Dusty Death (20 page)

‘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.'

‘And what reasons do you have for this view?'

She wanted to chant the words mockingly back into his smug face. Instead, she said, ‘No reasons, except my own experience. I know a thing or two about sex, that's all.'

‘And you're sure that it was Sunita who got rid of Matty, and not the other way round?'

‘Quite sure. And I couldn't say I was sorry at the time. Cocky young sod had it coming to him.'

‘And how did Matty react when Sunita wanted out?'

‘He cut up rough, didn't he? Silly bugger should have seen it coming, but he didn't. And when she shacked up with a woman, he couldn't take that.'

Not a muscle moved on either of the two contrasting faces which were studying her hard, experienced features so intently. Not a flicker revealed that this was new and sensational news to them. From what she had said, the woman didn't mean herself. That left only one woman, however unlikely a candidate she seemed for the role. The woman who was now Sister Josephine.

Peach said evenly, ‘I think you'd better tell us everything you can remember about this third woman in the squat.'

‘Jo. High and mighty Jo. The woman who talked about principles, and lived in a squat. The woman who told me to keep my hands off Sunita, and then turned out to be a dyke.'

Seeing the two thirteen years later, Peach would have expected a personality clash between the woman he had seen only as the virtuous Sister Josephine, working her heart out in a hospice, and this stone-faced blonde who seemed to know so much about the seamier side of the world. Even when they were half-formed young women thrown together in the exigencies of the squatters' existence, he would have expected them to clash. That was no bad thing now: a woman full of resentment was likely to reveal things she would otherwise have concealed.

He said, ‘You're sure this relationship was sexual?'

‘If you call sleeping together every night, if you call shutting themselves off in their own room, if you call moans of pleasure echoing through the house sexual, yes. Of course it was! That Jo was a dyke, talking high-flown rubbish about moral choices but just waiting for the chance to get a bit of Asian pussy under her blankets!'

Peach watched her breathing heavily, noting her vehemence with interest. Then he said calmly, ‘You said this Jo warned you to keep your hands off Sunita. That implies that you had designs upon her yourself.'

‘Not to get my hands on her, I hadn't. Jane Watson might have been around, but she's never been a dyke!'

He could see her suddenly with her coarse, indignant features as a man; one of those National Front thugs who had lately been causing so much trouble in the town, perhaps, with their homophobia and their racism. But this woman was more intelligent than those tattooed and unthinking louts. And probably as a result more dangerous.

Peach said suddenly, ‘Why Jane? Em was good enough in that squat.'

‘That's my business.'

‘Possibly. But what you did as Emily Watson was ours.'

She'd suspected all along that they knew, that they were playing cat and mouse with her about it. She'd run rings round that Tucker bloke, at the time, but that wasn't going to happen now with these two. But there was nothing they could pin upon her, if she gave them nothing: she told herself that firmly. Make them work for everything, from now on. She used her haughtiest businesswoman's tone to say, ‘I've no idea what you mean, Chief Inspector.'

‘I think you do. Within two years of leaving that squat in Sebastopol Terrace, you were running a disorderly house. Operating a ring of prostitutes. Living off immoral earnings.'

‘Prove it! Your Superintendent Tucker never did, and he was around at the time.'

Percy Peach was used to picking up the pieces after Tommy Bloody Tucker. But not pieces from before he was even on the scene. ‘I don't have to, Miss Emily Watson! Fortunately for you, I'm not interested in doing so, at this distance in time. I'm interested in a murder which took place three years earlier, and your possible part in that.'

‘Guilty until proved innocent now, is it?'

Peach answered her sneer with his most impudent grin. ‘Not a bad motto for an investigating officer, that, when the evidence is thin upon the ground. We're paid good money to be suspicious buggers, in CID!' He paused to register how eminently satisfying he found that thought. ‘It's my belief that you were not only operating as a prostitute yourself early in 1991, but that you tried to recruit Sunita Akhtar to go on the game.'

It was a hit, a very palpable hit. She snarled, ‘Prove it! I defy you to prove it!' at him, but it was no more than a ritual defiance. She was wondering furiously whom he had talked to, who it was that might have passed this on to him.

‘I don't have to prove it. And fortunately for you, I'm not interested in doing so at this moment. I'm interested in who killed the poor girl. Perhaps she resisted your suggestions, and you killed her when she refused to comply.'

‘I didn't.' But she was staring at the edge of the square table in front of her now, too shaken to look into the piercing black eyes of this odious man.

‘So who did?'

‘I don't know. I'd tell you if I did. Get me off the hook you seem so determined to put me on, wouldn't it?'

‘It might, if I felt I could trust a word you said. Tell me about Wally Swift.'

Emily thought quickly. He wasn't a man to grass on, Wally. Not even now, after all this time. But with her own neck on the block, she hadn't much option. She said in a low voice, ‘He was a vicious bugger, Wally, even then.'

Peach nodded. ‘So everyone tells us.'

Even Lucy Blake, sitting beside him and preparing to record whatever she could pick up about this still shadowy figure, was almost convinced at that moment that they had gathered accounts of this man Swift from various other people. Percy was making bricks without any straw at all, this time.

But Watson just nodded her agreement. ‘He had his own schemes going, whilst the rest of us were just surviving in that squat.'

‘Drugs.' Percy made it a statement rather than a question, though his only source was the dubious one of David Edmonds.

‘Yes. He was dealing himself from when I first knew him. By the time Sunita died, he had others working for him.'

‘Including her?'

‘I don't know. He may have tried to recruit her. This bloke who was holding his meetings next door certainly did.'

David Edmonds, who had already told them that Sunita was selling for him. Apparently she didn't know the name. Perhaps she really didn't know it, wasn't aware that he was now a prominent local estate agent. If he proved in the end to have no connection with this murder, they wouldn't bring his name into it.