Merely Players

by J M Gregson

‘You’ve used him in the past. Used him as a hit man to eliminate Dangerous Dave Wall four years ago.’

  ‘That was never proved.’

  ‘Precisely. The first time we can agree on something, Mr Valento. You were never charged, because the Crown Prosecution Service did not have the proof to bring you to court. But they and everyone else involved knew exactly what had happened. We still have the details. Perhaps Mr Ford will give us the proof in the Dangerous Dave case as a bargaining plea, when we arrest him on this one.’

  ‘This is harassment. You’ve no more proof now than you had then.’

  ‘Three thousand pounds, Mr Valento.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That is the sum you paid to Charlie Ford on Wednesday December the eleventh. Two days before Charlie fulfilled the contract and blew Adam Cassidy out of your life.’

  ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘Manchester CID keep tabs on Charlie Ford. It takes time, but we get contract killers in the end, you see.’ You protected your snouts at all costs; Clyde was determined that this should never be traced back to the hapless Delroy Flecker. ‘You should have chosen a different hit man for this killing, you see. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, is it not?’

  ‘Three thousand isn’t the price to kill a man.’

  ‘Know all about that, do you?’

  ‘I listen around. You pick these things up.’

  ‘Indeed you do. And we do as well, Mr Valento. We know just as well as you do that three thousand is a deposit. A down payment, with the rest of the price to be paid on completion. Another seven thousand or so. When did you deliver that to Charlie Ford?’

  ‘I didn’t. He didn’t kill Adam Cassidy.’ But Valento was staring hard at his desk now, unable to look into the wide dark eyes which seemed to move ever nearer to him.

  Peach had taken an undisguised pleasure in the exchange so far. He now spoke for the first time, saying quietly, ‘Much better to tell us now, Tony. Unless you want to run the risk of Charlie Ford turning Queen’s evidence and sliding you into a high-security cell beside him.’

  ‘Charlie Ford didn’t kill Adam Cassidy.’ Valento’s dull tone made him sound as if he did not expect to be believed.

  Peach raised his eyebrows high and smiled at the same time, a phenomenon which was a new horror for the man on the other side of the desk. ‘You’re saying Ford didn’t deliver on the contract you’d taken out with him? It’s a sad thing, when there isn’t even honour among thieves.’

  ‘I’m saying nothing.’

  ‘Much the best policy, in your place. Don’t think it will save you, though.’

  ‘Charlie Ford didn’t kill Adam Cassidy.’

  ‘And how would you know that, Mr Valento?’

  He shook his head, as if he could not think straight in the face of this joint attack. ‘I’m saying nothing. I want a brief before I say anything else.’

  ‘Very wise, that. Feels to me as though you’re slamming the stable door long after the contract killer has bolted, but we’re just simple policemen. Don’t leave the area without letting us know all about it, will you, Tony? I think we’d better leave it there, DS Northcott. For the moment, that is.’

  Throughout his exchanges with Peach, Clyde Northcott had continued to eye Valento like a Rottweiler who has discovered an unexpectedly juicy bone. He now rose with every sign of reluctance, keeping his dark brown eyes unblinkingly upon Valento as he backed reluctantly towards the door.

  The two had climbed into the police car before Peach said, ‘I thought you did quite well in there, Clyde. You probably went a bit too soft on the bugger, but that will be the effect of working with me and my peaceful pussycat nature.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The children were excited as they came out of the village school. They had finished for the Christmas break and they carried Christmas cards for their parents. These exhibited the usual wide range of childish expertise, but they had been compiled with a universal degree of enthusiasm and were received accordingly by the parents at the gates.

  Jane Cassidy was a little apprehensive about the names on the trophies which six-year-old Damon and four-year-old Kate would brandish, but she need not have feared. A thoughtful teacher had ensured that only ‘Mummy’ was afforded the Christmas greeting, that only ‘Mummy’ featured in the garishly coloured portraits within. Five yards away from them, eight-year-old Thomas Barnes was presenting a relatively much more sophisticated effort to his duly grateful father.

