Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  Matthew Hayward fought hard to gather his wits. He had moved from relative unknown to eminent soloist to police suspect in such rapid succession that his emotions were reeling. And his brain seemed to be a victim of those emotions. It wouldn’t work as he wanted it to. As he needed it to, indeed: he didn’t like the watchful observation of this contrasting pair.

  He said. ‘I’m sorry. This has been a stressful evening for me, and for a moment I couldn’t cast my mind back, even for a day. But yes, I did go out in the car last night. for an hour or so. I recall it now. Bought an evening paper, I seem to remember.’

  He was talking too much in the effort to recover his ground. Percy Peach liked that: people gave away more of themselves than they wished to when they talked too much. He said, making it a statement rather than a question, ‘You drove into the centre of Brunton. Took a very odd route indeed, for a musician going innocently about his business.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I think you do, Mr Hayward. But I’ll refresh your memory for you, since it seems to be working so patchily at the moment. You drove round a redevelopment site. An unlit area. A no-go area for drivers, actually, because of the heaps of rubble and God knows what else which are left after the demolition of buildings. A dangerous area, indeed, in the darkness. Dangerous even for those who were familiar with it in the days when rows of houses stood there.’

  It was a random arrow, but it struck home. Matthew Hayward looked at him with racing senses, then stupidly said the only thing he could think of. ‘I’m free to drive where I want. This isn’t a police state.’

  Peach smiled at him; Lucy Blake was reminded of a cat relishing the splayed limbs of a mouse beneath its paw. ‘No. The police are merely pursuing their enquiries. And you’re merely helping the police with those enquiries, Mr Hayward. The duty of every good citizen. No one has cautioned you, as yet. No one has placed you under arrest.’ He spoke as though that was only a matter of time. ‘But it does excite our interest, when we find someone prowling around in a place like that at dead of night.’ It had been just before nine o’clock in the evening, according to the uniformed PC’s report, but a DCI was surely allowed a little artistic licence. ‘We have acquired certain experience over the years, you see. And experience teaches us that people who drive into areas like that are usually up to no good.’

  An experienced lawbreaker would have told him to piss off, or worse. But this was not an experienced lawbreaker, and Peach knew his man. Hayward was thoroughly discomforted by now. With the conviction draining out of his voice, he said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong last night. There was no reason for you to be following me.’

  ‘You weren’t followed, Mr Hayward. You were observed. By a man patrolling the scene of a serious crime. You would have been questioned on the spot about your presence there, if you hadn’t made off so hastily. Suspicious, that, the speed at which you departed.’ He looked at DS Blake and they nodded their agreement on that, like stage policemen confirming their suspicions.

  Matthew Hayward was in no condition to decide whether their gesture was theatrical or not. He said, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t intend to do anything wrong. I was – well, I was curious, that’s all.’

  Suddenly and without any warning, Peach beamed at him, his round face splitting almost from ear to ear beneath the black moustache, revealing teeth that were disconcertingly white. It was much more unnerving to Matthew than his previous frowns. ‘Curious, Mr Hayward? Now what was there to be curious about in a dark, dreary and deserted place like that?’ Peach nodded his relish at the alliteration, as if he had discovered hidden depths within his resources, and was pleased by them.

  Matthew couldn’t recall how he had been brought to this point. At the outset, he had never intended to reveal what he was now going to say. After fifteen minutes with this man, there seemed no alternative. ‘I read about the body which was found there on Monday. It gave the details of the place in the evening paper. I was – was sort of drawn to the place.’

  ‘And why was that, sir?’

  Matthew wanted to say it was just curiosity, to brazen it out, whether they believed it or not. They couldn’t do much about it if he did, whatever they thought. But somehow he didn’t think he was up to brazening it out. Not here. And not with this man. He turned away from those penetrating dark eyes, but when he looked into the mirror, he could see the two of them behind him, observing him as if he was some specimen under a microscope. It was almost worse than facing them directly. He said very quietly, ‘I thought I might have known that girl. A long time ago.’

