Dusty Death (11 page)

He swallowed and said, ‘You'll want me to tell you all I can about Sunita. I don't know exactly where she came from; probably she never told us. She'd fallen out with her family and she didn't want them to find her. That wasn't unusual: most of us had had blazing rows, or worse, with one or other of our parents. But Sunita was almost paranoid about it. She wouldn't register for social security, because she was so afraid they'd find where she was.'

‘How long was she there?'

‘She was there when I got there.'

‘Which was when?'

‘I've been trying to pin it down exactly. I think it was about November, 1990. You might as well know why.' He had nerved himself to this, feeling sure they would ask about it, and it came out in a rush, like water bursting past an obstruction. ‘My father died when I was eleven. My mother had a succession of boyfriends after that. Some of them weren't too bad, but the one who eventually moved in was the worst of all. He knocked me about a lot, even when I was in the sixth form at school. He was big and strong and delighted in showing me that I wasn't, especially when my mother wasn't around. Eventually, after I'd played the piano at a school concert and got a bit of publicity, he tried to hit the back of my left hand with a coal hammer. Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow, but I realized that he would cripple me if I stayed around, so I got out.' He turned his hand over and looked at the back of it now, as if even after all these years he could scarcely believe that it was intact.

Peach watched Lucy Blake making swift notes with the small gold ball pen she always carried. ‘And you say Sunita Akhtar was there when you arrived?'

They knew her full name. Knew more than he had realized. ‘Yes, but she'd only just arrived. Not more than a day before me, I think. They're suspicious of you, the people already in a squat, when you move in. I remember that both of us felt we were being watched, for a few days.'

‘Drew you together, that, I expect.'

He knew far too much, this man. ‘Yes. We got on together, Sunita and I. We'd arrived together, and we were both fugitives from home.'

‘Lovers, were you?'

‘Who told you that?'

You did. No one else. But thank you for the information! Peach gave him a wide, appreciative beam. ‘Couldn't tell you who it was, even if I wanted to, Mr Hayward. Fall out with each other, eventually, did you?'

‘No!' Matthew was aware that he was losing it, that his denial was too emphatic. ‘It's too simplistic to say that we were lovers. We were thrown together by circumstances, as I've said, and eventually we slept together. But we never became an item.'

‘And did you regret that?'

‘No. We weren't in a position to form lasting sexual relationships, either of us.' He wondered how convincing his denial sounded.

‘Put it about a bit, did she, this Sunita?'

Matthew almost shouted at him again. Instead, he controlled himself and said with venom, ‘The poor girl's dead. Do you have to be so offensive?'

‘Probably do, yes, Mr Hayward. Just trying to get the fullest possible picture of what went on at twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace all those years ago, you see. So I'm asking you again, were you the only person who enjoyed the girl's sexual favours?'

‘No. I don't think I was. Sunita went off the rails a bit, I think. She'd had a very strict upbringing, and it seemed to be a kind of rebellion against that.'

This wasn't what a CID team wanted to hear. Sex meant passion, and passion meant possible violence. If the girl had offered sex around, it increased the possible number of suspects. ‘You think she slept with other people in the squat?'

The slim shoulders shrugged hopelessly. ‘I think she might have done. I think she probably did. I'm not certain of it.'

‘And others as well?'

‘I – I think she might have. It's a long time ago and I can't be certain.'

‘She didn't have a job?'

‘No. She did bits of work where she could pick them up. I remember she stacked supermarket shelves for a while, but it didn't last. She didn't like working with Asians, because she was worried it might get back to her parents and they'd come after her. I told you, she was almost paranoid about that.'

‘So she needed money, didn't she? If she was refusing to take Unemployment Benefit.'

‘Yes. She was a proud girl, Sunita. We didn't need much, in the squat, but she didn't want anyone to think she was sponging off them.'

‘So she might have sold sexual favours to raise money.'

