Dying Fall

by Sally Spencer

  ‘It’s petrol!’ Crabtree said.

  ‘It’s petrol,’ Woodend agreed. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. ‘Fan out. If we’re lucky, we might just have the bastard.’

  Warner went to the left, Crabtree to the right. Woodend himself made his way down the centre of the tannery.

  ‘You might as well give yourself up now, because there’s no escape,’ the chief inspector called out in a loud voice, as his beam, and those of the constables, swept across the room like small searchlights.

  Their target was hiding behind one of the far vats, close to the tannery’s office. Perhaps – for a while at least – he had been hoping that all he needed to do to escape detection was stay where he was, but the closer the three men got to him, the more he must have realized that that was no longer a possibility.

  When he did make his move, it was with stunning speed. One second he had been crouched down, the next he had flung himself forward and disappeared into what had once been the toilets.

  He moved so swiftly that none of the policemen actually saw him – but they heard the noise he made clearly enough.

  ‘I’ll get him! You find the poor bloody tramp!’ Woodend shouted, as he ran towards the direction of the sound.

  He felt his torch jar in his hand, as he inadvertently struck it against one of the vats. The beam went out immediately, and he let the torch fall to the floor. He didn’t need much light for what he had to do, he told himself. And when he caught up with the killer, it would be good to have both fists free.

  His quarry had reached the toilets fifteen or twenty seconds before he did, and had used the time to pull himself up to a high window. But it was a small window as well, and now he was having to wriggle and squirm to get through it.

  Woodend grabbed at his leg, in an effort to pull him back in, but he was just too late. The killer fell through the window, landing heavily in the alley on the other side, and all the chief inspector was left holding was his boot.

  Dropping the boot, Woodend pulled himself up to the window, and looked out. He couldn’t see anybody in the alley, but he heard the sound of the man running away. It was an odd sound – clump, pat, clump, pat, clump, pat – as first his boot hit the ground and then his bootless foot followed it. It was an awkward way to run – but it was fast enough, and though they would go through the motions of looking for him, they would never catch him now.

  ‘Shit!’ Woodend said softly to himself.

  He returned to the main tanning room. The two constables were leaning over a drunken tramp, who stank heavily of petrol. The jerry can which had been used to carry the petrol was lying a few feet away.

  ‘You, get on your car radio an’ tell headquarters what’s happened,’ he said to Crabtree. ‘You, get him out of those clothes as quickly as you can,’ he instructed Warner. ‘An’ if the old bugger wakes up an’ asks for a cigarette, for Christ’s sake don’t give him one.’

  Crabtree stood up.

  ‘Do you need your torch, lad, or can you find your way without it?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I think I can find my way without it,’ the constable told him.

  ‘Then give it to me.’

  Crabtree handed over the torch, and Woodend took it back into the toilets. The boot he’d pulled off the killer was lying on the floor. From the feel of the thing earlier, he thought he already had a pretty good idea of what it would look like, and when he shone the torch on it, his suspicions were confirmed.

  It was an industrial boot, with a steel toecap.

  Eleven

  When a new cleaner joined the staff at Whitebridge police headquarters, the old hands would take her into a quiet corner and tell her all about Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend’s desk.

  It might look like a disaster, they would explain, and, appearances – in this particular case – were not deceptive. Papers and notes were spread out all over it, and no one had any idea what lay on the lower levels. It would take an archaeologist to do the desk justice, the battle-scarred veterans would tell the novice, and a humble cleaning lady like herself would be best advised to ignore it altogether when cleaning the chief inspector’s office.

  In fact, the cleaners did Woodend an injustice. It was true that the desk, much like his mind, was strewn with seemingly random pieces of information, but the pieces made sense to him, and were set out in a pattern which, while he could not successfully explain it – even to himself – he knew how to manipulate in order to make the connections he needed to make.

  On the morning after the attempted murder, however – a morning in which the sky outside was battleship grey and malignant clouds hovered like armed zeppelins – the desk had been cleared of all its customary clutter, and occupying the middle of it, like an actor centre stage, was a heavy boot with a steel toecap.

