[Inspector Peach 05] - The Lancashire Leopard

by J M Gregson

  The Lancashire Leopard

  J.M. Gregson

  © J.M.Gregson 2001

  J.M. Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2001 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To John and Julie, leaders of the

  New Zealand Fan Club

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Extract from Body Politic by J. M. Gregson

  One

  Saturday, January 5th

  There was snow upon the ground. A soft carpet, an inch of sound-muffling whiteness. The flakes fell softly and slowly, brilliantly white for a second against the street lights, then almost invisible as they gradually thickened the covering upon the narrow streets and slate roofs of the nineteenth-century town. The terraces, which were normally so grim and functional, glittered with a fragile and transient beauty.

  Once Christmas was over, the weather had turned cold as usual, just as the children, who would have relished the snow, were about to return to school. At seven thirty on the evening of January 5th, most of the older residents of Brunton shut their doors gloomily against the snow and shook their heads over the trouble it would bring in the morning. The town was preparing to drop into its habitual resentful but resilient mood. Those soft southerners wouldn’t have to put up with weather like this — it was probably just drizzling in London; but Brunton folk were tough: they could handle snow, frost and worse.

  Most of the young who lived here were free of this siege mentality. They felt it was up to them to take a wider and less parochial view than the older generation. Hannah Woodgate, hurrying along with fun — fur collar turned up against the snow, was now nineteen but still near enough to childhood to feel she still wanted to enjoy this weather. She looked over her shoulder up the short street, found that she was unobserved, and broke into a joyful little run. She slid for two yards along the tarmac, feeling the soft snow build beneath the soles of her boots. It was only with difficulty that she resisted the impulse to go back and slide again over the same ground, building the incline into one of the glassy slides of her childhood.

  Daft ha’porth! she said to herself. It was a way of perpetuating the memory of the grandfather who had died at this time last year. He had always called her that, though young Hannah had arrived long after the days when you could buy a halfpennyworth of anything. Hannah thought of Gramps with great affection in that moment. But by the time she reached the end of the street she was ready for another, more ambitious glissade, whose abrupt conclusion almost precipitated her into the gutter.

  She was saved by a hand from her friend Anne, who’d appeared right on cue, and they fell laughing into each other’s arms. It was the first time they had seen each other since Boxing Day, so they had much gossip to exchange as they turned their steps towards King George’s Hall and the Saturday night dancing. As they moved into the centre of the town, the lights grew brighter and other groups joined them, all hurrying like ants towards the centre of activity. It was a scene which Lowry might have cared to paint, though it was given unwonted glamour by the brilliant whiteness of the falling snow and the glitter added to it upon the ground by the softened light of the lamps.

  As always, Hannah enjoyed the enclosed world of the disco, where the realities of life outside were temporarily forgotten. Anne had a boyfriend with her, whereas Hannah would not see her Tom until she returned to university next week. She thought of Tom for a moment, drinking with his fellows, trying to look as if he had done it for years and could handle it, offering her his opinions of the books she was studying and the ways of the university with all the lofty experience of a man a year ahead of her in his studies. Tom might think himself a man when he was at the bar, but he was a mere child when it came to bra-straps! Daft ha’porth, she thought affectionately. She’d be happy to see him again next week, to hear his fashionably disenchanted account of his family Christmas in Surrey.

  The evening passed surprisingly quickly. The lights, the rhythm, above all the noise, created a temporary world which was larger than life but also divorced from life, one which was intensely enjoyable but which would end with the last note of the music and the transition to the real world outside. There was a minor crisis when Hannah was offered pot in the Ladies. A few spliffs might do no real harm, might even be largely ignored by the police nowadays, but her New Year resolution was that she would have nothing more to do with drugs in any form, and that included even the smallest of spliffs.

  It was an embarrassing rather than a fearful moment. Her refusal was accepted with a shrug as the girl transferred her attentions to people who would be glad of the stuff. Hannah was relieved to get back to the dance floor. Brunton was her town, and she had grown up with most of the people around her on the dance floor; many of them had attended the comprehensive school together.

  She danced for ten minutes with Jason Wright, who had been her boyfriend when she was in the sixth form, who still fancied her, she knew. She was as friendly as she could be without encouraging him to think that the ashes of their relationship might be rekindled. It seemed to her to work quite well. The last hour passed in a pleasurable frenzy of brash rhythms and energetic dancing, with laughs of recognition interspersed with frenzied explosions of activity.

  They called their goodnights to each other at the front of the hall. Once these cheerful shouts were over and they moved away from the tall stone building, the town seemed unnaturally quiet beneath its blanket of whiteness. She had agreed earlier in the evening that she would share a taxi with three of her friends, but they had lost contact with each other during that last, intense hour and she could not find them in the crowd around the doors. Perhaps they had already gone, while she was changing back into her boots in the cloakroom, or perhaps assignations made during the evening had led to a hasty reorganisation of plans. These things happened at King George’s on a Saturday night.

