“Whatever happened to the woman he was going out with?” Bob Rutter asked.
“Oh, her! I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. She’s certainly not still around here or I’d have seen her. I mean, you couldn’t really miss her, could you. So maybe she moved back to her own country.”
Couldn’t really miss her? Moved back to her own country?
“Are you saying that she wasn’t English?”
“Didn’t I make that clear earlier on?” Greenwood asked, sounding surprised. “No she wasn’t English. Must have come on one of the ships from Africa or the Caribbean or somewhere like that.”
“You mean, she was coloured?”
“That’s right,” the constable agreed. “She was a real darkie.”
Eleven
The Maitland Temple School of Riding stood in the centre of a large paddock. As far as Woodend could make out as he was approaching it, the entire property consisted solely of a wooden stable and an ancient caravan which had had its wheels taken off and been put up on bricks.
The chief inspector reached the caravan and saw that the word “office” had been written on the door in green chalk. He knocked. The woman who answered the knock was around forty-five years old. Her greying hair was tied back in a tight bun, and her face was reddened by much exposure to the open air. She was wearing a woollen sweater – which did little to hide her large breasts – and tan jodhpurs which served to emphasise her formidable rump.
She ran a critical – though totally asexual – eye over him. “It’ll have to be one of our bigger horses if it’s going to carry your weight,” she said. “Still, it looks like you might have a good seat. Have you done any riding before?”
Woodend smiled, shook his head, and showed her his warrant card. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Luigi Bernadelli,” he said. “Assumin’, of course, that I’m talkin’ to Mrs Maitland Temple.”
“Yes, I’m Polly Maitland. But it’s Miss, not Mrs.” The woman frowned. “Is this anything to do with the murder up at Westbury Park? Because if it is, you’re barking up the wrong tree by asking questions about Lou. I’ve seen the way he works with my horses. You can tell a hell of a lot about a man from the way he handles animals. Certainly enough for me to say with absolute confidence that Lou wouldn’t even tread on an ant if he could help it.”
“I’m askin’ questions about all the men who saw Gerhard Schultz just before he was murdered,” Woodend said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean I suspect any of them. So if you’d just spare me a few minutes of your time, Miss Maitland, I’d really appreciate it.”
The woman turned the idea over in her mind. “All right,” she agreed finally. “If answering your questions will eliminate Lou Bernadelli from your inquiries, then I suppose I can find the time. Come into my parlour, as the spider is supposed to have said to the fly.”
Woodend followed her into the caravan. Inside it were crammed a battered desk, an equally battered filing cabinet, two straight chairs and two overstuffed armchairs.
“Take one of the comfy seats,” Polly Maitland told Woodend. “But watch out for the loose springs.”
While the chief inspector was gingerly lowering himself into the armchair, Miss Maitland went over to the desk and produced a bottle and two glasses from the desk drawer.
“Brandy,” she announced. “Says it’s French on the label, but at the price I paid for it, I’d be surprised if it had been anywhere closer to France than Algiers. Still, it’s good enough for this time of the morning. Not too early for you, is it?” she concluded, giving Woodend a look which suggested that this was more a test of his manliness than a casual enquiry.
“It’s never too early for a spot of eau de vie de turpentine,” Woodend told her.
The woman raised a surprised eyebrow. “So you speak French, do you, Chief Inspector?”
“A smatterin’,” Woodend said. “I picked it up durin’ the war. Bit of German, an’ all.”
“Well, you are an unusual policeman,” Polly Maitland said. She poured two shots of the brandy, handed one to Woodend, and plopped down in the chair opposite with a healthy disregard for the loose springs which she’d warned him about. “So what do you want to know about Luigi?” she asked.
“How long has been workin’ for you?”
“Strictly speaking, he doesn’t work for me at all. Oh, I slip him the odd pound or two now and again—”
She stopped suddenly, as if she realised she’d said something she shouldn’t have.
“It’s all right,” Woodend assured her. “I’ll not tell the taxman.”
Polly Maitland smiled gratefully. “You really are an unusual policeman. But as I was saying earlier, it’s not the money which brings Luigi here.”
“So why does he come? Because he loves horses?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Polly Maitland agreed.
But she had hesitated for the briefest of moments, and that hesitation was not lost of the chief inspector.
“What’s his other reason?” Woodend asked.
Polly Maitland laughed. “Oh I suppose there’s no harm in telling you of all people,” she said. “You see, Luigi’s a bit like a horse himself. Or, to be more exact, I suppose he’s a bit like a stallion. Can’t resist chancing his arm with the women when the opportunity arises. Even made a pass at me a few years back – and God knows, I’m no oil painting.”
“You’re sayin’ he comes to the ridin’ school because it gives him the chance to sleep with women.”
“I’ve no doubt that’s what he’d like to do if I let him. As it is, he has to content himself with letting his hands rove a bit when he’s helping them on to their horses. Most of them don’t seem to mind – he’s a big handsome man, after all – but if one of them does complain, as happens from time to time, I tell her she must be imagining things, then give him a tap on the head with my riding whip to remind him that I’m not running a stud farm.”
