by J M Gregson
He caught Tony Pickard casting his eyes heavenwards after a look at Brendan Murphy. “It may be bloody boring, Tony, but you lads are paid to be bloody bored. There were four hundred people at that dance: say two hundred men. Most of them you should be able to eliminate. There’ll be the ones who went home with their girlfriends and the ones who walked home in groups. Then there are the groups who shared taxis. I know that people can go out again after they’ve got home, or double back after they’ve left a group. But time is helpful to us here; one of the useful things we have is an exact time of death, so let’s use it. From what Hannah Woodgate’s friends have told us about the time they left her, it seems pretty certain that she was dead by twelve twenty a.m. — she would have reached her house otherwise.
“Unless it’s possible for a man to have been on his own and in the area where she was found by twelve fifteen, you can eliminate him. You and Brendan are both local men, so you know the ground: that’s why you’ve been chosen for this job. Be as bored as you like, but be bloody thorough — no Yorkshire Ripper-type cock-ups, or you’ll have me to answer to. You can have four uniformed coppers from different beats to help you get through this quickly. I want a list of possibles within twenty-four hours. Then we’ll follow them up.”
Peach nodded then to the man beside him, who introduced himself. “DI Parkinson, Serious Crime Squad. You may be wondering why we are so ready to assume that there is only one man involved. Everything about both this killing and the previous two indicates that this is so. There were people still awake in houses within fifty yards of where Hannah Woodgate died, but no one heard anything. There was no suggestion of a gang-bang, nor of any other sexual shenanigans. And if, as we think, this is a third killing by the same man, then you should know that we are sure that the murders in November and December involved only one man.”
Peach grinned mirthlessly. “That’s one of the few bloody things we are sure of. There isn’t much to pass on to you from the other two murders. That’s why I’m saying we observe our usual procedures, just as if this was a one-off. House to house is giving us a few names to follow up in the area, and we’ll have a go at the usual suspects while you lads and lasses are getting some lists together for us.”
A woman detective constable at the back of the room said, “Have we any indication at all of the man’s age?”
Peach shook his head grimly. “None whatsoever. You’ll have to keep your eye on all of us, love.” There was a ripple of laughter round the room at the weak joke, nervous rather than amused. No one liked a killer, and least of all one who struck like this.
DI Parkinson said, “If we assume for a moment that this is the Leopard, there are certain things of which we should all be aware. The first death was on the third of November. The second was on the twelfth of December. This one was on the fifth of January. It looks as if the frequency is accelerating as he gets more confident. And all the signs are that he is getting confident: the first two killings were in isolated areas, whereas this one was in a heavily populated part of a town, with lights still on in some of the nearby houses. We’re all guessing here, and he’s enjoying that. But my guess is that if we don’t find him quickly, he’ll kill again. He’s sitting on his own somewhere and laughing at us. Unless we get closer to him, he’s going to show us again before too long just how clever he thinks he is.”
*
On this early January evening, darkness dropped in quickly over the narrow streets of the old cotton town. It threw a cloak over the frenzied activities of the augmented team of sixty officers who were working on the death of Hannah Woodgate.
Much of the work was conducted around the Murder Room which had been set up in the Brunton CID section, where by the early evening officers who had worked alone or in pairs all day were exchanging information and making sense of their efforts within the larger context of the investigation. There was a steady chatter of computer keyboards as information and lists were fed in and cross-referenced.
Brendan Murphy watched his list of men who might have followed Hannah home from the dance lengthening as information was fed back to him. Tony Pickard was still out in the town with the uniformed officers, checking the stories of those who claimed to have gone home with girlfriends or in groups. Much of the checking had of necessity to be done in the evening. People arriving home from work found themselves involved, however peripherally, in a murder investigation.
Even Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker stayed an hour longer than usual at his desk. He had hoped that Peach would come in, to be regaled with the success of his chief’s media conference. It would have been satisfying to emphasise the importance of good public relations in modern police work to that stocky figure with the toothbrush moustache and shining bald pate, who reminded him so much of a more compact and muscular Oliver Hardy. He rang Barbara and asked her to record the interview with Sally Etherington when it appeared on the evening news. Her reply was not as complimentary as he would have wished. But he knew that nevertheless she would record it; it would be ammunition for the games she played at her coffee mornings.
As the man in charge of the investigation, he went down to the Murder Room, found that Peach was not there, and gave an impromptu pep talk. It began, “I am glad to see how thoroughly my orders are being implemented by DI Peach. It is important that you give him every possible support…”
The male and female officers listened dutifully to his words. Most of them held Peach’s opinion of the man who commanded them in CID, but they were making their careers in the police service, and rank was rank. Peach had made himself into a local legend by his carefully measured contempt for the man he called Tommy Bloody Tucker, but he had no wish for further promotion. As Tucker had become less efficient, more atrophied in his bureaucratic isolation, he had paradoxically become more dependent upon the man he would have loved to send on his way.
