[Inspector Peach 13] - Wild Justice Read online

  WILD JUSTICE

  A Chief Inspector Peach Mystery

  J M GREGSON

  This first world edition published 2009

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS

  9-15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  * * *

  Trade paperback edition published

  in Great Britain and in the USA 2009 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  Copyright © 2009 by J. M. Gregson.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gregson, J. M.

  Wild justice

  1. Peach, Percy (Fictitious character) - Fiction

  2. Blake, Lucy (Fictitious character) - Fiction

  3. Police - England - Lancashire - Fiction

  4. Murder - Investigation - Fiction

  5. Detective and mystery stories I. Title 823.9'14[F]

  * * *

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6731 -5

  * * *

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this

  publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons

  is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.’

  Francis Bacon

  To the librarians of New Zealand, sturdy and consistent evangelists for literature.

  Chapter One

  It was in the first week of January that Tamsin Hayes decided to kill her husband.

  It was a wholly rational decision. She was quite sure of that. Mrs Hayes was quite good at making decisions. She did not like people who shilly-shallied, who talked on and on about the issues involved, as a way of avoiding a verdict. When the solution to a problem was startling or unpleasant, when the only solution was a radical one, such people did not want to confront it. Tamsin had no such problem: it was obvious to her that in this case there was now only one way to proceed. The man had to go.

  Decision-making was one of the things which had divided her from Tim in the first place: she saw that quite clearly now, with the benefit of hindsight. Even when they had been newly-marrieds and quite fond of each other, a quarter of a century and more ago, he had been unable to follow a train of thought to its proper and inevitable conclusion. They had made decisions about furniture for their new house which had seemed to her simple enough, only for her to find her new husband changing them without any consultation.

  Tim Hayes must be a good decision-maker when he was at work, or he wouldn’t have been so successful: that was the argument which people always put to her when she complained about his treatment of her. Maybe that was so: he had certainly driven the business on from small beginnings to something which was now quite grand. But he had always excluded her from discussions about the business. By now, it was far too late for her to take an interest in his work, even if he had been willing to allow her.

  It was strange how clear these things could be at four o’clock in the morning. She had been awake for at least two hours now and what she must do had become ever clearer to her.

  She slipped from between the silk sheets - Tamsin Hayes had never taken to duvets - and moved silently to the window, sliding the heavy curtains a foot apart to look at the night sky. A clear, cold winter night, with a thousand stars visible in even the small section of the firmament she could see. The face of the man in the moon was clearly visible in the navy sky: if he was conscious of what she had just decided to do, he was quite impassive about it. Naturally so: in the face of the cosmos and what she was looking at now, the concerns of one woman in North Lancashire were surely puny and irrelevant. The vastness of the universe made the removal of one small, irritating man a trivial irrelevance.

  Tamsin shifted her gaze a few degrees and looked at the sky above the great black mound of Pendle Hill. The fell seemed larger and more dominating by night, when the long, very black outline and the abrupt descent to the fertile valley beneath it were all that you could see against the sky. No city of any size between here and Scotland: she remembered her dead father telling her that when she was a wide-eyed and impressionable little girl. She liked that thought, liked the idea of a rural landscape stretching away from North Lancashire through the Yorkshire Pennines and up to the higher hills of the north.

  It gave her a feeling of privacy, a certainty that what she was planning would remain her secret and hers alone. She was quite calm, but she shivered a little on that thought. That was no doubt because the night was cold. There was a frost out there; she fancied she could see the whiteness on the lawn as it sloped away towards the invisible gates, even now. She stole softly back to the big bed and slid her whole body, including her head, beneath the sheets for a few moments, shutting in her warmth, isolating herself with her own body heat and the delicious notion she had developed through the night.

  The man she was going to kill had chosen to sleep with her tonight, instead of going to his own room in the big, echoing house. He lay on the other side of the queen-sized bed, but Tamsin had no intention of snuggling closer to him to steal a little of his body-warmth, as a normal woman would have done. She found to her surprise that she enjoyed thinking of herself as abnormal. She had never really done that before. It was the decision to remove this unsatisfactory man from her world which had empowered her and made her unique. This difference from the rest of her sex was pleasing, even exciting.

  Tim Hayes was snoring. He lay on his back with his mouth slightly open and the long snorts coming irregularly. He moved one arm up beneath his head, breathed more quietly for a few seconds, then snatched in breath abruptly and resumed his noise more erratically, in the pattern which would normally drive a wakeful companion to anger and retaliation.

