Die Happy (6 page)

He heard the phone shrilling at the other end of the line and was surprised how his pulse quickened at the sound. Then the receiver was picked up and the authoritative voice he had expected said simply, ‘Marjorie Dooks.'

‘Er, good morning, Mrs Dooks. It's – it's Sam Hilton here. The poet. I'm on your literary festival committee.'

An indeterminate sound. Whether it was a stifled giggle or a grunt of exasperation or something else entirely, he couldn't be certain. ‘Yes, Sam. I know who you are. What can I do for you?'

‘Well, nothing really. I just wanted to tell you something.' Sam decided he hated phones, but held the small mobile more tightly against his ear.

‘And what would that something be, Sam?'

Marjorie was trying to be encouraging, but she came through to Sam as a woman near the edge of her patience. ‘I want to resign.'

There. He had blurted it out, when he had meant to give his reasons and emphasize how entirely logical the action was. The damned woman had this effect upon him, for some reason, when he should have just despised her and everything she stood for. He wanted to explain himself, when he should have just said, ‘I'm going. Peter bloody Preston and the rest of you can just piss off if you don't like it.' But they would like it, of course. They might bleat a bit about it for form's sake, but secretly they'd be damned glad to see the back of him and everything he represented.

‘It would be a pity if you felt you had to leave us, Sam. Speaking personally and selfishly, it would make my job a lot more difficult.'

He tried to be aggressive. ‘I should have thought it would have made it a damned sight easier. You could plan what you want to do without having any awkward fucking youngsters to get in the way.'

‘But we need awkward fucking youngsters. And you're the only one we've got, Sam.'

He'd tried to shock her and she'd come straight back at him with the word, as if she used it all the time. He had meant to throw her off balance and now he was thrown himself. He said desperately, ‘I'm twenty-two and I'm the only young bugger on that committee. Half the time I'm not even sure what you're fucking talking about.'

‘I'm sure that's not true, Sam. And Ros Barker's only thirty, you know. That may seem old to you, but to people like Christine Lambert and me, she's much more in your age-group than ours.'

‘Mrs Lambert taught me.' Why had he said that? It had been out before he knew he was going to say it. It sounded like a confession of weakness. ‘It's the first time I can remember enjoying a poem.'

‘That's interesting. I didn't know that. What age were you then, Sam?'

He wished she wouldn't keep using his name. Even though he wanted to sneer at her, he knew that he couldn't call her Marjorie. ‘I was about ten, I suppose. It was my last year in junior school.'

‘You owe her a lot, then. She helped to set you on the lonely road to becoming a poet.'

Despite himself, he liked that word ‘lonely'. It made her sound almost as though she knew what it was like to spend hours on your own wrestling with words, battering your mind to come up with the phrase that you and only you could produce. Before he could stop himself, he heard himself quoting,

‘“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.” I can't remember what quinquereme is. Some sort of Roman galley, I think. I just liked the sound of the words. They're from
Cargoes
by John Masefield. No one reads him now.'

‘More's the pity if they don't,' said Marjorie staunchly. ‘“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.” That poem must have made an impression on me as well, Sam.'

‘You know it!' He couldn't keep the delight out of his voice, when delight was the last thing he had planned.

‘I haven't thought about it for years. But we learned things by heart, in the prehistoric days when I went to school. Actually, that was out of date even then, but I went to an old-fashioned private prep school. I've been getting rid of lots of the stuff they taught me ever since, but I'm glad we learned a bit of poetry.'

‘It's full of rhythm, you know, that poem. You have to have rhythm, whatever sort of verse you're writing. Even free verse has to have some sort of rhythm.' He was preaching at her, the way he preached at his poetry-reading gigs, when people asked him about verse and why what they tried to write didn't satisfy them. She'd probably choke him off now, which would be a good thing. He could get on with resigning and telling her to piss off, if the damned woman would only behave as she was supposed to.

But the damned woman said, ‘That's why we need you, Sam, you see. I don't think there's anyone else in the group who understands properly what poetry is all about.'

He said sullenly, ‘People round here don't want to listen to people like me.'

She went on almost as if he hadn't spoken. ‘We need you to hold your corner against all this cosy middle-class satisfaction and give us access to people like Bob Crompton. I'm sure he'll be like a breath of fresh air for us. And stuffy old Oldford needs a breath of fresh air, don't you think?'

‘I suppose so.' He hoped he was just agreeing to the breath of fresh air and not to staying on her damned committee. He'd meant this to be short, sweet and vulgar, but the bloody woman seemed able to take all his shots and not even realize she was under fire. He said, ‘I'm no good at committees. I've never been on one before.'

‘And I've been on far too many. They're a bore for a lot of the time, but they're the only way of reaching decisions when you have a group of people with different backgrounds and different opinions. We want all of them to be represented – it's one of the differences between fascism and democracy.' Marjorie wondered if ‘fascism' was still the all-embracing, demonizing word it had been in her youth. Sam Hilton would have been amazed as well as consoled if he had known how hard his ogress was struggling with her own end of the conversation.

‘Anyway, that's why I've decided that it's not for me.'

‘I'd miss you if you did go, you know, Sam. Between you and me, I'm not sure I could hold out against the scorn of people like Peter Preston if you weren't there to express a different point of view.'

‘I can't fucking stand him.' He was surprised how much relief it brought him to be able to speak with real venom.

‘Peter has his uses and his contacts. And, believe it or not, he has experience none of the rest of us has. There'll be times when we need to listen to his opinions. All points of view should be represented, as I said. Including yours, Sam.'

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.'