by J M Gregson
He had planted out his geraniums and lobelia on the afternoon of that Monday. Although neither of them acknowledged it in words, they both knew that this was a kind of celebration. Both of them felt the freedom of release as they moved in the garden beneath the sun-whitened clouds; it was as if a burden, invisible but heavy, had been lifted from their comfortably ageing shoulders.
“Bit early to risk putting these out, most people would say,” said Derek as he looked up at the racing clouds. “But we don’t get late frosts at the seaside. We’ll be safe enough now, I reckon.”
It seemed like an assertion of the freedom, which had been brought to both of them by the removal of the spell cast over their lives by his dark-haired daughter.
Yet now, scarcely a day later, Derek again seemed to be troubled. She wondered if it was the prospect of the funeral that worried him, so she forced herself to raise the subject while they were eating their sandwiches at lunchtime. But it wasn’t that. He was preoccupied, at a distance from her because something was now concerning him, something which kept him from her. Something, she was sure, connected with this wretched stepdaughter whom she had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to like. It was a relief to be able to acknowledge how little she had cared for the woman, how glad she was, in fact, that she was not going to be coming into their house ever again.
But that was going to be of scant consolation, if Verna Hume exerted a baleful influence over Derek even now that she was gone. His sinister daughter was still threatening him, even in death. But perhaps that too could be changed.
*
“Of course I’ll sit beside you on the platform – it’s generous of you to want me there,” said Percy Peach to Superintendent Tucker. “But you must take all the credit for the early arrest. I wasn’t even on duty at the time.” Percy smiled the generous, self-deprecating smile which was perhaps the most disturbing one in his repertoire.
Tucker grimaced and got slowly to his feet, preparing himself reluctantly to leave the safety of his comfortable office. He wished he had never announced this press conference. But he knew that you couldn’t call a thing like this off once you’d announced a time for it. These journalistic wolves scented a cock-up faster than anyone he knew. Except for DI Peach, he thought unhappily.
His heart sank when he entered the big room near the entrance, which he had set up for the briefing. Not only were the crime reporters of the national and local press there in force, but the Radio Lancashire girl, Sally Etherington, was setting up her microphone on the table in front of his central position. There were blissful smiles on the experienced journalistic faces in the rows of chairs behind her; they studied her rounded blue-denimed buttocks with the lustful relish of accumulated experience.
The fourth estate found Percy Peach unexpectedly affable. He greeted three of them by name. But when questioned about progress, he shook his head and refused to comment, saying officiously, “Superintendent Tucker will tell you all about that. He’s in charge, you know.” But he pursed his lips in a manner, which indicated that there could be juicy information to come, for those with the patience to seek it out.
Tucker thanked them all for their attendance. His audience leant collectively forward, interpreting this immediately as a defensive attitude. The superintendent licked his lips and smiled nervously. “A suspicious death at a house in South Park Road was brought to our attention on Sunday night,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Some forty hours ago, now.”
Seventy-three eyes regarded him balefully. (The single eye of Alf Holdsworth, the reporter for the local Evening Dispatch, glittered brightly enough for any two others.) Tucker cleared his throat. “I have to tell you now that foul play is suspected. In fact, I can reveal now that we are treating this as a murder case.” There was not the little stir of excitement he had hoped for. They had known all this for twenty-four hours. They wouldn’t have been called here without a murder. Peach gave them his widest and most affable grin from beside his chief. Tucker looked at the microphone in front of him, at young Sally’s alert, expectant face behind it, and reached for a handkerchief to mop his brow.
From the second row, Alf Holdsworth, too old to be bothered with that most unreporterlike of virtues, patience, called, “We hear you’ve already made an arrest.”
Tucker looked helplessly at Peach. Usually, the superintendent was effective with the media, but this time he had brought them here with too few shots in his locker. A rare mistake, but one for a humble DI to savor. Peach said, “Superintendent Tucker ordered an arrest, yes. The credit for that is all his. I hope some of you chaps who moan about how we drag our feet will note that. A man was arrested within three hours of a suspicious death. And not on the basis of anything as simple and straightforward as a confession. Make a note of that, please.”
They did. Tucker watched thirty-seven ballpoint pens move swiftly over paper and thirty-seven heads rise to confront him expectantly. Sally Etherington sprang from her front row seat towards the microphone on the table in front of him and said breathily, “Could you give us the man’s name, please, Superintendent Tucker?”
Tucker, scenting that he might after all escape without too much damage, said, “I’m afraid we are not able to do that at the moment, Miss Etherington. For reasons I’m sure you will all understand.” He looked at the rows of unresponsive countenances. “Legal reasons,” he said desperately.
“Is it the dead woman’s husband?” said a florid-faced man in the back row.
“You must understand, ladies and gentleman, that I cannot at this juncture reveal anything which might prejudice the course of—”
“Then why have we been brought here?” said the red-faced man, looking at his watch. There was a murmur of support from the benches in front of him. Tommy Tucker’s over-active imagination heard the tumbrils beginning to roll towards him. It must have upset his judgment, for he turned in desperation to the man beside him. “Detective Inspector Peach will bring you up to date on the latest state of the investigation,” he said. “He’s more in touch with the hourly development of the case than I can be, as I’m sure you all appreciate.”
