Stone Killer

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Then you should be there, rather than here,’ Judith said tartly. She had retreated as far as she could, and now had her back pressed against the locked door. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I said you should be back there – in Whitebridge – rather than wasting your time talking to me.’

  Woodend said nothing. It had seemed to him it would be cruel to smoke when she wouldn’t, but now he lit up.

  ‘Are there … are there any children involved?’ Judith asked, in a voice so faint it was little more than a whisper.

  ‘There are no kids actually inside the bank,’ Woodend told her.

  ‘Thank God for that, at least.’

  ‘But if it all goes wrong, as it very well might, there are a few who might be orphans by tomorrow.’

  ‘Then don’t let it go wrong!’ Judith pleaded. ‘Let the robbers get away with their haul.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Of course it’s as simple as that! What does money matter, when children’s happiness is at stake?’

  ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Don’t know what?’

  ‘I suspected you didn’t, but now I’m absolutely sure.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense,’ Judith said.

  ‘The armed men in the bank aren’t robbers,’ Woodend explained. ‘They don’t want money.’

  ‘Then what do they want?’

  ‘They want me to prove that you’re innocent.’

  For a moment it looked as if Judith Maitland might faint clean away. Then she somehow managed to stagger forward and grab hold of the edge of the table for support.

  ‘Thomas!’ she gasped. ‘Thomas is one of them, isn’t he?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Woodend agreed. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure that your husband is the leader.’

  ‘Tell him to come out,’ Judith said in anguish. ‘Tell him to give himself up before he does any real harm.’

  ‘I could certainly do that,’ Woodend agreed, ‘but do you think he’d listen to me?’

  Judith Maitland bowed her head. ‘No, knowing Thomas, he probably won’t,’ she said.

  ‘So there’s one way to resolve the situation without bloodshed,’ Woodend said. ‘By giving him what he wants. By proving that you’re innocent. And if you’re not—’

  ‘I didn’t kill Clive Burroughs,’ Judith Maitland interrupted. ‘I swear to you I didn’t.’

  ‘Then help me with my investigation,’ Woodend implored her. ‘If you won’t do it for yourself or your husband, at least do it for the poor buggers trapped in that bank. And for their families.’

  ‘How can I?’ Judith Maitland said, in a voice which was almost a croak. ‘I don’t know who killed Clive.’

  ‘Then tell me about things you do know,’ Woodend pressed. ‘If he wasn’t your lover, what was he to you?’

  ‘He was … he was …’ Judith Maitland began. She shook her head, and grimaced, as if it were causing her real agony. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not, in God’s name?’

  ‘Because I have responsibilities.’

  ‘You’re damn right you do!’ Woodend said angrily. ‘You have a responsibility to the hostages. They’re only there because of you!’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘You know they are! If you hadn’t slit your wrists – if you hadn’t shown the full extent of your desperation in the most dramatic way possible – your husband would never have acted as he did.’

  ‘If only I’d succeeded in my attempt,’ Judith Maitland wailed.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ Woodend said bluntly. ‘An’ now you’ve got to make amends. You’ve got to help me in every way you can.’

  ‘I could try again,’ Judith said. ‘Give me something to kill myself with. A knife! A rope! Anything!’

  ‘Listen—’ Woodend began.

  ‘You don’t even have to do that. Just turn your back for a couple of minutes, and I’ll find some way to finish myself off. And with me dead, Thomas will have no reason to hold on to his hostages.’

  ‘You’re bluffin’,’ Woodend said.

  ‘I’m not. And if you’ll just give me the chance, I’ll prove it to you.’

  ‘D’you know, I really think you would,’ Woodend said. ‘But as convenient as it might be, all round, for you to do away with yourself, I simply can’t allow it.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing more I can do to help you,’ Judith Maitland said.

  Nine

  ‘Judith Maitland’s a complete mystery to me,’ Woodend confessed to Monika Paniatowski.

  They were sitting at a corner table – Woodend always liked corner tables – in a pub called the Green Man, just a few doors down from Dunethorpe Central Police Station. It was one of those old-fashioned boozers which the bright young designers at the brewery hadn’t yet managed to get their hands on, but there was no doubt that its days – like those of old-fashioned policemen – were numbered.

  ‘In what way is Judith a mystery?’ Monika Paniatowski asked, taking a sip of the neat vodka she habitually drank.

  ‘She doesn’t seem to have any real hope of gettin’ out of prison before she’s served her full sentence,’ Woodend replied, reaching for his pint of best bitter. ‘Her suicide attempt is proof enough of that.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So if she was havin’ an affair with Clive Burroughs, why doesn’t she just admit it?’

  ‘It’s always possible that whilst she doesn’t particularly mind people thinking of her as a murderess, she hates the idea that anybody might also consider her an adulteress,’ Paniatowski said tartly.

  Jesus, but Monika’s bein’ hard work today, Woodend thought.

  ‘An’ if Judith wasn’t havin’ an affair, why won’t she tell me what her relationship with Burroughs actually was?’ he ploughed on.

