Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  It was perhaps because he was preoccupied with such musings that he never noticed the car which was following him.

  Matt liked to be at the concert hall hours before the performance, principally to inspect the instrument on which he was to play, but also to get the feel of the place. He was still sufficiently star-struck, still sufficiently surprised by his own success, to enjoy looking round deserted concert halls, to enjoy letting his eye run slowly up the steeply tiered rows of seats and imagine them thronged with people bursting into thunderous applause. He might be almost in his mid-thirties now, but there was still a lot of the boy left in him.

  But he would like a quiet lunch, somewhere where he could read his paper and forget about music for half an hour or so. It was half past twelve now. He would stop before he got even to the outskirts of the city sprawl around Liverpool. He pulled into what looked like a quiet pub in the roadside village of Rufford.

  It was an old place, with a lot of alcoves, which had probably at one time been individual rooms. Matt ordered a bacon quiche and sat alone in one of these small enclaves with his copy of the Guardian and a half of bitter. He wouldn’t allow himself any more alcohol than that, on the day of a concert.

  He had not noticed the car which pulled in a few seconds after him and eased to the other end of the car park.

  Matt ate his way slowly through a surprisingly good quiche and read in a few paragraphs at the bottom of the front page that Sunita had been strangled, then hidden away behind the chimney breast of a fireplace in one of the derelict houses near the squat. The police were getting to know more and more about how it had happened, it seemed. He shuddered involuntarily, trying to cast away the feeling of foreboding which dropped upon him with that thought.

  Determined to think of other things, he turned to the accounts of the weekend football. As a boy, he had always wanted to score the winning goal for Rovers in the Cup Final, but he had slowly accepted that it would never happen, when he was invariably one of the last to be selected when the boys in his form picked teams. Being a concert pianist wasn’t a bad second, he told himself, though he still fantasized about Wembley, not Carnegie Hall.

  Perhaps in due course Carnegie Hall would be the reality for him, if his fame continued to rocket as it had in the last year. He sipped his bitter and vowed with a self-deprecating smile to keep practising.

  The man slid silently into the seat opposite him and regarded him steadily. He was about thirty, with blue eyes which looked almost black beneath eyebrows which beetled over them. He did not smile; nor did he offer any form of greeting or introduction. He held a tightly rolled copy of the Daily Mail in his left hand, which he now put carefully on the table, like a spy delivering a signal.

  Matt looked down at the paper, as if trying to read some impenetrable code. He said, ‘If you want an autograph, I don’t mind signing, but I don’t really want to talk. I’ve a concert in Liverpool tonight, and I want to have a quiet lunch and compose myself.’

  Now the man did smile. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. ‘Couldn’t care less about your bloody concert, mate. I’m here to tell you what you have to do if you want to continue playing.’ He looked at the slender fingers which were gripping the beer glass as if he were contemplating crushing them at this very moment.

  Matt glanced nervously towards the bar, then back at the man on the bench seat on the other side of the small table. He wondered if the barman knew this nutter, if he was someone who habitually came in and threatened customers. But the pub was unnaturally quiet at this Monday lunchtime, and the barman was nowhere to be seen.

  And somehow Matt knew that calling for assistance would not be a good move.

  And this man did not look like a nutter. Not like the kind of harmless nutter who might frequent a quiet country pub, anyway. He looked like something much more sinister, a creature of the city, attuned to violence, and accustomed to using it efficiently when it suited his purposes. Matt found when he tried to speak that his voice would not work. He had to clear his dry throat before he could say, ‘Who are you?’

  The man gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘That’s for me to know and you to speculate about, young Matty.’

  It was a long time since anyone had called him that. And this man was younger than he was, even if he was infinitely more experienced in the seamier ways of the world. Matt said, ‘Who sent you here?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, Matty me boy.’ There was a hint of Irish in the voice, but Matt couldn’t be sure whether it was genuine or assumed. ‘The important thing is that you have to watch what you say. That’s the message.’

