Dusty Death Read online

  Table of Contents

  By J. M. Gregson from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  by J M Gregson from Severn House

  Lambert and Hook Mysteries

  GIRL GONE MISSING

  MALICE AFORETHOUGHT

  AN UNSUITABLE DEATH

  AN ACADEMIC DEATH

  DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE

  MORTAL TASTE

  JUST DESSERTS

  TOO MUCH OF WATER

  CLOSE CASS

  SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

  A GOOD WALK SPOILED

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  IN VINO VERITAS

  DIE HAPPY

  MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

  Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries

  WHO SAW HIM DIE?

  MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

  TO KILL A WIFE

  A TURBULENT PRIEST

  THE LANCASHIRE LEOPARD

  A LITTLE LEARNING

  MURDER AT THE LODGE

  WAGES OF SIN

  DUSTY DEATH

  WITCH’S SABBATH

  REMAINS TO BE SEEN

  PASTURES NEW

  WILD JUSTICE

  ONLY A GAME

  MERELY PLAYERS

  LEAST OF EVILS

  DUSTY DEATH

  J. M. Gregson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2005 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2005 by J. M. Gregson

  The right of J. M. Gregson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the the copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data,

  Gregson, J. M.

  Dusty death

  1. Peach, Percy, Detective Inspector (Fictitious character) - Fiction

  2. Police - England - Lancashire - Fiction

  3. Squatters - Fiction

  4. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9’14 [F]

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-315-0 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6179-5 (cased)

  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.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To James, a two-year-old distraction,

  who may one day read this

  ‘. . . And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.’

  Shakespeare, Macbeth

  One

  No one was anticipating tragedy.

  The high brick wall stood firm at the first blow. It had stood here for a hundred and thirty years, and it was not going to go down without a fight. For a moment, it seemed as if it had a stubborn resistance of its own, gritting its teeth against this sudden and brutal assault.

  That was a fleeting illusion. The huge steel ball on its thick chain swung slowly away, like a heavyweight boxer setting himself for the killer blow against an opponent punched beyond any defence. The arm of the crane moved slowly to the right, allowing the great steel sphere to swing out beyond it. Then, as if in slow motion, the ball swung back, hitting the filthy old bricks with an impact which could not be resisted. The wall faltered for a moment, like the drunks which had for a century struggled for balance in the cobbled street beneath it, then fell with a dull, reverberating roar on to the piles of rubble below it.

  Peter Jennings’s lips spread into a thin, involuntary smile as he watched the fall of this, the biggest building of his morning session. He had been operating cranes like this for eight years, had grown used to the power he controlled, was now adept at applying it where it would be most telling. Yet when he saw walls which had stood for so long falling so quickly and easily, terraces which had once housed people descending so inevitably into anonymous industrial detritus, he still felt the same feeling of power which had surged through him all that time ago, when he had moved the big ball so much more tentatively to demolish his first building.

  Yet this was also the point at which an odd and disconcerting sadness hit him, a feeling of chilly dejection at the obliteration of those many and infinitely varied lives which had been lived out for so many generations in these houses. So many lives, so much tragedy and hardship and joy, should not disappear so quickly, with so little ceremony.

  Yet disappear they did. There were glimpses of the lives that had been led here, but no more than glimpses, as the walls fell. The porcelain of a lavatory bowl rose bizarrely against the sky, then crashed into many pieces, before the dust and broken bricks obliterated it. A kitchen unit, looking for a moment strangely modern amongst so much that was old, reared itself like a cry for help, then splintered and disappeared.

  Peter Jennings told himself that it was foolish for a man in his job to be nostalgic. These had never been good houses, even at their best. They had been built in the nineteenth-century heyday of King Cotton, when terraces of mean dwellings were thrown up quickly in the Lancashire towns which spun and weaved fortunes for those fortunate few who owned the mills and their chimneys. For the most part, it was the mill-owners who built the dwellings which would house their workers, developing a secondary source of profit as men and women flocked eagerly into the towns in the high noon of the Industrial Revolution.

  When they were built, these houses had been a cut above the worst. They had not had shared yards and privies. Each dwelling had had its own tight, narrow yard at the rear, its low brick privy with its wooden aperture giving on to the ‘back’ at the rear, where the night-soil men would come once a week to cart away the waste.