  Hannah didn’t mind. She could walk most of the way home with Anna and Robin, without being a gooseberry, for the three had known each other for years. And what a night it was for walking! It had stopped snowing now. The even carpet was two inches deep, beginning to glitter with the sharp frost which would crust it by morning. The navy sky was spattered with a million points of light. Once out of the main thoroughfares of the centre of the town and into the unsullied white of the side streets, the trio ran and slid more joyfully than Hannah had four hours earlier, with any inhibitions removed by alcohol and the crisp, clear cold about them.

  The three of them stood talking excitedly for several minutes at the point where their ways diverged, reluctant to let a magic moment go, watching their words wreathe into funnels of steam as they spoke. It was only when a light went on and the’ curtains were drawn back in the corner house beside them that they realised guiltily how late it was and how loudly they had been speaking. Their hasty leave-taking dissolved into gales of giggles as they glanced up at the shadow behind the lighted curtains. Then they turned away from each other and went their respective ways.

  Within twenty yards, Hannah became aware for the first time since t
hey had come out of the hall of just how piercingly cold it was. Still, it was less than half a mile now to her home. She pictured her mother, lying in bed, waiting for the soft scratch of her daughter’s key in the lock, waiting for the moment when she could sigh contentedly and drop into sleep. “Don’t wait up for me!” Hannah had said, as usual. Yet she would be willing to bet that her mother would not sleep soundly until her brood was complete and safe within the walls of her house. For the first time in her life, Hannah Woodgate felt glad of that, though she could not have said why.

  She was not afraid of the dark. As the eldest of four children, she had spent much of her adolescence telling the younger ones that there was nothing to fear, and in this respect bravado had become a habit with her. She crossed from shadow into light as she went down her first street alone, but that was to get the full effect of the panoply of moon and stars above her. She slowed for a moment, staring up and considering the remoteness of those pricks of light in that vast darkness, of the smallness of her own tiny spot within the universe. Then she hurried on.

  There was going to be a hard frost on top of this snow, there was no doubt about that. As she passed the allotments on her left, a frost-encrusted row of Brussels sprouts glittered like beacons in the light of the moon. Her father had spent many of his happiest hours here as she grew up, and she had often been sent to fetch him for his meals, when he became too absorbed to remember the time.

  It was as she hurried past the allotments that she became aware of the presence behind her.

  She was not sure how she knew that there was someone there. She could scarcely have heard him, for the snow mantled every sound. Nor could she have said why she knew immediately that this presence was male. Perhaps she had caught some tiny movement of a shadow, for her eyes were now well accustomed to the night, and the moonlight across the acres of snow on her left made it seem very light here. She knew that the presence itself was what mattered, that her queries as to how she had become aware of it were made only to keep her fear at bay.

  She wanted to turn and confront him, to have her fear made absurd by a familiar, friendly apparition. Yet she knew she could not turn round. And in that moment she became aware of the depth of her terror.

  It was greater than any fear she had known before. Greater than that of her childish nightmares; greater than that of the moment when she had seen her small brother slip beneath the wheel of a motorcycle. This terror was seizing her whole body, making it impossible for her to co-ordinate the familiar, automatic movements that were necessary if she was to run.

  She had to force herself to thrust first her right leg forward, then her left. It was as if she were rediscovering movement after a long immobilisation after an accident. It was no more than three hundred yards from here to her house. She could escape, if only she could run. She took the short cut, along the back of the terraced houses, past the row of garages where once there had been outside privies.

  And now she could hear the pursuit behind her. The man must be close. She felt the movement coming back into those reluctant limbs of hers. She sucked in a great gulp of air and tried to scream, but nothing would come. She reached the corner, and cursed the snow; with her arms flailing like a clown’s, she strove to keep her balance for the turn. It was a straight run for home from here.

  It was that turn which was her downfall. The soles of Hannah Woodgate’s winter boots were smoother than those of the sturdy wellington boots worn by her pursuer. She slipped, was almost down, touched the floor with a desperate right hand, and recovered.

  But her pursuer did not slip. He flung his arms round his quarry, with a low, exultant, animal growl. He crushed her for a moment against him, feeling the brief thrill of the supple young flesh beneath the winter clothes. Then his hands were at her throat, thrusting her down into the snow, watching the anguish in those bright eyes as they died in the moonlight.

  He held her for a long moment after all movement had left the flailing limbs, as if there might be some trick still left in this lithe young body, as if he could not believe that so much young life had been stilled so quickly. Slowly, experimentally, he released the vice of his grip. Then he stood for a moment over his victim on the ground.

  So still; so quiet; so innocent. For ever, now.

  Weeks ago, someone had dumped a van by the allotments. Long before Christmas, anything useful or valuable had been stripped from it. The back two wheels, the only ones with decent tyres, had been removed, so that the vehicle reared its nose crazily into the air, like some extinct monster. Now the hulk had one final use. It became the temporary tomb of nineteen-year-old Hannah Woodgate. Her killer shut the damaged rear doors as closely as he could upon the body.

