by J M Gregson
‘Joe Harvey and Jackie Milburn. Before my time, too, but my dad brought me up on tales of Tom Finney and Jackie Milburn.’
‘Wor Jackie. His autograph’s on the back of that print. My dad’s first action every time he comes here is to check that picture’s still hung straight. He’s accepted I’m gay, now. But he’d cut me off without a word if I didn’t sing “The Blaydon Races” and support the Toon.’
She was as black and white as her team’s strip. She had a white polo-neck shirt above black trousers and black leather low-heeled shoes which emphasized the slim, muscular length of her legs. Her hair was short and very dark around an attractive, small-featured face. He smiled at her and said, ‘You haven’t got pictures of yourself breasting the tape.’
‘Oh, but I have, Chief Inspector. I’m just not brazen enough to plaster them all over my living room, that’s all. The second bedroom is full of them, and there are one or two in the loo.’
The places where your parents would see them and enjoy them, when they visited, he thought. He knew without any emphasis from her that the bonds of family were strong for this woman, though she might never have children of her own. He went and sat down next to his detective sergeant on the chaise longue, with his short, powerful legs splayed a little, so that he reminded Jo of one of the weightlifters at her athletics club. He said without any further preamble, ‘How long had you known Annie Clark before she was killed?’
‘Eight years.’ She enjoyed surprising him – gave him a little smile before explaining herself. ‘I taught her, Mr Peach. Took her through a GCSE in general science.’
‘I thought she lived in Preston.’
‘She did. But she’d started to attend Brunton Comprehensive before the family moved there, so she continued to attend. The Preston bus goes past the school.’
‘Was she a good student?’
‘Average ability, in my subject. Discovering herself at the same time as taking exams. It’s a thing a lot of kids have to contend with. She was better at the arts subjects. But then a lot of girls have mental blockages about maths and science.’
‘You seem to remember her very well.’
‘I do. I have a special reason to. She had a pubescent infatuation with me. Fancied she was in love with me. That was in the year before her GCSEs. In case you should be in any doubt, I didn’t respond to her or reciprocate her feelings. There was no scandal.’
‘But it must have been awkward for you.’
She weighed the word for a moment. ‘It was certainly embarrassing, yes. It’s not at all unusual, as you’re probably aware.’ She glanced automatically at the woman with the striking red hair who was taking notes; the two gave each other cautious, reciprocal smiles. ‘It’s a very common feature of the later stages of pubescence. I was new to the school and it was my first experience of it here. And I had to be particularly careful, because of my own sexual preferences. I’ve never made a secret of them.’
‘And do you think that your preference might have encouraged Annie Clark’s fantasies?’
‘I’m glad to hear you call them that – because that is exactly what they were at that time.’
He nodded slowly. ‘How did you deal with it?’
‘I spoke to the head. When Annie’s mother came in for the parents’ evening, we had a quiet word with her together. I think she was more upset by it than anyone else, including Annie. We assured her that these things were quite normal in adolescent girls.’
‘And it didn’t seriously affect Annie?’
She shrugged. ‘Not as far as anyone could tell. Who can really say what effect our adolescent experiences have on any of us? Annie Clark was dating boys not long afterwards. You’d need to ask her exactly how the episode fitted into her life as a whole; but of course, you can’t do that.’ For the first time since they had come into the house, she looked a little distressed.
‘You kept in touch with her, after she left school?’
‘No. I wasn’t even aware that she was still in the area, until four months before she – well, disappeared.’
‘And died.’
‘So it now appears. I wasn’t aware of that at the time.’
He wondered why she found it necessary to stress that. ‘You’d better tell us how she came into your life again.’
Jo Barrett stretched out her long legs and crossed them at the ankles, studying her feet for a moment, as if she wished to emphasize how relaxed she felt. ‘Unexpectedly. But then I should think she was even more surprised to see me than I was her. I met her at our Wiccans meeting when she joined the coven.’
‘You didn’t introduce her to the group?’
