Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  They begin with the old abandoned mills – and even though Whitebridge’s industrial decline is still a whisper of what it will become, there are enough of them. Next, they criss-cross the wild, savage moors – redolent with early spring flowers – which surround the town. And, when neither of these searches produces any results, they finally admit things might have turned really nasty, and begin dragging the canal.

  We’d never treat it so casually nowadays, Monika Paniatowski had thought, as she’d read the old newspaper reports and remembered a similar case which she’d had to deal with when she was only a sergeant. We’d have given the matter top priority, right from the start.

  It is early on Thursday morning that a man called John Smith – out walking his equally prosaically named Labrador, Blackie – makes a discovery which will remain burned on to his brain until the day he dies.

  Their route takes the man and his dog across a stretch of wasteland that, until recently, has been full of thriving allotments which have produced more than their fair share of prize-winning marrows and amusingly shaped carrots.

  As he walks, Smith looks down at the ground – at the previously carefully cultivated patches of land where, even now, a few neglected vegetables are still struggling for survival.

  ‘It’s a bloody disgrace, what’s been allowed to happen here,’ he tells the dog. ‘And for why?’

  The dog, earnestly sniffing the ground, seems completely oblivious to his owner’s outrage.

  ‘I’ll tell you for why,’ Smith says. ‘For that!’

  He is pointing beyond the allotments, at a cutting in the ground – perhaps twenty feet wide and three feet deep – and at the heavy machinery which has been responsible for gouging it.

  ‘It’s been allowed to happen so they could build a bloody bypass,’ the man amplifies, in case the dog has missed the point. ‘A bloody ring road.’

  There is a roar in the distance, as one of the bulldozers fires up at the start of another day’s destruction.

  ‘An’ if you think that it’s noisy now, just wait until the bypass is opened,’ the man warns the dog. ‘There’ll be big lorries trundlin’ along it at all hours of the day an’ night.’

  But the dog continues to show little interest in urban planning, and instead saunters over to one of the huts where, in happier days, the allotment owners had potted their plants and brewed their tea on small spirit stoves.

  ‘Have you found somethin’ interestin’, Blackie?’ the man asks, as the dog paws at the door of the shed. ‘What is it, lad? A rabbit?’

  But even as he speaks, he thinks the prospect unlikely, because there has been little sign of any wildlife since the road builders embarked on their act of desecration.

  The dog continues to paw at the door, and the man – willing to indulge his pet – lifts the latch.

  And that is when he sees her – lying there.

  He looks down at her in horror. The glance lasts only for a second or two before he turns away, but that is enough to register the fact that her arms and face are badly bruised, and that her thick blue knickers are around her ankles.

  He turns and rushes from the hut, the dog at his heel. He has only one desire – which is to get away from the dreadful sight as quickly as he can – but he has not gone more than a few yards when he doubles up and is violently sick.

  The Chief Constable of Mid Lancs, Eliot Sanderson, has never had to handle a case of rape and murder before, but, with a stunning mixture of ignorance and arrogance, he assumes it will not present him with too much of a problem.

  ‘There’s no need to call in Scotland Yard,’ he says, with an airy gravity, to the assembled local reporters at his first press conference after the body has been discovered. ‘My lads are perfectly capable of sorting it out.’

  Then he sits back and waits for the quick result which can not but reflect well on him.

  Thursday slides into Friday, and Saturday, and Sunday follows with almost breathless speed – and still the killer has not been found. Sanderson, bowing to pressure from the papers, gives more press conferences, and – despite his brave words – seems shakier each time.

  ‘What he’s really burstin’ to do,’ the veteran bobbies inform each other, in whispered conversations in the corridors of their headquarters and over steaming mugs of tea in the police canteen, ‘is to call in Scotland Yard – as he should have done in the first place. But he can’t do that straight away, not after all the braggin’ he’s done about how good he is. So what he’s waitin’ for now is some kind of excuse which will allow him to call the Yard in without losin’ face.’

