‘Have I?’
‘Certainly you have. You’re trying to suggest – in a scarcely subtle way – that it’s you and me against the world.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Woodend said harshly. ‘I don’t approve of what you’ve done, an’ if, without hurtin’ any of your poor bloody hostages, one of the marksmen could take you out now, I wouldn’t have a second’s hesitation in tellin’ him to do it. So I’m not on your side at all, Major Maitland – but I am on your wife’s.’ He paused to light a cigarette. ‘I’ve got somebody outside who’d like to talk to you,’ he continued.
‘And who might that be?’ Maitland wondered. ‘A priest?’
‘No,’ Woodend said. ‘Your wife’s partner.’
‘Stanley’s here?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And he’s actually prepared to come into the bank, and face a man pointing a weapon at him?’
‘He is.’
Maitland laughed. ‘I didn’t think he was so brave.’
‘Then you seem to have underrated him,’ Woodend said. ‘Will you see him or not?’
‘I’ll see him,’ Maitland said.
Woodend walked over to the door, and signalled that Stanley Keene should be allowed to pass through the cordon.
Keene was wearing his conservative suit again. Perhaps he wore it to give himself confidence, Woodend thought. But he didn’t look very confident. In fact, he seemed as if he were about to mess his pants.
‘Come closer, Stanley,’ Maitland said, and Woodend realized that the soldier was actually enjoying the caterer’s discomfort.
‘How are you, Thomas?’ Keene asked, in a trembling voice.
‘Have you given even a moment’s consideration to the position I’m in?’ Maitland asked.
‘Well, yes, I—’
‘I’m in a bank, totally surrounded by armed men who’ll shoot me the first chance they get. I haven’t had more than two hours’ continuous sleep in the last twenty-four hours. So how do you think I am, Stanley?’
‘I … I …’ Keene said helplessly.
‘I’m on top of the world,’ Maitland said. ‘Never felt better in my entire life. I tell you, Stanley, this is all like a holiday to me.’
‘I know it must be hard,’ Keene said.
‘Hard!’ Maitland repeated. ‘What does a so-called man like you know about hard?’
This had all gone far enough, Woodend decided. ‘I think you’d better leave now, Mr Keene,’ he said.
But instead of taking his chance when it was offered to him, Keene stood his ground.
‘I don’t think you’re being fair to Judith, Thomas,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t.’
‘Fair to her? What are you talking about? Who do you think I’m doing all this for, if not for her?’
‘Loving someone isn’t about doing what you want for them,’ Stanley Keene said.
‘Then what is it about?’
‘It’s about doing what they want for themselves. And Judith wouldn’t want this.’
For the first time since his initial encounter with Maitland, Woodend sensed that the Major was starting to feel slightly unsure of himself. Stanley Keene might not have served in the war, but he certainly deserved a medal for this, the Chief Inspector thought.
‘What do you know about what Judith would want?’ Maitland asked sneeringly.
‘I’m her partner,’ Keene replied.
‘Her business partner. You shared an interest in making money. Nothing more than that.’
‘Much more than that,’ Keene said quietly.
‘I’ve shared a bed with her, which is more than you’ve ever done – or ever could do. I know how she thinks, and how she feels. She loves me.’
‘She loves me, too,’ Keene said.
‘Oh, I’m sure she does! I’m absolutely convinced of it! Who wouldn’t love you, Stanley?’
‘She doesn’t love me in the same way as she loves you,’ Keene said, ignoring the jibe. ‘I would never try to claim that. But it is still love. And I love her. I’d never make her suffer in the way you’re making her suffer now.’
‘If you love her, why don’t you prove it?’ Maitland hectored. ‘Why don’t you confess to the murder?’
‘If I thought I could convince the police it really was me who did it, then I would,’ Stanley Keene said. ‘If I had the choice of which of us should spend the next twenty-five years in gaol, I’d choose me.’
