[Inspector Peach 05] - The Lancashire Leopard

by J M Gregson

  “So if you hear the slightest whisper of who might have done it, you get on the blower to Brunton CID right away, see. There’ll be someone there ready to listen, harder than they’ve ever listened before to Billy Bedford. And we’ll protect you. No one will ever know where it’s come from. Understood?”

  The watery eyes stared for a moment into his, then dropped. Slyness mingled with fear in the mean face. “Information about this might be worth a bit if I could come across it, mightn’t it, Mr Peach?”

  Peach had to resist the impulse to shake the skinny frame until it rattled. He said between clenched teeth, “Don’t push it, Bedford. Just keep your grubby ear to the ground and let us know immediately if it picks up anything. Until we know something different, we’ll keep you in the frame.”

  He smiled briefly at the frail figure by the fire. “I’ll say good-night then, Mrs Bedford. Look after yourself now.” She did not look at him, but raised the glass of stout a couple of inches towards him as she gazed into the fire.

  Peach wondered as he climbed wearily into his car what those two would be saying to each other now in that shabby old living kitchen. This job took you into some strange places.

  *

  The man who had actually killed Hannah Woodgate was altogether more at ease than pathetic Billy Bedford.

  In his comfortable, centrally heated room he sat back in an armchair and watched the television news. He enjoyed the performance of Superintendent Tucker in the “News from the North-west” section. He watched it with the detached air of a connoisseur of such items. He would have asked different questions himself: this girl was letting the old windbag off the hook far too easily.

  Why didn’t she pin him down more? Why didn’t she confront him with the fact that the police team of sixty had been up and down the town all day without uncovering anything of value to them? Why didn’t she ask him if he expected to make an arrest in a day? A week? A month? A year?

  He laughed out loud at his thoughts. If he were a betting man, he’d be willing to wager that they’d be no nearer to him in a month than they were now. But he wasn’t a betting man: he only dealt in certainties. And he wouldn’t become overconfident, just because he knew the police machine was failing. He hadn’t taken anything for granted so far, and he wasn’t going to start now. Plan carefully. Never act in a hurry. Keep the bastards guessing! Enjoy it all with a straight face as they got more and more frustrated.

  They were bringing in extra resources from the Serious Crime Squad, the paper had said. That was just to reassure the public, who thought these sods were much more efficient than they were. Let’s see what Joe Public thinks in a week or two, when the team of sixty they keep boasting about has got no nearer to the truth. They won’t think so highly of the boys in blue then, will they? Sixty of them against one clever man, and they can’t catch him. Superintendents, inspectors, all the cream of the CID, and they can’t catch one man! The thick sods!

  He poured himself a generous whisky, filled the glass up with water, sat back to watch a comedy programme with his feet up. It was good to think that with all this frenzied activity being mounted against him, he needed to do absolutely nothing in response. He hadn’t left anything of himself behind at the scene of the murder; there had been nothing of that “exchange” at the scene of a crime which these clever buggers talked so glibly about. Apparently the killer was supposed to leave something of himself which the experts could pick up. Well, bollocks to that! If you knew about these things and were careful, you didn’t leave anything. No fibres, no hairs, nothing from which they could get DNA. And the gloves he’d used for these first three were at the bottom of the canal with stones in them. Up yours, forensic!

  If you were cleverer than these overpaid cretins who were supposed to catch you, you would always come out on top. Cleverer included lying low, for a while, anyway. It was satisfying in any case to have a rest and watch these silly sods chasing around like blue-arsed flies.

  There would come a time, of course, to remind them again how dumb they were. But for the moment you could enjoy your triumph. Pity it had to be so secret, but there it was. Other people who had killed had written to the police and taunted them, but he was far too clever to take such pointless risks. They knew well enough that they were failing, and in time the public would be telling them so and calling for blood. Good phrase, that!

  In a little while, it would be time to frighten the public some more. He dwelt for a while on that thought in bed before he went to sleep.

