Only a Game

by J M Gregson

  ‘No. I mean, you’re quite right there, Peach.’ The thought of his spouse’s Wagnerian rejection of a wedding invitation from Peach induced an uncharacteristic decisiveness in her husband. Barbara Tucker, who had no conception of how completely her husband’s reputation depended upon Percy Peach, could not understand why he tolerated the insufferable man. ‘Keep the gathering small, as you say. Much the best policy.’ Tucker waved a wide arm vaguely at nothing in particular to signify his approval. ‘I expect I shall have the opportunity to meet the lady at some future date.’

  ‘Actually, sir, you already know her.’

  ‘Already know her?’ Welcome return of goldfish.

  ‘She’s a police officer, sir. To be precise, she is Detective Sergeant Blake.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Blake?’

  ‘A member of your CID team, sir.’

  ‘I am aware who Detective Sergeant Blake is, Peach! Kindly credit me with a little knowledge, will you?’ A fact surfaced unexpectedly from the primeval swamp which was Tucker’s memory. ‘DS Blake is the woman you thought it would be impossible to work with when I assigned her to you.’

  Percy smiled in fond recognition of that moment four years earlier. ‘Indeed, sir. It shows how far your enlightened attitudes have pervaded your staff, doesn’t it? There was I thinking that I’d be unable to work with a woman and you with your wider perceptions saw that you were offering me happiness beyond the realms of detection.’ He beamed what he hoped was the appropriate romantic-novel bliss at the corner of Tucker’s ceiling. ‘Well, I am now able to tell you that your projection of your bedroom happiness with Barbara into other lives has borne fruit, sir.’

  The linking of bedroom with Barbara rang loud alarm bells in Tucker’s racing brain. He said sternly, ‘You shouldn’t be working with the woman, Peach, if there’s a relationship. Against all the codes of the service, that is.’

  After all this time, the bloody idiot is still so out of touch that he didn’t know we had a thing going, thought Percy. Tommy Bloody Tucker, top Brunton CID brain. God help us. He said sternly, ‘A whirlwind romance has overtaken us, sir. But you are right, as always. At the conclusion of the present Capstick case, DS Blake and I will reluctantly sever our working relationship. And shortly afterwards, we shall be united in holy matrimony.’

  ‘That will be in order.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Is there anything else. I’m really very busy at the moment.’

  Peach surveyed the shiningly vacant desk again. ‘No, sir. I shall get back to solving this business at Grafton Park now.’

  ‘Do that, please.’ His relief at seeing the back of his DCI was shaken by a belated thought of team management. ‘And Peach.’

  Percy turned wearily with his hand on the door handle. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do convey my congratulations to the lady in question. To DS Blake. To . . .’

  Percy took pity on him. ‘It’s Lucy, sir.’

  ‘Of course it is, yes. Well, tell her that I hope she will be very happy. Oh, and you, too, of course.’

  Tucker shook his head in bewilderment as the door finally closed and he was left alone. Someone wanted to marry Percy Peach – an attractive girl, too, if he’d got the right one. The world got stranger every day.

  ‘Do come in. I’ve been expecting to speak to you ever since this happened.’

  Edward Lanchester took the pair through the high Edwardian hall and into a comfortably furnished sitting room, where the flames of an open fire danced unexpectedly and cheerfully. ‘The central heating is perfectly adequate, but I’m of the generation which still likes to see a real fire in the evenings. I can remember us digging ourselves out of many feet of snow in 1947, though I was still a boy at the grammar school then. And everything seemed to freeze up in 1963 – that was the last year in which I remember there being burst pipes all over the town. I think we’ll draw the curtains and shut out the rain and the miserable evening, shall we?’

