by J M Gregson
Tom Boyd was doing the autumn tidy-up in his garden when they arrived.
He lived in Poulton-le-Fylde, a few miles inland from Blackpool and the coast, where the land was protected from the worst of the coast’s salt-laden gales. Poulton was the nearest place to the coast where trees would grow properly, the locals said, and Boyd, like many policemen, enjoyed his gardening.
He was stacking the dead top growth of phlox and peonies into his wheelbarrow, when a voice over the low wall of his garden said, ‘Burn well, that will, when you get the bonfire going.’ He recognized Peach as a copper immediately, as much by his bearing as his appearance. He was less sure about the pretty young woman with the red-brown hair at his side, until she was introduced to him as Detective Sergeant Blake.
Boyd thought of saying that things had looked up since his days as a young constable, but decided that even compliments might be interpreted as sexist: you couldn’t be too careful, these days. So he merely said heavily, ‘I was expecting a visit from CID. You’d better come into the house.’
He was ten years older than Peach, twenty years older than the watchful young woman beside him, but he knew that the age differential would afford him no privileges in this situation. He had the kettle ready and the biscuit tin beside it, but they refused tea. They sat in his neat, rather sterile lounge, which had so much less of him in it than the garden outside. He looked not at them but out through the window, at the greenhouse he had just filled with chrysanthemums in bud, as he said, ‘I’m embarrassed by this, but no more than that. I’ve been foolish, but I haven’t done anything criminal.’
‘Remains to be seen, Inspector Boyd.’ Peach dismissed the sympathy he felt for a lonely fellow-officer and summoned his normal acerbic tone: this man was a policeman, but he might also be a murderer. Guilty until proved innocent was the watchword here. ‘Kerb-crawling in search of sex. That’s an offence to start with. Before you’ve started, as you might say.’
Boyd looked at him sharply. ‘I’m from the firm, Peach. Surely that should count for something!’
‘Already has done. You know better than most that we could have held you in Brunton nick for twenty-four hours. Thirty-six, with a superintendent’s say-so. We could have grilled you there, yesterday. Instead of which, we’ve driven thirty miles on a Saturday afternoon to see you in your own house.’
‘All I was doing was paying for my sexual pleasures. I was quite frank about that. Surely my honesty and my rank in the service should mean something.’
‘Could do, perhaps, with lesser crimes. But not when someone’s committed murder. Was it you, Inspector Boyd?’
‘No, of course it wasn’t.’
‘Then convince us of that, and we’ll go away and leave you in peace.’
Tom Boyd glanced automatically at the young woman beside Peach. He had long since learned to accept women in the police service, working beside him, sometimes even giving him instructions. Yet his acceptance had not run as deep as he thought it had: in this crisis, he did not relish saying the things he would have to say in front of DS Blake.
He was powerful and broad-shouldered, with hair slicked back on either side of a parting which was nearly central: he looked like a footballer on one of the cigarette cards of the nineteen thirties. He said to Lucy, ‘You’re the same age as my daughter, love. It’s not easy for me to talk about this.’
‘You don’t have a choice, Inspector Boyd.’ Peach’s words cut like a whiplash across the man’s plea.
Boyd looked at him with a face full of fury, so that they glimpsed for a moment a man with the possibility of murder within him. Then his square face resumed its mask and he said, ‘All right. I live on my own. I’m divorced. It’s par for the course, in the police. You should know that.’
‘I’m divorced myself,’ said Peach quietly.
‘Well then. I’m forty-eight, not seventy-eight. I still have urges. Still need to satisfy them.’ He gave an instinctive nervous look at Lucy Blake’s face, but her blue-green eyes were on her notebook, her face studiously impassive.
‘So you come and indulge them in Brunton.’ Peach’s black eyes had never left his subject.
‘Where I’m off my own patch. Where I’m not shitting on my own doorstep.’
‘Where a girl was murdered a week earlier. Where as a copper you should have known you’d be asking for trouble.’
