous game.

Though
he had no intention of admitting as much to Lambert, he was secretly looking forward to this. He got too little exercise these days. Since he had given up serious cricket at thirty-eight, he had done nothing beyond the widely spaced long walks and sporadic visits to the gym in preparation for occasional police medical tests. Golf might be a silly game, but it was played in attractive places, and you could go on with it for as long as you could walk.

Moreover,
it surely couldn’t be very difficult for a good cricketer. You approached a dead ball in your own time: no one came and hurled an unplayable delivery at you, or edged your perfect outswinger through first slip’s fingers for four. It was partly the lack of challenge which had kept him away from golf over the years. But you had to lower your sights a little as you got older.

Bert
teed the ball on the rubber stub provided and swung Lambert’s five-iron speculatively a couple of times, as he had seen the men who earned such ridiculous sums from this game do on television. It felt quite easy: it was difficult to see why people made such a fuss about the technique involved in such a simple thing as hitting a golf ball.

He
stood with feet on either side of the ball and looked at it steadily, then swung the club in a wide, graceful arc, preparing a modest response for his chief’s surprise at the excellence of his first shot. There was no sound, where he had expected the echoing impact that was coming from the stalls behind him where other people practised. He looked to see the ball soaring in a graceful parabola over the green expanse in front of him, towards the hundreds of other balls which waited to be collected from the end of the practice area.

Lambert
’s attempts to control his mirth were pitifully unsuccessful. He spluttered for a moment, then burst into a long, relieving peal of laughter. Hook looked down, saw the reason, refused for a moment to believe it, then joined reluctantly in his mentor’s hilarity. The ball still lay where he had placed it in the tee. ‘We call that an air shot,’ said the recovering Lambert. ‘You should expect a few of those in the early stages.’

‘
Stupid game!’ muttered Hook. He glanced malevolently at the offending ball, then set the club behind it and froze his powerful frame into intense concentration. If it had been cricket and he had been hit for four, he would have bowled a lifter, pitching just short of a length and rearing at the offending batsman’s ribs. But there was no one to attack in this silly game.

He
eventually produced a savage slash at the ball. This time he made contact, but only minimally, with the top of the increasingly tiny target. The ball dribbled forward and fell from the elevated platform to the muddy grass beneath it, coming to rest some ten yards in front of him. ‘Bastard!’ said Bert.

Lambert
felt cheered by this evidence of a golfing gene in his sergeant. He had feared that the taciturn, nonswearing Hook might not have the vocabulary necessary for the serious amateur golfer. He need not have feared. Hook’s next three efforts got the ball into the air, but with drastic slices, which took the ball at an angle of almost forty-five degrees to the line he had intended. Bert’s language passed through the sanguinary to the scatological.

Lambert
called from his instructor’s position in the next stall, ‘Just swing the club, don’t snatch at the ball,’ and managed to send a couple of high, straight shots of his own down the inviting green expanse in front of them, demonstrating his own relative competence at this activity. A muffled outburst from the neighbouring stall indicated that Hook had now added blasphemy to his vocabulary of golfing reactions. Perhaps there was real hope for him in this game.

Hook
’s initiation to the game took less than half an hour, though in terms of suffering it seemed to him much longer. Lambert was quite gratified by his own efforts. He should practise more often, he realized. He felt quite invigorated, and the accuracy of his last few seven-iron shots in the still January air had been highly satisfactory.

Bert
Hook, on the other hand, stumbled away from the practice booth dishevelled and disorientated. His hair was tousled; his features were crimson with effort and frustration; he had lost a button from his unsuitable shirt and broken a lace in his unsuitable shoes with his final, titanic effort to dismiss an infuriating white ball far into the distance.

‘
You’ll get better, with practice, Bert,’ said Lambert patronizingly.

‘
I won’t, you know. I bloody won’t. This was a one-off. A debt of honour. All it’s done is confirmed to me what a damned stupid game this is.’ Bert flung the five-iron roughly into the boot of Lambert’s car. ‘Good sodding riddance to bad sodding rubbish!’ he said with feeling.

Yet
as they drove away and he seethed in the front passenger seat, Hook knew that he would be back. He wouldn’t dream of admitting it to John Lambert, of course. But this daft game couldn’t possibly be as difficult as he had made it appear today. He would meet the challenge, show he could cope with it, and
then
give up the game.

Lambert
drove silently, with a slight smile lifting the corners of his mouth. He had noted his pupil’s reactions with an experienced golfing eye, and he knew the temperament of Bert Hook. The fish was hooked.

