by J M Gregson
‘And what reasons do you have for this view?’
She wanted to chant the words mockingly back into his smug face. Instead, she said, ‘No reasons, except my own experience. I know a thing or two about sex, that’s all.’
‘And you’re sure that it was Sunita who got rid of Matty, and not the other way round?’
‘Quite sure. And I couldn’t say I was sorry at the time. Cocky young sod had it coming to him.’
‘And how did Matty react when Sunita wanted out?’
‘He cut up rough, didn’t he? Silly bugger should have seen it coming, but he didn’t. And when she shacked up with a woman, he couldn’t take that.’
Not a muscle moved on either of the two contrasting faces which were studying her hard, experienced features so intently. Not a flicker revealed that this was new and sensational news to them. From what she had said, the woman didn’t mean herself. That left only one woman, however unlikely a candidate she seemed for the role. The woman who was now Sister Josephine.
Peach said evenly, ‘I think you’d better tell us everything you can remember about this third woman in the squat.’
‘Jo. High and mighty Jo. The woman who talked about principles, and lived in a squat. The woman who told me to keep my hands off Sunita, and then turned out to be a dyke.’
Seeing the two thirteen years later, Peach would have expected a personality clash between the woman he had seen only as the virtuous Sister Josephine, working her heart out in a hospice, and this stone-faced blonde who seemed to know so much about the seamier side of the world. Even when they were half-formed young women thrown together in the exigencies of the squatters’ existence, he would have expected them to clash. That was no bad thing now: a woman full of resentment was likely to reveal things she would otherwise have concealed.
He said, ‘You’re sure this relationship was sexual?’
‘If you call sleeping together every night, if you call shutting themselves off in their own room, if you call moans of pleasure echoing through the house sexual, yes. Of course it was! That Jo was a dyke, talking high-flown rubbish about moral choices but just waiting for the chance to get a bit of Asian pussy under her blankets!’
Peach watched her breathing heavily, noting her vehemence with interest. Then he said calmly, ‘You said this Jo warned you to keep your hands off Sunita. That implies that you had designs upon her yourself.’
‘Not to get my hands on her, I hadn’t. Jane Watson might have been around, but she’s never been a dyke!’
He could see her suddenly with her coarse, indignant features as a man; one of those National Front thugs who had lately been causing so much trouble in the town, perhaps, with their homophobia and their racism. But this woman was more intelligent than those tattooed and unthinking louts. And probably as a result more dangerous.
Peach said suddenly, ‘Why Jane? Em was good enough in that squat.’
‘That’s my business.’
‘Possibly. But what you did as Emily Watson was ours.’
She’d suspected all along that they knew, that they were playing cat and mouse with her about it. She’d run rings round that Tucker bloke, at the time, but that wasn’t going to happen now with these two. But there was nothing they could pin upon her, if she gave them nothing: she told herself that firmly. Make them work for everything, from now on. She used her haughtiest businesswoman’s tone to say, ‘I’ve no idea what you mean, Chief Inspector.’
‘I think you do. Within two years of leaving that squat in Sebastopol Terrace, you were running a disorderly house. Operating a ring of prostitutes. Living off immoral earnings.’
‘Prove it! Your Superintendent Tucker never did, and he was around at the time.’
Percy Peach was used to picking up the pieces after Tommy Bloody Tucker. But not pieces from before he was even on the scene. ‘I don’t have to, Miss Emily Watson! Fortunately for you, I’m not interested in doing so, at this distance in time. I’m interested in a murder which took place three years earlier, and your possible part in that.’
‘Guilty until proved innocent now, is it?’
Peach answered her sneer with his most impudent grin. ‘Not a bad motto for an investigating officer, that, when the evidence is thin upon the ground. We’re paid good money to be suspicious buggers, in CID!’ He paused to register how eminently satisfying he found that thought. ‘It’s my belief that you were not only operating as a prostitute yourself early in 1991, but that you tried to recruit Sunita Akhtar to go on the game.’
