by J M Gregson
It was no contest, really. With a short statement of what a murder inquiry involved and a smiling explanation of the fate awaiting accessories after the fact, Percy Peach broke her resolution to assist her friend into small pieces and cast them upon the winds of a brisk morning.
No, she hadn’t actually been to the Rialto cinema with Sue on that fateful Saturday evening. No, she had no idea where she had really been in those hours when the baby-sitter had been with Toby. Yes, she realized that the bounds of friendship should have stopped well short of lying on her friend’s behalf. Yes, she did see now that conspiring to deceive the police in the course of their inquiries was a very serious offence. She was really very sorry that she had even considered wasting police time like this. And she did hope tremendously that there wouldn’t be any repercussions from conduct that she now realized had been very foolish indeed.
“That remains to be seen, Mrs Ashton,” said Peach as he swept imperiously out of her neat little house.
*
“Quarter to ten already,” said Percy, as he turned the Mondeo into the small estate where Sue Thompson had her council house. “Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself.”
Lucy Blake reflected that he had not even mentioned the previous evening and the things they had done. She found unexpectedly that she was pleased about that. She didn’t want anything to affect their working relationship and what she was learning from it. Besides, she wouldn’t have known what to say if Percy had raised the matter of where their private life went from here.
Sue Thompson looked very white beneath her yellow hair. Lucy, who was fair-skinned herself and sensitive to these things, thought how unfair it was for some people that their coloring should be so suggestive of their feelings and their health. A woman with darker skin, a Barbara Harris for example, would have been able to dissemble far more easily than this vulnerable creature. Lucy decided that almost all men were more difficult to size up than women like this.
Despite her drawn face and pale, tight lips, Sue Thompson tried to take the initiative, to begin with a little show of aggression which might keep them at bay. “I rang the people at work to tell them I couldn’t get in until later, as you suggested. But they weren’t pleased, and I can’t blame them – Fridays are busy days. It’s really very inconvenient.”
Percy grinned the mirthless smirk which said that he didn’t take this seriously and wasn’t going to apologise. He had on a black polo-necked shirt with sleeves which stretched tight over his muscular arms; it seemed to have been chosen to match his jet-black moustache and the neat fringe of hair round his bald dome. To Sue, he looked more than ever like the medieval torturer she remembered in drawings depicting the questioning of Guy Fawkes.
He said, “We could have questioned you at work. But that would have been much worse for you, I think. Had you told us the truth when we saw you on Wednesday after the inquest, this meeting wouldn’t have been necessary at all.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I told you; I was at the cinema last Saturday night. The Rialto. With Margaret Ashton.”
She had gone straight to the single lie in her evidence, they noticed, pinpointing it for them. Her words had carried less conviction with each phrase she had spoken. Perversely, Lucy found herself reacting in the woman’s favor: at least she was transparent now in her deceit, as a practised dissembler might not have been.
Peach said, “Obviously Mrs Ashton has not phoned you in the last twenty minutes. I’ve come from there, you see. She wasn’t able to support your story, when she knew what was involved.”
All Sue Thompson’s flimsy bravado dropped away. She sat down heavily on the single fireside chair in the small lounge, whose only abnormal furnishing was the collection of colorful toys in the wire basket beneath the window. “I shouldn’t have asked her,” was all she said; her shoulders drooped heavily, making her seem squat and shapeless in the chair, as she had not been when she was standing.
“No. And she shouldn’t have agreed. She realizes that now.” A trace of Peach’s satisfaction came out in the last phrase. “So where were you on Saturday night, Mrs Thompson? No more lies, please: you’ve already wasted quite enough police time.”
When she eventually replied, Sue’s voice was flat, defeated, exhausted, the voice of a woman who could no longer conjecture where this might be leading her, and perhaps no longer cared. “I went to see Verna. At her house. Because I knew Martin was away in Oxford, you see. I suppose you’ll want to know the time. It was about eight o’clock.” She delivered the facts she had tried so hard to conceal all at once, like pieces of garbage she was anxious to bin and be rid of.
