Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  The flying figure, looking back fearfully over its shoulder, came most opportunely out of the night, as if rewarding his decision. Peach’s small but expertly applied foot caught the youth’s instep with a wholly satisfactory precision. The man’s momentum made him a projectile; he hurtled through the darkness and landed on his chest in the gutter eight feet away with an expulsion of air that rent the night asunder.

  Percy had his foot between the narrow shoulder blades within a second but it was hardly necessary. The body was without air, its arms flung out above the head as if in supplication. After a moment, there was a shuddering intake of air into the battered lungs; it shook the whole frame into a groaning life. Percy voiced the familiar words with unmitigated satisfaction. ‘You’re nicked, sunshine!’

  He held the wrist gently until the youth struggled apprehensively to his feet, then moved it firmly into the small of the slim back. There were grazes on the cheek and forehead, trickles of blood from nostril and chin, but apparently no serious damage. As the man made as if to lean on Peach’s car, the DI moved the arm a little further up his back, squeezing out a little yelp of pain as the body straightened. ‘Don’t worry lad, you’ve still got two of everything,’ Peach said. He pushed him five yards farther down the road, bent him almost on to all fours as he retrieved the knife from the spot where it had come to rest beneath the wheel of a van.

  ‘Just fancy that!’ said Percy, as he examined the weapon beneath the street lamp. ‘Naughty lad, aren’t you?’ He pronounced the formal words of arrest as two uniformed men appeared panting from the darkness. ‘This what you want, lads?’ Percy Peach was back on familiar territory. Relief surged with the adrenalin through his veins.

  Back in the North Lancashire Golf Club, Peach’s golfing future was being decided. Only the committee would vote but, as a gesture towards democracy, all the people who had been at the cocktail party were invited to contribute their opinions before the formal session began. Even the one female who had been present was asked for her views: no one could say that the North Lancashire was not among the most progressive of golf clubs. It emerged that the Lady Captain had found Detective Inspector Denis Charles Scott Peach ‘a likeable man beneath his natural shyness’. She thought it quaint but appealing that he liked to be called Percy.

  Despite the handicap of this feminine approval, the committee subsequently found little fault with Peach’s candidature. The red-faced chairman of the Development Committee even ventured the positive view that he might be ‘the type of young feller we’re looking for’. It was rare approval from this quarter and the younger men around the table had not the temerity to question the basis for the thought.

  When the name was put to the vote and the bag passed around the table, no fatal black ball was slipped into its anonymous folds. While Percy Peach was consigning his captive to the cells, he was quietly accepted into the hallowed company of the North Lancashire Golf Club.

  In the weeks to come, he was to wonder increasingly why he had ever applied.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Shirley Minton had finished cleaning the house. It didn’t take her long, now that there were just the two of them. She often wished that there was more of a mess, as there used to be in the old days with the children around. The state they used to let their bedrooms get into! She smiled at the recollection, and her gaze switched automatically to the open door and the staircase she could see across the hall.

  Well, there was no use living in the past: Derek was right about that. It wasn’t fair to him, for one thing, and he was a good man. He understood what she felt about Debbie, as much as any man would. That was it, really: he was only a man, and you had to remember that. She pushed the vacuum away into its cupboard and got out a brilliant yellow duster. She had always liked a bright clean duster and she found that nowadays she looked forward to the tiny surge of pleasure it gave to her each day.

  For she had to admit that she now dusted on most days. Once it had been once a week. Then, in the first days after Debbie had gone and she had been waiting for her to come home, it had become twice a week; now, as the months passed and there was no news from her, she had begun to go round the surfaces in the living room every day. She did not know quite when that habit had spread out to include the rest of the house.

  It wouldn’t be so bad, she thought, if she saw Charlie more often, even if a son could never be quite the same as a daughter. But Sussex was a long way away and now that he had the two young children, it wasn’t easy for him to travel up to Lancashire. She understood all that. It wasn’t just because he had never quite taken to Derek.

