[Inspector Peach 12] - Pastures New

by J M Gregson

  ‘There’s no hurry. I’m perfectly happy as we are.’

  ‘Ah, but your mum isn’t. And it would take a braver and a crueller man than me to disappoint Agnes Blake.’

  Lucy could think of only one certain way to distract him now. She yawned extravagantly. ‘It’s been a tiring week and we’re working over the weekend. I’m for an early night. At least it’s warm, I won’t have to shiver in your bathroom tonight.’

  Percy brightened visibly. ‘You’re a shameless hussy, dragging me into my own bed like this. But your wish is my command, as always. I shall be putty in your hands.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope not, Percy Peach.’

  ‘Wash thee mouth out, lass. Or rather thee mind. And prepare to repel boarders.’

  She liked it when he thee’d and thou’d her and switched into the Lancashire dialect. And she found it pleasantly warm in Percy’s normally Arctic bathroom. It was even warmer in his bed, where Lucy’s protestations of fatigue were emphatically forgotten.

  * * *

  Later, as they were lying on their backs and staring at Percy’s invisible ceiling, she thought of what he had said earlier in the evening and surprised herself as well as her partner as she asked, ‘Do you ever think of your first wife?’ It could have struck a jarring note, but it didn’t. Percy said quietly and contentedly, ‘Never! It didn’t last long and fortunately there were no kids. It seems now to belong to another life entirely.’

  There was a contented silence, even after he had put his arm tenderly around her and drawn her body against his. Lucy, stretching contentedly, decided he had gone to sleep. She was almost there herself when she heard him say drowsily, ‘Tha can’t ’ave me living over t’ brush for ever, lass. We s’ll ’ave to fix a date for us nuptials over t’ weekend.’

  Nineteen

  At five o’clock on Saturday morning, the sun was already up. The western side of Pendle Hill is still in shade at that time of the day, but the clear light pours into the sleeping villages of the Ribble Valley.

  A hundred years ago, at the height of the haymaking season, farmers would have been out at this hour, eyeing the skies anxiously, estimating the clouds, offering prayers for a few days without rain for the cut grass to lie in the meadows. They needed then to make the very most of the long summer days, even though they had worked until after nine on the previous evening.

  In these days of silage towers and combine harvesters, both weather and time are of much less importance. Farmers can never be lazy, but in twenty-first-century summers they can afford to rise a little later. They operate their complex machinery with little assistance now, for the hundreds of farm labourers and migrant workers whom they used to pay to follow behind the horses and the cutters into the fields are no more.

  On a Saturday morning, with the weekend stretching luxuriously before them, the Lancashire industrial towns are even more blanketed in silence than the country. Where once the clogs would have been preparing to clatter over the cobbles to the Saturday morning shift in the cotton mills, the denizens snore on after the excesses of Friday night drinking.

  In town as in country, the dawn chorus of the birds is over now, so that even the sounds of blackbird and thrush are sporadic. The urban fox finds the security of modern wheelie bins as frustrating as his rural brother finds the netting round the few free-range hen coops which remain, but his sporadic barks do not disturb a sleeping Brunton. The rising sun illuminates more and more of the narrow streets of the old part of the town, where the cobbled stretches which remain are now regarded as areas for preservation rather the evidence of decline and desuetude they were a few years earlier.

  One man appreciates this silent world. Jemal Bilic, emerging from a house where the curtains are still drawn, blinks a little in the sudden sunlight, then looks appreciatively down the deserted suburban road outside his large detached house. He shivers a little, for in the shade of the high gabled wall the air is cool at this hour, then shrugs the apprehension away from his slim, powerful shoulders; there is no need for alarm in this bright, unthreatening, unpeopled world.