  ‘Have you a few minutes to spare, Paul?’ asked Jane, conscious of the eager adult ears around them and trying to sound casual. ‘If you have, I’d like your advice on our new lawn. An awful lot of moss seems to have appeared since winter arrived.’

  Barnes glanced ostentatiously at his watch. ‘I’m sure I can fit that in. I’ll have a look at the moss, certainly, but you’re probably better to leave any treatment until the spring.’

  His response had sounded stagey and contrived, thought Jane. But he wasn’t an actor like her, and she found she delighted in the clumsiness of his effort. When you loved someone, even their weaknesses were attractive to you. Or perhaps she just loved the things in him which were so completely different from the life she had previously known. It was reassuring to see his Land Rover following her car up the narrow lane towards her house.

  In a few months, they wouldn’t need to play these games at the school gates, but for the present it was better not to provide scandal for the gossips. Once the folk round here had got used to the fact of Adam’s death, it would seem only natural for two lonely people like her and Paul to be drawn together. She suspected she would always be an exotic creature from the outside as far as these likeable, conservative country folk were concerned. But she would rather be seen as someone who had opted for the rural life with Paul than a scarlet woman with predatory sexual appetites.

  They took the children into the playroom. Both of them were pleased to see how Thomas enjoyed his role as the senior and treated little Kate as if she were a fragile piece of human china, rather than the boisterous four-year-old tomboy Jane saw most of the time. She shut the door soundlessly upon the three and flung herself impulsively into Paul’s arms. ‘I needed that!’ she said, when they separated lips and limbs a full minute later.

  Paul Barnes nodded, smiled, but was unable to delay his need for information any longer. ‘Tell me about last night!’

  ‘It was OK, I think. The CID are still treating me with kid gloves, but they managed to ask about everything they want to know.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘They made me tell them about Friday night. I made it so that they had to worm it out of me. I told them I’d come to you. That we’d been together through the evening.’ His tenseness had got through to her. She found herself speaking in terse phrases, wanting to get out what she had to tell him as quickly as possible.

  ‘Didn’t they want to know why you hadn’t told them that at first? Why you’d changed your story?’

  ‘I think they accepted that it would have been embarrassing for me to confess that I’d been with another man when Adam died. When they saw me this time, they’d already questioned you and found out that there was something between us. If I’d tried to brazen it out and say I’d been here all through last Friday night, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway, would they? They don’t say much, but I think they just accepted that I was now telling them the truth.’

  ‘Good.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall in the kitchen where they were speaking. ‘I’d better collect Thomas and be on my way. It’s best that we keep things as low-key as possible as far as the public are concerned.’

  Hazel Cassidy studied her husband’s grey face anxiously. Luke looked exhausted; she felt a sudden, overwhelming surge of tenderness for him. ‘I can’t think they’ll have much to say to you. I’ve already told the young policewoman who took my statement that I sent you out to the pub last Friday. I’ll talk to them with you, if you like.’ Adam Cassidy had given Luke quite e
nough trouble when he was alive. It was cruel that even after his death he should be bringing them problems.

  ‘No. I’ll take them into the front room. Where are the children?’

  ‘Upstairs in their rooms. No homework now that they’ve finished for Christmas. No doubt they’re texting their friends with a view to festive mayhem!’ In the moment of silence which followed, they could hear the steady, muted bass rhythms which constituted the inevitable background to most teenage activities.

  ‘Make sure they don’t interrupt us in the front room. It shouldn’t take long, as you say.’ It was suddenly very important to Luke Cassidy that neither his wife nor his children should be involved in his exchanges with CID; he didn’t want them contaminated by any such contact. He went into the front room and sat nervously watching the clock, trying in vain to get his tired brain to work out tactics for this meeting.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening when he answered the door and showed DCI Peach and DS Northcott into the front room. At the end of what had presumably been a long day for them, neither of them looked at all tired. Indeed, Peach, looking curiously round what was obviously a little-used dining room, seemed positively eager to engage with him. Luke felt resentful of the man already, in view of his own weariness.