  ‘Watch what I say? About what?’ But suddenly he knew.

  ‘About Sunita Akhtar. About that Paki lass you used to shaft at one time.’

  ‘I loved Sunita!’ The words were out before he could check them, without his ever being conscious of framing the thought.

  The lips he could not take his eyes from curled into a sneer. ‘Lovely, that. You should have stuck to your own kind, Matty boy. Might have kept you out of trouble if you had.’

  ‘You’re too late! I’ve already spoken to the police about Sunita.’

  ‘I know that, you fool.’ The cold contempt for his naivety came at him across the table like a shaft of icy air, and for a moment Matt thought the man was about to lay hands upon him. ‘But they’ll be back again. You’re a murder suspect, young Matty. They’ll be back.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Sunita!’

  ‘You’d say that, wouldn’t you? I would, in your position. But I wouldn’t expect to be believed, unless I could prove it. And you can’t, sunshine! So they’ll be back. And when they do, you’ll keep shtum about anything Sunita told you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About anything she told you, mate. You might have killed her, for all I know. I don’t care if you did. Just keep quiet about anything she might have told you about other people, that’s all.’

  ‘And why should I?’

  Matt regretted his little flash of defiance immediately. The man leaned forward until his face was within a foot of his victim and gripped the collar of his shirt against the thin throat. Matt could smell his breath, see a filling within the irregular teeth, as he said, ‘Because I’m telling you now, that’s why. You could be fitted up for this murder, whether you committed it or not.’

  Later, it seemed an absurd threat. At that moment, Matt felt this man and the people who were paying him could do anything, if they wished. He said hoarsely, cravenly, ‘I won’t talk.’

  ‘That’s better. You’re getting the message now. Sensible man!’ The man relaxed the pressure at Matt’s throat slowly, as if it were a demonstration of great manual skill and strength to release his man so gradually. ‘The people who sent me could snuff you out like a candle, mate. You could be dead meat in the Mersey in the morning, if they chose.’

  ‘I told you, I won’t talk!’ Matt was anxious only to reassure the man, to get out of here and be rid of him for ever. He would have said anything just to get away. He had no idea what it was that he was supposed to know.

  Belatedly, the barman was back at his post, making ready to serve a noisy party of office workers who had just arrived. The man did not look towards them, but kept his eyes beneath the beetling brows steadily upon Matt. ‘I think you’ve got the message, Matty me boy! It’s simple enough. Keep shtum, or someone will be back to shut your mouth permanently.’ He gripped the top of Matt’s arm for two seconds in fingers of steel, and then was gone.

  It was some time before Matt Hayward was able to stem the trembling in his limbs and follow the man out of the pub. He drove slowly and carefully into Liverpool, putting on the radio to try to divert his thoughts from what had happened. It was the lunchtime request programme on Classic FM, introduced by the woman who treated you like a primary school child, patronizing you with waves of sugary pseudo-sincerity over the air waves.

  Matt found himself shouting defiance at her, shivering with fury as he yelled out his frustrati
on and fear in his warm moving cell of safety.

  The people at the concert hall were surprised to see him so early, but they were kind, understanding, accommodating to his wishes. Above all, they were normal. He could almost think that what had happened to him a couple of hours earlier was a nightmare, that it had not really happened at all.

  It was when he was changing into his white shirt and evening dress for the concert that he saw the livid bruising on the biceps of his right arm. That man had been real all right.

  Fifteen

  ‘Thank you for coming in to talk to us.’ Peach began the interview with uncharacteristic low-key politeness.

  ‘It was the lesser of two evils. I didn’t want police cars lining up outside my business and police boots all over my carpets.’

  Emily Jane Watson didn’t like policemen and didn’t see any reason to disguise the fact. She hadn’t met either this pugnacious-looking bald man with the moustache or the attractive redhead beside him before, but they’d be the usual meddlesome nuisances no doubt, believing nothing she said and keeping her away from more important concerns.

