by J M Gregson
Peach looked at her, watching the small hand rise to her face and try to brush away a tress of hair that had never strayed forward, and felt a little surge of excitement as he saw the cracks in her composure. He allowed a slow-burning smile to cross his lips beneath the black moustache, until he looked to her more than ever like a sixteenth-century torturer. “So you hated your sister. And she had the one thing you wanted – her husband. Did you kill her, Mrs Thompson?”
Sue heard a rasp of breath; it was a full second before she realized that it was her own. She had known this would be an issue, but she had not expected such directness as this man Peach was using. She was rattled now, but she was obscurely aware that he might have wanted that.
“No. Of course I didn’t kill Verna, any more than Martin did. She wasn’t going to make life easy for us, but we’d have beaten her, in the end. It would have taken a little longer, that’s all.”
Lucy Blake remembered reading somewhere that murderers were often people in a hurry. Impatience overrode logic and led to rash actions. And this woman had confessed to hate of the victim and love for her husband: both emotions that could lead to violence.
Trying to calm the resentment which she felt building in the woman on the other side of the table, Lucy said, “All right, Sue. You’re saying you didn’t like her but you didn’t kill her. You may not be surprised to know that we’ve had similar statements from other people. We shall need to know where you were last Saturday night, though. You can see that.”
“Yes. I was at the cinema in Brunton. The Rialto.”
They hadn’t expected that. They obviously thought that all single mothers should be at home with their children, Sue thought. She did not know that it was the classic weak alibi of those who had been where they should not have been at the time of a crime. Peach gave her the slightest and most sardonic of his repertoire of smiles: she felt that it should be a warning to her, but she was not sure of what.
He asked, “Alone?”
“No. I had a woman friend with me.” Against her inclination, she began to give explanations. “I’m in a baby-sitting circle, you see. We all have young children. I’ve built up quite a lot of credits, because when Toby was smaller I used to take him with me in his carry-cot. I still take him with me to other houses, sometimes, if I’m getting a lift home in a car: he goes off to sleep anywhere, so long as I’m with him.”
She smiled a little of her pride in the relationship with her son, wanting them to comment, to arrest the flow of her words, because she knew she was speaking too much. Neither of them did and she was compelled to go on. “Well, I haven’t had many places I wanted to go to myself, in the last few years. I’ve only begun to use my credits up since I met Martin.” Again, she found she was asserting this new presence in her life, when she had not meant to call attention to it.
“And what is the name of the woman who was with you at the cinema on Saturday night?” asked Lucy, quietly.
“Margaret Ashton. She’ll confirm it, if it should be necessary.”
“It will be,” said Peach, grimly. He looked at her dispassionately for a few seconds, then said, “If you didn’t kill your sister, who did, do you think?”
Sue managed a smile, though her heart was racing. They were going to let her go soon, she felt sure. But she mustn’t overplay it, mustn’t make any mistakes in the excitement of her relief. “Isn’t that for you to find out, Inspector Peach?”
His smile was broader than hers, but completely without mirth. “Detection is our job, yes. It’s also the duty of the public to give us every assistance. We shall check your story of course, Mrs Thompson. Just as thoroughly as we are checking those of anyone else who had dealings with the deceased in the weeks before her death.”
“I’ve already said that Martin couldn’t have killed Verna. You obviously think that yourselves. I can hardly—”
“You have a father and a stepmother. What are your relationships with them?”
Sue swallowed, trying not to rush into words she might regret. “I get on well with both of them. There was a bit of resentment of Alice when she took my mother’s place, but she’s a nice woman who has always made me welcome. And she’s just right for Dad. Mother had been dead for years when he met her; it was a bit of a shock, I suppose. And I was younger, then: more puritanical – and more selfish.” She smiled wanly at that young woman who now seemed so far away from her as to be a different person.
“How much do you see of them?”
“Not as much as I’d like. I’ve no car, or I’d go over to Lytham St Annes more often. Toby loves it there – they both make a great fuss of him.”
In her new life, she knew she would visit them more often, would build up the relationship between her child and his grandparents. And they must come and see Martin and her in their new home. She knew Derek and Alice got on well with Martin; they would enjoy seeing more of him. Everything was going to be easier and happier now that Verna was out of the way.
It was the torturer, of course, who dragged her back to the present and the business of Verna’s death, which must be dealt with before this bright future could evolve. Peach leant forward, until his eyes seemed to look into her very soul. “Do you know of any reason why either your father or your stepmother would have sought to kill your sister, Mrs Thompson?”
The suddenness of it took her breath away for a moment. “No,” she said automatically. Then, feeling that more emphasis was needed. “That’s a preposterous idea!”
“Is it? Someone suffocated your sister some time last Saturday night. We can’t be precise about the time. Perhaps it was while you were in that cinema.”
It sounded to her like a direct accusation. Though she tried to return his unblinking stare, her eyes eventually fell to the table and the silently turning tape. The recorder seemed to demand some response from her. She said, “I’m sure my father didn’t do this. And nor did Alice.” The words seemed to reach her ears from a long way off, as if someone else had spoken them.