  The team, gathered around the desk, had been staring at the boot for some time when Paniatowski said, ‘If only the boffins in the lab could analyse sweat and skin in the same way they analyse blood, this might be a real clue.’

  ‘Aye, an’ if only criminals had a switch in their heads which clicked on when they’d committed a crime and forced them to march down to the nearest police station, this job would be a doddle,’ Woodend said, with early morning sourness. He looked at the boot again. ‘I nearly had the bastard.’ He held out his hand, with thumb and index finger almost touching. ‘I came that close to catchin’ him.’ He turned to Paniatowski. ‘You’ve talked to last night’s intended victim, have you?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Paniatowski replied.

  ‘An’ from your less-than-enthusiastic response to my question, am I to take it that this talk of yours didn’t do much good?’

  ‘His name’s Lew Taylor,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘He’s ori­ginally from down south, and he says he’s been on the road since just after the Queen’s Coronation. He doesn’t have any enemies he knows of, and he hasn’t got a clue why anybody would want to burn him alive. The one thing he is sure of is that he’s getting out of Whitebridge as fast as his legs will carry him.’

  Woodend nodded, as if that was exactly what he’d expected to hear. ‘So if we’re gettin’ nothin’ from the victims, let’s attack it from the other side,’ he suggested. ‘Do you think the hard mods – an’ specifically your mate Barry Thornley – could have carried out the attack on Taylor, Colin?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Beresford said cautiously. ‘Bazza left the rest of the gang at just after eleven, so it would have been easy enough for him to get to the tannery by midnight.’

  ‘Then why isn’t that possibility excitin’ you?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘Well, for a start, the hard mods aren’t the only ones who wear this kind of boot. Anybody who works in a factory will own at least a couple of pairs.’

  ‘True,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘And even if Bazza was responsible for the second attack, I’d be surprised if he was also responsible for the first.’

  ‘What’s the thinkin’ behind that?’

  ‘I learned quite a lot about the hard mods last night. I’m not saying I’m an expert on them yet, but I’ve at least got some idea of how they think.’

  ‘An’ how do they think?’

  ‘Short term. If they see an Asian on the street, they might decide, on the spur of the moment, to kick the shit out of him – but to come up with the idea of burning tramps, sometime in the future, is just not their style. They don’t plan – they react.’

  ‘In other words, you think that if Barry Thornley was involved in last night’s attack, he was doin’ no more than copyin’ the previous evening’s murder?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ Beresford agreed.

  ‘Jesus!’ Woodend said. ‘That’s all we bloody need.’

  ‘There is another alternative,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘An’ what might that be?’

  ‘That though the hard mods didn’t come up with the idea themselves, they’re the ones who are implementing it.’

  ‘In other words, there’
s somebody else behind them, pullin’ the strings?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘An’ do you have any theories as to who this somebody else might be?’

  ‘I’d put my money on Councillor Scranton – the tramps’ friend and gentle Jesus of race relations,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?’ Woodend asked sceptically. ‘I mean, I know the man’s a bastard, but that’s a long way from accusin’ him of bein’ a murderin’ bastard.’

  ‘The two crimes that have been committed are apparently random and meaningless,’ Paniatowski argued. ‘But once we put Councillor Scranton in the frame, they’re not random or meaningless any more.’

  She had a point, Woodend conceded, and looked across at Rutter, to see what his right-hand man thought about the idea.

  But Rutter didn’t seem to be thinking of anything very much.

  Pogo woke up to the sound of birdsong, and for a moment he wondered what all the birds were doing in the front bedroom of a decaying terraced house. Then he opened his eyes, saw the evergreen leaves which surrounded him, and remembered where he was.

  The decision he’d made to abandon his usual base had not been taken lightly. He’d been well aware that there was a risk he might freeze to death in the night – but it was a risk worth running when the possible alternative was waking up in flames.

