Percy took her out to the old Fiesta, saw her safely into the driving seat and watched her drive to the end of the road and turn out of sight towards Longridge and home. He stood for a moment looking at the stars on this warm, clear spring night, then turned and went thoughtfully back indoors.
Lucy was watching him more carefully than he knew. ‘Thanks for being nice to Mum.’
‘It’s no effort. She’s the mum I always wanted. I’d have had you with whatever baggage you brought, but Agnes is a bonus.’ He turned the water on at the sink, waited for it to run warm. ‘I think she might have a point, you know.’
Lucy was silent for such a long time that he eventually turned and looked at her. ‘You’ll need to give that washing-up your full attention,’ she said sternly. ‘The curry stains the bowl unless you’re thorough at the end.’
It was Percy’s turn to be uncharacteristically silent. He stacked three plates carefully into the drainer before he said very quietly, ‘She’s not getting any younger and neither am I.’
‘And nor am I. You both talk as if I’m a slip of a girl, but I’ll be thirty soon.’
‘You’re saying we should try for a baby?’
‘I’m saying we should give it some thought.’
Twenty minutes later, Percy Peach, who had the capacity to be undressed and between the sheets faster than seemed humanly possible, lay on his back and watched his wife disrobing with low growls of approval. ‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ said Lucy.
‘I’m giving it some thought,’ he said. He watched her remove her pants and growled again.
‘I’ve warmed my hands for this,’ he said when she joined him.
‘That’s nice!’ she said presently. And then, ‘I only said we should give it some thought.’
‘I’m thinking hard. Very hard. And I shall need lots of practice.’
SIX
‘You’re a difficult man to get hold of, Mr Tracey. That’s why we had to come into your home.’
‘I don’t have an office. I don’t need one. I have a watching brief in different areas. I operate in many of the businesses owned by Mr O’Connor.’
‘Yes. You batter people wherever you are directed to do it. I can see you don’t need an office for that.’
Steve Tracey started almost out of his chair at this, so that Clyde Northcott took a pace towards him from where he had been standing by the door of the shabby lounge. DCI Peach seemed amused by this reaction. ‘I should watch your step if I were you, Tracey. DS Northcott has a history of violence, but I try to keep him in check. If you assaulted a police officer and gave him legitimate grounds for violence, there’s no knowing what he might do. And I’d have no grounds to restrain him, you see, under those circumstances.’
Tracey forced himself back into the armchair, gripping the wooden ends of its arms fiercely in his fists to make his body rigid and prevent any other movement. ‘You can’t go round making allegations like that, Peach. Not nowadays.’
‘So sue me. You’d have to prove I was slandering you to get any redress, and both of us know you can’t do that. Just as both of us know that you’d never dream of going to court. People like you don’t like courts.’ Peach let his full contempt curl over this seemingly innocent statement.
‘And people like you don’t believe a word we say.’
Peach seemed to find this amusing again. He didn’t trouble to deny it. Instead he asked, ‘So make me believe you. Tell me what you really did in the James O’Connor organisation.’
Tracey noted the past tense but said defiantly, ‘I am in charge of security. I make sure that things which are confidential remain so. It is important that certain facts and certain plans remain secret until we choose to reveal them. I make sure everyone knows that and that rival organisations don’t get information they shouldn’t have.’
He was obviously repeating a well-rehearsed script. Peach wondered aloud where the words had come from. ‘Jim O’Connor handed you that stuff, did he? I shouldn’t think the palookas you use to enforce things would understand a word of it.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you think you’re-’
‘Good word, that. Palookas. Straight out of black-and-white Hollywood gangster films. Which is where you and your muscle belong, Tracey. You’re as out of date as that.’
The big man with the cropped hair stayed in his seat with difficulty, his knuckles whitening on the wooden ends of the arms. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you. .’
He stopped dead just short of a threat, realising where he was being led, wondering what he could do to get out of this. Peach gave him a smile which combined amusement with derision. ‘Did you shoot your boss, Tracey?’
‘No. Course I bloody didn’t.’ He stared sullenly ahead of him, willing himself not to be riled by this bouncing ball of a chief inspector. ‘Why the hell would I want to do that?’
‘Because some other tycoon paid you handsomely to do it? Because this other villain’s now guaranteed you employment at a higher price? Violence is always there to be bought by the highest bidder, isn’t it?’
‘Get stuffed, Peach!’
‘So why didn’t you protect O’Connor, Steve? That was your job, surely? Can’t do your reputation any good, when the man you’re supposed to be protecting is shot down in cold blood, with you in attendance. Sheer bloody incompetence, I’d say. Wouldn’t you, DS Northcott?’
‘I would indeed, sir. Make it very difficult for Mr Tracey to secure other employment, I’d say, a cock-up like that would.’
Tracey was in before he could stop himself. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, black boy! You’ve no bloody idea about these things. You should stick to what you fucking know!’
There was a silence in the room, with the only audible sound that of Tracey’s heavy breathing. He’d given himself away. He’d forgotten how temper could betray you with the filth. An elementary mistake, for one with his experience.
Peach savoured the moment, letting a grin which became impossibly wide steal slowly over his expressive features. Finally he glanced at Northcott. ‘So he’s got himself other employment already. The biggest rat has deserted the sinking O’Connor ship with record speed. But then he probably couldn’t believe he’d been offered a new job, after his evident incompetence in the previous one. Or was this by prior arrangement, Tracey? If you didn’t shoot O’Connor yourself, did you leave him deliberately exposed because you’d already sold out to an even bigger rogue?’
The big man with the close-cropped hair glared at him, then said sullenly, ‘Get stuffed, Peach!’ But this was no more than muted, ritual defiance. He had sold himself by his temper; he wasn’t going to say more than he needed to from now on, but he’d done the damage.
Peach was determined to make the most of the gift he had been offered. ‘Who’s taken you on, Tracey? You and a couple of your palookas, I should think.’ He savoured the obsolete word again, pronouncing each syllable resoundingly. ‘My money’s on Lennon. Wouldn’t you say so, DS Northcott?’
‘From information received, I’d be almost certain of it, sir.’ Clyde brought his uncompromising face closer to Steve Tracey’s and gave his adversary a grin which held much aggression and nil humour.
Tracey, still reeling from his earlier mistake, was now shaken by the accuracy of their information. ‘Get stuffed, black man! It’s my business who I work for, not yours, pig!’
Peach regarded him balefully. Men like these, who dealt out violence to order, without even the passion of rage or resentment which drove domestic disputes, were the lowest as well as one of the most dangerous forms of life for him. ‘Not true, that. You’ve no right to privacy, when your business is beating up people. Or killing them, when the need arises. Did you kill O’Connor? Was that part of the deal with Lennon?’