Dusty Death (12 page)

‘I can't remember a lot, apart from the names. Jo was a couple of years older than me, I think. So about twenty at that time. Dark-haired. Rather a striking sort of face. Strong nose.'

‘Build?'

‘Quite sturdily built, as far as I remember.'

‘Buxom.' Peach threw the word in when Matthew was concentrating on his replies to the girl. It was not the word he would have used in this context, but it was uncomfortably accurate. He wondered how many of the other occupants of that squat they had already interviewed before him.

‘Yes. That wouldn't be a bad description of her.'

‘Anything else?'

‘No. I didn't think I could remember as much as that.'

Lucy nodded slowly. ‘And the other girl?'

‘Emmy. I don't know whether she was Emma or Emily, but she called herself Emmy. She was taller than Jo and Sunita. Almost my height, I think; probably an inch or so less than me; so about five feet nine, say.'

‘Age?'

He paused for a moment, his brow wrinkling into a frown. ‘I was going to say older than Jo. But she may not have been much different. She was more worldly-wise than any of us, except for Wally, and that made her seem older, I expect. Now, I think she was probably only twenty or twenty-one.'

‘Dark-haired?'

He wondered again if they were trying to trap him. ‘No. Definitely blonde.'

‘Figure?'

‘Quite shapely.' Absurdly, he felt himself blushing.

‘Pretty face?'

‘Matter of opinion, that, isn't it?' He gave a weak smile, but it brought no response from these two. ‘I think she had blue eyes, but I honestly can't remember much of the detail of her features, at this distance.'

‘Natural blonde?'

‘I don't know. I was even less of an expert in such things then than I am now.' Again he grinned weakly; again his smile dropped from his face like a stricken bird. ‘I think she may well have been natural. It wasn't easy to be anything else in that place. We'd no hot water, and I suspect none of us was as clean or washed as often as we'd have liked to.'

‘What else?'

‘Nothing, I'm afraid. It's all a long time ago.' He looked from one to the other for a response, found Peach nodding thoughtfully, as if he accepted this.

The DCI said, ‘Do you remember a mark on the back of her thigh?'

‘No.'

‘Not sure which leg. Just below the buttock, it would be.'

‘They wore trousers, the girls. It was damn cold in there, most of the time. I wouldn't have seen a mark like that, would I?'

The DCI gave him a smile which developed from small beginnings into something much grosser. ‘Sleep with either of these two, did you?' Peach shot the question across the six feet between them with relish.

Matthew felt a moment of panic, told himself firmly that it was completely irrational. ‘No.'

‘Reasonable question. Lot of it goes on in squats, doesn't it? And you've already admitted to sleeping with a murder victim. And you make the other two sound very beddable. Wouldn't be surprising if a young, virile lad like you, freed from home restrictions for the first time, was putting it about a bit.'

‘Well, I wasn't!' Matthew felt a desperate need to stem the flow of Peach speculation.

Peach studied him with his head on one side for a moment, then grinned conspiratorially. ‘OK. What about the others?'

‘I don't know. Really I don't. We kept ourselves to ourselves, didn't enquire too much about what the others were up to. It was one of the rules of the squat, and you soon learned to stick by it.'

‘I understand that. But when there's been a murder there, it alters all the rules. And brings some new ones of its own into play. Relationships, whether temporary or more lasting, might well be important. As might jealousy, sexual or otherwise.'

Matthew said stubbornly, ‘I can't remember anything of that sort.'

‘No tantrums?'

‘I can't remember any. We were all under various kinds of stress, but I can't think of anything which might be significant to you.'

Peach regarded him steadily for a moment with those dark eyes which seemed to be seeing far more than they should. Then he said, ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Hayward.' He looked at the music on the piano as he stood up. ‘Good luck with the concerts! Keep on thinking about this matter, please; other things may come back to you, over the next few days. No doubt we shall need to speak again.'

