Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  ‘Too many ifs,’ said Peach, as if that were her fault. ‘What about the mother?’

  ‘Christine Turner? I scarcely thought of her. She seems—well, somehow too much in control of her life to attempt murder.’

  ‘Whoever killed Debbie Minton was pretty much in control. Without the accident of someone deciding to demolish that old quarry pool, they’d almost certainly have got away with it.’

  Lucy said slowly, ‘A mother in defence of her child might do all sorts of things she wouldn’t do for herself.’ She was thinking of her own quiet, conventional mother, of the way she had stormed into her school with astonishing aggression when her eight-year-old daughter was being bullied. And Francis Turner was the only son of a widowed mother.

  ‘And she needn’t have killed the girl herself you know,’ said Peach with satisfaction. ‘Women like her always have resources available to them,’ he added mysteriously.

  Lucy didn’t want it to be Christine Turner. And because she had liked her, she didn’t want it to be her son. It was a wholly unprofessional attitude to bring to her first murder inquiry. Fearful lest Peach should divine her thoughts, she said a little desperately, ‘What about Derek Minton?’

  Peach looked up from his beer with a little smile of surprise, and she was fearful that he had read her thoughts about the Turners. But he seemed to approve of her suggestion, for he said, ‘Always a good principle to start with the next of kin. Statistically, at any rate, they’re the best prospects.’

  ‘But I couldn’t see either of the Mintons being involved. Shirley’s suffering has been too long and too well documented to be anything but genuine, surely?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘And I’d say they were too close-knit a family for it to have been Derek. He’s suffered with his wife—watching her pain, I mean. I think he’s too much in love with her to have done anything to her daughter, Percy.’ She tacked the appendage on to the end of her sentence, hoping it did not sound as clumsy to him as it did to her. At least it might stop him questioning her about how she had divined that a husband was in love with his wife.

  He said only, ‘You’re probably right. The only thing I would say is that it’s in those families where emotions are most intense that you get violence. So the statistics about manslaughter and homicide tell us. So we should keep Minton in the frame, for the moment.’

  Without asking her, he went to the bar and ordered the same again. It was what he would have done with a man, she supposed. She was still not sure whether she found that thought a consolation or not. ‘Bet they think in here that I’ve picked a student up!’ he said when he came back and set the drinks on the table. For the first time, he looked openly at her jeans and leather jacket, her shirt with all its buttons save the top one modestly buttoned. ‘Your clothes are a bit too clean for that, though. And I need to grow a beard before I could be a tutor on the make.’ He grinned his beaver’s grin and put his ankle on his knee for a moment, as if experimenting with what he considered an academic pose.

  Lucy did not know what to make of this. She said, diffidently, ‘There’s Gary Jones, of course.’ Then, because Peach said nothing, seemingly occupied with the depth of the foam on the top of his pint, she added, ‘The coloured lad on the ground staff at the North Lancs.’

  ‘Greens staff they like to call it. Same difference.’ He took a pull at his pint, as if finally accepting that he had not received short measure. ‘Statistics again: much higher incidence of violent crime among blacks than other immigrant groups or native whites.’ He used a soppy, high-pitched voice for this, and she knew that he was teasing her.

  Nevertheless, she rose helplessly to the bait. ‘Among the deprived, you mean. Urban black people have bad accommodation and wretched employment prospects, even when they’ve lived all their lives here. It’s no wonder they loom large in the serious crime statistics.’

  ‘Quite right, quite right.’ He grinned at her, enjoying her earnestness, not putting her down. ‘But when you confront a crowd, it’s easier to see a black face than deprivation, so one takes note, Lucy.’

  ‘Gary Jones was certainly frightened. Probably not just of us, Percy.’ She found herself enjoying this mixture of business and sparring.

  ‘No. He was scared as soon as they found the body. Perhaps even before they found it, if what his boss says is true. If it is, that might indicate that he knew the body was in the quarry pond.’ This time he did not append her name in that tantalizing way. This time he was deadly serious.

  She thought of that delicately handsome face, of Jones’s slim figure, of his eagerness to please. They all said at the golf club that he was a model employee. That he might go far in greenkeeping, with his enthusiasm and intelligence. That he might break out of the deprivation she had been pleading for his colour. Unless, of course, he was a murderer.

  She said, ‘He had a close relationship with Debbie.’

  Peach grinned at her formality. ‘He was knocking her off, yes, for a period. So were several others. He seems to have been a bit more serious about her than most. Perhaps he took it badly when she nipped into the sack with others.’ He looked at her across the top of the glasses, stubby chin jutting as if in challenge to her sex. ‘This case might have been straightforward, if Debbie Minton hadn’t been such a slag.’

  She wondered why there was no term for a man who put himself about like that. Because the men devised the terms, she supposed. But she forced herself to look at the matter as a good detective sergeant should. ‘There might not be a murder investigation at all, without that. But Debbie’s a victim, whatever her sexual habits, Percy.’

  This time the name came almost naturally. He said, ‘Of course she is. And without victims, we wouldn’t have a job. Gary Jones is our strongest candidate, at present. His friends say that he was far gone on the girl. Quite starry-eyed about her. He still seems a bit young for his age to me, and this was over two years ago. I can see him doing stupid things then.’

