Sins of the Fathers

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Would you care to give us an example?’

  ‘There’s always brown ale in the fridge, even though Mrs Hawtrey doesn’t much like the taste of it herself – an’ sometimes, I’ll find empty bottles in the rubbish bin.’

  ‘So she’s had a visitor who drinks brown ale, and you think that must mean that’s he’s a man?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Of course it’s a man!’ Mrs Chubb said scornfully. ‘It’s a man’s drink, isn’t it?’ She turned to Paniatowski. ‘How many women do you know who drink brown ale?’

  ‘None that I can think of,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Well, exactly!’ Mrs Chubb said triumphantly. ‘And that’s not all he drinks. He doesn’t say no to a glass or two of wine, either.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Mrs Hawtrey likes the odd tipple herself – not that there’s anythin’ wrong with that – and most mornin’s I’ll find a wine glass sittin’ on the coffee table with her lipstick all around the rim.’

  ‘Go on,’ Woodend encouraged.

  ‘But some nights, there’s been two glasses used – an’ she’s washed up the second one.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Woodend wondered.

  Mrs Chubb turned to Paniatowski again.

  ‘Men!’ she said, with mild contempt.

  ‘Men!’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘There’s an art to washin’ up, which is unknown to all men an’ some women,’ Mrs Chubb told Woodend, ‘and Mrs Hawtrey is one of them women who doesn’t know how to do it properly. How can I tell! What a question to even have to ask me!’

  ‘What a question,’ Paniatowski echoed obediently.

  ‘I can tell because the glasses that she does wash up are always left streaky,’ Mrs Chubb told Woodend.

  ‘Anythin’ else?’ the chief inspector asked.

  ‘He smokes.’

  ‘How do you know? Doesn’t she smoke?’

  ‘Of course she does. Everybody smokes! But she smokes filter-tipped, and his are untipped. Mrs Hawtrey puts his fag ends in the bin, but when I’m emptyin’ it out, I can’t help noticin’ them.’

  I bet there’s not much you can’t help noticin’, you nosy old bat, Woodend thought.

  ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mrs Chubb agreed.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  The charwoman fidgeted in her seat. ‘Well, there is one more thing,’ she admitted, ‘but it’s a bit personal, if you see what I mean, an’ I don’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘You can say anythin’ at all – however personal – to us,’ Woodend assured her. ‘We’re a bit like doctors, in that way.’

  ‘Or priests,’ Paniatowski added.

  ‘Well, Mrs Hawtrey doesn’t really do anythin’ at all around the house,’ Mrs Chubb said. ‘Even the simplest little job – one that she could finish in a minute, while she’s waitin’ for the kettle to boil – she leaves for me to do in the mornin’.’ She paused. ‘Not that I’m complain’ in any way, shape or form,’ she added hastily. ‘If she did it all herself, she wouldn’t need me.’

  ‘Understood,’ Woodend said.

  ‘But every now an’ then, she does strip down the bed. She doesn’t actually put the new sheets on – that would be too much to ask of her – but she takes the dirty sheets an’ puts them in the washin’ machine, so they’re already half-way through their cycle by the time I arrive. An’ why do you think she does that?’

  ‘Because she doesn’t want you to see that the sheets are stained?’ Paniatowski guessed. ‘Because she doesn’t want you to know that she hasn’t spent the night alone.’

  Mrs Chubb jutted out her chin in a prim and righteous manner. ‘What people do in their own homes is their own business,’ she said. ‘But I still think they could have some standards.’

  Twenty

  Rutter spread the map of the Whitebridge area across the table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.

  ‘The green Ford Cortina was spotted here,’ he said, indicating a point in Lower Bankside. ‘It’s unfortunate that my witness can’t say for sure exactly what time he saw it – and doesn’t know who was driving it – but in my mind there’s no doubt at all that it was Pine’s car.’

