To Kill a Wife (Inspector Peach Series Book 3)

by J M Gregson

  And yet. And yet you could never be sure. Hadn’t there been a murder in a big respectable house at the end of this very road a few days ago? At the weekend, of course, when he was off duty. Just his luck. Mind you, CID would have muscled in on it pretty quickly anyway, even if he’d been around. But at least he might have got in on the house to house.

  Darren took out a strip of chewing gum from the pack which had to last him the week. He unwrapped it slowly and methodically, stretching the moment into a ritual, which only a man with too much time on his hands could have devised. Refusing to contemplate whether his mother might after all have been right when she had tried to dissuade him from becoming a policeman, he thought again of the new blonde Venus at the station, PC Julie. He was hoping to introduce her to the tricks of the trade, if only he could persuade an uncooperative station sergeant to adjust the duty rosters.

  A lissome, athletic, lust-inducing figure, that PC Julie was. It was clearly Darren’s duty to protect her from the lubricious advances of the old sweats and afford her his own lechery-free advice and experience. She would be off-duty now; he tried not to think of her changing out of her uniform. And failed.

  A little desperately, he began to patrol the deserted road, walking with exaggeratedly slow, regular paces in an attempt to exorcise all libidinous thoughts. God, but she was desirable, that Julie. And he would be entirely considerate of her, absolutely the gentleman. Just to touch the nape of her neck beneath that straight yellow hair would be quite enough for him. Of course, if she herself should be excited, should find herself eager for a little more than that…

  He quickened his pace, trying furiously to think of football and the prospects of the Rovers when the new season should begin. The golden days when they had had Alan Shearer to lead the attack and score the goals were gone for good now. But they were a good team still, with youngsters to come through. Perhaps PC Darren Wall would be on crowd control duty there this year, instead of shouting his head off in the seats behind the goal. He imagined himself announcing to his friends on the night before the match that he would be at the ground in his official capacity, that he wouldn’t be with them, though he would of course be seeing the match for free in the line of duty.

  He might even be paid overtime to go to the ground, which had been the repository of his dreams since his boyhood; might even be policing the players’ entrance, nodding casually to his heroes, touching them briefly on the shoulder as he shepherded them through the excited crowds.

  But even these soccer images, entertained so often since he had first put on his police uniform four months ago, failed to excite him on this occasion. They could not distract his thoughts from the entrancing Julie, with her wide blue eyes, her neat nose and her soft, ingenuous mouth that was so obviously in need of protection. He marched still more quickly, thrusting his hands hard into his pockets, clutching at his torch, masticating his gum with a fierce resolve.

  Stupid idea this patrol was, anyway. Get the policemen out of the cars and back onto the beat, the chief constable had said to the press. Let the public see its police force; let the criminals as well as the innocent be aware that the enforcers of the law were around the town and were vigilant. An experiment, the CC had said, which would be implemented across the borough if it proved successful.

  What he hadn’t announced was that it was a very small experiment. Six constables, in fact. All of them young suckers like him. Or so it seemed to Darren. Once the maximum publicity had been wrung from it, the experiment would be quietly dropped. PC Darren Wall was beginning to learn the ways of authority.

  Well, it would be good to be back in a patrol car. At least there you had a mate to grumble with, and the time passed more quickly. That mate might even be Julie, if he played his cards right. He almost swallowed his gum at the thought.

  The fit of coughing this caused made a dog bark as he passed a darkened house. The door of the house opened, allowing a shaft of orange light to cut a swathe through the darkness. An invisible man pushed a springer spaniel out into the night and ordered, “Seek him out, boy!” The tones were obviously meant for the ears of some imagined intruder in the garden shadows rather than the dog itself.

  Darren moved hastily on down the road. The dog, after a single bark, confined its efforts to urinating on the trees within the boundaries of its territory. A snuffler, not a bared-fangs canine, thought Darren with some relief. Three houses down the road and safe, he found he had moved too swiftly in evading this potential threat to police authority: he had to melt into the shadows to ease the tightness of his boxer shorts.

  He looked at his watch. Time he was checking on Wycherly Croft again. It was part of his brief to check on the now empty murder house every couple of hours. God knew why. The scene-of-crime team had long since finished their examination of the premises; anything interesting must have been dispatched to forensic some time ago. But the ways of the CID were not to be fathomed by simple uniformed minds like his.

  Wasn’t there some old saying about the murderer returning to the scene of the crime? But there surely wasn’t anything in that notion; no one would be so foolish, in real life, would they? PC Wall, walking tall and squaring his shoulders in the darkness to give himself confidence, felt the summer night suddenly chilly around him.

  He had tried the doors of the murder house earlier, when it was still daylight. Perhaps he wouldn’t bother going right up to the doors and windows this time, whatever the regulations said he should do. It was a waste of time, really: he’d be better employed looking for someone breaking and entering elsewhere. Or even showing a police presence by the boisterous pub at the bottom end of the park, at the other end of his beat.

