Least of Evils

by J M Gregson

  Janey frowned. ‘He lives just down the corridor from me. I think I may have seen him at some time on Saturday night. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I wish you would. He seems very anxious. Talk to him, if he’ll let you. He might be a bit more open than he was prepared to be with me.’

  ‘I’ll speak to him. Our rooms are quite near to each other, but we’ve hardly exchanged a word since Mr Ketley was killed. We were getting on quite well before that, though we scarcely did more than greet each other. Our work doesn’t overlap much. He spends most of his days in the kitchen.’

  Greta was struck suddenly by a horrid thought. ‘You don’t think Chung Lee did kill Oliver, do you?’

  Janey laughed. ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. I expect the police are equally sure of it, but they don’t reveal much of their thinking, do they?’

  As she went back to her own room, Janey Johnson considered a different thought. The most capable and certainly the most powerful woman in this place was probably the one she’d just left. And from what she’d said about her boyfriend Martin Price and the work he’d done, they would make a pretty formidable combination. Perhaps that was the line of enquiry the police should be following now.

  Martin Price looked like a killer.

  Percy Peach, who was rarely assailed by such unscientific thoughts, felt it strongly. Price looked less than his forty years. His blue eyes glittered, alert, watchful, assessing. Even at the end of February, his face was tanned an unexpected brown; no doubt that came from his years spent in much hotter climes than England’s. His fair hair had scarcely receded at all, though it was cut very short, as if he had to be prepared for instant action. He was just under six feet, lean and fit. He looked confident but not overconfident; that was the least promising condition, from an interrogator’s point of view.

  Peach stepped into the sitting room of the flat, thrust out his hand, and said, ‘DCI Peach. You and I haven’t met before, but you know DS Northcott.’

  Price gave the big black man a guarded smile. ‘Yes. We had an interesting exchange of views yesterday morning. He was assisted then by a Detective Sergeant Peach. Any relation, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘My wife, sir.’ He was on the ball, this man. Very few people remembered the names of officers who had spoken to them; this one had not only remembered but made the connection with his new opponent.

  Martin permitted himself the thin smile of a man who had scored the opening point. ‘You’re a fortunate man, DCI Peach.’

  ‘Indeed I am, Mr Price. I hope your affair with Mrs Ketley will be equally fortunate. Why did you conceal it from us?’

  Martin took his time, remembering how Greta had told him not to underestimate this unimpressive-looking man. ‘I think it was your wife who pointed out that it gave us the oldest and one of the strongest motives for murder, so perhaps you could hardly expect us to declare it. Greta hated her husband. I hated him not just because of what I knew of him but because of the way he treated Greta. Frankly, we are delighted to be rid of him. To present you with all this on a plate seemed distinctly unwise.’

  Peach decided there was no point in any more preliminary fencing with this man. ‘You’re not only the man with the best motive, you’re also the man best equipped by experience to remove an enemy.’

  ‘Better than a contract killer? I doubt that.’

  ‘You have no cause to defer to my experience in matters of killing, Mr Price. I’ve met a few murderers, as you would expect. I’ve never killed a man.’

  ‘And I have? Well, yes, I shan’t deny that. Those deaths have always been in the cause of duty, and I deny that you could call any of my killings a murder.’

  ‘You were acting on orders, no doubt. The old excuse.’

  ‘In eight years of service in the SAS, I usually was. But you are also given more freedom of action in the SAS than in other military units. That is one of the attractions, the scope for initiative. In many situations, it is a necessity.’

  ‘And you obviously thrived on that system. After eight years you’d made the rank of captain, with more promotions and a promising career ahead of you. Why was that career halted so abruptly?’

  Price glanced at Clyde Northcott, who had his pen poised expectantly over his notebook. ‘I told you this yesterday. I enjoyed my years in the SAS, but it’s a young man’s game. I decided on a career shift, whilst I was still young enough to do other things.’

