‘I’ll do what I can for you,’ Woodend promised, ‘but you’re goin’ to have to be honest with me.’
Higson nodded. ‘All right.’
‘When Pamela issued her ultimatum, you knew you were goin’ to have to get rid of her. She couldn’t be bought off, because – in her own twisted way – she loved you just as much as Lucy did. So you decided you had no choice but to kill her. Am I right so far?’
‘Yes.’
‘You arranged to meet her down by the canal. You not only strangled her but you raped her with one of the upholstery instruments you’d brought with you from the factory. An’ then you messed up her face so much that it didn’t even look human any more. Now why did you do all that?’
‘You already know.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘I thought it would confuse matters. I thought it might make you think that her killer was deranged.’
He bloody well is deranged! Woodend thought.
‘An’ then, as an extra refinement, you even suggested to me that the murderer might be a woman,’ he said aloud.
‘Yes, I was quite proud of that particular touch,’ Higson said, managing a weak smile. ‘I’m a salesman, Charlie, and as every salesman knows, you’re not selling a product, your selling an idea – a feeling. You have to paint a picture in the customer’s mind of what it would be like to possess what it is you want him to buy from you. I sold you the idea that the killer might be a woman, but you soon made it your own, didn’t you?’
Oh yes, Woodend thought, with self-disgust. Oh yes, I most certainly bloody did!
‘Now you’ve heard my confession, I expect you’ll want me to put all this down in writing, won’t you?’ Derek Higson said.
‘Not yet,’ Woodend told him.
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because first I’d like to hear the rest of it.’
‘What rest of it?’
‘I want to know why you killed Maria Rutter.’
Thirty
It’s a grey October afternoon. They’re walking in the park together. He has told Pamela this is a dangerous thing to do – that even being seen together is a risk for him. He has said it because it is what she likes to hear – because she thrives on danger – but he’s not unduly worried himself. She is his secretary, he is her boss. They have a perfect right to be walking together, and anyone who sees them will probably deduce – from their serious expressions – that they must be talking about business. Why should they think anything else?
‘Have you decided when it’s to be yet, Lulu?’ she asks.
There are times when he regrets telling her his secret name, because he sometimes doesn’t like it when she talks to him as if he really were a woman. But, then again, he sometimes does like it – sometimes positively revels in it. He wishes life were not so complicated – wishes he were not so complicated.
‘I’m waiting for an answer, you bitch,’ she says.
‘It’s not that easy,’ he protests.
‘Of course it’s that easy,’ she says scornfully. ‘You just tell her you’re leaving her. And if you won’t tell her, then I will!’
They have drawn level with a bench. No one is sitting on it. In fact, there are very few people in the park at all. In this weather, most folk prefer to be indoors, warming their hands in the heat of a glowing coal fire.
‘I want to do it,’ she says. ‘I want to do it now!’
‘Here?’
‘Yes, here!’
They have made love in dangerous places before. But never so close to home. Never where there was any chance of their being discovered by people who would recognize them.
He bites back the comment that it’s too risky. That would only excite her more.
‘It’s too cold,’ he says.
‘We won’t be at it long. And it’s not as if I’m asking you to take all your clothes off. We only need to expose the important bits.’
‘I’m not wearing my dress.’
‘You don’t wear your dress every time.’
‘I know, but—’
‘Are you turning me down?’ she asks.
‘Not exactly turning you—’
‘Because if you won’t make love to me, I’ll have to find something else to do to amuse myself. There’s a phone box on the edge of the park. Maybe I’ll go and ring your wife.’
He looks around desperately. There is a small plantation of holly bushes some distance from the path. Once they are in the middle of them, they will be invisible.
‘Let’s do it in those bushes,’ he suggests.
‘Doesn’t holly prick?’ she asks.
‘Not if you’re careful,’ he replies.
A small smile comes to her face. It’s the first one he’s seen there for quite a while.
‘I think we will get pricked,’ she says gleefully. ‘I think you want us to get pricked.’
‘No, I—’
‘It might be rather interesting,’ she says.
She steps off the path and begins to walk towards the holly bushes. He watches her for a second, as if making up his mind whether or not he wants anything to do with this, then meekly follows. It is half-way between the path and the bushes that he decides he has no alternative but to kill her.
They make love quickly and – from his point of view at least – unsatisfactorily. But he can’t let that show, because if he does, she will want to do it all over again.
‘That was lovely, wasn’t it?’ he says.
She doesn’t reply.
‘Just like it used to be,’ he says, trying not to sound desperate.
‘You said I was the only one who mattered to you.’
Doesn’t the risk he’s just taken mean anything to her? He would have thought it would have bought him at least a little time.
‘You are the only one who matters to me!’ he says.
‘You said we’d be together for ever.’
‘We will be.’
‘Then what about her?’
Back to the old theme again. Will Pamela never give him even a minute’s peace?
‘She’s a complication,’ he says. ‘No more.’
‘She seems like more than that to me.’
He has zipped his fly and smoothed down the rest of his clothes. Cautiously, he raises himself above the level of the holly bushes.
