Remains to be Seen

by J M Gregson

  When she took the tea back into the sitting room, Brenda sat for a long time staring at the newspaper she was not reading. On the other side of the room, Derek was worrying about the DNA test he had given at the police station that morning. He had eventually changed his mind about refusing the test, because he thought it would only make him look guiltier to deny that smiling man Peach, but he was uneasy about what use the police would make of it. He wanted to talk about his fears with Brenda, as they would normally have discussed each other’s anxieties, but he knew that was impossible.

  It was Derek, who usually lingered for a while after she had gone up the stairs, who said an hour later, ‘Time for bed, old girl!’ and stood up determinedly. He realized only then that his tea still sat untouched and cold upon the little table beside him. He went and put his palm tentatively upon Brenda’s shoulder, and after a few seconds her small hand crept up and sat on top of his. It felt very cold.

  They were undressed and into bed very quickly. The central heating was off by this time, and they pretended that their haste was because of the cold, but each of them knew that darkness and the end of the day would be a relief to the other. They lay apart in the big bed, carefully avoiding contact with each other, as they had never done before this death.

  Brenda was tortured as she had been several times during the last week by that incident in Derek’s past which they never mentioned and which she had almost forgotten, until Neil’s murder. Twenty years ago, Derek had almost killed a man. She didn’t want the details, and had never wanted them, until now. Hadn’t he tried to throttle the man?

  At one o’clock, Derek was asleep and snoring very softly. Brenda lay on her back, staring at the invisible ceiling and contemplating the idea she had tried all day to thrust out of her mind. Was it possible that the man asleep beside her had killed her only son?

  Twenty-One

  On Thursday morning, the murder team had a full and very detailed report of the forensic tests done on Neil Cartwright’s car. They were comprehensive, but in the end not very illuminating.

  Eventually, and with varying degrees of reluctance, all the leading suspects had agreed to voluntary DNA tests. None of them had appeared very happy to give the simple saliva sample which could nowadays be so much more revealing than fingerprint tests, but only Derek Simmons had refused, and in the end even the stepfather whom the dead man had so detested had reluctantly come round to the idea that refusal would look suspicious for him.

  Hairs had been found on the front passenger seat of the car from both Sally Cartwright and Michelle Naylor, but in view of what the murder team now knew, this was no more than would have been expected. Various minute samples of clothing fibres had been picked up from the seats of the car, but because of the incinerated state of the corpse, it was difficult to establish and eliminate what clothing Neil Cartwright himself had been wearing at the time of his death. A small bag containing sweaters, shirts, underclothing, a pair of shoes and a digital camera was found untouched in the boot of the car. This appeared to confirm the dead man’s declared intention to visit his sister in Scotland.

  There was one strange fact, which might eventually prove either totally irrelevant or highly significant. The windows were shut and the car was locked, but there had been no car keys discovered on what was left of the incinerated corpse of Neil Cartwright.

  The staff nurse was watchful at the door of the ward. You had to protect your patients. The police might only be trying to find out who had attacked them, but they were still fragile and unable to take too much stress.

  She whispered to the young uniformed constable who had mounted guard in the corridor outside the ward for several hours, ‘She doesn’t even look like a police officer, that woman who’s with him.’

  The fresh-faced young man looked very young without his hat. He poked his nose cautiously round the door lintel, as if to reassure himself before he spoke. The curtains had been drawn around the patient’s bed to give the exchanges a little more privacy. ‘That’s Detective Sergeant Blake. She’s a high-flier, they say. The DS will know what she’s about.’ He tried hard to keep the respect out of his voice; it came partly for the rarefied realms of CID and murder investigations, and partly from his wholly male reverence for the buxom charms and aquamarine eyes of Lucy Blake. He whispered even more breathlessly, ‘I think your patient might even be a murder suspect.’

  ‘All the same, Mr Freeman has the same rights as anyone else in my ward. He’s got concussion and multiple minor injuries. He must be treated with care.’ But the staff nurse peered through the doorway towards the curtained rectangle with a new respect: as far as she was aware, she’d never nursed a murder suspect before.

