Free Just Desserts by J. M. Gregson Page B

car, negotiating the unlit Gloucestershire lanes, before Hook said to Lambert, ‘I notice that he said Nayland was a good friend and employer. He didn’t say anything about his qualities as a husband and stepfather.’
    Sitting with the sandwich and his mug of tea, John Lambert’s face had what his wife called ‘his murder look’. Christine had grown used to it over the years.
    It was a look which reflected suppressed, half-guilty elation. Only the major crimes brought that air to him, and even among the major ones the only certain trigger was murder. The hunter is an essential part of the make-up of all CID men; it was most apparent in her husband when he was faced with a homicide which had no obvious solution, when he was pitting his brains and deploying his team against someone who had perpetrated the oldest and direst of crimes.
    A generation ago, when they had argued about his work and he had buckled it about him like some secret armour, Christine Lambert had hated this quality in him, this grisly fascination with the darkest part of the human mind. She understood it better now. It still frightened her a little to see him so animated by evil, but she recognized it as a necessary part of his detective equipment.
    What she saw now was the same old elation, combined with a new factor that had only intruded in the last two or three years: fatigue. She had thought last year that he would be retired by now, but his Chief Constable had succeeded in getting his service extended, ‘in view of his outstanding record in bringing criminals to justice’. The
Gloucester
Citizen
had rolled out that phrase; it had added to John’s already considerable local reputation and caused him no little embarrassment.
    But watching him now, apparently relaxed in front of the television, she saw the lines about his eyes etched more deeply than she could ever remember them before, the corners of his mouth drooping downwards. He still had a good head of grizzled hair, but the back of his head was streaked increasingly with grey. Christine watched him as diligently as she had watched her children all those years ago, as fondly as she now watched her grandchildren. Presently his chin dipped, as she had known it would, and he drowsed in front of an excited Jeremy Paxman and a squirming politician. She removed the cooling, half-empty mug of tea from the arm of his chair and took it into the kitchen.
    Twenty minutes later, he blinked at her as she removed
The
Times
, unread, from his knees. ‘Not going to be easy, this one,’ he said with that small, intimate smile which he had always seemed to preserve for her. It was his attempt to allow her into his world, to share the experience he had once hugged so tightly to himself, and both of them recognized the moment. They had become closer with the passing years, closer still with her operations for breast cancer and a heart by-pass in the last few years, when he had thought that he might lose her. She was restored to full health, an energetic woman in her early fifties, but her husband found it difficult to accept that.
    The murder at Soutters was sensational enough for her to have picked up the lurid details from press and television. She grinned into his tired face, pleased that he was making this small attempt at a discussion of his work. ‘I thought you might have had a confession pretty quickly for this one. Somehow, it doesn’t seem organized. Not planned and executed with precision. A spur-of-the-moment thing.’
    â€˜Yes, though perhaps that was the way it was intended to look. Perhaps someone had in fact thought it through very thoroughly, but wanted to make it look like a desperate, impulsive thing.’
    Christine didn’t press him. She was happy to have him soundly asleep before midnight. It took her a little longer to sleep herself, but she fell soon enough into a deep, untroubled rest.
    At five thirty, two hours before the late winter