  Lucy Blake wondered if he talked so much because he was nervous, like so many of the people they spoke to in murder enquiries. Within a few minutes, she had settled for another explanation: like many people who lived alone, the old man was lonely, whether he realized it or not, and his reaction to visitors was to talk rather more than was necessary. She said, because some response seemed to be called for and Peach was still studying their host, ‘I like your curtains. This is a very pleasant room, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think it is, though it’s probably a little old-fashioned for your taste. I can’t claim any credit for the curtains, or for anything else in here, for that matter. My wife chose everything. Practically everything in the house was her taste. I suppose that’s the way it was when we were young, the man was the breadwinner and the woman made the home. Eleanor died two years ago.’

  ‘You must miss her very much.’

  ‘I do, I’m afraid.’ He thought suddenly of the daughters he saw so rarely, of the sympathy and support they might have offered him if they’d been closer. It was pathetic that he should be so grateful for such a small moment of warmth from this pretty young woman with the dark red hair, who had never known Eleanor. ‘But I’m forgetting my manners. Can I offer you some sort of refreshment?’

  ‘No need for that, sir. But thank you for the thought.’ Peach had been studying Lanchester, as his junior had expected. But Lucy Blake had missed noticing the thing which had really kept him silent: Percy had for a totally uncharacteristic moment been in awe of someone. Edward Lanchester had only just ceased to be the chairman of Brunton Rovers when the diminutive Denis Charles Scott Peach had begun supporting them as a small boy. Such a figure surely merited a moment of respect, even from the grown man who was now the senior policeman Percy Peach.

  Only a moment, though: Percy hastily reasserted his professional persona. ‘We need to speak to you about the murder of James Capstick.’

  Lanchester nodded his smiling acceptance of that. ‘As I say, I’ve been expecting you ever since the news broke yesterday.’

  ‘We’ve already spoken to a number of other people, sir. We haven’t been idle.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t implying anything like that. But I expect I shall now be a disappointment to you. I don’t suppose I shall be able to add anything useful to what you already know about the events of Saturday night.’

  ‘We speak to everyone who was close to the incident. It’s part of the routine of a murder enquiry.’ Peach found himself unusually ill at ease in the presence of this alert and well-groomed elderly man. It could only be because of Lanchester’s eminence at the football club during his formative years, he decided. He determined to assert himself. ‘You didn’t like James Capstick, did you?’

  The white-haired man was not at all put out by the abruptness of this. He’d always liked men who came straight to the point, who didn’t defer to his real or imagined eminence. ‘I don’t think many people liked James Capstick, Chief Inspector. I expect you’ve already discovered that. But to answer your question, no, I didn’t like him at all. He was a necessary evil, in the modern football world, but that did not mean I had to like him.’

  ‘A necessary evil?’

  Lanchester sighed. ‘You can’t run a Premiership football club, especially in a small town like Brunton, without having a lot of money behind you. Not nowadays. I chaired the club for many years, and I hope ran it prudently and efficiently. That was what was expected of a chairman in the sixties and seventies. Nowadays, unless the club is a public company, the chairman usually owns it and is expected to finance it. Jim Capstick had a lot of business interests and a lot of money.’

  ‘So he was necessary. But you called him a necessary evil.’

  Lanchester considered his reply. He was used to being cautious, after many years of being badgered by journalists. But this was a different and more serious situation. ‘Capstick was involved in some pretty dubious enterprises and had some very dubious associates: I know enough about the way he made his money to say that. I susp
ect the police in the Midlands know more than I do, though there have never been any criminal proceedings against him.’

  ‘Reliable evidence to mount a case is hard to come by, when people are in a position to threaten witnesses and many of the people involved have criminal records themselves.’ Peach had spent an hour on the phone and the police computers himself, enlarging his knowledge of James Capstick.

  ‘He wasn’t the man I wanted to see buying Brunton Rovers three years ago. But there weren’t many other candidates. To be frank, there weren’t any. But when I said that I regarded him as a necessary evil, I meant that I was never convinced that he had the interests of the club at heart. I felt that he was at best an asset-stripper – that he’d sell what property and what playing assets we have and leave the club in a sorry state. I stayed on the board in the hope that I could prevent that, but I was well aware that I was pretty well powerless. The most I could do was to expose any of his moves for exactly what they were rather than allow him to put the gloss he wanted on them. I would have done that in this case, but I couldn’t have prevented the sale of the club.’

