by J M Gregson
“Not very,” said Lucy. She stood erect, then bent her knees in the stage copper’s hitching-up of her non-existent underpants; Percy found the move quite disturbing to his concentration. In a contrived basso profundo, DS Blake intoned, “Police are proceeding with their inquiries. Superintendent Tucker last night revealed that a man had been detained and he was confident of an early announcement.”
Peach kicked a chair into place opposite him and nodded at the seat and then at Lucy Blake’s attractively rounded backside. “Park it, don’t talk through it, Sergeant,” he said. “Tell me who we can put in the frame to annoy Tucker.”
“You want suspects? Well, there’s the husband, of course. Dangerous things, husbands, much better avoided. This one’s an accountant. Martin Hume.”
“Did he do it?”
“Tommy Tucker thinks so. Mr Hume says he didn’t.”
“Good. Let’s hope he’s right. I’ll give him the chance to tell me why he didn’t in a little while. By the way, where’s Charlie Bancroft, the man who made this hasty arrest?”
“He’s taken two days of his annual leave. Superintendent Tucker told him he needn’t delay it. Our leader said the case was quite straightforward, and DI Bancroft could leave you to tie up the few remaining loose ends.” She kept her voice studiously neutral, trying to conceal her enjoyment as she quoted the phrases she had carefully committed to memory on the previous day.
Peach swore quietly, but without his usual vehement invention. Some instinct told him this was going to be one of Tommy Tucker’s cock-ups, and he relished the prospect. Peach was a CID man through and through, a natural ferreter out of truths, and the truth was that he would have been quite miffed if a juicy murder had been tied up without his assistance.
He leant forward, deadly earnest beneath his scorn. “Who’ve we got as possibilities, Lucy?”
“Not too many, as yet. Immediate family: first the husband, obviously. Says he was away at a conference over the weekend when his wife died.”
“Where?”
“Oxford.”
“Best part of two hundred miles south. Not easy to nip back for a quick spot of homicide.” Peach smiled his satisfaction. “There’s a sister. And a father.”
“What about a mother? And a mother-in-law?” Percy had a neutral view on mothers, but a traditional view of mothers-in-law as sources of conflict. His opinions were affected by eight years’ experience of a marriage which had ended in divorce.
Lucy shook her head. “There’s a stepmother. Verna Hume’s mother died almost twenty years ago, apparently. Her father has been re-married for the last ten of those.”
“Happily?” Percy made it sound as though that would be most unnatural.
“No idea. They live in Lytham St Annes.”
“No guarantee of happiness, that. George Formby lived there at one time.”
Lucy, who had barely heard of the legendary ukelele player and never of his egregious wife Beryl, did not follow the argument but was totally unfazed by that. “The sister is a younger one. Lives out beyond Clitheroe, I think. She’s doing the formal identification of the corpse today.”
“What about people outside the family?”
“Verna Hume was a successful businesswoman. Osborne Employment is her firm. There’s a Chief Executive who’s been with her for years.” Lucy looked at her notebook. “A Barbara Harris. She hasn’t been interviewed.”
“She will be. Soon. Unless Martin Hume can convince me of his guilt.” Peach jutted his chin out as if it was Blake and not the man in charge of Brunton CID who was frustrating him. But she was used to that.
“I gather from what the husband said when he was brought in that there might be a few other men you might wish to see in due course.”
“A few?”
“Apparently.”
“Drawer-dropper, was she? Hmm.” At one time, he might have added, ‘So she had it coming to her, did she?’ but a few dust-ups with his detective sergeant had brought him discretion in these matters. Discretion was not a quality he rated highly or exercised much, so that was a kind of compliment to DS Blake. “Any names?”
“Not yet. The scene-of-crime team is at the house now.”
“Anyone else? Burglars? Druggies? Rapists? Lancashire Rippers?”
“No one else as yet, sir. I haven’t been directly involved myself, of course. I just had a chat with DI Bancroft before he disappeared on his leave.”
