[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  Lucy nodded, making a careful, unhurried note. ‘And did you know her before that?’

  ‘No. She was from Preston, not from Brunton.’ That sounded silly, too – sounded Victorian, as if she couldn’t have known anyone from ten miles away. ‘I advertised for someone to share the rent of this place. They’re good flats, these; it’s a nice conversion of the big old house. But the rent is too much for one, unless you have a very good job.’ She resisted the temptation to go on further, to enlarge in an area she knew was safe.

  ‘And when did you last see Annie Clark?’

  ‘On the twenty-first of September.’ That was too prompt, too precise. She said apologetically, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, you see, since you said you were coming to see me about Annie.’

  DS Blake made a note of the date, nodding slowly. It was Peach who said to her, ‘That’s commendably precise, Miss Shields. A Saturday, I think. Have you any reason to remember it so vividly and exactly?’ His dark eyes opened wide and his eyebrows arched above them; he looked to Heather, who had studied Dr Faustus at school, like a modern Mephistopheles.

  ‘No. I just remember her going out on that Saturday night. The picture has come back to me quite vividly over these last few days. Since I heard about her body being found up on Pendle.’

  ‘Understandable, that. Very upsetting, these things, for those who were closely involved with the deceased.’

  He looked at her with his head a little on one side, like a curious but dangerous bird. She resisted the impulse to say again that she had not really known the dead girl very well at all. Peach said, ‘What time would this be on that Saturday?’

  ‘When I last saw her? About half past six in the evening, I suppose. Maybe a little later. She was – she was going out for the night.’ Her voice had faltered, almost broken. But they couldn’t read anything into that: they’d surely take it as emotion natural in one having to recall her last sight of a dead friend.

  ‘And where was she going?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She was looking at the table, her brown eyes staring fixedly at the two oranges in the bowl in the middle of it.

  ‘Was she going to meet her boyfriend, do you think? It was Saturday night.’

  ‘She might have been, I suppose. I really can’t remember.’ She could feel the silence stretching, but she did not lift her eyes from the fruit.

  After seconds that seemed to her like minutes, it was DS Blake’s softer voice which said quite gently, ‘You’re sure of that, Heather? It could be important, you see. It’s quite possible that you were the last person to have seen her alive, apart from her murderer.’

  She roused herself, made herself lift her eyes to look at them, and said earnestly, ‘I realize that. But I can’t remember where she was going, or even if she told me that. She might have been meeting Matt Hogan, I suppose.’

  She switched her eyes from Lucy Blake’s lightly freckled face to the paler one beside her, and found DCI Peach studying her as intently as ever.

  Eventually he said, ‘Would you describe your own relationship with the deceased for us, please, Miss Shields?’

  ‘We were friends. You have to be, when you share a flat together.’

  ‘Good friends?’

  ‘I’d say good friends, yes.’ But she had given the faintest shrug of her shoulders before she answered.

  ‘So tell us about her lifestyle. Tell us about the people you both knew during those months you spent together.’

  ‘There isn’t really a lot to tell. We both worked in offices, but they were at opposite ends of the town. I work in the packing department at a mail-order firm. I do most of the processing of orders.’ It sounded almost like a boast. She hadn’t intended that: she’d simply been looking for a way to seem helpful without offering them too much about her and Annie.

  ‘And what did Annie Clark do?’

  ‘She worked in a travel agent’s. She was doing very well there, I think. She was a bright girl, you know.’

  ‘No, we didn’t. We’re going to find out all about her, though, in the next few days.’

  He made that sound like a threat, she thought. But perhaps that was her overactive imagination. Heather said, ‘We got on well enough in the flat. I don’t think we ever had a serious argument. But we didn’t have the same friends. We didn’t go out together much at all.’

  ‘What about her boyfriend, Matthew Hogan?’

  ‘I knew Matt. He and Annie were friends whilst she was here, but they weren’t – well, they weren’t an item, until quite near the end.’

  The very phrase the lad had used himself. But there was nothing significant in that, perhaps. Peach said, ‘Quite near the end? You speak as if you know exactly when she died.’

  She looked into his dark, relentless eyes in panic. ‘No I don’t! I meant the end of the time when I knew her, I suppose. I was just – well, I was just assuming that she died soon after she left here on that Saturday night.’

  Peach relaxed into a broad smile, showed her a perfect set of very white teeth. ‘And you may very well be right, Miss Shields. But until we know exactly when she was killed, we can’t make assumptions like that, you see. It could have been a week or a fortnight or even a month after she left here that she was killed. The pathologist couldn’t be more precise than that about the time of death, you see, from what was left of her.’

  Heather shuddered. ‘I see what you mean. Well, I never heard another word from her after that Saturday night.’

  ‘I see. And why didn’t you report her as a missing person?’

  It was said so quietly that she didn’t realize at first how hostile it was. ‘I – I just didn’t think of it. I told you, we got on well enough, but we weren’t all that close. She’d paid her rent until the end of September, so at first I suppose I expected her back.’ She looked desperately at Lucy Blake for some sort of relief, but found that the woman sergeant was now watching her as curiously as Peach. ‘It’s difficult to recall exactly what I was feeling all these months later. And she had a mother, you know. Her mother only lives in Preston. I think perhaps I assumed she’d gone home, and that if there was anything wrong it would be her mother who reported her missing, not me.’