  The seconds seemed to drag like minutes as he watched for a reaction from those faces in the mirror in front of him. When Peach spoke, he was as quiet as the flustered man in evening dress had been. ‘There was nothing in the press release to say this was a girl, Mr Hayward.’

  ‘I’m sure there was. I’m sure I heard on the radio that the body of a girl had been found when—’

  ‘There were no details given, beyond the fact that the body was female. They were deliberately withheld. I did the release for the media myself with the press officer. But the interesting thing for us is that you are quite right, Mr Hayward; this was a young woman. So now you must tell us how you knew that.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’ This was worse than he had expected. He couldn’t see a way out of it.

  Lucy Blake leaned forward on her chair and said gently, ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Mr Hayward. You must see that.’

  He looked directly at her. She seemed to be trying to help him. It was a relief in any case to look away from those gimlet black eyes beneath the bald dome and into this softer, less aggressive face. ‘I – I thought I might have known her once. A long time ago.’ His voice seemed even to him to come from far away, as if someone else were speaking.

  ‘Around 1990, that would be.’ Blake’s voice was as soft as Peach’s had been harsh a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Around that time, yes. Perhaps a little later. How do you know that?’ His reeling brain was wondering now quite how much they did know. Perhaps it was everything.

  ‘We don’t reveal our sources, Mr Hayward.’ Lucy Blake was quietly insistent, the voice of quiet reason. Peach was suddenly taken with the thought of how delighted Billy Bedford would be to be described as something as lofty as ‘a source’, to know that for the first time in his life his confidences were to be respected and protected.

  ‘No. No, I suppose you wouldn’t. I thought this might be a girl I lived with. Early in 1991, that would be.’

  ‘You were partners?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head vigorously, as if trying to clear it. ‘There were several of us lived there. Five or six of us. After those streets had been cleared. When the real residents were gone.’ He was suddenly impatient, anxious to have this over with and these two out of his life.

  ‘You were squatters.’ This was Peach again, switching back from questions to assertions.

  Matthew nodded his head as if a string had been pulled in his neck. ‘I suppose you’d call it that. Sebastopol Terrace, it was.’

  ‘Number?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’ The number came up from his subconscious as promptly as if it had been yesterday, surprising him as much as his hearers. He would have said before tonight that he no longer knew it.

  Peach nodded, pursing his lips, wanting to encourage a man who was now being honest. It tallied. He’d spent an hour with an old street plan at the site today, trying to decide exactly which street and which house had been the ones where the body was found. It was on the right hand side of the street, somewhere in the three houses 26, 28 and 30.

  Until now, there had been the possibility that the body had been killed somewhere else and merely dumped there by someone who knew it was a good hiding place. Now, it seemed likely that this girl had actually lived there, been killed on site, by a fellow squatter or a visitor to the place.

  That made it more likely that they would c
atch the killer. His spirits rose as his hunter’s instinct kicked in. He said, ‘How old would you say this young woman was at the time of her death?’

  Matthew was suddenly cautious. He thought he had given up attempts at concealment, but now he could suddenly see the danger of admitting too much. He said, ‘I don’t know when she died, do I? I don’t know anything about her death. When I knew her, she was about twenty.’

  Peach nodded. ‘This girl was about that age, when she died. Did you kill her, Mr Hayward?’

  Even Lucy Blake was startled by the brutal abruptness of the question. Matthew Hayward’s brain reeled for a moment. Then he mustered all the outrage he could put into the words as he said, ‘No! Of course I didn’t kill her!’

  Peach grinned over his shoulder into the mirror, totally unabashed. ‘Just thought it would save us a lot of time, if you were prepared to admit it now. Difficult case wrapped up with a confession, inside two days, you see: lovely, that would be, if you look at it from our point of view. Doesn’t work like that very often, more’s the pity. So tell us about this squat.’

