Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  It took them some time to search him out, whilst she waited anxiously and smiled weakly at the few members who passed her. ‘Francis? Thank God they’ve found you. Look, I must see you. You’ve seen the papers?’ Even now, she felt she should not mention the name of Debbie Minton, as if that would somehow make things more damning for him. ‘I need to see you… No, don’t come here. I don’t think you should be seen around here at the moment. I’ll come and see you… No, not there. Somewhere more anonymous… Right… No, but I’ll find it, if it’s in the centre. Seven-thirty…? And Francis, just don’t say anything to anyone until I’ve spoken to you.’

  She rang off and stared bleakly at the phone for a moment. Then she pulled her golf club cheer over her features and went back into the noisy lounge to make her farewells.

  ***

  These two were a strange pair, thought Lucy Blake. She had almost got used to Percy Peach now, but his juxtaposition with Gary Jones still struck her as at once comic and a little sinister.

  Perhaps that was because Jones was so patently frightened. When she had first entered the police force, she had been told that it was hard to be certain what a black man was feeling from his face. That was certainly not so in Jones’s case. He was frightened, and it showed.

  Not just ordinarily frightened; the young man seemed for the first few minutes to be on the verge of physical flight from them. Peach must have been conscious of his terror, but he did nothing to dispel it. Lucy knew the inspector well enough by this time to be fairly certain that he enjoyed it, that he was thinking of ways of fostering rather than diminishing it.

  They had caught the young greenkeeper off his guard. He had been relaxing with his newspaper and the sandwiches he brought each day for his lunch in the big, hangar-like hut which provided shelter for both the course machinery and the course staff of the North Lancashire Golf Club. He was enjoying a few minutes’ quiet away from the others; having worked later than his colleagues during the morning on clearing a particularly obstinate drainage ditch, he was dining alone after the others had gone noisily back to their work on the course.

  Gary had worked hard with the trenching spade during the last two hours of the morning. He had enjoyed his sandwiches and the big mug of tea he had made himself as the others left. Normally he would have missed the gossip and the banter of his companions, but it was nice to have the place to yourself once in a while. He rocked contentedly backwards and forwards in the old chair. His eyelids began to droop as the warmth of the electric fire behind him stole over his tired limbs. There was a slight, not unpleasant smell of damp rising from the old carpet Tommy Clarkson had produced to cover the harsh concrete floor at this end of the big shed. In a moment, the newspaper slipped from between the slim fingers and drifted noiselessly on to the carpet.

  ‘So this is where you’re hiding yourself away. We thought you would have been back on the course with the others by now.’

  Percy Peach’s black leather shoes trod softly, and he had moved very close to the drowsing figure before he spoke. It meant that Jones, starting suddenly awake, saw the stocky figure framed in the light from the big open door as taller than it was, looming menacingly over him. It was so close that he had great difficulty in scrambling upright without touching this sinister new presence.

  ‘I—I worked late this morning. I’m still on my lunch break, you see.’ Gary peered at this menacing, bald-headed figure, who took care to stay between him and the light. Was it a member of the club? A new member of the Greens Committee perhaps, come to check on his staff? To report on the lad he mistakenly thought was a backslider? Most people were quite friendly when they passed him on the course, but Tommy Clarkson said there were still a few little Hitlers who got their kicks from a bit of authority. ‘It’s quite legitimate. If you ask Mr Clarkson—’

  ‘I did, lad. And Mr Capstick in the clubhouse. That’s why I’m here to have a word with you now. Assuming you’re Gary Jones, that is.’

  ‘Yes, that’s me. But—’

  ‘Police, lad. Inspector Peach. And this is Sergeant Blake.’ Peach didn’t trouble with a warrant card, not for a lad like this. For the first time, Gary became aware of the woman behind his awakener; she gave him a nod and a fleeting smile.

