Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  The two men looked in silence at the neat series of upright numbers. Both of them knew it was possible they had been written by the murderer of Debbie Minton.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Percy Peach admitted to a certain prejudice against vicars. He would have put it down to an unfortunate childhood experience, had he not rejected that explanation so often from criminals and their tame psyches.

  He took Lucy Blake with him to see the Reverend Joseph Jackson, in case he needed to be kept in check. It would at least provide his new detective sergeant with some sort of function, when he could see bugger-all else for her to do. He would have taken DS Collins with him in the old days and the new woman seemed to think she had the right to assume all the side-kick duties that that long streak of discretion had fulfilled. It was strange how last week had so quickly become ‘the old days’. Viewed through the tinted glasses of a rapidly growing nostalgia, Collins had begun to seem quite a good bloke. At least he had known when to keep his mouth shut.

  Joseph Jackson turned out to be one of the newer breed of clergy, all social awareness and guitars and none of your dogma and solemn services. ‘Do call me Joe, everyone does!’ he said, as he pumped the police hands vigorously in turn. Percy immediately became conscious of a need he had never perceived before in the church for formality and ritual. Even a touch of incense might not come amiss, he felt. There should be required a certain dignified remoteness in the representatives of God on earth. If they did not carry this, they merited the robust treatment Percy accorded to most of their flocks.

  ‘We’re here about this dead girl. Debbie Minton. Parishioner of yours and good-time girl, until someone decided to put an end to her.’

  Even the vicar’s professional cheerfulness was clouded for a moment by this uncompromising beginning. He had a fresh and rosy face, eyebrows which seemed perpetually about to take flight like doves from the ecclesiastical brow, large white teeth which might have been designed for display in his habitual smile. He was thirty-six and had been the holder of his post here for six years now; those two facts Percy had been able to check before he came to beard him in his vicarage.

  It was a high-roomed Victorian vicarage, but the church had compromised with slender modern revenues by dividing it into two. A parishioner with an eye for potential had purchased the other and sunnier half of the building, then sold it within three years at a handsome profit to an ungodly academic. This man had announced cheerfully that he was conducting an objective study of the present incumbent’s declining congregation and workload.

  Joe Jackson had glanced nervously over the fence towards his invisible neighbour when the police car drew up outside. He tried not to speculate about the man’s research as he addressed himself to Peach’s inquiries about Debbie Minton. He was faced with a situation he met often nowadays. It was unfair to claim the girl had been a regular attender at his services, but a denial might cause offence to the relatives. But this was official. He had decided before these people came that he had better be as straightforward as he dared. That had to be the right approach, so long as he took care to conceal the one vital fact that could be disastrous.

  Yet he found it difficult to speak. He did not like the look of this barrel of energy with the fringe of black hair round the shining bald pate. With his small white teeth and his lip slipping into the gaps where the upper canines were missing, DI Peach looked like a beaver preparing to gnaw at the dam of a man’s resistance.

  The Reverend Joseph Jackson eventually managed to say, ‘I—I think it would be stretching things to say she was a regular parishioner. She used to come fairly often to the youth club, in the old days, I suppose.’

  ‘And how often is fairly often?’ Peach rapped out his first question as if he had already spotted a weakness in an adversary.

  ‘Well, I suppose you could say she was a regular attender, in the days when she came.’

  ‘Twice a week? Three times a week? Every night?’ The small white teeth flashed briefly from the flat, aggressive face. The larger teeth opposite him were now hardly on display at all.

  Jackson licked dry lips. ‘The club is open five nights a week. I suppose Debbie Minton used to be there on most of those, in the period we’re speaking about.’

  ‘We haven’t spoken about any period yet, Joseph. Are you saying that she’d ceased to be a regular attender in the months before she died?’

  ‘But I don’t know when she died, do I?’ He managed a weak grin to accompany this challenge: at least he had not fallen for that one. But it showed the need for perpetual vigilance; it must be the business of people like this to trip up inexperienced people like him.

