A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

  By ignoring it – by attempting to push it to one side – he had permitted the goblin to become stronger, so that now its whispers had become a scream.

  It was like a disease which had been allowed to grow and mutate, he thought, and if it was ever to be vanquished, it was first necessary to hold the facts of the situation under the harsh – and unwavering – clinical light.

  Was he really to blame for what had happened? he asked himself.

  Even though he may have set the ball rolling, could he be held accountable for the final result?

  Would it be fair to blame a catalyst, which – after all – only speeds the reaction between two compounds, for the reaction itself?

  The goblin screamed no longer. Now it was laughing at him.

  He had given Mary two pieces of advice, Woodend argued, and it had been her choice, as an adult, to decide which of the two to follow.

  And she might well have chosen the second! She might well never have told Kineally what had happened between her and Coutes. In which case, he told his goblin, none of what had occurred on the railway station had any relevance to Kineally’s murder at all!

  True, the goblin agreed. If she didn’t tell him, you’re off the hook, Charlie. But you don’t know whether she told him or not, do you? Because you never bothered to find out!

  That was totally beyond dispute. So many of the friends a man made in wartime were little more than ships which passed in the night, and once he had sailed away himself, it was as if Robert Kineally – and Mary Parkinson – had never even existed.

  There were plenty of excuses for his behaviour, of course, if he cared to look for them.

  There’d been a war going on. A few weeks later he’d been fighting for his own life – and for the survival of the civilization he’d grown up in.

  And after that there’d been the invasion of Germany, where he’d seen – with his own disbelieving eyes – the Nazi extermination camps.

  The bodies of the dead, and the faces of the dying, were seared into his memory for ever. The images of the inhumanity that man could inflict on man would never leave him.

  ‘It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,’ Rick had said, at the end of Casablanca.

  And Rick had been right! Compared to tragedy on that scale, the dramas of domestic love affairs shrank to insignificance. Compared to what the Nazis had done in their concentration camps, Coutes’s callous seduction of Mary Parkinson had been no more than a harmless dalliance.

  Yes, there were lots of excuses he could gather up to imprison his goblin behind, but the stockade he built with them would never be quite high enough – never quite thick enough.

  He lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one. It was a long time since he had felt as bad as this.

  He would do what he should have done at the very start of the investigation, but had been afraid to, he told himself.

  He would go and see Mary Parkinson.

  Nineteen

  Though Woodend was far from being a slow driver, he did not normally share his sergeant’s love for speed – which made it all the more surprising, Monika Paniatowski thought, that he had chosen to treat the road between the camp and the village as if it were a Grand Prix race track.

  ‘Is there some special reason we’re in a hurry, sir?’ she asked, as he took a sharp bend on two wheels.

  ‘Aye,’ Woodend replied, forcing the gears of the Wolseley through a racing change they’d never been designed to endure. ‘I’m tryin’ to catch up.’

  ‘On who?’

  ‘Not on who! On what! I’m tryin’ to catch up twenty-one years!’

  ‘I’m not sure I quite—’

  ‘Shut up, Monika! This requires concentration.’

  Woodend did slow down a little as they passed through Haverton, but once they were clear of the centre – once the Dun Cow was in sight – he jammed his foot down on the accelerator again.

  ‘Is it some new lead?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No,’ Woodend snapped. ‘It’s an old lead. It’s been buried for a long time – I just didn’t have the balls to dig it up.’

  He drove into the Dun Cow car park and slammed on the brakes. As he climbed out of the Wolseley, the old car was still shuddering from the battering it had been given.

  Woodend marched purposefully towards the main entrance of the pub. Paniatowski followed a few seconds later.

  Something had happened to her boss, the sergeant thought, as she broke into a trot in order to catch up with him. Something bad!

  She had no idea what that something might be. But she did know this was not the same man she had been working closely with for over three years.

  It was still early in the evening, and they were the first customers. The barmaid, a pleasant-looking girl of eighteen or nineteen, gave them a welcoming smile.

  ‘Good evening, sir and madam!’ she said cheerily.

  ‘Is the landlord anywhere around?’ Woodend asked brusquely.

  His tone caused the barmaid’s smile to fade away, and a look of slight concern to replace it.

  ‘No, I’m awfully sorry, but Mr Halford isn’t here at the moment, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘He told me he had a bit of business to do over in Exeter. But he’ll definitely be back later.’

  ‘How much later?’ Woodend asked, and the urgency in his voice only increased Monika Paniatowski’s foreboding.

  ‘Don’t really know how long he’ll be,’ the barmaid admitted. ‘I suppose it could be as little as half an hour. Then again, it might be much longer. Do you want to see him about something important?’

  ‘Important enough,’

  ‘Then would you like to wait? Or would you prefer to leave him a message?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Woodend said. ‘Do you know a woman called Mary Parkinson?’

  The barmaid pursed her brow. ‘Mary Parkinson?’ she repeated. ‘No, I don’t think so. I know a Mary Parker, but that’s not—’

  ‘In that case, we’ll wait for Reg to get back from Exeter,’ Woodend interrupted her.