  ‘I believe you tried to enrol our young DC, Gordon Pickering.’

  ‘We can accommodate anyone. Even coppers. There’s lots of women who’d like to mother a daft young sod like your Gordon Pickering. Hardly knows a blow-job from a blow-wave, that one! Shouldn’t think he’s much use to you as a detective, though.’

  ‘And there you’d be wrong, Miss Watson. But you have a business to run, so let’s waste no more time on such pleasantries. We’re interested in a murder committed back in 1991. In or near twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace, Brunton, where you were resident at the time.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  Peach sighed heavily. ‘This is all going to take much longer if you are determined to be uncooperative. Do you deny that you were one of the people unlawfully occupying that house as squatters in the months at the end of 1990 and the beginning of 1991? Think carefully before you reply, please.’

  He seemed very confident, seemed almost to be inviting her to deny it. What would he do then? Place her under arrest? Jane Watson did not know what her rights were in this situation. So she operated the way she had done for the last ten years and more. If there was some point in lying, she would be as brassy as anyone, but if there was no point, there was no use risking police hostility. And she could see no point here: they were going to pin her down eventually, however long she denied it. ‘All right, I was there. I was in that squat, with a few others. But it’s a long time ago and I don’t remember much about it. OK?’

  ‘No, it’s not OK, Miss Watson. We need everything you can tell us about that period. We need to put it beside the evidence we are collecting from other people who were there. You were known at that time as Em or Emmy, a contraction of the first name Emily, which you now appear to have discarded.’ He contrived to make that sound like a piece of criminal deception.

  ‘I no longer use the name because it’s part of a world I’ve left behind me. That squat’s a long time ago, part of another life.’

  That was a phrase they were getting used to hearing. ‘Let’s jog your memory, then. It was at that time, on the seventeenth of January, 1991, to be precise, that you received a caution for soliciting. In the name of Emily Watson.’

  She felt her pulse racing, even whilst she told herself that she should have expected this. He was so calm, so matter-of-fact about it that she wondered just how much he knew about her life, how much else he had stacked up against her, just waiting to be brought out and thrown into her face like this. She said, ‘Doesn’t make me a murderer, does it, a caution for whoring?’

  ‘No. Doesn’t make you the Virgin Mary either.’

  ‘And it didn’t make the tosspot who arrested me a good copper, did it?’

  Peach kept his face studiously impassive as he said, ‘Mr Tucker was in charge of CID work in central Brunton in the mid-nineties.’

  ‘He’s a right wanker, your bloody Superintendent Tucker. I knew him when he was an inspector, and he was a tosser then. Didn’t know whether he was coming or going. People made bloody great rings round him.’

  She found she had dropped automatically back into the language she had used in the days when she had habitual conflicts with the police. She jutted her square jaw aggressively towards the man with the moustache beneath his startlingly white bald head, trying to provoke him with this assault upon his senior officer.

  Emily Jane Watson did not know what music she was sounding in his ears with this denigration of the good name of Tommy Bloody Tucker. He wished now that he’d recorded this; he would certainly have found a suitable occasion to play the tape back to the man in question.

  But Percy Peach did not even smile. Instead, he looked at Emily Jane Watson without emotion and said flatly, ‘Tucker’s a chief superintendent now, love. That’s the way the world goes, you see. And I’m a chief inspector, in charge of the investigation into the murder of Sunita Akhtar. And you’re running a prosperous business instead of whoring. You’re also a murder suspect, until you or we can prove it otherwise. So tell us about the days when you were Emmy the squatter.’

  There was something about his even tone which carried menace. She had better be careful with this man. She glanced for a moment at the woman with the gold ball pen ready beside him, then gave her full attention to Peach. ‘There were six of us in that place. One or two others came and went, but, through that winter and into the spring, there were six of us who were permanent. It was a good squat, in that no one really disturbed us. It was on Tucker’s patch, but he didn’t want to know. We had an initial warning, but after that, the police more or less ignored us. We had more trouble from peeping Toms than coppers.’

