Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘Yes. We were all frightened of him, even then. He could have got out of that squat earlier than any of us, could Wally. I think he stayed there because it suited him, because he could get hold of the people he needed for his set-up.’

  ‘People like you, Billy. People who could offer a little violence where it was useful to him.’

  ‘No! Honestly, Mr Peach, I wasn’t much good at violence, even then. I don’t expect you’ll believe that, but it’s true. I got out as soon as I could. North End gave me a second chance at football, and I wasn’t going to screw up on that!’

  He was desperate to convince now. Peach contemplated the excellence of the brickwork in the wall for a few seconds, feeling the tension building in the man beside him. Then he said very quietly, ‘Did Wally Swift kill Sunita, Billy?’

  Billy Warnock tried to control his breathing, which sounded very loud in that confined space. ‘I think he did. I didn’t see him do it. He was very annoyed that the girl had been working for that man who came next door and offered her better terms. I know he made her tell him all about that. I saw her afterwards and she was very upset and frightened. And – and that was the last time I saw her. I assumed she’d been frightened away, when she disappeared so suddenly. I think we all did. Even Jo – and she was closer to Sunita than any of us.’

  It sounded like the truth. When you were surrounded by lies, it was difficult to tell, but this sounded right to Peach. He said as casually as he could, ‘And when would this be, Billy? This last time that you saw Sunita Akhtar alive?’

  ‘End of March, 1991.’

  ‘You can do better than that, Billy.’

  ‘I can’t, Mr Peach. It’s too long ago! That’s God’s honest truth! End of March is as near as I can get.’ He was desperate in his need to convince.

  Another pause. Another agonizing few seconds in which Warnock wondered whether he would be believed. Then Peach said casually, ‘Kept in touch with Wally Swift, have you?’

  Billy gasped. His torso listed to one side, away from the muscular man in the driving seat, like a ship holed below the Plimsoll line by this unexpected salvo. ‘It’s more that he’s kept in touch with me, Mr Peach. He used to ring me up, ask how I was getting on.’

  ‘Very touching! But he wasn’t concerned with your welfare, was he, Billy? He was asking you to recruit for him, I expect.’

  ‘He was, yes. Only a very few lads make it in professional football, you know. The majority simply haven’t got the skills and the pace required to play it professionally. But there are other reasons why people miss out, too.’

  ‘Drugs.’

  ‘I was going to say temperament. But that’s part of it. You have to have the temperament to resist things like drink and drugs and gambling. Lots of young men haven’t, especially when they get big money too early.’

  ‘And you fed the names of lads like that to Wally Swift. Lads who you knew were users. Lads who might become pushers in one of Swift’s rings of dealers.’

  ‘He threatened me, Mr Peach. Said he’d reveal things about my past to the bigwigs at Preston North End, things which would make sure that I lost my job. I need this job, Mr Peach! I’m good at it, and it’s the only thing I can do.’

  ‘Good with the kids are you, Billy? Perhaps you are. Except that you’ve delivered some of them into Wally Swift’s clutches. I can’t think they’d thank you for that.’

  ‘I hadn’t a choice! Honest I hadn’t! I was scared.’

  ‘Scares a lot of people, Wally, doesn’t he? Scared people even back in those days you spent in the squat together. The question is, did he kill Sunita Akhtar, as you think he did? And is there any way you could be charged as an accessory to that murder? For withholding information, for instance.’

  It was no more than a final twist of the tail, for Peach was privately convinced that he had got everything this man had to give. But he was wrong.

  Billy Warnock spoke so quickly that it was difficult to distinguish the words as he said, ‘I rang him. Tried to speak to him on Monday. Tried to tell him that you might be on to him. I was scared, see. I left a message, but he never came back to me.’

  There was yet another pause, whilst the two men in the car considered the implications of this latest revelation. Then Percy Peach said, ‘Probably a good thing for you that Swift didn’t get back to you, Billy, I’d say. I know where to find you, when I need you. You can get back to your snooker now.’

