Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  ‘Why?’ The word came like a pistol shot from the woman beside him. Her face was flushed. A lock of red hair had fallen over her forehead and the blue eyes glittered with fury.

  Tucker held up a magisterial hand to her. ‘I’ll handle this, Sergeant, if you don’t mind. But the lady has a point, Inspector Peach. Our masters have long since admitted women to the processes of detection. There are even female detective inspectors.’ He smiled encouragingly at Lucy Blake, then with a triumphant blandness at Percy Peach. His archness was terrible to behold. ‘So why should even so effective an officer as DS Peach see himself as an exception to the rules we are all happy to operate by?’

  Tucker was pleased with his delivery of the speech he had worked on over the last week. As Peach threatened to explode, the superintendent’s civilian secretary brought in a tray with a pot of coffee, a plate of biscuits, and china cups and saucers. Tucker produced what he later decided was his master-stroke, a truly amazing improvisation. ‘Perhaps you’d be kind enough to pour the coffee, Percy? We can’t be seen to be sexist in the presence of the newest recruit to our team, can we?’

  Peach’s black eyebrows beetled so far forward that Lucy Blake could not see the dark, porcine pupils beneath them as he handed her a cup and saucer. ‘Make the most of this,’ he rasped. ‘You’ll find it’s chipped mugs in the real world downstairs.’

  In that moment, he knew that his cause was lost.

  DS Blake bit into a ginger biscuit with her perfect white teeth, then raised her china cup to Percy in what seemed to his suspicious eyes an ironic toast. ‘Thank you, sir. I expect I shall survive, though.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The first day of October might have been designed to show off the advantages of the North Lancashire golf course.

  The Indian summer which descends in most years for at least a week in early autumn had chosen to fall this time upon the whole of Britain. From Caithness to Cornwall, the sun shone unfiltered by clouds as the days shortened and the country basked in the year’s last warmth like a vast luxuriating animal. There were thin, still mists in the morning about the lower parts of the green land but, as the sun rose and banished them, the visibility on these mornings was the sharpest of the year.

  Gary Jones looked out on the many miles of country he could see from the high ground around the eighth tee and congratulated himself again on the marvellous luck which had sent him here. To some of the older members, there was something incongruous in seeing a black man smelling the cool English air with such relish. But his fellow-workers, catching Gary’s Lancashire accent as strong as theirs and knowing how he had grown up in nearby Brunton, saw nothing strange in the sight, though they liked to mock Gary’s enthusiasm when it grew too bold for them.

  Today he was strangely quiet, but even the least poetic soul would have paused over the view of the Ribble Valley from here. The land stretched away to Longridge Fell with only an occasional glimpse of the river and its tributaries. The bright green capping of the cupolas of Stonyhurst College was placed as if by a painter as a point of interest in the middle distance. The miles of land on either side of the broad, shallow valley were divided by the hedges and meadows of man, but not marked by his cities. Tommy Clarkson was prone to tell anyone who would listen that there was no town of any great size between here and Scotland to the north, despite the invisible proximity of Lancashire’s industrial settlements to the south.

  Away to the right was the great mound of Pendle Hill, with its associations with witches and the old faith which the area had held on to long after Henry’s breach with Rome. The land was wilder and bleaker here, with the great limestone heights of Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent sharp enough in the distance to persuade you that they were much nearer than they were. Gary had read that Penrith had once been capital of England, though he was not sure when that was and he had never been there. But he did know that this wild landscape to the north, which he looked at with his usual mixture of awe and pleasure, had not changed much in a thousand years.

  Well, he and his fellows were making their own small amendment to the face of the earth here. There had been a couple of protests from members about the change, as there always were in these ecological days. But it had been explained to them that the quarry they were trying to preserve was itself an intrusion upon the landscape, of industrial origin and scarcely more than a hundred years’ existence, and the protests had fallen apart.

  As Tommy Clarkson sturdily maintained, what they would achieve in the next month or two would be an improvement to the area; the new small lake, sheltering in the lee of the hill, would be a more promising habitat for wildlife than the deep but tiny pool of the disused quarry. As the sun climbed higher and the blue of the sky above him became even more brilliant, Gary turned with a will to the building of the dam across the little stream that ran clear and sparkling from the only spring on this high ground.

  It was satisfying work. One of his green staff colleagues had been brought up on a farm out beyond Clitheroe, and knew about the building of drystone walls. They had laid out their stones as he bade them by the side of the stream. Now, under his direction, the three young men selected and put into place the stones which they were gradually building into the lower section of the dam.

  They had worked on it for the whole of yesterday. The wall was already eighteen yards long and two feet high, so that the members who came past them on this weekday morning could see the project beginning to take shape before their eyes. To Gary’s secret surprise, the wall held back the water and the lake was beginning to build behind their handiwork. Moisture seeped through and re-formed into a tiny rivulet in the bed of the former stream, but that was the intention. When the lake was fully formed, the stream would both feed it and flow from it at the rate it had always done in its old course.

