A Little Learning (5 page)

Six

By two thirty on that November afternoon, when Percy Peach had forsaken the green pastures of the University of East Lancashire for the industrial centre of Brunton, the November sun had disappeared and the skies were full of low cloud.

An appropriate setting for a meeting with his chief, Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker, thought Peach, as he glanced up at the sky before disappearing through the portals of Brunton Police Station. He didn’t like the man he called Tommy Bloody Tucker, who in his view was a pompous windbag, a hypocrite, an idle sod and a craven wimp. Apart from those things, Percy conceded, Tucker might be no more than dislikeable.

As the superintendent responsible for the CID section, Tucker was in charge of all murder investigations. It was his habit to claim the credit for all successful cases and to blame the incompetence of his staff for any failures. He would not stir from his desk throughout this case. Percy didn’t mind that: it was par for the course with the modern police hierarchy, and even what the system suggested they should do. What he didn’t like was the total incompetence of Tucker, so that he got neither support nor direction from the man who should have been giving him both.

Denis Charles Scott Peach, universally known to his colleagues and a considerable number of people in the nation’s prisons as Percy, compensated himself by enjoying a certain amount of fun at his superior’s expense. In a service which was highly conscious of the respect due to rank, this had earned Percy an almost legendary reputation. Percy rode his luck and taunted Tucker mercilessly, because he knew two things.

The first was that he himself had no promotion aspirations: he was perfectly content with the role of inspector, which kept him working at the crime-face rather than in the office culture of the police top brass. The second was that he knew that Tucker was totally dependent upon him for the successes he claimed in his CID section, and could thus not afford to do without him. Threats of transfer had been raised from time to time, but never implemented. Tucker and Peach were metaphorically joined at the hip, Percy said, with as much in common as Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher.

He went up to Tucker’s office on the top floor to report on events at the University of East Lancashire as soon as he had eaten a belated sausage and chips in the police canteen. Tucker looked at him accusingly over the half-moon glasses he wore at his desk. ‘Couldn’t find you this morning. Had to send you a memo!’ he said accusingly.

Percy wondered whether to string him along for a while. He always enjoyed Tucker’s feeble attempts at bollocking, but he hadn’t a lot of time to waste. He said, ‘No, sir. Had to go to court first thing, to deliver a statement. Told you on Friday, if you remember.’

‘Did you? Well, perhaps you did, I suppose, if you say so. Anyway, it was inconvenient. Serious crime occurring, and you nowhere to be seen. It was urgent. I had to type the note myself.’

‘Yes, sir. I thought you might have.’

Tucker looked at him suspiciously over the gold-rimmed half-moons, then glanced at the word-processor on the side of his desk which was his gesture towards modern technology. It had taken him ten minutes before he could get the thing to print out the three-line missive he had laboriously typed. But Peach surely couldn’t have known that. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you got yourself belatedly out to the campus at the UEL.’

‘Yes, sir. I was puzzled at first, but I knew you must have something serious in mind. Trust your leader, I told myself, whatever he says; he never lets you down. So I grabbed a toilet roll and went out there.’

‘Toilet roll?’ Tucker’s long-suffering face showed what Percy considered an agreeable degree of bewilderment.

‘I suppose it’s some new kind of code, sir, to keep things confidential where necessary. Well, it had me fooled, for one! I took it quite literally, when I read it.’ Peach cackled uproariously at his own expense, a noise which made his long-suffering superintendent cringe in anticipation.

‘Code?’

‘You really must explain it to me, sir. My dull old brain hasn’t got the hang of it at all, I’m afraid.’

Tucker said between teeth that were beginning to clench, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Peach. Explain yourself, please.’

Peach’s expressive countenance managed to look both puzzled and pained. Then, moving in slow motion, he produced the Superintendent’s carefully preserved note from the pocket of his jacket and handed it across the desk. Tucker had typed in capitals to emphasize the importance of his command: ‘DIRECTOR OF THE NEW UNIVERSITY OF EAST LANCASHIRE HAS SHIT HIMSELF. TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION AND GET OUT THERE IMMEDIATELY.’

Tucker read his message three times before his eye caught the error. He sighed heavily.
‘Shot
himself, Peach. Shot himself ! The meaning would have been obvious to a six-year-old child!’

‘Didn’t have one available, sir, at the time. Course I realized that was probably what you meant, when I got to the UEL. Felt a bit of a fool, though, brandishing my toilet roll, with the Director lying dead. Still, I showed them your note and explained the misunderstanding. The Bursar’s staff and I had quite a laugh about it, in the end, so that was all right.’ Peach smiled his satisfaction at the memory of his public-relations triumph.

