by J M Gregson
‘Exactly, sir.’ Peach sounded as if he was congratulating a clever five-year-old. ‘His clients are being interviewed and there will no doubt be charges brought against many of them. They include a judge and several local luminaries. Probably one or two Masons among them.’ Peach had no idea who these people were as yet, but it seemed an opportunity for one of his ritual snipings at Tommy Bloody Tucker’s favourite pursuit.
‘So Mr Hurst is in custody?’
‘Yes, sir. I shall be interviewing him myself presently, in connection with the murder of Anne Marie Clark. I thought I’d let the Child Pornography Unit soften him up a little first.’
‘Well, from what you say it does seem—’
‘Then there’s the boyfriend, of course, sir. Matt Hogan. Always a likely candidate, as I think you indicated yourself in one of our previous meetings. Rather a devastating insight, that was. Says he didn’t know about the pregnancy: that seems unlikely. Also says he wasn’t the father. That seems more likely, since he wasn’t the regular boyfriend at the time of conception.’
‘Well, in the light of—’
‘Either way, the pregnancy gives Hogan a motive. If he was the father, the pair may have disagreed about whether to keep the baby. If he found she was carrying another man’s baby, he might have attacked her in a fit of jealousy.’
Tucker leaned forward happily. ‘I’ve said all along that the boyfriend was the likeliest candidate, you know.’
‘There’s good news about the foetus, sir. Forensic are pretty certain there’s enough left for a DNA match, once we have enough evidence against someone to demand a sample.’
Tucker nodded sagely. ‘Well, if that completes the list, I must say—’
‘And then there’s Dermot Boyd, sir. Only man who admits to knowing Annie Clark was going to be in the Pendle area on the Sunday when she died. Fellow member of the witches’ coven of which the dead girl was a member: the only male participant in that coven. Thoroughly unhelpful to us at the beginning of our investigation. Tried to steer his wife away from the building where the body was found four months later. Certainly seemed to be half-expecting that the body would be found there.’
Tucker shook his head dumbly at this welter of information, most of which he should already have known. Then he suddenly brightened. ‘But you said that you felt you were close to an arrest, Percy?’
Again the forename. Be careful, Percy old lad. ‘Just a hunch, sir. I don’t aspire to your remarkable insights, but I have the occasional gut feeling.’ He stared down at that part of his anatomy, as if it might suddenly voice a Delphic prophecy. When it remained obstinately silent, he said, ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything more definite. Then you can arrange your media conference.’
He’d managed to produce the phrase without even a curl of his expressive lips.
‘So you’re engaged, our Lucy.’
It was warm and intimate in the sitting room of the old cottage where Lucy Blake had spent the first twenty-two years of her life – just the setting for a mother to put a little gentle pressure on her daughter. Lucy took a deep breath and prepared herself to be firm.
‘Yes. Percy proposed last night.’
It seemed he’d taken notice of her, after all. They needed pushing along, these men. He was a bright lad, Percy Peach, but not where women and their emotions were concerned. ‘Your Dad would have been pleased. Especially with Percy being a cricketer.’
‘Ex-cricketer, Mum. He’s a golfer, now. Quite good, they tell me.’
‘Golf!’ As she had done with Percy himself five days earlier, Agnes managed to compress a lifetime of contempt into the monosyllable.
Lucy contrived to keep her face perfectly straight as she said, ‘I thought I might take up the game myself, Mum.’
‘Tchah! You want to keep a proper sense of proportion, our Lucy. When are you getting married?’
There it was – the question she had known would come, thrown in on the back of her teasing about golf, catching her unawares. She said defensively, ‘We haven’t fixed a date yet, Mum.’
‘It had better be soon, at your time of life.’
‘I’m barely twenty-nine, Mum, not fifty.’
‘Plenty old enough to be getting wed. Plenty old enough to be having childer.’ The old word she had not used for forty years had surfaced from Agnes Blake’s subconscious, as she tried to disguise her emotions.
