Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘I expect he was told to go, Mrs Bedford.’

  ‘Then he should have bloody refused, soft bugger. He’s old enough to know what went on,’e is!’ She snorted, then took another long, consoling draft from her tankard.

  This was more than Peach had expected. They could check the date of Hirohito’s funeral and get a pretty exact date for the vacation of the houses. He said, ‘That’s very helpful, Mrs Bedford. I knew you’d come up trumps for us!’ He took the second bottle of Guinness from his briefcase and put it beside the empty one on the little round table beside her.

  A hand as hot and rough as a sun-warmed lizard’s foot dropped on to his wrist. ‘Don’t open it yet, Mr Peach. I don’t like it flat. It’ll last me all night, if I go easy at it.’

  Billy Bedford felt a vague resentment that his old mother could be so useful. He said as scathingly as he could, ‘There were people in those streets after they’d been emptied, though. After old Betty Dickinson and the like moved off to the new council estates, there were still people in those houses. In some of them, anyway.’

  ‘Squatters?’

  ‘Aye. I suppose that’s what you’d call them.’ He suddenly wished that he hadn’t spoken after all.

  Peach could read his too revealing features as easily as a book. A large-print book. ‘Got up to your old tricks round there, didn’t you, Billy?’

  Billy Bedford was an incorrigible peeping Tom and an occasional flasher, one who was brought in as part of the investigation into most local sex crimes, though he had never proceeded beyond flashing to indecent assault or rape. He was part of the detritus of modern society, universally despised, but in Percy Peach’s informed opinion, relatively harmless.

  Billy said sullenly, ‘I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about, Mr Peach. I gave that sort of thing up a long time ago, well before the time the Dickinsons were moved out of them’ouses.’ He drew himself ridiculously up to his full but diminutive height. ‘And I resent—’

  ‘Bollocks, Billy Bedford!’ Peach found the alliteration beguiling, and the old lady had surely heard much worse. ‘Indecent exposure beside the Corporation Park, 1993. Peering through curtains at women undressing in Queen Mary Street, 1996.’ He had looked up Billy’s record on the computer before he left the station. ‘Which means you were no doubt in your randy heyday at the time we’re talking about. Prowling the streets and flashing your pathetic equipment at anyone you thought you could impress.’

  ‘I had a dog then.’ His mouth twisted into a crooked smile of lecherous remembrance.

  ‘Spot,’ his mother said unexpectedly. ‘He were only a mongrel, but very affectionate, Spot. I still miss’im.’

  Peach remembered now. Bedford had used the well-behaved little dog as an excuse to prowl the streets at all hours of the night, spying on women undressing whenever he got the chance, getting close enough to the town’s prostitutes to savour their provocative dress and no doubt watch them in action when the occasion offered itself, and just occasionally leaping out of hedges to shock the matrons of the town by waving his penis at them. He said, ‘You must have enjoyed it when the squatters moved in.’

  ‘They didn’t bother with curtains. The curtains went when the proper residents moved out.’ Billy Bedford’s eyes shone for a moment with reminiscent excitement.

  ‘So you and Spot spent a lot of time round there.’

  Billy fell back into his familiar whine. ‘What if I did? Wasn’t doing no’arm to no one, I wasn’t.’

  Peach looked at the 62-year-old wreck of a man and tried not to show his revulsion. ‘I’m not interested in what you were doing there, Billy. Not now. I’m interested in who was occupying those houses and when.’

  ‘There was people there for two or three years after the Dickinsons and their like’ad moved out. It was a bad time in the town, that, Mr Peach. Thatcher and the bloody Tories. Lot of poverty about. That were when that cardboard city started in London.’ For a moment, there was a glimpse of the sharp, well-informed being that might have emerged, if things had been different for this man in his youth. If he had not lost his father in 1950, perhaps.

  Peach said, ‘Can you recall those streets, Billy? Even individual houses, perhaps? It’s a long time ago.’

