[Inspector Peach 13] - Wild Justice

by J M Gregson

  Leroy Moore slept but fitfully, as Percy Peach had intended. He presented himself in good time at the raw brick building which was the new Brunton police station. Peach left him waiting in interview room two for ten minutes. Leroy steeled himself to meet his tormentor and his assistant, prepared himself for the formidable, unsmiling black face of DC Northcott.

  But nothing seemed to be predictable here. When Peach eventually bounced like a rubber ball into the room, he said, ‘This is Detective Sergeant Blake. I thought we’d have a different perspective on what you have to say this morning. We always like to be entirely fair.’ He gave Moore the smile of a tiger approaching a tethered goat. ‘I think we’ll have this recorded, even though there aren’t as yet any charges.’

  Leroy tried not to watch him as he made an elaborate play of unwrapping a new cassette and inserting it into the machine. Peach turned his anticipatory smile back on to Moore as he announced with relish, ‘You’ve a lot of explaining to do, Mr Moore.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you about my girlfriend.’

  ‘You didn’t tell us about a lot of things. We’re investigating a violent death. You’re a man whose trade is violence, a man who was employed by the late Timothy Hayes to use violence. Now we find you’ve been lying to us. Doesn’t look good from your point of view, does it? Of course, from our point of view, with an arrest in mind, it looks very good indeed.’

  Leroy licked his lips, telling himself that he’d dealt with pigs often enough before, in his Manchester days, striving to banish the thought that he’d never come across one quite like this. ‘I didn’t tell you about what Hayes did to Jane because I didn’t want to tell you how much she hated him.’

  ‘Because it gave her a motive for murder, you mean? It certainly does that. It also gives you an even stronger motive, when we take into account your attachment to Jane Martin and your previous history of killing.’

  Moore’s broad, revealing features winced too obviously at the barb. ‘That was self-defence. And I’ve altered since then.’

  Peach shrugged his broad shoulders elaborately. ‘Actions speak louder than words, Mr Moore. And your latest action is to conceal key facts in a murder inquiry.’

  ‘Jane didn’t do it.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘I just know it. Not my Jane. She couldn’t do something like that.’

  Peach shook his head sadly. ‘Not good enough, I’m afraid. We need evidence, not opinion.’ Then he brightened visibly. ‘Unless you’re telling us that you know Jane didn’t do it because you shot Hayes yourself?’

  ‘No.’ Then, belatedly, ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  Peach savoured his discomfort for three, four, five seconds. 'What time did Jane Martin leave the Gisburn Hotel last Friday night?’

  ‘Not till around midnight. She left with me in the Focus. She doesn’t have her own car.’ His voice was very soft and a tone higher as the tension hit him.

  ‘But she didn’t get a lift back into Brunton with anyone else who had been at the dinner, though she must have known people. Pity, that. It would have given her witnesses and taken her out of the frame.’

  ‘She didn't kill him.’

  Blake leaned forward, her fair colouring and dark red hair a startling contrast to that of the man opposite her. ‘So where was she between eleven and twelve, Leroy? We’ve got statements from most people who were around during that time, but no one mentions seeing Jane.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think she stayed in the ladies’ cloakroom for a while, then went out to wait for me in my car: I’d given her the spare key. I wasn’t with her, because I was watching Hayes. As his security man, I wondered whether he wanted me to see him safely off the premises.’

  ‘Which you conspicuously failed to do.’

  ‘I told Mr Peach on Monday, Hayes gave me the nod from the bar to say I could go. Around midnight, that was. I went out quickly then and drove Jane back to her bedsit.’

  ‘Or did you wait for Hayes in his car, extract your revenge for what he’d done to Jane and then drive home?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I think I’d have been tempted, in your place.’

  What happened to ‘good cop, bad cop’, he thought desperately. This woman who was not much older than he was, with the quiet voice and the persuasive suggestions, was almost worse than the aggressive Peach. He said with all the conviction he could muster. ‘It wasn’t like that. I drove Jane home and then went back to my own place.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t stay the night. Then at least your tales would look a little more convincing.’ She made a note with her gold pen in her small, neat handwriting.

