Fatal Quest

by Sally Spencer

  ‘No, ’e didn’t. Why would he bovver about whevver she caught cold or not, when ’e knew she was going to be dead in ’alf an ’our?’

  ‘So her coat’s still in the cloakroom, is it?’

  Shirley looked a little guilty. ‘No, it ain’t. I brought it ’ome wiv me.’

  Why had she done that, Woodend wondered. Because she wanted it for herself?

  ‘I know what yer finkin’, but yer wrong,’ Shirley said, reading his mind. She laughed bitterly. ‘It’s a long time since I’d ’ave fitted into that coat.’

  ‘So why did you bring it home?’

  Shirley shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Maybe I fort I’d ’ave the chance to give it back to ’er, sometime.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘Or maybe I just wanted somefing to remember ’er by.’

  ‘I’d like to see the coat, if you don’t mind,’ Woodend said.

  Shirley nodded sadly, stood up, and walked over to her battered wardrobe. When she returned, she had a grey woollen coat in her hands.

  ‘Funny fing for ’er to be wearing, really,’ the fat woman said. ‘It didn’t go wiv the dress at all.’

  No, it didn’t, Woodend agreed. The dress, which Pearl and her friend had ‘saved up like mad for’, had been slinky and sophisticated. The coat looked more like part of a school uniform. And that was exactly what it was – identical in every detail to the one Rachael Tompkinson had been wearing!

  ‘I’ll have to take this away with me,’ he told Shirley.

  ‘I know you will,’ the fat woman said sadly. ‘It’s evidence, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘But when this is all over, do yer fink I might ’ave it back?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Woodend promised. He paused to light one of the Player’s Weights he’d reluctantly bought at the Pride of London. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ he continued, ‘but there’s one thing you told me that still doesn’t quite make sense to me.’

  ‘And wot’s that?’

  ‘You said that you didn’t recognize the man when he walked into the club?’

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t.’

  ‘An’ didn’t recognize the woman who was with him, either?’

  ‘No, ’er nievver.’

  ‘So they were both complete strangers to you. Then how did you know the man’s name was Smithers?’

  ‘That’s ’cos of wot I ’eard the two ’ard cases say, after they finished warning me off.’

  ‘An’ what was it they said?’

  ‘They was still standing in the cloakroom, yer see, when one of them turns to the uvver and ’e sez, “Well, that’s one job all done and knuckle-dusted.” I fink he was probably making some kind o’ joke.’

  ‘I think he was, too.’

  ‘So then the uvver one sez, “In that case, yer’d better ring Mr Smivvers and tell ’im, ’adn’t you?” And ’oo was Mr Smivvers, if ’e wasn’t the bloke what left wiv the coloured girl?’

  Who indeed, Woodend thought.

  Twenty-Four

  The morning sun was smiling down on the gently rippling water of the Thames, birds chirped happily in the trees, and the people walking along the Victoria Embankment had a newly optimistic spring in their steps.

  It was a glorious morning, Woodend thought, as he surveyed the scene through DCI Bentley’s office window – the best one in weeks.

  But he was well aware that, for him at least, it would still have been a glorious morning even if there had been a blizzard raging outside. Because his own personal black cloud – which had been hanging heavily above him ever since that night on the bomb site, over a week earlier – had finally been lifted. And sitting there on the chief inspector’s desk was the object which had finally made that cloud go scudding rapidly away – Woodend’s own report into Pearl Jones’s death.

  He had spent most of the night working on the report, and he was pleased with the result. It was sharp and concise. It drew a clear distinction between what he knew and what he could only speculate on. And, most important of all, by doing no more than hinting at the further lines of investigation which should be followed, he had left Bentley room for manoeuvre – had allowed for the possibility that, should the chief inspector want to claim the ideas as his own, he would have no difficulty in doing so.

  Bentley laid the report to one side.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said blandly. ‘But I must admit, Sergeant, that I’m a little bit puzzled by the title.’

  ‘The title, sir?’

  ‘You’ve called it “The Investigation into the murder of Pearl Jones”, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s what it—’

  ‘Whereas it seems to me,’ Bentley interrupted, ‘that its real title should be “How Charlie Woodend, smart-arsed detective sergeant, tried to make himself look like a hero, while simultaneously making his guv’nor look like a complete bloody fool”. Because that’s what you’re really saying in this report, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, sir, not at all,’ Woodend protested. ‘If I’ve come up with a result, it’s only because I’m the one who’s happened to have the lucky breaks. But I don’t expect to get any personal glory out of it.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Bentley’s mused. ‘No personal glory, eh? So what do you want to get out of it?’

  ‘Only what I’ve always wanted – to see Pearl Jones’s murderer hangin’ from the end of a rope.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Hmm, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Bentley asked. ‘Do you know, Sergeant, you’re a lot smarter – and considerably more devious – than I ever imagined you were.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Woodend said.

  Bentley laughed, bitterly and dismissively. ‘Oh, I think you do. I think you do very well. What you’d like is for me to mount a massive operation, isn’t it? The number of people you want me to bring in for questioning alone is mind-boggling.’ Bentley scanned Woodend’s report. ‘Smithers, his minders, the manager of the Charleston Club, his bouncers, any guests at the club we can track down. How many people are we talking about here? Twenty? Thirty?’