For Percy Peach produced results. He might pretend to a scepticism about the system, and in particular about the man who represented it to him, but he waged a war on crime which was forceful and unremitting, nailing villains with an energy which was his own brand of integrity. Tucker rode upon his back, and both of them knew it. Tucker had realised years ago that as long as Peach was making arrests for major crimes on their patch he had to tolerate his insolence. He had examined the alternatives often enough, and come each time to the conclusion that even the insufferable Peach was the lesser of two evils.
At half past six, Tucker left the station and drove home to his comfortable house on the outskirts of Brunton. It is one of the ironies of the case, and indeed of life itself, that this most ineffective head of the investigation into the death of Hannah Woodgate passed within a few yards of her murderer on his way home.
Five
Monday, January 7th
It was now after nine o’clock at night. In the front room of the small terraced house, the only light came from a seventy-five-watt bulb, its dim illumination further diminished by a dusty shade.
But Peach had set his man on a chair directly beneath that dismal light, and he was watching for the first signs of fear in his face. It was a mean face, thin and lined, weasel-like with low cunning. But the mind behind the face was no match for Percy Peach, and both these old antagonists knew it.
The man had switched on both bars of the electric fire when they came into the front room of the grimy little turn-of-the-century house — the parlour, as it was still called by the old lady they had left in the living kitchen on the other side of the wall. There was a smell of burning dust from the rarely used elements of the fire. The room, musty when they had begun this, was now hot and airless.
Peach’s eyes, coal-black and unblinking, never left his adversary. “You might as well admit it, Billy. You were out last Saturday night. Putting yourself about a bit. Getting well out of your miserable depth. Panicking, eventually.”
“I never left the ’ouse, Mr Peach. I told you.”
“You were seen, Billy. Outside the Wagon and
Horses. Up to no good, as usual.”
“That was earlier. I was ’ere from ten o’clock onwards. Tucked up in me bed by eleven.” He repeated the words in a whine, as if it was a formula which might become true if he repeated it often enough.
“And who says so?”
The watery blue eyes narrowed as a small smile of cunning flashed momentarily into the narrow features. “Me mother does. You can speak to her now, if you like.”
An old lady, suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer’s, who still saw her son as a mischievous boy who got into occasional scrapes; she would bring herself to believe her own lies by the time they had prepared a case. Whom Peach knew he could never put into the witness box for cross-examination, in any case. Billy and he both knew the score here.
It had been a long day and Peach was suddenly weary. His brain told him that this was a pointless exercise, but he knew that it must be completed: you didn’t leave any stones unturned when murder was the crime. Or, as he was now almost certain in this case, triple murder. He used his irritation that this pathetic creature should be holding out against him to drive him on.
Billy Bedford was a wretched figure. His pink shirt was grubby at the neck and frayed at the cuffs; his thinning, greasy grey hair was dishevelled from the number of times he had run his hand through it since he had sat down opposite Peach. But his long experience of petty crime, of hours of questioning in the interview rooms of police stations, now stood him in good stead. He made his watery grey eyes carefully blank and folded his arms across his thin chest, challenging Peach to break his story. “Ain’t done nothing,” he reiterated stubbornly.
Peach knew that Bedford was only here because of his grubby past, and that that held no more than a string of convictions for minor, slightly comic, crimes, the kind even the police laughed about behind Bedford’s back. And here was that same Billy Bedford, outsmarting and outlasting that scourge of villains, DI Peach.
“You’re a flasher, Billy. Tried and convicted. And God knows what else you are!”
“Nothing else, Mr Peach! And I’ve given all that up. I’ve told you.”
He had, several times already in the last forty minutes. And he would go on doing so, unless Peach could frighten him.
“Flashers often go on to bigger things. You know that, Billy, and so do we.” That wasn’t strictly true. It was something of a rarity, and the ones who did were younger than fifty-four-year-old Billy Bedford. And they usually moved through the dark world of indecent assault and rape before they killed anyone. But it wasn’t unknown; it was possible — and so it had to be explored.
And Bedford didn’t know the statistics which Peach carried in his head. For the first time, he looked scared. “I ’aven’t done nothing. I told you.”
But he couldn’t keep his arms folded. His hands clasped in his lap, massaging each other in slow motion, the filthy fingernails appearing and disappearing in the dim light. Peach saw the first real apprehension and went for it, like a welterweight seeing his chance for a punch. “I told you, Billy, you’re out of your depth this time. This one is big. And very, very nasty. The girl was killed. Strangled, as she looked into the eyes of her killer, we think. Pressed down into the snow, with thumbs crushing her windpipe and a knee—”
“It’s not what I’d do, Mr Peach. Not my sort of crime, ’onest it isn’t!” Bedford was desperate to stop the flow of detail, to fracture the picture of violence that was being built up before his widening eyes. “I’ve — I’ve been a nuisance to women, God knows, but I’ve never hit them.”
“Not strictly true that, Billy, and we both know it. Four convictions for flashing, and the last time you assaulted the woman.”
“I wasn’t charged with that. Only with the flashing. I only put my hand over her mouth to try to stop her when she started screaming.”
