He ran his eyes quickly up and down her. She was twenty-three or twenty-four and smartly dressed in a black and white check suit which played down her natural curves. Her hair was short, blonde, and tightly permed. She was wearing glasses with heavy frames, but Woodend would have put money on the lenses being nothing but plain glass. She was, he decided, a pretty girl who was doing her best to play down her prettiness.
The girl took a step towards him, and pulled a notepad out of her bag. “Chief Inspector Woodend?” she asked.
“That’s right, lass.”
She frowned, as if she didn’t like being called a lass. “I’m Elizabeth Driver,” she said crisply. “I represent the Maltham Guardian.”
She put such stress on the words “Maltham Guardian” that she might have been announcing she worked for an important paper like the Daily Mirror. Woodend forced himself to suppress a grin.
“An’ what can I do for you, Miss Driver?” he asked.
The girl licked the lead of her pencil. “Well, obviously, I’d like to know how your inquiries are going.”
“I’ve only just started my investigation, la . . . Miss Driver,” Woodend said. “Right now, if you’ve read your own paper, you probably know more about the murder than I do.”
Elizabeth Driver smiled, but it was such an engineered, calculated smile that Woodend could almost hear the gears clicking it into place.
“You wouldn’t by any chance be holding out on me, would you, Chief Inspector?”
Woodend shook his head. “It’s always been my policy to co-operate with the press whenever possible.”
“The thing is, covering this murder case is a really big opportunity for me,” Elizabeth Driver told him – and the earnest, eager expression which came to her face suddenly made her look no more than about fifteen. “If I can get some of the national newspapers to take up my stories on the investigation, it could be my ticket out of the provinces.”
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high, lass,” Woodend advised her. “This murder might be creatin’ quite a stir round here, but it won’t cause even a ripple in the nationals.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Elizabeth Driver told him. “It’s going to create a huge splash.”
“Trust me on this one,” Woodend said. “I’ve investigated two other murders in Cheshire, an’ neither of them has merited more than a small paragraph tucked away at the back of the papers.”
Elizabeth Driver was smiling again, and this time her smile could only be described as triumphant.
“What you say may have been perfectly true for those other cases you’ve worked on,” she told him, “but they were completely different. They didn’t involve the Dark Lady, did they?”
Four
The sun had sunk behind the trees and, unseen by the two men who were strolling through the park, was casting its dying glow over the still waters of Westbury Mere. An outside observer – and there were several peeping from behind the curtained windows of the huts – would have said that the taller of the men was doing no more than stretching his legs and reflecting on United’s chance of winning the Cup, whilst the shorter stuck to his heel like a devoted dog. But the outside observer would have been wrong about both of them.
From previous experience, Rutter knew that there were two situations in which Woodend’s mind worked at its best. The first was when he had a pint in one hand and a Capstan Full Strength in the other. The second was when ambling, apparently aimlessly, through the area where whichever crime they were investigating had been committed. And on both sets of occasions, the best thing his loyal bagman could do was to take a back seat until Cloggin’-it Charlie’s synapses had made their own – often unique – connections.
“What do you think of Simon Hailsham?” the chief inspector said, completely out of the blue.
“I find his whole attitude rather supercilious,” Rutter replied.
“Supercilious,” Woodend repeated. “That’s one of them big words like ‘rhinoceros’, isn’t it?” He laughed. “But I know just what you mean, lad. He’s typical of your officer class. What’s really got me bothered about him, though, isn’t high-handedness – it’s the conversation he an’ Schultz had just before Schultz got topped.”
“Why’s that, sir?”
“Because, accordin’ to Tony the bar steward – who doesn’t seem to be a lad who misses much – the only things they talked about were the redundancies at the plant, an’ the so-called Dark Lady.”
“So what’s wrong with that? They worked together, so it was natural they’d discuss BCI, and the Dark Lady had, supposedly, just made a rather dramatic appearance.”