And is horrified by what he sees!
There had been no one on the bench when they went into the bushes, but there is now. A young, dark-haired woman is sitting there.
He bobs down again. ‘We have to go to the other path, on the far side of those trees,’ he tells Pamela, who is in the process of readjusting her bra.
‘The path we came off’s much closer,’ she says.
‘A bit of an extra walk won’t kill us.’
‘I know it won’t. But I don’t see the point.’
He daren’t tell Pamela about the dark-haired young woman, because if he does, the reckless bitch will probably instantly incorporate her into the game. She might even go up to the woman and ask her if the noise of their love-making had disturbed her.
‘If we keep our heads down and run to the far path, there’s always a chance someone will see us,’ he says.
‘So?’
‘So they’ll wonder what we’ve been doing. They’ll imagine all sorts of things. Won’t that be exciting for them? Won’t it be exciting for us?’
‘Yes, it might well be,’ Pamela admits. ‘All right, we’ll do it.’
No one does see them, and when they reach the far path Higson says, ‘I have to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘It’s none of your bloody business!’
She is about to protest, then decides against it.
Oh, I can read your mind, you bloody cow! he thinks. You’re telling yourself that if you allow me to treat you badly now, you can make all kinds of unreasonable demands on me later. Well, think what you like, you whore. You won’t be able to demand anything, because you’ll be bloody dead!
After Pamela has flounced off, he retraces his steps, and gets back to the holly bushes just in time to see the young man and the baby in the pushchair approaching the bench. He recognizes the man instantly, through having seen his picture so often in the local paper.
‘Oh God, let him have nothing to do with the woman on the bench,’ he prays. ‘Let them be strangers to one another.’
And then the man stops directly in front of the bench, and he knows that they are husband and wife.
‘I told myself it didn’t matter,’ Higson said to Woodend. ‘That even when Pamela turned up dead, nobody would be able to put two and two together. But however much I tried to convince myself, it simply wouldn’t work. Mrs Rutter was a detective inspector’s wife, you see. And the more I thought about it, the more I could see that she was the only weak link in my plans.’
‘Go on,’ Woodend said heavily.
‘It was easy enough to find out where they lived. They’re in the telephone book. And once the investigation had begun, I rang up my old friend, the Chief Constable, to find out which officers were involved. When he told me Inspector Rutter was part of the team, I knew I no longer had any choice but to act. There was always a danger Rutter would talk to his wife about the investigation, you see, and that she’d provide him with the missing piece of the puzzle. Besides, it seemed as if I was destined to kill her.’
‘What gave you that idea?’ Woodend asked bleakly.
‘Isn’t it obvious? If Rutter was working on the case, he wouldn’t be at home. It was almost as if Fate was inviting me to take my opportunity.’
‘An’ you did.’
‘Yes, I did. I drove Lucy’s car down to Ash Croft. I almost lost my nerve when I saw that people had actually moved into some of the houses, but I told myself that if I parked far enough away from them, I wouldn’t be noticed.’
Nor would you have been, if Mr Bascombe hadn’t been a fan of the new Cortina GT, Woodend thought.
‘You reached Bob Rutter’s house by cuttin’ across the buildin’ site?’
‘That’s right, I did. I’d been worried I might leave footprints, but the ground was so hard that I realized there was no chance of that. Fate again, you see.’
It was as much as Woodend could do not to throttle the man where he sat.
‘How did you get into the house?’ the Chief Inspector asked.
‘Through the French windows. There was a catch on them, but when you’ve been in the furniture trade for as long as I have, that kind of thing presents no problem at all.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I could hear noises from the kitchen. The radio was playing quite loudly, but there was also the sound of pots and pans banging. I crept across the living room into the hallway. That’s when I got my first glimpse of Mrs Rutter. The kettle was on. There were two cups on a tray, and she was reaching up into the cupboard. It looked as if she were getting ready to entertain someone.’
Me! Woodend thought. She was gettin’ ready to entertain me.
‘It struck me at the time that she was moving rather slowly and carefully,’ Derek Higson continued, ‘but some women are like that. She had her back to me. I had a hammer in my hand. I brought it down hard on the back of her head. It was very merciful, in a way. One second she was alive, and the next she was dead. She probably didn’t feel a thing.’
‘An’ when you’d killed her, you tried to make it look like an accident?’
‘Yes, I did. I fixed up the cooker so there’d be an explosion shortly after I’d left. I thought the fire might obliterate the traces of what I’d done. I didn’t make a very good job of it, did I? Though in my own defence, I have to say that I was rather hurried, because I knew she was expecting a visitor.’
‘What about the baby?’ Woodend asked.
‘What about her?’
‘Didn’t it bother you that she might be somewhere in the house you were just about to set fire to?’
‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t think about that.’
‘To tell me the truth, you didn’t care about that,’ Woodend said, his head pounding and his hands itching to fasten themselves around Higson’s throat.
‘I think you’re being a little unfair to me, Charlie,’ Higson said, sounding hurt.
