A Turbulent Priest (19 page)

“Not at all. It’s a bit of information, that’s all. It’s my job to gather information, you know. You must be glad to see things getting back to normal, to have a priest in the house again. I expect the parishioners are, too. The Cartwrights are back at the Sacred Heart, are they?”

Martha looked at him keenly, then offered him the plate of her gingernuts, as if that confirmed her approval. “They’ve never been away. They’re always at Sunday Mass — they came even when we were being serviced by the priests from St Mary’s.”

“And the Kennedy boys? Are they back?”

“No. The father’s never been, but the boys came regularly on Sundays when Father Bickerstaffe was here. I haven’t seen them since then. They might be going down to St Mary’s, of course.”

But you don’t think they are, any more than I do, thought Percy. He imagined the look of triumph on the ageing face of David Kennedy when he saw his boys ceasing their attendance at the church he hated. “What about Kate Maxted?”

“She’s at Mass and Communion regularly enough on Sundays, and her children with her. And so’s your man Reilly.”

“You know about that?”

Martha smiled a smile of infinite experience. “Of course I know. I don’t gossip, but they don’t trouble to disguise it. Father Bickerstaffe knew, and he was hoping they’d get together properly. Said it would be the making of Tony Reilly. He’s the kind of old-fashioned Irish Catholic who smashes faces in on Saturday nights and is there at the Communion rail on Sunday mornings, Father said. But there’s a good man underneath. And Kate Maxted deserves a good man. She had a rotten husband, but she’s devoted to her children, is Kate.”

They talked a little longer, as Peach prolonged the fiction both of them shared that this was a social visit. He found himself enjoying her company. When you dealt for so much of your time with villains and their associates, it was tempting to linger with someone as genuine as Martha Hargreaves.

***

In the murder room set up at Brunton CID, Peach did at the end of that Thursday afternoon what the Superintendent in charge of the case should have been doing. He reviewed the latest evidence from the extensive team assigned to a murder investigation.

“What’s Tommy Bloody Tucker doing?” he asked Lucy Blake, who had been bringing the computer files up to date whilst he visited the presbytery at the Sacred Heart and then checked the latest findings on their suspects.

“Very little, apart from panicking. He’s cut out all overtime here until his namesake the contract killer is located. He’s put out a nationwide alert for Francis Ward Tucker, on suspicion of murder.”

“Fat lot of good that will do! It’s one of the skills of the contract killer to disappear completely when they’re most sought by people like us. Anyway, he didn’t kill John Bickerstaffe.”

“Courcey seemed to think he might have.”

“Courcey knows bugger all about murder! No more than Tommy Bloody Tucker, our esteemed leader and superprat.”

“Why are you so certain of that?”

“Because of the price, my chicken! Five grand isn’t the price for a murder. Not from a professional killer like Francis Tucker. Not when he knows the people hiring him can call on the money of Charles Courcey and others.”

“So how do you explain the five thousand pounds?”

“A down payment. Five thousand at the outset, to set things in hand, another ten, perhaps fifteen thousand when the killing is successfully achieved. There’s no evidence that this second and larger sum was ever paid: it’s been checked and re-checked. This man got his five thousand, was setting up the killing in his own time. Only someone stepped in and did his job for him. Deprived him of the final fee, but also of any risk. Five thousand quid for nix. Make yourself scarce for a while, in case news of the down-payment leaks out and the boys in blue come looking for you.”

Lucy said dully, “I didn’t know the price of a killing.”

“It’s not fixed, and you won’t find it in any of the manuals. You look at what’s happened recently, at the rare occasions when a professional contract-killer is brought to book. Birmingham, last year. I wouldn’t expect you to know. I wouldn’t expect Tommy Bloody Tucker to know, but he damn well
should
!” For an instant, Peach’s real resentment and frustration burst out.

“So what next?” said Lucy Blake.

Peach was on his feet. “Time for a bit of bluff,” he said decisively. “It’s my guess the people who did this haven’t the heart for deception, for brazening it out. Let’s go!”

Seventeen

The clouds had dropped in low over the narrow brick streets of the old cotton town, emphasising the rapidly shortening September days, bringing in a very early twilight, reminding everyone that autumn was at hand.

For Percy Peach, who had been a cricketer of note in the Lancashire League until two years ago, it was sad to see that the boys on the spare land they passed had abandoned the summer game and were chasing a football in their shrill groups; another cricket season was over. Lucy Blake was driving the police Mondeo; glancing sideways at her companion, she was surprised to see how grim he looked, his lips set in a thin line, his forehead furrowed with a frown. Usually when they were near to an arrest he was exhilarated, driven forward by the lust of the hunter near his prey, that essential quality of all successful CID officers.

