by Gregson, J M
Barbara Tucker, garish in the orange dress which made her look even bigger, was dispensing coffee from a large jug and talking in muted tones to the people who held out their cups.
‘It’s better than letting the staff do it,’ she explained to Lucy. ‘You want to be private at a time like this.’ The big woman seemed glad to speak to someone who would not be shocked by the situation, and Lucy guessed that she had been getting little more than monosyllables as she took on the unaccustomed role of comforter and circulated among the stricken group.
There were a few tears and much smudged eyeshadow among the other women, but the predominant impressions were of exhaustion and bewilderment. John Whiteman, whose evening as Master of the Lodge had been so suddenly disrupted by the discovery in the car park, was in a corner of the room, talking quietly to Superintendent Tucker. His wife, the star of that part of the evening which now seemed days behind them, sat on her own, weeping quietly, wiping her eyes from time to time with a handkerchief which seemed already sodden.
Tucker noticed Peach’s entry and came over to speak to him, trying to convey an air of authority to an audience which had long since ceased to care. ‘Time we sent these people home,’ he said. ‘They’ve convinced me they have nothing useful to tell us.’
He waited for Peach to challenge him on this, but as usual when he wanted his inspector to speak, Peach remained obstinately silent, his only reaction a slight raising of his expressive black eyebrows. Tucker said nervously, ‘They’re respectable people, known to me personally.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course, one of them is quite possibly a murderer.’ Peach permitted himself a small smile at that thought. Then he turned and addressed the ragged semicircle of people. ‘We shall need statements from all of you, as you might expect. It’s far too late to begin that tonight. Is there anyone here who has any information, any previous knowledge, any suspicion which might help to throw some light on what happened out there tonight?’
There was a moment of absolute silence. Lucy Blake looked round the exhausted faces with what she hoped was an encouraging smile, but no one spoke.
Peach said, ‘In that case, I suggest you go home and get whatever sleep you can. I or a member of my team will be along to see each of you tomorrow. I trust no one is planning to be away from their home or their normal place of work?’
No one took up what sounded like a challenge. John Whiteman said with an attempt at a smile, ‘I suppose this means that we’re all suspects at the moment.’
‘No more than forty others who left before the body was found. No more than anyone on the hotel staff who had previous dealings with the late Mr Eric Walsh.’ Peach sighed at the enormity of the field confronting him.
The remnants of what had begun as a glittering concourse shuffled wearily out of the room. Peach watched their departure keenly, observant for any signs of excessive relief. Then he nodded to Lucy Blake and the duo went into the kitchen of the White Bull.
It was still warm in here, though the central heating in the main rooms of the hotel had been off for over an hour. And the atmosphere, though far from noisy, was less muted than among the group they had just left. The kitchen staff in their white overalls had mingled with the waiters in evening dress. The only real division was that between a small group who were smoking at one end of the big room and the rest.
Peach looked round both groups in the silence which had fallen upon them with his entry. He acknowledged the presence of Charles Davies, whom he had known since long before he became head waiter here. He registered the apprehensive face of Wasim Afzaal with no more than a minimal raising of his right eyebrow.
Davies took it upon himself to speak for the staff around him. ‘Your constables have already been questioning us, Inspector Peach. No one has been able to offer anything useful. Everyone here is exhausted. Almost all of us will be working tomorrow. We need our rest.’
Percy nodded. ‘Even policemen need their rest. But there is someone here — perhaps more than one person — who knows something, who has seen things which may be vital in the detection of a murder.’
An absolute hush fell on the line of white faces with the first mention of the word ‘murder’. Even though they had been discussing the thing in the car park in exactly those terms for the last hour, the official voicing of the word brought its own grisly glamour into the lives of people who had never met it before.
Davies cleared his throat. ‘I’m sure no one here is withholding information, Inspector.’
Peach allowed the disturbing effect of his smile to run along the line of hotel staff. His gaze seemed to assess each of them in rapid succession. ‘I wish I could be as sure of that as you, Mr Davies. I repeat my view that someone here knows things of value to us. He or she may as yet be quite unaware of the importance of some chance sighting, some overheard remark which will have an important bearing on bringing a murderer to justice. Or he or she may of course be deliberately withholding valuable information, which would be most unwise.’
His smile disappeared abruptly with this last thought. ‘Mr Davies, I shall need the name of anyone who was working here during the evening but is not here now. The rest of you should give your names to Constable Curtis as you leave this room.’ There was a slight, involuntary start from Curtis, who had not known that the local legend Percy Peach knew his name. The inspector said solemnly, ‘I advise you to think carefully overnight, and to try to recall any small detail which may be significant in this case.’
It was a dismissal, and with a collective murmur of relief they moved hastily towards PC Curtis and then on to the taxis which Davies had laid on to take them home.
Wasim Afzaal was careful not to be the first through the door. He placed himself in the middle of the ragged line of staff, stifled a yawn as he waited to give his details to Constable Curtis, exchanged a few words with one of his companions in the corridor outside before he went out into the cover of the night.
