A Turbulent Priest
Read A Turbulent Priest Online
Authors: J M Gregson
Copyright © J. M. Gregson 2000
The right of J. M Gregson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published by Severn House Publishers Ltd in 2000
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
To Rose, who reads, reasons, reduces, remonstrates and never reproaches
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry II, speaking of Thomas Beckett
It never stopped raining on that fateful Monday. Even allowing for the fact that this was a Bank Holiday in England, the downpour was exceptional.
On the Lancashire coast, which often escaped the worst of the weather as the clouds drifted towards the Pennines forty miles inland, the rain fell in sheets over a grey and sullen sea. In Morecambe and Blackpool and Southport, the holiday crowds and the day-trippers wandered damply along the promenades, stared resentfully at the low banks of emptying cloud, and turned hopelessly to the packed amusement arcades and the few remaining cinemas to find what shelter they could. On this miserable last day of August, Blackpool’s famous Tower absorbed thousands of these unfortunates, but its topmost point remained blanketed in cloud throughout the day.
Things were scarcely better inland, as the clouds moved on the slightest of breezes towards those invisible Pennine heights. While those sensible Lancashire folk who had decided to keep off the crowded Bank Holiday roads congratulated themselves grimly upon their wisdom, the rain fell even more heavily thirty miles inland than on the coast. Detective Inspector Percy Peach gazed miserably out of the window of the North Lancs Golf Club at the pools of water which grew ever wider upon the eighteenth green outside, cursed the weather, and ordered another pint. At one o’clock, even he and his equally determined companions had to accept that there would be no golf on that sodden day.
Further up the valleys of the Ribble and the Hodder, in the hills where these picturesque waterways had their sources, it rained even harder. There was no thunder, but the moisture fell with cloudburst intensity, not for ten minutes, as it might have done in a thunderstorm, but for hour after hour. The streams which had been at their summer lows after five weeks of drought stirred into life. Water which had been almost stagnant became by noon a steady trickle, by two o’clock a brown tumble of noise. By five, most of the country roads were impassable because of floods, and the water in streams and rivers was roaring towards the coast and the sea in angry torrents.
The floods dislodged things which had lain unmoving through the languid weeks of summer heat. The rubbish left by an untidy society was gathered from where it had been tossed. From culverts and from ditches, from the banks of streams and rivers, packaging from food, empty plastic bottles, and other, less savoury items were dislodged, lifted and borne swiftly away by the rising waters. Towards the end of the day, logs, even the occasional whole tree with its roots turning crazily in the brown flood, passed swiftly down the Ribble and its tributaries, awesome flotsam for those few hardy souls who could bear to stand and observe on the bridges in the unrelenting downpour.
Almost five centimetres of rain had fallen in parts of the Ribble Valley in the last twenty-four hours, said Radio Lancashire at six o’clock. Or two inches, the announcer added thoughtfully for his older listeners. A hell of a lot anyway, said his sidekick, in the chatty style which was now considered obligatory for local radio. DI Peach, returning home from the golf club to find the test match washed out, swore at the cheerful girl and feinted to kick the set.
And still it rained, as the light diminished quickly on this gloomiest of evenings. Ditches which for the rest of the year were no more than field-drains became temporary streams, as the waters filled them and rose high enough to seek a way out of these narrow trenches. Things were lifted and moved which might have remained undiscovered for months, even years, without this extraordinary and relentless opening of the heavens. Curious things, like scarcely-worn wellingtons. Amusing things, like a portrait of Adolf Hitler, still in its wooden frame but with the marks of darts all round the face and ‘Fuck the Führer’ inscribed as a motto by some alliterative genius of half a century earlier.