  ‘Really? Well, the scientists seem pretty convinced that she died about two years ago. Or was brutally murdered, if you haven’t picked up that detail either.’ Peach gave him his full killer shark grin, as if in mockery of the nervous gesture towards mirth Jackson had just produced. ‘Debbie Minton disappeared exactly two years ago, as even you must be aware, Vicar. How long before that did you last see her?’

  Jackson was not sure when a visit to find out the facts about Debbie Minton’s social habits had turned into a personal interrogation, but he had no time to dwell on the puzzle. ‘I—I couldn’t be sure of that. I don’t think I had much contact at all with her in that last year. She’d stopped coming to the youth club, of course. They mostly do, when they feel themselves older than the youngsters coming in. It’s a great pity in my view that—’

  ‘When did she stop coming to the youth club?’

  ‘When she was about seventeen and a half, I think. They mostly stop about then. Begin to think they’re adults. They’re not, of course, but—’

  ‘Two years before she disappeared, then. Four years ago from now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you just said you’d seen her in the year before she died.’

  ‘Did I?’ He sought furiously through a brain that was too excited to work properly for the memory of what he had said no more than a minute earlier. ‘No, I think you’ll find—’

  ‘I asked you when you last saw her and you said you did not have much contact with her in that last year. “Not much” means some, in my book. So you saw her at least once. Unless you’re now changing your story.’ He liked that word. When vicars had talked of telling stories when he was a lad in short trousers, they had always meant lies.

  ‘It’s a long time ago now. I must have seen her in the year before she disappeared, if only about the town. I can’t remember seeing her at a church service, I’m afraid. It might have been better for her if she had kept up her church attendance. But then you could say I have an axe to grind there, couldn’t you?’ Aware that he was now saying too much, he broke off with an involuntary giggle, high-pitched and weird, which seemed to reverberate away into the high corners above the Victorian frieze. Peach regarded him impassively, like a powerful cat waiting to pounce on its prey’s first clumsy move.

  Jackson turned in desperation to look at the female detective sergeant, hoping for a softer response from her. Instead, Lucy Blake said, ‘Mrs Minton seemed to think that she was still attending the youth club, right up to the time of her disappearance. Would you care to comment on that, Mr Jackson?’ There was a smile on the lightly freckled face beneath the red hair, but she made it sound as if the discrepancy in the accounts of the girl made his story suspect, just as her awful boss had done.

  Joe Jackson wondered if that was something they taught them at the police school, if they had such things. He swallowed hard, finding to his surprise that it took him two attempts to do so. ‘She stopped coming to the club when she was seventeen and a half. More than two years before she disappeared.’

  Lucy Blake’s head moved fractionally to one side. Perhaps she was surprised that he should suddenly be so certain of the timing, but she said nothing. Jackson fingered his dog collar briefly, as if he wished to make sure that it was still in place. Then he said, ‘Perhaps she gave her mother to understand that she was s
till coming here when she was going off to other, less salubrious places. It happens, I’m afraid.’

  Percy Peach had already decided from his conversation with Derek Minton that his daughter had done just that. But he saw no reason to let this sky pilot off the hook to which he had so obligingly attached himself. ‘What was your own relationship with Debbie Minton, Mr Jackson?’

  He found the effect of this most gratifying. The vicar’s jaw dropped for a moment and his blue eyes opened wide. Though he swiftly corrected these things, he could not disguise the way the colour drained from his high cheeks: his countryman’s redness of countenance did not permit deception here. He said, ‘I was friendly with her, as I was with all of the young people in our youth club. No more than that.’

  ‘Nothing—what’s the right word now—improper? But you must have got to know her quite well, in those impressionable years when she came here five nights a week. How close to her did you get?’ Percy liked that deliberately clumsy, deliberately ambiguous phrase. No one could take exception to it, but it carried a hint of the unsavoury.

