by J M Gregson
‘I’m not going down, Peach. There isn’t the evidence. You won’t get that Jenny Pitt to go into court.’
‘Her injuries are being photographed at this very moment, Ray. In glorious technicolour. The blues and the greens and the yellows should be at their best on this bright morning – bright for us, anyway. Our chief photographer’s a good lad. He’ll make the most of the bruises on the body, when he prints and develops. And it looks as if you might have broken Jenny’s cheekbone. Shame for her, but it will help the case.’ Percy didn’t mind stretching the truth a fraction, in a good cause like this.
‘You won’t get me for it.’ But the apprehension in the thin face belied the words.
‘It was DC Pickering here who put us on to you in the first place. Bright lad, he is, though I don’t suppose someone like you would give him credit for it.’
Ray Shepherd glanced at Pickering contemptuously. ‘Brains of a pig, I should think he has.’
‘Intelligent animals, pigs. But I don’t expect you’ve read Animal Farm.’ Peach switched suddenly back to business. ‘I’ve already noticed that you’re left-handed, Shepherd. But it was DC Pickering here who worked out that the man who struck Jenny Pitt so hard with the back of his hand had to be left-handed. Smarter than your average cop, isn’t he?’
‘Doesn’t mean it was me, does it? It could have been any—’
‘And then there’s the DNA, of course. Useful new addition, DNA, when we’re dealing with thickos who forget all about it. Almost unfair, it seems sometimes. We could ask you for a sample now, but there’s no real hurry. I think we’ll leave all that to the Forensic boys when you’re safely in custody.’ The DCI smiled happily, even smugly.
His attitude had its effect on Shepherd. They could hear the confidence draining out of his voice as he said, ‘You don’t scare me, Peach. You won’t get a DNA match with me.’
‘You really think not? Well, I’m glad to say that I don’t share your view on that, Mr Shepherd. You broke the skin on that girl’s face with the back of your hand: I’m sure you left a small sample of your estimable self behind. I shall be very surprised if it doesn’t show up in the blood samples DC Pickering collected from the poor girl’s face last night.’
It was news to Gordon Pickering, but he managed a brilliant smile when Shepherd glanced instinctively at him. Peach registered this pleasing reaction without turning towards his DC. Having lured this dangerous fish into the complex meshes of his net, he was looking now for a much bigger catch. ‘So you can look forward to at least an ABH charge, or possibly GBH, when we’ve assessed the injuries. With your record, a conviction for either of them should get you a nice few years inside.’
Now Peach did look at his companion; then he spoke as if they were in conference alone. ‘The question is, DC Pickering, can we now nab this bugger for murder?’
‘I should think it very possible, sir.’
‘I’m glad you agree.’ The two faces turned back in unison to look at the slim man behind the desk, studying him in unblinking silence, as though he were a specimen under a microscope.
The scrutiny was unnerving, even to a man who had endured many police interviews in the past. Ray Shepherd said uncertainly, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Peach dropped his smile as swiftly as if it had been a foul smell beneath his nose. ‘Murder, Mr Shepherd. The unlawful killing of Sarah Dunne on the night of Friday, the fourteenth of November.’
‘I didn’t do that. I’ve never killed anyone. You’re barking up the wrong tree there. That would have been . . .’ His voice drained away, seeming to echo a little in the silent room as it went.
Peach’s smile returned slowly, grimly, letting the speaker realize the mistake he had made. ‘Would have been who, Mr Shepherd?’
‘I don’t know who, do I?’
Peach watched him closely, savouring the fear in this man who lived his life by physical violence. Then he said in a low, even voice which made every syllable register, ‘If you want to save your own miserable skin, Shepherd, your only chance is to co-operate absolutely with us. Even someone who has behaved as stupidly as you must see that, surely.’
‘I’m not a grass.’
The sentiment Peach had heard before, a thousand times. The words that even the youthful Gordon Pickering was bored with by now. Peach shrugged. ‘If you want to go down for the maximum, I’ll be happy to arrange it. I don’t like blokes who beat up helpless girls.’
‘You know I can’t grass. You know what Joe Johnson would do to anyone who grassed.’
Peach concealed his excitement, apparently coming near to a yawn before he said, ‘All right, we’ll throw the book at you, if you want to protect one of Johnson’s other palookas. We’d like to have the right man, of course, but so long as we get a murder conviction, it will look just as good on our clear-up rates.’
‘You won’t make murder stick.’ Yet the apprehension which now flooded into his vulpine features said otherwise.
‘Oh, but I think we will, Shepherd. If I were a betting man, I’d estimate us as about five to one on. Of course, the odds might alter dramatically if you gave us a name.’
‘That death was nothing to do with Mr Johnson.’
‘Really? You’ll understand if I treat that view with a certain scepticism.’
‘It was nothing to do with us. I don’t know who killed Sarah Dunne.’
Peach saw denial dropping down the wolfish features like a drawbridge. He said, ‘Indulge me for a moment, Mr Shepherd – you’ll have plenty of time on your hands, where you’re going. So let us speculate. If someone in the Johnson organization had killed her, who might it have been? Assuming for a moment at least that it wasn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t us. Wasn’t any of us.’