  The two of them had got over that and it hadn’t been too awkward when her son had come up for those two days at Christmas. She couldn’t remember much about it now, except that she had felt Debbie’s absence even more keenly when her son was with her. They had all tried to make her forget and be jolly but it was only natural that she should be sad, wasn’t it? Someone had to keep the poor girl’s memory green, after all. You needn’t worry about that, Debbie love, whilst Mummy’s here. But come back quickly, love, won’t you? Come back. Soon.

  She moved round the room in the routine that had become so familiar that she had ceased to notice it. Even the moments when she paused to look out over the neat suburban back garden stretched to the same length each time now, though it was others and not she who had remarked on it. She wished sometimes that she could interest herself in the garden, as Derek and the doctor had tried to encourage her to do, but she did not much like going out of the house lately, even into the garden.

  People saw you if you were out, and if they saw you they asked questions. She hadn’t the patience for them any longer. It was all right people offering sympathy but of course they didn’t really understand. You couldn’t expect them to, she supposed, since they hadn’t been through it. Perhaps when Debbie came back it would all be clearer to them.

  She worked her way methodically round the room to finish at the sideboard, postponing until last, as usual, the pleasure of the photographs. There were three of Debbie, but she didn’t spend long now on the ones of her as a child. She dusted the biggest one last, then held it in both hands to stare fondly into the shining face, with its broad mouth and perfect teeth. Last of all, she looked into the eyes, those wide brown ovals of perfect life, and found them laughing with her as always. Each day she had the secret fear that the smile would not be there in them, but each day that secret, intimate laughter which bonded the two of them together was there for her to hear. She bent her head to kiss the picture. The glass was cold against her lips. Cold as the grave, her mother used to say. Well, she wasn’t having that, whatever they all tried to tell her.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that, you know.’ She jumped as if she had been stabbed. Her duster flew into the air and dropped soundlessly to the spotless carpet. But he had watched her silently for almost a minute, waiting for her to put the photograph down, so that she would not break the frame when she was startled. He went across and put his arm round her shoulders, feeling them trembling still with the shock through her cardigan, frightening himself with the strength of the love which surged through him at the feel of her suffering.

  She said, ‘I’m glad we had that taken, Derek, when she was eighteen. Coming into her majority, she called it. The little madam! You remember that I said it should be twenty-one?’

  How could he forget it, when she mentioned it each time she touched the picture with him around? But he knew that it was just an excuse to talk about the daughter who had vanished. He took a deep breath, trying desperately to pitch in with a tone of optimism, not resignation. ‘Shirley, I thought we’d agreed on something, old girl. You promised you’d look to the future, not the past.’

  That again, she thought. Why can’t they all leave me at peace with the little that I have? She said, ‘What future? I’m living in suspended animation; you should know that, Derek.’ It was the phrase the doctor at the hospital had used. She didn’t say he had told her she m
ust get out of it herself.

  Indeed, Derek Minton did know it. He thought of the one-sided conversations over meals. Of his arrivals home to find her staring sightlessly at the walls. Of the lovemaking which was without love, as one-sided as their conversations. Many times now, he would have welcomed a little open hostility. Those normal little marital spats, with raised voices over the disagreement and laughing reconciliations in due course, seemed now to belong to a different world. He said hopelessly, ‘You’ve got to face it, Shirley. Debbie may never come back.’

  ‘She’ll come. You’ll see.’ Shirley was still an attractive woman of forty-five, despite all this. But her seraphic smile made him understand how people who looked after geriatric relatives were sometimes driven to savage assaults on their loved ones as their resolute determination to live in a different world finally became too much for the carers.

  She nodded now, looking out over the garden where the child had played before she grew into a woman, and he knew the exchange was going to be hopeless, even as he said, ‘You have to face the fact that Debbie may never come back, love. Something—something might have happened to her. It’s nearly two years now, you know. She wasn’t the kind of girl who wouldn’t get in touch, not in all that time.’ He tightened his arm across her shoulder blades, wondering if the thought was too brutal for her, but as usual he need not have worried.