  From the gate, the silhouette of the house looked menacing against the blue-black sky, like a building in those horror films he had laughed at so bravely with his friends as they asserted their adolescence. The moonless late-spring night felt colder still, as if there might be a touch of frost before he went off duty in the clear dawn light.

  Then, as he looked at the house, Darren could scarcely believe his young eyes. There was a light inside the place. A dim light, appearing and disappearing, but a light, he was sure. He gulped; it was the kind of incident he had been praying for half an hour earlier. Now it had come, he felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck, as they had not done since he was a child.

  He spoke softly into his radio, his eyes glued to the light flickering behind the windows of the dark slab of a house. “PC Wall to Control. PC Wall to Control. Come in, please.” No answer. The blasted thing was on the blink. It had been faulty earlier when there had still been full daylight. Then, for a while, it had worked impeccably – when there was nothing to report. Now that he needed it, it was dead. Dead as a dodo. Darren was not sure he liked that phrase.

  He was standing under a big chestnut tree at the gate, by the sign with the picture of a witch beneath the name, Wycherly Croft. Perhaps he should move out into the open, try the radio again. But he knew in his heart that it was the instrument that was faulty. Shitty bloody thing! Should have been chucked away years ago. And he didn’t want to take his eyes off the house. This was real policing at last, even if it was scary. Darren was vaguely aware that he would never forgive himself if he missed out on it. And he’d get a right bollocking if he let an intruder get away through moving round the corner to try again on a bloody radio that he knew was shot.

  There was a car in the drive, just to the left of the house; he saw it as he moved a pace or two nearer. Not very professional, that: it could have been hidden round the side of the building. And it was scarcely a getaway car. An old Fiesta Popular, 950 cc. It didn’t look the kind of car to contain massive men with baseball bats and balaclavas. Without his radio, he could not even check out whether it was a stolen vehicle. It was white, and the letter he could see on the number plate told him that it was eight years old.

  Darren crept past the car, down the last yards of the drive, stooping to use the cover of the rhododendr
ons, despite the darkness. The light was more definite now that he was close, but intermittent. For an excited moment, he thought someone had set fire to the place, that flames were beginning to get a hold on the downstairs rooms. Then he realized what the source of this illumination must be. A torch. And whoever held it was moving from room to room. That was why the illumination sometimes disappeared altogether, then reappeared in a different place.

  Darren gripped his own rubber torch firmly. It was reassuringly solid as he drew it from beneath his tunic. He’d have this bugger: get him when he came out of the front door to go to his car. He’d have surprise on his side, wouldn’t he? He didn’t allow himself to entertain the thought that there might be more than one intruder.

  He didn’t have long to wait. He slipped behind the square shape of the hatchback as he heard the front door of the big house open, trying to ignore the pounding of his heart. He had somehow assumed that this sort of reaction would be removed when you became a policeman and got your uniform. He had a long moment to feel the blood thumping in his head before he heard the click of the Yale lock as the door was pulled carefully shut. Then a dark figure appeared at the corner of the house and crossed the few yards to the driver’s door. Darren was too busy hiding himself to see much, but he knew at least that there was only one bloke to tackle – and he hadn’t looked huge. Wiry and strong perhaps, ruthless no doubt in his panic, but not huge.

  Darren made himself wait for the sound of the key in the lock. Men were always vulnerable when they had one hand occupied with the door lock and were off balance.

  He had been right about the size of his adversary. As he sprang, he was conscious of a reassuringly diminutive figure.

  He shouted only, “You’re nicked, mate!” leaving the words of the formal caution until he should have the man’s arm up his back and his charge at his mercy.

  He had both hands on that arm before his quarry could even try to turn. He was conscious of how thin and unresisting it was in his grip, even as the shriek of alarm from his victim rang in his ears.

  It was a thin, high scream of fear. Too thin. Too high.

  PC Wall looked down unbelievingly into the frail face that turned in terror to look up into his. A female face. An elderly, pop-eyed, female face, set in a small, frightened head, with a feathered hat on top of it.

  “Oh, bugger!” said Darren.

  His radio still wouldn’t work. He had to get his arrest to drive them to the station in the ageing Fiesta. She took a long time to do it, following his directions with elaborate concentration, trying to stop her hands from shaking with the shock of her capture.

  The station sergeant who watched prisoner and escort entering his nick had seen most things, but his face told Darren that this was a first for him. He listened to PC Wall’s breathless account of the arrest at Wycherly Croft, then put the old lady in a cell. Apologetically.

  Turning back to the arresting officer, he said simply, “Bloody ’ell, Max!” Max was PC Wall’s nickname, after the late lamented comedian. It looked as though he was going to keep it.

  Sixteen

  “I wish you’d eat a proper breakfast!”

  It took a mother to hit that anxious, resentful tone, thought Lucy Blake. She said, “I’m all right, Mum. Really, I don’t need it. Just the opposite actually – I need to watch my weight. I’ve put on six pounds since I moved into the flat, you know.”

  “That’s that body-building course they put you on when you went in for this police job, that is.”

  “It was a fitness check, Mum, that’s all. Can’t have our detectives unfit, can we?” She sneaked a look at her watch. Almost seven already. She’d be in front of the Brunton rush hour, though; and she could use the lanes for the first part of the fifteen-mile journey.

