[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  ‘This place is like a morgue. It’s too bloody cold for me! I’m going to have a hot shower to warm me up.’ She grabbed her sports bag and slipped into the bathroom, ignoring Percy Peach’s wild shout of deprivation, drowning the continuing litany of complaint from the bedroom across the landing by turning on the shower. ‘It’s time you had an en suite!’ she shouted through the door by way of defiance.

  The bathroom wasn’t much warmer than the rest of the upper storey of this rather neglected semi-detached house. But at least she could strip swiftly here, without the selection of erotic growls and moans with which her lover invariably accompanied the process. And the water in the shower was mercifully hot. She luxuriated in it for a few minutes, then stepped reluctantly from the warmth of the little cubicle and dried herself quickly in the sudden cold outside it.

  ‘Hurry up in there! I’m getting terribly lonely in here,’ said a plaintive voice from the bedroom.

  Lucy Blake grinned to herself and slid her curves into the garments she had taken from her sports bag. Then she spread her towel carefully on the radiator for the morning, took a deep breath, and tripped lightly back across the landing into Percy’s bedroom.

  The sound that greeted her went some way towards repaying her considerable outlay on her new nightwear. It was a gradually rising whine of pure animal pleasure, beginning low and moving through several octaves to a triumphant howl. She had never really appreciated lust before; now she decided that lust in the one you lusted after was a wholly admirable quality.

  ‘Bloody ’ell, Norah,’ said Percy Peach. It was his highest term of approbation and delight, the most welcome piece of the code they had developed between them on these occasions. As if to emphasize that, he repeated the phrase at a higher volume: ‘BLOODY ’ELL, NORAH!’

  The object of his attention was a pair of light-blue silk pyjamas, now filled to their optimum capacity by the buxom figure of Lucy Blake. He reached his hands imploringly towards her as she remained just out of his reach: it was a skill she had quickly learned was necessary with Percy. ‘Must have cost you a bomb, those!’ he said, ‘and worth every damned penny!’ He growled again, his voice rising from a throaty rattle to a yelp of pure pleasure.

  ‘The neighbours will hear you,’ said Lucy, affecting to be unconscious of him, studying her new outfit approvingly in the mirror. The pyjamas were worth the money. And on the whole, she was glad she had chosen the smaller size: it was comfortable enough, and just about adequate.

  ‘Bugger the neighbours! They can’t see what I can see. Come to bed, or I shan’t be responsible for my actions.’

  Lucy allowed herself a coquettish twirl in front of the wardrobe’s full-length mirror, turning her head to see how the silk clung to her splendid posterior. ‘I got them in the sale,’ she told Percy. A Lancashire woman couldn’t have her man thinking he’d taken on an extravagant partner. ‘They’re pure silk, you know. They weren’t cheap, but they’re excellent quality.’

  ‘Worth every damned penny, whatever they cost,’ Percy assured her again. He watched her adjust the elastic of the waistband and gave a ritual groan of anticipated pleasure. ‘But it’s the model that sells things. It’s like a box of chocolates: it’s what’s inside that really matters, in the end.’ And with a superhuman effort of will, his powerful arms became telescopic, his strong fingers seized Lucy’s hips and drew her inexorably towards his bed.

  She subsided with a becoming little yelp of female appreciation. Percy had warmed the sheets as he had promised, and he now ran what seemed to be at least two pairs of hands repeatedly over the treasure that had come into his lair. Lucy giggled gratefully; she was always surprised anew by his combination of energy and approbation. Then she caught his manhood almost by accident in her hand, and gasped some appropriate nonsense into his ear.

  ‘Pure silk,’ he said in muffled tones, ‘pure silk!’ Whether he was referring to her new garments or to something else entirely, neither of them was quite clear.

  ‘I wasn’t sure whether to buy these or not,’ she said, when next a pause presented itself. ‘Pyjama trousers aren’t the most practical wear, when one is spending the night with Percy Peach.’