  On the following Monday morning – a full nine days after Lilly Dawson went missing – the excuse that Sanderson has been praying for finally presents itself.

  There is another murder. This time, it is a man called Bazza Mottershead, who has done a stretch for robbery with violence and is well known for his association with what – in provincial Whitebridge – passes for the criminal underworld. His body is discovered behind a garage which the police have long suspected of dealing in stolen cars. His throat has been cut and he has bled profusely – but not so profusely as to mask the fact that someone else who has been at the scene has also bled.

  It is clearly a matter of ‘thieves falling out’, and the general opinion at Whitebridge HQ is that even the greenest bobby on the beat could solve the case – as long, that is, as he is prepared to use his boots as part of his interrogation technique when questioning the known felons likely to be involved.

  The chief constable quickly calls another press conference.

  ‘The death of little Lilly Dawson is a tragedy which has affected each and every one of us,’ he tells the hacks, with a sincerity he has been practising in the mirror. ‘But it is nonetheless an aberration – a once-in-a-generation crime. The murder of Barry Mottershead, on the other hand, is part of a worrying trend towards criminal violence which is sweeping the whole country, and which must be nipped in the bud, here in Whitebridge, before it is allowed to spread any further. With that in mind, I have reluctantly decided to concentrate the resources available to me on bringing Mottershead’s killer to justice, and have asked Scotland Yard to take over the investigation into poor Lilly’s murder.’

  One of the reporters raises his hand in the air. ‘Can I just ask you, Chief Constable—’ he begins.

  ‘I’m afraid, with all I have to do this morning, there will be no time for questions,’ Sanderson interrupts.

  And having – in his opinion – managed to successfully dodge the bullet, he steps hurriedly down from the podium and goes straight to his office, where he dials Whitehall 1212, and asks to be connected to the Murder Squad.

  ‘He wasted six days,’ Paniatowski muttered, as she finished inspecting herself in the mottled loo mirror. ‘The first forty-eight hours of any investigation are the crucial ones – everybody knows that – and he wasted six whole days.’

  She walked out on to the platform to await the arrival of the train from London. It would be an electric train – they were all electric on this line now – and she smiled as she remembered Charlie Woodend’s comments on the demise of the old steam engines.

  ‘Electric trains are all right for kids to play with,’ Woodend had said, ‘but they’ll never be suitable for transportin’ grown men around.’

  Well, suitable or not, they’re what we’re stuck with, Charlie, she thought.

  She closed her eyes, and could almost see him – a big man with a face that looked only half-finished, clad in a hairy sports jacket which was quite unsuitable for an officer of his rank.

  She wondered how he’d looked that morning, twenty-two years earlier, when he climbed down from the steam train – suitable transportation! – on to this very platform.

  And, more importantly, she thought, she wondered how he’d felt as he embarked on his first major case as a chief inspector.

  PART TWO

  Whitebridge, April 1951

  THREE

  Ch
arlie Woodend had never travelled First Class before, and though he’d long ago accepted – on an intellectual level – that such luxury was one of the perks of his new rank, he was finding the practice rather more uncomfortable than the theory had been. It bothered him, for example, that just by paying more for the ticket, he had acquired the services of attendants who were more . . . well, attentive. And while it was grand to have so much space to yourself, it didn’t seem quite right when, further down the train, women with small babies on their knees sat sandwiched between building workers puffing on their hand-rolled cigarettes and commercial travellers clutching their sample cases.

  ‘You’ll probably get used to it, Charlie,’ he told himself.

  But he was not entirely sure that he wanted to get used to it. In fact, he found the idea that there might come a time when he didn’t notice the women with their babies really quite worrying.

  The railway track was following a gentle curve. Looking through the carriage window, Woodend saw the Black Moss railway viaduct ahead. The journey was almost over, and – for the first time in over a year – he would soon be in the town which he had once called home.