Boyd’s lips set in a thin line beneath the broad nose. ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’
‘Convince us of that, and we’re on our way. We’ve got better things to do on a Saturday afternoon, like you.’
Tom Boyd allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I’ve nothing really to add to what I said last night in Brunton. My first inclination was to get well away from Blackpool. Preston was too near. The first place where I felt comfortable was Brunton. I drove out there, had a drink in a pub to bolster my nerve – I’m not as used to picking up tarts as you might think.’
‘Where?’
‘Mellor. The Miller’s Arms.’
‘Time?’
‘I wasn’t checking that. It must have been nearly half past nine by the time I got there. I didn’t stay long in the pub. There were two blokes at the bar talking about the murder of that call-girl the week before. They might or might not remember me: I didn’t speak to them.’
‘It’s not important at this stage. What time did you start cruising?’
Boyd noticed the use of the offensive word, but did not pick up on it. He knew that if you lost your rag it made you more vulnerable. ‘I told you, I wasn’t checking the time, it wasn’t important to me. I picked a girl up in Brunton at about ten, I should think.’
‘Why Brunton?’
‘I told you, it was the nearest place where—’
‘Come off it, Inspector Boyd. You’re a copper, a man who knows his way around well enough to have made Inspector. You know the ropes well enough not to go whoring in a town where a pro’s been murdered seven days earlier!’
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because there was a very good chance of landing yourself in the situation you’re in now. A very good chance of being caught with your trousers down and dragged into a murder inquiry.’
‘I – I suppose I should have been more careful, yes. I just didn’t think this would happen. I took a chance and—’
‘No, Inspector Boyd! You’re not a chance-taker, are you? Your whole career, your progress to date, is evidence of that.’
‘All right, Peach! We’re not all the kind of chancers who make DCI in the CID. Some of us play life a bit more carefully.’
He had allowed himself to be angered after all, and it wasn’t doing his case any good. Peach looked at him steadily, without the animosity the man had shown to him. ‘You weren’t just picking up a tart and paying for it, as you’ve said so far. You were looking for a particular girl, weren’t you?’
Tom Boyd looked for a moment as if he would deny it. Then he said sullenly, ‘So what if I was? If you find a girl you like and go back to her, it makes it a bit more personal, doesn’t it?’ He glanced into Lucy Blake’s unlined face and said bitterly, ‘A bit more like the real thing, see?’
‘So you admit that when you were kerb-crawling, you were looking for a particular girl? That the reason you took the risk of going back to Brunton was to seek out a particular hooker?’
‘All right, yes! Since you seem to know so bloody much about it, yes! I’d seen the girl before. Paid her for sex. Liked what I got. Thought it would be nice to repeat the experience. That’s all.’
Peach regarded him steadily as his breathing came in uneven gasps. Tom Boyd had conducted plenty of interviews, even though he was not CID. But he could not remember when he had last been interviewed himself, and he felt unexpectedly helpless in the situation.
Peach looked at him as if he was a fish floundering on a river bank, studying his increasing discomfort with a disconcerting objectivity. Then he said quietly, ‘She gave special services, this particular girl, didn’t sh
e, Tom? That’s why you were so anxious to find her.’
Boyd was still trying to steady his breathing, feeling that if he could get that back to normal, his brain would work better. He knew he must be careful. For all he knew, these people had already talked to the girl, had received a full account of everything they had done last night. He said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like being on your own. When you get a girl you like, you go back, even though you’re paying for it. You feel better in yourself about going to one you know than going to anyone who will take your money, working your way through a whole succession of girls.’
He looked pathetically at Lucy Blake, as if he might get more sympathy from her, as if she might understand that this was a little less dishonourable, that even among prostitutes you could be less promiscuous if you chose to be.
She smiled at him. She wanted to use his first name, to use her softness to draw from him things which he might deny to Peach’s harsh approach. But the training of rank was hard to dismiss: even here she could not bring herself to address an inspector by his first name. She said, ‘What was it that Katie Clegg offered that made you go back to her, Inspector Boyd?’
