To Kill a Wife (Inspector Peach Series Book 3)

by J M Gregson

  The pause stretched so long that Lucy Blake said gently, “Mr Hume? You understand why we need to ask about these things?”

  “Yes.” Martin found that his throat was suddenly and ridiculously dry, when he wanted to be at his most assertive. “Verna and I didn’t – well, we weren’t close.” He looked up at the two expectant faces, the one concerned, the other ghoulishly gratified, and said suddenly, “We didn’t sleep together. Had separate rooms.”

  “I see.” DS Blake was low-key and sympathetic; Martin did not dare look at Peach. “Do you have a serious sexual relationship with anyone else, Mr Hume?”

  Martin thought of his wonderful, fair-haired Sue. Of the marriage they had planned when he had got rid of Verna. Of the marriage they would still have, when this nightmare was over. And he thrust from his mind, the canker that had eaten its way into his brain during the long hours of solitary darkness in his cell: the thought that Sue might have done this, might have killed her own sister to release him from her.

  He drew in a long, slow breath. “No,” he said. “No, I haven’t got a serious relationship with anyone else.”

  He felt like Peter denying his Christ in the market place. But he was only trying to protect Sue, wasn’t he? To keep her and Toby out of this awful business, until the real killer was discovered.

  Rather to his surprise, they didn’t press him further about the matter. Instead, Peach said abruptly, “Resented that, did you? That you weren’t sleeping with your wife, I mean.”

  Martin felt more composed, now that they weren’t grilling him about his feelings for Sue. “I suppose I did,” he said carefully. “But if you mean did I resent it enough to kill her for it, no. Sorry to disappoint you, but I got over any jealousy about the way Verna went on years ago.”

  “Went on, did she? With other men, I suppose.” You could never tell which sex was involved, these days. Terrible world we live in, in Percy Peach’s opinion. Lots of work for policemen, though.

  “She did, yes. But I couldn’t tell you who they were. I’d lost interest in what she did, years ago.”

  Percy didn’t believe that. But you could never tell. He said, “We’ll need to investigate them. They might be involved.”

  Martin saw a chance to score a small point of his own in this contest. “You accept that I didn’t kill her, then?”

  “Not at all, Mr Hume. Not yet, anyway. But we’re always anxious to see justice done. No stone unturned to discover the whole truth, and all that.”

  “So are you going to let me out of here?”

  “Might do, later. When we’ve checked out one or two things. That will be up to Superintendent Tucker, of course. He was the one who thought there was enough evidence to put you in here, you see.” Peach smiled his satisfaction. “Must go, now, Mr Hume. See what the scene-of-crime team has turned up at your house.” He rose. “Interview terminated at nine fifty-nine,” he said into the microphone, and switched off the recorder.

  He led his detective sergeant back to the safety of his own room and shut the door carefully behind them. Lucy Blake said, “You don’t believe all that nonsense about him driving back through the night from Oxford.”

  “Course not,” said Peach delightedly. “That bloke didn’t kill her. Tommy Bloody Tucker has shot himself right up the arse this time. And I hope Hume sues him for wrongful arrest!”

  He exploded into laughter at the thought.

  Twelve

  “Got a confession out of him, did you?” asked Superintendent Tucker.

  “No, sir. Afraid not. Your Mr Hume was unwilling to cooperate, I’m afraid.” Percy Peach was as inscrutable as the Chinamen he had read about in his school days.

  Tucker felt his first wave of uncertainty. Peach should have been groveling by now in the face of his chiefs efficiency, yet he seemed distressingly unmoved by any sign of envy. Tommy Tucker peered suspiciously at his detective inspector. “Gave him your customary third degree, did you, Percy?”

  Peach smiled, and Tucker’s disquiet increased with the sight. “You will have your little joke, sir. Helps to maintain the CID section’s sense of proportion, your sense of humor does. I questioned Martin Hume with my usual thoroughness, yes, sir. Offered him a lawyer of course, but he said he didn’t require one. Seemed quite confident of his innocence, in fact, even when DS Blake and I pressed him hard. Putting up a front, I suppose. But I must say it was quite a good one. I was glad you were so confident of his guilt, or I might have begun to have my own doubts.”