  ‘Maybe we should get back to basics,’ Paniatowski suggested. ‘Is Judith Maitland in prison for a crime she didn’t commit?’

  ‘Yes,’ Woodend said. ‘I rather think she is.’

  ‘And what are you basing this assumption of yours on, sir? Gut feeling?’

  ‘That’s part of it,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘So what’s the rest?’

  ‘An assessment of Judith Maitland as a person.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I just don’t think she’s what DCI Baxter would call a “stone killer”. When I told her about the hostages, she tried to act as if it didn’t bother her at all. But she couldn’t keep that up. She was really distressed by the thought that the hostages’ kids might lose their parents.’

  ‘In other words, however you might choose to dress it up, it’s all down to gut feeling,’ Paniatowski said.

  Why was she doing this? Woodend asked himself.

  But he already knew the answer to that. She was attempting to diminish him in her own eyes – because then his opinion of what she and Bob had done would somehow matter less!

  ‘Besides, she’s a planner by nature,’ he continued. ‘She was part of one of the most successful caterin’ businesses in Lancashire, an’ even her partner admitted she was the real drivin’ force behind it.’

  ‘So?’ Paniatowski asked sceptically.

  ‘So you don’t build up that kind of business without bein’ able to think ahead. Just look at the way she decided to kill herself, as an example. She didn’t just rush at it – she waited for the right opportunity.’

  ‘She didn’t succeed, though, did she?’

  ‘No, but that was only because there was a random cell inspection that nobody could have anticipated.’

  ‘And all this proves …?’

  ‘That if she had killed Burroughs, she’d have been much cleverer about it. For a start, she would never have driven her distinctive white van right up to the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t intend to kill him,’ Paniatowski suggested. ‘Perhaps it all happened in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘Even if it had, the woman I talked to wo
uldn’t simply have driven to the nearest lay-by, an’ set about gettin’ herself thoroughly pissed.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No! What that woman would have done was put as much distance between herself and the scene of the crime as she could, an’ then try to establish some kind of halfway-decent alibi.’

  ‘Well, if you’re so convinced she’s innocent, why are you worrying about her relationship with Burroughs at all?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘You know why I’m worryin’ about it, Monika. Because that’s the way I operate.’

  He shouldn’t need to explain this to a woman he’d been working with so closely for so long, he thought. She knew as well as anybody else – better than anybody else – that he liked to collect all the information he could, even if much of it was later discarded. And she was fully aware of the fact that an essential part of his methodology was to do all he could to get right inside the heads of the people he was dealing with.

  ‘I don’t think you can afford to be quite so leisurely in your approach to this case as you usually are,’ Monika Paniatowski told him.

  She had said it with the express intention of hurting him – he knew that – but he chose to ignore the remark, and contented himself with saying only, ‘Is that because we’re workin’ against the clock?’

  ‘Of course it’s because we’re working against the clock!’ Paniatowski replied brusquely. ‘There are twenty hostages in that bank, and the longer the siege goes on, the greater the danger that some of them will lose their lives. So we have to focus, don’t we? And for once that means that you’re going to have to learn to cut corners.’

  ‘And what particular corners do you think I should be cuttin’, Monika?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Well, for a start, you can stop worrying yourself about the Maitland–Burroughs relationship.’

  ‘All right,’ Woodend agreed. ‘So we go for a new approach, do we? We abandon the methods we’ve used so successfully over the years?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘An’ what, specifically, will that new approach involve?’

  ‘There are two possible ways of going about the investigation,’ Paniatowski said crisply. ‘The first is that we can prove that Judith Maitland didn’t kill Clive Burroughs. The second is that we can prove someone else did. And given that it’s very hard to disprove circumstantial evidence, I suggest that we concentrate most of our efforts on the latter.’

  She was lecturing him as if he were a raw recruit, Woodend thought. And the purpose of that lecture was perfectly apparent. It was no more than part of her ongoing campaign to reduce him to a man whose opinion of her didn’t really matter a damn.

  He should have been angry. He was angry. But she was his protégée – he had nurtured and developed her – and there was at least a part of him which was proud that she had found the strength within herself to stand up to him.

  ‘So you’re suggestin’ that we centre our investigation on Clive Burroughs,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘Even from what we’ve learned so far, he seems to have been a particularly nasty piece of work, and I’m sure there are more than enough people around here who’ve at least thought about topping him at one time or another.’

  ‘So if we follow that line of thought through to its logical conclusion, the main thrust of the investigation will have to be concentrated on Dunethorpe, rather than Whitebridge?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You do realize, don’t you, that that pretty much dictates that the major part of the investigation is goin’ to be entirely down to you?’

  ‘Me?’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘You,’ Woodend repeated.

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Then I’ll explain it to you. I’m the only person Thomas Maitland will talk to, which means that when he wants to talk to me, I have to be near at hand. Which means, in turn, that I can’t be far away from the Cotton Credit Bank for too long. So like I said, any investigation in Dunethorpe is largely down to you.’

