Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1)

by Gregson, J. M.

  Fred Hogan was looking down at his narrow feet, wondering at what point his ankles had become entwined as he sat on the upright chair. He felt very exposed now that he was the centre of all the attention. He had thought it might be more exciting than this. He looked for a moment as though he might produce a few more of the clichés of denial, then looked at Ros’s wide-eyed face and seemed to change his mind.

  He was a killer now, anxious only to demonstrate his cleverness to these lesser men. “I ’eard someone coming just as I was checking that ’e was dead. So I ’id in the bathroom till it was safe to come out.” Perhaps he thought the details would shock them. In fact, his delivery was so low-key that it took most people in the room some time to recognise it as an admission. They had been expecting a denial, even in some cases hoping for one.

  Ros Harrison stared up appalled at the mean and mobile profile of the man beside her. It was the first time she had been close to a murderer: surely the agents of melodrama should be more prepossessing than this. After a moment she said, as though the words were dragged from her against her will, “But why on earth did you kill my father-in-law, Fred? I know he’d falsely accused you of theft a few days earlier, but —”

  The sound of her voice seemed to release Fred from the tableau in which he had the central place. He turned eagerly to her. “The old bugger accused me of thieving when I ’adn’t even seen ’is watch. I ’adn’t touched nothing since I come out of the nick. I was going straight this time, for good.”

  Even in these appalling circumstances, the claim brought a tiny, instinctive nod of approval from Trevor Harrison. But Fred Hogan did not notice it. His attention was all upon the only woman he could remember being consistently kind to him in his adult life. “But I didn’t kill ’im for that. It was because he was taking away your ’appiness, Mrs Harrison.” He slowed to pronounce her name, producing the aspirate with an immense effort, as if it marked the divine status she now carried for him. “The old devil was going to sell the ’ouse over your ’ead. You told us ’ow ’e was trying to force you to give up your work with people like us. We’d all ’eard that at the ’ouse conference, that very night.”

  DS Collins, who had not spoken at all since Peach began, looked up from his notes and said gently, “Tell us how it happened, Fred.” He might have been the psychiatrist who would shortly be brought into play for the prisoner in custody.

  And Hogan responded like one in therapy. Normally he was distrustful of words, suspicious that they might provide the material for others to get the better of him. Now he spoke like a stammerer who has been released from his affliction by strong emotion. “I knew old ’arrison got up regular during the night. So I just waited until he came out of the bathroom and gave him a shove at the top of the stairs. He went over easy enough.”

  It was the last phrase which chilled those who listened to him. There was no regret for his action, but almost an exultation. Harry Bradshaw thought how quickly violence blunted sensibilities. Had he been like that himself, when he had killed?

  But Fred was going on, anxious now to demonstrate his competence in violence to these people who had thought of him only as a petty thief. “I checked ’e was dead, then waited in the bathroom until Mrs Harrison came down to him. It was easy.” He looked unseeingly at the faces around him, his broken teeth flaring yellow in an awful conspiratorial grin.

  Harry looked at him dispassionately now, like one waking from an evil dream, as he said, “That’s why I didn’t hear any movement from your room after the sound of the fall. You weren’t there.” He was concentrating hard, making sense now of what had happened. But it was difficult for him to give his attention to such things: his senses vibrated with his own release, with the notion that he was not after all to be arrested.

  Peach addressed Harry without removing his basilisk gaze from Hogan. “Your mate Michael Ashby heard nothing either, on the other side. But as he was pretending to be asleep he couldn’t say so, until he abandoned that story.” That thought seemed now to break the spell of his concentration on Hogan, and he glanced at Ashby with distaste. Perhaps, now that he had his confession from Hogan, he had no further hostility for him.

  Harry was aware from Hogan’s restless movements beside him, of his wish to talk further. He said, “But why did you kill Dick Courtney?”

  Hogan made no attempt at evasion: he was too excited now by his own stature in this. “Dick’d found out about old Tom, like you said, ’e said a little thief like me would never kill again, but that ’e would know, always. It would be our secret.” The little man paused, gathering his breath and his concentration as gravely as a child. “He said he’d come back when he thought I could be of use to him.” He had sounded all his aitches in the last sentence, as if it was necessary to quote, as accurately as possible, the young man who had taunted him.