And there was more disquieting detritus also, though no one saw the first movements of the most ominous of all. It lay beneath the brambles which scrambled across the top of the ditch, covered in twigs and the dead leaves of former autumns. It was heavy, and it remained static through the first six hours of the deluge, whilst the water rose around it, dislodged its covering and floated that noiselessly away. It was six o’clock before the insistent rising of the water caused this heaviest of flotsam to lift from the bottom of the ditch. It was seven o’clock before the water brimmed against the very top of the ditch and the thing floated free and slowly moved upon the surface.
And still the rain drummed relentlessly, on the back of what had once been a living human head. There was no living person yet to observe its progress, but the corpse inched sluggishly along the edge of the wood which the ditch skirted towards the rushing waters of the stream fifty yards away.
By eight o’clock, the carcass was moving swiftly down the brown torrent of the racing stream towards the swollen Ribble, scarcely a mile away. The rain fell still — would go on, indeed, without abatement until after midnight on that sodden Monday. The corpse might easily have reached the river and been carried swiftly away to sea and oblivion on the flood, had it not been for the willpower of a young Labrador.
The animal was determined to enjoy its normal evening walk and could not understand the reluctance of its master to relish the refreshment of a little rain upon his face. At eight o’clock, the dog prevailed and leapt joyfully into the near-darkness of this dismal day. His owner followed reluctantly, oilskinned to his very eyebrows, hunched against the downpour, cursing his canine charge, resentful of the obvious joy exhibited in the dog’s every bounding movement. With his left hand thrust deep into his pocket and his right hand gripping the walking stick he carried to control the dog, the man trudged out to inspect the bridge over the stream at the edge of the village, a macabre curiosity driving him to see just how high the waters had risen against its ancient stones on this, the wettest day he could recall.
The water was almost touching the topmost point of the arch itself, its sound roaring as he had never heard it before, scarcely two feet beneath him as he stood upon the bridge, the vibrations strong enough to prevent him lingering in contemplation of the racing flood below him. As he moved away, he caught sight of something that set his pulse racing. It poked out from the driftwood which had gathered where the waters eddied at the edge of the bank near the bridge. It was the back of a human hand, grey-white against the brown of the raging waters.
He was reluctant to believe the evidence of his eyes in the little light that was left but, as he watched, he saw shoulders, then the back of a head — almost submerged, but lifting and falling unmistakably with the movement of the current on the edge of this miniature maelstrom. The body lifted, moved in a half-circle, threatened to join the mainstream again and be borne away beneath the bridge. For an instant the hand rose almost clear of the waters, as if in mute supplication against the indignity of its helplessness.
The man scrambled to the edge of the water, hooked the handle of his walking-stick beneath the collar and the hair of the corpse, and pulled it carefully to the sand and stones of the bank. He hauled it heavily on to the sodden grass, where it would be safe from the torrent. He yelled at the excited dog when it began to bark, made it obey him and keep away from the body. But he could not control his own breathing, which came in great, uneven gasps. He did not know whether it was the effort or the revulsion which made him gasp like this.
He was careful not to turn the body over. He did not want to see the face, nor any part of it.
It should have been easy to tap out the digits of 999, but he found it needed all his concentration to control fingers which seemed to be no longer at his command. When a calm voice answered, “Emergency: which service, please?” his own voice sounded both hoarse and high-pitched in his ears, like that of an over-excited stranger. He had to concentrate hard to give the details of his find and his position. An ambulance and a police vehicle would be there very quickly, he was told. He nodded dumbly at the instrument, unable to speak at all now that the essentials of his news had been delivered.
By nine o’clock, Detective Inspector Peach knew that this Bank Holiday was not after all to conclude in the boredom and frustration which had characterised the rest of it for him. There was work to do. A suspicious death.
By seven thirty on the morning after the great deluge of 31st August, it was fine. There was even a wan sun to illuminate the dripping scene. But it was cool enough to make DI Peach feel that autumn was not too far away as he got out of his car beside the swollen stream.
