by J M Gregson
‘Popular misconception, that, sir. This lot do believe in magic, though, they tell me. Gosh, you could do with a bit of magic, at the moment, sir, couldn’t you?’ This last was occasioned by Tucker’s wild attempt at a drive, which disappeared irretrievably into a dense clump of brambles on their right. ‘Bit of a waste of a brand-new ball, that one, sir.’
Tucker’s long drawn ‘Aaaaaargh!’ of agony would have been identifiable only to fellow golfers. He turned to Peach and said with ominous control, ‘And you think that one of these wild women might have killed this Clark girl?’
‘Not all women, modern witches, sir. They include men among their number.’
Tucker looked at his two golfing companions as they waited patiently and had a sudden inspiration. ‘Warlocks.’
‘If you say so, sir. I was only trying to be helpful.’ Peach’s brow furrowed with hurt.
‘Male witches. They’re called warlocks. As I’ve no doubt you know very well.’ Tucker hastily teed another ball and dispatched it along the ground with a galvanic heave. He glared at Peach and said, ‘So what do you expect me to do about this?’
Peach studied him for a moment with his head on one side. ‘You could try taking your right foot back a little at address and swinging more slowly,’ he said thoughtfully.
Alan Hurst lived in a 1930s detached house which had once been on the very outskirts of the town. Suburbia had surrounded it now, but it was still the last house before the paved road ended and the route became a wide, stony track, which carried only dog-walkers and farm vehicles. The house’s mature bricks stood out starkly and dramatically against the snow and the darkening blue of the winter sky when the CID visited Hurst in the twilight of January’s last Saturday.
Peach and Blake parked their car and walked the forty yards up the drive, their breaths forming long funnels of white vapour in the still, freezing air. Hurst opened the door without their needing to ring the bell. The heat from within the house hit them like a wall of warmth, so that they both accepted his invitation to remove their coats as he led them into a sitting room at the front of the house.
Hurst was in shirt sleeves himself, and when Lucy Blake commented upon the welcoming warmth of the house, he said, ‘We like to keep the temperature well up. My wife’s an invalid, you see.’
It was a natural enough explanation to volunteer to them, but Alan felt immediately that he was playing Judith’s illness as a card in the game, a ploy to give him some sort of psychological defence, as these two police officers and he played their respective hands. He knew he was being too sensitive: he could have taken them into the even more stifling room on the other side of the wall, and displayed the visual evidence of his wife’s handicap, if he had really wanted to use her like that. But then she might have heard things that he didn’t want her to hear: he didn’t know how this meeting was going to go yet.
They said they were sorry to hear that, mouthed the conventional things that well-meaning people always offered. They didn’t ask him what was wrong with her, and he found himself stumbling into an account of the progress of Judith’s multiple sclerosis which he need never have given to them.
Then, signifying that the preliminaries were over, Peach said briskly, ‘Well, you know why we’re here, Mr Hurst. You were one of the last people to see Anne Marie Clark alive.’
Alan smiled, taking his time as he had told himself he would, feeling surprisingly confident. ‘That seems a very dramatic way of putting it.’
Peach arched his eyebrows in the little gesture of surprise which any copper at Brunton nick could have told Hurst was dangerous. ‘If you can tell us that lots of other people saw her later than you, that would be exactly the kind of information we want to collect, wouldn’t it, DS Blake?’
‘Indeed it would be – especially if Mr Hurst could furnish us with a few names.’ She produced her tiny gold ballpoint pen, deftly removed its top, and poised it expectantly over her small notebook.
‘I’m afraid I can’t be helpful in that way. I was just surprised when you said that I was one of the last people to see poor Annie Clark alive.’
Peach weighed this for a moment before he said, ‘When did you last see her, Mr Hurst?’
‘On Saturday the twenty-third of September. You said you would want to know that, so I checked my records at work. She worked on that Saturday for me. She used to do alternate Saturdays.’
