by J M Gregson
Lucy Blake saw his point, though she rather wished he hadn’t made it. “Yes. Where we’re heading now. Where Brendan Murphy lives.”
*
Peach drove into the Brunton Police Station car park to find it almost deserted. He sat for a moment in the darkness, gathering his resources, preparing for what he must now do. Then he got out and marched into the station with his normal bouncy gait. No need to betray any sign of uncertainty to those you worked with; you had an image to sustain.
There was no sign of Lucy Blake, though he had seen her blue Corsa in the car park. He tried her mobile again, but there was still no reply. She must be working — out in the town somewhere, probably. He tried her on her radio, but there was no reply on that either. For the first time, Percy felt a pang of anxiety.
He went into the reception area, spoke to the station sergeant: the man on the desk tended to know where most people were. “Have you seen Brendan Murphy?” he said. “I need to speak to him, urgently.”
*
It was only seven o’clock when Tony Pickard turned the Mondeo carefully into the road where Brendan Murphy lived. But it might have been the middle of the night, for all the activity there was around the place.
Pickard knew exactly where Murphy lived, or they might have had difficulty finding the place. The road was unpaved, with no street lights. They bumped gently over large potholes as he drove past the silent house. He parked forty yards past it, so that anyone peering between the curtains from the unlit frontage would have thought the car was visiting one of the other houses.
“What do we do now?” said Tony.
“Turn the car round, ready for a quick getaway if we’re embarrassed,” said Lucy tersely. “Brendan may still be in there. He might be at the back of the place. Check that. But don’t confront him; I want to be there for that.” She wondered if her speech betrayed her tension.
Tony Pickard slid out of the driver’s seat, drew himself to his full height, and stood for a moment looking at the building. Then he walked up the path to the front of the silent house. It was semi-detached, built in the 1930s, pebble-dashed in a style long departed. Builders had not allowed for garages in those days, and the house was separated from the adjoining pair only by a narrow passageway, allowing pedestrian access to the rear. Pickard hesitated for a moment before the front door, then disappeared into the shadows as he took this route to the back of the house.
Lucy controlled an absurd wish to run after him, to keep the two of them together in this unfamiliar environment, where the darkness and the silence suddenly seemed to threaten rational thought. She wondered whether she should try to radio in to CID, to report their position and warn that help might be needed. But she could not do that without stating why they were here and what they were about, and her mind shrank from that. If this was as preposterous a quest as she still felt it would be, the fewer people who knew about it the better.
Why was Tony taking so long? He had only to check whether there were lights on at the back of the house to know whether Murphy was there. She had told him not to go beyond that. She couldn’t radio him without risking blowing his cover, but she would do it, if he wasn’t back in another minute.
*
Peach radioed Brendan Murphy and had him back in the station within minutes. They had a terse exchange in Peach’s office, away from the few people who were logging information in the Murder Room.
No one seemed to know where DS Blake had got to: the popular view was that she must be off duty by now. Yet there was still no reply from either her personal phone or her police radio. Murphy hadn’t seen her since he had interviewed Paul Dutton with her in the morning. He said, “I lost my cool a bit with that bugger, when I shouldn’t have done. He was so bloody arrogant that—”
“Never mind Paul Dutton. Where the hell is DS Blake? And where the hell is Tony Pickard?”
“They went out to see Clyde Northcott at the electrical works this afternoon. But that was hours ago, now.”
Peach took the steps two at a time as he raced down to the car park, with Murphy following more sedately, despite his youth. Lucy Blake’s Corsa was still there; Pickard’s Mondeo was not. Peach stood with his arms on the top of his black Scorpio and his head thrust down upon them for a moment, forcing himself to think when he wanted the release of action. He looked up, seemed for a moment surprised to find Murphy beside him. “You live out at Padiham, don’t you, Brendan?”
“Yes. It’s just a—”
“That’s east from here, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Almost due east, I think, but—”
“Get in!”
He had the engine started and the car moving even as the big DC’s buttocks hit the seat. Murphy only got the door shut just in time to avoid the brick pillar at the exit.
*
“Where the hell have you been?” Lucy Blake let out her tension in the abruptness of her question to the returning Pickard as he slid into the driver’s seat of the Mondeo beside her.
“Sorry, Sarge. He’s not there.”
“Right. We wait.” She was determined to give the orders, to take charge of a situation she felt was in danger of passing out of her control.
“He might not be back for hours. There is something we can do, though. If you approve, that is.”
She glanced sharply sideways at him. All she could see was a dark profile, staring ahead. “Well?”
“There’s a window I can force at the back. The frame is old and worn. Brendan’s house maintenance is about as effective as his gardening!”
It was meant to be a little joke, reducing the tension. But neither of them laughed. It took Lucy’s mind back to those stark new gardening gloves, which had started all this.
“You want to break in? To a colleague’s house?”
“A colleague who might be the Leopard. Correction: a colleague who is the Leopard. I know I’m right, and I’m sure there’ll be evidence in there. Maybe notes about his planning, newspaper cuttings about the murders, that sort of thing. We might need that evidence, to make a case against him: he’s sure to deny it, and he’s left nothing of himself at the scenes of the crimes.”
