by J M Gregson
That frailty gave Derek Minton confidence. He issued his instructions with authority: his listener would never know how he had needed to nerve himself for this call. ‘You and I need to meet.’
‘I—I hardly think that will be helpful. I’m very sorry about Debbie, as I said, but—but I don’t think it would be any use—’
‘You saw her, just before she disappeared. Just before she died, it now seems. I know that, you see.’
‘I—I don’t see how you can—’
‘She told me, you see. We talked a lot, my daughter and I. She told me where she was going, that last night.’ Derek spoke with authority, with a massive confidence which was building on the other’s uncertainty.
At the other end of the line, the man looked round the deserted hall like a hunted animal. He knew he was alone, yet the urge to check his surroundings, to make sure that he was not observed, was overwhelming. The very cupboards seemed to be listening, to be recording the agony of mind into which he had been plunged so abruptly. His voice rose towards a shout as he said, ‘I can’t help you, you know. And I swear I didn’t—’
‘No need to swear. We’ll meet and talk about it. About what she said. About what you said. I’ll come and see you there, if you like.’ Derek knew that was cruel. He felt also his enjoyment in that cruelty.
‘No!’ This time it was a shout, echoing round the high cornice of the ceiling, returning like a blow to the ear which was not pressed to the phone.
‘You can’t come here. You must see that!’
‘All right. You name the place, and I’ll be there.’
For a moment, panic deprived his listener of all power of thought. He could think of no place and no time for this dreadful confrontation. His heavy, uneven breathing heaved down the line. Eventually he lurched into uneven phrasing. ‘Half past eight. Tonight.’
‘All right. The sooner the better. In a pub?’
‘No!’ He knew suddenly that it must not be inside, where others could observe his disintegration before the dead girl’s father. He said desperately, blurting out the words as if he might at any moment be deprived of the power of speech, ‘At the end of the shopping precinct. Near the entrance to the multi-storey car park.’
‘Right. Make sure you turn up.’ Derek Minton paused, savouring the final dagger of anguish before he thrust it home. ‘I know all about you and Debbie, you see.’
Minutes after Derek Minton had left the public phone box and moved on towards his home, the man he had called stared unseeingly at the instrument which had brought this sudden horror upon him. He knew he must pull himself together quickly: his wife might return home at any moment. Yet the control his teeming mind desired would not come to him.
In the hall of the old vicarage, the Reverend Joseph Jackson dropped his face into his hands and wept.
***
Jeans everywhere. Pop music; the same programme from several unseen sources. Long hair, slim bodies, some but by no means all of them androgynous. A pervading stale smell of coffee and toast and beans. Percy Peach wrinkled his nose. ‘What a lovely bloody life being a student. Bed, booze and pot.’
Lucy Blake said primly, ‘The life has its own stresses. And there’s not much pot nowadays. Not among British students. You’d soon smell it round here, if there was.’
Percy looked round the big room with its parquet floor, its cafeteria at one end, its strident murals on the other three walls. ‘Bleedin’ parasites,’ he said without rancour; by now he was guying himself and the attitude he had adopted. ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of this life myself. Don’t know they’re born, this lot.’
‘You wouldn’t be happy for one day, sir. Not without someone to order around.’
He glanced sideways at her. With the jeans and black leather jacket she had donned to come here, the dark red hair suddenly less disciplined than usual, she could have been a student herself. She looked younger in this gear; there was not a line on her face, her blue-green eyes were bright and observant. He felt a vague resentment that she should seem so much at home here. His own bald pate was probably the only one to have been in here all day: there was no sign of the mature students he was told were now such a feature of university life.
‘Let’s find the young bugger and get this over with,’ he growled.
A young woman with blonde hair in a lengthy pony tail directed them without much curiosity to the hall of residence. They aroused more interest there in the acned youth who met them in the small entrance hall. ‘Francis Turner? Sure, he lives here. What do you want with him?’