“Knowing we’d be left to pick up the pieces this morning, you mean. You did right, girl. And now you shall be involved, Cinders shall go to the ball, even though Baron Hardup Peach is now in charge of arrangements for it.” Percy sprang up and made for the door. “We’ll start with the husband. Poor miserable sod.”
*
Sue Thompson moved into the low modern red-brick building as though walking through a dream. She had never been in a mortuary before and had no idea what to expect. The fact that it was a trim, quiet place, with a carpeted reception area and comfortable chairs, made the task she had taken on seem more unreal.
She realized that she had never even looked at a dead body before. She had been too young when her own mother died to go into the funeral parlor with the adults to see the corpse in its coffin. And when her grandparents and her uncles had died, she had excused herself from the contemplation of corpses with the heartfelt thought that she would rather remember people as they had been in life than as they lay in death. Yet now, it was she who had been chosen to come here to study a particular body, to inspect it carefully and determine for the official world that this was indeed Verna Hume, the sister with whom she had shared a room through the years of her adolescence, and whom she had watched for hours in front of the dressing-table mirror as she grew into a teenager and studied what seemed the incredibly sophisticated ways of her dark-haired and beautiful older sister.
Everyone around her was very understanding; she could feel them watching her for signs of distress. They had brought her here in a police car when she told them she had no transport of her own. Now a uniformed policewoman – she had said in the car that they were all just police constables now, but it would take Sue time to get used to that idea – stood discreetly beside her at the desk, ready to offer whatever support was needed. She was younger than Sue, probably ten years younger, but she seemed, in this place, immensely more experienced in the details of death.
They waited a moment until the word came that things were ready for them. Then they were conducted into a room which seemed to Sue all stainless steel. Verna Hume’s body was awaiting identification before being slid neatly away into its deep steel drawer among the other silent occupants. The mortuary assistant drew the sheet gently aside at a nod from the constable, and Sue saw Verna’s unmistakable face within two feet of her own.
The eyes were closed. Death had removed all strain from the features, and Sue saw the face again as it had looked when she had awakened early on summer mornings and gazed at the sixteen-year-old countenance, which had been so impossibly beautiful in the other narrow single bed beside hers. How dark the hair was! And how smooth the skin. Verna might have been sleeping now, had there been the soft rise and fall of breath beneath the sheet that was so still.
She looked serene and untroubled, like those pictures of saints Sue had seen in the Sunday school of her childhood. Sue was shaken by a sudden impulse to cry out that her sister had not been this saintly figure, that she had been cruel, even vicious. That the husband, who was now in prison because of her death was innocent. That the world would be a better place without this dangerous and calculating beauty.
Instead, she said, “That’s her. That’s my sister, Verna Hume.”
She was not conscious of getting back to the police car on the gravel outside; perhaps someone took her arm and led her there, but she did not remember it. As they drove her back to her house, she sat stiff and silent as a nun, staring unseeingly at the bright day and the lush greens of late spring. Slowly, she returned to a consciousness of the re
al world around her. But she remained deliberately, stiffly erect, and set her full lips in a resolute silence. The task of identification was over. Another step in the removal of Verna from her life had been achieved.
It would never do if these representatives of the law, who traveled with her, divined that in her mind she was singing with the joy of that release.
Eleven
To Martin Hume, the situation still did not seem real, even after he had spent a night in the cells.
Finding the wife he had planned to kill lying dead upon her bed had been shock enough. Then, when they had arrested him, he had had to fight an overwhelming impulse to laugh. The irony of the situation was rich, and the fact that only he appreciated that irony had made it almost impossible to contain his feeling that this was all some ridiculous dream, from which he would awaken in due course.
But the black farce was going on, even in the bright light of the day he had been allowed to glimpse as he was taken to an interview room. That square box with its dark-green walls, its single high fluorescent light, and its scratched table with the tape recorder, should have convinced him at last that this was not only reality but a dangerous reality, as far as he was concerned. Yet, he still found it difficult to take his peril seriously.