  Pogo knew all about risk. He had spent the last months of the War behind enemy lines, as part of a sabotage team. There’d been an officer leading them at first, but he’d been killed and the sergeant had taken over. Then the sergeant had died, too, and Pogo reluctantly assumed command, only to discover – to his own amazement – that not only did he like being in charge, but that he was good at it.

  He crawled slowly out of his sleeping bag. His back ached, and the muscles in his legs were clenched tightly, but both those things would pass. He stood up, put all his weight on his left foot, and began the painful process of stretching his right leg. And as he brought slow relief to his burning muscles, he found his mind drifting back to the dying moments of the War.

  The raids he led his men on were bolder and more audacious than any of those either of his predecessors had planned – and that meant they were much riskier, too. When he went to sleep at night, it was always in mild wonder that he was still alive. And when he woke up in the morning, it was with the expectation that this would be his last day on earth.

  These thoughts didn’t bother him. He needed no vision of a better future for himself – or any personal future at all – to drive him on. He had a purpose – and that was all the engine he required to drive him on.

  He had a purpose now, he realized with surprise, as he transferred his weight to his right foot – a purpose that Monika Paniatowski had given him. He was the champion of men who had so little regard for their own worth that they could not be bothered to champion themselves. He would save them, even though they would not thank him for it – even though many of them had no desire to be saved.

  He took his bottle of meths out of his pocket, looked at it for a moment, then put it back again. It wasn’t necessary, he told himself – though with not enough conviction to make him drop it in the nearest waste bin.

  He thought about the ‘bacon sandwich’ tramp of the previous night. The man’s information might be a valuable starting point for his investigation. On the other hand, he might merely have been making it all up – saying what he did because he had to say something if he was to get his reward.

  Pogo put his hand in his pocket and jangled the change which was left from the pound note that Monika Paniatowski had given him. Those coins would make his work easier, because having given up almost everything else, money was the one thing that tramps still really wanted.

  Emerging from his hideout, he started to make his way to the public toilets, where there were washbasins which would allow him to clean up a little before he began his day’s work.

  A young woman, taking her baby for an early morning walk through the park in its pram, saw him suddenly emerge, put the pram into a rapid three-point turn, and walked hurriedly back the way she had come.

  She was frightened of him, Pogo thought – and who could blame her?

  Rutter looked down at his watch. It was the third time he’d done so in the previous ten minutes, Woodend noted.

  ‘I think I’d better be going,’ the inspector said.

  ‘Any particular reason for your hurry?’ Woodend enquired. ‘Is it that you have something more important to do? Or could it be that we’re just startin’ to bore you?’

  Paniatowski and Beresford exchanged rapid – questioning – looks. ‘We’re not used to this kind of friction,’ Beresford’s expression said. ‘Bloody right, we’re not!’ Paniatowski’s agreed.

  ‘I have to go to Manchester,’ Rutter said, suddenly very much on his dignity. ‘You asked me to go there yourself, sir. Remember? You told me you wanted me to track down the victim’s relatives.’

  That was accurate enough, as far as it went, Woodend thought. But it wasn’t like Bob Rutter to want to miss out on one of the team’s brainstorming sessions, whatever else he had to do.

  Then he found himself wondering if his thought had been strictly accurate. It wasn’t like the old Bob Rutter to miss out on the brainstorming, but this new Bob Rutter – this Elizabeth Driver Bob Rutter – was a different matter entirely.

  ‘Am I being fair?’ he asked himself silently. ‘After all, it was Bob who uncovered the identity of the first victim.’

  Yes, that was true, even if Rutter had left his other duties – his assigned duties – in order to do it. But after his initial feelings of guilt had faded, the chief inspector had found himself wondering if Rutter had been entirely straight with him the previous day – if the whole of his absence could be accounted for by his search of the cotton mill. And if it couldn’t, then what the bloody hell had he been doing the rest of the time?