  Inside the high room, with its eight beds and clutter of expensive medical machinery, Lucy Blake tried to ignore the livid bruising and stitches on one side of Ben Freeman’s face and focus on the one eye which remained open. She said with all the confidence she could muster, ‘We need to know who did this to you, Ben. We’ll put them away, with your help.’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see them. They never gave me a chance.’ Ben said what he knew he must say in a monotone, trying hard to concentrate through the pain which throbbed in his head.

  ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘Two, I think.’ There couldn’t be anything wrong with telling her that, surely. But as an insurance policy, he added lamely, ‘There might just have been three of them, I couldn’t see in the dark. But I think there were two.’

  DS Blake sighed, knowing now what was coming, sensing that the frightened man in the bed was too scared to give her the cooperation she needed. ‘And no doubt you didn’t see their faces. Were they wearing balaclavas?’

  ‘They might have been. I’m not sure.’ Ben Freeman realized that he could be perfectly honest about the details of the attack: he really hadn’t seen anything of the brutal men whom he had feared were going to kill him. ‘They had me face down in the brambles, and it was dark. I think they had baseball bats, or something like that.’ He passed a hand cautiously over his face, wincing as he touched the stitches on his cheek, nodding as the lesser scratches on his forehead confirmed the damage of the bramble thorns.

  Lucy Blake glanced through the gap where the curtains met towards the doorway of the ward, knowing her time to question this victim who was also a murder suspect was going to be limited. ‘Who did this to you, Ben? Who sent these men to attack you?’

  Even his one eye was half shut, giving a soft-focus effect to his view of this shimmering presence at his bedside. Ben Freeman saw a dazzling aureole of red-brown hair, eyes which were not only an impossible shade of green-blue but which seemed to be brimming with concern for his welfare, a delicious, untouchable curve of breast beneath the small, firm chin. This vision was a few years older than him. She was also that most dangerous of things for an impressionable young man, a highly desirable woman who was also mothering him in his wounded state. He fought back a huge urge to tell her everything, to make a clean breast of it, to lie back and leave his fate in her delicate and sympathetic hands.

  Ben shut his one good eye and said to the blackness, ‘I don’t know why they did this to me. I don’t know why they picked on me.’

  ‘I think you know a little more than you’re telling me, don’t you, Ben?’

  He thought she was going to touch him, to wipe his hot forehead with a cool cloth, as nurses did in films. But there was no contact. He said faintly, ‘I think it was a random attack.’

  ‘But they took nothing, Ben. They didn’t want your bike, and they didn’t go through your pockets. They could have killed you, but they didn’t. They did just as much damage as they’d been ordered to do. I believe it was a warning to you, Ben. Perhaps next time it might be worse than that.’

  It was so accurate a summary of what had happened in those awful moments when he had thought he was going to die that he thought for a moment that she must know everything about him, that this gentle, persuasive voice was ju
st giving him the chance to make the best of it for himself. He didn’t dare to open his eye and look at her again, sensing that if he added the spectacle of her to what he was hearing he would capitulate entirely. He said dully, ‘I can’t help you. I don’t know any more.’

  ‘This attack was connected with what you had done whilst you were at Marton Towers, wasn’t it, Ben?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He knew it was feeble. He had the absurd illusion that his resistance was ebbing away through the bandaged wounds beneath the sheets.

  ‘Oh, but you do, Ben.’ The denial came in a voice of sadness, as if she were a therapist assisting him to rid himself of a burden. ‘You were dealing when you were at the Towers, weren’t you? Working for Neil Cartwright. You were one of his ring of drug dealers, weren’t you?’

  Now it was he who sighed, wincing a little with the pain the exhalation gave to his ribs. They knew, then. He was surprised at the relief he felt. ‘How did you find that out?’

  Lucy Blake smiled, paused, waited for him to open his eye, which he eventually did. She said quietly, ‘We have our sources, Ben.’ It wouldn’t do to let him know just how much had been conjecture, before his admission.