  In later years, after Hitler’s war and the death throes of cotton which followed it, some of these places had been much improved, had become what admiring visitors with pardonable hyperbole called ‘little palaces’. Bathrooms had been built into their cramped first floors, kitchens had been extended into the little alcoves beneath the stairs, where coal had once been stored behind a curtain. Central-heating pipes had even been run through into those icy front parlours, which had until then been reserved for Sunday teas and pre-funeral corpses lying in open coffins.

  And all this history, all these lives, with their trium
phs and disasters, their reminders of the petty aspirations and passing achievements of the men and women who had lived and died here, were swept away with the savage, inhuman blows of Peter Jennings’s wall-crusher. Dwellings which had existed for centuries, which had housed sinners and saints and the vast variety of humanity between the two, were gone in a few seconds of noisy mayhem, a few minutes when clouds of noxious dust shut out the sun, and a variety of sour scents rolled over broken bricks and across the bleak industrial site.

  Progress, they called it. And progress indeed it was, Peter Jennings told himself firmly. These places had had their day. New and better buildings would arise phoenix-like from the tired old site. No one would have wanted to live in these narrow, rotting houses now. They were buildings, that was all: bricks and mortar, and not very good bricks and mortar at that.

  Peter swung the crane round again, measured the next blow with his eye, and swung the ball a long way through the dank February air.

  You were never without a crowd when you were perpetrating this spectacular destruction. People were fascinated to see what had taken years to build disappear in minutes. You could see that from the crowds which invariably assembled to see nineteen-sixties tower blocks brought down. Explosives made such demolitions into more spectacular sights than anything Jennings could achieve with his crane. But people were roped off half a mile and more away from these city spectacles; they could get much nearer to his destruction, feel much more involved in the sudden and violent alterations to their local landscape.

  At the end of February, most of his audience was juvenile. It was the school half term, and the crowd of children had grown as the morning proceeded. The sounds of his destruction carried through the still air, over the house tops and the office blocks to the new estates and the private housing beyond them. There was a ragged cheer with each major collapse of walls, a round of applause each time a long swing of the steel ball achieved something particularly dramatic.

  Peter Jennings kept his eye upon this enthusiastic but undisciplined audience, but he knew that there were people on the ground below him who would ensure that the children did not sneak too dangerously near to the falling buildings, as excitement got the better of them. The ground was uneven and unstable, because a few of these houses had had cellars beneath them.

  But most had been the quickly built, shallow-foundationed houses, thrown up as cheaply as possible by mill-owners anxious to house their workers as near to their work as possible. It was important then that the clogged feet did not have far to shuffle to work before the factory whistle sounded.

  Those days, like the mills themselves for the most part, were long gone. A Labour council had long ago recognized that these tight terraces of old houses were below the accepted standards for modern living, and made them part of a slum-clearance programme. It is one of the axioms of modern town planning that such clearances inevitably take much longer than the periods originally mooted for them. This area had been unoccupied for ten years and more. The rats had enjoyed themselves, but once the windows had all been broken and the area sealed off as dangerous, there had been no other life here.

  The pest-control people had been here last week, on the last of their periodic visits. But rats are resourceful creatures, and the broken remnants of ancient sewers are difficult to penetrate. Colonies of survivors raced clear of the falling walls, seeming to know from the vibrations when Jennings’s crane was moving crucially near to them. The scurrying vermin appeared and disappeared within the smoke and dust of the demolition, bringing yells and hastily thrown stones and bricks from the bolder boys, and screams from the girls.

  But it was something else which stopped Peter Jennings, which made him twist the levers in his crane and desist abruptly from the work he had planned to complete by the end of the morning. He thought at first that it must be an illusion, that his eyes were playing tricks upon him as the clouds of dust swirled and eddied among the smashed masonry below him.

  For minutes which seemed to stretch like hours, he waited for the dust to settle. An acrid smell rose to his nostrils. He felt dry dirt upon his lips, but he made no move to reach for the mask beside him as he leaned out of the window of his cab to get a better view.

  It must surely have been an illusion. This was the thing which happened to other demolition men, one in a thousand of them. But never to Peter Jennings.

  By the time the scene below him became clear, he found he could not be sure exactly where he had seen that gruesome thing. Or imagined he had seen it. He thought he had kept his eyes fixed on the place, even as the dust of centuries swirled between him and the spot.

  Then, just as he was exhaling a sigh of relief that he had been mistaken, he saw it again.