Peach studied her face for a full half-minute before he spoke again: she had a vision of sitting here, exhausted, hours from now, confessing her lies and throwing herself abjectly upon the mercy of these representatives of the state. But they couldn’t conduct things like that, could they? Not in Britain, not now?
Then Peach said, “Did Verna Hume have any jewelery which belonged to Alice Osborne?”
It was such a strange, unexpected question that she almost laughed. “No. Well, not that I know of. No, I’m sure she didn’t.”
It was ludicrous. Her sophisticated sister, with her cultivated tastes and the collection of expensively set stones she had acquired as gifts from men over the last few years, would have looked with contempt on any of poor Alice’s paste trinkets. Sue wanted to ask them why they had such ridiculous ideas, but she knew that they would tell her nothing except what they wanted her to know. In any case, she did not trust herself to speak. She felt her face burning with the tension; it was really very unfair that her coloring should be so revealing of her emotions.
“And your father, Mrs Thompson. Had he any reason to wish his daughter dead?” Peach’s voice creaked in her ears like the turning of the rack.
She wondered why they kept harping upon the closeness of the blood ties in this death. They said most killings took place within the family. Were this pair convinced that Verna’s murder was one of those? Did they really think that her father had killed his own daughter? Well, it was a plausible theory, with such a daughter as Verna. Hadn’t her father seemed on the point of confessing something to Sue when they had last been together three weeks ago? She wished now that she had conferred more closely with Martin and her father and Alice after the inquest, so that they might present a united front to these probing enemies who seemed so anxious to divide them.
Sue made herself speak very slowly. “You must know by now that Verna was not a likeable woman. You’ve already said I hated her, and I haven’t denied it. I’m sure she gave our father r
eason to hate her, too. That doesn’t mean that he killed her.”
“No. We realize that. But you will see that we have to consider every possibility, which is exactly what we are doing.” The cool, soft voice came from the woman at Peach’s side; Sue had almost forgotten that she was there in the intensity of her contest with the inspector. DS Blake went on quietly, “And that means we have to include Alice Osborne also as a possible killer, until we can eliminate her from the inquiry. Our forensic people assure us, you see, that a woman, even an elderly woman, could certainly have suffocated your sister with that pillow, if she was taken unawares as she lay on her back on the bed.”
Again, the emphasis that the victim was her sister, and this time the details of the death she had heard so recently in the Coroner’s Court were emphasized anew, as if they felt that if the picture was vivid enough her control would crack. The image of Verna’s desperate dying eyes, wide with surprise and horror, swam before her and would not be banished.
She said, like one speaking through an anaesthetic, “I’m sure Alice didn’t kill Verna.”
Peach said harshly, “Whether she did or she didn’t, she has done things since the death which can only excite suspicion. So has your father. We’re asking you to give us any information you possess about either of them, that’s all.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean you refuse?”
“I mean I don’t know of any reason why they should have killed Verna.”
He regarded her for another long moment; he was as cool and objective as she was hot and ruffled. She hated him, wanted suddenly to scream her loathing at him, but no words came. She listened to her own breathing, trying hard to impose some rhythm upon it. Peach said, “When did you last see Verna Hume?”
The fierce formality of the question, the use of the full name after all these references to family ties, almost made her laugh. But she was aware that it would not be easy to stop, if she let laughter start. “Not for three weeks at least. I thought it best to keep out of her way. She knew about Martin and me, you see. She wasn’t the type to let it go.”
“I see. We shall incorporate these things in a statement for you to sign, in due course. If you have second thoughts about what you have said, it would be best to put it right before you sign anything.” He nodded briefly at the woman beside him; from that moment, Sue Thompson, who had occupied his most concentrated attention for the last twenty minutes and more, might have ceased to exist for Peach.
Lucy Blake said, “We can make you a quick cup of tea before you go, if you’ve time.”
But Sue only wanted to be out of this place, to be back in her bright little home, to sweep Toby up into her arms and clasp the innocence he represented against her body.
Lucy Blake saw her out, then went back and sat with Peach in his office. These were the best times: that thought came unexpectedly into her head. The times when they conferred, wonderfully united by the hunt, when she was taken into his mind and they swapped ideas as equals.
Percy gave her that small, welcoming smile that was so reassuring. The early days of his resentment at being given a female sergeant seemed now years rather than months behind them. This time he was silent for quite a long time, while she voiced her own thoughts about the interview with Sue Thompson.
Then he said, “I wonder where she really was on Saturday night.”
Twenty-Three
“You’d no need to get up at this time, you know. I’m quite capable of looking after myself!”
Lucy Blake heard the petulance in her voice as she poured milk over a modest portion of slimline cereal. She was never at her brightest first thing in the morning; you’d have thought a mother might have known that after twenty-six years. It would have been nice to eat her hurried breakfast alone, to collect herself for that other, working world she should never have left.
There was no need for her to have come: she realized even through her bad temper that that was what she really resented. You thought you’d cut the old ties, made yourself a thoroughly modern career woman, and then here you were having breakfast with your mum fussing round you, for the second time in three days. Agnes Blake had said on the phone that there was no need for her to come, that it was only a cold. But Lucy had worried about a cold becoming flu, had visualized her mother lying helpless with a high temperature and no one to take care of her.
