by J M Gregson
The boys found they were in each other’s arms, clutching each other briefly for comfort in a way they would never have believed possible before they came upon this terrifying thing.
Then they were out of the hut, running frantically back across the derelict site and towards the sanctuary of the lights and the street beyond, their lungs screaming their terror at what lay behind them in the hut.
Their lager tin lay forgotten beside the corpse of Sarah Dunne.
Three
‘Come in, Percy! Do sit down! Tell me how life has been treating you since our paths had to diverge.’ The Chief Superintendent was at his most effusive.
Bloody ’ell, thought DCI Peach. He’s calling me Percy. Better be careful here. Tommy Bloody Tucker wants something. He sat down cautiously in the armchair towards which Tucker had waved an expansive arm. ‘Can’t grumble, sir. Variety is the spice of life, they say – especially police life.’
‘You’re looking well, Percy, I must say. Very well.’ Tucker eyed his man up and down as Peach regarded him warily from the other side of the big desk. Tucker wasn’t used to seeing this man in uniform. The dark cloth emphasized the contrast with the white of Peach’s round bald dome, which was also set off by the neat black fringe of hair around it and the jet moustache and eyebrows. The pupils in the eyes below those mobile eyebrows were almost black: they were Peach’s most valuable asset in interrogations, those piercing black eyes. They seemed to penetrate the defensive armour of people who argued with him, but gave nothing away about the thoughts of the powerful, stocky man behind them.
‘I’m feeling well, sir. Very well. Happy with my lot in my new section. Carving out a new and better career path. And I trust you’re well too, sir. Maintaining your usual perceptive overview of CID, I expect. Bringing your usual powerful presence to the direction of serious crime? I’m sure you are, sir. Of course, I’m not really in touch with CID matters, but I hear how things are going from time to time. Your reputation goes before you, as you might say.’
Thomas Bulstrode Tucker felt the interview slipping out of his control, even at this early stage. He had expected this bouncy little sod Peach to be desperate to get out of uniform and back into plain clothes and CID work, as people normally were. And here he was saying he was happy where he was. And making remarks about CID which were most suspicious.
Tucker peered over the gold-rimmed half-moon glasses he had donned for the occasion and tried to assert himself. ‘The CID section has been progressing pretty well without you, Percy. Going from strength to strength, you might say.’ He tried not to notice the black eyebrows rising higher than seemed possible in the forehead beneath the bald pate. ‘However, I’m always looking to make a strong team even stronger. I like to think that’s one of my virtues, not being content to sit upon my hands just because things are going well.’
‘No, sir. I used to tell the lads and lasses in CID in the old days, “Don’t think the man upstairs is just sitting upon his hands, because he won’t be.”’ Peach nodded several times over this gnomic utterance, as if remembering old, forgotten, far-off things.
Tucker was thrown. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. Well, as I say, I want to reinforce my team. And I would regard you as providing that additional strength, Percy.’
‘Very gratifying, sir.’ And it’s still Percy, so watch your step here, lad, he thought. ‘I don’t quite see my way to coming back to CID at this moment, sir.’ He had been counting the days until he could get out of uniform and back to serious villain-taking, but he thought he’d keep that thought to himself.
Tucker’s jaw dropped most gratifyingly. ‘But – but I thought you’d surely be grateful—’
‘Grateful, sir? Well, of course, I’ll always be thankful to you for what you’ve taught me. I learned some interesting things from you, over eight years. But it seems that I have a future in Traffic Policing, sir.’
‘Traffic? But surely—’
‘Expanding field, they tell me, sir. Governments keep spending more money on motorways, but congestion grows ever worse. The man who can keep traffic moving in this part of the world will carve himself out a reputation, they tell me. Not that you haven’t got quite a reputation yourself, sir.’
Tucker glared at him suspiciously. Then he thought of the Chief Constable’s acidic comments and pressed on. ‘We were always a good team, you and I, Peach.’
‘Not for me to say, sir.’ Peach allowed himself a winsome smile; he felt happier when he heard Tucker lapsing back to his surname.