Plastic tapes had been hastily strung round the area where the corpse lay during the previous evening’s downpour. They hung motionless in the still, damp air. The hollow-eyed young constable who had maintained a lonely vigil here throughout the night had been relieved now, but he lingered at the edge of the scene for a moment, hoping for a word of praise or recognition from the officer who was in charge of the case. Percy grinned cheerfully into the exhausted young face. “Just what you joined for, eh lad? Whole night to yourself without any interference from the station sergeant! Nice little skive for you, that!”
“Well, sir, it wasn’t exactly—”
“On overtime too, I expect. Got it made, some of you lads have.” He glanced at the little cube of canvas erected over the corpse. “Didn’t say anything to you during the night, did he? Like who he was, or how he got here?” The young constable trudged stiffly to his car, taking care not to mutter “Cocky CID bastard!” until he was out of sight and earshot.
Peach nodded affably to the sergeant in charge of the Scene of Crime team. “Police surgeon been and gone, has he?” However dead a corpse might be, however long ago it had perished, death had still to be officially confirmed by a doctor. Mere policemen would not suffice.
“Yes. Been dead for some time, he said. At least a week, he thought. The meat wagon and the men with the body bag will be here soon; they’ve had to wait until they could get a pathologist to come out with them to supervise the removal. We shan’t find much here, you know. Patently obvious the poor bugger didn’t die where he was found.” Joe Jackson, a grizzled officer now looking forward to his retirement, always took it personally when his work was difficult. He glared malevolently at the little tent, as if it was inconsiderate of the man inside it to have left the world so unhelpfully.
Percy went and drew back the flap of the tent. Apprehensively, because this was not a new corpse. But the water had removed the worst of the smells; Percy ducked and moved his squat body cautiously over the remains of what had recently been a man. The corpse lay face down, as it had been found. The backs of the hands were bloated and white, looking too big for the thin arms, like hands in a child’s drawing. There was no sign of a ring, nor any sign that the swollen fingers had ever carried one. But that didn’t mean the man hadn’t been married: not all married men wore rings, despite what Percy considered the deplorable modern tendency to do so.
Peach stooped and lifted the right hand gingerly with his pen. Soft, unmarked white flesh. No signs of abrasions or calluses. Difficult to be certain after the effects of the water, but he’d guess this man hadn’t been a manual worker. Percy didn’t look at the face, which lay completely invisible amidst the lush wet grass. He knew what happened with an older corpse. The eyes went first, usually, if there were birds around. And various bugs he preferred not to itemise got into the mouth and began their work. He felt no pressing urge to look at the face.
It was only when the ‘death wagon’ rolled to a halt beside the bridge and the men climbed carefully down the slope with the plastic shell to take away the body that Joe Jackson reluctantly volunteered his single useful piece of information. “Police surgeon did say one thing, Percy. This poor bugger didn’t die from drowning. He didn’t think he’d been in the water very long.”
***
Percy Peach rapped hard on the door inscribed ‘Detective Superintendent Tucker, Head of CID Section’, causing the room’s occupant to spill his coffee over the digestive biscuit in his saucer.
“Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said cheerfully to the man behind the big desk, “but I wonder if you have any insights that you’re able to pass on yet about this suspicious death out beyond Clitheroe.”
Percy knew perfectly well that Tucker had only just arrived in the building: he had watched through his window as the Super had climbed stiffly out of his Rover in the car park. But Peach’s twin missions in life were to make life difficult for criminals and to make life hell for his chief, the man he called Tommy Bloody Tucker. These missions gave him equal satisfaction, but he found baiting Tucker much the easier of the two. In Percy’s opinion, Tucker had reached his exalted position by shameless creeping and skilful appropriation of credit which should have gone to others; thus he deserved to be kept hopping about a bit as he sought a quiet life and waited for his fat pension. Tucker wouldn’t even know yet about the case for which he would be nominally responsible.
The Superintendent looked suspiciously at Peach as he poured the coffee back into his cup. “I haven’t had time to catch up on that yet. You’ve no idea of the mountain of administration that was waiting for me this morning, you know.”
