A Little Learning (11 page)

She managed to edge the last sentence with contempt, but Peach only gave her a small, confident smile. ‘As a matter of fact, I might. I used to ride a Yamaha 350 myself, when I was about that age. One or two of the gang had Harley-Davidsons, but we considered them a bit middle-aged.’

She wanted to fling herself at him, to wipe the smile off that smug face with her fists. Instead, she held herself steady for a full two seconds before she said, ‘Then you’ll understand the feeling of power you get in a group. That was when I became really interested in social psychology, I think.’

‘After you’d smashed up a drug store and seriously injured the owner? Group pressure again, was it?’

‘I took no part in that! I didn’t even know one of the boys was carrying a gun, until it was too late.’

‘But you were charged, along with the others. And found guilty. Miscarriage of justice, was it?’

She knew he was trying to rile her. Worse than that, she knew that he was succeeding. She said roughly, ‘They pin whatever they can on you, don’t they, the police? You should know that.’

Peach smiled. She was softening up nicely: would be ready for the real questions any time now. ‘Not always. Not everywhere. Otherwise we might be talking about a murder charge now, Miss Campbell.’

She glared at him. ‘Anyway, the judge must have felt I wasn’t guilty. I only got a suspended sentence.’ She could see again that hushed courtroom in Massachusetts in 1991, with the electric silence as the white boys were sent down and the single, strikingly beautiful coloured girl was released. Surely this man who seemed to know so much wouldn’t have seen the front pages of the local press screaming about political correctness after the verdicts?

Peach watched her for a moment, sensing the turmoil behind the face which gave him so little. Then he said quietly, ‘Well, that’s ten years and more ago. You’ve come a long way since then, Miss Campbell. Without any further charges. And landed in the UK, as a respected tutor in the UEL. Tell us about your affair with Dr George Andrew Carter.’

He had come back to it so suddenly that she was caught unawares. The carefully prepared statement she had rehearsed to cover this had fled her mind. She said. ‘I’m not sure that “affair” is the right word. It was nothing quite as grand or as ongoing as an affair.’

DS Blake leaned forward and said softly, ‘So tell us just what it was, Carmen. How many meetings, and how deep the relationship went.’

It gave her a framework, even it if was not her own framework. She said, ‘Four, perhaps five, meetings.’

‘Overnight meetings, were they?’ Lucy Blake was quiet, even diplomatic, after Peach.

Carmen smiled. ‘You don’t need to pussyfoot around, DS Blake. I’m a big girl now. The first two weren’t what you call “overnight meetings”. The other three were. Yes, we went to bed together. In a motel the first two times. In a hotel in Harrogate, on the other three.’

Peach said, ‘Thank you for being so precise.’ He looked for the first time since he had arrived so abruptly in the room a little uncertain. ‘Forgive me, Miss Campbell, but we have to get some clear idea of this relationship, in which one of the partners is no longer alive to give his version. Were you in love with Dr Carter?’

Carmen felt a little easier, a little more in control. But she knew she must go carefully here. ‘No. I’m quite clear that I wasn’t.’

‘Then what was the attraction? You are, if you will allow the description, a vital and attractive young woman of — thirty-three, is it? Without any permanent attachments.’

Carmen nodded slowly. ‘And Dr Carter was a man of forty-eight, with a wife and two children, no obvious good looks, and a nickname of Claptrap, which implied a certain derision. I’m a stupid and unimaginative policeman, but I can’t see any obvious chemistry between the two of you.’

Carmen knew by now that he was neither stupid nor unimaginative: he had played her like a fish on the end of a line when he had raised her past rumbles with the law. She had not expected that the nature of her relationship with George would be raised so directly. She looked at the woman beside Peach and said, with a not unbecoming embarrassment, ‘We’re not always proud of the things we do. It was power, I suppose — the position George held. We women don’t always care to acknowledge it, but for a lot of us power is still the great aphrodisiac.’

