Remains to be Seen (19 page)

‘No, sir, I probably wouldn't. I was trying to find a murderer, myself.'

‘And I was able to brief Henry Rawcliffe about our efforts. It's highly important that we make a friend of the Chairman of the Police Authority, you know.'

‘I see, sir. And did you succeed in doing that?'

‘I did indeed.' Tucker leaned forward confidentially over his big desk, unable to resist the temptation to confess his triumph. ‘We had a game of golf at my club yesterday. That's how well we got on on Saturday night. That's how close we are.'

‘Really, sir. You're sure that was wise, are you?'

Tucker glared at this irritant in his comfortable world. ‘Of course I'm sure. If you're trying to cast aspersions on my golf, to imply that I wouldn't be able to give the man a good game, then I must tell you that you haven't seen the best of my game. You have an unfortunate tendency to—'

‘Nothing to do with your golf, sir. I wouldn't dream of commenting on anything so sensitive. I was thinking that a man in your position needed to be more careful than most about his choice of friends.'

Tucker gave the underling his most condescending smile. ‘I think you can safely leave the nuances of social intercourse to me, Peach. It's hardly your forte, is it? And I could hardly make a better friend than the Chairman of the Police Authority, could I?'

Peach decided that the patronizing sod intended this as a rhetorical question, so he didn't venture an opinion. ‘I thought I'd better brief you on the latest position at Marton Towers, sir.'

‘And I agree with you. Leave my choice of friends to me and get on with what you should be doing.'

‘Well, sir, as of this moment, it still seems possible that the butler did it.'

‘The butler?'

It reassured Peach to find his chief back in goggle-eyed, dead-fish mode. ‘Yes, sir. Mr Neville Holloway. General Manager at Marton Towers, he calls himself. Still in the frame, at the moment.'

‘You're telling me you've still made no progress in this matter, after all this time?'

‘Four days, sir, since the remains were discovered. Including a weekend when my only junket was to have tea with a seventy-year-old lady. I can now tell you that there are others in the frame, as well as the butler. The wife, sir, for a start.'

‘The spouse is always a suspect, you know, in a suspicious death.'

‘Yes, sir. I'll try to remember that.' Peach shut his eyes and was silent for three seconds. ‘This one didn't seem to be unduly affected by her old man's departure. It's possible that she was being knocked off by someone else, sir, but that hasn't been confirmed as yet.'

‘That would explain why she wasn't too upset by her husband's death, wouldn't it?'

‘It would indeed, sir. That was a line of enquiry we thought worth pursuing, sir.'

‘She might even have killed him herself, you know, or partnered someone else in the crime.'

‘That had occurred to us, sir. It's good to have it confirmed by your overview.'

Irony was wasted on Tucker. He said, ‘Well, who else do you have to offer for this?'

‘Mrs Cartwright is forty-one, sir. There's a younger couple, also living on site: James and Margaret Naylor. He's thirty-one and she's thirty, sir.' Tucker had a reporter's attitude to suspects: the first thing he always wanted to know was their ages.

‘The wife, Tucker. Is she voluptuous?'

Tucker pursed his lips at this politically incorrect but highly relevant question. ‘Eminently bedworthy, sir, I'd say. Of course, I'd always defer to your superior expertise in these matters, but that's—'

‘Then you must consider the possibility that this younger man was conducting an affair with her. Very likely a highly passionate affair. The attractions of the voluptuous older woman must never be underestimated, Peach.'

‘I see, sir.' Peach frowned in concentration, as if striving to etch this precious insight into his memory. ‘Well, we're checking out the non-resident staff at the Towers, the ones who come in to work there each day, and the other relatives of the deceased; they include a stepfather who didn't get on with him at all and has a past history of violence. So far my money's on either him or one of the four residents for this.'

‘One of the women seems likely, if adultery's involved. But keep an open mind, Peach.' Chief Superintendent Tucker waved a lordly arm towards the door of his office.