‘No. That had nothing to do with me. She came along experimentally to her first meeting, as most people do. I’ve always presumed that it was Kath Howard who introduced her to the idea of being a witch. It was certainly Kath who told us who she was and introduced all of us to her when she came to that first meeting.’
‘Which was when?’
‘About the end of April, I think.’
‘And you recognized her?’
‘I don’t think I did, no. People change a lot between sixteen and twenty-three. She recognized me as the woman who had once been her teacher – came up to me rather shyly when we’d finished our prayers and incantations.’ Jo wondered if she was being almost too light-hearted and dismissive; they were here about a murder victim, after all. She realized that she might not be very good at dissimulation. She did not have to practise it very often, these days. Those dark days fifteen years ago when she’d concealed her sexual preferences and trusted no one seemed to belong to another world.
It was Lucy Blake who said quite suddenly, ‘How seriously did Annie Clark take these Wiccan beliefs?’
Jo looked at the younger woman coolly. You almost said ‘all this witches nonsense’ then, you smug bitch, she thought. It’s what you think, isn’t it? It’s what most of you think, underneath this polite correctness with which you now have to mask everything. You don’t dare say you hate gays, nowadays. You don’t even dare to say you think witchcraft is rubbish, but you nearly did then. Well, I can play your games, as deadpan as you, my girl. ‘Annie took her beliefs very seriously – the way all of us do who are involved in modern witchcraft. There are thousands more of us each year, you know.’
‘I accept that. But not everyone is convinced. Mrs Howard told us that two of your group left shortly after Annie arrived.’
It was a reminder that they had talked to Kath, would no doubt talk to others. Thank you for the aide-memoire, pretty girl. ‘That had nothing to do with Annie. They scarcely met her.’
‘So you don’t think that either of them should occupy much of our time. You don’t think either of them would be involved in Annie Clark’s death.’
‘No. They wouldn’t even remember her name.’
She let her contempt for the question come out in her answer, so that Lucy Blake reminded her softly, ‘Someone killed Annie. Probably someone who knew her well. Possibly someone involved in your coven.’
‘It seems ridiculous to me to suggest that. I follow your argument and I suppose I have to accept it, but it’s inconceivable to me that any of us would be involved. I know the coven, and I know how fondly we all thought of Annie Clark.’
‘And how did Annie Clark think of you?’
Jo made herself pause, told herself that she must not let the irritation she felt with this woman colour her replies. Peach was watching her as closely as a predatory bird, whilst his junior went through the standard questions: that man wouldn’t miss any mistakes she made. ‘Annie found our beliefs and our worship a great relief and a great release – as I did myself, when I discovered the centrality of nature and other Wiccan beliefs four years ago.’
Lucy Blake refused to be diverted into the intriguing cul de sac of Jo Barrett’s beliefs. ‘Would you say that Annie Clark was showing the enthusiasm of the convert?’
It was so exactly how Annie had been that she might have known
her. Jo told herself that even if she didn’t like her, she mustn’t underestimate this girl, with her dramatic chestnut hair and her dark-pink lipstick and her freckles and her air of surprise. ‘Annie was enthusiastic, yes. It would be fair to say she felt the zeal of someone who had discovered a true and convincing religion. But of course that would seem natural enough to us, as fellow believers.’ She couldn’t prevent edging her last sentence with the scorn she felt, and was annoyed with herself immediately for this weakness.
Perhaps Peach felt the tension between the two. He came back in abruptly with the bluntest of questions, ‘So who do you think killed Annie Clark, Miss Barrett?’
She switched her attention back to the round face beneath the bald head. She was glad the enquiry had come from him: if it had come from Blake, she might have been tempted into asking how the hell should she know. ‘That’s for you to find out, surely.’
‘Which we do by talking to people like you, Miss Barrett. By exploring what people think about the murder victim; about each other; about life in general. Sometimes they have very conflicting views on these things, and that is usually helpful to us.’
She did not like the way his black eyes never left her, had been studying her face for minutes on end now. She said derisively, ‘And would you say that you’ve discovered anything this morning? Or that you’ve been wasting your time?’