  ‘Somethin’ like that,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Or perhaps even more. And then there’s the places you want search warrants issued for – the Charleston Club itself, at least three premises known to be owned by Ron Smithers … What you’re proposing could involve half the Met.’

  ‘I don’t think it would be quite that big an operation, sir,’ Woodend countered. ‘An’ it wouldn’t just be catching a murderer, would it? In arrestin’ Smithers, you’d also be takin’ a major gangster off the streets.’

  ‘Let’s just say that, after we’ve done everything you want us to, we don’t manage to pin this murder on Smithers,’ Bentley said. ‘Who do you think will get the blame for wasting so many police resources?’

  ‘Since I’m the one who started the whole thing, it would probably be me.’

  ‘Grow up, Sergeant!’ Bentley said contemptuously. ‘You’re nothing! Less than nothing. I’m the man in charge, and I’m the man who’ll take the fall.’ He paused for a moment. ‘But say, for the sake of argument, we can make it stick. Who gets the credit?’

  ‘You do, sir. As you’ve just pointed out, you’re the man in charge, an’ it will have been your operation.’

  ‘Yes, you’d think that would be the case, wouldn’t you?’ Bentley agreed. ‘And maybe I would get the credit. At first! But then a certain detective sergeant would start spreading the rumour that it was all his idea – and he’d have a copy of his report to back up his claim. So if the investigation goes wrong, you lose nothing, but if it’s a success, you’re the main winner. Now don’t try to tell me, Sergeant, that you haven’t already worked all that out for yourself.’

  ‘I promise you, sir—’ Woodend began.

  ‘I don’t want promises of any kind
from you,’ Bentley said. ‘You can go now, Sergeant. Close the door behind you, go back to your desk – and stay there until I tell you otherwise.’

  Back at his desk, Woodend tried to analyse what had gone wrong in his meeting with Bentley, and wondered if there was anything he could have done to prevent it from ending up the way it had.

  Was it all down to his own lack of experience, he asked himself.

  He didn’t really see how it could be, because, as green as he was, he had conducted a careful investigation, and produced a solid report.

  So if the fault didn’t lie with him, it had to be Bentley who had deliberately buggered things up. And the only explanation for him doing that was that the chief inspector – for unfathomable reasons of his own – didn’t want the murder to be solved.

  Woodend looked out of the window, and saw that the sky outside had clouded over, and now it was beginning to rain.

  It was half an hour before the chief inspector’s door swung open again, and when Bentley emerged from his office, he seemed much calmer than he had been earlier.

  ‘You’re finally going up in the world, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘To be precise, you’re going up one floor.’

  ‘One floor?’

  ‘You’ve been summoned by God’s assistant representative on earth.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir?

  ‘Deputy Commissioner Naylor wants to see you. Right now! Can you find your own way up there, Sergeant – or would you like me to come with you and hold your hand?’

  ‘I think I can find my own way there, sir.’

  ‘Off you go, then,’ Bentley said.

  And Woodend thought he could detect a great sense of relief in his guv’nor’s voice.

  So DCI Bentley had come through after all, the sergeant thought as he climbed the stairs to the deputy commissioner’s office.

  The chief inspector might well be a loud-mouthed lazy drunk – was a loud-mouthed lazy drunk, as Commander Cathcart himself had so clearly pointed out the previous Sunday – but when it had come to the crunch, he had ultimately decided to do the right thing. True, he had not put his own neck on the line for the operation against Smithers, choosing instead to kick the whole thing upstairs, but even the fact that he’d gone that far was a minor miracle.

  Deputy Commissioner Naylor was in his early fifties. His skin was a delicate shade of pink, and his thick white hair – swept back – gave him something of the air of a patrician.

  ‘It is not my normal practice to interview mere detective sergeants,’ he told Woodend. ‘I usually have matters of much more significance to deal with. Besides, such a meeting could scarcely be called “going through the proper channels”. Even so, I thought I would make an exception in this case.’

  What the hell was this? Woodend asked himself.

  He hadn’t exactly been expecting balloons, streamers, and a full parade when he’d walked through the deputy commissioner’s door. Nor had he anticipated the deputy commissioner himself pinning a medal on him then and there. But the bloody man could have at least congratulated him on a job well done.

  Still, he told himself, this wasn’t his office, and these weren’t his rules, and since Naylor had been at pains to point out what a privilege had been granted to him, he supposed he’d better come up with some kind of appropriate response.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

  Naylor frowned. ‘I wouldn’t thank me yet, Sergeant. Not until I’ve finished disciplining you.’

  ‘Until you’ve finished what?’ Woodend gasped.

  ‘Disciplining you,’ Naylor repeated. ‘You surely expected to be disciplined, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, you certainly should have been expecting it, as should any man who conducts an unauthorized investigation which goes against the explicit orders of his immediate superior.’

  ‘With respect, sir, DCI Bentley didn’t explicitly order me not to investigate the case. He assigned me to another one.’

  ‘And isn’t that the same thing?’ Naylor asked impatiently.