  His gaze shifted from the window to the man sitting opposite him. Sergeant Bannerman had had his head buried in a copy of The Times since they left London, and even if he was an inordinately slow reader – and his academic record said otherwise – he must have virtually memorized every article in it by now.

  So perhaps he just doesn’t want to talk to me, Woodend thought. Perhaps he simply doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘See that viaduct, Sergeant?’ he asked.

  Bannerman lowered his newspaper and glanced briefly out of the window.

  ‘Yes, sir, I see it,’ he said, in a bored, uninterested way.

  ‘There’s folk round here who will tell you – straight-faced – that it was built by the Romans,’ Woodend chuckled, ‘and when you say that you didn’t know the Romans had trains, they look at you as if you’re a nutter.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Sergeant Bannerman replied.

  Woodend felt a sudden – unexpected – wave of shame wash over him.

  Now why was that, he wondered.

  It could have been the other man’s tone which brought it on, he thought – or it could have been the fact that he himself had chuckled while telling his story.

  He had been trying to make the people of Whitebridge seem quaint and funny, he realized.

  And perhaps they were. Perhaps their narrow view of the world – their firm belief that Whitebridge, for all its industrial ugliness, was the centre of the universe – was humorous. But it was a belief that he had largely shared before he had gone away to fight in the war. And even if the people of Whitebridge were slightly ridiculous, they were still his people – and he had no right to make fun of them for the amusement of an outsider.

  Not that, despite his efforts, Bannerman had appeared amused, he admitted. Instead, the detective sergeant had seemed rather superior – as if he found Woodend’s attempt to convey quaintness to be quaint in and of itself!

  Perhaps takin’ that promotion was a mistake, he thought, as he felt the rat of doubt gnawing away at his self-confidence. Perhaps I should have waited for a couple of years.

  He hadn’t felt like that when the Assistant Commissioner – who hated his guts – had offered him a double promotion because that was quickest way of getting him out of London and keeping him out of London. No, back then, he’d been delighted. But now he was beginning to see the advantages of spending some time as a detective inspector – of growing slowly towards the role of DCI, rather than of suddenly being dropped into it from a great height.

  But even if he had served his time as a DI, working with Bannerman would still have been a problem, he thought, though – in all fairness – that was due less to Bannerman himself than it was to the fact that they were a classic mismatch.

  A classic mismatch, he repeated silently, rolling the words around in his brain. Yes, that was exactly the way to phrase it.

  He found himself imagining sitting in the opposite corner from Bannerman in a boxing ring, and the master of ceremonies – always an impartial outsider – introducing them to their eager, bloodthirsty audience.

  ‘My lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ said the imaginary MC, ‘may I present to you, in the red corner, Slugger Charlie Woodend – an elementary-school-educated ex-mill worker from Whitebridge; a private soldier in North Africa who managed to claw his way to the rank of sergeant by the time of the D-Day Landings in France; a “big bugger” as they say in Lancashire; a man you might mistake for a bricklayer’s labourer or a digger of ditches, but who is, in fact, no less than a chief inspector from Scotland Yard.’

  And what would he say about the man in the blue corner? Woodend asked himself.

  ‘And in the blue corner, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, Ralph St John Bannerman, educated at one of England’s finest and most ancient schools; a man who missed the war only by virtue of his youth, but nevertheless served with distinction as a second lieutenant in the peace which followed it; a gentleman, in every sense of the word, who carries his slim yet muscular frame with an elegance quite beyond the ability of the bruiser opposite him; a man who could have become a diplomat or a merchant banker, but instead chose to become a humble policeman.’

  ‘Have you ever done any boxin’, lad?’ asked Woodend, carried along by the whimsy.

  Bannerman crinkled his nose in disdain.

  ‘No, sir, can’t say that I have,’ he answered in a lazy drawl which was already starting to drive Woodend crazy. ‘Rugger’s more my sport.’

  ‘Rugger’, Woodend noted.

  Not rugby, which was what they called the game in down-to-earth Whitebridge, but rugger, as played by the gentlemen of England.

