Woodend sighed, and held out a piece of paper in front of him. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Higson, but we’ve got a warrant to search your house,’ he said.
‘A warrant?’ Lucy Higson repeated, a puzzled expression coming to her face. ‘To search my house?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘But what could you possibly be looking for?’
‘I’d rather not say, at the moment.’
Puzzlement was slowly being replaced by mild outrage. ‘The mayor is a personal friend of mine, you know,’ Lucy said.
‘I’m sure he is,’ Woodend agreed. ‘You’re probably quite pally with the Chief Constable, an’ all. But that’s neither here nor there.’
‘Is there nothing I can do to stop you searching?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Then I suppose you’d better come in,’ Lucy Higson said resignedly. ‘But if you think that I’m going to allow you wander around my house completely unsupervised, then you’ve got another think coming. I shall insist on accompanying you wherever you go.’
‘I’d be grateful if you would.’
Lucy Higson shook her head slowly from side to side, as if she still didn’t quite believe all this was happening.
‘I don’t know whose orders you’re acting on, but to search the house of one of the most prominent, respectable and law-abiding men in Whitebridge is just plain ridiculous,’ Lucy said. ‘Wouldn’t you call it ridiculous, Chief Inspector?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Then what would you call it?’
‘I’d call it bloody tragic,’ Woodend said
They went straight upstairs to the master bedroom.
‘Why, of all places, are you starting here, Chief Inspector?’ Lucy Higson asked.
‘Please don’t ask me questions you know I’m not goin’ to answer,’ Woodend replied.
It was a large room – and it needed to be in order to accommodate the two huge wardrobes it held.
Woodend and Paniatowski checked the one on the left. Men’s suits, shirts, jackets, ties and trousers, all of them expensive.
‘That’s my husband’s wardrobe,’ Lucy Higson said, with just a tinge of sarcasm to her tone.
‘I think we could have worked that out for ourselves,’ Woodend answered, deadpan.
The wardrobe on the right contained dresses, skirts and blouses.
‘Could you please identify all these clothes as yours, Mrs Higson,’ Woodend asked.
‘Who else’s are they likely to be?’
‘Just do as I ask, if you wouldn’t mind.’
Lucy Higson sighed and gave her wardrobe no more than a cursory inspection. ‘Yes, they’re all mine. Are you satisfied now?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not. Do you have any other clothes than the ones which are here?’
‘There are my dirty clothes, of course. I imagine the maid will have taken them to the laundry room.’
‘Any others?’
‘There may be a few items I’ll never wear again, but which I haven’t got round to giving away to charity yet.’
‘May be a few items?’ Woodend said.
‘There are a few items.’
‘An’ where will I find them?’
‘Where does anyone put things they don’t want any more? They’ll be in trunks in the attic.’
‘Then that’s where we’ll go next,’ Woodend said.
All the clothes in the attic trunks were Lucy Higson’s size, and she identified them as belonging to her.
They moved on to the laundry room, and Paniatowski and Woodend carefully went through the dirty clothes hampers.
‘What a glamorous life you police officers really do lead,’ Lucy Higson said, and the sarcasm was much more in evidence this time.
She was starting to become uneasy, Woodend told himself. She was starting to suspect that there might actually be something wrong.
‘Do you send any of your clothes to an outside laundry?’ he asked.
‘No, the maid does everything.’
‘An’ there are no clothes anywhere else in the house?’
‘What is this obsession of yours with clothes?’
‘Just answer the question, please.’
Lucy Higson sighed again. ‘No, there are no clothes anywhere else in the house.’
‘Is there any part of the house where your husband doesn’t like you to go? Anywhere he considers his private space?’
‘I don’t know what kind of marriage you and your wife have, Chief Inspector, but my husband and I keep no secrets from each other,’ Lucy Higson said witheringly.
That’s all you know, Woodend thought.
‘Does Derek have an office in the house?’ he asked.
‘He has a study, if that’s what you mean.’
‘An’ how often do you go in there?’
‘Not very often.’
‘Because he doesn’t like you to?’
‘Because I see no need to.’
‘We’ll look at that next,’ Woodend said.
Derek Higson’s ‘study’ was all that might have been expected of it. A large mahogany desk dominated the centre of the room, and there was space enough in one corner of it for a half-sized snooker table. There were framed photographs of various stages of the factory expansion on the wall, as well as a map of Europe with several coloured pins stuck in it.
‘The map shows the places we conduct our criminal activities from,’ Lucy Higson said. ‘The red pins indicate where we have brothels, the blue ones where we fence all our stolen property.’
‘I’d thought it might just be places you shipped your furniture to,’ Woodend said.
‘Well, aren’t you a clever little policeman. You should go straight to the top of the class.’
‘Please, Mrs Higson,’ Woodend said.
‘Please what?’
‘Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.’
There was a full-length cupboard built into the wall. Paniatowski opened it to find several fishing rods and a set of golf clubs.
‘Derek’s a keen sportsman, Chief Inspector,’ Lucy Higson said. ‘You should try developing a few outside interests yourself. It’s very healthy for the mind. And a man who’s totally obsessed with his work does come up with some very strange ideas, you know.’
