Dusty Death (3 page)

Yet what
had
actually happened here? DS Blake put on the plastic coverings offered by the constable at the entrance to the site and trudged forward to the man in charge of the operation. Sergeant Jack Chadwick gave her a nod of greeting. ‘Percy tied up?' he enquired laconically.

She nodded. ‘He's making phone calls to speed things up. Getting everyone to make this a priority. Last time I saw him he was preparing himself to brief Tommy Bloody Tucker about it.'

Chadwick nodded. When he had been injured in a shooting years ago, it had been Percy Peach who secured him this job as Scenes of Crime Officer, when others higher up the ranks would have retired him as a young man on sick pension. It was something both of them knew very well, but neither of them ever mentioned. Jack Chadwick was probably the only member of the Brunton force who would rather have had Percy Peach visit him here than this pretty, shapely girl with the striking chestnut hair, who was still in her twenties. ‘There's not a lot for him here, anyway. Probably scarcely worth his time.'

Lucy bit back her reaction. She wasn't going to say that it seemed all right for a woman to waste her time, whilst the men got on with more important things. It was a question of rank, she told herself firmly: Chadwick thought that a DS was all that was required here, that it wouldn't have been worth the considerably more expensive time of a Detective Chief Inspector. She watched the men and the single woman on their knees amidst the debris and told herself how lucky she was. Sergeant Chadwick had returned to the notes on his clipboard. She said, ‘So what have you found, Jack?'

‘Not much. You wouldn't expect much, on a site like this. For one thing, this woman died a long time ago, so most things which might have been useful have long gone. We're not likely to find fingerprints or hairs from a guilty party's head here, are we?'

She wondered if he'd have bothered stating the obvious to Percy Peach. But she was used to the fact that, if you didn't look like the traditional copper, people, even policemen who should know better, didn't take you seriously. And most of the people working at a Scenes of Crime investigation weren't coppers, nowadays. She said tersely, ‘That sounds like you've already assumed this is a suspicious death. Have you any reason for thinking that?'

Chadwick grinned ruefully at her. He had been looking forward to a ritual moan with his old friend Percy Peach about the hierarchy, and the weird ways of Chief Superintendent Tommy Bloody Tucker in particular. Instead, he had this fresh-faced, eager girl to talk to; it scarcely seemed fair to visit his old sweat's cynicism upon her.

But she wouldn't be Percy Peach's sidekick unless she was a bright lass: he'd give her whatever help he could. And beneath his surface scepticism, Jack Chadwick was an enthusiast for his work, the best Scenes of Crime Officer around: experienced, intelligent and meticulous. When he decided to close down his work at a scene, you could be satisfied that there was nothing more to be learned there.

Now he led Lucy Blake across the site to where a splintered piece of wood lay inside a transparent polythene cover. Lucy saw a panel in it, realized that it was probably part of what had originally been a door. It was covered with grime on one side, but this was the side that interested Chadwick. He pointed to a point near the end of the wood, where the black of the grime shaded to a dark brown. He said simply, ‘I'd be surprised if that isn't blood.'

Lucy thought that she would not even have noticed the slightly lighter patch on the blackened surface. But if Jack Chadwick thought it was blood, it was odds on it was. He voiced the immediate query which came into her mind. ‘Nothing to say it's the blood of your corpse, of course: forensic will tell us if it's the same group.'

‘Anything else?'

Chadwick shrugged. ‘We've found various fibres, which have been bagged up for the attention of the boys and girls in forensic. Whether they've any connection with the corpse or the way she died is another matter. We may never know that, unless you can pin down when this death occurred and who was around at the time.'

Lucy stared at the neat plastic bags, watched the rain falling more steadily now through the fierce beams of the arc lamps, smelt the decay as the men in oilskins carefully turned over another pile of mortar and brick. It seemed at that moment, in that desolate place, that it was most unlikely they would ever pin down the detail of this woman's death.

Half a mile away from the place where the corpse had appeared so unexpectedly, there were terraces of nineteenth-century houses still standing and still occupied. At seven o'clock on that Monday evening, DI Percy Peach rang the bell of one of them and stepped over the worn stone doorstep to the interior.

