[Inspector Peach 05] - The Lancashire Leopard

by J M Gregson

  She said, “That’s as may be, Mr Plant. DC Pickard and I are here to talk to you about another matter altogether.”

  A flicker of interest crossed the professionally vacant face. Then he said, “Whatever it is, I won’t be able to help you. I ain’t a grass.”

  Tony Pickard smiled. “You won’t be incriminating anyone else, Terry, whatever you say to us about this. This only concerns you.”

  “If it’s that bitch who used to be my wife, I don’t want to know. We’re finished.”

  “But you went looking for her, when you came out of Strangeways. One of the first things you did.”

  “Yes. I didn’t want this divorce she’s pushed through. But I’ve given up on her now. Sod her, wherever she is. Anyway, how’d you come to know I was looking for Debbie?”

  “Only because we thought we’d like to know where you were, Terence Plant. A touching concern on our part, you might think.” Pickard’s tone switched from mocking to menacing. “You went missing, a week after you’d come out of Strangeways. Not what you were supposed to do, that, Terry. Where did you go?”

  The brown eyes narrowed, feeling the threat in his tone. There was no point in trying to deceive them, because they’d get the truth eventually, from the man who was inside with him for the building-society job. “With a mate. In Manchester. It’s not easy, when you come out of the big house, you know.” The last sentence had the automatic whine of the long-term offender.

  “A mate you’d been friendly with in Strangeways, no doubt.” Pickard paused, then took the silence for assent. “You were planning the raid you attempted in Preston, weren’t you?”

  Plant looked as if he was going to deny it, then said with what little spirit he could muster, “Well, what if we were? You’ve got us banged to rights for that.”

  Pickard grinned at him. It was true; their little exchange was strictly speaking irrelevant. But it was part of the necessary softening up process for what was to follow. Show a man the hopelessness of his position in one area, and he might be less able to resist you in another, more vital one.

  It was Lucy Blake who said, “Are you telling us you were living in Manchester from the date at the beginning of October when you disappeared from Brunton? Right through to last Monday morning, when you were arrested in Preston?”

  Plant immediately looked more shifty. “Basically, yes. Except that we stayed the odd night around Preston when we were setting up Monday’s job. We looked at a few building-society and bank branches before we chose that one.” There was the glimmer of a ludicrous professional pride.

  Lucy ignored it, said coldly, “You were seen in Brunton on January the second.”

  “So what? I said we were ‘around Preston’, didn’t I? What’s Brunton...ten miles away?”

  He was scared again, anxious to take them away from Brunton as a place where he might have been spending time. That might mean no more than that their getaway driver had come from the town, that Plant didn’t want to reveal that. She made a note to pass on that thought to the DI investigating the building-society job. But Plant’s anxiety might also stem from something quite different. “Where were you on the night of Saturday, January the fifth, Mr Plant?”

  “I don’t know. How the hell should I? It’s nearly a month ago.”

  “Twenty-five days, yes. It snowed that night, in Brunton. Does that ring any bells?”

  “Remember it snowing. I can’t remember where I was or what I was doing. I wasn’t in Brunton.”

  “And could you give us the name of anyone we could contact to confirm that?” She was patient, matter-of-fact, implying that no great issues hung upon his answer — almost as if she was bored with this.

  “No, I couldn’t. What’s it to you, anyway?”

  “To us? It’s a matter of some importance, actually. I can tell you that it would certainly be of help to you, if you could account for yourself on that night.”

  “Well, I can’t. I was in Manchester somewhere, that’s all I can tell you.”

  Lucy Blake made a note of that, reminding herself also to check whether it had actually snowed that night in Manchester as well as Brunton, since Plant claimed to remember the snow too.

  Then she nodded to Tony Pickard and he said, “Let’s see if your memory is any better for some other dates, Terry. November the third of last year, for a start. Another Saturday. Clear night with a crescent moon, in case that jogs the memory of a nocturnal animal like you.”

  “No. It’s too bloody long ago. If you’re trying to fit me up for other jobs, it won’t work. There weren’t any others, until Monday.”

  “Of course there weren’t, Terry! And that was such a fiasco you’re giving up crime forever, sticking to the straight and narrow from now on, I know. We’ve heard it all before. Save it for the judge. Just tell me where you were on the night of Saturday, November the third, there’s a good boy.”

  “I can’t. But there’s no bloody reason why I should. I know my rights!”

  “Rights, is it, now, Terry?” Tony Pickard folded his arms and smiled, then unfolded them and leant forward. “Listen to me, Plant. You’re a bloody thug and everyone knows it! We don’t have to prove that; you’ve proved it admirably yourself, and you’re going down for a five stretch at least for the latest episode. I don’t give a damn what happens to scum like you, but I’ll tell you this much: it’s in your own interests to batter that thick head of yours into some action. Tell us where you were on these dates. In fact, find some means of convincing us where you were on these dates, or we’ll become very interested in you!”

  Plant recoiled as if he feared physical violence; like many men who hand out casual beatings to the defenceless, he was quickly afraid when anyone threatened to assault him. And Pickard had sounded ready to hit him; even Lucy Blake glanced quickly sideways at her companion, ready to intervene if he showed any sign of letting his anger take over.

