Necessary End, A

By J. M. Gregson

The new DCI Peach mystery . . .

Alfred Norbury is a learned man. He is never afraid to display his erudition, but he is generous in his encouragement of younger people. The people who assemble around him to form a reading club are also learned. Some of them are simply well-read, whilst others have formal qualifications which rival those of Norbury.

But learning is no protection against violence. Murder arrives suddenly, brutally and unexpectedly. The investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach and Detective Sergeant Northcott reveals several people with good reason to hate the victim. They range from the young man who was his latest protégé to the two women forty years older whose lives were radically damaged by him a decade earlier. Peach tackles the case, and the people involved in it, with his normal ebullience. The solution when he arrives at it is both unexpected and moving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780105918

J. M. Gregson

J.M. Gregson, a Lancastrian by birth and upbringing, was a teacher for twenty-seven years before concentrating full-time on writing. He is the author of the popular Percy Peach and Lambert & Hook series, and has written books on subjects as diverse as golf and Shakespeare.

Book preview

ONE

Enid Frott needed to be in charge of something. She was that sort of woman.

She hadn’t admitted that to herself yet, though. She was still constantly telling herself that you couldn’t expect things to be the same, once you’d retired. You needed to make adjustments. You needed to slow down a little and create a different way of life for yourself. You had plenty of interests, hadn’t you? You weren’t stupid and you were well capable of making the necessary adaptations to your lifestyle. Surely you’d thoroughly enjoy the process, if you gave yourself a little time. You should expect it to take time. Everyone said that, didn’t they? You couldn’t expect to settle into the joys of retirement overnight.

It was three months now and time didn’t seem to be helping her much. Enid had always been contemptuous of clichés – lazy thinking, in Miss Frott’s view – but time was hanging heavily on her hands. She couldn’t think of a better way to put it, when she looked the situation in the face. And she’d always made a point of confronting things head-on. Anything else was a cop out. Another damned cliché – or was it an Americanism? Perhaps her mind was slowing up, as some people said minds did in retirement. But no, she wasn’t having that. Not at sixty-three. Perhaps she should have insisted on staying on at work. But she’d been too proud for that. She wasn’t going to hang around where she wasn’t wanted.

Enid glanced at her watch. Time she was moving on. Twenty minutes was quite long enough for a cup of coffee. When she’d been working, she’d taken her coffee on the hoof, as often as not. She’d liked to set an example to the girls in the office. You could ask more of them when you didn’t spare yourself. Flying Frotty, they’d called her, when they’d thought she couldn’t hear; she’d heard them all right, but never reacted. Quite a flattering nickname really, on balance. No one had ever accused her of being lazy or incompetent.

It was quite pleasant up here after the chaos below. Good idea for the store to have its café on the top floor, away from the maelstrom of Christmas shoppers. She wouldn’t have minded another few minutes at her table in the corner here, if she’d had something to read. Her own fault, that: she should have shoved a book into her bag. She enjoyed her own company, but she’d never been a great people-watcher.

There were a lot of people waiting at the lift, but she chose to walk past them and then down the stairs to the toy department. Good exercise. Excellent for the knees, her neighbour had said – not that she needed to be thinking about things like that. Not for ten or fifteen years yet. She tripped down the successive flights of stairs quite quickly and was scarcely out of breath at all when she pushed through the door on her chosen floor.

It was even more crowded now than when she had left the department and gone for coffee. She was trying to buy presents for her two great-nephews. Books would have been the thing, in her view. Educational as well as enjoyable, and a source of lasting joy if you chose the right ones. But she wasn’t quite sure what was appropriate for boys of eight and six, and the girl on the counter had been totally useless. Better to go to a specialist bookshop if you wanted that sort of advice, the girl had said. She’d spoken as if Enid had been asking for some strange and esoteric novelty, when books should have been a standard purchase.

Her nephew’s bitch of a wife had been no help to her, as usual. Computer games were more the thing now, she said patronisingly. She’d spoken as if she didn’t expect Enid to understand, when a few months earlier the older woman had been instructing young girls in the mysteries and possibilities of IT in the office. Enid wished she’d had Althea under her control for a month or two there. She’d have had her skipping around and giving respect, not looking at her with that sneer she seemed to reserve for her husband’s family.

Charles hadn’t been able to offer her much in the way of present suggestions. He seemed content to leave all that sort of thing to his wife. Men were like that. But then it was probably fair enough to put it on Althea, since the bitch seemed determined to stay at home even now that the children were well established at school. Her nephew didn’t even know what he wanted for himself. A sweater, Charles had suggested under pressure. But surely he’d need to select that for himself? She’d have to go to M&S. He could take it back himself if it didn’t suit. Same for the bitch: whatever Enid bought for her was never acceptable.