  Peach moved closer still, so that Jones took an involuntary step backwards and stumbled over the leg of the old rocking chair he had been dozing in when they crept up on him. ‘No need to be afraid, lad. Unless you’ve done something naughty, of course.’ Peach managed to turn even reassurance into a threat. He looked at Jones speculatively from this closest of ranges, his bald head inclining a little to one side, like a healthy fox assessing the throat of a terrified chicken.

  ‘Wh—what do you want with me?’ Gary knew that he should present himself better than this. He had been questioned by the police many times before; no black youth growing up in the town could have avoided that. He wanted to be truculent, as some of his companions had learned to be over the years. But he had never mastered that trick. And besides, these were plain clothes police, and that meant it was serious.

  And Gary Jones knew already why they were here.

  Peach looked unhurriedly round the shed, with its tractors and mowers, its chain saws, its fearsome-looking machine to spike the greens, its pile of fencing posts, its smells of grass and oil. ‘Like working here, do you?’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Gary tried the cautious surliness he had seen others use with the police. But his words seemed unfair to Tommy Clarkson and the others and he said, ‘It’s good here. We work hard, but it’s in the open air and it’s interesting work. And the boss—’

  ‘You won’t want to lose the job, then. No reason why you should, providing you give us your full co-operation. Unless, of course, you’ve been a seriously bad lad.’

  Gary found that he had backed away to the bench against the wall: he could feel the steel handle of the vice pressing like a gun into his back. Peach must have followed him, for he was still very close, but Gary had never seen him move. He said, ‘I’ll give you all the help I can. But I’m sure—’

  ‘Debbie Minton. That’s what we’re here about. To see what you can tell us about Debbie Minton.’

  Gary swallowed, nodded. It was almost a relief that this menacing man had got to it at last. ‘Is that the girl whose body we found when they blasted out the old quarry pond on the eighth?’

  Peach smiled: a horrid, knowing smile. ‘That’s the one, lad. But what we’re interested in is the people she knew when she was alive. The people she was close to in the months before her death. Including a certain Gary James Jones. Very close to her, he seems to have been, at that time. According to our records at the station. According to other young men and women we have been talking to.’ Best to feed that in now: saved a lot of time with denials.

  Gary felt his knees trembling. He pressed back hard against the bench, finding the vice pushing his spine awkwardly forward. He must look as bent as some of the old men who played in the seniors’ section on Wednesday mornings. Except that they usually seemed to be enjoying life, despite the restrictions of their infirmity.

  He said, ‘I knew Debbie, yes.’ Then, with what seemed like a flash of inspired improvisation, he added, ‘That’s why I was so upset when we found what was left of her up there on the eighth.’

  Peach’s face broke into a slow, wide smile, the mirth spreading gradually over the squat features, until they reminded Gary of a long-forgotten illuminated turnip he had carried long ago on Hallowe’en. ‘Mr Capstick and Mr Clarkson both noticed that. That you seemed unusually upset when those gruesome remains were discovered up there.’ The row of small, immaculately white teeth, with the two upper canines missing, seemed to be all that Gary could see at that moment. The rest of the face must now be perfectly visible in the light from the window at his back but that Cheshire-cat grin was all he could see. It deprived him of all power of thought, so that he blundered on, consolidating the mistake with which he had already delighted his tormentor.
‘I was upset. I told you so. Finding Debbie up there like that really got to me.’

  ‘Very understandable. Except, of course, that you shouldn’t have known it was Debbie.’

  ‘Shouldn’t have known?’ Gary heard himself stupidly repeating the phrase, like a television straight man.

  Peach’s grin disappeared as slowly as it had arrived; all humour seemed to drain with it, until the round white face of a tormenting ogre was restored. His voice was clipped, almost bored, as he said, ‘We didn’t know who it was ourselves for twenty-four hours. The identity wasn’t released to the public until another day after that.’ Without taking his eyes off his victim’s face, Peach kicked the stool from beneath the bench out into the open. ‘I should sit down, lad, if I were you. You look as if you need to. And we’ve hardly started yet.’