  But Tony Pickard had not lost control. His white, unlined face was glaring at Plant, but his voice was perfectly level as he said harshly, “Let’s try another date, Terry. The twelfth of December. A Wednesday. See if you can remember where you were on that night.”

  Plant shook his head dumbly, his eyes widening. Lucy was sure that he knew where this was leading now. If his horror was simulated, he did it well. But then you would have expected no less from the killer who took such pains to leave nothing of himself behind at the scenes of his crimes.

  Once he had realised what this was about, they left him alone, knowing that eventually he must speak, that he would not allow the silence which was so threatening to him to stretch for ever. After a good thirty seconds, Terry Plant said hoarsely, “The Lancashire Leopard. Those are his dates, aren’t they? You’re trying to fit me up with that. It’s...it’s bloody laughable!”

  Tony Pickard had relaxed with the mention of the Leopard. He said, “But you’re not laughing, Terry. And on this side of the table we don’t find the notion funny at all.”

  “I didn’t kill those women. I’ve never—”

  “We had a look round your place, Terry, a colleague and I. Well, the place your dubious friend who’ll go down with you enabled you to share. Found a few interesting things. One of them was a pair of gardening gloves. Unused for horticulture. Unused at all, apparently, as yet. The kind of gloves the Leopard wears, when he’s throttling women. They’re bagged and in our Murder Room now. Anything to say, Terry? Any explanation of why those gloves should be found in an apartment in Hulme which has no garden?”

  Plant was panicking now. He said desperately, “I don’t know about no gloves. I never saw any gloves. I never bought them. They...they must be Keith’s, if they were there at all.”

  “Oh, they were there, Terry. Hidden away, of course, ready for the occasion when they would be used. Under the mattress you slept on, as a matter of fact. And curiously enough, your friend Keith denies any knowledge of them.”

  “They weren’t mine. I didn’t buy them. They...they must have been there be
fore I ever used the place.”

  “Unlikely, that, Terry. Be difficult for you to convince a jury of it, when the time comes, I should think.”

  Lucy Blake decided that this had gone as far as it could usefully go. She said, “Think about it Terry. When you’re in your cell tonight, think hard about it. If you’ve no explanation for the gloves, you’d better come up with an account of where you were on at least one of those dates, and provide someone convincing to support your story. Otherwise we shall be back.”

  The warder locked the door upon a thoroughly frightened man, who had suddenly become a focus of much more interest in the prison.

  *

  Superintendent Tucker got the news of Blake and Pickard’s visit to interview Terry Plant at lunch-time as he prepared for his press conference. It seemed to him at the time like manna from heaven. In retrospect, it proved nothing of the sort.

  At the conference, Tucker was ruffled by some hostile questioning. It seemed, said the man from the Express, that the police were getting precisely nowhere, despite the extra personnel allotted to the case, despite the passage of almost four weeks since the death of the Leopard’s third victim Hannah Woodgate, despite the nightly fears of hundreds of women in the north-west of England.

  Tucker said that it was a particularly difficult case, because the Leopard left nothing of himself at the scenes of his crimes. He was unusual in that there were no traces of sexual assault on his victims. That made things more than usually difficult for the police and the forensic services.

  So the message was that it would be more helpful all round if the killer raped his next victim before he killed her, said the woman crime reporter from the Mirror.

  That was a ridiculous suggestion, and in the worst of taste, said Tucker; as usual he was more easily nettled by a woman journalist than he would have been by a man. He insisted that the police should be congratulated on their industry: they had painstakingly eliminated hundreds of possible candidates for these murders.

  So the man in charge of the case had nothing to tell them, suggested the local man, Alf Houldsworth. They were no nearer to an arrest than they had been a month ago. The only message the papers could give to their readers were the old clichés: the Leopard is too clever; the police are baffled.

  There were signs of merriment at Tucker’s expense and he produced the card he had meant to keep hidden until much later. He told his critical audience that a man was even at this moment in custody, that he was helping the police with their enquiries.

  He had their attention immediately. Even for Thomas Bulstrode Tucker, the adrenaline could pulse through his veins, and it had the same effect as upon other people. It made him a little more excited, prompted him to say a little more than he would have done in a calmer moment. He told his listeners that while nothing was settled yet, certain evidence which might be helpful had been unearthed. No, he could not give them a name. Yes, he was very optimistic about an announcement. When? Within the next forty-eight hours, he hoped.

  It got him off the hook. His audience dispersed with some excitement. The radio and television bulletins that night carried the news that a man was being questioned in connection with serious crimes in East Lancashire; that the man in charge of the case thought that he probably had the Lancashire Leopard under lock and key.

  *

  The murderer watched the television reports of these latest developments with acute interest. At ten o’clock on that Wednesday evening, he poured himself a small whisky, added a precise three times the amount of water to it, and began to think about what he should do next.

  That Superintendent Tucker had shown himself up for the wally he was. The public didn’t realise that yet, but they soon would. The police were chasing their own tails, were nowhere near him.