  She had seized eagerly on the sudden thought of Mrs Clark – too eagerly, perhaps. Peach studied her for another moment before he nodded slowly. ‘Who do you think killed her, Miss Shields?’

  Another bit of dynamite which he had slipped in almost casually. Heather felt her mind racing as she said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve really no idea.’

  ‘No idea at all? What about the people she worked with? What about the people she saw in the evenings? The chances are that she was killed by someone who knew her quite well.’

  ‘I suppose so. But as far as I know, she was a girl without enemies.’

  ‘I see. So she didn’t mention that she’d had a serious disagreement with anyone in the days before she disappeared?’

  ‘No. But she might have done, without telling me. I told you: we got on well enough, but we weren’t intimate friends.’ That was a summary she’d planned to use before they came, but it had taken her a long time to get the phrases in.

  ‘What about the boyfriend? Anything there?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’ She faltered a little, staring again at the oranges between them. ‘They’d only begun a serious relationship a few days before she disappeared. I think one reason why I didn’t report her missing was that I thought they might have shacked up together somewhere.’

  ‘But she’d have told you, wouldn’t she? – if she’d been planning that. She wouldn’t have simply disappeared to set up house with Matt Hogan without telling you about it?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose she would have done that. She’d have told me about it, I expect, as you say.’ Heather Shields was curiously listless.

  They took the address of the travel agent’s where Annie Clark had worked and then stood up. Heather tried not to show her relief as they prepared to leave, her eagernes
s to have them out of her flat and to breathe a long sigh of relief. She never drank on her own, but she might even allow herself the luxury of a beer, if there was a can in the fridge.

  Peach slid his arms into his car coat, prepared to face the cold of the night outside. For the first time since he had set foot over the threshold, he was not looking at her as he said conversationally, ‘You’ve been able to let the flat again, have you? You said you needed someone to share.’

  ‘Yes. I parcelled up Heather’s things and took them to her mother, after we spoke on the phone. It’s a fully furnished flat, so there wasn’t a lot of stuff.’

  ‘Yes. Our people have taken that stuff to forensic, just in case it tells us anything significant about Annie. Her mother hadn’t opened the plastic bag, she said.’

  ‘I see.’ She wanted to say something about the pathetically small things that were left behind from a life. Instead, she found herself wondering whether there was anything in that black dustbin bag of clothes and trivia that could undermine what she had said to these two today.

  ‘Been with you long, your new flatmate, has she?’

  ‘Carol? Two or three months, yes. She was a friend before she came here. She was looking for accommodation and I needed someone, so it just seemed right. I didn’t even need to advertise. There was hardly any time when I had to pay the rent on my own. And it’s really worked out very well. We get on well together, without living in each other’s pockets.’

  She wondered if she was talking too much, in her relief to be finished with the questions about Annie Clark; but Peach said nothing, and Lucy Blake gave her a farewell smile as they left.

  They were half a mile away from the place and the heater was putting some warmth back into the police Mondeo before Peach said, ‘She moved in a replacement flatmate very quickly, then. She says vaguely that it was about two or three months ago, but I expect it was earlier than that. About the beginning of October, I’d guess, from what she said. She must have been sure very quickly that Annie Clark wasn’t coming back.’

  Eight

  In Brunton, January is always the longest month.

  It is the deepest month of winter, and people in the north-west of England take it for granted that their winters will be hard. It is especially so in this northern corner of Lancashire, where the snow winds sweep in from the Irish Sea and the Pennines raise their heights to the east. Of course, the days when the clogs of workers hurrying to the mills clattered loud on the frozen cobbles of the old cotton town are now long gone. Central heating and a succession of milder winters have made some of the younger residents careless of the dangers of cold. Frozen pipes are no longer the constant fear in every house, and chilblains are a thing of the past for Brunton’s noisy children.

  But to the older people of the town, at least, the days of January still seem to stretch interminably. It is now the night of the twenty-seventh of the month, and the daylight is beginning to stretch a little. It has been a clear, bright day today, and light enough to see the hills around the town until five o’clock. In two months, people will be slipping their clocks an hour forward and thinking of spring.

  But by seven o’clock on this evening, the stars have disappeared, clouds have crept in, and winter is reminding Bruntonians that it has plenty to throw at them yet. The whiteness that only fell upon the flanks of Pendle Hill in the previous week, picking out the greater heights of Ingleborough and Pen y Ghent forty miles to the north, is beginning to descend into the towns of the area. The first flakes of snow are tiny ones, drifting almost tentatively between the long rows of terraced house and into the narrow streets. They drop through the still, cold air as a gentle warning of what is to come. But within fifteen minutes, the flakes have grown larger and their fall steadier, as if some unseen presence above has tried its hand and gathered confidence.

