Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

‘Matthew Hayward?’

  He was absurdly disconcerted by this prompt response, when he had thought to put her on her back foot. ‘You’re still in touch with him?’

  ‘No. I’ve followed his career from afar. I heard him on the radio the other night, playing the Emperor concerto with the Hallé. A patient of mine wanted to listen. He said Matt was going to be one of the greats. I hope he was right.’

  ‘He’s probably right. We were in the Bridgewater Hall, waiting to speak to Matthew Hayward after that concert. He got a tremendous reception. Your patient has good judgement.’

  ‘Had, Chief Inspector. He died the next morning.’ There was at once acceptance and compassion in the simple statement, without a trace of sentimentality. Percy Peach had the absurd, irrelevant thought that he’d like to be nursed by this woman, if someone told him he was dying.

  He drew the pad towards him and said, ‘Tell me what you remember of Mr Hayward.’

  ‘Matt. He’ll always be young Matt, to me. Not that he was much younger than me, at the time. We were both pretty wet behind the ears, when I look back on it.’

  ‘How did you come to be there?’

  ‘My mother died of cancer when I was eighteen. I should have been going to university at the end of that school year, but I missed a lot of schooling to nurse her through the last months. I’d never been as close to my dad as I was to her. When he started bringing home other women in the year after Mum died, I couldn’t stand it. We had a series of rows and I moved out after the last one. I lived at a friend’s house for a couple of weeks, but it was obvious that I couldn’t stay there. Her mother kept trying to get me to go back home. I wandered around those deserted houses one autumn day and ended up in the squat. Matt moved in just after me.’

  ‘And moved out a fortnight after Sunita disappeared. Is that correct?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. About that time, anyway: she’d certainly disappeared before he went.’ She wondered how much this calm man with the piercing black eyes and the startlingly bald head knew about what had gone on all those years ago. This was a completely alien world to her. She had never even set foot in a police station until this morning.

  Peach nodded quietly. ‘Do you think he killed her?’

  It was shocking in its calm, matter-of-fact delivery. The figure in black on the other side of his desk looked very calm to Percy Peach, and that was a challenge in itself.

  ‘No! Of course he didn’t!’

  ‘Someone did, Sister Josephine. Almost certainly one of the five people who were living with her at twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace.’ He studied her coolly, reminding himself that even nuns could have awful secrets.

  ‘I’m sure it wasn’t Matt!’

  ‘How sure? He was her lover, wasn’t he?’

  She felt a tremor at the thought of how much this man already knew, how difficult it would be to prevent him from discovering everything. ‘Yes, he was, for a time. But not at the time when she disappeared.’

  For the first time, she was looking at the desk, not at him. Perhaps she did not like discussing sexual liaisons. Too bad: this was a murder investigation. He said, ‘Who broke off their affair?’

  ‘She did.’

  That was definite enough. ‘Then look at it from our point of view for a moment. The boy was rejected by a girl who subsequently disappears, almost certainly because she was murdered. Her body is hidden in the deserted house next door to number twenty-six. A couple of weeks later, Matthew Hayward himself leaves the squat and never returns. Suspicious?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t think Matt killed Sunita.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t come here to tell you that.’

  He let a few seconds drag by, knowing that eventually she would have to look up into his face again. ‘Did you kill the girl, Sister Josephine?’

  ‘No.’ She did not seem to find the idea as preposterous as it sounded to him.

  ‘I had to ask.’

  ‘And no doubt you will have to keep me in the frame, until you know otherwise. That’s what you call it, isn’t it? In the frame. I pick up all kinds of fragments in the television room at the hospice, you see!’ She smiled at him, mocking him a little.

  He had the uncomfortable thought that she certainly seemed cool and competent enough to be a murderer, if circumstances had required it. He allowed himself an answering smile. ‘I think you had better tell me everything you can about the other people in that squat. Start with Sunita Akhtar, please.’

