by J M Gregson
Percy descended the stairs dolefully, pausing at the window to gaze out over the grimy old town he loved. What he needed to animate him and to dissipate his resentment of Tommy Bloody Tucker was an interesting major crime, of which there had been a serious dearth over the last four months.
DC Brendan Murphy, the large, fresh-faced officer who was a local, despite his name, was waiting for him in the CID section. ‘I’m glad you’re back. Something’s just come in.’
‘You’re brighter than you look, Brendan. It’s the only virtue I can see in you, sometimes. Your bearing tells me that this is something interesting. So spit it out.’
‘Man shot in his car, sir.’
Peach raised the impressive black eyebrows beneath his bald head. Brunton wasn’t Los Angeles: gun crime was still the exception rather than the rule here. ‘Suicide?’
‘Too early to say, sir. Seemingly not a burglary, though. Victim’s wallet intact and well-filled. Name of Alfred Norbury.’
NINE
Wellington Street was a quiet residential road near the centre of Brunton. It had been the finest street in the town in its Victorian heyday, when cotton had been king, a hundred chimneys had belched smoke from the town’s mills and foundries, and a few fortunate men had made huge fortunes.
It was still one of the best and most convenient roads in the town, but smaller family units and the cost of domestic help meant that only two of the houses had survived as individual residences. The others had been converted into flats. But unlike many units in more rundown urban areas, these were mostly owner-occupied and changed hands infrequently. The major aesthetic decline from Victorian days was in horticulture. Where geraniums and lobelia and alyssum and snapdragons had flourished in long front gardens behind low front walls, the motor car now dominated.
That ubiquitous and many-hued modern marvel had replaced horticultural design and beauty with a random and constantly changing parade of metal. The front walls and the railings which had topped them had disappeared a long time ago. Huge slabs of grey concrete had spread where many years ago there had been lawns and flowers. Tyres came and went where once gardeners had worked with loving care to set off the high brick houses behind them. Progress is sometimes the enemy of beauty.
It was only four o’clock on this Wednesday afternoon and many of the vehicles which parked here overnight were still at the owners’ places of work. But the early January nightfall was already beginning to envelop the scene of crime. That is what the area outside 12 Wellington Street had been designated, even though no one had yet officially established what crime had been committed. The ribbons defining it as such were already in place, enclosing a rectangle of twenty metres by eighteen metres in front of the high building, which looked more sinister in the developing darkness.
Because of the quietness of the area and the chill of the January evening, there were fewer curious spectators than usual standing around to observe the police activity. But the word would get around quickly enough and the rubbernecks would gather. This was the best area of the town. There was always an additional frisson of excitement when crime and scandal struck among your supposed elders and betters.
As was usual on such occasions, there was very little for bystanders to see, beyond the official comings and goings. The chilled and gloomy spectators watched the scene of crime team, who were mostly civilians, and the plain-clothes officers. These were the people who were going to decide what crime, if any, had taken place here and what police resources this death warranted. The vehicle which was at the heart of this was surrounded by a high temporary fence of canvas, so that the onlookers could see nothing of the most vital activity.
Within the wider areas of the crime scene outside this hidden nucleus, a young man and a young woman stooped low over wet concrete to gather whatever peripheral evidence they could acquire. They were constables gaining experience, the only police service members of the SOCA team. Every officer needed to know how a meticulous scene of crime chief worked, and this also gave two raw young newcomers their first fringe contact with a suspicious death. They used tweezers to pick up cigarette ends, chocolate papers, even the plastic wrapper from a loaf of bread, then transferred them with scrupulous care into small plastic bags.
Peach and Northcott took in the scene for a moment, then slipped plastic covers over their feet and moved down the designated track to the small gap at the rear of the inner enclosure which was not visible to the public. Jack Chadwick, former police colleague of Peach’s but nowadays a civilian, was watching the fingerprint expert removing powder from the rear door handle of the car which was now revealed to them. He looked up into the formidable black features of Clyde Northcott. ‘No offence, son, but I preferred Percy’s last bagman – baglady would give entirely the wrong impression.’