Peach hadn’t fastened upon him in there, as he had half-expected he would. But even Peach couldn’t know everything. And no one else on the hotel staff knew enough to give him away.
Seven
Two hours after Peach had dismissed both the staff and the patrons of the White Bull, a car eased softly into a quiet suburban road four miles from the centre of Brunton.
It was a cold night for early November, but it was apprehension, not the cold, which made the driver shiver as he sat for a moment and looked at the dark outlines of the silent houses ahead of him. There was not a light to be seen, but he still parked here, at the end of the road, rather than outside the building which interested him; some insomniac, drawing curtains silently aside, might see the dark shape of an unfamiliar vehicle.
His overwrought imagination pictured that very thing happening, even now. But those prying eyes would not be able to pinpoint his whereabouts from the position of his vehicle. Not if he left it here. He steeled himself to open the door, slipped quietly into the cold velvet of the darkness, and pressed rather than slammed the door shut behind him.
He removed the keys, but did not lock the door. There would surely be no danger of car thieves in this quiet place at three thirty in the morning. And he might need to get away very quickly, if he was disturbed.
That thought set him trembling anew, and he hurried down the road beneath the sheltering trees, finding a release from his tension in the movement. The temperature was low, but there would be no frost tonight. The cloud cover would ensure that. And the clouds cut out any light from the stars and the thin crescent of the new moon. That suited his purpose. He had to struggle with the catch of the familiar gate when he reached the house.
He hesitated for a moment. What he proposed to do was foreign to him, totally outside his previous experience. He had no moral scruples about it, but the danger which always attends the unfamiliar pressed hard upon him, pounding the blood in his ears as he loped swiftly up the drive.
He was surprised how much his fingers shook as he tried to g
et the key into the lock. He had to use both hands, finding the seating for the key in the Yale lock with the index finger of his left, then sliding it home at the second attempt with the fingers of his right. The kid gloves he wore made it a little more difficult, but he knew that nerves were the things which slowed him down.
For an awful moment, he thought the key was not going to turn the lock, that the catch had been applied from the inside. But he knew that could not be so, and in a moment the heavy door fell back and he was inside, shutting the door carefully behind him, leaning against the inside of it for an instant’s respite, feeling the coldness of the single small pane of glass against his forehead.
He was safe now, for the moment. He turned and shone the torch he had not dared to use outside around the line of doors in the silent hall. He knew that there could be no one here, that he was alone in the house. Yet he had to force himself to turn the handle of the door he knew he needed to open, as if some inhuman presence was waiting patiently for him behind it.
There was nothing, of course. He flashed the beam of his torch round the room, finding the familiar objects more dramatic in the sudden shaft of harsh light. Then he switched on the room light at the door. This room was at the rear of the house. And who was to know that this was not the normal occupant of the house, unable to sleep and come down to search out a book? They said you only attracted attention to yourself if you behaved like a guilty person. Boldness be my friend, then. Who said that? The question rattled inconsequentially and irritatingly round his fevered brain.
Now that he was here, he realized that he did not know exactly what he was looking for, and the task suddenly seemed for the first time impossible. At least the filing cabinet wasn’t locked. He went hastily through it, fumbling over the sheets of paper with his gloved hands. He snatched out a couple of sheets, cramming them hurriedly into the pocket of his leather jacket. But he hadn’t time to inspect everything, and he couldn’t carry everything away with him.
In a rising panic, he went out into the hall, careless where he had lately been so careful, switching on lights in the hall and landing, taking the stairs two at a time, as if swiftness could compensate for the knowledge he did not have. In the bedrooms, he turned out drawer after drawer, swearing aloud as he found only clothes, heaping obscenities upon the absent owner when he could not find the things he wanted.
He went downstairs again, almost falling headlong in his haste, back into the study, shouting at the desk and the bookshelves, which seemed to mock him with their solemn, watchful silence.
It was when he went into the dining room that the full futility of his errand struck him like a blow in the face. A laptop computer was on the big table, with the chair in front of it drawn back at an angle, as if the user had just risen from his work. Of course! This is where the records would be. This is where the details of his involvement would be preserved.
Even with that realisation, the hopelessness of his mission crashed about his ears, and his head turned dizzy with the knowledge. He sat down heavily on the chair, shooting a sharp spasm through his back with the abruptness of his descent. How had he ever thought he could outwit a damned computer? You needed passwords to get into the stuff he wanted.
‘You bastard!’ He shouted the word uselessly at the room at large, heedless now of the noise as well as the light. Then he snatched off his shoe and crashed the heel into the monitor screen of the instrument, seeing the glass shatter an instant before the noise beat back at him from the walls. He raised the laptop above his head and smashed it as hard as he could against the parquet floor of the room. Putting his shoe back on his foot, he made ready to jump upon the instrument, seeking at least to vent his fury and frustration upon its blandness.
Then at last caution reasserted itself. They could do things with what you left behind — take prints of your shoes, or something like that. He looked helplessly at the shattered screen of the monitor, on which he had used the heel of his shoe like a hammer. But they surely couldn’t learn anything from those scattered fragments, could they?