  She shook her head, still with that childish, undisturbed smile. She did not even trouble to contradict him. She knew so much more than he did about her daughter, and that was an end of it, really. She wanted for a moment to say, ‘You can’t really know, Derek; you’re not her real father, even though you were good to her and she liked you, even though she was happy to take your name.’ But that would have been unkind, and she had no wish to hurt Derek, who loved her, she supposed, though she didn’t think about that much, nowadays.

  She looked back at the sideboard, at the pictures of her daughter as a small child, and felt a deep compassion for Derek because he had not seen Debbie in those carefree years, when he might have thrown her laughing above his head, as fathers did with young children, and caught the delicious infection of her laughter. What a giggler she had been, in those days! And how clever and how charming in getting her own way! Shirley said, ‘Perhaps she’ll come home, when the two years are up. She was always one for birthdays and anniversaries.’ A little frown furrowed her brow for a moment. ‘I’m still surprised she didn’t come for her twenty-first, really.’

  Derek Minton fought the despair which he felt dropping upon him like a dark blanket. Debbie’s twenty-first had been an awful day, with the cake standing on the table and Shirley gazing down the road for the girl who all but she knew would not come home for the party. He roused himself to frame a last argument, ‘That’s just it, love. If she’d been going to come, she’d surely have come then. For her twenty-first. It would have meant a lot to Debbie to be here then.’

  Somehow, without either of them noticing her stoop to retrieve it, the bright yellow duster was back in Shirley’s hands. She had been twisting it gently between her fingers for a minute at least. Without looking down, fingering her way over the object as securely as a blind woman, she began to dust again the frame of her daughter’s last picture.

  ***

  The new Brunton police headquarters building was like any other office block. There were discreet notices near the entrance which proclaimed its function, no bigger than those which announced the insurance company in the next block or the northern branch of the electrical giant on the other side.

  There were cells aplenty in the basement at the rear of the block and the interview rooms were suitably airless and austere, but the public saw none of these things, unless they got themselves into trouble. Only the vast size of the building proclaimed that crime was the great growth industry of the nation: the block had seven times as many rooms as the solid Victorian cop-shop it had replaced.

  Percy Peach would have liked a more aggressive police presence—let the buggers know you’re around and watching was his policy—but the architect had not consulted Percy. According to those who worked within this tower of computer Babel, he had not consulted any policeman. Otherwise he would not have put in a car park which was too small at the bottom and a huge oak-panelled conference room which was used on average once a week at the top. But the men and women who actually work in such buildings take too narrow a view, of course.

  These thoughts passed in quick succession through Peach’s mind before it switched to more trenchant ones about the people within the building. And in particular Chief Superintendent John D Tucker, Head of the CID section. Tommy Bloody Tucker, as Percy had grown used to calling him, had sent for Peach bright and early on this Tuesday morning. Before he was actually in the building, in fact. Percy had found the note requesting his attendance among the other papers on his desk; it had improved neither his morning nor his temper.

  He pressed the button outside Tommy Bloody Tucker’s office. The column of round lights to the right of the door said in quick succession ‘Engaged’, ‘Wait’ and ‘Come In,’ then repeated the process in a more random order. It was rather like an inferior disco; Percy reflected that it had taken Tucker five years to master the command ‘Come!’ when people knocked at his door in the old building: he was never going to come to terms with this electronic wizardry before his eagerly awaited retirement.

