by J M Gregson
Agnes agreed a little reluctantly that it might be so. She was anxious for more details of Pam Williams’ background, but her daughter was distressingly ignorant about this. ‘You were with the man’s daughter, and you didn’t find out any more than this about the woman who’s to become her stepmother? And you call yourself a detective?’ Agnes Blake said with mock incredulity.
‘We were talking about old times, Mum. We didn’t have that long together. And I’m not sure Louise knows all that much, anyway. I think her dad’s announcement that he was going to marry Pam might have come as a bit of a bombshell to her, actually.’ She thought back to the glimpses she had seen of the faces on the top table when Geoff announced his intentions to his audience, and wondered for the first time how many of them had known that he was going to do this.
They discussed the rest of the Aspin family and the lives they were now leading, but Lucy was a disappointingly sparse informant for a mother hungry for news. Agnes managed to elicit the fact that although Geoff Aspin was ten years younger than her, he had four grandchildren already, and to comment anew on her daughter’s shortcomings in this field. Finally, she reluctantly abandoned the story of the day at Marton Towers and the Aspin family, telling her daughter, ‘Well, I expect you’ll find a lot more about what’s going on in the next few months.’
‘I don’t really think I shall, Mum. Louise and I promised each other we must meet up again soon, but we probably won’t. We both have busy lives, in our different ways. And if I don’t meet Louise, I’m hardly likely to learn much about the rest of the family, am I?’
Lucy Blake was sometimes wrong about things, as her mother was always happy to point out. This was one such instance.
At quarter to eight the next morning, Lucy was stretching deliciously in bed, noting the morning sunlight on the flowered curtains, and telling herself that there was no need to hurry into the long summer day. Then she heard the phone shrill, and her brow furrowed. It was early on a Sunday morning for this disturbance of her mother’s life. A moment later her mother was in the room, handing her the portable phone, telling her resentfully that it was the station at Brunton asking for her.
The switchboard operator told her briefly that she was being connected. Then Percy Peach’s familiar voice was loud in her ear. ‘Sorry to spoil your weekend, girl, but I think you’d better get that delicious arse of yours down here pronto. There’s been a murder. At Marton Towers, of all places. Bloke by the name of Geoffrey Aspin.’
Eight
Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker stood before DCI Peach in the peacock splendour of his golfing gear.
It was a pity that it was Sunday morning and the CID section at Brunton police station was so sparsely populated, for Peach considered that this vision deserved a much wider audience. Perhaps the whole of CID and the uniformed boys as well. Policemen, despite adverse publicity in some sections of the press of late, had a testing job. They deserved a little light relief at times - or even a lot of light relief, as seemed to be on offer here.
Tucker wore plus twos in a violent purple and green tartan to which no clan had ever laid claim. Beneath them, his mustard yellow socks were beautifully ribbed, leading the eye naturally downwards to two-tone tan and white shoes, which the old sweats had called ‘co-respondent shoes’ when Percy had been a young copper on the beat. The horizontal blue and white stripes of Tucker’s rugby-style top emphasized an increasing tendency towards corpulence in the head of CID.
‘Colourful shirt, sir,’ said Peach cheerfully.
Tucker divined correctly that this was code for garish. ‘They’re very fashionable, these,’ he said defensively.
‘So I’ve been told,’ said Percy with a nod. But not fashionable for long, if displayed on models like this, he thought. ‘And brand new socks. Brunton Golf Club is in for a treat today, sir.’
Tucker looked at him suspiciously. ‘How do you know that they’re new?’
Peach had noted that the socks did not have the multiple pulled threads which represented the inevitable results of Tommy Bloody Tucker’s frequent visits to the brambles which fringed the fairways of his course. Straightforward detective work, if you had witnessed Tommy Bloody Tucker’s attempts to play golf. Percy decided not to give the detail of his reasoning. ‘I just played a hunch, sir.’
‘Don’t give me that Hollywood nonsense. We don’t play hunches in Brunton CID. We assemble the facts and make proper deductions.’
