by J M Gregson
‘You’d think so, but I’m a hollow sham, I’m afraid. I’m from Irish stock, but I’ve never lived outside Lancashire.’
‘Like me. People place me anywhere from Morocco to Cuba, with most of the West Indian islands in between, but I’m from Bolton. Where my dad was from is anyone’s guess!’
They enjoyed a mutual giggle at her humour and her frankness. Then she said, ‘I suppose I should be disappointed to find you here, but I’m not.’ When she saw his puzzlement, she hastened to explain. ‘My boyfriend, whose flat this is, rated a DCI and a DS, whereas all I qualify for is a simple DC.’
‘And I’m disappointed that you’re disappointed. And that you have a boyfriend.’ Brendan wondered if his face was colouring up; his fresh complexion and fair skin constantly let him down. He was managing the chat a little better than he usually did with girls who attracted him. Perhaps that was because this was strictly a working context; no emotion here, he told himself sternly. He noticed that she knew all about police ranks: perhaps she wasn’t as innocent as she looked, perhaps she’d had contact with the police before.
He told her, ‘You should be relieved, not offended. It means you’re low-profile, not expected to feature in the later stages of the investigation. Everyone who was at Friday night’s dinner has to be seen by a member of the team, in case they saw or heard anything useful, but only senior employees and people who knew Mr Hayes personally will get the full treatment from DCI Peach. Believe me, you wouldn’t want that.’ Brendan Murphy, who had in his time been on the wrong end of a couple of Peach’s legendary bollockings, spoke with genuine feeling.
‘I wasn’t sitting near to Mr Hayes on Friday night. I didn’t speak to him at any time during the evening.’ She knew that she should have waited for this unusually friendly policeman to ask the questions, but with his mention of the dinner, she had become very tense.
‘That’s two of the things I wanted to know. Did you see him having any conversations with other people which now seem suspicious? Any arguments, for instance?’
‘No. I was busy with my own concerns, with talking to the people around me. I’m afraid I wasn’t even very conscious of Mr Hayes, until he spoke.’
That rang true, anyone placed near to this ravishing girl would certainly want to monopolize her attention, Brendan thought.
‘Yes. What about this speech Mr Hayes made? Did he seem at all disturbed or on edge?’
‘No. A lot of it didn’t mean much to me. But it seemed quite polished.’ What she could actually remember was her resentment that the man who had raped her should be so urbane and in control of himself. Jane had wanted to shout out what she knew about him, whilst he had been presenting the innocent businessman so effectively on this public occasion. She thrust that memory aside and made herself speak carefully. ‘He thanked the people who’d been with him from the start and acknowledged the support he’d had in the town. Said how much he owed to the loyalty of his workforce. That sort of thing. It was all well prepared and he carried it off well. I wouldn't say he was nervous or upset.’
Murphy looked at her for a moment in that close, unembarrassed way which CID men had. People weren’t used to being studied like that in a social context, so that it often disconcerted them. Then he said abruptly, ‘How well did you know Mr Hayes?’
‘I scarcely knew him at all. He didn’t interview me when I was appointed as a croupier at the casino. I expect he hardly knew me.’ This was what she had agreed with Leroy that she would say. Best not to give away that she had any sort of motive, they’d decided, so as to keep her out of it altogether. She thought she'd delivered it reasonably well, but she wasn’t happy about it.
‘Like it at the casino, do you?’
She hadn’t expected this. ‘I do, yes. More than I thought I would, when I applied for the job. It’s interesting work. My mother was worried about me going into a gambling den, as she called it, but I never feel in any danger. You meet a few dodgy characters at the tables, but you don’t get involved with them. There are people around who make sure that everything is conducted properly.’
And lots of men who are persuaded to put a few extra quid across the tables, with someone like you smiling at them, I’m sure, thought Brendan. ‘What about the company at work? Do you have people to chat with?’