  ‘This isn’t a punishment, is it?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Woodend didn’t ask her what she meant by that, because he knew – and knew that she knew he knew.

  ‘Nay, lass, it’s not a punishment,’ he replied.

  ‘Then just what is it?’

  ‘It’s no more than one of them corners that you said we were goin’ to have to cut.’

  Monika took another sip of her drink. Perhaps she had won a victory of sorts, she thought – but it certainly didn’t feel like it.

  ‘I wish Bob was here,’ she said.

  Aye, Woodend thought, we both wish Bob was here.

  Ten

  Even during the years when he had been absent from the town, Whitebridge High Street had still formed a part of Woodend’s spiritual and emotional life. It was there that he stood as a toddler, watching the victory parade at the end of the Great War, waving his Union Jack at the smiling soldiers with no idea of what hell they had endured. It was there that he had sat with his mother – in what would turn out to be the last year of her life – at a street party to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

  He knew the place on market days when it was bustling with life, and on quiet Sunday afternoons, when there were only a few window-shopping strollers to be seen. He had known it in all its guises, and in all its moods. But he had never seen it as he saw it now – as he observed it through the gap between the big police vans which effectively sealed this end of the street off.

  All the market traders’ stalls – save for those too close to the bank to be safely approached – had been dismantled and removed, leaving only the odd piece of fruit lying in the gutter as proof that they had ever been there. The traders’ tatty vans had been towed or driven away, too, and the only vehicles left on the street were police cars, behind which officers dressed in bullet-proof vests and carrying high-powered rifles were positioned.

  The Chief Inspector stepped clear of the barricade, and began to walk up the High Street. Despite all the other clearing up they’d done, none of the officers in charge seemed to have thought to turn off the shop window illumination. That probably wouldn’t have been noticed much earlier in the day. But now – as darkness began to fall – the windows took on a cheery appearance quite at odds with the abandoned emptiness of the shops themselves, an effect made even more bizarre by the merry twinkling of the Christmas fairy lights.

  It was all a scene that no one in Whitebridge could ever have expected to see, Woodend thought. It was as if an alien way of life had invaded the town – and completely taken it over.

  He reached the bank, pushed open the door, and entered. There was no one in evidence, but the single eye of the camera, still pointed at the door, would soon inform those deeper inside the building that he had arrived.

  It was perhaps a minute before the door behind the counter opened, and the hooded man with the submachine gun stepped through it.

  ‘Come closer!’ he ordered. Then, when Woodend had reached the middle of the room, he barked, ‘That’s far enough!’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘It’s well over an hour since I rang your headquarters and said I wanted to see you,’ the man with the gun said angrily.

  ‘Is that right?’ Woodend asked.

  He reached into his jacket pocket with his right hand. Maitland/Apollo, noticing the move, raised his submachine gun so that it was pointing directly at the Chief Inspector.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, relax! I’m only reaching for my packet of fags!’ Woodend said.

  ‘You want a cigarette?’ Apollo/Maitland asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘There’s no need to sound so surprised about it,’ Woodend said. ‘I like to smoke when I’m nervous – an’, for some strange reason, nervous is what I’m feelin’ at the moment.’

  ‘How do I know it’s not a trick?’ Apollo/Maitland asked.

  ‘A trick?’ Woo
dend repeated. ‘Just what do you think I’ve got down there in my jacket pocket? A knife? A bazooka? A couple of platoons from the Parachute Regiment?’

  ‘You may take out your cigarettes, but you must do it very slowly and carefully,’ Apollo said.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Woodend agreed.

  He extracted the packet of Capstan at a speed which would have made slow-motion film look hurried, took a single cigarette out of it, and lit up.

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ the other man said.

  ‘Is that right?’ Woodend asked, puffing on his cigarette and then blowing out the smoke. ‘An’ what might that be, exactly?’

  ‘You’re hoping to avoid answering my question.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware you’d asked one.’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever with me. I asked why it had taken you so long to get here.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Woodend contradicted. ‘You informed me that you’d asked for me over an hour ago. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you did mean to ask what took me so long. The answer’s simple – I can either be the investigative detective you said you wanted me to be, or I can be your little pal who’s always droppin’ in for a chat. But I can’t be both.’

  ‘A few moments ago, you said you were nervous, but I don’t think that’s true,’ Apollo said. ‘You’re not really afraid of me, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Woodend agreed. ‘But I am afraid of what you might do in here. Which is why I’m workin’ as hard as I can to get you what you want. Which is why I went to see your wife.’

  ‘My wife!’ Apollo said, trying – and failing – to make it sound as if he had no wife, and hence had no idea what Woodend was talking about.

  ‘You can’t have expected to keep your identity secret for long, Major Maitland,’ Woodend said. ‘So why bother at all?’

  ‘It’s one of the rules of warfare never to reveal more to the enemy than you absolutely need to at the time,’ Maitland said.

  ‘But I’m not the enemy,’ Woodend pointed out.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Maitland told him. ‘You’re not working for me because you want to – you’re doing it because you have no choice.’