She stopped there, as if she had told them all they needed to know and cast away her last defences. Lucy Blake said softly, “And you wore jeans and a green anorak. Your visit was witnessed, you see, Sue. You were observed both entering and leaving the house.”
A grim, hopeless smile at her own naivety, at the idea that she should have even thought that she could deceive the police machine with her feeble lies and her flimsy attempt at an alibi crossed her face. “I went to plead with Verna. To ask her not to make it difficult for Martin to divorce her and come to me. I should have known better.”
“She refused?”
“No, she didn’t. But she laughed at me. She said that she’d finished with him, and I was welcome to what was left. She said she’d already told Martin he could have his divorce, but it would cost him. He’d have to pay to get rid of her. Then – then she was awful about Martin and what he did in bed. Said she supposed it might be all right for a cabbage like me.”
Her voice should have been shrill with emotion and resentment. But it remained flat and defeated, though her cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. Lucy prompted, fearful of the reply she might hear, “And did you kill her, Sue?”
The moist blue eyes looked up at them, for the first time in minutes. But Sue Thompson made no attempt to defend herself. She sounded almost surprised as she said, “No. I stopped up my ears at the things she was saying about Martin and me. She was screaming at me, like a witch. Then she looked at the clock and told me to get out. Said she had a real man coming to see her. A man who knew what a bed was for. A man who knew how to please a woman.”
“So you left. At about quarter past eight, would you say?” Lucy quoted Horace Tattersall’s timing: he had thought she had been in the house for about fifteen minutes.
“I don’t know. Probably. I was too upset to notice the time. I just wanted to get away, as far from her as possible.”
Peach came in again, turning the screw of the rack he had left untouched for a good five minutes. “So you’ve now confessed to a heated argument with the deceased on the night of her death. But you’re telling us that your sister was alive when you left.”
“Yes.” Listless still, as if she no longer cared whether she was believed or not, as if events must now take their course without any further attempt at interference from her.
Lucy Blake felt that she carried some of the other woman’s heavy, defeated emotion back into the car with her. She was grateful to Percy for dissipating it as they drove out of the winding avenues of the council estate. “A quiet Saturday night, and people in and out of that respectable bloody house like a dockside brothel!” He sighed. “Thank heavens for nosy old buggers like Horace Tattersall.”
*
The sun was high as the morning advanced towards noon; only a few weeks to the longest day of the year. Percy whistled softly at the wheel as they drove through the highest part of the town, along a ridge where the few mill chimneys which had not been demolished lay like smokeless skeletons below them. The air was clear and the sun was warming even the brisk breeze which swept across this elevated road.
“You’re cheerful,” said DS Blake.
“I usually am, when we get near to an arrest. It’s the thief-taker in me. Except that this is more than a thief. Besides, I shall be able to play golf this weekend, if we’ve solved this one.”
He whistled again the finale from Haydn’s trumpet concerto, which he had heard that morning on Classic FM and could not get out of his mind. Being quite new to the game of golf, though he had been a league cricketer of note for fifteen years, experience had not yet taught him the golfing axiom that when you arrive expecting to play well, you invariably play badly.
Lucy thought furiously, wondering if she had missed some vital, obvious fact in all this. She said a little desperately, “They all seem to be telling the truth to me. Perhaps I believe people too easily to be a CID sergeant.”
“Possibly.” Percy smiled happily. “Most people do tell the truth to the police, most of the time. Trouble is, it’s the lies that are the interesting part, usually, so you have to spot them.”
“What about Sue Thompson. Was she telling us the truth?”