‘We all preferred Sergeant Lucy when she was Blake. Only one of us got any further than that. I reckon Percy pulled rank to make her Mrs Peach.’
‘Animal magnetism,’ said Percy calmly. ‘If you can’t spot that from a mile away, you’re no detective. What news, Jack?’
‘Very little, so far. Suspicious death is as far as we can go.’
Northcott bent to look at the slumped figure in the driving seat of the car. It had very black hair, which just failed to conceal a surprisingly neat bullet hole in the right temple. There was less blood visible than he would have expected. The hand at the side of the corpse, invisible until you stood beside the vehicle, held a medium-sized pistol. ‘Suicide?’
‘Possibly. The pathologist has been and gone and wouldn’t commit himself. Says he’ll give you more when he’s had him on the slab and cut what’s left to pieces: you know the form.’
Percy looked at the gleaming dark blue metal. ‘Nice car.’
Chadwick nodded. ‘Valuable, too. Triumph Stag Mark One, in sapphire blue and with not a spot of rust visible.’ He glanced down at the registration number. ‘1972. And only ninety-one thousand on the clock. I’d need convincing of that, but she’s a lovely motor.’
Peach ran his eyes along the sleek flank of the vehicle. ‘You should sell ’em, Jack.’ He gestured towards the figure he’d hardly looked at as yet. ‘Didn’t do chummy much good, did it? How long do you reckon he’s been dead?’
Chadwick shrugged his highly experienced shoulders. ‘Pathologist will give you his opinion tomorrow. He agreed to make it urgent. He’s only got a road death to occupy him, other than this.’
‘And your opinion?’
Jack grinned for a second at his old colleague. ‘He’s as cold as an Arctic nun. My guess would be that he died last night.’
Northcott looked back at the street, then the other way, towards the entrance to the house at the top of three stone steps, where a series of bells rose neatly beside the names of the people who had flats here. ‘And has lain here ever since? Surely someone would have seen a body and reported it earlier?’
‘You’d think so, but you and I know that people don’t want to get involved nowadays. They ignore things they should report and get on with their own lives. Remember that Catholic priest who lay dead for three days in a supermarket car park before anyone reported that he was there? Ignorance is a safe way of life for a lot of people. You can’t see the pistol, unless you come and peer through the window. And this is a quiet place. It isn’t the sort of house where old ladies peer out from behind lace curtains.’
Peach nodded and looked resentfully at the long and impressive Victorian bay windows in their stone surrounds. He’d collected a lot of useful information over the years from inquisitive old women of both sexes, with or without lace curtains. ‘I suppose people who were parked on the concrete here could have come out in a hurry and at the last minute to get to work. I don’t observe much myself when I’m running late.’ He looked up at the heavy grey sky. This was one of those dreary winter days which are scarcely more than intervals between long nights. People racing off to work in the grim half-light of the morning might well have failed to register the figure in the Stag. And Ch
adwick was right: a depressing proportion of the modern British public would have left it for someone else to report, even if they’d suspected something might be amiss.
Jack said, ‘There are garages round the back. According to the woman who also lives on the ground floor, each of the flats has one. Assuming chummy was a resident here, he’d probably have one of the garages.’ He glanced back appreciatively at the Stag. ‘This car certainly looks as if it’s spent most of its life in a garage.’
It was something to be borne in mind, one of a whole series of routine questions which would need to be asked of the people who lived here, over the next twenty-four hours. Where, when and how were the three major questions with a suspicious death. It looked pretty certain that this man had died here. Chadwick had given them an informed guess about when. Now they were starting on how. It was pretty obvious that this man had died by a bullet from the gun in his right hand. But exactly how? Who had pressed the trigger?
As if he followed Percy’s thoughts, Jack Chadwick grinned mischievously and volunteered a thought. ‘My team’s almost finished here. You’ll have to wait and see what the pathologist says. It’s my view that you’ve got a murder on your hands, Percy Peach.’
