Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘I see. Then I can’t see what I have to offer you.’

  ‘How old are you, Mr Edmonds?’

  ‘Thirty-seven. What is the relevance of that?’

  ‘None. Except that I wouldn’t expect someone of that age to be suffering from memory loss. I’m a year older than you, and I can recall perfectly well what I was doing thirteen years ago.’

  It was insulting, but David’s racing mind told him that he had much better swallow it. ‘And so can I. I just don’t see the relevance of this.’

  ‘Don’t you, sir? We have reason to believe that you were very familiar with what was going on at twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace. That you visited the empty house next door on several occasions and took part in what have been described to us as drugs parties.’

  ‘I’ve never done drugs. I fear you’ve picked up the wrong man here, Chief Inspector. And I think you’ve wasted my time for quite long enough.’ He tried to push back his chair and rise, but was disconcerted to find that it was bolted to the floor. And his own legs did not seem to be working as he would have wished.

  Peach gave him a much grimmer smile. ‘I do hope you’re not going to refuse to co-operate, Mr Edmonds. Of course, if you feel that you need to have a lawyer present for this exchange, you are perfectly entitled to enlist one.’

  David did a quick evaluation and saw the nightmare scenario of his wife, his children, his parents-in-law having to be told all about this section of his life. He said, ‘Of course I don’t need a lawyer! I’m sure I’m capable of clearing up this misunderstanding without any legal advice.’

  ‘Misunderstanding.’ Peach pursed his lips, then articulated every syllable of the word distinctly. ‘I don’t see any reason for any confusion here. We’re saying that you were in that house at that time. That you brought drugs there for sale. Are you denying that?’

  David wondered exactly how much they knew already. The man seemed very confident. Perhaps they were letting him tie himself in knots, and then would throw irrefutable evidence into his face, from someone who had been there at the time. He looked at the cassette, turning slowly, silently, incriminatingly. He wished now that he had objected to it in the first place, but it was too late to turn the clock back now. He couldn’t see how he could do anything else but co-operate, or at least give the appearance of co-operating. He couldn’t let them know everything, of course.

  He said through dry lips, ‘What is it you want to know?’

  Peach nodded his approval of this change in attitude. ‘Everything you can tell us about those parties at number twenty-eight, Mr Edmonds. And everything you know about the people occupying the squat next door at number twenty-six. So that we can put it together with what other people who were there at the time are telling us and see how far it tallies.’

  ‘I deny that I was dealing in drugs, for a start.’

  ‘Pity, that. There’s a caution on record, you see. It reads to me as if you were very lucky to get away without a prosecution and a conviction at the time.’

  ‘That wasn’t at Sebastopol Terrace. That was months later, in the summer.’

  ‘Your memory seems to be coming back quite well now, doesn’t it? Very gratifying, that. Let me pinpoint it for you. You were cautioned for dealing in drugs on June the twenty-second 1991. You had been apprehended in the car park of a Brunton public house. Not in Sebastopol Terrace, as you now recall so vividly, though within a mile of it.’

  For a wild moment, David wondered if he could deny it. He wanted to say that this man wasn’t him at all, that this was a hideous case of mistaken identity, that the thick-headed police would be apologizing to him, when their error became obvious even to them. Instead, he heard himself saying dully, ‘That was a long time ago, in another life.’

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps you could even demonstrate that to us, if we had the time. But it wouldn’t be of any great interest to us, Mr Edmonds. Because it’s that other life we’re interested in, you see. And I think you know why that is.’

  ‘The murder of Sunita Akhtar.’ Again he hadn’t meant to say that. The words had come unbidden to his lips.

  ‘That is what we’re investigating. Along with a team of almost thirty other officers.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. You won’t expect us merely to accept that statement, however. It will need to be investigated. Which is what we are now beginning to do. You say you didn’t kill her. So can you tell us who did?’

  ‘No. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But you knew the girl.’

