A Little Learning (4 page)

Peach leaned forward, put his elbows on the big desk, and spoke in an unexpectedly low voice. ‘It seems to me, Mr Barnes, that what you have given DS Blake and myself so far is no more than a right load of old boots. I don’t know about her, but my patience is wearing very thin indeed. We are in the early stages of what might well prove to be a murder inquiry. I would advise you to start telling us the truth about what happened last night. Immediately.’

Paul gulped. He didn’t trust the police. These were in fact the first dealings he had had with them in his life, but everyone said you shouldn’t trust them. Fascists, and unscrupulous bastards to boot, they were: that was the student view. But he had to admit to himself that what this squat, loathsome man said made sense. You couldn’t go pussyfooting about, not with dead bodies lying around. Paul licked his lips, looked for support to the female face with its nimbus of red hair, and said, ‘You won’t believe it, when I tell you.’

Lucy Blake gave him a small smile of encouragement. He watched her slim fingers tighten around the gold ball-pen as she prepared to record his amended version of events. Then Peach, resuming his most aggressive mode, rapped out, ‘Try us with the truth, sunshine. Then we’ll discuss why you chose to tell us a pack of lies previously.’

Paul wondered if he should tell them half of the truth, concoct some version of events which got round the fact that he and Gary had undoubtedly been guilty of breaking and entering into the house of the Director of their university. But his brain would not work properly under the baleful glare of those dark eyes. And it wasn’t an easy thing to improvise any new version of events which would get them off the hook. And if he did, that wimp in bear’s clothing Gary Pilkington would never back him up and carry it through. Paul Barnes had begun the process of transferring his resentment to his unwilling partner in crime.

He swallowed hard and said abruptly, ‘It was earlier in the night.’

‘What was?’

‘The time when we found the body of Dr Carter. Just after midnight, if you must know.’

‘Oh, we must. Don’t be in any doubt about that. Just as we must have a proper account of the circumstances of that discovery.’

Paul nodded, then said with a last hint of defiance, ‘You aren’t going to like it, when you hear it.’

‘Probably not. I haven’t liked many of the things you’ve said, so far. But try me.’

‘Gary and I had this scheme — well, it wasn’t so much a scheme as an experiment, really, to test out a theory.’

‘Fascinating. The workings of the student mind. Listen carefully, DS Blake: this will very likely enlarge your experience.’

The sergeant’s smile on that soft face seemed suddenly almost as unnerving as her inspector’s aggression. Paul tore his eyes away from both and cast them determinedly on the table. If he was to complete this bizarre tale and make it even moderately convincing, he would have to concentrate fiercely. ‘We’d been discussing it for a few days. The Perfect Crime. Whether it was possible, I mean. Whether it was feasible to commit any sort of crime and get away with it completely.’

Despite his resolution to concentrate, he found himself looking up for a reaction. He found only mockery in those unblinking black pupils. Peach was secretly amused by the earnestness of this slim figure, now that he was admitting the truth. Did he seriously think this was an original concept? Did he think policemen themselves were not fascinated by the same idea? Did he not realize that they had to contemplate each year an increasing number of crimes which were quietly pigeonholed as unsolved, while the fiction was maintained to the public that the files were never closed?

Peach said eventually, ‘And who was the mastermind behind this great enterprise? Who was going to be the Professor Moriarty of the campus?’

Paul was tempted to put the onus on Gary Pilkington, to play an apologetic Judas. A whole range of rationalizations with Gary, not himself, at the centre of operations suggested themselves to a mind suddenly agile again with the possibilities. Then he caught Peach’s all-seeing eyes and abandoned the idea. ‘It wasn’t like that. We were both involved in the planning. It was all a bit of a joke, really.’

‘A joke which landed you with a high-profile corpse and a whole welter of suspicion. Not to mention contaminating the scene of a murder. Quite a long way from the Perfect Crime, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. But we didn’t know we’d find a dead body, did we?’

‘What you knew and what you didn’t know remain to be established, thanks to the rubbish you furbished us with at our first meeting. Get on with this new story, please.’

Paul didn’t like that use of the word story. They could twist anything, these buggers. He’d better do his utmost to tell this exactly as it happened. The trouble was, in the cold light of day, without the benefit of drink or pot to set things in context, the truth seemed more unlikely than fiction. How could they possibly have been so stupid?

He swallowed hard. ‘Well, we tried to think of a fairly harmless exploit to test out our theory about the Perfect Crime. More of a student prank, really.’ He grinned feebly, caught Peach’s expression, and went on hastily, ‘We knew the Director was going to be away for the weekend, and we were pretty certain that he wouldn’t be back until Monday morning. So on Saturday night, we looked round the place to see how we might get inside.’