‘In your travel-agency shop.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she give you any reason to think that she was proposing to leave that employment?’
‘On the contrary, she seemed very happy. I was certainly happy with her work. She was doing very well. She’d made herself very well informed about the business and tourism generally. She was a bright girl.’
‘Too bright not to be ambitious, perhaps?’
It was a chance to distance himself from her, this – a chance to show that he was a considerate employer, who saw things objectively. He felt a little spurt of excitement as he realized how coolly his mind was working: that must be the adrenaline which improved the performance of sportsmen under pressure.
He nodded a little and took his time as he said, ‘I know what you’re getting at, Chief Inspector. Would a bright girl be content to stay in a small shop for ever? My answer to that is probably not. But she’d only been with me for three months or so, and she was learning all about the business. And she said she enjoyed working for a small firm rather than the large and faceless corporation she had been with before she came to me. Of course, it’s possible that after a year or two she might have wanted to spread her wings in a bigger company, to go for the career and promotions which would only have been possible there. But I like to think that I wouldn’t have stood in her way if it had come to that, that I might even have been encouraging her to move on, if I’d felt that was the best thing for her.’
For Percy Peach’s taste, it was a little too oily, however deprecating the smiles with which the man accompanied it. But it might be perfectly genuine, in character. He didn’t know yet whether this man was genuinely a moralizing windbag, or whether that was a front he was adopting for his own purposes. He said, ‘Our information is that Annie Clark died around the end of September.’
‘So she probably lived for a week or so after I had last seen her.’
‘No, Mr Hurst, we certainly can’t say that – not as yet.’ He looked at the wedding photograph on top of the display cabinet beside them, saw a young and innocent-looking version of the man opposite them with a pretty, willowy girl in white, who was as tall as he was. ‘Do you know what happens to a corpse when it is left undiscovered for four months?’
‘No. And I hope you aren’t about to tell me.’
Peach considered the matter. ‘It deteriorates. Grubs move in, develop, and move out, unless some predator comes to claim them. Birds remove the eyes from the body. Then the rats move in, usually.’ He studied his man’s face with every phrase. ‘After four months, what’s left is mostly black and you can hardly tell whether it was male or female.’
‘You have the advantage of me, Chief Inspector. I’ve never seen a corpse, except after it’s been subjected to the embalmer’s arts. But I really can’t see the point of your—’
‘Impossible for even the best pathologists and the best forensic-science people in the country to say exactly when a four-month-old corpse was dispatched from this life, you see, Mr Hurst. So the young woman you described as “poor Annie Clark” could have died anything up to a month after you last saw her. Or she could have died on that very day: Saturday the twenty-third of September.’
‘Yes. I realize that I was naïve in my assumption that she died a week after I’d last seen her. But you really can’t expect me to—’
‘What was your relationship with the deceased, Mr Hurst?’
He was shaken now. He could feel his heart thumping. He had expected neither this aggressive line of questioning nor this abrupt introduction to the most important area of al
l. ‘I think I’ve already indicated that. I found her a good worker. She was both intelligent and diligent. In my opinion, she had the prospect of an excellent future in the travel industry, if she wanted it.’
‘And if someone hadn’t strangled her and hidden her body in that ruin up on the side of Pendle Hill.’
It was brutal, and it was clear that this policeman was being deliberately so, in an attempt to ruffle him. Alan decided it was time for a protest about these tactics. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I killed Annie and took her body up there, because I should have to—’
‘Your suggestion, Mr Hurst, not mine. You’re telling us that Annie Clark was killed somewhere else – in Brunton, perhaps – and then transported to that deserted farm in a vehicle of some kind.’
‘Well, wasn’t she?’
‘Don’t know, Mr Hurst. From what was left up there, it was impossible to tell whether she was killed on the spot or whether the corpse had been brought there from somewhere else entirely. It’s interesting that you should be so sure that the latter is what happened. Why are you so certain of that?’