  “Made your shoulders too big, that body-building did!” said Mrs Blake resentfully. “Not ladylike, that isn’t.” She moved round behind her daughter, who sat at the breakfast table, studying those shoulders and the straight neck beneath the soft auburn hair, reflecting with that universal maternal regret on the vulnerable schoolgirl who had sat at this table so short, so very short, a time ago and resenting this sturdy, independent young woman who had come so brusquely into her place.

  Knowing that she should not say it, that it would produce only irritation in this girl she loved, she was still driven to raise the issue yet again. “I don’t know why you needed to move into that flat. You could have traveled from here in the car.”

  “Need to be on the spot, Mum. Irregular hours, now I’m in CID. Have to be available at short notice.”

  They both knew that wasn’t the real reason. She would have moved out anyway by now, even without the transfer to CID. She needed to be independent, to come and go without a parental watchdog. It was the modern way, but it made Agnes Blake suddenly feel very old, when she was scarcely fifty. But you couldn’t go admitting your loneliness to the young. She said, acknowledging defeat, “I bet you eat a lot of junk food. That’s why you’re putting on weight, you know.”

  Lucy felt uncomfortably that there was something in that, though she would never admit it. “I don’t eat as well as I do here, Mum, that’s true. But I’d put on even more weight, if I had your baking to tempt me!”

  They left it at that, each with a little smile at the other which an onlooker would have noted as facsimiles. Lucy drove the bulbous little Vauxhall Corsa away into the morning sun with a cheerful, valedictory wave, and her mother went back into the house with a sigh to listen to the news on Radio Lancashire. They didn’t seem to be any nearer to catching whoever had murdered this Verna Hume woman in Brunton.

  Mrs Blake hoped her Lucy wasn’t involved in dealing with things like that.

  *

  The sign over the door read ‘Pearson Electronics’. It was edged with glass tubing, so that it could light up in green neon at night. The sign sat most uneasily over the pillars of a Georgian door and beneath the elegant rectangular windows of a building that was two hundred years old.

  Hugh Pearson saw the look of distaste that Peach cast at the sign as he came into the building. “It pays to advertise,” the director of the business said brightly, “even when your headquarters are in a building like this.”

  Peach did not comment. His black pupils were as bright and vigilant as a bird’s as he followed his quarry through a room with two secretaries and into his private office. So the mysterious Hugh’s surname was Pearson. It had taken them until last night to find a murder suspect’s full name; there was much ground to be made up here.

  “Do sit down,” said Pearson, his smile as bright and automatic as a politician’s. “I’ll arrange for some coffee.” He made for his desk and the intercom.

  “Don’t bother,” said Percy. “Too early in the morning. Too much to do.”

  “Ah. Well, if you won’t be staying long…” said Hugh Pearson.

  “That will depend on you. We shall be here as long as is necessary to find out what we want. This is Detective Sergeant Blake.”

  It was to be one of Percy’s aggressive interviews then, thought Lucy, as she sat down at his side. She was rather pleased about that: she had not appreciated the oleaginous smile Pearson had poured over her when she was introduced.

  Hugh Pearson sat down rather awkwardly behind his desk, put his hands together, steepled his fingers, and said, “How exactly can I help you, Inspector Peach?”

  Percy stared at the man behind the big desk in silence for a moment. He looked as if he had turned over a stone and found something unpleasant but interesting beneath it.

  “You can start by telling us why you did not come forward earlier,” he said.

  Hugh Pearson had not expected this to be easy, but he had thought he would carry it off without too much difficulty. The filth might be a nuisance, but they were not very intelligent, for sure. His plan had been to run rings round them, then be thanked for his cooperation.

  He controlled his anger, forced a smile, and said winningly, “Look, Ins
pector, perhaps we got off on the wrong foot last night at the golf club. I didn’t like being disturbed with my friends – we have what may seem an old-fashioned view that business shouldn’t be brought into the golf club.” He glanced at Lucy Blake’s blue-green eyes, and offered her another of his wide smiles. “We’re old-fashioned enough to think that the men’s bar in particular should be sacrosanct, you see.”

  Percy Peach studied him without a word, his face as expressionless as it had been since Pearson began. Hugh found this absence of reaction far more disturbing than he would have thought possible. He faltered on, trying not to lose the thread of his argument. “What I’m saying is that if I was in any way offensive last night I—”

  “Fine. Now would you answer the question, please. This is a murder inquiry. Why didn’t you come forward to help?”

  Pearson was suddenly aware of DS Blake. The woman’s neat hands were poised over a notebook at Peach’s side; the gold ballpoint pen hovered above the naked page to record his reply to this verbal assault. He gathered himself and said with an attempt at truculence, “Now look here, Inspector—”

  “No! You look here, Mr Pearson. A woman has been brutally murdered. Several days ago, now. Two days ago, we put out a request for anyone who had been in touch with her in the days before her death to come forward to Brunton CID. You choose to ignore that call. Why?”