Death of a Nobody (4 page)

But what she found most disturbing were the moments when she discovered herself toying with the idea of killing him herself.

6

It had been a good day, Charlie Pegg decided. He had completed the installation of a new boiler in an Oldford garage in the morning, tested the system, and found it working perfectly. The staff had been full of praise as the heat seeped into their hangar-like workshop. The sense of accomplishment had given him great satisfaction in itself, for this had been the biggest heating job he had so far dared to tackle.

The fact that he had managed a revealing glimpse of a bank statement on the desk of the empty office was merely icing on the cake.

Late in the afternoon, he called to see his friend George Lewis, the porter at Old Mead Park. There was work for him in three of the flats, it seemed. Small jobs, more bother than they were worth in themselves, but sprats which in due course could net him mackerels. That was a pattern which had become familiar: customers who tested his work and found it satisfactory usually came back in due course with more challenging assignments. And Charlie noted with some satisfaction, as George Lewis showed him what was required, that he had not been in two of the flats before.

The third one was the luxurious penthouse of James and Gabrielle Berridge, where Mrs Berridge apparently wanted new locks on the drawers of her bureau. Charlie thought he could guess at the reason for that, but he asked Lewis to let him in for a moment to reconnoitre the work. The suggestion that they might enjoy a cup of tea and chinwag over old times in George’s cosy little office near the entrance to the building sent the porter swiftly down in the lift; portering could be lonely work. Charlie Pegg found there were three messages on the Berridges’ answerphone tape. Then he spent an interesting three minutes in James Berridge’s study.

***

Amy asked him about his day as she always did, and he told her everything he thought she should know. He knew his eyes were prejudiced, but he thought her as buxom and pretty as she had ever been. It seemed to him that Amy was one of the few women who improved with age, as her angularities disappeared beneath a pleasant plumpness. Perhaps it was contentment rather than all these mudpacks and facelifts the Americans went in for that was the secret of retaining a woman’s looks, he thought.

He went into the kitchen and put his arms round his wife’s waist, leaning his chest lightly on her well-covered shoulders. ‘Get on with you, Charlie!’ she said automatically. Her low giggle became almost a purr of pleasure in the repetition of a ritual they both knew in its every detail.

The institution of marriage carries a multitude of ironies. It was at that very moment that Gabrielle Berridge was sitting combing her hair before the hotel mirror. She studied her abnormally bright eyes, her face still flushed with the warmth of her departed lover, and wondered whether there might be safe ways of disposing of her husband. And in her normally lucid mind, the distinction between a pleasant fantasy and a serious proposition became a little more blurred.

Charlie Pegg enjoyed his meal, as throughout the day he had known he would. Steak and kidney pie, fashioned with care and skill by his wife’s experienced hands. Since his days in stir, Charlie could eat anything, but on his rare visits to restaurants he had never eaten anything as tasty as the meals served to him each day by the buxom Amy. There was fresh fruit salad to follow. Amy had been reading about diet in the glossy women’s magazines she collected from the lady who employed her to clean twice a week; she did not have cream on her fruit, but she watched her husband pour a copious amount over his heaped dish with the indulgence of a mother.

She had lit a fire: it was still cold at nights, and they liked to sit by a real fire to watch the telly in the evenings, even though they could have relied on the central heating. They took their tea there now. Charlie said before they could settle too comfortably for the evening, ‘I’ll need to go out for a while later. See a man about a dog.’ He was not sure what he meant by the old cliché, but it had become part of the ritual, an assurance that nothing abnormal or dangerous was involved.

‘Do you have to, Charlie? You look tired. I bet you were humping heavy pipes about all morning.’ This too was part of their conventions. She would never prevent him from going wherever he wanted to go, but she wanted him to know that she cared about his welfare, even as she indulged him.

‘After your meals, I’m a giant refreshed.’ He stretched his thin arms and his puny torso in a parody of Tarzan, and they both laughed at the incongruity of it. ‘We’ll watch
Coronation
Street
together before I go. And I won’t be late back.’

Amy sat down carefully with her tea, taking care not to spill a drop on the skirt that was newly released from its covering pinafore. ‘If you are, I’ll be suspecting you of running off with a blonde, so think on.’ It was another line of their regular banter, which would have bored both of them but for the affection behind it.

‘I’ll just have to check, you see, that they don’t need me for the darts team on Thursday. And I did tell George Lewis from Old Mead Park that I’d be in tonight, if he fancied a pint.’