  ‘Fifteen years. Well, somewhere about that. But I can remember a lot. I’ve a good memory, Mr Peach. And Spot and I used to go up there most nights.’ He was pathetically anxious to be helpful, to show that he was more useful than the society which had discarded him thought he was.

  It was in the days before Peach came here, when Tommy Bloody Tucker would have been the Inspector in charge. Percy couldn’t see Tucker being anxious to protect squatters from peeping Toms or flashers; he would have been more than content to pretend that the squatter problem didn’t exist. And people living like that were never going to report the likes of Billy Bedford. He must have felt that the squatters had fallen from heaven into his squalid world. Peach said, ‘You must have known the area like the back of your hand, Billy! I bet there’s no one knows more than you about what went on there at that time.’

  Bedford enjoyed flattery: indeed, he had met so little of it that he found it irresistible. ‘That’s right, Mr Peach. You’d win your bet, all right. I was up there’most every night, like I said.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Billy. When I can pinpoint the actual house I’m talking about, I’ll come back and see you. Find out if you can tell me anything about what went on in there.’

  He didn’t really think he would get much more from the man. But with what they got from forensic added to Billy Bedford’s recollections, they could begin to get a picture of the time and the place where this death had occurred. He said, ‘I’ll be back, when I can pinpoint the time we’re interested in. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Billy!’

  Bedford laughed as if this was the most original joke in the world. ‘I won’t, Mr Peach!’ He glanced down at the full and the empty bottles of stout beside his mother. ‘I’m not a Guinness-drinker myself.’

  Peach took the hint. ‘I dare say there might be half a bottle of whisky in this for you, Billy Bedford, if you can provide something really useful for us.’

  The wretchedly thin man saw him off at the door of the old terraced house. His face was grey and fleshless. Peach had a sudden apprehension that he might die before the frail but feisty mother within the house. In a life that had offered little but hardship, that would be the worst thing of all for old Lizzy Bedford.

  Four

  The post-mortem report yielded more than it might have done. Percy Peach announced that firmly to his team. It was important for morale that they felt progress was being made. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it was all too easy for an old crime like this to be written off as insoluble.

  There were multiple fractures in the bones of this female corpse, but they were probably all recent. In other words, the body had been considerably damaged by the heavy machinery brought in for the demolition of the houses. Had it not been for the crane-driver’s keen eyesight and his glimpse of that gaunt forearm rearing itself so dramatically from the rubble, the body might never have been discovered, might have been anonymously interred for ever beneath the concrete foundations of the new office block which was to rise on the site.

  The blood group was confirmed as the same as that of the patch discovered by the observant Jack Chadwick at the scene of the crime. That made it likely but not certain that the corpse had lain for years against that wood, which was confirmed as the lower part of what had originally been a substantial door, belonging either to a large cupboard or perhaps even to a room. A cluster of fibres found in the grime of that wood, six inches from the dark brown smear of blood, matched those from the sweater, parts of which still clung to the torso of the body even after its years of entombment.

  That was the next detail in the emerging picture. The partially mummified state of the body suggested that it had been enclosed after death in some relatively airless place.

&nbs
p; DC Brendan Murphy looked up from his notes. ‘Hidden away, you mean, sir?’

  Peach nodded. ‘Almost certainly yes. Possibly beneath floorboards. But the presence of blood and fibres on what’s left of that door suggests that the body rested tight against it for quite some time. The probability is that she was locked away in a cupboard. Or that the wood from a door was used to hide her somewhere else, like a chimney breast where fires were no longer lit. The body is too damaged for us to be certain, but we’re not talking evidence in court here. We’re simply trying to build up for ourselves a picture of how this woman might have died.’

  Lucy Blake said, ‘Jack Chadwick had found a lot of other fibres at the site. Has anything useful come of them?’