  ‘No, sir, it isn’t. I investigated the case that Mr Bentley assigned me to – the murder of Walter Booth in the Waterman’s Arms – and I got a result.’

  Even if it was the wrong result, he added mentally. Even if, for reasons I still don’t completely understand, Jimmy Machin allowed himself to be fitted up.

  ‘This is the Metropolitan Police Force,’ Naylor said gravely. ‘We do things properly here – and we do not consider that a success in one area of your activities gives you the right to flout the rules in another.’

  ‘But I didn’t flout any rules. My investigation into the Pearl Jones case was carried out in my own time.’

  Naylor’s frown deepened.

  ‘You’re beginning to sound rather too much like a barrack-room lawyer for my taste, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘But leaving aside your disregard for the proper procedure, there is another question to be answered. And it is this – did you really think that you could conduct a better investigation, working on your own, than DCI Bentley could with the entire resources of New Scotland Yard at his disposal?’

  This had to be a dream, Woodend thought. He wasn’t in Deputy Commissioner Naylor’s office at all – he was still back his own bed, caught up a delirium brought on by the flu. How else could he explain the fact that he thought he’d just heard Naylor say he couldn’t possibly expect to solve a case which, in fact, he’d already solved?

  And yet, despite the logic of this argument, the room seemed to be real enough, and so did the deputy commissioner. And as hard as Woodend tried to, he still couldn’t convince himself that he was making up this whole encounter in his own head!

  ‘I asked you a question, Sergeant, and I am still waiting for an answer,’ Naylor said. ‘What made you think that you had a better chance of finding Pearl Jones’s murderer than DCI Bentley had?’

  It was all real! It had to be!

  ‘When I started out, I’d no idea whether or not I’d be able to get a result before DCI Bentley did, sir,’ Woodend said, ‘but the simple fact is that I have.’

  ‘Have you, indeed?’ Naylor asked quizzically.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what do you base this sweeping assumption on?’

  ‘Well, there’s the girl’s coat, for a start.’

  ‘Ah yes, the coat. That proves the girl was in the club, does it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So you found it in the club, did you?’

  ‘No, sir. My informant took it from the club, and gave it to me.’

  ‘And your informant is?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, sir.’

  ‘So I have absolutely no basis on which to assess the reliability of this informant, except the opinion of an inexperienced detective sergeant,’ Naylor said cuttingly. ‘But let us assume, for the moment, that the coat did come from the club. How do you propose to link it to the girl?’

  ‘It’s part of her school uniform.’

  ‘And no doubt of the uniform of several other schools, as well,’ Naylor said. ‘But again, even if the coats were unique to her school, how do you propose to set about proving that she, and not one of the other girls, left it at the Charleston Club?’

  ‘The other girls had no reason to be at the club,’ Woodend said. ‘The other girls weren’t lookin’ for a gangster who they thought might be their father.’

  ‘And how do you know that was what Pearl Jones was doing?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘I’ll tell you how you know – or think you know, at any rate. You’re basing your whole theory on what you were told by another impressionable young girl, who probably doesn’t know fact from fiction.’

  ‘You haven’t met her, sir,’ Woodend said stubbornly. ‘If you had, you’d have as much confidence in her as I have.’

  ‘It seems to me that Tompkinson girl is not the only one with an overactive imagination,’ Naylor said. ‘I can think of a certain detective sergea
nt who seems only too willing to plunge into the depths of unreality.’

  ‘Look, sir, I know there might not be enough evidence to arrest Smithers yet,’ Woodend said, ‘but the evidence will be there, an’ it shouldn’t be too difficult to gather it up – because there’s no doubt that he did it.’

  ‘But that’s just the point,’ Naylor countered. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘As well you might, Sergeant, because Ronald Smithers isn’t the killer.’

  ‘But he has to be! He was at the club, he left with the girl, and—’

  ‘You’re quite wrong about that as well. He wasn’t at the club at all.’

  ‘He bloody was! He’s been placed there by my source, an’ I have complete faith in her.’

  ‘And I have complete faith in the officers serving under me, Sergeant,’ Naylor said coldly.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘Of course you don’t. How could you? You’ve got such a high opinion of your own abilities that you’re convinced that you – and only you – have all the answers. But you don’t – not by a very long way.’

  ‘If you’d care to explain, sir …’

  ‘I am under absolutely no obligation to explain anything to you, Sergeant Woodend.’

  ‘I know that, sir, but—’

  ‘However, since your own arrogance is unlikely to allow you to appreciate just how foolish you’ve been until I do explain, I’m prepared, on this one single occasion, to tell you why I find it so easy to rule Ronald Smithers out of the investigation.’

  Before Naylor would say any more, he was going to have to say something himself, Woodend realized. And he knew what the deputy commissioner expected that something to be.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, almost choking on the words.

  It seemed enough for Naylor – but only just.

  ‘Smithers has been under deep investigation by the Flying Squad for some time,’ the deputy commissioner said. ‘We have him under observation round the clock, which means, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, that he was under observation the Tuesday night before last. So we know exactly where he was, Sergeant – and he was nowhere near this Charleston Club of yours.’