It was a hit, a very palpable hit. She snarled, ‘Prove it! I defy you to prove it!’ at him, but it was no more than a ritual defiance. She was wondering furiously whom he had talked to, who it was that might have passed this on to him.
‘I don’t have to prove it. And fortunately for you, I’m not interested in doing so at this moment. I’m interested in who killed the poor girl. Perhaps she resisted your suggestions, and you killed her when she refused to comply.’
‘I didn’t.’ But she was staring at the edge of the square table in front of her now, too shaken to look into the piercing black eyes of this odious man.
‘So who did?’
‘I don’t know. I’d tell you if I did. Get me off the hook you seem so determined to put me on, wouldn’t it?’
‘It might, if I felt I could trust a word you said. Tell me about Wally Swift.’
Emily thought quickly. He wasn’t a man to grass on, Wally. Not even now, after all this time. But with her own neck on the block, she hadn’t much option. She said in a low voice, ‘He was a vicious bugger, Wally, even then.’
Peach nodded. ‘So everyone tells us.’
Even Lucy Blake, sitting beside him and preparing to record whatever she could pick up about this still shadowy figure, was almost convinced at that moment that they had gathered accounts of this man Swift from various other people. Percy was making bricks without any straw at all, this time.
But Watson just nodded her agreement. ‘He had his own schemes going, whilst the rest of us were just surviving in that squat.’
‘Drugs.’ Percy made it a statement rather than a question, though his only source was the dubious one of David Edmonds.
‘Yes. He was dealing himself from when I first knew him. By the time Sunita died, he had others working for him.’
‘Including her?’
‘I don’t know. He may have tried to recruit her. This bloke who was holding his meetings next door certainly did.’
David Edmonds, who had already told them that Sunita was selling for him. Apparently she didn’t know the name. Perhaps she really didn’t know it, wasn’t aware that he was now a prominent local estate agent. If he proved in the end to have no connection with this murder, they wouldn’t bring his name into it.
Peach said, ‘Do you mean that this man operating from twenty-eight Sebastopol Terrace actually succeeded in enlisting Sunita to sell drugs, or that he merely attempted it?’
She ran a hand briefly across her forehead and the top of her broad nose, as if she was checking that she wasn’t sweating. ‘I don’t know. I thought she was working for him, at one time. She suddenly seemed to have more money than she’d had before. I’d always thought she was sponging off Jo, until the last month or so.’
‘Do you think that Wally Swift might have killed her for working for someone else rather than him?’
She paused for so long that they thought she was not going to reply. Then she gave a tiny shrug of her square shoulders and said in a low voice, ‘I don’t know. It’s possible – I told you, he was a vicious bugger, was Wally, if you didn’t do what he wanted. If he’d got her working for him and she transferred to this other bloke, he’d have taken that very badly. You can’t let that kind of thing happen to you, if you want to be a big player in drugs.’
That rang true enough. They were going to have to find this man, and quickly. Peach said casually, ‘And where is Wally Swift now?’
The square jaw dropped. She had thoug
ht they had already questioned Swift, whereas it seemed they didn’t even know his present whereabouts. How much else had she given away that she might safely have concealed? She said dully, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t had any contact with him since we were together at Sebastopol Terrace. We went our separate ways.’
‘Separate criminal ways, it seems.’ No harm in reminding her of that, if they wished her to continue to co-operate. ‘Do you think it was Billy who killed Sunita?’
Again that abrupt switch, catching her off guard when she had been preparing herself to fend off more questions about Wally Swift. She hadn’t even thought about the young West Indian, until now. ‘I don’t know who killed the damned girl, do I? I’ve told you that.’
‘So it might have been Billy?’
‘It might, yes.’
‘Keen on her, wasn’t he?’
They knew that much then. They might be trying to trip her up here. ‘Yes. He seemed to think because they were the two non-whites that he had a right to bed her. She didn’t go along with that. He was very black, Billy; I don’t think she liked his colour. They can be as racist as anyone, you know, the Pakis, but no one makes a fuss about that, do they?’