And if you find nothing, it will help to destroy the theory you’re now so cocksure about, thought Lucy. “All right. But what do I do if he turns up while you’re in there?”
“He won’t. Or rather he might, but he won’t come to the front. These places have garages at the back, with an unpaved track down to them. I’ve checked and his car isn’t in there. That’s another reason why I was so long.”
The fact that the whole exchange was conducted in whispers seemed to increase the tension. Lucy thought for a moment, then said as calmly as she could, “All right. I’ll go round to the back and keep watch. I’ll radio you if there’s any sign of him returning. But don’t be in there longer than ten minutes. I don’t want you conducting a full house search.”
She slid out of the warmth of the car, pulled her coat more tightly about her in the biting cold. She could see the frost sparkling already on the grass of the field opposite the houses. Best get this over and done with, as quickly as possible.
*
Peach drove fast, switching the Scorpio’s headlights on full whenever he had the chance, watching the ribbon of dark road leaping towards and under him like a rally-driver on a night assignment. The big man beside him brushed back his unruly brown hair and watched anxiously as the familiar landmarks flashed past. Brendan Murphy had never known Percy Peach drive like this.
He was even more disturbed when he heard the terse statement of the DI’s accusation. He stuttered out some sort of denial, some assertion that this could not possibly be true.
There followed a staccato summary of Peach’s thinking, punctuated by pauses as he flung the big car round long bends and their progress became even more hectic. It was a strange setting for an even stranger theory. Murphy crouched in his seat and tried to come to terms with it.
Brendan put a cautionary hand on his driver’s forearm
as the thirty limit sign leapt at them out of the darkness, beside the customary notice that told him they were running into Padiham. He had never neared his own house with such trepidation.
*
Lucy Blake found Brendan Murphy’s garage without much difficulty. It stood like a dark box against the night, looking larger than it was because of the unbroken outline of its roof and the absence of larger buildings to give it any perspective.
There was no moon, but the pale light of the stars reflected from the single small window in the side. She peered automatically through this; she could see nothing of the interior save that there was no car within it, as Tony Pickard had reported. She moved into the shadow between the back wall of Murphy’s house and the garage on the other side of the unpaved track which skirted it, providing access to three other garages behind the short row of houses.
She wondered how she would explain her presence here if any of the other residents discovered her. She would have to flash her warrant card and say she was on police business. At least the public generally felt less threatened by women than men in these circumstances. She tried not to think of those other women, the four who had died swiftly and silently at the hands of the Lancashire Leopard.
It was a fairly still night, but it had the biting cold of early February in the foothills of the Pennines. What little wind there was came from the north-east, funnelling down this gap between the garages and the houses, coming straight from Siberia and feeling as if it did. She glanced at her watch, registering the time: ten minutes here was going to seem much longer.
After five, she extracted her radio from the pocket of her coat with fingers that were clumsy with the cold. Tony must be inside by now: there could be no harm in asking what he had found. And she would exhort him to rejoin her as swiftly as possible: she did not fancy being here if Brendan Murphy should come home.
The radio was dead. She could not understand that: it had been working perfectly earlier in the day. Perhaps the battery was down. Or maybe it was just a connection. With her hands shivering with the cold, she managed to ease the battery compartment open. She stared dumb and uncomprehending at the small, empty recess. There was no battery there.
It was at that moment that she heard a slight sound on the other side of the wall and the wooden gate in the wall opened with a tiny squeak of its hinges. Her relief leaped to her lips. “Well? Did you find what you were looking for? Or are we—”
Out of the blackness, the Leopard was abruptly upon her, a black balaclava enclosing his head, the rough leather of the gardening gloves snatching at her throat. She caught the whites of the eyes, then the centres of them blazing with madness as she was borne down, as she felt the strength she had no way of countering above her.
She forced herself to fight. She must keep those questing hands at all costs from her throat. She punched instinctively with her small fists at the face above the hands, then remembered that her only hope was to go for the groin. She turned her shoulder into the centre of this black shape which seemed so huge, so irresistible, threw her weight on to her left leg, brought her right knee up with all the force she could muster into the genitals of her attacker.
But this man was as trained in personal combat as she was. He anticipated her move and brought his thigh up to frustrate it. She provoked a grunt, no more. Not even a muttered curse came through the darkness. And the Leopard was immensely more powerful than she was. Even as she attempted to scream, the coarse leather of the glove was over her mouth, the palm of it was pushing her head inexorably backwards, exposing the throat she knew she must protect.
She went on fighting as he bore her down, knowing now that she must lose. Her resistance was translated into the wish to leave some mark of herself upon him, some scar from her nails upon his face, which might suggest to those left behind who it was that had done this to her.
He pushed aside her hands, held her wrists, brought his own knee up violently in a parody of what she had tried to do, hitting her stomach with it like a mallet, knocking the wind from her in a single gasp of pain and despair. And then those hands were at her throat, seeming huge in the thick leather of the gloves, seeming to have a strength which was more than human. Lucy felt herself thrust down, passing into oblivion, wanting to plead for a last prayer and without the voice to do so.