‘Well, we were. An effective combination.’ The Chief Superintendent tried to keep the irritation out of his voice. ‘That was recognized by the powers that be. Without me, you’d never have made Chief Inspector, you know.’
‘I’m well aware exactly how much my promotion owed to you, sir.’
Tucker glared at him, but Peach’s countenance was impassive, his eyes firmly fixed on the wall behind his chief’s head. Tucker had planned this as a lordly offer, but it seemed to be turning into a plea from him. He said rather desperately, ‘Well, I think the time has come for you to resume your duties in CID, Peach. I shall be making arrangements for you to do so.’
‘Beg pardon, sir, but shouldn’t you discuss my future career path with me, at the end of my year in uniform?’
‘I – I suppose I should, if we played things by the letter of the law. But you were never one for playing things strictly by the book and—’
‘Stickler for it now, sir. Perhaps it’s the result of a year in uniform. Perhaps that’s why I decided that my future path lay in Traffic Policing. Quite consoling, the book seems, sometimes. Like the rules of golf, sir. They always say you can use them to your advantage, if you know them well enough, don’t they?’ Peach smiled innocently into the increasingly reddening face beyond the desk.
Tucker did not want to get on to the subject of golf, where he had never got beyond the tyro status in many years of effort and Peach had reached a single-figure handicap five years after giving up cricket. ‘Look here, Peach, we need you here. And you must surely realize that CID is your natural métier.’
‘Need me, sir?’
‘We need your experience. Your insights. Your natural talent as a thief-taker.’ Tucker tried not to speak through clenched teeth. He had intended to patronize his man and admit him back into CID as a great personal favour; he could scarcely believe that he was now saying these things.
Percy beamed at him with a delight which was almost that of a child. ‘Wonderful to hear you say these things about me, sir, needless to say. I believe your judgement is a little clouded by your natural affection for me, but I’m very touched, all the same.’ He spent a couple of seconds trying hard to look very touched. ‘But it’s not quite as simple as you suggest, unfortunately. It is hardly modest for me to relay it, but the Chief Superintendent in Traffic has been saying equally complimentary things, you see. I’d more or less decided that my future lay there.’ Even if he had actually decided that he would be out of Traffic like shit off a shovel during the very first minute after his year in uniform was concluded, there was no need for Tommy Bloody Tucker to know that.
Tucker said feebly, ‘You’ll have more or less a free hand here. The arrangement you always liked in the old days.’
The system which suited you, whereby you didn’t dirty your hands but took all the credit, you mean, Thomas B. Tucker. Percy Peach pursed his lips, shook his head sadly over the brilliant career he was giving up in Traffic, and said doubtfully, ‘I suppose I’d have to take DS Blake back as my sergeant?’ Percy, who had just spent a night of bliss in bed with the delectable Lucy Blake, had no intention of working with anyone else, but he might as well have her imposed upon him as a burden.
Tucker was prepared to concede anything now to get his man. ‘Not if you don’t want to have her. I know how put out you were when I had to allocate you a female detective sergeant in the first place. I’m sure that we could arrange for you to have someone else assigned to you if that is—’
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‘Wouldn’t be fair, sir, that. Politically incorrect, it would be, nowadays, for me to discard a female officer who has always been entirely satisfactory.’
‘But within the privacy of this room, you and I know that you are a man’s man, Peach, happy working in the rough camaraderie of a male ambience. I’m sure if I explain the matter tactfully to DS Blake—’
‘No need to do that, sir, I assure you.’ Peach held up a hand magisterially, demonstrating his penchant for traffic control. ‘I wouldn’t dream of causing embarrassment. We must move with the times.’ He stiffened his back, moving into the martyr mode which Tucker had rarely seen in him, and said in a lofty, neutral voice, ‘I shall be happy to resume working with DS Blake.’
‘Well, I suppose that would cause the minimum of disruption. It’s good of you to look at it like that, Peach.’ Tucker stood up and offered his hand. ‘Welcome back to CID, Percy.’
