Dusty Death (21 page)

Peach said, ‘Do you mean that this man operating from twenty-eight Sebastopol Terrace actually succeeded in enlisting Sunita to sell drugs, or that he merely attempted it?'

She ran a hand briefly across her forehead and the top of her broad nose, as if she was checking that she wasn't sweating. ‘I don't know. I thought she was working for him, at one time. She suddenly seemed to have more money than she'd had before. I'd always thought she was sponging off Jo, until the last month or so.'

‘Do you think that Wally Swift might have killed her for working for someone else rather than him?'

She paused for so long that they thought she was not going to reply. Then she gave a tiny shrug of her square shoulders and said in a low voice, ‘I don't know. It's possible – I told you, he was a vicious bugger, was Wally, if you didn't do what he wanted. If he'd got her working for him and she transferred to this other bloke, he'd have taken that very badly. You can't let that kind of thing happen to you, if you want to be a big player in drugs.'

That rang true enough. They were going to have to find this man, and quickly. Peach said casually, ‘And where is Wally Swift now?'

The square jaw dropped. She had thought they had already questioned Swift, whereas it seemed they didn't even know his present whereabouts. How much else had she given away that she might safely have concealed? She said dully, ‘I don't know. I haven't had any contact with him since we were together at Sebastopol Terrace. We went our separate ways.'

‘Separate criminal ways, it seems.' No harm in reminding her of that, if they wished her to continue to co-operate. ‘Do you think it was Billy who killed Sunita?'

Again that abrupt switch, catching her off guard when she had been preparing herself to fend off more questions about Wally Swift. She hadn't even thought about the young West Indian, until now. ‘I don't know who killed the damned girl, do I? I've told you that.'

‘So it might have been Billy?'

‘It might, yes.'

‘Keen on her, wasn't he?'

They knew that much then. They might be trying to trip her up here. ‘Yes. He seemed to think because they were the two non-whites that he had a right to bed her. She didn't go along with that. He was very black, Billy; I don't think she liked his colour. They can be as racist as anyone, you know, the Pakis, but no one makes a fuss about that, do they?'

‘Did Billy take it badly?'

‘I think he did, yes.' She couldn't actually remember, all these years later, but anything which spread suspicion away from herself was worth using.

‘Like Billy, did you?'

‘What sort of question's that? We were interested in surviving, in that place, not liking or disliking each other.'

‘But you've already expressed certain thoughts about the others. So what about Billy?'

Had they been asking the others how they felt about her? And what had they said? She wished after all this time that she hadn't been quite as vicious with Jo and Matty as she had at the time. Not to mention Sunita. She said cautiously, ‘I didn't mind Billy. He was black but he knew his place. And he was streetwise for his age, knew how to look after himself. He wasn't asking for trouble or likely to bring it on the rest of us, like Matty or that dyke Jo.'

‘Or Sunita.'

‘Or Sunita. She got what she was asking for in the end, that girl.'

They let her go on that. Let her go back to her legitimate and lucrative business. Let go this woman who had run a brothel and might be a murderer.

‘I want to speak to Mr Swift.'

‘Who is that?'

‘It's an old colleague of his. Billy Warnock. He'll speak to me.'

A pause. Then, ‘He's not available, I'm afraid. But I'm his manager here. Empowered to deal with all matters. What is it you want, Mr Warnock?' The voice managed to put a faint stress of bored contempt into its pronunciation of the surname. It was a male voice, heavy with menace beneath the polite words. The tone which carried those words was saying that Mr Swift was a powerful and important man, who paid well to keep unwanted calls and unwanted callers out of his life, that this anonymous voice from the past had much better forget the attempt to contact him.

‘He'll speak to me. He'll want to know about this. We go back a long way, Wally and me.' Billy tried to keep his voice firm as he mouthed the once familiar forename, to answer menace with menace. This man couldn't know that he wasn't as powerful a man as Wally, that he didn't employ underlings of his own to keep people at arm's length.

