“Never forget you have a life outside the job,” the young John Lambert’s first CID mentor had told him, and twenty years later the mature Lambert passed on the same idea to his juniors. Christine would have reminded him that he was past forty before he seemed to realise it. It was his obsession with the taking of villains that had once almost split up a marriage most now thought rock solid. Nowadays he tried to practise in his own life what he preached for others, to look for the diversions of a life outside the job. On Monday evening he engineered such a diversion from routine for Bert Hook, and his Sergeant soon decided that pursuing the murderer of Tamsin Rennie would have been much less onerous. They were playing in the Oldford Golf Club’s knockout competition for the President’s Prize: it was the last day for second-round matches and they had to play that evening or give the game to their opponents. Bert, who had never given a match away in a long and successful cricketing life, swiftly decided that in golf a walkover for the opposing pair would have been the better option.