“True,” Woodend agreed. “All very true. But from my experience, whenever you get two war veterans together the first thing they do is start swappin’ yarns, especially when there’s some alcohol involved. Yet there you had a couple of fliers, both of whom had fought in the Battle of Britain, an’ the subject never came up.”
“The Germans did lose both the Battle of Britain and the whole war,” Rutter pointed out. “Perhaps Hailsham was merely being tactful.”
“Aye, tactful,” Woodend said thoughtfully. “The thing is, tact doesn’t strike me as bein’ one of Simon Hailsham’s main strengths.” He stopped to light up a cigarette. “But let’s put that aside for the moment – I think it’s time we did a bit of visitin’.”
Rutter took his notebook out of his pocket. “Who do you want to see?” he asked.
“One of the Poles. No, on second thoughts, I’ll tell you what: let’s start with the Italians. We’ll have a word with that Bernadelli feller – you know, the one with a moustache like a scrubbin’ brush.”
Bob Rutter scanned his list. “This is Elm Avenue, and he lives at number thirty-two, so we must be very close to his house,” he said.
“Then it seems like it was meant to be, doesn’t it?”
They crossed the road and knocked on Bernadelli’s door. A woman opened it. Woodend’s eyes clicked, registering the details: late thirties; hair greying, but still an attractive face; wearing a bright floral pinafore which was spotlessly clean and faultlessly ironed.
“Are you Mrs Bernadelli, madam?” Rutter asked.
“Yes, that’s me,” the woman replied.
She had what the sergeant had come to recognise, during the course of his other two investigations in the area, as a Cheshire accent – and there was a slight tremble in her voice.
“We’d like to have a few words with your husband, if he’s at home,” Woodend said.
She should have been expecting it, once she’d seen who the callers were, but the woman still managed to look shocked. “You haven’t . . . I mean you don’t think he’s the one who . . .?”
“We just want a talk,” Woodend said gently. “Nobody’s accusin’ him of anythin’.”
An expression of relief appeared on the woman’s face. “You’d better come in, then,” she said.
They walked down a narrow passageway, then turned left into the living room. Woodend’s gaze swept the lightwood three-piece suite, the veneered teak table and the seventeen-inch television set. He noticed that the carpet, like Mrs Bernadelli’s pinafore, had a floral motif, and that the brass ornaments on the sideboard had been recently polished.
“I must say, you’ve got the place lookin’ very nice indeed, Mrs Bernadelli,” he said.
The woman positively simpered. “Well, I do like to keep things ‘just so’ for my Lou,” she said. “He works very hard, an’ when he comes home he’s entitled to a bit of comfort.”
Rutter shook his head slightly, in silent admiration. A minute earlier this woman had been terrified of Woodend, and now he had her eating out of his hand. And as had been the case when he’d complimented Tony the bar steward on his beer, he’d managed to soft-soap the woman while, at the same time, being completely sincere.
“An’ where’s your husband now?” Woodend asked.
“He’s on the lavatory,” Mrs Bernadelli said. “We’ve got
one inside, you know,” she added proudly.
Woodend smiled. “It’s a bit different from when we were growin’ up, isn’t it eh? I remember how I used to hate that journey to the bottom of the yard on a cold winter night.”
“Me, too,” the woman agreed. “Your candle was always blowin’ out, wasn’t it?”
“Course, the worst thing was when they used to come round an’ empty the pans on a Thursday,” Woodend continued. “The stink was terrible. I used to feel sorry for them sanitary engineers.” He winked at her. “Not that sanitary engineers was what we called them.”
The woman giggled. “We didn’t used to call them that either.”
“Still, we’ve put that behind us now, you an’ me, haven’t we, lass?” Woodend continued.
Making her identify with him, Rutter noted. Pulling down the barriers between policeman and potential suspect’s wife.