  ‘Not as yet. They come from a dozen different garments and furnishings, but some of them may have predated this death by several years. Forensic will retain them, in case we can match them up with anything we discover on a suspect at a later stage in the investigation. The probability is that we won’t get anything very useful from them.’

  DC Gordon Pickering was the latest addition to Peach’s CID team. He was lanky, fresh-faced, twenty-two and very keen. He said, ‘Are we any nearer to an identification of this woman?’

  ‘Nearer, perhaps, but we’re not nearly there yet, lad. We don’t know who she is but we know a little more than we did yesterday. She’s young, for a start. Probably between eighteen and twenty-five when she died, as far as they can tell from what’s left of her.’

  ‘Dental records?’

  ‘It’s in hand, but it takes time. She hadn’t had a lot of dental work, but hopefully there’s one filling, and a distinctive enough jaw pattern to get an identification. Eventually. None of our Brunton dentists has found a match, so she’s probably not local.’

  ‘How long before we know?’

  Peach allowed himself a rueful smile; he was as anxious as young Pickering to pin down this victim, so he was not going to squash his enthusiasm. ‘Impossible to say, because it’s out of our hands. They got a bit of DNA from a nerve still there at the base of a tooth, but that will only be useful at a later stage, when we’ve got a possible match. We’ve asked dentists nationally to check their records, but we’re dependent on them for the degree of urgency they give it. We really need a name. However, we’ve got something already. One of the people in the forensic lab at Chorley is apparently an expert in what he calls “Tooth Morphology”. He reckons teeth are fascinating little things – takes all sorts, I suppose. Apparently this lady had “shovel-shaped incisors”. This means that she was more likely to come from an Asian group than a Caucasian one.’

  Lucy Blake said, ‘So she was probably Indian or Pakistani.’

  ‘Not necessarily. There’s a strong incidence of this type of teeth in the Chinese, for example. And don’t forget she’s probably not from our Brunton Asian group.’

  DC Murphy said, ‘I suppose we’re quite sure this is a suspicious death?’

  Peach smiled grimly. ‘I thought you’d never ask. In fact, we’re quite sure this was murder. There isn’t much flesh left on the skeleton, and what there is is severely damaged by the fractures and abrasions caused by the clearance machines. But the PM shows quite clearly that this girl was strangled.’

  The discovery of a body beneath the rubble of Brunton received muted coverage in the national newspapers and television.

  It would have been different if they had been able to carry a picture of that skeletal arm, rising from the ground as if beseeching justice from the heavens, but that image was denied to them. And as yet there was no hint of the sexual dimension to this crime which would guarantee their full attention. They had to be content with the bald police announcement that the unidentified body of a woman had been discovered on an industrial site, that it had been there for some time, and that until more facts could be established the death was being treated as suspicious.

  Local radio was rather more excited about it. The News Editor at Radio Lancashire made as much of a sensation as he could of an event which could enliven a drab time at the end of February. He sent a young woman reporter to the place, who described the landscape as if it were a bomb site in Iraq, teeming with unseen terrorists, rather than a levelling of the ground for a five-storey office block, near the centre of a run-down East Lancashire town. She then focused in to provide a graphic word-picture of the floodlit arena at the scene of this crime, emphasizing the diligent work of Jack Chadwick’s team, dwelling on the number of pictures the official photographer was taking and the number of possible clues being bagged from the debris. She made excellent bricks from very little straw, her mind on a more national job with BBC or ITV and greater things ahead.

  There was much local interest in her report, of course. An old corpse and thoughts of mischief long buried were bound to arouse curiosity in Brunton itself, especially when many of the older listeners could play the game of pinpointing the exact place where this body had been discovered.

  One man, especially, listened to every word of the young reporter’s coverage with rapt attention. He caught the first news of the discovery on the Tuesday lunch-time bulletin, then listened again to the evening coverage, eager to see if anything had yet been added to the bald facts.