  Wednesday night on the first of March. A new month, with a hint of spring in the mild air and the first brave daffodils bursting from bud into flower in Brunton’s Corporation Park.

  The battered corpse of the girl who had died thirteen years ago lay in the mortuary, not yet released for burial. The people who knew her in the months before she died, who thought she had disappeared for ever, tried to continue their lives, whilst wondering how much the police now knew about the manner of her death.

  Matthew Hayward locked all the doors and windows of his cottage as darkness closed in. Normally, he loved the solitude, and the wildness of the moor behind him, rising towards the navy blue of the night sky. But since he had been threatened so unexpectedly with violence two days earlier, he had felt lonely and vulnerable, and those emotions rose in him again as darkness closed in upon the village below him. He told himself that Wally Swift was safely under lock and key, that the threat must surely have come from him. But he knew that Swift’s brutal instruments were still at large, and even wondered if they would blame him for Wally’s arrest. And Peach had made it clear to him that as Sunita’s discarded and resentful lover, he was still a murder suspect.

  He sat down at his grand piano and tried hard to concentrate on the slow movement from Beethoven’s first concerto, which he was due to play with the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in two days’ time. For once, music failed to distract and engross him. He could not remember when that had last happened. He wished increasingly that he was not alone.

  David Edmonds was not alone. He was surrounded by his boisterous family, looking forward eagerly to their holiday in Madeira in two days’ time. He would like to have been alone, to collect his thoughts and deal with the image of that chimney breast at 28, Sebastopol Terrace, the container within which the body of Sunita Akhtar had been entombed for all those years.

  It was an image which had risen to haunt him on each of the last three nights. In his detached and luxuriously furnished house, David Edmonds wished with ever-increasing fervency that he had never set foot in that place, had never tried to set up a network of drug-dealers, had never seen that brown, attractive face which now threatened his rest each night.

  Billy Warnock was also at home with his wife and children. He did not long for solitude like Edmonds. His girl of seven and his boy of five were a welcome distraction to him. Their joyous and innocent black faces shone brightly through his anxiety, convincing him that all would be well, that this uncomplicated and healthy life he had built for himself in football would surely not be snatched away from him now.

  It was only when they were safely in bed that his thoughts turned again to his actions in that other life, half-forgotten until they had been brought vividly back to him with the events of the last week. That was when he bitterly regretted the things he had done for Wally Swift all those years ago. He had always wondered what had happened to the body. It had been clever of Wally to hide it in a derelict house like that. He’d got away with it nicely at the time, and would have got away with it for ever if it hadn’t been for that damned wrecking ball.

  Billy Warnock wished that he had never set eyes on Wally Swift.

  In the hospice, Sister Josephine worked hard and long, staying with a woman dying with ovarian cancer far into the night, upping the morphine when the pain rose, holding the woman’s hand in both of hers long after she knew that she must be unconscious. Jo Ingram was happy to sit here in near-darkness.

  She had thought she had got over Sunita, long ago. But the discovery of the body had brought it all back to her
. She tried to utter a prayer for the girl she had loved, but the right words would not come to her. The God with whom Sister Josephine had of late been so familiar had withdrawn beyond the thick clouds of this starless night.

  Jane Watson was trying to enjoy a dinner in Bolton’s best restaurant. She was here with a man who had put money into her business, a married man who was twenty years older than her. He would want to slide into her bed at the end of the evening. Both of them knew the score, and normally that didn’t worry her. She had taken him on as a sleeping partner, in both senses of the phrase, and got her money interest free as a result. And she had seen that he got his money’s worth: she knew how to pleasure a man by now.

  But ever since Peach had brought back that other name, that Emily she thought she had discarded for ever, she had been disturbed. She would have backed herself to carry this situation off better than anyone, before it happened. Yet it had disturbed her more than she would have thought possible, to the extent that she was frightened that she had given things away. She kept going over what she had said to the police, trying to convince herself that she had given them nothing which would allow them to pin this death upon her.