‘I suppose she might. I don't have any knowledge that she did.'

‘When did you leave that squat, Mr Hayward?'

‘April, 1991.'

And why did you go?'

‘No one really wants to live in a squat for ever, do they? By definition, it's an insecure and impermanent existence. I'd got myself together again. Before things blew up at home, I'd already secured a scholarship and a place at the Northern College of Music, in Manchester, to begin in September. I'd thought that was all off when I left home, but I realized that it could be my salvation. I got a job for the summer playing the piano in a pub in Blackpool. Even got the odd booking in theatre orchestras for the summer shows, when the regular players were ill; I can play the violin well enough to get by. I had cheap digs and I got myself back on my feet.'

It had come out in a rush again, like a prepared statement. But there was nothing wrong with that: they had asked him to spend twenty-four hours thinking back to that vanished time in his life, hadn't they?

‘And Sunita was still there when you left?'

Matthew wondered if he could get away with saying she was. It would be a large step to putting him in the clear for her killing. But they had another source of information: he couldn't be certain how much they already knew about this. ‘No. She'd disappeared a little while before I went. About two weeks earlier, I'd say. I can't be precise, at this distance from it.'

‘You must have been curious to know what had happened to her.'

‘No. Well, not very curious, anyway. We weren't very close to each other by that time. And people come and go in squats. Sometimes they tell you what's happening, what's turned up for them, sometimes they don't. You're never very curious when someone leaves.'

‘No, I realize that. But you used the word “disappeared”, for Sunita. Wouldn't it have been more natural to say she left, as you did?'

How sharp he was, this man! And he was right; Matthew had implied there was a mystery, that he was worried about her going, when he had not meant to. He said carefully, ‘It's just a question of semantics. I suppose it seemed to me like a disappearance, because it was so abrupt. She hadn't said anything about going, as I said.'

‘I think you're right. Because it now looks to me as if she vanished so abruptly because she was killed, Mr Hayward. Especially as she'd said nothing to you, or to anyone else as far as you know, about leaving.'

He nodded, wary now of words.

‘It's interesting that you thought of it as a disappearance at the time, rather than a simple exit from the group, like yours. Perhaps you had an inkling at the time that something had happened to Sunita.'

This man, whose dark eyes watched him so intently, who had been so quick to pick him up on a word, hadn't said ‘knowledge', but only ‘inkling'. He hadn't accused him of murder, but he hadn't let him off the hook either. Matthew said, ‘Perhaps it was hindsight which made me speak of her disappearing rather than leaving. Perhaps it was a result of what I have learned over the last few days.'

‘Perhaps. But you must see that this sudden, unexplained, apparently unpremeditated disappearance increases the likelihood that one of the people in that squat killed her. I'd put money on it, if I were a betting man.' Peach gave the man opposite him a contented smile on that thought.

‘I suppose so.'

‘And of course, experienced coppers, older and wiser men than me, would say that the man who left so soon after the dispatching of this poor girl would be the most likely killer. The prime suspect, they'd call a chap like that.'

‘I didn't kill her!'

It was a reaction so childishly prompt and instinctive that in a few seconds they were all smiling at it, though Matthew, after the surprise of his smile, felt hysteria welling briefly at the back of his throat. This meeting was not going as he had envisaged it at all.

Peach said, ‘No one has accused you, yet. You're helping us with our enquiries, as a good citizen should. If it's any consolation, what you have told us so far has been most helpful, Mr Hayward. So let's be generous to you, and disregard your unfortunate departure so soon after what we now think is a murder. There were five of you as well as the murder victim in that squat at number twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace. So on the simple statistics, you're four to one against as our killer. The best way to become an outsider rather than the favourite is to tell us all you can about the other four unlawful occupants of that house.'

It was a crude logic he was using, but Matthew in his now fevered state couldn't argue with this Chief Inquisitor. He said feebly, ‘I can't remember much about the others. It's a long time ago now.'