The old woman's face clouded with concern when she saw him. ‘'E'asn't done nothing, Mr Peach.'E's never in trouble again, is'e?'

Lizzy Bedford was well into her eighties now, the only woman Peach knew who still wore the woollen shawl about her shoulders which had once been the standard garb for women clattering in their clogs to the mills. She had lived a hard life, and her face was worn and lined with the wear of it. Percy saw her only at irregular intervals, and each time she looked even smaller. But she had the bright, alert look of a street sparrow.

‘He's not in trouble, Mrs Bedford. I'd just like a few words with him, that's all. I think he might be able to help me.' He took a bottle of Guinness out of his briefcase and put it beside the battered radio on the small table at her elbow.

Her head did not move, but bright eyes glanced sideways and glittered. ‘There's an opener in the top drawer of the kitchen cabinet.' She watched him find the opener in the fifties kitchenette, take a thick glass tankard from the shelf above, and pour the dark fluid carefully into it, tilting the glass sideways so as to avoid excessive foam. It was not until he delivered the brimming tankard into her bony hands that the old lady said, ‘“Helping the police with their enquiries” you call it, don't you? That means'e's in trouble, doesn't it? What's'e been up to this time?'

‘Nothing, that I know of, Mrs Bedford. I just want to ask him a few questions about what happened years ago.'

She looked at him suspiciously, then nodded her relief and took her first appreciative pull at the Guinness. ‘Billy's done'is time for that. You're never going to bring all that stuff up again.'

‘No, we're not. I just think he might be able to help me with some information. You as well, perhaps. You've lived round here for a long time.'

‘Aye. Since my man were alive and I worked at Bank Top Mill and Billy were nobbut a lad.' The bright eyes stared past him, seeing through the long, sad decades to a time he had never known.

‘Aye.' Peach dropped automatically into the Lancashire response. ‘You'll remember more than most, then.' He caught the sound of a movement behind the door and called, ‘You'd best come in here now, Billy.'

Billy Bedford shuffled sheepishly into the room. He was a man made for shuffling: a slight, stooping figure who carried guilt like a cloak upon his narrow shoulders. He was sixty-two now, and looked older. He said, as automatically as if Peach had touched a nerve, ‘I ain't done nothing, Mr Peach.'Onest I ain't.'

Percy eyed the shifty face beneath the greasy grey hair with distaste. ‘I doubt that, Billy Bedford. You've usually been up to something, haven't you? But I'm not here to take you in. Surprising as it may seem to you, you may actually be able to help us.'

‘Ain't no grass. Billy Bedford don't grass on anyone.' The thin lips set into a line as automatic as the words.

‘This isn't grassing, Billy.' Peach tried to keep the contempt out of his voice. ‘This is straight information about the district. You and your mum might be the only people still around to help us on this one.'

Bedford lifted his hollow eyes for the first time, checking that this was genuine. It wasn't often that he was asked to be of help to anyone: it was quite a pleasant feeling, which took him by surprise. ‘If you're not asking me to shop no one, I don't mind'elping you.'

Peach gestured with his arm towards the darkness outside. ‘That area over there. The houses that have been cleared for slum clearance and new industrial developments –'

Old Mrs Bedford followed the direction of his gesture as if she could see the long, low terraces which had once stood proudly on each side of the cobbled streets. And indeed she could, in her mind's eye. She could see them sixty-five years ago, at the beginning of Hitler's war, when house-proud women had covered their doorsteps with yellow sandstone and young Lizzy Bedford had clattered free and lighthearted in her clogs to the mill with hundreds of other girls. She said, ‘You mean Alma Street, Sebastopol Terrace, Balaclava Street, that area. It's all gone now.'

The names meant nothing to Percy Peach, but he said, ‘That's it. When were the people cleared out of them, do you know?'

‘Ten years ago and more,' said Billy Bedford, surprisingly promptly.

His mother was slower, but even more accurate. ‘More than that. Betty Dickinson's husband died a week before they were due to move out to the new estate. She had the funeral the day she should have been flitting.'

‘But you don't know exactly when this was.'