Peach glanced sideways at Lucy Blake. ‘Listen to this carefully, DS Blake, and record everything. This might be important for that article you were planning on the criminal psyche.’

Paul tried to ignore him, to cast his mind back to what had actually happened. ‘It was dark and misty on Saturday night, and there aren’t many students on the campus at that time. We had a look round the back of the house, found that it wasn’t overlooked by anyone, and that there was a small window there where we might get in. And we knew the route the night porter takes on his rounds, and the times when he would be well away from the Director’s Residence.’

‘Fascinating! Research and development, you call this, in universities, don’t you? We’re more inclined to call it casing the joint, and arrest people for suspicious conduct.’

Paul Barnes seemed to remember using a similar phrase himself, when he was setting up the enterprise with Gary. He tried to shut out Peach’s commentary. ‘Well, it all seemed pretty simple, at the time. So we went back last night. At just after midnight. I know the time, because the clock on the old stables chimed when we were waiting to do it.’

‘Do what, exactly? Spray graffiti on the Director’s walls? Steal his teabags? Or dispatch him from this world for ever?’

Paul realized that he hadn’t said what they proposed to pinch. It all seemed very bizarre now. And certainly very difficult to explain away to this officer of the Inquisition. ‘Sorry. I forgot to tell you that. We were going to take some books. It was more of a joke than a theft, really.’

Paul saw Peach’s black eyebrows climbing towards the bald pate, so high that the face beneath them seemed suddenly longer, like an inquisitive owl’s. He wished he could play the videotape of Claptrap Carter to these two, show them what a pompous twit the Director had been, show how the man had set himself up for this theft with his portentous moralizing about deprived students and the importance of books. Instead, Paul said limply, ‘He had a collection of first editions of Jane Austen. We were going to remove those.’

Peach breathed out a long sigh of satisfaction as his eyebrows slowly returned to earth. ‘That’s breaking and entering and burglary admitted so far, DS Blake. The best is still to come, I expect.’ He was sure now that this wiry lad with the sharp, intelligent features had been the motivating force behind both this crazy enterprise and the feeble attempt to deceive them with a different story. He deserved to squirm a bit — and when it came to squirm-inducement, Percy Peach was your man. You might even say he took a modest pride in it.

Realizing he hadn’t allowed himself a smile since this account began, Peach now visited one of his most dazzling ones upon his unhappy victim. ‘Right. So you’re planning to break in through a back window and nick some priceless books. So who’s your fence? Someone who plans as carefully as you must have lined up a fence to dispose of hot gear.’

Horror coursed through the veins of Paul Barnes. They were being treated like real criminals! How was he ever going to make it clear that it had all been a bit of student fun? It had, hadn’t it? God, he wasn’t even sure himself, now. And that shambling hulk of guilt he’d left outside was going to be no help, for sure. He said dully, ‘It wasn’t like that. We never thought of it as a real burglary!’

Seeing those Peach eyebrows rising inexorably again, Paul went on desperately, ‘We didn’t plan to make any profit out of it. Not for ourselves. We just wanted to see the pigs — sorry, the police — baffled and the crime unsolved. Then, after a decent interval, when no one had been arrested and it was clear that this was the Perfect Crime, we were going to send the books to be auctioned for charity and at the same time let Claptr— let Dr Carter know where they were. The idea was that if he claimed them back, he’d have to deprive needy children of the sum that would have been raised at auction.’

It had come out all of a rush, at the end, as the increasingly grotesque nature of the logic became apparent and Paul became ever more fearful of interruption by the appalling voice of reason that was DI Peach. He ended breathless, and Peach let his gasps resonate through the quiet room for a moment before he said, ‘Well, well, well! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! I thought I was well versed in the workings of the criminal mind by now, DS Blake, but there is always something new for us to learn. Breaking and entering for charity, now! Risking the end of promising student careers and long stints of porridge, just for the sake of hiding away a few books, annoying the Director, and just possibly raising a few bob for children in need. Eventually. Oh, and for “the pleasure of seeing the pigs baffled”, of course. We mustn’t forget that. You made a note of that, did you?’

Lucy Blake made a pretence of studying her notes whilst she fought back a smile. ‘Yes, sir. Got the very words here.’

‘Sorry!’ said Paul automatically, and then immediately decided from Peach’s expression that apology was a mistake.

‘So where are these trophies now, Mr Barnes? Where have you deposited the first editions of the immortal Jane?’