Peach went back downstairs and made a call to an inspector friend of his in the Lancashire County Police. The information about Henry Rawcliffe, Head of the Brunton Police Authority, was most satisfactory.

After this moment of self-indulgence, he turned his mind to the people he had mentioned to Tommy Bloody Tucker as being in the frame for this one. Each of the five was concealing something, he was sure, but he relished the challenge of that: he'd break them down, in the next day or two. He would have been altogether less pleased with himself had he realized that his five main suspects were about to become six.

No one who saw the erect figure striding into DCI Peach's office would have recognized the furtive creature of the underworld who had lived from hand to mouth in the squat a week earlier.

Only a certain restlessness, an inability to settle in one position for longer than a minute at a time, remained from the being who had lived with incessant danger over those perilous months. Jack Clark's hair had been cut, his shirt was clean, dark trousers had replaced the torn and filthy jeans which had clung to his slim legs for so long. He even wore a tie; you might have mistaken this brave and reckless man for a banker.

Peach, of course, knew otherwise. The Detective Chief Inspector would have protested that he was a born coward, with a healthy consciousness of the vulnerability of his own skin. His colleagues, on the other hand, would have told you that Percy Peach was in fact a man who had never flinched from danger, whenever his work led him into it. But Peach knew that he could never have done what Clark had done, never have lived the necessary lie that he had lived over weeks of almost unbearable tension and vigilance.

Clark in his turn had been made aware as he chatted to the station sergeant of the iconic reputation as an aggressive taker of villains which Peach had built up for himself over the last few years in Brunton. For a few minutes, the two men circled each other respectfully in conversation, two very different creatures who were each slightly in awe of the other's strengths.

Rank was soon dispensed with; the pair spoke as two men playing very different parts in the same war against evil. They discussed the success of the raid at Marton Towers on the previous Wednesday night, with Peach paying fulsome and uncharacteristic tribute to the accuracy of the information Clark had provided to set it up, and Jack making more conventional noises about the swiftness and efficiency of the police swoop.

Then Peach said, ‘But you didn't come in here to review past triumphs, Jack Clark.'

Jack was glad that Peach had taken the initiative: he had been wondering how to cut through the conversational pleasantries, without knowing when or how to do it. Polite conversation was not his strength. He said, ‘You're right. I've been a bit restless, since last Wednesday night.'

Peach smiled wryly at him. ‘Wish I could say the same. But I collected an investigation into arson and murder at the Towers, after the successful conclusion of the raid.'

‘I know that. I was hoping I might be able to help you.'

For a moment, Peach thought the man was asking to join his team. But then he knew that it couldn't be that: this man lived and worked in a very different world from that of normal detection. ‘You think you may have information?'

Jack nodded. Now that he was here, what he had to say seemed more vague and ephemeral than it had when he had paced the narrow confines of his flat. ‘It won't give you an arrest. It will add to the sum of your knowledge.' He gave a grim little smile at the formality of that phrase.

Peach's smile was equally grim, but also encouraging. ‘Any information will be welcome, Jack. We're nowhere near an arrest at present.'

‘It's a bit vague, because what we were concerned with was trapping the big boys. But some of the people who worked at the Towers were dealing. I thought you'd like to be aware of that.'

‘I can't say I'm surprised. But it's valuable information, because no one up there's told me a thing about it. I'm sure Holloway, the man in charge, was aware of it, even if he wasn't involved himself, but he's said nothing. Do you know who was dealing?'

‘No. At least, the only name I can give you won't be of much use. It's Neil Cartwright, your murder victim. He'd been dealing for some time. I think he had the type of job they were planning to offer me, where you supply and direct your own small ring of dealers.'

‘So he might have been using other domestic employees at the Towers to deal for him?'

‘He might, or he might have recruited completely different people from outside. People like Cartwright are small fry, when you consider the big picture, so they were of no real concern to us in the build-up to last Wednesday's arrests. And of course, Cartwright's dealing may have no connection at all with either the fire which followed the raid or the murder which preceded it.'

