[Inspector Peach 05] - The Lancashire Leopard

by J M Gregson

  He looked into the hatred of the brown eyes opposite him. “Don’t even think about it, Wayne! Assaulting a police officer would complete the set for you. Go down well in the Crown Court, that would.” He reached forward slowly with his ball pen, indicating a point on the huge knuckles of the right hand as precisely as if he had been unfurling the petals of a chrysanthemum. “Skinned your knuckles there, Wayne. Hit him pretty hard, didn’t you?”

  There was a tiny hint of admiration in the tone, just enough to lure this floundering fish into the Peach net. “Wayne Dodd don’t need no knuckle-dusters, mister. I told you, ’e asked for it. And when I ’it ’em, they stays ’it. He ’ad a swing at me, so I laid into ’im, then. Stretched ’im out good and proper at me feet, didn’t I, before your lot ever come.”

  Peach leaned forward earnestly. “How many times did you hit him, Wayne?”

  The slightly bloodshot eyes narrowed, aware now that he had been tricked, wondering at exactly what point in the proceedings he had capitulated. “Six or seven. Maybe ten. I told you, ’e asked for it.”

  “And he got it. He’s still lying in hospital. Wasting the time of doctors and nurses, who could be attending to more deserving cases.”

  There was a discreet knock at the door. Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake entered, moving as unobtrusively as her gently pneumatic contours allowed. “They’ve found that missing girl,” she whispered into Peach’s ear.

  “Dead?”

  She nodded. “Since last night, it seems.”

  Peach was on his feet in an instant. He did not even accord Wayne Dodd the status of a final nod from the door. He had known from the start that the scum in hospital would never bring charges against the scum in the interview room.

  He gave his advice to the custody sergeant as he passed the desk at a brisk walk. “Get a statement from Cecil Dodd in there, in case we should need it on a future occasion. Then give him a caution for ABH and pitch him out of here: he makes the nick look untidy.”

  It was time to cease amusing himself. There was real crime demanding the attention of DI Peach.

  *

  That Sunday morning was bright but bitterly cold. But the weather had not dispersed the bystanders who gather like vultures around the scene of any sensational crime. There was nothing for them to see: the van was already invisible behind screens, the white plastic tapes kept the public a good thirty yards away from what limited activity there was around the body.

  The police surgeon had already completed the absurd formality of certifying that the ice-cold thing that had been found in the back of the van at 09.47 hours was indeed a corpse. He had been and gone within ten minutes, causing a little stir of excitement among the ragged circle of onlookers, two thirds of them children, who had assembled at the end of the short street by the allotments. There would be no further activity visible to them until the “meat wagon” eventually took the body away in its plastic shell for the post-mortem examination. Yet the number of onlookers increased steadily through the morning.

  There were already two police cars there when Peach arrived with Lucy Blake. “Typical bloody police,” said a sour, anonymous voice behind them as they pushed through the crowd of observers. “Place is swarming with the buggers now. It took one of our kids to find the body in that van. Where were they last night, when they might have done the poor girl some good?” A mutter of agreement followed, from a crowd anxious for anything which might warm them. Resentment was better than nothing. Better than the feeling of blank, helpless outrage which always followed a crime like this.

  Peach watched the police photographer completing his pictures of the corpse as it lay on the sloping floor of the van. The girl looked absurdly young and tender, innocent as a child in her death. Her fur collar was turned up around her neck; she had one arm thrown awkwardly above her head, as if in a final supplication to a world which had not heard her distress. But that was no doubt just how she had landed when she had been thrown, dead but still warm and floppy, into the concealment of the van. The eyes were open. As he bent over the unlined, surprised face, Peach saw the pin-point haemorrhages in the whites of them which almost certainly indicated strangulation.

  A young DC who had been recently assigned to the Brunton CID section, Tony Pickard, stood awkwardly on the fringe of the group, apprehensive of Percy Peach and yet wishing to be acknowledged as one of his team. But it was DS Blake who said to him, “Is there any indication yet of where she died?”

