Merely Players (15 page)

None of his friends mistook his scream for a hoax. There was too sincere a note of terror in it for that. Wayne stared down in horror at all that remained of what had once been a man, at the blood and gore amidst the whiteness of the snow and frost.

Percy Peach had been at the Brunton Rovers–Stoke City match himself that afternoon. He had supported the Rovers since he had been a boy, so that he was much elated by their second-half recovery and went home with a warm glow within him which owed nothing to alcohol.

‘Stuffed 'em!' he informed Lucy triumphantly. Then, with a conscientious attempt at objectivity, ‘We were a bit flattered by three–one, really. But it was an exciting match.'

‘That's good, then. The meal will be ready in twenty minutes. There's a gin and tonic ready for you on the table.' Detective Sergeant Peach, as she was still getting used to calling herself, was enjoying domesticity more than she had expected. It must be the novelty factor, she told herself, as a consciously modern woman.

It was just after six o'clock when the call came through for Detective Chief Inspector Peach. A suspicious death. The body of a male beside the highest and loneliest stretch of the A666, on the other side of Darwen. Been there for some time, by the looks of it. The police surgeon was on his way, for the ridiculous legal formality of confirming death. Percy gave swift, automatic orders. Check the missing persons register for any males reported in the last three days. The scene to be cordoned off immediately, but not investigated until daylight. Even with floodlights, investigators might destroy more than they revealed, if they blundered around before morning. A uniformed PC to be stationed beside it overnight. Two officers in a car, taking turns to keep watch. Poor bloody sods: he hoped they realized what it would be like up there, with the temperature below freezing.

He came back in sober mood to the table, where Lucy produced the meal she had slid back into the oven when he was called to the phone. It was the worst possible point in the week to assemble a scene of crime team. Nowadays they were all civilians and many of them simply wouldn't be available on a Saturday night. As soon as they had finished the main course, he rang his old colleague Jack Chadwick, who had been invalided out of the police service and now ran SOCO teams as a civilian. They agreed that Jack would have a scene of crime team assembled on the site by nine o'clock on Sunday morning.

The sweet was gooseberry crumble, one of his favourites. When he had chomped thoughtfully for several minutes without speaking, Lucy said, ‘You'll be up and out bright and early in the morning, then.'

‘No. I'll let my new sergeant go out there. Clyde Northcott can take Brendan Murphy with him. Be good experience for the pair of them. I'll have a lie-in with the woman of my dreams. If I have any energy at all at the end of that, I might go and worry Tommy Bloody Tucker with this later in the morning.'

It wasn't like Percy Peach not to visit the scene of crime scene. But for over three years he had always done that with the then Lucy Blake as his DS. Marriage had meant they could no longer work together, even though she was still in the Brunton CID section. Perhaps that was why he had elected to let others do the job this time – not that you ever discovered anything an efficient SOCO team and the forensic labs weren't going to show up for you anyway. Lucy wouldn't ask him why he wasn't going to this one. He would dismiss the idea that he didn't fancy it without her as sentimental rubbish.

But she was grateful to him nevertheless.

Jack Chadwick drove his SOCO team out through Darwen and on to the lonely moorland stretch of the A666 at nine o'clock on Sunday morning.

He took a photographer, a fingerprints man and one non-specialist with him. They would search for the miscellaneous detritus which might offer a clue to whoever else other than the dead man had been in this place at the moment when he died. They were an experienced team; they didn't expect much on a site like this one, but they would do their job and search it minutely, nonetheless. The car was pretty quiet as they drove through Darwen; everyone in it had expected to be still in bed or yawning at breakfast at this time on a Sunday morning. But they knew what to expect and what they were about.

None of them voiced the thought, but there was always the outside chance that one of them would pick up something vital at the scene, something which would lead many months later to a commendation from a judge in the high court on the diligence of the person who had brought this to light and ensured justice. Jack Chadwick knew from long experience that the possibility was remote, but anything which buoyed enthusiasm on a morning like this was valuable.