‘Nothing that need concern you, sunshine. Just tell us where the lad resides and be on your way.’ Percy bristled cheerfully at the sign of opposition.
The youth looked at him for a moment, then turned abruptly upon his heel and leapt up the stone stairs two at a time. Probably he thought he would leave them behind. If so he was disappointed. Peach accepted the challenge and almost overtook their guide: he was like a bouncing ball of muscle, thought Lucy Blake, as she flew behind him up the three flights.
It was the young Apollo rather than either of his followers who was panting when they arrived at a grey door with the number 317 upon it. He glared resentfully at the two bland faces beside him, then knocked at the door and threw it open. He stood in the entrance to the small room, so that they could not see what lay beyond him, and said to the invisible occupant, ‘Visitors for you, Frank. Couple of pigs, I shouldn’t wonder. Do you wish to see them?’
His four-square presence in the doorway did not survive this inquiry for more than a second. Peach slipped alongside the lanky figure. Then his shoulder caught the side of the thin chest, so that the acned guardian was bounced against the doorjamb and then somehow turned outwards. He stumbled against Lucy Blake, who returned him to equilibrium on the other side of the detectives, just in time to receive Peach’s rejoinder. ‘Lovely things, pigs. But dangerous animals when confronted in confined spaces. Might just be worth your while remembering that. Thanks for your help, sunshine.’ He shut the door firmly on their discomforted guide.
In the small, square room there was a bed, a desk, two stand chairs, a single plastic-covered armchair. Hi-fi equipment, posters on the walls, books; even books that were open and in use. And in the midst of it, a youth, newly sprung to his feet. A young man with wide, fearful eyes.
‘Do sit down,’ said Percy, taking over as host in the man’s own stronghold. As the student sank limply back on to the chair in front of the desk from which he had risen, Peach walked over and sat on the other chair, turning it so that his face was not more than three feet from his victim’s as Lucy sank gracefully into the room’s single armchair. Not a bad little room for this meeting, thought Percy, shifting his posture a fraction to allow the full light from the window behind him to fall on Turner’s face. Not so very different from an interview room, when you organized it properly.
‘First things first. You are Francis George Turner?’ Nice touch of formality: students weren’t used to that. Percy was a great believer in the power of the unfamiliar.
The slim young man nodded. Apprehension surged from his face through his whole frame, so that he could not find a comfortable position for his legs; they kept trying different crossings at the ankle, as if they moved independently of their owner.
‘Then you’ll already be aware why we’re here.’
‘Debbie Minton?’ Francis tried to couch it as a question, but it emerged instead as an admission.
Peach said, ‘Nasty business. Murdered. You’ll be aware of that by now, if you weren’t before.’
Before what, thought Francis. Then he realized what the implications of the remark were, and tried to stir himself to resistance. ‘Listen, if you’re suggesting that—’
‘Suggesting nothing, lad. Not yet. We’re here to find what you have to say for yourself. Then we might make a few suggestions.’
‘Well, I knew the girl, yes.’ The distancing suddenly made it sound cheap, as if he was dismissing her and e
verything there had ever been between them. That beautiful young face was suddenly before him, not dead but vividly alive, and he said, ‘Knew Debbie, that is. Quite well, at one time.’
‘Yes. We gathered that, from some of your friends in Brunton. Very close, weren’t you, in the weeks before she disappeared?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose we were. But I’m afraid I can’t—’
‘Strange that. Well, not that you should be close, but that someone should try to conceal it. DS Blake here saw your mother, you see. Only what we’d normally do, as she’d employed the deceased for six months. But your mother chose to tell us nothing of any liaison between you and Debbie Minton.’
‘No. She wouldn’t.’
‘Really? Well, when people start concealing things, it’s always of great interest to us, you see. They should realize that, but fortunately most of them don’t.’ Percy permitted himself a moment of satisfaction at the public’s naivety.
‘Mum didn’t approve of me and Debbie.’
‘And why was that?’