The man who came swiftly into the room might have been calculated to dispel any remaining illusions Martin had. He strutted in like a bantam cock, bristling aggression from every fiber of his short and muscular frame. Once through the doorway, he stopped abruptly; from just inside the room, he studied Martin without any attempt at dissimulation. This tableau of concentration could only have taken seconds, but it seemed to stretch for much longer. Then the man nodded and sat down in the chair on the other side of the table. Martin, who had half-risen to his feet in automatic politeness as the stranger entered the room, sank back onto his hard plastic chair and felt ridiculous.
“Detective Inspector Peach,” the newcomer said without preamble. He looked to Martin irresistibly like a small version of Oliver Hardy, with his toothbrush moustache, fringe of jet black hair around a bald pate, and expression of disgruntled malevolence. But there was no Stan Laurel lookalike to bring humor into the claustrophobic room. Instead, Peach said, “And this is Detective Sergeant Blake,” and Martin became aware that a woman had come into the tiny room behind Peach. A woman with dark-red hair and blue-green eyes, which studied him as curiously as Peach’s dark ones had done as she took her seat beside her senior colleague.
“Done your wife in, they tell me,” said Peach by way of conversational opening.
“They tell you wrong, then,” said Martin.
“Found in the house with the body. Relationship between the two of you not too good. Quite bad, in fact, I believe. No longer lovebirds.” Percy stretched the scanty information, which the police machine had so far gathered with practised ease, then shook his head sorrowfully.
“Doesn’t mean I killed her.” To his surprise, Martin found he enjoyed replying to the inspector in his own terse style.
“No. Quite right. Doesn’t look good for you though, does it? Many people have been convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, you know. Popular fallacy that you can’t be. Want a lawyer, do you? You’re entitled, you know. If you feel you need one.”
“Not at present, thank you.” Martin summoned what dignity he could muster and forced it into the words. It wasn’t easy, when they had taken away your tie and belt and emptied your pockets. It was surprising how much of your confidence departed with your possessions.
“So when did she die?” asked Peach, turning a box of matches which had appeared from nowhere over and over between his fingers.
Martin almost ventured a speculation about that, then realized that the question was a trap. He must be careful with this man. It wouldn’t do to let him know how much he had hated Verna, how much he had wanted her out of his way. He wondered what the man already knew about him.
He said, “Are you telling me you don’t know when she was killed? And yet you’re holding me on suspicion of murder?”
For a fleeting moment, Peach looked discomfited. Then he grinned for the first time, revealing that his upper canine teeth were missing from an otherwise perfect, very white set. His grin was not only unpretty: generations of Brunton criminals had found it positively disconcerting. He said, “Nice one, that. I can see why you think you don’t need a lawyer, Mr Hume.” He turned suddenly to the officer at his side. “That’s a good point Mr Hume makes. Why are we holding him, Sergeant Blake?”
Lucy, who had thought that Peach was no longer capable of surprising her, was caught off guard. “Well, Superintendent Tucker considered that there were reasonable grounds for an arrest. I’m sure—”
“Ah, yes. Superintendent Tucker, Mr Hume. Head of CID here. Very senior man, you see. Very experienced man. Clearly must have very good grounds for suspicion if he bangs you up so promptly, as I’m sure you’d agree. Wouldn’t do that unless he was pretty sure he had a case against you. You’d have grounds for complaint, you see, on the score of wrongful arrest, if he couldn’t justify the action he ordered. So I expect there must be more to this than meets my innocent little eye. I think you—”
“I didn’t do it.” Martin felt that if he didn’t arrest the flow of words from this squat little man it would sweep over him, drowning his judgment and his capacity for independent thought.
His interruption at least stopped Peach. But it brought another of his pauses for study of the face opposite him, which were so disconcerting to the subject of his scrutiny. And another of his smiles, which was worse.
