by J M Gregson
The words came abruptly, between breaths he could not control. He had abandoned all thought of the phrases he had rehearsed so often for this dreaded moment. They listened to his horrid breathing for another long thirty seconds, wondering if he had more confessions, more revelations for them. Then Lucy Blake said gently, ‘Did you have any association with her in the months before she died, Mr Jackson?’
The carefully chosen phrase hung in the air for a moment. When he spoke, his brow was furrowed in concentration, as if he was determined now that he would offer them no further deception. ‘No. That was long past.’
Lucy said, ‘Think carefully, please, because this is very important. Can you think of any man who had a close relationship with Debbie in those last weeks before she disappeared?’
‘No. I’ve thought about it, as you can imagine. If I could, it would get me off the hook, wouldn’t it?’ His wide wet eyes held not hope but an appeal for some crumb of reassurance as he raised them for the first time in several minutes.
Peach said, ‘It might. If you were telling the truth, of course. We have to make that reservation about everyone, Joe. Even for vicars with wandering hands: perhaps especially for them. Did you speak to Debbie Minton in those last weeks?’
God help me, he knows, thought Jackson. This bullying beaver of a man seemed to know everything. He said, ‘I suppose you’ve got this from Derek Minton. Yes, she came to see me on the night she disappeared. But I didn’t kill her!’ His voice rose a little on this insistence but it seemed to him a hopeless denial now. His head dropped again, so that he did not see the looks his two interrogators exchanged.
‘What did she come to see you about, Joe?’
‘She came to ask me for advice.’ Suddenly he giggled, as the ridiculous irony of that struck him. How on earth could he expect them to believe that? Well, he was beyond caring now whether they did or they didn’t. ‘She didn’t say openly that she was pregnant but I guessed at it from other things she said. She said I was the only one she could trust.’
This time the giggle rose towards hysteria, and Peach wondered if he should slap the heavy, mobile features. Instead, he said sharply, ‘Who was the father, Joe? Did she tell you?’
‘No, she didn’t even discuss it.’
‘Then what did she want to talk about?’
‘She said there was an older man. She wanted to get rid of him, but she didn’t know how.’
‘What was his name, Joe?’
‘She didn’t say. All she said was that she wanted to get rid of him, but she didn’t know how to go about it.’
‘Was he the man who had made her pregnant?’
‘I don’t know. I told you, we didn’t even discuss it openly.’
‘So what was your advice?’
‘I’m afraid I wasn’t much use. I told her to go and talk it over with her parents. She said she couldn’t, but then young people always say that at first, don’t they?’ He looked up at them, seeking not approval—that was far too much—but some sort of agreement. ‘I—I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I spoke to her, did I?’
Again he looked into their alert, attentive faces, searching for the confirmation that did not come.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Paul Capstick normally felt thoroughly in control in his secretary’s office at the North Lancashire Golf Club. It was his domain, and he had the confidence that comes from knowing more about what goes on in a place than any other single person. Yet on this occasion he was nervous.
The man in front of him was a new member, who would normally have been diffident in this room, searching for guidance and reassurance. As a golfer, even DI Percy Peach might have been a little overawed by the panelled walls and the ancient sepia photographs of the secretary’s office. But in his professional capacity, he was too preoccupied even to consider such a preposterous notion.
‘Where is he?’ he said.
‘I’ve put him in the television room to wait for us. He’s a good lad really, Percy. Been a good worker here. We were expecting him to do very well. He says he—’
‘Better hear what he has to say for himself, I think. Let’s have him in here right away.’
Gary Jones shuffled in like a condemned man, looking from, his boss to Percy Peach and on to Lucy Blake. Then his gaze fixed upon the inspector’s left hand, which held Debbie Minton’s brooch.
‘All right, lad. Don’t waste our time. Where did you get it?’
‘On the path near the quarry. The one on the eighth. Where—’
‘Where the body of your former girlfriend was found. This is Debbie’s, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. She was very proud of it.’
‘When did you find it?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘You can do better than that, lad.’
‘Two years. I found it early one Saturday morning, when I was the duty greenkeeper, out raking the bunkers.’
‘The morning after Debbie disappeared.’
‘Yes. I think it was, now. At the time, I didn’t know that.’
‘Why didn’t you produce this when she became a missing person and the uniformed men were asking questions about her?’
The tortured features twitched a little, but remained silent for a long, agonized moment. The mind behind them was searching for words it had never needed before. ‘She was only—only missing, then. I thought she’d gone away somewhere. The brooch was all I had left to remember her by.’ It made more sense than he thought it did, but it came out unevenly, as he snatched at ideas before they could elude him.
‘But you knew Debbie’s body was in that pond, didn’t you?’
Lucy Blake and Capstick looked at each other involuntarily. But Jones was too preoccupied to notice it. ‘I didn’t at first. But when she didn’t turn up and no one heard anything from her, I began to think she must be in there, because of finding the brooch where I did. That’s why I was upset when I heard about the quarry pond being blasted away to change the eighth hole.’