‘There are three or four people of my own age or only a little older, yes. And lots of the older people have led interesting lives. We’re a good working group, I feel.’
‘Interesting. In all the gossip and chat amongst this varied group of people, you must have discussed the boss at times.’
‘Yes. It’s human nature, isn’t it? I expect all of us speculate about the people in power, the people who control our working lives.’
For the last few minutes, since he had moved the questioning to her work at the casino, lane Martin hadn’t been looking at him. This was particularly noticeable because of the frankness he had seen earlier in those large brown eyes. But what she was saying was straightforward enough and made sense. Brendan said. ‘You must have picked up snippets of knowledge about the way people felt. Do you recall noticing that anyone felt very strongly about Mr Hayes?’
‘No. There were the usual bits of speculation about how much he was making out of the casino, the usual bits of jealousy of his success. Nothing serious enough to suggest that someone might be planning to kill him, if that’s what you mean.’
He grinned at her, willing her to look him in the face again. ‘That’s what I mean, yes. Wherever there is any evidence of strong feeling, we shall have to follow it up. What did you hear about his personal life?’
She did look him full in the face again now, and Brendan thought he glimpsed a flash of alarm. ‘That’s too vague. I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘Well, we need to know what weaknesses he had. Weaknesses lead a man into trouble, if they’re serious enough. Was he a big boozer, a big betting man? Had he a fiery temper?’
‘No, none of those things, as far as I know. You’d need to speak to people who knew him better than I did.’
‘And other people will be doing just that, Jane. But at the moment I’m asking you. What about women? Or men, for that matter? Was he too fond of either?’
She was staring at the carpet between them again. ‘Not men. You heard bits of gossip about women. But I didn’t pay much attention. I told you, I hardly knew the man.’ She had asserted this too often, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘Well, if there were any serious liaisons, we shall no doubt learn all about them in the next few days. If you hear anything that you think might interest us, please contact me at this number.’ He gave her his most friendly smile as he left, and earnestly hoped that she would.
Jane Martin looked at the small, neat card, with ‘DC Brendan Murphy, Brunton CID Section’ neatly printed above the telephone number. He hadn’t been at all frightening, but she’d found it more taxing than she’d hoped it would be. Nevertheless, she’d done rather well, she thought. Men were simple creatures, most of them. But she was glad that it was over. She made herself a cup of tea and thought about work in the evening, wondering what the others would have to report about the police questionings.
She would have been surprised and disturbed if she had known what Brendan Murphy was thinking. Driving his car back towards the station, he was deciding that he must relay things to DCI Peach about this routine interview. He would need to tell Percy that in his opinion the ravishing Jane Martin knew a little more about Timothy Hayes than she had been prepared to volunteer.
Chapter Sixteen
Leroy Moore was having a less easy ride than his girlfriend. DCI Peach was giving him the sort of interview which Brendan Murphy said Jane Martin had done well to avoid. Leroy was surprised to find another black man lined up against him. He was used to hard men, to handling himself, and he wasn’t usually upset by appearances. But he feared this was a leaner, harder and tougher black man than himself. DC Clyde Northcott was six feet
three, without an ounce of surplus fat upon his rangy frame. With his narrowed eyes, his smooth skin over the prominent bones of his face, he looked, to Leroy, as hard as ebony. Northcott sat beside Peach, watching their quarry and waiting his moment, looking like the muscle who silently waited to enforce the views of a gangster boss.
Leroy Moore had met men like this before, had operated both with and against them in his Moss Side days, but he had never seen one on the law-enforcement side of the table. Leroy had kept the idea of playing the race card as his fall-back position, the one which gave you time and made the fuzz cautious if all else failed; now he gave up this idea, even before Northcott had spoken a word to him.