  He was surprised how much this seemed to upset her. Perhaps it was just the thought of murder, of this girl she had lived with being violently dispatched by one of her fellow-residents. ‘She was a disturbed girl, Sunita.’

  ‘Can you enlarge upon that? First of all, can you confirm that she had left home because her parents wanted her to contract an arranged marriage?’

  ‘Yes. She hadn’t anyone else in mind at the time, but her father wanted her to marry an older man, whom she didn’t like anyway. I think it was her father rather than her mother, but of course in her culture, fathers were powerful men, even more so thirteen years ago than now.’

  ‘Would you say Sunita was emotionally disturbed whilst she was with you in that house?’

  This time it was she who paused, taking the time to consider her answer carefully. ‘I’d say she was when she first came there. Matt was a nice lad, but I think at that time she’d have given herself to any man of her own age who was sympathetic and attracted to her.’

  ‘So you’d say she was unstable?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure I’d say that. Did Matt tell you that she was?’

  ‘He thought she might have offered her sexual favours around, after she finished with him. Even sold them, perhaps.’

  ‘She didn’t do that.’ The reply was prompt, even terse.

  ‘You’re sure of it?’

  ‘Yes. Sunita was desperate for money at times, but she didn’t resort to that.’ It was suddenly important to her to convince him.

  ‘It’s rather important to us, this question. You see, if Sunita was selling herself to people outside the squat, it opens up a new range of possibilities about her death.’

  ‘She wasn’t.’ Again the reply came promptly on the heels of her questioner’s words.

  Peach wondered if this was prudery, whether she was embarrassed to talk to a man about sexual matters. But she hadn’t seemed in any way inhibited previously. ‘You must see that this increases the likelihood that she was killed by one of your friends in the squat.’

  ‘Yes, I do see that. But it doesn’t alter the facts. And I wouldn’t describe all of them as friends. When you’re desperate enough to be living like that, you can’t choose your company. We were thrown together by a common need for a roof over our heads, not by anything else we had in common.’

  Peach nodded. ‘I understand that, Sister. And this is the kind of frankness we need if we are to find out who killed Sunita. Tell me what you remember of the other occupants of that house, please.’

  ‘Matt you know about. Did he tell you about Wally?’

  ‘A little, yes. But I need your impression. It may be quite different.’

  ‘I doubt that. He was a bull of a man. When I look back at life in that place now, I think Wally controlled all of us. He certainly did exactly as he wanted to, and I don’t think any of us would have dared to cross him.’

  ‘How old do you think he was?’

  ‘I think of him as much older than I was then. He probably wasn’t. I’d guess now that he was then about twenty-four or five.’

  ‘We need a description of him.’

  She nodded slowly, picking words which came oddly from beneath a nun’s headdress. ‘Powerfully built, but not all that tall. Swarthy; he had a beard, which I think he grew whilst we were in that place. We didn’t have hot water on tap, so shaving couldn’t have been easy. And he exuded menace, physical menace – I always felt he’d fell me with a back-hander, if I upset him.’

>   ‘Did you see him hit anyone?’

  ‘No. I think we were all a bit frightened of him, and that was probably enough. He was there when I got there: I don’t know what had gone on with the others before then.’

  ‘Accent?’

  ‘Difficult. Not from Brunton, I’d have said, but probably Lancashire. Not Liverpool, definitely not a Scouser – I’ve nursed one or two of them since then and I’d know.’ For a second an affectionate smile of remembrance lit up her smooth countenance.

  ‘Have you any idea where he is now?’

  ‘Not a clue, I’m afraid. I haven’t even thought about him for years. Haven’t wanted to, as a matter of fact, whereas I’ve been delighted to keep tabs on Matty Hayward’s progress. I’d be pretty sure that Wally wasn’t his proper name, by the way. He was there when I landed in that squat, and he was there when I left it.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  ‘May, 1991. About a month after Matt, or perhaps a little more. I went back to the school where I’d spent six years. The nuns gave me work in the kitchen, encouraged me to take a few exams. As you can see, I eventually decided to enter the order. But they’ve allowed me to do my own thing in the hospice for the last three years. I said I’d found my calling, that I was staying there, even if they took the habit away from me. So far, they haven’t.’ She lifted her arms a little beneath the black folds, let them fall back to her sides, and grinned at him. He saw in that moment the feisty, independent woman she had been, the difficult opponent she could still be.