‘Right, Peach! You’ve had your fun, if that’s what you think it is. Let’s have your damned report!’

Temper, Tucker, temper, thought Peach. But even Percy recognized that he could go too far, when he saw his superior bristling with fury. ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Well, the first thing is that when I’d realized your typing error and explained it to the Bursar, you were still wrong.’

‘Wrong?’

‘Wrong, sir. Not only had the Director not shit himself. He hadn’t even shot himself. Foul play, sir.’

‘Not suicide?’ Tucker’s face fell. A high-profile murder was the last thing he needed, with staff off sick and Christmas already looming in his mind. Barbara would give him hell if he couldn’t take his usual long break between Christmas and New Year.

‘Definitely not suicide, sir. Man would have to have been a contortionist to do it himself, Jack Chadwick says. Don’t expect that was one of the requirements laid down for a university leader.’

‘Murder?’

‘Oh, I should think so, sir. Socking great hole in the back of his head. Big pool of blood and brains on the carpet beside—’

‘Don’t give me all the detail, Peach. Just tell me who the hell did it!’

‘Don’t know, sir. Not yet.’ Peach refused to be thrown off balance by the colossal effrontery of the man. He leaned forward confidentially, as if about to impart information of great importance. ‘Matter of fact, sir, between the two of us, I haven’t a clue. George Andrew Carter had been dead for at least twenty-four hours before we got there, the pathologist says. Found by two students, he was. Eventually.’

‘Ah! Leading suspects, then.’

Peach nodded, pretending to weigh the idea. Then he said decisively, ‘Already eliminated them from the inquiry, sir.’

‘Oh!’ Tucker’s face fell, then assumed an expression of immense craft as he said, ‘Well, you’ll check their home backgrounds before you rule them out completely, if you take my advice. And see if they’ve run up any debts.’

Peach wondered quite how killing off their Director might be expected to solve a student debt problem. But he didn’t care to probe further into the labyrinthine depths of Tucker’s reasoning when there was work to be done. ‘We could do them for breaking and entering, if we’d a mind to. And they’ve contaminated the site of a murder, plodding around the place. But they didn’t kill Claptrap Carter.’

‘Claptrap Carter! Peach, this is an academic of considerable standing. A scholar and a gentleman. You will remember that during your investigation. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir. Member of the Lodge, was he?’

‘That has nothing to do with it! I’ve told you before that Freemasonry — mine or anyone else’s — has nothing to do with police work.’

A Mason then, the Director, thought Percy. No relevance to his death, in all probability, but a fact to be stored up against the possibility of further fun with Tucker. ‘You don’t think he might have had rivals for Master of his Lodge, sir? People who might have cared enough to kill him, to remove a powerful contender from the field?’

‘I do not, Peach. Your melodramatic ravings about motive sometimes make me worry whether you’re the right man for the job or not! If it’s not those students you have so readily dismissed, consider the family. Three-quarters of murders are committed by people within the family, you know.’ Tucker delivered his well-worn and slightly out-of-date statistic with satisfaction, then sat back further in his chair. ‘You would do well to remember that.’

‘Really, sir? Well, you’ll be happy to hear I’m off to see the wife and family now, sir.’

‘Get about it, then! Don’t waste your time here, Peach. I’ll hold the fort for you here!’

‘Very good of you, sir. Tower of strength as usual.’ Before Tucker could move it from where he had set it down on the desk in front of him, Peach picked up the memo about the late Director of the UEL’s bowel trouble. Might be useful during some pub gathering of the CID section, that, to add to the folklore of their leader’s gaffes. ‘I’ll get off right away, then.’

He didn’t see any need to tell him that the wife was sixty miles away to the north, well out of the Brunton ambit of Tommy Bloody Tucker.

*

Most people didn’t consider a chaplain a key appointment when they thought about the staffing of a new university. And the UEL was so new that its leader still hadn’t changed his title yet from Director, which he had been in the old college of higher education, to Vice Chancellor, which he was entitled to call himself, now that the new institution had been confirmed as a university. Nevertheless, the UEL had a chaplain.

Thomas Matthews wasn’t a chaplain with an established chapel, like those in the older and larger universities. He had been grudgingly allotted a terrapin building on the edge of the campus, with an old industrial oil heater which seemed to give off more fumes than heat. He held services here twice a week and gave Communion on Thursdays. In the ecumenical spirit of the new century, he had encouraged his Roman Catholic, Methodist and Islamic fellows to come and use the building and minister to their flocks, but there had so far been little enthusiasm from either clergymen or students. Well, it was early days, yet.

