Passion in the Peak Read online

  Kenworthy had been happy to oblige. The fee meant a family continental holiday next year, and he had had two fascinating if abrasive brushes with Derbyshire in his inspectorial days: once on a case in which he had actually worked with Gleed. He and Gleed had liked each other, once preliminary hazards had sorted themselves out. They might even have remained friends, if either of them had had time to keep contacts alive.

  Before he had been on the production site long, there was uncharitable criticism of Kenworthy. Onlookers saw nothing to persuade them that he was moving himself. He wandered about the theatre and its adjoining lots, smiling at those he met—the sort of smile one might see on the face of someone convalescing from an enfeebling illness. Now and then he asked a question, but it was always a trivial one, and if the answer was evasive, he did not press his point. He went on his way with another kind of smile—a sort of apology for having been importunate.

  He made several attempts to see Gleed, the first within minutes of his arrival, but Gleed was always somewhere else. His headquarters staff were courteous but unforthcoming. It was not clear whether this was the way Gleed had briefed them, or whether they spontaneously resented a retired professional coming on the scene on the side of private enterprise.

  Gleed was constantly adding to his extensive tactical HQ. He had a report centre in one of the contractors’ huts on the theatre site that Lord Furnival had put at his disposal. And equipment—filing cabinets, telephone handsets, trestle tables and folding chairs—kept arriving in great strength. Even the man-power servicing this complex was extravagant. It must be making great demands on the Force’s overtime, if not undermining their efficiency in other vital areas.

  One of the first calls that Kenworthy made was on the Culvers. He found Joan looking ill and fatigued, her mind seemingly sluggish at first. She did not want to answer questions.

  ‘Have I got to go into it all again? There’s nothing I could possibly add to what I told Mr Gleed, and he made me go into it three or four times. And I’d already told Mr Fewter all I could.’

  ‘There is a difference,’ Kenworthy said. ‘I am a man without standing. I have no authority, no sanctions up my sleeve. If you don’t want to talk to me, I shan’t try to force you to. I know what you must be feeling.’

  At that moment, her father came into the room, a man with the old-fashioned working man’s habit of social courtesy.

  ‘Mr Kenworthy—you won’t remember me—’

  Spontaneous pleasure to see him—but Kenworthy had no memory of having met him before.

  ‘You wouldn’t—no—but we did exchange a few words when you were here the last time.’

  It was years ago that Kenworthy had been in this area: the murder of a young woman probation officer. He had talked to many men and women. What was routine to a detective-inspector might be a memorable event to people who only had dealings with the CID once in their lives.

  ‘I came for a word with your daughter, but she isn’t feeling up to it.’

  The old man looked at Joan as if she disappointed him.

  ‘But you’ll let us offer you something? Tea—coffee?’

  ‘Coffee would just fill the bill.’

  Old Culver started for the kitchen, but Joan said she would make it, obviously relieved to escape from the room. When she came back, Kenworthy noticed that she had not brought a mug for herself. It was only a trivial thing, but it looked as if she felt under the need to withdraw from all things.

  ‘If there’s anything you could tell Mr Kenworthy, it would be wrong of you not to help him,’ her father said.

  She shrugged it off.

  ‘You’ve heard me speak of him, haven’t you? How many years ago is it now? Fifteen?’

  In how many other families had Kenworthy’s casual questions become a legend? Joan smiled meagrely.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve heard the story. More than once.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better apologize for that,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘Oh, take no notice of me. Life isn’t normal.’

  ‘Of course it’s not.’

  ‘If only last week hadn’t happened.’

  ‘If only they’d set up their damned theatre in North Wales, or on Salisbury Plain,’ old Culver said.

  ‘No—don’t say that, Father. It could have been a wonderful play.’

  ‘It still may be,’ Kenworthy said.

  She looked surprised at his optimism.