  “Yes. I see. Well, it’s only a matter of time. If Martin Hume won’t confess to killing his wife, we’ll just have to find more evidence and confront him with it.”

  “My sentiments exactly, sir. I believe I gave him to understand just that. I expect the scene-of-crime team have got some juicy stuff ready for us, have they?”

  Tucker shifted uneasily; the leather seat of his directorial chair seemed suddenly uncomfortably hot against his executive buttocks. “Scene-of-crime team are at the house at the moment, as a matter of fact. Moved in this morning. Well, there didn’t seem any great hurry yesterday for them: I thought the bugger would have confessed by last night.”

  Hoped he would have, you mean, thought Peach. So that you could have confronted me this morning with a completed case and shown how clever you are without me. Instead of which, Tommy Bloody Tucker, you’ve got a man who says he’s innocent, and no SOC team findings to support his arrest. Ho ho ho.

  Percy raised his dark eyebrows no more than a couple of millimeters towards the wrinkles of his white forehead to register his surprise at this irregularity in police procedure. Tucker squirmed again. The superintendent had got to his exalted position through keeping his nose clean and playing things by the book. These were the cardinal virtues to Tucker, and he had often had cause to rebuke the ebullient Peach for ignoring them.

  Now here was his DI underlining his own failure to observe sacred police protocol in his haste to secure an arrest. There was a pause which stretched for several seconds, as the enormity of his omission swelled in Tucker’s vision into a dark balloon above Percy Peach’s impassive head. Then, as Tucker’s throat struggled at last into sound, Peach said with impeccable timing, “You know best, as always, sir. But I think I’ll just go over to the house and seen how the SOC team is getting on. With your permission, of course, sir.”

  “Yes. Do that. Right away, please.” Tucker tried to rap out the orders briskly, as if it was Peach and not he who had been at fault in not dispatching the SOC team more promptly.

  Peach stood up unhurriedly. “Pity I wasn’t here yesterday, sir.”

  Tucker, who yesterday had been delighted by his absence, squirmed anew as he found himself agreeing with the sentiment.

  *

  Lucy Blake was a good driver. That had been another prejudice which Peach had been forced to abandon early in their association.

  She drove without haste through the tree-lined avenues, which led to the house where Verna Hume had died, while Percy tried not to observe the movements of her shapely nylon-sheathed knees. Plain clothes had always seemed a contradiction in terms for him, in the case of female personnel.

  This was the west end of Brunton, the area where the owners and managers of the mills had built their solid Victorian and Edwardian mansions, in the great days of King Cotton. The burghers had built a municipal park of which they and the town could be proud. It had a row of bronze cannons on the highest of its terraces, from which the grimy panorama might be surveyed in all of its industrial might; it had green slopes where infants might escape from the dark streets to play; it had a broad lake where toddlers could feed ducks and swans, and a stream which tumbled down from the lake to a place of fountains and stone lions with water issuing from their jaws. The Victorian planners had set within their park a broad gravel walk, where people of all classes could saunter in their Sunday best and the world might view its neighbor. The citizens of Brunton could pretend, on the one day when the scores of chimneys in the town below
them did not belch their smoke, that they wandered in some English Florence. Or at least in Hyde Park.

  By Percy Peach’s time, the grand days of the park were long gone. The red squirrels had given way to the ubiquitous grays in the willows by the lake. You were more likely to find litter than parasols among the chestnuts, which lined the Broad Walk, more likely to find used contraceptives than Sunday finery among the straggling rhododendrons. The park was no longer a place to stroll at twilight, unless you went there in search of forbidden substances.