He watched her for what seemed to Jo a very long time, before the slightest of smiles eventually lightened the bottom part of his impassive face. ‘I’d say that we’ve learned very little indeed from you today. That in itself may of course be of interest to us, in due course.’
Just when she wanted him to go on, to enlarge on what he meant by that, he stood up, with one of those sudden movements which seemed an outlet for the energy surging within him. ‘Let us know if you think of anything that may help us to unmask a murderer, Miss Barrett. Immediately.’
Jo Barrett tried to keep her contempt for them going when they’d gone, to convince herself that they were as bumbling and as clueless as she’d almost believed in their presence. She got herself a brandy, though she never drank at this time of day – felt the warmth of it coursing through her upper body, without it bringing the comfort that she had hoped would come with it.
She had given nothing away; she was almost sure she hadn’t. But she was more disturbed than she had ever expected to be.
Sunday evening. Bitter winter cold on the hills outside. A fire flaming merrily in the front parlour of the old cottage at the base of Longridge Fell, and Agnes Blake entertaining her daughter and the man she was determined would eventually be her son-in-law.
It was one of the more startling facts of life that Percy Peach got on like a house on fire with Agnes Blake. Lucy had concealed the existence of Peach in her life for some months before she introduced him to her mother. That was partly because Percy concealed his better qualities as if he was slightly ashamed of them. Lucy knew perfectly well that her man would never have confessed to his sympathy for the underdog, his care for his juniors, his passionate integrity when it came to matters of right and wrong. In addition, Percy was almost ten years older than her, bald, aggressive and divorced – scarcely the qualities to endear him to a mother who had but one child in the world.
Yet Percy and Agnes had hit it off from the start, so absolutely that Lucy sometimes felt a little secret jealousy of their relationship. Lucy had not been born until her mother was forty, and her father had died when she was eighteen. He had been a notable league cricketer, and his photograph in cricket gear, a shy, smiling man with a sweater over his shoulder and six wickets under his belt, had occupied the place of honour on the mantelpiece of the parlour for as long as Lucy could remember.
Agnes Blake had never lost her enthusiasm for the game. She had known of Percy Peach, before he had come into her house, as a dashing amateur batsman in the Lancashire League, who took on the West Indian fast bowlers who came there as professionals and used his dancing feet to dispatch them to the boundaries. When she had found that this man’s father had insisted on christening him Denis Charles Scott, her cup had run copiously over. Agnes’s hero had always been the laughing cavalier of cricket in the years of rationing after Hitler’s war, Denis Charles Scott Compton. Her father had taken his young daughter to a bomb-scarred Old Trafford in 1948 to see one of the man’s great innings, and Agnes had never forgotten it.
When a man whose own father had insisted on giving him the great man’s surnames had come into her life, it seemed to Agnes Blake that some divine providence must be guiding her daughter’s destiny. If only her daughter, normally an intelligent young woman, would accept how clearly this match was ordained for her, all would surely be well, and Agnes could begin to anticipate the grandchildren she craved. Cricketers, they’d be, with a bit of luck and a pedigree like that.
Percy was as complimentary as ever about her baking, and he proved his sincerity by consuming great quantities of apple pie, scones and sponge cake. ‘You realize I only eat the salad so that I’ll be let loose on your home baking, don’t you?’ said Denis Charles Scott Peach.
‘Go on with you!’ said Agnes Blake. She’d been brought up in the days when the man was the breadwinner in the house, when you ‘liked to see a man eat’. And that suited her daughter’s man just fine.
He insisted on washing up when they had finished their expansive and leisurely meal. ‘Let him do it, Mum, for God’s sake,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s time someone called his bluff.’
So Percy busied himself at the sink, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow and the plates accumulating steadily in the draining rack on his right. And after five minutes, Agnes Blake came hesitantly into her own kitchen, as he had somehow known she would.