  Pickard was eager to show his industry. “No. But I’d be pretty sure it wasn’t within fifty yards of the van. It was a uniformed lad who reported the body — I think some kids alerted him to it — but I was here within five minutes. There wasn’t much disturbance of the snow in the immediate area, then. I had a good look round, but I couldn’t see any signs of a struggle.”

  “Which would have been what, lad?” Peach, rising and turning quickly from his contemplation of the body, caught Pickard off guard.

  “Well, signs of a scuffle in the snow, sir. The marks of a body, perhaps, if he pressed her to the ground as he killed her.”

  “Fair enough, Sherlock. So long as you don’t start telling me about the deeper footsteps of a man carrying a body — I don’t believe you could distinguish that, you see, in two inches of frosted snow.”

  “No, sir. I did search for just that, as a matter of fact, but what footsteps there were all looked much the same, I’m afraid. Standard welly prints were the norm.” He looked down at his own stout size ten police-issue wellington boots ruefully.

  “And anywhere further afield than a thirty-yard radius will have been contaminated by this lot, no doubt.” Peach looked with distaste at the ring of onlookers beyond the tapes. “Nevertheless, you can make yourself useful by scouting around a bit. Public won’t take much notice of you if you melt quietly away and start looking. Advantage of plain clothes, that.” He looked at Tony Pickard’s rather garish red anorak and ski trousers with some distaste: these were not clothes designed to be obscure. But the young man moved eagerly away beyond the public to begin his search.

  “My guess is that she died within a hundred yards of this van,” Peach said in a low voice to Lucy Blake. “You wouldn’t want to carry a dead weight very far over freezing snow. Even a slender girl like this would take a bit of carrying, once she was dead. More important, chummy wouldn’t want to run the risk of being seen with a body for any longer than he needed to.”

  “You’re assuming this is the work of one man?” said DS Blake.

  Peach smiled grimly. “Yes, I’m assuming just that, until we find any evidence to the contrary. But that doesn’t mean I’m ruling out a gang-bang. Or even a woman. Or even Santa Claus and his bloody reindeer. Just in case anyone from the press asks you about it.”

  The pathologist arrived, picking his entry carefully over the narrow track of frozen snow they all had to use to protect the rest of the site, almost slipping over as the plastic bags they had to wear over their footwear betrayed him on the packed snow that was turning to ice. He conducted a cursory examination of the corpse on the site, taking the air temperature in the van with an electronic thermometer, slipping a clinical thermometer inside the girl’s ear to record a temperature reading from the site without disturbing the girl’s clothing.

  He glanced at the grim-faced Peach. “Do we know who she is?”

  “Yes. She’ll be formally identified later, but we know. She’s called Hannah Woodgate. She lived over there — about two hundred yards over there.” He waved with the back of his hand, as if he wished he could make the gesture into a blow. Peach felt a blind fury at this killing which seemed already so pointless, a fierce frustration even at this early stage that the killer should still be so anonymous.

  The pathologist was more even in his tone, less personally affronted by this death. “Well, I can only confirm things you’ll feel you already know. She’s been dead many hours now — almost certainly since last night. And she very likely died from asphyxiation. From the look
s of these bruises on her neck, whoever did it wore thick gloves, and pressed very hard with both thumbs on each side of her throat. It will be scant consolation to her family, but I’d say that she died very quickly; that she suffered very little.”

  But how do you measure suffering? thought Peach. How do you assess its intensity? How fierce was the anguish the girl suffered in those final few seconds, knowing that she was dying, so pointlessly, so close to home. He wondered whether she had known her killer. And in that moment he felt the thickness of the blank wall of ignorance which separated him from this slim figure in the van. He said harshly, “We’ll need all the help you can give us, when you get her on the table and cut her up.”

