Golden Mile to Murder

by Sally Spencer

  His breathing was coming harder and faster, his vision was beginning to blur slightly and his hands felt as if they had turned to ice. Gutteridge reached forward and grasped the rail for support.

  The whole of Blackpool was spread out before him. He could see the miles of golden sands, stretching as far as Fleetwood in one direction and Lytham in the other. He could see the three piers projecting out into the sea, and the tramcars making their way along the promenade. He was a long way up, he realised – higher than anyone ever should be.

  The man in the blue suit had appeared again, and was talking to a group of the sightseers.

  Why was he talking to them? Gutteridge’s panicked mind screamed. The whole point of the two of them meeting at the top of the Tower was so they wouldn’t be noticed – and yet there he was making himself conspicuous!

  The lift had returned, and there seemed to be a sudden rush for it. Gutteridge counted heads. Five adults and three children! Eight people! All his remaining witnesses!

  As they entered the lift, he moved forwards it himself, but the operator held out his arm, barring the way.

  ‘Sorry, mate. There’s no room for any more.’

  ‘But there’s plenty of room!’ Gutteridge protested. ‘You could fit at least a dozen more people in there.’

  ‘Have to follow regulations,’ the operator said stubbornly. ‘Can’t take any more.’

  He slid the door closed and turned the handle. The lift began to sink out of sight.

  I should have forced my way in, Gutteridge thought. He’d have had let me in if I’d made trouble.

  But it was too late for that now. The lift had gone, and he and the man in the blue suit were all alone on platform – no more than a few feet apart.

  ‘G-give me the money,’ he stuttered, reaching out for the briefcase. ‘G-give me the money and I’ll be out of your life for ever.’

  The other man smiled, and took a step backward. ‘If only it were as simple as that,’ he said. ‘If only I felt I could trust you.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ Gutteridge assured him.

  ‘No, I can’t. The police will catch up with you in the end, and when they do you’ll tell them everything you know.’

  ‘I won’t. I promise I won’t.’

  The man in the blue suit glanced at wire. ‘There’s only one solution to the dilemma we’re facing – and we both know what that is,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ Gutteridge croaked.

  ‘Yes,’ the other man said firmly. ‘Only one solution, but two ways of bringing it about. The easy way is for you climb up the wire and jump. It will all be over very, very quickly. The hard way is for you to resist. If you do that, then I’ll knock you unconscious, pull you up the wire and throw you over. When they ask me what happened, I’ll say I tried to stop you killing yourself, but I wasn’t in time.’

  ‘Nobody will believe you!’

  ‘Everybody will believe me.’

  ‘There’ll be marks of the struggle on my body!’

  ‘Do you really think they’ll survive a five hundred foot drop?’

  It was true, Gutteridge thought. It was all so horribly true. He was going to die – and there was nothing he could do about it. And yet he still couldn’t bring himself to climb over the netting.

  He heard the lift start its ascent again, and felt a faint glimmer of hope. If he could scream – if he could just attract the operator’s attention . . .

  The man in the blue suit closed the gap between them at lightning speed, and struck Gutteridge hard at a pressure point on his forehead.

  The theatre manager’s knees buckled, and he fell to the ground, unconscious. His attacker was well aware that he did not have long for the next phase of the operation – but he didn’t need long. He grabbed Gutteridge under the armpits and hauled him to his feet. A few seconds was all it would take. Half a minute at the most. He looked up at wire, assessing his task.

  The lift gate creaked open, and Woodend stepped out. He turned and saw the two figures – one lifeless, the other manhandling him.

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Your best plan now would be to come quietly, Sergeant Hanson.’

  Thirty-Two

  It was rather early in the day to go on to the vodka, but when the waiter asked what they wanted, Paniatowski ordered a double anyway.

  ‘I’m sorry it had to be Sergeant Hanson,’ Woodend said.

  Paniatowski shrugged. ‘It was who it was,’ she replied, hoping that the chief inspector would leave it there.