Percy Peach got out quickly, once his forename was used again. As he went down the stairs from Tucker’s penthouse office he dropped his martyr’s mode and punched his fist into the palm of his hand in triumph. It was good to be back.
It didn’t take Peach long to get rid of his uniform. He shook himself like a dog coming out of cold water when he was back in his smart grey suit.
And he felt the old, familiar excitement returning as he approached the scene of a serious crime. He could scarcely conceal his eagerness as he put the regulation white plastic bags over his shining black shoes and prepared to go through the break in the plastic tapes and into the shed where the mortal remains of Sarah Dunne had been found.
There was a light in here now, a strong beam from the naked bulb illuminating the scene which darkness had made even more fearful for Tommy Caton and Jamie Betts. The heat from the bulb seemed to accentuate the smells of the place as well as throwing it into pitiless detail. The smell from the body mingled with the smell of the rot at the base of the shed, as if the decaying timbers of the hut sought to emphasize the human decomposition they had entombed.
Jack Chadwick, the Scenes of Crime Officer, exchanged the briefest grins of greeting with Percy Peach. It was over a year since they had last worked together, but they behaved as if it were yesterday. Peach went and stood wordlessly for a moment, looking down at the corpse with its awkwardly posed limbs. Beside him, DS Lucy Blake crouched and looked closely at the dead face, as if drawn by the invisible bonds of gender into a final, useless intimacy.
‘It’s a suspicious death, I suppose,’ she said hopelessly. It was a last gesture to the dead girl she had never known: there would surely have been less pain in a death from natural causes or suicide, whatever the mental anguish involved.
‘It’s murder,’ said Jack Chadwick quietly. ‘She was strangled.’ He lifted the scarf the police surgeon had already loosened away from the throat with his ruler, showing the ugly red-black marks of constriction around the young throat.
The unmarked face looked more frightening with the contrast of the livid marks in the white flesh of the unlined neck. But Peach had eyes only for the wounds. ‘No signs of thumb or finger marks, Jack,’ he said gloomily, as if he were accusing Chadwick of making things difficult.
‘No. The police surgeon reckoned she was probably killed by simple and rapid tightening of the scarf, though he gave us the usual guff about having to wait for the PM report.’
The pathologist arrived at that moment and the policemen went outside to look at the approach to the hut, affording the dead girl a privacy she could never appreciate whilst the forensic examiner took rectal temperatures and conducted his minimal brief examination on the site before the body was removed for the detailed science of the post-mortem investigation. Lucy Blake remained in the hut; she had still not managed to become blasé about death in the approved, self-protective, police manner, though she knew that Peach would want her to get whatever she could from the medical man at this early stage.
She found herself looking away automatically as the man lifted the clothing of the dead girl. He said softly, ‘We can’t hurt you now, love. We want to find who did this, you see.’
Lucy was startled for a moment. Then she realized that the pathologist was speaking to the corpse, not to her, as if apologizing for the liberties he had to take, the indignities he had to inflict in the causes of science and detection. He spoke as if she was a child, but a living child. Lucy was pleased and a little moved to hear it: it was a human contrast to the man’s necessary detachment, an acknowledgement that what lay beneath his hands had been a living human being, with a person’s reactions and emotions.
‘Did she die here?’ asked Lucy tentatively.
‘Impossible to say, yet,’ said the man without looking up. He switched his dialogue back to the corpse. ‘Just let me move you a little, love. Gently does it.’
Lucy Blake let a few seconds pass before she said, ‘Any idea how long she’s been dead?’
He grunted and at first she thought he was not going to answer. Then he said, ‘She’s been here some time. There’s extensive hypostasis throughout the body. Do you see?’
Lucy looked unwillingly. She saw his ball pen pointing to a slim thigh that was very white on its upper surface but dark blue in the inch above the floor, where the blood had sunk in the many hours since the heart had stopped pulsing it around the limbs. She nodded, not trusting herself to comment. After a moment she said, ‘Is there much rigor?’
The pathologist looked into her face for the first time, wondering how much these young, unlined features had seen of violent death. ‘It’s not as advanced as you might expect. But if she’s been here since she died, in the temperatures we’ve had this weekend, it would take a long time for the processes of rigor mortis to be complete. It’s not a very reliable guide to the time of death, you know, rigor.’