  ‘Do you think this deal will still go through?’

  Lanchester shrugged his well-suited shoulders. ‘Who knows? The radio suggested at lunch time that the sheikh who was planning to buy the club is no longer interested. We shall see.’

  ‘Tell us exactly what happened on Saturday night, please.’

  Edward wrenched himself away from his contemplation of the future of his beloved Rovers. ‘We were all full of excitement at the victory over Liverpool. I can remember the fifties, when they were in the old second division with us and we were more or less equals. Those were the days! But a victory over one of the top teams now is a bigger and rarer event than ever it was then, so we were all very excited and happy. Until Capstick breezed in and told us he was selling the club!’

  ‘I can see what a damper that must have put on things. I understand that you were the first person to react to it.’

  ‘I expect I was, yes. I suppose I usually spoke up first when someone had to oppose Capstick, if you want the truth. But then I had less to lose than most other people who were around, hadn’t I? He could always chuck me off the board, if I went too far, but he wanted me there, as a representative of the town and the old days. And I suppose I had a certain respectability, didn’t I? I suspect that men like Jim Capstick crave respectability, in spite of themselves.’

  ‘You’re probably right. And he probably expected you to oppose him. Did you offer him any sort of threat?’

  Edward Lanchester smiled. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to treat this lightly – a man has died, after all, even if he is a man I couldn’t respect. It’s just that the idea of me threatening a man like Capstick is slightly ludicrous, you see. I’m sure I’d have threatened him with whatever I could which was legal, but I had no weapons at my disposal. Capstick held all the cards: he owned the club and could do with it as he thought fit. He took a great delight in telling me just that in front of the assembled company.’ A little tic of pain twitched his cheek, and they had a glimpse of the proud man he had been and perhaps still was.

  ‘Wasn’t Mr Capstick at all apologetic about his news?’

  ‘Capstick wasn’t an apologetic man. Arrogance was more his forte. He said he was sorry to have to interrupt the merrymaking with his news. That much was probably true. But once he’d announced the takeover, he positively enjoyed emphasizing the fact that there was nothing any of us could do about it, that the decision was his and his alone. He was one of those men who liked to assert his power openly rather than go quietly about things.’

  Peach looked at him steadily for a moment. ‘There was something you could do and one of you probably did. You could remove him from the scene. That might stop this deal going through.’

  Lanchester smiled ruefully. ‘As I said, the media, and especially our wonderful sporting press, are speculating that this might already have happened. The mysterious sheikh has apparently reserved his position. I suppose there is some chance that whoever inherits James Capstick’s assets – Helen Capstick, I presume – will not be as enthusiastic to dispose of the club as he was. There has even been a local report in the Evening Telegraph that I will be asked to take over the chairmanship. I wouldn’t do that, even on a temporary basis. My time has gone.’

  Peach waited for a moment to see if he would elaborate on this, but the silver-haired man said nothing more. The DCI asked quietly, ‘Who do you think killed James Capstick, Mr Lanchester?’

  Another smile. Edward was not shaken by a question he had anticipated, which also signified to him that the interview was almost over. ‘I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did, despite the feelings about him that I’ve just expressed to you. If this were crime fiction, I suppose I’d be yelling hysterically that I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. But this is real life, and the law must be upheld.’

  It was Peach’s turn to smile. ‘So in real life, you probably think some of the people in that room on Saturday night are more likely candidates for murder than others.’