  ‘I—I helped her as best I could through the trials of adolescence. That is no more and no less than it was my duty to do as a minister of the Church.’ Joe rarely invoked his cloth as a defence; he wondered if it now rang as defensively in police ears as it did in his own.

  Peach certainly looked as if it did. ‘These “trials of adolescence”. We see a lot of those. Sometimes we have to lock the little buggers up on account of them. Saving your presence, Vicar—sorry, Joe. Which ones did you guide Debbie Minton through? Drink? Drugs? Boys? Girls? Shoplift—’

  ‘Debbie wasn’t a bad girl!’ Jackson interrupted the catalogue with a desperate insistence. ‘We didn’t see any evidence of drink or drugs here. I told you, not many of them come to the club once they’re past about sixteen or seventeen.’

  ‘So what were the particular troubles you held her hand through? Metaphorically speaking, of course.’

  Now that the crisis was at hand, Joseph Jackson found himself strangely calm. It was almost like that dreaded first sermon which they had built up so much in the theological college. When the moment had come, he had been able to handle it better than the others. ‘There was nothing too dramatic, Inspector. Debbie was a little too fond of the boys, but not unique in that.’

  ‘And you were able to help her?’

  Jackson took his time, as he had not been able to do earlier. ‘I offered advice. Only she could tell you whether it helped her. She did come and talk to me on her own initiative, on several occasions.’

  ‘And what was the subject of these little tête-à-têtes, Joe? You’re not bound to secrecy, like the Romans, are you?’

  Jackson smiled, feeling at last a degree of control. ‘Even a Catholic priest is only bound to silence about the secrets of the confessional, Inspector. There is a lot of confusion about that. This was nothing like that. We had a few friendly talks, that’s all. I felt she was being a little too free with herself.’ He glanced at Lucy Blake; she thought afterwards that he almost seemed to know when he was going to produce one of her mother’s phrases. ‘There was a danger of her making herself cheap, I felt.’

  Lucy said, ‘How far did these liaisons go, Vicar? Was she sleeping around? Did you feel the need to speak to her parents?’

  The clergyman seized almost eagerly upon the familiar question. ‘I never speak to parents, unless it can’t be avoided, in which case I warn the young person first of what I intend to do. So no, I didn’t contact Debbie Minton’s parents. I hope she wasn’t actually hopping into bed with boys, but I can’t be sure of it. If you put me on the spot, I’d have to say I believe she probably was, but I’m not certain of it.’

  ‘With more than one? With several?’

  Jackson was almost urbane in his regret. ‘I fear so. That was the cause of my concern, you see. I don’t know how successful I was in my efforts to divert her from this course.’

  Peach said, ‘Not very, from what we hear. Incidentally, she was pregnant when she died.’

  Jackson raised his black-clad arms, steepled his fingers, pressed them together. He seemed about to offer some emollient platitude. Then he looked down at his hands and desisted hastily from what he saw as a cliché pose. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But don’t forget this was two years after she had ceased attending our youth club.’

  ‘So you’ve no idea who the father might have been?’

  ‘No.’ It came too quickly, without the pause for thought the question invited, so that what should have been merely a fact came almost like a denial. ‘I’ve told you, I wasn’t in close touch with Debbie by then.’

  Peach let that hang for a moment, then said, ‘We are questioning a lot of people, as you would expect in a murder inquiry There seems to be some evidence that the girl also associated with older men. Could you give us a view of that, please?’

  This time the colour rose rather than fell in the fresh, tell-tale cheeks. ‘I don’t have a view. When I knew her well, she only seemed concerned with her contemporaries. But girls develop a lot in the years from seventeen to nineteen, as you must be well aware. You’d do better to ask other people who knew her movements in those years.’

  ‘Oh, we shall certainly do that, Joe. In fact, we’ve already started. It’s surprising what we unearth, when we have the full resources of a murder inquiry to give to the job.’

