by J M Gregson
She found such a man in Martin Price. For both of them, the possibility of discovery brought with it a spine-chilling excitement they could have taken from nothing else.
Price had served for eight years in the SAS. He had risen to the rank of Captain in that impressively daring and impressively vicious organization. He had been forced to leave the army because he had broken a rule in even the elastic code which was peculiar to the SAS. It was an organization which needed to countenance much more than the regular army if it was to achieve its perilous goals, but Price had done something which even the SAS could not ignore. Greta had still not found out exactly what he had done. Nor had she pressed Martin for details; his vague and undefined offences brought a touch of mystique to the man which added to her excitement.
Martin Price had first met Greta at this stage of his life. Immediately after he had left the SAS, he had been doing some covert work for Oliver. Mystery had combined with dashing good looks to imbue him with glamour, but he had then disappeared for six years to operate as a mercenary soldier in different parts of Africa and Asia.
His experience in the SAS gave him the ideal background for such work. He had a capacity to weigh the chances of success and failure in any battle exercise more accurately than any of the native troops he commanded. He was not only experienced but cool and dispassionate. People zealous for a particular cause usually entertained delusions of military glory which undermined calculation. Price estimated the realities of combat and his chances of success with cool efficiency.
When he resurfaced in northern England, Martin was older, harder and even more captivating for Greta Ketley. His reappearance coincided with her final realization that she was never going to change Oliver Ketley, that she was never going to be more than an exotic appendage in her husband’s life. When Price appeared from nowhere beside her on one of her shopping expeditions to Manchester and asked her to join him for coffee, she agreed immediately. Months later, both of them agreed first that she had not hesitated for a moment before doing so and secondly that each of them had known that this was a commitment to something much more serious.
Martin Price did not live in a city. In the small town of Chorley, between Preston and Manchester, a Georgian mansion had been converted into four luxury flats. Martin lived in the larger of the two ground-floor flats. It was much easier to see who was coming and going in Chorley than in the city, much easier to note the presence of any stranger who might be checking on the movements of people in the new flats. You took such precautions, when you had lived as Martin Price had lived.
He kept his blond hair short, not to disguise the advent of baldness, as some forty-year-old men did, but because it was a habit he had acquired in the SAS and maintained in the rainforests of Africa. Long hair brought lice, when water was scarce; it also made you vulnerable in close combat. Greta stroked his hair now, delighting in its familiar springiness beneath her fingers, gazing from no more than a foot into those blue eyes which were so much darker and more alive than Oliver’s. Martin had a good mouth, too, so much more active than—but comparisons were odious, when you could and should enjoy a man for his own sake.
He levered himself up on his elbows on the silk sheets and smiled down at her. She wondered how he had managed to preserve such perfect teeth through the danger and the violence he had encountered. ‘Fag?’
‘Yes, please.’
It was quite the strangest of the little rituals they had adopted to confirm the uniqueness of their relationship. Neither of them smoked; when they compared notes, they both appeared to have given up at the same time, when they were in their twenties. But Martin was an admirer of the films noirs and the Hitchcocks of the fifties and sixties and he had converted Greta to them. Bogart and Cary Grant and seemingly everyone else smoked then. Partly in memory of them, but much more to seal their own bonding, they had taken to smoking a single black Turkish cigarette as a post-coital rite. Neither of them inhaled any more, but they blew out long wreaths of aromatic smoke, which seemed as they mingled to symbolize their own happy pairing.
Greta had left her clothes well away from the bed and she would shower thoroughly before she dressed, lest a husband who suspected nothing should pick up the traces of smoke on her clothes. She might be daring, but she was not stupid. One of her frustrations was that Ketley was never far from her thoughts. That was probably why she now said without any forethought, ‘I wish I could stay here for ever.’
Martin blew a long funnel of smoke, then watched it slowly disintegrate like incense as it rose towards the high ceiling. ‘And I wish you could, too.’ It was a more measured response than her original thought had been, but it surprised him even more because of that. Commitment had been an alien word for him throughout his life. He was sure that Greta also had intended nothing permanent when they had started this. She snuggled a little closer and he slid his arms beneath the shoulder blades which had recently writhed so passionately within his grasp.
‘I’ll have to go soon.’ But she made no effort to move. Instead she moved her body softly against the arm beneath her and raised both of her hands to stroke his.
There was a long pause before he said slowly, ‘If you’d really like to make us more permanent, we shall have to think what we should do about that.’
Now she did move, turning on to her side so that she could look directly into his face again. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Oliver’s not a man to cross. I worry enough already about the danger I’ve put you in.’
‘The danger I put myself in. I went into this with my eyes open.’
‘But you didn’t think then that we’d be talking like this.’
He smiled at her, that slightly lopsided grin that could make her tremble, even now. ‘No, I didn’t. I don’t think I thought too clearly about it then. I knew that you were the most attractive woman I’d ever met and I lusted after you. I didn’t think much beyond that.’
She was suddenly afraid for both of them. ‘Perhaps it would have been better if it had stayed like that.’
‘It would have been simpler, certainly. But not better. You can’t regret the way we feel, just because it makes life more complicated.’