Seventy-three eyes turned speculatively upon the toothbrush moustache and the domed white head of DI Peach. Percy gave them his widest, most encouraging smile, so that the gaps where his upper canines should have been made him look like a laughing cavalier with blacked out teeth.
“Superintendent Tucker is generous with the credit, as always. I wasn’t around in the early stages of the inquiry, so I can take no credit for the rapid moves which were made then. But we are pursuing the case now as vigorously as the superintendent has indicated. Perhaps the best thing I can do at this stage is to invite your questions.”
Over half the people there knew Peach from previous such occasions over several years. It was the first time they had ever heard him encouraging media questions. There was a moment of stunned silence, during which Percy took the opportunity to assume again the wide grin he had not been able to maintain while he spoke. Then a young man with acne and no shorthand said from the first row, “This man you’re holding for the killing. Has he been charged?”
“No.” Percy’s teeth flashed white. His eyebrows rose towards the white dome above them, positively inviting a supplementary question.
The florid-faced veteran was the first to respond. “Is he about to be charged?”
“No.” Percy watched Tucker’s arm move instinctively in front of him, then drop helplessly out of his vision.
“How long do you expect to hold a man without a formal charge?”
Before Percy could make his unhurried answer, the acned youth, anxious to demonstrate his fledgling knowledge of criminal law, called, “Have you made application to the magistrate’s court to keep the man in custody for a further period?”
Percy shook his head regretfully. “No. We have not.”
There were murmurs of excitement through an audience that had begun to think that there was not a decent headline to be had from
this. Police malpractice was always a runner, if there were going to be no details of sex and violence made available to them. There were mutters about the Birmingham Four and cutting corners. The tabloid press prepared to mount its high moral horse.
The complexionally disadvantaged young man became quite animated. “You mean you’re holding a man and denying him his legal rights?” He rose to his feet, would have clasped his lapels if he had not been wearing a polo-necked sweater, and said, “Detective Inspector Peach, are you seriously telling this media conference that you are holding a man without observing the due processes of English law?”
Percy ignored the murmurs of assent, which ran round the rows behind this latter-day Camille Desmoulins, allowing the excitement to build upon his silence until he judged the moment of maximum impact was at hand. Then he held up the stubby fingers of a neat white hand in a gesture that was oddly magisterial.
“No,” he said, “I am not telling you that at all.”
“Then what the hell are you telling us, Inspector?” roared the young man. He would record that line in his copy, he thought. There was no reason why he should not give himself a leading role in his account of this exchange, beneath the headline of his clarion call to British justice. He felt the blood pulsing in his temple.
“I’m telling you that the due courses of the law have been meticulously observed,” Peach said calmly.
The young man should have seen the warning signs of a Peach coup, but he was too excited to back off now. “Oh, come on, Inspector! How can you say that, when a man who may be innocent, who by the most sacred tenet of our legal system is certainly innocent until he is proved guilty, is being held without even any consideration of—”
“Because he isn’t.”
The silence which dropped upon the hall was wholly satisfying to Peach. He smiled down at the acned youth as that deflated champion slowly resumed his seat. That particular reign of terror had been neatly overthrown before it began, Percy thought.
It was Sally Etherington of Radio Lancashire who said, “But I thought you said a man was being held in connection with the death of Verna Hume.”
“No.” Percy’s smile was inexorable. “We said that a man had been arrested.” He turned his head sideways to look at Tucker, without moving his body at all, like a parrot looking curiously at some new source of amusement. “That is correct, isn’t it, sir?”
Tucker nodded weakly. The bright young woman from local radio resumed with the words which were always music in Percy Peach’s ears. “But I don’t understand. If that man is still in custody and hasn’t been charged, then surely—”
“But he isn’t, you see.”
“Isn’t in custody?”
“No. He was released two hours ago.”
“Released?” Seventy-three eyes widened. Sally Etherington said, “Why was this?”
Peach shrugged. “The due processes of law.” Peach looked down with pity upon the deflated young man below him. “What I think our young friend here called ‘the most sacred tenet’ of our legal system: a man is innocent until proved guilty. We did not have enough evidence to hold the man, so we released him. Quite simple and straightforward, really. Any more questions?”
There were, of course. Questions about wrongful arrest, and precipitate police action. About the identity of the man who had been held, and his reactions to it. The press switched tracks with accustomed skill to a new attack on police inefficiency. Peach let Tommy Bloody Tucker field these enquiries as best he could.
No sense in saying too much to these lads and lasses, once you had made it clear to them where the blame for a cock-up lay.
Fourteen
“Why ‘Osborne Employment Agency’ when we’re told Verna Hume was the owner?”
Detective Inspector Peach looked at the large, impressive letters which ran down the whole length of the double-fronted premises while they waited for an opportunity to cross the busy street.
