[Inspector Peach 10] - Witch's Sabbath

by J M Gregson

  Judith was patient and uncomplaining, invariably cheerful when the nurse called, though of course like everyone who suffered as she did she must have her moments when she railed against a cruel world, and those nearest to her caught the flak. That was par for the course, a necessary therapy for those stricken with illnesses like Judith’s, and any other of the medical clichés you chose to use.

  The only thing in which Judith had struck lucky was her carer.

  Alan Hurst carried his loving care for his wife into practical deeds and had sustained it over years, in a way which the district nurse didn’t see very often. No doubt it helped that he was younger than most of the people in such situations: too often she saw age getting the better of love, saw the carer borne down by the brutal realities of caring, and the spouse collapsing earlier than the invalid he or she tended. An overstretched National Health Service exploited carers much more than any of its paid employees.

  The nurse had helped Judith with her bath, talking cheer-fully through the small indignities that dependency brought, knowing that there would be greater ones over the next year or two. She helped Judith to dress and then left the exhausted invalid slumped in her chair, summoning up the energy to comb hair that still had a little of its original lustre.

  Alan Hurst was waiting for the nurse, as he always did, in the spotlessly clean sitting room. That was where they conducted their weekly assessments of Judith’s condition.

  ‘She’s getting worse,’ he said, as if he divined that this was easier for his visitor than if she had to make the announcement. ‘She’s already looking forward to the spring coming and being out in the garden. But she won’t be able to do anything there. Won’t even be able to walk round, the way things are going.’ He gazed through the window and down a lawn white with frost, his eyes moistening with the thought of the joyous springs that would not come again.

  ‘How are you managing with the stairs?’

  Alan gave her a grim smile. It was good to be talking to a professional, good not to have to pretend that things were better than they were, as he did all the time outside the house and some of the time when he was with Judith. ‘With increasing difficulty, I’m afraid. She lets me help her now, which she wouldn’t do at one time, but I’m always afraid of her falling. It’s getting more and more difficult for her to keep her balance.’

  ‘You might have to consider a stair lift. I know Judith didn’t want it last year, but I think she’d accept it now.’

  ‘She does. But I’ve got other ideas. Better ones, I hope. I’m planning a major extension on the ground floor – out from this room into the garden: two rooms, plus an en suite bathroom and a walk-in bath. A little purpose-built flat of her own.’

  ‘That would be ideal. It won’t be cheap, though.’ Better to be realistic now than later: too many of her patients and their carers had ideas which collapsed when they found what it would cost to implement them.

  ‘I know that. I’ve had a builder friend in to give a preliminary estimate. We’ll manage it. The building society will extend the mortgage provision: they say it would make an excellent granny flat when the house is eventually sold. I’ll find the rest, somehow. And it will be an investment, you see, adding to the value of the house. I’ve already sold it to Judith on those lines.’

  Alan knew how he was going to raise the money, but he couldn’t talk about that, not even to this helpful, supportive woman. Not to anyone.

  She said, ‘Well, that would be ideal, if you can stretch to it. Life isn’t going to get any better for Judith, physically, as you obviously realize. The best we can do is to help her to enjoy the life she has.’

  He went out to her car with her, saw her out into the lane. The district nurse was aware, as he waved to her cheerfully, that he could scarcely wait to get back into the house to his wife. She wished again that all her carers were like Alan Hurst. But the world wasn’t like that.

  Alan went back into the house to find that Judith had moved her wheelchair into the sitting room. He went and gave her a little kiss on the forehead, alarmed by how tired she looked at the end of the morning. ‘Nice woman, that. I told her about our plans for the extension. She thinks it’s a great idea. I might have the plans ready to show to her when she comes next week.’

  ‘Are you sure you can afford it?’ Judith’s brow wrinkled in the way it had when he had first known her as a pretty, high-spirited nineteen-year-old.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure. Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it!’ That was the phrase he had always used when they were first married and setting out on life together, and she smiled her recognition of it. Alan thought what a good thing it was that she had always trusted him about their finances. She would never know where the money was coming from to build this extension.

  He went to the airing cupboard and got out the travel rug he had washed and dried on the previous night. He tucked it carefully round her hips in the chair, tried not to notice how wasted her thighs were becoming beneath her skirt. ‘You’ll need this. It’s still bitterly cold outside. But you might want to go into the conservatory this afternoon, if the sun comes out.’

  ‘Yes. I like looking at the frost on the trees. You notice more detail, as your horizon gets narrower. That’s good.’

  He didn’t suggest that she took up her painting again. They had endured a terrible hour a month ago, when she had found that she could not control her hands and fingers as she wanted to, had flung the brushes and her paints against the wall and screamed out her frustration with her failing body. Judith knew now as she often did exactly what he was thinking. She said, ‘You’d better get off to work. You’ve been away for too long already.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Anna Fenton will cope.’

  ‘Good girl, is she, your new one?’

  ‘Anna? Yes, I should say she is.’ Alan nodded a couple of times, as if he had not considered the matter before. ‘She’s interested in the travel business and she’s learned quickly. I’m quite happy to leave her in charge for short periods.’