She looked at him for a moment full of wonder. Then she took his face between her hands and kissed him long and tenderly, feeling the renewed stirrings of desire as he stroked the small of her back. ‘So what do we do about it?’
‘Nothing in a hurry. Nothing without serious thought.’ He was a soldier again; a soldier-lover, planning a daring sally to secure his woman.
Pleasure lasted in Greta for scarcely a moment. Fear was abruptly stronger, surging up and over her gratitude to him. ‘You shouldn’t even think about it! Oliver wouldn’t consider divorce, unless he’d initiated it. He’d punish me. And the first step in that would be to eliminate my lover.’
‘I can look after myself.’ The lover’s eternal, blinkered assertion.
‘Not against Oliver Ketley, you can’t. That’s no reflection on you, my darling. It’s just that he has resources you can’t match.’
‘But we have certain advantages. He doesn’t know about us, does he?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure. I’d know about it, if he had even an inkling. And you’d probably be dead. Don’t underestimate him, Martin.’
‘I shan’t do that. But whilst he doesn’t suspect us, we have the advantage.’
Greta nodded, still fearful, but feeling the tense excitement which danger always brought to her. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet. But as long as he doesn’t know about us, we needn’t hurry. We can lay careful plans.’ He took her impulsively into his arms again, pressing his lips hard against hers, feeling her tongue move urgently against his teeth, exulting in the stirring within the length of her body as he held her tight against him.
He held her for a long time like that, then reluctantly thrust her away from him to look into her face. ‘Once we
have made our plans, we’ll make our move. It will need to be swift and decisive.’
Eddie Barton should have heeded his instincts. The golf club job had felt wrong from the start. Nothing in its execution changed that view.
Yet it began easily enough. They managed to park the battered white Ford van quite near to the entrance to the men’s changing rooms at the golf club. A portly man who was shouting to his friends that he was on the way round to the first tee held the door open for them obligingly and scarcely glanced at them as he left.
But they were too nervous to make the most of the pickings from the trouser pockets in the big room and they were interrupted repeatedly by members coming through to use the toilets. Eventually they grabbed two bags of clubs from the lockers and left, forcing their legs to move casually rather than to run to the van.
In his anxiety, Luke Gannon gunned the accelerator too hard as he started the van. Eddie thought they must surely excite attention. But no one came running from the clubhouse. They were away between the high posts and out of the golf club car park within seconds. Eddie glanced behind him at the booty on the floor in the back of the van. They wouldn’t get much for what they’d pinched and the risk hadn’t been worth it. But at least they’d got away with it. They’d need to get rid of the hot stuff fast, though.
The police car was waiting at the end of the cul de sac. It eased sideways across the road as they approached, making it totally clear that the main road and the wide world outside was not for them.
Luke Gannon sprang from his seat and made a token effort to evade the strong arms of the law. They encircled him before he had gone five yards. The constable was still quite young; there was real jubilation in his tone as he voiced the words of arrest. His first ‘collar’: a story to retail to his girlfriend that night. Gannon and Barton would no doubt emerge then as bigger, stronger and more fearsome than the defeated pair who now meekly surrendered their golf club pickings.
Eddie Barton journeyed towards Brunton nick and formal charges with his heart in the shoes he had polished for the occasion. He clasped his aching ribs and wondered whether a life of petty crime was quite the easy option he had thought it a month ago.
SEVEN
DCI Peach and DS Northcott observed things carefully whenever they went into a room. It was a CID habit.
They had seen hundreds of rooms like this one. They had seen hundreds of people like the defeated figure who was centre stage. The woman’s blonde hair needed urgent attention at the roots. Beneath the badly buttoned cardigan, her drooping breasts cried out for a better bra. There was a faint smell of stale food. The plastic containers of the supermarket curry were still on the sink beside the unwashed pots. Yet the rest of the room was tidy and clean; it strove against the odds for shabby respectability.
The woman was weighed down with care, but not stupid. The tired grey eyes quickened with apprehension as they showed their warrants. ‘A detective chief inspector and a detective sergeant? My Eddie isn’t in that league; he don’t do that sort of job. He don’t do anything, hasn’t for weeks now. He’s been injured. What you got against him?’
Peach found himself sorry as he often did for the mothers of young petty crooks. Probably she’d struggled to bring the lad up on her own after the departure of a feckless partner, warning him frequently against the dangers of bad company and the need to get a steady job. Now there was only the prospect of increasing disappointment and increasing hurt from yet another son who thought he could buck the trend and flout the law. ‘He tried to pull that daft trick at the golf club last week, as you know perfectly well, Mrs Barton. But we’re not here to arrest him. We need to speak to Eddy, for his own good.’
She didn’t believe that. It was always for their good, not yours, with the cops. She hesitated, looking at Peach and the tall black detective sergeant behind him. She’d had the odd copper in here before, but never plain clothes men and never these exalted ranks. She said, ‘Eddie’s in his room. You’d better go up.’