‘Did Billy take it badly?’
‘I think he did, yes.’ She couldn’t actually remember, all these years later, but anything which spread suspicion away from herself was worth using.
‘Like Billy, did you?’
‘What sort of question’s that? We were interested in surviving, in that place, not liking or disliking each other.’
‘But you’ve already expressed certain thoughts about the others. So what about Billy?’
Had they been asking the others how they felt about her? And what had they said? She wished after all this time that she hadn’t been quite as vicious with Jo and Matty as she had at the time. Not to mention Sunita. She said cautiously, ‘I didn’t mind Billy. He was black but he knew his place. And he was streetwise for his age, knew how to look after himself. He wasn’t asking for trouble or likely to bring it on the rest of us, like Matty or that dyke Jo.’
‘Or Sunita.’
‘Or Sunita. She got what she was asking for in the end, that girl.’
They let her go on that. Let her go back to her legitimate and lucrative business. Let go this woman who had run a brothel and might be a murderer.
Sixteen
‘I want to speak to Mr Swift.’
‘Who is that?’
‘It’s an old colleague of his. Billy Warnock. He’ll speak to me.’
A pause. Then, ‘He’s not available, I’m afraid. But I’m his manager here. Empowered to deal with all matters. What is it you want, Mr Warnock?’ The voice managed to put a faint stress of bored contempt into its pronunciation of the surname. It was a male voice, heavy with menace beneath the polite words. The tone which carried those words was saying that Mr Swift was a powerful and important man, who paid well to keep unwanted calls and unwanted callers out of his life, that this anonymous voice from the past had much better forget the attempt to contact him.
‘He’ll speak to me. He’ll want to know about this. We go back a long way, Wally and me.’ Billy tried to keep his voice firm as he mouthed the once familiar forename, to answer menace with menace. This man couldn’t know that he wasn’t as powerful a man as Wally, that he didn’t employ underlings of his own to keep people at arm’s length.
Another pause. Billy wondered if this smooth and anonymous heavy had his hand over the mouthpiece, whether he was speaking to someone else. Then the baritone voice, bereft of all accent and therefore conjuring no visual picture for Billy beyond its sound, resumed with what was nearly a drawl. ‘I’ll pass on your message, Mr – Mr—’
‘Warnock. Billy Warnock.’
‘Mr Warnock, yes. Well, if he wants to ring you back, no doubt Mr Swift will do so.’
‘He’ll ring me. Tell him it’s urgent.’ Billy forced a little impatience into his voice.
‘Yes. Perhaps you should know that he is now universally known as Walter. To those few people who do not address him as Mr Swift, that is.’
The phone went dead.
Billy Warnock, who had nerved himself for three hours to make the call he did not wish to make, found that he was sweating profusely, in the unheated room where he had gone for privacy, on the twenty-eighth of February.
‘We’ve located another suspect, sir.’
It was a grey Monday afternoon, with flurries of tiny snowflakes passing the big window in the Chief Superintendent’s office. DCI Peach felt in need of a little light relief, on such a bleak day.
‘Another pillar of society, is it?’ Tucker was pleased with the sneer he managed to inject into the words.
‘Can’t control who gets himself into trouble, can I, sir?’ Peach allowed himself a moment of outraged innocence.
There didn’t seem to be any answer to that. Tucker had to content himself with a peevish, ‘Well, you’d better get on with it, Chief Inspector. I haven’t got all day, you know!’
‘No. sir. Absolutely not, sir. I can see that.’ Peach allowed his dark eyes to sweep slowly across the immaculately empty surface of the big desk between them. ‘Well, this one’s not a Mason, sir.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. You seem to me to be obsessed with sullying the reputation of as fine a—’
‘Restrictive rules wouldn’t permit this one to join a Lodge, sir. Though I dare say there’s some as wouldn’t mind viewing this suspect with a bared breast. It’s a woman, sir.’
‘Ah.’ Tucker gave such a weight of understanding to the meaningless syllable that it might have denoted a serial rapist or multiple poisoner. ‘This sounds much more promising.’