  It was a statement, not a question. David wondered if he should have denied all knowledge of her, defied them to prove any connection between this caution he had received for dealing and the dead girl. But he didn’t know how much they already knew, how much he could dare to lie. He said, ‘I think I did. There was a Pakistani girl used to attend our little gatherings sometimes. I don’t remember her name, not at this distance, but I’ll assume it was her, if that’s what you’re telling me.’

  You’re lying, thought Peach. You know perfectly well it was Sunita, but you’re trying to distance yourself from the girl. Why? I wonder. What else have you to hide? He leaned forward and said, ‘It’s my belief that you met Sunita Akhtar at number twenty-eight Sebastopol Terrace quite frequently.’

  ‘I don’t remember that. But it’s too long ago for me to deny it. I’ve already said that I have only the haziest memories of the girl.’

  ‘It’s rather important to us that you start to remember more. Important to you as well, if you’ve nothing to hide. This is a murder investigation. We’d like to eliminate you from the list of suspects, if that proves to be possible.’ Peach managed to imply that he thought this was very unlikely.

  ‘She was one of a group. She didn’t say a lot. She was quite attractive, I think. I can’t remember much else about her.’ He spoke tersely, picking his words like one anxious not to make any mistakes with them.

  ‘We’ll have to try to help that memory of yours, then.’ Peach stroked his moustache and gave his man a sardonic smile. ‘Describe your relationship with this murdered girl, please.’

  David wished this truculent, muscular man wouldn’t keep mentioning murder. It didn’t help, when you were fighting to save whatever you could of your reputation. ‘I’ve only the vaguest recollection of her. I didn’t see her that often.’

  ‘What was the purpose of these meetings in a deserted house?’

  ‘We smoked a little pot, that’s all. I’m not proud of it. It seemed like fun at the time.’

  ‘Funny place to have parties like that. An empty house, with no heating and light. And most of the doors removed for fuel by the people in the squat next door, if my experience of squats is any guide.’

  ‘We got by. I took an electric fire in with me to give us a bit of warmth, I remember. But I expect most of the meetings were in the spring and the summer. It’s difficult all these years later to—’

  ‘No electricity in the house at that stage of its life, was there? Made a mistake on that one, Mr Edmonds, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I remember now, I used to buy one of those small bags of coal from a garage, on the way there. Well, it wasn’t always me, I expect. Others must have taken their turn to buy the fuel, but—’

  ‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr Edmonds!’ It was Peach who was terse now, dangerously so. ‘At this rate, we’re going to be here for a long time. So, let me shorten that time. I believe that it wasn’t just cannabis involved at those meetings.’

  ‘You forget how much more relaxed things are now than then. It may be regarded as just a recreational drug now, but in those days—’

  ‘And I don’t buy all this rubbish about meeting for parties. There was no heat in that place, and you didn’t bring coal or any other fuel into it. You were there to deal, not smoke. And you were dealing more than pot. Heroin, coke, probably LSD in those days. Probably other Class A and Class B drugs as well.’

  David Edmonds had
taught himself to look people straight in the face as he had climbed the hierarchy at Ormerod’s. It was important when you were selling property to have eye contact with people: it gave the illusion at least of frankness and sincerity.

  Now he discovered that he could not look this odious tormentor in the eye. He found himself staring hard at the small, scratched table between the two of them and trying hard to summon up the convincing defence which would not come to him. He wanted to shout, ‘Prove it!’ at the man, to fling defiance into his face. But something told him that it would be foolish to provoke this man, to challenge him to come up with evidence. Perhaps, indeed, he already had that evidence, was just allowing his quarry to wander ever deeper into the mire. He shook his head and said heavily, ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  In the tension of his struggle with Peach he had almost forgotten the watchful girl beside him. It was she who now said unexpectedly, ‘Then tell us how it was, Mr Edmonds. We can only help you if you are prepared to help us.’