‘Women have children when they’re much older, nowadays. The maternity units are well used to dealing with older mothers.’
‘What about older grandmothers? I’m going to be in a wheelchair by the time these kids are running around. That’s if I’m not pushing up daisies.’
‘You’re good for many years yet, Mum, I’m sure. You’ll be chasing around with a toddler when you’re eighty, if I’m any judge.’
‘Well, you’re not any judge, our Lucy. And I certainly don’t want to wait until I’m eighty. I want to teach my grandson how to hold a bat and play straight, before you get hold of him and start talking about bloody golf!’Agnes Blake never swore, but it seemed right to make an exception for that stupid game and this obstinate daughter.
‘It’s not as simple as you make out, Mum. I’ve a career to think of, for one thing. And then there’s Percy. We have to take into account his opinion on these things, you know.’
‘Yes, I do know. And I fancy he’s likely to be a sight more sensible about a family than you seem to be! He’s a good lad, our Percy – more amenable to reason than some I could name around here!’ She gazed into the glowing coals of her open fire and nodded thoughtfully.
‘Now don’t you start pressurizing Percy, Mum. These things have to be settled privately, between husband and wife.’ Lucy had never spoken of Percy and herself like that before: she found that she rather liked the expression.
‘Pressurize? Me? You know I’d never do any such thing.’ She sniffed her contempt at the idea. ‘All I’m saying is that your Percy Peach has his head screwed on right. He’s likely to see the sense of these things a lot more clearly than a slip of a girl like you!’
Lucy reflected on how a mother’s prejudices could turn her from a woman in danger of being left on the shelf two minutes ago to a slip of a girl at the end of this conversation.
And Agnes Blake thought that the solution to the problem was now clear. She’d talk to Percy about the issue of grandchildren. He’d listened to her about proposing, and he would surely see the sense of fathering a new line of English batsmen.
Twenty-Three
Judith Hurst swivelled herself with difficulty in the passenger seat of the Jaguar car. She took the strong female hand as firmly as she could into her two emaciated ones and hauled herself stiffly upright. ‘You’ve been a good neighbour, Jane. I don’t say that often enough. You’ve not just been kind; you’ve been a good friend as well.’
The plump, cheerful woman looked up at the high, modern walls of Brunton police station and did not know what to say. ‘I hope it’s not as bad as it seems. I expect they’ll let Alan out soon.’
‘Don’t come in. I can manage, with my stick. I hope they don’t think I’m playing for sympathy.’ But Judith knew that all the sympathy in the world wouldn’t make any difference to this. She wanted to scream out to the world that her husband wasn’t into child pornography, that he would never harm a child. She wanted to storm into this impersonal modern building and scream at these stolid policemen that Alan Hurst was into young women, not children – that he had the normal healthy lusts of the flesh, not this awful perversion of them.
But her days of storming anywhere were over. She hobbled carefully towards the big doors, easing herself over the single step with slow, careful effort; she didn’t want to begin this by losing her balance and falling. The station sergeant was sympathetic, as most people were to this woman of forty-one who moved as if she were eighty-one.
At seven o’clock on a Friday night, there were plenty of empty rooms in the place, and he found her a vacant
office and a chair with arms to support her. The rules said that a young constable would have to sit in the room with them, but he’d sit at the back and not interfere with their conversation. The station sergeant implied that he would hardly be listening at all, that this was just a tiresome formality.
Judith was shocked by Alan’s appearance when they brought him to her. This man who was usually dapper, even a little vain, about the way he looked, had hair that looked as if it had not seen a comb for days and buttons undone on his shirt. He caught her glancing down at his shoes and said with a sad smile, ‘They take your shoelaces away. And the belt from your trousers. So that you can’t hang yourself in the cells, that is.’
He looked as if they had also taken away every shred of his self-respect. She didn’t know what to say; it was almost like sitting beside a hospital bed. She said, ‘Have they been treating you properly?’