Peach wondered what Lucy Blake would make of that; she was sure to think he was exaggerating when he retailed this to her. ‘This is a woman who was in that squat in 1991, sir. I’d hazard a bet that she was acting as a part-time prostitute at the time. We’re certain that she’s run a brothel since then.’
Tucker leant forward, solemn and portentous as an Old Testament prophet. ‘My feeling is that this is our killer. Just a gut feeling at the moment, mind; you’ll need to get on and gather the evidence. But remember that you heard it first here, Percy.’
‘Yes, sir. I certainly shall, sir.’ It always disturbed him when Tommy Bloody Tucker addressed him as ‘Percy’. He said hastily, ‘This is the benefit of your overview of crime, sir. Sometimes we people working on the ground can’t see what should be staring us in the face.’
‘Indeed.’ Tucker waved an arm, magisterially and vaguely. He said generously, ‘Of course, I shall give you full credit in all my reports to the Chief Constable, at the conclusion of the case.’
Peach, who knew that this was a brazen lie, mustered his widest and most innocent smile. ‘It’s good to hear that, sir. I’m sure you’ll be as generous as you always are to your team.’
Tucker, who had an ear deaf to irony, said, ‘Excellent work! Tell the rest of your team that they’ve done well, will you? It’s good to know that a woman who has been involved in criminal activity for so long is finally going to—’
‘She’s a prosperous businesswoman now, sir.’
‘Who is? You mean . . .’ The same hand which had lately swept broadly and generously in front of Tucker now pawed feebly at the air.
‘Emily Jane Watson, sir. Known as Em or Emmy when she was in that squat in Sebastopol Terrace in 1991. She seems to have dropped the Emily now, sir. Understandable, with a past like hers.’
‘But you say she’s now running a successful business?’ The confidence drained out of Tucker’s voice word by word as he spoke. ‘You’re sure this isn’t a case of mistaken identity?’
‘We are, sir. We’re confident that this is the same woman who was in the squat. But she’s a brassy piece, prepared to deny any knowledge of the murder and any connection with it. And as I say, she’s now running a very successful and legitimate business, as she was only too eager to point out. An introduc
tions agency, in Bolton, sir. High Street position, very expensive and prosperous-looking premises, DC Pickering assures me. She’d very likely be in the Masons by now, if she were a man.’ He nodded happily on that thought.
Tucker hastened to backtrack in the face of this new information. ‘She may just have had an unfortunate start in life, Peach. People do, you know.’
Percy was glad to hear his surname back in use. ‘That’s the kind of argument she’s sure to put forward, sir. And she won’t easily be diverted from it. Quite capable of pulling a few strings and creating quite a stink, I should think. It’s good to know that you’re so certain she strangled Sunita Akhtar.’
‘Now wait a minute, Peach. I never said—’
‘Gut feeling, sir,’ Peach quoted happily.
‘I know, but—’
‘Benefits of your overview, sir. I often tell the lads and lasses at the crime-face just what your overview is worth to us.’ He smiled contentedly, his eyes consistently on a line three inches above his chief’s head.
‘What I’m saying, Chief Inspector Peach, is that you must keep all your lines of enquiry open. Never jump to conclusions without proper evidence. It’s a basic rule of detection, that.’
And as unvarying as your talent for stating the blindin’ bleedin’ obvious, thought Peach. ‘This means that we have found and interviewed three of the five people who were in that squat with Sunita Akhtar. Matthew Hayward, now a concert pianist, Josephine Ingram, now Sister Josephine in a hospice, and Emily Jane Watson, owner and manager of the successful Watson Introductions Agency.’
Tucker nodded glumly. ‘None of them seems a very likely candidate for murder.’
‘There’s also the man who met Sunita in the empty house next door, and possibly tried to recruit her to push drugs for him. The man who is now Chief Executive for Ormerod’s Estate Agency.’
‘David Edmonds? He wasn’t even residing in that squat at the time, and he’s now a pillar of Brunton society.’