She looked at a toy car with batteries for the six-year-old. But she wasn’t sure he was the right age for it. And it was ridiculously expensive. She wasn’t stingy, but you didn’t want to throw money away, not when you were spending sums like this. And Enid wasn’t sure what was the right amount to spend. You mustn’t spoil children; everyone said that. She’d never had any children of her own and she didn’t regret that. Not really. She’d told herself many times over the years that she didn’t regret it. You couldn’t have everything – well, you could now, but not when she’d started. Kids might have been welcome at one time, but she’d had a long and satisfying career. People should remember that.

Ms Frott took a long, despairing look at the crowds of people milling around the counters on the children’s floor and decided to abandon ship. Another cliché, that, but she was fed up with this. She went outside and looked up through the gathering November gloom at the Manchester skyline, or at least at that section of it which she could see. She’d known Market Street and Piccadilly and the other shopping streets around it quite intimately at one time. She could have directed people to the best places to shop. Marshall and Snelgrove for good quality clothes at fair prices. Lewis’s for good advice and keen prices on white and electrical goods. Had life really been simpler then, or did it just seem so from the distance of years?

She tried a couple of other shops, but they were even more crowded and people were even more frantic than in the big store she’d just left. A woman who was shouting for the attention of a salesgirl trod on her foot and scarcely bothered to apologise. Enid limped away with a thunderous face and went to queue for the bus to Altrincham. Leave it to Althea to get whatever presents she thought were appropriate, as she’d done last year. Or just give them money, which they seemed to like as much as anything. But that would just ‘go towards’ some major purchase they were saving for. It didn’t give her as much satisfaction as buying a present might have done. As buying a book and seeing them read and enjoy it might have done. She’d do that next year, and bugger the bitch.

It seemed to take much longer to get out of the centre of the city now. It was the same in every conurbation, she supposed, with the traffic as dense as it was nowadays. She was lucky living in Brunton. The traffic was bad enough there, but the population was only a hundred thousand, and you were soon out of the town and into the Ribble Valley. She’d be quite glad to get back to her own comfortable and spacious flat.

They were running into Cheshire now, though you’d scarcely have known it, with the road just as busy and the houses almost as densely packed as ever. Althea always took care to tell people that she lived in Cheshire, not Manchester. Pathetic, really. If you were vulgar you were vulgar, wherever you lived. But jumped-up plebs never realized that.

She went and lay on the bed in her room when she reached her nephew’s house. She was surprised how tired she was, and it saved her from making meaningless conversation with the bitch. She got up when she heard the boys come into the house from school. They liked her, in their noisy, boisterous way, and she was surprised how much she liked them and how easy she found it to talk to them. Young Thomas wanted to show her how much his reading had come on and Jason had been awarded a gold star in maths for his facility with fractions. Enid knew all about fractions and was delighted to show him that she wasn’t the ignorant old biddy that he’d assumed she was.

She was glad when her nephew Charles got home from work. It was easier to talk to the bitch with him around. To talk to Althea, she told herself firmly: she must give the woman a chance and listen to what she had to say. There was a generation gap between them, that was all. Nothing between them but thirty-odd years, really.

‘Aunty Enid had a bad time in town, darling. Didn’t manage to get anything she wanted. I expect it was terribly hectic, a month before Christmas.’

She always speaks of me as though I’m not there, as if I were a backward child, thought Enid. I’m being unfair again. ‘I should have made a list of exactly what I wanted before I went. That would have made it much easier. Or shopped in Brunton, perhaps. I know my way around there, and some of the shopkeepers know me. I thought I’d get a better selection of things in Manchester, the way you used to do. But the choice was just the same, really.’

‘We find it better to shop online, a lot of the time, don’t we, darling? I could easily show you how to do that, Enid. It’s much simpler than you’d think.’

‘I’ve done it myself. Quite often, actually. But I like to see exactly what I’m getting, whenever it’s possible.’ Enid knew that she was tight-lipped, grudging, tense. She didn’t want to be, but the bitch always got to her.

The children had left the table now. They’d eaten enough to earn their exit and they’d gone off to watch the telly in the other room. That’s what seemed to happen nowadays. Not like when Enid and her brothers were young. You didn’t speak until you were spoken to then and it was the adults who conducted the conversation, talking about things you didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand. It was all different now. The children were asked for their opinions about everything and you couldn’t have a decent adult conversation about politics or music or books or anything like that. Probably just as well really: Althea wouldn’t have been able to sustain an adult conversation for long.

Now who was being bitchy? Enid Frott hated herself for what she was thinking and tried to banish it, but she knew that she was never going to like this woman. Controlled neutrality would be the best she would ever manage. She said as brightly as she could, ‘Would you like me to read the bedtime story to the boys? I could do it separately, if they have different ones now.’

