Authors: J M Gregson
Lucy Blake sank her strong, very white teeth into a ham roll and munched appreciatively. ‘You’d set him up. The lad was at the end of his emotional tether. Ready to grasp at any comfort.’
Peach pulled at his pint of bitter, wiped his moustache carefully with his paper napkin. ‘Maybe. I wish they were all as easy as that. But we’re a good team, you and I. And Tommy Bloody Tucker still doesn’t realize it. He thinks I resent you.’ He slid his hand over hers for a moment to emphasize the absurdity of that delightful misapprehension.
‘I didn’t notice much resentment last night!’
Percy was silent for a moment, savouring the vision of the buxom Blake in the shortest nightie he had ever seen. ‘You led me on, with that garment. Shouldn’t be paraded before active male hormones without a health warning, nighties like that!’
She arched her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Winceyette, that was. For winter warmth, the box said.’
Peach laughed. ‘Can’t provide much warmth when it’s round your neck for most of the night.’
Lucy finished her roll, sipped at the pure orange juice which was all she allowed herself during the working day. ‘Perhaps I should put the garment away. Perhaps it’s dangerous to inflame the thinning blood of an older man.’ Peach was ten years older than her twenty-six.
‘Don’t do that, love, please! I’ll do press-ups, control my blood pressure, even go to the gym, if I must. But please don’t withdraw the fanny pelmet from circulation!’
‘We shall see,’ she said contentedly. It was nice that a man who was so much in control in his work should be content to be so much under her spell away from it.
Carmen Campbell sat on the table at the front of the room, pushed her hands beneath her thighs, and said, ‘So what do we make of all this?’
She had the complete attention of all twelve students in her tutorial group. She was an excellent teacher, well prepared, lively and with that enthusiasm for her subject which always communicated itself to an audience. She was also very supple and very curvaceous; she had extraordinarily long legs within her tight jeans; she had well-formed breasts which asserted themselves explicitly beneath her charcoal sweater; she had large brown eyes set above the high cheekbones of her smooth, chocolate-coloured face.
And nine of the students in this tutorial group were wide-eyed young males. Carmen Campbell could have talked in a monotone in Serbo-Croat and kept their attention.
Instead, she spoke in excellent English, with an attractive hint of Caribbean sun in the accent. Her subject was social psychology. She had just showed the group a videotape demonstrating how people’s actions were conditioned by group expectations. A series of otherwise reasonable people who supported Manchester United had ignored a figure in distress at the roadside with a supposedly broken ankle when he wore a Liverpool shirt. Then they had offered instant assistance to the same man in the same situation when he wore a Manchester United shirt.
Students and tutor had a lively discussion about group pressures and inclinations, which were all the more sinister because they were unconscious, and Carmen invited the group to speculate about the implications of this for the situations they met in their own lives.
Some interesting exchanges ensued, with much hilarity as the students raised several group situations they met regularly on the campus of the UEL.
The time flew by, until Carmen experienced that most flattering thing for tutors, a look of disappointment on some faces when the time came for the session to end. The girls thanked her for the material; the boys gave her that special, guarded smile reserved for women who feature in their erotic fantasies in the small hours. Once they had gone, Carmen gathered her books and her tape and prepared to vacate the tutorial room.
She was approaching the door when it opened abruptly. A compact, dapper man stood before her, looking her up and down without any of the embarrassment she associated with males at a first meeting. He had a very bald head, a little startling above a face still in its thirties, a fringe of very black hair and an equally black moustache. He said, ‘Miss Carmen Campbell? I’m Detective Inspector Peach and this is Detective Sergeant Blake.’
They came forward, showing her their identification cards. She had not seen the girl at first: she was as tall as her superior officer, with milk-white skin and striking hair, almost Titian as it caught the low November sun through the window. They did not offer to shake hands. Peach said, ‘We need a few words with you, to clear up one or two loose ends.’
‘That’s all right. I’ve finished my teaching commitments for the day now.’ She flashed him a smile from her wide mouth and her very white teeth. Her large brown eyes expressed a slight, unspoken surprise.
‘It’s in connection with the death of your Director, Dr Carter.’
They watched for her reaction, but she gave them nothing more than a polite, slightly surprised nod. Carmen had dealt with police before. They were the same the world over, in some respects: they would go for any sign of weakness, take up any strand of information you inadvertently offered them. It was best to let them make their own running, until you found out how much they knew.
