Free Body Politic by J.M. Gregson Page B

breathed heavily for a moment, checked that there was no movement in the pulse in the neck. Then the hand which had lately dropped the cord upon the unsuspecting throat reached up unhurriedly to the mains switch it had switched off less than two minutes earlier.

     
     
    CHAPTER NINE
     
    Christmas night in the Cotswolds. Behind the closed doors of family celebrations, there is merrymaking of different sorts.
    Detective Sergeant Bert Hook has put away his Open University books for the day. The boys have got bicycles for Christmas, but it is dark now, and Eleanor can rest, for the bikes are back in the garage and their riders safely back at the family hearth. The boys are watching an ancient Morecambe and Wise show replayed on television as their last treat of the day. Once they are gone, Bert will open the port he so thoughtfully purchased for his wife.
    *
    Ten miles away in his unusually boisterous bungalow, Superintendent John Lambert, who set out several hours ago to play the jolly grandfather, has long since forgotten that this is all an act. He is reading the same chapter of Winnie the Pooh for the third time to a six-year-old boy, who falls asleep before it is over. Lambert’s daughter Jacky watches her father with affection whilst she chats with her mother, diverting her concern for a whole hour from the second breast-cancer scan which has shadowed Christine Lambert’s Christmas.
    *
    By nine o’clock, small children throughout the country are either asleep or getting fractious. But in the childless house of Dermot Yates, it has been a strange day. Various relatives have visited, but most have stayed only for short periods, as if they were visiting someone in hospital. And that is not an inappropriate comparison, for Moira Yates has for most of the day had an abstracted air, carrying on surface conversations perfectly sensibly, yet giving the impression that her mind is elsewhere, in some secret world which only she can visit. It is behaviour common to many people with her ailment, says the doctor. By the middle of the afternoon, she is looking very tired, and retires to her room to rest for an hour.
    *
    They ate at six, as planned. Dermot cooked the turkey and set the table for Christmas dinner for three; for Gerald Sangster sat down to the meal with them, as Moira had requested he should. Wine was drunk and crackers pulled; the chef was complimented; the three made routine, harmless jokes; in short, they pretended hard that this was a normal Christmas.
    Dermot found himself wishing that someone would drink too much, become noisy, even rude. Anything to break the mould of good behaviour. It was all so decorous that it was false. He felt that all of them knew that, but none of them knew how to fracture the spell. Or rather, the one person who could have changed things chose not to. Moira, the one of whom they were both so careful, from whom they took their cues, was the only one of the trio who might have changed this strange atmosphere. If she realized that she had that power, she must have chosen not to use it.
    *
    Chris Hampson, at home with his wife and grown-up children, hugged the troubles of Gloucester Electronics to himself and tried hard to be seasonably jolly. At ten o’clock, the children drove away to their own homes, and he found himself suddenly very tired. He plodded steadily through the day’s mountain of washing up, the steady physical labour an escape from the things he did not want to discuss with his wife. She was tired but happy after the labours of the day; she did not seem to notice his preoccupation. Returning carefully correct replies to her talk about the small triumphs of her table, the small problems of their children, he felt like an expert, defensive, table-tennis player.
    *
    Only Joe Walsh had spent the day alone. Or almost alone. The retriever, who had crept in from the boisterous house next door to the quiet he knew he would find here, put a sleepy head obstinately on his knee as