  The old cotton town of Brunton acquires a strange, unreal, deceptive beauty as the snow becomes first a film and then a thin carpet of white. The tall new buildings in the centre of the town look from a distance like a Manhattan skyline as the curtain of falling snow alters proportions. The steep slate roofs of the cramped terraces that were built to house mill workers at the end of the nineteenth century lose their meanness under the sparkling white mantle, acquiring a Disneyesque charm that has no relation to their normal appearance.

  It is eight o’clock now on this bitter evening, and the few vehicles that are using the wider thoroughfares of the town are hastening home, their drivers anxious to be safely indoors before winter asserts its full grip. There are no cars in the smaller streets, which seem wider as the thickening snow obliterates the lines of their footpaths and the snow swirls silently across street lamps, yellowing and softening the light that falls from them.

  There are few pedestrians abroad, as the temperature drops and the snow continues its steady accumulation upon the town. There is one, however, making whatever haste she can in the treacherous conditions, looking neither right nor left as she hurries with head down and eyes assessing the treacherous footing of the snow-covered stone flags.

  Fifty years ago, a woman abroad on such a night would have been hunched in the then ubiquitous shawl. She would probably have been hurrying the short distance to the off-licence with her jug beneath the wool – it was inconceivable then that any ‘respectable’ woman would venture alone into a public house. Those days have long gone, though some of the old streets and roads remain. Tonight’s walker is a taller, fitter woman, with a longer stride and a perspective that stretches far beyond the end of the street where she lives.

  This woman is, in fact, Jo Barrett – educated, independent, lesbian and defiant; the same Jo Barrett who was so animated in the school staff room three days earlier by Ellie Boyd’s account of the discovery of a decaying body.

  She knows exactly where she is going, for she has trodden the route often enough before. But never in conditions like these: everything seems different under the snow. The absence of cars on the streets and of walkers along the pavements brings a feeling of emptiness to normally busy streets. But it is the silence that the snow brings, softening and muffling every movement, which lends an eerie quality to her progress.

  She stamps her high black leather boots hard as she reaches a corner, as much to hear the sound of the heels on the stone as to clear them of snow. She looks back down the street she has left and forward along the one she is now to tread, but there is no other human presence visible. Both streets look much longer than usual under their white covering, and she cannot quite see the end of either of them through the veil of thin, stinging flakes. She is suddenly glad of the lights from the windows of the houses, reminding her that the area is not after all deserted.

  And Jo Barrett is not, as she fancies, the only person abroad on this picturesque but bitter night. An aerial view of the town would reveal another figure, invisible to her because it is moving from a different area altogether towards the same point. The figure has come the first part of its journey by car and it is male. But the man does not drive to the house he plans to visit.

  He parks and locks his car three streets and a quarter of a mile away, looks carefully and automatically to his right and to his left, and then sets off alone towards the house.

  It is an Edwardian house, a high, detached villa that was erected in the heyday of King Cotton, shortly before the First World War. With the obliteration of normal landmarks under the white blanket, the house is not as distinctive as usual, and he checks the number to make sure he is right before he turns into the drive.

  He is standing looking up at the high elevations of the house, watching the snow swirling against its eaves in the light of the street lamp behind him, when Jo Barrett, arriving from the opposite end of the road, turns into the drive behind him. Each of them endures a brief moment of alarm, then the relief of recognition.

  They exchange brittle greetings, which sound unnaturally loud in the pervading silence. Then both of them stamp their feet clean of snow on the broad stone
steps beneath the wide door, and Dermot Boyd follows Jo Barrett into the dark interior of the house.

  By eleven o’clock on this bitter night the snow had ceased to fall; but it lay two inches thick in the streets of Brunton, and there was the sparkle on its surface which denoted frost. There would be treacherous skid-pads on untreated roads by the time the citizens of the town rose to the challenges of a new January day.

  Percy Peach did not have double glazing in his nineteen-fifties house, and the central-heating system was due for a new boiler. Lucy Blake parted the curtains, scratched a small peephole in the ice that had accumulated on the inside of the window, peered out into the night, and said, ‘It’s stopped snowing. But it’s freezing hard now.’

  ‘It’s winter out there, then. High time respectable folks were in bed and saving on heating.’

  ‘You’re already doing that. It’s cold in here.’ Lucy slid her hands within the arms of her thick red sweater and hugged herself in her armchair. She thought of her own cosy modern flat, with its efficient central heating and its double-glazed windows, and wished it hadn’t been her turn to come here.

  ‘Have to do my bit for the environment, you know,’ said Percy cheerfully. ‘The world has a finite supply of fossil fuels, and I’m doing my bit to preserve them. And it’s high time we got to bed and generated our own warmth. It will be nice to feel we’re helping the environment.’ He gave her his most benign beam and switched off the television.

  Lucy shivered anew when she reached his icy bedroom. ‘Can’t sleep if it’s too hot, you see,’ Percy explained. ‘I’ll nip into bed and warm the sheets for you, whilst I watch you undress. I’m the soul of consideration, aren’t I? Don’t feel you have to hurry. I can be patient, too, when the need arises – especially when there’s a show like this.’ He slid his tie expertly over his shining bald pate. And seconds later, he was somehow out of his clothes and into the bed, whilst she was still summoning her nerve to the ordeal of disrobing in this environment.