  One of the many frustrations of being in a wheelchair was that you couldn’t look into people’s faces when you wanted to; people spoke from above you or behind you. Unless you had them sitting in a chair opposite you, you couldn’t study their faces, and, even with Alan’s familiar voice, she needed to see the face as well. She often wondered exactly how close he got to the succession of girls who worked in the shop. He was still a handsome man, and he took a lot of care of his appearance, always checked himself in the mirror before he went out. Well, if he was having a bit of fun where he could get it, you couldn’t really blame him, Judith thought sadly. And he was very good to her. It was better not to speculate about that other life he had outside, the life she never saw nowadays.

  Alan was glad to get out of the stifling heat of the house and into the cold, clean air of the middle of the day. He drove carefully into the town, adjusting himself slowly to this second life he lived, slipping into the persona that was Alan Hurst the businessman. The transition was complete by the time he parked the car in the little yard behind Hurst Travel. He went breezily into the office and apologized for having taken so long over the visit of the nurse.

  ‘That’s all right. First things first. There was nothing I couldn’t cope with. There are some very good offers coming in this morning for late bookings.’ He went and stood close behind her chair, stooping a little to peer at the screen. He let his hand rest experimentally on the back of her chair, lightly touching the point where her sweater met her neck. She must surely have been conscious of it, but she did not move away, even leant back a little against his fingers, as she went methodically through the best of the bargains on her screen.

  Alan said enthusiastically, ‘Yes, we can certainly sell a few of those!’ He moved his head closer to hers, still staring at the screen, catching the scent of her perfume. How young she was, how firm and wholesome was her flesh! He put one hand lightly on each of his assistant’s shoulders as he stood
behind her, gave her a little squeeze and said, ‘I don’t know how I’d ever manage without you, Anna Fenton!’

  Heather Shields found that everyone who worked in the packing department wanted to talk to her about Annie Clark. It gave her a certain local celebrity for fully a week; people were much more interested in her as the flatmate of a girl who had been brutally murdered than they had ever been in plain Heather Shields.

  When her companions heard that the CID were coming to see her at two o’clock on Monday afternoon, her status was heightened even further. The news ran round the whole works at lunch time, and she had to endure a succession of jovial but unoriginal remarks about her importance to the police. It was an eminence Heather could well have done without.

  As she had feared, her inquisitor was to be Chief Inspector Peach, the man whom she had not liked at their first meeting. But he didn’t bring the girl with him this time. He introduced the man who came into the works with him as Police Constable Northcott. He was tall, lean, inscrutable, and his police uniform fitted him as if it had been tailor-made. He was also very black, with close-cut black hair, and he looked as hard as nails. Heather looked as nonchalant as she could as seven pairs of eyes followed the trio into the supervisor’s office, which had been volunteered for this meeting.

  It was Peach who conducted things, whilst the black man noted her replies and looked at her as if she were already behind bars. It became an unnerving experience very early in the proceedings.

  Peach said, ‘We know a lot more about Annie Clark than when we spoke to you on Thursday. I told you that we would.’

  ‘That’s good, then. Have you found out who killed her?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled, as if she had amused him. ‘We haven’t come here to arrest you. We can set your mind at rest about that.’

  ‘I don’t know why you are here, though. I told you everything I knew about Annie last time I saw you.’

  Peach nodded almost affectionately at her on that, as if he appreciated her spirited response. ‘Not everything about yourself, though. Let me enlighten you a little about our procedures, Miss Shields. When a serious crime like murder occurs, we check up on the backgrounds of those closest to the victim. Not to put too fine a point on it, we check if they have criminal records, if they have been questioned by the police in connection with any previous incident or incidents.’

  She told herself that she had known this would come up, that it didn’t really mean a thing, that this was Britain, not Stalinist Russia, that they couldn’t pin this on her because of her record. But she found she had lost a little of her confidence when she said, ‘So I’m damned for ever because of things that happened years ago, am I? I’m never going to be let off the hook because of some stupid little quarrel which happened in my teens?’

  Peach smiled the smile of a man with all the aces in his hand. ‘Stupid, perhaps, Miss Shields: all crime is stupid, as far as I’m concerned. But hardly little. And not so very long ago, after all. You were nineteen at the time: although still technically a teenager, as you say, an adult as far as the law is concerned.’

  ‘I wasn’t myself at the time – wasn’t fully responsible for my actions.’ She fell back on the phrases her counsel had produced in court.

  This time it was the black man who weighed in upon her. ‘No defence, that, Heather. Being high on drugs is no defence in law, as you’re well aware – not for a violent act such as assault with a dangerous weapon, to wit, a knife.’

  There was no point in denying it. They’d have read all about it, probably even seen the psychiatric reports which had got her out of it with a probationary sentence. Perhaps they’d come here to arrest her now, to pin this one on her because she’d got away with that other crime. They were like that, the pigs: they didn’t like you getting the better of them. She said, ‘I don’t deny that I was drug-dependent at the time, that I’d got into the wrong set, was going downhill rapidly.’

  The black face studied her inexorably. ‘You were dealing.’