“Osborne was her maiden name, apparently. It’s not unusual for women to preserve their own identity in their business ventures,” Lucy Blake pointed out.
Percy sniffed but did not comment. He had learnt to exercise an uncharacteristic caution in discussing feminist issues with his detective sergeant. “Must be prosperous,” he said. “They’ve just opened another new branch, according to the telephone directory. But then, with three million unemployed, people who say they can get you a job are in a good position, I suppose.”
The most remarkable thing about the woman who came to meet them was her luxuriant crop of chestnut hair. It was not as rich a red as Lucy Blake’s – Peach, with his absence of cranial hair, was something of a connoisseur of these things – but it was dark, lustrous and altogether remarkable. Peach did not examine the roots as his sergeant automatically did. It was part of being a detective to observe things accurately, Lucy told herself when she felt uncharitable.
“Barbara Harris,” the woman said, and offered each of them in turn her hand. People meeting the police were often unsure of the niceties of introduction, but this one showed no hesitation.
Ms Harris took them through a bright room where three girls worked quietly at computers and into her private office at the rear of the building. “Good of you to keep to the time we arranged, when you must be busy with the case,” she said. “I’ve arranged for tea in five minutes.”
She expected this exchange to take a little time, then. And presumably that it would be completed within the half hour she had allotted them when Lucy rang her. That was all right. Percy didn’t mind punctuality and afternoon tea. As long as this tall, efficient woman cooperated equally readily in volunteering information to them, there should be no problem.
She ignored the upright chair behind the big desk and sat down with them in one of the three comfortable armchairs the carpeted room contained; they were set so that none of them directly faced the light from the window, and Percy wondered if they had been carefully arranged that way for their meeting, so that no one should feel at a disadvantage.
He said, “I’m afraid I have to tell you that we are now certain that your partner, Verna Hume, was murdered – she was your partner, by the way?”
“Yes.” There was the slightest hesitation before this confirmation, but no sign of grief at the death or excitement at the mention of murder. Often the very voicing of the word brought a frisson of horror into people’s reactions. A cool one, this.
The tea came then, and she took the tray from the girl, shut the door firmly behind her, and busied herself with pouring and distributing the amber fluid, in what in more gracious centuries they used to call ‘the ceremony of the tea’, Percy recalled. But women with the leisure for such things would have patronized him in those days of class divisions; and he could never have become a policeman then, let alone a detective inspector with considerable powers at his disposal.
“We don’t know who killed her, yet. As a matter of fact, we don’t know as much as we would like to about Verna Hume. That’s what we have to do in a murder case, you see: build up as full a picture of the victim and her habits as is possible, from those who knew her. It’s the one crime where the victim can’t speak for herself. A prime suspect usually emerges from those who knew the deceased if only we can get enough information about him or her.”
And that prime suspect might even be you, he thought. She was too intelligent a woman not to make that deduction for herself, but her hand was very steady as she offered him a biscuit from the oval china plate.
She said, “Well, our relationship was mainly a business one. But a close one: we’d known each other for fifteen years. Verna and I used to work together as secretaries, and we set up Osborne Employment within a couple of years of meeting each other. Well, it was Harris and Osborne then.”
She looked into Peach’s dark eyes, expecting a reaction to that. But he let it go. First things first. “You obviously got on well.”
“We built a successful business together. We thought very much along th
e same lines, and it worked for us.”
She hadn’t quite answered his question, and both of them knew it. Peach asked, “Did you associate much outside the business?”
“No.” The word came a little too quickly and she hastened to soften the denial. “When you work together all day, perhaps you need to get away from each other when you leave work behind. Don’t forget, we worked very long hours together, in the early days.”
Barbara found she was nervous about this, now that the time had come. She had prepared these phrases in advance; she wondered if that was obvious as she delivered them. Were her answers coming out like prepared statements? This dapper, muscular man and the quiet girl at his side were studying her quite openly, and she found it disturbing. In a social exchange, people would not have looked at her so directly, but this pair were not even pretending that this was anything of the kind.
Lucy Blake asked, “Did your partners meet much?”
Barbara had not expected this. “Our husbands? No. Scarcely at all.” She looked briefly at the print of Venice on the wall behind her questioner, then said, “You might as well know: Verna and Martin didn’t get on at all. I couldn’t see why they stayed together. Whereas Michael and I…”
“Your marriage was a happy one?”
Barbara noted the past tense. They knew Michael was dead, then. She wondered with a sudden shaft of fear how much more they knew about her life and her feelings.
“Yes. Very happy. Until Michael was killed in a car accident. Five years ago, that was.”
“Yes. That must have been a difficult time for you.” The girl was not unsympathetic but it was a statement which invited comment, and she left it hanging in the air like a challenge.
Perhaps they knew everything she was trying to conceal, were merely hoping she would make the mistake of lying to them about it, Barbara thought, with a rush of panic.
“It was difficult, yes. In all kinds of ways.”
“Financially difficult?” asked Peach, whose dark eyes had never left her face while his sergeant had introduced this subject.