  And in the simple phrases, pouring out now, his hearers caught a vivid picture of the meeting between that handsome, vulpine young man and this hunted creature in the narrow room upstairs. Both of them in their different ways had become victims of that exchange. Hogan was calm, even measured now in his delivery. But he had to hug his arms against his chest to control the movements of that body which had produced so much more violence than they had all expected.

  “So you showed him he was wrong. You could kill again,” Harry prompted. He was both horrified and delighted by the details of this story; his head swam with the excitement of his release, even as he despised himself for leading on the teller. They were not going to lock him up again. There was no room yet in his mind for what would happen to Hogan. Beside him, he felt the adrenalin flowing from the wiry little man on the stand chair, who could now scarcely keep still.

  “I followed Dick. Found out where he went at nights. I’m good at that: he never saw me.” There was a bizarre pride in his achievements. He had been small fry around the prisons on all his previous stretches. This time they would give him respect. He was a killer now. High security. Even the hard men didn’t taunt murderers: you never quite knew where you were, once a man had killed.

  And his loved one must see that he had done all this for her; that he had real power, and had been prepared to sacrifice everything for her. She must be told how he had dealt with that dangerous young shark who had threatened the security of all of them. “I waited for him to come out of the big house he went to most nights and followed him home. It was quite easy — he was pissed, you see.”

  He looked then at Ros, more apprehensive that she would be upset by his vocabulary than by the appalling things he had done. “I shoved him in the canal, ’e went in easy enough.” It was almost the same phrase he had used for old Tom’s despatch from the landing above them. But this time he giggled at the recollection of Courtney’s fatal plunge, his scanty teeth flashing yellow again as they caught the light. “Then I just grabbed his hair as he came up. It was easy to hold him under: he had a lot of hair.” He said it as though those dark, luxuriant tresses had been specially grown for his benefit. Perhaps he could not believe that the violent crimes he had eschewed for so long could really be so easy to achieve.

  Peach stood up and came round to the small, animated figure. He pronounced the formal words of arrest and Collins slipped a handcuff round Hogan’s wrist and the other one on to his own. It was a necessary formality, no more: the little man was going to offer no resistance.

  Fred Hogan was carried forward now by the vision of himself as a big fish in prison, treated by all with the wariness appropriate to a double murderer. It was not what he had planned, but he now perceived in it a glamour he had never envisaged for himself, not even when he had read and re-read the details of the different Rippers’ mutilations. And the woman he had done it all for would surely appreciate now the depth of his love. Perhaps she might even visit him in prison.

  Most of the initial reactions were selfish ones as the others saw him standing between the two CID men. Trevor thought of the headlines that would bedevil the work he wanted to do at
Westhaven. Michael Ashby was overcome with relief that Detective Inspector Peach’s evident distaste for him could not after all affect him.

  Harry thought as he saw the handcuffs on Fred of what was to come for the little man who had murdered two men. Of the weeks of waiting on remand; of the stress of the trial; of the years of loneliness to come. Yet, for the first time since he had left prison, he was conscious of a detachment from the underworld of crime and guilt, a feeling that he, Harry Bradshaw, belonged not there but in the world of ordinary people. He was suddenly impatient for Hogan and his captors to be gone, for he knew that he would not look at his watch until then. He might still be in time for his meeting with Sarah.

  It was only innocent Ros Harrison, her senses reeling under the revelation of Fred’s feelings about her, whose horror was undiluted at the sight of the little man being led away.

  And the worst moment was still to come. Fred Hogan turned awkwardly at the door. His arm was impeded by its attachment to the patient, watchful Collins, but he had seen too many bad films not to know that this was the moment when he must rise to his ultimate heroic stature. He drew himself to his full, diminutive height, looked full into her white face and said, as though offering her reassurance, “I did it all for you, Ros.”

  Then, on that appalling banality, he was gone. It was the first and last time he ever used her first name.

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