  And, one way or another, without compulsion, she did tell her story—without at first seeming conscious that she was launching out on it. She told about the taxi to Buxton, about shopping in the rain, about the brief visit to the hotel—this part loosely skipped. Kenworthy noticed a change in her tone, in her speed of speech. At that stage she was making herself unnaturally casual. But he did not take her up on it.

  ‘I’m not going to plague you with a lot more questions, Miss Culver.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Mr Gleed behaved as if he thought I was involved in it somehow—as if I was in some sort of conspiracy.’

  ‘That was Gleed doing his job. A policeman has to play with every possibility.’

  ‘I suppose there have to be policemen. I’m sorry, Mr Kenworthy—I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘There’s another thing I must ask, and you possibly don’t know the answer. Who knew that Larner had retrieved his car from the garage in Buxton?’

  ‘How do you mean—who knew?’

  ‘I mean were you, as far as you know, seen by anyone who knew you, either at the garage or on the road? This is a very important question, Miss Culver, because whoever strewed those spikes on the road above Brackdale must have known that Larner was driving. That’s assuming that the spikes were meant for him, and let’s assume that, for the sake of thinking things through.’

  ‘Well, Wayne’s so-called bodyguard knew. They followed us from Buxton to Macclesfield.’

  She was clearly striving hard to remember.

  ‘And then there was a funny little man I’ve seen about the village and the theatre. A man in a dark suit, always carrying a musical instrument about with him.’

  ‘Where did he see you?’

  ‘He was on the pavement outside the garage as we came out.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  She frowned. She seemed completely to have overcome her reluctance to talk, and was thinking fast.

  ‘But it couldn’t have been any of them, could it? Somebody must have known when Wayne was going to drive up the hill. If the spikes had been put there much earlier than they were, there’d have been a pile-up of cars.’

  ‘How right you are, Miss Culver! So it must have been someone at the nightclub, you think?’

  ‘I don’t know who. There were people from the Passion there, but I don’t know them all. The room was so full, and you know what the lighting is like in these places. There were, of course, The Deviants—they are one of the lesser groups in the show, and were also giving a turn at The Grey Cat that night. And Jimmy Lindop, the sound engineer from the show—he was there looking after their amplifiers. But it can’t have been any of them, can it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because their turn came on very late—after Wayne’s, after Wayne and I had gone. They didn’t arrive until we were nearly ready to leave. So they couldn’t have had anything to do with spikes up Brackdale Hill, could they?’

  ‘They couldn’t have put them there,’ Kenworthy said, ‘but there is such a thing as the telephone, even in the High Peak of Derbyshire. This may all be a waste of time, though. He may have decided in advance that he was going to get his car out. He might have told somebody or other back here.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Kenworthy. It was a sudden idea. I can picture even now how it came to him. And I was responsible—for persuading him, I mean—for pushing him over the brink. It seemed outrageous, treating a grown man, an important man, like a schoolboy on probation. And he was a splendid driver.’

  ‘I’m sure he was.’

 
‘Oh, but if only I hadn’t made Freddy Kershaw try to get my bag back!’

  ‘Made him, Miss Culver?’

  ‘That’s what it amounted to—it’s no use pretending. I did want it back, and though I didn’t say so in so many words, he knew that. He wanted to do anything he could to please me.’

  Chapter Nine

  Kenworthy ran into Nall and Fewter when he walked up the hill to take a look for himself at the spot where the car had run into the wall. Nall was there, looking closely at the contour and camber of the road. And that in itself seemed a little odd, since Gleed would surely have had the place examined and important measurements taken by traffic specialists as a very early priority.

  Today’s weather, in the fickle way of early spring, was ideal for savouring landscape. Sunlight was beginning to warm swelling tree-buds and a bank undulated with celandines.

  Nall did not spot Kenworthy immediately, so Kenworthy stood and watched him. He was interested to know what the nature of the sergeant’s interest was, and to get into affable conversation with him if possible. But Nall saw him at the critical second—and did not know him by sight.

