by J M Gregson
He tried to work his brain furiously, to out-think this man. But it wasn’t an equal contest. Peach held all the cards, and Alan was never going to learn exactly how much he knew and what his sources were. The man seemed very confident that he could substantiate what he was saying. Cut your losses and run, Alan Hurst’s furiously working mind told him. Admit to a bit on the side and keep him well away from the criminal sideline that is making you a rich man.
He forced a smile, glanced for a moment at the girl who looked so innocent beside the chief inspector, and said, ‘All right, I was attracted to Annie Clark. No doubt people with nothing better to do have told you how they saw us in some of the pubs of the Ribble Valley. Everything I told you about the excellence of Annie’s work is correct. She was also a very attractive young woman. I used to take her out for a drink occasionally.’
‘And also took her to bed.’
It was a statement, not a question. He could deny it, but he sensed that that would only land him in deeper trouble. He smiled ruefully. ‘All right. It’s not a crime, is it? I suppose you could say I was a little flattered when she found me attractive. You wouldn’t blame me for that, perhaps, if you had seen what an attractive twenty-three-year-old Annie Clark was.’
‘She wasn’t the first, was she? Annie was one of a succession of young women with whom you consorted.’ Peach savoured the word and apparently found it to his liking.
‘I can’t see that it’s really any business of yours to hound me over this.’
Peach produced one of his smaller smiles and shook his head sadly. ‘We’re not here to take moral stands over who sleeps with whom, Mr Hurst. It’s not a crime, as you say. But neither was it a crime on Saturday, when you chose to lie to us about it. It’s the lying that we’re here to investigate. Lying to us when we’re trying to trace a murderer is very serious indeed. It is also very foolish, because it makes us ask ourselves why you did it.’
Alan forced himself to take his time. ‘I can see that. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.’ He took a deep breath, nodded slowly, and spoke as evenly as he could. ‘You’ve seen my house and the way I have to build my life around my wife’s illness. Judith is a permanent invalid, getting worse each year. I am only forty-one and I have my sexual urges, like most men of my age. I’m not proud of the fact that I’ve indulged myself elsewhere, which is why I tried to conceal it from you. To use your word, it was foolish. I lied to you, held back the full story, because I was ashamed of my weakness. But there was nothing vicious about it. I wasn’t concealing anything which had a bearing on Annie Clark’s death.’
‘Really, sir.’ Peach managed to convey a weight of cynicism in four syllables. ‘So how long had you been sleeping with Miss Clark at the time of her disappearance?’
‘You make it sound like a full-blown affair. It was less noble and more furtive than that. And quite sporadic. We took our chances wherever we could.’ Alan tried a self-deprecating, man-of-the-world smile, but couldn’t quite bring it off.
There was no answering smile from either of the contrasting faces which were so close to him in the tiny, crowded room. Peach merely said, ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘What? Oh, I suppose the first occasion when we had sex was about six weeks before she disappeared. And for what it’s worth, I think whatever there was between us was over by that time. She’d acquired a new boyfriend and she seemed quite serious about him.’ He tried to imply that they would be better investigating Matt Hogan than him as a killer, but he had more sense now than to put that idea into words.
Peach said, ‘It would be interesting to have Annie Clark’s version of her relationship with you, but of course we cannot have it.’
Alan Hurst was well aware of that. He allowed himself a small, bitter smile. ‘I’m sure that if she were here, Annie would confirm what I have told you.’
‘Were you the father of her child?’
It came like a blow across the face because of its abruptness. Alan had known from the moment they had found out about his bedding Annie that Peach would ask that question, but the suddenness still threw him off balance. ‘No! Of course I wasn’t!’
‘No of course about it, is there, Mr Hurst? You’ve got to be a likely candidate for instigating Miss Clark’s pregnancy. Particularly as you chose to conceal the affair from us.’
‘Well whatever you think, that foetus had nothing to do with me. You’ll need to look elsewhere for your father. I didn’t even know she was pregnant until you told me on Saturday.’
‘So who do you think was the father?’