They were glad to see one thing when they reached the site and saw the ribbons delineating the area of the crime scene. It was some distance from the parking bay. When there were no toilets at a parking place, everyone knew what happened on the ground immediately adjacent to it. The team donned their plastic shoe covers and overalls, looking like a surgical theatre team as they reached the single narrow entrance which had already been marked out at the site.

There had never been more than an inch of snow, but another hard frost had crusted this thin covering over the ground where the body lay, some sixty yards from the tarmac of the parking bay. They made one immediate and satisfying discovery, but they had been at work for no more than ten minutes when they heard an unexpected sound through the clear, cold air.

A powerful motorbike, roaring throatily in the distance, then changing gear as it turned into the parking bay and stopped behind Jack Chadwick's Citroen. The two tall men who climbed off the bike were in black leathers and gauntlets. They did not remove the helmets for a moment, which they spent studying the frost-coated BMW sports car which was cordoned off in the car park. Then they turned and marched carefully to where Chadwick and his team had stopped work to witness their impressive entrance.

The leading figure removed his helmet only when he was two yards short of Jack Chadwick. There were involuntary starts of shock in the three people behind Chadwick, for the features now revealed were almost as black and shiny as the helmet which had concealed them. Everyone who worked at Brunton police station would have already recognized the Yamaha 350. The black face gazed for a moment around the civilian faces, then smiled and said, ‘Detective Sergeant Clyde Northcott. And this is DC Brendan Murphy. Anything of interest yet?'

‘We have, yes. Percy Peach not coming today?' Chadwick had been looking forward to a few words with his old comrade.

Northcott's smile broadened to a grin. ‘Percy sent the poor bloody infantry, didn't he? Too cold for him, I expect. He won't be in church, if I know Percy. He'll be still in bed, with Lucy Blake as was. Lucky sod!'

It was said without bitterness but with genuine envy. Lucy Blake, with her dark red hair, blue-green eyes and ample curves, had been the object of many advances and many more erotic fantasies among the male officers of the Brunton service. It had been an immense surprise and a source of lasting regret among them when she had announced her commitment to the bald, bustling figure with the out of date black toothbrush moustache. Percy Peach was a local detective legend, a figure who excited respect and fear in equal measure among his juniors, but they had not thought of him as a rival for the delectable Detective Sergeant Blake. But all argument and all speculation were over now; she was Mrs Lucy Peach. Not all envy, though; virile young men and the odd woman still clung to their sexual fantasies.

Brendan Murphy, a native Lancastrian despite his Irish name and heritage, rubbed his hands vigorously together and beat his arms rapidly across his chest. ‘Last time you'll get me on that damned bike! I had my eyes shut most of the time. And now I'm bloody frozen!'

The four people who had already begun work on the site smiled at him in friendly fashion. When you were dragged out on a morning like this to work in a place like this, it was always good to see someone even colder and more distressed than you were. ‘You'll live!' Northcott growled unsympathetically towards the fresh, unlined face which was almost as white as his was black. ‘Put another woolly on next time.'

Murphy informed them that he was wearing a thermal vest and long johns, but no one was interested any more. Jack Chadwick had lifted their one indisputable trophy and was holding it out reverently in gloved hands towards Clyde Northcott, as if he were an acolyte in some solemn religious service.

Northcott did not touch it, but studied it for a moment through the transparent plastic which already protected it against contamination. ‘You're holding a lot of money there, Jack. That's a Purdey. Is it the murder weapon?'

‘Almost certainly, I should think, unless it was left here to divert us. Forensic and the pathology boys will confirm it. But all of us here know enough to be certain that this man died from a shotgun fired at close quarters.'

The two policemen turned towards the white mound they had been conscious of since they came here. They stared down wordlessly for a moment at the shattered torso and the crimson-black spattering on the white ground. Above them, the face was curiously unmarked, frozen into a rictus of surprise, with only two spots of now blackened blood upon it. The sun was rising now, slowly melting the thin layer of whiteness which covered the grisly contents of this cordoned area. On the face of the corpse, only the eyebrows still held their covering of frost.