She gave him the smile which lit up her small, ageing face, then watched him for a moment or two before picking up a towel and beginning to wipe the crockery. ‘You should use your proper name, not Percy,’ she said. ‘It’s a proud name, not one to be ashamed of.’
‘You and I know that, Mrs Blake. Not many others do, though. Denis Compton is a name from the past for the youngsters. A lot of them don’t even like cricket.’
Agnes shook her head sadly over this latest evidence of the decadence of modern youth. ‘You gave up cricket much too early.’
There were times when Percy thought she was right about that. ‘I was thirty-six, Mrs Blake. The eyes were beginning to go a bit. You have to be ready to duck nowadays.’
‘Great waste, stopping too early. I hope it was nowt to do with our Lucy.’
‘Nothing at all; I’d given cricket up before I ever knew her.’ Percy hastened to reassure her against the awful thought that her daughter might have made a man give up cricket. ‘And I’ve still got my golf, you know.’
‘Golf!’
Percy would not have thought anyone could have compressed so much contempt into a single syllable. As a noted practitioner of such techniques himself, he had to admire it. He came back hastily to the subject of his forename. ‘I’ve always been Percy in the police service. They like a bit of alliteration, policemen.’
But both of them knew she hadn’t come in here to talk about his name. ‘Get on well with our Lucy, don’t you?’
‘Almost as well as I do with you, Mrs Blake. She can’t make cakes like you, though.’
‘She can do it when she wants. When she doesn’t think it’s beneath her to do such things; when she’s not going on about her career.’
Percy lifted a pudding dish from the water, watched the steam rising from it, turned it this way and that to make sure that it was spotless before consigning it to the drainer. ‘She’ll have a great career, your Lucy. She’s a good detective. She’ll go as far as she wants to go, will Lucy.’
Agnes balanced his pause with one of her own, drying the dish with elaborate care before setting it on a pile with its fellows. It was if she were following his steps in some elaborate, old-fashioned dance. ‘And how far will that be, Percy Peach?’
>
‘I don’t know. I’ve never discussed it with her. I’ll give her all the help I can.’ Chief Inspector Peach, the most feared man in the criminal fraternity of Brunton, was suddenly struggling for words.
‘I’m getting old, Percy. It won’t be long before I’m seventy.’
‘No age at all, nowadays, Mrs B.’
‘Young people always say that. As if they’d know. It’s old enough, Percy Peach. I’m not planning to pop my clogs, but I’d thought to see our Lucy settled by now.’
He knew what she meant, of course. ‘Settled’ meant married, to Agnes Blake’s generation, preferably with two or three kids by now. He said gently, ‘She could do much better than me, Mrs Blake.’
‘’Appen she could. And ’appen she couldn’t, in my book. But she only wants you, Percy Peach.’
‘That’s very flattering, Mrs B., but I’m not sure that we should be in here making assumptions about what—’
‘Time you were getting her to settle down, Percy. Time I was looking forward to grandchildren.’
Percy, whose own parents were both dead, suddenly wanted to turn and take her into his arms, to hug her and to hold her tight for a long time. He did no such thing, of course. He said rather stiffly, ‘I haven’t a lot to offer Lucy, you know. I’m almost ten years older than her, divorced, and no oil painting. I’m grateful that she wants to be with me at all. I can’t get over it, a lot of the time, if you want the truth.’
‘And I know my daughter, Percy Peach. She wants you, not some empty-headed young go-getter. She told me how you wouldn’t go for promotion, wanted to stay where you were, catching villains. She’s got a lot of respect for you.’
‘It’s different nowadays, Mrs B. – women’s lib and all that. I don’t really feel I can take the initiative, with someone as beautiful and talented as Lucy.’ He felt woefully inadequate. It was a feeling that was quite alien to him and no doubt very good for him.
‘I’m not quite out of the ark, you know. I understand about careers for women and so on. I understand about the difficult choices that modern women like Lucy have to make. But it’s my belief that Lucy wants to marry you.’ There: it was out in the open at last. She wasn’t anything like as sure as she said she was – not about marriage, and all the word entailed; but never mind that.