  But the houses in the quiet roads around the park, where horses and carriages had once trundled over the wide gravel drives, were still thought highly desirable. Although some of the largest ones had been converted to flats, most of these solid residences had been modernized and preserved. There were increasingly complex security systems built into them, of course, but it was now fashionable to preserve those very turn-of-the-century features which had been anathema to the interior designers of the fifties and sixties. Victoriana flourished anew instead of hiding its head.

  Wycherly Croft, the house where Martin and Verna Hume had carried on their strange existence over the last few years was at the end of a lengthy cul-de-sac. Here the purple of the Rhododendron ponticum, which flourished on Brunton’s clay soils had generally been replaced by expensive modern varieties of the same shrub, which now formed an avenue of pink, white and crimson as the police car rolled slowly to its goal.

  Sergeant Jim Burke looked up briefly from his work and greeted DI Peach. He had plainly been expecting him. Burke was a man of forty who looked ten years older. He had headed many a SOC team over the last eight years. He knew what to look for, and it was an advantage to have a man who could be trusted to organize the first, highly important stages of any investigation without supervision.

  “Should have been here yesterday, by rights, Percy,” he grumbled. Burke was a good grumbler, and in the modern police force you had to play to your strengths.

  “So why weren’t you?” asked Peach.

  “Day off. Like you. Work just piles up while you’re away,” Burke said gloomily.

  So that explained why Tucker had delayed the SOC investigation. Without the reliability of Burke, he might have had to do some work himself – even if it had only extended to selecting a different team to undertake the work.

  “Photographer finished?” asked Peach.

  “Yes. He was in before they moved the body, of course. Which is when we should have been here.” Burke watched his two constables moving on all fours over the floor of the bedroom where the body had lain, picking up hairs, fibers, anything which might suggest a presence other than the victim’s. “The bedlinen’s all gone off to forensic.”

  “Did you spot anything significant on it?”

  Burke shook his head gloomily. He knew what Peach meant. Any traces of semen might have indicated a crime of passion. An intruder, perhaps. Something salacious to get your police dentures into, anyway. And something to indicate that Tommy Bloody Tucker had been barking up entirely the wrong tree in arresting Martin Hume. Both of them would have liked that. Burke was as bolshy as Peach beneath his lugubrious exterior. But not so brave, nor so good with words, so that he rarely confronted Tucker directly.

  Lucy Blake wandered into the dressing room next door to the bedroom. It was always interesting to know what another woman kept in her cosmetics cupboard, and Verna Hume had used an impressive array of implements in the fight against the advancing years. Thirty-five, she had been, apparently. To Lucy, who was almost a decade younger, that was early middle age. All these tubes and bottles, these depilatories and mascaras and powders, which made cosmetics the most lucrative of contemporary crafts, were useless now to that flesh which lay preserved in the frigidity of the mortuary, waiting until the law determined that it could be burned or buried.

  Lucy smiled at the female constable who had been tabulating the contents of this tiny room, “Anything unusual?”

  The girl hesitated. She was a probationer constable; a CID sergeant seemed to her impossibly far up the hierarchy, so that she was afraid of saying the wrong thing. The pleasant freckled face confronting her, divined more than she knew of her uncertainty, gave her another encouraging smile, and the girl said, “Nothing that seems very significant in the bathroom or the dressing room. But we did find something in the top drawer of the dressing table which I think might be important.”

  She handed over a small, blue-backed book with a tiny metal ballpoint pen in its spine. A diary, obviously. Lucy flicked quickly through the pages. There were entries on most of the days, the majority of them just initials and times. But the single name ‘Hugh’ recurred on several pages, sometimes without a time against it, sometimes with one. The only complete name she found was against 2.30 on a Tuesday afternoon. ‘Richard Johnson’ was written in a neat, easily legible hand. Looking more closely at the subsequent weeks, she found ‘R.J.’ recurring four times in all.

  It was something, perhaps. Two names to add to those they had already listed from the family.