‘Oh, I’m not sure they’ll have time for stories tonight, Enid. They’ve got homework to finish. And Jason’s reading quite well himself now. He likes to have his own books.’

Enid smiled and nodded, biting back the thought that it was still good for kids to have stories in bed, that they liked being read to even when they could read for themselves. It wasn’t her business, was it? And she must respect the views of the parents, who would know their children as she never could. She said carefully, ‘I’ll need to be off quite early in the morning. But I’ll be able to wave goodbye to the boys as they go off to school.’

There was quite a long pause which no one seemed to know how to fill. Then Charles said with a false brightness, ‘So how is retirement going, Aunty Enid?’

He’d asked her that before, scarcely twenty-four hours ago. But he meant well, so she mustn’t snub him. ‘Well enough, I suppose. I’ve been drawn into all the bridge I can take and I’ve joined the local branch of NADFAS.’ She glanced at Althea’s uncomprehending face and explained, ‘National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies. Quite a mouthful, really. Some of the men just call it the Fine Farts.’ She grinned at Charles and enjoyed the look of shock on his wife’s face. ‘Takes a bit of time to adjust to life without work, but I’m getting there.’

Her nephew nodded thoughtfully. ‘You need something to organize, knowing you, Aunty. You’ve always loved books and reading, haven’t you? Why don’t you start a book club and compare notes with other people who also read a lot? I’m sure you’d enjoy that.’

‘It might be worth thinking about,’ agreed his aunt.

And think about it Enid Frott did, in the days which followed.

TWO

Funerals were strange occasions, Enid Frott thought. When you weren’t at the very centre of them, as widows and close relatives were, you could observe funerals and study them as the strange rituals they were. Touching, at times, but strange all the same.

She’d been Frank Burgess’s PA for fifteen years, but he’d been eighteen years older than her, so that his death hadn’t come as a great surprise. He’d been eighty-one and ailing for some time, and she hadn’t seen him in the last few years. As she sat in the back row of the crowded crematorium, she regretted that. Grief was affecting her much more deeply than she would have expected.

Frank hadn’t been a religious man, but he was being seen off with a clergyman and hymns. Curious how people lost the courage of their convictions, when it came to the end. She wondered if she would want hymns and prayers and a clergyman uttering pious, conventional thoughts when she went. Emphatically not, she thought: she’d always been a woman who knew her own mind. She’d feel she was losing face, if she didn’t carry things through. Then she grinned at herself. What the hell would it matter to her, when she was gone? She wouldn’t have any face to lose, would she? She tried not to think of how few people might attend her last rites. Enid dropped her head and studied her order of service sheet assiduously.

‘The Lord is my shepherd’ was over now; they were listening to the eulogy from one of Frank’s sons. She was surprised how much she’d enjoyed singing the hymn. Memories of childhood and youth and that innocent and very different Enid Frott, she supposed. At least today they wouldn’t be standing at a graveside in the freezing rain and throwing earth upon the lid of a coffin. She shuddered at the remembrance of her grandmother’s and her father’s funerals and the dark shadows of the hereafter they had brought to her as a young and impressionable girl.

She felt sorry for the clergyman here, as she had done at her last three funerals. He was a portly, balding man who could have modelled as a medieval monk. He would have fitted in better as a figure of fun than as the person in charge of this solemn procedure. He hadn’t known Frank, but he had studied his brief from the family and was emphatically doing his best. The poor man was on a hiding to nothing, in Enid’s view. If he spoke convincingly, people would say he had never known Frank and accuse him of hypocrisy. If he was less effusive about the man whose remains lay in the coffin behind him, he would be accused of shallowness and insensitivity to the grief around him.

Enid listened and tried to recognize in the vicar’s description the man she had known. It was all a little too bland for her, but that was the way with funerals. You remembered the best in people, and that was probably how it should be. There was enough nastiness in the world, so let a man’s life be remembered for half an hour here without bitterness. Good husband and father, good grandfather, ready now to be received into the Kingdom of Heaven, the vicar told them. Amen to that. But there were so few churchgoers among his audience that the vicar had to conclude his prayers with his own ‘Amens’.

Ms Frott tried hard to be charitable. The vicar’s pious account wasn’t describing the man she had known, but this might be just another side of Frank. One man in his life plays many parts, as someone with greater insights than her had remarked. The vicar’s version might well be the Frank Burgess that his family had seen and wanted to remember today. And this was their day, above all. Funerals were for those who were still here and living on, not for the man beneath the flowers in the box. The man who had gone before them and was being welcomed by God, as the vicar kept insisting.

They were into the Lord’s Prayer now, and Enid voiced it with the vigour which would have been appropriate in a genuine believer. The joy of the familiar, she thought, as the words came ringing back to her from her youth, and with them came the vision of the high stone vaults of the church that she had found so awesome and forbidding as a child. It was curious how things you thought you had forgotten and laid aside many years ago came singing back to you at moments like this.