They knew the girl’s name then. Ten to one they’d had her in and got every detail of what they’d done last night out of her. Bloody CID! They wouldn’t pull any punches when they saw a uniformed officer from another force in trouble. He muttered, ‘I didn’t even know her name. She did a few extras, that’s all.’
Peach, sensing that his resistance was ended, spoke quietly now. ‘What sort of extras, Tom?’
‘Nothing much. Nothing very unusual, for these days. An extra ten quids’ worth, a bit of fun for me and a nice little bonus for her.’
‘So tell us what you paid the extra for.’
Boyd made a last desperate plea. ‘Look, there’s no need to humiliate me like this, is there? What do you want, Peach? A cheap thrill in front of a pretty sergeant, is it? Is that what you get off on, the fantasies some poor old bugger has to pay to indulge? Is that—’
‘Inspector Boyd, this is a murder inquiry! Until we learn something different, you are a suspect in that inquiry. You know the score as well as anyone. Now, answer the question please, or we shall have to record the fact that you refused.’
Boyd looked at Peach’s round face, at his unsmiling mouth and the relentless dark eyes which would not leave him. Then his big shoulders gave a hopeless shrug and he said in an even voice, ‘It was no great deal. Not nowadays. I find I enjoy a bit of bondage as I get older, that’s all. She got out the fetters and the handcuffs: I can’t be the only one, can I, or she wouldn’t have them so handy?’
‘And you enjoyed a bit of violence to go with it.’ Peach made it a statement, not a question, this time.
‘God, you want your pound of flesh, don’t you? Well, believe it or not, I can’t recall it very clearly. I got my rocks off, which is what I’d gone there for, and the preliminaries got me pretty excited. We got a bit aggressive with each other as I came towards orgasm, even knocked each other about a bit, I suppose. Is that what she told you?’
Peach smiled. ‘You know the system too well to expect an answer to that, Inspector Boyd. You also know that in the light of the murder of a prostitute a week earlier, we are going to have special interest in anyone who admits getting off on violent sex with a lady of the streets.’
Boyd nodded slowly. ‘All the same, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I’m not your man.’
‘Where were you on the night of Friday the fourteenth of November?’
The tough, squat-featured man glanced from one to the other with something like panic in his eyes. ‘I was at home. I didn’t go out on that night.’
They noted that the answer had been ready, that he hadn’t needed to think much about it. Lucy Blake, making a note of his reply, said softly, without looking up, ‘And were you alone?’
‘Yes. I finished duty at the Blackpool nick, had a pint with another officer in the pub near the station, and went home. I was at home from six thirty onwards.’
Peach and Boyd eyed each other steadily whilst the implications of this hung heavily between them. Then Peach said, ‘Is there anyone who could vouch for your whereabouts on that night?’
‘No.’ The reply came almost too promptly.
‘You didn’t make or receive any phone calls during the evening?’
‘I’d have told you if I had done. There’s no one who can vouch for the fact that I was sitting quietly in my own house on the night when that girl was killed. And unlike most criminals, I don’t have a wife who will conveniently swear to anything her man requires.’
They were policemen together for a moment as he said that, smiling sourly at the petty thief’s traditional alibi. But this was not petty thieving.
Boyd took them to the door of the clean, characterless house whose garden said so much more about the occupant than the interior. He made a last attempt to reassure himself as they left. ‘We both know I didn’t kill that girl on the fourteenth, Inspector Peach.’
Peach turned to look into the square face beneath the straight, slicked-back hair. ‘We both hope you didn’t: you more than me. But we haven’t got anyone lined up for this, so you know the score as well as I do. You remain in the frame, Inspector Boyd. If you think of anything which might take you out of it, ring Brunton CID immediately and ask for me.’
Twelve
Saturday night was quiet in the murder room. The week’s information had been logged on to the computers, cross-referenced in accordance with the latest practices. Local prostitutes had been interviewed about their clients. The clients themselves were varied but anonymous, but were in many cases being quizzed about their activities. Tom Boyd wasn’t the only man to be asked to account for his movements on the night of the fourteenth of November.