Tucker was at his most pompous. Percy decided he looked more like a strutting turkey than a peacock, after all. ‘Then I deduce that this is only a fleeting visit, sir. I have already deduced that you are on your way to golf.’
Tucker examined his lower limbs and blinked a couple of times, which seemed to Peach to imply that his chief still retained some deeply hidden aesthetic sense. ‘You’re wasting my valuable time, Peach. There is a serious crime to be dealt with, and as usual you are following diversions.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. It has yet to be confirmed by the pathologist, but my gut feeling is now supported by your vast experience: it seems that we have a murder on our patch.’
‘Geoffrey Aspin, the message on my phone said.’
Peach’s heart sank. He knew now why Tucker had made this unprecedented and gaudy Sunday morning appearance. ‘Yes, sir. Prominent local businessman, I’m told. You knew him, sir?’
‘Indeed I did. Geoff Aspin was a man without enemies.’ That was the kind of banality you expected from the family, even the public, but not from a chief superintendent. Unless it was Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker.
Peach said quietly, ‘It seems not, sir. Unless you think that having your head well-nigh removed with a piece of rope is some sort of accident.’ He hadn’t seen the corpse yet, but a degree of poetic licence was surely permissible when you were coping with T.B. Tucker.
‘We’ll need to solve this one quickly. Peach.’ Meaningless, as usual, like most of Tucker’s attempts to galvanize his team. The man couldn’t even muster a decent bollocking these days.
‘That would certainly be a result, sir. Be taking direct charge of the investigation yourself, will you?’
Tucker thought he caught a slight and unnecessary emphasis on that word ‘direct’. The head of CID said stiffly, ‘I never interfere with my team, as you well know, Peach.’
‘As I well know, indeed, sir. But no doubt in due course we shall have the benefits of your overview of the situation.’
‘You will indeed.’ In his relief at avoiding any direct contact with the crime-face, Tucker overlooked what he should have recognized as insolence from his DCI. He said with as much threat as he could muster, ‘I shall be keeping a close watch on this, since I knew Geoff so well.’
‘Yes, sir. Member of the Brotherhood, was he?’
‘Mr Aspin was not a Freemason, as a matter of fact. Not that it would have made any difference at all to my feelings if he had been,’ Tucker added hastily. His Freemasonry was such a frequent target for Peach’s barbs that the head of Brunton CID had grown sensitive about it.
‘I see, sir. Just a close personal friend of yours, was he?’ Peach spoke as if it were inconceivable that there should be any such animal.
‘I knew him through the golf club, if you must know.’
‘I think I must, sir. All facts are vital, as you reminded me a couple of minutes ago.’
‘We didn’t play a lot together. Geoff Aspin was quite a good golfer, as a matter of fact.’
There might be some connection between those two facts, thought Peach. You could no doubt be rather a modest golfer and yet be rated ‘quite good’ in Tommy Bloody Tucker’s assessment.
Peach leant forward towards Tucker’s huge empty desk. ‘This gives us an enormous advantage at the beginning of a murder investigation, sir.’
‘What does?’
‘Well, having a man with your background who was on intimate terms with the victim, sir. With the combination of that friendship and your grasp on t
he world of crime, I’m sure you’ll be able to write down a list of suspects for us immediately. Perhaps even give us a prime suspect at the outset.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. ‘Whoever planned this crime reckoned without the formidable presence of Chief Superintendent Tucker!’
‘I didn’t know him all that well, you know.’ Tucker was immediately and agreeably on the defensive.
‘Come, sir, there’s no need for modesty! Not with a fellow-professional who realizes just how much your insight will be worth.’
‘I knew him a little at the golf club, that’s all.’ Tucker was decamping faster than school cadets before the SAS.
‘But at least you’ll be able to tell us all about his family. Sixty per cent of killings take place within the family, as you reminded me last week, sir.’ Peach was delighted to fling Tucker’s predilection for the obvious and insulting fact back into his face.