An idea too tentative even to be called a theory was starting to form in Woodend’s mind.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a list of all your clients, would you, Miss Maitland?” he asked.
Suspicion darkened the woman’s eyes. “Now why would you ask that?” she said,
“Because if you have a list, I’d like to have a quick glance at it.”
“I’m not sure I should show it to you,” the woman said dubiously.
Woodend shrugged. “Why not? What harm can it do? There’s no law against people takin’ ridin’ lessons, is there?”
“True,” Miss Maitland agreed. “And after all, you are a policeman with a smattering of French.”
She went over to the desk and returned with a leather-backed ledger. “This contains a record of all the people who’ve had lessons. It includes their names, addresses, telephone numbers and how many lessons they’ve had. But I’m afraid it only goes back two years.”
“That should be long enough,” Woodend said. “I don’t think the person I’m lookin’ for will have been havin’ lessons for more than the last few months.”
Then he opened the ledger, ran his eyes down the list, and saw almost immediately that was right.
The carefully tended gardens which surrounded the large detached house were so extensive that they almost qualified for the term “grounds”, and Bob Rutter was finding it an extremely pleasant experience to wander through them with the white-haired man who carried himself so erectly.
“A large part of the Battle of Britain was fought in this area,” the man said. “There might have been dog fights in the skies right above this house, for all I know. I could even have been in one – you don’t look down to admire the scenery when you’re in the enemy’s sights.” He sighed. “I think that’s probably why I bought this place – so I could stay close to those scenes of glory. And they were glorious, you know.”
“I’m sure they were, Wing Commander,” Rutter said, conscious, once again, of his relative youth.
“Since we didn’t know when Je
rry was going to be coming over, we had to be ready to be airborne for as long as the light lasted, and at that time of year that meant from four o’clock in the morning until ten thirty at night. We couldn’t work a shift system – however fast they trained new pilots, we simply didn’t have the manpower for that – so every flier had to be on duty at all times. It really was quite an exhausting business.”
“It must have been.”
“A lot of people have the wrong idea about our job,” the wing commander continued. “They think we were supposed to shoot down German fighter planes.”
“And weren’t you?”
“No, we were supposed to knock out the bombers before they could do any damage.” He looked up at the sky, as if he could see some even at that moment. “But of course, that meant dealing with the fighters who were escorting them first. And that wasn’t easy. The German fighters – the 109s – didn’t fly alongside their bombers, you know. They flew above them, so that when we attacked the Ju 88s – that’s the bombers – the fighters would come swooping down on us at a terrific speed. They had fuel injection, you see, so they could get away with it. If we’d tried a manoeuvre like that in any of our Hurricanes, we’d have stalled the bloody engine.”
“There must have been a tremendous spirit of camaraderie in those days,” Rutter said.
“Oh, there was,” the wing commander agreed. “And in a strange way, that feeling extended to the opposition as well. We wanted to shoot their planes out of the sky, of course, but we never meant the pilots any harm. I remember one of my young chaps – his name was Chetwynd, if my memory doesn’t fail me – being quite upset because instead of shooting the wing off an enemy plane, which was what he’d intended to do, he’d sprayed the cockpit and killed the pilot.”
Which was pretty much what Simon Hailsham had said about his relationship with Schultz, Rutter thought.
“In fact,” the wing commander continued, “I, and a few of my men, used to go and visit the captured German fliers whenever we got the chance. There was an internment camp quite close to the base, you see. The Jerries always gave us a very warm welcome – no hard feelings at all.”
“Did you ever meet a German pilot called Gerhard Schultz?” Rutter asked, taking a shot in the dark.
“Schultz! How incredible you should mention him. Indeed I did know him. He was one of prisoners I got closest to. An absolutely splendid chap. An officer and a gentleman in every sense of the word. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
“You don’t know?” Rutter asked. “Haven’t you seen it in the papers?”
“Don’t bother with the papers much any more,” the wing commander confessed. “Got better things to do with my time than read about all the disasters going on in the world. Fought a war to make things better, and there doesn’t seem to have been any improvement at all. So what’s Gerhard been up to?”
“He’s been murdered.”
“Extraordinary thing to happen! Who on earth would want to kill a nice chap like Gerhard?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, sir,” Rutter said.
And we might just be getting somewhere, he thought excitedly. We might – possibly – at last be establishing a firm link between the past and the present.
“You said you took a group of officers with you to visit the German prisoners, didn’t you?” he asked.
“That’s right. Not a big one. Just three or four chaps who were interested in coming along.”
Rutter took a deep breath. “And did Simon Hailsham happen to be one of that group, sir?”
The wing commander looked blank. “Who?”
“Simon Hailsham. Group Captain Simon Hailsham,” Bob Rutter prodded.
