Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘I think you’re right. Because it now looks to me as if she vanished so abruptly because she was killed, Mr Hayward. Especially as she’d said nothing to you, or to anyone else as far as you know, about leaving.’

  He nodded, wary now of words.

  ‘It’s interesting that you thought of it as a disappearance at the time, rather than a simple exit from the group, like yours. Perhaps you had an inkling at the time that something had happened to Sunita.’

  This man, whose dark eyes watched him so intently, who had been so quick to pick him up on a word, hadn’t said ‘knowledge’, but only ‘inkling’. He hadn’t accused him of murder, but he hadn’t let him off the hook either. Matthew said, ‘Perhaps it was hindsight which made me speak of her disappearing rather than leaving. Perhaps it was a result of what I have learned over the last few days.’

  ‘Perhaps. But you must see that this sudden, unexplained, apparently unpremeditated disappearance increases the likelihood that one of the people in that squat killed her. I’d put money on it, if I were a betting man.’ Peach gave the man opposite him a contented smile on that thought.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And of course, experienced coppers, older and wiser men than me, would say that the man who left so soon after the dispatching of this poor girl would be the most likely killer. The prime suspect, they’d call a chap like that.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her!’

  It was a reaction so childishly prompt and instinctive that in a few seconds they were all smiling at it, though Matthew, after the surprise of his smile, felt hysteria welling briefly at the back of his throat. This meeting was not going as he had envisaged it at all.

  Peach said, ‘No one has accused you, yet. You’re helping us with our enquiries, as a good citizen should. If it’s any consolation, what you have told us so far has been most helpful, Mr Hayward. So let’s be generous to you, and disregard your unfortunate departure so soon after what we now think is a murder. There were five of you as well as the murder victim in that squat at number twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace. So on the simple statistics, you’re four to one against as our killer. The best way to become an outsider rather than the favourite is to tell us all you can about the other four unlawful occupants of that house.’

  It was a crude logic he was using, but Matthew in his now fevered state couldn’t argue with this Chief Inquisitor. He said feebly, ‘I can’t remember much about the others. It’s a long time ago now.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you’ve had a day to think about it. You’ve done quite well with yourself and Sunita. Let’s see what you can tell us about the others. It’s very much in your own interest to give us all you can.’

  ‘There were four others. That’s correct.’

  ‘Two other men, apart from you, and two women.’

  He felt another chill of apprehension at Peach’s simple statement. How much more did he know? Was he playing cat and mouse games, trying to catch Matthew out in lies? Did he know even now far more than Matthew could recollect about that house and its occupants?

  Lucy Blake on the other side of the fence was amazed once again by what skilful use Peach was making of the minimal recollections of that pathetic creature Billy Bedford. She said, ball pen poised over her notes, ‘Can you confirm the names of these people for us, Mr Hayward?’

  Her eyes were dark green in the clear light filtering into the room, as if they caught the green of the hills outside. He found it a relief to turn to this softer presence beneath the lustrous red-brown hair after Peach’s remorseless stare, though he was aware that he must be just as careful in his replies. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. The girls were called Jo and Emmy.’

  She made a careful note, taking her time, using Peach’s technique of allowing silence to build into tension. ‘And the men?’

  ‘One was Wally. He called himself that, but I never felt it was his real name – I don’t think any of us did. It was a kind of joke in the place, because he said it in that way himself, but not a joke that we laughed at very much.’

  ‘Frightening bloke was he?’

  ‘He was, yes, as I remember it.’ It seemed easier to admit things like that, to this pretty, understanding girl. ‘Of course, I was very young at the time. He was probably only four or five years older than me, but that seems a lot when you’re that age.’

  ‘Indeed. But there must have been more than his age between you.’