  ‘If you ever want to come to terms with your feelin’s, you’ll have to learn to stop denyin’ them in the first place,’ Woodend told her.

  Paniatowski felt anger start to bubble up inside her. ‘He was a fling – that’s all,’ she said. ‘He meant nothing to me. For God’s sake, I hardly knew the man.’

  ‘You gave him your trust,’ Woodend said softly. ‘An’ that’s not somethin’ you hand out lightly.’

  He was speaking the truth, Paniatowski thought. But he was saying more. He was saying: ‘We’re a team – and whatever else you do, don’t lie to me.’

  She took a slug of her vodka. ‘I’ll be more careful, next time,’ she promised.

  ‘But not too careful,’ Woodend cautioned. ‘If you spend all your time worryin’ about gettin’ your fingers burnt, you never find out what a great pleasure it is to warm your hands by the fire.’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘What are you quoting from, sir?’ she asked. ‘The follow-up to the Working for Woodend Manual – Uncle Charlie’s Advice to the Lovelorn?’

  For a moment, she wondered if she had gone too far, then Woodend returned her grin and said, ‘Somethin’ of that nature,’ he agreed. ‘Shall we talk about the case now?’

  ‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘An ambitious young sergeant finds himself workin’ in a place where there’s a lot of activity which, if it’s not exactly criminal, in teeterin’ on the edge of it,’ Woodend said. ‘An’ he sees the opportunity to make a tidy sum for himself. A bit of protection money here, a percentage off an illegal gamblin’ operation there, a deal with a stolen car ring somewhere else. An’ of course, his masterpiece – his blackmailin’ partnership with Gypsy Elizabeth Rose.’

  ‘And then the anonymous letters started to arrive,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Where do you think they came from?’

  ‘We’ll never know for sure, but in all probability one of the people he was puttin’ the squeeze on finally decided he’d had enough. Anyway, once the anonymous letters did start to arrive, Hanson had two options. One of them was to quit while he was ahead – but he was too greedy for that. The other was to make sure that when Chief Inspector Turner finally got off his arse an’ started investigatin’, there was somebody else already in place to take the fall. An’ the somebody he chose was Punch Davies. I imagine it won’t be long before we come across a few bank accounts which Hanson opened in Davies’ name. They won’t contain a lot of money – but there will be enough in them to incriminate him.’

  ‘He’d arranged for a number of other people to implicate Davies as well, didn’t he?’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Aye,’ Woodend agreed. ‘People like Gutteridge. But they were what you might call a last line of defence. They were only to implicate Punch when it was plain they were goin’ down themselves. But we’re getting’ ahead of ourselves. Hanson was settin’ Davies up to take the fall, then Chief Inspector Turner – God bless him – completely buggered up his plans by tryin’ to warn Davies off. An’ that had an effect that neither Turner nor Hanson could have anticipated. Up until that point, Davies had had no idea he was under suspicion. Once he found out he was, he was determined to clear his name.’

  ‘That’s why he suddenly started putting in appearances on the Golden Mile.’

  ‘Correct. An’ he must have been a pretty good detective, because we know from the fact that he talked to Elizabeth Rose
an’ Bolton that he must have been gettin’ close to at least part of Hanson’s network. An’ that, of course, is why he had to be killed.’

  ‘And Gypsy Elizabeth Rose?’

  ‘I don’t think Hanson ever intended usin’ her as part of his plan to run rings round Charlie Woodend, but then one of his team – possibly Stone, or maybe Eliot – must have come up with the information that Davies had been to see her. Now Hanson had two choices again – he could suppress the report an’ run the risk of me findin’ out later that he’d done it – or he could tell me about that meetin’. He decided in the end to tell me about it, because, in the meantime, he’d come up with a neat little refinement which he thought would only add to my confusion.’

  ‘What neat little refinement?’

  ‘I’ll get back to that later,’ Woodend promised. ‘For the moment, let’s stick to the main story. After I’d been to see the gypsy, Hanson started to wonder whether it might have been a mistake to let me talk to her. An’ from there, it was only a short step to him seein’ her as the weakest link in the chain. So she had to be got rid of.’