But the caution which had surfaced so belatedly now took him over like a powerful drug, coursing through his veins, turning the desire to he away from here into a panic. He banged off the lights violently, as if the switches had caused him some personal hurt.
He had thought when he came here that he would search carefully and methodically, removing all traces of himself meticulously from the house. Now he left drawers open and chaos in every room he had visited, anxious only to be out of the place as the impossibility of what he had wanted to do washed over him.
He slammed the front door behind him, the very door which he had taken such pains to open quietly on his entry. Then he fell flat with a cry of fear when his foot caught wet leaves on the lower of the two steps in front of the door. He picked himself up without checking the damage and raced through the darkness, flinging himself with a huge gasp of relief into the seat of his car.
He started the engine, revved it more than he had meant to, careless now of the noise. He was a good mile away from the place before he saw that his gloves were torn and blood was seeping from his fingers.
*
Superintendent Tucker very rarely appeared in the station on Saturday mornings. In the wholly exceptional circumstances of a murder in his own North Brunton Masonic Lodge, he felt he had no option but to present himself this Saturday. It did not improve his temper.
He had been in his office at the top of the new police building — ‘Tommy Tucker’s piss-packed penthouse’, as Peach sometimes called it — for over half an hour before his inspector appeared. As head of the Brunton CID section, Tucker was convinced he should be doing something, but he was not quite sure what. He found that Peach had already put together a murder team. The members of it were even now deployed about the town, so there was no one in the station for Tucker to bollock or galvanize into action. He wasn’t much good at anything else, and he knew it as well as anyone, even if he could never admit it.
It was a relief when Peach rapped smartly on the door of his office. Tucker relished a rare opportunity to put one over on his junior officer. He said sniffily, ‘I’ve been here for nearly an hour. In the circumstances, I should have thought you could have got out of your bed rather earlier, even if it is Saturday.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘If I can make the effort when I recognize a serious crime, it should surely not be too much for a younger man to show willing.’
‘Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.’ Peach stood like a schoolboy before the big desk, his hands behind his back as the toe of his right foot rubbed against the heel of his left and his gaze focussed on the floor in front of him. He thought, I shouldn’t really take the piss out of the pompous old bugger, but I’d hit him if I didn’t, and that would be much worse.
As usual, Tucker didn’t see the warning signs. ‘It’s not the behaviour of a man I’m proposing to promote to the rank of chief inspector, a man whom I have supported through thick and thin in his career.’
The effrontery of this, from a man who would have consigned him cheerfully to hell had it been possible, was too much for Percy Peach. ‘Yes, sir. Can you tell me what you have turned up about this case which is so significant?’
‘Significant?’ Tucker looked like a retarded goldfish.
‘Yes, sir. I mistakenly thought I’d be better employed at the scene of the crime. Sorry, sir.’
‘You’ve been round at the White Bull?’
‘Since seven o’clock, sir. Scene-of-crime team’s working hard there in the car park. DC Murphy and DC Clay are questioning the staff of the hotel about anything they may have seen or heard last night. And the uniformed officers are —’
‘And has all this activity produced any results yet?’ Tucker tried desperately to stem the tide of information from his inspector.
‘There have been certain sightings, sir, which may or may not be significant. I shall be following them up myself when we have completed preliminary qu
estioning. Unless of course you would like to take this over yourself, sir? First day is always crucial in a case like this, and it would be advantageous to have the sharpest minds operating at the crime face.’
‘No, no. I don’t want to interfere with your enquiries.’ Tucker recoiled as always from the prospect of direct involvement. ‘So long as you can assure me that maximum energy and resources are being properly applied. It’s my job to keep an overview of the case, you know.’
‘Yes, sir. Exactly what I told the lads and lasses when I was ringing them at six thirty on a Saturday morning. “Superintendent Tucker will be keeping an overview,” I said. I thought they’d find that reassuring when they were losing their weekends to form a murder team.’
Tucker glared at him suspiciously, but Peach’s expression was earnest, his gaze fixed resolutely upon the wall above his chief’s head. Tucker, who had thought that his very presence here on a Saturday morning would be enough to awe his staff, was left wondering what to say next. He opted for a portentous, ‘This will be a very high-profile case, you know. Eric Walsh was a well-known and highly respected citizen of this town.’
Peach nodded. ‘A member of the North Brunton Masonic Lodge. A singing member.’
Tucker frowned. ‘The fact that Mr Walsh sang the song of welcome to the ladies last night has surely nothing to do with this case.’
Peach pursed his lips. ‘Good singer, was he?’
‘Quite good, yes. He had a considerable local reputation.’
‘We can probably rule out tortured musicians, then. But I wouldn’t like to rule out a musical connection completely at this point, sir. Not until we have more of the facts. Unless your overview has already provided us with a leading suspect, of course?’ His dark pupils fastened for the first time on Tucker’s face, bright with an innocent hope.