‘I don’t know. How should I know?’
‘You were in daily contact with the girl. As well as taking her to bed. Sporadically.’ Peach managed a huge contempt as he dwelt on the five syllables of the word Hurst had given him. ‘You’re as likely as anyone to have been the recipient of Annie’s confidences.’
‘Well I wasn’t! I told you: it was a complete shock to me to find that she was pregnant at the time of her death.’
They left him then, without any of the social niceties of a leave-taking, with a gruff direction to get in touch if any further recollection about Annie Clark came back to him. Alan thought that Peach lingered a little in the public part of the building, looking assessingly at Anna Fenton, who fortunately was serving a customer at the time.
In that moment, Alan Hurst decided that he had better go carefully with Anna, had better take things slowly until this Annie Clark thing was out of the way. They’d exposed what he’d been doing with Annie, as he now realized he should have expected them to do. But they didn’t seem to have a clue about the way he was now making big money, the way in which he was going to finance poor Judith’s new luxury quarters back at the house.
Seventeen
‘So who’ve we got in the frame?’ Chief Superintendent Tucker leant back in his chair and assessed his chief inspector. ‘Do sit down, Percy, and give me a full report.’
It was always a sign of danger when Tommy Bloody Tucker used your first name. Peach positioned his chair with extreme care, as if an inch out of place would lead to some undefined disaster, and sat very upright on the edge of it. ‘We have several possibilities, sir.’ Tucker, he noted, was like a golf caddie: it was always ‘we’ when the man sensed a success, always ‘you’ when things were going wrong.
Tucker smiled benevolently. Management was all a matter of carrots and sticks. Today he would use the carrot on Peach. He might detest the man, but on this day he would encourage him, show his skills in man-management. The fact that he knew that his own success was carried on the back of his enigmatic chief inspector was quite incidental. ‘You’d better give me the full picture. Take your time, Percy. Murder is too important to hurry.’
Peach realized with a sinking heart that his chief had time on his hands. No meetings with the Chief Constable; no regional crime conferences; no media briefings. Tuesday was usually a quiet day for Tommy Bloody Tucker, however busy his underlings might be. Percy said carefully, ‘No father has been identified for the foetus found in Annie Clarke, sir. I’m not certain that forensic will be able to do a DNA match on the foetus, because the corpse was so badly decomposed.’ Privately, he was pretty certain that DNA matching would be possible in due course, but they would need strong evidence against a suspect before they could demand a DNA sample.
‘Let me know if I can be of any help with forensic. I’m quite willing to add the weight of my rank, if it helps.’ Tucker shifted that weight in his chair, as if preparing to throw his body into the lists. He apparently had some vague idea that the laboratories were being deliberately obstructive.
Peach said, ‘It’s not easy, either for them or for us, when a body isn’t discovered until four months after death. Scents go cold. People disappear. People with something to hide have ample time to cover their tracks.’
‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d say that sounded defeatist, Percy!’ This was Tucker’s attempt at impish humour; it crashed to the carpet wit
h a thud when it met Peach’s uncompromisingly inscrutable face.
‘Well, sir, we still seem to have six possibilities for this crime. Not equal possibilities, sir: I’d say some of them would be much shorter odds than others, with the bookies.’
‘Well, give me your leading suspects, and I’ll give you my opinion, Percy.’
Again that first name. Percy Peach expected it, even welcomed it, from almost everyone else in the station, but he didn’t like it at all from Tommy Bloody Tucker. He said, ‘I think it would be best if I ran all six of them past you in no particular order, sir. Then you could give me the benefit of your expertise and insights. Your detached overview is often the most valuable thing you contribute.’
Tucker looked at him suspiciously. ‘Very well, if you think that’s necessary. But I’d much rather you gave me your leading candidates to start with. We haven’t got all day, you know.’
‘Yes, sir. I must have been deceived by your suggestion that we should take our time over it, that murder couldn’t be hurried.’ Peach’s sturdy frame became even more upright on his seat; Tucker thought with irritation that this was the only man he’d ever met who seemed to be able to sit to attention.