  She had said that girl was trouble from the start, had done her best to get rid of her early on. If pious bloody Jo hadn’t taken her into her bed, she’d have gone, too. Emily had told everyone that she was trouble. But she hadn’t expected her to come back like this, all these years later.

  Emily Jane Watson said to the man on the other side of the expensive wine, ‘You won’t be able to come back to my place tonight, I’m afraid.’

  In his cell in the bowels of the police station in Manchester, Wally Swift was exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep. The events of the day revolved in his head like a manic merry-go-round. When Peach and that girl had finished with him, he’d had two hours with the Drugs Squad detectives. He’d had a brief with him for that, sent in by the men above him in the drugs hierarchy, and he hadn’t given away more than he needed to. But he’d been shaken by how much they knew, by how far their undercover man had penetrated into the organization. They were on to bigger fish than him, and they had the evidence to send them all down, as far as he could gather.

  Wally tried to banish his depression by telling himself that they couldn’t keep holding him like this. They’d have to charge him or release him tomorrow; the good old English law was always on the side of the criminal, as his brief had told him with a chuckle before he left.

  But Wally knew that he wouldn’t be released. He’d be remanded in custody and locked away in Strangeways. There’d be serious drugs charges, and he would be going down for a long stretch.

  That was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst. You got life for what he was going to be charged with. With the cards stacked against him like this, with him locked in here and unable to put pressure upon anyone, Wally Swift was convinced that the filth were going to charge him with the murder of Sunita Akhtar.

  Twenty-Three

  David Edmonds arrived at work early on the morning of Thursday, the second of March. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and he couldn’t face a conversation with his wife over the breakfast table.

  Nor did he fancy the children bringing him the pictures of the hotel in Madeira, with its swimming pools and its gym and its restaurants and its views over the Mediterranean. They would be there in thirty-six hours now, as they kept telling him, and able to see for themselves. He could not tell them that their father had a superstitious, unreasonable feeling that the more he talked about the brilliant blue of that sea the less likely he was to see it.

  He told himself repeatedly on his way to the office that this was a silly and illogical idea. Yet the first event of his morning proved to him that instinct was a surer guide than logic in this. Detective Chief Inspector Peach was standing unsmiling beside the window display of properties for sale as David Edmonds emerged from the private car park at the rear of the building with his keys in his hand.

  David tried aggression. ‘This is an imposition, you know. It’s really not convenient. I’ve a lot of work to get through before I go on holiday tomorrow. That’s why I’ve come in early, to get a bit of privacy.’

  ‘Bit of privacy’s what we’ll need for this, I reckon. Your wife said you were missing at home, that we’d likely find you here.’

  David tried conciliation. ‘Well, I suppose you’ve a job to do, like the rest of us. I hope you’ve been making good progress with your enquiries into the death of that poor girl.’ He smiled at Lucy Blake, whom he had not at first noticed behind Peach.

  ‘Very steady progress, since you ask.’ Peach’s dark eyes had not left the estate agent’s face since he had appeared on the scene.

  David accepted the inevitable. ‘You’d better come inside. Hopefully we can get this out of the way before any of my staff come into the office.’

  ‘Hopefully we can, yes. It shouldn’t take too long, if you behave sensibly.’

  David Edmonds didn’t like the sound of that. He turned the key in the lock, noting with relief that his hand was very steady, and threw open the door. He went and switched off the alarm, cutting off its insistent bleeping without haste. He was suddenly aware that he must take his time, that he must marshal his thoughts carefully if he was to outwit this calm, watchful opponent.

