Backhand Smash

by J M Gregson

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by J.M. Gregson From Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Recent Titles by J.M. Gregson from Severn House

  Lambert and Hook Mysteries

  A GOOD WALK SPOILED

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  IN VINO VERITAS

  DIE HAPPY

  MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

  CRY OF THE CHILDREN

  REST ASSURED

  SKELETON PLOT

  Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries

  REMAINS TO BE SEEN

  PASTURES NEW

  WILD JUSTICE

  ONLY A GAME

  MERELY PLAYERS

  LEAST OF EVILS

  BROTHERS’ TEARS

  A NECESSARY END

  BACKHAND SMASH

  BACKHAND SMASH

  J.M. Gregson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and 2016 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2016 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by J.M. Gregson.

  The right of J.M. Gregson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gregson, J. M. author.

  Backhand smash. – (A Percy Peach mystery)

  1. Peach, Percy (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Blake,

  Lucy (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 3. Police–

  England–Lancashire–Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery

  stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8565-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-674-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-731-8 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Christine and Michael, for their steady and valuable support over the years

  ONE

  ‘You’ll need to watch her. She’s only small, she’s fifty if she’s a day, and she looks as if she couldn’t hurt a fly. But Olive knows her tennis and she’s bloody good at the net. She’ll volley it straight into your privates if you give her half a chance.’

  It wasn’t the kind of conversation you’d expect in a police staff canteen. (The bureaucrats had tried ‘restaurant’ and ‘dining hall’, but neither had caught on at Brunton Police Station.) The talk here normally ranged only from the latest atrocities of the criminal fraternity to the latest inanities of the decision makers in the police service.

  But then this speaker wasn’t the typical consumer of dubious toad-in-the-hole or bangers and mash. Elaine Brockman was graduate entry to this distinctively scented eating place. She lived what seemed to most of her fellow officers an exotic life outside the station. Her father was a civil servant and her mother was a nursing sister. Both of them had bitterly opposed their daughter’s choice of career, though no one who sat with Elaine in the canteen knew anything of that.

  The officer she was speaking to could hardly have had a more contrasting life. Nor could he have been more physically different. PC Brockman was small and curvaceous and had dark blonde hair. She also had a surprisingly crisp right uppercut when it was needed. This had recently been used more amongst her over-amorous colleagues than amidst the town’s yob fraternity. But Elaine weighed no more than a trim nine stones. She was fair-skinned, blue-eyed and deceptively vulnerable in appearance: the right uppercut had surprised its victims.

  No one would have described Detective Sergeant Clyde Northcott as vulnerable. He was very black and very powerful. At six feet three and around fifteen stones of bone and muscle, he was not a man anyone cared to argue with. He had first-hand knowledge of the criminal low life, having been a small-time drug dealer for three months when he was nineteen. His lifestyle and his colour had ensured that he had needed from an early age to be very handy with his fists.

  Northcott had even been a suspect in a murder case. DCI Peach, his present boss, had cleared him of that and then unexpectedly recruited him to the police service. Now, six years later, he was Peach’s bagman and trusted aide, the member of the team whom Peach always described as his ‘hard bastard’, which added even more to Northcott’s formidable reputation. Whereas PC Brockman crept into the police car park each day in an ageing green Toyota passed on to her by her mother, DS Northcott roared in confidently on a Yamaha 350cc motorcycle.

  They made an odd couple, but they enjoyed exchanging their very different experiences of life. It was the third time in ten days that they had sat together at lunchtime. An unlikely pair, and today an unlikely subject of conversation: they were talking about tennis. And in particular about the rather snooty Birch Fields Tennis Club. Elaine was filling Clyde Northcott in on the diminutive middle-aged lady who had been endeavouring to recruit him as one of its members.

  Olive Crawshaw was her name and Elaine Brockman knew her well. She had known her since she was ten years old. ‘She’s a lady it isn’t easy to say no to,’ she told Northcott.

  ‘I found it easy enough to say it. She just didn’t seem to hear me,’ said the big man plaintively.

  ‘That’s Olive. She doesn’t hear what she doesn’t want to hear. She wears you down. Then, when you show the slightest sign of weakness, she pounces. Just like she does at the net when she’s on court.’

  Clyde frowned. ‘I didn’t show any weakness. I’m almost sure I didn’t show any weakness. But she just went on with her spiel as if I hadn’t spoken.’