The chief inspector now spoke stiffly, through lips that scarcely moved. ‘Well, there’s the boyfriend, sir – always a good place to start. Lad of twenty-three who goes by the name of Matthew Hogan. Some people would say not a lad, sir, but when—’
‘A strong candidate, as you say, Peach. Didn’t you say that the girl was pregnant?’
Even his short-term memory’s going now, poor old soul, thought Percy. ‘I did, sir. About two minutes ago.’
‘Well, there you are, then. Irresponsible young man, like most of them nowadays. Puts her into the club, then refuses to accept his responsibilities. Probably wanted her to have an abortion, and the poor girl was refusing that. Very strong candidate, I’d say.’
Tucker’s ability to jump to conclusions was surpassed only by his talent for leaping on to bandwagons, in Percy’s view. He enunciated now like one trying to get through to a very old person, ‘Matt Hogan says that he didn’t know that Annie Clark was pregnant, sir.’
‘And you believe him?’ Tucker smiled his superior smile and shook his head. ‘For an experienced detective, you can be very naïve at times, Peach.’
Percy noted with satisfaction that they now seemed to be firmly back on surname terms. ‘I don’t believe or disbelieve him, sir. But it appears that he had only been the boyfriend of the girl for about a week when she disappeared.’
‘So he says.’
‘So other people say, as well, sir. He’d known her socially for a few months, but she only became his girlfriend about a week before she went missing.’
‘Ah! But without having a serious relationship these young people are quite capable of leaping into bed with each other, don’t you think? He might have given her a bun in the oven, and then she comes on to him wanting marriage, you see. And he doesn’t want to accept his responsibilities, so he strangles her and dumps her body up on Pendle Hill.’
Percy wondered what a lawyer would make of the chief’s capacity to predict the behaviour of a whole generation from what he read in his Daily Mail. ‘It’s an attractive theory, sir. It will take a bit of proving.’
‘Well, get out there and get the proof, then. That’s your job, you know, Peach.’ Tucker stared past him and out of the window, his chin jutting in what he regarded as his Churchillian mode.
‘Yes, sir. Annie Clark’s flatmate was an ex-girlfriend of Matt Hogan’s, sir.’ He looked at Tucker’s uncomprehending face and decided that this time the man needed to be led. ‘She let the flat very quickly after Annie had disappeared. Almost as though she knew Annie Clark wouldn’t be coming back.’
‘And she was probably very jealous of her. The girl who’d snatched away her boyfriend. She might very well have killed her in a mad fit of revenge.’
What a loss to the romantic-fiction market the chief was. Percy said, ‘Yes, sir. That sort of thing had occurred to us. But it’s wonderful to have the benefit of your oversight, sir. Gives us a lot more confidence.’
‘Cherchez la femme, Peach. Always a good principle.’
Peach reflected sadly that the feminists would never hear this conversation. ‘Then there is the girl’s employer, sir. That’s if you think we need to look any further than her flatmate.’
‘No, let’s hear about him, Peach, by all means. You have to remain objective, you know. When you’ve been in this job as long as I have, you’ll find that objectivity must be a watchword.’
‘A watchword, sir. Objectivity. I’ll remember that.’ Peach furrowed his noble brow as if making an immense mental effort.’
‘Dodgy character, is he, this employer?’
‘Not on the face of it, no, sir. Alan Hurst. Hurst Travel Services: you probably know the shop, on Southgate. He has an invalid wife. She suffers from multiple sclerosis, which is now quite advanced. Everyone says that he’s a saint in the home. Cares for her admirably. He’s even planning a major ground-floor extension because she won’t be able to manage the stairs for much longer.’
‘Doesn’t sound like a murderer.’
‘Indeed not, sir.’
‘And Hurst’s a respectable businessman. Running his own firm. Very successfully, by the sound of it.’
