A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Very well then, that being the case, I am happy to proceed,’ the solicitor said.

  ‘I ain’t,’ Bascombe said.

  The solicitor raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘My dear chap, why ever not? Is there a problem of some kind?’

  ‘Yeah! What’s this guy doin’ here?’ Bascombe asked, jerking his thumb in the direction of the captain sitting next to him.

  The solicitor sighed. ‘As I’ve already explained, Mr Bascombe, I am not licensed to practice law in the United States—’

  ‘We ain’t in the United States!’

  ‘For the purposes of these proceedings, I can assure you that we are. At least temporarily, this camp has been designated as American soil. And taking that as a given, it is necessary for the captain – as an American lawyer – to provide you with additional representation.’

  ‘But he’s in the army!’

  ‘That doesn’t matter in the slightest. Since he has agreed to accept you as his client, your interest has become his primary concern.’

  ‘An’ he can’t welsh on the deal?’

  ‘Nobody can “welsh” on the deal, Mr Bascombe,’ the solicitor said, wrinkling his nose at the inelegant language he had just been obliged to use. ‘Welshing is simply not an option.’

  ‘Well, all right!’ Bascombe whooped triumphantly.

  ‘Can we proceed now?’ Special Agent Grant asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Bascombe agreed. ‘What do you wanna know?’

  ‘We want to know who killed Robert Kineally,’ Grant said.

  ‘Hell, that’s an easy one to answer. That liberal piece of shit was stuck by a good ole boy called Harry Wallace.’

  ‘Why did Wallace kill him?’

  ‘Cuz Kineally showed him up in front of a couple of niggers. Harry said no white man should do that to another white man, an’ he was just gonna have to be punished for it.’

  ‘So he decided to kill him?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Not first off, no. First off, he was just gonna beat the crap outta the Yankee son-of-a-bitch. But then he saw the problem.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘Kineally was an officer. If you beat up an officer, they lock you in the stockade, an’ throw away the key. So whatever he did to Kineally, Harry had got to make sure Kineally couldn’t talk about it afterwards.’

  ‘So then he decided to kill him?’

  ‘Yeah! He didn’t have no choice, did he?’

  ‘How did he kill him?’

  ‘A couple o’ weeks earlier, Harry had stole this big old knife from a dipstick Limey officer called Coutes, an’—’

  ‘Why had he stolen it?’

  ‘Cuz he liked the look of it, and cuz Coutes had left it around where it could be stole. Anyways, once he’d decided to kill Kineally, he thought it’d be real smart to use that knife to do it with.’

  ‘Why would it be “real smart”?’

  ‘Cuz if the stiff was ever found, they’d blame the whole thing on this Coutes guy.’

  ‘How did Coutes’s bloody fingerprints come to be on Kineally’s dog tags?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘How in hell would I know that?’ Bascombe demanded.

  ‘Quite,’ Grant agreed dryly. ‘Now the next thing I want to know is the exact location—’

  ‘Just hold your horses a minute!’ Bascombe said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think I got an answer to that dog tag question.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Sure. A couple o’ hours before Harry killed him, that son-of-a-bitch Kineally got into a fight with this Coutes guy over at the Dun Cow. Maybe Coutes grabbed his dog tags then.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Grant agreed. ‘I’d now like you to tell me where Wallace killed Kineally.’

  ‘He done it over on that piece o’ land where they used to keep all the military vehicles.’

  ‘How did Wallace persuade Kineally to go there?’

  ‘Dunno. Musta fed him some kinda yarn about wantin’ to show him somethin’.’

  ‘Why did he choose that spot?’

  ‘Cuz it was well away from the main camp. An’ cuz that’s where we were gonna bury the body.’

  ‘Did you actually see Wallace kill Kineally?’

  ‘Oh yeah! Not from close to, cuz I was keepin’ watch. But I seen it, right enough. Drove that knife into him like he was stickin’ a hog. Kineally didn’t hardly make no sound at all.’

  ‘What about the jeep?’ Woodend asked.