They were his first lies, and he wished immediately that they had remained unspoken. They were not needed, for he never had to account for his movements to Amy nowadays, and they seemed a betrayal of the cosiness of the last hour. He pretended to immerse himself in the wildlife programme which preceded the
Street
, and they spoke little in the forty minutes which elapsed before the brass notes of the soap’s signature tune announced the end of the episode and he rose rather reluctantly from the warm armchair.

He reversed his little van quietly out of the drive, hoping that the blaring of the television adverts would drown the sound of the engine: he would normally have walked the half mile to his local. At the end of the little cul-de-sac, he turned the vehicle away from that worthy hostelry and made his way swiftly towards the lights of Gloucester.

The industrial area was quiet at this time of night. He parked in the deep shade of the high brick wall of a warehouse. He had left the van in that vast cavern of darkness when he had come here before; he had no wish to advertise his presence in this place. He looked automatically around him after he had locked the car, but he was not expecting any human presence here, and he found none.

Satisfied, he turned towards his destination, which could not be more than two hundred yards away. He moved quickly, despite the shuffling gait which remained and was now a habit, an unconscious survival of those departed years when he had been subject to the whims of violent men. He did not see the figure which emerged from the side street when he had moved halfway to his goal; it followed him at a discreet distance.

The lights in the grubby pub were low, but the man he wanted to see was already there, waiting in the recess which they had chosen on other occasions because it was hidden from most eyes. Charlie bought two pints and set them on the small table with its rings from the bases of other glasses, its unemptied ashtray and smell of stale beer. Twenty years ago, he had done time with this man; in Charlie’s imagination, his companion had the stigma of their cell still upon him. Indeed, it was not all imagination, for the man had spent eight of the intervening years in various of Her Britannic Majesty’s prisons, and would doubtless return to at least one of them. He now had the grey face and bowed shoulders of a man who was so little in the open air that he found it an alien environment.

Charlie could not prevent a little surge of self-satisfaction when he considered his companion, with his grubby collar, black fingernails and downtrodden air. He transferred his mental thanks as usual to Amy, and determined with the same thought that he would not linger here longer than was strictly necessary. He might even consider giving up this aspect of his income altogether; there was no doubt that it was dangerous—and his building work was going from strength to strength.

But for the moment, he put himself out to be friendly. The man with him had had several drinks before he arrived. Charlie’s experienced eye told him that it would not need much more lubrication to loosen his tongue. And they got on well enough. Charlie had done various small pieces of joinery in the man’s council home, producing the same standard of work as he delivered to his richest clients. He had refused any financial payment and the man was absurdly grateful. He scarcely realized that he had made a different kind of payment, by means of the snippets of information he had volunteered to Charlie in his befuddled state.

Charlie Pegg’s talent as an informer lay in fitting together scattered, apparently random scraps of information into a coherent whole. Once he had enough pieces of knowledge from his different sources and his own research, a lucid picture of what was afoot sprang out at him. The process gave him a certain intellectual satisfaction, though he would never have recognized it as that.

Tonight was such an occasion. Between gulps of beer, the man opposite him responded to his promptings with first a name, then, a pint and a half later, with a time. Charlie already had a fair idea of place. He gave no hint of his elation, though he realized that what he now knew could bring him the biggest police payment he had ever received. Instead, he went to buy his companion another beer.

On his way to the bar, he went briefly to the public phone, glancing swiftly around him before he dialled the number he knew by heart. He recognized the voice which answered, but did not identify either it or himself for any unauthorized listener to the line: that was the grass’s code, and Superintendent John Lambert understood it as well as he at the other end of the line. Charlie said only, ‘I have gathered now what you want to know. I’ll meet you at the usual place.’

They were the sentences he had delivered on earlier occasions. Lambert knew the rules to protect his snout. He said simply, ‘Tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock?’

‘Yes.’ Nothing save a slight excitement in Pegg’s tone gave a hint that this coup might be greater than any of his previous ones. He found himself tempted to give an inkling of its importance, but his discipline held and he rang off.

From behind a cloud of cigarette smoke ten yards away, the man who had followed him here watched Charlie’s actions with interest, but made no effort to hear what he said. That might have alerted the quarry to his danger.

Charlie sipped the half of bitter he had contented himself with for the last half hour and concealed his impatience to be away, whilst the man on the other side of the small, round table drank his whisky and grew sentimental over old times. It would take a drunk to get nostalgic about the nick, thought Charlie. With that thought came a sudden revulsion for the man: perhaps he saw in him what he might so easily have become himself.