Francis Turner drew his over-active feet back under his chair and entwined them with the wooden legs, as if determined to immobilize them. ‘She’d employed her. She thought she was too flighty.’ It was his mother’s word and it fell awkwardly from his lips.
Lucy Blake had confined herself so far to observing this young man under stress. Now she leaned forward on her armchair and said gently, ‘She said as much to me, Francis. But she never mentioned that you’d even met the girl. That seems curious, when she obviously knew that the two of you had been quite close, and in the period which interests us.’
Francis seemed happy that she had come into the exchange. He was even anxious to explain himself to this apparently more sympathetic questioner. ‘It was all right when we were just going around in a crowd. Mum got worried when we got a thing going with each other.’
Peach could not resist the opportunity. Indeed, he did not even try. He said, ‘And she was even more worried when the two of you were pulled in for questioning about drugs, I expect.’
Turner whirled to confront him, his long face very white, his brown eyes blazing with resentment. ‘There was nothing in that! And it wasn’t just Debbie and me. Anyway, no charges were ever brought against any of us.’
‘True. They could have been, though. You were in possession.’ Peach looked briefly round the crowded little room. ‘A promising academic career could have been blighted at the outset. You were lucky they were only interested in finding the suppliers, or you’d have had a record, lad.’
Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘Is that what made your mother so worried about your relationship with Debbie Minton?’
Francis found himself able to think when the questioning came from her. He even strove to be objective now about her query. ‘It didn’t help, obviously. But it was later that she got really worried.’
‘You mean when you were having sex with her?’ Lucy put it as simply as she could. And as accurately. Most people would have said ‘sleeping with her’, but from the parents’ accounts of this girl’s activities, she doubted whether this boy had ever had the luxury of actually sleeping with her.
He said, ‘That’s right. She warned me not to get seriously involved with Debbie. She was right, of course, but I wouldn’t listen. You don’t, at that age.’ He spoke as if the time were two decades rather than two years behind him, as if he was looking back from middle age at the indiscretions of youth. Though he was not yet twenty-one, the two years that had concluded his adolescence stretched like a generation behind him.
Lucy said, ‘You say your mother was right about Debbie, Francis. What made you see that?’
He paused, gathering his thoughts, organizing them into some sort of coherence. ‘I’d been at public school. You don’t learn much about girls there.’ He permitted himself a wan smile at his own expense; perhaps he was recalling some far-off sexual indiscretion. ‘Debbie was behaving like a tart, opening her legs to anyone who asked.’
Turner glanced at DS Blake, thinking in his naivety that she might be shocked, and found her instead impassively attentive. ‘When I accused her, she admitted it freely enough. Said she’d enjoyed “sampling my innocence”. I’m sure that was a phrase she’d picked up from some book.’ For a moment, his disgust at her plagiarism seemed greater than any sense of betrayal. Perhaps his contempt was really for himself, that he should have been so easily taken in by this shallow girl. They knew without him telling them that she had been his first sexual experience.
Lucy Blake, timing her line as carefully as any actor, said, ‘Debbie Minton was pregnant when she died, Francis. Did you know that?’
‘Yes.’ Then, when they waited, he said, ‘I read the report of the inquest.’
In the quiet room, they could hear the sounds of the pop music from a room a long way down the corridor. It was a raucous, incongruous love song. Lucy Blake said in what was little more than a whisper, ‘But you knew much earlier than that, didn’t you Francis? You knew before the night when Debbie Minton disappeared.’
There was a pause which stretched into several seconds, until they thought he might say nothing. Then he said, in a voice as low as hers, ‘Yes. I knew.’
‘And were you the father of that child, Francis?’ She was like the priest in the confessional, quietly leading the penitent on, until the full depth of his sinning should be quietly revealed. Except that there was no privacy for the secrets of this confessional.
‘I could have been. I don’t think I was, but I could have been.’
There was a kind of relief that it was out at last: that too was like the confessional. Beyond the double-glazed window, two men were teasing a pretty female student; it was the silent horseplay of a different world.