  ‘Be fun taking them off!’ he said stoutly. Then, suiting the action to the words, he removed them, quite unhurriedly, and with many pleasurable diversions along the way. It took him some time, and then he said softly that he didn’t think he had the inclination or the energy to remove the top as well.

  ‘Just treat it as if it were a very short nightie,’ said Lucy softly, almost drowsily.

  So Percy Peach did. And it worked. And he thought he was the luckiest man in the world. And Lucy Blake assured him that he probably was. And certainly the most vigorous.

  When he returned from a pee at three o’clock in the morning, Percy was surprised to find that the pyjama trousers had returned to base – a very desirable base, to be sure, but they were back in position. The skills of womankind are varied and manifold.

  So Percy Peach removed the silk pyjama trousers again – more quickly and skilfully this time.

  Practice makes perfect.

  Nine

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see us about this.’

  Ellie Boyd said, ‘It wasn’t a problem. I have a free period first thing this morning.’ She wondered if they would explain why they had wanted to see her alone, why they had made sure that Dermot would have gone to work before they agreed to come to her house at this time. She had been expecting this meeting for thirty-six hours now, ever since Dermot had come home on Wednesday night and told her that they had been to see him at the office.

  DCI Peach said, ‘This shouldn’t take very long.’

  Ellie glanced at her watch as she led them into the sitting room. She had spent several hours in here on the previous evening, but at this time in the morning the room felt cold and unfamiliar, as if it had not been occupied for months. It was almost ten to nine. She said, ‘I’ll have to be out of here by twenty past nine, at the latest. The roads will be bad with this snow.’

  ‘Then we’d better get down to business, hadn’t we?’ said Peach. He sat down on the sofa beside the woman he had introduced as Detective Sergeant Blake, who produced a small notebook and a neat gold ballpoint pen, and who looked at her with a smile which Ellie supposed was meant to be reassuring.

  She had expected one of them to tell her that this was just routine stuff, but neither of them had.

  They took her through the preliminaries of her aborted attempt to climb Pendle Hill in the snow six days earlier, listening carefully to the account she had gone over so often in her mind. She told them of the blizzard, of the lace in her boot breaking, of the need for shelter to conduct emergency repairs. Then Peach said, ‘When did you decide to go into that old farmhouse?’

  ‘As soon as we saw it.’

  ‘And when was that?’

  A curious question; she hadn’t expected it. ‘Well, it might have been visible earlier in the day, from a distance. If it was, I don’t remember it. When the blizzard came, you could only see about a hundred yards. I just caught the low shape of some sort of building, below us and to our right. With it snowing as hard as it was and my lace going like that, I was glad to spot any sort of shelter.’

  ‘So it was you who decided to use the place?’

  ‘It was both of us. As I say, we were glad of anything that would offer us respite from that blizzard!’ But she knew now that it was she that had been determined to make for the place, that Dermot, even in that harsh environment, even in the midst of her distress, had tried to persuade her against it. She wondered if she would have remembered that, if her husband had not been so insistent that they should both tell the same story to these people. His story.

  She watched the woman making a careful note of what she had said. Wonderful hair, Ellie thought with irrelevant envy, as her head bent over the notebook.

  Then DS Blake looked up at her and said, ‘And it was then that you discovered the remains wh
ich we now know were those of a twenty-three-year-old woman named Anne Marie Clark – in the room at the end of that derelict farmhouse. Who went into that outbuilding first?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Try, please. We need the fullest possible picture.’

  ‘Why? Why is this important?’

  As soon as the question was out, she wished she hadn’t asked it. Peach looked at her steadily for a moment, then said quietly, ‘We don’t even know that it is. The probability, indeed, is that it isn’t, as you imply. But we have to gather every detail we can when there is a suspicious death. What is important and what isn’t only emerges much later on.’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s just that I can’t see—’

  ‘So if you can just cast your mind back and remember who decided to go into that particular room, we’d be obliged to you.’