  For the first time since he’d begun his story, Bascombe looked uncertain of himself. ‘What jeep?’

  ‘Captain Kineally’s jeep. It was driven to the railway station and abandoned.’

  ‘Don’t know nuthin’ about no jeep,’ Bascombe said. ‘Maybe Wallace took it later.’

  ‘Once Wallace had killed Captain Kineally, the two of you buried the body?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Under one of them ole armoured cars. See, we figured the tracks would soon cover what we done.’

  ‘Where’s Wallace now?’ Grant asked.

  Bascombe shrugged. ‘Don’t rightly know. Ran into him in a bar in Montgomery once – must have been round about ’forty-eight or ’forty-nine – but I ain’t seen him since.’

  ‘What made you decide to run the risk of helping Wallace in the first place?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘The guy was a buddy of mine, an’ you always help your buddies out,’ Bascombe said.

  ‘An’ that was the only reason you helped him?’

  Bascombe turned to his solicitor. ‘Can they get me for somethin’ I didn’t do – somethin’ I only planned to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Not if you took no actual steps to put the act into commission,’ the solicitor said.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Not if you did no more than think about it.’

  Bascombe nodded. ‘The other reason I helped Harry out was cuz Harry had promised he was gonna help me right back,’ he said.

  ‘Help you with what?’ Grant wondered.

  ‘Harry wasn’t the only one who’d been showed up in front of them two niggers,’ Bascombe said.

  ‘Who else was?’ Grant asked.

  Bascombe ignored him, and turned to Woodend, instead. ‘Remember it?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll never forget it,’ Woodend told him. ‘When my fist hit your gut, it felt like I was punching an overstuffed bag of sand.’

  ‘Yeah, I was a real hard man back in them days,’ Bascombe agreed complacently.

  ‘But when you went down, you went down like the bag of shit that you really were,’ Woodend added.

  ‘I wish I’d got you, like I wanted to,’ Bascombe said angrily. ‘I wish I’d stuck you like Harry stuck Kineally.’

  ‘But I’d been transferred by then, hadn’t I?’ Woodend said.

  ‘Yeah, you had, you Limey bastard,’ Bascombe agreed, ‘an’ I was real sorry about that.’

  Woodend sat in the ‘operational command module’, smoking a cigarette and watching Special Agent Grant transfer files from the table to boxes labelled, ‘FBI documents in transit’.

  ‘So what happens now?’ he asked. ‘Will you give Douglas Coutes a clean bill of health, and release him?’

  ‘The Minister was never officially under arrest,’ Grant said, closing one full box, and then immediately opening an empty one. ‘Even so, I think that to state unequivocally that he’s been completely exonerated on all charges would be a tad premature.’

  But from the speed with which he was packing away his files, it was plain that he didn’t consider it that much premature, Woodend thought.

  ‘You’ll start looking for Harry Wallace now, will you?’ the Chief Inspector asked.

  ‘We’re already looking for him. There are agents all over the States following up leads, even as we speak.’

  ‘An’ d’you think you’ll find him?’

  Grant nodded. ‘I don’t want to sound in any way disrespectful to you or any of the rest of the wonderful Br
itish bobbies, Chuck,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think you have any real concept of just how effective the Bureau can be once it’s got its teeth into a case.’

  ‘Robert Kineally called me “Chuck”,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Which means I’d rather you didn’t.’

  Grant looked troubled. ‘You’ve never really liked me, have you, Charlie?’ he asked.

  A wave of guilt swept over Woodend. Though he could not put his finger on why it had happened, he had begun to experience a feeling of vague discontent from the moment Bascombe had made his confession. And rather than starting to abate, as he’d expected it to, the feeling had got worse – like a sting which only really begins to itch some time after it’s been inflicted. But even so, that was no excuse for being deliberately unpleasant to Grant.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ed,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s that I dislike you so much as that I don’t understand you. We’re two very different kinds of policemen. You see the big picture – the Communist menace, and the spread of organized crime – while I just look at a dead body and wonder who-dun-it. But I think there’s room in the world for both kinds.’

