Murder at the Lodge (Inspector Peach Series Book 7)

by Gregson, J M

  ‘I very much doubt that, Peach. I think you need to keep a more open mind than you appear to —’

  ‘Reinforce my statistical survey, that would, you know. “A Freemason is four times as likely to commit a serious crime in the Brunton area than an ordinary member of the public.” Remarkable, that.’ He mouthed the words like a piece of well-established religious dogma, then shrugged sadly at the mystery of it.

  ‘Just because a member of the Lodge was the victim, you shouldn’t assume that his killer was a member of the Fraternity. I hear you’ve already been bothering the Master of the Lodge and his lady. I trust this was absolutely necessary?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir. You’d have done it yourself, in my place, I’m sure.’ Peach leaned forward confidentially, feeling the leap in his spirits as he saw Tommy Bloody Tucker recoil. ‘Both of the buggers telling porkies, if you ask me!’

  The Superintendent’s heart leapt to his throat on the other side of the big modern desk. He saw his dreams of the Mastership vanishing into thin, Peach-polluted air. ‘I’m sure that can’t be true. What grounds could a man like John Whiteman have for lying to the police? A respected local solicitor of many years’ standing! And still less his good lady. Why, Ros Whiteman gave us a wonderful speech on Friday night. An impeccable lady. She’s positively … well, positively …’

  ‘Fragrant, sir? Like Lady Archer once was, in an eminent judge’s view? We mustn’t forget that that fragrant lady’s testimony in court was subsequently shown up as highly suspect. It’s my belief that the fragrant Mrs Ros Whiteman will eventually prove to be telling us porkies.’ He smiled, happy in both his confidence and his chief’s distress.

  ‘And what possible reason could a lady like Ros Whiteman have for killing Eric Walsh?’

  ‘Don’t know yet, sir. Not for certain. Just intrigued that she wouldn’t be completely honest with us. An inspector’s hunch, if you like. But I think I’d still have it, even if I were a chief inspector.’

  ‘And John Whiteman? You saw him both in the office and his home. An unwarranted interference with his privacy, unless you had very clear grounds. He’s the Master of the Lodge, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You said so earlier.’ No doubt the Masonic grapevine had informed Tommy Bloody Tucker of all his inspector’s movements over the weekend; scarcely any point in him coming up here to report, really.

  ‘Mr Whiteman is a man of considerable influence in this town. He might even be in a position to block your promotion.’

  And yours, thought Percy. And up yours, too, Tommy Bloody Tucker. He produced his most innocent smile, topping it with a small frown of bewilderment. ‘Even if he proves to be a murderer, sir?’

  Tucker’s jaw dropped for a moment. Was all his diligent preparation work on the Master, all his months of what others might have seen as creeping, to be made suddenly and cruelly worthless? ‘Are you telling me that the Master of the Lodge murdered one of its valued members?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. Not at present. Just that he’s behaving suspiciously. And so’s his wife. I don’t like people who hold things back when we’re engaged in a murder inquiry.’

  Tucker glowered at the round, open face. Peach’s piercing dark eyes, which so often seemed to be trained on a spot just over his head, were now staring into his face with a frankness which infuriated him almost as much. He wanted to repudiate what the man was saying, but he could find no immediate flaw in the logic of his statement. He tried the only diversion he could think of. ‘Well, at least Darren Cartwright is alive and well, despite the threats to his life you were supposed to be investigating. When I was taken out into that car park to see a body on Friday night, I thought at first it might have been Darren who’d been killed.’

  ‘No, sir. He’s gone very quiet about the threats to his life now, your Mr Cartwright. Doesn’t seem to be worried any more.’

  ‘No? Well, at least he wasn’t in danger on Friday night. I thought he’d be at the Ladies’ Night, but he wasn’t.’

  ‘No, sir. Except that he was, in a manner of speaking.’

  Got the little bugger! thought Tucker triumphantly. Correct him on a matter of fact, take the cocky little sod down a peg or two. ‘No, Peach. Darren Cartwright wasn’t at the White Bull on Friday. He didn’t attend the function. Perhaps I should remind you that I was there and you weren’t.’