He was impatient to be away to Amy, but he did not mention her name to this man, as though she might be in some way tarnished by even so distant and indirect a connection with this world he had left behind. Or very nearly left behind; as he corrected himself, he determined again that he would now sever all connections. He would take whatever Lambert offered for this last and greatest of his deliveries, and then get out with his skin intact. Perhaps there would be enough to take Amy abroad, for the first time. Somewhere in the sun perhaps, during next winter’s frosts; Amy always complained about the damp and the cold when the days were short.

Perhaps it was that thought which made him a little careless as he left the pub. He did not see the two men who followed, and though he glanced to the streets on either side of him, he did not look to his rear until he heard the sounds of their arrival at his heels.

It was still an hour before closing time, and the streets were quiet. The men were professionals, swift and efficient in the execution of their task. Pegg was down in an instant, falling with a cry which was scarcely more than a gasp of horror as he realized what was coming. He flung his hands behind his head and twisted into a foetal position, knees against his chest and head thrust deep into his breast, which might minimize the injuries in the beating he expected.

They gave him a blow or two, more to stun any impulse towards screaming than to damage him. For they intended worse than mere damage. The long, slim knife they used glinted briefly in the sliver of light from the streetlamp which was a good eighty yards behind them. The first thrust had gone home, right up to the hilt, before the man on the ground twisted one terrified eye to see it. It was plunged home three more times, searching for the ventricle in the left of the chest, before his assailants paused.

They were professionals, knowing that one thrust from a knife rarely killed, unless there was a lucky precision. They left nothing to chance. As their victim’s sweater filled swiftly with blood over his thin chest, the man who had not stabbed him felt carefully for the vein in his neck, felt the pulse there slow, then stop, and nodded at his companion.

They left Charlie Pegg’s body in the gutter, still a hundred yards and more from his van. It was another hour before Amy began to get anxious about him. By that time, the instrument of his death was at the bottom of the Severn, dropped there unhurriedly as his killers drove out of the city.

7

It was a night watchman, coming out of the back door of his warehouse in the first grey light, who found Charlie Pegg’s body.

The blood had run five feet down the gutter, and there was a lot of it. The man, who had been anticipating a breakfast of thick bacon sandwiches and lots of tea, was suddenly no longer hungry. His first thought was that the men who had done this might still be around, his first impulse to run. Then, looking reluctantly again at the thing in the gutter, he saw that the blood was crusted and darkening at the edges of its gruesome flow. He accepted that this attack had probably taken place many hours previously and went back into the awakening factory to ring the police.

Lambert heard of Pegg’s death while he was waiting to go into a divisional meeting about community policing and its implications for CID work. The sergeant who brought the message was unguarded enough to say, ‘Well, I suppose he had it coming to him. Grasses always live dangerously, sir.’

‘They are on our side, Sergeant.’ Anyone who knew Lambert would have recognized danger in the quiet of his tone; those who worked closely with him would have known that the formal recognition of rank was often a prelude to an explosion from their superintendent. This man, preoccupied with his own concerns now that he had delivered the message from Oldford, picked up no warning.

‘I suppose they are a necessary evil — a part of the police system. But no one can shed many tears over a grass, surely?’

‘His wife will, in this case. And others too. Charlie Pegg was a good man. How many people of his background manage to go straight when they’ve done time?’ Lambert realized that he had never formulated these thoughts until now, even to himself.

The sergeant wondered why it was always his luck to run into the eccentrics of the force. Surely this grizzled senior officer should have acquired a little professional cynicism by now. He said stiffly, ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t know you knew the man personally.’ Lambert grunted, and the sergeant should have left it at that. Instead, he was unwise enough to venture, ‘Not much chance of catching the blokes who did for a grass, though, is there? They’ll have covered their tracks, and it won’t be easy to find witnesses. No one likes a grass, whatever he might be like when he’s not informing.’

‘He’s a man, Sergeant. Or he was. Now he’s a man who has been brutally murdered. The worst crime of all. The one which will get all our attention; which will have to be solved if we’re to stop the criminals running out of control.’

He went sourly into his meeting with the division’s top brass, wondering how he had got into this exchange with an officer who was not under his control and whom he might never see again. His humour was not improved by the realization that there was something in what the man said: the chances of pinning down the shadowy men who had killed a snout were not high, because the degree of cooperation among the criminal fraternity, normally low, would no doubt be zero.