  Matthew noticed that the man hadn’t accepted his assurance that he wasn’t a killer. ‘There were five or six of us, as I said. Including Sunita.’

  They had a name. It was far more than he could have expected at this stage, two days after she had been found, with the scents long gone cold. ‘Tell us about these people in the squat.’

  ‘I can’t. Genuinely I can’t.’ It was suddenly very important to Matthew to convince them of that. ‘People came and went, disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived. We didn’t tell each other much about ourselves. I suppose most of us had something to hide.’ He looked down wonderingly at the black trousers of his evening dress, as if he could not comprehend how different his life was now from those almost forgotten days. ‘It seems like another world, now. It seems more than thirteen years ago. Another world entirely.’

  As he repeated himself, they saw just how exhausted he was. They were going to have to come back to him, to press him hard for every detail they could get. They weren’t going to get much more from him tonight. Peach said softly, ‘Sunita, you said. What was the girl’s second name?’

  Matthew shook his head wearily. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I ever knew. We didn’t give away much about ourselves. I was just Matt. She was just Sunita.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound English.’

  ‘She was Asian-English. Brought up here from birth, I think, but her parents were immigrants. Pakistanis, I think. Well, I’m sure they were.’

  ‘From Brunton?’

  ‘No. Not far away, though. Lancashire, somewhere, I’m sure. I think it might have been around Bolton.’

  It tallied. They were getting nearer to an identification. Peach gave no hint of his excitement as he asked calmly, ‘You’re sure you don’t recall a second name?’

  Matthew shook his head exhaustedly. ‘No, and I won’t get one, however long you give me to think. I don’t think I ever knew her second name. I told you, we kept our own secrets. And what people didn’t tell you, you didn’t ask too much about. It’s one of the rules, in a squat.’

  He could hear the final movement of the seventh symphony thundering out triumphantly now, even through the walls and the closed doors. That showed how silent it was in here. ‘The apotheosis of the dance’, Wagner had called this symphony; a fanciful idea which seemed a long way from his examination by these two watchful adversaries in this private cell of interrogation.

  Peach looked at his man, wondering how much more he could take, deciding that he had probably got beyond the stage where he was capable of any elaborate deceit. But there was still one highly important area to be explored. ‘Mr Hayward, you’ve admitted you were driving around the area because you thought the corpse which had been discovered might have been this girl Sunita. Why did you think that? Why, when you heard that the body of a woman had been found during excavations, did you immediately think that it might be this particular girl?’

  They’d come back to that, when Matthew thought they’d left it and moved on. He wanted to construct some elaborate and convincing reason for his journey to the site, but he was beyond it now and he knew it. He said dully, ‘She disappeared. One day she was with us, the next day she was gone. No one knew where.’

  ‘You asked the others about it, at the time?’

  ‘Yes, I asked. No one knew.’

  ‘Do you think that someone did know, but was concealing the information from you?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head hopelessly in his fatigue. ‘I don’t know, do I? It’s a long time ago. I think I decided eventually that Sunita had just gone away. People did that, all the time.’

  ‘But in all probability she didn’t, did she? If we assume for a moment that this body is that of Sunita, she died at twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace or very near to it. That is where the corpse was unearthed on Monday.’

  Matthew stared unseeingly at his casual clothes on the hanger on the wall. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘How long were you there after she disappeared, Mr Hayward?’

  ‘I don’t know. A month, maybe two months. I can’t be accurate about the detail, all these years later.’

  ‘We’ll need the fullest possible details of the people who were in that house with you.’

  ‘I can’t recall much about them. People came and went, and it’s a long time ago. Is it important?’

  It was Lucy Blake who answered him, her lighter voice perfectly clear as the symphony in the concert hall reached its climax. ‘I think you know it is, Matthew. Have a good night’s sleep, and then give the matter your fullest possible attention, please. Anything you can recall about the people who shared that house with you may be quite vital.’

