Mortal Taste by J. M. Gregson Read Free Book Online Page A

increasing intensity that he had never given up cricket for this ridiculous pastime. The seam bowler who had terrorized the batsmen of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire for twenty years was being reduced to an incompetent by this effete game.
    Well, not so much by the game as by his chief’s advice on how to play it.
    Matters came to a head with the match all square on the fourteenth. ‘Swing easily, you’re snatching at it,’ Lambert advised the perspiring Hook. Bert tried. He made minimal contact with a ball which seemed to be growing smaller with each hole. It flew low and right and curled savagely into a ditch.
    Lambert was there before his disgusted partner. He inspected the bottom of the ditch. ‘There’s hardly any water in there. You can get it out with a wedge, if you’re careful. It’s our only chance, now.’
    Bert didn’t like that ‘now’. It was meant to remind him that all the partnership’s troubles were down to this most recent disastrous shot. He stared unbelievingly at the top of his ball, just visible above an inch of green mire. He climbed obediently into the ditch, affecting not to notice the smirks of their opponents at this interesting development. To get anywhere near his ball, he had to bend like Quasimodo beneath a hawthorn. A vicious crop of steely thorns savaged his lower back and his buttocks. Nettles reared between his knees to threaten his manhood. He could no longer see his ball.
    He reminded himself without conviction that he was doing this for pleasure.
    Lambert’s voice said from somewhere above him, ‘You’ll need to keep your head very still for this one. It’s not an easy shot.’
    By gingerly placing his left foot halfway up the bank of the ditch and leaning far to his right, Bert found that he could just see the top of his ball again through the undergrowth. He swung at it, hopelessly and without hope. His club caught in the branches of the hawthorn behind him, but with a desperate brute strength he wrested it clear and launched it at the ball. The steel of the club-head hit mud and stagnant water with an awful splatter and Hook’s vision disappeared as a black wetness filled his eye-sockets.
    He climbed heavily from the ditch, refusing to scream as the hawthorn scored his back and shoulders. There was spontaneous applause from his two opponents, with whom he had developed a rapport in the face of Lambert’s assistance to him. He looked down and saw that the new trousers he had donned to represent the club in this, his first match, were spattered with evil-smelling black and green ditch water. There were ragged cheers and shouts of ‘Encore!’ from the four men in the match behind them.
    Bert Hook limped towards his golf bag like a malodorous Dalmatian. He had slammed his wedge back into it before he realized the club-head was still covered with mud.
    He was studiously avoiding any glance towards his partner. He took a deep breath and said, ‘Where did the ball go?’
    â€˜It didn’t come out of the ditch,’ said Lambert sadly. ‘I thought you were rather ambitious to attempt that shot, you know. When you’ve played a little longer, you’ll realize what’s possible and what isn’t.’
    It took two pints of bitter in the clubhouse to restore the usually equable Hook to anything approaching normal conversation with his chief. In the interim, he reflected sullenly that Lambert seemed worse since the news of his impending retirement had broken. He was bearing up bravely at work, even talking of time for hobbies, but Bert fancied sometimes that he detected a quiet sort of panic in the man he had worked with for so long.
    Lambert would not have acknowledged anything so feeble in himself. But he was conscious of a restlessness, a refusal of his normally disciplined mind to settle to the tasks in hand. Perhaps it was because there was no really serious crime to occupy