  ‘Just a moment—Press, are you? Identity?’

  ‘I have none,’ Kenworthy said pleasantly. ‘At least, not in the sense that identity sometimes carries clout. Simon Kenworthy, private individual—’

  ‘So what interests you up here, Mr Kenworthy?’

  ‘I’m just enjoying the rugged landscape, sniffing the air, and revelling in the approach of spring.’

  ‘Well, there’s good air and good landscape over many a square mile of this county. I find sightseers off-putting when I’ve work to do. And we’ve no need for private investigators on this patch.’

  ‘There are two ways of pointing a thing like that out, Sergeant—and yours is the one I don’t like,’ Kenworthy said, but he said it so mildly that Nall was slow to rise to the provocation. The encounter had, however, been heard by Detective-Inspector Fewter, who had just come in sight from higher up the road.

  ‘Is this man giving you trouble, Sergeant?’

  ‘Not that you’d notice. His name’s Kenworthy.’

  ‘Ah yes—I heard you’d arrived, Kenworthy. On Lord Furnival’s payroll now, I believe. Well, don’t get in our way, will you? We don’t care for meddlers.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think you’ll get many,’ Kenworthy said agreeably. ‘Or that much ready assistance is forthcoming, either.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Forthcoming? I was using it in the sense of ready, willing. And assistance means help, information, cooperation. In my experience, both best lubricated by patience and good manners. Not by the style you adopt. What are you looking for, by the way? Something that Traffic found and you missed?’

  ‘Clever bugger,’ Fewter said loudly to Nall as Kenworthy moved away.

  Kenworthy went over to the Hall to talk to Cantrell. Cantrell was clearly another who regarded him as a usurper. But it was also clear that Cantrell was having to play things carefully with Furnival at the moment, and dared not be too abrasive. Instead, he pretended a languorous boredom with the whole affair. He also made himself out to be overwhelmed with work.

  ‘Happy to tell you anything you want to know. Gladly show you round the place—all my alarums and gadgets—but not just now, if you’ll forgive me. Supposed to be in four other places at this moment. His Lordship is a little on the testy side since he lost his leading lout.’

  ‘Don’t let me hold you up. There were just one or two little questions.’

  ‘Honestly, Kenworthy, I haven’t much time.’

  ‘Won’t take a second. How soon last Saturday did you learn that Larner had liberated his car?’

  ‘Within three minutes of its happening. One of his bodyguards stayed behind in Buxton to phone me. The whole bloody crew might as well have done, for all they achieved in Macclesfield.’

  ‘And what was your reaction?’

  ‘Absolute joy, old man. Ready to welcome anything that might persuade his Lordship to get rid of Larner.’

  ‘At least you’re honest. Don’t you think that that might be a dangerous admission? You do see, don’t you, Cantrell, how important it is for us to know how many people were aware that Larner was back at the wheel—and would be driving himself home that night?’

  Cantrell’s face had become unexpectedly suffused with blood.

  ‘Not accusing me of anything, are you, Kenworthy?’

  Kenworthy smiled at him, provocatively amiable.

  ‘May I ask two other questions, please? Do you speak Urdu?’

  ‘Urdu?’

  It was a favourite device of Kenworthy’s—asking in all apparent seriousness a question that had no visible purpose. It could worry men of a certain mentality.

  ‘Urdu? No, Kenworthy—my time was after the Raj.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Stupid of me. Were you ever in Northern Ireland?’

  ‘No, I’d finished my time before the present troubles started. But I don’t see—’

  ‘Never mind. I was on the wrong track. Thinking of quite a different chap. Just one more. Would you mind telling me who the two men were that you ejected from the theatre this morning?’

  ‘Oh, them! Young Harpur, hobbledehoy, lout, needs a good hiding, conceited, work-shy young oaf. Best brain in the county at the age of seven, according to fond parents. Goes about nowadays looking like a drooling imbecile. If you ask my opinion, that’s one of his brain’s built-in defences against the dreaded word work.’