  Bilic looks up at the ivied front elevation of the house, at the curtained window of the room where his wife sleeps alone. He walks to the side of the building and slides behind the steering wheel of the sleek maroon Mercedes. He glances for a moment at a road map, then turns the key in the ignition. Even now, in this latest and greatest crisis of his life, he pauses for four or five seconds to appreciate this car as the tangible evidence of his success. He savours the smooth, almost silent, purr of the engine, wonders at the amazingly tiny vibration beneath his body from the three litres of perfectly tuned power.

  Then he eases the car out of the drive, along the tree-lined avenue, and on to the main road at the end of it. There are no checks to his progress in the deserted streets of the sleeping Brunton. The only human presence he notices is a postman riding his bicycle to the sorting office. The traffic lights are all green and there is scarcely a hindrance to his exit from the area.

  In ten minutes, he is leaving the last houses behind him and feeling the thrust of the seat against the small of his back as he accelerates. Even the motorway is almost deserted at this hour, but he keeps his eye on the rear mirror for police vehicles as the speedometer needle moves up towards a hundred miles an hour. A small smile flickers on to his lips. Even Jemal Bilic himself is not sure whether it is a smile of relief or of triumph.

  Within an hour, he has left Brunton and its troublesome CID far behind.

  Louise Hawksworth elected to come and see them at the station: it would be easier than at home on a Saturday, she said, because of the children.

  Policemen are professional cynics: it is the job that makes them so. Peach wondered if she had some other reason for wanting to see them away from the rather cramped house where they had interviewed her husband on the previous morning. He directed officers to take her to number one interview room when she arrived. He took care to leave her on her own for precisely five minutes in that claustrophobic little box of a room before he went in to speak to her.

  He divined correctly that Louise had probably never been in a police station before, let alone in the windowless sage-green cube which was the smallest of their interview rooms. No harm in allowing an interviewee to build up a little tension, even if she was totally innocent of any crime. Tension was a tool of the trade, prising from people more than they intended to reveal.

  Louise was disappointed that there was still no sign of her friend Lucy Blake, from whom she would have expected a sympathetic hearing. She asked this unyielding man Peach why this should be so.

  ‘Unusual situation, this,’ said Percy with one of his grimmer smiles. ‘This is Detective Constable Brendan Murphy.’ He nodded to indicate the fresh-faced twenty-four-year-old, who had positioned his chair carefully beside Peach. ‘Your friend Lucy is an experienced and able officer, but questioning you could be embarrassing both for her and for you.’

  ‘You mean that if it turns out that I killed my own father she wouldn’t want to be involved.'

  She hoped Peach would dismiss that as ridiculously melodramatic. He didn’t even smile. He looked at her with those dark, penetrating eyes and said quietly, ‘I think we’ll have what we say recorded, shall we? People under stress often remember the things they’ve said differently later on, you see, and it’s better not to have arguments.’ He switched on the machine and watched the cassette turning silently for a moment. ‘Did you kill your father, Mrs Hawksworth?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘I thought that when you elected to come in here and do this away from your husband and the children we might have a confession, you see. I’m an incurable optimist. I’m not saying that I want you to have done this, you understand. It’s just that a confession from anyone would be a wonderful thing for overworked policemen like myself and DC Murphy to hear, you see. We could all go off and enjoy our weekend.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t kill my dad, much as you and the more sensatio
nal tabloids might wish I had. But I’ve been giving the matter thought, as you asked me to do. I think Pam Williams might have killed him.’

  She had hoped for some reaction from Peach on this: even outrage or hilarity would have been more acceptable than his calm acceptance of her suggestion, as if it was exactly what he would have expected from her.

  He merely nodded a couple of times and said, ‘And why would you think that, Mrs Hawksworth?’

  ‘She’s got a record, hasn’t she?’

  This time Peach did smile, infuriatingly, as if he were indulgently correcting a headstrong girl. ‘Not a record. She inherited some money from an older friend who died a few years ago. Perfectly legally.’

  ‘Having cultivated him, as she was cultivating my father.’

