Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

Tucker peered at him suspiciously, but Peach’s dark eyes were directed to the wall above his head. ‘Well, if you’re telling me nothing of note has happened over the weekend, I’ll—’

  ‘Racial punch-ups in the town centre on Friday night, sir. Usual ritual insults on both sides. There are more injuries among the British National Party boys this time. The Asians are beginning to look after themselves. Inevitable, if we can’t protect them, I suppose.’ This was a reference to Tucker’s ignoring of the escalation of racial incidents in the town, in the mistaken hope that the trouble would go away. The truth was that for a long time Tucker and the Brunton hierarchy had not cared to admit that a serious problem existed.

  ‘I’m sure there’s nothing there that you and your team can’t handle, Peach. Routine violence, I expect. Male hormones running riot on drink.’ Tommy Bloody Tucker might not be very bright, but he had a certain low cunning, a well-developed instinct for self-preservation. There was no kudos and only brickbats from the public on both sides if you got yourself involved in trying to sort out racial disturbances. Let your underlings get on with it.

  ‘The Muslim element doesn’t drink, of course, sir. But you’re right, it’s dealt with. The ringleaders appeared in court this morning. The matter is taking its course without your involvement.’

  ‘Good. Well, if that’s all you have to tell me, I think you might now be better employed in—’

  ‘There is this, sir.’ Percy Peach took his time as he carefully drew the big photograph from its folder, building up his moment of drama, enjoying the older man’s impatience.

  ‘What on earth is this, Peach? I must warn you that unless it’s something of real importance, I have much more . . .’ Tucker stopped: even his considerable resources of verbiage were arrested by this dramatic black and white photograph. He said stupidly, ‘It’s a body.’

  Peach resisted the urge to congratulate his chief on his percipience. Instead, he nodded and said, ‘Certified as such at 12.47 hours today by the police surgeon, sir.’ It was one of the more bizarre features of police procedure that even if a skeleton which was centuries old was discovered, it had to be certified as officially dead by a qualified doctor, as the first step in any investigation.

  ‘How old is this?’ Tucker stared at what was scarcely more than the outline of something human, still encased in the dust and soil of the clearance site. He was reminded of those pictures of corpses which had been miraculously preserved for two thousand years in the ashes of Pompeii.

  ‘Can’t say yet, sir. We’ll need a post-mortem report and anything else the forensic team can give us before we know where to start.’ In the presence of this bleak and distant death, Peach found all inclination to score points off this high-ranking buffoon had left him. The stark monochrome reminder of the mystery of mortality which lay across Tucker’s desk overshadowed more petty concerns.

  Tucker studied the picture for a moment longer before he said quietly, ‘Where was this found?’

  ‘In the last terrace of houses being demolished for industrial redevelopment, sir. The area out beyond Montague Street.’

  Tucker nodded slowly. He seemed unable to take his eyes off the picture. ‘Not that old, then. Not as old as it looks here.’

  ‘Probably not, sir. Those houses haven’t been occupied for at least ten years. Except by mice and rats.’

  ‘But this could have been put there after that. Or could have been killed somewhere else and dumped in there.’

  Just for a few minutes, they were coppers united in the face of a puzzle. Peach could not remember when he had last had that feeling. ‘Yes. We’ll need to wait and see about the circumstances. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty certain the body had been hidden somewhere in there. The clearance company’s staff inspect all property carefully before demolition. It’s standard practice, apparently. No one saw any sign of a corpse anywhere in that terrace of houses before the breakers and bulldozers moved in; even the cellars were carefully checked.’

  ‘Or should have been. No one’s going to admit he didn’t do his job, in these circumstances.’

  Police cynicism, born of hard observation. Peach felt the pleasure of shared experience again with this man who normally seemed so far away from crime. ‘Exactly, sir. But it does seem probable that this body had been hidden away somewhere. The police surgeon couldn’t tell us much, and of course he couldn’t strip anything away from the body for fear of destroying evidence. But he did say that it seemed to be partly mummified.’