Peach looked round the flat coolly, taking in its tidiness and the faint vestiges of perfume which told him that there had been a woman here recently. He looked unhurriedly at the pictures of animals on the walls which had been hung there by unknown hands long before Moore came here, the enlarged photograph of a stream running through trees in the Trough of Bowland which was his single, unlikely addition to the furnishings. Peach looked at the drawers in the shabby oak dresser which dominated one wall, as if he was wondering whether to open them and inspect the contents. Leroy was glad that he had no drugs in the flat, that Jane Martin and his determination to reform had seen the last of coke and horse for him.
This short, bald-headed man with the smart grey suit and eyes like black coal seemed to know all of this as he turned his attention back to the occupant. It was almost a relief to Leroy when he finally spoke. What he said soon dismissed that reaction. ‘You’ve got form, Mr Moore. You should know that we are aware of that form. You should take that into account when answering our questions. Any attempt to deceive us will not be well received.’ Peach smiled grimly, relishing his understatement. ‘What was your function in this grubby little empire?’
This shook Leroy even more than the reminder about his past. He’d expected them to accept all the stuff Hayes had put out about the respectable businessman, to accept the wall of respectability he had set about himself. He sought for words which Hayes might have used himself. ‘I don’t know what you mean by “grubby”. Hayes Electronics is a reputable concern, much appreciated in Brunton for the work it provides. Ask any of the people who were at the Gisburn Hotel on Friday night.’
‘Oh, we shall, Mr Moore, we shall do that. But we know certain things already, you see. We know certain things about the new and profitable parts of the business, the ones that Mr Hayes did not care to publicize, don’t we, DC Northcott?’ The policeman at his side nodded, without ceasing his scrutiny of Moore’s too-mobile face. ‘You would do well to remember that when you make your replies to our questions, Mr Moore.’
‘I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.’ It sounded woefully inadequate, even in the ears of the man who framed it.
‘Really?’ Peach’s dark eyebrows arched impossibly high towards his bald pate. His small black moustache seemed to Leroy to bristle with disbelief. ‘I think you’re trying to deceive us already. I don’t like that, and I shouldn’t think DC Northcott does either. Now, how about answering my first and very simple question, Mr Moore? I’ll put it to you again, even more simply, if you like. What is your function in this shitheap?’
‘I’m the Head of Security Services.’ Leroy tried to roll out the title impressively. He failed.
‘And what exactly does that involve?’
The question he had feared. The question to which he really didn’t have an answer. He swallowed and launched himself into the sentences he’d prepared before they came. ‘It was a new appointment. It reflected the growth of the firm. The exact terms of the post hadn’t been formally defined. I was due to discuss that with Mr Hayes today.’
Peach allowed a slow smile of scepticism to steal across his round face. It was a facial exercise he had practised much over the years and it was an unnerving sight for Leroy Moore. ‘Reading from the sheet, are you, Mr Moore? If you can’t tell us what you are planning to do, give us an account of what you’ve done for the firm in the past, will you?’
‘A variety of jobs. Whatever Mr Hayes asked me to do. Mainly in places like the casino and the betting shops, but also round the electronics factory from time to time. Anywhere he found a use for me.’ Leroy heard the desperation level rising in his voice as he stumbled from phrase to phrase.
‘A variety, eh? And what would you say your particular skills were, Mr Moore?’
‘I wouldn't say I had particular skills. Mr Hayes gave me a chance and I took it. He must have been quite pleased with me, or he wouldn’t have offered me this major new post, would he?’ Peach gave him a broad smile, as if it was pleasant to be hearing the things he had expected. ‘Makes sense, that, Mr Moore. It’s almost the first thing that does in what you’ve been saying. DC Northcott and I were in danger of losing our footing among the bullshit. So we all agree that Mr Hayes must have been well pleased with the skills you had been employing on his behalf. Trouble is, you still haven't come clean about what those skills are.’
‘I told you, I was employed in a variety—’
‘So I’m going to help you out, Mr Moore. I’m going to ask DC Northcott here to suggest what he thinks these mysterious skills of yours might be.’