  ‘Things like working for Oliver Ketley and fighting as a mercenary soldier in Africa. Scarcely less dangerous or less demanding than SAS service, I’d have thought.’

  ‘We can’t always choose the work we undertake, Detective Chief Inspector. Life doesn’t proceed as logically and inevitably as it does in the police service.’

  Peach smiled grimly. ‘The decision wasn’t yours. You were slung out of the SAS. Lucky to leave without a court martial.’

  Price nodded grimly. ‘You’ve done your homework. I thought the authorities might have made it rather more difficult for you.’

  ‘They had to be persuaded; Army Records are very good at ignorance, when it suits them. I sometimes wish the police had their clout when it comes to concealing things. But murder opens doors, if you push hard enough. The people concerned didn’t seem very surprised that you should be the leading suspect in a murder hunt.’

  ‘Leading suspect, am I?

  ‘You have all the qualifications. Efficiently trained in all sorts of combat by the SAS. Subsequent career where violence was positively encouraged and nothing like so controlled. Determination to lie low rather than even reveal your existence after the murder of a man who stood formidably in your path.’

  ‘You make it sound as if I’m parcelled up ready for a jury. The snag for you is that I didn’t kill Ketley. In choosing to lie low, I was allowing you to concentrate your formidable police resources on discovering who did.’

  ‘Your army service was terminated because you sanctioned the torturing of a prisoner in Iraq.’

  ‘You did lean hard on the people at records, didn’t you? We needed that information in Iraq. We saved British lives by acquiring it.’

  His mouth was a hard line and his experienced face set in stone. This was obviously an argument he had conducted and lost at the time and re-lived many times since then. Peach had wanted to open this up, to weaken the man’s position in the rest of the interview. But now he could see no point in pursuing it further. He said curtly, ‘Tell us about the work you did for Oliver Ketley after your discharge.’

  Martin paused for a moment. He mustn’t allow himself to be hurried on this dangerous ground. He said grimly, ‘There aren’t many employment opportunities when you leave the army under the circumstances I did. You don’t like starting at the bottom somewhere else and being ordered about by idiots, when you’ve been SAS. Ketley knew that when he approached me. He said he wanted someone to organize his personal defences. He said he swam in dangerous waters and wanted people who would watch out for sharks.’ Price smiled bitterly as he quoted the dead man’s phrase.

  ‘So you surrounded him with vicious people.’

  He weighed that. ‘Not surrounded him. I supplied him with a couple of men who were skilled and not too scrupulous to act as his personal bodyguards.’

  ‘You might have made a new career with him. But you didn’t stay long.’

  ‘No. He didn’t just want personal protection. What he wanted me to do was to organize a small private army for him, to contest the gangland wars he saw developing. I wasn’t up for that.’

  Peach wondered about that. There was no knowing at this distance who had dispensed with whom. But again there was nothing to be gained by pursuing that thought. ‘So you went off to Africa to be a mercenary soldier.’

  Again that bitter smile, which told them he could tell them much more than he was going to do if he chose. ‘When you’d worked for Oliver Ketley and you knew a little about his rackets and the way he ran them, it wasn’t advisable to stay in the country. I didn’t fa
ncy a bullet in the back of my head. It was safest to disappear to another continent for a few years.’

  ‘So you went off to kill Africans.’

  Martin knew the provocation was deliberate, so he refused to react. ‘I was offered the chance to lead my own unit of eight men, very much on SAS lines, though in a private army. It was dog eat dog – no one out there was going to bring me to book for torturing the odd prisoner, if we secured our objectives.’

  ‘So you killed people for the highest payer.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. In the Congo you did whatever you had to do to survive, but I got out of there as soon as I could and took my men with me. You won’t believe me, but elsewhere I was always on what you’d probably call the right side – that is, against petty tyrants who were exploiting their people and milking their countries. It wasn’t easy: a lot of the conflicts out there are still tribally based.’