‘Properly? He looked as if she had introduced a foreign word. ‘Yes. I suppose so. You don’t seem to have many rights, when you’ve done what I’ve done. But they’ve been kind enough to me, yes. They’ve given me drinks, and what little food I could eat. They’ve told me I’ll need a lawyer. Apparently you should have a lawyer, even when you’re pleading guilty.’
They were both silent for a little while, while the implications of his words sank in for both of them. Judith could not contemplate life without him. She did not want to ask what sort of sentence he would get. But she could not prevent herself saying wildly, ‘Why did you do it, Alan? Why on earth did you do it?’
‘We needed money – for the extension. I wanted to make life a little easier for you. For both of us.’ It was at once the absolute truth and the most abject of excuses. ‘A man came into the shop and said he could supply the materials to me. He said it was easy money. And it was, until this happened.’
‘But you’re not – not …’ She couldn’t frame the words that would complete the question.
‘Not into sex with children? No, of course I’m not. The idea revolts me. Don’t ever think that.’ With that last phrase, he acknowledged that he wasn’t going to be with her for long months, perhaps years, and left both of them staring into a bleak and separated future.
‘Then why get involved with this? I need to understand, Alan.’
‘It was easy money. The people who like this stuff were going to buy it from someone, so why not me? That was the way it was sold to me, and I believed it.’
‘You knew people who bought these vile videos?’
‘I knew one. He gave me the names of others. It was as if he wanted to prove that he wasn’t alone, that there were lots of others who liked child pornography. And there are, Judith. That’s one of the awful things. The man who supplied the tapes was right: it was easy money.’
She was silent for a moment, wondering how you could live with someone for so many years, could love him and be loved by him, without knowing him properly and fully. ‘But why, Alan? Why take money for something like this? Why get involved with anything as squalid as this?’
He wanted to say that it was for her, that he would do worse things even than this, for her. But that might be the most wounding thing of all. He said dully, ‘We needed the money. The business isn’t doing as well as it used to, when you were more involved. I had to get the money from somewhere, to do what we planned to do to the house.’
She had no tears left. A great weariness was coursing through her frail body. She mustn’t collapse. Not here; not with only strangers’ hands to lift her and carry her outside to her neighbour’s car. She forced out the words she had not wanted to voice. ‘Will you be coming home?’
‘Of course I will. I don’t know when. Soon, I hope. There’ll be formal charges. They’ll let me out on bail, I expect. The lawyer will handle it for me. I never intended that it should come to this, Jude.’
Judith Hurst stood up then, before either of them could collapse into tears. She put her hands briefly on top of his, then turned carefully, staggering a little, steadying herself quickly with her stick and a hand against the wall, as the young constable hurried to help her. She crippled her way out of the room without another look at the wretched man at the table.
Alan Hurst sat with his head in his hands where she had left him, feeling his eyelids still dry against the palms of his hands. He told himself that at least he had gone through the horror of confronting Judith, that things could certainly not get any worse now. He found no consolation in that.
And he was wrong to think that the worst was over. Five minutes later they led him with surprising gentleness from this room to another, starker one, and told him that Detective Chief Inspector Peach wished to speak with him.
Peach stood for a moment looking down at the handsome, ravaged face. Alan Hurst looked ten years older than when they had seen him three days earlier. Peach decided to forsake his normal aggression: if this man was to reveal everything he knew, they might need to coax him rather than bully him.
‘We need to ask you some questions, Mr Hurst. There may be formal charges, in due course. You may wish to have your lawyer present for this interview.’
Hurst looked up, seemingly conscious for the first time that Peach had entered the room. ‘I haven’t got a lawyer. I don’t want one, not yet.’
Peach looked at him for a moment, sizing up his condition. He wanted to be certain of his reliability, not just his vulnerability. Then he set the cassette turning silently in the recorder and announced that it was seven twenty-three p.m. on the evening of the fourth of February and that Alan Charles Hurst was about to be interviewed by DCI Peach and DS Blake.
Before he could speak, Hurst said, without raising his head, ‘I’m concealing nothing. But that other inspector has already had all I have to offer.’