  He stared at the radio for a few moments after the announcer had switched to the sports news, willing the uncaring box to give him further facts, to tell him exactly how much those policemen and civilians at the site had discovered; what the police were thinking at this moment; how many resources they proposed to devote to this old crime with the scents gone cold.

  He learned none of this, of course, and he found that his feverish speculation disturbed him far more than the known facts. He could not settle in the house. Normally he liked being alone, enjoyed his privacy and having to answer to no one, but tonight he wished he had company. It would have distracted him, forced him to think of other things and deal with other issues.

  He was surprised when he looked at his watch and found that it was still only ten past eight. He went out into the cool night. The clouds were lifting and he could see the stars. There would be a frost tonight. He felt as if the elements were conspiring against him, that he would much rather have had it cloudy. He could not quite say why that was.

  He drove into the town, stopped to buy a copy of the Evening Telegraph at the brightly lit Pakistani one-stop shop on the main road. He put the light on in his car and read the front-page coverage of the body found in the area of what had once been Balaclava Street. They had pinned the name down for locals, as the radio reporter had not been able to do. It wasn’t the street he had expected, but it was the next one to it, one he had walked along many times.

  The very sight of that once-familiar name in print made the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  But other than that, the paper had nothing to add to what he had already learned from the radio. He should have expected that, of course: they must have gone to press well before the evening radio report was compiled. But he felt he had to explore every source, to rake together whatever scraps he could to feed his hunger for facts about what they had actually found at the place.

  He read the newsprint painstakingly again, looking carefully at the pictures of the piles of rubble. They were given perspective only by the single factory chimney in the background, included in each shot by a photographer anxious for anything to give depth and interest to this drab and featureless scene. The man turned as he was bidden to page four for the conclusion of the material, and found only an official statement from a Superintendent Tucker that enquiries were proceeding and that this death was being treated as suspicious until it could be proved otherwise.

  The car was getting cold and the windows had misted up. He must have been sitting there longer than he thought, reading and re-reading the evening paper. He felt suddenly that he must not draw attention to himself. He switched off the internal light, directed the fan on to the windscreen, waited impatiently as it cleared agonizingly slowly. None of
the pedestrians who passed seemed to be taking any interest in the parked car or its occupant. Why should they? the driver told himself irritably. And why should he be getting himself so wound up over what had happened a long time ago?

  He drove slowly into the town, conscious that he wanted to keep a low profile but telling himself that he was uncertain which road to take. It was only as he was picking his way through the one-way system, quiet at this time of night, that he acknowledged where he was going. Instead of hastening his progress, the knowledge made him drive even more slowly.

  He kept glancing at his rear-view mirror, though he knew perfectly well that nothing could be following him, that no one could challenge his right to drive here. It was years since he had ventured into this district, and he could not believe how much the landscape had changed, how many landmarks which had once seemed permanent had been removed. He lost himself twice, had to go back to the main road to get his bearings and start again from there.

  He was glad now he had got rid of the old sports car. The Vauxhall Vectra would be much less noticeable. He shook himself physically, trying to get rid of the tightness which had suddenly made his shoulders rigid, telling himself that there was no reason at all why he should not be here, that the worst thing he could do was to give anyone the impression that he felt guilty. He eased the car round a sharp bend and over the first set of cobbles it had ever encountered.

  He was in the area now. The street lights had ceased abruptly, and all he could see was the corridor of bright white light thrown up by his headlamps. He put them on full and crawled forward. He could see the damp cobbles glistening ahead of him, but he was not sure how far he could drive before what remained of the old street petered out into rubble.

  He crawled forward for a hundred, two hundred yards like this and then came up against a red sign which said blankly: ‘NO THROUGH WAY. IT IS DANGEROUS TO PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT’. There was nothing but darkness behind him, nor in front of him when he switched off the car’s lights. He took the torch from the glovebox, snatched his anorak from the seat beside him, and eased himself slowly, reluctantly, out into the night.