  Thirteen

  The pathologist still wore his rubber boots when he spoke to Percy Peach. He had removed his cotton cap and the microphone into which he had spoken softly of his findings in the hour during which he had cut the corpse and investigated the organs of the late Verna Hume. He had washed his hands, Percy was pleased to note. But in the room beside them, the water still ran over the stainless steel, washing away the detritus of scientific investigation, removing the blood and gore which had issued from what was now no more than human meat.

  “Straightforward enough, to my mind,” said Doctor Binns. He was a tall, lean man, with the beginnings of a tall man’s stoop, although he was only forty-one. Like many people of his calling, he was resolutely cheerful about death and its consequences. Perhaps he compensated for the strains of what most laymen considered a grisly occupation with this graveyard humor. The dead were gone; no one could touch them now. One had to consider the feelings of relatives, but there was no need to put up false fronts for anyone else.

  “She was smothered?”

  “Asphyxiated. Quickly and efficiently. Almost certainly by means of the pillow found beside her. Forensic will confirm that in due course, but I have no doubt of it. There were traces of saliva and lipstick in the center of it.”

  “So a woman could have done it?”

  “Certainly. Very little strength needed, once you have the victim lying flat on her back and the pillow in position over her face. Quite a preferred method among females, in fact, over the last few years. But that would include a few so-called mercy killings, of course.”

  “When?”

  “Ah, the perennial CID enquiry!” Binns seemed almost disappointed to have to release what would no doubt be useful information. “At least twenty-four hours before her husband reported the death on Sunday night. Probably rather longer than that.”

  “So she was killed some time on the Saturday.”

  “Almost certainly on late Saturday afternoon or evening, I’d say. I don’t think a medical witness for the defence would dispute that, though he might if I tried to be more precise.”

  “Right.” So Martin Hume was in the clear; he could surely demonstrate that he was in Oxford with his fellow course members at the time of his wife’s death. In a perfect Peach world, Hume would sue Tommy Bloody Tucker for wrongful arrest. But Percy had learnt long ago that the world rarely revolved to his command. “What else?”

  Mark Binns sighed. “Not a lot. She’d had a light meal not long before she died. Perhaps two to three hours earlier.”

  “Any recent sexual activity?”

  “Not immediately before death. No traces of semen in the vaginal area. But she was sexually active. Plenty of rumpety in the last few months, I should say.”

  “Not with her husband, there wasn’t. Not according to what he told us this morning, anyway.”

  Mark Binns shrugged his high shoulders. “Cherchez I’homme, Inspector. It doesn�
��t have quite the same ring as Cherchez la femme, does it?”

  Peach was thoughtful as he left his cheerful scientific colleague. A killing that might have been accomplished by another woman. A victim who had been putting it about a bit with lover or lovers in the months before her death. There was going to be something for a keen DI and his team to get their teeth into here, once he had released Martin Hume and told Tucker all about it.

  *

  Derek Osborne had seemed relieved to hear of his daughter’s death. Alice had been secretly shocked to see how little he grieved for her, how contented he seemed to be after the policewoman who came with the news of her death had left them.

  She could read her Derek like a book, she told her friends, and she was proud of it. They had no secrets from each other; or rather she had always thought that was the case. Recently, she had been less sure of it. And it was when that beautiful witch of a daughter was around, or even in his thoughts, that the barriers went up and she felt he was concealing things from her.

  So Alice Osborne had rejoiced when that sinister presence had been so abruptly removed from their lives. She had felt guilty, because Verna was Derek’s daughter, and she had stood behind her husband’s chair with her arms around his shoulders when the young policewoman had gone, leaving the two of them alone with the knowledge of this death.

  But she had known within two minutes that Derek was elated rather than stricken by the news, which had been brought into the neat little bungalow. She had stood with her chin on the top of his head, looking through the big window of the lounge at what he saw, at the white horses on the breezy, distant sea. She had felt relief, not pain, flowing through the quietness of his chest and arms as the two of them had stayed wordless for a few minutes. And when she had whispered softly, “You’re better without her, love, really you are!” Derek had not made even a token protest of his grief.