by J M Gregson
She moved back on to the metalled road, walked unevenly for a moment in her exhaustion, then forced her body back into some sort of rhythm and trotted the short distance to her car. You had to wind down, especially on a night like this, if you were to avoid the risk of pulling muscles. She still had it in her, Jo Barrett; she could still be up there with the best in Britain, if she chose.
Jo was still giggling a little to herself with the excitement of her run when she turned the Audi into the drive; and, as usual, exercise had clarified her mind. She knew now what she must do, as clearly as if it had been outlined for her in a book of instructions.
She took the photographs and the letters from the little drawer in her bedroom and went through to where the wood-burning stove glowed softly in the lounge. The glow flickered into flames as she opened the door of the stove. She put the letters in first, watching them swiftly disappear into the flames. She paused only for a second before she slid the photographs on top of the red heat.
Jo Barrett watched the smiling face of Annie Clark curl swiftly at the edges, then disappear for ever in a tiny twitch of smoke.
Matt Hogan considered that he was quite an authority on policemen. The boyfriend of the late Annie Clark had lived rough in his time, which meant inevitably that he had met a lot of policemen.
He had never met one like Detective Chief Inspector Peach.
Matt lived in the first block of flats that had been built to replace the slums cleared in the nineteen-sixties. It had been a symbol of hope at the time, a solid token of the brave new Brunton world which was to come. It had not remained so for long. Architects had discovered too late that creating a bold new skyline was not enough, that people did not like living in aseptic rabbit warrens.
Forty years later, the flats were even more undesirable and considerably less hygienic. People lived as tightly together in them as in the old terraced houses they had replaced, but did not support each other in the way they had in the hard days of the cotton mills.
In the first decade of the new century, you kept yourself to yourself in Wilson Square. You didn’t look for help from your neighbours, and you didn’t enquire too closely into what they were doing, if you knew what was healthy for you. ‘Streetwise’ was a word that might have been invented for the area. Matt Hogan prided himself on being streetwise, and in most respects he was.
That didn’t make him in any sense a match for Percy Peach.
The chief inspector bounced into the flat like a solid-rubber ball, glanced with distaste at the flickering gas fire and inspected the healing scar on Matt Hogan’s forehead closely but without comment. He said, as though it were an accusation of indecency, ‘You’ve already met DS Blake.’
‘Yes. And a Detective Constable Pickering.’ Matt was glad he’d remembered the name of that lanky sod. Show them he was on the ball, that would.
Peach nodded, considering his man as if he was something he’d just scraped off his shoe. ‘Nice chap, Gordon Pickering. Bit too nice, for my taste, but there it is.’ He wouldn’t reveal the fact that Pickering, like all of his team, had been carefully selected by Peach himself. ‘We need to talk to you again, Mr Hogan. Now that we know a lot more about our murder victim. Now that certain discrepancies in the evidence are beginning to emerge.’
Matt found his fingers straying nervously to the scar on his forehead, which had reached the itchy stage of healing. ‘Perhaps I should remind you that I came into the police station of my own free will.’ The words were so starchy, so different from his normal speech, that they sounded odd. But that wouldn’t matter, if it was the right way to deal with this cocky bugger.
Peach smiled at him, said nothing for so long that Matt wanted to say something, just to fill the silence. He glanced at pretty Detective Sergeant Blake, sitting silently and watchfully beside Peach on his battered sofa. That delicious woman had done most of the questioning when he had gone into the station, and he had somehow expected that it would be so at this second meeting. He licked his dry lips and said, ‘I came in to tell you about Annie. To tell you that the body you had found might be her.’
‘Of course you did, Mr Hogan. And we’re very grateful – of course we are. We’d be even more grateful if you told us that you’d killed her, of course.’
‘Of course I didn’t kill her! It’s a bloody liberty that you should even suggest that! I’ve got rights, you know.’ He was suddenly quite near to tears. It went oddly with his hard man’s appearance. He’d had his hair cut very short since he had been into the station on Wednesday. His head was almost shaved, so that its thin covering of black hair was scarcely longer than the stubble on his unshaven face, and the scar on his forehead stood out even more lividly.
‘Of course you’ve got rights. And of course we shall respect those rights. Make life very difficult for policemen, rights do. We like clear-ups, you see. We make a career out of clear-up rates, in CID, so if you’d been prepared to confess to a murder, it would have made our day.’ He smiled wistfully at that thought, then studied his man for a moment, drumming his fingers upon his knee as if he needed some outlet for the violence simmering within him. ‘So you didn’t kill Annie Clark. But you were her boyfriend, it seems. Boyfriends are always suspects, when a young woman is murdered. I expect you realize that.’
‘I suppose so.’ Matt wondered why he was agreeing with the man.
‘Serious, was it?’
Matt nodded earnestly. ‘We were an item.’
‘Ah, an item. And how long had you been an “item”?’ Peach pronounced the word as if it represented a strange new semantic discovery for him.
‘About a week.’ The pale face reddened right up into the scalp, too visible beneath its scanty covering.