  ‘That’s Olive,’ said Elaine again. A fond smile flicked across her highly mobile lips. ‘She likes getting the better of men, likes feeling that they’re putty in her hands. The bigger the man, the greater the triumph.’ She leant back a little to make it more obvious that she was running her gaze up and down Northcott’s formidable frame. ‘She’ll enjoy getting her way with you.’

  ‘She won’t do that,’ said Clyde firmly. ‘I’m not going to join. I decided years ago that tennis wasn’t going to be my game.’

  PC Brock
man gave him a sceptical but wholly beguiling smile.

  Olive Crawshaw would have been surprised but not at all disconcerted to know that she was the subject of conversation in the police canteen. Very few things disconcerted Mrs Crawshaw.

  She was, in fact, fifty-four rather than the fifty years that Elaine Brockman had conceded to her, but she had the energy of a thirty-year-old and the resolution of a Matterhorn scaler: she had climbed that formidable Alpine height to celebrate her fiftieth birthday, exciting wonder and admiration in the Swiss guides who had been reluctant to accompany her when she proposed the enterprise. Olive was a traditionalist: the challenge of the Matterhorn excited her far more than the now fashionable and much easier Kilimanjaro.

  At the last committee meeting of the Birch Fields Tennis Club, she had volunteered her support for the new initiative the committee had agreed to after several hours of lively debate. The committee members had learned survival techniques over twenty years; Mrs Crawshaw’s offer to head the new scheme had been eagerly accepted. This was a controversial venture, which wouldn’t be supported by all club members. If you wanted to ride out a controversy, Olive Crawshaw was your woman. Olive wasn’t given to boasting, but she might well have been pleased with that summary of her strengths.

  The new policy was both ethically correct and economically inevitable. Those were the phrases Olive had used when she had made her trenchant case for it to the committee. The club needed new members. It couldn’t simply go on increasing its subscription as its numbers fell. That was counter-productive: unless they remained competitive, putative tennis players would take their custom elsewhere. Worse still, if membership remained exclusive and the cost of playing rose, hard-up young people might give up tennis altogether and switch their allegiance to cheaper and more welcoming sports.

  The new policy, now belatedly approved by the committee, was to look for young members from a wider social spectrum and a wider ethnic background. School-leavers who were not going on to college or university would be encouraged to join the juniors. Seniors would be recruited from the Asian community – not many of the older members could distinguish with certainty between the Indian and Pakistani communities that now made up almost thirty per cent of the Brunton population. Respectable people from the lower ranks of society and even manual workers should be encouraged to join the club, provided that they understood and respected its rules.

  Trouble ahead, said the chairman, who had been the chief opponent of this widening of membership. But if there was going to be trouble, let Mrs Crawshaw meet it head-on. As the most enthusiastic advocate of the new policy, she could only expect to be allotted this challenging role.

  Challenge was a thing Olive relished. Head-on was very much her mode of attack. You couldn’t have anything much more head-on as your first recruit than a former drug dealer, reported to be handy with his fists, who was very large and very black. Mrs Crawshaw had determined that Clyde Northcott would be a talisman for the new policy. He would be a quarry whom she would pursue, capture and display triumphantly to those whingers and doubters who had opposed her will on the committee of Birch Fields Tennis Club.

  She would display Detective Sergeant Northcott in his shining ebony glory on the number one court at the weekend, as a slap to the prejudiced faces of those who said such men were not suitable members of the town’s most exclusive tennis club.

  Clyde Northcott was blissfully unaware of the plans Mrs Crawshaw was making for him. He was concentrating very hard on his professional responsibilities. You tended to do that when Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach was around.

  Peach’s real name was Denis Charles Scott Peach, but few save his mother-in-law, who was a cricket enthusiast, understood the significance of that D.C.S. They were the initials of the late and much lamented Denis Compton, the most dazzling and best-loved British batsman of the post-war years – Peach’s long-dead father had also been a cricket fan. The police service, with its predilection for alliteration, had christened him Percy as a young, fresh-faced copper and Percy he had been ever since then. Percy wasn’t yet forty, but no one at Brunton Police Station remembered him as fresh-faced, whilst the local criminal fraternity saw nothing even faintly comical in Percy.

  Percy was scowling his contempt at a particularly obnoxious member of that fraternity at this moment. For a man who carried a small black moustache on a round face beneath a shining bald pate, Percy did contempt rather well. On this occasion, there was nothing feigned about his scorn for the man in front of him. Sean Catterick was twenty-six. He had a record of violence and had already served a six-month custodial sentence, reduced to less than half of that by a judicial system that Peach regarded as absurdly ill-informed and misguided.