Mistake! Woodend thought. Keene should never even have raised the possibility that Judith would serve her full sentence. But it was too late to do anything about it now.
The implication of Keene’s words had made Maitland rock slightly on his heels.
‘But Judith’s not going to spend the next twenty-five years in gaol,’ he said, almost desperately. ‘The police are soon going to find Clive Burroughs’ real murderer, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, yes, of course they are,’ Stanley Keene said, unconvincingly.
‘Liar!’ Maitland said, spitting out the words. ‘You don’t really believe they will, do you, Stanley?’
Stanley Keene flapped his hands helplessly in the air. ‘What do you want me to say, Thomas?’ he asked.
‘I want you to say that everything’s going to be fine, you bloody simpering idiot!’
‘I’m … I’m sure Mr Woodend is trying his very best to do what you want him to, but—.’
‘Get out!’ Maitland screamed. ‘Get the hell out of here. I’m sick of the sight of you, you mincing little queer.’
‘Thomas—’
‘Call me Major Maitland, you nasty little poof!’
‘Major Maitland, please, if you’ll just listen—’
The submachine gun had been pointing at Woodend, but now Maitland swung it round and aimed it directly at Keene.
‘You’ve got five seconds to get out,’ he said. ‘If you’re still here after that, I’ll spatter your pathetic little body all over the walls.’
For perhaps three seconds, Keene did not move, then panic engulfed him and he turned and fled out into the street.
‘He doesn’t even run like a real man,’ Major Maitland said in disgust.
‘There’s more than one way to be a man,’ Woodend told him. ‘An’, in my book, Mr Keene’s up there with the best of them.’
Stanley Keene was leaning heavily against one of the police cars. Without its support, Woodend guessed, he would probably have fallen over.
‘I made a complete mess of the whole thing, didn’t I?’ Keene asked plaintively.
‘It turned out to be a mess, all right,’ Woodend agreed, ‘but hardly any of it was your fault.’
What had gone wrong, he’d already decided, was that Maitland – who was prepared to lay down his own life for his wife – simply couldn’t bear the thought that there was someone else out there who loved her, and was also prepared to make sacrifices for her.
‘He didn’t mean it,’ Keene said.
‘Mean what?’
‘All those names he called me. He must have seemed like a vicious bully, but that’s not really Thomas at all. He’s a very decent man, you know. It’s just that he’s under a lot of pressure.’
‘That’s very forgivin’ of you,’ Woodend said.
‘And when he threatened to shoot me – to spatter my pathetic little body all over the walls – he didn’t mean that, either. I knew he didn’t mean it. I was almost sure I’d have been perfectly safe to stay there. But I still ran away. I just couldn’t help myself.’
‘There’s very few people who wouldn’t have run, under those circumstances,’ Woodend said.
Tears were forming in Keene’s pale eyes. ‘Do you really think so, Chief Inspector?’ he asked.
‘I’m sure of it,’ Woodend said.
Stanley Keene took a deep breath. ‘If you want me to go back into the bank, I will,’ he said. ‘It won’t be easy for me, but I’m almost certain that I can force myself to do it.’
‘There’d be no point in your goin’
back in,’ Woodend said. ‘He won’t talk to you again. I’ll consider myself lucky if he’ll even talk to me.’
‘If only I’d been able to handle it differently,’ Keene agonized.
‘You did your level best, Mr Keene, an’ that’s all any of us can do,’ Woodend said.
‘So what happens now?’ Keene asked. ‘Now that I’ve failed so miserably.’
Woodend looked around him – at the sharpshooters on the roofs, at the barricades at the end of the street.
‘What happens now?’ he said. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Keene, I’ve absolutely no bloody idea!’
Twenty-One
Back in her temporary office in the rabbit warren which was Dunethorpe Central Police Station, Monika Paniatowski gazed down despondently at the stack of documents Chief Inspector Baxter had so assiduously collected on the Burroughs case.