  ‘That was never established. I was never charged with dealing.’

  ‘No. But you were dealing.’ PC Northcott was grimly certain, watching her with just the suggestion of a smile at the corners of his broad mouth.

  ‘You can’t be certain of that. You shouldn’t come in here making allegations that you can’t—’

  ‘You sold cocaine to me.’

  For a moment she thought it must be some sort of elaborate joke. But Clyde Northcott wasn’t laughing. She said, ‘I’m not admitting to anything. And I don’t see what this has to do—’

  ‘Outside Mullards. I used to work there. And I rode a three-hundred-and-fifty-cc Yamaha. You sold cocaine to me and to one or two other bikers.’

  She remembered him now – a wild, feral boy whom no one had been quite at ease with, whose eyes had always looked manic, the whites of them glistening hard against the black of the rest of him. He looked very different in the police uniform, with his cap with the black and white squares laid carefully on the table beside him. The dark-blue uniform might have been made for him as a fashion suit, so absolutely did it become him. He smiled as he saw how disconcerted she was. Then he said quite gently, ‘So we all have our skeletons in the cupboard, Heather. Even policemen.’

  Peach took over again, bathing her in one of his broader and more dangerous smiles. ‘And all of this is off the record, Miss Shields. You are at present a citizen helping the police in the course of their enquiries, as a citizen should. But the fact that you once flew at someone with a knife is bound to interest us, when we’re looking for a killer. Incidentally, our forensic people have informed us that Annie Clark could well have been killed by a woman. Taken unawares, you see. No great strength would have been required. Especially if some sort of ligature was used. You didn’t do that, did you?’

  It was asked as casually as if he were enquiring whether she wanted sugar in her tea. Heather found that her mouth had gone dry when she said, ‘No. And when I stabbed that boy, I was drug-dependent. When I look back at that period now, I feel that I didn’t know what I was doing half the time.’ She looked hard at Clyde Northcott, remembering what a wild, unpredictable, dangerous creature he had been three years ago, wondering how much of that temperament he had carried with him into the police service. ‘They got me dealing because I was drug-dependent myself at the time. That’s how they get you to work for them. You get your own supplies as part of your allocation.’

  Clyde Northcott nodded. ‘I know that. How did you kick the habit?’

  ‘I took a rehabilitation course – after I’d wielded that knife. I was injecting heroin then, but I hadn’t been doing it for long. And I didn’t know who my supplier was, so I managed to give up dealing without being rubbed out. I wasn’t important enough for them to kill me off.’ She was silent for a moment, as they both contemplated that grim criminal industry, where anyone who knew too much was likely to be quietly eliminated by a professional killer. ‘The social-services people got me on to the rehabilitation course in Manchester, after I’d got away with the probationary sentence.’

  Northcott nodded. For a brief interval, the two of them were back in that other life they had shared, the nightmare world of addiction, which he had never quite reached and which she had survived. He smiled at her and said, ‘I was a murder suspect, you know. There was a time when they thought I might be the Lancashire Leopard.’ He was referring to the region’s most infamous serial killer of the last decade. ‘When the real killer was arrested, DCI Peach suggested I might consider a career in the police service. I thought he was joking at first, but when—’

  ‘When you two have finished your pretty picnic down memory lane, we’re in the middle of a murder investigation!’ said Peach abrasively. ‘In connection with which, we’d like to know your reason for attacking your victim with a knife four years ago, Miss Shields.’

  She glared at him, trying to refocus her mind to what she must do now; for a minute or two, the black man had almost made her feel
that pigs could be the same as other people. It was no use trying to deceive them. They’d have read the court case, would know all about the damning circumstances of her attack. ‘I didn’t fly at him, as you said earlier. And I didn’t come prepared to stab him, with a knife in my pocket.’ She was desperately going through the arguments her counsel had put to the jury in his summing-up at the crown court. That seemed to her now like a different world, with herself as a different person in the dock. But there was no point trying to explain that to the filth.

  ‘That man said awful things to me. Hurtful things. And I was high on heroin. I picked up a kitchen knife from the table and stabbed him. As it happened, I only got him in the upper arm, but it bled a lot.’ Despite herself, she could not contain a little grin of pleasurable recollection.

  ‘And what was your relationship with the victim?’

  ‘You know that. He was my boyfriend.’ She felt a little spurt of real fear as she said it. She knew where this was going now, where this bald-headed tormentor was leading her.

  ‘But he was no longer your boyfriend at the time of the incident.’

  ‘No. He’d ditched me. Shacked up with someone both of us knew. Thrown it in my face.’ She wanted to justify herself, to repeat the vile, obscene things he had said to her, the taunts he had thrown into her face about what he proposed to do with her friend. But there would be no point in that, not with this man. She made herself take a deep breath. ‘It’s over, all that. It went through the court and I was sentenced. You might think I got away with it, but you can’t alter the verdict. And I’m a different person now.’

  She glanced away from Peach’s remorseless dark eyes to Clyde Northcott, and the uniformed man said involuntarily, ‘That’s true, Heather. You seem to have made a good job of picking up the pieces, getting your life back together.’