  He looked up into clear eyes, which seemed green to him in the harsh fluorescent light of this square, claustrophobic room. ‘You already know from that caution that I was dealing. But I was a small man in a big, dangerous world. I gave it up quickly after that caution. It scared me.’

  She let that assertion hang unconvincingly in the air for a moment, as Peach had taught her to do when you got an improbable reply. ‘I should think other people scared you far more than the police, Mr Edmonds. Drugs are a big industry: a lucrative, evil industry. There are some very big criminal fish in it. Fish who would devour a small dealer like you for breakfast. It’s my belief that you were warned off by them.’

  He nodded. They seemed to know far more than he had even feared. He wondered what they were going to do about it. ‘I got out while I could. I’ve never been sorry about that. And you must admit that—’

  ‘It’s your dealings at twenty-eight Sebastopol Terrace which interest us. The house where the body of a murdered girl was hidden.’

  She was almost as bad as his first torturer, this girl in the green sweater, with her pretty face and her soft curves and her gentle, persuasive voice. He said hopelessly, ‘What is it you want to know?’

  ‘Tell us about your relationship with Sunita.’

  ‘I hardly knew her. She was living next door and she came in with someone else. She was only there a few times.’

  ‘Mr Edmonds, we have already established that these weren’t merely parties. Number twenty-eight was where you briefed people who were dealing for you, wasn’t it?’

  He shook his head, trying to find the words which would make a denial convincing. ‘Sunita came in with someone else.’

  It was at this point that Peach re-entered the exchange, like an official torturer giving the rack another and crucial turn. ‘Not good enough, Mr Edmonds. These meetings didn’t last long. You were expanding your activities in drugs. Moving from dealing yourself to creating your own network of small-time dealers. It was a good place to brief them, you thought. Away from the police and away from other and larger figures in the drugs industry. Sunita Akhtar was one of the people you recruited to work for you.’

  He spoke with such certainty that no one would have known that this was speculation rather than established fact.

  David Edmonds certainly didn’t. He said, ‘All right, I admit it. She was dealing for me, that girl.’

  ‘Along with several others. Weren’t you lucky to get away with a mere caution, in that year?’ Peach dwelt a little on the last phrase, as though considering whether they might even now choose to prosecute, in view of his admission. ‘So what went wrong with the empire you were building for yourself?’

  ‘I told you. The police caution scared me off.’

  ‘Not good enough, Mr Edmonds. That wasn’t what stopped you.’

  His eyes flashed desperately round the featureless green walls of the small room, came back to the relentlessly turning cassette in the tape recorder. ‘I’ve a lot to lose here. I’m an established figure in a perfectly legitimate business now. Do I have your assurance that this won’t go any further?’

  Peach gave him the smile of a tiger poised over its helpless prey. ‘You have no such assurance. No one could give you one, in the middle of a murder inquiry. If all of this proves to have nothing to do with this killing, it won’t be made public by us. But you may of course be called as a witness in a murder inquiry, and questioned in court about your activities at that time. It should be obvious to you by now that your best chance of keeping the lid on all of this is to give us the fullest possible co-operation. So far we’ve had to wring everything out of you.’

  It didn’t feel like that to David Edmonds. He felt that he had hardly mustered even a token resistance. But by now he was in no condition to argue. ‘All right. I’m sorry. Please understand that I thought all this was far behind me, that I’d never even have to think about it again, let alone talk about it. What is it that you want to know?’

  ‘For a start, what it was which really stopped you dealing. It wasn’t just a caution from the Brunton CID. That merely proved that they didn’t know enough about what you were doing to charge you. If they’d had the evidence to show that you were setting up a ring of dealers, you’d have been behind bars. So who was it who warned you off?’

  ‘Joe Johnson.’ His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but the name was perfectly clear in the quiet, airless room.