  Peach opened the door abruptly and discovered his chief still frowning over the buttons. He looked at Percy over the top of his glasses, then smiled in recognition. A bad sign, usually: he was not given to smiling at Percy unless he had bad news for him. It might be no more than a change in the duty roster, or it might be something much worse; it was just not possible for anyone to fine-tune the monitoring of the chief’s facial expressions. Percy said, ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

  Tucker’s face clouded for a moment in the face of the challenge, then cleared. ‘Indeed I did, Percy. Do sit down.’ He waved expansively at the big leather armchair which had come with the room. These are bad signs, thought Percy, both the use of the first name and the request to be seated. Usually Tucker was uncomfortable enough with Peach to want him in and out as quickly as possible.

  Tucker waited for a moment, studying the detective inspector’s dapper grey suit and watchful morning face, waiting for curiosity to cloud the squat features beneath the fringe of jet-black hair. Peach remained stubbornly inscrutable, his pate shining as brightly white as his shoes shone black at the other end of his stocky frame. Tucker was nettled into a little diversion. ‘You weren’t in when I sent for you earlier.’ It sounded petty, even to his own insensitive ears.

  Peach hastened to underline it as that. ‘No, sir. I didn’t hurry in this morning, because I was in here at almost midnight last night. Charged a lad with GBH and possession of an offensive weapon.’

  Tucker’s eyes widened. ‘I thought you were off duty last night.’

  Peach smiled delightedly. There was a use for Tommy Tucker after all. As a straight man. Percy said modestly, ‘Oh I was, sir. But a good policeman is never off duty. I think I’ve heard you say that yourself, sir. When bolstering morale among the younger officers, I think.’

  Tucker searched Peach’s bland features for a hint of the insolence he thought he detected in the tone. ‘Yes. Well, err, well done, anyway. First-class job. Got him banged to rights, I gather.’

  ‘I understand he intends to plead guilty, sir, yes. Get him for causing an affray as well, I expect.’

  Tucker looked down at the papers on his desk, striving for the casual note for his next inquiry. ‘I thought you were going for an interview at the golf club last night, Percy?’ He tacked on the first name like a man addressing a dangerous dog.

  ‘The North Lancs, yes.’ Peach dropped in the prestigious name with all the casualness which his chief had aimed at and missed. How had this bugger found out about that, he wondered. Was it the masonic grapevine? If it could land a wanker like Tucker in a job li
ke this, it could certainly glean information easily enough. Percy tended to blame the masons for everything since he had found out that Tommy Bloody Tucker was one.

  ‘Successful was it? The interview.’

  Peach tried to look as if he was considering the matter for the first time. ‘Oh, I think so, sir. Of course, I had the formal interview some time ago. I gather last night’s exercise was just a social occasion—to let me see the club and meet a few of the bigwigs, you know. But of course, you’d know far more about these things than I would, sir.’ He enjoyed that. Tucker was a member of the more mundane Brunton Golf Club and by all accounts far too much of a golfing rabbit to be proposed for the North Lancs.

  Tucker said, ‘Yes. Well, that isn’t what I asked you to come in here to talk about.’ He made it sound as if it was Peach, not he, who had raised the diversion of golf clubs; Percy bent his head apologetically, pleased that his shaft had so clearly struck home. He hoped more desperately than ever before that the North Lancs would indeed accept him.

  The chief superintendent riffled through the papers on his desk, then said abruptly, ‘We’re going to lose DS Collins, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that, sir.’

  ‘Well, we are. Partly owing to your report on his assessment form, no doubt.’ Tucker made it into a peevish accusation. He hated disturbance, would have preferred that even the most efficient officers were held at their present ranks for ever if it kept his team intact and prevented his incompetence being discovered by new personnel. ‘Collins is being promoted to inspector.’

  ‘He deserves it, sir. He’s a good man.’

  Peach would never have let Sid Collins hear him say that. He realized almost for the first time what an effective team they had been over the last three years: he as bouncy and aggressive as a bantam cock, Collins taciturn and observant, looking for areas where the soft touch might complement his inspector’s belligerence. They were physical contrasts, too; the station referred to them as the long and short of it. Collins was tall and thin, his quiet competence towering almost a foot above Peach’s squat pugnacity.