  Special Agent Grant smiled gratefully. ‘That’s what I think, too,’ he said. ‘It’s what I’ve always thought. But it’s still a great pleasure to hear those words coming from you.’

  ‘What happens if you can’t find Wallace?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘We’ll find him.’

  ‘But what if he’s dead?’

  ‘That would be a pity,’ Grant conceded. ‘The Senator would dearly love to see his brother’s murderer stand trial for his terrible crime. But the really important thing is that we’ve solved the case.’

  ‘So you do believe Bascombe?’

  ‘That depends exactly what you mean by your question. Do I believe that he had no part in the actual murder? I’m not sure about that. But even if we hadn’t granted him immunity, we’d never have been able to put together a case against him. As for the rest of what he told us, I’m pretty confident it happened in just the way he described it.’

  ‘Bascombe had a great deal to gain by lying,’ Woodend pointed out, playing devil’s advocate. ‘Less than two hours ago, he still had a couple of years of a prison sentence left to serve. Now, he’s going to walk away from Haverton Camp a free man.’

  ‘Sure, he had a lot to gain from the situation,’ Grant conceded. ‘But the only way he was ever going to gain it was by telling us the truth. And that’s just what he did, didn’t he?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Woodend said, reluctantly.

  ‘Look, most people thought that Kineally had simply disappeared, but Bascombe knew that he’d been murdered. He also knew which particular knife had been used to do the killing. And to top it all, he knew exactly where Kineally’s body was buried.’

  ‘Maybe somebody else fed him some of those details,’ Woodend said, still doubtful.

  ‘Who?’ Grant asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When he arrived here, he was a convict with time yet to serve, so he’s been housed here under what were essentially prison conditions. He’s been under guard even when he took his exercise.’

  ‘So maybe those guards told him—’

  ‘There wasn’t much they could tell him. They’re not directly involved in the investigation, so they know as little about what’s been going on here as the electricians or the guys who work in the commissary.’

  ‘Which is the same as saying that they knew nothing at all?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Which is the same as saying that they knew nothing at all,’ Grant agreed. ‘Face the facts, Charlie. Bascombe might have made a lucky guess about one particular detail of the crime, but he couldn’t possibly have guessed it all. He had to have been there. He had to have seen it all with his own eyes.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Woodend agreed reluctantly.

  But his feeling of discontent – the irritating itch – still refused to go away.

  Twenty-Six

  Woodend and Paniatowski were the first customers of the day to cross the threshold of the Dun Cow, but this would not normally have bothered the Chief Inspector. He didn’t need other drinkers around him to help him to relax. It was enough for him to be inside a pub – the welcome refuge of the true-born Englishmen over the centuries, in which the very walls oozed a feeling of benign well-being. Yet that morning, the Dun Cow’s public bar was failing to have its usual healing effect on him, and the pint of best bitter, within easy reach of his right hand, was refusing to work its usual magic.

  Woodend gazed moodily out of the window at the wall, beyond which lay the skittle alley where Harry Wallace and Huey Bascombe had once intended to teach two black soldiers a lesson they’d never forget, and Captain Douglas Coutes had beaten the living daylights out of Captain Robert Kineally.

  ‘It makes perfect sense that Harry Wallace should be the killer, you know,’ Monika Paniatowski said. ‘He was a racist – and a violent one, at that.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Woodend said.

  ‘For a man like him, being humiliated in front of those two black men must have been like his worst nightmare come true,’ Paniatowski argued. ‘Being made to apologize to them was a depth he’d never thought he would sink to. Is it any wonder, then, that he couldn’t rest until he got his revenge?’

  ‘No wonder at all,’ Woodend said – but with a lack of conviction in his voice which belied his actual words.

  ‘So, given everything I’ve just laid out for you – all of which you seem to agree with – just what is your problem, sir?’ Paniatowski asked, impatiently.

  ‘My problem?’ Woodend replied. ‘My problem is that it’s all too neat an’ tidy.’