  Again that complacent, understanding smile: she knew now that he was enjoying riling her. ‘Dangerous word, “cultivating”, in this context. Lawyers wouldn’t like it - that’s one thing to be said for it, I suppose. But there is no evidence that Mrs Williams was doing anything other than responding to Mr Aspin’s advances. A mutual friendship was developing between two people of almost the same age. Whereas Mrs Williams had been twenty-five years younger than this other gentleman you mention who left her money. It seems they’re not really parallel cases, are they?’

  She hadn’t expected him to discuss her legacy allegation seriously. The police had obviously researched it and now knew more about it than she did. It made her nervous about what else they might have researched, what more they might know that she did not. Already she was regretting venturing into the lion’s den like this: being shut up with two hostile men in this cramped little room put her at an additional disadvantage. ‘Steve said Dad and Mrs Williams had a spat after Saturday’s party. More than a spat, perhaps. I thought Dad might have threatened to go back on his marriage promise and ditch her without a quid.’

  It was nearer than she could have conceived to the truth. Surely she couldn’t know about her father’s promise to pay off Pam Williams’s hefty mortgage and the suspicion that that promise might have been withdrawn?

  Peach said cautiously, ‘Our information is that it was Mrs Williams who was annoyed because your father announced his plans to wed her. She hadn’t agreed to that previously and he hadn’t consulted her about what he was going to say last Saturday.’

  ‘She’s claiming she didn’t plan to marry him?’

  ‘All I’m saying is that she thought he was being too precipitate. He hadn’t discussed it with her and she wanted time to prepare the family for it.’

  ‘That’s what she says, I suppose.’

  ‘It is. And as yet, we’ve no reason to doubt the truth of it. It would explain this sudden and unexpected row, when by everyone’s account your dad was feeling pretty pleased with himself. No one has given us any reason to think that it was Mr Aspin who initiated the dispute.’

  ‘And no one except her has given you any reason to think the facts are as she reported them.’ She hoped that was true: she couldn’t see why any of the family would have said anything favourable to the woman.

  ‘But surely those facts argue that Mrs Williams would be the last person who would wish to see Mr Aspin dead? In view of the financial rewards which she could expect to follow marriage, she had every reason to keep him alive.’

  ‘But you know now that she’d had this dispute with him when things broke up after the meal. And she was the last person with him before he died.’ She didn’t know where that last wild statement had come from. Desperation, she supposed: she hadn’t intended to say it.

  Peach raised the very black eyebrows beneath the very white bald head. ‘Interesting theory, that. Your father didn’t die immediately after the celebration at Marton Towers, Mrs Hawksworth.’

  ‘You mean he was killed somewhere else, and then dumped there?’ She got the right degree of amazement into her voice, partly because she had surprised herself, not only by the idea but by the speed at which her brain was working.

  ‘No. We think he was lured back to Marton Towers later in the evening, perhaps at dusk or even after nightfall, and killed by a man or a woman who had gone there for that very purpose.’

  She noticed the evenness of his tone, the way he had carefully included both genders in his trawl, even the way the eager young man beside him leaned forward a fraction, in anticipation of her reply.

  She said doggedly, ‘That person could still be Pam Williams.’

  ‘Indeed it could. It seems likely that your father would only have gone back there to meet someone he trusted. Probably the woman he planned to marry or one of his immediate family.’

  He was watching her, she knew, studying the effect of this latest scarcely veiled suggestion about her own actions that night.

  She tried hopelessly to divert him. ‘It could have been a business colleague. Or even someone from another firm that he was trying to do a deal with. Dad never turned away a business opportunity.’ Even as she said it, she was not sure that it was true.

  ‘It’s possible he might have met his partner, Mr Oakley, who had been at the meal earlier. Someone from another firm is hardly likely, at that hour on a Saturday night.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Well, I was at home with my husband, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘So we’ve been told, yes. I don’t suppose you’ve thought of anyone else who can confirm that for us, have you? Suspicious coppers always like outside support for a husband-wife alibi, if it’s possible.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I spent an hour and a half with my children that night, putting them to bed and reading them stories. I don’t want them brought into this.’