  Tucker had still not taken his eyes away from the photograph. He said slowly, ‘Yes. These look like scraps of flesh, here. And skin, perhaps.’ He picked up a ball pen from his immaculate desk and pointed at two different points on the big photograph.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It had been difficult to be certain of anything beneath the mud and dust and mortar which had clothed that mysterious figure, amidst the bricks and the plaster and the broken tiles. Percy Peach felt he could still smell the stink of death and decay upon himself from his visit to the site, though he had showered in the station since his return.

  ‘Ten years or more ago, you say. I don’t suppose you recall any local missing person from that time.’

  ‘I wasn’t around here then, sir.’ Peach was less scathing than he would normally have been in the face of Tucker’s fumbling after the truth. He did not point out how many thousands of people went missing in Great Britain every week. Chief Superintendent Tucker knew that well enough. He was simply groping after somewhere to start. Percy Peach said, ‘I was just a DS then, sir. Not even working in Brunton.’

  ‘No. But it was on my patch. I was a Detective Inspector here at that time. All those clearance areas were environments for crime. All kinds of people on the fringes of society operated there, once the last official residents were cleared out.’

  Everyone knew that. The flotsam and jetsam of society moved in; the down-market prostitutes, looking for somewhere to offer a quick knee-trembler; the druggies on the way down; the squatters who had missed out on legal accommodation. But for once Peach wasn’t irritated by Tucker’s stating of the obvious. He felt the man floundering, wondering where to start on this. He had experienced similar sentiments himself an hour earlier, when he had stood and looked at what had once been human, and watched the Scenes of Crime team commencing its work on that squalid, foetid site. He said quietly, ‘I’ve begun to set up a team, sir. We aren’t certain it’s murder yet, but we certainly have to treat this as a suspicious death. Hopefully we’ll get some accurate estimate of how long ago it occurred within the next twenty-four hours. The National Forensic Laboratory at Chorley has agreed to give this one priority.’

  ‘We had a lot of trouble with those slum clearance areas.’ Tucker repeated himself, casting his mind back to those harsh days when he still involved himself directly in the investigation of serious crime.

  ‘I’ll get on with it, then. I’ll report back as soon as we know a little more.’ Peach picked up the big photograph and put it carefully back into its folder. ‘By the way, sir, one of the only things we are certain about at the moment is that the body is that of a female.’

  It was the first stage in giving an identity to this thing. The first move towards the translation of the shape in that picture into something which had been vital and human, with emotions and opinions and a personality.

  Three

  It was still scarcely half past three, but the arc lamps were on to enable the Scenes of Crime team to go about their work.

  The lamps gave a sense of theatre to the scene, with the brightly lit square of uneven ground cordoned off by the plastic ribbons as the stage. The audience consisted of a motley group of children, housewives and pensioners, standing outside those tapes and cast into early darkness by the brightness at their centre. A thin drizzle was beginning to descend upon the place as Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake arrived there.

  The scene, with its acrid smells of decay, its thousands of fragments of cheap, shattered bricks, its soot
and its crumbling mortar, could scarcely have been more drab or depressing. Lucy wondered as always at the random and dejected-looking crowd which always assembled on the periphery of a Scenes of Crime search. Most of them, she supposed, had never seen anything as dramatic as what had occurred at the centre of this brilliantly illuminated stage.

  Yet what had actually happened here? DS Blake put on the plastic coverings offered by the constable at the entrance to the site and trudged forward to the man in charge of the operation. Sergeant Jack Chadwick gave her a nod of greeting. ‘Percy tied up?’ he enquired laconically.

  She nodded. ‘He’s making phone calls to speed things up. Getting everyone to make this a priority. Last time I saw him he was preparing himself to brief Tommy Bloody Tucker about it.’

  Chadwick nodded. When he had been injured in a shooting years ago, it had been Percy Peach who secured him this job as Scenes of Crime Officer, when others higher up the ranks would have retired him as a young man on sick pension. It was something both of them knew very well, but neither of them ever mentioned. Jack Chadwick was probably the only member of the Brunton force who would rather have had Percy Peach visit him here than this pretty, shapely girl with the striking chestnut hair, who was still in her twenties. ‘There’s not a lot for him here, anyway. Probably scarcely worth his time.’