  ‘Two other people were in the house at the time of this death. I need everything you can give me about them.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘Billy. That was the other man. Very black, very sharp. Slung out by his stepfather. He was the youngest of all of us, but in some ways he knew more about surviving in a squat than any of us. He’d got used to living on his wits from when he was a kid of ten or so, I think.’

  ‘What kind of relationship did he have with Sunita?’

  Again he fancied she was frowning, but he could not see her forehead behind the white linen. Again he was forced to realize how much you needed the whole face to gauge how people were reacting.

  She said, ‘They were close. He educated her in the ways of the squat. Told her not to ask questions, how to make the most of the food we got, how to keep warm on winter nights.’

  ‘Sexually close?’

  ‘No. I think he was quite keen on Sunita. They were the two non-whites in the group, and I think Billy wanted her to feel a common bond. She was grateful to him for his help, but there was nothing sexual between them.’

  He wondered for a moment how she could be so certain of that. But there was little privacy in a squat, where everyone was living from hand to mouth and the occupants tended to congregate in one room for warmth for a lot of the time. He said, ‘But you think they were close to each other?’

  ‘Yes. They were good friends.’ Her face clouded a little. ‘They used to go next door together, to what Billy called raves. At number twenty-eight.’

  Percy Peach’s heart sank. A new dimension to the crime, with God knew how many other people brought into its periphery. ‘You’d better tell me what you know about these gatherings.’

  ‘I didn’t understand them at the time. Remember, I was a convent girl who’d led a very sheltered life, until I arrived there. I think now that there were drugs involved. Sunita came back high, and I know she didn’t drink. I don’t think they were “raves” at all, not as I’d understand the word. Things were very quiet, for a start. I think that there were only a few people there, and that they probably just sat around and smoked pot. I wouldn’t know whether there was anything stronger available. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, drugs were around, but we weren’t as conscious of them. But you’d know that!’ She gave him a wan smile.

  ‘I wasn’t around here then, but no one thought Brunton had a major drugs problem at that time. Did any of the others take part in these gatherings at number twenty-eight?’

  ‘No. Only Billy at first. Then Sunita went with him, not more than two or three times, as far as I can remember.’ She paused, studying him closely. ‘That’s where the body was found, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know anything about the man who organized these meetings?’

  ‘No. I’ve tried hard to dig something out of my memory over the last few hours, but I don’t think I ever knew. Probably didn’t want to know, at the time. I know that I didn’t like Sunita slipping off like that, but it paid you to mind your own business, in a squat.’

  ‘What else can you remember about this Billy?’

  ‘He was average height, slim and athletic. Quite a sportsman, I think. He’d had a trial with the Rovers, but he reckoned he’d blown it by being unreliable.’ Her face suddenly brightened with recall. ‘Billy went off to Preston North End, though. That’s just this minute come back to me. They took him on, gave him an apprenticeship, or whatever you’d call it in sporting terms. He said he was going to make a go of it this time. He was still very young, you know, probably only seventeen or eighteen at the time. And they fitted him up with digs in Preston, which got him out of the squat. Some time in the summer of 1991, that would be.’

  It gave them a start. With average luck, someone would still be around at Preston who remembered a slim black boy named Billy arriving there, thirteen and a half years earlier. A boy who had apparently tried for a relationship with Sunita Akhtar, and been rebuffed.

  Peach looked at his now encouragingly lengthy notes. ‘That just leaves the other girl in the set-up.’