Another pause. Billy wondered if this smooth and anonymous heavy had his hand over the mouthpiece, whether he was speaking to someone else. Then the baritone voice, bereft of all accent and therefore conjuring no visual picture for Billy beyond its sound, resumed with what was nearly a drawl. ‘I'll pass on your message, Mr – Mr—'

‘Warnock. Billy Warnock.'

‘Mr Warnock, yes. Well, if he wants to ring you back, no doubt Mr Swift will do so.'

‘He'll ring me. Tell him it's urgent.' Billy forced a little impatience into his voice.

‘Yes. Perhaps you should know that he is now universally known as Walter. To those few people who do not address him as Mr Swift, that is.'

The phone went dead.

Billy Warnock, who had nerved himself for three hours to make the call he did not wish to make, found that he was sweating profusely, in the unheated room where he had gone for privacy, on the twenty-eighth of February.

‘We've located another suspect, sir.'

It was a grey Monday afternoon, with flurries of tiny snowflakes passing the big window in the Chief Superintendent's office. DCI Peach felt in need of a little light relief, on such a bleak day.

‘Another pillar of society, is it?' Tucker was pleased with the sneer he managed to inject into the words.

‘Can't control who gets himself into trouble, can I, sir?' Peach allowed himself a moment of outraged innocence.

There didn't seem to be any answer to that. Tucker had to content himself with a peevish, ‘Well, you'd better get on with it, Chief Inspector. I haven't got all day, you know!'

‘No. sir. Absolutely not, sir. I can see that.' Peach allowed his dark eyes to sweep slowly across the immaculately empty surface of the big desk between them. ‘Well, this one's not a Mason, sir.'

‘I'm glad to hear it. You seem to me to be obsessed with sullying the reputation of as fine a—'

‘Restrictive rules wouldn't permit this one to join a Lodge, sir. Though I dare say there's some as wouldn't mind viewing this suspect with a bared breast. It's a woman, sir.'

‘Ah.' Tucker gave such a weight of understanding to the meaningless syllable that it might have denoted a serial rapist or multiple poisoner. ‘This sounds much more promising.'

Peach wondered what Lucy Blake would make of that; she was sure to think he was exaggerating when he retailed this to her. ‘This is a woman who was in that squat in 1991, sir. I'd hazard a bet that she was acting as a part-time prostitute at the time. We're certain that she's run a brothel since then.'

Tucker leant forward, solemn and portentous as an Old Testament prophet. ‘My feeling is that this is our killer. Just a gut feeling at the moment, mind; you'll need to get on and gather the evidence. But remember that you heard it first here, Percy.'

‘Yes, sir. I certainly shall, sir.' It always disturbed him when Tommy Bloody Tucker addressed him as ‘Percy'. He said hastily, ‘This is the benefit of your overview of crime, sir. Sometimes we people working on the ground can't see what should be staring us in the face.'

‘Indeed.' Tucker waved an arm, magisterially and vaguely. He said generously, ‘Of course, I shall give you full credit in all my reports to the Chief Constable, at the conclusion of the case.'

Peach, who knew that this was a brazen lie, mustered his widest and most innocent smile. ‘It's good to hear that, sir. I'm sure you'll be as generous as you always are to your team.'

Tucker, who had an ear deaf to irony, said, ‘Excellent work! Tell the rest of your team that they've done well, will you? It's good to know that a woman who has been involved in criminal activity for so long is finally going to—'

‘She's a prosperous businesswoman now, sir.'

‘Who is? You mean . . .' The same hand which had lately swept broadly and generously in front of Tucker now pawed feebly at the air.

‘Emily Jane Watson, sir. Known as Em or Emmy when she was in that squat in Sebastopol Terrace in 1991. She seems to have dropped the Emily now, sir. Understandable, with a past like hers.'

‘But you say she's now running a successful business?' The confidence drained out of Tucker's voice word by word as he spoke. ‘You're sure this isn't a case of mistaken identity?'

‘We are, sir. We're confident that this is the same woman who was in the squat. But she's a brassy piece, prepared to deny any knowledge of the murder and any connection with it. And as I say, she's now running a very successful and legitimate business, as she was only too eager to point out. An introductions agency, in Bolton, sir. High Street position, very expensive and prosperous-looking premises, DC Pickering assures me. She'd very likely be in the Masons by now, if she were a man.' He nodded happily on that thought.