It was the woman in the team who identified the victim. She gave a quick gasp and said, ‘That's Alec Dawson. Or rather the man who plays him, Adam Cassidy.'

Jack Chadwick and the others abandoned their work for a moment and came over to confirm this. It was Chadwick who said, ‘You're right, Annette. Never watch that rubbish myself, because it's so far away from real policing.' He was anxious to assert his ex-copper status with the derision he knew would be the police reaction. ‘But my wife loves the series.' He glanced round his team. ‘This is a local celebrity, the most famous man to come out of Brunton for a long time. The shit's going to hit the fan when this gets out. For God's sake, let's make sure we don't miss anything.'

The two CID men looked round at what they recognized already as an unpromising scene of crime. The photographer had already finished his work here; he was helping a younger woman to conduct a minute examination of the frozen ground. They each had tweezers and sample bags. They had already collected several cigarette ends and a few hairs from a stunted hawthorn. These looked animal rather than human; dogs too felt calls of nature, and their owners usually took them further away from parking areas, in unconscious acknowledgement of man's pre-eminence over the rest of the animal world.

The pair were treating this ground with due care, carefully skirting the dark yellow circle of Wayne Carter's urination before he discovered the corpse. So far, they had found none of the used contraceptives which were too often discarded in places like this. Perhaps this spot was too wintry and exposed for even the hardy fornicators of Lancashire. But they would bag everything they found here, however unsavoury. Ninety per cent, perhaps a hundred per cent, of what they took away would have no relevance to this crime, but there was no means of distinguishing that on site.

‘Have you done the car yet?' asked Northcott.

‘No. The keys were in his pocket, though. I've opened the door and had a quick look, but we'll move on to it when we've finished here. I don't think we'll find much in the BMW. It's very new: only eight hundred miles on the clock. The passenger seat looks as if it's never been used. Maybe it hasn't.'

Brendan Murphy came back to the one jewel the place had so far offered to its investigators. He looked down at the shotgun, then at the corpse, then back at the most experienced man there. ‘Any chance of suicide?'

Jack Chadwick came and stood beside him. When you find the instrument of death near a body, it holds about it a strange wonder. The pair stared at the inanimate object as if it could tell them more, if they only looked at it long enough. Jack eventually said, ‘This isn't suicide. At least not in my view, but forensics will confirm it. For a start, suicides normally shoot themselves in the head, especially if they're using a shotgun. And though recoils can do strange things to weapons, the Purdey was lying too far away from the body for this to be self-inflicted.'

‘Then why should a killer leave it here for us to find?'

Chadwick glanced at the fresh young face beside him. DC Murphy was eager for knowledge, not afraid to appear naïve if that's what the search for knowledge demanded. ‘We don't even know for certain yet that this is the murder weapon. If it is, then it's possible that someone who was shocked by what he had done simply flung away the shotgun in a panic. The more likely reason for it's being here is that your killer didn't care if it was found, because he knew it wouldn't tell you anything about him.' Killers were always male until you knew otherwise, simply because in violent deaths men were overwhelmingly more numerous. ‘We've already fingerprinted it and found nothing useful.'

Murphy beat his arms across his chest again. He wasn't looking forward to getting back astride the Yamaha. He glanced at Clyde Northcott, who seemed to be preparing to do just that, then down again at the shotgun in its wrapper. ‘Even someone who wasn't contemplating murder when he came here would have been wearing gloves in December, in a place like this.'

‘Welcome to the murder team,' said DS Northcott grimly.

Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker was an enthusiastic but dreadful golfer. This combination exists in all sports, but it is commonest in golf. There are many reasons for that. The commonest is probably the much-lauded handicap system, which allows the abject to play against the proficient, on what should be level terms. The system is more complex for the outsider than the Bible and Koran combined, but basically it means that the duffer is given extra shots to compensate for his dufferdom.