That was a literary reference, wasn’t it? Surely the pigs weren’t supposed to be able to make those? Paul said miserably. ‘Still on the Director’s bookshelves, I expect. We never got to them. I found Dr Carter’s body and we got out.’

Peach’s eyebrows lifted again, this time in delight. ‘So there’s no evidence to support this unlikely tale of philanthropy. Nothing to prove that you didn’t break into the place with the express intention of killing Dr George Andrew Carter, the Director of the University of East Lancashire.’ He rolled the full name and the title with relish off his tongue, as if it gave even greater weight to this sensational demise.

Paul was emotionally exhausted by now, too wrung out to be scared any more. He said, ‘We didn’t kill him. Didn’t have any intention of killing him. It was a shock when we found him lying there.’ He shuddered involuntarily at the recollection.

Peach studied him for a moment. ‘Do you know, Mr Barnes, I’m inclined to think you might at last be telling us the truth. If only because if I were trying to deceive the law, I’m sure I could make up a much more convincing story than that.’

It took Paul a moment to work out that he might be off the hook, for the present. He said, ‘Er, Gary and I have rather a lot at stake, haven’t we? We might be thrown off our courses, for a start. Does — does all this have to come out in public, Inspector?’ He gave the ogre his title for the first time, feeling as if he were trying to bribe the Dobermann with a bone.

‘Oh, I should think it has to, wouldn’t you? You’ll almost certainly have to give evidence of finding the body, in the Coroner’s Court, and perhaps later on in a Crown Court, depending on the cause of death. Possibly even in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, if this business ends with a high-profile trial. I should think you could become quite a local celebrity — for a short time.’ Peach beamed his satisfaction in that thought at the boy who had tried to deceive him.

Then he looked at the forlorn figure on the other side of the desk and said, ‘Look, if you’ve now told us everything, and we find it tallies with what we find in that house, we’ll do our best to keep you out of it. We can’t prevent some crafty defence counsel from probing into exactly what you were about when you found that body, but he won’t do that unless it helps his case, and at the moment I can’t see how it would. I should think your university tutors are bound to find out about it, but you’ll have to plead youth and stupidity — which shouldn’t be difficult, for either of you daft sods — and throw yourselves on their mercy.’

He took Paul Barnes outside onto the landing, told an enormously relieved Gary Pilkington that he had no need to see him again, and sent the crestfallen pair upon their way. Not really a fair test of the Peach skills of interrogation, these students, he thought.

But it had filled in the time and made it clear what had happened last night. By now, the Scene of Crime team might have something to report from the house across the way. It was time to begin piecing together just what sort of a person this Dr George Andrew ‘Claptrap’ Carter had been.

Five

It was one of the best English autumn days. Peach stood on the steps of the high stone Victorian mansion, sniffed the air appreciatively, and surveyed the scene.

There were students streaming in various directions, concluding their morning lectures and making for the refectory or bars, bustling like ants about their business. The day was still, and a pale sun shone out of a muted blue sky, illuminating the amber and orange on the oaks and limes which had grown here for almost two centuries, making the eye aware of subtle shades which it would have missed on a duller day. This wasn’t a bad place to be, especially when you had the delightful Lucy Blake at your side.

Peach looked at the masses of scurrying humanity and frowned. ‘If this is murder, there are a thousand bloody suspects. Every bugger you can see out there had access to the Director’s house!’

It was no more than the ritual protest of a professional about to embark upon a difficult task and DS Blake recognized it as such. She knew that she was merely responding in kind as she said, ‘We’ll prune the field down pretty quickly. You’ve already eliminated two of the students.’

They walked from the front of the house over to the massive canopy of the old cedar, then along the shaded path which Paul Barnes and Gary Pilkington had trodden during the darkness of the previous night. Even with the site busy with pedestrians moving in different directions, this was a quiet place, for the path led nowhere except to the Director’s house, invisible beneath the trees until you reached the single lamp standard forty yards from its front elevation.

This was a very different building from the neo-Gothic stone mansion house at the centre of the estate, but impressive in its own way. The style owed something to the mock-Georgian fashion of the 1990s, but the size and the setting of the house, on a spacious plot among the trees, with no other building in view, gave it an elegance which was surprising in a brick building no more than ten years old.

The pale but steady November sun glinted on the rectangular windows and warmed the brick of the frontage to a surprisingly mellow hue. The police cars parked in front of the double garage were invisible from where the pair stood, and the isolated house seemed quiet, even deserted, as they gazed up at its broad frontage. Then, as they moved towards it, they caught a glimpse of figures moving behind the glass and were brought back abruptly to the real business of the day.