  Lucy Blake looked miserably at her still untouched second glass of beer. She still didn’t want it to be Gary Jones. She supposed that she would become more objective with experience. Assuming, that is, that she was allowed to gather it. Trying hard to sound enthusiastic about the recollection, she said, ‘Jones did tell us about how she taunted him about his performance in bed. That bites deep with men—I imagine.’

  He looked at her when she made this hasty addendum, and found her blushing to the roots of her dark red hair, her freckles only highlighting the pink around them. She was furious with herself as she felt the blood rise, but she had always had to contend with the phenomenon; it was something that went with her colouring, they said. Fat lot of consolation that was. She half expected Peach to make fun of her, and knew she would explode with fury if he did.

  Instead, he said, ‘He wasn’t the only one to mention an older man. Wonder who it might be? Or whether, knowing our Miss Minton as we are beginning to do, there was more than one older man?’

  ‘It could be someone we don’t even know about. Someone no one has mentioned yet, from outside the area.’

  ‘Of course it could. But if she was killed on the night she disappeared, which seems more and more likely, that is much less probable.’ Peach paused, then sipped his beer. It appeared no more than an appreciative moment, but he was coming to a decision; one he would not have made a week earlier. ‘There are two candidates I can think of for the old man role. Even leaving out Derek Minton. The first one you don’t even know about.’

  She looked her question, feeling the fire subsiding in her cheeks, grateful that he had chosen not to comment upon it. ‘But I’m about to learn?’

  He grinned, a little boy’s grin, his small white teeth briefly fully visible. ‘Would I ever keep things from my DS? But not a word to anyone about this. Least of all to Tommy Tucker. You’ll see why in a moment. It’s a policeman, you see, Lucy.’

  She was so surprised that she scarcely noticed how naturally her name had come this time. ‘Is i
t someone I know? Someone at Brunton?’

  ‘No. Someone who used to be. Chap called Bob Cook. PC Bob Cook. Aged twenty-eight. Married, with two kids. Good golfer, very good. Proposed me for the North Lancs.’ He took a ruminative pull at his pint, as if meditating upon the ironies of life.

  ‘And is his golf relevant to this case?’ She was ribbing him a little, mocking the preoccupation with the game she chose to detect in him. But in fact, he did not speak about it at all at work. And he certainly did not sneak off to play when he should be working, like Superintendent Tommy Tucker, who kept a putter in the cupboard in his office to practise on the carpet when he thought he was protected by the light outside his office which announced he was ‘Engaged’.

  Percy took her question seriously. ‘It might be relevant that Bob Cook knows the North Lancs course so well. He’s played there since he was a boy. So he would know all about the existence of that old quarry and its pond. Whoever dumped Debbie Minton’s body in there didn’t come across that pond by accident on the night: it’s far too remote.’

  ‘But there has to be more against him than that. Otherwise the whole membership would be suspect. Including one Percy Peach.’

  She could not resist looking at him to see how he took that. He was looking hard at her, as if he had been waiting for her scrutiny and found it amusing. His dark, almost black pupils were wider than usual in the subdued light of the pub alcove. There was a glint of mirth in them, and he smiled, appreciatively, not wolfishly, as he did when in pursuit of victims.

  Then his face became serious. ‘I hope to God it isn’t Bob. But he did know the Minton girl. And he didn’t want to talk about her. And last Saturday, his golf fell apart when we got to the point on the course where her body was found. So I checked his record at the station. Did it myself, it being a Saturday afternoon, without even the assistance of my trusty DS.’ He checked automatically that they were not overheard, then leaned forward and said to her, ‘No one else knows this as yet, Lucy. But Bob Cook applied for a transfer three days after the night when Debbie Minton disappeared.’

  She stared glumly at her half-empty glass. No one likes a bent copper, and she had absorbed enough of the tribal ethos to be as disturbed as the most grizzled station sergeant by the idea that one of their own might be a murderer. She said, ‘What do we do next? Question him further?’

  ‘Yes. But discreetly. If it becomes clear he’s guilty, we throw the book at him, of course. But if he isn’t, we must be careful not to affect his future career in the force.’ He wondered if she thought it was men looking after men, prepared to cover over sexual transgressions if they proved to be no more than that. A week earlier, probably two days earlier, he would not even have considered her reactions, let alone cared about them.

  She was thinking of the wife and two young children, of the shattering of this family she did not even know if Bob Cook should be involved in this. It would have surprised her to know that Peach was thinking about them, too. They were the chief reason for his warning that they must proceed with discretion. A copper who had behaved stupidly, even if not criminally, would get the normal robust treatment he meted out to the venal and the foolish, but there was no reason for his innocent dependants to suffer.

  Peach said, ‘I’ll set up some kind of meeting with Bob Cook. Preferably not on police premises. I…err, I’d like you to be there.’

  This time the dark eyes were staring resolutely at the period mirror on the wall advertising Wills’ Woodbines. She had the sense to say no more than, ‘Of course.’ She feared she would blush again, and was glad when he pressed quickly on.