  Peach stood up abruptly. He announced the time of termination of the interview and stopped the recorder. ‘You can go now, Mr Moore. Don’t leave the area without letting us know your movements and leaving us an address. But then with your previous record, I expect you know the form.’

  * * *

  Agnes Blake’s old stone cottage, with the long mound of Longridge Fell running away behind it, seemed a world away from the interview rooms of Brunton police station. And the lady herself, with her concern for her daughter, her enthusiasm for Percy and the cricket he had relinquished, her automatic and unthinking integrity, seemed to Peach to represent all that was best in that world outside crime. The world which police officers could easily believe had ceased to exist.

  They had told her they wanted nothing but a sandwich. Percy surveyed the home-made steak and kidney pie with potatoes, spring cabbage and carrots and said guiltily, ‘You should have let us take you out for a pub lunch, Mrs B.’

  ‘And let our Lucy shirk her duty with the wedding lists again? Not Pygmalion likely!’ It was a favourite expression of Agnes’s: respectable working-class women brought up as she had been did not use even the most modest of bad language.

  ‘I have to admit she has a rather high-handed carelessness about paperwork which even I, her greatest admirer, cannot approve,’ agreed Percy sententiously.

  Lucy gave him the molten look which this agreement between mother and fiance often occasioned in her. ‘Let’s eat before this gets cold. You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble, but thanks. Mum.’

  The meal was punctuated only by the diners’ approval of the cook’s expertise. Then Percy, who had long since mastered the art of pleasing his future mother-in-law and irritating his future wife with an apparently innocent suggestion, said, ‘I think we should finalize those wedding lists as quickly as we can. They should really have been posted some time ago.’

  Agnes Blake beamed. ‘You’re absolutely right. May isn’t really very far away.’

  Lucy, knowing they were right, still felt a need for ritual resistance. There was one sure way to upset Percy’s smiling equanimity. She looked at the ceiling and said thoughtfully, ‘I still think we have to invite Chief Superintendent Tucker.’

  ‘We don't want Banquo at our bloody feast.’

  Lucy smiled primly. ‘Thomas Bulstrode Tucker is a living being. Banquo was a murder victim.’

  ‘And so will Tommy Bloody Tucker be if he presents himself at my wedding.’

  Lucy went on thoughtfully, as if he had not spoken, ‘And surely you must agree that Barbara Tucker would add tone to the occasion.’

  ‘Brünnhilde Barbara would ruin a Barbara Cartland wedding,’ said Percy grimly.

  ‘But I’m sure Mum would love to see her wedding hat.’ Lucy pouted prettily.

  ‘I’ll have the rest of the regular team. I might have Clyde Northcott as my best man.’ Percy smiled contentedly, anticipating the stir the tall black man with his shaven head and uncompromising chiselled features would make in the ancient village church. ‘I should think he does a good line in wedding speeches, Clyde.’

  Agnes brought the list in with the tea which always followed lunch in her disciplined Lancashire mind. ‘You’d better add any names you want.’

  Instead, Lucy struck a few names firmly out and reasserted the line she had taken for man
y months, in a phrase her mother might have used herself. ‘We want a quiet do. Mum. As few guests as possible. No rubbish like morning dress.’

  Agnes looked at Percy for support, but this time he could not give it. ‘Your Lucy must wear a posh dress. But she’ll be the bonniest lass in church, whatever she wears. I’ll make sure the lads wear suits and ties and I’m sure Lucy will tell her pals not to show too much bare bosom. But we do want it quiet, Mrs B. Nothing formal.’

  Agnes Blake knew when she was beaten and she didn’t really care, so long as the wedding went ahead and Lucy had what she wanted. She gave a token but still formidable sniff. ‘I suppose you’re only regularizing what’s been going on for months.’

  ‘Don’t make me blush, Mrs B. I don’t do it as prettily as your daughter.’

  ‘I still think Tucker should be there,’ said Lucy, by way of riposte.

