A Death Left Hanging (14 page)

‘The list goes on for another six pages,' Rutter said. ‘It must have taken someone hours to compile.'

‘Aye, it must,' Woodend replied. ‘An' it's just the sort of list
I'd
have compiled.'

‘It is?'

‘Definitely. Especially if I wanted to convince any future auditors that I'd been completely open – while at the same time I was tryin' to hide a vital piece of evidence.'

‘The old needle in the haystack?' Paniatowski suggested.

‘Aye, that's it,' Woodend agreed. ‘An' the trick is to make sure your haystack is
so
bloody big that, rather than sift through it, the searcher's likely to persuade himself the needle must be somewhere else.'

‘Is that meant to be a dig at me, sir?' Rutter asked, sounding just a little offended.

‘Nay, lad,' Woodend assured him. ‘I was speakin' in general terms – of ordinary mortals. I've worked with
you
long enough to know that even if it looks like hay and feels like hay, you still won't be convinced it
is
hay until you've found some horse that's willin' to eat it.' He paused for a second. ‘Movin' on again, I think it's about time I told you about an old whippet fancier I talked to last night in the Red Lion.'

J
ane Hartley had awoken that morning with an Olympic-class hangover, but in the time it had taken her to read the career-suicide note she had dictated over the phone to Elizabeth Driver – and was now writ large on the front page of the
Daily Globe
– the waves of pain had already begun to ebb away.

She glanced at the whisky bottle, still sitting comfortingly on her bedside table. It was tempting to speed up the process of her recovery by having just one drink – a hair of the dog that had bitten her – but she knew that once she started she wouldn't be able to stop.

She lit a cigarette and wondered how she would fill the time until the hour when it would be possible to persuade herself that it would be all right to have just one small Scotch. She could work, she supposed – she had a case bulging with briefs – but she was not sure whether her clients, having read the papers, would still want her to represent them. Besides, for the first time in twenty years she did not
feel
like doing any work. The problem was, though, that she didn't feel like doing
anything else
, either.

She found herself thinking about Aunt Helen. She had really loved that woman. It had been Helen who had comforted her when she'd fallen down and grazed her knee, Helen who had encouraged her to apply for Oxford, Helen who had shared her joy when Ralph had proposed – and the heartbreak when the marriage collapsed. In so many ways, her aunt had been as much of a mother as any little girl had the right to expect.

Yet . . . yet there had somehow always been a wall between them. It hadn't been a wall of her making – Jane was sure of that. No, it was Aunt Helen who had – carefully and deliberately – built the wall herself.

And why? For what purpose?

Because Helen had not dared to let her niece see her as she really was?

Because somewhere beneath that soft, gentle exterior a monster had been hunkering down?

Jane had tried so many ways to breech that wall. And when that had failed, she had attempted – with her questions – to at least see over the top of it.

‘Are you glad I came to live with you, Auntie Helen?'

‘Of course I am, my little pet.'

‘Then why do you look so sad?'

‘I'm thinking of your mummy, I suppose. Thinking what a pity it is that she should never have had the joy of seeing you grow up.'

‘Was my mummy a bad person?'

‘No, of course she wasn't.'

‘Then why did she have to die?'

‘You shouldn't think about it, Jane. It will drive you mad if you think about it. It will drive us
both
mad!'

The more she had questioned, the higher and thicker the wall had seemed to grow. And so Helen had died with the mystery still unsolved – the barrier still in place.

Jane remembered the sense of grief that had overwhelmed her as she stood by her aunt's grave. She had mourned not just for what she had lost, but for what had never really been hers to lose – what had been denied to her even before she could take full possession of it.

She had been entitled to a mother who would stay with her until she was ready to fly the nest. She had been entitled to an aunt who was not driven mainly by the fear of intimacy. These things had been
stolen
from her!

She wondered where the thief was now. Wondered if he had read the morning papers and finally understood that she was as determined to destroy his life as he had been to destroy hers.

Lord Sharpe crossed the central concourse of Euston Station with a copy of that morning's
Daily Globe
in his hand.

The bitch! he thought. The bloody vindictive bitch!

He understood revenge. He was something of an expert in it himself. But what he could not even
begin
to understand was the kind of revenge that would also ruin the person taking it.

The woman must be mad. There was no other explanation for it.

He passed the WH Smith's newspaper stall, and saw the tall stack of
Daily Globe
's waiting to be sold. He scanned the station, tried to estimate how many of his fellow passengers had already bought the filthy rag, and decided there was a depressingly large number of them.

His thoughts travelled back to the conversation he had had with the government chief whip earlier that morning. The whip had looked across his desk with eyes that showed kindly concern. Sharpe had not been fooled. He knew the whip for what he really was – a man whose task was to clean up other people's messes, a pest controller posing as a kindly uncle.

‘This really is rather unfortunate, Eric,' the whip had said.

‘I know,' Sharpe had replied, in the voice of an errant schoolboy brought up before the stern headmaster.

‘Your work for the party has earned you at least a minor place in the history of this century. It would be a great pity to lose that – to feature only in the gallery of infamy – would it not?'

‘Yes.'

‘Is your conscience clear, Eric?'

‘Of course it is.'

‘None of what I've read in the papers is true? There is nothing reprehensible in your investigation of the Margaret Dodds case?'

‘Nothing.'

The whip had favoured him with a ghostly, thin smile. ‘Then go up to Whitebridge, Eric. Bury this thing before it buries you.'