‘I don’t know the family. I was merely—’
‘You weren’t at this celebration of the victim’s sixtieth birthday at Marton Towers? What a pity you had to refuse your invitation, sir! We might have had our detective mastermind at the scene of the crime. Or at least at the fore-scene, as you might say.’
Tucker ground his teeth, an activity he only seemed to engage in when Peach was around. ‘I wasn’t invited to Marton Towers. I wouldn’t have expected it. 1 imagine this was a gathering of the immediate family to celebrate—’
‘Over a hundred people there, I’m told, sir. Quite a large circle of friends, apparently. Pity you were overlooked, as it turns out.’
‘Look, Peach. I knew the man as a good egg at the golf club, that’s all. But he was a prominent local businessman and you need to find his killer quickly. Very quickly, if you’re to avoid criticism from the local hacks.’
Peach repeated ‘good egg’ slowly, as if it were of great significance, and wrote it carefully at the top of the pad in front of him, noting for the hundredth time how Tucker’s ‘we’ became ‘you’ as soon as difficulties threatened.
Then he reviewed once again his chief’s garb of many colours, as though it was somehow important to him that he committed this picture to memory. ‘Enjoy your golf, sir.’
* * *
The weekend in England has a deadening effect even upon essential services such as the police. Sergeant Jack Chadwick, one of the few policemen not to have been replaced by a civilian as Scene of Crime Officer, was ready for action as soon as he was apprised of the facts at eight o’clock: a body discovered in suspicious circumstances at Marton Towers. But on Sunday morning, it took him longer than usual to assemble his SOCO team and to begin the detailed examination of the site.
Nevertheless, by the time that DCI Peach and DS Blake arrived at ten thirty, things were well in hand. The pathologist had been and gone and the police van known within the service as ‘the meat wagon’ was waiting to take the corpse away. The site was screened off by high canvas walls to protect it from the insatiable public curiosity which always accompanies violent death. The official photographer had almost finished his grisly work of recording pictures of the corpse and the place in which it had died from every conceivable angle.
Chadwick greeted his old friend Peach with some relief. ‘The manager’s been down to see me three times. And each time he’s told me they’ve got a silver wedding with over a hundred guests planned for this afternoon; he’s shit scared they’ll have to cancel and waste the food.’
‘Will you be finished here by one?’
‘We’ll have all we can get by midday at the latest. I think we’re almost finished now.’ He glanced towards the spot where two of his team were crawling on hands and knees across the gravel, picking up detritus, ninety-nine per cent of which would almost certainly prove to be quite irrelevant to the case: cigarette ends; fibres of clothing; a broken shoelace; a couple of hairs which might or might not be human, which might or might not have come from the head of the person who had attacked the man whose remains still sat in the Jaguar which was at the centre of all this attention.
Peach wandered across to a lady who had once been a copper but was now a civilian part-timer. He looked down at the dubious treasures she had gathered. ‘Any good?’
‘Probably not. Most of this stuff looks as if it’s been here for days rather than hours. It was a very still night, so hopefully nothing’s blown away. I’ve picked up a couple of hairs from right under the front passenger door of the car.’ She nodded down at the small plastic bag in which these fragile traces were already enclosed. ‘Of course, forensic will probably tell you in due course that they come from the cadaver’s head,’ she said with professional pessimism.
Peach gave her a wry smile and went back to Chadwick. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt it’s murder?’
Chadwick grinned the cheerful grin of a man about to slide the problem across to someone else. ‘No doubt at all, me old mate. Someone put a cord round the poor bugger’s neck and snuffed him out. Within about forty seconds, I’d say, without even the benefit of the post-mortem. You’ve got a nice juicy murder all right, Percy. With ninety-two suspects: that’s the number of guests at yesterday’s party, the manager tells me. Plus all the staff at Marton Towers, of course.’ He beamed his satisfaction at the complexity of the CID life, which had been denied to him after he had been shot and badly wounded in a bank raid years ago.
