[Inspector Peach 12] - Pastures New

by J M Gregson

  ‘You’ve changed my picture, Mrs B,’ he said wonderingly.

  ‘Aye. I’ve got several, now. Bought them from the Evening Telegraph.’ She gave him the smug grin of a seventy-year-old who was delighted that she could still surprise the young. Then she added severely, ‘I’d still be collecting new ones, if you hadn’t retired much too early.’

  ‘He’s taken up golf,’ said her daughter innocently, well aware of the reaction this would produce.

  ‘Golf!’ Neither Lucy nor Percy had ever heard so much contempt compressed into a single monosyllable. Consequently, they loved to trigger this supreme scorn from the cricket-loving Agnes.

  ‘Some of the people at the station tell me he’s now quite good at it,’ added Lucy.

  ‘Game for red-nosed colonels and pompous twits!’ said Agnes with confident derision.

  ‘That’s an old-fashioned view of the game. Mum. All sorts of people play golf now. Look at Tiger Woods.’

  ‘I do. And every time I see him, I think he should be playing cricket. Loose-limbed, that lad is, like Gary Sobers. Could have been opening both the batting and the bowling at test level like Gary, I reckon, if he hadn’t been badly advised in his youth.’

  ‘But Tiger is American, Mum,’ protested Lucy mildly.

  ‘American!’ Her mother’s performance on this word was less impressive than on golf only by virtue of the fact that this time she had four syllables into which to cram her disdain. ‘Sex and violence. That’s what we get from America!’

  Lucy was tempted to point out that there wasn’t a high incidence of those things in golf, but she’d had her fun. ‘Why don’t we eat outside? It’s such a lovely day. Let’s use your nice new patio.’

  She had persuaded her mother to have the flags laid only in the autumn of the previous year. Agnes looked at her darkly, then glanced up at the cloudless blue sky and relented. ‘You’ll have to help me bring stuff out, our Lucy.’

  Peach and her daughter had the table set with the ham salad and the fruits of the older woman’s baking with surprising speed. Some time later, when Agnes was pouring the tea into her best china cups, she said a little wistfully, ‘I should have gone with you to Marton Towers last week, our Lucy. I didn’t know I was going to miss a murder.’

  Peach said breezily, ‘You wouldn’t have seen anything worthwhile, Mrs B. But with your powers of observation, you’d likely have picked up more than your daughter did.’ With fair colouring, dark red hair and a few freckles round the temples, it is difficult to do a good glower: you tend to turn red when you should be darkening thunderously. But Lucy Blake managed it: Percy decided it was a glower almost as good as Tommy Bloody Tucker at his most frustrated.

  Lucy said with a fair degree of steel, ‘I was enjoying a party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the father of my oldest friend. I had no idea at the time that it was going to end in homicide.’

  ‘Ah, but if you’d been a proper detective, you’d have had a hunch, you see. People in books are always having hunches. Particularly people in American books.’ He glanced sideways at Agnes Blake and was emboldened by the delight on her face at this latest slur on the special relationship. ‘Useful things, hunches. Private eyes seem to rely almost exclusively upon them. My team seems to find them difficult to come by.’

  ‘Perhaps because we know exactly what reaction we’d get, if we dared to produce anything as esoteric as a hunch for you.’

  Percy smiled happily at the thought. ‘A private eye came in to see me this morning at the station, Mrs B.’ He delighted himself with the thought of how the shabby John Kirkby would have squirmed at that description.

  Agnes Blake resisted the temptation to follow her favourite man down this fascinating byway. ‘I hope you’re not getting our Lucy into dangerous situations again, Percy Peach.’

  ‘I’m doing my best to protect her, but you know how headstrong young women can be.’ Percy professed the policeman’s professional disdain for psychologists and psychiatrists, but his own knowledge of the way minds worked was surprisingly extensive. He knew, for instance, that women of twenty-nine are still young girls to their mothers and that all mothers like to think of their children as headstrong.

  ‘Marriage will take her out of danger.’