  ‘Have you made much progress?’ he said nervously.

  ‘Discrepancies,’ announced Peach gravely. ‘Bane of our life, discrepancies are. But in answer to your question, they also represent a kind of progress. We investigate discrepancies and find out things we didn’t know. And in our job, new information always means progress.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you, Mr Cassidy? Then perhaps you can help us to unravel the discrepancies in your own statements to us.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware of any discrepancies. What I said seemed straightforward enough to me.’

  Peach’s eyebrows rose with a slowness which was almost stately. Then he smiled sadly. ‘Straightforward does not necessarily mean correct, though, does it? Any more than simplicity means honesty.’

  Luke felt an immense lassitude seeping through his body. Wasn’t it better just to let this man have his way? It would certainly be much easier than fighting on. He said heavily, ‘Perhaps you had better just tell me what the problem is.’

  ‘I think that would indeed be much the best thing to do. DS Northcott, would you recall to us the section of Mr Cassidy’s statement which was problematical?’

  Clyde opened his notebook and launched into the sentences he had been waiting to deliver. ‘“I went out to the pub at about eight o’clock – at my wife’s insistence . . .I saw friends I hadn’t seen for months and spent more like three hours than one with them. It was after eleven when I got home. About twenty past, I should think.”’

  Peach let the silence hang heavy for a moment. Then he said very quietly, ‘Not wholly true, that account, is it, Mr Cassidy?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Hazel has told you when I went out. And I’m sure people can confirm to you that I was in the pub, if you need that.’

  ‘They already have confirmed it, Mr Cassidy. The interesting thing from our point of view is when you got there.’

  Luke knew now what was coming, but he could see no way of deviating from the course he had set for himself. He said with weary inevitability, ‘The people in the White Hart might have a little difficulty in giving you exact times. The place was crowded and noisy – on a Friday evening, it usually is.’

  ‘Yes. I think you were relying on that.’ Peach sounded almost sympathetic.

  ‘They know me there, even though I haven’t been in much lately. I was greeted by old friends. I even played darts.’

  ‘In other words, you did everything possible to remind people of your presence.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But Luke knew exactly what the man meant; he just couldn’t see any loophole left for an escape.

  ‘You played darts to make people very much aware of your presence. You spoke to lots of people. You tried to give the impression that you’d been in the White Hart for much longer than you actually had. Several people remember seeing you in the pub. None of them remembers seeing you before ten o’clock. Indeed, one of them remembers your coming into the pub at about ten.’

  ‘He’s mistaken, then, isn’t he? I told you the place was crowded and—’

  ‘Where were you between eight and ten o’clock last Friday night, Mr Cassidy?’

  For a moment, he considered stubbornly continuing his defiance. But he knew it was pointless. He said dully, ‘I went round to Dad’s house. I think I wanted to argue with him about Adam, to tell him that he should try to stop doting on his every promise, because he was never going to be reliable. But when I got there and parked, I knew it would be hopeless and I couldn’t bring myself to go into the house.’

  He was silent then, wondering how he could have spent so long before he went to the pub, wondering how he was ever going to convince them without contriving a better story than he had prepared. Peach said softly, ‘You don’t get much help with your father, do you, Luke?’

  He hadn’t expected this. He couldn’t see where it was going. He said loyally, ‘That isn’t true. Hazel cooks a meal for him almost every day. She’s been a good daughter-in-law to Dad.’

  ‘But you bear the brunt of his decline, don’t you. You’re the one who sees him every day. You’re the one who had to listen to him perpetually praising Adam, when Adam rarely chose to come near him.’

  Luke felt his love for the woman in the rear part of the house like a physical pain. ‘Hazel does everything she can for Dad. She won’t go and see him any more because she can’t stand his bigotry, his racism and his narrowness, and most of all how he insists on going on about Adam and denigrating me. She doesn’t like our children seeing him, for the same reasons. It’s different for me. I know that Dad’s not always been like this; I know the way he used to be when we were young.’