  Perhaps he too was anxious to dismiss the moment, for he said with abrupt satisfaction, ‘What about the Reverend Joseph Bloody Jackson?’

  ‘You think he might be involved?’ She asked it stupidly, with her mind still on the previous exchange. It was an amateur’s reaction, and she hastened to cover it. ‘I mean, he was certainly a bit creepy, but I doubt whether he had it in him to be a murderer.’

  It sounded banal in her own ears. But this was her first murder investigation, so that she could perhaps be forgiven for producing the layperson’s stock reaction to killers.

  Percy Peach merely smiled, where once he would have snarled. He found this mildness a little disturbing in himself but he pressed on with his demolition of the clergyman. ‘He’s a bit free with his attentions to the girls in that youth club, according to what the team have turned up in their questioning of Debbie Minton’s contemporaries. And Debbie seems to have been pretty free with herself. If Jackson had his hand up her skirt, God knows what could have happened afterwards. And unfortunately God doesn’t grass on his workers, even when they let him down.’

  He wondered if she might object to the way he spoke of Debbie Minton, if she might point to her youth and the weight of guilt upon any older man who traded upon her weaknesses. Instead, she said, ‘I can see how Debbie might have rather enjoyed a situation which would have frightened other girls. And we do have the mention from several sources of this mysterious, so far unidentified older man in the background.’

  ‘There are two things about that. First, if he exists, and he probably does, there is no necessary reason why he should be Debbie’s killer. Rather the reverse: youngsters like Gary Jones and Francis Turner are more likely to be panicked into sudden, violent action than an older man who might have been after a little cheap fun. And secondly, we have to remember that the mention of an older man comes from Debbie herself, who was no more than nineteen at the time of the relationship. Bob Cook, who seems to me quite young, has a wife and children. He might well be seen by a girl of Debbie’s age as an older man.’

  ‘So Joseph Jackson isn’t the only candidate for the role. Just the one you’d like it to be.’ She grinned across the table, daring him to challenge this slur on his objectivity.

  He grinned back, then intoned in a pious, pulpit voice, ‘If Joseph Aloysius Jackson is soiling the honest young women of this parish, it is our bounden duty to protect our young English roses.’

  ‘Even if they guided the ecclesiastical hand up their provocative skirts and into the confines of their too scanty drawers?’

  ‘Our English roses would never do that. We shall need to have further discussions with the Reverend Joseph Jackson.’ Peach’s expression left no doubt that it would be a pleasure as well as a duty.

  They did not speak much as they drove the thirty miles back to Brunton. He dropped her off at her flat. He leaned across from the driver’s seat to look at her front door as she got out, but neither of them made any suggestion that he should come in. Perhaps both of them were a little relieved that the day was at an end.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  At the very moment when Peach and Blake were deciding that the Reverend Joseph Jackson merited their further attention, Derek Minton was preparing for the meeting he had compelled upon that unhappy clergyman.

  He did not leave his wife often in the evenings, and since Debbie had disappeared Shirley had ceased to work at the supermarket which had kept her out on three evenings of the week. It was no hardship for him to stay in with the wife he loved, particularly now that she was showing signs of returning to normal. He was not a drinking man, nor one who sought the company of his own sex as a respite from domesticity.

  He had always been keen on sport, but he had given up his tennis and badminton after Debbie disappeared, pleading that he had always meant to desist when he reached fifty, and that forty-six was near enough to that, in these circumstances.

  The truth was that he had not wanted to leave Shirley, feeling that she was alone enough during the day in any case; that his presence, even in those dark months when she had stared unseeingly at the wall, was some sort of assistance to her.

  But he had kept up his membership of the North Lancs Golf Club, playing a little even when things were at their worst, when every leaf in the garden had been in place and that tidy house had become like a prison, with the wife he loved as its silent
sentinel. He was not a bad golfer, and he was surprised how much he enjoyed those rounds he stole as therapy. And after he had played, he kept his ears open as he sat over his modest half of bitter in the bar, feeling obscurely that there might eventually be news of Debbie here.

  And in the end, there had been news. Perhaps, indeed, the golf club, being the place where she had been found, was still the place to gather news: wasn’t that sinister little bull terrier of a man who was pursuing the investigation now a member of the North Lancs?

  It was that thought which gave him his excuse to leave the house. ‘I think I’ll just pop up to the golf club for half an hour,’ he said to Shirley. ‘See if I can fix myself up with a game at the weekend—the starting-time sheets might be up for the November medal.’

  She looked at him curiously, a little smile twisting her pale lips. He had always had the feeling that she could see through his lies, but perhaps that was merely his imagination. It was good to see her alert and showing some interest in his movements, at any rate. It was curious how the awful news about Debbie’s body had initiated a slow revival in her. Perhaps she was glad to see him going out to the place where Debbie had been found. Perhaps, in a few months, they would be able to get back to a normal life together. Once the search for their daughter’s killer had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, that is.

  Wasn’t that what he was about tonight? And didn’t that justify his small white lie to the woman he loved? Sometimes events had to be given a little push forward, that was all.