Matthew wondered why that sounded so much like a threat.

Lucy Blake had driven three miles before she said, with reluctant admiration, ‘You're a clever devil, Percy Peach. Matthew Hayward thinks we know a lot more about that squat than we actually do.'

He was silent, and for a while she thought he was revelling in this praise. Then Peach said, ‘The next interesting research is to discover exactly what it was that he was holding back from us.'

Tommy Bloody Tucker on television was a thing of wonder. It was over a year since his last such appearance, and Percy Peach, watching him on the monitor in the privacy of his own room, admitted to himself that he could not have done anything like as well.

Percy could never have inspired such confidence in the public by his very appearance, for a start. Tucker was in his best uniform, spruce as a matinee idol, earnest as a bishop, with his still plentiful and lightly waved hair specially trimmed for the occasion. The silvering at his temples gave just the appropriate gravitas to his message. The Chief Superintendent's regular features had been skilfully treated by the make-up girl; he contrived to look healthy, vigorous, and yet weighed down by an appropriate concern.

The police needed the public's help, he said, in the matter of the woman's body unearthed during the demolition work near the centre of Brunton four days earlier. A moment's thought would make it obvious to every citizen how difficult an investigation of this kind, into a death which had happened many years earlier, must be.

He had taken personal charge of this investigation from the moment the corpse was discovered, and he was gratified to report now that substantial, some would say surprising, progress had already been made. For a start, there was not a shadow of doubt that this was murder. Chief Superintendent Tucker faced the camera head-on and made a suitably melodramatic use of that word, which always chilled and excited the public.

The victim was a young woman named Sunita Akhtar, nineteen at the time of her death. Diligent enquiries had revealed that this seemed to have taken place early in 1991, probably in March. To pinpoint the time of death so accurately thirteen years later was no mean feat of detection, as Tucker reminded his questioner with a modest smile.

It seemed the young lady had been living unlawfully in a house which had been condemned for slum clearance and cleared of its legitimate occupants – what was commonly known as a ‘squat'. The immaculate Tucker pronounced the word with distaste and took the opportunity to emphasize the dangers to young people in choosing to inhabit such places. His interviewer enquired gently whether the police should not have been checking on such unlawful occupation back in 1991, and perhaps even preventing it.

Tucker was ready for her: as Percy Peach noted with reluctant admiration in his private viewing, he hadn't risen to the dizzying rank he held without honours in bullshit. His interviewer was obviously far too young and pretty to remember it, Tucker implied, but back in 1990 things were very different. Cardboard cities were springing up throughout the kingdom. Perhaps the authorities had been happy to see young people with a solid roof over their heads, even in a condemned property. And no doubt the policemen then in charge had had other and more serious crimes on their hands at the time, he added tolerantly. He contrived to imply that this was long before he was on the scene, and his interviewer was too far away to pick up the sound of Percy Peach's fiercely grinding teeth.

The modern police force was a formidably efficient unit. Tucker produced a visual aid, in the form of a street map centred on Sebastopol Terrace, the scene of the crime. The cameras had shown the desolate waste on the building site in the introduction to this item. Tucker pointed to his map and explained that he had now been able to establish exactly where this partly mummified body had lain for all these years. It had been hidden not in the squat in which Sunita Akhtar had lived out the last months of her short life, but in the unoccupied house next door.

Paint samples from fragments of wood and the clothing of the deceased revealed that a broken door had been used to immure the corpse in the chimney breast of this derelict house, where it had lain undiscovered until the development firm moved in with its heavy machinery.

Peach was fascinated despite himself as he watched the latest forensic findings, which he had delivered to his Chief Superintendent that morning, now made to seem a product of the individual diligence of Tucker himself. The man made a passing reference to his team, but he contrived to imply that they were dull plodders, who would have been lost without the forceful direction and insights of their chief.