“Indeed I haven’t, sir, thank goodness. But I know you relieve us of hours of paperwork by your enlightened managerial practices — I often tell the lads that. They don’t all understand, of course, but they don’t see you operating at close quarters, as I have the privilege of doing.”
Tucker wondered for the hundredth time how he could deny this close quarters contact to Peach, without finding a solution. The man seemed positively to enjoy having work piled upon his shoulders. And when his chief had pulled off what he thought a masterstroke, and given Peach a young female Detective Sergeant to contend with, the man had taken it in his stride like everything else. Tucker said gloomily, “You’d better enlighten me, Percy.”
Peach thought that there wasn’t a man on this earth who could do that. “I’ll put you in the picture, yes, sir.” He wondered whether to adopt the tone of a constable reading from his notebook in court for his report, then decided this would be going too far: rank had some dangers, even when it was carried by men like Tucker. “Thanks to your shouldering the burdens of administration, I was able to get out to Bolton-by-Bowland at half-past seven this morning. The police surgeon had already certified death — the chap was found late last night, sir, I believe.”
“Chap?” Tucker’s dull repetition of the word was due to the fact that he had made the mistake of picking up his sodden digestive biscuit from his saucer. It fell on to his tie, then slid like a brown slug on to his immaculate white shirt, which it continued to descend like a snail in slow motion through the rest of their conversation. Tucker tried to ignore it; Peach’s eyes widened unblinkingly as they followed its progress, whilst his heart sang within him.
“Male Caucasian IC One, sir. Found dead beside a stream in flood just outside Bolton-by-Bowland. Now on his way to the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at Chorley.”
Tucker should have known about this. He wondered who to blame. But his phone had been off the hook at his wife’s insistence last night, whilst they entertained her parents and an aunt. Peach seemed to know these things, to be able always to pierce the easy lies he got away with for the rest of his day. It would be safer just to minimise this, to take the wind out of his sententious Inspector’s sails. Tucker looked at his immaculate nails, trying to ignore the creeping mess on the front of his shirt. “Just a vagrant, I expect. Someone who’d been living rough.”
Percy looked puzzled. “Interesting thought, sir. I thought perhaps a white-collar worker of some kind. I inspected the hands, you see, and they didn’t look like a manual worker’s, or a vagrant’s.”
“Ah, you must beware of jumping to conclusions, Peach. All good detectives should beware of generalisations made on too little evidence.”
That was rich, coming from a man who thought any rural death must be that of a vagrant, thought Percy. “Yes, sir. I’ll try to remember that. I think you may have reminded me of it before, but I have such a terrible memory for these things.”
Tucker glared at the round, earnest face with its black toothbrush moustache beneath the prematurely bald head. As usual with this Inspector who looked like a smaller Oliver Hardy, he thought he was being mocked, but could not put his finger on the precise phrase. “Yes. Anyway, if it’s not a vagrant, I expect it’s a routine domestic death. Manslaughter maybe, rather than murder. Four fifths of killings take place within the family, you know.”
Percy did. Every policeman did. It was one of the first things they were told in training. He could even have brought Tucker’s statistics up to date, given him a percentage for the last recorded year. Instead, he said, “Yes, that’s very useful to know, sir. Might be worth your setting your thoughts down on paper and circulating them more widely. Of course, in this case, we don’t yet know that there’s been any killing. Might be a suicide. Might even be natural causes. No doubt the forensic wizards will tell us, in due course.”
Tucker was furious with himself. He should have said that at the outset, demoting this death, pretending he would only show interest if it emerged that there was real meat for a top CID man like him to feed on. It was too late now. He snarled, “Well. What else do we know?”
“Not a lot, sir, as yet. Doctor Martin wouldn’t venture much, as usual, but he did say that he thought the man had been dead for some time. More than a week, he thought. We’ve checked the missing persons register, but not come up with anyone. Looks at the moment as though he wasn’t reported missing.”