‘I’m not. I just assumed it must have happened like that.’
‘You weren’t certain of it?’
‘No, of course I wasn’t.’ Alan told himself that it was just a trick – that this man who seemed so certain was only trying things on. Perhaps he did that with everyone. Yes, that was it: he must be the hard cop, and this pretty girl would come in with the soft-cop routine, when it suited them. Well, he’d be ready for that. He said to Peach, ‘I’m an innocent citizen, doing my best to help the police. You really mustn’t treat me like a hardened criminal.’
Peach gave him a smile which held no hint of embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry about that, Mr Hurst. But do bear in mind that one of the many people we shall be speaking to over the next week or so will almost certainly be a person guilty of the worst of all crimes.’
‘I appreciate that. It can’t be easy for you, when a murder isn’t discovered until four months after it’s happened.’
‘Thank you. I don’t think you answered my question about your relationship with the deceased girl. You told me something about her abilities and her prospects, but not about your own relationship with her.’
‘Professional.’ Alan hoped he didn’t sound too satisfied as he delivered the word he had decided upon before they came. ‘I had a high estimation of the potential of Miss Clark, as I’ve already indicated. And I trust that she in turn found me an understanding and considerate employer.’
Peach nodded slowly, listening to the phrases as if he hoped to detect some subtext beneath them. ‘But you worked very closely together: Annie Clark was your only full-time employee.’
How could they know that? Had they researched him before they came here? Or was it merely a reasonable deduction for a small business? He forced a smile, as lightly as he could. ‘That is correct, yes. We have to be open every Saturday, and I employ part-time assistance to cover all the hours we need, but Annie and I were the only ones who worked a full week in the shop.’
‘And as you’ve already indicated, you have a difficult domestic situation.’
‘Yes. What has that to do with anything?’ It was the first time he had really lost his composure. He heard his voice rising on the question.
‘I’ve no idea. I was hoping you would tell me that, Mr Hurst. I would imagine that you must surely have put a great deal of trust in Miss Clark, once you had discovered how competent she was – that you must have come to rely upon her quite a lot.’
‘Yes. I found that I could trust her to work on her own when I needed her to.’ They surely couldn’t know anything about the lucrative sideline he had developed, which took him increasingly out of the office. He added rather lamely, ‘Annie was very helpful, whenever my domestic situation needed my time.’
‘You sound as if you had grown very close to her? Would you say that your relationship went beyond the merely professional?’
He had taken up Alan’s word and delivered it back to him with what sounded to his sensitive ears something like a sneer. He forced himself to take his time as he delivered the necessary clichés. ‘No, of course it didn’t. I’m a happily married man, Chief Inspector.’
Peach studied his face for two or three seconds, then nodded curtly. It was Lucy Blake who looked up from her notes and said quietly, ‘Did you know that Annie Clark was pregnant, Mr Hurst?’
‘No.’ He didn’t trust himself to say anything more as he concentrated upon his look of surprise. They seemed to expect something else from him, so he said eventually, ‘She had a boyfriend, you know.’
‘We do, yes. As a matter of fact, it was left to him to come forward on Wednesday and tell us that she had gone missing. He was instrumental in establishing her identity for us.’
‘Well then, isn’t it probable that he was the father?’
‘He says he wasn’t, Mr Hurst. Have you any idea who else might have been the father?’
‘No.’
‘You obviously got to know Miss Clark very well – professionally, at least. Would you say she was the kind of girl who slept around?’
He felt an overwhelming urge to tell this girl with the striking ultramarine eyes that Annie had been that sort of girl, to broaden the field of suspicion, to leave them floundering among the testosterone of Brunton’s youth culture. But they would be talking to others, as well as to him – they’d already reminded him of that. He would only draw attention to himself if he said things out of line with what others were going to say. And despite all his instincts to distance himself from Annie, there was a small part of him that wanted to do its best to make sure she was well remembered. ‘No. Annie Clark wasn’t that sort at all. I’m very surprised to hear that she was pregnant.’