  ‘It will certainly be a large step in that direction, Mrs B.’ Percy nodded sagely and closed his eyes in ecstasy as he bit into an Agnes Blake scone.

  ‘You two are talking about me as if I’m not here again. You do it all the time,’ said Lucy resentfully.

  ‘It’s high time we fixed a date for t’wedding. Now that we’re all agreed it’s going to happen,’ said Agnes complacently.

  ‘I agree, Mrs B. Forward planning is the secret of success. Superintendent Tucker tells me that frequently.’

  ‘And we all know how much attention you pay to him,’ said Lucy tartly.

  Percy modestly accepted the slice of rich fruitcake which Agnes urged upon him. He looked at the sky, which was now darkening from the lighter shade of Wedgwood to the darker one, and said with relish, ‘Our revered leader will be getting banged up for the night, any time now.’

  Lucy and he were at last reconciled by the thought of the bewildered Tucker being locked away in a prison cell after a day of unsuccessful networking.

  It was Agnes Blake who eventually broke the contented silence with a sally down an unexpected avenue. She said darkly, ‘I told our Lucy that no good would come of it when Geoffrey Aspin began to dabble with women.’

  ‘He wasn’t “dabbling with women”. Mum. His wife had been dead for nearly four years and he was a lonely man. He was developing a deep relationship with one woman, whom he planned to marry.’

  Agnes considered it a mother’s privilege to ignore logical arguments from her daughter when it suited her. She repeated stolidly, ‘I said no good would come of it, and it didn’t.’ Lucy thought of the picture of her beloved father in pride of place on the mantelpiece and wondered whether this was another statement of her mother’s refusal to consider any other man for herself since Bill Blake’s death over a decade ago. She said gently, ‘Geoff Aspin might well be alive and well today if he hadn’t decided upon a second marriage. But that doesn’t mean that he was wrong to look for happiness.’

  ‘You sound like a Mills and Boon, our Lucy,’ said her mother with waspish satisfaction. She looked at Percy Peach for confirmation and found him sporting his widest beam of approval.

  Lucy changed a subject where she was having scant success. ‘Louise was looking very tired, Mum. She’s got two children to look after, Daisy and Michael. Remember I told you that Michael has Down’s syndrome.’

  Agnes thought of the laughing teenager with flying hair and an infectious laugh who had once come frequently to her cottage. ‘Life changes for all of us, love. How’s her husband getting on?’

  Lucy had forgotten that her mother had been at Louise’s wedding, that she’d known Steve Hawksworth and liked him at that time. She hoped this wasn’t going to be another oblique attack on her own unmarried state. ‘He’s all right, I think. I didn’t get the chance to talk to him much at Marton Towers.’

  And any talk since the murder was professional and confidential. Agnes Blake knew the rules. ‘Has he got his own business yet? I know that was one of his ambitions when he’d only just started work.’

  ‘No, he’s still working as an accountant for Robinson’s in Brunton. But he’s doing well enough, I think. Not as well as Carol’s husband, Jemal, though. They seem very prosperous but not very happy together.’

  There was a silence, whilst Percy and Lucy wondered exactly where Jemal Bilic might be at this moment.

  Agnes Blake said that she had never known the elder daughter very well and her husband not at all. She wanted to ask Lucy about the mysterious woman Pam Williams who had set all this off, but she knew that she must not trespass on to sensitive ground with a case in progress.

  ‘They announced on Radio Lancashire this afternoon that Jemal Bilic had gone mis
sing,’ Agnes said. ‘That he’s wanted by the police for questioning.’

  Percy shrugged. ‘It will come out soon enough, Mrs B. He’s been bringing in illegal immigrants.’

  Agnes’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Like those poor Chinese cockle-pickers who were drowned in Morecambe Bay?’

  The men who had been used as slave labour, undetected until they’d been caught by the treacherous tides and drowned. Twenty-three of them had died in 2004, though only twenty-one of the bodies had ever been retrieved. A few years ago now, but still vivid in the horrified minds of Lancastrians.