Jim Chadwick, the sergeant in charge of the mixture of police and civilians who made up the Scene of Crime team, greeted Peach with a professional pessimism which echoed that recently expressed by the inspector himself. ‘Bloody great barracks of a place to search, this is!’ he said gloomily. ‘Some of us will be here for a couple of days, I should think, before we’ve got round this lot. Might help if we’d any idea what we’re looking for!’

He didn’t get any of Peach’s normal acid in the reply. Percy had a lot of respect for Jim Chadwick, who had been a detective sergeant at the same time as him, a thief-taker with his eye just as firmly on the ball. Chadwick had been shot through the shoulder after a bank raid; could have taken a sick pension and retirement into some less demanding occupation; had opted instead to stay with the police service; had carved himself out this role as a scene-of-crime expert, when deprived of the more active career he would have preferred. He knew now that he would never progress beyond sergeant, but from all outward signs he bore no resentment of that fact.

Chadwick was a copper’s man, not a PR merchant. He knew what coppers wanted from the place where crimes had taken place; he had a CID man’s eye for details which might seem insignificant to others. It was Peach who had ensured that he was assigned to investigate the scenes of only the more serious crimes on the patch. That had never been stated, but both of them knew it.

Jim Chadwick looked carefully past them to make sure no higher rank was muscling in on what promised to be a high-profile crime. ‘Jack the Lad didn’t take kindly to being hauled out in the middle of the night. Binns the Blood has been this morning.’

‘Jack the Lad’ was the police surgeon, whom Chadwick, purely on the basis of his youth and bachelor status, suspected of being a local Lothario. It was not surprising if the young doctor was less than happy to be brought from a warm bed, whether his own or some anonymous lady’s, to certify as dead a corpse which had plainly ceased to breathe at least twenty-four hours earlier, in which the first signs of rigor mortis were already apparent. But he knew as well as everyone else that this was one of the rituals which must be observed: the first essential was that the fact of death had to be established and confirmed by a doctor.

‘Binns the Blood’ was a different and far more important professional. Dr Mark Binns was the pathologist, who had visited the site whilst Peach was having his fun with the two students who had discovered the body. Binns had taken body temperature and anything else he thought significant at the house, and sanctioned the removal of the corpse for the more leisured and searching investigation of the post-mortem.

‘The night porter saw bugger-all. Anything useful here?’ said Peach. They spoke in shorthand, these two, the result of long years in the job.

‘Binns confirmed it as murder,’ said Chadwick gloomily. ‘Lot of bloody use that is, as you’ll see when you look at him. Man would have had to be a contortionist to shoot himself from that angle.’

Peach saw what he meant as soon as they reached the main bedroom of the house. The corpse lay on its back, staring at the ceiling, but what was left of the head was slightly on one side, and they could see a ragged-edged but surprisingly regular bullet wound in the back of the it, just above the line of the collar, which had faint powder marks upon it. He said, as though completing the words of a ritual, ‘No sign of the weapon, I suppose?’

‘No. And sod-all else, so far.’

‘Any ideas on how the bugger got in?’ Automatically, Peach spoke of the killer as a man, because statistically it was overwhelmingly likely to be so. Their criminal would remain male, would continue in the argot of the service to be called words like ‘chummy’, until he had some more definite identity. It didn’t mean that females wouldn’t be considered as carefully as anyone else; it was simply a recognition of the statistical probabilities of the serious crime scene.

‘There’s a window forced at the back. Small one, in the utility room. Someone’s prised away the frame where it was rotten at the bottom. Jemmy, or a big tyre lever, by the looks of it. It’s the only window in the house that doesn’t have modern double-glazing, as usual.’ Chadwick’s tone held in it his contempt for a public that was too often penny-pinching when it came to security.

Peach shook his head. ‘That’s the way those students got in. The ones who found the body.’

Chadwick brightened up a little. He didn’t like students, thought most of them were a waste of public money, even if they didn’t get grants any more. ‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance those buggers did for him, is there? Resenting being slung off their courses, or getting lower grades than they should have? Or in a drug-crazed orgy of violence?’

Peach smiled. ‘Afraid not, Jim. Dr Carter was cold and dead long before they found him, I think. It will be small consolation to a fascist hyena like you, but the tale they told us at first was a right bucket of you-know-what. They found him a couple of hours before the time they claimed. And it wasn’t because they saw any mysterious light in here. They were bent on a little petty pilfering. Well, not so petty, as a matter of fact. A set of valuable first editions. I think they got a hell of a shock when they found the late Dr Carter.’