And Thomas Matthews himself, although an official appointment, was only a part-time chaplain. He had a parish of his own, two miles away on the edge of the industrial town of Brunton; his meagre stipend there was considerably supplemented by his salary for two days a week at the new university.

Tuesday and Thursday were his official days. But the Reverend Matthews spent most of the Monday after the death of the Director on the UEL campus. He saw the entrances of Paul Barnes and Gary Pilkington into the Bursar’s office on the first floor of the old mansion, as well as their discomfited exits. He wanted to speak to them, to offer them spiritual support, and to find just what they had been up to that they were of such interest to the police.

But neither of them was a regular attender at the distant wooden building with the distressingly small sign announcing ‘University Chaplaincy’ on its wall. And neither of them, despite their distress, showed any signs of seeking spiritual consolation when their ordeals had finished. The Reverend Matthews, DD, despite his anxiety to know just what was going on, had more sense than to invite a rebuff by approaching them.

Sometimes he envied the Romans their sacrament of confession.

In the afternoon, he secured himself a seat by a west-facing window on the first floor of the library. He could just see the garage of the Director’s house from here, though the house itself was hidden in the trees. He watched the grey polystyrene ‘shell’ being taken from the police van and then returned with its grim contents, to be driven slowly away and off the site. He watched the various comings and goings of the Scene of Crime team, saw little groups of students collect around the path to the house, then melt away, as they realized they were going to discover nothing of the action within it.

At four o’clock, as the first rain began to fall from the now cloudy skies and the early November dusk moved towards darkness, the chaplain emerged from the library, turned up his collar, and strolled quickly along the path beneath the trees and past the Director’s house. There were still two police cars in front of the double garage, and plastic tape on an improvised fence, cutting off access to the house itself and the area around it.

The Reverend Matthews took this in, but he did not stop, despite the cloak of near-darkness. He walked on, to his deserted wooden chaplaincy at the edge of the site. He climbed into his car and drove slowly home to his small modern vicarage, beside the tall, blackened stone church which was now much too big for its congregation.

He felt safe once he had shut the door of the vicarage behind him, here in his small, modern, private world. He went into his study and picked up the phone there. He exchanged terse greetings, then said, ‘The police are still in there. There’s every sign they’ll be back tomorrow. I’m sure they won’t find anything. But the best thing you can do is to keep well away.’

Seven

Peach enjoyed the drive to Kendal. The M6 north of Preston becomes ever more attractive as it runs towards Scotland. Most of the heavy traffic has turned off for Manchester, Liverpool and the numerous smaller industrial towns of north-west England: the horrendous reputation of the M6 for roadworks and traffic hold-ups is confined to the area between Birmingham and Preston.

Except for weekends, when holiday traffic pours towards the Lake District, the section which runs past Lancaster and towards the southern end of the Lakes is a pleasant drive. And all the more pleasant with Lucy Blake at your side, thought Percy contentedly. He wondered how long it would be before Tommy Bloody Tucker tumbled to what the rest of the station already knew: that Percy and Lucy were ‘an item’. Probably the silly old sod wouldn’t even have met the term yet, thought Percy Peach with satisfaction.

He eased the Scorpio up to eighty, the speed at which he reckoned he was safe from exciting the interest of the motorway traffic police, and slid his hand over Lucy’s. A moment later, he gave her thigh an affectionate squeeze. ‘Don’t handle the goods in transit, please,’ said Lucy. ‘Keep both your hands on the wheel and both your brain cells on the matter in hand!’

Percy thought of saying that he would have concentrated completely on the matter in hand, if only she had allowed that hand free range. Instead, he sighed and said, ‘Sound upset, did she, our Mrs Director?’

‘I didn’t speak to her. I spoke to her mother when I arranged our visit.
She
sounded very upset.’

Mothers-in-law weren’t supposed to be upset by the death of their daughter’s spouse, thought Percy. He was sure that the mother of the woman he had divorced seven years ago would greet his own death with unabashed glee. They drove past the turnings to Blackpool and then Morecambe, Lancashire holiday towns where the seaside-postcard legend of the mother-in-law, which was now so politically incorrect, had been fostered.

Percy favoured most things which were politically incorrect. But he liked Lucy’s mum, a sprightly, cricket-loving lady of sixty-seven, the only woman he had ever met who had recognized that the man the police service universally knew as ‘Percy’ had actually been named after the late, great Denis Charles Scott Compton, the laughing cavalier of cricket. He almost missed his motorway exit through wondering if the feisty Agnes Blake might eventually become his mother-in-law: very dangerous ground, that.