‘Nevertheless, you've had a day to think about it. You've done quite well with yourself and Sunita. Let's see what you can tell us about the others. It's very much in your own interest to give us all you can.'

‘There were four others. That's correct.'

‘Two other men, apart from you, and two women.'

He felt another chill of apprehension at Peach's simple statement. How much more did he know? Was he playing cat and mouse games, trying to catch Matthew out in lies? Did he know even now far more than Matthew could recollect about that house and its occupants?

Lucy Blake on the other side of the fence was amazed once again by what skilful use Peach was making of the minimal recollections of that pathetic creature Billy Bedford. She said, ball pen poised over her notes, ‘Can you confirm the names of these people for us, Mr Hayward?'

Her eyes were dark green in the clear light filtering into the room, as if they caught the green of the hills outside. He found it a relief to turn to this softer presence beneath the lustrous red-brown hair after Peach's remorseless stare, though he was aware that he must be just as careful in his replies. ‘I've been thinking about that. The girls were called Jo and Emmy.'

She made a careful note, taking her time, using Peach's technique of allowing silence to build into tension. ‘And the men?'

‘One was Wally. He called himself that, but I never felt it was his real name – I don't think any of us did. It was a kind of joke in the place, because he said it in that way himself, but not a joke that we laughed at very much.'

‘Frightening bloke was he?'

‘He was, yes, as I remember it.' It seemed easier to admit things like that, to this pretty, understanding girl. ‘Of course, I was very young at the time. He was probably only four or five years older than me, but that seems a lot when you're that age.'

‘Indeed. But there must have been more than his age between you.'

‘We didn't fall out, never had any serious disagreements.' He wondered if he had been too quick to say that. ‘It was just that he seemed – well, formidable, in that context. He was a powerfully built man. Not particularly tall, as I remember it, but heavily built. Like a prop forward.' He grinned despite himself at this sudden image from his past. ‘And he came and went as he pleased, without reference to any of us. I may be wrong, but I don't think any of us ever knew what he did outside the place. And he always had stubble round his chin, before it became a fashion to have it a few years later. I think he grew a beard in the later stages of my time there. Dark-haired, he was, and swarthy.'

‘Did he have a tooth missing?'

Again evidence that they had other sources than him, that what he had to say was being weighed against other accounts, that if he got this wrong he would be in trouble for deceiving this contrasting but equally observant pair. ‘I think he did, yes. I'd forgotten about it, but now that you—'

‘Upper or lower jaw?'

He made himself pause, as if giving thought to the matter. ‘Upper jaw, I think. Not quite in the middle, but near to it.'

Lucy made a careful note of that, trying not to imagine what the photofit compilers might make of the detail at some later date. ‘And you don't think he will be going by the name of Wally now?'

‘No. I think it very unlikely that it was his real name at the time. But I've no idea what has happened to any of them, since then. And I've no idea how long they were there after I left.'

‘I see. What about the other man?'

‘He was coloured. Very black.' Matthew grinned unexpectedly at himself. ‘Well, I suppose he seemed even darker, in that place, in winter. We hadn't a lot of light, in most of the rooms. He was West Indian, I think. Extraction, I mean – I'm sure he'd lived all his life in this country. I can't recall a name for him. Wally used to call him Sambo sometimes, to try to wind him up, but I never saw him react to it.'

DS Blake had a sudden picture of the grim life in this squat, but she knew it was only a snapshot, that they would probably know a lot more about the place before this one was solved. ‘Any idea what he did to support himself?'

‘No. I think he had work, for at least part of the time, but I'm not sure what.'

‘Age?'

‘He was young. Younger than me, I think, but much more streetwise.'

She could believe that. Matthew Hayward, successful concert pianist with the musical world at his feet, looked younger than his thirty-three years even now, with his unlined face and his attractively tousled dark hair. It was difficult to think of him as a potential murderer. She said, ‘What about the other two girls?'