A Little Learning (18 page)

Nineteen

Malcolm McLean was in custody at Brunton police station. The Drugs Squad was holding him for twenty-four hours, whilst they followed up information he had given them in interview and framed the charges he would eventually face.

On Friday afternoon, when he should have been teaching chemistry at the UEL, McLean was languishing in a police cell. The morning interviews with the Drugs Squad Superintendent and sergeant had been harrowing for him. They had played their man expertly, never revealing to him just how much they knew about the grim world of drugs which lay behind his burgeoning profits on the UEL campus, contriving to convince him that they knew more of his own activities than they actually did.

In the end, McLean was glad to remain in custody, after what he had told them. The barons of the vicious drugs industry, the top men whom he had never even met, did not take kindly to the release of any sort of information to the police. Swift and anonymous retribution to those who grassed on them was one of the pillars of their trade. Malcolm McLean knew well enough that these men would eliminate him with no more thought than they gave to a troublesome wasp if they discovered what he had said to the persistent police questioners that morning.

At least you were safe here, within these stark walls, beneath the single, small, high window with its black iron bars. The police lunch had been basic, but better cooked than he had expected. It was a grim prospect he faced, all the same. There would be imprisonment for what he had done: the only thing at issue was the length of the sentence. He felt desolate and alone. For almost the first time since she had left him four years ago, Malcolm McLean yearned for the company and support of his wife.

Then, just when it seemed that things could not get any worse, he was taken up to the interview room again, to be questioned by Percy Peach.

Percy and Lucy Blake observed him closely as he was led into the small, square room by the uniformed PC. Malcolm McLean looked older and considerably less suave than when they had visited him twenty-four hours earlier in his chemistry laboratory. His face appeared thinner, almost gaunt; his deep-set eyes, which had then been so watchful, now looked hunted. After his hours of interviews and confinement in a cell, even his beard seemed ragged, rather than the well-trimmed addition to his features they remembered.

Percy Peach believed that the most rewarding time to hit a man like this was when he was down. ‘Been doing some research on you, Mr McLean,’ he said.

McLean raised his haggard face to confront this latest tormentor. ‘There’s nothing left to tell,’ he said wearily. ‘Those buggers had everything I know out of me this morning.’

Peach smiled. ‘I heard you were unexpectedly forthcoming. Spilled quite a lot of appetizing beans, I believe. Some of which I might come back to.’ He glanced down at the sheets in front of him and ruffled them threateningly. ‘But I don’t mean what you told the Drugs Squad lads, richly interesting as it was. We’ve been doing a little research at the University of East Lancashire.’

The deep brown eyes looked suspiciously into Peach’s even darker ones. ‘What do you mean by research?’

‘Oh, nothing as grand as you university chaps would mean. It’s not material for a doctoral thesis. Or even a dissertation. But it gave DS Blake and me a modest satisfaction. It might even put someone not a million miles from me behind bars for life.’

To Malcolm McLean, this man with the immaculate fingernails, the muscular torso, and shining bald head above the jet-black fringe of hair, looked like a medieval torturer. He wanted to throw in the towel, to tell the police to do what they pleased with him. Yet he could not take his eyes off Peach’s face. He said wearily, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re on about. I’m not going down for life; not when I’ve been cooperative; not for drugs.’

Peach regarded hem unblinkingly, then leaned forward so that his eyes were even closer to the prisoner’s. ‘For murder, you might.’

Fear started into the eyes which lay so deep within the head. It made Percy think he was on to something, even as McLean said roughly, ‘Fuck off, Peach! I haven’t murdered anyone! You can’t fit me up for that!’

He switched his eyes away from the torturer to the softer face of his assistant, to the unusual ultramarine eyes and rich red hair of the woman who observed him so closely. But there was no relief here, just the beginnings of an explanation. Lucy Blake said, ‘We’ve been talking to Miss Burns, the Director’s secretary at the UEL. She helped us interpret some entries in the late Dr Carter’s appointments diary.’