  ‘We didn’t fall out, never had any serious disagreements.’ He wondered if he had been too quick to say that. ‘It was just that he seemed – well, formidable, in that context. He was a powerfully built man. Not particularly tall, as I remember it, but heavily built. Like a prop forward.’ He grinned despite himself at this sudden image from his past. ‘And he came and went as he pleased, without reference to any of us. I may be wrong, but I don’t think any of us ever knew what he did outside the place. And he always had stubble round his chin, before it became a fashion to have it a few years later. I think he grew a beard in the later stages of my time there. Dark-haired, he was, and swarthy.’

  ‘Did he have a tooth missing?’

  Again evidence that they had other sources than him, that what he had to say was being weighed against other accounts, that if he got this wrong he would be in trouble for deceiving this contrasting but equally observant pair. ‘I think he did, yes. I’d forgotten about it, but now that you—’

  ‘Upper or lower jaw?’

  He made himself pause, as if giving thought to the matter. ‘Upper jaw, I think. Not quite in the middle, but near to it.’

  Lucy made a careful note of that, trying not to imagine what the photofit compilers might make of the detail at some later date. ‘And you don’t think he will be going by the name of Wally now?’

  ‘No. I think it very unlikely that it was his real name at the time. But I’ve no idea what has happened to any of them, since then. And I’ve no idea how long they were there after I left.’

  ‘I see. What about the other man?’

  ‘He was coloured. Very black.’ Matthew grinned unexpectedly at himself. ‘Well, I suppose he seemed even darker, in that place, in winter. We hadn’t a lot of light, in most of the rooms. He was West Indian, I think. Extraction, I mean – I’m sure he’d lived all his life in this country. I can’t recall a name for him. Wally used to call him Sambo sometimes, to try to wind him up, but I never saw him react to it.’

  DS Blake had a sudden picture of the grim life in this squat, but she knew it was only a snapshot, that they would probably know a lot more about the place before this one was solved. ‘Any idea what he did to support himself?’

  ‘No. I think he had work, for at least part of the time, but I’m not sure what.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘He was young. Younger than me, I think, but much more streetwise.’

  She could believe that. Matthew Hayward, successful concert pianist with the musical world at his feet, looked younger than his thirty-three years even now, with his unlined face and his attractively tousled dark hair. It was difficult to think of him as a potential murderer. She said, ‘What about the other two girls?’

  ‘I can’t remember a lot, apart from the names. Jo was a couple of years older than me, I think. So about twenty at that time. Dark-haired. Rather a striking sort of face. Strong nose.’

  ‘Build?’

  ‘Quite sturdily built, as far as I remember.’

  ‘Buxom.’ Peach threw the word in when Matthew was concentrating on his replies to the girl. It was not the word he would have used in this context, but it was uncomfortably accurate. He wondered how many of the other occupants of that squat they had already interviewed before him.

  ‘Yes. That wouldn’t be a bad description of her.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think I could remember as much as that.’

  Lucy nodded slowly. ‘And the other girl?’

  ‘Emmy. I don’t know whether she was Emma or Emily, but she ca
lled herself Emmy. She was taller than Jo and Sunita. Almost my height, I think; probably an inch or so less than me; so about five feet nine, say.’

  ‘Age?’

  He paused for a moment, his brow wrinkling into a frown. ‘I was going to say older than Jo. But she may not have been much different. She was more worldly-wise than any of us, except for Wally, and that made her seem older, I expect. Now, I think she was probably only twenty or twenty-one.’

  ‘Dark-haired?’

  He wondered again if they were trying to trap him. ‘No. Definitely blonde.’

  ‘Figure?’

  ‘Quite shapely.’ Absurdly, he felt himself blushing.

  ‘Pretty face?’

  ‘Matter of opinion, that, isn’t it?’ He gave a weak smile, but it brought no response from these two. ‘I think she had blue eyes, but I honestly can’t remember much of the detail of her features, at this distance.’