  An arm, vertical. It seemed to be groping towards the heavens he had suddenly exposed above it when he struck down the houses. An image sprang into his mind from the school-days he had thought for ever dismissed. A poem that woman teacher with the grey hair and the thick glasses had tried to make them learn. An arm had appeared above a lake, ‘Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’. Holding a glittering sword. He couldn’t remember who’d written the damned poem, nor anything else about it, except the arm and the sword.

  But this arm held no sword. And it was not white. And it certainly was not wonderful. Yet it was surely an arm: that became more certain with each passing second. Peter Jennings climbed stiffly down from his crane and went unwillingly towards it, shouting hoarsely to the children to keep their distance.

  It was a human arm all right, putrid and decaying. What flesh remained on it hung in grey strands. He knew that it was merely an accident of its unearthing that it pointed so vertically at the sky, with a single one of its poor broken fingers rising towards heaven.

  But it seemed to the stricken Peter Jennings to be a limb demanding justice.

  Two

  Detective Chief Inspector Denis Charles Scott Peach, universally known as ‘Percy’ to his associates, was looking out of the CID section at a grey February afternoon.

  The clouds seemed to sink a little lower with each passing minute. Thin drizzle drifted past the glass on a raw East Lancashire afternoon, and twilight was dropping early over the stark industrial silhouettes of the town. It was difficult to feel happy when you beheld a landscape like that.

  And when you were contemplating a session with Chief Superintendent Tucker, Head of Brunton CID, you had every reason to feel deeply dispirited.

  Percy breathed the deep sigh of the perennially abused, put the big folder under his arm, and climbed the two flights of stairs to the penthouse office of Thomas Bulstrode Tucker. This world, he told himself, was never meant to be perfect. Life on earth, he recalled from his starkly religious childhood, was but a vale of tears, an ordeal designed to prepare our souls for a much better existence in the next world. That had seemed logical as a child, when he had more faith in that eternal continuance in bliss.

  He wondered if the person they had turned up on the building site this morning had found that eternal reward. It was difficult to handle that notion, when you saw what was left behind in this world.

  ‘I haven’t much time, Peach, so I’ll have your briefing as quickly as you can give it!’

  Chief Superintendent Tucker was in one of his brusque moods. He waved his hand vaguely over a broad expanse of empty desk, as if to indicate how busy he was, how good it was of him to take these few minutes from a busy day to listen to the concerns of a lesser brain.

  Tucker was an impressive figure, a man who might have been designed for public relations. He had regular features, good teeth, and just enough lines in his early fifties to give the appropriate gravitas to the statements he gave to press, local radio, and occasionally to television. His crowning glory was his hair. He still had a good head of that, and it was silvering attractively around the temples. Who could fail to trust a man like this?

  Percy Peach could, for one. He had little but contempt for the man he called Tommy Bloody Tucker. Peac
h was a copper’s copper, a man who was on the side of right and had a mission to be the unrelenting enemy of villains. He might cut the occasional corner in his pursuit of justice, but there was never the faintest hint of corruption about his determination to lock away all who operated outside the law, all those unscrupulous and vicious strong men (DCI Peach never thought of the criminal fraternity as anything other than male) who preyed upon the weak and the helpless to make their fortunes.

  Peach was almost as unprepossessing as his chief was impressive. Bald at thirty-eight, he looked if anything a little older than his years. Short for a policeman, but stocky and powerful, with a black moustache and a black fringe of hair which seemed only to emphasize the whiteness of the bald pate above it, he had carried Tommy Bloody Tucker on his broad shoulders for the last nine years. Peach got results, and Tucker rode cheerfully and shamelessly upon those results.

  Peach’s results had taken Tucker up the ranks to Chief Superintendent, and because he could not reach such dizzy heights without taking his benefactor with him, Percy Peach had been promoted to the supposedly obsolete police rank of Chief Inspector. Tucker detested the younger man, but he was sensible enough to recognize how completely his reputation depended upon him. He had to tolerate Peach’s insubordination, because the alternative would have been much worse. It would have involved running the Brunton CID section efficiently and keeping in direct touch with the business of crime detection, both of which Tucker had demonstrated to himself as well as to others that he could not do.

  Peach began the Monday briefing he had to give to a Tucker who could not read or could not remember the content of his memos and e-mails. ‘There’s the usual Saturday and Sunday night domestics, sir.’

  ‘Don’t bother me with small crime. I have to take a broader view.’ The back of Tucker’s right hand waved away the concerns of lesser men.

  ‘Yes, sir. Your overview is the most valuable thing we get from you. I often stress that to the men and women at the crime-face.’