  Peach allowed himself a small snigger. ‘Very good, that, sir! Of course you were! And of course I wasn’t! Not until there was police work to be done, anyway. Nevertheless, Darren Cartwright was at the White Bull on Friday evening.’

  Tucker frowned hard, struggling to take this in, like a child confronting an impossible riddle. ‘I didn’t see him.’

  ‘No, sir. Nor he you, very likely. He wasn’t at the Masonic function, as you say, but he admits he was in the hotel. Claims he went down there for a drink.’

  Tucker digested this, then leaned forward himself. ‘I find it difficult to believe that a man like Darren Cartwright could be involved in anything like murder. But this could be suspicious, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I thought that.’ This man will never lose his talent for the blindin’ Weedin’ obvious, thought Percy.

  ‘I think you should question him.’

  ‘Already have done, sir. This morning. He didn’t go to the White Bull by arrangement, he says. Just on impulse. Claims he didn’t meet anyone who can bear out his story. And we haven’t turned up anyone yet who can confirm his account of when he arrived and left.’

  ‘Then, however unlikely it seems, you have a suspect. You’d be far better employed investigating him rather than harassing the Master and his good lady, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘Yes, sir. You wouldn’t like to take over yourself, would you? In case I get a little out of my depth in the murky waters of Masonry?’

  For a moment, Tucker was sorely tempted. It would be wonderful to claim all the credit for a high-profile murder case. But his suspicion of Peach and his awareness of his own incompetence rang simultaneous bells of warning in his smoothly coiffured head. ‘No. It wouldn’t be right to take the credit away from you, Percy. But do tread carefully, won’t you? Of course, if I can be of any assistance. I’ll be only too ready to —’

  ‘Thank you, sir. What can you tell me about Adrian O’Connor?’

  Tucker gaped for a moment at this prompt response to his offer. ‘He’s a fairly recent member of the Lodge, I think.’

  ‘Three years, sir. Wasn’t even a Mason before that.’

  ‘He’s a Catholic, I think.’ Tucker’s brow wrinkled with distaste for a moment; he was a man who wore his prejudices on his sleeve. ‘But I don’t really know anything against him. He was there on Friday night, though. Accompanying the widow of a Worshipful Master.’

  ‘But he left quite early, sir. Eric Walsh was seen alive after he’d gone.’

  ‘Why are you pestering me for information about him, then?’

  Peach noted that after an offer to help wherever he could. Tommy Bloody Tucker was now accusing him of pestering. Par for the course, that. ‘He goes back a long way with Eric Walsh, sir. To 1988, in Ireland, sir. When they were sworn enemies.’

  Tucker adopted his elderly statesman expression whilst he paused to digest this. ‘Better investigate him, then. They can be strange people, these Catholics.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was one myself, once.’

  ‘Well, there you are then!’ Tucker laughed uninhibitedly at a joke he seemed to have made by accident. ‘Seriously, though, you’d better look into Mr Adrian O’Connor. Though I find it difficult to believe that this murder could have been done by a Mason. A fellow member of Eric Walsh’s Lodge.’ He shook his head. ‘Most unlikely. What about the staff of the White Bull? Aren’t there any suspicious characters there?’

  ‘Not really, sir. There is an Asian chap who has given us trouble before.’

  Tucker was torn between an eagerness to pin this on a non-Mason and a fear of provoking accusations of racial persecution. He said fear
fully, ‘Not a particularly prominent family, is it?’

  ‘Quite prominent, I would say, sir. The father is well known and well respected in local circles. The lad working at the White Bull is Wasim Afzaal.’

  Tucker’s heart pounded anew. ‘Not the son of —’

  ‘Son of the Afzaal who owns the cotton mill and the supermarkets, yes, sir. He’s the lad we let off with a caution after an attack on old Harry Alston’s corner shop.’

  Tucker closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his strength to direct his odious subordinate. ‘Go carefully, for God’s sake, Peach. You could stir up all sorts of adverse publicity for us here.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Peach did not seem to find the prospect as distressing as his chief did. ‘But I don’t think you should worry too much. We shall probably clear Afzaal of this fairly quickly. My guess is that our murderer will be a Mason.’