  The post-mortem examination: another savage indignity for this seemingly flawless young body. Another horrid imagining for the parents and siblings who would already be finding this death too much to bear. He watched the two constables from the Scenes of Crime team, who were examining the interior of the ruined van in minute detail, working with tweezers to gather any wisp of hair or thread of clothing that the murderer might unwittingly have left behind. “Gather the lot and bag it, whether it looks useful or not,” he said unnecessarily — these men knew their job better than he did. “This is all we’ve bloody got, you know.”

  *

  By half past four on that afternoon of the sixth of January, it was completely dark. The body had gone for its post-mortem examination, the van had been lifted on to a trailer and taken away to the car park behind the new police headquarters in Oldford. The crowd of frozen onlookers melted slowly away, preparing to review their brief contact with melodrama in the warmth of their own homes.

  The killer of Hannah Woodgate sat very still beside his new hi-fi stack as he listened to the news from Radio Lancashire. The summary gave the girl’s name now, and a little of her family background. It provided a local context and an identity for a victim who had been anonymous in the earlier reports.

  There was nothing he found alarming. The impersonal voice of the announcer did not say that the police were anxious to interview anyone in particular.

  They knew nothing.

  But the murderer had studied these things long enough now to know that Monday morning’s newspapers would be more interesting and colourful in their accounts of his crime. Their reporters would be digging hard at this very moment, just as the police would be resisting their overtures, trying to reveal as little as possible about this death.

  Trying to conceal the full, appalling extent of their bafflement.

  Hannah Woodgate’s killer smiled on that thought. He looked forward to what the newspapers would say. He would buy them all tomorrow. Not all in one place, of course: that would arouse suspicion. He would buy not more than two at any one outlet. He quite enjoyed the planning that went with this.

  And he was certain of one thing which both broadsheets and tabloids would carry, though it had not yet been mentioned in the radio and television reports. By tomorrow morning, with no killer in sight, they would be speculating that this was not one of those silly family killings which took place so often at this time of year. Nor even an isolated death.

  He was confident that the newspapers would place this as one of a chain of killings, the third one to go undetected.

  The third in the chain of deaths associated with the man the papers had tagged “the Lancashire Leopard”.

  He rather liked that label. He fell to wondering how many more deaths the Leopard might achieve.

  Three

  Monday, January 7th

  Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was not sorry to get back to work.

  Most police officers work either Christmas or New Year, with much jockeying for position beforehand according to individual requirements. Tucker expected his staff to work one or the other of the holidays, but felt he was now near enough to retirement to ignore the setting of examples. Do as I say, not as I do: that was the attitude of the man who commanded the Oldford CID section.

  Tucker had taken both the holidays, and bridged the gap between them with three days of his annual leave. He had not been seen in Brunton Police Station since Christmas Eve, an absence which could only benefit the CID unit he directed, according to DI Peach. As the senior inspector in a smallish CID section, Peach carried the man he called Tommy Bloody Tucker on his broad shoulders, and as a result took certain liberties in their relationship.

  “It’s good to have you back, sir. The unit has missed your example and direction.”

  Tucker, who was not impervious to the irony which has such a large role in English speech, peered suspiciously at his blank-faced inspector. He had been attempting a breezy zest and dispatch on his return after such a long break. Now he said, “I expect you’ve all had an easy time of it over the holiday period. I hope you haven’t allowed discipline to slip, Peach. I hope there hasn’t been any slacking in my absence.”

  “Slacking?” Peach looked puzzled, as if the idea of slacking in the police was a new and difficult concept for him. “We’ve been pretty hard at it, on the whole, sir. And the criminal fraternity has done its part, while you’ve been away. Quite a lot of wife-beating over Christmas, as usual. Festive spirit, I expect. And as a sign of our emancipated times, two husbands roughed up by their wives. Not a thing you’d even be able to comprehend, from your own loving relationship with your spouse, sir. One of your many strengths, that is; I always think that it’s that rock-like certainty at home which enables you to bring a perspective into the station which many—”

  “Just leave Barbara out of this, will you, Peach? I don’t wish my domestic life to be discussed in the station, as I seem to tell you repeatedly.” Tucker’s dragon of a wife was a perpetual source of interest to Peach, who had seen at a glance this morning how his chief was regretting his prolonged bout of domestic intimacy over the holiday period.