Tucker hastened to backtrack in the face of this new information. ‘She may just have had an unfortunate start in life, Peach. People do, you know.'

Percy was glad to hear his surname back in use. ‘That's the kind of argument she's sure to put forward, sir. And she won't easily be diverted from it. Quite capable of pulling a few strings and creating quite a stink, I should think. It's good to know that you're so certain she strangled Sunita Akhtar.'

‘Now wait a minute, Peach. I never said—'

‘Gut feeling, sir,' Peach quoted happily.

‘I know, but—'

‘Benefits of your overview, sir. I often tell the lads and lasses at the crime-face just what your overview is worth to us.' He smiled contentedly, his eyes consistently on a line three inches above his chief's head.

‘What I'm saying, Chief Inspector Peach, is that you must keep all your lines of enquiry open. Never jump to conclusions without proper evidence. It's a basic rule of detection, that.'

And as unvarying as your talent for stating the blindin' bleedin' obvious, thought Peach. ‘This means that we have found and interviewed three of the five people who were in that squat with Sunita Akhtar. Matthew Hayward, now a concert pianist, Josephine Ingram, now Sister Josephine in a hospice, and Emily Jane Watson, owner and manager of the successful Watson Introductions Agency.'

Tucker nodded glumly. ‘None of them seems a very likely candidate for murder.'

‘There's also the man who met Sunita in the empty house next door, and possibly tried to recruit her to push drugs for him. The man who is now Chief Executive for Ormerod's Estate Agency.'

‘David Edmonds? He wasn't even residing in that squat at the time, and he's now a pillar of Brunton society.'

Peach pursed his lips. ‘Member of the Freemasons, sir. And thus four times more likely to be guilty of a serious local crime than—'

‘Peach! For heavens sake stop quoting that ridiculous statistic at me!'

‘Very well, sir. I suppose I'm just proud of my research.' Percy looked suitably hurt.

‘This means that there are two people you haven't yet unearthed.' Tucker was pleased with his arithmetic. ‘Why not?' He jutted his jaw aggressively at his odious subordinate: it was time to press rank.

‘Covered their traces well, sir. But we are making progress in their direction. We now have a name for the one they all seem to have been frightened of at the time, Wally Swift. Whereabouts at present unknown, but I have feelers out with other forces in the north-west and with the Drugs Squad. And a man at present only known as Billy. Black man, sir.'

‘Aah!' This time Tucker elongated the syllable, and oozed a weight of satisfaction into it.

Before the man in charge of Brunton CID could display another of his prejudices, Peach said hastily, ‘I'm planning to interview a man we hope will prove to be Billy tomorrow morning, sir.'

‘Good. Very good.' Tucker put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. ‘You must keep an open mind, as I said. But it's my belief that your murderer will turn out to be one of these last two.'

Peach, who thought that Tucker might very well be right, could nevertheless hardly credit such an unashamed volte-face. He rose and turned to leave, then stopped just before he reached the door, like an actor determined to make the most of an exit line. ‘There is just one more thing I think you should know, sir. To keep you fully in the picture, I mean.'

Tucker, dropping back into the role of overworked executive with Peach's anticipated exit, said wearily, ‘And what might that be?'

‘Sister Josephine, sir. Apparently she was enjoying a lesbian relationship whilst in that squat, sir. With the dead girl.'

He carried the appealing picture of his chief's goldfish-wide mouth away with him into the winter night.

Music was a friend in need to Matthew Hayward.

He was nervous right up to the moment when he walked out into the welcoming applause of the audience for the concert with the Liverpool Philharmonic. He had been uptight about any following cars on his way into the city. He had even watched edgily as the audience filed into the hall to take their seats. He had been apprehensive in his dressing room as the orchestra played the overture which preceded his performance of the Rachmaninov Number Three concerto. These were not the normal stage nerves which he felt before every performance, but something more sinister, which ran directly back to that exchange with the man who had threatened him in the pub over his quiet lunch.