He gave her terse directions, no more. Eventually she risked a quick, “Why so grim?”

He glanced at her for the first time, affording her a quick smile, a gratified recognition that she should catch his mood so quickly.

“This job gets to you, sometimes. I should be glad we’re wrapping this one up. And of course I am — that’s what the job’s about. I just wish it could have had a different outcome, this time.”

It was the first time in years he had been prepared to declare so much of himself, to reveal a crack in the facade of Percy Peach, clear-headed, ruthless thief-taker and hardman of Brunton CID. He found his admission more of a relief than he would ever have expected, so much so that he wanted to enlarge upon it. “There are kids involved. Kids who are going to lose good parents.”

“You know the answer to that. We solve crimes; we don’t play God. We pin down the criminals: it’s up to the courts to take account of the circumstances which surround a crime. You’ve told me that often enough.”

He twitched a little, partly with his impatience at the familiar phrases, partly with his resentment that he should find this weakness in himself. “I know all that. Perhaps in this case I’ll be hoping for once that the court listens to the trick-cyclists. I don’t know how I’d have reacted myself if I’d had a son abused, do I?”

“No. None of us knows what we’d have done.” She wondered for a moment if she would ever have a son by this still surprising man beside her, then steered herself away from such dangerous ground. “Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate. We may bring people to justice, but what form that justice takes has nothing to do with us.”

“No. You’re right, of course — it’s the only way we can operate. But we see enough of that justice to see how flawed it can sometimes be. I hope these kids don’t end up with Social Services.”

They were almost at the house, and she said no more. And Percy Peach, like a man donning the mask of brisk efficiency, was his normal dynamic and aggressive self by the time he rang the bell by the door of the cramped modern detached house.

They could hear the sound of children’s voices from behind the building, but these modern houses were built so close to each other that it was not clear whether the shrill sounds came from the rear garden of this house or from one of its neighbours. The white-faced woman who answered the door led them into the lounge of the house and they saw with relief that the garden was deserted. Peach took in the tidy, well-worn furnishings, the empty garden, the soundless house, all without taking his eyes from the woman who had led them here. He sat down with Lucy Blake as she gestured towards one of the room’s twin sofas.

Only then did he say, “You seem almost as if you were expecting us, Mrs Hanlon.”

“I wasn’t. I don’t know what you—”

“Children out, are they?”

“Yes. They’re with their cousins. They’re having tea at my sister’s house. She’s like a second mother to them — even more so since that — that trouble Jamie had.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“They’ll be in presently, if you want to—”

“No need for that, Mrs Hanlon. Your husband’s here though, is he?”

She looked towards the door, where her husband had appeared without a sound, as if responding to a stage cue. “I heard the voices,” he said. He spoke almost apologetically, thought Lucy Blake. Keith Hanlon came into the room, took his wife’s hand, and pulled her gently to sit beside him on the sofa, directly facing the two CID officers. There was a pause. He glanced down the garden towards the black ashes of his bonfire, invisible in the gathering gloom to all save him, before he said, “What can we do to help you, Inspector Peach? I thought we’d said all we had to say to each other when you came here on Saturday.”

“If you really want to be helpful, you could tell us exactly how you killed Father John Bickerstaffe,” said Peach quietly.

He might have been asking for directions to a destination, not accusing a man of the gravest crime of all. Kevin Hanlon did not react physically, save to put his hand on the wrist of the wife who had flinched so palpably at his side. He said with a forced calmness, “You’d better have good reasons for saying that.”

He hadn’t denied it, and neither had she, Percy noticed. Time to implement the bluff, to make a few bricks out of precious little straw. “What happened to Jamie appeared to have hit you hardest of all the parents involved. That doesn’t make you murderers, of course. But you had your story of where you both were at the time of the murder very well rehearsed: you gave us the details of what you were supposed to have been doing between five and seven thirty on Thursday the twentieth of August as though you had been over it many times before you spoke to us.”

Hanlon looked down at his hand, which had slid down now to cover his wife’s, thinking furiously, feeling his way into speech before she could say anything revealing. “I’m prepared to admit that we had talked about that before you came here on Saturday. But it doesn’t mean we killed the man who had assaulted our son. We knew he’d been murdered: it’s only natural that we should have anticipated your questions, that we should have thought carefully about exactly what we were doing at the time he was killed.”

“Except of course that if you were innocent you shouldn’t have known what time the victim died,” said Peach calmly.

“The news of Bickerstaffe’s murder had been made public by the time we spoke to you. The time had still not been revealed. Yet you admitted just now that you discussed your alibis for that time before we came to see you.”

Keith Hanlon sat very still on the sofa, feeling the rigidity of his wife beside him, willing her not to speak, not even to look up into his face. Even a look could be fatal now, he felt. He tried hard to sound calm as he said, “You’ll have to do better than that, Inspector Peach. I told you, even the innocent can examine what they were doing at any particular time.”