And then ‘Jerusalem’ and they were out into the relief of the open air. Frank Burgess would have liked that last hymn. Frank had known a thing or two about dark, Satanic mills and a thing or two about William Blake. And about the mills of God which ground exceeding small. Enid shook hands with the vicar and thanked him for his efforts, even as she decided that Frank Burgess would have given the clergyman short shrift. Which wouldn’t have been deserved, because the poor man had been doing his best.

She went and conveyed her sympathy to the widow, who looked older, as was inevitable, but elegant and dignified in black. She’d been younger than Frank: fourteen years younger, if Enid remembered right, which she invariably did. That would make her sixty-seven, and wearing well. A small, illogical piece of Enid Frott’s brain resented that.

Other people were giving the widow sympathetic hugs before they moved on to their own conversations and their own cars in the crowded park. Enid decided not to hug. She shook hands with Sharon Burgess and pressed her hand for a couple of seconds. They smiled guardedly at each other and the widow thanked her.

Neither was quite sure of the protocol for widow and former mistress at the conclusion of a funeral service.

Jamie Norris was not pleased with life. His girlfriend had stood him up last night, for the second time in a month.

He wasn’t having that. When you were eighteen, you put up with anything, if you wanted a girl enough. It wasn’t sensible, because it did you no good and you always came off worst in the end. But you hadn’t the sense and the experience to see that, whatever other people told you. You were driven by your urges: you thought about what you had done in bed, and then everything else disappeared into some sort of sexual mist.

But when you were twenty-six and experienced, it was different. You could still be a bit stupid where women were concerned, but you were conscious of the danger. You put up with a certain amount if you really liked a girl, but you knew where to draw the line. And he was drawing the line after last night. Well, he was unless Annie came up with a really good explanation.

He’d been writing a poem for her, too. She’d never know what she’d missed. He’d worked her name into a couple of the lines, to make it personal. The sonnet wasn’t complete, but he thought it would really have been quite good if he’d been allowed to finish it. And it wouldn’t do for another girl later: Annie was quite a difficult name to work into verse, and sonnets weren’t things you could mess about with. ‘With which you could mess about, Jamie,’ his teacher would have said, years ago. He could hear her voice in his head now, silly old bat.

They weren’t especially busy in the supermarket today. Tuesday was a quiet day, and it had been raining earlier. Bigarse would have him, though, if he caught him slacking. Bigarse despised poetry, and Jamie despised Bigarse. It didn’t help that it was Jamie who’d christened him that, and that Bigarse suspected it. He was just looking for an excuse to sack him, and Jamie Norris knew it. He knew also that he hadn’t been here long enough to give himself any protection against instant dismissal.

He stacked his trolley with tins of baked beans, sighed the sigh of a much older man, and trundled towards the shelves. Baked beans always sold steadily and they were on special offer this week. Packs of four tins for £1.30: you couldn’t go far wrong at that price. Beans might mean Heinz, but they also meant back-breaking work re-stacking the shelves, as far as Jamie was concerned. Try making that into an advertising slogan, you copywriters who sold your souls for money.

Jamie Norris thought sometimes that he should try selling his soul for money. But he didn’t seem to be presented with many opportunities for merchandising his soul. And his soul probably wouldn’t be worth very much, as he hadn’t given it much attention lately. He decided that he definitely wouldn’t rework that sonnet entitled ‘Annie Combing her Hair at the Mirror’ for anyone else, because that would be selling his soul, even without money changing hands.

There was a sudden scream from the next aisle, out of his view. Then a woman’s voice shouted in anger, and provoked the repeated screams of a child in tears. He was there in a moment, taking in what was becoming a familiar scene to him, even after only three weeks here. A child who was no more than a toddler had taken a jar out of her mother’s trolley and waved it in her small chubby hand. It had slipped from those weak, unreliable fingers and crashed to pieces on the floor. Jamie shepherded mother and child away from the scene, gave them the routine ‘These things happen’ and went to fetch brush, mop and bucket.

He cleared the glass carefully, mindful of the health and safety briefing he had been given when he got the job, then slopped plenty of hot water and detergent around to make sure he cleaned the floor thoroughly. Too much water, as it turned out. His mop was too soaked to clear up all the water and he had to seal off the end of the aisle whilst he went for a dry one to complete the job.

He was almost back when there was a roared expletive and a bump which set cans shivering on the shelves around him. An impressive descent, in its own way. Jamie Norris found it even more so when he saw who sat splay-footed on the floor with his head in his hands and his back against the coffee jars on the bottom shelves.

Bigarse. And it was that eponymous section of his anatomy which had hit the floor with such a crash. Nothing was broken – well, there