  ‘I think I did. Yes, I remember; I was particularly anxious to get some shelter, to do something with my lace, so I went into the first place that offered itself.’ She remembered Dermot trying to dissuade her from entering the outbuilding now. She wished she had gone through what Dermot had said to this man with him now. All he had said, in his scathing, dismissive way, was that Peach had taken a forbidding black constable with him, and that they had been a formidable pair. She wondered if she was going to contradict anything he had said, despite her best efforts to present the united front Dermot had been so insistent upon.

  ‘And who was it that first saw the body?’

  ‘It was me.’ That surely couldn’t do him any harm. She remembered that first appalling moment, when she had seen the thing in the corner, the brief instant when she had wondered what on earth it could be, before she realized that it was a body. Or what was left of a body. Dermot had not even been inside the place then. He had responded to her cry. She remembered him stooping low, coming unwillingly through the crumbling entrance after her scream of anguish. Even then, he had scarcely entered the place.

  ‘So Mr Boyd didn’t go very near to the remains.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He was anxious to protect me from the sight, I think. It wasn’t a thing either of us wanted to linger over.’

  ‘I agree with you there. DS Blake and I saw the body the next day. We had to look closely, of course, for professional reasons. You get used to that. But you still don’t enjoy it. And what was left in that farmhouse was a particularly harrowing sight.’

  ‘Yes. Neither of us looked at it very closely. We got out as quickly as we could.’

  ‘Indeed. And that’s the normal human reaction which I would expect. And yet when we spoke to him on Wednesday, your husband seemed very certain that these remains were not only female but those of a young girl.’

  ‘But you’ve just said they were. You’ve just told me the girl’s name.’

  ‘Yes. The identity of the victim will be in this evening’s papers and on radio and television newscasts. The fact that it was a young woman was released by my chief superintendent on Wednesday night – not until some time after I had interviewed your husband about your discovery of the remains.’

  Ellie felt her head reel as she sat and endured this, under the scrutiny of the two very different but equally watchful faces opposite her. She remembered now that Dermot had spoken of the body as being that of a young woman when he had talked to her about this, when he had been emphasizing the necessity for them to present a united front. He’d said there was no reason to suppose that the poor girl had been raped, and she’d picked him up on it at the time. Was this why it had been so necessary for them to be careful? Had he known all along who that victim was? Was that why he had not wanted her to go near that abandoned building?

  She said as firmly as she could, ‘I’m sure Dermot didn’t actually know that. I’m sure he merely assumed that it was going to be a young girl. Most murder victims are, aren’t they?’

  Peach smiled glumly, ‘A great many of them are, certainly, Mrs Boyd.’

  ‘And I think the body had trainers on. Yes, I’m almost sure it did. White, or mainly white. And you’d be able to tell from them that it was female. Even if it didn’t register at the time, those small feet would stay in your mind, wouldn’t they?’ But she sounded desperate, too anxious to convince them that it must be so.

  Peach said, ‘Yes. I suppose that’s how it must have been. I’m glad you’ve been able to clear that up for us, Mrs Boyd. Thank you for your help.’

  Alan Hurst inspected himself carefully in the mirror above the tiny washbasin: hair carefully coiffured, its hint of grey arrested at what he considered the right level; maturity with virility – that was the image he wished to convey. And the face was still handsome; the small lines developing around the clear grey eyes suggested experience rather than decline. The nose was still good: regular and definite, without being too prominent – women didn’t like a big hooter, whatever the more racy myths said about what went with it. Well, he’d never had any complaints from the women in that department. He grinned a roguish grin at himself in the mirror. For most of the time, Alan Hurst had a very good opinion of himself.

  He went out for a moment to the counter at the front. ‘I have to go out for a couple of hours, as I told you last night.’ He dropped his hand on to the back of the girl’s chair, felt the warmth from her back against his thumb. Next week, if all went well, he’d let his fingers run around the lace at the back of her blouse: one of the first erogenous zones, a woman’s neck. And when they were twenty-two and impressionable, doubly so.