  There really was no room for passengers in a murder inquiry, Woodend thought – and it looked to him as if that was just what his inspector – his almost-son – was rapidly becoming.

  ‘Shall I go or shall I stay?’ Rutter asked, with just an edge of impatience in his voice.

  ‘You might as well go,’ Woodend told him. ‘There’s no point in stayin’ if your heart’s not in it.’

  Big Bazza was at work. He hated his job – the mindless repetitive nature of the production line, the heat and the sweat, the air clogged with iron filings, and the fact that he had to be there in the factory, whether he felt like it or not. Even his pay packet on a Thursday was not much consolation, since he had to hand most of it over to his mother.

  Though he was not a deep thinker, his thoughts were deep enough for him to realize that he was trapped. He was like an animal in a cage – powerful in his own right, but made helpless by the thick bars. And outside the cage were the others – the ones who had escaped from it themselves, or else, by an accident of birth, had never been in it. These others could do what they liked – laugh at him, poke him with a stick – and he had to take it.

  But the nights were different. At night, the bars melted away and he was free to roam as he wished – a dangerous, frightening animal on the loose. At night, he was the one outside the cage.

  ‘We pay you to work, not to stand there daydreamin’,’ said a harsh voice to his left.

  Big Bazza looked up. ‘Sorry, Mr Hoskins.’

  The foreman glanced down at his feet. ‘New boots, Thornley?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Mr Hoskins.’

  ‘Well, they look new to me.’

  ‘They’re my best boots, but they’re not new,’ Bazza explained.

  The foreman shook his head wonderingly. ‘Wearin’ your best boots to work,’ he said. ‘Whatever will you do next? It seems to me that you young lads have more money than sense.’

  ‘Are you comfortable about the idea of continuin’ to hang around with the hard mods, Colin?’ Woodend asked Beresford.


  ‘Yes,’ the DC replied.

  ‘You don’t sound very comfortable,’ Woodend told him. ‘If you’re thinkin’ that it will put you in too much danger—’

  ‘The thought of danger wasn’t on my mind at all,’ Beresford interrupted. ‘What I was thinking about was that, if I’m going to learn anything useful, I need the gang to take me into their confidence.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Woodend said.

  ‘But it usually takes time to build confidence – and time is just what we don’t have.’

  ‘Agreed again.’

  ‘So what I’m looking for is some kind of short-cut to acceptance. I think I’ve found one – but to make it work, I’m going to need Sergeant Paniatowski’s help.’

  ‘What can Monika do?’ Woodend wondered. ‘Even if she shaves her head like you’ve shaved yours, she’ll never look like a working-class male thug.’ He paused, then chuckled. ‘Let’s face it, for a start, she’s far too old to pull off that kind of deception.’

  ‘Thanks a bundle, sir. You’ve really made my day,’ Paniatowski said.

  But she did not mind the joke. She welcomed a little levity after the scene with Rutter.

  They all did.

  ‘So tell me how you think the sergeant can help you,’ Woodend said to Beresford.

  The constable outlined his scheme, and when he’d finished Woodend shook his head and said, ‘I’ve heard of some pretty devious, underhand tricks in my time, but I’ve never heard of that particular variation before.’

  Beresford looked crestfallen. ‘It was just an idea,’ he said. ‘If you don’t think it will work, then I’m more than willing to—’

  ‘Don’t do yourself down, lad,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘It’s a brilliant idea – a real bobby-dazzler of an idea. What do you think, Monika?’

  ‘It’s good,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘An’ I’ll tell you somethin’ for nothin’, young Beresford,’ Woodend continued. ‘If you carry on in this devious underhand way, you’ll have a great future ahead of you in the CID.’

  As Bob Rutter left the doctor’s surgery, he checked his watch. It had been a very detailed medical examination – which was a good thing when you were considering taking an import­ant step in your life – but it did mean that he had spent longer in the surgery than he’d planned to. Still, if he broke a few speed regulations on the journey between Whitebridge and Manchester, he should be able to make up at least some of the time he had lost.