Merely Players

by J M Gregson

  She took the weapon, trying to catch some of his boyish pleasure, thrusting away the thought that he had a small daughter he should be cradling in the crook of his arm. ‘It’s very heavy, isn’t it?’ She was suddenly conscious how banal that sounded. ‘I’m no good with guns. They frighten me. You know that.’ She raised it dutifully to her shoulder.

  He snatched it away from her. ‘Don’t do that! You were pointing it at me. You should never, ever, point a weapon at anyone. I’m sure I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘It’s not loaded, is it?’ she stared down dumbly at the cold, smooth steel of the barrel.

  ‘No, it’s not loaded. But that’s not the point. You have to get into the right habits. You never, ever, point a gun at anyone.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I told you, I’m no good with guns. But show me how you fire it.’

  ‘It’s obvious enough, surely.’ But he put the Purdey back in her hands, then stood behind her and flexed it open and shut. He lifted it until she stared straight down the barrel with the stock against her shoulder, and pressed her finger gently upon the trigger. ‘There you are, you’ve brought down a pheasant!’

  Jane couldn’t repress a shudder. She would never understand why people had to shoot down living things for nothing but the pleasure of killing. She laid the new toy down in its case. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Adam closed the case on the shotgun carefully, almost reverentially, before he spoke again. ‘That’s why I won’t be around this weekend, you see. I’ve got the chance of a weekend’s shooting in the Scottish borders.’

  She said dully, ‘Can’t you get out of it? I had plans for us to do things round here.’

  ‘Not now, darling, I’m afraid. These chances don’t come very often, you know.’

  Jane Cassidy said nothing more. Her mind still held the feel of her index finger upon that trigger, still felt the smooth click which the tiniest pressure had brought.

  NINE

  In the end, Adam Cassidy left for his weekend’s shooting on Friday night. It was the fourteenth of December and the days were the shortest of the year. You needed to be out early to make the most of the light, he told Jane. If you travelled a hundred and fifty miles on Saturday morning, you’d lose most of that day’s shooting.

  He took the BMW sports car which was his favourite for long distance motoring. He didn’t need the extra seating of the Merc or the Jag, because he’d be travelling alone. The rest of the party would already be up there, he explained to Jane. He was only waiting until Friday night so that he could see the children before he went. He would like to collect them from school, but his presence brought so much unwelcome attention from the other parents that he couldn’t do that. Much better for the children if they avoided that circus and the nanny Ingrid collected them. Jane wondered uncharitably how long it was since their father had last met them at the school gates.

  Adam asked Damon about his day at school, though he didn’t seem to give a lot of attention to the six-year-old’s account of his reading triumphs and what the teacher had said about them. Kate didn’t need to be asked about her day in the nursery class. As usual, she burbled happily about her paintings and how she was now the tallest in her group and was ready for the big school next year. She was very pleased with the doll her father gave her as he left, and Damon seemed almost as happy with his ray-gun. There was no need to worry about all this gender-shaping nonsense when you were buying gifts, Adam assured Jane. She wondered who had been sent out from the studios to buy these things for him.

  Damon and Kate were bathed and in their pyjamas when she heard the BMW explode into life in the garage. Jane hurried them down the stairs to wave their daddy off, but by the time they reached the back door he had swung the car rapidly round on the forecourt in front of the garage. He did not hear the children’s shrill cries above the throaty roar of the engine as the low car zoomed away into the darkness.

  The forecast had said there might be snow showers tonight in this north-eastern part of Lancashire, particularly on high ground. In any event, there would be the sharpest frost of the winter so far. The young men and women of Brunton got on with whatever Friday night activities they had planned for themselves. Most of the middle-aged adults in the town took a swift glance at the rising moon and the clear sky, turned up the heating, and resolved to stay comfortable indoors. There was a busy weekend of Christmas shopping and preparation for the great commercial festival creeping up on them. Best to save themselves for that rather than be out in weather like this.