  ‘No. I’ve thought about it over the last forty-eight hours, of course, but I really have no idea. Our chief executive and our manager had been told they were likely to lose their jobs. I noticed that Debbie Black was also very animated at the time. I scarcely know Helen Capstick, but for all I know, she might have other and more personal reasons to be rid of her husband. I presume she will be a very rich woman as a result of this death. But speculation is useless, because I find it impossible to suspect any of these people of killing anyone. I don’t envy you your task, Detective Chief Inspector.’ He paused, and this time his smile was ironic. ‘I suppose that even an ageing ex-chairman who sees his beloved club being destroyed might be a candidate for you.’

  ‘Indeed. When did you leave the club on Saturday night?’

  Lanchester looked as if he was enjoying playing out this little charade. ‘I suppose it would be about an hour after Capstick said he was going up to his office. I can remember that when he left I immediately sat down in the corner of the room. I suppose I must have been more shaken by the news than I’d cared to show to Jim Capstick. I appreciate that it would simplify your task if I could tell you that I’d garrotted the man in his office before leaving, but I cannot do that.’

  ‘Did anyone see you leave?’

  ‘One of our stewards had been locking all the doors in the players’ section. Harry’s been around for years – he must be as old as I am. I said good night to him. I then drove here and didn’t go out again, but there are no witnesses to that.’

  His sad face gave a glimpse of his loneliness. Peach nodded. ‘You know this club better than anyone, Mr Lanchester. If anything occurs to you which might be even marginally relevant, please ring the CID section at Brunton immediately.’

  At nine o’clock, the drizzle had set in for the night. Darren Pearson’s windscreen wipers flapped steadily as he drove to his wife’s flat. There were pools of water now in the gutters; in one stretch in the lower part of the town, a drain was clogged and the water stretched dark and sinister across the road, so that cars waited cautiously to crawl along the middle in low gear.

  He sat in the Vectra for a moment before he went into the block of flats, but as usual the thoughts which he found so easy to marshal in a working context refused to be forced into a logical sequence when he was beset by emotions. By the time he knocked tremulously on the plain wooden modern door, he was not even sure that he was doing the right thing, whereas he had been quite certain that he was before he set out.

  Margaret Pearson must have divined his confusion from his face. She made him accept the offer of tea and sit in the big armchair she had brought to the flat from their old home. She set a beaker he had not seen before in front of him and said, ‘Everyone’s talking about that death at Grafton Park. You must have had a busy day.’

  He smiled weakly, his face grey and drained. ‘It was murder, Meg.’

>   ‘I guessed that. “Suspicious death”, the police said. They don’t give much away, do they?’

  ‘I don’t think they know much, yet. But you’re right, they wouldn’t tell us if they did. I’ve been trying to calm everyone down and carry on as if nothing has happened, but it isn’t easy. All anyone wants to talk about is Capstick’s murder.’

  ‘Well, that’s natural enough, I suppose. But I can see it must make things difficult for you.’

  He smiled at her, grateful for even this conventional, meaningless sympathy. ‘It complicates things, being a murder suspect yourself. You wonder all the time what other people are saying about you when you’re not there.’

  ‘But surely the police can’t think you had anything to do with it?’

  Her surprise and concern were genuine and instinctive, and again he was ridiculously pleased. ‘It isn’t just me, Meg. It’s everyone who was in the hospitality suite on Saturday night when Capstick announced he was selling the club. Well, all those who stood to be losers by it, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve never been close to a murder enquiry – never even had to think about it.’

  ‘It’s an odd feeling. You can’t believe that it’s really happening to you. And according to the papers today, the takeover might now be off. I might keep my job, as a result of this killing.’

  Both of them were silent for a moment. Then she found herself voicing the thought she had told herself she would not raise. ‘How are you getting on otherwise?’

  He gave her an acrid smile. She wouldn’t even name his vice openly, as if the very word might bring its own curse with it. At one time he would have lied to her. He had determined before he came here that he would lie to her no more. ‘I’m fighting the urge to bet. Gamblers Anonymous are a great help.’

  ‘Fighting but not winning?’ She had been over this ground too often to deceive herself.