Malcolm McLean wasn’t even sure whether he was still thinking straight, but he knew this was important. He tried desperately to muster his few remaining resources. ‘So what? I expect the old dragon told you I had appointments to see old Claptrap from time to time. So did lots of other people.’

Lucy smiled, ‘Not so many people, Malcolm. Not many of your rank in the place ever saw the Director. As the university grew rapidly, he was much too remote a figure for ordinary lecturers to have many dealings with him. There are exceptions, of course. You are one of them.’

‘And we were right! They are interesting, these exceptions,’ said Peach, with immense satisfaction. ‘You are the living proof of that, Mr McLean.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ said the man on the other side of the small, square table. He knew now he should not have refused the offer to bring in his brief. But he had not wanted to call in the lawyer whose name had been given to him for emergencies by those further up the ranks in the drugs racket: that would have told his superiors that he was in trouble, that he had slipped up and been taken in for questioning. He had not wanted that.

But he had quickly been out of his depth, and now he was floundering ever deeper. He felt an immense desire to confess everything he knew, to end this cat and mouse game once and for all. He said wearily, ‘What have you dreamed up now?’

‘Not dreamed up, Mr McLean. Filling in the picture, I prefer to call it. And I think the picture in which you figure is now very nearly complete. You had seen Dr Carter twice in the fortnight before he was killed. He had your file in his office at the time when he died. You were due to see him again, on Wednesday, had he lived. His elimination was very convenient for you, wasn’t it?’

Malcolm McLean felt an appalling weariness, a wish to be finished with all this, a wish to be back in that bleak cell, which suddenly seemed a haven from this dark-eyed, round-faced, impossibly clean torturer. He muttered, ‘It may have been convenient, but I didn’t kill Claptrap Carter.’

Lucy Blake’s quiet voice seemed to McLean to come from a long way away as she said softly, ‘Tell us why it was convenient, Malcolm.’

‘You know that, don’t you? He was on to me. He knew what was going on.’

Lucy felt Peach tensing beside her as she said, ‘He knew about the drugs, didn’t he, Malcolm? Knew that you were the man organizing the distribution on the UEL campus.’

‘Yes. Someone on the campus had told him. He’d never have found out for himself.’ It was the last vestige of defiance in him, the last faint trace of the perverted pride which had made him think he would never be exposed.

‘Who told Dr Carter?’

He shrugged hopelessly. He didn’t know and he no longer cared. ‘Students, possibly. A tutor, after students had been to him or to her. Maybe someone who lived on the campus, one of the residents. Someone might have seen my dealers, got something out of them, like you did with Kevin Allcock. That crafty little sod Culpepper seems to know everything that goes on in that place. Anyway, Claptrap Carter knew, and he was going to make me resign. He wanted me to do that rather than expose a drugs scandal in his new university, he said. But he’d see I didn’t get another job. Sanctimonious sod!’ But McLean couldn’t summon much energy, even to denounce the man who would have ruined him.

There was a lengthy pause, until he looked up from the table and into the relentless eyes of Peach. The DI’s voice came at him in a passionless monotone as he said, ‘What did you do with the weapon after you’d shot him, Malcolm?’

It was so quiet, so matter-of-fact, that it took the exhausted man a moment to assimilate it. ‘I didn’t kill Claptrap Carter!’ he gasped after a second. ‘I was exultant when I heard he was dead, ready to give three private cheers, but it wasn’t me who shot him.’

‘You’re going to have to convince me of that, Malcolm. In view of what we now know about you.’ Peach waited patiently for the logic of this to sink in. He wouldn’t reveal the final, damning fact which the Drugs Squad had given him until he found whether McLean would lie about that, too.

Malcolm McLean would have compelled sympathy, even in Peach, in other circumstances. But this was a man who had cynically exploited the young people he was paid to teach and guide, who had probably killed the director of the institution in a ruthless attempt to protect himself. At this moment, Percy was merely glad the man hadn’t given himself the protection of a lawyer. He waited through seconds which must have seemed like minutes to the man struggling to organize his thoughts, until McLean eventually muttered, ‘I was nowhere near Claptrap Carter when he died.’

