by J M Gregson
‘And before too long, she became pregnant.’
‘No!’ The word came unexpectedly loud, echoing round the walls of that sterile box of a room. But it was an automatic, unthinking denial, an assertion of the way he wanted things to be rather than the truth. He could not muster his thoughts to follow it up with any convincing logic.
Peach saw all this and said quietly, ‘The foetus found inside what was left of Annie Clark was severely damaged. But the forensic laboratory assure us that there will be no difficulty in establishing a DNA match with the father. We shall be requiring a DNA sample from you in due course, Mr Hurst.’
Seconds elapsed, during which he tried to gather together the rags of his resources to make a final, hopeless defence. ‘I’ll deny it. There won’t be enough left to make a connection. You’ll never make this stick.’
Lucy Blake said almost gently, ‘We have a statement made this morning by the secretary at the Gold Hill Convalescent Home, which is primarily an abortion clinic. On September the fifteenth of last year you made an appointment for a termination for Anne Marie Clark.’
‘You’ll never be able to prove it was me. I never gave my name!’ He was careless now of the way he phrased things. The prizefighter was on his knees, with nothing left to offer save the urge to resist, listening to the count and unable to get to his feet.
‘The appointment was for Thursday the twenty-first of September. It was cancelled on Tuesday the nineteenth by Annie Clark herself, who said that she had decided to keep the baby and was ringing to cancel the appointment made by a Mr Hurst.’
‘She said she wanted to keep her child – that she wanted me to acknowledge that I was the father and help to bring it up.’ His voice seemed to be coming from a long way away; he felt as if he were a medium for someone else’s thoughts.
More to take him forward than anything else, Lucy Blake said firmly, ‘She had every right to do that, Mr Hurst.’
He lifted both hands a few inches, then let them fall back heavily on to the table. ‘I couldn’t let her do that. I couldn’t let Judith see another woman carrying my child.’ He sobbed, suddenly and hopelessly, without producing the tears which might have brought some sort of relief. ‘Jude always wanted a child. We never managed it, and then she was ill.’
Lucy Blake thrust away the thought of those other, putative children, the ones her mother was so anxious for her to conceive, and said remorselessly, ‘So you killed Annie Clark. She died because you couldn’t face the consequences of what you had done.’
‘I took her out to the Ribble Valley on that last Sunday, to explain to her that I couldn’t let her go ahead with this. I thought that now that she had a boyfriend, she’d want to get rid of our baby, to start a new life with him. She said her religious beliefs wouldn’t allow it.’ Hurst said it with an exhausted bitterness, as if a moral argument had been the final irony for him.
‘And you climbed Pendle Hill.’
‘That was her idea. There was cloud on the top and a cold wind, but she was always full of energy, was Annie. I went along with it because I knew it would take hours. I felt that if I only had enough time I could convince her.’
‘But it didn’t work.’
‘No. We climbed all the way to the top. The wind got stronger and stronger, but she kept saying how much she was enjoying it. I teased her about her Wiccan beliefs and having Pendle to herself for a witch’s sabbath. Once the weather worsened, we seemed to be the only ones up there, and she liked that.’ He stopped, and for a moment all three of them were visualizing the last, exhilarating hours of a pretty, unsuspecting girl. ‘I was afraid that we’d get lost in the mist, but Annie ran in front of me along the ridge to the top, shouting and throwing her arms into the air. We were on the way down when it happened.’
‘Near that deserted farmhouse.’
‘Yes. I suggested that we rest for a minute – said that I was tired out; that she had too much energy for me. Really, I just wanted to go over the arguments with her again, to make her see reason. I don’t think I was planning to kill her, even then.’
‘But you did.’
He nodded, all resistance now long gone. ‘We sat on the wall by that ruin and argued. I went over everything I’d said before about Judith and the impossibility of Annie keeping this baby. She just kept shaking her head, more and more vigorously, as if she wanted to shut out my words, to stop listening to me. It was then that I took her throat into my hands. I think I was just trying to shake some sense into her, at first.’ He spoke wonderingly, as if he still did not understand how it had happened. ‘And then she started to scream, louder and louder. I had to stop that.’
It was Peach who said, ‘And you found you had a corpse in your hands.’
He nodded, seemingly grateful to them for their understanding. ‘There was no one about. It was evening by then. I put Annie in the outbuildings of the farm, against the far wall. I was almost out of the place when I remembered that I should empty her pockets, remove all traces of who she was. So I turned back and did that. And I removed the cheap ring that her new boyfriend had given to her from her engagement finger.’
A curious smile crept over his exhausted face at the memory. Lucy Blake said, ‘Was that because you thought it would help to identify her?’
‘Yes. I’ve still got it, though. I’ve kept it in the drawer of my desk at work.’ With the charge of murder being prepared against him, Hurst was pathetically anxious not to be seen as a petty thief.
‘And you got away from the farmhouse without anyone seeing you.’
He nodded. ‘I didn’t meet anyone until I was almost back at the car.’
Peach stood up and informed him that a charge of murder would be brought against him. Alan Hurst merely nodded meekly. He was told that he would now be taken back to his cell and he moved stoop-shouldered to the door. Then he turned a ravaged face back to them and said, ‘You’ll look after Judith, won’t you? Someone needs to explain all this to Judith.’
It was Judith Hurst they were all thinking about. They had to remind themselves that poor, pathetic Annie Clark, the girl they had never known, had a measure of justice at last, as did the child she had never been allowed to bear; that Anna Fenton, that other innocent at large, had been protected from the attentions of a dangerous man.
Percy Peach dealt with the formalities of the charges. Alan Hurst would appear before the magistrates and be remanded to the crown court on Monday morning. Lucy Blake collected a uniformed constable and went off to the detached nineteen-thirties house on the fringe of the town.
She was relieved to find a nurse already with Mrs Hurst. As quietly and quickly as she could, Lucy gave her the worst news of all: that her husband was to be charged with murder. She left Judith Hurst staring at Alan’s plans for the extension and contemplating a long, lonely journey into death.