  Six

  Tuesday, January 8th

  “It’s time you settled down, our Lucy! I’ve said it before—”

  “And you’ll no doubt say it again! Change the record, Mum. I keep telling you, I am settled.”

  Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake was undergoing the kind of grilling that can only be given by a mother to a daughter. It was worse now that her father wasn’t around to say, “Give the girl a chance, Mother!” And the maternal examination of her life and its goals was more concentrated, now that she had her own place and didn’t live at home. She had her own neat little modern flat, three miles from the centre of Brunton, where town met country, and she loved it. But she still spoke of this rural cottage where her mother lived as “home”, still enjoyed being greeted so cheerily by the villagers who had known her since she was a girl.

  Her mother regarded Lucy’s flat as a strange and temporary departure. Agnes Blake had always known that her daughter would have to leave her house and probably the village eventually, but she did not regard this new flat as representing that final break. No one stayed for long in flats anyway, did they? Flats hadn’t existed round here, when Agnes Blake was young, and there was something essentially transient about them. Lucy had been born when her mother was forty and her beloved dead father was fifty; Agnes Blake clung unconsciously to the notions of a generation which was almost gone.

  She returned to her theme. “When I say ‘settled’, I mean properly settled.” Her brow furrowed. She didn’t want to put her pictures into words. She knew quite well that they were old-fashioned, and knew even more clearly that her daughter would laugh at them. Good-naturedly, even lovingly, but that wouldn’t help. Agnes set her lips in a prim line, refusing to respond to the smile which danced about the girl’s mouth as she looked at her. “You know what I mean, our Lucy, perfectly well.”

  “You mean find myself a nice man. Settle down. Have babies. Dress them up pretty, for Granny to parade around the village.”

  Agnes smiled in spite of herself. It was an appealing picture, and she couldn’t deny that her ideal for Lucy was something of that sort. “Is that so bad a thing to hope for?”

  “Maybe not. But I’ve got to shape my own life, Mum. You know that. You’ve told me before that you want just that.”

  Agnes supposed she had. You found yourself mouthing these modern notions, not wanting to seem a reactionary parent. But she’d picked up another idea from Woman’s Hour the other day, and she produced it now, as nonchalantly as she could. “You’re twenty-six, my girl. Nearly twenty-seven. And your biological clock is ticking, you know. You can’t leave these things for ever.”

  Lucy grinned at her across the comfortable room. It was a thought she had had for herself, one which she had thrust away at the back of her mental filing cabinet. But she couldn’t admit that to her mother. “You’ll be reading the Guardian next, Mum, and campaigning for gay rights. I’m not ancient, you know, not yet! There’s plenty of time. Women are having their babies much later — it’s the modern trend, with joint mortgages and bigger incomes for women.”

  Agnes shook her head and said stubbornly, “You’ll be thirty before you know where you are.”

  And you’ll be seventy, thought Lucy, and still not a grandmother. She felt suddenly guilty, in a way she would never have anticipated. This was another of the trials of being an only child. Trying to move away from the thought, she said, “Anyway, you have to have the right man to be the father of your children, don’t
you? ‘Marry in haste and repent at leisure,’ your generation used to say. Well, I’ve seen plenty of that, and so have you.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you married in a hurry. You’re putting words into my mouth. But I won’t deny that I’d be happy if you had a nice man to look after you. There must be plenty interested, with your looks.”

  Lucy smiled. “I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’m a detective sergeant in the police now, for God’s sake.” She wondered what her mother would say if she knew that she’d found a nice man. That she’d spent four days at New Year in his house, that she’d only gone back to her own flat because she wanted to retain her independence, and to guard against things moving too fast.

  She wanted to tell her mother about Percy Peach. Indeed, she had been determined to tell her on this visit home. But it wasn’t easy to tell the mother who had such dreams for her that she was attracted to a stocky bald man who was ten years older than her — and divorced.

