McLeash grunted again and set off towards the pub.
Woodend watched his progress with interest. In his dress, his general attitude, even his walk, he was typical of every other gypsy the Chief Inspector had had dealings with, but in one significant way he was very unusual indeed.
The prickle at the back of his neck had not gone away, even though McLeash had. There was something he had missed. Woodend concentrated. Someone else was watching him, had been watching him all the way through his exchange with the gypsy. He turned, slowly, and located the man, halfway down the side of the salt store.
The watcher’s instincts were as sensitive as Woodend’s. He wheeled round and began to run back towards the canal. Woodend followed, jumping over clumps of grass, swerving round brambles dimly outlined by the light of the moon. His lungs burned with the effort, but he was gaining on his prey. He would have the bastard.
The ground gave way beneath him and, while the rest of his body moved on, his right foot remained stuck in the rabbit hole. He felt his ankle twist and then his body was lurching forward and downward. He hit the ground with a sickening thud and felt the breath being forced out of him. As he painfully pulled himself up again, he saw the man turn right and disappear under the bridge.
“Shit!” he said.
Pressure on the ankle sent hundreds of red-hot needles shooting up his leg.
“I’m too bloody old for this sort of game,” he thought. “This is what we have sergeants for.”
He cursed the rabbit whose hole had brought him down. The man he had been following had something to hide – or why would he run? And now he had lost him. Or had he?
He put himself in the other man’s place. He wouldn’t risk coming back the same way, so he had two choices. He could follow the canal to Claxon, or he could wait a while and then return up the steep dog-legged path around the other side of the salt store. Woodend, hobbling slightly, walked up the bridge and stationed himself outside the door of Number One Pan.
It was fifteen minutes before he heard the cautious footsteps at the bottom of the path, and another twenty seconds before a head emerged, looking quickly to the left and right. The man saw him and bobbed down again.
What the bloody hell was he doing out at this time of night?
“Good evenin’, Mr Poole,” Woodend said loudly.
The head appeared again and Poole climbed the last few feet of the path with the air of a man who had been taking a purely innocent stroll. Woodend walked across the road to him.
“It’s a lovely night,” Poole said, and for once his dourness was replaced by an effort to be pleasant.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Woodend said. “Your wife told me you’d got a headache and were lyin’ down.”
“I was but . . . er . . . I thought some fresh air might do me good, so I took a walk along the canal.” He seemed to feel the need to say more, and added, “I often do.”
“Didn’t see anybody else while you were down there, did you?” Woodend asked.
“No. Should I have done?”
“No,” Woodend said. “No, I don’t think you should.”
Woodend watched Poole until he entered the George, then made his own way down the hill. He stopped once more in front of the salt store. It seemed to gaze down, Sphinx-like, on the life of the village below it – solid, immovable, enigmatic.
“So,” he said, addressing the empty building, “we’ve got the riddle, now what’s the bloody answer?”
Chapter Eight
As if in mourning for Diane Thorburn, whose funeral was that day, the weather had suddenly changed. The sky was grey and a cold, unseasonable wind blew down Maltham Road, carrying with it the smell of salt and smoke. As Woodend leant over the car, issuing instructions to Davenport, he felt the drizzle trickling down his collar.
They had passed Black on the way into the village, standing self-consciously at the bus stop, dressed in his best suit so as not to intimidate the school kids.
Not that there’s much chance of that, Woodend thought. Give him an eye patch and razor scars, and he’d still look like a Sunday School prize winner.
Davenport executed a neat three-point turn and headed off back to Maltham. With any luck, he would discover the whereabouts of Lieutenant Ripley who might, or might not, have strangled his girlfriend sixteen years earlier.
“We’ll split up,” Woodend said. “I’ll take the narrow boat people and you go an’ see our resident child molester, Fred Foley. Want any guidance?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” Rutter replied confidently.