  Yet on the other side of the bed, Tamsin Hayes listened to the cacophony and stared at the invisible ceiling with a contented smile upon her lips. Snore away, unconscious, faithless husband. You do not know it, but you do not have many snoring nights left.

  Chapter Two

  Tim Hayes had no idea that his days were limited. He enjoyed his normal breakfast of cereal and toast and showed not the least sign of nervousness.

  As his wife watched him, she felt empowered. The fact that Tim did not know he was to be killed gave her a feeling of control over him and her own destiny which she had not possessed in years. She offered to get Tim his toast, to fetch the marmalade from the larder for him, and was gratified when he looked at her curiously. He could not make out the reason for this unexpected benevolence; he had no idea what was to happen to him.

  Tamsin looked at him dispassionately, for the first time in months. He was a good-looking man for his age. She affirmed that with a little frisson of surprise: her hatred for him had become so intense that it was a long time since she had even considered such things. He was now forty-eight; his plentif
ul dark hair was greying a little at the temples, but becomingly so: it gave him that touch of gravitas which he no doubt thought was appropriate to the successful businessman. His large grey eyes were wide and clear as he looked at her curiously and then went back to his paper. He was running just a little to fat, but his expensive suits disguised that. He put away the glasses he now used for reading as he finished his mug of tea.

  Tamsin Hayes savoured the feeling that she knew something which Tim did not. She rather than he was directing their lives now. However badly he might treat her in the days to come, whatever contempt he showed in his conversation, whatever women he chose to consort with at her expense, she would know that his days were limited. She, and not he, would decide how long he could continue these insults to her. He had lost his power to hurt her.

  It was that thought which made her decide that there should be no hurry over this. She had to get it right, if it was to give her real satisfaction. She felt nothing but contempt for those silly women who picked up a knife and killed a husband in a red mist of fury and were promptly arrested. Blind passion, which penalized the killer as much as the victim. There was nothing clever about getting yourself locked away in a high-security prison for years. The smart thing was to leave people wondering who could have done this awful thing, to be the wide-eyed, horror-stricken wife in the aftermath of it. The canny thing, in fact. In her youth, she had always been delighted when her father had called her a ‘canny lass’.

  This would need careful planning. There was no hurry: she could put up with anything Tim threw at her, now that she knew it was only a matter of time. She was going to enjoy considering the various methods by which the man was going to meet his end, just as she would enjoy the eventual selection of the one which was most effective. Revenge is a dish that tastes better cold, the proverb said. For all that Timothy Hayes had done to her over the last twenty years, this would be revenge indeed.

  He left as usual with scarcely a word to her and without telling her which of his enterprises he proposed to visit. She could not remember when he had last kissed her, any more than she could pinpoint the time when she had last wanted him to kiss her. She stood at the front door and watched him reverse the big blue BMW out of the garage and then glide almost noiselessly away from the high country house. The winter sun was gilding the flanks of Pendle. The hill looked much less sombre in the bright morning light than when she had looked out on it during the night in the exultation of her decision.

  She stood for a moment, relishing the sharpness and clarity of the January air, before she went back into the house.

  * * *

  An hour later, her intended victim had no thought of his wife. The electronics firm which had been the start of his success was still profitable, though he used it now partly as an innocent front for his other enterprises. He dictated a few routine letters, sent a memorandum to his sales director to say he had promised delivery within three days, and collected the information which had come in during the last two days when he had not been here.

  Clare Thompson, his personal assistant, handled the routine stuff very competently when he was not around. Though she was golden-haired and blue-eyed, she was much less vacuous than the conventional and now very old-fashioned stereotype of the dumb blonde. At thirty-eight, she was carefully but expertly made up and her fair skin carried the becoming light tan which was rare in Brunton at this time of year.

  When you were the mistress of a boss who had so many opportunities, you had to give careful attention to such things.

  She reminded the man she always took care to call Mr Hayes in the office that he had two meetings with important clients later in the week. He nodded, itemized the documents he would need for each encounter and gave her instructions that he should not be disturbed in the hour before these visits, so that he could prepare himself thoroughly for them.