  ‘Not cockle-pickers, but people like that, yes.’

  ‘Those poor men.’ Agnes shook her head a few times and the three were silent, dwelling for a moment on the depths of human misery and desperation, and the depths of human avarice which could trade upon such things.

  ‘The people Bilic was bringing in are mostly from Eastern Europe, it seems, but they paid huge sums to get here and then were treated more or less as slaves when they arrived.’

  It seemed from what he had heard from the investigation that most of the women were being forced to work as prostitutes. Peach sighed, looking up at the darkening sky: it was a naive thought, but at the end of days like this, it seemed even more amazing that there should be such depravity abroad. ‘It’s Customs and Immigration who are handling it. It’s not our investigation, I’m glad to say. The private eye I mentioned had some valuable information, though, which has been passed on to them. Geoffrey Aspin had employed the man to find out just what his son-in-law was up to.’

  ‘And now the man’s killed him.’

  Lucy glanced sharply at Peach, then said, ‘We know Carol’s husband is a wrong ’un. Mum. We don’t know that he killed Geoff Aspin.’

  That was a question Peach and Blake discussed more openly as midnight approached and they drove back to Brunton through the warm darkness. But it was not until well after dawn on Sunday morning, as he struggled into consciousness, that Peach thought he had the answer to it. It was at that point that a chance remark from the previous evening flicked the tiny connection in his brain which gave him the solution.

  * * *

  There was a watch on all major airports and departure ports for Jemal Bilic.

  Twenty-first-century terrorism and the measures it has compelled have brought certain beneficial side effects. One of them is that it is less easy for wanted men to slip through cordons. Vigilance has now become a way of life for people who operate in such places.

  Ironically, Bilic was arrested not at one of the outlets where hundreds of people had been alerted but at a small private airfield just south of Glasgow. It was known that he had flown in and out of the country from there before, so it was under discreet surveillance from the moment the news came through that he had fled from Brunton. In the end, it was something as mundane as the registration number on his Mercedes which alerted the watchers to his arrival there on Sunday morning.

  There were a lot of police on the spot within twenty minutes, but they did not rush things. The more of the man’s staff they could corner with him, the greater the chance of scuppering his vicious enterprise for ever. Jemal Bilic was preparing to board the small single-engined plane when the forces which had encircled the area moved in and arrested him.

  His dark eyes flashed quickly to right and left as he was warned that it might prejudice his defence if he did not declare things he might later wish to use in court. He saw police everywhere: there was no escape and he knew it. He watched the handcuffs being clicked shut over his slim, steely wrists and delivered the ritual defiance which was all he had left to him: ‘This is some ridiculous mistake and you will be made to pay for it. I shall say nothing until I have my lawyer here.’

  The arresting officer was far too experienced to let his distaste for the man stray into verbal abuse. He spoke without emotion but with evident satisfaction as his prisoner was put into the back of the car. ‘You are also wanted for questioning in connection with a murder in Brunton, Lancashire.’

  Carol Bilic hesitated for a long time before she tapped in the number.

  When her sister answered, Carol was uncharacteristically hesitant. She asked about Louise’s children, hardly listened to the response, gave a few unremarkable details of the progress of her own older offspring.

  When Louise asked her if Lisa was still as keen as ever on her horse, Carol’s preoccupation did not permit her to reply. She cut through her sister’s polite enquiries with a terse, ‘Jemal’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you hear the radio or the television?’ She was suddenly irritated by the innocence and ignorance of her sibling, as she had been when she was eighteen and Louise was eleven.

  ‘We haven’t had them on today. We took the children into the park for a while.’ Not for the first time, Louise reflected how different her life was from that of her sister. She mouthed to Steve on the other side of the room that it was Carol. He went into the hall and picked up the other phone, coming back into the room with the instrument at his ear and his eyes anxiously upon his wife.

  Carol rapped out a series of tense sentences. ‘Well, Jemal’s gone. I don’t mean just that he’s left me. He’s fled from the police. He took his car and went early this morning before I was up. They’ve announced on the radio that they want to speak to him. That’s what I meant when I said hadn’t you heard.’