  ‘Nor in mine, either,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Now, the car was coming from the centre of town, which is here, and the body was found here, on the dual carriageway,’ Rutter continued, pointing to two spots on the map. ‘Does the fact that it was ever in Bankside make any sense to either of you?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Paniatowski said. ‘If it was the killer behind the wheel, and he was taking Pine’s body to be dumped, why would he go that way? The quickest route out to the dual carriageway from the centre of town is in completely the opposite direction.’

  ‘And if Pine himself was driving the car, what was he doing going towards Upper Bankside?’ Rutter wondered. ‘We know from what the charwoman said that his relations with Mrs Hawtrey have been distinctly chilly since her husband’s death, so why would he even be thinking of calling on her?’

  ‘No reason at all,’ Woodend said. ‘But I can think of somebody else who might have had a very good reason for payin’ her a visit.’

  ‘Her lover?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend said. ‘Her wine-drinking, untipped-cigarette-smoking, bed-staining lover.’

  He paused, to take a drag on his own untipped cigarette.

  ‘I can see two possible ways that this whole thing could have developed,’ he continued. ‘The first is that Thelma Hawtrey makes the decision to take a lover simply because she’s lonely, or because she’s missin’ the sex. But later, when the affair’s been goin’ on for some time, she suddenly realizes that she can use this lover of hers to kill Bradley Pine.’

  ‘And the other way it could have developed is that the only reason she takes a lover in the first place is so she’ll have someone to kill Pine,’ Monika Paniatowski said.

  ‘That’s right. She has no relatives she can turn to – they’re either dead, or she’s lost contact with them years ago. She has no male friends to speak of, either. An’ even if she had, it’d be stretchin’ friendship a bit too far to ask that friend to kill for her. So she has to find some other way to recruit her accomplice. An’ where would be a better place for recruitin’ him than in bed! I don’t imagine that findin’ a man willin’ to sleep with her would have been much of a problem, because she is a good-lookin’ woman.’

  ‘And once she’s got him into bed?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘She’ll have played the poor bugger like a violin for months – maybe even years. An’ just when he’s so hopelessly in love with her that he can’t bear to live without her – when he’s prepared to do anythin’ at all to keep her – she tells him exactly what her price for stayin’ with him is.’

  ‘That would explain why she’s been keeping him a secret from everyone else all this time,’ Paniatowski said. ‘She will have seen that we couldn’t possibly suspect the man of murder if we didn’t even know he existed!’

  ‘I’m still more than a little bit troubled about the nature of the attack,’ Bob Rutter said.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Dr Shastri said there’d been a lot of anger – as well as a lot of force – behind the fatal blow.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why would the lover have been angry with Pine?’

  ‘He wasn’t angry with Pine,’ Woodend said. ‘He was angry with Mrs Hawtrey, for talking him into carryin’ out the murder. Or maybe he was angry with himself – for agreein’ to it. Whichever was the case, it was Bradley Pine who bore the brunt of the anger.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Rutter conceded. ‘But even allowing for that, I still don’t see why he would have driven the Cortina – presumably with Pine’s body in the back – up to Mrs Hawtrey’s house. Surely, once he’d done the deed, he’d have wanted to dump the corpse as soon as possible.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ W
oodend said. ‘But remember that the body wasn’t just dumped – it was mutilated as well.’

  A look of pure horror came to Rutter’s face. ‘And you think that she … that she …?’

  ‘I think she wanted to do that part of the business herself. I think that once he’d killed Pine, her lover went to her house to pick her up, and they both drove out to the dual carriageway, where Mrs Hawtrey first smashed Pine’s mouth in, and then slit his stomach open.’

  ‘If that’s true, she’s not just a murderer – she’s a complete bloody monster!’ Rutter said.

  ‘If that’s true, she certainly is,’ Woodend agreed. ‘An’ once we’ve got a warrant from a friendly magistrate to search her house, we just might have the evidence to prove she is.’

  Woodend stood in the centre of the large living room of the house in Lawrence Road. He had hardly moved at all for several minutes. Thelma Hawtrey, in contrast, seemed unable to keep still, and was continually pacing from one end of the room to the other, then back again.