And that was what he was doing on Euston Station. Going up to bloody Whitebridge. Trying to bury this thing before it buried him.

As he walked towards the ticket barrier, he let his mind rove over the pitfalls that might lie ahead.

It was possible, of course, that the new investigating team would have found nothing they could use against him. More than possible – because even in his headlong rush for a seat in parliament, he had still taken the time to pause and cover his tracks.

On the other hand, what he had learned from his contacts at the Yard about this bugger Charlie Woodend inclined him to take a more pessimistic view.

So what was the worst Woodend and his team could come up with, and how might he deal with it?

Witnesses like Brunskill – the toe-rag who claimed to have seen Margaret Dodds outside St Mary's Church – might have been a problem a few years ago, but the chances were that they were all either dead or gaga now.

The physical evidence, what little there had been, could only work in his favour.

So, the real danger didn't come from anything he had done, so much as from the things he had chosen
not
to do. And there were enough of those around to land him in a sticky situation.

Like the dead coalman, he thought with a shudder. He hoped to Christ they hadn't found out about the dead coalman!

W
oodend stood in the toilet stall, draining his bladder and thinking about a course he had once attended in the police college at Hendon.

He was remembering one particular lecture given by a chief superintendent who had appeared on television so many times that he could almost have been called a celebrity. In his lecture, this chief superintendent had chosen to compare the task of a senior detective involved in a major criminal investigation with that of a chef preparing a meal.

‘Both must deal with a number of ingredients which seem to have no value on their own,' the man had said. ‘Both must be able to see how these ingredients can be blended together to produce the desired result – in the chef's case a culinary masterpiece, in our case a solution to a crime.'

Most of the audience had loved the analogy, and had applauded furiously at the end of the lecture. Woodend himself had been far from impressed, because though the concept had the advantage of appealing simplicity, that very simplicity was also, it seemed to him, a serious flaw.

For a start, he had argued later with his colleagues in the pub, the chef not only knew exactly what it was he wished to make, but also which ingredients would be required for the task. The bobby, on the other hand, was aware that some kind of dish would ultimately have to be produced, but he had no idea what it would look or smell like – or even which of the many ingredients he had been given he would eventually use.

This current case – the Fred Dodds murder – was a good example of what he'd been saying back then, he thought as he washed his hands vigorously in the sink. Was the stuff that the team had already gathered up going to be of any use – or were they still at the stage of starting to cook their omelette without having any eggs?

He walked back down the corridor to his office. Paniatowski and Rutter were sitting just where he had left them, as silent as two people who didn't speak each other's languages and were waiting for the interpreter to arrive.

Woodend slid behind his desk. ‘Well, based on what I was told in the pub last night, do we now have a clearer picture of Margaret Dodds than we had yesterday?' he asked.

‘Yes, I think so,' Rutter said.

‘Then tell us what your impression is.'

Rutter nodded. ‘I think the best way to express it is to say that if Margaret Dodds had been a man, she'd have been the kind of man who didn't know how to keep his trousers buttoned.'

‘If she
had
been a man, you'd never have made that comment,' Paniatowski said sharply. ‘Either you wouldn't have
cared
how she behaved, or you'd have admired her for it. It's only because she was a woman that you object to her having a lover.'

‘
A
lover!' Rutter repeated, clearly stung by her comments. ‘We're not talking about
a
lover here, Sergeant Paniatowski. From what the boss has told us, it appears to have been common knowledge around Whitebridge that she was having an affair with Fred Dodds while she was still married to Robert Hartley––'

‘Truly a scarlet woman!' Paniatowski said. ‘Seems to me that hanging was too good for her!'

‘And that the ink on her second wedding certificate was barely dry before she was betraying Dodds with someone else,' Rutter said, ignoring the interruption. ‘That's
two
lovers we're pretty sure of already, and I'd be willing to bet that we'll uncover a few more during the course of the investigation. The woman just couldn't seem to get enough of it.'

‘Are you really as obsessed with sex as you sound?' Paniatowski asked, an angry edge to her voice.

‘Monika!' Woodend cautioned.

‘Well, is he?' Paniatowski demanded. ‘Are you, Inspector?'

‘No, I'm not,' Rutter said. ‘But your friend Margaret Dodds certainly seems to have been.'

Paniatowski shook her head in exasperation.

‘That's complete bollocks!' she said. ‘And I'll tell you why. Firstly, it's bollocks because, despite what you've just said, we have no actual proof that Margaret had
any
affairs. Secondly, it's bollocks because even if you are right about
what
she did, you may well be wrong about
why
she did it. Lust isn't the only thing that can drive a woman into a man's arms, you know.'

A slight, uncharacteristic sneer played on Rutter's lips. ‘You're surely not suggesting she did it for money, are you?'

‘No, I'm bloody not!' Paniatowski retorted. ‘I'm suggesting that in a lot of affairs there's an element of comfort – at least on the woman's part. If Margaret was seeing another man just before Fred was murdered, then perhaps it was because she was finding life with her husband unbearable.'

‘And what about Robert? Did she find life with him unbearable, too? If she did, it doesn't say much for her choice in husbands.'

‘Some women
do
make bad choices,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘That doesn't mean they have to be either nymphomaniacs or prostitutes.'

‘But it doesn't exclude them from those categories, either,' Rutter pointed out.

‘I'm glad I don't see life through your eyes,' Paniatowski told him. ‘I really am!'