It was almost as an afterthought that Francis Turner looked from Blake back to Peach and said, ‘I didn’t kill her, though.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lucy Blake was quietly pleased with herself. Peach seemed to approve of the way she had handled Christine Turner earlier in the day. And now he had let her play a major part in the questioning of the woman’s son. She checked her reactions. It wasn’t the male approval that pleased her; it was the professional approval. Peach was her boss, infinitely more experienced in the techniques of detection than she was. So that was all right, wasn’t it?
As they marched briskly to retrieve Peach’s Sierra from the university car park, she was almost stopped in her tracks. For Percy Peach, male chauvinist and expert in arrogance, said suddenly, ‘Fancy a drink, Sergeant?’
She managed to disguise the slight check in her step, so that she was alongside him again almost immediately. She glanced surreptitiously at the stubby profile. There was no sign of irony there; Peach was gazing resolutely ahead, as if the tower of the administrative block was suddenly of consuming interest to him. Had she not known him to be proof against anything so human, she might have thought he was embarrassed.
She said, ‘I’d love to, sir. On two conditions.’ Could it really be her who had said that? She was astonished at her own temerity.
Peach seemed not at all surprised. He kept his gaze glassily on that high brick tower to his left. ‘Well?’ he grunted.
‘First that you call me Lucy, at least in the pub. Second that you let me buy.’
For a moment, she thought he was going to erupt. Then he said gruffly, ‘Fair enough.’ After another few paces, he said, ‘Never known to refuse an offer like that, Percy Peach. And you must call me Percy, of course. Everyone else does.’
But not necessarily to your face, thought Lucy, thinking of the awe and fear which attended the mention of his name in the locker rooms of the Brunton cop-shop. There seemed nothing else to say after this momentous exchange and they walked on without words, neither of them daring to look at the other’s face. She was glad when they reached the pub. They wheeled into the public bar in parallel, like thirsty soldiers after a long march.
Lucy went to the bar, wondering now why she ha
d insisted on buying. He must be laughing up his sleeve at her—if you could really do that. Perhaps she was getting more butch by the day, as she strove to hold her own in this predominantly male environment. She’d be flexing her knees and loosening her underpants next. Just so long as Detective Inspector Percy Peach didn’t try to loosen them for her.
Good job he couldn’t read these insubordinate thoughts. She looked back towards where he had seated himself carefully in an alcove. In his neat suit and tie, with his immaculately groomed hands and his jet-black fringe of hair beneath the shining pate, he could be industrial middle-management relaxing after a day at the office. Seeing what he could get from a bird from the typing pool, perhaps.
Except that she was no typist. And Percy Peach was surely not interested in anything he could get from her. And he was not so much older than her, anyway. Ten years was not much of a gap, all the magazines said. It just seemed a gulf because he had been at this work so much longer than she had.
She took him his pint of bitter and set her own half down precisely opposite it, as if to emphasize her femininity. Then she realized that beer, even in halves, was hardly going to do this. Perhaps it might make her one of the boys. She would welcome that, surely? Hadn’t she spent most of her time in the police force striving for just that acceptance?
Peach took a pull at his bitter, then afforded it a small grimace, which seemed to mark a guarded approval. ‘Well, did he do it?’ he said abruptly.
‘Francis Turner?’
‘Who else, Sergeant? Lucy.’ He produced her name like a man getting rid of a mouthful of something he found overwhelmingly sweet.
She thought about it for a moment, resolutely thrusting away her amusement at his difficulty with her name. ‘Possible. He didn’t come forward when he knew we were looking for people who’d been close to her. Both he and his mum failed to behave as responsible citizens should—more like ordinary people, they were.’ She looked at him for any sign of amusement, but his round, intent face did not smile. ‘If he was the father of Debbie’s child—and I’m not sure he was as uncertain about the parentage as he protested himself to be—I’d say he’s definitely in the frame.’