  He left with a smile on that happy thought, carrying the picture of Tommy Bloody Tucker’s distressed face down the stairs with him to buoy him for the rest of the day.

  DI Peach was wrong about one thing, however. Young Wasim Afzaal would loom much larger in this case than he currently thought.

  Thirteen

  It was like watching a stoat with a rabbit. You knew the rabbit had no chance, but some survival instinct would make it struggle until it died.

  The rabbit being killed off by Percy Peach was a lad called Tom Cook, who worked in the kitchens at the White Bull. He seemed an innocent sort of lad, and Lucy Blake found herself wondering quite what he had done to deserve this.

  Peach gave her the answer to that in his next phrase. ‘Concealing information,’ he said heavily across the table in the manager’s office at the hotel. He made it sound as if the acned youth had killed several old ladies with a cleaver. ‘Concealing information in a murder case. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by —’

  ‘Don’t make things worse for yourself, lad. Think before you speak. We’ll get you a lawyer, if you think it would do you any good. Better if you told the truth, though, if you want my advice.’

  Tom didn’t, but it didn’t seem the moment to say so. He looked up at the cornice round the high ceiling of the old room. He hadn’t been in here since he’d been interviewed for his job in the kitchens. The manager would want to know why the police had singled him out for this special treatment. His own voice sounded to him like someone else’s as he said, ‘I told the truth to that constable who interviewed me. The one who took my statement. I was in the kitchen for the whole of the time he asked me about. I was there from eleven twenty until after midnight. Working most of the time.’

  ‘Shifty, you were, PC Curtis said, and I have to agree with him. Shifty.’ He relished the word, rolling it on his tongue as if savouring a fine wine.

  Tom felt a fine sheen of sweat dampening his forehead, resisted a pressing urge to wipe it away with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know why he should say that. I wasn’t trying to conceal anything.’

  ‘Really?’ Peach gave him the smile that a hundred criminals could have warned him was a red light. ‘Maybe you weren’t. Just maybe. We’ll reserve judgement on that, for the moment. But were you trying to add a little something to your version of things. You chefs like to add a little something, don’t you? Liven up a dull dish. But you shouldn’t try to liven up a dull story with the odd addition. Naughty, that would be. We wouldn’t like it at all.’

  Tom Cook wasn’t a chef. He was on the bottom, very slippery rung of the sous-chef ladder. It didn’t seem the moment to say so. ‘I just said where I was between eleven twenty and midnight. I don’t think I added anything.’

  ‘Ah!’ Peach pounced on the word like the stoat going for the rabbit's throat. ‘You don’t think. I don’t like the sound of that word, “think”. It denotes uncertainty to me. And we don’t like uncertainty in our statements, do we, DS Blake? Especially in a murder inquiry. Get you into a lot of trouble, uncertainty can.’

  Tom Cook swallowed. His Adam’s apple leapt violently up and down the thin neck with the effort. ‘If I said anything wrong, I’m sorry. I don’t know what it would be.’

  ‘Don’t you, now? Well it’s possible you said nothing wrong. I have to admit that. But what you said smells a bit to me, so we need confirmation. Or revision, of course, if you decide that’s appropriate.’ Having brought his victim to the point of capitulation, he gave him a broad beam. ‘We mustn’t lead you to say anything against your will, of course. Not just to please pleasant people like us. You mustn’t do that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So can you just confirm for us what you said about one of your colleagues on the staff of the hotel?’

  ‘Wasim?’

  ‘Ah! You remember!’ Peach seemed immensely pleased with himself and the miserable youth in front of him. ‘Wasim Afzaal, that’s the chap. I thought you might want to review your statement. In particular the bit about Wasim being with you for all of that time.’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘Aaaah! But you said he was, in your statement to our uniformed officer.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sure you are, now. Well. We shall have to see whether sorry is good enough, shan’t we? What was our friend Mr Afzaal up to during that time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing, as far as I know. He just asked me to say I was with him. So that you couldn’t pick on him.’

  Peach gave Cook a smile which didn’t bode well for Afzaal. ‘So why should we “pick on” the poor chap? Unless we found that he was trying to get someone to tell porkies for him, that is.’