Peach looked at him for a moment, waiting to see if he would go any further. Then he said slowly, ‘Were you scared because you knew she was in there, Gary? Knew because you had put her in that pond, keeping the brooch as a remembrance of the days you’d had together?’ Peach’s voice would normally have hectored his victim on such a suggestion. This time his tone was quiet, almost sympathetic. It was a strain Lucy Blake had never heard in him before.
‘No. I didn’t put her there. But I found the brooch within a few yards of that water, on what turned out to be the morning after she disappeared. I just became more and more certain as the months passed that someone had dumped her in there. I wanted to tell someone what I thought, but I thought I’d be suspected of killing her if I did.’
He was right, thought Peach. He would immediately have become the chief suspect, in those circumstances. Percy said almost gently, ‘And who do you think killed her, lad?’
‘I—I’ve no idea.’ Jones wanted to go on, to explain how much he had thought about that question. But he was so suffused by relief that he could not do it. It seemed that this awful man, whom he had thought would seize the opportunity to lock him away, might actually believe him.
Peach studied the slim black figure for a moment longer, then spoke to Paul Capstick. ‘Gary could do with a coffee, I think. Perhaps with a dash of something stronger in it. DS Blake and I must be off.’ He turned back to Jones. ‘I’ll have to keep the brooch, lad. It’s evidence now, you see; and you’ll probably become a witness, in due course.’
They left secretary and junior greenkeeper, highest and lowest employees in the North Lancs hierarchy, looking equally bemused and relieved in the doorway of the office.
So it was to end where it had begun. In the car they talked in snatches, each thinking about what was to come, neither of them caring to voice their feelings about it. Lucy Blake drove slowly as the lane snaked over the moor, allowing them a distant view of Pen-y-Ghent and Ingleborough, forty miles to the n
orth.
Peach said suddenly, ‘We could become a good team, you and I. I told Tommy Tucker that.’
It was so far from what they had been a week ago that they both burst into laughter at the idea. Lucy said, ‘I bet that pleased him. He only brought me in to annoy you, you know. He said I was to go to him if I had any trouble with you.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘Have trouble?’
‘No, you daft cow. You didn’t go to Tommy Bloody Tucker.’
‘No. I prefer to solve my own problems, when I can.’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘But Percy Peach is no problem. He’s easy to work with when you know how.’ On that first day, she would never have believed she would come to say such things. Daringly, she mimicked the uncertainty of his opening remark, ‘I think we could become a good team, you and I.’ Then she watched the road ahead with great concentration, though there was no traffic visible.
He grinned, then put out his hand to rest lightly on the smaller one that lay on the gear stick between them. ‘You might have other problems with me, in due course.’
‘I expect I shall be able to deal with those too, Inspector. Without recourse to Tommy Bloody Tucker.’
The house looked like all the others in the row, except that it was perhaps a little better maintained, a little more trimly presented in the morning sunshine. The grime of the town which was only two miles away was invisible from here. There was a glimpse of the shoulder of Pendle Hill behind the suburban neatness as one looked to the north.
It was Derek Minton who opened the front door to them, his face clear and untroubled. ‘We can speak freely if you have any news for me,’ he said as he led them indoors. ‘Shirley has gone to the doctor’s.’
They knew that. They had engineered that she would be detained there for longer than he thought. She was going to need some counselling. And much, much more than that.
They sat on the three-piece suite in the comfortable lounge, with the detectives each on the edge of an armchair and Minton sitting back on the settee, his arms stretched along the back of it, as though he was encouraging them to relax with him. He said, ‘Are you any nearer to finding out who killed our Debbie? I appreciate that it must be difficult for you after all this time, but—’
‘We know who killed her.’ Peach was calm, watchful, very quiet even in that quiet room. Was it to be as low-key as this, Lucy wondered. It was her first murder case, her first arrest for that most ancient and most awful of crimes. She could see the two protagonists watching each other, still as lizards at this moment, Peach sitting very erect on her right, Minton still simulating relaxation on the sofa in front of her.
She watched him now lean forward, producing the right degree of animation in response to Peach’s assertion. ‘That’s good, Inspector. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it will be to both of us. Perhaps now we shall be able to start getting on with our lives again. I think Shirley is beginning to pick up the pieces a little at last…’
Peach had let him go on, amazed at the steadiness of his voice, curious to see how long it would be before he ran out of the platitudes he thought appropriate, studying him like a specimen newly arrived under a microscope. It was the mention of Shirley Minton that galvanized Peach. He moved quickly over the seven feet that separated him from Minton, who half rose as he came but offered no aggression. Peach pronounced the formal words of the caution with his hand lightly upon the shoulder of the wiry figure. It looked to Lucy Blake like a tableau which might have been frozen into a Victorian story painting, so quietly was the moment achieved by both the parties concerned in it.
Minton looked for an instant as if he would deny the charge and continue for a little while longer the charade of his innocence. Then he sank back on to the sofa and said, ‘She was a nymphomaniac, you know, our Debbie. I suppose that’s the word for it. I heard one of the lads say “prick-teaser”, but it went further than that.’