  Peach stood up, moving towards the door with his sergeant at his side. As the vicar relaxed, he turned like a swift welterweight. ‘We shall need a list of the people who were her contemporaries in your youth club. Girls as well as boys. Some girls of sixteen or seventeen confide everything to their girlfriends, as you in turn must be aware.’

  The Reverend Jackson shut the door upon them before they had reached the last of the four steps. As Lucy Blake reversed the police car over the ecclesiastic gravel, they caught a glimpse of a white, oval face from a room above them which was probably the kitchen of the truncated vicarage. Mrs Jackson, presumably. She looked very much more anxious than curious. Lucy felt very sorry for her.

  Peach felt a need to know how the woman beside him was reacting to his methods. They drove half a mile without a word. That was one of the things about women: they babbled away continually most of the time, but were quiet just when you wanted them to speak. Eventually he said, ‘Do you think I was too hard on him?’

  ‘Not for me to say, sir.’

  ‘It is if I ask you.’

  She turned a corner, braked briefly to avoid a kamikaze cat, and considered her reply for fully thirty seconds more. ‘Yes, if we go by the book, you were too hard on him. But it’s not on tape, is it? And since you ask, I rather enjoyed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I should say because you seemed to be getting more out of him than by being polite. But really it was because I wanted to see him squirm. I thought he was a creep.’

  Percy was delighted to find his prejudice echoed. ‘Why?’

  She gave a tiny shrug as she drove. ‘The way he shook my hand. The way he took it in both of his, and held on a little too long. Female intuition, you might call it.’

  He glanced sideways, studied her for a moment. He was able to do it more easily than ever before, because she was concentrating upon her driving as they approached a school crossing from which the lollipop lady had disappeared in the latest cuts. The nose on the firm, impassive profile turned a little upwards; the freckles at the temples were more noticeable from this angle; there was no smile upon the broad red lips. There was no tangible sign of amusement: he could not tell whether or not she was making fun of him. He looked back to the road ahead and said with satisfaction, ‘We made the bugger jump about a bit, anyway.’

  ‘We did indeed, sir!’ Her relish seemed even greater than his.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Christine Turner was a big success as Ladies’ Captain of the North Lancashire Golf Club. Those men who were prepared to listen thought she had ideas which might well be of val
ue to the future development of the club. Those diehards who considered women should be confined to the kitchen and the bedroom looked at her trim figure and her ready smile and thought her an appealing slip of a girl, even though she might well have been a grandmother by now.

  But Christine was most successful with those who had chosen her to represent them, the ladies’ section of the club. The old and infirm found her not only kind but mindful of past glories, when their limbs had been stronger and the world had been a kinder place. The good players found her both aware of their needs and able to compete with them; she was even on occasions able to emphasize that what they were about was after all a game, when they might have been tempted to take it too seriously.

  The rabbits among the lady golfers (golf clubs have only ladies, never anything so dangerous as women) found her always ready with encouragement and understanding, and when necessary, with tactful guidance as to the arcane procedures in this most ritualistic of sports. She even contrived to encourage one or two teenage girls to take the plunge as golfing juniors into what would otherwise have seemed to them the forbidding blue-rinsed waters of the North Lancs.

  But on this particular ladies’ day, when her flock had the course to themselves for their competition, Christine Turner was preoccupied with other things. Only someone who knew her well would have recognized it. She made her usual brief but well-turned speech in presenting the prizes. She chatted with different groups as the decibel level rose to a shrill climax over the communal tea in the lounge. She made a point of going over to welcome back the lady who had just had the mastectomy and was sitting, wanly cheerful, over her tea and cake.

  But Christine could not wait for this time she usually enjoyed to be over. She kept her eye on the clock over the bar, deliberately ignoring the neat gold watch on her wrist lest people should divine her impatience. As soon as she could do so, she slipped into the entrance hall of the club and made a call on the members’ phone.