Lucy Blake studied her without speaking; it was one of the CID techniques she had learned from Peach, and it often worked. People who were unnerved spoke to fill the silence, often revealing things about themselves they would otherwise have concealed. But this alert girl was a psychologist, an expert in such things.

Lucy wondered about power as an aphrodisiac. Was that what had attracted her in the first place to Peach? She had been aware of being pulled towards him because he was so good at his job, so single-minded in his pursuit of villains. Perhaps that was almost the same thing. But she was sure that the capacity to make her laugh had also been highly important. She said rather woodenly, ‘You’re saying that it was because Dr Carter was in control of this place that you found him attractive?’

Carmen smiled ruefully. ‘I’m trying to be perfectly honest, as you asked me to be. We all know that there is a complex of things involved in any relationship. When George Carter appointed me, it was just before the college got its university status. He was still involved in all the academic appointments, as he no longer was by the time of his death. He seemed to me a very powerful man. And frankly, that power carried a certain glamour. I don’t think I’d have considered George as a lover without it.’

Lucy nodded, trying to keep this woman’s tongue running whilst she was in confessional mode. ‘And how deep did the relationship go?’

Carmen shrugged, allowed herself a regretful smile, and said, ‘Not very. We went to bed together a few times, as I’ve told you. It promised more than it delivered — probably for both of us. There wasn’t much more than sex. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer.’

There was another silence, but Carmen Campbell was too experienced, too much at home with the picture she had given, to try to fill it. It was Peach who asked her quietly, ‘And who would have ended it?’

‘I would. But for all I know, George might have found that something of a relief, as well as me.’

‘Thank you for being so frank. Where were you last Saturday night, Miss Campbell?’

She had known it would come, but had not been prepared for it to be dropped in as abruptly as this, with no preamble about routine enquiries. She tried not to let the shock show as she smiled at them. ‘I was in Cheshire. In Altrincham, to be precise. I was at a Who revival concert in Manchester on Saturday night, with a group of people. I stayed the night at my boyfriend’s house afterwards. I had no car with me, on this occasion: I travelled from Brunton by train and came back the same way on Monday evening. I had someone with me, from four o’clock on Saturday evening until the next morning.’

Game, set and match, as far as her own guilt was concerned. Her smiling, untroubled face proclaimed as much to Peach. She gave the details as asked to Lucy Blake, even volunteered her boyfriend’s phone number so that her story might be checked out.

‘What does Keith Padmore know about your relationship with Dr Carter?’ asked DS Blake without looking up, as she recorded the information in her own version of shorthand.

‘Very little. As far as Keith’s concerned, George Carter was merely the Director of the university I worked in, and I knew him only on those terms, as a rather remote academic figure. And I’d like it left that way.’

Peach regarded her curiously, wondering about the mores that could accommodate a brief fling with the Director alongside an apparently serious, perhaps long-term relationship. They came across the full gamut of sexual liaisons in CID work, but this seemed one of the more curious combinations. Perhaps this lively and attractive woman was one of those sexually voracious modern females who took a variety of sexual partners almost casually. Carmen Campbell would certainly not be short of offers.

He offered her the routine final enquiry, not expecting any very useful response on this occasion. ‘You must have gained an impression of the state of George Carter’s private life, even from your relatively few meetings with him. Can you think of anyone who might have hated him enough to kill him?’

Carmen felt an immense relief as the questioning turned away from her own part in this. She tried not to show it, to give every impression of treating Peach’s enquiry with serious reflection. After a moment, speaking as if the words were drawn unwillingly from her, she said, ‘You must be investigating the people who live on the site. Members of staff, I mean, not students.’

‘We are in the process of doing that, yes. Why do you think them particularly worthy of our attention, Miss Campbell?’

Carmen was as wary as Peach was watchful. He was an intelligent man this, a worthy opponent. She mustn’t overplay her hand. She smiled. ‘The same reasons as you, I suppose. They had the easiest access to the victim, didn’t they? And people living on the campus get to know each other, over eighteen months or so.’