“Not done your homework properly, young man,” the wing commander said severely. “That wasn’t his name at all.”
As Woodend walked through Westbury Park, he was thinking about his visit to the riding school and what he had achieved there. On the whole, very little, he decided. True, he’d cleared up one little mystery, even if he hadn’t had time to bring it to its final resolution yet. And true again, he’d managed to eliminate one suspect from his list of possible murderers – but that list was still depressingly long. So all in all, it could hardly have been called a productive morning’s work.
Even the expedition he was embarking on at that moment was aimed more at getting the chief constable off his back than assisting him in catching his killer. But it had to be done. God, how he hated the politics involved in police work.
He entered the woods from exactly the same point at which he had entered them the night before. Once he had gone more than a few yards, however, he was no longer sure that he was still on the route he had taken the last time. Had he turned right by this bush? he asked himself. Or had he decided it would be easier to go to the left? After five minutes’ walking he realised that any further speculation was pointless. If he was ever to find what he was searching for, it would have to be purely on a basis of hit and miss.
He had been walking for nearly an hour when he found an old brick building, not much bigger than a garden shed, close to the shore of the lake. An old pumping station, the chief inspector guessed, no doubt used to pump up water for the gardens and fountains of Westbury Hall when the place had been in its heyday.
The windows were all boarded up, and many of the slates on the roof were missing, but there was a shiny new hasp and padlock fixed firmly on the rotting front door.
“Did you have that idea of yours, an’ then go lookin’ for a place like this, Mr Rozpedek?” he asked, looking around the empty wood. “Or was it the other way round? Did findin’ this place give you the idea?”
Whichever way it was, one of the Poles had obviously been afraid he’d find the pumping station the night before, and had attacked him to stop him searching any further.
He hadn’t known for sure that he’d need a screwdriver, but he was glad he’d brought one along anyway; because it saved him a trip back to the hall. He took the implement out his pocket, and inserted it into the groove of one of the screws which held the hasp in place.
Whoever had installed the lock had done a good job, and it took five minutes’ work before Woodend could push the hasp to one side and open the door.
There was a good deal of metal inside the small brick room, but it was not the original machinery which had been used to pump water. The chief inspector examined the copper tubes with admiration. The Poles had done a first-class job, but then that was only to be expected. This was not a commercial enterprise – it was a labour of love.
It also explained why Fred Foley had hung around the hall so much, he thought. And how Foley’s overcoat had come to be covered with the dead man’s blood. But unless the Poles were hiding him – and he didn’t think they’d take that risk – it didn’t explain how poor, pathetic Foley had managed to evade the local police for several days.
Woodend closed the door again, and painstakingly replaced the screws. Then, whistling slightly off-tune to himself, he made his way back to Westbury Hall.
Commander Hartley Greaves of New Scotland Yard sat back in the leather armchair, took a puff on his expensive cigar, then reached for his balloon glass of very old French brandy. This club was something else, he thought – exclusive, expensive and downright classy.
He looked across at the man who was sitting opposite him and indulging in all this luxury as if it were no more than his natural right. Sir Roger Ives was around fifty. He had slim features and pale silky hair. At first glance, he looked mild and inoffensive, but his eyes, Commander Greaves had noticed right away, were as hard as diamonds.
Greaves took another puff of his cigar. He had been delighted to get the call from Ives – whom he had never met before – and had readily accepted the invitation to lunch, because when a man is approaching retirement age, it’s always useful to start making contact with people who are in a position to find him a job which calls for very little work and a large pay packet. Yes, he’d been delighted
– but he hadn’t been at all surprised. Though no mention had been made of it yet, he was sure that the name of Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend would soon come up.
Even the thought of Woodend brought a bad taste to his mouth. The man was totally undisciplined. He dressed like a door-to-door brush salesman. He had absolutely no respect for people in authority – especially his own commander. He had developed sarcasm into an art form. And worst of all, he had the luck of the devil, so that while his approach to the cases to which he was assigned was all wrong, the bastard usually ended up solving them.
Sir Roger Ives flicked the ash on the end of his cigar vaguely in the direction of the ashtray. “We’re experiencing a little local difficulty in one of our Cheshire plants,” he said.
“Oh yes?” Greaves replied noncommittally.
“Yes. One of our chaps got himself murdered, and frankly, the senior officer you’ve sent up to deal with it seems to be making a hash of the job. There are some obvious suspects, but he seems quite content to let them remain at liberty. Not only that, but he practically accused one of our senior staff up there of committing the murder himself. Now we’ve tried to sort it out on the spot – the chief constable kindly agreed to go and see your man this morning – but it doesn’t seem to have done any good.”
Bloody right it hadn’t, thought Greaves, who had wasted at least three quarters of an hour that very morning talking to Chief Constable Blake on the telephone.
“It’s plainly impossible for us to deal with this man of yours ourselves,” Ives continued. “That’s why I was wondering if you might be in a position to help us.”
The Dark Lady Page 12