  He had spoken for a moment with something like passion. At some time in the future – possibly when the man was locked away in a cell – Peach would like to hear more of these African adventures. But no doubt he never would. ‘And then you came home and began an affair with Greta Ketley.’

  Again the attempt to provoke. And again it would be resisted. ‘You make it sound as if the two things are connected. Soldiering as a mercenary is a young man’s game. I was a veteran when I got out at thirty-nine. The last thing I wanted here was anything which would take me anywhere near Oliver Ketley; I’d been close enough to him to realize what a dangerous man he was. But quite by chance I met Greta in Manchester. I was attracted to her and quickly realized that she was unhappy. I love the woman, DCI Peach, whatever that odd word means. It isn’t a word I’ve had any time for in the rest of my life.’

  ‘And Ketley stood in your way.’

  Martin knew where he was going with that, but refused to follow. ‘We were very careful. I have grown used to secrecy over the years; it’s become a habit and I think I’m rather good at it. I knew better than Greta herself that I must not do anything to put her in danger.’

  ‘So you watched and you waited. And when the opportunity arrived, you shot Ketley with his own weapon. No doubt the irony of that appealed to you.’

  Price had again the grim smile of the man who is more expert in these things than his audience. ‘You’re very naive, DCI Peach, for a man who knows about violence. When you’re killing people, you have no time for such things as irony. They are luxuries you cannot afford.’

  ‘Neither you nor Mrs Ketley have an alibi for the time of this death.’

  ‘And I know as well as you do that the absence of an alibi in no way indicates guilt. You will need something much more positive and you are not going to find it.’

  Peach’s smile as he stood reluctantly acknowledged the man’s qualities and experience. ‘Don’t go away without giving us your new address, please.’

  ‘I shan’t do that, DCI Peach. I look forward to the successful conclusion of your case.’

  NINETEEN

  As Clyde Northcott collected his lunch in the police canteen at Brunton, he saw Lucy Peach’s companion leave her at the table in the corner. He went and sat with Lucy as she opened her strawberry yoghurt. The two had always got on well. Now that he had been promoted to the job she used to do with Peach, Clyde also felt a sort of undeclared bond with a fellow detective sergeant.

  ‘We saw Martin Price in Chorley again this morning,’ he said.

  ‘And what did my esteemed husband think of the man? Percy was picking my brains last night about our meeting with him yesterday.’

  ‘You know Percy better than anyone. He doesn’t say a lot, when he’s thinking hard.’

  ‘And he’s thinking hard about Price?’

  ‘Very hard, I’d say. One of the things about this case is that the two strongest candidates are going to be the hardest to pin down – assuming one of them has done it, of course. If you take the backgrounds of both the suspects and the victim into account, the two likeliest killers are George French and Martin Price. Contract killers are always elusive, because they’re professionals – they’re experienced, and they give attention to every detail. Usually it’s impossible to place them at the scene of the crime. I know Price isn’t a contract killer, but he ticks all those boxes.’

  Lucy nodded ruefully. ‘From what I saw of Martin Price yesterday, he’ll be as slippery as any contract killer. He’s got all the skills and all the experience to take on the job. He also has the nerve to kill a big fish like Ketley. I can see why he appealed to Greta Ketley. I’ve never met her, but there can’t be many men who’d risk an affair with Ketley’s wife. And I found myself responding yesterday to his coolness and his frankness about his own capacity for violence. Knowing the sort of villain Ketley was, I almost ended up on Price’s side.’

  That was an interesting insight, thought Clyde. He wouldn’t have gone as far as that. He came back to what the chief had told the team at the beginning of this. ‘Murder’s murder and it’s our job to solve it. I feel in my bones that this one is down to Martin Price. But pinning it on him won’t be easy.’

  ‘Could this murder be a joint effort? The two people who’ve gained most from this death are Martin Price and Greta Ketley. Could they have been operating together?’