They followed that up, tried to get more out of her about what lay behind her statements, but she wouldn’t — or couldn’t — go any further. Perhaps she shouldn’t have said as much, she said. It wasn’t fair of her to speculate, in something as serious as murder. Perhaps it was just feminine intuition, and should be treated no more seriously than that.

Carmen Campbell sat motionless for ten minutes after they had gone, reviewing what she had said and how it had been received. They were a pretty good combination, that unlikely pair, she decided: they had caught her off guard, once or twice. But the important sections seemed to have been all right.

As DS Blake drove the Mondeo, DI Peach was speculating also. It was some time before he said quietly, ‘A busy girl that. And a dangerous one, I’d say. I wonder if her affair with Carter was as passionless as she claims it was.’

Thirteen

The student bar in the UEL was quite full by nine o’clock on that Wednesday. The visiting football and rugby teams from Liverpool University had been there for some time, and were making the most of the last half hour before boarding their coach for the forty-mile return journey. The songs were vulgar, the merriment was strident, the decibel level was high.

No one took much account of the tall young man with the head of curly black hair as he sat with a book and a pint in the corner by the door. He was perhaps a little older than the average in the bar that night, but it was scarcely noticeable. A postgraduate student, perhaps, or a research assistant; the new university, anxious to build up its status as quickly as possible, had brought in a few of both these exotic species.

People expected students to read books, and the one this fresh-faced young man immersed himself in so deeply would excite no comment in any university in the world: it was a Penguin paperback edition of Niccolo Machiavelli’s
The
Prince
. He turned the pages at regular intervals, and only the very observant would have realized that his eyes moved sometimes above the pages of the book he held, and took in everything that was happening in that raucous, unevenly lit room.

The merriment was at its height and the bar at its fullest when the moment came for which DC Brendan Murphy had waited.

The man in the greasy navy anorak was perhaps three years older than him, and unshaven, with a little more stubble than was fashionable, even in a student community. He slid himself behind a rectangular table no more than ten yards from Brendan, on the other side of the entrance door. This man made no attempt to buy a drink, but sat in a pool of shadow, with his hands in his pockets and his neck shrunk within his anorak, silent and watchful as a sewer rat.

He did not have to wait for long. Two youths came from the other end of the bar, where they had been invisible to Brendan behind the waving arms of the soccer and rugby teams. They had obviously been expecting this arrival, though they exchanged no greetings with the newcomer. There was far too much noise for Brendan to hear what was said, but he saw the man spread polythene sachets on the table ahead of him, saw the students nod and pass ten-pound notes across the table. Cannabis, he thought, parcelled in quarter- or half-ounce packets; enough for twenty or forty good spliffs. The drug was now so common in environments like this that its purveyors scarcely troubled to conceal their trafficking.

A third student joined the table, then a fourth. There were swift enquiries, in response to which the man looked round, took in Brendan, apparently engrossed in his book, and motioned with his head to indicate that his customers should follow him outside. Brendan let them get through the door before he slipped the paperback into his pocket and followed them cautiously.

He could not see them at first. Then, as his eyes grew more used to the darkness, he found them. They were very close to the windowless brick wall which formed the back of the bar, where empty steel kegs stood awaiting collection when the brewery van made its delivery the next morning. The man in the anorak had spread out some of his wares on top of one of the big kegs; it was so dark that he was demonstrating the genuine nature of what he offered by the light of a small torch.

Brendan crept to within five yards of them but stayed invisible behind the corner of the building. The man in the anorak was giving the nearest he came to a sales pitch. ‘This crack coke is good: none of your adulterated rubbish. Fifty quid for three rocks. The Ecstasy is forty pounds for three big tablets. What you lads want is this: Rohypnol. It’s what we use in date-rapes. Completely undetectable. Fifty quid for a good supply. Quick as you can, lads, I can’t hang about here. I’ve bigger fish to fry tonight!’