They glared at each other, their faces four feet apart as they sat forward on the edges of their chairs. Peach caught the stench of Bedford’s breath, gusting at him in waves in the overheated room. He could smell the fear as well as see it now, and he went in for the kill. “And when the man had finished with this pretty young girl, when he saw the life die in her eyes, he threw her in the back of a derelict van and slipped away. Just to stop her talking, he did that. Or to stop her screaming, like you did with that other woman. Or to give himself more pleasure than he could get from just a flash. You tell me which, Billy Bedford!”
Bedford wasn’t used to this direct attack. Policemen usually kept the details of crime from him when they pulled him in to question him, hoping to make him uneasy by keeping him in ignorance about what he was accused of, looking to collect the bits of information which he might reveal if he jumped to the wrong conclusion. And he wasn’t used to being questioned by inspectors — even Peach had only been a detective sergeant when they had last crossed swords. This blunt confrontation by top brass in his own home threw him off balance. “You can’t set me up for the Hannah Woodgate killing. I’ve known her since she was a kid!”
“And now she’s a young woman, Billy. Or was. A pretty one. Innocent. Just the kind to get a man like you excited.”
“But I knew her, Mr Peach, and I’ve never—”
“So she knew you, Billy. And recognised you. So you had to shut her up.”
“But I didn’t!” Bedford’s voice changed from a whine to a scream. They heard the sound of movement on the other side of the thin wall.
“Maybe you panicked. Just felt you had to stop her screaming. That would be your best defence, Billy, now you’re in the frame for this. Go for manslaughter — say you didn’t really mean to kill her.”
“But I didn’t kill her at all! I wasn’t even—”
“You were seen earlier in the evening, within a quarter of a mile of where she died. Not a lot earlier, either. We have a witness to that.” He watched the thin fingers twining and untwining in Bedford’s lap.
The man’s gaze followed Peach’s and rested on his hands. But he made no effort to still their movement; he watched them as though the fingers belonged to someone else. “I didn’t do it! I wouldn’t do anything like that! You’re not going to pin this on me!”
But he could hear the panic singing in his own voice. In the world in which Billy Bedford moved, the creed was that the pigs could pin most things on you, if they had a mind to. And the squat ball of muscle opposite him certainly looked as if he had a mind to fix him for this.
Peach heard the panic, and read the signs. Guilty or innocent, this man would just go on with his denials now, shouting his innocence like a child pinned into a corner. Peach wracked his tired brain for a new tack, then felt into the pocket of his jacket. “Want a fag, Billy?”
The mobile hands moved forward a couple of inches, then stopped abruptly. “No. Keep your snout!” The prison word was out before the mobile lips could arrest it.
Peach gave him a sour smile, signifying that the intensity of the interrogation was to be relaxed a little. “Just as well, that. I gave up smoking five years ago. Might find you a stick of chewing gum, if you talk sense. You see, I’d like to help you, Billy. To help you to help yourself, perhaps. If you didn’t do this, where were you at midnight last Saturday?”
“I was here. At home. My mum’ll tell you.”
“I’m sure she will. But I don’t think I’ll even bother to ask her. I like to leave old ladies with clear consciences. Besides, I saw the Amitriptyline tablets on the table in there. Fifty milligrams. After one of those, she wouldn’t know whether her son was in Brunton or Bombay.”
They had lowered their voices now. And at this moment there was a knock at the door and a frail voice quavered, “Are you all right in there?”
“Right as rain, Mrs Bedford,” said Peach, opening the door and smiling reassurance at her. “And we’ve just about finished our business in here now.” He went into the shabby but clean living kitchen. As the eighty-year-old resumed her seat by the fire, he felt a surge of painful sympathy for this woman who had never broken a l
aw in her life but who had found her final years so disrupted by the seedy crimes of her son.
She stared into the crimson glow of the fire. “He didn’t do it, you know. Not this one. He wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t Billy. Not kill a girl.”
So she’d been listening at the door, as he thought. No sign of Alzheimer’s tonight in the old girl. Peach reached into his suitcase, glancing towards the parlour door. His exhausted adversary had not followed him into the room. He produced a can of stout, pulled aside the curtain to the scullery, and found a single glass, into which he carefully poured the dark liquid, trying not to react to the sharp beads of eyes which followed his every movement.
He set the glass down on the hearth beside the old lady’s rocking chair and spoke softly into her ear. “Between you and me, Mrs Bedford, I think you’re right. But we have to be certain, you see, before we can leave him alone.”
His voice had scarcely been raised above a whisper, but Bedford must have heard enough to know he was speaking. He came through the door from the parlour and stared suspiciously at the conspiratorial pair by the fire. Peach straightened and considered him without affection. “We were just saying, Billy: if you really did have nothing to do with this and you want to convince us of that, the best thing you can do is to give us a lead on who did do it.”
“I ain’t no grass, Mr Peach!” The old lag’s instinctive reaction. The petty criminal’s fear of reprisals from bigger fish in his murky pool.
Peach went over to him, resisting the impulse to grip the shabby cardigan, to stare into the narrow features from close range. There was no call to upset the old lady whose only link with the modern world was this miserable son. “This is murder, Billy! Not shoplifting. Not opening your raincoat to show how little you’ve got to people who’ve seen much better. Murder. Understood?”
“Yes, Mr Peach.” Bedford spoke in a choked voice, as if Peach was actually holding him by his collar.