Peach pursed his lips. “I should think so, wouldn’t you? She didn’t strike me as being a good liar. But then the best ones never do.” He turned the car into the private parking beside the Georgian building which housed the head office of Pearson Electronics. “Hugh Pearson thinks he’s a good liar. But he isn’t, is he? Bet you wouldn’t trust him, even when he was telling you the truth.” He threw open the driver’s door and sniffed the day appreciatively as he stepped out. “Let’s get him hopping about a bit, shall we?”
Hugh Pearson made a great play of telling his secretary that he was not to be disturbed during their visit. “If there are any calls, I’m in a meeting. And you’d better get on to Charles Yates: tell him I’ll ring him back as soon as I’m through with this.”
He took them into his spacious private office and waved a hand expansively at the armchairs opposite his desk. “I hope this won’t take long. Naturally I’m anxious to be of every assistance to our gallant defenders of law and order – especially when they arrive in so comely a form.” He afforded Lucy one of his most appreciative smiles as his eyes ran swiftly over the nyloned knees below him. “But you do come upon me in the middle of a very busy day, and I can’t pretend it’s entirely convenient.”
Peach waited patiently until the words dried up and the blue eyes transferred themselves reluctantly from DS’s thighs to DI’s face. Then he accorded Pearson his own pre-prandial smile, which had been compared to a hungry Dobermann’s recognition of its dinner.
“Shouldn’t tell us porkies, lad. Then we wouldn’t need to interrupt the smooth running of the emporium.” He looked round the room, taking in the drinks cabinet and the expensively framed prints on the wall, deliberately keeping his eyes off the face of the man at the wide mahogany desk.
Pearson found this quite unnerving. It was difficult to bluster when a man didn’t look at you, but he had a try. “Now look here, Inspector, I’ve changed my schedule to accommodate you, and if the best you can do is to come in here accusing me of lying, then I’m afraid I shall feel compelled to take things up with your superiors. I’m sure Superintendent Tucker wouldn’t be pleased to hear that you’d been making wild—”
“Superintendent Tucker would be most interested in the full details of your relationship with Verna Hume! Which we haven’t yet explored.” Peach’s black eyes fixed on him suddenly, then seemed to bore into his face as the color left it. His words flew like stones across the wide, low-ceilinged room. Lucy had the strangest feeling that Percy was defending her honor against this vain and shallow man, that his anger this time was real, not feigned. She thrust aside this surely ridiculous idea.
Hugh Pearson was shaken, but he was not so naive as to pinpoint the area of his lying for them, as Sue Thompson had done with her denials. He said, “I told you we were lovers. That we had been for months. What more do you want? The details of the positions we adopted? The number of times we did it with her on top? How often she—”
“If we thought these things were relevant, we should certainly ask you about them. In the meantime, you might tell us why you chose to conceal the fact that you had arranged to meet Verna Hume on the night of her death.”
Pearson’s eyes widened, staring like a transfixed rabbit’s at Peach’s stoat’s smile. But the next blow came from another source. DS Blake’s voice came soft and cool. “We have the dead woman’s diary, Mr Pearson. Your name is the only entry under last Saturday’s space. It has the time 9 p.m. beside it.”
“Which is very near the time she died,” said Peach triumphantly, as if he was slipping the last piece into an agreeably taxing jigsaw. “Both the forensic evidence and our own inquiries over the last few days now indicate that.” He appeared to find that thought infinitely satisfying as he watched the man before him quite literally squirming in his executive chair.
As Hugh Pearson transferred his weight from buttock to buttock and back again, the leather seemed to be getting uncomfortably hot beneath him. “I didn’t go there. Not on Saturday night. All right, I should have done, but I didn’t.”
“And you expect us to believe that?” Peach’s tone echoed just how ridiculous that notion was.
“It’s true. Honestly, it’s true. Look, Inspector, I can see now that I’ve been a fool.”
“Really, sir?” Peach’s long-suffering face said that such an obvious fact should have been apparent to the man long ago. “Would you care to tell us where you were at nine o’clock on Saturday night, then?”