“Right,” Woodend said. “Well just think on. I know you can’t wait to get back down south – back to civilisation – an’ Foley is a very convenient suspect. But don’t go arrestin’ him, lad. Not unless there’s at least a 50 per cent chance you can make it stick.”
Two days earlier, Rutter would not have known how to take the remark. Now he grinned and said innocently, “I don’t see how the murderer could be anybody in the village, sir. I mean – they are all northerners.”
“Cheeky young bugger,” Woodend said, without heat, as he turned and walked up Maltham Road.
Cadet Black had had it all planned out. He would get to the bus stop before anyone else, and talk to individual kids as they arrived. During the journey, he’d move discreetly up and down the bus, interviewing the latecomers.
It did not work out like that. For a start, the kids were reluctant to move away once they had been questioned, preferring instead to stand in a tight circle around him. Once on the red North Western bus, it was even worse; those in front of him turned round, those behind looked over his shoulder, and most of the rest crowded in the aisle. And instead of him asking them questions, they were asking him.
“Have you caught him yet, Phil?”
“Have you got any clues?”
“Did they let you see the body?”
“Was it horrible?”
Black told them several times to sit down, but they ignored him – especially the older girls.
In the end, the conductor, a small, thin, middle-aged man with National Health specs, intervened.
“I’ve told you before about misbehavin’,” he shouted. “Now get back to yer seats.”
They obeyed almost instantly. The conductor sat down next to Black.
“If I was you, son,” he said kindly, “I’d leave my questionin’ until I got off the bus.”
Black nodded, and felt about ten years old.
They were a bloody nuisance, this lot, the conductor thought. All except for that pretty little girl from the pub. She hadn’t bothered the young feller. She’d sunk right down in her seat, almost as if she was tryin’ to be invisible.
Foley’s front garden was a wilderness, the paint on the door was cracked and peeling, two broken windows had been boarded up with pieces of roughly torn cardboard. The house stood out like a sore on the neat face of Harper Street.
Rutter swung open the rickety gate and knocked on the front door. From within, a dog barked, then a harsh voice said, “Take that, you bugger!” and the animal yelped. Still no one came to the door. Rutter knocked again.
“I’ll pay you next week,” the voice called out. “I’m a bit short at the moment.”
Rutter hammered a third time.
“Police! Open up!”
The door, like the gate, creaked and juddered on its hinges. If anything, the man who opened it was in an even worse state. His eyes were red, his nose encrusted with blackheads. Thick black stubble clung untidily to his chin. He was dressed in a soiled collarless shirt and a pair of ragged grey trousers. A greasy cap rested on top of his straggly hair. Rutter knew that he was only in his early forties, but had it not been for his body, which was still lean and hard, he could have been taken for sixty.
“What’s it all about?” Foley demanded.
“You know as well as I do,” Rutter said.
“Diane Thorburn?”
Rutter nodded.
“You mak
e one mistake,” Foley said bitterly, “an’ they never let you forget it. I suppose you’d better come in.”
The dog, a mangy mongrel, cringed when Foley entered the kitchen, then crawled on its belly under the table. Rutter looked around the room. The table had no cloth and its bare boards were caked with congealed food. The walls and windows were filthy. The whole place stank of urine, cheap cider and vomit. Rutter decided not to touch anything if he could help it. Foley, having no such scruples, plopped himself down in a battered armchair, oblivious to the clouds of dust that swirled around him.
“What d’you want to know?” he demanded.
There was no point in being subtle, not with a man like this. Brutality was the only thing he would understand.
“Let’s start with the girl you pushed in the canal,” Rutter said. “Jean Parkinson.”
Foley shook his head.
“You have to go further back than Jean Parkinson, right back to the bloody Yanks.”
“The Yanks?”
“I was happily married before the war,” Foley said. “Then the Americans came across with their dollars an’ their nylon stockin’s. My missis started carryin’ on with them before they’d even unpacked their kitbags. Only I didn’t know.”