  The weathermen were right: in the ancient argot of the region, it was going to be a cold ’un tonight.

  One of the middle-aged men who did go out was Adam Cassidy’s elder brother. Luke looked exhausted after a week of intensive work at school, followed each day by at least an hour with his father. When he said he fancied an hour at the pub, his wife was surprised. But she encouraged him to go. In past years, Luke had been a star of the quiz nights, and a popular member of the darts and domino teams whenever they were short. But promotions at school had given him more work, at the same time as his father became more dependent on him and Hazel. Luke had neither the time nor the energy to enjoy himself as he once had.

  Tonight, he was out for longer than Hazel expected. But that was surely a good thing. He must be enjoying himself, chattering to people he had not met for months, even years perhaps. It was Friday night and there was no school tomorrow, so it took her longer than usual to persuade the children into bed. They’d be teenagers soon, with all the tiresome arguments and contests that would bring, but they were good kids really, both of them. She was surprised to find it was eleven o’clock. The heating had switched off and the temperature was dropping in the lounge. Hazel went upstairs and got ready for bed. She was glad to creep between the cool sheets and curl herself into a foetal ball of warmth, but she knew she would not sleep until Luke was safely in.

  At twenty past eleven, she heard him closing the front door softly and going through the hall. He didn’t want to disturb her; she called softly through the open door that it was all right, she was still awake. She meant to ask him whether he had enjoyed himself at the pub, but once he was safely back in the house, she relaxed. She was almost asleep when he came into the room. Luke whispered a goodnight to her, told her that it was bloody cold outside, and went to the bathroom. By the time he returned three minutes later, Hazel was sleeping peacefully.

  Luke was right about the cold. There was not a breath of air outside and the temperature dropped steadily beneath a cloudless navy sky. By the time old Harry Cassidy’s bladder disturbed him at three o’clock, as it invariably did, it was perishing cold, as he muttered to himself. He relieved himself as he did everything else nowadays, fitfully and arthritically. It took a long time for his old bones to warm up, once he was safely back in the valley of the worn-out mattress. He wished his wife was still in the old bed with him. He had always thought that he would go first. For a moment, he had expected her to be there now when he got back into bed; he must be getting more confused, as people said he was. He hadn’t known old age would be like this. Perhaps Adam would come this weekend.

  It was as well Harry didn’t know where Adam was at that moment. The A666 runs between Blackburn and Bolton, and on beyond that to Manchester. It is a busy road by day, though less so since the M66 offered the speed of motorway travel to those making major journeys north and south. The older road is not very busy during the night, and on this freezing one it was almost deserted. Frost like this clamps itself quickly on to metal, as if it were a living fungus, with a preference for the cool smoothness of steel sheeting. In one of the lay-bys beside the highest part of the A666, Adam Cassidy’s BMW hard-top sports car was covered with an ever-thickening layer of white frost.

  Sixty yards away from it, Adam’s eyes stared unseeingly skywards. The face was handsome still, scarcely touched by what had happened beneath it. But the left half of his chest was blown away completely, scattered around his f
allen corpse in bloody fragments of bone and sinew.

  The devil’s number, some call 666. It had been so for Adam Cassidy. At four o’clock in the morning, tiny flakes of snow began to fall. A shower, no more than that; the weathermen were vindicated. But the snow fell steadily over the frozen face of Cassidy and the awful mess of what had been his torso.

  TEN

  Many football matches were postponed on that Saturday. But frozen turf was no problem to Brunton Rovers, who played in the English Premier League, and had under-soil heating to allow them a perfect playing surface.

  The Rovers were playing Stoke City. This was a match in which both needed points in the perennial fight against relegation. It was a contest without subtleties, with fierce tackling and several bookings. Brunton were a goal down at half-time, but some forthright words from their manager and a couple of substitutions worked magic. The Rovers conducted a prolonged second-half siege of the Stoke goal, equalized after an hour, and scored the decisive goal with ten minutes left, after the stubborn Stoke defenders had twice blocked the ball on the line. The third goal in injury time was, as the local paper put it, merely icing on the Christmas cake.