‘But until we know that's the case, we need to give special attention to anyone who worked with or close to Cartwright.' Peach's mind was already on the sheet of paper he had been looking at before Clark came into the room.

‘What was his job at Marton Towers?'

‘He was Head Gardener. But that title wouldn't cover the full range of his duties. He was also in charge of the estate. And he had staff who worked for him. At least one of them was full time.'

‘If it was an older man, it's unlikely that he'd have been recruited to sell drugs.'

Peach smiled at the earnest, neatly clad officer opposite him, who looked so unlike a man who would willingly put his life into extreme danger. ‘This was a young man, Jack. A young man who seems to have made himself very scarce since the events of last week.'

B
en Freeman kept his eye on the Head Greenkeeper, who was planting a young tree in the rough beside the adjoining fairway. When you were on probation, it paid you to take extreme care over your work, to make sure that you understood exactly what the boss wanted and then deliver it to the best of your ability. He'd been warned about that when they took him on, and he was doing his best to perform.

It was the first time they had allowed him to drive the gang mowers which cut the fairways at Brunton Golf Club. There wasn't a great growth of grass so early in the year, but there was enough for him to be able to survey the appealing swathes he had just cut across the second and third fairways. He was pleased with what he saw. The pattern was regular and the lines were straight. With the neatening effect that mowing always has on growing grass, the two fairways looked a hundred per cent better for his efforts.

He glanced at his watch. Twenty to twelve already. The time went quickly when you were concentrating on the work. Lunch break in twenty minutes, and the rest of the day fine and bright, if the forecast they'd been given that morning was correct. A couple of the members gave him a cheery good morning and complimented him on the look of his work. It was a good life; he'd made the right decision in coming here.

He drove the tractor across to the Head Greenkeeper to ask if he should now move on to mowing another fairway. His boss was a powerful, grizzled man of fifty, with the dark, healthy skin which came from much work out of doors. ‘You done well there, young Ben,' he said.

He'd been watching, then, estimating the skills of the newest member of his staff. Ben said, ‘I've done a lot of mowing before. Mostly fine grasses, though. Smaller mowers than this, to give a fine cut. Lawns and the like.' He didn't know quite what he meant by ‘the like', but he wanted to get in the line about lawns, because they might let him on to the greens, if they were satisfied with his other work. The more experienced lads who worked with him had said that that was the elite job at a golf course: when the boss trusted you to work on the greens, you really knew you were in.

‘Might let you mow the first fairway, next week,' said the boss. And Ben realized in a flash that he hadn't been trusted on the first fairway for his first outing with the big tractor and the gang mowers. The first hole was visible from the clubhouse windows, and any clumsiness in the lines left from his cutting would have been all too evident to the members in the bar. But telling him that he might now be trusted there was telling him that he had done all right.

Ben Freeman said, ‘Do you want me to move on to the fourth now?' Always show willing, however near it is to break time.

At that moment, the Head Greenkeeper's mobile phone screeched in his pocket. He pulled it out, pressed the button and put it to his ear, with the wariness of a man who does not trust such things. He listened, nodded, looked cautiously at the man who sat on the tractor above him as he spoke. ‘You're to go to the clubhouse, lad. Secretary wants to see you. There's two coppers come in to talk to you, apparently.'

Ben Freeman's bright day seemed suddenly a little darker.

The grass was also beginning to grow on the neat lawns around Marton Towers. Neville Holloway knew that it would need attention in the next week or two, if the mansion was to have the elegant emerald surround which had set it off so admirably over the last few years.

With Cartwright dead and no regular outdoor staff now available, it was a situation which would demand his attention before long. At present, he had two men coming in on an hourly basis to keep things tidy outside. But the future was uncertain, with the owner of the Towers in custody and by all accounts likely to stay there. Richard Crouch's instructions from jail were to carry on as usual for the present: there was plenty of money in the bank for staff wages. But no one, and perhaps least of all Crouch, knew what was the long-term future of the estate and its employees.