“We’ve been lucky, Lou an’ me,” Mrs Bernadelli said. “You have to say, BCI’s really looked after us. Lou’s got a steady job, an’ we’ve got this house. Yes, we’ve been very lucky.”
But would they have stayed lucky if Gerhard Schultz had had his way? Woodend wondered. Or was Luigi Bernadelli one of those unfortunate workers with the German’s black spot already against his name?
“I expect you have a lot of friends in the park, haven’t you, Mrs Bernadelli?” he said.
“Oh yes, quite a number.”
“Mostly English, would you say?”
“Well, yes, most of my friends are English.”
“An’ you probably see quite a lot of each other.”
“A fair amount, I suppose. We all meet in the laundrette for a good natter, an’ we sometimes go round to each other’s houses for tea. Then there’s the knittin’ circle—”
“Don’t you talk to any of the Germans or Poles in the laundrette?” Woodend asked innocently.
“Oh, they don’t go on a Monday like we do,” Mrs Bernadelli said. “The way it works is, it’s the Germans on Tuesday, the Poles on Wednesday an’ the Italians on Thursday.”
“Is that a park rule?”
Mrs Bernadelli laughed. “Goodness me, no. It’s just how things have worked out, that’s all.”
“And what about your husband’s friends?”
“Well, let’s see. He’s got three really big mates. There’s Mario and Giuseppe, then there’s Leo an—”
The door from the corridor opened, and Luigi Bernadelli entered the room. If he was at all surprised to see the two detectives standing there, he certainly didn’t let it show.
“Please take a seat,” he said, in an accent which was a comical mixture of Italian and northern English. He turned to his wife. “Make us a cup of tea, will you, love.”
He sat down himself, facing the Scotland Yard men. “I expect you are going to ask me if I have an alibi for the time at which Gerhard Schultz was murdered,” he said.
“Well, that’s as good a point as any to start from,” the chief inspector agreed.
“Schultz left the club just before closing time,” Bernadelli said, “so naturally it was not long before the rest of us left too. I walked part of the way back with some of the other men—”
“Mario, Giuseppe and Leo?” Woodend guessed.
Bernadelli’s eyes narrowed. “That’s right.”
“Your wife was tellin’ us about them. But I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Carry on with what you were sayin’.”
“Mario lives closest to the club, so he left us first. Leo was next, and Giuseppe and me parted company at the corner. I must have got home at about twenty past eleven.”
“Can your wife confirm that?”
Bernadelli shook his head. “She wasn’t here.”
“Why was that?”
“She was staying with her mother. The old lady had gone down with the flu. So no, to answer your question, I do not have an alibi. But I had no reason in the world to kill the German.”
“The German,” Woodend mused. “Now that’s what I call a very interestin’ label to give the man. Not ‘Mr Schultz’, or even ‘that bastard of a manager’, but the German.”
“What’s your point?” Bernadelli asked.
“I couldn’t help noticin’, back in the club, that the Italians and the Germans don’t mix,” Woodend said.
“That’s quite true,” Bernadelli admitted. “But it is more of their choosing than it is of ours.”
“Is that because they feel that your lot let their lot down in the war?”
“Let them down?”
“You know what I mean. They probably think that you surrendered to the Allies too easily.”
Bernadelli smiled. “Yes, I do know what you mean. I know all the old jokes as well,” he said. “Have you heard this one? How many gears does an Italian tank have?”
“I don’t know.”
“Five – one to go forward and four for reverse.” He laughed defensively. “Perhaps you are right when you say that the Germans do not think we were very good soldiers to have on their side. But it was once we were taken prisoner that the real resentment started.”
“Why should that be?”
“Because we were treated very differently. We Italians were put to work on the farms. It was no hardship for me. You have to understand, I was a slum boy from Naples. I had never even seen a farm before.” Bernadelli smiled again. “I thought it was wonderful to be allowed to work on such a place. That was when I learned to love horses. I still work in a stable in my free time. Not because of the money, but so I can be close to those beautiful animals.”