It’s always the people most closely concerned who are the last to know, Rutter thought. Look at Mr Wilson.
“When did you find out?” he asked.
Foley hesitated.
“I had me suspicions before I went overseas,” he said, “but I didn’t know for sure till I came back. Three years of fightin’ for me country, and when I got home, she’d buggered off to America. They’re rotten, women – all of ’em.”
He buried his face in his hands and began to sob. Rutter had to restrain himself from stepping forward and patting the man’s heaving shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Foley said, sniffing. “Anyway, I started drinkin’ an’ I lost me job on the pans. I lost me mates, too. I just used to sit here on me own. I got talkin’ to the kids in the street. It was boys an’ girls at first and then . . . it was just girls. They used to come round to see if I’d got any little jobs, shoppin’ or owt. I’d always give ’em a few coppers for their trouble.”
Rutter could see it all: the loneliness, the misery. He could understand how a man no longer able to cope with the adult world might turn instinctively to the simplicity of children.
“Some of ’em were little minxes,” Foley continued. “They looked innocent enough, but they had knowin’ eyes. That Jean Parkinson, she didn’t have to go under the bridge with me. She knew what I wanted, all right, even before I did. She led me on, an’ then she said no. But I never threw her in the canal, I just pushed her away from me an’ she fell.”
“The judge didn’t believe that,” Rutter said, though not harshly.
“I can’t say I blamed him. I served me time, an’ that’s fair enough. But I swear, as God is my witness, I never meant her no harm. An’ I had nothin’ to do with what happened to Diane Thorburn either.”
Rutter felt another wave of sympathy. You’re a policeman, he told himself angrily. Act like one.
“Where were you the morning Diane met her death?” he asked, in a cold, official tone.
“How would I know?” Foley asked. “The only day that matters to me is Thursday, when I draw me dole. All the rest of ’em just run together. I sit in here, I walk about without havin’ anywhere to go. They won’t even serve me in the pub now.”
“Is it likely that any neighbours saw you?”
“I haven’t got any neighbours,” Foley said, “just people who live near to me. They meet me on the street, they turn the other way. I’m invisible to them, do you know that?”
Black stood in the playground of Maltham Secondary Mod. with Miss Paddock, Diane’s form teacher. All around them, children were running and playing games, laughing and arguing. Miss Paddock hadn’t been in the school when Black was a pupil there, and she seemed younger and prettier than the teachers he’d had. But she was still a teacher and he felt uncomfortable in her presence, expecting her, at any moment, to accuse him of smoking in the toilets or copying his homework.
“I pride myself on knowing all about the children in my form,” Miss Paddock explained. “Their little problems and worries, their family background. Beresford,” she shouted at a boy standing to the left of Black, “if you can’t use that bat properly, I’ll take it off you. In fact,” she said, returning to the cadet, “I’m famous for never having to look anything up in the records. But Diane Thorburn, well, there’s really very little I can tell you about her. Now if it had been one of my other girls who’d been murdered . . .” She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh, what a terrible thing to say.”
Black was still marvelling at his discovery that teachers could be real people.
“She was a quiet girl, withdrawn. Maybe it was because she was Roman Catholic. Most of them go to Ashburton RC High, but I expect living in Salton, with the buses and everything . . . dear me, I do go on, don’t I?”
“Any information is useful in a murder inquiry,” Black said in a serious, official voice, then spoiled the effect by adding, “Miss.”
The teacher stretched out her arm and pointed to a girl who was passing.
“Maureen, I want to see you straight after assembly,” she said sternly. “It wasn’t just her religion, though,” she said, addressing Black again. “I think her parents were a little over-protective. She never really had the chance to get to know other girls outside school, at dances or on trips to the pictures. And that’s where friendships are really cemented. I think it must have been especially hard for her this year, now a lot of them are starting to go out with boys and . . .”
“The mornin’ she died,” Black reminded her.