  ‘And the other chap?’

  ‘Equally barmy—only in a different direction. Alfie Tandy. Got bees in his bonnet about every damned thing under the sun.’

  ‘What’s his connection with this place?’

  ‘Works for The Deviants—one of the loudest and least harmonious of our groups. Calls himself their road manager. Road manager my arse! Man couldn’t manage a game of Bingo. And what would they want with a road manager on a static site like this? The man’s a half-wit, helps them load their van when they go out moonlighting. And that’s another thing that they’ve got to account for, these damned Deviants: singing protected songs from the show at pubs in Edale and Doncaster. With any luck we might be saying goodbye to The Deviants too.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Doncaster?’ Kenworthy asked him.

  ‘Doncaster? Doncaster—oh, it must have been all of twenty years ago. A race meeting when I was stationed at Catterick.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Kenworthy said, ‘I’ll be off now. Mustn’t interfere with your work.’

  Chapter Ten

  Kenworthy knocked on Dyer’s door. Dyer asked him to sit down, his dark eyes burning with unreadable concerns.

  Some men fancied that they understood Dyer’s basic motivations. A standard range of stories went the rounds about him. Kenworthy had dropped on information—of a kind—about Dyer before he had set out for Derbyshire. A few years ago, one of the Sunday Supplements had done a thing about Dyer. To assess it, you had to remember what public it was written for. Kenworthy remembered it vaguely, and was certain that it would be one of the things that his daughter had never cleared out of her bedroom cupboard when she left home to get married. And it was still there—on top of a pile of her discarded LPs: Buddy Holly and Little Richard. Because at the age when Joan Culver was being fed the knowledge of the pop scene that the likes of Dyer wanted her to have, so was Karen Kenworthy.

  Dyer had fads. They were not luxuries. You might call them eccentric attachments. Deprived of them, people said, he was inclined to sulk. There was a certain type of denture-cleaner, for example, not even a brand of spectacular repute or efficiency, that he bought wholesale and carried about with him in absurd quantity. He was fussy about his toilet paper, of which he took a dozen or more rolls with him on any journey. It was coarse-textured stuff. He would use only one kind of synthetic sweetener in his coffee, and was apt to become restive if he had less than a fortnight’s supply in reserve. Also he suffered c
hronically from insomnia. If he had a conscience, the writer had amended the Wodehouse quote, he might conceivably have something on it.

  Dyer had come out of the army at the end of the Second World War with rather more behind him than the gratuity due to an RASC Captain. The Sunday journalists did not go so far as to suggest that he had fiddled along the lines of communication in France and Belgium, but they reported how he had once been held up and minutely searched by Customs on his way home on leave. Nothing was found on him. Clearly he got a kick out of living on his wits. His first civilian living had been eked out on the legitimate edge of the army surplus trade. But he had never been one of the big operators. His profits did not resemble theirs, and when there were arrests in the late 1940s, he was not caught in the trawl. Dyer had always been remarkable for stopping short of major legal risks. He knew his law, had a photographic memory for small print clauses, and the older he got, the more rigorously did he stay on the right side of them.

  It was not until the mid-’fifties, on the crest of Rock’n’Roll, that he began to dabble in popular entertainment. He bought a partnership to revive a flagging agency—not Charing Cross Road stuff, simply moving semi-amateur skiffle groups about in places like Deptford and New Cross. The public he was catering for were the sort who talked of going tooled-up to their revels—with coshes, loaded belts, even choppers under their jackets. But Dyer had nothing to do with this imitative gang warfare. In the early days he was not even much concerned with musical talent. In the heyday of the washboard and the tea-chest bass, he scouted for groups, recruited and rostered them, saw that they turned up where they were booked, and were minimally equipped to satisfy their fans. They had to be youngsters with enough stamina to stand up to the squalor and the hours. Most of them were not gifted enough to have earned regular money through any agency but Dyer’s.