But the few officers who were working on the night of Saturday the twenty-second of November were out on the streets of Brunton. Apart from DC Gordon Pickering, who was alone in the murder room, manning the phones and trying hard to feel like the man in temporary charge of things.
It was ten thirty when the significant phone call came in. Gordon was listening to the sound of the first aggressive drunks of the night being cautioned and put in the cells. It was curious how sound penetrated quite thick walls when all else was quiet in the building.
The voice on the phone sounded a little slurred, as if it too might have been drinking. It said, ‘You haven’t caught the man who killed Sarah Dunne yet.’
It was a statement, not a question, and it banished abruptly the yawn which DC Pickering had just embarked upon. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and pressed the buzzer which would tell the switchboard that this call should be traced. He felt a tingle in the short hairs at the back of his head: for the first time in his life he might be talking on the phone to a murderer. As calmly as he could, Gordon said, ‘Who’s speaking, please?’
A laugh at the other end of the line. Probably not near to the mouthpiece: it sounded distant, almost as if it came from another room. ‘That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Who am I addressing?’
‘This is DC Pickering. What is it you have to report, please?’
‘Nothing to report. Just checking on what you have to report, actually. Which seems to be practically nothing.’
‘Give me your name, please.’
Again that distant, sardonic laugh. ‘Is Superintendent Tucker there?’
‘No. I’m the only CID officer in the station at present. What is it you have to tell me?’ Pickering was trying desperately to place the accent. He’d thought at first that it might be Liverpool, but this was no Scouser. Gordon wasn’t good at accents; it had never mattered until now.
‘I wanted to speak to the organ grinder, not the monkey. Well, never mind. Just you tell your Superintendent Tucker that he won’t catch this murderer.’
Pickering had the accent now. It was Birmingham, or Black Country: he didn’t know enough to distinguish between the two;
wasn’t even sure in fact that there was a distinction.
He found himself striving to keep his voice steady as the hairs crept anew on the back of his neck. He’d never met this situation before, never even envisaged meeting it. The secret was to keep the voice talking on the phone until the call could be traced, until you could send a squad car screaming to the scene. Or preferably not screaming: such advance notice of arrival should be confined to television series. ‘I’m in charge here tonight. I’m empowered to record whatever it is you have to tell us. It will be passed on to Superintendent Tucker and everyone else involved in the case. Please start with your name.’
‘In your dreams, lad. Tell your boss I just wanted to make sure the filth were as baffled by this one as by my previous two in this neck of the woods. Good night, son.’
‘Please keep talking, sir. I may be able to—’
To what? Gordon Pickering wondered. But it didn’t matter now, for the phone was dead. He was still staring at the receiver in his hand when the switchboard came through with the information that the call had come from a public phone booth in the centre of Birmingham.
Percy Peach was strictly off duty at the moment when Gordon Pickering was taking his call from Birmingham. Even his mobile phone was off duty; it lay on the chest of drawers with its battery switched off.
Lucy Blake looked into the full-length mirror in the wardrobe and saw the lubricious look she had feared lighting up the round features which had terrified so many villains. She said, ‘I think you’re a secret knicker fetishist.’
‘Wrong!’ said Percy Peach cheerfully. ‘I’ve never made a secret of it.’
Lucy measured the distance to the bed with her eye, making sure that she was just out of his reach. He might be reclining on one elbow in his bed like a Roman emperor, but she knew from experience that those powerful arms of his were unexpectedly long, when lust drove them on. Almost telescopic, at times.
The emerald green pants and bra had seemed a good idea, in the bright fluorescent lights of the shop. ‘Always buy something which would shock your mum!’ the shopgirl had advised, and they had enjoyed a giggle together about the thought. But here in Percy Peach’s bedroom the colour seemed to deepen and grow richer; that was all right of itself, but when applied to these garments perhaps it was tarty. The low moan from behind her as she stepped out of her slip did nothing to reassure her.