There was a nagging feeling in some far corner of her mind that she’d missed something. That at some point the previous evening – either just before she’d fallen asleep, or shortly after she’d woken up – she’d come across a document which, if she’d been feeling sharper, she would instantly have homed in on.
The problem was that she had no idea which document in the large pile it could be, or even which aspect of the late Clive Burroughs’ life it related to. Yet it was there – she was almost certain it was there.
She heard a gentle tapping on the open door, and when she looked up she saw that Chief Inspector Baxter was standing there.
‘Woke up this mornin’, and found my baby gone,’ he sang in a voice that sounded passably like Mick Jagger’s.
He was making a joke of it, Paniatowski thought. But just below the surface, there was clearly a rebuking edge to his tone. And joke or not, she didn’t like being referred to as his ‘baby’.
‘Yes, I did slip out rather quietly,’ she admitted, sounding – even to herself – ridiculously prim. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’
Not quite true. What she hadn’t wanted to do was to talk to him – not until she’d got all her feelings about the previous night properly sorted out.
‘Never mind, we’ll make up for it by going somewhere nice for lunch,’ Baxter said.
‘I’m not sure I’ll have time for lunch, sir.’
Baxter’s smile turned to a frown. ‘Sir? You didn’t call me “sir” last night, Monika.’
‘That was then, this is now,’ Paniatowski said, smiling to blunt the apparent sharpness of her words.
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean,’ Baxter said – though it was perfectly clear from his expression that he did.
‘Then, we were two lonely people, seeking a bit of comfort in each other’s arms,’ Paniatowski clarified. ‘And maybe we will be again. But now, we’re two working bobbies, both snowed under with our current assignments, as working bobbies always are.’
‘Is that really how you see us?’ Baxter asked wonderingly.
‘As working bobbies?’
‘As nothing more than two lonely people.’
‘You don’t seem to have ever seriously considered Mrs Burroughs as a suspect,’ Paniatowski said.
‘What?!’
‘You investigated the case amazingly thoroughly, you’ve collected mountains of background material, but you don’t seem to have ever seriously considered Mrs Burroughs as a suspect.’
‘Ah, I see. That’s a way of telling me not to bring our personal life into the office,’ Baxter said.
‘When I’m working on a case, I don’t have any personal life,’ Paniatowski countered.
Or even when I’m not working on a case, she added silently.
‘So what happened last night, if it wasn’t a personal life?’ Baxter wondered.
‘I really would much prefer to talk about the investigation, sir,’ Paniatowski said, insistently.
Baxter nodded. ‘All right. If that’s the way that you want to play it, Monika.’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘In answer to your question, no, I didn’t really consider her a suspect, Sergeant Paniatowski.’
‘Why not? She had plenty of reasons to despise her husband, and stood to gain a great deal of money from his death.’
‘All that’s true enough. But I already had my prime suspect – locked up in the cells.’
‘So what happened to your prime suspect’s overall? According to your theory, she was wearing it when she killed Burroughs.’
‘That’s true.’
‘Yet you never found it.’
‘She must have destroyed the overall before we picked her up in the lay-by. Given the time element, she’d certainly had ample opportunity to do so.’
‘That would imply she took it with her when she left the crime scene.’
‘Of course.’
‘The nightwatchman said she didn’t.’
‘You’re putting words into the witness’s mouth. What the nightwatchman actually said was that he didn’t see her carrying it. That certainly doesn’t mean that she wasn’t.’
‘So he was observant enough to notice that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes, but yet somehow completely missed the fact that she was carrying a bloodied overall in her arms?’ Paniatowski asked sceptically.
‘It’s possible.’
‘But not likely.’
Baxter ran his fingers through his wiry, greying hairs. ‘You should know yourself that if you ask six different witnesses to describe an incident, you’ll get six vastly different versions of what actually happened,’ he said.