Peach nodded slowly. ‘Pity, that. You’re a waste of space, Shepherd, and I’d like to see you put away for as long as possible, so a life sentence won’t worry me. But the purist in me likes to get the right man, when it’s murder. You could call it a weakness in me, and I expect—’
‘Lubbock.’ The tone was so low that it was no more than a mutter.
‘Did you say something, Mr Shepherd?’
‘I said Lubbock. It wasn’t anyone in our set-up who killed her, but if it had been . . .’ His voice trailed away unconvincingly, as if he could not bring himself to repeat the name.
‘If it had been, it might have been Lubbock. I understand. Just hope for your sake that you’re not setting us up.’
Shepherd shook his thin face miserably, unable to produce the words he needed to plead for discretion from them in following up this information.
Peach nodded to Pickering, who stepped forward and pronounced the words of arrest over the man who had been so contemptuous when they had entered the room.
‘You’ll be safe from any Johnson reprisals, where you’re going,’ said Peach sourly.
Father Devoy looked after the finances at St Matthew’s church. It was the biggest Roman Catholic parish in the town, and the turnover was considerable.
On those nights when he put on the blue anorak and ventured out into the town, John Devoy had always taken the fifty pounds out of his own resources, but that was becoming less possible as his visits to the ladies of the streets became more frequent.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, Father Devoy was wondering whether to extract fifty pounds from the parish coffers for the first time.
No one would notice. He would simply take fifty pounds in cash from the moneys which had been collected at the weekend masses. The old Canon wouldn’t question it, wouldn’t even consider that the highly regarded and hard-working Father Devoy would be capable of such a thing. The theft, if theft it was, would go undetected.
It was the morality of the gutter: the question was not whether an action was right or wrong, but whether you could do it without being caught. He had always despised that stance, had even preached from the pulpit against it. John Devoy could scarc
ely believe that he had now sunk so low.
He was losing control of himself and his actions. He despised himself, but he despised also those Jezebels who were leading him on to his destruction. He’d warned that girl on Monday night of the evil she was doing, told her that she was destroying herself and the weak-willed men she led astray. But she hadn’t paid any heed to him. Probably she’d laughed at him, when he’d gone away. Perhaps she’d even told her friends about him. Those friends with the short skirts and soft, supple, accessible bodies. Perhaps they’d all laughed at him together.
He didn’t fight the urge to go out after them at nights any more, not the way he used to fight it. That was because he knew now when he began to wrestle with his conscience what the outcome would be. He would go in the end. And once you knew what the outcome of your inner turmoil was going to be, it made the argument much shorter. The days when he had prostrated himself before the Blessed Sacrament in the empty church and prayed for the strength to resist seemed suddenly to be a long way behind him, to belong to a different world.
Thoughts raced through his mind in rapid, feverish succession. Contradictory thoughts. Sometimes he saw himself as a lost soul, consigned to Hell by the deadly sin of Lust. Then this picture was subsumed into that of the missionary bringing salvation to those lost souls who paraded in the streets and sold their bodies to weak and fallible men.
There was a third image, one which his troubled brain identified vaguely with the Old Testament. What happened if the women failed to heed that message, if they treated the word of the Lord with contempt, as that girl had on Monday night? Divine retribution would surely fall upon them. Perhaps it was to be John Devoy in his torment who was to be the instrument of that retribution. It seemed that these women were failing to heed the lesson of the girl among their number who had been struck down twelve days ago. They had been back on the streets within days, sinning themselves, and also offering their bodies as the occasion of sin in others.
Father Devoy slipped the fifty pounds into the pocket of his trousers.
Nineteen
David Strachan was pale but determined. Brazen it out. Give them nothing. Let them know that they weren’t going to get any co-operation from him. They’d have to prove his guilt, and they wouldn’t find that easy if he kept his head. Correction: they’d find it impossible. He tried to adjust his mind-set to the appropriate position. This was Britain, where a man was innocent until proved guilty. The opposition had its hands tied and would soon get frustrated. The system was all on the side of the criminal.
He had never met Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach.
Strachan had spent a troubled night on the hard bed in the police cell. He had used his one phone call to tell his wife that he had been arrested, that there had been some kind of mistake, that it was probably a case of mistaken identity. It looked as if he would be detained overnight, but he had no doubt that he would be released with apologies on Wednesday morning. He had expected Eileen to be curious, had prepared an elaborate tale for her, but she had been non-committal and low-key. She did not seem astonished by what had happened.
He had been given breakfast and a big mug of tea before eight o’clock. He expected to be interviewed early in the day. But two hours dragged by with no sign of any activity. Every twenty minutes or so, an eye would peer at him through a flap in the steel door, but he got no information when he asked what was going to happen to him.
It was half past ten before he was taken to an interview room, a small, bleak box of a place with green walls and minimal furniture. He was confronted there by a pretty woman with striking red-brown hair and an unsmiling man with a bald head and a very black moustache. When they studied him without speaking, he smiled weakly at them, but received no response. The man said tersely, ‘I’m DCI Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Blake. And you are David Strachan and in the deep doo-doo. Do you want a brief?’