They left him then, with the usual injunctions to get in touch with them if anything significant occurred to him.
Alan Hurst spent five long minutes analysing their exchanges in that stifling front room before he felt calm enough to go back to Judith. It had been tougher than he’d anticipated, but he couldn’t see that he’d given anything vital away.
Twelve
Jo Barrett loved her Saturday afternoons.
The best ones were when the Rovers were at home to a big team in the Premiership and much of her neighbourhood of Brunton was deserted. She could run to her heart’s content then – exhaust herself, if she wanted to. It was unlikely that she would be spotted by the children whom she taught at the comprehensive during the week. Those who weren’t at the match would probably be shopping in the town centre.
Jo left her outing until the edge of dark, when she was confident that she would have the roads to herself on this icy evening. Within a hundred yards of parking her car, she was on the grass, feeling the ground hard beneath her feet, dropping into the rhythm that she dreamed of in moments of stress at school, the steady pattern of physical movement that calmed her mind and assisted the processes of thought.
Jo Barrett was thirty-four now. She had given up all competitive running three years ago, and found to her surprise that she did not miss it. She had been a miler and a fifteen-hundred-metres specialist, and some said she had been unlucky not to go to the Olympics in both 1996 and 2000. She would have liked to go to Atlanta or Sydney, not just for the trip, but because it would have been, for her, the ultimate recognition of her prowess.
Like most middle-distance athletes, she found that she could have stretched out towards the longer races as she moved past thirty; she could almost certainly have had a real go at the five thousand and perhaps even the ten thousand metres, if she’d chosen to do it. But you had to be a full-time athlete nowadays to go right to the top, and nothing but the top really interested Jo Barrett. And you had to be single-minded, almost paranoid, about training and times and success, which was easier when you were eighteen than when you were past thirty.
Jo wore the black vest and shorts she had always chosen for her running, the garb which had ma
de her a distinctive figure at athletics meetings and on television during her peak years. And today, as a concession to the rigours of January, she had put on black leg-warmers as well. As day dropped into evening and the first stars appeared in a clear sky, she was a distinctive, swiftly moving figure, dark against the horizon for any who might be abroad to observe her.
Jo Barrett enjoyed the tempo of her running. She knew she could outdistance all of the women and most of the men who chose to exercise like this, but she relished the very fact that this was not competitive, that she was here solely for her own satisfaction and enjoyment. She grinned to herself in the near-darkness: not many people would call this enjoyment, this pushing yourself to the limit as a freezing day moved into an even colder night. But she had always been exhilarated by it, always enjoyed pushing herself hard. Years ago it had been against the clock. Nowadays it was just against herself, against the elements, and sometimes, she felt, against a hostile world.
She hit the tempo she wanted, held it for two miles and more, felt the exultation of her fitness, as her heartbeat rose and the blood pulsed through her racing limbs. She was breathing hard but easily; in the days of her track racing, she would have had resources left for a sprint finish. And on that thought, she raised the rate of her steps, keeping the long stride-length which had always been her strength, not cheating to give herself the illusion of a faster pace.
She pushed herself harder than she had done for months over her last three hundred metres, feeling the beat of the blood in her head, calling on that masochistic streak which all athletes must have to push her towards her limits. She was flying now, flying fast over the ground her eyes could scarcely see, leaving her imaginary pursuers toiling hopelessly behind her. She was almost through the pain barrier; she felt her control of her limbs and her stride failing at the last, as she drove herself over the final thirty yards to the stile which was her finishing post.
And then she was leaning in a state of near-collapse on the gate, her breath coming in huge, gasping wrenches, her shoulders twitching uncontrollably. As her breathing eventually slowed, she wondered for a moment what the strange, uneven sound around her head was. Then she realized that it was her own wild laughter, her own exultation in this strange and private achievement.