And then, suddenly, at the moment when consciousness was passing from her, the pressure was released, the hands of the Leopard were torn away from her throat. She saw nothing in those first few seconds of her release. But she heard Percy’s voice, in a curse more terrible, more pain-filled, than any sound she had ever heard. Then strong hands were holding the Leopard against the wall, pinioning his arms to his side. And Peach’s hand was wrenching the balaclava from Tony Pickard’s head.
And Brendan Murphy was yelling the words of arrest into Pickard’s face, repeating the familiar, formal phrases about harming his defence if he did not mention when questioned something which he might later rely on in court.
*
It was almost an hour before the last of the three police cars left the quiet road, the sirens which had announced their arrival long since stilled, their blue lights no longer flashing with the urgency which had proclaimed their presence outside the small semi-detached house.
Tony Pickard had made no great protestations of innocence, had submitted with a dazed air to the handcuffs before he was bundled into the back of the car between the two burly men in uniform. Perhaps, as with other serial killers before him, there was a kind of relief for him in being caught. But he gave no sign of that; he looked merely dazed that what he had planned and executed so carefully had failed after all.
Lucy Blake had a bruise on the left-hand side of her throat and a certain hoarseness of speech to remind her of how near she had been to death. She looked shamefacedly at Brendan Murphy. “I never really believed him, you know, when he said you were the Leopard.”
“No? But you thought you’d better come out here and investigate me, just in case!”
She shook her head wearily, stopped the movement abruptly as it hurt her throat. “We were supposed to be investigating any lead, however bizarre. I wanted you to defend yourself to us and dispose of the idea, before it went any further. And he was very persuasive with those gardening gloves.”
“I don’t know how the hell he expected to get away with it.”
Peach looked at him sharply. “Don’t you, Brendan? You haven’t thought it through, then. He produced the gardening gloves and pretended they’d come from your locker. He removed the batteries from Lucy’s radio. He persuaded Lucy that you might be — just might be — the Leopard and got her out here to check on you. He’d have killed her, left her, and been away from the scene long before her body was found.”
“But why try to frame me?”
Peach shook his head slowly. “I don’t think he was. Lucy’s body would have been found here and you’d have had to explain yourself. No doubt he’d have had extra pleasure if you’d had any difficulty in proving you were elsewhere at the time. But all he was really interested in was another killing — a bolder one than ever, with a policewoman as victim — with nothing at all to direct suspicion towards him. I’ve no doubt Tony Pickard would have been back at Brunton nick within half an hour, probably pretending he’d been there all the time. Don’t forget that in all probability the body wouldn’t have been found until tomorrow morning, if he’d dumped it by the side of your garage. By then, no one could have been very precise about the time of death.”
Lucy Blake shivered. She didn’t like being talked about as “the body”: it had been far too near the truth for comfort. “He was bloody clever: he made me think I was making most of the decisions. And he must have taken the batteries out of my radio back at the station.” She looked suspiciously at Percy. “How long have you suspected Tony Pickard?”
Peach grinned ruefully. “Since about three o’clock this afternoon. It came to me in a flash.”
“What did?”
“When we put our heads together about the Leopard yesterday, he mentioned that we’d been told that the last victim, Sally Cartwright, screamed before she died. But we hadn’t. No one had mentioned that. Not even the man walking his dog who thought he spoke to the killer afterwards mentioned any scream. The only person alive who could have heard that scream was the Leopard himself.”
“And how did you know that he’d be out at Brendan’s place?”
“I didn’t. I was desperate, once I found that he’d taken you off in his Mondeo. The only thing I could think of was that the next murder was likely to be east of Brunton, to complete the geographical pattern — we thought the Leopard was a planner, who enjoyed that planning and his own perverted logic. I knew that Brendan lived pretty well due east, that Tony Pickard would have known Padiham well from visiting Brendan — and that it was quite a remote spot. I’ve been here too, you know!”
“And so have I, now,” said Lucy Blake grimly. “I think I might need to come back some other time, to exorcise the demons. Some bright summer’s afternoon, perhaps.”
They left Brendan Murphy in his own house. Peach drove slowly on the way back into Brunton, glad to have something to do with the hands he found suddenly wanted to tremble. When they had travelled a good two miles of the way, he managed to say, “Tha wer’t a daft prat tonight, lass.”
Lucy smiled for the first time in hours. She liked it when he thee’d and thou’d her. “Ay. A gret gobbin, my Dad would have said. Tha’ll need to take better care of me, Percy Peach.”
He was still too shaken by the narrowness of her escape to continue in light-hearted vein. “And you’ll need to take better care of yourself, won’t you?”
She nodded a little, watching familiar Brunton landmarks appear as they reached the outskirts of the grimy old cotton town. “We got the Leopard, though, didn’t we?”
“Ay, lass, we did that.” Percy allowed himself a small sigh of satisfaction. Then another thought clouded his horizon. “And I’ve no doubt Tommy Bloody Tucker will get his promotion out of it.”