The house they wanted was to the north of the pleasant old town of Kendal, almost in the Lake District National Park. They caught the impressive outline of the Langdale Pikes and the southern fells of Lakeland as the road climbed a knoll before dropping into a village in the shelter of the hill. The house was detached, not large but solid and foursquare, built of grey-blue Lakeland stone at the turn of the nineteenth century. The orange berries of pyracantha blazed bright against the wall by the front door.

They had rather expected the owner of the house to admit them, but the woman who opened the door before they could even touch the bell was no older than her mid-forties. She was tall and erect, with neatly cut ash-blonde hair and a turquoise lambswool sweater above a well-cut grey skirt. She held out a hand to each of them in turn, waved aside their identification cards, and said, ‘I’m Ruth Carter. You want to see me, I believe. Please come inside.’

Lucy Blake caught a glimpse of an older woman, smiling wanly at them from beneath dishevelled hair from the doorway of a kitchen at the end of the hall, but Mrs Carter took them into a sitting room at the front of the house without introducing them to anyone else. She said by way of information, ‘My mother now lives here on her own — my father died six years ago, only a year after they’d retired here from Manchester.’

Lucy said, ‘I spoke to her on the phone. She sounded quite upset by what has happened. Not unnaturally.’

Ruth Carter nodded. ‘George’s death has hit her hard. She was very fond of him.’ She paused, then added almost reluctantly, ‘He was very good to her, in his own way, was George. It’s natural she should be upset, as you say. I’d prefer it if you didn’t speak to her, unless it’s absolutely necessary.’

Peach said, ‘I don’t see why we should bother your mother. Not at this stage, anyway.’ It implied a lot of things, that last phrase, to the attentive listener. Principal among them was the thought that if Ruth Carter cooperated as fully as she should, her mother could be left alone. ‘This is just routine, Mrs Carter. As we didn’t know your husband, we have to build up a picture of him for ourselves from those who lived their lives around him. Speed is important: that is why we have to intrude upon your grief so quickly. I apologize for that.’

‘There is no need. I appreciate what you have to do. I wouldn’t want to impede your work in any way.’

‘That’s very understanding of you. We shall be as brief as we can.’

He’s less at his ease with middle-class women than with yobs most people would run a mile from, thought Lucy with amusement. If this wife had resisted, had given him something to bite on, he’d have been at her with his usual aggression, but he was fencing for an opening here, wondering how to get her on the back foot before he began the routine questions.

Or perhaps she was being a little too harsh on Percy: he could be surprisingly tender-hearted when he met real suffering, though he would never have admitted it. Perhaps he was treading carefully over a widow’s pain. Except that to Lucy, Ruth Carter did not seem to be tortured with grief. Her oval face was white and strained, as you might have expected, with little or no make-up beneath the rather attractive waves of soft blonde hair. But she seemed perfectly composed as she invited them to sit on the sofa and then sat down opposite them in a heavy armchair; she was even calm enough to be watchful about her actions and her words, in Lucy’s view. But even though she was only twenty-seven, Lucy had already seen enough to know that grief took many forms, that those who displayed it most obviously were not always those who felt it most deeply.

Ruth Carter said, ‘You mentioned that you were part of a large team when you rang, DS Blake. Am I to assume that this is now a murder inquiry?’

It was Peach who answered her. ‘Officially we must wait for the verdict of the Coroner’s Court on that, Mrs Carter. But we believe it was murder, and we are proceeding on that assumption.’

‘How did he die?’

She must surely have known. It had been included in the radio bulletins. And she would certainly have asked the WPC who came here to break the news at eight o’clock this morning for the details. ‘He was shot through the back of the head at close range.’

‘It couldn’t have been suicide?’

‘No. The angle of the shot rules that out, in my opinion and that of the doctors who examined him.’ He was carefully neutral. Most people found suicide a worse fact than murder in someone close to them, but there were no absolutes in the awful stresses brought by a sudden death. ‘I shall be able to tell you more about the type of firearm involved in a few days.’

‘It wouldn’t mean much to me. I know nothing about guns.’

‘Your husband didn’t possess one?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

It was an answer which revealed rather more than she intended when she made it. If she genuinely didn’t know whether or not her husband possessed a firearm, it meant at the very least that the two had some secrets from each other. Ruth Carter appeared to be careful in her replies, anxious not to give away more than she had to. But she might of course be merely numbed with shock by the suddenness of this death, feeling the first resentment at the stripping away of the layers of privacy which was now inevitable.