  Then he was away, as silently as he had come, swift as a snow leopard over this white land, his excitement keeping the warmth coursing through his body on this coldest night of the infant year.

  Two hundred yards away, Mrs Woodgate, drowsy with unaccustomed sherry, listened to her husband’s soft snoring, and wondered if she had missed the sound of Hannah’s key in the lock.

  Two

  Sunday, January 6th

  Detective Inspector Percy Peach was beginning to enjoy himself.

  The neanderthal youth in front of him said truculently, “I don’t talk to the filth. Didn’t you hear me the first time, cloth-ears?”

  DI Peach allowed a delighted grin to light up his round face. Its breadth seemed to be accentuated by the lack of hair on his shining bald pate; after a few seconds, this smile seemed to have a life of its own, extending beyond the features which had produced it. A Cheshire Cat of a smile Peach had, visible in the minds of his victims long after its owner had departed. He spoke confidentially into the cassette recorder which turned silently on the square table at his elbow. “Mr Dodd refused to speak. At first.” He lifted his head to the sullen figure opposite him. “I suppose they did tell you how it might prejudice your defence if you withheld information which might later be used in court? Yes, of course they did. I expect you just didn’t understand. Pity, that.”

  The first, minimal doubt stole across the massive pink face opposite him. The stubby, grime-encrusted fingers of the man’s right hand pulled unconsciously at the left forearm, agitating the tattoo of the naked woman on which they rested. Her buttocks writhed suggestively under the pressure and Peach affected a little shock. “Mr Dodd produced a show of mild pornography in an attempt to divert DI Peach and DC Murphy. The officers refused to become inflamed.”

  “’Ere, what you...? I ’adn’t never—” Dodd stopped abruptly, then stared accusingly at the tattoo. He knew that despite his best intentions, he had been provoked into speech by this odious little opponent.

  “Be better if you ’adn’t never ’it the bloke, wouldn’t it, Cecil?” said Peach truculently.

  “Don’t you bloody Cecil me!” said Dodd viciously. “I’m Wayne, and just you bloody remember—”

  “Cecil Albert Wayne Dodd, it says on your charge sheet,” said Peach, enunciating each name with relish. “Go down well in court, that will. Give the gallery a bit of a giggle on a wet Monday morning. Make a good headline for the Evening Dispatch, I shouldn’t wonder. They’ll probably use the Cecil in prison, you know, when you’re sent down. They can always use a few cheap laughs in Strangeways.”

  “I ain’t done nothing.” Dodd glowered menacingly from beneath his jutting eyebrows.

  Peach’s pleasure visibly increased. “Double negative, that is, Cecil. Really, you’re saying you did something. Wonder if that could be construed as an admission in court, DC Murphy?”

  “Oh, I should think so, sir. Especially if you get one of those clever prosecuting counsels the Crown seems to use nowadays.” DC Brendan Murphy might be the newest recruit at Brunton CID, but he knew his supporting role in this little cabaret.

  “Pity that, really. Because I’m inclined to think that Cecil here meant to imply that he had not really done anything criminal. Still, the law will take its course, I expect. I�
��ve always said it’s weighted against the really thick boys who won’t take advice, but I suppose some people would argue that that’s a good—”

  “You’re trying to fit me up, you bastard! All I said was that I ’adn’t never ’it no one, and you’re trying to—”

  “Not trying anything, Cecil. I did think of trying to make you look a bit of a prat when I came in, but then I decided that you could do that for yourself, without any assistance from me. I believe in fostering individual enterprise, wherever possible, and—”

  “‘E ’ad it coming to ’im, the bastard!” said Dodd, desperately trying to interrupt the flow of words from his tormentor.

  Peach looked puzzled, then allowed joy to suffuse his face again in slow motion, the pace of the whole exercise being designed to suit Dodd’s dull brain. “You’re telling me you hit him, now? Well, there’s a change of tack, and no mistake.” He turned to the man beside him. “This is progress, DC Murphy. This is what I mean by a man helping police with their enquiries. A model prisoner this is. We shall have a full confession before the hour’s gone, you mark my words.”

  The gorilla, thoroughly alarmed by that word “confession”, lurched into speech. “’Ere, what you making me say? I ain’t confessing to nothing! All I said was I ’it ’im when ’e asked for it.”

  He hadn’t said that at all, thought Brendan Murphy. Well, not until now. That was the trouble with Percy Peach. By one method or another, he led you into indiscretions — sometimes even when the two of you were on the same side. DC Murphy leant forward eagerly to seize his piece of the action. “So you’re now telling us that you hit him, Mr Dodd?”

  The gorilla looked thoroughly puzzled now. “I just said so, didn’t I? When Wayne Dodd ’its ’em, they stays ’it.”

  Peach beamed his approval. “Indeed they do. Even when Cecil Albert Wayne Dodd hits them, it seems. Good thing, that. Having a good thump on you, I mean. A bloke called Cecil might need to be able to defend himself, where you’re going.” He looked assessingly at the huge fists, now clenched tight two feet in front of him on the square table and plainly longing to hit him.