  By the afternoon, the wall was three feet high and they had used almost all the stone they had gathered for the task. When they came back from their dinner break—in these northern climes lunch was a pretentious southern invention—the embryo lake was ten yards across, rising invisibly but inexorably towards the top layer of their dam. The first two of the many thousands of golf balls which would be lost here lay pathetically clear in the central section of the water.

  Against the skyline, where the outcrop of the old quarry bulged above them, they saw three dark figures. They recognized the boss immediately, but the other two were strangers to them. Tommy Clarkson came and inspected their morning’s work, complimenting Walter, the drystone waller, on his achievement. The lad, unused to having a specialist skill to display, smiled shyly and shrugged away the praise, his boot kicking absently at the ground. ‘We shall need more stone afore we can build much higher, boss,’ he said, pointing at the scattered and mostly rejected stones which were all that remained of the several trailer loads they had brought here behind the tractor.

  Tommy took off the cap he invariably wore and looked at the heavens, wiping his brow; it was a mannerism he often used as a prelude to speech. ‘You shall have stone a-plenty before the day’s out. Those chaps have come to plant a charge to blow away this side of the old quarry. The water should come tumbling down here, and there should be plenty of stone up there after the blast.’ They looked up to the two figures, who had already decided exactly where to place the charge and were determining how much explosive the enterprise would need.

  Walter was dispatched with another of the assistants to bring up the tractor and trailer from the machine shed, and Tommy Clarkson took Gary up above the quarry with him to begin marking out the site of the new tee for this remodelled hole. They soon had the rectangle marked out with string and wooden pegs, but Tommy found his dark young protégé unusually silent. Gary kept sneaking glances at the movements of the two explosives experts on the ground below them, though for much of the time the men were out of sight behind the rugged outcrops of stone which marked the perimeter of the old workings.

  Tommy Clarkson decided that Gary had probably never seen a
n explosion of this kind at close quarters. Few people had nowadays, unless you counted the demolition of the sixties council blocks which had become something of a spectator sport in the cities. ‘All right, lad, we’ll go and watch from the other side, when we’ve finished this,’ he said indulgently. Gary grinned weakly, as though in apology for such an unprofessional attitude.

  They had already erected the notices warning the members that the eighth hole was out of play for the afternoon. ‘Come on!’ said Tommy, ‘Before we miss the excitement!’ Like all good greenkeepers, he was as thrilled as a schoolboy by any activity that promised a major improvement to this course. He did not notice how reluctantly Gary Jones trailed behind him.

  ***

  It was an efficient explosion; not spectacular, by the standards of the professionals who engineered it, but satisfying in its effects. To Tommy Clarkson and Gary Jones, standing eighty yards away in the position of safety to which they had been directed, it was quite sufficiently dramatic.

  There was a muffled but still quite loud bang, then a fountain of earth and stones, which flew like water into the clear air, appeared to hang against the blue sky for a moment, then fell to earth in a prolonged spatter of sound. There was a ragged cheer from the four green staff; the two experts treated this as no more than a routine part of the day’s work. After a suitable interval of awe, Tommy Clarkson, who seemed to think it incumbent upon him as the senior man to make some comment, said, ‘Just like the bloody Blitz!’ He was far too young to have been even a child of the war but he felt the comment emphasized his senior status among the youngsters on his staff.

  The excitement was not over. The charges had been well placed, and the water from the quarry was pouring through the livid gap which had been blown in the side of its containing wall. The brown torrent cascaded down the hillside in a sudden flood, frightening in its speed and volume even though no one stood in its path.

  The flood raced down the cleft in the slope exactly as they had planned, joining the waters of the small lake they had already contrived, arriving like a tidal wave upon its still surface. The wave rushed across to the far bank of the natural container they had prepared for it, then fell back and eventually disappeared into a hundred subsidiary currents and disturbances. The residue began to pour over the top of the barrier they had made, but gently, subsiding in a moment into a series of rivulets. Walter said proudly, ‘Our wall held firm, even against that lot!’

  The hillside was now littered with a mixture of rocks, mud, earth and turf. The six men who had seen the explosion moved from their different positions to what a few minutes ago had been the old quarry pond. Most of the water had already gone, and the sides which had not seen the air for eighty years were exposed and raw on the near-vertical faces which remained intact. At the bottom of the steep-sided pit, there was still a muddy remnant of the pool, perhaps no more than two feet deep. Even that would not survive long, for the force of the departing water had removed most of the earth at that shattered side of the pool, so that the ragged gap had become now a sea of mud, with no resistance against the remaining water. The brown water frothed out in a gentle stream, carrying the mud with it wherever it met resistance. In a few minutes, there would be no more than a series of puddles at the bottom of the quarry.

  The detritus of the years began to emerge, surreal shapes covered in slime. Not much had been dumped here, since the quarry had been on private land, far from any road and hundreds of yards from public footpaths. There were two broken umbrellas, probably tossed there after their collapse by disgruntled golfers. There was what looked like a biscuit tin of thirty years or more before. There was a single bicycle wheel.