Clyde Northcott looked for three long seconds at Leroy Moore as if he might be something unmentionable he had just scraped off his shoe. You didn’t work regularly with Percy Peach without learning how to exploit a silence. Then he said, ‘You brought your skills with you from where you learned them, Moore. From gang warfare in Moss Side, Manchester. You haven’t got qualifications. You haven’t got experience, except in beating up people. That’s what Hayes employed you for. To make sure small people did what he wanted them to do. To make sure loans were repaid punctually and with interest. To make sure rent and protection money came in on time. To make sure the users who become small-time drug dealers kept in line. To make sure the toms came up with their forty per cent without question and didn’t try to moonlight on their own behalf.’
‘That’s not fair. I came to Brunton to get away from that sort of life.’ To his horror, Leroy caught in his voice the familiar old lags’ whine which he had heard so often in his youth and had been determined he would never use.
Clyde Northcott went on as if there had been no interruption, as if he had not even heard Moore’s protest. ‘Hayes employed you to keep his own hands clean. To enforce what he was doing to make serious money whilst he pretended to be the enlightened capitalist, bringing employment and new industries to the town.’
Leroy Moore hadn’t been prepared for any of this. He had known his own position would be dodgy, that he would be expected to provide some account of himself. But he had thought that Hayes’s position as a pillar of local society and a valued provider of employment would be unquestioned. They had cut the ground from under his feet by telling him that Hayes was a villain and then asking what particular branch of his roguery he himself had been involved in. He said sullenly, ‘I told you, I left Moss Side to get away from all that. I like it here. I’m making a new life. I’m planning to get married and make something of myself. All the things you pigs told me that I should do.’
Perhaps because for the first time he had spoken spontaneously, this wasn’t treated with the cynicism which coppers would normally have afforded it. They heard similar protestations far too often not to treat them as either evasions or pious hopes. But this time Peach growled, then said as though pandering to a weakness in himself, ‘I’m almost prepared to believe that, Mr Moore. If it’s true, it shows more sense of reality than I see in most men of your background.’ He sighed like a fond father over an errant child. ‘The trouble is, you still haven’t provided us with any proper details of the work you were doing for this whited sepulchre Tim Hayes, have you?’
Leroy felt a little thrill of unexpected pleasure at that phrase. It took him back to his brief period in a Sunday School with a dozen other black seven-year-olds, where a young Wes
t Indian he had thought the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth had told them Bible tales and taught them gospel songs. Whited sepulchre was the sort of phrase he had been seeking for to describe Tim Hayes, ever since the bastard had done that thing to Jane Martin. He wanted to repeat the words, to shout them out, to agree with them that yes, that was what Hayes had been, a whited sepulchre who deserved exactly what had happened to him.
He couldn’t do anything of the sort, of course. But he said with a dull air of confession. ‘All right. Hayes did use me to do his dirty work, to put the frighteners on people who weren’t meeting their deadlines. But that was mainly what it was. Frightening people was usually enough. If you could give them an idea of what might happen to them, get them shit-scared, they usually came up with the money. Or they got out and let someone else take over - someone Hayes wanted to put into place and control.’ Clyde Northcott nodded at him, almost conspiratorially, as if he could now acknowledge an honest description of the situation. ‘And if they didn’t conform, you applied just enough violence to make them see reason. Gave them a beating without putting them into hospital. Let the news of what had happened to them filter around to others so that they would be expected to come up with the goods on time.’
It was much too accurate a description of his work over the last year for Leroy’s taste. This man seemed to know all the workings of that underground world which the public did not see. Moore could not know of course that Peach had recruited Clyde Northcott from exactly such a background to become first a policeman and a couple of years later a member of his CID team. Leroy said rather dazedly, ‘It was a bit like that, yes.’
‘Those are your skills, Leroy. There’s quite an art in knowing just how thoroughly you can beat a man without putting him into hospital, isn’t there? How you can put the fear of God into people without breaking bones.’