by J M Gregson
Barbara was suddenly annoyed with these people who came on to her own ground and asked her about things no one else would have dared to raise with her. “Look. I can’t see how this can possibly have anything to do with Verna’s death. It’s my business, and no one—”
“Possibly. Possibly not.” Peach enjoyed interrupting her, relished the opportunity to do a little bullying. He was at his least likeable in these circumstances, thought Lucy, as she watched him from the corner of her eye, but possibly also at his most effective. “We shall find out in due course whether it’s our business or not, Mrs Harris. Verna Hume has been callously murdered, by person or persons unknown – for the moment. If it’s not to remain that way, we need to find out as much as we can about her relationships with everyone around her. You knew her better than most, as you’ve already admitted.”
Barbara took a sip of her tea, watching her hands, surprised that they still moved so competently. She felt at the moment as if they belonged to someone else and were directed by some brain other than her own. She said, “I heard you’d arrested Martin Hume.”
“Yes. And now we’ve released him. He didn’t kill his wife, Mrs Harris. Were you hoping he had?”
“No. Well, I sort of assumed…”
“It would have made things simpler for everyone, wouldn’t it? Us most of all. We wouldn’t need to be sitting here prying into your feelings about your dead partner, for a start.”
“She wasn’t my partner.” Barbara stared into her half-empty cup, holding the saucer tightly in both hands, glad to have something that would anchor them as she threw away her plans for concealment. “I know I said she was, but she wasn’t. Not now. She was until five years ago. That was when the firm was Harris and Osborne.”
“It changed after your husband died?”
“Yes. Verna lent me money to tide me over a difficult time. Said I could pay it back when it suited. I paid it all back, but she’d taken over the firm, legally, and she wouldn’t let me back in.”
“Awkward.”
She flashed Peach a look of hatred for the word, then controlled herself. “More than awkward as far as I was concerned. I was left working as Chief Executive – a well-paid employee of the firm I had set up with Verna and worked all hours God sends and a few more to develop.”
“And that was still the situation at the time of Mrs Hume’s death?”
“Yes. She wouldn’t budge.”
Barbara thought of the blazing row she had had with Verna on the day before she had died, of the way the girls in the outer office had looked at her afterwards, of her certainty that they had heard the raised voices and the high passions in this very room. The girls knew, and if they were questioned by this awful, persistent man and his attentive sergeant, they would tell. So there was no point in trying to conceal that dispute.
Barbara forced herself to speak of it. “As a matter of fact, we had a serious disagreement about it on the day before Verna died.”
“Really. And how do you know that Verna Hume died on that Saturday, Mrs Harris?” Peach’s tone was quiet, polite, deadly accurate.
“I – I don’t. I should have said just before the weekend when she died. I was upset. I was preoccupied with the row I had with Verna. You must see…” She stopped, aware that she was saying too much, that there was nothing she could do now to retrieve the blunder she had made, that the two near-black eyes and the two ultramarine ones were studying her stumblings with an analytical interest.
They allowed the pause to stretch in the quiet room; the noise of a car horn on the other side of the building came to them unnaturally loudly through the double glazing. Lucy Blake thought that these silences in interrogations, when confused people willed them to speak, were almost the cruellest thing they did. But detection fed on confusion, and Peach had taught her to foster it whenever it appeared.
Peach eventually said, “All right. Let’s get back to this ‘serious disagreement’. What exactly was it about, Mrs Harris?”
“About the company. About the partnership issue. Verna told me when she lent me the money that I could buy back into the firm whenever I was ready. Last Friday, she refused to honor that agreement.” Barbara’s tone was even, exhausted. She wanted to get the facts about this out and have done with it. She tried to speak evenly; she was aware even in her distress that it would be as well to conceal what she could of her burning sense of grievance.
“That must have made you very angry.”
She flashed him a bitter smile, a recognition that he had pinpointed what she had sought to hide. “Yes. Of course it did. I was very angry. And very frustrated. Because we’d never written anything down about it. I knew I had nothing to fall back on, if she chose to deny me what she had promised at the time of Michael’s death.”