  ‘I was getting out, you know. I didn’t want to deal any more. I wanted to go straight, have a proper career.’ He turned his head painfully to look her full in the face. ‘Will this affect my job at Brunton Golf Club? I’m doing well there: the boss told me that, just before this happened. We had a cup of tea and a chat. That’s why I was riding home in the dark when – when they got me.’

  She pursed those desirable, unattainable lips and her forehead wrinkled attractively. ‘It’s possible no action will be taken about your dealing. A lot depends how cooperative you are with us now. Those thugs were sent after you by the drugs bosses, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They knocked you about as a warning that you weren’t to talk. Probably gave you notice that it would be much worse next time if you opened your mouth about them.’

  ‘Yes.’ This time it was the man in the bed who glanced anxiously towards the gap in the surrounding curtains, as if he feared that even now there might be some sinister presence listening to what he was saying. ‘But I don’t know anything. Neil Cartwright never told me anything about his suppliers, and I didn’t want to know.’

  It was probably true. People at the lowest level in the illicit trade, who ran the risks of dealing drugs in public places and were always likely to be caught, were kept completely in the dark about those above them. The muscle who had beaten up Freeman had probably just been sent in as an extra insurance that he would keep his mouth shut about any information he might have picked up.

  Lucy was surprised she had been allowed as long as this with the patient. She said, ‘You had a row with Neil.’

  Ben was not sure whether it was a question or merely a statement. They seemed to know so much more than he had imagined they did. He said wearily, ‘Yes. Neil didn’t like me giving up dealing for him. He said I didn’t have a choice about it. He – he told me things would happen, if I tried to stop dealing. He said that the men above him would expect him to put me straight.’

  Lucy nodded seriously. ‘Let’s just get the sequence of events correct then, Ben. You decided you were going to give up dealing. Neil Cartwright, as your supplier, said it wasn’t on and threatened you with violence. Immediately after this, he is murdered. And immediately after that, you abruptly cease your employment at Marton Towers.’

  ‘Yes.’ His single eye widened in horror and even the blackened lid of the closed one flickered with movement for a moment as the implications of this dawned on him. ‘But you can’t think that I – that it was me who …’

  ‘Doesn’t look good for you, does it, Ben? Especially as you approached the scene of the crime on the Thursday morning after the fire, and made off in a highly suspicious manner before the constable there could challenge you.’

  ‘I – I just wanted to see what had been going on.’ He couldn’t manage anything better, and it sounded ridiculously feeble, even in his own ears.

  ‘Or wanted to see whether the body you had hidden in the stables had been discovered as a result of the fire.’ Lucy shook her head sadly over that thought, in a manner which the redoubtable Percy Peach would certainly have approved.

  ‘I didn’t! I didn’t kill Neil Cartwright!’

  His voice rose in panic, and the staff nurse thrust her head belatedly through the gap in the curtain. ‘That’s all the time I can allow you, DS Blake,’ she said severely. ‘You can see that my patient is exhausted. I’d have been here earlier if we hadn’t had an emergency in the next ward.’

  Lucy made a business of gathering up her belongings and leaving the bedside chair. As she did so, she said casually, ‘Can you drive a car, Ben?’

  ‘I can, yes. I don’t have one of my own yet, but I sometimes drove Neil’s, when he wanted me to collect something for the estate.’ He was almost boasting over this modest skill, in his relief that she was leaving him at last.

  ‘So you could easily have dumped his car, after you had deposited the body in that disused room at Marton Towers.’

  DS Blake didn’t need any reply; the horror on his damaged face was quite enough as she took her leave, thanking the staff nurse for the access to her patient.

  The nurse took Ben Freeman’s blood pressure and temperature, and remarked that both were higher than she would have hoped. She examined the bruises on his back and his ribs, then ran the back of her fingers lightly over his livid cheek. ‘You’re a good healer,’ she said approvingly. ‘Things could have been a lot worse, you know! You’re really quite lucky.’