*

It is a mistake to take on a boxer puppy when you are sixty-nine. The man flapping the lead decided that this warning should be inscribed in capital letters in every canine handbook, in every RSPCA publication, in the directives of the hallowed kennel club itself. He had covered seven miles and more of winter Cotswolds, with the dog covering a good four times as much. Now, when she should have been exhausted, she had disappeared.

‘
Daisy!’ he called hopelessly. ‘DAISY!’ The woods might have been empty of all life, for all the reaction his shouting extracted. He hadn’t even felt like a pensioner, until he got this wretched animal; now he felt older than his years, as he toiled unavailingly in the wake of this muscular bundle of energy. He got out the dog whistle his wife had presented to him hopefully on the previous day, panted for a moment, then summoned all his breath to blow a single long, high-pitched blast.

He
waited for a full thirty seconds with diminishing hope. There was no sound in the high, leafless trees around him. Then, somewhere in the invisible distance, a rook cawed faintly. He wondered bleakly if it had been disturbed by Daisy. If so, she was a long way off.

He
went back to the road and moved slowly along it, bellowing the dog’s name every two minutes, whistling in between times, cursing the day he ever let himself be talked into this purgatory. They had walked many miles before she went missing; surely he had a right to expect even a ten-month-old boxer bitch to be decently tired and obedient after such labour on her behalf?

They
were into the early dusk by now, and he began to wonder what he would do if Daisy didn’t reappear soon. At that moment, he heard a slight noise away to his left, near where a road ran away over the hills to Cirencester. A snuffling. Probably some wild creature, but it could be Daisy. He called her name, felt his heart lift in relief with her short answering bark. ‘Come on then, girl!’ he trilled encouragingly.

She
didn’t come. He turned off the lane, between ivy-clad stumps which might once have been gateposts. He could hear the dog now, growling excitedly at something; she could not be more than thirty yards away, but he could see neither her nor the source of her interest.

Then
suddenly he came upon both, fixed in a scene which would haunt him for months. A low, dark pond beneath the trees, and the dog up to her haunches in water, growling at something within a foot of her nose. The ice had gone from the pool with the thaw, save for a few half-melted grey slabs floating at the far end.

And
between him and that ice, the grotesquely bloated body of what had but recently been a man, the arms and legs swollen within the clothing like those of a Michelin man, the eyes staring unblinkingly at the sky they would never see again.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

The Chief Constable’s face was grave. Lambert looked a question as he took the proffered chair, and Harding nodded. ‘It looks as though it’s Keane,’ he said. ‘We shall know within a couple of hours; the formal identification can wait a little longer, if necessary.’

Already
he was shaping the way the investigation would go, deploying his resources, considering the national spotlight this would bring to his force. ‘Damned politicians! If he had to do away with himself, why couldn’t he do it in London, and leave his own patch clear?’

‘
You think it’s suicide?’ said Lambert. Something told him it wasn’t, but for a wild moment he hoped Harding had found something to support the idea. A message to someone, perhaps, or a previous threat to end it all in this way. He knew nothing of Keane other than the public pronouncements of the man, and from that suicide did not seem likely.

George
Harding gave him a rueful smile. ‘It’s the most likely thing statistically, as you know. But no, I doubt it, as you obviously do, John. It’s early days, but there doesn’t appear to be any note, either at his flat in London or in his cottage down here.’ He picked up a sheet from the folder in front of him. ‘And his mother said he was, “cheerful and looking forward to his Christmas,” when he left her. That was four days ago, of course, when our MP was merely a missing person.’

He
sighed, wondering if the tall man opposite him was thinking as he was of the impact of today’s news on that resolute old lady. Harding liked Lambert, even though most police wiseacres had forecast that there would be clashes between the new CC and his senior CID superintendent. Those who had thought that Lambert was a throwback to an earlier age and would be treated accordingly had forgotten that he was that most indispensable of police personnel, a thief-taker. Chief Constables were dependent for their reputations upon the successes of such men. Whatever their own skills in negotiating the minefields of public accountability, they needed the statistics of success to back them.

Harding
looked at this shrewd, grizzled officer. ‘You’ll be in charge, of course, John.’

Lambert
said, ‘It will be high profile, sir. Assuming that it’s going to be a murder investigation, that is.’

Harding
nodded. He knew what Lambert was getting at. ‘Don’t worry about that aspect. I’ll handle all the public statements, the press conferences, the television and the local radio. I may want you beside me on occasions, if this runs on for any length of time.’ It was his way of saying that he was not shutting the superintendent out, not anxious to take all the credit for himself from a successful outcome.

He
was assuming success, when that was anything but certain. But the men at the top had to do that: it was part of leadership. One of the things they taught you at management courses for senior police personnel. Harding would have done it anyway; optimism came naturally to him, and was one of the foundations of his success.