The girl interviewing this modern Colossus of detection, newly arrived at Granada Television from local radio, now offered an observation so much to Tucker's taste that Peach wondered if she had been primed with it before the exchange began. She said that she supposed the police team could know very little as yet of the people who had occupied this long-departed squat, who it now seemed had contained a murderer within their number.

Tucker raised a benign, controlling hand. ‘We must not jump to any such conclusion. The layman might do that, but the experienced senior policeman in charge of a case like this knows that he must keep an open mind. It is still possible that Sunita was killed by some other person entirely, who merely hid her body in that bleak place.' He allowed himself an enigmatic smile. ‘Nor is it true to say that I know nothing of the people who occupied that squat.'

Tucker made the dramatic pause of the experienced ham and looked straight into the camera, his grey eyes filling with a steely threat. ‘I already know that there were three males and three females in that squat at the time of this death. One of the females was the deceased. We are anxious to make contact with the other five people who were living unlawfully at number twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace in the early months of 1991. One of them has already been found and interviewed. It is only a matter of time before the others are discovered. I urge them now to come forward and declare themselves. This is a serious crime, and that is their duty. No one who is innocent has anything to fear.'

‘You sound very determined, Chief Superintendent Tucker. Is this case something of a personal crusade?'

His smile as he regarded her was modest, understanding and confident at the same time: a masterpiece of public relations art. ‘I cannot say that, Jenny. The modern senior policeman has to keep an overview of crime, to have an eye for the broader picture. But you are right: I take a crime of this sort on my patch very seriously indeed. I shall not be counting the hours I work in the days ahead.' He took a deep breath whilst he turned the full force of Tucker sincerity on the camera in front of him. ‘It is fair to say that I am confident of a successful outcome, and determined to bring to justice the person responsible for this dreadful murder.'

The Chief Superintendent jutted his chin at the camera with a grim smile. Percy Peach, a man not given to spitting, was at that moment sorely tempted.

Not all of Superintendent Tucker's interview was shown on television's evening news. But one man in particular gave intense attention to the Chief Superintendent's update on the Sunita Akhtar case.

David Edmonds, partner in and unofficial Chief Executive of Brunton's oldest estate agents (‘dealing in Lancashire property for over a hundred years'), watched the news item with mounting apprehension. Even his wife noted his interest. ‘Sold the site for that office development, didn't you?' she said, as she passed him with her youngest child on her arm.

‘Yes, I think we did. A few years ago, though. I didn't have anything to do with the sale myself.' He wondered if that sounded as casual and offhand as he wished it to.

David Edmonds was left on his own in front of the television set as the newsreader went on with the rest of the news of the north-west. He did not register any of it. He sat for a moment with his head in his hands, willing his brain to come up with a solution to this. But that brain told him logically enough that there were some situations to which there were no solutions.

He went into his study and shut the door of the small room carefully behind him. He could hear the sounds of his wife and his children over his head. He picked up the phone and dialled his father-in-law's number. ‘Good evening, Stanley.' He made himself use the forename of the older man, a habit which still came hard to him even after ten years. ‘Sorry to bother you at home. I have a small favour to ask of you.'

It sounded oddly formal, when he wanted to minimize the impact of what he had to say. But apparently Stanley Ormerod didn't notice that. He said affably enough, ‘Pleasure to hear from you, David, as always. Baby-sitting, is it? I'll get Mary for you if—'

‘No, it's not that. It's connected with the children, though.'

That sounded desperate in his own ears, but all the older man said on the other end of the phone was: ‘Fire away, then!'

‘You remember that I was thinking of taking them away for a little break?'

‘Down to Devon for a day or two at half term, didn't you say? I thought you'd given up the idea.'

‘Well, I had, yes. But they're looking pretty pale and feeble at the end of the winter, I think. And so is Michelle. I'd like to give them a dose of sun. Spain or Portugal, I thought. For a fortnight.' He tacked the important bit awkwardly on to the end, trying to slip it by under a welter of other facts.