  Ben lay on his back and watched the high ceiling swimming before the vision of his single eye. ‘They’ve got me lined up for a murder rap,’ he said faintly.

  Percy Peach sat back on the sofa in Lucy Blake’s neat modern flat and stretched his powerful but rather short legs as far as they would go. ‘Nice place, this. Hardly big enough for two, though, when you make an honest man of me.’

  Lucy loved the flat she had bought when this small block had been built three years ago. It was on the second and top floor, with extensive views over the old cotton town and out towards the Ribble Valley beyond it. And with the curtains closed on the winter evenings, it was a cosy place, where you could shut yourself away from the cares of the day and get on with the rest of your life. Percy’s talk of marriage and of sharing made her feel very protective about this first residence she had owned. She said acidly, ‘Everything here works, if that’s what you mean. Including the central heating, unlike your place.’

  ‘Tha won’t need much heating when tha’s wed to me, lass.’

  She liked it when he thee’d and thou’d her, but this wasn’t the moment to encourage it, when he was coupling it with the marriage which he was anxious to push on and she was anxious to postpone. She said firmly, ‘You wanted me to bring you up to date on my visit to the hospital to question Ben Freeman.’

  ‘Eeh, tha were always one for the Protestant work ethic. I never thought I’d find that attractive in a woman, but in thee, lass, it’s fair champion!’ Percy reached out to stroke his partner’s rear as she set the two cups of coffee on the table beside them, but she moved out of his reach with a swift grace which came from much practice.

  Lucy sat firmly at the other end of the sofa and thumped a cushion into place between them. ‘Young Ben Freeman is a suspect,’ she said firmly.

  Peach resigned himself to the inevitable, assuring himself that the inevitable could still be quite short. ‘In spite of being beaten up?’

  ‘Because of it, if you like. He was roughed over because he’d given up dealing drugs. It was a warning to keep his mouth shut about anything he might know. Which appears to be zilch, incidentally.’

  ‘He was dealing for Neil Cartwright?’

  ‘Yes. He was one of the ring Cartwright was establishing to increase his earnings from drugs.’
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br />   Peach nodded, suddenly fully professional. ‘The Drugs Squad tells me that Cartwright’s supplier has now been arrested, as a result of information gathered after last week’s seizure of the big boys at Marton Towers. So that chapter is closed, as far as they’re concerned. But it leaves us with Freeman as a suspect for our killing.’

  ‘Yes. Ben Freeman admitted that Cartwright cut up rough when he said he wanted out from his ring of dealers. Threatened him with violence, he says. Whether Ben responded with violence of his own remains to be seen.’

  ‘Like too many other things in this case. Did Freeman seem like a killer to you?’

  Lucy thought of that damaged, confused, rather pathetic figure she had seen a few hours earlier. She was far too experienced a CID officer now to make a murder judgement on appearances. ‘I don’t think he’d plan a killing in cold blood. But if he got into an argument with Cartwright, if he panicked, he might have done anything. If someone hid Cartwright’s body away in that room without quite knowing how he was going to dispose of it, without any clear plan, that sounds like the kind of thing Ben Freeman would have done. He fled from Marton Towers immediately after the murder, and he approached the crime scene after the fire. He’s certainly scared. But he was still in shock when I questioned him.’

  ‘Aye. I think I’d be a bit scared, when the ministering angel at my bedside turned into a gauleiter.’ Peach was a man of very different background and experience from young Freeman, but he had the male knowledge of the effect his partner could have on impressionable men. ‘At twenty, he’s our youngest candidate. I’d say he’s just as likely as the oldest one, the stepfather, who’s sixty-six.’

  ‘Derek Simmons? He isn’t the conventional wicked stepfather, though, is he? For one thing, he only appeared on the scene when Neil Cartwright was an adult, and for another, he seems to have done everything he could to be friendly to Neil. All the hostility seems to have come from the stepson, even according to his mother.’