  He looked at her, trying to follow her thoughts, but weighed down now by a great fatigue. He repeated doggedly, ‘How did she die?’

  ‘It seems that she was murdered, Matthew. By person or persons as yet unknown.’

  They watched his face closely as it crumpled into silent, wracking tears.

  Each of them had the feeling that Matthew Hayward had known all along that the woman would have died like this.

  Eight

  ‘Still no identification of this demolition site corpse? I hope you aren’t slacking on this one, Peach.’ Superintendent Tucker jutted his jaw aggressively towards the industrial world outside the long window of his penthouse office. To his mind, a bright Thursday morning at the end of February was the ideal time to be letting his staff know who was in charge.

  The silly old sod’s trying to bollock me. Must have another day on his hands with not enough to do, thought Percy Peach. He tried not to sound aggrieved as he said, ‘We were over in Manchester until ten o’clock last night, sir, DS Blake and I. Didn’t get to bed until nearly midnight.’ We made up for it then, though, didn’t we, Lucy and I? Percy tried hard to control the smile which forced its way on to his lips with the recollection.

  Tommy Bloody Tucker did not consider the notion that his bête noir and the delectable Lucy Blake might have been in the sack together; it was yet another feature of Brunton police life with which he was out of touch. He said grumpily, ‘No doubt the overtime budget is taking a bashing again.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know how my DCI expects me to keep the finances in balance, when he goes racing off to Manchester at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘It’s not bloody Barbados, sir.’ Peach lapsed into a rare moment of open resentment at the injustice of life with Tucker.

  ‘Indeed it isn’t, Peach! And I’ll thank you not to swear at your superior officers!’

  ‘Sorry, sir. It must be the fatigue, sir.’ But he knew irony would never work with Tucker. That was what had betrayed him for a moment into something much more blunt.

  ‘What on earth were you doing in Manchester, anyway?’

  ‘Attempting to determine the identity of the corpse on the demolition site, sir. The one you were asking about. Trying to establish the framework for a mu
rder investigation.’

  Tucker recognized dimly that he might have been a little unjust. It only made him more tetchy. ‘Pity you couldn’t do that in Brunton. Pity you had to do it at that hour of the night.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Exactly what DS Blake and I said, when we were driving back over the moors beyond Darwen in freezing fog.’

  Tucker peered at him suspiciously. ‘What were you doing in Manchester anyway?’

  ‘Interviewing a pianist, sir. Matthew Hayward. At the Bridgewater Hall. He was a soloist with the Hallé. Going to be as good as Alfred Brendel, some people reckon.’

  Music was not one of Tucker’s enthusiasms; he even wondered if the great Alfred Brendel might be an invention of Peach’s. ‘What on earth were you doing swanning off to Manchester to interview a pianist?’

  ‘Possible murder suspect, sir.’

  ‘A soloist with the Hallé orchestra?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. Evening dress and all that. Matthew Hayward. Very good, he seemed, from what little we managed to hear.’

  Tucker didn’t like the sound of this at all. A high-profile suspect, and Peach wandering round like a loose cannon. It sounded like a recipe for disaster to him. There could be bad publicity from this, and bad publicity was Tommy Bloody Tucker’s worst nightmare. ‘You’ll need to proceed very carefully here, Peach. What possible connection can an eminent musician like this have with a murder in the back streets of Brunton in 1990?’

  ‘Remains to be seen, that, sir. I’m keeping an open mind on it, as you’ve advised me to do so often. By the way, it now appears we may be looking a little later than 1990, sir.’

  ‘I thought you said—’

  ‘Residents moved out to the new council estate in 1989, sir. Place apparently became a squat after that.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like squats.’ Tucker looked from his sullen visage as if he hoped to change the facts by the force of his personal preference.

  ‘No, sir. Fact of life, though. Don’t suppose you remember any squats in that area, around late 1990 or 1991?’ No harm in reminding the bugger that he was in charge of things then.