Peach paused to relish this reddening, then said with deep disappointment, ‘It’s not long, is it? Are you sure that the lady would have agreed that you were an “item”?’
‘Yes. We were serious.’
‘Because our problem is that the lady isn’t here to deliver her own opinions, and people say all sorts of things about what dead people thought. Some of them quite contradictory.’
Matt wondered, as Peach had known he would, exactly what it was that other people had been saying about his dead girlfriend. He repeated sullenly, ‘It was me who came forward. Me who told you that it was Annie Clark.’
‘Indeed it was. Took you rather a long time to come forward, though, didn’t it? Four months or thereabouts.’
‘I didn’t know where she’d gone, did I? And I wasn’t next of kin.’ He couldn’t say that where he came from you told the police nothing, that you didn’t volunteer things until they were dragged out of you; that it had been quite an effort for him to set foot inside the Brunton nick.
‘You see, policemen – and even nice policewomen like DS Blake – tend to be suspicious devils, Mr Hogan. A police officer might think it possible that you didn’t report Annie Clark missing until you knew that she had been found and the CID were about to descend upon you.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Descend upon you as the murder victim’s boyfriend – who we’ve already agreed is always a strong candidate for a murder charge.’
Matt Hogan wasn’t sure whether he’d agreed to that or not. He ran his hand over his scalp, feeling the still unfamiliar sensation of the prickle of his coarse, close-cut hair against his fingers. He said desperately, ‘It’s those bloody witches you should be harassing, not me!’
‘Had a lot of girlfriends, have you, Matt?’
This was the woman, using his first name as the squat bugger had not done, trying to trap him by different methods, with her sympathy and her soft voice and her green eyes and her smiling, perfect teeth. Well, he knew all about things like that. ‘I’ve had a few. Most people have, when they’re twenty-three.’ He tried to make it sound immensely mature and experienced.
‘And what about Annie?’
‘I expect she’d had a few boyfriends.’
‘But you don�
�t know?’
‘I told you: we’d only been an item for about a week when she disappeared.’
She made a note of something in her neat, small hand. He couldn’t see what it was that she was writing. It was Peach who said harshly, ‘Slept around, did she, Annie Clark?’
‘I don’t know what right you have to—’
‘Right of officers investigating a murder, son. Makes its own rules, murder does. And lots of twenty-three-year-old girls have slept around a bit. Way of modern life, some of them would call it.’
‘Annie wasn’t like that.’ His lips set in a tight line.
‘Thought you didn’t know, one way or another. Because you’d only been an “item” for a week.’
Matt wondered how that word which had seemed to him so innocent could have been transformed into a stick to beat him with. He’d expected that they would take him up on what he’d said about the witches, but they seemed much more interested in Annie’s relationship with him. He said wretchedly, ‘I don’t think Annie Clark was a girl who slept around. I’d known her for quite a while before she became my girlfriend, and I don’t think—’
‘How long?’
‘What?’
‘How long had you known her before she became your girlfriend?’
‘I’m not certain of that. Three, four months perhaps.’
‘And to your knowledge, did she have any serious attachments in that time?’
He didn’t like that formal phrasing. It sounded too much like a prosecuting counsel in a court of law. ‘No. But I didn’t know everything she was doing during those months.’
‘You admired her from afar.’
‘If you like, yes.’ He wondered if the man was mocking him, wondered how much he really knew.
‘Because Annie Clark was pregnant, wasn’t she? Three months pregnant.’
Peach and Blake were both watching him keenly, waiting to see the effects of this bombshell dropped into the exchanges. But neither of them was sure when they compared notes afterwards whether this had come as a surprise to him. His face registered surprise, but it was like one of those grotesque masks that display only a single emotion. His mouth dropped open a fraction, and remained so; his eyes widened, but stared at the grubby rug between them, not at his tormentors. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘You weren’t the father?’
‘No. I couldn’t have been.’
‘So who was?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve no idea. It’s news to me, this. Annie hadn’t told me.’ He went on repeating the fact, as if by repetition he could convince them.
Peach spoke more gently than at any time since he had come into the fetid, low-ceilinged room. ‘Think about it, Mr Hogan. If you can think of anyone who might possibly have been the father, we’d like to hear from you. In confidence, of course.’
Matt Hogan sat staring at the gas fire, listening to its tiny puttering, for a long time after they had gone. It had been much worse than he’d expected. They’d probably be back to see him again, in due course: they’d hinted at that. But he’d know what to expect, next time. He’d prepare himself for it.
But at least the pigs hadn’t got the key things out of him.
Thirteen
Heather Shields wanted to be a writer. Lots of people from her sort of background had made it as writers. You had to keep on trying, refuse to be discouraged, show that you had the determination. Then eventually, if you tried hard enough and showed that you were good enough, you’d win through.
Heather Shields was still very young and inexperienced.