‘Had he any interest or expertise in firearms?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘And when did you last see him, Mrs Carter?’

The blue eyes narrowed a little, making the small lines around them more noticeable. But if she realized the question registered her as a suspect in this death, she gave no sign of it. ‘When I left the house on Friday afternoon to drive up here. About two thirty, that would have been. Because George wasn’t coming with me, I was able to get away early, so as to drive here in daylight and get ahead of the weekenders. The M6 north is always busy on a Friday evening with the second-homers. Even in November.’

Peach nodded. ‘Would your husband normally have come with you?’

There was the faintest of hesitations before she replied, ‘Yes, more often than not he would. He liked my mother, and she him.’

‘And why didn’t he come with you on this occasion?’ She looked at him sharply, and he said evenly, ‘We have to piece together what happened in the last hours of his life if we are to discover exactly how he was killed; you must see that.’

‘He said he had too much work to do this weekend to get away.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you any idea what it was that detained him?’

‘No. The UEL has only been operating for fifteen months. There is a constant accumulation of small problems. Many of them are minor administrative details. But they take time.’

She spoke as though repeating a formula, and they knew that she had used those words before, perhaps many times.

‘How long were you married to him, Mrs Carter?’

‘Twenty-three years. We met when we were students, married when I was twenty-two. He was two years older than me.’

‘Please understand that I have to ask this, in the case of a violent death. How happy was your marriage at the time of his death?’

She had been picking off the routine questions swiftly and efficiently, as though ticking them off on a list of what she had expected. Now she looked angry for a moment, though she raised no objection to the question. There was an obvious effort of will as she said, ‘It was as happy as most marriages, I suppose. We had our ups and downs, like everyone else.’ It was the first cliché she had allowed herself, and a quick, unexpected flash of contempt burst into her sallow face, either at the thought itself or the lameness of her language.

Peach said, ‘You can do better than that, I hope. Was there any serious trouble between you in these last few months? Did you have a quarrel before you left him on Friday?’

‘No!’ This time the denial came too quickly and too vehemently. Then Ruth Carter eased herself back a little into the armchair, forcing herself to take time. She looked like a woman who hated to display emotion, but whether this was habitual or a piece of caution applied to this particular situation they could not tell. She crossed her long legs for the first time, and Lucy Blake was surprised to see that they looked like those of a much younger woman.

Then she folded her arms, so that they could see the slim wedding and engagement rings on the finger of her left hand, and said, ‘Look, I understand why you have to ask these questions, but I can’t be of much help. I can’t compare our marriage with others, give it some sort of rating, because you don’t know how other people are getting on unless they choose to tell you. We had been together twenty-three years, raised two children, and there was no question of a divorce. That should tell you something. We got on reasonably well — perhaps better than that.’

And perhaps much worse, thought Percy Peach. But you’re not for telling us that. He said, ‘Did your husband seem at all disturbed when you left him?’

‘No. Perfectly normal. He went out of the house and back into college at two o’clock, saying that he’d see me on Monday. Things were exactly as usual, as far as I can recall.’

‘Thank you. Now, another unwelcome question, probably. But obviously a necessary one, in these circumstances. We need to know of any enemies your husband may have had.’

She smiled, with a touch of real amusement. ‘My husband had made his way through the academic rat race to a post many people would covet. You make enemies along the way, inevitably.’

‘Serious enemies?’

‘More serious than the people who think we live in ivory towers would ever credit, Inspector. People who think they have a grievance can be both extremely petty and extremely vicious, at times. But I don’t know of anyone who might have nurtured enough resentment to shoot George through the head.’

Peach nodded. ‘I may need to speak to you again, in due course. When we know rather more about the circumstances of this death.’ He tried to make it sound a little like a threat, but he was no more successful than previously in breaking through the defences of this composed, rather impressive woman.

Lucy Blake looked up from the notes she had been taking and said quietly, ‘You say you met as students.’

‘Yes. We really got together when I was in my last year and George was doing an MA.’

‘So you probably had an academic career of your own.’

It looked for a moment as if she would reject this line of enquiry. Then, perhaps accepting the question because it came from a woman, Ruth Carter said, ‘I did, for a few years, yes. I had a better degree than George, as a matter of fact. Then I gave up serious academic work to raise my children. Most people still did that, you know, twenty years ago.’ There was an edge of contempt, and perhaps too of regret for the years gone and the opportunities missed, as she looked at this serious-faced girl with the greenish eyes and the lustrous chestnut hair who was pursuing a career of her own.