  Peach’s voice was as gentle as a therapist’s. ‘But it’s not easy for you. Not easy for you to keep things in perspective. Luke, you said on Wednesday that there were times when you could have killed Adam. Did you in fact drive up on to the A666 last Friday night and do just that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps without ever intending to harm him, until you found his shotgun in your hands?’

  ‘No.’ He lifted his hands to the level of his chest in an attempt at denial, then let them drop back hopelessly to his sides. ‘I didn’t go up there. I’d no idea where Adam was. I rang to try to speak to him but Jane said he was away for the weekend. Then I drove up to Revidge Road and sat looking out over the town, trying to get my head into some sort of order.’

  It was the road at the highest point in Brunton. It commanded a view over the park and the old cotton town below it; where once there had been scores of mill and foundry chimneys, now there were four. Peach said, ‘Are you telling us you were up there for two hours?’

  ‘For the best part of two hours, if you say I didn’t get to the White Hart until en. I sat outside Dad’s house for a few minutes, then I drove up there. I remember watching the lights of the town, and for some reason finding it consoling that they didn’t change, apart from those of the cars moving along the streets.’ He sounded as if he found his conduct as strange as they did. He said feebly, ‘I was very tired, I suppose, after a busy week at school and all the troubles with Dad. I wasn’t thinking very straight; I think I just wanted to be on my own. Eventually I pulled myself together and told myself that if Hazel had been good enough to send me out to the pub I ought to go there and make the best of things. That’s why I put myself about so much when I got there. And it was good for me, I think. Old friends help you to get a better perspective on life, don’t you think?’

  ‘Have you any idea who killed Adam?’

  ‘No. I know his wife and children, of course, but I know scarcely any of his friends, and none of the people he’d been working with.’

  Clyde Northcott
waited until they were safely back in the privacy of the police Mondeo before he said, ‘Luke Cassidy strikes me as a man at the end of his resources.’

  ‘Yes. People like that commit murder sometimes. Losing all sense of perspective can be highly dangerous.’

  ‘He’s no real alibi for the time of the killing.’

  ‘No. I think if I’d planned murder, I’d have made sure I had something more solid to offer than he had. But this killing might have been completely unplanned, of course. There might have been an argument which erupted into violence, with a shotgun at hand.’

  Clyde Northcott negotiated the Mondeo past a group of office party revellers lurching into the road outside a pub. ‘Do you think Luke Cassidy killed him?’

  ‘No. But I’ve now got a very good idea who did.’

  It was just after nine when Percy Peach got home at the end of a long and eventful day. He looked forward to getting back to his rather shabby house now as he had never done when he lived alone in it. He had a new wife. And not only a wife, but a woman who was the subject of male fantasies around the Brunton nick. He still couldn’t quite believe his luck. And it was all down to Tommy Bloody Tucker, who four years ago had assigned Lucy Blake to him as his sergeant, in the belief that he would be outraged by being teamed with a woman.

  ‘I’m home, love,’ he called down the hall as he hung his coat on the hook in the porch.

  Lucy came out and decided that despite his brave show of energy he was allowed to be tired. ‘The gin and tonic’s ready for you.’ She looked at him nervously. ‘And mother’s here.’

  A man at the end of a thirteen-hour working day has every right to be disappointed when he arrives home and finds his mother-in-law encamped there. Indeed, for many men, ‘disappointed’ would be a mild word. But Percy Peach was no ordinary man. And his mother-in-law was no ordinary woman. Perhaps that is why there had been such a bond between them, from the moment when the then Lucy Blake had taken home her new boyfriend, bald, divorced, and almost ten years older than her.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for weeks!’ said Percy as he gave Agnes Blake her customary hug. He held her for a moment at arm’s length. ‘Do you think your daughter is trying to come between us? Do you think she’s jealous of our relationship?’