by J M Gregson
‘Thompson’s highly sexed,’ said Lucy unexpectedly.
Percy pricked up his male ears at this contribution. ‘He’s a four-eyed git with carroty hair and a body that needs feeding up,’ he said reasonably.
‘Doesn’t alter the fact that he’s highly sexed,’ said Lucy with a smile. ‘Women can tell. You’re lucky to have me assisting you.’
‘I’ve never disputed that!’ said Percy, moving a little closer to her on the sofa and slipping his right arm round her shoulder. He then caressed her breast thoughtfully and added, ‘You must allow for the fact that you have the kind of bosom which drives strong men wild.’
‘I didn’t mean he fancied me, you idiot! I don’t think he did. But he wasn’t just nervous; he had those quick movements of his limbs which were almost out of his control at times. He kept folding his arms to try to prevent his hands moving. I’m not saying that always means people are highly sexed, but in his case it does. And I wish some other people would also try to control their movements!’ She detached her fiance’s hand from her breast and held it firmly as she reiterated, ‘Take it from me, Jason Thompson is highly sexed. It probably has nothing at all to do with the case, but he is!’
‘Your psychological insights continue to amaze me,’ said Percy reverently, setting his head comfortably on her shoulder.
Lucy Blake straightened suddenly. ‘Anyway, what do you mean, saying he can’t be attractive because of his carroty hair! May I remind you that my own hair is red, Mr Peach!’
‘Ah, but not carroty, my dearest. Titian, I’d call it, not common red. A unique shade of hair. And uniquely arousing!’ He stroked her hair enthusiastically, then transferred his attention to other areas to show just how uniquely aroused he was.
She controlled his hands with what was by now practised ease, then offered him the promise which would allay his ardour until she had finished the discussion. ‘All in good time, dear.’
‘Ahhhhh! ’ A low moan of pleasure which became a long monotone of admiration. Then, unexpectedly, he too sat up straight. ‘If you must bring work home to what should be a couch of unmitigated physical pleasure, apply these psychological insights to the puzzling Mrs Hayes, please.’
Lucy was aware that any reference to her psychological knowledge was a concealed insult. You didn’t need to be a police officer long to be dragged into the service’s habitual distrust of professional psychologists and everything they represented. Much worse, in her view, were social workers who learned a very little psychology and then were beguiled into applying it without full understanding. She had seen this happen in both the most complex and the most straightforward of criminal situations, with equally disastrous results.
Although she knew that Percy Peach was more open to ideas than most beneath his hard-man veneer - he had even been known to invite forensic psychologists into complex cases - she had more sense than to move out of her depth. She said cautiously, ‘I thought that Tamsin Hayes, like Jason Thompson, was holding something back.’
‘You didn’t simply accept that she was a woman in shock and deep mourning?’
She thought for a moment before shaking her head. ‘Shock, maybe. I didn’t buy the deep mourning. It was laid on too thick.’
‘I agree. I think she’d dressed for the part very deliberately. Overdressed, perhaps. And she had all that black gear out very quickly. Within two or three hours of hearing her old man was dead.’
‘Her beloved old man.’
‘So she said.’
‘Maybe she wasn’t as attached to him as she’d like us to think. Maybe she went back to the Gisburn Hotel and disposed of him.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she never left - so far we only have her word that she drove home when she left the party.’
‘Or maybe she was exactly where she said she was, knowing that someone else was seeing him off.’
‘Or maybe highly sexed carroty-bonce was seeing him off. The world is full of possibilities, my darling.’ With an abrupt change of course, Percy Peach addressed himself energetically to one of them.
It was some thirty minutes later, when they were lying contentedly tired between the sheets, that Lucy Blake said drowsily, ‘I told you I could recognize when a man was highly sexed.’
Chapter Fifteen
Leroy Moore thought he would have heard from the police by now. It was Monday morning and he felt he should be going into work, but he did not know quite where to go: the duties of the Head of Security Services at Hayes Electronics had not been defined at the time of the proprietor’s death.
‘They’ll want to know where you were when he died,’ said Jane Martin.
‘They’ll want to know where all of us were. That’s the way they work. Unless they already have a prime suspect for the case. In which case they might well be grilling the poor sod at this minute.’ He looked at his watch. It was still not nine o’clock, but they had been up for hours. They’d had coffee and what they could manage to eat some time ago now, and done what tidying up was necessary in his small flat. When you didn't know exactly what you should be doing and where you should be, the time dragged by very slowly.
‘You think they’ll want to speak to me?’
He caught the alarm in Jane’s voice, was moved again by the tenderness which still surprised him. ‘I think they’ll want to speak to everyone, unless they think they already know who did it.’ He wondered how Jane would behave under questioning, whether she would panic like some other girls he had known. He even wondered for a moment whether she had anything to hide from them.
As if she followed his thoughts, she gave him the familiar smile and said, ‘I’ve been grilled by the pigs before, you know. It’s a few years ago, but I think I remember the rules.’
‘Don’t tell them anything you don’t have to.’ Leroy spoke automatically, almost as a reflex reaction. ‘Don’t give them anything and they can’t use it to trip you up.’