‘Know just when he died, do you, Malcolm? Interesting, that. Because even we aren’t sure of the exact time. Perhaps you could enlighten us.’

‘I — I didn’t mean that. I meant I wasn’t around on Saturday night, when he died.’

‘I see. Where were you at that time?’

‘I don’t know. At home, I expect.’

‘With witnesses?’

‘I live on my own, Peach. You know that.’

‘Interesting. As is the information my colleagues have collected about your whereabouts late last Saturday night. You said you were at home at the time. But you were seen, Malcolm. By more than one person.’

‘Seen where?’

They watched the hope draining from his face. ‘On the campus of the University of East Lancashire. To be precise, in a storeroom adjacent to the chemistry laboratory, to which you no doubt had a key. Within two hundred yards of the Director’s Residence where Dr Carter was shot.’

A blanket of despair fell over the shoulders of the defeated man. McLean said dully, ‘I was there. There’s no use denying it, if you know. If you have witnesses.’

Lucy Blake felt the thrill which surges through all CID officers when they scent a confession to a serious crime. It was still relatively new to her, and she felt her pulses racing in the silence which stretched as they waited to see whether McLean would go on. Eventually, taking her cue from Peach without needing to look at him, she said, ‘What were you doing there, Malcolm?’

He didn’t look up now. ‘You know, don’t you? I was meeting Kevin Allcock and my other distributor on the site. Seeing what supplies they needed. Keeping an overview of the situation.’ That phrase was from a time of prosperity for him in his grim but lucrative trade, a time which had vanished without trace in less than twenty-four hours; he smiled mirthlessly at the quaintness of his words.

Lucy’s voice was light but insistent, a stiletto after Peach’s bludgeoning blade. ‘And when you’d finished your review and your juniors had gone, you went and shot Dr Carter, didn’t you, Malcolm?’

‘No. I didn’t kill Carter. I don’t know who did.’ He looked up eventually, when they did not speak. ‘Are you going to charge me with murder?’

Peach grinned at him, back in torturer mode, stretching the moment of suspense. ‘Not at present, Malcolm. No need to, have we? You’re safely in custody. You’ll be charged with serious drugs offences by tomorrow morning, and kept under lock and key. Gives us plenty of time to ferret about at the UEL campus and other places and come up with the evidence for a murder charge.’ He stood up, nodding to the uniformed constable at the back of the room that he could take his man back to the cells. ‘It also gives you time to review your situation. To come up with a confession that puts murder in the most favourable terms possible. I should get myself a brief, if I were you, Mr McLean.’

It was advice Percy Peach never gave until he was sure there was nothing more to be wrung from an opponent.

*

Brendan Murphy was waiting to report to Peach in the CID section. The detective constable had just got back from a journey down the motorways to Cheshire. ‘That bloody M62’s hell on a Friday afternoon!’ he said with feeling.

‘Nice day out for you. Expect you’ve been swanning about filling in the time and chatting up the girls at the motorway services. Any joy in Altrincham?’

‘No. Unless you think a negative result is helpful. Carmen Campbell’s boyfriend is a Keith Padmore. Very smitten with her, he seems.’

‘Nothing surprising in that. The dusky Miss Campbell is both bedworthy and bright, a fatal combination for susceptible young lads like you. Dangerous as well, perhaps, but racing hormones never did notice danger.’

Brendan grinned. ‘Keith Padmore’s not a susceptible young lad like me. He’s over thirty, I should think.’

‘Ancient, then. What did he have to say for himself ?’

‘Not a lot. I should think Carmen Campbell runs their relationship, most of the time. But he convinced me he was telling the truth.’

‘Which is?’

‘Carmen Campbell was with him from four o’clock on Saturday evening until the next day. With others too, apart from the time when the two of them were in bed together. Party of six of them went to a pop concert, then back to Padmore’s place. Two of them left before eleven, two others as well as Carmen stayed the night.’