“So you parted on bad terms?”
“Very bad.”
They paused again, waiting to see whether she would offer any more. Then Lucy Blake said quietly, “We shall need an account of your movements over the weekend. Can you start by telling us where you were on Saturday afternoon and evening, please?”
“I was on my own at home. I live alone. I do see a man fairly regularly, but not on Saturdays.” She looked up at them with a bitter little smile. “He’s married, you see, with a family.” And now he can’t even provide me with an alibi for this, she thought. She could picture the apprehension on his face at the very thought of any involvement in a murder inquiry.
Barbara watched Lucy Blake record the information in a neat, swift hand in a small notebook. She used a small gold ballpoint pen, a surprisingly decorative and female touch amid all this police efficiency.
Barbara, drawn by the silence to speak when she had never meant to, asked, “Is that when Verna died?”
“We think so. You appeared to think so yourself, a little while ago.” Peach smiled a predatory smile at her, returning briskly to the attack after the softer female tones of his partner. “If you think of anyone who could confirm your whereabouts at that time, it would be in your interests as well as ours to let us know about it.” He flashed her a brief, mirthless smile. “Assuming, of course, that you didn’t go round to Mrs Hume’s house and kill her.”
“No. I didn’t do that. Even though on Friday I would have liked her to disappear from my life for ever.”
“Then you must help us to find who did kill her. By definition, a murder victim must have at least one serious enemy. Most people have more. We should like help from you with some names.”
Barbara had given up smoking ten years and more ago. Now, for the first time in many years, she found herself longing for a cigarette, for the long, slow inhaling, which would draw the smoke and the drug into her lungs, settling her nerves and her brain which raced too fast within her head. She looked down at her fingers, imagining the slow curl of smoke at the end of a freshly lit Benson and Hedges, even twitching the first two fingers of her right hand as if they held that solace. “Verna Hume had plenty of enemies, Inspector Peach.”
He was surprised she had remembered his name: most people didn’t, under stress. Part of her job, he supposed; but it showed her mind was still working hard. “We need to know about them, Mrs Harris. In confidence, of course. And as you’d expect, we shall be asking the same question of other people we see.”
Barbara shrugged her elegant shoulders. “You make enemies in this business, inevitably. People are unrealistic about their own abilities: they think you should have got them jobs which were way beyond their range. But no one resented things enough to kill Venia, I’m sure.” Except me, she thought, except me, whom Verna cheated out of the business which had been our whole life.
Peach, who was considering exactly the same thought, said, “What about her life outside the firm? Her husband has already told us there were other men.”
“There were.” Even now, even with herself as a suspect and owing the woman no favors, she found it difficult to talk about Verna and her men. Some vague feminine code seemed to make it more
difficult for her than if she had been speculating about a man and his mistresses. “Verna had lots of men. Seemed almost to need a succession of them, as if she was proving something to herself.”
Peach said, deliberately provocatively, “We need names, not psychology, Mrs Harris. The more time that elapses after a murder, the less likely we are to find the killer. And people who have killed once and got away with it often feel bold enough to murder again.”
That usually got them going, hastened things along a bit. Especially when the first murder victim had been a woman. Percy watched with satisfaction the sharp intake of breath beneath Barbara Harris’s expensively brassiered breasts.
“Most of them I didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. Verna kept business and pleasure strictly apart, and that suited both of us. But there seems to have been one particular man in the last month or two. Almost for the first time, really, I began to think there might be something serious and long-term in it.”
Lucy Blake gripped the gold ballpoint point. “We need a name, please.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the surname. But I think his first name was Hugh.”
It was the second time that mysterious mono-syllable of a name had been recorded in DS Blake’s book.