  Peach for his part was aware that the evidence as yet was thin upon the ground. The more he could get from the man here, the better the case they would be able to mount. He watched the tall, rather handsome man of thirty-seven as he put his car coat inside the cupboard in his office and waved his hand towards the armchairs beside his desk. A nice office, this, with a good carpet and prints of Chester and York on the walls. Not as dramatic a view as from Tommy Bloody Tucker’s penthouse office in the new Brunton police headquarters, of course. But then probably a lot more work went on in here, a lot more useful business was transacted.

  Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake sat in the armchair beside him and studied their man just as intently as Peach. It was a shame, this outcome, in many ways. David Edmonds was probably a good father and an excellent family man. His wife would be terribly shocked, his parents-in-law even more so. His three children would have to carry this with them through the rest of their lives.

  Edmonds decided it was much too early in the day to get the whisky bottle out. That was a pity, because he could have done with a generous double to see him through this. He kept telling himself to keep his professional smile on his face and brazen it out. Whatever they had come here for, they could surely not pin that old, forgotten murder upon him. It had been a shock when the wretched girl’s body had turned up like that, but he had grown accustomed to it now. If he kept his nerve, it would be over soon and he could look forward to the rest of his life. By tomorrow night, he would be in Madeira, gazing out over the Mediterranean, and this would be no more than a bad dream.

  He became aware that Peach was watching him, studying him with as little embarrassment as if he had been a slide under a microscope. He wondered if he could let the silence stretch, challenge this man who seemed so at home with it. But before he was even aware that he was speaking he heard his voice say, ‘Come to give me an update on the case, have you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ Peach gave him a small, mirthless smile.

  ‘Got that Swift bloke under lock and key yet?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Wally Swift was arrested in Manchester on Tuesday night. I understand he is still in custody. In view of the serious nature of the charges against him, he has been refused bail.’

  David tried not to show his relief too obviously. ‘I’m glad about that. The rest of us will be able to breathe a little more easily now. Swift was a bad lot in 1991 and he hasn’t improved since, from what I’ve heard on the grapevine.’ He glanced from the watchful and impassive Peach to the more agreeable female face beside him and decided to address his remarks to DS Blake. ‘If it doesn’t sound too sycophantic, I’d like to congratulate you on the effi
ciency of your investigation of this crime. The police get a lot of—’

  ‘Wally Swift will go down for a long stretch, for serious offences in connection with the trafficking of illegal drugs. But not for life. He hasn’t been charged with murder.’ Peach’s voice cut through the thin skin of Edmonds’ strained affability like a barbed whip.

  ‘No?’ David felt suddenly that he knew what was coming. He strove desperately to keep up his front. ‘Well, you know your business best, of course, but I must admit that I’d rather assumed that he’d killed that Asian girl.’

  ‘Sunita Akhtar!’ Peach rasped the name like an accusation, suddenly outraged by the way this man had dismissed his victim into anonymity. ‘She had a name, Mr Edmonds. That girl you throttled without mercy. That girl you killed and then calmly stowed away like so much baggage behind a chimney breast. Sunita Akhtar!’ He found himself quivering with fury on behalf of this girl he had never known, who had died so many years ago, in a house he had never visited.

  David felt his pulses racing as he saw this rare flash of temper from Peach. He told himself that he had always expected this, that they could prove nothing if he kept his nerve and played out this game of bluff and counter-bluff. He was pleased to hear how steady his voice sounded as he said, ‘That is a wild accusation, made without reason. You have not a shred of proof. You may regret saying these things in due course, particularly as I have a witness to your rashness.’ He shone his full professional smile into the face of Lucy Blake for a moment, then turned his attention back to his adversary. ‘There are laws about such things as slander, and they apply even to detective chief inspectors.’

  ‘Forensic science has moved forward in the years since you murdered Sunita Akhtar. Material has been gathered from the corpse, even after all this time. Hairs which did not come from Sunita’s head, Mr Edmonds. Fibres which did not come from the clothing which Sunita was wearing.’ Peach found that he relished his repetition of the girl’s name, sounding it as if it were a challenge from the grave, a cry for justice from this pathetic, forgotten victim.