He looked down at the corpse, with its single remaining eye like glass and the foot-wide pool beside the head, which had thickened until it looked more like crimson jelly than blood and brains. If those lads had really never seen a dead body before, it must have given them a hell of a shock when they came upon it in the darkness as they crept into the room. As a guardian of the law, he found that imagined picture very satisfying. That would teach the young Turks to go breaking and entering.

Chadwick nodded his agreement to a sentiment which had remained unvoiced. ‘Did they say they found the window already forced when they got there?’

‘No. They admitted to using a tyre lever on the bottom of the frame, where the wood was rotten.’

‘In that case, your killer was probably known to the victim. There’s no other sign of forced entry. Either he had a key or he was let in, probably by the deceased. Unless you think he came in whilst a door was open and simply waited a few hours for the chance to surprise the Director.’

The two men grinned at each other. They had the working policeman’s contempt for such more unlikely possibilities, which they regarded as the material of crime fiction. Peach said, ‘I expect that there are a lot of keys floating about, in a place like this. And probably a lot of people who might have had reason to be let into the house, as this is a college. Sorry, a university, as we must now call it!’

Another grin, in which the two old male sweats allowed Lucy Blake to join them. The locals had a scepticism about this grandiose label clapped on a college which even ten years ago had been ‘Brunton Tech’ and well down the academic hierarchy. Now it had this spacious greenfield site and undreamt-of new resources. And a rather smarmy new Director who appeared frequently on regional television news programmes; a Director who was now extremely dead.

Peach walked out on to the landing. Inured as he was to crime and death, he still found it a relief to be free of that sinister thing on the floor, with its accusation of violence as yet unpunished. He watched the photographer taking pictures of the stairs, noted the fingerprint girl industriously lifting prints from the grey powder on the banisters, and said tersely, ‘Anything missing?’

Chadwick followed immediately the train of his thought. Had someone engaged in some form of burglary been surprised by the man who lay dead behind them? Someone who had killed him in panic? It was usually the first thing relatives thought of, perhaps as part of a reluctance to admit that the man they had known had any enemies among his intimates who hated him enough to kill him like this. He said, ‘Nothing obviously missing. We shan’t be sure until the wife gets back and goes round the place, of course. Where is she, by the way?’

‘At her mother’s. I’ve encouraged her to stay there for a couple of days, until you’ve gone through this place thoroughly. The porter’s identification of the body will do for the moment; she can do the official one after the post-mortem, when he’s been tidied up a bit. Her mother’s place is up near Kendal; I’ll go and see her up there, I think.’ All three of them knew that spouses were always the first source of police interest in a sudden, violent death.

‘Are there children?’

‘Two. But they’re eighteen and twenty. Old enough to be away at university themselves. I’ve told them not to come here. They’re going to comfort their mother at their grandmother’s house.’

Very soon now, as soon as Chadwick signified that his body could be removed from the scene of crime, the mortal remains of George Andrew Carter would be placed in their fibreglass ‘shell’ and taken to the pathologist’s laboratory in the ‘meat van’ which waited outside. Peach pushed open the door next to that of the bedroom where he lay.

This room was a small, neat study, its walls lined with bookshelves, its small desk without paper, pen or word-processor upon it. Over years of experience, CID men develop a ‘feel’ for empty rooms. Perhaps this one was used by someone obsessively tidy, who insisted upon leaving everything neat. But DI Peach sensed that this was a room which had been little used.

He walked over to the single glass-fronted bookshelves, on the north side of the room, where the sun would never fall. He saw the gold-tooled titles of the Jane Austen novels which the students had been planning to appropriate. The rich leather spines of
Emma
and
Persuasion
and
Pride
and
Prejudice
seemed to carry more than their normal significance, after this ill-starred youthful enterprise.

When they went out again onto the landing, the two constables who were going through the house on hands and knees with tweezers had reached the area outside the room where the corpse lay. It was a necessary but time-consuming business, this gathering of any fibres, hairs or tiny pieces of detritus which might be of later significance in proving that a suspect had been here. Chadwick said, ‘The refuse collection is on Fridays, so there’s nothing outside the house. Just our luck. We’ve bagged what little rubbish there is inside. I haven’t had the chance to look at it in detail yet, but I’m not hopeful.’

It was DS Lucy Blake, feeling herself a little shut out of this male colloquy, who said, ‘I made a few discreet enquiries around the offices when I got here this morning. I gather Dr Carter wasn’t at all popular with his academic staff.’