Jane nodded thoughtfully. ‘You think that’s true, even in a murder inquiry?’
He didn’t want to go into the sessions he had had with the fuzz six years ago when he had killed a man. He hadn’t told Jane about that, though in due course he would do; he didn’t want to have any secrets from her, did he? It had been self-defence, anyway, and eventually he’d convinced the cops of that. Or they hadn’t been able to get enough evidence in the murky pools where he had swum in those days to bring a case. He said, ‘You want to keep yourself as far away from the victim as you can. Make out you hardly knew him and they won’t be interested in you.’
‘You don’t think I should tell them about - about what happened on that Thursday night?’ Jane still found it difficult to speak of that night, even with Leroy.
‘No one else knows about it, do they?’
‘No. You’re the only person I’ve told.’
‘Leave it that way. Keep yourself as far away from the victim as possible, if you don’t want the pigs to get interested in you.’
She nodded. It seemed logical enough, but she was troubled, both by what had happened that night and the way she had felt about the man who had done it.
At that moment, the phone rang and Leroy spoke briefly into it. He forced a smile into his normally cheerful black face as he turned back to her. ‘That was some CID bloke. He and his DCI want to speak to me this morning. It’s all right, love. I was expecting it, wasn’t I?’
* * *
Clare Thompson was at her desk at her usual time on the Monday morning. After the cat-and-mouse games with Jason at the weekend, she found the routine of work a relief.
There was certainly no time for private reflection. The telephone calls came in thick and fast. She dealt with them swiftly and efficiently, every inch the proficient personal assistant she had always been. The fact that strictly speaking she was at this moment personal assistant to no one was irrelevant. She kept the day-to-day work of the firm moving along as smoothly as ever. She discouraged gossip about the sensational events of the weekend among the younger women i
n the outer office, answered the myriad small queries which came in from the factory workforce with a grave smile, repeated at every opportunity the maxim that production should proceed exactly as normal.
Clare accepted the external messages of condolence with grave thanks; her telephone manner had always been one of her strengths. When she sensed unspoken questions beneath the routine sympathy, she reassured both customers and suppliers that business would be proceeding much as usual. She was not herself in control of policy, of course. But she was sure that the death of even as prominent a leader as Mr Hayes would not diminish either efficiency or service, that deadlines would continue to be met and prices would remain as keen as ever.
Clare set the phone down with a little sigh of pleasure and satisfaction after the latest of these calls. Only then did she become aware of the figure who had arrived without her noticing him and was sitting quietly waiting for her to finish the call. Her initial reaction was of irritation that someone should be listening, almost eavesdropping, upon her performance. Only belatedly did she realize that she knew the man.
‘It’s Mr Ballack, isn’t it?’ she said, as he shuffled awkwardly to his feet.
‘You’re good at names. That’s a skill I never had and envy in you.’ He smiled, wondering how he was going to assert himself as an authority figure with this very efficient bureaucrat.
She saw a man in a well-cut suit which was just a little too tight over a developing belly, a man with earnest, watery, slightly bloodshot eyes, who was probably not much older than Tim had been, but who didn’t look very healthy. She wondered just what he was here for this morning, but sensed also that she didn’t need to ask him about that, that he had come to tell her about it.
She gave him a little smile in recognition of his compliment. She was good at names: it was one of the necessary skills which she had acquired early. ‘I’m Clare Thompson, Mr Hayes’s personal assistant. We’ve spoken on the phone a couple of times, but it’s a long time since I saw you.’ That was when I was in the general office, she was thinking, before I took on this job and got myself involved with Tim Hayes. I think you used to be quite important, but I’m damned if I can remember what you do now.
He sat down in the chair at the other side of her desk, forcing himself to relax, telling himself that he was here to control this formidable, informed presence, that it was up to him to tell her what was going to happen, not discuss it with her. But he must do that tactfully: he needed this efficient, all-knowing woman on his side, not leading the opposition to his coup. ‘I was Mr Hayes’s partner at the outset, before even you were around, Mrs Thompson. I was still his partner at the time of his death on Friday. I’ve been involved in the newer and more peripheral activities of the firm in recent years.’
‘That’s why I haven’t heard much of you lately.’
‘That’s one reason, yes.’ He might tell her later, much later, about the way Hayes had treated him. But he would need to probe how deep-seated her loyalty to the dead man was before he did that, and that would take weeks, maybe months. ‘I’ve had health and family problems as well, so I’ve been content to adopt a lower profile in the last year or two. But I’m back in the run of things now, and Tim and I were discussing only last week what new management tasks I should take on.’ He smiled at her, thinking he had carried that off rather well.
The phone shrilled, but she told the caller she would ring back. That gave Matthew a little more confidence: at least she was treating his visit as an important one. He said firmly, ‘Tim’s totally unexpected and tragic death is a loss to all of us, but as you have just been indicating so lucidly to our customers, business must go on as usual. I’m here to help that process.’
They smiled at each other whilst their brains worked frantically. Clare was wondering what this man who had emerged from the shadows was proposing, how it would affect her, what if anything she could do about it. She said, ‘I’m sure that the firm’s going to need everyone’s help to survive. Tim was very much a one-man band, wasn’t he? His death has left a huge hole here.’