  It was time to show people just how futile were the efforts of that self-inflated balloon Tucker and his underlings. He had already researched the area of his next strike. Success came from careful planning and cool execution. The first he had already put in place, the second was just a matter of following the straightforward methods of the previous three.

  Tomorrow, or the next night, he would make his move. He was so excited that it took him hours to get to sleep.

  Thirteen

  Thursday, January 31st

  In the end, Superintendent Tucker decided to attend the session with the forensic psychologist. If the initiative was successful, he would wish at some time in the future to claim credit for it. Even he would hardly be able to do that if he had conspicuously ignored the man at the time.

  Dr Hamish Wishart was a small man with a trimmed ginger beard, a mop of rather untidy matching hair, and intense blue eyes. He brought a flat black briefcase into the room, which was crowded with CID officers whose expectations ranged from the optimistic to the openly sceptical. Tucker got the meeting off to a good start by getting their visitor’s name wrong in his introduction. Wishart corrected him humorously and Tucker, whether from caution or a fit of the sulks, hardly spoke for the rest of the meeting.

  Peach gave a summary of what was known so far. It was succinct, partly because there was really so little to report. No clothing fibres; no blood to test against samples acquired from suspects; no semen; no possibility so far of any DNA profile. Tucker winced as Peach ended with, “Bugger-all to show from the efforts over many weeks of a team that has grown from thirty to sixty.”

  Wishart smiled. “Not quite nothing, Inspector. We can deduce certain things about the criminal from his behaviour. Not definitive, but worth bearing in mind. Such as that your man is a planner. As you say, he has left very little of himself behind. That does not happen by accident. He has taken care that it should be so. Perhaps elaborate care. Would you agree?”

  Peach nodded. “Yes. He’s also mobile. My guess is that he parks some distance from where he actually kills, because there was mud around at the scene of the December killing and snow at the time of the third death in January. But we didn’t find any tyre tracks near either body. Nevertheless, we can presume that he’s a driver, I think, because of the sites of the killings. They are quite widely spread within East Lancashire, and he must have had some method of getting there and getting away swiftly afterwards. The first two bodies were found quite quickly, but no suspicious characters were reported in the area.”

  Brendan Murphy said, “It could be either a car or a motorbike, of course.” Only those involved knew that he was thinking at that moment of the smooth black features of Clyde Northcott, who had still not been able to come up with an alibi for the three nights of the murders. “We’ve checked stolen vehicles on the night in question, and are satisfied that none of them were used in connection with any of the murders. So the probability is that our killer is a motorcycle or car owner, probably using the same vehicle on each occasion. Door-to-door enquiries have given us a few vehicle sightings, but none which tally on two of the occasions, never mind all three.”

  Wishart nodded. “More evidence of how careful your man is. What we have to try to do is to construct a net with smaller holes. Too often a man like this gets through the net, simply because the holes are too big. We need to narrow those holes. So far we know that he’s a driver, probably but not certainly with his own vehicle, and a careful planner. Let me suggest something else which might save fruitless work; which might narrow the holes in our net a little. That is that you should eliminate flashers and people with convictions for minor sexual crimes. This man has scrupulously resisted any form of sexual assault. It is almost certain that flashers, gropers, even rapists and deviants like necrophiliacs, would not have been able to resist sexual assault of some sort.”

  Tony Pickard said, “There may have been verbal assault on the victims before they died, of course. We don’t know what awful things this man might have said before he killed.”

  “True enough. But sexual criminals talk to excite themselves as well as to torment their victims. It is very rare that obscene suggestions or threats are not followed u
p by some form of physical sexual attack.”

  Peach said, “All the killings have been late at night. It may be the time of maximum opportunity for our man, but the chance to isolate women and kill them is by no means confined to the time around midnight when he seems to operate. Can we draw anything from that time?”

  Wishart shook his head. “Nothing conclusive. But it probably means he has a job. Probably works what most of us would regard as a regular day. I think otherwise it’s likely that by now you would have had an assault during the day on an isolated housewife. There are plenty of them around, now that so many women go out to work, and we know this man is a planner.”

  Lucy Blake nodded. “A man with a regular job looks likeliest. We checked out people like barmen, who work in the evenings and could have killed immediately afterwards. But the geographical spread of the killings works against them. Dr Wishart, you said we should probably not be looking for someone with a history of sexual crimes. What about people with a history of violence?” She glanced across at Tony Pickard, who gave her a smile of recognition, so that she knew they were both thinking about Terry Plant.

  “That’s much more likely. Especially if the violence is towards women, and especially if it’s not related to sex. That would be quite an unusual combination, I have to add.”

  DS Blake smiled. “We do have one such candidate. He’s safely under lock and key at present, because he’s on remand for another offence.” There was a little stir of interest in the crowded room, and Lucy added hastily, “He doesn’t strike us as highly intelligent, though, as we said earlier the Leopard might be.”

  “I think I said a planner. He need not be highly intelligent in the conventional sense of the word. The proverb says that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains; I do not care for that definition myself, but on that basis your man might be a genius. I prefer to think of him as a very careful criminal. A planner, who very probably enjoys the minutiae of planning.”