  ‘Natural blonde?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was even less of an expert in such things then than I am now.’ Again he grinned weakly; again his smile dropped from his face like a stricken bird. ‘I think she may well have been natural. It wasn’t easy to be anything else in that place. We’d no hot water, and I suspect none of us was as clean or washed as often as we’d have liked to.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. It’s all a long time ago.’ He looked from one to the other for a response, found Peach nodding thoughtfully, as if he accepted this.

  The DCI said, ‘Do you remember a mark on the back of her thigh?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not sure which leg. Just below the buttock, it would be.’

  ‘They wore trousers, the girls. It was damn cold in there, most of the time. I wouldn’t have seen a mark like that, would I?’

  The DCI gave him a smile which developed from small beginnings into something much grosser. ‘Sleep with either of these two, did you?’ Peach shot the question across the six feet between them with relish.

  Matthew felt a moment of panic, told himself firmly that it was completely irrational. ‘No.’

  ‘Reasonable question. Lot of it goes on in squats, doesn’t it? And you’ve already admitted to sleeping with a murder victim. And you make the other two sound very beddable. Wouldn’t be surprising if a young, virile lad like you, freed from home restrictions for the first time, was putting it about a bit.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t!’ Matthew felt a desperate need to stem the flow of Peach speculation.

  Peach studied him with his head on one side for a moment, then grinned conspiratorially. ‘OK. What about the others?’

  ‘I don’t know. Really I don’t. We kept ourselves to ourselves, didn’t enquire too much about what the others were up to. It was one of the rules of the squat, and you soon learned to stick by it.’

  ‘I understand that. But when there’s been a murder there, it alters all the rules. And brings some new ones of its own into play. Relationships, whether temporary or more lasting, might well be important. As might jealousy, sexual or otherwise.’

  Matthew said stubbornly, ‘I can’t remember anything of that sort.’

  ‘No tantrums?’

  ‘I can’t remember any. We were all under various kinds of stress, but I can’t think of anything which might be significant to you.’

  Peach regarded him steadily for a moment with those dark eyes which seemed to be seeing far more than they should. Then he said, ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Hayward.’ He looked at the music on the piano as he stood up. ‘Good luck with the concerts! Keep on thinking about this matter, please; other things may come back to you, over the next few days. No doubt we shall need to speak again.’

  Matthew wondered why that sounded so much like a threat.

  Lucy Blake had driven three miles before she said, with reluctant admiration, ‘You’re a clever devil, Percy Peach. Matthew Hayward thinks we know a lot more about that squat than we actually do.’

  He was silent, and for a while she thought he was revelling in this praise. Then Peach said, ‘The next interesting research is to discover exactly what it was that he was holding back from us.’

  Ten

  Tommy Bloody Tucker on television was a thing of wonder. It was over a year since his last such appearance, and Percy Peach, watching him on the monitor in the privacy of his own room, admitted to himself that he could not have done anything like as well.

  Percy could never have inspired such confidence in the public by his very appearance, for a start. Tucker was in his best uniform, spruce as a matinee idol, earnest as a bishop, with his still plentiful and lightly waved hair specially trimmed for the occasion. The silvering at his temples gave just the appropriate gravitas to his message. The Chief Superintendent’s regular features had been skilfully treated by the make-up girl; he contrived to look healthy, vigorous, and yet weighed down by an appropriate concern.

  The police needed the public’s help, he said, in the matter of the woman’s body unearthed during the demolition work near the centre of Brunton four days earlier. A moment’s thought would make it obvious to every citizen how difficult an investigation of this kind, into a death which had happened many years earlier, must be.

  He had taken personal charge of this investigation from the moment the corpse was discovered, and he was gratified to report now that substantial, some would say surprising, progress had already been made. For a start, there was not a shadow of doubt that this was murder. Chief Superintendent Tucker faced the camera head-on and made a suitably melodramatic use of that word, which always chilled and excited the public.

  The victim was a young woman named Sunita Akhtar, nineteen at the time of her death. Diligent enquiries had revealed that this seemed to have taken place early in 1991, probably in March. To pinpoint the time of death so accurately thirteen years later was no mean feat of detection, as Tucker reminded his questioner with a modest smile.

