occasions.
Harding smiled at him. ‘And operate in your usual manner, I suppose you mean?’ They grinned at each other, the years falling away; for a moment they were both young coppers, eager to bring in a result. Lambert was unusual in his unwillingness to mount an investigation from CID headquarters, to run a team from his desk with only occasional sorties into the world outside.
As the phone shrilled on his desk, Harding ignored it long enough to say, ‘Yes, you go out and get the smell of the case, John. As long as you bring home the bacon, I don’t care how it’s done.’ He would have added the rider, ‘Within the law, of course,’ to most of his thrusting younger officers, but it was not necessary with this man. Lambert did not cut corners when it came to getting his evidence. That was taken for granted, and it was a major source of the building trust between the two men.
Then the Chief Constable picked up the phone and listened gravely to the voice which spoke animatedly on the other end of the line. He nodded twice, then said, ‘Right. Superintendent Lambert will be in charge of the case. Pass all information to him—he’ll keep me briefed. The murder room will be set up here in Oldford.’
It was the first time the word had been used. He stared hard at the instrument for a moment after he had put it down, then looked into the long, attentive face opposite him. ‘You were right, John, of course. The pathologist made the usual noises about waiting for the PM, but he’s pretty sure even out by that pool that the body was dumped there. That Keane didn’t die by drowning.’
It took Lambert thirty minutes to drive the old Vauxhall Senator to the pond where all that remained of Raymond Keane had been discovered. He did not hurry, for he had Bert Hook beside him, and they discussed the little they already knew of the missing person that had suddenly become a murder case.
There was a pale winter sun behind a thin cover of white cloud, so that the landscape of the southern Cotswolds took on an impressionist look, with the bare tops of the forest trees shimmering in a haze against the winter sky. The streams in the bottoms of the gentle valleys appeared and reappeared like silvered ribbons, catching and losing the light as the car climbed and dropped over the slopes. The M5 was well behind them now, and they had left the main road to Stroud. There were few other vehicles visible in this area of agriculture and forestry. Most of the ploughing had been completed in autumn, so that they saw not a single tractor crawling over the arable areas. As always, this seemed a quiet place for evil to be abroad.
It would have been easy to miss the place altogether, had it not been for the bright-yellow plastic ribbons and the single police vehicle. The plastic had been used to cordon off a rough rectangle extending from the lane to an area around the pond itself. The ambulance bearing the mortal remains of Raymond Keane was leaving as Lambert’s old Vauxhall arrived. Although it had been obvious from its appearance that this had been a corpse for many days, the police had still had to wait for death to be formally confirmed by their doctor.
‘ There’s no doubt that it was in fact Keane?’ said Lambert to Sergeant Jack Johnson, the experienced Scene-of-Crime officer.
‘ Not to my mind. The clothes conform to the ones his mother described him as wearing when he left her house on Christmas Eve.’
Lambert nodded. ‘We’d better get the formal identification completed as soon as possible. Is there anyone other than his mother we can use?’
‘ He was divorced. First wife hasn’t seen him for four years, she says. Apparently there was a second wife in the offing. But there’s a sister. She might be the best bet. He wasn’t a very pretty sight when he came out of the water, though you and I have seen worse.’
Lambert turned to Hook. ‘Can you contact the sister, please, Bert? And you’d better attend at
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