  Gary sat down hastily, abruptly, deprived now of all rhythm in his movements. The stool jarred his buttocks, his hips, his whole frame, as if he had fallen on to it from a height. He gripped the edges of it as hard as he could, trying to feel the blood in the fingers, to give himself the proof that they were not actually as nerveless as they felt. ‘I didn’t know it was Debbie when we found her.’

  ‘But you just said you did.’

  ‘Yes. I—I was mistaken.’

  Peach gave the tiniest of nods to Lucy Blake, which Jones did not notice because he had dropped his eyes hopelessly upon the cracks in the concrete floor. She said quietly, ‘Then why were you more upset than the others, Gary? So upset that your boss and the club secretary noticed it.’

  He looked at her in bewilderment; he had almost forgotten her presence during Peach’s withering attack. ‘I—I don’t really know. I knew she’d disappeared suddenly and that no one had heard of her since then. I suppose I thought as soon as there was a body that it must be Debbie.’

  He wondered how convincing it sounded. He was so disturbed by his own mistake and Peach’s exploitation of it that he scarcely knew what he thought himself now, what was genuine and what he was fabricating in a desperate attempt to keep these people at bay.

  Peach had withdrawn for a moment when his sergeant spoke. Now he returned with two battered chairs, which he set facing his nervous quarry. When he sat down beside Blake, his feet were so close to Jones’s that the two sets of toes almost touched. He said, ‘Debbie Minton was murdered. You know that now. Maybe you knew a long time ago.’ He studied Jones, watching the young chin wagging desperately from side to side. ‘You won’t be surprised to hear that we’re very interested in those who were close to Debbie Minton in the months before she died. You were one of them, weren’t you? Perhaps the closest of all.’

  ‘Not in that last month I wasn’t!’ His vehemence drove out his fear for a moment, so that he was more definite than he had been at any moment since they had surprised him.

  Lucy Blake saw her chance to make him talk. ‘Why was that, Gary?’ she said softly, easing forward on her chair, using her proximity to encourage the slim figure rather than to threaten him as Peach had.

  Jones looked at her, at the freckled, unlined face and the lock of dark red hair which escaped to flop towards her deep green left eye. She was so close that he could smell her. And she smelt nice: very fresh and clean. Gary wondered if it was perfume, or just expensive soap. He warned himself to be careful; he had never been questioned before by a policewoman.

  But he wanted to talk, despite this caution he urged upon himself. ‘She ditched me, didn’t she? I hardly saw her during the last few weeks before she disappeared—not to speak to, anyway.’

  ‘Debbie was last seen on the twentieth of October, almost exactly two years ago. She was killed very soon after that—possibly even on the night she disappeared. How long before that did you two split up?’ She kept her voice even, unexcited, concealing the fact that they had not even known just how close was the relationship between this man and the dead girl until he had unwittingly revealed it a moment ago.

  ‘Five weeks.’

  They noted the precision of that. He had not even needed to think about it. ‘Why did you split up, Gary? We need to know.’

  His fear had subsided now into a sullen exhaustion which had the resignation that Peach always liked to see: when people ceased to resist, information came quickly. He watched the boy’s small, well-formed features as he strove to convince Blake of his integrity. ‘We’d been very close, for a time. But I think now that it was really over before that. It was just quite a while before that final bust-up.’ He suddenly sounded like a much older man; this earnestness issuing from the still very young black face would have been comic, if the issues had not been what they were.

  It was Peach who said, ‘You did drugs, Gary. We know that, because you were pulled in for questioning.’ He had done his homework around the station before he came here. It never did any harm if suspects got the idea that the CID were omniscient. ‘Did you introduce Debbie to LSD?’

  ‘No!’ This time Gary was conscious of how his denial rang round the huge shed like a shout of desperation. He tried hard to modulate his tone. ‘I don’t do drugs. I dabbled with them a bit, once. I didn’t introduce Debbie to them. It was rather the reverse.’