  But he wouldn’t push it. He didn’t want her shying away like a nervous kitten and claiming sexual harassment. You couldn’t be too careful, these days. Much better to be sure before you made your move. But Alan was confident enough: power was still the great aphrodisiac. And he did own the place, even if the business was modest. He’d made sure that she hadn’t got a regular boyfriend when he’d interviewed her a month ago. This girl would still be flattered when she found her handsome, masterful boss taking an interest in her. But don’t push it; there was plenty of time.

  Anna Fenton kept her eyes on the computer screen, watching the latest holiday offers from the big firms flashing up for those who could get away this weekend. She quite enjoyed it when he left her in charge. She said, ‘I’ll be OK. I know my way around the place now.’ She nodded at the screen. ‘There’s a great offer just come up here for a fortnight in a four-star hotel in Tenerife – ideal for those who can just drop everything.’

  He almost took up the sexual-innuendo possibilities in the phrase, then decided that it was probably too early for that. No need to risk frightening her away; you wanted her to see you as an interesting mature man, not a dirty old one. You had to maintain the illusion of a sort of innocence, however ludicrous that might seem to you. He looked at the screen over her shoulder. ‘They’re filling up places at the last minute. But not many people can go off at the drop of a hat. They think they can, but when it comes to it, they usually have commitments.’

  As he had. He thought of patient, uncomplaining Judith, at home with her multiple sclerosis, watching herself grow weaker and more helpless, as the drugs began to have less effect and she felt her limbs losing their strength. The succession of girls who worked in the shop didn’t know and would never see that other life he led. It was a private world, that one where his wife and he watched each other tenderly and waited for her to die.

  ‘That girl they’ve found – the one up on the moors: she used to work here, didn’t she?’ Anna Fenton was still looking at the screen as she spoke, staring fixedly at it, as if further details would come to her there, not from the man behind her left shoulder.

  ‘She did, yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention it?’

  ‘I was going to. I only found out yesterday that it was Annie Clark. It was a hell of a shock to me, as you can imagine.’

  ‘It must have been.’ Anna felt that she couldn’t ask the bold questions she wanted to ask if she turned to look at the boss. She tapped
out an instruction on her PC, watched the screen flash up a new file. ‘She had a first name almost the same as mine. What was she like?’

  Like you, he thought – far too much like you. The same age. The same combination of prettiness and naïvety which I have always found it impossible to resist. Very nearly the same first name. He said, ‘Annie Clark was quite different from you, Anna. She was blonde. A little shorter than you. Probably not quite as good a figure. And her eyes were a different colour, I think. I don’t remember her all that well. She wasn’t here that long.’ He felt a sudden, searing shaft of conscience at his treachery. But what else could he do?

  ‘How long?’

  ‘How long was she here? I’m not quite sure. About three months, as far as I can remember.’ It was four, but his instinct was to play it down, to make it as brief and as trivial an episode as he could.

  ‘Your employment records would tell you.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps I’d better check them – get it exactly right. The police want to speak to me about her, you see. Just routine, they said. I expect they’ll want to know if I can think of anyone who might have killed her. But I can’t, of course. It was as big a shock to me as to anyone when I heard what had happened to the poor girl.’

  There was a little pause. He watched a couple outside looking at the list of special offers in the window. He willed them to come in, to finish this exchange he didn’t like but didn’t know how to end. The middle-aged pair spoke to each other, pointed to different cards with their blazing red letters. But they didn’t come into the shop. The slim girl at her desk said stubbornly, ‘You should have told me, Mr Hurst. Apart from anything else, we might have customers coming in here talking about it. I’d look a fool if I didn’t know, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘But you do know, don’t you? You’re on the ball, as usual! How did you find out, anyway?’

  ‘My sister told me last night. We were out together, with three other girls. The name of the dead girl had just been announced on Radio Lancashire, apparently. And one of the girls had known her.’