  ‘Emmy. Tall, shapely, streetwise. Three or four inches taller than me, so probably about five feet nine. Twenty-one. I remember her announcing that it was her birthday, one bitterly cold day in January.’ For a moment, she was back in that bleak world where she seemed to have been another person entirely. ‘We weren’t particularly close, Emmy and I. We came from very different backgrounds. She’d been brought up hard, with a mother who brought home a succession of different “uncles” for the girl to cope with. She had a low opinion of men in general, as you might expect, but she didn’t have much time for me, either. I can understand why: I was still wet behind the ears, as I said earlier, and Em wasn’t the most patient of women.’

  ‘I’m told she was a blonde.’

  She reminded herself again that she wasn’t his only source of information about these people. ‘Yes. I’m sorry, didn’t I say that? I think she was a natural blonde, too. It wasn’t easy to do anything sophisticated with your hair, in that place. In case you’re wondering, I’m a brunette, under this lot!’ She flicked her hand briefly towards her head.

  ‘What about her relationships with the others?’

  ‘She was a tough cookie, was Emmy. She even stood up to Wally, when she felt she needed to. Mind you, most of the time she kept herself to herself, like the rest of us. But she seemed to have more confidence that she was going to survive and go on to better things than anyone else in there.’

  ‘How did she get on with Sunita?’

  ‘I don’t think she liked her much. Emmy had a contempt for her naivety, for a start – but she felt that for me too.’ She paused, as if wondering whether to speculate further. ‘But she seemed to resent Sunita being there at all, sometimes. She seemed to think she was a source of danger for us.’

  ‘As she may have been, for someone. Someone who felt a need to remove her permanently from the scene.’

  ‘Yes. I’m well used to death at the hospice, but I’ve never had to confront one like this before. Forgive me, but I find the thought of Sunita dying alone like that, with all her life in front of her, very disturbing.’

  Suddenly she was weeping, dropping silent tears into a man’s large white handkerchief which had arrived in her hand from nowhere. It was odd, after her previous composure.

  Peach said, ‘Thank you for coming in here this morning, Sister Josephine. I can assure you that what you have told me will be most useful to the team investig
ating this killing. All we can do for Sunita now is to find her killer and bring him to justice.’

  She composed herself and stood up. ‘I understand what you say, but I’ve become accustomed to thinking in terms of divine justice, which is sometimes rather different from the human sort in which you have to deal.’ The handkerchief had disappeared as mysteriously as it had arrived. ‘Thank you for being so considerate. I think I’ve given you all I can. If I think of anything else in the days to come, I shall be in touch with you.’

  She was back in the privacy of her room at the hospice before she allowed herself to analyse what she had said to that strange, understanding Chief Inspector Peach. He seemed to think she’d been helpful to him.

  She hadn’t been able to tell him everything, of course.

  Twelve

  David Edmonds could not remember when he had last been in the office on a Sunday. Ten years ago at least, he reckoned, back in the days when he was a trainee negotiator. Before he had proved himself in the estate agency business. Before he had married the boss’s daughter.

  It wasn’t a bad thing, opening up the offices of Ormerod’s Limited and spending a quiet Sunday morning there alone. It gave you privacy. He enjoyed being a family man with three young children, enjoyed the image of wholesome respectability, but he had almost forgotten what it was like to have the luxury of being alone with your own plans for a couple of hours.

  He had booked them all into a good hotel in Madeira, got quite a good deal with a late booking. He took one or two pictures of the swimming pool and the dining room off the Internet to show to the children; he would be greeted as a hero when he returned home at lunchtime. Then he rang his father-in-law to give him the news; no harm in letting the boss know that you were hard at work on a Sunday morning, when others were still in bed with the Sunday papers. ‘I’ve arranged a couple of viewings for this afternoon,’ he informed Stanley Ormerod. ‘It’s good to have time to myself in the office: I want to tie up all the loose ends before I go off to Madeira, as I said on Friday.’

  There were four properties which were marked as ‘Sold, subject to contract’. David Edmonds left memos for the staff concerned, instructing them to push solicitors for definite exchange dates, to harry the prospective purchasers a little to make sure they were serious. People talked about gazumping, but much more often it was the purchasers who let you down, in his experience.