Free Dusty Death by J. M. Gregson

yes. Perhaps a little later. How do you know that?’ His reeling brain was wondering now quite how much they did know. Perhaps it was everything.
    â€˜We don’t reveal our sources, Mr Hayward.’ Lucy Blake was quietly insistent, the voice of quiet reason. Peach was suddenly taken with the thought of how delighted Billy Bedford would be to be described as something as lofty as ‘a source’, to know that for the first time in his life his confidences were to be respected and protected.
    â€˜No. No, I suppose you wouldn’t. I thought this might be a girl I lived with. Early in 1991, that would be.’
    â€˜You were partners?’
    â€˜No.’ He shook his head vigorously, as if trying to clear it. ‘There were several of us lived there. Five or six of us. After those streets had been cleared. When the real residents were gone.’ He was suddenly impatient, anxious to have this over with and these two out of his life.
    â€˜You were squatters.’ This was Peach again, switching back from questions to assertions.
    Matthew nodded his head as if a string had been pulled in his neck. ‘I suppose you’d call it that. Sebastopol Terrace, it was.’
    â€˜Number?’
    â€˜Twenty-six.’ The number came up from his subconscious as promptly as if it had been yesterday, surprising him as much as his hearers. He would have said before tonight that he no longer knew it.
    Peach nodded, pursing his lips, wanting to encourage a man who was now being honest. It tallied. He’d spent an hour with an old street plan at the site today, trying to decide exactly which street and which house had been the ones where the body was found. It was on the right hand side of the street, somewhere in the three houses 26, 28 and 30.
    Until now, there had been the possibility that the body had been killed somewhere else and merely dumped there by someone who knew it was a good hiding place. Now, it seemed likely that this girl had actually lived there, been killed on site, by a fellow squatter or a visitor to the place.
    That made it more likely that they would catch the killer. His spirits rose as his hunter’s instinct kicked in. He said, ‘How old would you say this young woman was at the time of her death?’
    Matthew was suddenly cautious. He thought he had given up attempts at concealment, but now he could suddenly see the danger of admitting too much. He said, ‘I don’t know when she died, do I? I don’t know anything about her death. When I knew her, she was about twenty.’
    Peach nodded. ‘This girl was about that age, when she died. Did you kill her, Mr Hayward?’
    Even Lucy Blake was startled by the brutal abruptness of the question. Matthew Hayward’s brain reeled for a moment. Then he mustered all the outrage he could put into the words as he said, ‘No! Of course I didn’t kill her!’
    Peach grinned over his shoulder into the mirror, totally unabashed. ‘Just thought it would save us a lot of time, if you were prepared to admit it now. Difficult case wrapped up with a confession, inside two days, you see: lovely, that would be, if you look at it from our point of view. Doesn’t work like that very often, more’s the pity. So tell us about this squat.’
    Matthew noticed that the man hadn’t accepted his assurance that he wasn’t a killer. ‘There were five or six of us, as I said. Including Sunita.’
    They had a name. It was far more than he could have expected at this stage, two days after she had been found, with the scents long gone cold. ‘Tell us about these people in the squat.’
    â€˜I can’t. Genuinely I can’t.’ It was suddenly very important to Matthew to convince them of that. ‘People came and went, disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived. We didn’t tell each other much about ourselves. I suppose most of us had something to hide.’ He looked