  As the train began to slow, Woodend looked out of the window again, and saw the whole of the town spread out before him.

  Every town or city had something distinctive about it – something which set the tone of the place – he thought.

  Paris had its Eiffel Tower, a symbol of both its past glory and its hopes for the future. New York had the Empire State Building, a colossus which proclaimed the city’s energy and confidence.

  And Whitebridge?

  Whitebridge had its forest of factory chimneys – built from finest Accrington Iron Brick – which were still belching out poisonous black fumes, twenty-four hours a day, just as they had always done.

  The uniformed constable, who was waiting for them on the platform, saluted smartly, then said, ‘Hello, Charlie, it’s right good to see you!’

  A look of haughty irritation crossed Bannerman’s face. ‘What you mean, constable, is, “Hello, Chief Inspector Woodend, it’s right good to see you, sir”,’ he growled.

  Prick! Woodend thought.

  Although he supposed that, in a way, his new sergeant was right. He was no longer the old Charlie Woodend – the lad in short trousers who’d gone bird nesting with this constable in Sparrows’ Copse, long ago. Now he was the new Woodend – a Scotland Yard man who was only in Whitebridge to solve a crime that the locals seemed unable to solve themselves.

  But even taking the change in circumstances into account, you could still push things too far.

  ‘It’s good to see you, an’ all, Sid,’ he said, patting the other man on the shoulder. He grinned. ‘So, is this a chance meetin’ – or are you here to make us feel like VIPs?’

  ‘I’m here to take you to police headquarters, sir,’ PC Sid Smart said, looking, as he spoke, at Bannerman, to see if he’d got the tone right. ‘Mr Sanderson said he wanted to see you the moment you arrived.’

  Aye, Woodend thought, he probably had.

  ‘They tell me you’re a local chap, Mr Woodend,’ the chief constable said, gesturing to the two men from London to take a seat in front of his desk. ‘If that’s the case, it’s surprising we’ve never run into each other before.’

  No, it isn’t – not really, Woodend thought. Not when you remember
that my dad worked in a mill, and your dad was the part-owner of one.

  ‘Yes, that is strange,’ he said aloud.

  ‘You, on the other hand, definitely remind me of someone, Sergeant Bannerman,’ the chief constable continued. ‘You’re not related to Samuel Bannerman, the polo player, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, sir, he’s my father,’ Bannerman said.

  ‘Is he, by God! He has a damn fine seat, your father. We played against his team at Hurlingham once, and they gave us a real thrashing.’

  Bannerman smiled. ‘My father does like to win,’ he admitted.

  ‘Indeed he does,’ Sanderson agreed. ‘And I should imagine that you take after him.’

  The whole conversation was getting far too cosy – far too tea-and-cucumber-sandwiches – for Woodend’s liking.

  ‘Do you think we could talk about the Lilly Dawson murder now, sir?’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is time we got down to discussing the more unsavoury aspects of life,’ the chief constable conceded – though he did still manage to look slightly offended at being pushed into it quite so quickly. ‘Let me start by laying down what I consider to be the ground rules.’

  ‘All right,’ Woodend agreed cautiously.

  ‘While I’m more than willing to assist with your investigation in any way I can, I hope you’ll be able to appreciate that, with a second major murder case on my hands, my resources are somewhat stretched,’ Sanderson said.

  He sounded as if he was addressing a press conference, rather than talking to colleagues, Woodend thought.

  And Bannerman obviously felt that too, because he leant forward, rested his hands on the chief constable’s desk, and – with a cold edge to his voice that Woodend had never heard before – said, ‘With respect, sir, we’re not here by our own choice – we came because you requested us to,’

  ‘I . . . err . . . beg your pardon, Sergeant?’ the chief constable said, clearly taken aback.

  ‘We’re here to do the job you asked us to do, and in return we have every right to expect you to provide us with everything we need to see that job through to the end,’ Bannerman amplified.