Tucker decided that the only thing to do was to stick to his guns. “Sounds to me like a suspicious death, you know.” He brightened at the thought of difficulties ahead for his tormentor. “If it is a murder, it won’t be easy to find the killer, you know, after this much time has elapsed. Sixty per cent of killings which are not detected in the first week remain unsolved, you know. You’ve already missed the most vital time for investigation.”
He smiled blandly at Peach. Not only had he come out with another generalisation which every copper and most of the public knew, thought Percy, but he seemed positively pleased at the thought that it was going to be difficult for his staff. “That is true, sir. The team may need the full benefit of your expertise and experience to succeed on this one.” He watched his chief’s face cloud with dismay, then switched his ground again. “Though as I say, we don’t know yet that this is a murder. At present, we have only an unidentified corpse. Could be an accidental death or a suicide. As good detectives, we must beware of generalisations made on too little evidence.”
This time, Tucker knew it was insolence: to have his own words quoted back to him like this was plainly insubordinate. But it was difficult to know what to do about it, with Peach’s round, expressionless gaze fixed firmly at some point above his victim’s head. Tucker said desperately, “Well, anyway, we’ll see what forensic can tell us about this drowning. They often come up with—”
“Not a drowning, sir.” This time Percy denied himself any reiteration of Tucker’s injunctions about generalisations. Instead, he transferred his gaze back to the superintendent’s face and allowed himself the most childishly innocent of his range of smiles. “That was the one useful thing our police surgeon volunteered, apparently. Chummy was dead before he went into the water.”
Tucker felt his mind reeling. An appropriate word, for a man floundering like a fish on a line. He said tentatively, “Then it looks as if our man might have been killed by someone else after all.”
“Oh, I should think that’s very likely, sir. I didn’t want to jump to any unwarranted conclusions. But I did notice a bloody great gash across the back of his head.”
***
“There’s no need for this, you know,” said DI Peach. Chivalry did not come easily to him, especially when he found it rejected.
Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake smiled and snatched a sideways glance at him as she drove. She liked him when he was an old chauvinist softy, though she couldn’t possibly let him know it. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Part of the learning process, a post mortem is, as you said when you insisted on my attending the first one. Seems a long time ago now.”
She was secretly relieved to find that the post mortem was complete by the time they drove into the quiet grounds of the forensic laboratory at Chorley. She would have tightened the muscles of her stomach as usual if she had needed to stand by during the cutting of the corpse and the investigation of its organs, but she preferred not to have her digestion tested in this way, despite her assurances to Percy Peach.
The Home Office pathologist was brisk and breezy; in her limited experience practitioners of this grisly calling often were. “Looks as though you have a murder to investigate,” he said cheerfully, as he peeled off his gloves and unhooked the microphone into which he had dictated his findings whilst he worked. “My name’s Browne. You’ll have my full report by tomorrow. If it’s any help, I’ll give you my thoughts on the major findings right now.”
“Thank you. The less time we waste the better, when a man’s already been dead for several days.” Peach was also aware that a man submitting a report which might eventually be probed in court by a defence counsel had to be cautious on paper; no one liked being made to look a fool in public, and least of all a fool in his profession. It meant that PM reports confined themselves to facts, when a little informed speculation might well be more useful to the officers beginning an investigation.
“Right you are.” Browne led them into an office dominated by a huge desk, which was littered with letters and documents, very unlike the neat precision of the stainless steel counters and sinks he had left behind him. He gestured at two chairs; they had to remove cardboard boxes from them before they could sit. He slumped opposite them and took off his green cap, leaving his thinning grey hair in disarray, but kept on the green rubber gumboots he wore in the lab as he slumped down in an armchair opposite them. They had been well washed, but there was a small smear of brown blood on his left sleeve, reminding them through his cheerful demeanour of what he had been doing whilst they drove here from Brunton.
