A Little Learning by J. M. Gregson Read Free Book Online Page A

sort of a person this Dr George Andrew ‘Claptrap’ Carter had been.

 
    Five
     
    It was one of the best English autumn days. Peach stood on the steps of the high stone Victorian mansion, sniffed the air appreciatively, and surveyed the scene.
    There were students streaming in various directions, concluding their morning lectures and making for the refectory or bars, bustling like ants about their business. The day was still, and a pale sun shone out of a muted blue sky, illuminating the amber and orange on the oaks and limes which had grown here for almost two centuries, making the eye aware of subtle shades which it would have missed on a duller day. This wasn’t a bad place to be, especially when you had the delightful Lucy Blake at your side.
    Peach looked at the masses of scurrying humanity and frowned. ‘If this is murder, there are a thousand bloody suspects. Every bugger you can see out there had access to the Director’s house!’
    It was no more than the ritual protest of a professional about to embark upon a difficult task and DS Blake recognized it as such. She knew that she was merely responding in kind as she said, ‘We’ll prune the field down pretty quickly. You’ve already eliminated two of the students.’
    They walked from the front of the house over to the massive canopy of the old cedar, then along the shaded path which Paul Barnes and Gary Pilkington had trodden during the darkness of the previous night. Even with the site busy with pedestrians moving in different directions, this was a quiet place, for the path led nowhere except to the Director’s house, invisible beneath the trees until you reached the single lamp standard forty yards from its front elevation.
    This was a very different building from the neo-Gothic stone mansion house at the centre of the estate, but impressive in its own way. The style owed something to the mock-Georgian fashion of the 1990s, but the size and the setting of the house, on a spacious plot among the trees, with no other building in view, gave it an elegance which was surprising in a brick building no more than ten years old.
    The pale but steady November sun glinted on the rectangular windows and warmed the brick of the frontage to a surprisingly mellow hue. The police cars parked in front of the double garage were invisible from where the pair stood, and the isolated house seemed quiet, even deserted, as they gazed up at its broad frontage. Then, as they moved towards it, they caught a glimpse of figures moving behind the glass and were brought back abruptly to the real business of the day.
    Jim Chadwick, the sergeant in charge of the mixture of police and civilians who made up the Scene of Crime team, greeted Peach with a professional pessimism which echoed that recently expressed by the inspector himself. ‘Bloody great barracks of a place to search, this is!’ he said gloomily. ‘Some of us will be here for a couple of days, I should think, before we’ve got round this lot. Might help if we’d any idea what we’re looking for!’
    He didn’t get any of Peach’s normal acid in the reply. Percy had a lot of respect for Jim Chadwick, who had been a detective sergeant at the same time as him, a thief-taker with his eye just as firmly on the ball. Chadwick had been shot through the shoulder after a bank raid; could have taken a sick pension and retirement into some less demanding occupation; had opted instead to stay with the police service; had carved himself out this role as a scene-of-crime expert, when deprived of the more active career he would have preferred. He knew now that he would never progress beyond sergeant, but from all outward signs he bore no resentment of that fact.
    Chadwick was a copper’s man, not a PR merchant. He knew what coppers wanted from the place where crimes had taken place; he had a CID man’s eye for details which might seem insignificant to others. It was Peach who had ensured that he was assigned to investigate the