  Wayne Carter was a Stoke City supporter, had been since his birth. He journeyed the eighty miles to the ground in Brunton with three of his companions in a battered Ford Focus with two hundred thousand miles on the clock. They stayed on the motorway until Preston, then turned on to the A59 and took their time over the ten miles to the ground. There was no hurry; they had an hour to spare before kick-off. They passed a spliff of pot round among themselves as they ran into the suburbs of Brunton, then found some other Potteries men in a pub and downed a couple of swift pints before kick-off.

  Thus insulated against the cold, they were happy to strip their upper bodies down to their red and white replica Stoke City shirts in the visitors’ enclosure. When City took the lead, Wayne was moved to slip his shirt over his shoulders and whirl it around his head in celebration, displaying the delicate skin and less delicate tattoos of a lilywhite physique to an unimpressed Brunton public.

  Wayne and his companions had a good day until about twenty past four, when Brunton Rovers scored their first goal. Things went rapidly downhill after that. The four young men were disappointed but philosophical. They were Stoke City supporters, after all. You were prepared for these things because you had a considerable previous experience of them. They managed a ragged clatter of applause when their captain and a few other members of their team turned briefly and waved to them before trooping disconsolately off the pitch.

  At least there was no parking ticket on the Focus when they got back to it in the narrow street near the ground. Wayne proposed that they went back through Bolton and joined the M6 south of Manchester. No doubt they’d be stopping for a pee and a few tinnies on the way home and it was best not to rely on the motorway service stations. They didn’t sell booze and they could be thronged with rowdy returning football supporters. You didn’t want to meet the Liverpool lot returning from Birmingham – they travelled in much greater numbers than the men of Stoke, and numbers meant strength, if it came to the tribal exchanges of football factions.

  The young men stopped in Darwen and picked up a dozen cans of Budweiser in a Co-op supermarket. Enough to dull the pain of defeat until they were back in the sympathetic Potteries. It was ten miles later that Wayne Carter told their driver to pull in to the parking bay beside the road because he needed a leak.

  His three companions moaned a little about this early delay in their return journey. But the power of suggestion is strong upon receptive minds and full bladders. Within thirty seconds of their stopping, the other three had followed Wayne out into the low bushes beyond the parking bay, cursing the sudden cold and fumbling urgently with the flies of their jeans.

  There was still a thin covering of snow at this height, where it had remained around freezing point all day. It was Wayne who had the torch; there had been ribald comments about the necessity of light to discover his equipment in these temperatures. He moved carefully a little way further away from the car than his fellows; these things demanded a degree of privacy, even from your intimates. He switched off the torch and urinated copiously, examining the stars in the night sky and gasping at the simple pleasure of relief which had been delayed a little too long. He switched the torch on again when he had finished. You had to be careful where you placed your feet in places like this, which had been used by others before you for similar and perhaps worse purposes.

  None of his friends mistook his scream for a hoax. There was too sincere a note of terror in it for that. Wayne stared down in horror at all that remained of what had once been a man, at the blood and gore amidst the whiteness of the snow and frost.

  Percy Peach had been at the Brunton Rovers–Stoke City match himself that afternoon. He had supported the Rovers since he had been a boy, so that he was much elated by their second-half recovery and went home with a warm glow within him which owed nothing to alcohol.

  ‘Stuffed ’em!’ he informed Lucy triumphantly. Then, with a conscientious attempt at objectivity, ‘We were a bit flattered by three–one, really. But it was an exciting match.’

  ‘That’s good, then. The meal will be ready in twenty minutes. There’s a gin and tonic ready for you on the table.’ Detective Sergeant Peach, as she was still getting used to calling herself, was enjoying domesticity more than she had expected. It must be the novelty factor, she told herself, as a consciously modern woman.