  Lucy bit back her reaction. She wasn’t going to say that it seemed all right for a woman to waste her time, whilst the men got on with more important things. It was a question of rank, she told herself firmly: Chadwick thought that a DS was all that was required here, that it wouldn’t have been worth the considerably more expensive time of a Detective Chief Inspector. She watched the men and the single woman on their knees amidst the debris and told herself how lucky she was. Sergeant Chadwick had returned to the notes on his clipboard. She said, ‘So what have you found, Jack?’

  ‘Not much. You wouldn’t expect much, on a site like this. For one thing, this woman died a long time ago, so most things which might have been useful have long gone. We’re not likely to find fingerprints or hairs from a guilty party’s head here, are we?’

  She wondered if he’d have bothered stating the obvious to Percy Peach. But she was used to the fact that, if you didn’t look like the traditional copper, people, even policemen who should know better, didn’t take you seriously. And most of the people working at a Scenes of Crime investigation weren’t coppers, nowadays. She said tersely, ‘That sounds like you’ve already assumed this is a suspicious death. Have you any reason for thinking that?’

  Chadwick grinned ruefully at her. He had been looking forward to a ritual moan with his old friend Percy Peach about the hierarchy, and the weird ways of Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker in particular. Instead, he had this fresh-faced, eager girl to talk to; it scarcely seemed fair to visit his old sweat’s cynicism upon her.

  But she wouldn’t be Percy Peach’s sidekick unless she was a bright lass: he’d give her whatever help he could. And beneath his surface scepticism, Jack Chadwick was an enthusiast for his work, the best Scenes of Crime Officer around: experienced, intelligent and meticulous. When he decided to close down his work at a scene, you could be satisfied that there was nothing more to be learned there.

  Now he led Lucy Blake across the site to where a splintered piece of wood lay inside a transparent polythene cover. Lucy saw a panel in it, realized that it was probably part of what had originally been a door. It was covered with grime on one side, but this was the side that interested Chadwick. He pointed to a point near the end of the wood, where the black of the grime shaded to a dark brown. He said simply, ‘I’d be surprised if that isn’t blood.’

  Lucy thought that she would not even have noticed the slightly lighter patch on the blackened surface. But if Jack Chadwick thought it was blood, it was odds on it was. He voiced the immediate query which came into her mind. ‘Nothing to say it’s the blood of your corpse, of course: forensic will tell us if it’s the same group.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Chadwick shrugged. ‘We’ve found various fibres, which have been bagged up for the attention of the boys and girls in forensic. Whether they’ve any connection with the corpse or the way she died is another matter. We may never know that, unless you can pin down when this death occurred and who was around at the time.’

  Lucy stared at the neat plastic bags, watched the rain falling more steadily now through the fierce beams of the arc lamps, smelt the decay as the men in oilskins carefully turned over another pile of mortar and brick. It seemed at that moment, in that desolate place, that it was most unlikely they would ever pin down the detail of this woman’s death.

  Half a mile away from the place where the corpse had appeared so unexpectedly, there were terraces of nineteenth-century houses still standing and still occupied. At seven o’clock on that Monday evening, DI Percy Peach rang the bell of one of them and stepped over the worn stone doorstep to the interior.

  The old woman’s face clouded with concern when she saw him. ‘’E’asn’t done nothing, Mr Peach.’E’s never in trouble again, is’e?’

  Lizzy Bedford was well into her eighties now, the only woman Peach knew who still wore the woollen shawl about her shoulders which had once been the standard garb for women clattering in their clogs to the mills. She had lived a hard life, and her face was worn and lined with the wear of it. Percy saw her only at irregular intervals, and each time she looked even smaller. But she had the bright, alert look of a street sparrow.

  ‘He’s not in trouble, Mrs Bedford. I’d just like a few words with him, that’s all. I think he might be able to help me.’ He took a bottle of Guinness out of his briefcase and put it beside the battered radio on the small table at her elbow.