He’d heard them, of course. He’d turned his television down and listened hard to the conversation in the living room, just as his mother would no doubt hear most of what was going to happen now from the bottom of the stairs. Peach left the bedroom door a fraction open; when you were talking sense, let the older generation hear it too. Mum might even reinforce your arguments, after you’d gone.
‘I’ve nothing to tell you,’ Eddie Barton said defensively. He sat on the edge of his bed and kept his eye on the very black face of DS Northcott; the big man looked as if he might be inclined to beat the shit out of him if he stepped out of line. The fact that the DS was six feet three and said very little only made him seem more menacing in the small, hot room. When neither of them responded to his opening statement, Eddie blurted out nervously, ‘I’ll be pleading guilty to that golf club thing. Never should have got involved in it. All we got was a couple of lousy sets of clubs.’
‘You’re right there, sunshine!’ Percy Peach nodded agreement, switched off the television, and sat down in Eddie’s favourite chair, his round, enquiring face no more than six feet from his subject’s. ‘Only Luke Gannon would go back to the place where he’d pulled the same stunt only seven weeks ago. Almost like giving himself up, that was. All our lads had to do was follow you down there and block your exit. You’re nicely recorded on the CCTV at the golf club. And a right pair of twats you look!’
He allowed himself a smile at such stupidity. Eddie couldn’t help noticing that DS Northcott did not smile at all; he looked unpleasantly like a Rottweiler awaiting a command. Barton licked his lips and said as boldly as he could, ‘You’re wasting your time here, then. I’ve told you we’ll be pleading guilty.’
‘Of course you will. That’s not that we wanted a word about, though, is it DS Northcott?’
‘No sir.’ Clyde Northcott seemed to take the question as an invitation to become more involved. He stepped forward and stood beside his chief for a moment, then moved smoothly to sit beside the man on the single bed. Eddie cringed away from him, but all the DS did was to turn his head sideways, as if to observe an interesting specimen from a different and more intimate angle. He said in a deep voice which Eddie thought full of menace, ‘We need Mr Barton’s cooperation on a much more important matter.’
‘Oliver Ketley,’ Peach announced briskly.
Fear flashed on to the thin face and stayed there. Then, belatedly and pathetically, he said, ‘Who’s Oliver Ketley?’
Peach laughed outright at that. ‘Don’t ever go in for the stage, Eddie. You’re supposed to conceal what you’re thinking if you do that. Let’s try to cut a long story short, shall we, because it’s bloody hot in here and I can see my colleague’s getting impatient. You were guilty of breaking and entering at Thorley Grange and you were shot while escaping by one of the gorillas who guard Mr Ketley and all he surveys. How am I doing so far?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Eddie, sullenly and hopelessly.
Peach proceeded as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘You were taken to Brunton Royal Infirmary with gunshot and other wounds. We put you under expensive police guard there. When you were fit to speak, we sent a detective sergeant and a detective constable to interview you about your injuries, but you refused to cooperate. As a direct result of your criminal offence and the retaliation of your victim, you have been a burden on the NHS and wasted a considerable amount of valuable police time and resources.’
Eddie felt a need to arrest this torrent of words and accusations before it engulfed him. ‘She were a right cracker, that sergeant you sent in. Lovely bum and tits on ’er. Wouldn’t kick ’er out of bed, mate.’
‘I see. Well, I’ll tell my wife what you said, Eddie, but I wouldn’t hold out any great hopes, if I were you.’
Barton’s face registered first incomprehension, then consternation, then abject fear. He turned his eyes from Peach’s faintly amused round face to the ebony features beside him, and found that for the first time DS Northcott
was smiling. His mouth looked very wide and his teeth looked very white. His amusement was an even more frightening sight than his previous impassivity.
Peach said, ‘You’re a lucky lad, Eddie. We’re not going to prosecute you for the Thorley Grange business. If you offer us full cooperation, we might even put in a good word for you with the JPs on the bench when that golf club nonsense comes to court. Might even suggest you were led astray by an older man.’
Eddie said automatically, ‘I ain’t a grass. I don’t cooperate with no pigs.’
Peach shook his head sadly. ‘I was hoping you’d have more sense – your mum seemed to think you were quite an intelligent lad. But then mums do, don’t they?’
‘I’m not stupid. If I grass that lot up, they’ll—’ He stopped abruptly.
Peach made the most of Barton’s mistake by allowing a smile to creep very slowly across his expressive features. ‘And who would “that lot” be, Eddie?’
Barton shook his head glumly, not trusting the tongue which had already got him into trouble. Peach said earnestly, ‘We protected you whilst you were in hospital, Eddie – used expensive manpower to do it, as I pointed out to you a moment ago. But we can’t protect you for ever, now that you’re back in the community. You must have realized by now that you bit off more than you could chew up at Thorley Grange. There are some very nasty people up there. Your best policy would be to have us pigs on your side.’
‘Fat lot of use you lot were, when—’
For the second time he had reacted without thinking; for the second time Peach welcomed it with a broad beam of comprehension. ‘They’ve already visited you, haven’t they, Eddie?’
Barton’s hands felt automatically for the still painful ribs on his left side. He did not deny Peach; words only led you deeper into the mire with this persistent man, who seemed to know most things and to understand everything.