  It was just after six o’clock when the call came through for Detective Chief Inspector Peach. A suspicious death. The body of a male beside the highest and loneliest stretch of the A666, on the other side of Darwen. Been there for some time, by the looks of it. The police surgeon was on his way, for the ridiculous legal formality of confirming death. Percy gave swift, automatic orders. Check the missing persons register for any males reported in the last three days. The scene to be cordoned off immediately, but not investigated until daylight. Even with floodlights, investigators might destroy more than they revealed, if they blundered around before morning. A uniformed PC to be stationed beside it overnight. Two officers in a car, taking turns to keep watch. Poor bloody sods: he hoped they realized what it would be like up there, with the temperature below freezing.

  He came back in sober mood to the table, where Lucy produced the meal she had slid back into the oven when he was called to the phone. It was the worst possible point in the week to assemble a scene of crime team. Nowadays they were all civilians and many of them simply wouldn’t be available on a Saturday night. As soon as they had finished the main course, he rang his old colleague Jack Chadwick, who had been invalided out of the police service and now ran SOCO teams as a civilian. They agreed that Jack would have a scene of crime team assembled on the site by nine o’clock on Sunday morning.

  The sweet was gooseberry crumble, one of his favourites. When he had chomped thoughtfully for several minutes without speaking, Lucy said, ‘You’ll be up and out bright and early in the morning, then.’

  ‘No. I’ll let my new sergeant go out there. Clyde Northcott can take Brendan Murphy with him. Be good experience for the pair of them. I’ll have a lie-in with the woman of my dreams. If I have any energy at all at the end of that, I might go and worry Tommy Bloody Tucker with this later in the morning.’

  It wasn’t like Percy Peach not to visit the scene of crime scene. But for over three years he had always done that with the then Lucy Blake as his DS. Marriage had meant they could no longer work together, even though she was still in the Brunton CID section. Perhaps that was why he had elected to let others do the job this time – not that you ever discovered anything an efficient SOCO team and the forensic labs weren’t going to show up for you anyway. Lucy wouldn’t ask him why he wasn’t going to this one. He would dismiss the idea that he didn’t fancy it without her as sentimental rubbish.

  But she was grateful to him nevertheless.

  Jack Chadwick drove his SOCO tea
m out through Darwen and on to the lonely moorland stretch of the A666 at nine o’clock on Sunday morning.

  He took a photographer, a fingerprints man and one non-specialist with him. They would search for the miscellaneous detritus which might offer a clue to whoever else other than the dead man had been in this place at the moment when he died. They were an experienced team; they didn’t expect much on a site like this one, but they would do their job and search it minutely, nonetheless. The car was pretty quiet as they drove through Darwen; everyone in it had expected to be still in bed or yawning at breakfast at this time on a Sunday morning. But they knew what to expect and what they were about.

  None of them voiced the thought, but there was always the outside chance that one of them would pick up something vital at the scene, something which would lead many months later to a commendation from a judge in the high court on the diligence of the person who had brought this to light and ensured justice. Jack Chadwick knew from long experience that the possibility was remote, but anything which buoyed enthusiasm on a morning like this was valuable.

  They were glad to see one thing when they reached the site and saw the ribbons delineating the area of the crime scene. It was some distance from the parking bay. When there were no toilets at a parking place, everyone knew what happened on the ground immediately adjacent to it. The team donned their plastic shoe covers and overalls, looking like a surgical theatre team as they reached the single narrow entrance which had already been marked out at the site.

  There had never been more than an inch of snow, but another hard frost had crusted this thin covering over the ground where the body lay, some sixty yards from the tarmac of the parking bay. They made one immediate and satisfying discovery, but they had been at work for no more than ten minutes when they heard an unexpected sound through the clear, cold air.