The setting for Clyde Northcott the next morning couldn’t have been more different from Wellington Street. That place had been emphatically urban, albeit upper-class urban.
This house was in gently undulating Cheshire countryside and barely within sight of its nearest neighbours, which were over half a mile away. It was a low stone farmhouse, in contrast to the high brick Victorian town house outside which the body of Alfred Norbury had been discovered. But this was no longer a working farm. The land it had once controlled had been taken over by a larger neighbouring farm, invisible behind a copse of trees at the top of the slope behind it. This building had now been converted into a luxurious private residence.
The two CID officers parked on the large cobbles which must once have been a farmyard. The adjacent labourers’ cottages had been demolished and replaced by a huge conservatory, where the buds of camellias were already showing colour in gentle heat. A woman in there noted their arrival and appeared a moment later at the front entrance of the farm to meet them. Clyde said, ‘I rang earlier. I’m Detective Sergeant Northcott and this is Detective Constable Murphy.’
The building must be more than two hundred years old, he reckoned. He wondered as the woman led them indoors how many black men had crossed its threshold in all those years. The ceilings were low and he had to bend his head to pass through the doorway into the lounge – a large, comfortable room which was almost square, with a Turkish carpet and long sofas which looked as if they had been designed for the room. The only evidence of the building’s original more humble station were the small windows, which had been carefully preserved. They seemed to emphasize the thickness of the cream-painted walls around them.
The woman wore black leather low-heeled shoes beneath black jeans and a blue top which looked to Northcott’s inexpert eye very expensive. He said, ‘I think you should sit down, Mrs Tilsley.’ She gestured towards the sofa and the two big men sat down as carefully as if it had been much more fragile. She watched them with a small smile. Only when they were seated did she sit in an armchair opposite them and cross her elegant legs.
Northcott said. ‘I must first of all check that we have our facts right. Are you the former wife of Alfred James Norbury?’
‘I am indeed. You hinted when we spoke on the phone that you had bad news. He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘I fear he is, yes. I’m sorry to be the one who has to tell you this.’
‘You’ve no need to treat me with kid gloves. I stopped having tender feelings for Alfred a long time ago. We’ve been divorced for twelve years. I haven’t seen him since the details of the divorce were finalised. There were no children, so it was a clean break. That suited me. I haven’t spoken to Alfred for ten years and I had no intention of ever speaking to him again.’
‘Thank you for being so plain. May I ask how you knew that Alfred was dead? There has been no official announcement.’
‘I heard on the radio that there had been a suspicious death in the centre of Brunton. Ten minutes later, you rang me, said you were CID, and established that I had once been married to Alfred Norbury. I made an assumption.’
‘A correct one. You’ve indicated that you are not overwhelmed with grief. I hope it is not impertinent of me to say that you also do not seem to be very surprised that your former husband should have died violently at the age of forty-six.’
‘I’ve had a couple of hours since you rang me to get accustomed to the idea. I was more shaken at first than I feel now. But no, it’s not impertinent, and yes, I suppose it’s true that his death is not as much of a shock as I would have expected it to be.’ She gazed past them and through the window to a patch of sun moving swiftly across the swathe of green outside, weighing her opinion as coolly as if she had been asked her view on new curtains.
Brendan Murphy spoke for the first time. ‘Neither of us has ever met Alfred. As far as we are aware, he has had no dealings with the police. There is no official verdict yet, but it appears that he might be the victim of a violent crime. We know nothing about him and he can no longer speak for himself. We have to try to build up a picture of him through those closest to him.’
‘I can see that and I’d like to help you. But I’ve already told you that I’ve had no recent dealings with him and had no intention of renewing our acquaintance. I believe that suited both of us. I have been happily married for the last eight years to a very different man and I have two young children, who are at present at school. I suppose I should be sorry that Alfred’s dead, if only for old times’ sake. Every man’s death diminishes me, and all that stuff. But I’m afraid I feel nothing. To be strictly accurate, I suppose I feel a certain relief that an unfortunate chapter of my life is finally and irretrievably closed.’ She clasped her hands in front of her and looked at them thoughtfully. ‘I’m sorry to be so frank, but I hate hypocrisy.’