“And even the guilty can agree their stories, Mr Hanlon. Can make up a lie and then test each other to see that their stories tally, that they are giving each other an alibi for a particular time, a time they should not have known was important but somehow did. It always seemed that this wasn’t an individual crime, that whoever tightened that wire round Bickerstaffe’s neck had a partner who had helped him to set it up and provided him with an alibi for the time of the killing.”

Pat looked up into her husband’s face sharply on the phrase about the wire round the victim’s neck, and Peach knew in that moment that she had never until then known the exact details of the garrotting of the man who had abused her son. Keith had protected her from that, just as now he tried to protect both of them by pressing his hand down warningly on top of hers.

Keith was afraid of what she might say, but when she spoke at last it was an attempt to defend him. “We were here that night,” she said in a monotone. “Here at seven o’clock on that night. And I can prove it. It was our turn to shut up the church. The Sacred Heart. We still did it, you know, even after — after what Father did to Jamie. You can look at the roster for church security if you don’t—”

“
You
were here on that night, Mrs Hanlon. But your husband wasn’t. Not at seven o’clock. Your husband’s name was on the roster, but it was you who shut the church. You took his place, because he wasn’t back home at that time.”

She could have denied it. She could have given him lots of reasons for the change other than her husband’s absence. He would have known they were false, but he could not have disproved them. But she was a naturally truthful woman, with none of the resources of the habitual deceiver. She looked at Peach for a moment in horrified silence, then her resolve cracked. “That man deserved it!” she shouted. “He abused our boy! Our Jamie, who never hurt a fly!”

Then, suddenly, her arms were round her husband and she was in tears. It was Keith Hanlon who had to conclude the bizarre ritual of confession. “Pat phoned him the night before and arranged that she would meet him in a ruined barn we knew, just outside Bolton-by-Bowland that Thursday evening. I waited in the barn until he came and then jumped him from behind. It was easy — he was only expecting Pat, you see. I hit him over the head with a cricket stump, before he even saw me. I didn’t give him the chance to speak. If he had spoken, had argued with me, had asked for mercy, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

At this thought, Pat Hanlon was wracked by a renewed bout of sobbing; he pressed her head against his chest and stroked it gently, whispering wordless comfortings, as a mother might do to a child. Then he spoke again to the two faces opposite him. “He was unconscious, after I hit him. I tightened the wire around his neck before he could come round and look at me.”

Lucy Blake said gently, “Why did it take you so long to get home after you’d killed him?”

“I had to hide the body, didn’t I? That’s why we’d arranged he should meet me there. There was a wood behind the barn, with a deep ditch beside it. We’d picnicked there you see, when the children were younger, so we knew the spot well. I emptied the pockets. There was a letter there, threatening what would happen to him if he didn’t keep his mouth shut about some photographs. I’m afraid I burned it with the other things.” He was genuinely apologetic, as if he regretted this minor breach of the law more than the crime of murder.

Lucy nodded, then asked quietly, “What did you do with the body?”

“I put the body in the ditch, in the spot I’d selected before he came. It was a good five feet deep at that point, and overgrown — there was no water in it at that time. If it hadn’t been for that torrential downpour on the Bank Holiday Monday, it could have been undiscovered for years.”

Act of God, they call that, thought Peach. He didn’t voice the thought to these devastatingly pious people. Instead, he radioed for assistance as Lucy Blake uttered the formal words of arrest over the couple, still clasped in each other’s arms but now both weeping. The uniformed men who arrived looked very young, even to Peach’s eyes. They took the unresisting couple out to the car. “No need for the cuffs,” said Peach quietly as they went.

Pat Hanlon turned her face back to him at the door. “Father Bickerstaffe should never have done that, not to our boy. He didn’t deserve to live. And him a priest. Bringing disgrace to Holy Mother Church.” She sounded as if she still thought that might be a bigger sin than the assault itself.

Lucy Blake stayed behind to break the news of what had happened to the children. She made a swift phone call to the children’s aunt, then set off to walk the half-mile to her house, rehearsing the wording of her dreadful news as she went.

Peach went with the Hanlons to prepare the formal charges at the station. They seemed almost peaceful, quieter now with the relief of confession, that relief which their religion had afforded them all their lives. As if she divined Peach’s thoughts, Pat Hanlon turned to her husband in the back of the police vehicle and said, “We’ll be able to go to Confession now, and receive absolution from our sins, won’t we, Keith?”

Her husband nodded, unable to speak, pressing his hand upon her arm to try to silence her. But she said contentedly to Peach in the front seat of the car, “They’ll allow us a visit from a priest in prison, won’t they?”