“Oh, yes. I really can’t tell you anything about that,” the teacher admitted, a little shamefacedly. “As far as I’m concerned, she just never arrived at school.”
“Thank you anyway, Miss . . . Paddock,” Black said.
But he was not dismissed yet.
“You’re from Salton yourself, aren’t you?” she asked. “Do you know Margie Poole?”
“Not well,” Black conceded.
“Between ourselves,” Miss Paddock dropped her voice, “I’m a bit worried about her. The last few days, she’s been so pale and quiet. Oh, I know she was Diane’s best friend, and it was bound to cause some distress – but it’s more than that. She even fainted outside the school gates on Tuesday – or was it Wednesday? – morning. I’ve been meaning to contact her parents about it, but everything’s such a rush at this time of year that I simply haven’t had the time.”
“I think you’re underestimatin’ the shock that comes with murder,” said Black, one day on the inquiry and already an expert on the subject. “It’s always terrible when one of your family or friends dies suddenly, a road accident or a drownin’. But it’s a sight worse to know somebody’s actually killed ’em.”
Miss Paddock looked relieved.
“You’re probably right,” she said. “Thank you, Constable.”
Constable. Black had been brought low by the bus conductor’s attitude to him – now he felt like a real policeman again.
The Daffodil and The Iris had just arrived and were moored close to The Oriel. The Walters and the McQueens, both couples in late middle age, seemed to bear Woodend no grudge for sealing off the salt store. As far as they were concerned, he was only doing his job. Their stories tallied perfectly: they had arrived in Salton early on Monday morning and their boats had been fully loaded by the time Brierley’s men knocked off work. They had set off for Wolverhampton early on Tuesday. When had McLeash arrived? Some time in the afternoon. They were decent, respectable folk, Woodend thought. If it turned out they’d had anything to do with the murder, he’d give up policing and open a paper shop.
Unlike the others, McLeash did not invite Woodend into his small cosy cabin and offer him a cup of tea. Instead, the interview was conducted on the
canal bank, with the wind whipping around their trouser legs.
Woodend had noted, the night before, that McLeash was tall and muscular, but it was only now that he was really able to get a proper look at him. McLeash’s curly hair was jet black, his eyes deep and intelligent. His nose hooked slightly. A gold earring hung from one ear. He was not conventionally handsome, but he had a romantic air about him that was probably attractive to women – and young girls.
“Tell me what happened on Monday and Tuesday,” Woodend said.
“They were here when I arrived,” McLeash answered, flicking his thumb towards the two other craft. “So Brierley’s men loaded them first. Ma boat was only three-quarters full when the hooter blew an’ they all pissed off.”
So far, McLeash was only confirming what the McQueens and Walters had said.
“I wanted to be away, so I got up early on Tuesday an’ bagged the rest of the salt maself. The salt store wasna locked then.”
He grinned, but it was not a joke he was inviting Woodend to share.
“Have you bagged up yourself before?” the Chief Inspector asked.
McLeash shrugged.
“Now an’ again.”
“What time did you finish?”
“Half nine, ten.” He stretched his arm, then pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to show Woodend his bare, brown wrist. “I dinna have a watch. I’m no governed by other people’s time – I make ma own.”
“What did you do then?”
“Hung aroond till the George opened, had a pint and then got one of Brierley’s men to check ma load.”
Which meant, Woodend thought, that the man from Brierley’s wouldn’t have inspected the boat until at least half-past eleven. So there was no way of establishing when McLeash left the salt store.
“You were in such a hurry to leave that you bagged up yourself,” he said slowly, “an’ then you waited for at least an hour for the pub to open. Doesn’t seem like you were in much of a rush to me.”
“I thought the baggin’ up would take longer,” McLeash said easily. “Anyway, I’m a Scot – there’s always time for a drink.”
“And while you were workin’ in the salt store, until half-past nine or ten – or possibly even ten thirty, Mr McLeash – you didn’t notice anythin’ out of the ordinary?”
Salton Killings Page 9