“So convince me,” said Percy Peach.
“I don’t know when Verna died. And you won’t tell me.” Peach beamed blandly at him; his mouth seemed wider and his teeth whiter than ever. He was certainly not going to admit that he didn’t know yet. Martin pressed on. “But I was away for the whole of the weekend.”
“Ah! Where?”
“In Oxford. At a conference on Investment Planning. Attended by almost a hundred accountants.”
Peach winced visibly at the thought, as if a convocation of crocodiles had swum before his vision. “You mean a hundred bloodsuckers can bear witness to the fact that you were somewhere else at the time of your wife’s death? We may have to ask one or two of them to do just that, in due course. Where was this gathering of financial wizards, Mr Hume?”
“At the Radley Arms Hotel in Oxford. Over two hundred miles south. I measured it on the milometer of my car when I drove back on Sunday night.” Martin found it difficult to keep a note of triumph out of his voice.
Peach too found the thought satisfying. It looked more and more as if Tommy Tucker had made a right arse of this one. But his instincts would not allow him to foster any complacency in his present victim.
“Just the right distance to allow a convincing alibi, I’d say. But wait a minute: if you left at midnight on Saturday, when all your fellow accountants should have been tucked up in their virtuous beds and expecting you to be in yours, you could have been back in Brunton by three in the morning. Ten minutes at the outside to smother an unsuspecting wife. Then three hours back, on an empty M6 and M40. Time for a stop and a snack on the way if you wanted, and still be back in your bed before the randier lads were back in their own rooms.”
Martin grinned a sickly grin back at Peach’s broad one. “It’s hardly likely, is it?”
“On the contrary, lad, that and more has been done. Chap drove from further south than Oxford to Wastwater in the Lake District and back one night a few years ago. Dumped his wife’s body in the lake in a plastic bag and hightailed it back south. Well over six hundred miles, that was. Very nearly got away with it, too. It was years before he was arrested. Whereas you’re safely inside straight away, thanks to our vigilant Superintendent Tucker.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Martin insisted weakly.
“So you say.”
“And it was I who reported Verna’s death.”
“Yes
. Convincing touch that. Just as it would have been if you had really returned all unsuspecting on Sunday night and found your wife lying dead.”
“No, Inspector! Just as it was.” Martin was suddenly enraged by this aggressive little man who delighted in his murky allegations. “What I’ve told you is exactly what happened. Now you prove it wasn’t.”
“I’m just doing my job, Mr Hume. There’s nothing in the regulations to say I shouldn’t enjoy it, you know.” Peach flipped his matchbox a few inches into the air, caught it expertly between his thumb and first finger, and made it disappear as abruptly as it had arrived.
Martin wondered afterwards if it was some sort of sign. For the girl, who had not spoken, whom he had almost forgotten during the minutes of his torment by Peach, now leant earnestly forward and said apologetically, “Forgive me, Mr Hume, but you hardly seem to be devastated with grief by your wife’s death. Would you tell us about your relationship with her, please?”
Martin had known this must come at some stage, but he found himself unready for it, nevertheless. His composure had been shattered by this bald turkey-cock of an inspector who had arrived so abruptly upon the scene. “Is this really necessary? Surely my—”
“I’m afraid it is, yes. Unless you’re going to confess, of course. Because if you really didn’t kill Mrs Hume, we shall have to find out who did. And the way we work is to build up as full a picture as possible of the deceased and her relationships with those around her, you see.” Lucy Blake was as patient and low-key as a social worker explaining to an old person what was going to happen, or as a doctor explaining the process of a fatal illness, thought Martin with sudden apprehension. He began to wonder if he needed that lawyer, after all.
He deliberated for a moment whether he should refuse to speak. Or whether he should pretend that all had been better with
Verna than it really had been. But that wouldn’t work. They were going to go and talk to other people about this, weren’t they? Shouldn’t he encourage them to do that, since he wasn’t guilty?