Fifteen
“Golf is a bloody stupid game!” shouted Percy Peach. He shouted it vehemently, but to no one in particular. None of his companions troubled to deny such a self-evident fact. Percy glared at his ball, contemplated the distant green, and perpetrated a shot, which sliced extravagantly to the right and confirmed his opinion. “Golf is a BLOODY STUPID game!”
Yet, he delivered the thought with less than his normal vehemence, and trudged into the rough to seek his ball quite philosophically. The North Lancashire Golf Club, with its views over the Ribble Valley and its distant prospects of Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent, was not a bad place to be on a balmy summer evening after a trying day. Indeed, if pressed hard enough, Peach, who was not given to overstatement, would have confessed that he thought there were few better places to be in the whole world. And if his golf was bad, he could always remind himself that the North Lancs had shown the good taste to reject Tommy Bloody Tucker’s application for membership.
Nevertheless, Percy felt it was a pity he had to spoil the peace and the panorama with such execrable golf. The feet which had once danced down cricket pitches so effectively, which had on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion put him in position to hook the fearsome Curtley Ambrose for four, now only got him into trouble at golf. In this silly game, his feet had to remain rooted to the earth while the whole of the rest of his body moved. His left heel kept lifting from the ground on his backswing, despite his best efforts, so that he lost control of his swing path in returning it to base, just as the pro had told him he would. Stupid game. BLOODY STUPID game. Sod it.
Then, as he swung a five-iron without hope or preparation, everything magically and mysteriously came together. The golf ball which had been so maddeningly wayward sprang away from the clubhead so smoothly that he hardly felt it. It was effortless, akin to the sensation he had previously enjoyed only on those rare occasions when he had lifted a cricket ball out of the ground off the very middle of his bat.
The small white ball soared high against an azure sky, then hung there for so long that it seemed the action had moved into slow motion. When it finally descended, it plummeted softly to earth on the emerald carpet beyond the greenside bunker. Percy studied its position by the distant flagstick for a stupefied moment. “Bloody ‘ell!” he muttered softly to himself.
“Bloody ‘ell, Percy!” shouted his partner appreciatively from the other side of the fairway. Peach waved a modest, self-deprecatory acknowledgement, trying to convey in the gesture that this was his normal game, despite all previous evidence to the contrary. Two minutes later, he holed the putt for a most unlikely four, and the world was suddenly a perfect place. Then, with three wins and a half on the last four holes, the rejuvenated Peach and his partner halved a match which had seemed irretrievably lost.
In that last hour of summer daylight, Percy walked on air in a perfect male world. The cares of work and the complications of personal relationships alike dropped away as he concentrated on his game and enjoyed the view to Longridge Fell, over fields and hamlets which might have been set out as a background for Gray’s elegy. Here, there was no need to worry about the disturbing Lucy Blake; about the personal complications which were impinging upon a working relationship; about making a fool of himself with an attractive woman ten years younger than he was; about the tenderness which could so easily compromise his steely image.
The figures who moved beside him were indisputably male, middle-aged and undesirable. They had that indefinable scruffiness, which overtakes men towards the end of a round of golf, that boyish capacity to devote themselves to things which are essentially unimportant as if the whole world depended upon them. As his companions walked ahead of him with their trolleys, they were reassuringly without grace in both form and movement. Percy was free of that disturbing curve of Lucy’s perfectly rounded and engagingly mobile rear, which impaired his concentration by day and agitated his dreams by night.
The North Lancs still had a men’s bar, so that the male ambience, which Percy had found such an uncomplicated comfort could be preserved after the golf was over. The four sat at their own table, indulged in hilarious exchanges about the game they had just completed, and reviewed their performances with a robust humor which women might have thought cruel. After the first two pints, the conversation began to seem a model of wit and invention.
As the twilight dropped into darkness beyond the windows, the men’s bar emptied and there was much noisy leave-taking. Peach’s four-ball had been the last one in, and presently there remained only one other group in the bar with them. It was a larger one than theirs: eight men clustered around a table at the other end of the small room with its red leather chairs, swapping jokes and reminiscences.