  There was no denying that it was an unlikely pairing, until you knew Percy Peach as well as she did now. Tommy Bloody Tucker had assigned her to be Peach’s DS as a punishment to him, and Peach had started off in the best male chauvinist tradition — she smiled now as she thought of their earliest exchanges. They had enjoyed a few laughs together over the New Year about those early days. But there was no getting round the fact that Percy was an acquired taste. He’d be nice to her mother, she was pretty sure, to please Lucy. But she had never seen Percy Peach straining to be nice: it might well be a disaster.

  Agnes Blake saw the faraway look swim into her daughter’s ultramarine eyes, and divined far more from it about the state of the girl’s affections than Lucy knew. There was a man, then. She hoped he was suitable, that if he was he would be long-term. There must be something wrong about him, or he would have been revealed by now. She said suddenly, before she was aware of the thought herself, “You need someone to look after you, with this man they call prowling about in Brunton.”

  “I’m in no danger from him, Mum. But it’s interesting to see how we go about catching a man like this, a serial killer — I’ve never been involved in a case like this before.”

  Agnes glanced at her quickly. “You’re involved, then?”

  “Yes. The whole of the CID is, really. So you see, I’m in no danger, Mum, as I said.”

  “You’re no nearer to catching him, then.”

  It was a statement, not a fact. Lucy was startled, as children are wont to be by a parent’s shrewdness. “Not really. But we shall get him. It’s early days yet.” That sounded as defensive as Tommy Bloody Tucker, she thought. “There’s a very big machine in operation, now. We’ve been given extra resources.”

  “His first two murders were on each side of here, you know. One on the outskirts of Preston, one in Clitheroe. Each of them within eight miles of here. They questioned all the men in the village. And now there’s a third one, right on the doorstep of this new place you’ve bought for yourself.”

  “Hardly that, Mum. A good two miles from my flat.”

  “You might be safe while you’re at work, with all those hefty policemen around you, but you still have to go home on your own. Working all kinds of odd hours, getting home in the dark. You just promise me you’ll be careful, my girl.”

  “I’ll be all right, Mum, really. You’re not to worry about me. Anyway, what about you? You must come home here in the dark in January, with no street lighting to help you.” She wished as soon as she had said it that she had bitten back the words; it sounded as if she had been trying to frighten her mother. The truth was that she had almost told her about Peach, to reassure her, and then had shied away again from the revelation.

  She climbed into the bulbous blue Vauxhall Corsa. “I have to go and help interview someone about the case now,” she said importantly. She knew that the news that Agnes Blake’s girl was involved in the hunt for the Lancashire Leopard would be round the village by the time her mother had finished her part-time stint in the supermarket, that her prominence would be exaggerated in the evening exchanges in the Hare and Hounds.

  She smiled at the thought as she waved to her mother and drove away. In her wildest imaginings, she could never have conceived quite how important her part would become in this local melodrama.

  *

  Neither the autopsy on Hannah Woodgate nor the work of the Scenes of Crime team were able to provide the police team with much that was useful.

  The PM confirmed what the pin-point haemorrhages in the eyes had suggested in the back of the abandoned van — that the victim had died from strangulation. Analysis of the stomach contents and the internal organs showed that the last meal had been eaten some six hours before death and that a very small quantity of alcohol had been consumed at some time during the evening — certainly not more than a pint of cider. There was no evidence of any illegal drug intake, either in the stomach contents or elsewhere on the body.

  A bruising on the right shoulder indicated that the girl had probably been seized from behind and spun round while fleeing from her assailant. She had died facing him. Her killer had forced both of his thumbs hard into her neck, constricting the carotid arteries until she died. The slightly greater pressure on the left side of the throat suggested that he was probably but not certainly right-handed. He had worn thick leather gloves, possibly cycling or motorcycle gauntlets, but just as possibly thick leather gardening gloves, of the kind on sale at Boots, Woolworths and a host of other retail outlets. Not only were the broad thumb-prints upon the neck consistent with such gloves, but one of the strips of Sellotape placed on the victim’s neck at the place where the corpse had been found revealed tiny traces of such leather when examined under a microscope.