“You were tellin’ us about how you were treated differently from the Germans,” Woodend pointed out.
“That’s right. As I said, we worked on the farms. And we were paid for it – five shillings a week. It wasn’t a great deal of money, even back then, but it allowed us to buy the little luxuries which made our lives bearable. I saved up enough money to buy a second-hand bicycle. And at the weekends, we were allowed to go into the town. We were not permitted to use public transport or enter any of the pubs, but other than that there were no restrictions on us. Many of us made friends with the local people, even before the war was over. I met my wife just after the Allied Forces crossed the Rhine.”
“You were better off than me!” Woodend said.
Bernadelli smiled again. “We were better off than most men in Europe at the time,” he said. “But life as a POW was not the same for the Germans. People around here remembered the times when their planes went over every night, on their way to bomb Manchester and Liverpool. They remembered all those hours spent huddled in shelters, where they prayed that one of those planes wouldn’t decide to drop its bombs on top of them. As far as they were concerned, we Italians were just likeable clowns, and the real enemy was the Germans.”
“So they didn’t get the same freedoms you did?”
“They were wired off in their own special section of the camp. When we went out in the morning to work in the fields, we could see them standing close to the fence and watching us. And we could feel their hatred, even from a distance. Now that the war is over, they have managed to forgive the British – but they have never forgiven us.”
“Gerhard Schultz was a prisoner of war, wasn’t he?” Woodend said reflectively.
“That is what I’ve been told. But he certainly wasn’t a prisoner here,” Bernadelli said.
“No, but he was a prisoner nonetheless. An’ possibly he had exactly the same experience of Italians as the Germans incarcerated here did.”
“Possibly,” Bernadelli agreed cautiously.
“An’ now, finally, he was in a position to pay you back, wasn’t he?” Woodend said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, Mr Bernadelli, you’re far too intelligent a man not to have followed my line of logic. You did hear him tell Mr Hailsham that there were goin’ to be job losses, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” the Italian admitted. “I did.”
&
nbsp; “An’ where would those cuts fall? Why, as far as Schultz was concerned, they should probably fall on the Italians, who had had such an easy time of it durin’ the war. Perhaps one of your lot figured that if it was someone other than Schultz who made the decision – someone who hadn’t got anythin’ against Italians – you wouldn’t come off quite so badly.”
“You’re saying that he could have been killed to protect jobs?” Bernadelli asked, giving a fair impression of incredulity.
“An’ homes,” Woodend said. “You’ve got a nice house here. Lose your job an’ you’d lose that as well.”
The Italian nodded thoughtfully. “Do I need to ask to see my lawyer?” he asked.
“No, Mr Bernadelli. I’d have to have a lot more on you than no alibi before you’d need that.”
Woodend and Rutter stood watching a colony of bats glide around in the gathering twilight.
“A nice woman, that Mrs Bernadelli,” Woodend said. “Makes a good northern cup of tea, an’ has plenty to say for herself once you’ve got her to open up a little.”
Rutter smiled. The conversation over tea had been about the old days and the similar experiences they’d had. Coming from a comfortable suburban home as he did, it had all seemed as alien as if he’d been overhearing a conversation between a couple of Eskimos.
“What did you make of the husband?” Rutter asked.
“I think he’s hidin’ somethin’,” Woodend replied. “But let’s face it, which of us hasn’t got somethin’ to hide?”
“And what do you think his secret might be?”
“Ee, lad, I haven’t got a clue.” Woodend checked his watch. “There’s just time to make one more visit before we call it a day an’ have the last couple of pints of the evenin’.”
“And who will it be this time?”
“The Pole,” Woodend said. “The one who fancies himself as a bit of a translator.”
Zbigniew Rozpedek did not look pleased to see Woodend and Rutter, but after the man’s hostile attitude during the meeting in the bar, the chief inspector had hardly expected to be welcomed with open arms.
The Dark Lady Page 5