When they got nothing from her, it was Lucy Blake who said softly, ‘That doesn’t surprise you, Miss Campbell?’
‘Please feel free to call me Carmen. Even the students do that. And no, I don’t suppose it does surprise me, really. Old Claptrap was murdered, wasn’t he, poor guy? I expect you’re questioning almost everyone on the campus. Among the academic staff anyway. Though I’ve no idea how these things work, of course.’
She gave them that wide smile, with a hint of mockery at its edges, and Peach acknowledged it with a grimmer smile of his own. ‘We often have to talk to a lot of people in the days after a murder, yes, unless it’s what we call a domestic. But we narrow it down pretty quickly, as a rule.’
Carmen did a swift calculation. Wednesday afternoon. Almost four days now, since the murder. Was she one of the many in the blanket early coverage, or one of the select few left after the field had been narrowed down? She said, ‘I’m willing to offer any you any assistance I can, of course. But I can’t really see how I can possibly be of any help to you.’
She hadn’t asked them to sit down, preferring to imply that this exchange would be no more than a brief formality. But Peach now nodded to the single chair beside the overhead projector at the front of the lecture room, while he and Blake sat down on the chairs recently vacated by the two male students who had sat nearest to their coffee-coloured Aphrodite. ‘We have been going through all the papers of Dr Carter. Things we gathered from both his house and his desk and files at work.’
Carmen hoped that the quickening of her pulse didn’t show in anything external. Her work had made her something of an expert in the signs people gave in different group situations, but it was different when you were the person in the spotlight. And she had never been able to study people involved in a murder investigation. She said as nonchalantly as she could, ‘And you came up with my name, somewhere among this mass of material?’
‘Not exactly. We came up with the initials “C.C.”. Several times. We thought it might be you.’
Her brain was working fast, very fast, but she felt refreshingly cool. However much they knew, they couldn’t pin anything serious upon her. ‘I suppose it could be me. But without knowing the context, I can’t be sure, can I?’
Peach smiled. He would reveal that context in his own time, not hers. Keep them on the back foot whenever you could was his motto, whether they were GBH men with tattoos all over their arms or voluptuous academics with skins as smooth as milk chocolate. ‘We found those initials in several places, Miss Campbell. In some instances, they had a time after them, which suggested meetings. Are you indeed the “C.C.” we are seeking?’
She felt as though they were encircling her, quietly cutting off her means of escape. If they trapped her in a lie, things could only get worse. She smiled, lapsing into an American idiom which seemed more informal. ‘I guess I might be. I did have some meetings with Claptrap Carter.’
Peach’s eyes had not left her face for a full two minutes now. He nodded. ‘Details, please.’
‘Well, I saw him at my job interview, when he and others appointed me.’
‘Of course. We’ve already discounted that. The Director’s personal secretary, Miss Burns, helped us eliminate many such dates.’
So they’d had old Tindrawers Burns helping them. The thought shook Carmen a little. She should have expected it, but somehow she hadn’t expected the icy front of Miss Burns to be scaled so easily, even by the police. She fenced for a little longer, trying to buy herself time to think. ‘Yes. Well, it’s difficult for me to remember what the others might be, when I don’t have the dates.’
Peach nodded at Lucy Blake, who already had her notebook open. ‘How about the eighth of July? Or the sixteenth of September? If it helps to jog your memory, both of those are Saturdays, Carmen.’
She noticed that the girl had taken up the invitation to use her first name, whereas Peach had ignored it. The old hard cop/soft cop routine. But it seemed to come naturally to this hard-as-nails little bundle of muscle and this well-formed, well-organized girl with the peaches-and-cream skin. Carmen wondered how much they already knew, how much they were trying to lead her into a string of lies she might regret. Honesty was definitely the best policy, until you were absolutely forced to lie. She sighed, gave them a quick, nervous smile of concession, and said, ‘All right. I was hoping you wouldn’t dig it out, but I suppose I should have expected it, once George was murdered. We had a thing going, the two of us. Oh, I know —’
‘What kind of a thing, Miss Campbell? You will understand that it is necessary for us to be quite clear about this.’ Peach’s voice cut through her embarrassment like a knife.