Lucy Blake said, ‘She enjoyed sex, anyway. We’ve been able to establish that.’ She was not sure why she had spoken. She did not think it was to defend her sex against further spatterings, nor even to assert her presence in this meeting where she had not yet spoken. Probably it was to release her own tension: she felt a little of it drop away with her words.
Minton said, ‘She enticed me into her bedroom, the first time. I didn’t realize what was happening, until it was too late.’
It was the weak man’s old excuse. But he sounded dispassionate, almost curious in his examination of how this awful thing had evolved. ‘It was Debbie who said, “We aren’t related by blood, you know, so it’s all right between the two of us. It won’t be incest.” I should have known then that it would be disastrous. But she was an attractive girl. And I did love her, you know, when she was younger, in a different way. Like a daughter. What we did took me by surprise.’
Suddenly, his face was in his hands and he was sobbing quietly. The emotion came as a relief to them; it was much less disturbing than his previous emotionless account of the emerging tragedy.
After a moment, Peach said, ‘How old was she when this happened?’
‘Nineteen. The first time was four months before—before she disappeared.’ Even now, he preferred to maintain that evasive phrase.
‘And it became a regular thing between the two of you.’
‘Yes. In the evenings, when Shirley was working at the supermarket. She was there on three nights a week, as I told you. She never suspected. But then, she had no idea what Debbie was like when it came to sex. Neither had I, at the start. I thought I was special.’ His face set like stone on the last words. They had heard the same sentiment before about the dead girl, coming from others. The echo from this source had a chilling irony.
‘But eventually you found out about her activities.’ Peach was studiously neutral, a prompt towards further revelations from the quiet man on the sofa.
‘Yes. A few things came back to me from people in the office. When I challenged her, she told me everything. I see now that she was besotted with sex. I was just something else to try.’ He buried his face in his hands again. ‘You won’t believe me, but I love my Shirley. It was because I couldn’t bear to lose her that I did this.’
Lucy Blake, busy recording his exact words now that he had been cautioned, wondered if this constituted a confession. She said, like a doctor taking a patient through the history of an illness, ‘Was it the pregnancy that brought matters to a head?’
‘Yes. She said I was the father. Now, I don’t know whether I was or not, but I believed her at the time.’
‘And you tried to get her to have an abortion.’
‘Yes. She wouldn’t go to the doctor, so I got the number of a private clinic for her. Even offered to arrange it all myself, but she wouldn’t have that. I left the number with her, hoping she’d see sense, but she wouldn’t make her mind up. Kept saying perhaps she ought to keep the child, and telling me her mother wouldn’t approve of an abortion. I think now that she was quite enjoying the situation.’
‘So you felt that you had to cut short the arguments.’
Minton paused, weighing up the situation as coolly as a man playing chess. Then he nodded, as composed as if he were explaining a committee decision in the council office. ‘She was going to tell Shirley about what had been going on between us, and I couldn’t have that.’ He spoke as calmly as a father forbidding a daughter to be in late. It was difficult to believe that this self-possessed figure, sitting still but erect now on the sofa, was a murderer, who had maintained his secret for two years whilst ministering to the wife he still loved.
It was Peach who said quietly, carefully maintaining his neutral tone, ‘So you killed her, Derek.’
Minton registered no surprise at this first use of his forename; perhaps he did not even notice it. ‘Yes. I had to. She mocked me when I said her mother must know nothing about us. She said I was no more proof than all the other men against the attractions of young flesh, and
that Shirley had better know about that. Perhaps she wasn’t serious: I could never tell as she got wilder what she really meant to do.’
It was on that thought that his voice faltered for the first and only time. At that moment they were sorry for him, as the scene in that quiet house sprang vividly alive for them. They could see the laughing girl, unconscious of her danger, and the desperate man who was losing the power of reason in the face of her derision. Then Peach said harshly, ‘So you strangled her. Was it here?’
‘Yes. In this very room.’ He looked beside him at the sofa, as if he sought confirmation from some invisible presence, and they knew suddenly that it had been there that Debbie Minton had died, bending back over the top of the couch as those steely fingers ground ruthlessly into her slim neck.
‘And you knew how to dispose of the body.’
‘Yes. It was as though I had planned it all, though I don’t think I had. It was half past seven on an October evening. I knew there would be no one around in the darkness if I took her up to the old quarry on the golf course. I’d often thought when I played my golf that a body could lie undiscovered for ever in that pond. I never thought it would be me who tested the theory.’
Minton was back in his analytical vein, explaining the detail of murder as if it had been no more than a planning problem in his local government department. He looked up at Peach without rancour and said, ‘How did you decide it was me?’
‘Partly by elimination. We knew that Debbie had been involved with an older man: there were various possibilities, but you always seemed the likeliest. The place where the body was disposed of suggested knowledge of the locality; as the place is nowhere near any public footpath, a member of the golf club was the likeliest of all to think of such a place to lose a corpse.’