“I – I didn’t go to see Verna. I wasn’t at the house on Saturday night.”
“I see. And yet you claim to have been able to see Mrs Harris leaving the place. To be more specific, you say that you saw her driving away from a house in which lay a body which was still not yet cold. Because she found in Wycherly Croft a woman who had been killed within the previous hour.” No harm in accepting Barbara Harris’s version of events, thought Percy, if it put this smug bastard on the line. Wet lettuces, his mother used to call people like Pearson; but language had gone downhill since then.
“I’ve been a fool. Nothing more than that.” There was rising panic in Pearson’s insistence which Peach sniffed appreciatively.
“You’ve got some convincing to do, lad. Can’t expect us simply to believe you, you know. Especially when you’ve lied to us before.” Peach seemed to find that reflection splendidly gratifying. He gave Pearson his most relaxed smile, like a dog surveying a bone which it knows is coming its way any minute now.
“I didn’t go to Verna’s house on Saturday night.”
“So you say. Yet the evidence of your appointment is there in the murder victim’s diary. It was only when we presented you with that fact that you even admitted you’d planned to be at Wycherley Croft.” Peach pursed his lips and whistled soundlessly through them. “And then Mrs Harris says you’ve admitted to her that you were in the vicinity at the time of the death. Looks bad, to suspicious CID officers like us, that does, Mr Pearson.”
Pearson looked desperately at the woman he had hoped to charm, but found no solace there. Lucy Blake, taking her cue from Percy, did not look at their panicking victim, but shook her head in sad agreement with her chief. She pretended to consult her notes. “Nine o’clock, it says in Verna Hume’s diary,” she confirmed, as if she felt the case was about to be wrapped up.
“Alright! I should have gone there, but I didn’t.” Pearson was shouting now, heedless of what his curious staff might hear on the other side of the heavy mahogany door. “I wanted to tell Verna I was going to finish our affair. It was all getting too heavy for me. She was talking about marriage, about divorcing her husband to be with me, but I wasn’t ready for that.”
“So why didn’t you simply tell her that?” Peach made it sound the easiest thing in the world.
“I wanted to. I’d tried to hint that I wasn’t into the affair as seriously as she thought. But she wasn’t an easy woman to talk to.” To Pearson, who always talked among his drinking companions as if he could handle any woman, the first admission he had made in his life that he had actually been afraid of one was peculiarly difficult. “I planned to tell her on Saturday night. I – I sat in my car for an ho
ur at the end of her road, rehearsing what I would say, what I would do when she turned on me.”
Peach glared at him, daring him to say more. “And that’s today’s story, is it?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Hmm. No witnesses, I notice.” He brightened, as though an acceptable solution had just struck him. “What about a lovers’ quarrel between the two of you, with her screaming and you trying to shut her up, pushing a pillow over her face to stop her shouting, holding it there. You might even get away with manslaughter, with a good brief.”
“No! I didn’t go into that house at all. I’ve told you the truth.” But Pearson was defeated now, scarcely expecting to be believed. He said desperately, “It was while I was sitting at the corner of the main road, trying to pluck up the courage to confront Verna, that I saw Barbara Harris drive into the cul-de-sac, and come out again a few minutes later. I guessed she’d been to Wycherley Croft.”
“What time did you get there?”
“I was supposed to meet Verna at nine, as you say. But I was late. It must have been after half past when I got to the end of the road: more like quarter to ten, I should think. I’d been driving around trying to plan what I was going to say to her.”
“Did you see anyone else you knew turn into that road?”
“No. It was nearly dark. I only recognized Barbara Harris because I knew her car; I’d picked Verna up from Osborne Employment a few times. I thought it was her, so I watched for her coming out again.”
It was probably true, Peach decided reluctantly. And if it was true, Pearson would not have been parked there when their killer drove in to Wycherley Croft on that fateful evening. “Don’t leave the area without letting us know your movements,” he snapped irritably as he rose.