  All the evidence was that the victim had died mercifully quickly. She had unfortunately been wearing fine leather kid gloves during her last brief struggle for life, so that there had been no chance of finding hair or skin beneath her nails which might help to identify her killer. There was no evidence of any sexual assault, nor of any kind of interference with the clothing. There were no marks on the body to indicate any form of torture before death.

  From the point of view of detection, all this was negative, apart from the minor piece of information about the gloves. Torture, like sexual assault, would almost certainly have left them with some traces of the assailant, some clue which could be followed up, which might in due course clinch an arrest.

  SOCO were equally bleak about the area where Hannah Woodgate had died. The snow, which they had hoped might be useful to them, had in the end only helped to confuse matters. It meant that almost everyone who had trodden the area had worn boots or wellingtons, so that there was little chance of identifying the killer by any distinctively soled footwear.

  There had been considerable contamination of the site around the van before the SOCO team had arrived to rope it off. A CID officer, DC Pickard, had conducted a detailed examination of the broader surrounding area soon after the body was discovered, but this also was covered with the footprints of local residents who had been drawn to the scene by the discovery of the body. It had not been possible to identify the precise spot where the victim had died. Of the sole-marks from numerous wellingtons and boots, none could be identified as worn by the killer of Hannah Woodgate.

  At the end of his PM report, the pathologist made one more suggestion. Everything about this killing — the swift, ruthless dispatch of the victim, the absence of any injury apart from the neck and throat, the apparent lack of any indecent assault — replicated the deaths in November in Preston and that in December in Clitheroe. Even a copy-cat killer would be unlikely to have shown the same restraint, or to have replicated the killing so exactly. This killing was almost certainly the work of the same man. The police should think in terms of a serial killer.

  They were looking officially for the man everyone was now calling the Lancashire Leopard.

  *

  Peach decided he would interview the former boyfriend of Ha
nnah Woodgate at Brunton nick. To those unfamiliar with them, police stations could still be frightening as well as dismal places. And Peach was a great one for putting on the frighteners. He sent DC Pickard to bring Jason in.

  He turned out to be a good-looking boy, tall, with fair hair and an attractive, rather shy smile. Peach wetted his lips and prepared to remove the smile. “You’re here of your own free will, Mr Wright. Helping the police with their enquiries into a most serious crime. The most serious of all, in fact. Murder. But you should understand that you are not under arrest. Not yet.” He gave the lad the most businesslike in his huge range of smiles, implying that it was probably only a matter of time before the boy was thrown into a cell.

  Jason looked round the windowless interview room, trying to convey the impression that he was perfectly calm, that he felt under no threat. The survey did not take him long. The room was no more than ten foot square, with a small, square, heavy table in the middle of it, on which stood a heavy cassette recorder. The walls were not plastered; the bricks were covered with light green emulsion paint, badly scratched at the bottom by chairs and feet. His own chair was the only one on his side of the table; there were two on the other side, occupied by this aggressive inspector and the pretty girl with the beautiful reddish hair, who had introduced herself before they came into this room as Detective Sergeant Blake. He felt as though the single harsh light in the centre of the ceiling was shining directly into his face.

  Jason thought he could show how calm he was by volunteering information, without waiting to be asked. He said, “I wasn’t Hannah’s boyfriend when she died, you know. She’d picked up someone new at university, I understand, some chap who lives down in Surrey.” It didn’t emerge as nonchalantly as he had planned, mainly because he could not keep his voice steady as he spoke. The quaver was because Hannah lay dead, not because he was nervous, but he could hardly start to explain that to this unsympathetic man with the dark eyes and the even darker moustache, who studied him so unnervingly.