  ‘What I don’t see is how you came to suspect Fr— Hanson in the first place,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘That wasn’t hard – once we’d learned that Davies, instead of bein’ a crook, was as pure as the driven snow,’ Woodend told her. ‘You see, the villain really had to be some kind of bobby.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the rumours about Davies emerged from police headquarters, which means that was where they must have been planted in the first place. And the only person who could have planted them was another bobby. Then there was my little talk with Gypsy Rose Elizabeth.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘She told me that the thing I had in common with Davies was that we both felt guilty about lettin’ our daughters down. That rattled me – as it was intended to – because, you see, I was already subconsciously frettin’ over movin’ my Annie away from her school an’ all her friends.’

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Paniatowski confessed.

  ‘Everythin’ depends on whether you believe the gypsy’s warnin’ or not.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘For a while, I at least half-believed it,’ Woodend confessed, ‘but when I found out about the blackmail business I began to see her less as a mystic an’ more as a con-man. So if she hadn’t read my mind, just where had she got her information from?’

  ‘Police records!’

  ‘Spot on. She knew I’d been transferred from London. She knew I had a fifteen-year-old daughter who was still at school. An’ bein’ both a smart woman an’ an amateur psychologist, she worked out I’d probably be worryin’ about Annie. But the point is, she’d never have been able to get that information on her own – it had to come from a bobby.’

  ‘Clever,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Me? Or Elizabeth Rose?’

  ‘Both of you.’

  ‘Hanson was clever, too,’ Woodend said. ‘He tried to bugger up my brain by the Annie thing, an’ he tried to bugger up yours by encouragin’ you to go on a wild goose chase over this hit-an’-run accident.’

  True, Paniatowski thought bitterly. Hanson had known who’d knocked down the old lady, but he must also have known – given the stark facts as they stood – that it wouldn’t be Bolton she suspected, but one of the last five Golden Milers to leave the hotel.

  ‘I still don’t why you homed in on Hanson, rather than anybody else on the local force,’ she said.

  ‘If you’re goin’ to fit somebody up, your best plan is to choose a feller you know well. That way, he’s not likely to surprise you. The first time I met Hanson, he told me he’d worked very closely with Davies. In fact, he said that the only reason he wasn’t workin’ on any of Davies’ current cases was because he’d been on leave when they were assigned. An’ there was an added advantage in pickin’ Davies rather than anybody else.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Davies trusted him. It’s more than possible that he kept Hanson informed about his attempts to clear his name.’ Woodend paused to light up a Capstan Full Strength. ‘Then there was the fact that Hanson seemed very interested in spendin’ a lot of his time with you.’

  ‘Are you saying he didn’t find me attractive?’ Paniatowski demanded – and the moment the words were out of her mouth she realised how ridiculous she must sound and felt herself starting to blush.

  Woodend chuckled. ‘Oh, he found you attractive, all right. But you were also an invaluable source of information from right in the middle of the enemy camp.’

  ‘I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘We’re all entitled to one mistake, lass,’ Woodend said. He grinned again. ‘Just don’t go makin’ any more.’

  ‘I’ll do my best not to.’

  ‘But the biggest clincher of all, as far as leadin’ me to Hanson went, was that Gypsy Elizabeth Rose’s body was buried in a shallow grave,’ Woodend continued.

  ‘What did that tell you?’

  ‘That the killer needed to make it difficult to establish the exact time of death. An’ why? Because though he had a rock-solid alibi for earlier in the evenin’, the one he had for the time she was actually killed was shakier – an’ certainly wouldn’t stand close scrutiny.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Paniatowski interrupted. ‘I’m not disputing the fact that Hanson had Elizabeth Rose killed – but he couldn’t have done it himself, because he was with me.’