Matthew smiled, trying to fill her with confidence at the same time as he gathered his own. ‘He was perhaps a little too much of a one-man band, at times. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I say that affectionately, I hope. I claim the privilege as his oldest business colleague and his partner.’
‘You wouldn’t expect me to comment on that. I don’t make business decisions or have anything to do with business strategies. I see things from the narrower viewpoint of the personal assistant who kept his diary and arranged his appointments. I never told Tim how to run his firm and would never have wanted to.’
She was stone-walling, waiting for him to make his move. Intelligent woman. Matthew wondered exactly what she had made of the man she was conventionally defending. ‘As you say, everyone is going to have to pick up the pieces if the success of the firm is to continue. In a day or two, we’ll put out an official statement to that effect, to allay any disquiet amongst our workforce. In the meantime, I should be grateful if you’d continue to convey that message informally to the people around you. It will filter out from here, as you know.’
Clare nodded, her mind still working furiously. Had this man really been as close and as friendly with Tim Hayes as he claimed? She realized how little Tim had actually told her, not only about those newer areas of the business, from which it appeared much of its present prosperity stemmed, but about other people who worked for him. She said, ‘I’ll do that, of course. May I ask exactly what future role you propose to play yourself, Mr Ballack?’
She was cool, quick-thinking, direct. Men often underestimated women who were blonde and blue-eyed, but with her alert, mature face, her trim, long-legged, slightly angular figure, her air of experience and calm authority, only an idiot would not rate this one. Matthew Ballack was pleased to find he liked her already. He needed her to like him, for she would be a valuable person to have as an ally. An indispensable one, in his case, since she knew far more about the day-to-day operation of the original electronics section of the business than any other person alive.
Matthew took a deep breath and said, ‘The original partnership still stands, though not many people other than Tim and I have been much aware of it recently. I shall move in here - into Tim’s office.’ He glanced instinctively at the closed door to that inner sanctum; it was five or six years since he had last been in there.
Then he turned back with a smile to the woman who had controlled access to the head of this enterprise. ‘I expect there will be a little talk about dead men’s shoes and hasty assumptions of power, but it is in everyone’s interest that I do this, that the firm is not left with a vacuum at the top. I shall depend very heavily upon your support, especially in the next few weeks. Mrs Thompson, I hope that you will agree to become my personal assistant and offer me the same efficiency and loyalty you offered Tim Hayes.’
‘Of course I shall. It will make my position a little easier, if I can assure people that there will be a seamless transfer of authority.’ Behind her smile, Clare was wondering about his right to muscle himself into power like this. But the challenge to that, if it came, must come from people other than her. ‘When do you propose to move into the managing director’s office?’
‘This afternoon, I think. This morning I shall tour other sections of the business and assure as many people as I can that things can and must proceed as normal. I shall see you later, then.’ He smiled, finding this time that there was nothing forced about it, that he was speaking with authority rather than pomposity. ‘I look forward to working with you. I’m already sure that I shall enjoy it.’
Clare Thompson had hardly a moment to herself for the rest of the morning, with the constant need to apprise both insiders and outsiders of the new situation. Even at lunch time, she had little privacy, as she answered questions about Matthew Ballack, the partner no one seemed to remember, and eavesdropped a little on the excited conversations of others.
She had to lock herself in a cubicle in the cloakroom to get a few minutes to herself and review this tumultuous first morning back at work. She decided cautiously that she liked what little she had seen of Matthew Ballack, that she had been more impressed by the time he had left her than when she had first discovered him in her office.
The other important idea came suddenly to her, almost as an afterthought. In material terms, Matthew Ballack seemed to have gained more by the death of Tim Hayes than anyone else.
* * *
When he moved into the room. Detective Constable Brendan Murphy was instantly reminded of one of Percy Peach’s precepts, which formed the young detective’s ten commandments of behaviour.
When you had to interview a looker, be careful. If you were a young lad with a cock throbbing where your brain should be (Percy’s amiable description of this youngest member of his hand-picked CID team), you should be extra-careful. Lust could be a destroyer of all judgement; even a simple recognition that a face was pretty could make you miss other and more important things.
This one was certainly a looker. He hadn’t been prepared for anything so stunning in this shabby, run-down section of the town, where clogs had once clattered over the cobbles and ageing, battered cars and vans now dominated the streets. Her wide brown eyes and skin the colour of creamy coffee framed the most open and winning of smiles, as if she were genuinely pleased to see him. The sinuous movement of her body beneath a simple cream shirt and very tight jeans shrilled like a Peach alarm in his ears as she led him into the bedsit. DC Murphy decided that he had better be very careful indeed.
He felt his voice a little high as he said, ‘This is a routine enquiry in connection with the death of Mr Timothy Hayes. I’m DC Brendan Murphy.’
‘And I’m Jane Martin. Spinster of this parish.’ A slight but definite Lancashire accent. Brendan wasn’t sure why, but in this exotic creature, he found that reassuring. She said, ‘With a name like that you must surely be Irish,’ and gave him another of those radiant smiles.