  ‘This is bloody outrageous!’ she said angrily, as she passed by Woodend for fifteenth or sixteenth time. ‘You have absolutely no right to invade my house in this manner.’

  ‘We’ve got every right,’ Woodend replied evenly. ‘An’ since you’ve seen the search warrant for yourself, you know we’ve got every right.’

  There was the sound of banging overhead.

  ‘They’re in my bedroom now,’ Thelma Hawtrey said bitterly. ‘They’re destroying my home, and I still have no idea what you’re looking for.’

  ‘If it’ll make it any easier for you to bear, I’ll tell you what we’re lookin’ for,’ Woodend said. ‘We’re lookin’ for evidence.’

  ‘Evidence!’ Mrs Hawtrey repeated. ‘Evidence of what?’

  ‘Any kind of evidence. But it would be especially nice if we could find somethin’ that would not only reveal your lover’s identity to us, but also give us an indication of where we might find him.’

  ‘My lover?’ Thelma Hawtrey said. ‘You want to find the identity of my lover?’

  ‘You don’t really think that the trick to soundin’ innocent is simply to repeat everythin’ I say, do you?’ Woodend asked. ‘Because I’ll tell you right now, it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Is that really what you said? That you’re looking for my lover?’

  ‘In fact, Mrs Hawtrey, the more you try that particular trick, the less effective it becomes.’

  ‘Even if I did have a lover, why would you want to find him?’ Thelma Hawtrey asked.

  ‘Oh, that’s an easy one to answer. We want to find him because we think he helped you murder Bradley Pine.’

  Thelma Hawtrey laughed, hysterically. ‘That really is too funny for words, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I certainly hope you’ll still be findin’ it amusin’ when you’re both standin’ in the dock,’ Woodend countered.

  Rutter had started by searching the area around the part of the driveway which was closest to the house, and was gradually working his way towards the point at which it let out on to the road outside. He had chosen this particular task himself, not because he expected to find anything out there – he was sure that he wouldn’t, since Pine had almost certainly been killed elsewhere – but because rummaging through other people’s homes had always been one of the aspects of police work that he most disliked.

  His aversion to it came, he supposed, from his childhood. His father had run a small greengrocer’s shop in London, and the family had lived above it. His mother had loathed the business, and loathed the area in which it was located, and her solution had been to pretend that none of it existed.

  The flat had provided her with an escape from the real world. She had treated it almost as if it were sacred – a kind of holy hot air balloon, which allowed her to hover above, and remain totally untouched by, all the distasteful things which were going on at street level. It gradually became her life, and she would rather have lost an arm or a leg than give up even one tiny corner of it.

  Thus, though Rutter could – and did – force himself to execute search warrants, he often felt, when he left the premises, as if he had been raping his mother’s dream, and so generally avoided it whenever he could.

  He had reached the big double gates. Large rhododendron bushes grew on either side of them, giving this part of the garden a rather funereal air – and him something of the creeps.

  He was on the point of widening his search – perhaps following the progress of the walls round the small estate – when a sudden burst of sunshine hit the bushes, and he saw that, from under the foliage, something was glinting at him.

  It could be anything – the silver foil wrapper of a discarded chocolate bar; a bottle which some thoughtless drunk had thrown over the wall on his ambling way back home; a coin or cheap brooch dropped by a hapless magpie and never retrieved – but he supposed that now that he was there, it was probably worth investigating it more fully.

  He crouched down in front of the bush, pushed one of the branches to one side with his hand – and saw the watch. He picked it up carefully in his handkerchief, straightened up again, and moved away from the shadow of the bushes so he could examine it in better light.

  He could tell immediately that it was a very expensive timepiece – far better than he could ever have afforded on a detective inspector’s salary. There was a little dirt on it, but it bore none of the signs of deterioration which it would have acquired if it had been lying there a long time. Besides, it was still working perfectly. In fact, the only damage which seemed to have been done to it was that the leather strap was broken.