Instead of which, the cold was on the mend and her mother had been able to say that there was no need for all this fuss. Lucy glanced up at the clock. Twenty to seven already. But it would be five minutes fast: all the clocks in this house had been set thus as she knew from the moment she had learnt to decode them as a four-year-old.
Her mother sniffed, blew her nose dramatically on a tissue, and said, “I used to get up at this time every morning, when your dad was alive. We were used to early starts, in my day.”
Lucy smiled up at the housecoated figure with the thickening waist and the graying hair. “Your day isn’t that long ago, is it, Mum? And it’s not over yet. They tell me you can still run rings round the younger staff at that supermarket.” No one had told her that, but it was a fair enough guess. Had she been born a generation later, when the working-class woman’s place was no longer taken automatically to be in the home, Agnes Blake’s sharp mind would have taken her at least as far as her daughter had gone.
And was going to go. Lucy wondered for a moment quite where that might be. Sometimes, when Percy Peach was charging about producing results and she was his willing assistant, there seemed no limit to her progress. She had a good base already: there weren’t too many women who made detective sergeant at her age, as her mother was proud to remind her neighbors when the occasion arose.
But in the privacy of her early-morning kitchen, Mrs Blake was in disapproving mode. “Too tight, that sweater is,” she said pontifically. “There’s no call to show off your curves to the types you have to deal with all day in that job.”
Lucy smiled. The moment took her back all those years ago to her first bra and her mother’s critical assessment of her pubescent profile. “I’m not feeling collars all day, you know, Mum. It’s different in CID. Most of the time, I’m dealing with perfectly innocent members of the public. I’m supposed to dress as I would if I were doing a different job altogether.”
“It was much better when you were in uniform, if you ask me. I liked you in that. You used to look really smart in the uniform.” But she hadn’t approved at the time, Lucy thought. She had complained about her daughter’s loss of identity beneath the dark cloth and silver buttons, had said repeatedly that it was no job for a woman.
Lucy stood up and went to look at herself in the mirror in the hall. Her figure would become positively Edwardian, if she gave it a chance, she thought. She was resigned to having to battle to keep slim for the rest of her life. She pulled the hem of the turquoise sweater her mother had criticized down a little further below her waist, noting with satisfaction how effectively the color complemented her eyes. Men usually saw her as voluptuous; the lads at the station sometimes indulged in low growlings which were only partly parody. But that was the lustful nature of the male beast: she could handle that.
And if Detective Inspector Percy Peach had been caught out recently in the occasional admiring glance, she could handle that, too – she was almost sure she could.
In the mirror, she saw her mother standing behind her. “Is that all you’re going to eat?” said Agnes Blake in mock surprise. This was a ritual they had played out many times before.
“Certainly is, Mum. Can’t afford to make my contours even more inflammatory in this sweater, can I?”
“I despair of you sometimes, our Lucy, I do really. You should let me make you a proper cooked breakfast, if you want to do a proper day’s work. Everyone knows a good meal at the start of the day is important.”
Agnes Blake didn’t really believe it. It was a plea to be useful still to the one person who really mattered in her life, a small attempt to turn
back the years to the time when a laughing pigtailed girl looked to her mother for guidance in everything. The daughter could not know how short a time separated now from then for the woman who sighed and brought Lucy her coat.
Lucy put on the coat as her mother held it for her, feeling a sharp pang of guilt she could not pinpoint. She said breezily, “See you next week some time, Mum. I’ll give you a ring to let you know just when.”
“Look after yourself, love. I wonder what you live off in that flat of yours, sometimes, I do really.”
Agnes Blake was annoyed with herself. Even now, when the daughter she loved was about to drive off into that working world of which she knew nothing, she could not keep the note of admonition out of her voice. But love strikes a variety of notes, many of them unwanted: she hoped her daughter realized that by now.
Lancashire folk didn’t make displays of emotion. Lucy understood that. But now, in the cool of the early summer morning, with the hour still before seven, there was no one else visible in the little row of country cottages. She flung her arms impulsively round her mother’s ageing shoulders, discerned the surprise quivering for a moment beneath her fingers, and felt the strength of the older woman’s answering clasp.
Then she leapt quickly into the little blue Corsa, started it first time, and drove away, her arm waving through the open window, her eyes watching the foursquare, yet vulnerable, figure in her rear-view mirror. It remained waving by the side of the house, as she knew it would, until the last vestige of her presence was removed, when the car went round the bend of the lane and out of her mother’s sight.
As she drove over the deserted bulk of Longridge Fell and turned the car towards Brunton, Lucy tried to concentrate on the murder case to which she was returning. She puzzled over the statements of Martin Hume and Sue Thompson; of Hugh Pearson and Barbara Harris and Richard Johnson; of Derek and Alice Osborne. One of them at least was not telling the truth. Yet despite all her conscientious efforts to direct her thoughts to such issues, her mind kept coming back from these people who should have fascinated her to her fellow officer, Percy Peach.