  Clare Thompson made a note on her pad of these directions, though she had known that they would come. Tim Hayes might be excitingly unpredictable as a lover, but he was both consistent and thorough in his working practices. She had decided a long time ago that she liked that in him. She could not have respected a boss who did not plan efficiently, whatever the attractions of power as an aphrodisiac. A certain danger in private conduct was acceptable, even desirable, but diligence and common sense were necessary to keep the professional ship upon an even keel.

  Tim Hayes watched her out of the comer of his eye as he gave his instructions. He felt the little frisson of sexual excitement he had known so often before at the spectacle of a woman soberly dressed in a grey skirt and long-sleeved white blouse, with every hair on her expensively coiffured head impeccably in place. She worked hard at her role of personal assistant and was highly efficient in it. That was what made her wildness in the bedroom even more attractive to him.

  The head of Hayes Electronics walked over to straighten the Renoir print on the wall which he fancied was marginally askew. On his way back to his desk, he paused behind the chair in which his personal assistant sat so demurely. He ran the back of his index finger gently down her spine, felt the tingle of desire which the contact brought to both of them.

  ‘Thursday night as usual?’ he said softly.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock, Tamsin Hayes was still not dressed. She was shocked to realize that she must have spent a full hour staring out unseeingly at the winter garden and relishing the new circumstances of her life. Well, that didn’t matter, she decided. You needed time to accustom yourself to the idea of being a killer. Or rather, of being the instrument of justice: that was a higher mission altogether.

  This hour of contemplation had been an indulgence, but a necessary one. But now she must get back to normal: it was essential that the daily, mundane routine of life should be preserved, if she was to carry this off successfully. She stretched herself deliciously, took a last look at the frost-bound vista outside, and then went upstairs and showered. She did not know yet how she would spend her day, but she rifled through her wardrobe and selected the expensive trousers she had bought last month, then slid her only mohair sweater luxuriously over her shoulders. It was an important day, the first day of the new life she had awarded herself: it was important to dress properly for it.

  Tamsin looked across from her wardrobe to Tim’s, as if she might project a little of her hatred of the man by glaring at his possessions. Seeking to relieve a little of the tension which had fallen upon her suddenly when she was dressed, she went across and opened the door which concealed his clothes, as she had not done for years. She did not at first see what she sought, but when she felt inside the jacket of a dark blue suit, she found it.

  The pistol was in its small black holster, the one made to fit under the armpit of a jacket. She reached in gingerly, forced herself to take out the weapon and examine it. It felt unexpectedly cold and heavy in her small hand. It was a Smith and Wesson. She had never known the name before and it meant little to her. Yet the knowledge felt like one more step in her empowerment. She found that she had a smile on her face as she went back down the stairs.

  She made herself a cup of coffee, a little stronger than usual, and went into the room she had furnished as her study. She selected herself a book from the bookcase her husband had never used and sat down in the single armchair. It was an afterthought which made her go back for the dictionary of quotations she had not consulted in years.

  She hadn’t been quite certain who had said it when she recalled the phrase, but there it was in black and white for her. It was old Francis Bacon, that dusty arbiter of Tudor ethics, who had first pronounced the words. Tamsin liked the fact that the thought was four hundred years old; the centuries seemed to give added weight to the pronouncement: 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice’.

  Tamsin Hayes settled down with her coffee to begin the delicious task of planning her justice.

  * * *

  Tim Hayes had left his plush office at Hayes Electronics for an altogether more seedy room at the Br
unton Casino.

  This was a glamorous name for a gambling club in the grimy old cotton town. It was a lucrative but not at all glamorous enterprise for the man who owned it. There was no well-groomed personal assistant here, no polished desk and well-organized files. Most of the business done here was not recorded. Hayes sat behind a table with telephones and made the calls himself.

  Not only the environment but the persona of the man who controlled it was changed here. Hayes was not the urbane man who operated at Hayes Electronics, with a polite word for most and the occasional tender one for his personal assistant. Female croupiers operated during the evenings at the gaming tables in the long, low-ceilinged room where the business of the place was conducted, but this was otherwise largely a male world.

  And the miscellany of males who passed through it reflected the dubious nature of the activities which were conducted from this base. Some of them wore expensive coats and drove expensive cars. Others had more basic transport and adopted a humbler dress; jeans of various quality and states of repair were common, perhaps because of the anonymity afforded to the wearers by this universal form of cover. Whatever their status and degree of opulence, most people who came and went here had acquired the habit of keeping a wary eye on what was happening around and particularly behind them.