***

The tap was running steadily, sluicing the results of the scientific butchery which is a postmortem examination away over the stainless steel.

Lambert, resolutely avoiding the visual evidence by remaining in the office outside the laboratory, tried to shut his ears to the steady sound of the water. He was unsuccessful, for he found his mind filling with the images of gore and worse, swirling away into the drains. Cyril Burgess, wearing his green rubber boots and soiled cotton overall like the uniform of a soldier fresh from battle, wondered how best to exploit the delicacy of the superintendent’s stomach for his own amusement.

‘He bled a lot,’ the pathologist said by way of conversational opening. ‘Four or five pints gone before we ever got at him here. What the meat wagon brought in was an empty container, as far as blood was concerned.’ He turned towards the entrance to his dissecting room with an invitational wave of his arm. ‘He’s still on the table: we can’t sew him up until we’ve done more tests on the innards. I can show you if—’

‘That isn’t necessary!’ The haste of Lambert’s refusal brought a delighted smile from his tormentor. The superintendent was disgusted with himself for his weakness; he should have grown used to the abattoir aspects of the job in his uniformed days of twenty years and more ago. Yet somehow the worst of road accidents had never affected him as badly as the damage done to human bodies with full and malicious intent. He seemed to be becoming more squeamish as he got older. He strove for a professional question. ‘How quickly did he lose all this blood? I mean, did it seep away gradually, or was there a sudden…?’ His words tailed away hopefully.

‘Poured like a fountain, I should think. Positively gushed out,’ said Burgess with relish. ‘It does from the heart, you know, when they hit the main artery. Positively pumps out. But it would be much easier to show you—’

‘I know how the heart works, thank you, Cyril,’ said Lambert. ‘You’ve explained it to me on previous occasions.’

‘Really? Well, anyway, this one worked as it should. Case of “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” eh?’ Burgess was an avid reader of detective fiction, who treasured an idea from his youth that no murder was complete without a quotation.

‘Not so old,’ said Lambert stolidly.

‘No. About fifty, I’d say. Are you telling me that you knew him, John?’ Burgess was suddenly put out, as if a new rule in the game had been invoked: if the dead man was known to Lambert, perhaps even a friend, his teasing would be in bad taste.

‘I knew him, yes. I suppose he was about fifty.’ It was a bleak reminder of his own mortality. He realized now that he had always thought of the nervous, shuffling little man as being older than him, when he must have been almost exactly the same age. He did not give any more details of the relationship to Burgess.

The pathologist became carefully professional. ‘I can’t give you a precise time of death, but he’d been dead for at least six hours before he was found, and probably rather longer. You can say with certainty that he was killed sometime before midnight.’

‘Yes. We can probably pinpoint the time of death fairly accurately, now you’ve confirmed that. Apparently he was seen in the Star and Garter pub at around half past nine. We shall eventually find the man he was talking to there.’

The determination in Lambert’s tone kept Burgess from any further attempt at humour. ‘He’d eaten a meal of steak and kidney pie and two veg, followed by fruit salad and cream, approximately three hours before he died.’

‘He’d been in the pub for some time. Was he drunk when he died?’

‘No. A long way from it. He’d not had more than a pint of beer; maybe even a bit less than that.’

A meeting, then. And not just a convivial exchange about old times. Men like Charlie Pegg did not normally journey fifteen miles to spend hours over halves of bitter. Lambert said, ‘How many men involved? Do the injuries suggest more than one?’

Burgess brightened at the prospect of being drawn into the investigation. He was fascinated by the processes of detection, though like most laymen he thought the business of investigation much more glamorous than it usually was. But at least his interest meant that he was prepared to speculate, in the hope of helping. The worst pathologists from any CID man’s point of view were those who confined themselves stiffly to the statements they would deliver to a court.

He said now, It’s impossible to say how many people killed him, John, from what’s left in there. He wasn’t beaten up — as you know, the boots and shoes as well as the fists of assailants can tell a story when a man is knocked about. There are a couple of bruises to the head — I think inflicted by gloved hands. But the only real damage is from the knife wounds. The thrusts were repeated at short intervals, probably by the same person. But there were only four stab wounds, which suggests he stopped once he was certain that the wounds were fatal. There may have been two or three, perhaps even more men around him, but there’s no evidence to show that.’

‘Premeditated, rather than a row that went wrong.’