For the first time Peach went and looked at the corpse itself. Lucy Blake wondered whether he had been saving the best or the worst until the last.
You didn’t want anyone killed, of course, but she was used by now to the extra spurt of excitement produced by the most serious crime of all. After the inevitable and often depressing round of thieving, domestic conflict and thuggish drunken violence, murder was a challenge to which every CID pulse responded. It was high profile: there were satisfaction and kudos if you got it right and produced an answer, but plenty of professional and media brickbats if you failed.
Geoffrey Aspin lay where he had died, in the driving seat of his Jaguar Mark 8. His head was thrown back; the livid, blackening scar on his throat indicated exactly how he had died. The cord or cable which had killed him had cut deeply into his neck, so that only the ends of it must have been visible. Peach’s remark to Tucker about the head being almost severed was an exaggeration, but not by very much. There had been determination, probably high passion, driving the hands of whoever had held the ends of this cord. The carotid artery had been smashed very quickly: Peach could see why Chadwick could be so certain that this man had died in seconds.
Lucy Blake said softly, as if it was necessary for someone to speak to move things on, ‘It looks as if he was killed from behind.’
‘It does, yes. And that suggests that this was probably premeditated. But not necessarily so. It could have been an argument that went wrong, an assailant who lost his temper and reached for the nearest implement.’ The killer was always ‘he’ until events threw up other possibilities, an acknowledgement of how few women actually commit the ultimate crime. ‘But it would have been odd if he’d found this implement so conveniently to hand.’
Lucy looked automatically through the open rear door of the car, where this sinister and as yet mysterious figure might have waited for his victim. The rear seats and the floor looked to CID eyes depressingly immaculate. But she knew that any fibres or hairs, even any dirt or dust from footwear, would have been meticulously removed and bagged by the SOCO team.
‘OK, thanks, Jack. Let’s have him away,’ said Peach, and the waiting men from the anonymous grey van beside the crime scene moved in with the plastic body shell, anxious to remove the remains before advancing rigor mortis made the task any more complicated.
Peach watched the van drive away from the wide stone steps at the front of the mansion, then turned and went inside Marton Towers to the manager’s office. He had been there before, when investigating another and very different murder, but the man who had occupied this office then had long since gone. The manager n
ow was somewhere around Peach’s age of thirty-nine, though with a full head of hair he no doubt looked much younger. He had the permanently worried look of the man who oversees receptions and catering, Percy decided. He took pity on him and gave him the good news first.
‘The body’s being taken away at this moment. I see no reason why you shouldn’t go ahead with today’s function.’
He thought for a moment that the man was going to spring forward and wring his hand in relief. But he controlled himself and said, ‘That’s good news. We’d have lost a lot of goodwill. And most of the fresh food would have been wasted, you see. The hygiene regulations don’t allow—’
‘We’ll need to keep the site screened off until our forensic boys have been in and studied the car in situ. Very particular, these boffins are. But a murder site will just be one more of the attractions of Marton Towers.’
‘Oh, I doubt that. It’s a silver wedding you see, and the kind of people—’
‘Trust me, there’ll be a lot of interest. Give the public the slightest contact with a nice juicy murder and you can’t keep them away. I’ll make sure there’s a uniformed copper on duty, so that you won’t need to worry about what they’re getting into.’ He beamed generously at the anxious face.
‘Well, our guests will be in here most of the time, so I don’t expect—’
‘Go off well, did it, yesterday’s little bunfight?’
The manager swelled with professional indignation. ‘It was rather more than a bunfight. Detective Chief Inspector. It was a five-course meal with genuine champagne and fine wines.’
Percy was tempted to ask whether you could have champagne that wasn’t genuine. Instead, he said, ‘Must have set someone back a quid or two, then.’
‘Apart from the extra bottles of champagne and wine consumed on the day, it was all paid for in advance by Mr Aspin.’ The manager felt that such splendid financial habits should be widely publicized.
‘And there were ninety-odd people, I hear.’