Peach nodded. He said to the top of the head in front of him, ‘The officer from the National Child Pornography Unit says that you have been entirely cooperative. I’m quite prepared to believe that you’ve told him everything you know about those child-pornography videos.’
‘Then why this?’ He lifted his arms, then let them drop back helplessly to his side; the gesture took in his abject state, the criminal charges which were pending, and this sterile, green-walled box of an interview room. ‘Why can’t you leave me alone now? I need to be with Judith. My wife needs me, and I need to be with her, if she’s ever going to understand why I did this.’
It was Lucy Blake who now said softly, ‘We don’t need to go over that ground again, Alan. The specialist detectives from the National Child Pornography Unit are handling that. As DCI Peach has just told you, we’re quite prepared to believe that you’ve been completely frank with them.’
‘I have! I wish I’d never got involved in that vile trade and I want to do everything I can to damage it.’
It was the first time since they had come into the room that he had spoken with energy. But he could not hold his moment of conviction. His eyes fell back to the surface of the square, scratched table and the cassette tape moving silently through the recorder.
Lucy Blake’s instinct was to be compassionate to a broken man. But she was a CID officer, and she knew by now that suspects are at their most defenceless when they are either in the grip of passion or in the atrophy of despair. She said softly, ‘We don’t want to talk to you about the videos, Alan. We’re still pursuing our enquiries into the death of Annie Clark.’
Alan Hurst raised his eyes, looked in turn at each of the contrasting faces on the other side of the table. He felt an immense weariness, an overwhelming desire to let lethargy take him over. He knew that he must rouse himself, must stir his reluctant brain into action against this new and even greater threat. But his mind refused to obey his will. He said dully, ‘I’ve told you everything I know about Annie Clark and the way she disappeared. You’ve questioned me twice before and you’ve had all I know.’
It was Peach who said, almost apologetically it seemed, ‘We don’t believe that, Mr Hurst. We believe you’ve both concealed the
truth from us and lied directly to us.’
Alan felt an intense urge to give them what they wanted, to capitulate quietly and have it over with. But he heard himself saying, ‘You must be mistaken. I don’t know what happened to Annie on that last weekend.’
‘On the first occasion when we saw you, you concealed the fact that you had been having an affair with the dead woman in the months before her death.’
‘I shouldn’t have done that. But I wasn’t proud of my behaviour with Annie. I was scared that if I told you about it Judith would get to know of it. I didn’t want that.’
‘You also denied any knowledge of Annie’s pregnancy and said you had no idea who the father could be.’
‘Yes. I wasn’t completely honest with you when you came to the house that first time. I’ve already admitted that.’ The trouble with lying, Alan thought, was that you had to remember exactly what you had said and on what occasion. He was too battered by the events of the last twenty-four hours to remember anything very clearly.
The DCI seemed to know exactly what his problem was, which was disconcerting. Peach now said, ‘When we saw you for the second time, on Tuesday, you admitted to having an affair with Annie Clark.’
‘Yes. I realize now that I should never have tried to conceal it. But you were interviewing me in my own house on that first occasion, with Judith in the next room. I wasn’t proud of my adultery.’ He’d never used that word before, never admitted to himself that it had been that. He dragged a hand wearily across his forehead. He kept thinking of Judith, when he needed to have all his attention on the contest with this determined opponent.
‘Miss Clark had been working for you for four months when she disappeared. You told us on Tuesday that you had been lovers for six weeks. But I believe that you had been sleeping together for most of those four months.’
‘Probably.’ He found that he wanted, absurdly, to tell them how quickly Annie had fallen for his charms. Even in his exhaustion, some tiny sediment of vanity tried to assert itself. He thrust away the idea and said with some of the revulsion he felt for himself, ‘Annie Clark was asserting her freedom when she left home and started a new life. Perhaps I took advantage of that, but I didn’t see it like that at the time. I saw a chance of bedding young, healthy flesh, and I took it.’