  Her head did not move, but bright eyes glanced sideways and glittered. ‘There’s an opener in the top drawer of the kitchen cabinet.’ She watched him find the opener in the fifties kitchenette, take a thick glass tankard from the shelf above, and pour the dark fluid carefully into it, tilting the glass sideways so as to avoid excessive foam. It was not until he delivered the brimming tankard into her bony hands that the old lady said, ‘“Helping the police with their enquiries” you call it, don’t you? That means’e’s in trouble, doesn’t it? What’s’e been up to this time?’

  ‘Nothing, that I know of, Mrs Bedford. I just want to ask him a few questions about what happened years ago.’

  She looked at him suspiciously, then nodded her relief and took her first appreciative pull at the Guinness. ‘Billy’s done’is time for that. You’re never going to bring all that stuff up again.’

  ‘No, we’re not. I just think he might be able to help me with some information. You as well, perhaps. You’ve lived round here for a long time.’

  ‘Aye. Since my man were alive and I worked at Bank Top Mill and Billy were nobbut a lad.’ The bright eyes stared past him, seeing through the long, sad decades to a time he had never known.

  ‘Aye.’ Peach dropped automatically into the Lancashire response. ‘You’ll remember more than most, then.’ He caught the sound of a movement behind the door and called, ‘You’d best come in here now, Billy.’

  Billy Bedford shuffled sheepishly into the room. He was a man made for shuffling: a slight, stooping figure who carried guilt like a cloak upon his narrow shoulders. He was sixty-two now, and looked older. He said, as automatically as if Peach had touched a nerve, ‘I ain’t done nothing, Mr Peach.’Onest I ain’t.’

  Percy eyed the shifty face beneath the greasy grey hair with distaste. ‘I doubt that, Billy Bedford. You’ve usually been up to something, haven’t you? But I’m not here to take you in. Surprising as it may seem to you, you may actually be able to help us.’

  ‘Ain’t no grass. Billy Bedford don’t grass on anyone.’ The thin lips set into a line as automatic as the words.

  ‘This isn’t grassing, Billy.’ Peach tried to keep the contempt out of his voice. ‘This is straight information about the district. You and your mum
might be the only people still around to help us on this one.’

  Bedford lifted his hollow eyes for the first time, checking that this was genuine. It wasn’t often that he was asked to be of help to anyone: it was quite a pleasant feeling, which took him by surprise. ‘If you’re not asking me to shop no one, I don’t mind’elping you.’

  Peach gestured with his arm towards the darkness outside. ‘That area over there. The houses that have been cleared for slum clearance and new industrial developments –’

  Old Mrs Bedford followed the direction of his gesture as if she could see the long, low terraces which had once stood proudly on each side of the cobbled streets. And indeed she could, in her mind’s eye. She could see them sixty-five years ago, at the beginning of Hitler’s war, when house-proud women had covered their doorsteps with yellow sandstone and young Lizzy Bedford had clattered free and lighthearted in her clogs to the mill with hundreds of other girls. She said, ‘You mean Alma Street, Sebastopol Terrace, Balaclava Street, that area. It’s all gone now.’

  The names meant nothing to Percy Peach, but he said, ‘That’s it. When were the people cleared out of them, do you know?’

  ‘Ten years ago and more,’ said Billy Bedford, surprisingly promptly.

  His mother was slower, but even more accurate. ‘More than that. Betty Dickinson’s husband died a week before they were due to move out to the new estate. She had the funeral the day she should have been flitting.’

  ‘But you don’t know exactly when this was.’

  The old lady allowed herself a thin smile and a surprisingly large swallow of Guinness. ‘Yes I do, young man. 1989. I saw his stone in the cemetery when I was up there last week.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Course I’m sure. I can even tell you when it was in the year. It was the week of that Bloody Emperor Hirohito’s funeral. Him what tortured my Albert in his camps during the war. He was never the same, when he came back. And that bloody Duke of Edinburgh went and attended the bugger’s funeral, didn’t he?’