  In Peach’s view, Catterick should still have been in prison when he perpetrated his latest outrage. The DCI gazed into the coarse features on the other side of the small interview-room table with undisguised distaste. ‘Robbery with violence, Catterick. Violence against a defenceless eighty-one-year-old man in his own home. You’re going down for years for this. The world will be well rid of you. Even in Strangeways, they don’t have much that’s worse than you.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man, Peach. I was nowhere near the place at the time. We’ve got witnesses to prove it.’ He glanced at the thin-faced lawyer beside him and strove to fling confidence across the table. ‘You take us to court and we’ll make you look fucking stupid, mate.’

  ‘I’m not your mate. People like you don’t have mates, Catterick. They have people who lie for them. Anyone who lies for you this time will go down himself.’

  Sean Catterick didn’t have a wife. He’d battered the two women who’d lived with him over the last three years, but each of them had been too scared to give evidence against him. The coppers on the other side of the table were glad he’d no woman to lie for him now; no one gave much credit to alibis provided by wives or partners, but they were usually difficult to disprove. This man didn’t have that support. Catterick said with all the truculence he could muster, ‘I didn’t do this and you bastards aren’t going to fit me up for it.’

  Peach glanced at the lawyer who sat beside his quarry with almost as much dislike as he was showing for Catterick: the law said that even scum like this had the right to be defended, but you didn’t have to respect the men who did that. The man stared into Peach’s black pupils for no more than a second before dropping his eyes to the clipboard in front of him. ‘My client denies his presence in Alexandra Street at the time of this attack. Unless you can produce someone to attest to his presence there, you do not have a case to take to court. You must charge him or release him within three hours.’

  ‘Teaching granny to suck eggs, are we? More chance of that than of getting Mr Sean Catterick back on our streets, I’d say.’ Percy hissed his genuine hatred on the sibilants. Just half an hour earlier, he’d been with a severely damaged octogenarian who would never go back to his own home, and he carried the image still in his head. ‘DS Northcott will tell you why you are going to remain in custody, Mr Catterick.’

  If Clyde was surprised to be called upon without notice, he gave no sign of it. He gave the slightest smile of satisfaction and leaned forward to loom over his adversary, so that Catterick instinctively flinched six inches away from him. Peach didn’t quite understand how he did it, but Northcott had the capacity to loom over people whilst sitting. He admired this rare quality in his bagman.

  Northcott said in the dark voice that suggested deep reserves of violence, ‘We have the best of all witnesses, Sean. The victim of your cowardly and unprovoked attack. Joe Brown himself will be in court to put you behind bars.’

  ‘He won’t, you know. You’ll never persuade the old bugger to give evidence when it comes to the fucking crunch.’

  ‘He’ll be there, Sean. Don’t cherish any illusions that he won’t. And he won’t be back in his own house for you to get at him in the meantime. If and when he’s fit to leave hospital, he’ll be in state care. His w
ounds might have healed a little by the time you’re in court, but we’ve got a full range of photographs, taken yesterday. We shall present them as evidence in glorious technicolour. Juries are much affected by pictures such as the ones we shall display to them; they tend to remember images when the words of defence lawyers have tinkled away into silence.’

  Catterick was scared now. He offered no more than routine, automatic defiance. ‘Fuck off, pigs! You can flash all the pictures you like, but you’ll still have to prove it was me who hit the old bugger with that lead pipe. You won’t be able to do that.’

  Percy Peach said nothing, but allowed the richest and most carnivorous of his vast range of smiles to illuminate his round face; the process took several seconds and struck fear into the hearts of accused and lawyer on the other side of the table. ‘Very accurate description of the assault weapon, that, Mr Catterick. And very interesting to us pigs, because we haven’t issued any description of that weapon to the media. Very interesting indeed.’

  DS Northcott loomed again and Sean Catterick flinched again. Clyde bathed the prisoner in his own smile, displaying a perfect set of large white teeth, which looked to Catterick ready for use and very sharp. ‘Very nice set of prints we’ve been able to lift from that ten inches of lead pipe, Sean. Conclusive, I’d say, with the other evidence we have and the information you’ve just given to us.’

  The white-faced lawyer raised his left hand in front of his client’s face, warning Catterick against saying any more. ‘Could I have a word with you in private, Detective Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Of course you may. Always happy to accommodate the law and its representatives.’ Peach directed the smile of a tiger scenting feeding time at his unhappy adversaries.