  ‘You’re saying that when you were in trouble it was her fault?’

  ‘No.’ Why did this muscular, aggressive man have the power to turn everything he said to his disadvantage? It was like being cornered by a pit bull terrier. ‘We all tried pot. Some went on to LSD or coke—’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘All right, like me. But when you warned me off, I listened.’

  That didn’t often happen, but perhaps it had this time. Certainly there was no evidence that Jones had incurred any further inquiries from the drugs squad. Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘And did Debbie Minton listen, too?’

  He looked troubled, as if even at this distance he did not want to betray her. But perhaps he was merely treading carefully, lest he accuse himself of a much greater crime. ‘I think so. But she was into them before me. It was more curiosity than anything, for all of us. But drugs weren’t important.’ It was a familiar enough story.

  Young people experimenting with pot as with other things in life. Some desisting, some going on to other and more damaging things.

  ‘You said you didn’t split up over drugs.’

  ‘It wasn’t because I was black, either!’

  Neither of them had suggested it was. But perhaps they had always had the unspoken question at the backs of their minds: at that moment, neither of them could have been certain whether or not that was the case. They waited with inscrutable faces, and Jones eventually said, ‘It was other men.’

  ‘Which other man in particular, Gary?’ Lucy wondered if she sounded a little too eager; for the first time, she realized that Percy Peach, who trampled so mercilessly over his victims, knew also how to hold back.

  ‘There wasn’t any one in particular. Not that I’m aware of. She—she was just too free with her favours.’ The old-fashioned phrase came so inappropriately from the frightened boy in that hangar-like setting that it should have been laughable. But he sat wretchedly with his head between his hands, and the four watching eyes were searching like lasers for a murderer; no one was inclined towards laughter.

  Lucy waited for a moment before she said, ‘Debbie was sleeping around?’

  He nodded miserably, his head in his hands still, not trusting himself to speak. The tears were as near as if this had happened yesterday, not two years before. Peach was thinking of the first murderer he had arrested, who had cut his wife into pieces, dropped her in dustbin bags on to a waste disposal site, and then wept abjectly of his love for her as he had confessed.

  Eventually Gary Jones said, ‘I knew much earlier that it was over, really, but I suppose I didn’t want to admit it.’

  ‘You say there wasn’t a particular man involved. But were there older men?’ For a moment, Jones was silent, and she prompted him gently. ‘We’ve already been told that there were, Gary.’


  He looked up at her then. ‘There were, yes. She taunted me that older men were so much less clumsy in bed than me.’ The pain leapt on to his face at that remembered taunt, the worst a young man in love can have to endure. His observers shared at that moment the same thought, that such pain had often been the prelude to sudden, unpremeditated murder. ‘Maybe there was one particular older man. But if there was, I don’t know who it was.’

  ‘Try, Gary. You want to know who killed her, just as we do. Do you think it was someone local? Someone with a position to keep up, perhaps?’

  ‘She was secretive about him, whoever it was. She behaved as though there was something to be hidden.’

  ‘And previously she hadn’t troubled to spare you the details of her lovers?’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose she did.’ He seemed to be seeing that distinction for the first time. ‘But things moved quickly with Debbie. She was restless. “Trying to find myself” was the phrase she used to throw at me. I didn’t even speak to her in the five weeks before she disappeared. She could have taken up with someone else entirely in that time.’

  Gary was pleased when they had gone that he had given them that thought. It seemed to distance him, somehow, from this girl who had given him so much grief in life and now returned two years after her death to put him in danger. He sat alone for a long time in the shed before he could trust himself to move back into the bright daylight of the world outside.

  In his room that night, Gary took the pewter brooch with its bright flashes of green glass from the back of the drawer and looked at it again. It seemed to have acquired an extra significance which came from outside itself, like the jewelled crosses and chalices he had once been taken to see in York Minster.

  He could never forget now that this had been the brooch that Debbie had been wearing when she died.