‘Very successfully indeed, to judge by what he’s spending and planning to spend. And he’s not a Mason, sir. Which, as you know from my research, would increase his chances of being involved in serious crime by a factor of—’
‘Peach, I’m not interested in your ill-advised attempts to blacken the reputation of a fine body of men! It seems that you’re wasting your time in giving this degree of attention to a respectable man like Mr Hurst, so—’
‘Even though he was bedding Annie Clark at the time of her disappearance, sir?’ Percy’s face was full of innocent surprise, his eyebrows arching like black slugs into the furrows of his forehead.
‘You didn’t mention that. You should have begun with it.’
‘Sorry, sir. Well, he denies it has anything to do with either Annie’s disappearance or her death. Confesses that with an invalid wife not able to give him the bedroom excitements he desires, he snatches a bit of rumpety wherever he can get it.’ Percy thought that this was a fair and succinct summary of what it had taken Alan Hurst twenty minutes to confess.
Tucker was torn between his prejudice in favour of business success and the emergence of a very obvious motive for murder. He said doubtfully, ‘Some men do manage to take young women to bed outside their marriages.’ He stared bleakly past Peach at the picture of the Queen on the wall, as if trying to come to terms with such marvellous philandering. His own wife Barbara, a thirteen-stone Brunnhilde, did not even indulge fantasies of that kind, let alone permit the real thing. He strove to emulate Peach’s mastery of the vernacular. ‘It’s possible that he was giving her the occasional poke without actually having killed her, you know.’
Percy nodded sagely. ‘There’s your objectivity again, sir – your ability to take a properly detached view. I was thinking that it was possible that he might be the father of the foetus the girl was carrying, that he might have panicked about that and decided to get rid of her.’
‘I don’t say that that isn’t a possibility.’ Tucker hastened to cover his tracks. ‘You must proceed as you think fit. I was only pointing out that a respectable businessman might have his little weaknesses without being a murderer.’
‘Very true, that, sir.’ Peach furrowed his brow as if trying to compel his mind to accept a memorable and original human insight. ‘Hurst tried to convince DS Blake and me that that was exactly the case. We were a little sceptical, but it will clarify our minds to know that you agree with the thesis.’
‘Now, I didn’t exactly say that, you know. I—’
‘And then there’s the witches, sir.’ Percy smiled happily at this new complication of Tommy Bloody Tucker’s happy da
y.
‘Witches?’ Tucker flicked a hand over his brow, as if trying to banish a vision of crones dancing round a cauldron. ‘You did say something about that when you interrupted me on the golf course on Saturday. You’re surely not serious about black masses and Satanism being involved in this death?’
‘Not Satanism, sir. And no black masses or curses, they assure me.’ Peach shook his head sadly, as if a few broomsticks and black cats would have been a welcome addition to a humdrum day. ‘White magic, they say. Bringing themselves into line with nature – with the world and all things in it. And beyond that, with the sun and the moon and the stars.’
‘And you’re telling me that you take this seriously? That you really think these women might—’
‘Warlocks, sir.’
‘What?’
‘You gave me the word yourself, sir. From the benefits of your oversight. When you were struggling a little with your swing on the golf course.’ He took pity on his goggling master. ‘Male witches, sir, as you were kind enough to point out to me. Witches aren’t exclusively female. There’s one male in this coven.’
Tucker sighed deeply. You’d better tell me about these witches, if you think they have a bearing on this case.’
‘Wiccans, sir.’
‘Wiccans?’ Tucker’s perplexity was wonderful to view.
‘That’s what they call themselves, sir. They worship the Universal Goddess and the Horned God.’
Tucker tried condescension. ‘Well, I’m sure this is all very interesting, but I shall be very surprised if—’
‘Annie Clark was one, sir. A Wiccan. A member of this coven.’
‘I see. Then I suppose I’d better hear all about them.’ Tucker spread his arms stiffly outwards for a minute, a gesture which was meant to indicate the intense magnanimity of his attitude to his inferiors.
Peach relaxed visibly, pulled his chair six inches nearer to his chief’s desk, and prepared to impart confidences. ‘Katherine Howard, sir.’