‘No. I don’t need one. I’ve done noth—’
‘Your decision, sir.’ Peach gave just the faintest impression of surprise, and David was immediately wondering whether the decision he had taken in the first grey light of the day was the right one. ‘But you’ll understand that we shall be keeping a record of this conversation. People under arrest have a curious habit of forgetting quite what they said later in the day.’
David Strachan watched the cassette tape silently turning, recording his every syllable, waiting, it seemed to him over the next twenty minutes, to chronicle the errors he made under the relentless attack of the squat man who sat opposite him and who seemed now to be preparing to enjoy himself. He said, ‘I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I’ve been kept in a cell and treated like a common criminal for the last twelve hours.’
‘Really, sir? Well, perhaps we can now give you some answers to those questions.’ Peach gave the slightest nod to the woman beside him, without taking his eyes off the pale face two and a half feet from his own.
Lucy Blake spoke unemotionally but with extreme clarity. ‘You are probably aware that twelve days ago a young woman was killed within a quarter of a mile of the house where you were arrested last night. Her name was Sarah Dunne and she was a prostitute. As part of the investigation into that crime, the known prostitutes in the area have been equipped with alarm buttons in the rooms where they practise their trade. They have been asked to draw our attention to anyone who threatens to turn violent in the course of a sexual encounter.’
So it was Sally herself who had shopped him. That experienced, accommodating woman, with the pneumatic curves which had so excited his imagination in the nights of the last week. Sally had taken him back to her flat, pretended that she was going to be Miss Whiplash, had taken his money, and then buzzed the police to come and get him.
David looked at the fresh, unlined face of this younger woman who had told him of Sally’s treachery and said, ‘She didn’t need to do that. I wouldn’t have hurt her.’
‘Remains to be seen, that. It’s what we’re here to find out. We’ll see what story you have to tell us, Mr Strachan.’ Peach’s voice was harsh after the cool clarity of his companion. ‘Where were you on the night of Friday, the fourteenth of November?’
He wanted to say that he was nowhere near here, that he was a hundred miles away, at home with Eileen, the lean wife who suddenly seemed a safe haven. But he was conscious of the recorder, turning slowly and silently, recording any mistake he might make now to be played back to him, perhaps to be used against him in some sceptical courtroom. ‘I can’t remember, off hand. I wasn’t expecting to—’
‘Were you in this area on that night, Mr Strachan?’
‘I – I suppose I might have been. I’m a sales representative. It’s my area, the north-west. Lancashire in particular. We do a lot of business in this region. There’s quite a demand for computer hardware and—’
‘Were you anywhere near Brunton on that Friday evening? It’s only twelve days ago. It shouldn’t be impossible for you to recall.’
He tried the apologetic tone. It usually seemed to work with the traffic police: you often got off with a warning if you seemed contrite. ‘I’m afraid I really can’t recall where I was, not immediately. It may come to me later. You must remember that I’ve had a very disturbing and embarrassing experience. My thoughts have been concentrated on what happened last night, only to find you now—’
‘We could contact your factory in Wolverhampton, I suppose. Get them to consult their work schedules. Ask them to look at where you were supposed to be on that day. We haven’t involved them so far, because we didn’t wish to add to your embarrassment unless there was a real need. But now it appears that we’re going to need their help.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t contact the office. I asked my wife to ring in and say I was sick, and if they now find that—’
‘I see. Quick work, that was. Dishonest, but resourceful. Would you say that you were habitually dishonest, Mr Strachan?’
‘No. It’s no more than many�
�’
‘And resourceful? I’d say a man who was going to kill women and go round threatening others would need to be dishonest and resourceful, if he was to get away with it for any length of time.’
‘I haven’t killed anyone.’
Peach regarded him evenly. ‘You’ll have to convince us of that.’
‘I don’t see why I should. Surely a man is innocent until proved guilty.’
Peach smiled at such naivety. ‘I wouldn’t advise you to take that attitude. Really I wouldn’t. I’ve seen it get a lot of men into trouble. Men less deep in the doo-doo than you are at this moment.’ He paused and pursed his lips. David Strachan wondered why this Torquemada of an opponent never seemed to blink. ‘Where were you on the night of the fourteenth of November, Mr Strachan?’
‘I was in this area. I’d been in Lancaster and Morecambe, trying to pin down orders from three firms in those towns. Although it was a Friday, I didn’t finish work until quite late in the day.’
‘And after you’d finished, you no doubt returned home for the weekend?’
He wanted to lie. It would have been so easy to agree. But they’d check it out. ‘No. I – I was very tired. The M6 is busy on a Friday night.’ It sounded feeble, even to him.
‘When did you get home, Mr Strachan?’
‘It must have been around midday on the Saturday. Between ten and a quarter past twelve, I think.’ The ridiculous detail seemed suddenly important to him, as if by convincing them of such unimportant trivia he might get them to believe in other and greater things.
‘So where did you spend the Friday night?’
‘In Preston. At a bed and breakfast place I’ve used before. I can give you the address and telephone number, if you want them.’
‘I’m sure you can. Can you also give us an account of your movements on that evening?’