  ‘Tucker doesn’t even know we have a relationship yet. He couldn’t let us work together if he did. I’ll need to enlighten him soon, I suppose. And bring him up to date on this Hayes murder investigation.’

  It was on that melancholy thought that they concluded their business in this innocent world and turned back to Brunton and the crime face.

  * * *

  Matthew Ballack tidied the seedy flat as thoroughly as he could. He made sure all the crockery was stowed in the single kitchen cupboard and ran the vacuum over the fraying carpet. He couldn’t do anything about the dark marks of damp on the ceiling and he hadn’t got a shade to cover the bare light bulb, but he moved the scratched dresser along a little to hide the patch of wallpaper tom away by the child of some previous tenant.

  He hadn’t wanted to meet them here, but the impersonal voice on the phone had said that DCI Peach would prefer it. It seemed that preference from this quarter amounted to a command. Matthew wondered if the man had divined from their meeting on Tuesday that he had endured hard times in the last few years and was determined to see how he lived.

  He was right, of course. Peach had noted the address with interest: it was in an area of Brunton that he knew well, because it housed many people who lived on the fringe of and beyond the law. It was by no means a Dickensian den of thieves, but this rabbit warren of flats and bedsits in what had been a century earlier the best part of the town housed drug-dealers and felons and many of the less successful criminal detritus of the town. After many visits, he knew its streets of high, increasingly decrepit Victorian detached and semi-detached houses intimately.

  Clyde Northcott parked the police Mondeo carefully on the concreted forecourt of the house, where it could be seen from the front windows; this was the sort of area where police cars excited juvenile interest, even on an afternoon when teenagers should have been at school. The days when the ‘truancy man’ had been a feared figure in the streets of the old cotton town had long since departed, along with the gentility of areas like this one.

  Peach noted the grimy ceiling and faded wallpaper with interest and without haste. Matthew Ballack, who had been determined to brazen things out without comment, found that resolution seeping away swiftly with Peach’s scrutiny. ‘It’s just temporary, this. I’m negotiating for a new property. But things have been pretty hectic this week, as you can imagine.’

  ‘I can indeed,’ said Peach. ‘Been here long, have you, Mr Ballack?’

  ‘Longer than I should have been, I suppose. I moved in here after my marriage broke up, as a temporary measure, and seem to have just stuck here.’

  ‘Just stuck here.’ Peach repeated Ballack’s nervous, unthinking phrase as if it had some hidden import, which must be teased out. ‘I suppose your gambling addiction didn’t help. Atrophied any inclination to move, I should think, as the rest of your fortunes went downhill.’

  It was so accurate a summary of his state in those years that it unnerved as well as infuriated Matthew Ballack. The watery brown eyes bulged a little and he ran a hand over the sparse hair on his cranium. ‘I had a bad time. I admit it became an addiction. An illness, in some people’s view. It cost me a lot, but I’m completely cured now.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. Your work must have suffered, along with the rest of your life.’

  ‘It did, yes, for a few years. I’m glad that my health was fully restored some time ago. In view of what happened last Friday, I shall need to be at my best in the coming months.’

  Peach looked at him for a moment with his head a little on one side, as if inviting further thoughts. When none were forthcoming, he asked almost apologetically, ‘Mr Ballack, what exactly was your official job description at the time of Timothy Hayes’s death?’

  ‘I am a partner in the firm.’

  ‘A very low-profile one, in recent years. In any case, “partner” is hardly a job description, is it?’

  ‘No. Well, I had what I suppose you might call a roving commission, making sure that the executives handling the various new branches of the firm’s activities were operating efficiently.’ Matthew tried boldly to stare the man out, hoping that the panic which was raging in his brain was not apparent in his eyes.

  DC Northcott now leaned forward, as if to assist in a pincer movement upon their victim. ‘Mr Ballack, I think you should know that I spoke yesterday to a woman called Sandra Rhodes.’ For a moment, the name meant nothing to Matthew. Then the memory of a house and the overweight slob who had allowed him access to the lady came back to him and his heart sank. He said as breezily as he could, ‘One of our most reliable cleaning operatives. I hope she gave you a good account of us.’