  So much for not being able to remember that period of her life, thought Peach. But he wasn’t going to remind her of the contradiction with what she had said at the outset, if she was going to talk openly of the place. ‘We’ve contacted some of those people already. We need to know everything you can add to what we’ve already discovered.’

  Which included my whereabouts. I could have done without that. And now I’d better be careful, because I don’t know what the others have said about me. Jane Watson said, ‘You’re welcome to what I know. I can’t see that it’s going to help you to find out who killed that stupid girl.’

  ‘Stupid, was she? No one else has called her that. So, for a start, we’d like to know why you thought her stupid.’

  ‘A Paki wandering into a squat with a lot of desperate English people? She had to be stupid, to take a chance like that.’

  Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘Maybe she didn’t see any other option open to her. Maybe she was desperate.’

  Emily studied the pretty, open face beneath the red-brown hair for a moment, wondering how much she knew about how life was lived at the bottom of the pile. She’d been introduced as a Detective Sergeant, so she couldn’t be as young or as raw as she had seemed at first. Emily said, ‘All right, maybe I shouldn’t have said stupid. I didn’t mean she was unintelligent. I meant she knew nothing about life. Nothing about people. She didn’t seem to realize that people like Wally Swift regarded anything non-white as fair game, that if it suited him, he’d have her knickers off in the first couple of days, and rape her if she didn’t go along with it.’

  ‘And is that what happened?’

  Emily realized that her impatience with this innocent-looking woman had led her to reveal more than she had intended already. ‘I don’t know. You minded your own business in the squat.’

  Peach said, ‘Wally Swift hasn’t confessed to anything like that. Not so far.’ She didn’t know that this was only the second time they had heard the name mentioned; that they had not even known the name until they got it from David Edmonds twenty-four hours earlier; that Swift had never been questioned; that they had so far no idea where this increasingly sinister figure was at present. No wonder Lucy was busy with her notes.

  The blonde woman on the other side
of the table folded her arms and told herself to be more careful. The last thing she wanted was to find an irate Wally Swift back in her life, smashing up her expensive premises, wrecking her new respectability. ‘He didn’t rape her, no. All I was saying is that he could have done, if he’d wanted to, and very probably get away with it. I was saying that girl Sunita was asking for trouble, coming into a place like that.’

  ‘And trouble is what she got, in the end. She became a murder victim. But she was there for at least six months before that happened.’

  ‘Yes. She was lucky. At first, I mean.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Other people looked after her. That other young fool, Matty, took up with her, for a start. Offered her his protection. There’s no knowing how long she’d have lasted, on her own.’

  ‘And why was Matthew Hayward a young fool?’ Peach was quiet, matter-of-fact, asking for information rather than being confrontational.

  She looked at him irritably, not used nowadays to having to justify her words. ‘He was almost as wet behind the ears as she was. Lucky to survive as long as he did. Of course, the girl would have ended up going to bed with anyone who gave her a bit of sympathy and a shoulder to cry on. But he didn’t see that. He thought it was some great love affair which was going to last.’

  ‘You weren’t surprised when they split up then?’

  She wondered just how much they knew about what had gone on in that squat. She had better be very careful. She tried to curb her contempt for the girl as she said cautiously, ‘No, I wasn’t surprised. I’m pretty sure Sunita was a virgin when she came there, that Matty was her first man. It wasn’t going to last. And perhaps she was the first woman he’d had, for all I know. That would explain why he cut up so rough when they broke up, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It would be one possible explanation, yes. We’d like your version of the break-up now, please.’

  ‘I think the Paki girl was bowled over by freedom. That once she’d got over the first thrill of being in the sack with someone, she wanted more, with different people.’