  ‘Ed Grant used almost exactly the same words,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Only he wasn’t referring to the case against Wallace, he was talking about the one against Coutes.’

  Woodend’s eyes flickered with a sudden interest. ‘An’ when did Grant say this?’

  ‘Last night,’ Paniatowski said vaguely.

  ‘That doesn’t sound at all like the Special Agent I know,’ Woodend mused. ‘Right from the start of this investigation, he was absolutely convinced Coutes was our man. Of course, he’s changed his mind about that now. He didn’t have much choice in the face of the fresh evidence that’s turned up, did he?’

  ‘No, I suppose he didn’t.’

  ‘But until this mornin’, there was no fresh evidence. An’ yet you’re tellin’ he said this last night?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Paniatowski said, starting to wish she’d never begun this conversation. ‘Shall I order us some more drinks?’

  ‘We’ve hardly touched the ones we’ve got,’ Woodend replied. ‘Now, what would make a man who was so sure he was right about every single aspect of the case suddenly back down like you say he did last night?’

  ‘Doesn’t really matter, does it, sir?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘The case is officially closed.’

  ‘Didn’t he realize that, by backing down in that way, he was makin’ himself look a complete bloody fool?’ Woodend said, refusing to let go.

  Paniatowski sighed, and gave in to the inevitable.

  ‘Perhaps he said it without really believing it,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps he was just teasing me.’

  ‘Teasing you?’ Woodend repeated. ‘Teasing you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How could sayin’ somethin’ like that have been seen as teasin’ you?’

  There really was no way out of it, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘I’d told him that, as a result of our investigations, we were coming round to the view that Coutes was guilty,’ she said. ‘And then Ed … then Special Agent Grant … said that because the evidence was so neat and tidy, he was starting to think that Coutes had been framed.’

  ‘An’ that was teasin’ you?’ Woodend said, as if he still hadn’t grasped the point.

  ‘He was showing off,’ Paniatowski said, exasperatedly. ‘Assertin
g himself by taking a contrary opinion to mine. It’s what a certain kind of man will do when he finds himself in a certain kind of situation.’

  ‘Where, exactly, did this conversation take place?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘In bed!’ Paniatowski said angrily. ‘All right? We were in bed! Do you have any objections to that?’

  ‘No objections at all,’ Woodend told her, though he was shaking his head sadly. ‘It’s none of my business what you do in your free time. But, I have to say, Monika, you really can pick ’em, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I can,’ Paniatowski agreed wistfully. ‘But that still doesn’t mean that I appreciate you sitting in judgement on the quality of the men I choose to sleep with,’ she continued, her anger returning. ‘If I make mistakes, then at least they’re my mistakes, as an adult, I’m entitled …’

  She stopped, not because she had run out of either steam or righteous indignation, but because there wasn’t any point in going on when it was plain that Woodend was no longer listening to her.

  ‘Grant didn’t look all that shocked when Huey Bascombe confessed,’ Woodend muttered, almost to himself. ‘He saw his own rock-solid certainties collapse around him, and it didn’t bother him at all – or at least, nowhere near as much as it should have done.’

  ‘I am still here,’ Paniatowski said, annoyed. ‘And I am still trying to make a point.’

  ‘Finish up your drink, Monika,’ Woodend said. ‘We need to get back to the camp.’

  If Special Agent Grant had still been occupying the ‘operational command module’, Woodend would have invented some pretext to take him somewhere else, and left Monika Paniatowski to do the search. But Grant wasn’t there. Having packed away most of the files in their FBI transit boxes, he had probably returned to his own trailer to do something equally neat and efficient there, and the two English detectives had the place to themselves.

  Woodend opened the first of the boxes with great care. ‘We don’t want Grant to know we’ve been rooting around in here,’ he explained. ‘At least, we don’t want him to know quite yet.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what you’re looking for, sir?’ Paniatowski asked, for the fourth or fifth time.

  ‘I’m lookin’ for photographs!’ Woodend replied. ‘Eight by ten glossy photographs! Of the corpse!’