As the anecdotes dried up, they moved on to local topics. Percy Peach kept his end up in the conversation at his own table, but his alert policeman’s ear picked out scraps of what was happening at the other end of the room.
“You knew the woman, didn’t you, Hugh?” asked a young man in a Pringle sweater, speaking more loudly than he realized.
“I did, yes,” said the blond man he addressed. He had been dominating the group; now he spoke more quietly. His apprehensive glance at Peach’s table revealed more than he knew.
“Bet you had ‘er knickers off, then!” said the voluble one. He was the youngest one in a group who were all under forty, wanting to be laddish with the rest and yet unsure of himself. He sniggered at his companions in a way which was meant to be wholly complimentary to the man he addressed. Sexual conquests were the surest mark of status in this company.
“Leave it, Matt,” the fair-haired man said urgently. He snatched another nervous glance at the only other occupied table in the bar. “The woman’s dead, isn’t she?”
This vague attempt to appeal to the good taste of a drunken man was unsuccessful: Matt gaped at him uncomprehendingly. Nor did it save Hugh from the intervention he feared. Percy Peach was at the speaker’s side as he looked up.
“We’re talking about Verna Hume, aren’t we?” he said quietly.
The fair-haired man looked up, simulating a calmness he no longer felt and anxious to preserve the stance he had always adopted within the group. “We aren’t talking about anyone,” he said, insolently. “I wasn’t aware that anyone had asked you to join in our private conversation. Of course, if—”
“Your name Hugh?”
“Yes, it is. Not that that’s any business of—”
“Detective Inspector Peach. We need to talk.”
The man smiled. He had a complete set of expensively dentured teeth and an elaborate haircut. Percy had neither, and both were red rags to his bullish advance. He thought the copious yellow hair beneath him might even be permed, though he disdained any e
xpertise in such things.
Now the man glanced at the steward, who was watching them from behind the bar, and tried to assert himself. “We don’t talk in here, especially to PC Plods. This is a golf club, Mr Peach, where we come to relax. We don’t like people who bring business here. Especially business like yours. I don’t—”
“Quite right, too. Your place or mine, sunshine?”
Hugh put his hands on the edge of the small round table in front of him, feeling his way carefully among the empty glasses. He was intensely conscious of his image among the men around him, who were suddenly silent after all their noisy hilarity.
“Well, I’m certainly not coming to Brunton Police Station. I shall be at my place of work, Pearson Electronics, tomorrow morning as usual, but you should be warned that I’ve no intention of—”
“Right. I’ll be there at eight thirty. Look forward to hearing what you have to tell us. Murder inquiry it is. You’d best be frank, sunshine, if you know what’s good for you.”
Percy was back at his table, smiling his satisfaction, almost before his three companions realized he had been away.
*
PC Darren Wall was trying hard to look alert and in control. You never knew who was watching you. That was the trouble with being in uniform. You had to keep up the image of the force with the public at all times, as they told the rows of rash young faces at training school. Smart. Vigilant. Confident, without being arrogant. In control, without being aggressive. What a load of bollocks.
As the warm summer darkness cloaked his actions, Darren moved into a gateway between two cypresses and tugged at his boxer shorts; they had been riding up as usual beneath his black uniform trousers. They told you all those other things at training school, but never mentioned the effect of police trousers upon boxer shorts.
He looked up at the quiet houses, where bedroom lights were beginning to go on behind the curtains as people prepared for bed. Not much chance of anything happening around here to enable a young constable to make his name. (At nineteen, PC Wall was still young enough to think in these terms, like a reporter looking for a scoop.) There was always the possibility of a burglary in these big houses near the park, he supposed, but there wasn’t much chance of glory, even in that. Burglary was too common a crime to carry any glamor these days, and you had to radio in for assistance; that was the official procedure. And a right prat you could look then, if you brought out a carful of police muscle to pick up some pimply unemployed school-leaver who was just trying his luck in an empty house.