She was shaken for a moment. Then she shrugged and said ruefully, ‘I shouldn’t have thought I could get away with it. It was a bit cheap, calling him Claptrap, wasn’t it, when I knew him as George?’ She gave them a sheepish smile, which Lucy Blake thought almost as winning as her welcoming one. ‘The students and a lot of the staff called him that, and I suppose I thought I could distance myself from this, by calling him that.’
‘Distance yourself from what, Miss Campbell?’ Peach was unsmiling, insistent, observant. She was beginning to find his scrutiny unnerving.
‘From — from all this.’ She lifted her arms and held them wide apart, then let them drop back to her sides. ‘From the murder investigation. From the murder itself, perhaps. It was pretty unnerving to find that a man I’d been to bed with had been killed like that.’
‘I see. So you were planning to conceal your relationship with Dr Carter from us, to save yourself from being implicated.’
‘No! To save myself from embarrassment. To save myself from having my private life paraded before staff and students! You can imagine how some of my colleagues would have enjoyed gossip like that!’
‘So you decided that you would lie to the police investigating a violent death. Not the best way of avoiding embarrassment, as you may eventually discover. More important than that, it makes us wonder what else people might have been concealing when we find that they have lied to us.’
Those remarkable brown eyes seemed bigger and wider than ever as she glared indignantly at him. ‘There was nothing else. Look, when you come from the kind of background I’ve had, your natural instinct is to distrust the police, to withhold whatever you can about yourself from them!’
Indignation sat well upon her, making her more striking, more than ever like some Inca goddess. Peach studied her silently for a moment, wondering exactly what was happening in the brain behind that smooth forehead. It was Lucy Blake who said, ‘You’d better tell us a little about that background, hadn’t you, Carmen?’
Carmen hadn’t meant it to come to this. She had taken the deliberate decision to tell them things about herself and George Carter, to outline the nature of that relationship on her own terms, to reveal as much as she thought necessary. But the combination of Peach’s unashamed confrontation and this Titian-haired girl’s quiet insistence was prising more from her than she had intended. She paused for a moment, gathering her resources, trying to organize what she was going to say into some coherent account that would give no more away than was necessary. ‘There isn’t a lot to tell. I had what I suppose in this country you would call a wild youth. In Barbados, it wasn’t a lot more than par for the course. I got in with the wrong set.’
‘Surprising how many offenders seem to have done that,’ said Peach drily. ‘Must be the same in Barbados as it is here. Makes you wonder who the ringleaders are. Modest people, criminals.’ He dropped the word like a stone into a smooth pool, and watched for its effect upon Carmen Campbell. ‘Drugs, I suppose? And what else?’
Carmen was again left wondering how much this man knew, how keenly he wanted to lure her into further deceptions which he could expose. ‘Only soft drugs. Everyone used those a little. It was part of the beach culture, on the warm nights. And we were charged once with causing an affray. It was only a street fight that got out of hand. Too much rum, I suppose. We were very young then.’
Peach nodded. ‘Nineteen, I believe. Not so very young. And I wish I had a pound for every young ruffian who has offered me the excuse that he was drunk when he committed a crime. And causing an affray is a serious charge, especially when people are gravely injured: the magistrate didn’t take as light a view of it as you, did he? I gathered that it was only your youth that protected you from a custodial sentence.’
Carmen tried not to show how angry she felt. He had done his homework before he came here, this odious man. At least she had been right in electing not to lie about her past. She looked at the rather more reassuring face of DS Blake, who had encouraged her to come clean about her earlier troubles, and said with a touch of truculence, ‘That’s all a long time ago. It didn’t prevent me getting to Harvard.’
Perhaps the waspish tone of this provoked Peach. He smiled grimly. ‘No, it didn’t. You were obviously a very bright young lady. But it wasn’t the end of your difficulties, was it? The law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts had a little trouble with you while you were attending their ancient university.’
So he knew about that as well. There was nothing for it but to brazen things out. She said defiantly. ‘They’re a bit staid, around the American Cambridge. We livened things up a bit. Youthful high spirits.’
‘I see. But at the time you were twenty-two, and in the final year of your degree course.’
Carmen’s heart seemed to stop for an instant, then start beating again furiously, as if it needed to make up for this omission. It was something she could never remember happening to her before. She found she was breathing unevenly as she tried to make light of the episode. ‘We were all bikers together. Only two of us were girls. It seems to do something to you when you put on the leathers: makes it feel as if you can do almost anything. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, Detective Inspector Peach.’