  It seemed the young lady had been living unlawfully in a house which had been condemned for slum clearance and cleared of its legitimate occupants – what was commonly known as a ‘squat’. The immaculate Tucker pronounced the word with distaste and took the opportunity to emphasize the dangers to young people in choosing to inhabit such places. His interviewer enquired gently whether the police should not have been checking on such unlawful occupation back in 1991, and perhaps even preventing it.

  Tucker was ready for her: as Percy Peach noted with reluctant admiration in his private viewing, he hadn’t risen to the dizzying rank he held without honours in bullshit. His interviewer was obviously far too young and pretty to remember it, Tucker implied, but back in 1990 things were very different. Cardboard cities were springing up throughout the kingdom. Perhaps the authorities had been happy to see young people with a solid roof over their heads, even in a condemned property. And no doubt the policemen then in charge had had other and more serious crimes on their hands at the time, he added tolerantly. He contrived to imply that this was long before he was on the scene, and his interviewer was too far away to pick up the sound of Percy Peach’s fiercely grinding teeth.

  The modern police force was a formidably efficient unit. Tucker produced a visual aid, in the form of a street map centred on Sebastopol Terrace, the scene of the crime. The cameras had shown the desolate waste on the building site in the introduction to this item. Tucker pointed to his map and explained that he had now been able to establish exactly where this partly mummified body had lain for all these years. It had been hidden not in the squat in which Sunita Akhtar had lived out the last months of her short life, but in the unoccupied house next door.

  Paint samples from fragments of wood and the clothing of the deceased revealed that a broken door had been used to immure the corpse in the chimney breast of this derelict house, where it had lain undiscovered until the development firm moved in with its heavy machinery.

  Peach was fascinated despite himself as he watched the latest forensic findings, which he had delivered
to his Chief Superintendent that morning, now made to seem a product of the individual diligence of Tucker himself. The man made a passing reference to his team, but he contrived to imply that they were dull plodders, who would have been lost without the forceful direction and insights of their chief.

  The girl interviewing this modern Colossus of detection, newly arrived at Granada Television from local radio, now offered an observation so much to Tucker’s taste that Peach wondered if she had been primed with it before the exchange began. She said that she supposed the police team could know very little as yet of the people who had occupied this long-departed squat, who it now seemed had contained a murderer within their number.

  Tucker raised a benign, controlling hand. ‘We must not jump to any such conclusion. The layman might do that, but the experienced senior policeman in charge of a case like this knows that he must keep an open mind. It is still possible that Sunita was killed by some other person entirely, who merely hid her body in that bleak place.’ He allowed himself an enigmatic smile. ‘Nor is it true to say that I know nothing of the people who occupied that squat.’

  Tucker made the dramatic pause of the experienced ham and looked straight into the camera, his grey eyes filling with a steely threat. ‘I already know that there were three males and three females in that squat at the time of this death. One of the females was the deceased. We are anxious to make contact with the other five people who were living unlawfully at number twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace in the early months of 1991. One of them has already been found and interviewed. It is only a matter of time before the others are discovered. I urge them now to come forward and declare themselves. This is a serious crime, and that is their duty. No one who is innocent has anything to fear.’

  ‘You sound very determined, Chief Superintendent Tucker. Is this case something of a personal crusade?’

  His smile as he regarded her was modest, understanding and confident at the same time: a masterpiece of public relations art. ‘I cannot say that, Jenny. The modern senior policeman has to keep an overview of crime, to have an eye for the broader picture. But you are right: I take a crime of this sort on my patch very seriously indeed. I shall not be counting the hours I work in the days ahead.’ He took a deep breath whilst he turned the full force of Tucker sincerity on the camera in front of him. ‘It is fair to say that I am confident of a successful outcome, and determined to bring to justice the person responsible for this dreadful murder.’