Brendan Murphy waited until he saw money changing hands under the pale spotlight of the torch before he made his move. When he acted, he moved swiftly, arriving like a black angel of vengeance out of the darkness. He didn’t make any attempt to lay hands on the students, knowing that there were others to deal with them. He had the anorak’s hand up his back between his shoulder blades before he could attempt resistance, heard the man’s oath and yelp of agony even as he hissed the words of doom into his ear: ‘
I
arrest
you
on
suspicion
of
dealing
in
Class
A
drugs
.
You
do
not
have
to
say
anything
,
but
it
may
harm
your
defence
if
you
do
not
mention
when
questioned
something
which
you
later
rely
on
in
court
.
Anything
you
do
say
will
be
recorded
and
may
be
given
in
evidence
.’

Quite a mouthful to deliver under stress, but he was used to that. Two of the lads had run straight into the arms of the three uniformed men around the corner. Brendan held the arm of his captive until he was able to push him roughly into the back of the van with the youths who had bought from him. Anorak said nothing on the way to the station, beyond the brief advice to his fellow prisoners that they should ‘say nothing to these bastards’.

It was, thought DC Murphy, a highly satisfactory evening of overtime.

*

At ten forty-five on that Wednesday evening, at the very moment when Brendan Murphy’s prize was being charged and delivered to his cell, Detective Inspector Percy Peach had other problems.

He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to solve them, but the problems themselves were wholly more pleasurable than those posed to Brendan by a greasy anorak with halitosis. For Percy was studying Lucy’s winceyette nightie again. And it seemed shorter than even his inflamed memory had pictured it.

He was on his own ground tonight. His 1950s semi was older and more spacious than Lucy Blake’s trim little modern flat, but nothing like as neat and tidy. He had done his best to make it look spruce tonight, once he knew he was on a promise, but the house still carried that air of a place which was scarcely lived in and resented it.

Still, Lucy was used to that by now. She had put away his breakfast dishes from the drainer and approved his purchase of the instant coffee she had suggested during her last visit. They had watched the ten o’clock television news, and found that even in the local section there was no mention of the murder of the Director of the University of East Lancashire. Even a sensational murder like this had held its place in the news for no more than two evenings. The two of them were rather pleased about this: CID work was not easy when conducted in the blaze of publicity which stemmed from media attention.

And now they were in the bedroom, and Lucy was voicing her first criticism of his residence. ‘It’s cold in here!’ she said. She ran her hands along the top of Percy’s ancient, lukewarm central-heating radiator, then rubbed them vigorously together and flapped her bare arms violently across her chest.

The movement, in that celebrated nightie, excited Percy, and he gave a low moan, part pure pleasure, part agonized anticipation. He did a good moan, full of pent-up emotion on its sustained, plangent note. ‘It won’t be cold when you get into here!’ he promised fervently.

He was lying in his double bed, his head exactly level with the lower fringe of the nightie, his concentration on the artistic appreciation of the scene absolute. He allowed himself a quieter, less agonized moan.

‘You make me self-conscious! Every bit of me’s cold, while you just lie there whining!’ she complained. She turned her back on him, bent automatically to take off her slippers, then hastily changed her position, lest she should reveal enough to cause a cardiac arrest in her excited lover. Percy began to croon his own erotic version of ‘Blue Moon’.

‘I think I’ll put on my bed-socks and get myself a hot water bottle,’ said Lucy vindictively.

‘Bloody ‘ell, Norah!’ said Percy. It was a comment he offered for all occasions, sometimes in mock horror, sometimes in awed appreciation. He followed this one with another moan, to show that it was appreciation. ‘That were an ejaculation, lass, that about Norah,’ he said. ‘Does tha like it when I talk dirty?’

Lucy’s shiver developed into a giggle. She didn’t mind whether he talked dirty or not, but she liked it when he thee’d and thou’d her. She couldn’t say why; perhaps it was something connected with being a Lancashire lass who had grown up in the country, where the old accent and even bits of the old dialect were still strong.