  ‘I don’t know. He just said he was frightened you’d have it in for him. I suppose because he’s … well …’

  ‘Coloured?’

  ‘Asian, I was going to say.’

  ‘So you thought we’d persecute him?’

  ‘Well, no, not really. But Wasim seemed to think that —’

  ‘What he should have thought is that if he persuaded some silly sod to tell porkies on his behalf, he’d end up deep in shit. Up to his neck, in fact, whatever colour that neck might be.’

  ‘Yes. He was foolish.’

  ‘Foolish!’ Peach was histrionically aghast at the weakness of the word. ‘He was a bloody sight worse than foolish, lad. Unless he’s a vicious murderer, trying to set up an alibi. In which case the misguided twat who helped him would be bloody mad, not foolish. Accessory after the fact, he’d be.’

  Tom felt his feeble resistance slipping away. All he wanted was to stop this man from talking. ‘I’m sorry. He … he had a bit of a hold over me. He’d supplied me with pot and threatened to expose me. And he gave me some more when he asked me to include him in my statement — just cannabis, mind.’

  Peach sighed theatrically. ‘First threats and then bribery, eh? You’d better tell us everything you know. Make a clean breast of it and throw yourself on our mercy, as you were taught at school.’

  Tom opened his mouth eagerly to comply with this, then realized he had nothing to say. ‘I … I’ve told you everything I know.’

  ‘What was your pot-pushing friend doing when he claimed he was with you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing, as far as I know.’

  ‘Let’s hope not, for your sake. Accessory after the fact.’ Peach savoured the repeated phrase as he gazed at the pale face with its sheen of sweat. ‘Piss off and make some omelettes, Mr Cook. Don’t leave the area without telling us.’

  *

  Sergeant Jack Chadwick was a contemporary of Peach’s. Twelve years earlier, when they had both been detective constables, Jack had been shot in the shoulder after a bank robbery. He had been a hero for a week, and a recipient of a medal a few months later, but the incident had ended his CID career.

  Jack knew he was stuck at sergeant, but he was not resentful: it could have been much worse. He was now the most efficient scene-of-crime officer in the area. Percy Peach always demanded Sergeant Chadwick and his team for seri
ous crimes, and Jack for his part knew how insistent his colleague had been that he be retained in the service. There was a bond between them which was never openly voiced, but Jack knew that his interests would be preserved by Peach against the incompetence of prats-in-office like Tommy Bloody Tucker.

  He was at the Brunton police station with Percy now, reporting on his investigation of the break-in at the home of Eric Walsh during the night after the Irishman had been murdered. ‘Doesn’t look like a burglary,’ he said. ‘There’s not a lot of value in the place, but there’s some silverware, very portable, which would normally have gone. Also quite a valuable carriage clock. Even a little cash in a kitchen drawer. All left behind.’

  ‘Do we know precisely when entry was made?’

  ‘No. Sometime during the early hours of Saturday, the ninth of November, is as precise as we can be. There was a neighbourhood party at the end house, which many residents of the road attended. People were leaving until about one a.m. No one saw anything happening at Walsh’s house or any strange cars in the road before that time, so pretty certainly the break-in took place sometime between one and seven in the morning.’

  ‘Method of entry?’

  ‘No sign of forced entry. The lock is a Yale and well worn. All the same, my bet would be that chummy used a key.’

  ‘Any clue as to what he came for, or whether he found it?’ As usual with policemen, the criminal was male until events proved otherwise. It didn’t mean they had ruled out a woman intruder; it was simply that in well over ninety per cent of crimes like this, the culprit was male.

  Chadwick smiled grimly. As usual, it was impossible when it wasn’t a straightforward burglary to know whether the intruder had found what he had come for and removed it or had drawn a blank. ‘I think our man was after something he didn’t want someone else — probably us — to find. It’s impossible to say whether he found what he was looking for. He went through the filing cabinet and the desk in the room Walsh used as a study and may have removed documents from them. He turned out all the drawers in the bedrooms. He may or may not have found what he was looking for. I think the chaos indicates a certain desperation, so perhaps he didn’t.’