  ‘Would you like to order any drinks?’ the barmaid said tentatively, as if half-expecting that Woodend would tell her to mind her own business.

  ‘Aye, we would,’ the Chief Inspector replied. ‘We’ll have a vodka with ice – an’ a whisky on its own.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, sir?’ Paniatowski asked, her concern deepening by the minute.

  ‘Am I what?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘Are you sure you want a whisky,’ Paniatowski said, holding her ground. ‘You normally stick to pints at this time of day.’

  ‘Tell me, Sergeant, has there been a new law passed which says that you’re the only member of the team who’s allowed to drink spirits?’ Woodend said sarcastically.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Well, that is nice to know,’ Woodend told her. He turned back to the barmaid. ‘Make that whisky a double, will you?’

  He paid for the drinks, and they took them over to a table which was out of earshot of the barmaid. The moment they had sat down, Woodend knocked back at least half his whisky.

  ‘What’s bothering you, sir?’ Paniatowski said, in a voice which was almost pleading.

  ‘Nothin’s botherin’ me,’ Woodend said. ‘Why should anythin’ be botherin’ me?’

  ‘I don’t know, but—’

  ‘Then we’ll let the matter drop, shall we?’ Woodend gulped down the rest of the whisky, and signalled to the barmaid that he’d like another one. ‘So tell me, Sergeant, what have you been doin’ all while I’ve been cooped up in a tin box all day with Young Mr America?’

  ‘This morning, I talked to two of the surveyors who found the body,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘I rang the company’s main office in London as well, to see if I could possibly talk to the third one. But the person who I spoke to seemed very vague – deliberately vague, I think
– about exactly where the third surveyor is at the moment.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Woodend said, abstractly.

  The barmaid arrived with Woodend’s second drink. He gave her a ten shilling note, and told her to keep the change.

  ‘Then, this afternoon, I started ploughing my way through one of the mountains of documents that Special Agent Grant has had sent from the States,’ Paniatowski continued, not sure that Woodend was hearing a single word she’d said. ‘It’s a very impressive collection, on the face of things, But when you actually get down to the details, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal there that will be of much use to this case.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Right? About what?’

  ‘Right that, at this stage of the investigation, we certainly can’t afford to rule anythin’ out.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s exactly what I was saying,’ Paniatowski told him.

  But she was wasting her breath, because the landlord had chosen that moment, to enter the bar – and now Woodend no longer had interest in anything but him.

  ‘Could you spare me a couple of minutes of your time, Reg?’ the Chief Inspector asked.

  ‘Be glad to, Charlie,’ the landlord replied. He walked over to the table and planted his ample backside on the chair next to Paniatowski’s. ‘Now what I can do for you?’ he asked with a smile. ‘I’ll bet I know. You’ve heard about Old Joshua’s famous rough cider, haven’t you? It’s a fine drink, and I can get you a barrel if you want one. But since no duty’s been paid on it, it is just a little bit illegal, so I’ll have to insist on payment in cash.’

  ‘I need to know about Mary Parkinson,’ Woodend said.

  The landlord’s joviality melted away, and he began to look distinctly troubled. ‘What about her?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Does she still live in this village? Or has she moved away?’

  ‘Charlie, she’s—’

  ‘And if she has moved away, do you happen to have an address I can contact her at?’

  The landlord shook his head, slowly and mournfully, from side to side. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Mary’s dead!’

  ‘Dead?’ Woodend repeated. ‘She can’t be.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘But if she was nineteen when I knew her, that would only make her – what? – only forty or forty-one now.’

  ‘Something like that,’ the landlord agreed.

  ‘So when did she die?’

  ‘In May 1944.’

  ‘Good God! An’ what did she die of?’

  ‘They said it was pneumonia. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But if it was that, it caught her awful quick, because one minute she was walking around as healthy-looking as you please, and the next minute she was gone.’

  ‘What do you think killed her?’ Woodend asked, though he was dreading the answer.

  ‘Are you sure you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s very important that I know.’

  ‘The day after she died, her dad lit a big fire in the farmyard,’ the landlord said darkly. ‘And once it was going properly, he brought out her mattress and all her bedding – and he burned them. Now why do you think he would have done that, Charlie?’

  ‘Because they were soaked in blood?’ Woodend guessed.

  ‘We’ll probably never know for sure,’ the landlord confirmed, ‘but that certainly seems to be the general opinion round here. Whatever the doctor put on her death certificate, we don’t think she died from natural causes. We think she slit her own wrists.’

  The woman perched precariously on the tall stool in the saloon bar of the Duke of Clarence was probably in her middle to late thirties. She had a firm bosom, shapely legs – tantalizingly revealed by the split in her skirt – and a mane of long blonde hair. From a distance, she looked stunning.

  Closer to, her imperfections were immediately apparent. The hair was dyed – badly, and some time ago. Both the skirt and top were sloppily pressed, and none too clean. And as for the shapely legs, they were disfigured by a good number of broken veins.