Paniatowski tapped the back of the cupboard with her knuckles. ‘It’s hollow,’ she said.
She removed the fishing rods and the golf clubs, and examined the panel at the back of the closet.
‘It’s got a false back,’ she told Woodend.
‘Can you remove it?’
‘No problem at all. It’s only held in place by a couple of clips.’
‘Your warrant gives you permission to search the house, not to dismantle it,’ Lucy Higson said, with an edge of panic to her words now.
She doesn’t know about her husband for a fact, Woodend thought, but she certainly suspects that something isn’t quite right.
‘Did you hear me?’ Lucy Higson demanded. ‘I will not have you pulling my house apart.’
‘We’re only goin’ to remove one panel, an’ if we cause any damage, we’ll pay for it,’ Woodend said.
Lucy Higson walked towards the door. ‘Well, I’m certainly not going stand around and watch while my home is destroyed,’ she said.
‘Stay where you are,’ Woodend said.
‘You can’t—’
‘Stay!’ Woodend repeated.
Paniatowski removed the panel from the cupboard, delved into it again, and emerged holding two dresses and a wig. The dresses were cheap and garish. One of them was covered with shiny blue sequins, the other with shiny red ones. Both of them were so large that they would have swamped Lucy Higson. The wig was made up of long, platinum-blonde, hair.
‘Are these your clothes, Mrs Higson?’ Woodend asked.
‘You know they’re not,’ Lucy Higson replied.
And then she burst into tears.
Twenty-Nine
The rain had e
ased off slightly. Now it was no more than a slow persistent drizzle, the kind of rain it was almost possible to ignore, but which still managed to soak those exposed to it right through to the bone.
In Interview Room Three, which had no window to the outside, they didn’t even know it was raining. But then, as Woodend often reminded himself, that was the point of the place.
An interview room was a world of its own; a world in which all the complexities of life were stripped down to a single issue; a world in which one man rained his questions down on another man until he was sodden with them – until he lost the will to resist.
When Woodend entered the interview room, Derek Higson was already sitting at the table. He looked perfectly calm, and perfectly in control of himself, but then many men before him had felt exactly the same at the beginning of the process.
Woodend sat down opposite Higson. He didn’t speak. He didn’t reach into his pocket for his cigarettes, though he desperately wanted to. The silence filled a full minute, then stretched to two. Higson was doing better than Woodend had thought he ever would, but then the man was a salesman – and all salesmen know the value of silence.
It was somewhere in the middle of the third minute that Derek Higson finally spoke.
‘Well, Charlie, here we are, two old mates from Sudbury Street Elementary, back together again,’ he said.
‘Is that how you see it?’ Woodend asked.
‘Isn’t it how you see it?’
‘No. I see it as a chief inspector sittin’ across a table from a man he’ll soon charge with murder.’
Derek Higson laughed. ‘Come on, Charlie, we both know that’s not really going to happen. I wasn’t even in the bloody country when poor Pamela was murdered.’
‘You don’t really think I’ll buy that story, do you?’ Woodend asked, almost sadly.
‘Why shouldn’t you, when it happens to be the truth?’
‘When you drive to Europe, you do it in your bloody Rolls-Royce, for God’s sake!’
‘I know I do, and there’s a very good reason for that. It impresses the clients over there, you see. That’s the trick to successful selling, Charlie. You must never let the customer know how eager you are to make the sale. So when the Germans or the Dutch see me arriving in the Roller, they say to themselves, “Here’s a man who doesn’t need to do business with us. Here’s a man who’d almost doing us a favour by doing business with us.” Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Grow up, Derek,’ Woodend said wearily.
But perhaps that was the problem, he thought. Perhaps Derek Higson had never grown up. Perhaps he’d learned early on – or, at least, thought he’d learned – that if you had a protector there was no need to take responsibility for your own actions.
And who had been one of the first people to teach him that lesson?
Little Charlie Woodend!
‘You still don’t see the point about the Rolls-Royce, do you?’ Woodend asked. ‘So maybe I’ll explain it to you. Even if your foreign clients were prepared to lie for you, and say you were in Europe at a time when you weren’t – and they won’t, Derek, trust me, they won’t – it doesn’t really matter. Even if HM Customs and Excise at Dover have lost all the records of your disembarkation at the port – which they won’t have – it makes no difference. And why is that?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Because people notice Rolls-Royces. People remember Rolls-Royces. Without even breakin’ into a sweat, the Dover police should be able to collect a dozen statements on exactly when you landed.’
Derek Higson thought about it for a moment. ‘So perhaps I did come back to England earlier than I’ve previously claimed I did,’ he said. ‘In fact, if it’ll make your job any easier, I’m perfectly willing to admit that I did. But that’s not to say that I killed anybody, is it?’
‘So what did you do when you got back to England?’
‘I wanted a little time to myself, away from all the responsibilities of the factory. I went touring in Cornwall.’
‘Touring? In October?’
‘The Cornish coastline can be very beautiful, you know, even in bad weather.’
‘So where did you stay? Do you have any receipts for the hotels you spent the night at?’