  Louise did not know what to say. She managed a limp, ‘I’m sorry!’ which only made Carol more impatient on the other end of the line.

  ‘Don’t waste any sympathy on me! Still less on the bastard who was my husband. We were finished anyway, before all this blew up: I told you that. I’m sure he’s going to deserve everything he gets!’ Years of accumulated bitterness came out in the vehemence of this last sentiment.

  Louise and Steve were looking with wide eyes at each other as the vitriol poured into their ears. Steve made a small, urgent gesture and his wife said tentatively, ‘Carol, are you telling me Jemal murdered Dad?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Her frustration burst out and she heard the anger in the question herself. ‘Sorry. I can’t get my head round what’s happening. All I know is that two plain clothes coppers came here looking for him yesterday and I had to tell them that he’d gone. And that I didn’t know where he’d gone.’ She heard her voice rising impatiently again: Carol was overtaken by a sudden, totally illogical, feeling that they should already know all this, that they shouldn’t be delaying her with such banalities. ‘They want him for other things. Serious things. I’m sure. I know now why the bastard never told me what he was up to.’

  ‘But did he kill our dad, Carol?’

  She hadn’t heard Louise use that phrase ‘our dad’ for years. Not since they had lived under the family roof together, she thought. ‘He may have done. I don’t know, do I? The policemen didn’t tell me what they wanted to speak to him about.’

  From their more modest house, Steve Hawksworth then spoke to his sister-in-law. ‘It’s Steve here, Carol. I think Jemal might have murdered him. I’m afraid he probably did, if he’s got other crimes on his hands. Perhaps your dad was on to him. Perhaps Jemal killed Geoff to prevent him telling the police what he knew.’

  Carol Bilic was suddenly resentful that this man who had always seemed to her so timid should be using her dead father’s first name like this. Her voice was brittle with emotion as she said, ‘That’s another thing I might have to face, isn’t it?’ She faltered into more words, then stopped abruptly and said, ‘Look, can I come and see you? My kids are out for the day and—’

  With the mention of children, Louise was suddenly firm and decisive. ‘It had better be this evening. I’ll get Daisy and Michael into bed and then we can have a proper, uninterrupted discussion.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll come at about eight. I can arrange for my kids to do a stopover: they’ll be better out of the house at present. I might have more news of Jemal and what’s happening by then.’
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  Carol Bilic stared at the phone for a long moment when she had put it down, trying to sort out the issues in her teeming and uncharacteristically disordered mind.

  Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker cursed the prison service, the progressives who had landed him in the cell at Nottingham as part of their experiment, the Sunday train services which had left him on the platform at Manchester for half an hour.

  He even cursed the perfect summer weather: why should the rest of the world have enjoyed two such balmy days whilst he had been incarcerated? He had glared up resentfully at the oblong of blue sky above the exercise yard as a hundred senior policemen paraded ridiculously round the cramped area during the forty minutes of exercise time they had been permitted on Saturday and Sunday.

  He told himself that it was good to be out of that ridiculous prison uniform and back in his own clothes. What a disaster that had been! You couldn’t even distinguish rank under that shabby grey denim. He’d spent twenty minutes cultivating some bloke from Brighton because he thought he was a chief constable, then found that he was no more than a humble inspector from the traffic section, who’d been sent on this pointless exercise to leave his seniors free to enjoy their weekends.

  Chief Superintendent Tucker had queued with the man for that awful prison grub, sat talking about football with him at the table, endured all that drivel about the trials of the job at the seaside, where the population of the town could triple at a summer weekend, murmured his sympathy about the hardness of the beds in the cramped, overcrowded cells - and all for nothing.

  All this was supposed to make you more understanding about the rest of the world, that pompous twit had said in his address at the end of the weekend. You were supposed to feel sympathy not only for the unfortunates who were locked away from the world in places like this but for those nearer to you in the hierarchy, those lesser ranks whose fate it was to be ordered about by you in their working lives.