‘You disappoint me, sir,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I thought you were my kind of bobby. But you’re not, are you?’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘No. I’ll admit that you did a superb job of collecting up all the available evidence, but does that really count for much when you’ve already made up your mind about the case? You weren’t really conducting an investigation at all, were you? You were just going through the motions.’
Baxter shook his head again, almost despairingly. ‘You may have all the drive and energy of youth – you may have a very quick brain – but you’ve still got an awful lot to learn about detective work.’
‘Maybe I have. But you could claim that about anybody. Even an old dog should try to learn a few new tricks occasionally,’ Paniatowski said cuttingly.
Baxter looked hurt. ‘In life, as distinct from popular fiction, the obvious suspect is almost always the right one,’ he told her.
Charlie Woodend would never have said anything like that, Paniatowski thought.
Cloggin’-it Charlie approached every new case with a totally open mind. For him, evidence was a broad light which helped to illuminate the whole picture, not a narrow beam which focused on one aspect of it.
Why hadn’t she seen that when they’d been having their argument the previous day? she wondered.
Then she realized that it wasn’t so much that she hadn’t seen it as that she’d chosen to ignore it – chosen to cast Woodend in the role of dinosaur, because a dinosaur’s opinion of you didn’t really matter.
She saw now that having just almost lectured Baxter on his inability to keep the personal and professional sides of his life distinct, she’d been falling into exactly the same trap with Woodend. And what was even worse, she’d let her personal feelings warp her professional judgements.
‘If you don’t mind, sir, I have to make a phone call in connection with my investigation,’ she said.
‘And you’d rather I wasn’t here when you did it?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Right then,’ Baxter said, turning to face the corridor. ‘I’ll see you around, Sergeant.’
‘About lunch?’ Paniatowski said.
‘Yes?’ Baxter asked over his shoulder.
‘I really don’t have time today, but if I’m still here tomorrow, it’s certainly something we could think about.’
Woodend made use of the phone when he had to, but he didn’t care for it. He liked to study the face of the person he was talking to, and a disembod
ied voice emerging from a piece of moulded plastic was no substitute for that at all. Thus, whilst he was pleased that Monika Paniatowski had phoned in her report – because he had been just a little bit concerned about her mental balance – he couldn’t help wishing that she was sitting opposite him instead.
‘You might just be on to somethin’ there,’ he said, after Paniatowski had told him about Judith Maitland’s uniform. ‘Good work.’
‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it?’ Paniatowski’s voice crackled at him from the other end of the line.
Cocky young bugger, Woodend thought. Still, it was nice that she felt she could be cocky again.
‘What’s your view on this month that Burroughs spent in Manchester?’ he asked.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Besides, I think I know what he was doing there – and it has nothing to do with the case.’
Woodend lit up a cigarette, but said nothing.
‘It hasn’t, has it, sir?’ Paniatowski asked, with a note of uncertainty creeping into her voice.
‘Hasn’t what?’
‘Hasn’t anything to do with the case?’
‘Probably not,’ Woodend conceded. ‘But if you want to learn somethin’ new about a feller, you shouldn’t study the ordinary things he’d done – you should look at the extraordinary ones.’
‘So are you saying that I should go down to Manchester to chase this lead up?’
‘If you were given all the resources you needed to do the job properly, then you most certainly should,’ Woodend replied. ‘But we both know that’s never goin’ to happen – that you’re always goin’ to have to juggle with what you’ve actually got. An’ since you already seem to have enough balls in the air to keep you busy, there’s no point in goin’ lookin’ for any more.’
‘So what do you think I should do?’
It was nice that she was asking his advice again, Woodend thought. ‘If I was you, I think I’d pay another visit on the grievin’ widow,’ he said.
‘And what should I do when I see her? Ask her straight out if she picked up a hammer and battered her husband’s brains in?’
Woodend chuckled. ‘Aye, why not do just that?’ he said. ‘She’s bound to break down an’ confess immediately.’
‘You think so?’
Stone Killer Page 15
