Dusty Death (29 page)

‘Yes. Emmy tried to get her to do that. I think she even toyed with the idea. She might have even tried it out.' His face was tortured with the recollection.

‘And she was pushing drugs, wasn't she?' Lucy's voice was gentle as a therapist's, encouraging him to spit out secrets he needed to be rid of.

‘Yes. I think she tried that out, as well. Tried working for this man who came into the house next door to set up his operation. She was frightened of taking proper employment in case her parents found out where she was, you know.' He found he wanted to defend his lost love, even after all these years.

‘And what about Wally Swift? Was she working for him?'

Matt shook his head hopelessly. ‘I don't know. She'd stopped talking to me about what she did by then. She – she was with Jo.'

‘Yes, we know that.'

‘But I think she was probably working for Wally when she died. I'm pretty sure he stopped her pushing drugs for this man next door. Billy Warnock might be able to tell you: he was pretty thick with Wally by that time. I know that Wally had Sunita in tears in a corner one day, had everything out of her about what this other man was doing.'

‘Yes.' She gave no sign that these were new details to them, new additions to the picture of the life in that squat which had preceded a murder. ‘Mr Hayward, it's obvious that this man who threatened you on Monday wasn't acting on his own behalf. Who do you think it was who retained his services to try to silence you?'

He couldn't know for certain, of course. But they had asked him what he thought. And there was only one man he could think of who would have sent a man to threaten him like that. Matt said, ‘I think it must have been Wally Swift.'

Lucy nodded slowly, then decided that she could offer this frightened man a little consolation. ‘You might like to know that Walter Swift is currently in custody. He was arrested last night in connection with serious drug offences, and will probably be charged with them in the next few hours. He has already been interviewed in connection with the murder of Sunita Akhtar, though no charges have been preferred against him as yet in connection with that crime.'

Matthew Hayward found that the sun had come out whilst he had been inside the big new police station. And the whole world felt a brighter place with the news he had just heard within it.

The snooker balls looked very bright under the brilliant white light.

Billy Warnock rolled the red in expertly with a bit of stun, then watched with satisfaction as the cue ball rolled slowly behind the black. He made thirty-four before he narrowly failed to double the last red into the middle pocket to keep the break going. It was good enough to clinch the frame from the eighteen-year-old lad with acne and an expensive haircut. You had to show these youngsters who was in charge, even when you could no longer keep up with them on the pitch.

‘Sign of a misspent youth, my dad used to say,' said Percy Peach. ‘I expect you keep this place going, you and your football lads.' He grinned with satisfaction at the way the startled Warnock whirled round. Then he looked round the rather depressing scene in the snooker hall, which at three in the afternoon was peopled largely by the unemployed of Preston. The brightly lit tables were rectangles of light in the long, low room. The walls were lined with bench seats, on which a few people sprawled whilst they waited their turns to play. Otherwise there were few furnishings and fewer conversations.

‘I have to come in here to keep an eye on my lads. Make sure they don't join the drinking culture, see? It's not like it was in your day, Mr Peach. We do our best to make sure these lads stay on the straight and narrow, now.'

He made it sound as if it was forty rather than twenty years since Percy was a teenager, but the DCI knew what he meant. You had to have the right diet and the right lifestyle, as well as the skills and the luck, to succeed in football, these days. He looked at the youths with their Diet Cokes and said, ‘Need a word, Billy. In private.'

Warnock looked for a moment as if he would resist, then caught the glint of Peach's dark eyes in the half-light above the table. He followed the DCI without a word out into the car park. A moment later he was sitting in the passenger seat of the unmarked police Mondeo, with a blank brick wall six feet ahead of him the only thing he could see. He could not even see the top of it; it was like a prison wall, hemming him in, crushing his spirit.

As if he understood all of these things that he could not possibly know, Peach allowed the feeling of claustrophobia to build for several seconds before he spoke. ‘You weren't completely frank with us yesterday, Mr Warnock. That was a mistake.'

Billy wasn't used to this formal mode of address. Amidst the informality of a football club, you rarely got a ‘Mister'. It unsettled him far more than he would have expected. He said without hope, ‘I can't think what you mean, Mr Peach.'

‘I think you can, Billy. And I think you're going to change your tactics and tell me everything you know. Right now.'

‘There's nothing else I can think of which—'

‘Wally Swift's in a cell, Billy. He's going down for quite a stretch. Whether we pin a murder on him or not.'

Billy Warnock wondered if it was all bluff, if this man with the quiet, menacing voice was spinning him a yarn to make him say things which would get him a severe beating or something much worse from Wally. He said stupidly, ‘I don't believe it. You'll have to give me proof of—'

‘I don't have to give you proof of anything, Mr Warnock!' Peach's voice was suddenly harsh, with Billy's title appended this time as a sardonic afterthought, as if it were a prelude to charging him. ‘Drugs Squad officers are interrogating Wally Swift at this very moment. They've waited a long time for the right moment to net him. Serious charges will certainly follow. And I've already spoken to him myself about the murder of Sunita Akhtar.'

Billy wished unexpectedly that he had been facing Peach, looking directly into those dark, hostile eyes. This strange set-up where he could not look at his interrogator, where both of them sat staring ahead at the blank brick wall, was even more unnerving than confronting the man directly. He said falteringly, ‘It's a long time since we were in that squat. Difficult to remember things. I – I might have made the odd mistake when I spoke to you yesterday.'

‘Oh, you did, Billy, you did! Not so much in what you said as in what you didn't say.' Peach stopped for a moment, as a gang of noisy youths came out to a van behind them and drove noisily out of the car park, their voices more raucous than ever in the quiet around them. Once they were through the gates and away, the silence dropped back like mist into the car park which enclosed the pair in the Mondeo. Peach's voice began again, quiet and insidious. ‘You helped Wally Swift to set up his drugs operation, when you were in that squat in Sebastopol Terrace, didn't you, Billy?'

This time it was Billy who paused, seeking desperately for words in which he could frame a denial. No words offered themselves. ‘I gave him a bit of help, yes. I didn't know exactly what he was about at the time.'

‘You sold drugs for him, didn't you?'

‘No. I'm not saying I did that.' He could hear the desperation in his own voice.

‘You might get away with this, Billy, if you come clean now. Unless you killed the girl yourself, that is.'

‘No! No, I didn't do that! And I didn't see Wally kill her! I've not been hiding that!'

‘Lot of denials, there, Billy. You'll need to convince me, won't you? And the best way to do that is to come clean. I keep telling you that, don't I? Keep giving you another chance. But my patience isn't inexhaustible, Billy.'

‘I – I just fell into it. Really I did. I was using myself: mainly pot, but a bit of coke as well. Anyway, it wasn't easy for me to get any sort of job when I was in that squat, being black and a user. I started running errands for Wally. Then I helped him to set up his first small ring of dealers – I knew some other users, see. Knew some who were desperate enough to become sellers. He paid me when no one else would. Not a lot, but—'

‘Paid you to put the frighteners on Sunita, I expect.'

‘No! He did his own frightening in those days, did Wally. He was good at that. Enjoyed it.'

‘I see. Enjoyed violence too, didn't he?'

‘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.