  ‘And neither do we, Mrs Hawksworth. Courts don’t like evidence from children.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to rely on Steve to authenticate my story that I was at home at the time when my father was killed, won’t you?’ She tried to pour contempt into each phrase, so as to underline quite how ridiculous it was that they should suspect her.

  ‘What do you plan to do now, Mrs Hawksworth?’

  ‘Now?’ She was playing for time, thrown by his sudden switch.

  ‘In the next few years, I should say. Your father’s death will make you a rich woman.’

  She wanted to tell him to go hang himself, that this was her business and not his. But she found that she wanted to outline her plans, to convince him of her innocence by her co-operation. ‘We shall probably move to a bigger house, with a little more room for the children. We’ll get the best possible schooling for Daisy and the best possible care for Michael.’ She felt suddenly that she was being disloyal to Steve, making him seem like an inadequate provider for the family. ‘We were thinking about doing this anyway. Steve earns quite a good wage. It’s just that money from Dad’s estate will make things a little easier, that’s all.’

  ‘Were you planning to get your father to help you with this, even when he was alive?’

  She wished again that she had talked to Steve about this: she might then know just what he had said to them. It was no doubt her fault rather than his that they’d hardly spoken about these things since Dad had been killed. ‘Yes, we were, as a matter of fact. Dad was a good granddad and I’m sure he’d have wanted the best for Daisy. And for Michael.’ Brendan Murphy, who had done nothing but listen and watch, picked up the tiny hesitation between the mentions of the two children. He said softly, ‘How did your father react to having a Down’s syndrome grandchild, Mrs Hawksworth? Was it a shock to him?’

  A new attack, from a different quarter. Louise strove to switch her concentration towards this other, less threatening figure. Was this a trick? What did they know already?

  She said dully, ‘It wasn’t a shock. I was told after scans during the pregnancy that a Down’s baby was likely. My father wanted me to have a termination, but I refused.’ There, it was out. If they’d thought they were going to trip her up on it, they’d failed.

  Murphy’s voice came softly to her, like a doctor’s off
ering therapy. ‘Was there a serious disagreement about this between the two of you?’

  ‘Serious enough. It came between Dad and me, for a time.’ She wanted to be honest now. This was Michael she was talking about, and she couldn’t be dishonest about poor innocent, smiling, lovely Michael.

  ‘And were you reconciled at the time of Mr Aspin’s death?’

  She returned to the real world with a physical start, which was so abrupt that it was painful. ‘You’re asking if I hated my father enough to kill him, aren’t you?’

  It was Peach who said with unexpected gentleness, ‘We’re probing your relationship with your father at the time of his death, Mrs Hawksworth, as we are probing the relationships of all those who had the opportunity for this murder. These things aren’t pleasant, but murder is the vilest of all crimes.’

  ‘All right. Perhaps Dad and I would never have been quite as close as we had been before I was married, but we’d made it up. Once Michael was around, Dad loved him. You couldn’t help doing that: no one could help doing that.’ For a moment, she was near to tears as she thought of her engaging, vulnerable, wonderful son. ‘Dad was going to help to make life easier for Michael. Easier for all of us.’

  For a moment she was out of that soulless interview room and playing on the carpet at home with Michael.

  Then Peach said, almost reluctantly it seemed, ‘So the advent of Mrs Williams upon the scene must have been an unwelcome development for you.’

  She was weary of deceit, of trying to work out what Steve and Carol and all the others had said to them and what these men already knew. ‘It was something we hadn’t foreseen. Dad told me all plans would have to be put on hold for a little time until Pam was “part of the family”. That was the phrase he used to me when I was telling him what we needed for Michael and for Daisy.’

  ‘Was that a phrase you passed on to your sister and the rest of the family?’