  Rutter turned the watch over, hoping to find an inscription on the back of it, and was disappointed to discover that there wasn’t one.

  He took another step back, and considered how the watch might have got there.

  It could, he supposed, have fallen off a man’s wrist when he was opening the gates. But would it then have flown far enough to have landed where he’d discovered it? And even if it had, surely the owner would have noticed the loss of such an expensive watch before too long, and immediately gone searching in the places he might have dropped it.

  Rutter wrapped the handkerchief around the watch and slipped it into his pocket. Then he knelt down again, in order to see if the rhododendron bush had any more treasures it might be willing to yield up.

  ‘You’ve been here for over an hour,’ Mrs Hawtrey said. ‘If there was anything to find, don’t you think you’d have found it by now?’

  ‘This is a big house,’ Woodend reminded her. ‘There’s lots of places in it where you could have hidden things.’

  ‘But I have nothing to hide, for God’s sake!’ Mrs Hawtrey protested. ‘My life’s an open book.’

  ‘Oh, I sincerely doubt that,’ Woodend told her. ‘I doubt, to be honest with you, that anybody’s is.’

  A door to the hallway opened, and Bob Rutter entered the living room. ‘Could I have a word, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Woodend said. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Not here,’ Rutter cautioned. ‘I think it would be much better if we talked outside.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Woodend replied, following him to the door.

  It was five minutes before Woodend returned to the living room, and when he did he was holding his hands palm upwards, and carrying a handkerchief in them.

  ‘What’s that?’ Thelma Hawtrey asked. ‘The Holy Grail?’

  ‘No,’ Woodend said. ‘But for my money, it comes pretty damn close to it.’ He carefully unwrapped the package, and held it out for the woman to see. ‘Does this look familiar to you?’

  ‘Oh, my God, it’s Brad’s watch!’ Mrs Hawtrey gasped.

  ‘Do you know, I rather thought it might be,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Where did you … where was it …’

  ‘Where was it found? Near the gates. Just about where the struggle must have taken place.’

  ‘The struggle? What struggle? I have
absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’ve told you before that just repeatin’ my words won’t do you any good,’ Woodend said.

  ‘But I really don’t have any idea,’ Mrs Hawtrey protested.

  ‘Oh, I think you do,’ Woodend said confidently. He cleared his throat, as he always did on such occasions. ‘Thelma Hawtrey, I am arrestin’ you for the murder of Bradley Pine,’ he continued. ‘You do not have to say anythin’ but anythin’ you do say may be taken down an’ used in evidence against you.’

  Twenty-One

  There were three interview rooms in Whitebridge Police Headquarters. They were all rather depressing – and deliberately so – but Interview Room C, which had the smallest window and the least natural light, was the dreariest of the trio. And Interview Room C was the one in which Woodend had chosen to conduct his interrogation of Thelma Hawtrey.

  Woodend looked across the table, at the woman who he had already charged with murder.

  She looked very calm, he thought. No, that wasn’t it at all. She didn’t just look very calm – she was very calm.

  ‘You may as well make a clean breast of it right from the start, you know, Thelma,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve done nothing wrong, and I’ve nothing to come clean about,’ Thelma Hawtrey said firmly. ‘And I would prefer it, Chief Inspector Woodend, if you would address me as either Mrs Hawtrey or Madam.’

  Woodend sighed. ‘Look, Mrs Hawtrey, you know we found Bradley Pine’s watch in your garden, don’t you?

  ‘I know you say that you did. But I’ve no proof you didn’t put it there yourselves.’

  ‘Now why should we have done that?’

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Not to me, it isn’t.’

  ‘Then I’ll explain it to you. I’ve seen Henry Marlowe on the television. He’s desperate for someone to be arrested for Bradley’s murder, and you’ve decided that I’m the perfect candidate. But before you could arrest me, you needed some kind of proof, and that’s why you planted the watch.’