  And as the last of the waters seeped away down the slope, there was something else entirely. Limbs splayed into an obscene spread-eagle by the weights which held them down, there was something that once had moved and spoken and laughed like other human things. The men who found it now were cast into a sudden silence. The thing which had once been human like them lay face upwards, but with its whole surface mercifully covered in slime, so that no one could distinguish features on the face to which six pairs of eyes were inevitably drawn.

  Five of them were not sure at that first sighting whether the thing had been male or female. But one of them knew.

  All of them were aghast at the sight. But one of them was not surprised.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As head of the CID section at Brunton, Superintendent Tucker heard about the discovery of a body on the eighth hole of the North Lancashire Golf Club within twenty minutes.

  One of the tools of management essential to senior ranks is the capacity for delegation. It is a skill which is emphasized in all the management courses for high-ranking policemen. It was the one talent that Tommy Tucker had practised with real diligence. According to Detective Inspector Percy Peach, Tucker delegated all work and all responsibility until they disappeared from sight. In Percy’s not entirely unbiased view, Tommy Bloody Tucker passed the buck as swiftly as if it was a red-hot turd.

  Superintendent Tucker received the news of a decaying corpse of indeterminate age in the privacy of his penthouse office. He turned his swivel chair away from the window, with its view of the last two mill chimneys in the town and the rows of terraced housing snaking away over the hills from the centre. Then he looked at the emulsion-painted wall, which was blank apart from the small Lowry print which was his gesture towards his roots. He found the wall an aid to thought.

  Within two minutes, his face brightened. Awkward case, this was going to be. Body still to be identified; location unhelpful; scene-of-crime evidence no doubt minimal; suspects very probably no longer in the area; scents long gone cold. No one was likely to make a reputation on the strength of this one. Tucker mentally ticked off the list, then smiled.

  He picked up the internal telephone.

  ‘Peach? Something interesting has just come in. Seems right up your street, especially with your specialist knowledge of the area where the body was discovered… Yes, there is a body. Oh, and Percy, you’ll need to take DS Blake out there with you. Be a good run-in for the new pairing, this one will. You must have been looking forward to a serious crime investigation to test out the partnership.’

  He put down the phone before Peach could harass him by demanding detail. Then he swivelled his chair back to enjoy the view over the town. It was an indulgence, but he knew he could not be observed: Tommy Tucker permitted himself his first chuckle of the week.

  In his office at the North Lancashire Golf Club, the secretary strove to digest the sensational news from the course. Paul Capstick had not the wealth of experience of the darker side of life that made Superintendent Thomas Tucker such a model of composure. His reaction to the news of the corpse at the bottom of the old quarry pit was nothing like so measured as that of the head of the Brunton CID.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ was all he said to his female assistant. But he thought, why here? Why me?

  It was an understandable response. The secretary of a golf club is accustomed to think in terms of his organization before he allows himself a personal thought. The popular press, confident of a conditioned reaction in its readers, likes to make fun of golf clubs, and television has of late enjoyed its own measure of hilarity at their expense. Over recent years, some clubs, though not Paul Capstick’s, have provided the eager media with a wealth of comic social material.

  Scandal is even better than laughter as a boost to audience figures, if it can be found in high places, and golf clubs are seen as bastions of privilege and citadels of reaction by many who do not play the ancient game. A body on the course is a sensational starting point; if in the weeks to come it proved to be connected with one or more of the members, the North Lancs could remain in the headlines until it acquired a notoriety.

  That was not a pleasant thought for Paul Capstick. He quailed at the thought of fending off insistent, thick-skinned reporters. He groaned at the thought of distractions from his already busy schedule. This
was sure to halt work on the modifications to the eighth hole, and just when the weather had seemed to be assisting them with the heavier and messier parts of the work. The members would not like that; and members had a habit of assigning all blame to the secretary, even when only the most oblique of logic would allow them to do so.

  As Paul Capstick hurried out to the eighth hole, the future on this perfect October day seemed suddenly full of problems. It had been suggested to him that he put in an application for the secretaryship at Royal Lytham when that vacancy occurred in a year or so. The chairman at Royal Birkdale had even suggested that they might come head-hunting for him when their post fell vacant. Was all this to be thrown into jeopardy through unwanted publicity at the North Lancs?

  Golf club secretaries grow used to looking ahead. It is right for them to do so. But it also tends to make them nervous.

  Paul found as he hurried out to the eighth that the police surgeon was already on the scene. He felt the first stab at his amour propre when he saw policemen roping off the area and beginning the erection of a canvas screen; it was the first time he could remember outsiders erecting such barriers on a golf course without any consultation with the secretary. But these, he told himself again, were unusual circumstances.

  The police surgeon had put on a pair of wellingtons to wade into the mud and make his grisly examination. With the dark trousers of his city suit tucked carefully into the green rubber, he looked like a company director visiting a building site. When Paul Capstick called to the doctor across the twenty yards of brown water and oozing silt, he did it more to announce his presence than in genuine pursuit of information. ‘Is it a suicide, do you think, Doctor Patterson?’