DS Blake laid her clean pants and bra for the morning carefully on top of the aged radiator, in the faint hope that they might gather some warmth to receive her then. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for action. Then she whipped the nightie up and her pants down, depositing them in one continuous movement in the darkest corner of the room. This disrobing of the nymph provoked DI Denis Charles Scott Peach into an uninhibited yell of pure pleasure.

‘You haven’t warmed my half !’ complained Lucy, as her teeth chattered and she tried to ward off three indecent assaults at once.

‘Then come into mine!’ said Percy. He managed to get both arms round her shapely shoulders and heaved her expertly on top of him.

‘Ooh!’ said Lucy. It was only proper to show a decent degree of surprise.

‘Aaaaaargh!’ said Percy. Curious how your moans became so much lower, when you had a weight on top of you, even such a delicious weight as this. Still, you had to show your appreciation.

‘This nightie’s too short!’ said Lucy modestly into the well-formed ear where her lips had landed.

‘Just the right length!’ Percy differed, with a low, animal growl which said far more than words. He didn’t know where the nightie had gone at the moment, and he didn’t care. His hands fell on what it should have been covering. There seemed an awful lot of precious flesh here, for a small piece of winceyette like that to cover. It was only right that he should offer a helping hand. Or hands.

Decidedly expert hands, Lucy found. She allowed herself a low moan of her own: womanly, if not exactly ladylike.

Fifteen minutes which seemed like one passed before Percy sank back into his pillow, adjusted his breathing to the slowing palpitations of the form above him, and muttered through the chestnut hair a heartfelt, ‘Eeh, lass, that were champion!’

Lucy smiled in the darkness, shifted her head to give a gentle kiss to the man below her, touching his chin lightly with soft lips, running the tip of her tongue lightly across his neck. ‘Tha weren’t too bad thiself, Percy. Not for an old ‘un, like.’ She slipped her body from above his and pulled down her nightie. ‘Fanny pelmet you called this, and fanny pelmet is just about all it is!’ she said. Everything she had hoped it would be when she bought it, she thought happily.

They lay with their arms around each other, pleasurably warm and content, drifting towards sleep and yet with part of them anxious to stay awake, to prolong the intimacy of the post-coital moment. She was breathing regularly, and he thought she must be asleep when he heard her mutter drowsily, ‘I hope we didn’t disturb the neighbours!’

‘Might ‘ave,’ he murmured, with a touch of pride. ‘They’re not used to noises like that. They think I’m a sad divorcee who lives in a state of quasi-monastic seclusion. You’d best show yourself at the window in that nightie in the morning. I wouldn’t like them to think I was making noises like that playing solo.’

She giggled. She liked the idea that there hadn’t been others here before her. She had no right to expect it, but it gave her satisfaction, nonetheless. It was her last thought before she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

One of the reasons Percy Peach’s bedroom was so cold was that it faced due east. Even on the 21st of November, the grey light of dawn crept under the ill-fitting cotton curtains before seven o’clock. Lucy Blake, rolling on her back and stretching sensuously, thought at first that it was the light which had wakened her. Then she heard the rattle of crockery and found a cup of tea on the small bedside cupboard beside her.

She had been given a cup and saucer, but Percy clutched his favourite mug as he moved round to his side of the bed. He was naked. ‘Winceyette doesn’t do the same things for me as it does for you,’ he explained. He slid between the sheets and gave a theatrical shiver. ‘God, but that lino’s cold on the kitchen floor, lass.’ He contrived somehow to raise a cold foot and place it precisely between her warm buttocks.

She screamed. That would give those neighbours something to think about. ‘I’m going to wear flannel pyjamas when I come here next!’ she said. ‘With a padlock and chain, I should think!’

He removed his foot, sipped his tea, and said, ‘That should give the locksmith a few moments of pure pleasure. If I get Horny Harry from Oswaldtwistle, he might pay
me
the call-out fee.’