The girl who had been Annie Clark’s flatmate went to a writers’ circle, where they showed their work to each other and read it aloud. Most of them were older than her, but they seemed to think that her work was really quite good. ‘Promising,’ someone had said, and the others had rather seized on that word; they’d all nodded their heads and agreed. Well, it was true that one of the older men had said that it perhaps needed a bit more of a rough edge to it; Heather wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that.
Probably the man didn’t really understand what she was trying to do. Heather wanted to be a romantic novelist. She’d always read quite a lot of romantic fiction, so she felt quite experienced in it, for a woman of twenty-three. People said you should know your market, and she thought she did. And there was an awful lot of romantic fiction published, so that had to be a good thing: lots of opportunity for a new young writer to break in.
The other thing that everyone in the group kept emphasizing was that you should write about things you knew about, draw upon your own experience. That wasn’t always easy, when you worked in the packing department of a mail-order firm, with five other women who led lives rather like yours, when you spent most of your day at a computer, fulfilling routine tasks and sending out standard letters to clients.
Then this great slice of real drama had fallen into her lap, or been dropped there deliberately by a fate which wanted her to be a writer. First of all, she’d had the trauma in her own life, with her boyfriend ditching her. It had been too painful to write about, at first. But Heather knew that that was the amateur’s reaction to personal tragedy. The proper writer had a splinter of ice in her soul, a detachment, which would enable her to use an experience like that, to make it the material of successful, publishable writing.
She’d made several attempts already at writing up this passionate experience, at capturing the ecstasy that had gone before and the pain of rejection. She hadn’t quite pinned it down yet – not to her own satisfaction. But being self-critical, being prepared to revise and rewrite until you had it perfect, was part of the writing process, everyone said.
Besides, this even greater shock, this even greater gift to a writer, had come so shortly after her rejection that she must be meant to use it. There were very few people in the world who had a flatmate disappear from the face of the earth because she’d been murdered. You could surely make something out of that, even if it was not at first sight the stuff of which romantic novels were made. You must observe everything that went on, store it away, make notes on what was happening and how you felt about it at the time. And you must put yourself in the place of the central character, Annie Clark. That way, you could come up with it fresh as paint when you chose to integrate it into your fiction in due course.
Heather Shields had taken a day off work on Thursday, so that she could watch the scene-of-crime team at work in her flat. She explained to them that they wouldn’t find much, because she’d put Annie’s things into a bin bag and taken them to her mother’s house in Preston. She’d had to do that, to make the place ready for the new flatmate she had needed to share the rent. She’d told Chief Inspector Peach all about it. They’d nodded, said they’d already been told that, that even so they had to search the place, just in case something turned up. They’d given her the impression they were just going through the motions, the three civilians and the single police sergeant who was in charge.
Heather had watched them taking photographs and fingerprints and fibres from the carpet beneath the bed in what had been Annie’s room. She’d followed them into the bathroom and watched them go through the cabinet and put Annie Clark’s nail varnish carefully into a plastic bag with a label.
And all the time Heather Shields had known that the thing which would really have interested them, that little red-backed diary of Annie’s, was safely locked away in the bottom drawer of her desk at work.
A writer had to have her materials.
Jo Barrett lived in what had once been the entrance lodge for a great house, with an estate of forty acres. The mansion had long since gone, and housing estates sprawled over what had been the rolling acres of the estate, but the square, solid little stone cottage, which had once stood by the main entrance, had sturdily outlived the architectural splendours that had brought it into being.
Jo had emulsion-painted the walls in strong, dark colours when she had moved in, which gave a dramatic air to the interior of t
he place. The furniture was mostly antique and mostly mahogany. The pieces did not always match, but the prevailing dark-red sheen of the wood gave a harmony to the décor and reinforced the vivid effect of the strong colours on the walls behind the furniture.
At eleven o’clock on a bitterly cold Sunday morning, the black wood-burning stove made the surprisingly large sitting room pleasantly warm. Jo seated her visitors on the Victorian chaise longue which faced the fire and was exquisitely uncomfortable. She herself took the black leather recliner which was the only really comfortable chair in the room – ‘My concession to the sybaritic lifestyle,’ she assured them as she slid gracefully into it.
Percy Peach did not immediately sit down beside Lucy Blake. He walked across to the table beneath the window and looked at the pile of exercise books on the table. ‘You teach at Brunton Comprehensive,’ he said.
She knew it was a statement, not a query, so she added a little information of her own that he might not have. ‘For the last eight years. Chemistry and general science. I used to do a little Latin as well, when I started there, but there isn’t much demand for that nowadays.’
It was an unusual combination, but Jo Barrett was an unusual woman. She watched this short, powerfully built man without resentment as he walked across to examine the photograph on the wall above her sideboard. He said, ‘Before your time, this.’ Then he turned and smiled at her. ‘Geordie, are you?’
‘Yes. My dad framed that for me – said it would help me to keep the faith when I went to university and moved away from the area.’ It was a large picture of the Newcastle United football side of the fifties: tough-looking, determined men in vertical black and white stripes. ‘Won the Cup three times in five years, that team. We haven’t won a lot since.’