  ‘They’ve both got the nerve for it. Greta Ketley played the grieving widow when we first saw her last Sunday. She was quite different after we’d discovered her affair with Price. Even if she wasn’t there, she could have set up the time and the place for Price to dispatch the man they’d decided to liquidate.’

  Lucy nodded. She felt oddly bereft not to be at the centre of this case, having operated beside Percy Peach during so many serious crime searches. ‘Percy always said that the more people who are involved in a crime, the easier it is to solve. When people have to coordinate, they’re more likely to make mistakes during interrogation.’

  Clyde saw the logic of this, but he said dolefully, ‘They’re a pretty cool pair, as they’d need to be to take on Oliver Ketley. They don’t seem to have made any mistakes in what they’ve said to us so far.’

  The long dark face looked so baffled that Lucy tried to cheer him up. ‘All the same, two suspects give you a better chance of a solution than one, Clyde. That’s if our surmise is right and both of them are involved in this.’

  Janey Johnson’s room was in the new buildings at Thorley Grange, at the other end of the corridor from Chung Lee’s. This was obviously where the residential members of the staff were accommodated. There were four other doors and presumably four other, similar rooms behind them.

  Mrs Johnson’s room was comparable in size and outlook to Chung Lee’s, but it took them a moment or two to realize that, because it was much more personalized. There was a large black-and-white photograph of a young couple marching arm in arm on the promenade at Blackpool, with dozens of children leaving the sands with buckets and spades in the background and the Tower rearing towards clear sky further on still. They had the carefree look of a couple without worries and with the world unfolding before them. ‘My mum and dad in 1964,’ said Janey when she saw Clyde Northcott studying it. He thought of telling her the details of the powerful Norton 500 motorcycle on the road alongside the couple, then caught sight of Peach’s face and decided against it.

  Peach himself picked up a smaller, coloured picture of the same couple some years later. They still looked happy, but older and less carefree – not surprisingly, as they now had three children sitting between them, two girls and a boy. ‘That’s me in the middle, I was the baby of the family,’ said Janey, pointing to a pretty, serious youngster with plaits and her sister’s arm around her. ‘That must be early eighties, I suppose.’

  There were several other photographs of the family, individually as well as in groups, but Peach walked over to look at the paintings on the walls, of which there were four, in various sizes, all landscapes and all originals. He stopped in front of a woodland scene, with autumn hues on the leaves and a st
ream running briskly across the foreground. ‘These are good. By someone in the family?’

  Janey felt herself blushing; she couldn’t remember when she had last done that. She hoped the blood didn’t show in her face; it wasn’t the way she had planned to begin what must be an important meeting. ‘They’re mine, actually. I used to do quite a lot, in – in the old days. I don’t get much time now.’

  ‘You should make the time. I’m no expert, but I think these are good.’

  The room was a little squarer than Lee’s had been, but with the same outlook over the kitchen garden of the old house to the wall of the estate and woods beyond. As if to reflect a more outgoing occupant, it had three small armchairs rather than his two. Janey had arranged them for this meeting as soon as they had announced it to her an hour ago. She now took the smallest of the chairs, with her back to the window, leaving the two larger ones to the men.

  When she had heard that they wanted to see her for a second time, she had nerved herself for a full grilling about her own background, but this surprising man Peach looked round the room and offered only, ‘Very similar to Mr Lee’s room at the other end of the corridor, this, but you’ve stamped yourself on it more firmly than he has.’

  She glanced round at her personal effects. ‘I’ve never been in his room. He’s a long way from home – his real home, I mean. Perhaps he hasn’t got the things I’ve got to display; or perhaps men don’t have the same instinct to shape wherever they live into a comfortable nest.’

  Perhaps she was sending herself up a little: this capable woman struck Peach as much more than a nest-builder. ‘Do you see much of him?’

  ‘Chung Lee? Very little, actually. He works full-time in the kitchen and I work in the residential parts of the house.’

  ‘But you live very near to each other and you have considerable leisure time.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. But neither of us has been here for very long. We’ve been finding our feet in the place, I suppose.’