  But it was her face which showed most clearly how Lily Hanson’s lifestyle had ravaged her, Bob Rutter thought. It must once have been very pretty, but now it was a wreck, and even the layers of hastily applied make-up could not disguise the fact that this woman drank far too much.

  He had been following her ever since she left the luxury apartment block in which she had once reigned as Coutes’s mistress – and now served only as his humble housekeeper. He had thought of approaching the moment she had entered the pub, but had then decided to wait until she had two or three drinks inside her. That had been less than half an hour earlier, and since she was already on her third gin and tonic, he judged the time ripe.

  Rutter sat on the stool next to hers, and ordered a whisky and soda. Lily Hanson seemed to be totally unaware of his presence until he contrived to knock her drink over.

  The gin and tonic spilled over the bar, soaking the woman’s cigarettes. She shrank back to avoid the spillage, and almost fell off her stool.

  ‘You want to look what you’re doing, you clumsy oaf,’ she said, once she’d re-established her balance.

  The voice had a refined quality which didn’t quite mask the coarser speech patterns which lay beneath it, Rutter thought.

  Like the woman herself, it had made a long ascent – and was now on the decline again.

  ‘I really am most awfully sorry,’ Rutter said.

  ‘So you should be,’ Lily Hanson retorted, though not quite so aggressively now that she’d got a good look at him.

  ‘Let me clean up this mess I’ve made, and then buy you another drink,’ Rutter suggested.

  He picked up a napkin, and wiped down the bar. He reached for a second napkin, and dabbed her naked thigh with it. She did not object to this almost intimate contact, though she must have been as aware as he was that none of the gin and tonic had spilled on to her leg. And Rutter knew that the first – and probably most difficult – obstacle had been overcome.

  They chatted for over an hour, during which time she gave him a potted autobiography which was only loosely based on the truth, and he returned the favour by telling her one which was a complete bloody lie.

  She worked as the chief advisor to ‘a very important politician’, she told Rutter.

  ‘Of course, I can’t reveal his name, for reasons of security,’ she added, in a confidential whisper.

  Of course she couldn’t, Rutter accepted.

  Her work was very high pressured, she continued, and sometimes the strain got so much that it was necessary to leave it all behind her, and go out for a couple of drinks. But that was only normal, wasn’t it?

  Absolutely, Rutter agreed. He found the same in his work with the international bank.

  Still, as hard as it was, the job did have its compensations, she was willing to admit.

  Like what? Rutter wondered.

  Well, for example, it did mean that she was able to afford an extremely nice flat, quite close to this very pub.

  Interesting she should say that, Rutter replied. He had been thinking of moving into the area himself.

  Oh yes?

  But he was still not quite sure in his own mind whether or not it would suit him.

  Well, why didn’t he come up and see her flat, just to see how he liked it? Lily Hanson suggested.

  That did seem like a good idea, if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition, Rutter agreed.

  No imposition at all, Lily assured him.

  Ignoring the barman’s knowing leer, Rutter ordered another round of drinks. When they had finished them, he helped Lily Hanson on with her coat and escorted her to the door.

  Twenty

  Woodend had parked the Wolseley in the driveway to the Parkinson’s Farm, and was just reaching for the door handle when he felt Paniatowski’s restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘Best you stay here, sir,’
the sergeant said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it would be better, all round, if you left this particular interview to me.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re runnin’ the show now, are you, Sergeant Paniatowski?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘Not at all,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘You’re the boss. I’ve never argued with that.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘But of the two of us, I’m more equipped to deal with the grieving. We both know that’s true.’

  ‘The grievin’!’ Woodend repeated disdainfully. ‘Why should they still be grievin’, for God’s sake? It’s been over twenty years since their daughter died, you know.’

  ‘Do you think you’d have got over your own daughter’s death in only twenty years?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Woodend’s head jerked back, as if she’d just slapped him.

  For perhaps half a minute, he remained silent, then he said, ‘You’re right about the grievin’, Monika. If Annie died, I don’t think I’d ever get over it.’ He paused again. ‘But you’re wrong about the other thing. It’s because I’m a parent – and you’re not – that I’d be the best person to talk to the Parkinsons.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Paniatowski contradicted him. ‘You’re too involved to do a good job.’

  ‘Am I now?’ Woodend asked, with a hint of his belligerency rising to the surface again. ‘An’ would you mind tellin’ me just exactly how an’ why I’m too involved?’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘But I do know it’s true. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my entire life.’

  Another silence followed, and when Woodend spoke again there was a catch in his throat. ‘I really need a result on this one, Monika,’ he said. ‘I’m desperate for a result.’

  ‘I can see that for myself,’ Paniatowski confirmed. ‘And that’s why I think you should stay in the car.’

  Paniatowski sat in the Parkinsons’ farm kitchen, facing Mary’s parents. She knew, given the time which had elapsed, that the couple had to be quite old by now, but they looked positively ancient – as though, despite still drawing breath, they had both been dead a long, long time.