Northcott had moved not a muscle of his dark, solemn face through all this. ‘We much prefer frankness, Mrs Tilsley. It saves both us and you a lot of time. But as my colleague said, we have to build up a picture of a man about whom we know nothing. Even after ten years, you know much more about him than we do. And I’m sure that if he has been the victim of violence you would like to see the person or persons involved brought to justice, despite your differences.’
She didn’t give him the conventional assent he expected. Instead, she stared steadily out of the window for a few seconds, then gave the curtest of nods, almost as if she was reluctant to recognize a weakness in herself. ‘He was a difficult man from the start. We should never have married. I was six years younger than him, only twenty at the time. It was a huge mistake.’
‘Was he violent?’
She glanced at him sharply. ‘Are you sure this is relevant?’
‘Probably not. We shan’t know until the end of the case exactly what was relevant. But people who are violent often provoke violence in others. That might be a factor in whatever relationships Alfred has established since his time with you.’
‘He wasn’t violent to me. Not physically violent. His cruelty took other forms. He sometimes enjoyed inflicting suffering on others. He could do that without inflicting physical blows.’ She looked from one to the other of the two very different young, attentive faces. ‘But you are thinking, “How much reliance can we put upon what this woman says? How much is her own bitterness colouring the picture of the man she is painting for us?” I cannot answer that for you. I hated Alfred by the time we parted. My hatred is not as sharp as it was, because of the life I have now. But if he was around, I know I would hate him still. I cannot think he changed much in the years which have passed.’
She had appeared so controlled when they had come into her home that the passion with which she was now speaking was a surprise. Brendan Murphy said softly, ‘
You indicated earlier that his death had not come as a great surprise to you. Could you offer us any thoughts about who might have wished him dead?’
‘No.’ A mirthless smile. ‘I have no idea of his recent acquaintances. I took care to cut myself off completely from Alfred and all his associates. I have no idea who might have been close to him recently. Or whom he chose to favour with his attentions.’ The bitterness she had stored for at least a decade hissed out in her last sentence. Then she looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. ‘You’ve come quite a distance. I should have offered you some refreshment. Would you like coffee or tea? Or perhaps something stronger?’
Northcott smiled, happy to lighten the tension he felt in her. ‘No thanks. We need to be on our way, once we are convinced you have nothing more to tell us. But thank you for the thought.’
‘Once you are convinced that I have nothing more to tell you. It’s difficult for me to appreciate that you really know nothing about him. Alfred isn’t a man you would forget, if you’d known him at all. I’m not going to resurrect all the details of our battles and our separation. That would upset me and it wouldn’t help you.’
She looked as if she was about to reveal something, but there was such a long pause that Clyde feared she might be having second thoughts. He took advantage of her silence to ask, ‘Where were you last night and this morning, Mrs Tilsley?’
She looked at him, allowing her lips to lift at the corners in what might have been amusement or might have been contempt. ‘You really think I might have killed him?’
Clyde shrugged his formidable shoulders. ‘It’s a question we shall no doubt be asking a lot of people over the next few days. Unless we get a confession from someone, of course. Or unless this proves to be a suicide.’
She shook her head immediately. ‘It won’t be suicide. Alfred’s not the type to do the decent thing. Or to do anything to help others out. And I didn’t kill him. I was here from four o’clock yesterday until you arrived this morning with my husband and two children. But if you really do know nothing about him, there are facts you should take away from here. He enjoyed causing me pain and he enjoyed taunting me. Sexually, whenever he could. He played for both sides, as he put it. He made great play of being bisexual, of saying how little I knew and how little I’d lived, and how inadequate I was as a partner for a man like him. In my view, he should never have got married: it was just another of his sexual experiments. I was the one who had to suffer to further his research.’