The old lady allowed herself a thin smile and a surprisingly large swallow of Guinness. ‘Yes I do, young man. 1989. I saw his stone in the cemetery when I was up there last week.'

‘You're sure of that?'

‘Course I'm sure. I can even tell you when it was in the year. It was the week of that Bloody Emperor Hirohito's funeral. Him what tortured my Albert in his camps during the war. He was never the same, when he came back. And that bloody Duke of Edinburgh went and attended the bugger's funeral, didn't he?'

‘I expect he was told to go, Mrs Bedford.'

‘Then he should have bloody refused, soft bugger. He's old enough to know what went on,'e is!' She snorted, then took another long, consoling draft from her tankard.

This was more than Peach had expected. They could check the date of Hirohito's funeral and get a pretty exact date for the vacation of the houses. He said, ‘That's very helpful, Mrs Bedford. I knew you'd come up trumps for us!' He took the second bottle of Guinness from his briefcase and put it beside the empty one on the little round table beside her.

A hand as hot and rough as a sun-warmed lizard's foot dropped on to his wrist. ‘Don't open it yet, Mr Peach. I don't like it flat. It'll last me all night, if I go easy at it.'

Billy Bedford felt a vague resentment that his old mother could be so useful. He said as scathingly as he could, ‘There were people in those streets after they'd been emptied, though. After old Betty Dickinson and the like moved off to the new council estates, there were still people in those houses. In some of them, anyway.'

‘Squatters?'

‘Aye. I suppose that's what you'd call them.' He suddenly wished that he hadn't spoken after all.

Peach could read his too revealing features as easily as a book. A large-print book. ‘Got up to your old tricks round there, didn't you, Billy?'

Billy Bedford was an incorrigible peeping Tom and an occasional flasher, one who was brought in as part of the investigation into most local sex crimes, though he had never proceeded beyond flashing to indecent assault or rape. He was part of the detritus of modern society, universally despised, but in Percy Peach's informed opinion, relatively harmless.

Billy said sullenly, ‘I don't know what on earth you're talking about, Mr Peach. I gave that sort of thing up a long time ago, well before the time the Dickinsons were moved out of them'ouses.' He drew himself ridiculously up to his full but diminutive height. ‘And I resent—'

‘Bollocks, Billy Bedford!' Peach found the alliteration beguiling, and the old lady had surely heard much worse. ‘Indecent exposure beside the Corporation Park, 1993. Peering through curtains at women undressing in Queen Mary Street, 1996.' He had looked up Billy's record on the computer before he left the station. ‘Which means you were no doubt in your randy heyday at the time we're talking about. Prowling the streets and flashing your pathetic equipment at anyone you thought you could impress.'

‘I had a dog then.' His mouth twisted into a crooked smile of lecherous remembrance.

‘Spot,' his mother said unexpectedly. ‘He were only a mongrel, but very affectionate, Spot. I still miss'im.'

Peach remembered now. Bedford had used the well-behaved little dog as an excuse to prowl the streets at all hours of the night, spying on women undressing whenever he got the chance, getting close enough to the town's prostitutes to savour their provocative dress and no doubt watch them in action when the occasion offered itself, and just occasionally leaping out of hedges to shock the matrons of the town by waving his penis at them. He said, ‘You must have enjoyed it when the squatters moved in.'

‘They didn't bother with curtains. The curtains went when the proper residents moved out.' Billy Bedford's eyes shone for a moment with reminiscent excitement.

‘So you and Spot spent a lot of time round there.'

Billy fell back into his familiar whine. ‘What if I did? Wasn't doing no'arm to no one, I wasn't.'

Peach looked at the 62-year-old wreck of a man and tried not to show his revulsion. ‘I'm not interested in what you were doing there, Billy. Not now. I'm interested in who was occupying those houses and when.'

‘There was people there for two or three years after the Dickinsons and their like'ad moved out. It was a bad time in the town, that, Mr Peach. Thatcher and the bloody Tories. Lot of poverty about. That were when that cardboard city started in London.' For a moment, there was a glimpse of the sharp, well-informed being that might have emerged, if things had been different for this man in his youth. If he had not lost his father in 1950, perhaps.