  “As you wish, sir. I can see that you do not wish to wave your perennial domestic bliss in the faces of those of us who have been less fortunate in the lottery of the marriage market. You have always been very considerate in that way.”

  Tucker again peered suspiciously at the earnest face over his gold-rimmed glasses. Peach was always at his worst when he exercised his extensive vocabulary. He said petulantly, “Yes. Well, it’s not my fault if some people can’t make their marriages work.” Peach’s wife had left him several years previously, in an atmosphere of mutual acrimony which Peach had carefully preserved over the ensuing period.

  “No, sir. Indeed it isn’t. Those of us who live in a state of quasi-monastic celibacy have much to envy.” He allowed a picture of the formidable Barbara Tucker in bra and pants, pursuing her fearful husband across their spacious bedroom, to swim across his vision. It was one of his favourite fantasies; Peach told his colleagues that the horrors of Stephen King were much overrated by comparison with this lurid apparition.

  Tucker attempted to strike back, lurching into the vernacular which did not come easily to him. “Yes, well it’s not my fault if you’re not getting your end away, DI Peach. It’s not part of the police employment package to provide spare totty for inspectors, you know, even in these enlightened days.” He allowed himself a nasty laugh at that thought.

  He still doesn’t know about Lucy Blake, thought Peach. Oh, thank you, God! He still hasn’t heard about me and luscious Lucy, though it’s stale station gossip by now with the rest of CID. Par for the course, that is, with Tucker. In life, as on the golf course, this prat remains a twenty-five handicap hacker. Thank you, Lord, I owe you one!

  Aloud, Peach said, “Well, those of us without the comfort of warm sheets and pretty backsides to cuddle have been getting on with the crime, sir. Sexual frustration concentrates the mind wonderfully, someone said — Saint Augustine, I think it was. We’ve cleared up all the minor stuff without too much trouble. There was one incident which might concern you, sir. Press Officer’s outside now, as a matter of fact. Waiting to see you, when we’ve finished our little chat.

  “In
cident?” Tucker was looking at him doubtfully over the glasses again.

  He hasn’t heard, thought Peach. Doesn’t the idle sod even get the radio or television news? As if in answer, Tucker said apologetically, “We were at my wife’s sister’s over in Leeds all day yesterday, so I didn’t—”

  “Murder, sir. One we didn’t want on our patch, to be frank. I expect you’ll need to mount one of your media conferences, to tell the world what we’re doing about it. Looks rather like another killing by this bloke they’re calling ‘the Lancashire Leopard’.”

  He left Thomas Bulstrode Tucker looking like a particularly surprised dead cod on the Brunton fish market.

  *

  Peach offered to accompany Lucy Blake on her journey to see the parents of the dead girl, but she refused the offer. She knew a more private and gentler side of the man, but she could do without his abrasive presence at her side in a task like this. She took DC Brendan Murphy with her instead.

  The woman who opened the door to them at eleven o’clock on that Monday morning looked as if she had been through the full gamut of grief in twenty-four hours. She was only in her late forties, but she looked nearer sixty now, though her grief gave a painful and timeless dignity to her ravaged face. Her surviving daughter had been combing her mother’s dishevelled hair when the bell rang and Mary Woodgate insisted on going to the door. The tidy greying hair gave a curiously formal framework to the lined face, with its eyes deep in sockets grey from crying. When DS Blake produced her warrant card, she said dully, “We’ve seen the police. The girl in uniform was here yesterday.”

  “Yes, Mrs Woodgate, I know that. I’m from CID. We need to ask you some questions, I’m afraid, if you can bear it.”