  ‘When you came into the dinin’-room the mornin’ after your night of passion with Hanson, you looked a real mess. It wasn’t just that you were wearin’ the same clothes you’d had on the previous evenin’ – a clear pointer that you hadn’t been back to your own room – but from the look on your face I’m guessin’ that it must have felt as if you had the Halle Orchestra playin’ in your head. An’ out of tune, at that!’

  ‘I was feeling pretty rough,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Now the thing is, from what I’d seen of you earlier, I’d gained the impression you were the kind of lass who could hold her booze, an’—’

  ‘Now I get it!’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Get what?’ Woodend asked innocently.

  ‘Get why you insisted that I got drunk last night.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. You did it because you wanted to see what I’d look like this morning.’

  ‘An’ you looked fine. From bein’ virtually legless at midnight, you’d recovered enough to be ready for action by eight o’clock in the mornin’. So I knew I’d been right about you when I’d decided you could hold your booze. But it had been an entirely different story after the night you spent with Hanson.’

  ‘We both had a last whisky just before we went to sleep. He must have slipped a knock-out drop in mine.’

  ‘Aye, he did,’ Woodend agreed. ‘An’ while you were out for the count, he drove down to the South Pier an’ killed the gypsy. When I saw you this mornin’, I was finally sure that’s what must have happened, an’ I knew that as well as puttin’ a tail on Gutteridge, we needed to put one on Hanson.’

  ‘It’s an education working with you, sir,’ Paniatowski told him.

  That’s just what Bob Rutter might have said, Woodend thought, feeling inordinately pleased with himself.

  ‘I suppose you’re here because you’re expecting me to pat you on the back and bring out the cigars, are you?’ Detective Chief Superintendent Ainsworth asked, looking up from his paperwork at the man in the hairy sports coat who was standing in front of his desk.

  ‘No, sir, I’m not here for that,’ Woodend replied evenly. ‘I’m here because you left instructions that I was to report to you as soon as I got back to Whitebridge.’

  ‘You’ve left Blackpool in a real mess.’

  ‘Really. I thought I’d done a pretty good job.’

  ‘A pretty good job!’ Ainsworth repeated. ‘You’ve arrested one of our own for a double murder, and you’ve got o
ne of Blackpool’s top attractions locked up on a hit-and-run charge.’

  ‘They did do it,’ Woodend pointed out.

  ‘Of course they did it!’ Ainsworth exploded. ‘Nobody’s disputing that. But there are ways to handle delicate matters of this nature – and ways not to handle them. And you seem unable to distinguish between the two.’

  ‘Are you sayin’ I shouldn’t have arrested Tommy Bolton, sir?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘He had a bit too much to drink – as we all do on occasions – and accidentally killed an old woman who probably hadn’t got much longer to live anyway. He’d never have repeated the mistake, and by locking him up you’ve done serious damage to Blackpool’s tourist trade.’

  ‘Are you sayin’ I shouldn’t have arrested him, sir?’ Woodend repeated.

  Ainsworth took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and mopped his brow. ‘No! No, of course not.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. What about Frank Hanson? Should I have let him get away with it?’

  ‘He had to be punished for his crimes, of course. But that might have been accomplished without the glare of publicity there’ll be when he comes to trial.’

  ‘You’re sayin’ I should have given him the same option he was givin’ Gutteridge, an’ let him jump off the Tower?’

  ‘I can think of officers who would have done that,’ Ainsworth said, noncommittally.

  ‘Aye, well, I’m not one of them,’ Woodend said. ‘Besides, he’d never have taken that option. He’s a real chancer. Even now, he probably still thinks he can find some way to wriggle out of the mess he’s landed himself in.’

  ‘But you didn’t even try, did you? You didn’t even test the water,’ Ainsworth said. He turned his attention back to the paperwork on his desk. ‘That’s all, Chief Inspector. You can go now.’

  ‘There is one more thing before I leave, sir,’ Woodend said. ‘Sergeant Paniatowski.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’ve nothin’ against workin’ with women, sir, but I find her a bit hard to take. I’d appreciate it if you could assign me another bagman for my next case.’