Lucy seized her cue. ‘So you think she’s been dead for some time. Days, perhaps?’
The pathologist smiled at her. Professionally, he wouldn’t commit himself to anything yet: he was experienced enough and had appeared often enough in court to have the spectre of a clever defence counsel who was out to make a fool of him perpetually at the back of his mind. But he was here to help the police, and the only service he could offer to this poor dead girl who sprawled so pathetically behind him was to point the way towards her killer. So he said, ‘You’ll have to wait until I’ve had her on the table for anything more definite. Even then, it will be informed speculation: time of death is notoriously difficult to establish, when we’re not on the scene immediately. But this girl’s been dead for some time: the body temperature has dropped virtually to that of the environment.’
‘A day? Two days?’
He smiled into the white face beneath the striking dark red hair, so anxious for information, so eager to get on with the hunt for the killer of what lay behind him. ‘I couldn’t stand up and state this in court – not yet anyway – but I’d say she’d been dead for two or three days. That’s an informed guess: it could even be longer than that; it’s as cold as a fridge in here, and cold preserves. But probably not less that a couple of days.’
‘Thank you. It will help us with the door-to-door enquiries when we set them up. We’ve no idea who she is yet.’
They turned automatically and looked down at the white face, smooth as carved alabaster upon a tomb. He said, as though reluctant to trample a little more on that face’s privacy, ‘She’d had sexual congress not long before death.’
‘You mean she’d been raped before she was strangled?’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t say that, yet. You’ll understand that I have to disturb the body as little as possible here. When we have her on the slab, we’ll be better able to see whether penetration was violent, whether there was much, or indeed any, resistance to intercourse. All I can tell you at the moment is that there are traces of sexual fluids evident in the genital area.’ He stood up. ‘That sounds like the meat wagon arriving now. I’ve finished my site examination. The sooner she’s rem
oved, the sooner we shall be able to give you the benefits of a full post-mortem report.’
He sounded glad to be briskly professional again. And he was right about the vehicle arriving. With swift, practised hands, the slim body was slid into a plastic body bag and placed in its ‘shell’, a plain fibre-glass coffin. Thus concealed from the prying eyes which still lined up behind the plastic ribbons on the edge of the area, the corpse was borne away from the shed on the derelict site.
Lucy Blake reported to Peach on her exchanges with the pathologist as they returned to Brunton Police Station in the Mondeo. At least they now knew that she had been dead for some time, possibly since before the weekend. But it was back at the station that DS Blake discovered what she thought was the most depressing fact of all about the dead girl.
No one had yet reported anyone of her description as a missing person.
Four
Lucy Blake was glad to spend that Monday evening with her mother. It took her away from the dour, narrow streets and cheap and grimy brick houses of the town and back to the more innocent country world of her childhood.
Her mother’s cottage, in the village at the base of Longridge Fell, was within ten miles of the sordid shed in the industrial area of Brunton where she had knelt beside the decaying body of that still anonymous dead girl. Yet in the feeling it conveyed of a safe and wholesome security, this place might have been on the other side of the world.
It was a stone cottage with a neat, cheerful garden at the front, at the end of a row which made up one of the three lanes in the small village. These had been humble dwellings for farm workers when they were built, but the small houses had been skilfully placed. When the winds howled in from the Fylde coast on its western side, these dwellings seemed to curl themselves up in the lee of the hill, letting the winds sweep over their sturdy slate roofs.
Agnes Blake had been widowed for ten years. She was sixty-nine now, but still hale and independent enough to work part-time in a supermarket in the neighbouring Longridge. She looked forward to her daughter’s visits more than she would ever have admitted. Although the old place had central heating these days, Agnes had lit a fire two hours before Lucy’s arrival, so that flames now licked cheerfully up the chimney. And the face of the woman Agnes still saw as a girl glowed pink and healthy, as she nestled cosily into the chair in which her father had once sat and told stories to the wide-eyed child upon his knee.