  ‘She said that was the phrase you used for it, Mr Ballack. A euphemism, DCI Peach calls it. We’re more used to calling such ladies prostitutes. And as for your firm, she seemed to think that forty per cent of her earnings from spreading her legs for a string of sad weirdos was a lot for you to take. That’s the cleaned-up version, but no doubt you get the point.’

  Matthew licked his lips. 'I’d no idea these things were going on.’

  Peach said contemptuously, ‘And you a partner, Mr Ballack? Come off it!’

  ‘On this scale, I mean.’ His head dropped hopelessly.

  ‘Mrs Rhodes said you were in charge of the brothels,’ said Northcott quietly. ‘She told me you visited her on the seventh of February and announced that you were now her boss. She was a little surprised by that, I think. She said no one from the firm had ever talked to her or the other toms before.’

  ‘Hayes told me I was to take charge of the brothels. It was one more step in his humiliation of me.’

  Peach found himself feeling sorry for the man whose distress was now so apparent. He decided that in this instance there was no need to conceal his sympathy. They might have a confession before they left this depressing place, if they played this right. He said gently, ‘You didn’t like each other very much, did you, you and Mr Hayes?’

  ‘He hated me and I had learned to hate him. I was a fool with my gambling, but he pretended to be sympathetic, when all the while he was depriving me of all control and status in the firm we’d begun together.’

  ‘So he put you in charge of something quite illegal. And you took it over willingly.’

  ‘I had no choice. I didn’t plan to do the job for long. Now that I’m in charge, the firm will divest itself of all connection with prostitution and drug-dealing. I’ve already begun the process.’ His voice had risen with the genuine zeal of the evangelist, as he contemplated the crusade he planned.

  Peach said quietly, ‘So you disposed of Mr Hayes, so that you could take control and implement this righteous mission. It’s understandable, from your point of view. It might even excite a degree of sympathy in a jury. It will come to that, because it is also murder, Mr Ballack.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Hayes.’ There was fear apparent now in those moist, slightly bloodshot eyes, as if Ballack felt the lack of conviction in his own voice. ‘God knows, I wished the bastard dead, but I didn’t—’

  ‘Why did you visit a lawyer in Bolton on February the thirteenth, Mr B
allack?’

  They knew everything. For a moment, Matthew was overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the situation. Then he said in a voice which was so hollow that it seemed to belong to someone else, ‘I just wanted professional confirmation of what I knew in my own mind. The only written proof of our partnership dated back over twenty years and I wanted a lawyer to run his eyes over it.’

  ‘Mr White said you were particularly interested in one clause. The one which related to what happened in the event of the death of either partner.’

  ‘I suppose I might have been.’ Ballack looked up with what little defiance he could muster. ‘It’s natural enough, isn’t it? That’s the only way I was going to get back the position I should have had in the firm.’

  ‘Timothy Hayes was a man of forty-nine, in excellent health. Isn’t it odd that you should suddenly decide to check on the situation in the event of his death? And to do so secretly?’

  ‘Secretly? You surely couldn’t have found out about my meeting with Mr White if it had been that.’ Matthew found himself clutching desperately at straws, delaying them for a moment whilst he tried to marshal his resources for a defence which seemed hopeless.

  ‘You didn’t use the company lawyers or your own family solicitor. You deliberately used the anonymity of a Citizens’ Advice Bureau enquiry in a different town. If this hadn’t been a murder investigation, overriding the normal rules of confidentiality, we’d never have discovered it.’

  ‘I - I didn’t want Tim to know I was checking things out.’

  ‘Fair enough. It doesn’t explain why you made the enquiry at this particular time. Put that fact together with the brutal dispatch of Mr Hayes three weeks later, and you can see the implications as clearly as we can.’

  Matthew looked at the sentimental Victorian print of children fondling a dog in its battered frame behind them, realizing with a shock that it had been there throughout his tenure of this place, without his ever looking closely at it before. He kept his eyes upon it, not daring to look at Peach as he said, ‘A man is allowed to dream. The only way out of my predicament at the time, the only way back for me, seemed to involve the death of Tim Hayes.’