Woodend took a deep breath. It would soon be over, he told himself. He would soon walk out of the room, and this loathsome creature would be somebody else’s problem.
‘I still don’t see why you thought you had to kill her,’ he said.
‘She was a witness!’ Higson replied exasperatedly. ‘She’d been there in the park, and heard me arguing with Pamela. She could have tied us together. She could have linked me to the murder.’
‘You thought that hearing you argue from a distance would have been enough for her to be able to make a positive identification of you?’
‘No, of course not. I thought she’d seen us. Or at least seen me!’
‘She was a blind woman, for God’s sake!’
‘I know that. But I didn’t know it until I read the account of her murder in the paper.’
Epilogue
It was still raining, but instead of rushing to the protection of his Wolseley, Woodend stood in the centre of the car park, and let the weather do its worst. He was not sure how long he was there – though his body remained rooted to the one spot, his mind was ranging far and wide – but by the time he did make a move towards his vehicle, the shoulders of his hairy tweed jacket were sodden, and his boots squelched as he walked.
He would probably have a heavy cold in the morning, he thought as he turned the key in the ignition, but he didn’t really care. Standing out in the rain had been a good thing – standing out in the rain had done a little to wash away the layer of disgust, despair and desperation which had been clinging to him since he left the interview room.
As he drove into central Whitebridge, he found himself thinking about his career. He had saved himself yet again. However much the Chief Constable might yearn to discipline him for interfering in the Maria Rutter murder instead of devoting all his energies to investigating Pamela Rainsford’s death, he could no longer do it – because the two cases were inextricably linked. There should be some comfort to be drawn from that, but he hadn’t found it yet.
He had reached a roundabout. The first exit off it led to the Drum and Monkey. He longed to take it, but instead drove past and took the second exit instead. The case was not quite over, he reminded himself. There was still some unfinished business to deal with.
He’d fully expected Elizabeth Driver to be propping up the bar at the Clarence Hotel, and she didn’t disappoint him. The journalist was drunk, but it was not, he thought, the drunkenness of desperation she’d been displaying the last time he saw her. No, this was quite different. This drunkenness had a celebratory – relieved – air about it.
She greeted him like an old friend.
‘I’ve just been talking to my contact at police headquarters,’ she said, slightly slurring her words. ‘And do you know what he told me? He told that Cloggin’-it Charlie’s come through again – that the brilliant Chief Inspector Woodend has arrested the big bad man who killed poor, blind Maria Rutter.’
‘You never did get around to telling me what you were doing in Whitebridge,’ Woodend said.
‘No, I never did, did I?’ Elizabeth Driver agreed.
‘So let me take a guess. There were no stories to chase, so you went about creating one of your own.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Last year, when I was investigatin’ the bonfire murders, we made a deal,’ Woodend reminded her. ‘I gave you an exclusive on the killer, and you agreed in return to forget that you’d ever known that Bob Rutter and Monika Paniatowski had had an affair. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Only you never stick to your deals longer than you have to, do you? The Monika and Bob story wasn’t that big a news item, but it was certainly made more poignant by the fact that B
ob’s wife was blind, and you decided it was worth resurrecting it. But how would you go about it? How would you bring the story to the surface again? The answer’s obvious when you think about it, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘Somebody told Maria about Bob and Monika’s affair, and I think that somebody was you.’
Elizabeth Driver blinked. ‘You can’t prove it,’ she said.
‘I think I just did,’ Woodend told her. ‘All you were expecting from your mischief was for Maria to institute divorce proceeding against Bob,’ he continued. ‘Then Maria was murdered, and Bob was the chief suspect. You thought it was all your fault, and for once in your life, you learned what it was like to feel guilty. That’s why you were so upset, wasn’t it? Because you thought Maria’s death was partly your fault.’
Elizabeth Driver lurched slightly. ‘But it wasn’t my fault, was it? Whether I told Maria or didn’t tell Maria has nothing to do with anything. She’d have been dead whatever I’d said. So no harm done, and it’s a case of all’s well that ends well.’
No harm done! Woodend repeated bleakly to himself.
A baby had been left without a mother, a husband without a wife. Monika and Bob would be carrying around their guilt for the rest of their lives, not because they were wholly – or even partly – responsible for a lot of what had happened, but because that was what decent people like them did.
He couldn’t lay any of that at Elizabeth Driver’s door, but there was one thing he could blame her for.
‘I hit her on the back of the head, as hard as I could,’ Derek Higson had said. ‘She probably didn’t feel a thing.’
But that was where he was wrong. For the last week of her life, Maria had been carrying around with her a burden of unhappiness, brought on by knowledge of her husband’s affair. And that had been unnecessary.
‘Say it!’ Elizabeth Driver demanded.
‘Say what?’
‘Whatever it is that’s going on in that head of yours.’
‘All right, I will,’ Woodend agreed. ‘If somebody had to be in the park to overhear Pamela Rainsford and Derek Higson, then I wish that somebody had been you.’
Dying in the Dark Page 22