‘I slept in the car.’ Higson chuckled. ‘You could almost live in a Roller, you know.’
‘You didn’t dare drive all the way back to Whitebridge in the Rolls, because someone would have spotted it,’ Woodend said, as if the other man had never spoken. ‘So my guess is that you left it somewhere like Manchester, an’ made the rest of the journey by bus or train. That’s why, when you got here, you had to use your wife’s Cortina to get around.’
‘I was in Cornwall,’ Higson said stubbornly.
‘But you can’t leave a Rolls on the street, like you might an ordinary car,’ Woodend continued. ‘You’ll have to have parked it in a secure garage. It shouldn’t take us too long to find where that is.’
‘Why are people always trying to fit me up for things I didn’t do?’ Higson asked, as if the question genuinely puzzled him.
‘Is that what they do?’
‘You know it’s what they do. They were even doing it back in elementary school. Don’t you remember what happened in the bogs?’
‘Remind me.’
‘Foxy Dawes and his mates grabbed me and pulled my pants down. Then they slipped a pair of girls’ knickers on to me, and tried to say I’d been wearing them all along.’
‘You know, you said all that so convincingly that I could almost believe you,’ Woodend told him. ‘But you see, Derek, when we searched your house, we found the dresses.’
‘What dresses?’
‘The red one an’ the blue one. Lulu’s dresses.’
‘My wife’s name is Lucy. She’s never called herself Lulu. She wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘You’re Lulu,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s the name Foxy Dawes an’ his mates gave you back at Sudbury Street. I’ve been wonderin’ why you started to apply it to yourself, an’ I think I’ve finally worked it out. Would you like me to tell you what I’ve come up with?’
‘No!’
‘Well, I will anyway. There’s two things you like about havin’ a protector. One is obvious – he or she protects you. But by the same token, you have to put yourself in your protector’s power to a certain extent – an’ I think you rather enjoy that, too.’
Higson smiled. ‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ he said. ‘I always seek out protectors. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You protected me from Foxy Dawes’s gang. And my wife Lucy protected me from …?’
‘From your business goin’ under. New Horizons was on the verge of bankruptcy when you married Lucy. She ploughed money into the firm, an’ now she runs the parts of it you can’t be bothered with.’
‘And what about Pamela?’
‘What about her?’
‘Well, if I had the kind of relationship with her you seem to think I have with most people I come into contact with, she must have been protecting me from something herself, mustn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was that, exactly?’
‘She was protectin’ you from ruinin’ your marriage.’
‘What rubbish you do come up with sometimes.’
‘You daren’t tell Lucy you were a transvestite, because she’d never have accepted it. But you could tell Pamela. An’ as long as one of the women in your life knew your little secret, that was enough for you. But then things came to a crunch, didn’t they? Pamela began insistin’ that you had to leave Lucy. If you’d said you wouldn’t, she’d have told your wife about your little quirks, an’ Lucy would have left you.’
A tear slowly began to run down Derek Higson’s right cheek. ‘I love my wife, Charlie,’ he said. ‘It’s not just her money I’m interested in. I truly do love her for herself.’
‘I believe you,’ Woodend said.
‘If s
he could just have accepted that I liked to dress up now and again – that there was no harm in it – I wouldn’t have needed Pamela at all. But I knew she never would.’
‘How could she accept that, when both the dad she worshipped, an’ her first fiancé, who was a hero, would never have considered doin’ such a thing?’ Woodend mused, almost to himself.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Derek Higson demanded.
‘Nothin’,’ Woodend said. ‘Or, at least, nothin’ that should concern you. Let’s get back to the way you killed Pamela Rainsford.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ Higson insisted. ‘All right, I may have lied about not being in Whitebridge when she died, but I certainly didn’t kill her. I was with my wife the whole evening. Lucy will confirm it.’
‘I can see how you might believe that,’ Woodend said. ‘Why shouldn’t she continue to lie for you, when she’s told so many lies already?’
‘She hasn’t told any—’
‘I don’t know what cock-and-bull story you told her to explain your unexpected return to Whitebridge – and why she had to keep that return a secret – but she believed it. Because she wanted to believe. Because she needed to believe. But any power you once had over her has gone for ever.’
‘Has it really?’ Derek Higson asked, making no attempt to hide his scepticism.
‘Yes, it has,’ Woodend said firmly. ‘It’s gone because she’s seen Lulu’s dresses for herself.’ He paused for a second. ‘You know, I think we both might have been wrong about her never acceptin’ your need to dress up,’ he continued. ‘It would have been hard for her, but it’s possible she might have come to terms with it. But what she’ll never accept is that you shared a secret part of your life – a part that was vital to you – with another woman. She won’t protect you any longer, Derek. She hates an’ despises you. An’ if we still had public executions for people like you, she’d queue up all night just to get a good view of you droppin’ through the trap-door.’
It was as if the bones in Derek Higson’s face had suddenly begun to crumble. His jaw fell, his skin slackened, and his eyes seemed to want to retreat into the back of his head.
‘Help me, Charlie,’ he said.
Dying in the Dark Page 21