Burgess thought the words sounded like a statement rather than a question, but he responded nonetheless. ‘It looks like it, John. You’ve seen a lot more violence than I have: we only get the worst in here. But if there’s been an argument, I’d have expected to find other, more minor injuries, inflicted in the minutes before a quarrel escalated into a stabbing. Of course, with more and more people on hard drugs, one can never be certain.’

‘I think this was a professional job, by hired men.’ It was what he had thought from the first, but Lambert spoke the words reluctantly. It was the kind of killing that was most difficult to pin down, the kind anticipated by the sergeant at divisional headquarters to whom he had given such short shrift four hours earlier. He said to Burgess, volunteering him a little information in return for his attempts to help, ‘Charlie Pegg spoke to me at half past nine. He thought he had something for me.’

It was the first time he had used a name for those pieces of dead meat that lay in the next room. And he had virtually said that the man was a police snout. Burgess felt absurdly touched by the confidence. He said, ‘Everything about the wounds supports your view. A professional job. By professional cowards, of course. The victim appears to have been entirely defenceless.’

They were silent for a moment, trying to picture Pegg’s last moments of life. Had he pleaded with his attackers? Had he recognized them? Had they confronted him with his supposed offence before they dispatched him? How quick and how painful had been his death? Then Burgess said, ‘We’ve sent his clothes on to Forensic, of course. I doubt whether they’ll tell you very much. There is one thing, though.’ He paused, reluctant to revert to his earlier
Grand
Guignol
details now that he was aware that Lambert had been acquainted with this victim.

‘Well?’

‘The blood must have spouted from the man’s chest. When his killer stabbed him on the second and third occasions, he must almost certainly have been splashed with substantial quantities of blood. The sleeves of whatever garment he was wearing will be heavily marked with blood. If you find that garment, it would be easy enough to match the samples.’

Lambert nodded and took his leave. He wondered as he drove away whether that garment had even now been destroyed.

***

Sergeant Bert Hook had spoken to Amy Pegg on a few previous occasions. She lived only half a mile from him, separated by a few fields and a straggling road of houses built at intervals over the last half century. The village bobby which still lurked beneath the CID man meant that Bert knew most of the people in his area.

This sporadic acquaintance was scant preparation for the task he now had. He shepherded her out of the mortuary, guided her to the white police car, watched her as she stowed herself, then put the seat belt carefully into place around her, as if she were either helplessly young or fragile with the extremity of age, instead of a vigorous woman of fifty. Shock took people like that; he had coped with it often enough to be an expert.

The CID section tended to use Bert to cope with the extremes of emotion, as Lambert had done now when he asked Hook to take Mrs Pegg to identify her husband. Policemen and policewomen have the same weaknesses as the rest of humanity. They mocked Bert for what they saw as an inappropriate sensitivity, for his predilection for the underdog in a world where they saw underdogs as more often than not the instruments of the crime they sought to control. Yet they were ready enough to exploit Hook’s reputation for empathy when it meant that they could assign to him delicate tasks such as the first soundings of a bereaved spouse.

Routine has it that the next of kin are the first suspects in an unlawful killing, and the routine is such simply because statistics prove that it is justified. The first procedure is always to check the reactions to the death and the whereabouts at the time of the crime of those nearest to the deceased by ties of blood or marriage, even when as now the officer may be privately convinced that a spouse has no connection with the death.

‘It was Charlie all right.’ The woman in the back of the car spoke as though she were addressing the world at large rather than an individual, her eyes staring unseeingly at the hedges which flew past on each side. ‘He was very — very white. Like paper. I thought for a moment it might be someone else.’ Her words spoke of the split second of wild hope she had had by the corpse, but her voice was not the soft west country sound which Bert remembered; it had a dry rasp and a sporadic delivery. Like sweet bells jangled out of tune, thought Bert. He was doing literature in his Open University degree, and these comparisons sprang up now when he least expected them.

He did not say anything else until they were back in the neat little terraced house, thinking that she might talk more easily and be more reliable in her facts when she was on familiar ground. He looked at the neat, spotless room with its cottage suite and its flowered curtains and said awkwardly, ‘You’ve got a lovely place here, Amy.’ It was the first time he had ventured upon her first name. It was not entirely politeness; his own house, with two active boys of nine and eleven, never seemed to be tidy nowadays, except precariously, when they had gone to bed.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ She was standing in the middle of the room, still staring ahead as if addressing a group. It was convenient for policemen to behave as if their snouts did not have private lives, but the reality was confronting him now.