  ‘I thought so.’ From a base in Brunton, twenty years ago, Johnson had created a drugs and betting empire which extended through the north-west of England. It had been Percy Peach’s greatest achievement of recent years to put him behind bars a few months previously, for his part in the murder of a young prostitute. ‘That’s better. We’re beginning to get answers which make sense at last. Now tell us about Sunita Akhtar, and what went wrong with your arrangements with her.’

  ‘She came to me, you know. I didn’t go out looking for her.’

  ‘All right. Hardly matters, does it? What happened to her is the important thing. The reason why the three of us are buggering up our Sunday in an interview room at Brunton nick.’

  ‘She came and asked to deal. Wanted the money. Said she couldn’t do legitimate work for fear of her family finding out about it.’ He looked up at them, flashing his troubled gaze from one earnest face to the other. ‘Was that true?’

  ‘It may have been. So you took her on.’

  ‘Yes. She only wanted to do pot, and that was all I wanted to trust her with, for a start.’ He shook his head and said with sudden bitter emphasis, ‘I wish I’d never seen the damned girl!’

  ‘I expect that was mutual, in view of what happened to her,’ said Peach grimly. ‘So what went wrong with the arrangement?’

  ‘The attention she brought with her from next door. That’s what went wrong! I should never have entertained using her. I didn’t realize how little she knew about the dangers of the trade.’

  ‘Wally.’ Peach nodded sagely, as if he knew everything about a man who was no more than a name to him.

  ‘Wally Swift. He knew far more than I knew about drugs. I was a novice.’

  ‘I can believe that. I expect he warned you off.’

  ‘He did more than that. He questioned Sunita, frightened her to death.’ As the apposite nature of that phrase struck him, he shivered suddenly in the warm room. ‘Swift pinned me in the corner of the pub car park and told me to get off his patch. I tried to say there was room for both of us, but he wasn’t having that. He had me by the throat at the time and I wasn’t going to argue. I thought that night that he was going to kill me, but he said there were other men to do that, that he didn’t need to soil his hands with me.’

  ‘He was working for Johnson?’

  ‘I’m sure he was. It wasn’t mentioned – you don’t throw names about in the drugs trade – but I already knew Johnson was the big player in the area.’

  ‘So you got out. Scared off not by a police caution but by Joe Johnson.’r />
  David wanted to argue. Apart from anything else, it made him sound a wimp, and he wasn’t used to that nowadays. He made an attempt to assert the worthiness of his present position. ‘Anyway, they did me a favour, those people. I found a different and better way to make a living, in estate agency.’

  Peach nodded and gave him the smile all of Brunton CID would have recognized as dangerous. ‘Yes. You took up a different kind of lying and distortion, some people would say. Not me, of course. Married the boss’s daughter. Joined the Masons. Lived happily ever afterwards. Until someone discovered your murky past.’ He studied the sweating man in front of him dispassionately for a moment, then rapped out, ‘So what happened to Sunita Akhtar?’

  ‘I told her I couldn’t use her any more. I don’t know what became of her after that.’ David was fighting hard to convince them, to find words which would ring true, but he knew himself that he was far too shaken to be persuasive.

  ‘And when would this be?’

  ‘Some time in the spring of 1991. I can’t be any more precise than that. It’s a long time ago. And it’s a part of my life I’ve put a long way behind me.’

  Peach looked at him sourly. ‘Let me put another scenario to you, Mr Edmonds. Sunita Akhtar knew too much about your activities. She’d already let you down with Wally Swift. She was a walking time bomb as far as you were concerned. So you put her out of the way.’

  David Edmonds tried to control the panic he felt welling within him. ‘No. I’m not a man for physical violence. I could no more strangle a helpless girl than fly to the moon. You’ll see that I have no record of physical violence, anywhere in my life.’

  That was true enough. But there was no need to concede the point. Peach said, ‘You’re not planning to leave the area, are you, Mr Edmonds?’

  ‘I’m going away for a family holiday, that’s all. We’re off to Madeira for a bit of early spring sunshine.’