Dangerous Games (15 page)

‘About half an hour.'

‘The three of us – Terry Pugh, Reg Lewis and I – were all called up at the same time, and we served in the same unit,' Hough said. ‘We were in Aldershot at first, for our basic training. Then, when the powers-that-be had decided they'd probably turned us into real enough soldiers to face enemy bullets, they shipped us off to Cyprus.'

‘Cyprus!' Woodend exclaimed.

And he was thinking: Maybe the feller who Terry Pugh left the pub with wasn't a Turk or a Yugoslav after all. Maybe he was a Cypriot.

‘It's a funny thing, you know,' Hough continued, ‘I hadn't thought about Reg Lewis for years, yet the moment I heard his name on the radio, I was transported back to that little island in the Mediterranean, where people always seemed to be trying to kill us.'

‘It was rough, was it?' Woodend asked.

‘Oh, nothing like the show I imagine you were in,' Hough said dismissively, ‘but I suppose it was rough enough. The Greek Cypriots wanted their independence from Britain, our government didn't want to give it to them, and us fellers in the poor bloody infantry were caught right in the middle.'

‘Like fellers in the poor bloody infantry always are everywhere,' Woodend said with feeling.

‘We never knew, when we got up in the morning, if we'd still be alive to see the sunset,' Hough mused. ‘Of course, that's true of everyone, isn't it? But in addition to the hazards that normal people have to face, we had to deal with snipers who could be hiding virtually anywhere, and roadside bombs which could reduce our Land Rovers to no more than scrap metal in an instant.'

‘Is that how you lost the use of your legs?' Woodend asked.

Hough laughed. ‘As the result of a roadside bomb?'

‘Yes.'

‘No, it wasn't! I wish it had been, because at least then I'd have been crippled doing what I'd been trained to do, and might possibly have got a medal out of it. But they don't hand out medals to men who get blind drunk and fall into the path of a military lorry.'

‘I'm sorry,' Woodend said. ‘I shouldn't have asked.'

‘Think nothing of it,' Hough assured him. ‘We all have to live with our mistakes, and however much we wish we could turn the clock back and do things differently, we eventually have to accept that we can't. And it could have been worse, you know. A few more inches, and the lorry would have run straight over my bloody head!'

The door opened, and Priscilla Charlton entered, carrying a tray with three coffee cups.

‘I hope this is all right for you,' she said, as she handed Woodend and Paniatowski their cups. ‘I have to make it rather strong, because that's the way that Mr Hough likes it.'

‘We like it strong, too,' Paniatowski assured her.

‘She makes the best coffee in Whitebridge,' Hough said proudly. ‘Don't you, Cilla?'

‘Priscilla!' the girl said. ‘It's
Priscilla
– and if I've told you that once, I must have told you a hundred times.'

Hough put his hand to his mouth in mock horror. ‘I keep forgetting,' he said. ‘Please forgive me.'

The secretary seemed to be considering the request. ‘All right,' she said finally. ‘But make sure it's the last time.'

She flounced out of the room, and when she'd gone, Hough said, ‘I know I really shouldn't tease her, but it's such fun to see her pretending to be annoyed with me.'

Woodend felt slightly uncomfortable. He knew that Hough had asked to see him, rather than the other way round – and that the factory owner himself had felt no embarrassment himself over the exchange he'd just had with his secretary being witnessed by others – but even so, the chief inspector still could not help feeling as if he had barged in uninvited on an intimate moment.

He cleared his throat and said, ‘How well did you know Reg Lewis, Mr Hough?'

‘Much better than I'd have wished to,' Hough replied frankly. ‘I never liked the man personally, but in Cyprus I learned to depend on him. We all learned to depend on each other, when we were out there. We had to. You must know how that happens yourself.'

‘Aye, I do,' Woodend agreed. ‘There were fellers in
my
war who I entrusted my life to on a daily basis, though I doubt I'd have wanted anythin' to do with them if I'd met them
before
the war, back in Civvy Street.' He paused to light up a cigarette. ‘How did Pugh an' Lewis get on?'

‘Terry had much the same relationship with Lewis as I had – and for much the same reasons.'

‘How many other lads were there from Whitebridge who served in Cyprus with you?'

‘I couldn't say, exactly. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that it was round about a couple of dozen, though sitting here, I can only actually put a name to eleven of them.'

‘If you could give us those names …'

‘I've done better than that. I've given them to Priscilla. She'll hand you the list on your way out.'

There was one question that Woodend had really wanted to ask since the moment he'd walked into the room. He was tempted to ask it now, but since Hough's answer could well turn out to be of significance to the development of the case, he decided to postpone it until the very end of the interview, when the other man's guard would be down.

So, instead of asking that question, he reached into his pocket, pull out the police artist's sketch, and laid it on the desk.

‘Do you know this feller?' he asked.

Hough studied the sketch carefully, for perhaps a minute.

‘Is he a Cyp?'

‘You tell me.'

‘He reminds me a little bit of a lot of men I knew in Cyprus,' Hough said finally, ‘but,' he added with regret, ‘there's not a close enough resemblance to any one of them for me to be able to say, for example, “That's Costas, who ran the little bar down by the harbour”.'

‘To go back to a couple of the points you raised earlier,' Woodend said casually. ‘You say that there were around two dozen Whitebridge lads serving on Cyprus?'

‘More or less.'

‘And that Lewis and Pugh weren't particular pals?'

‘No, they weren't.'

‘So what I
don't
see is why it should be them.'

‘Why
what
should be them?'

‘If the killings are connected to Cyprus, I don't see why the killer should have chosen those particular two men – out of the twenty-four he had available – for execution.'

‘Maybe he didn't,' Hough said, with a laugh that could have been no more than bravado. ‘Maybe he intends to kill us all.'

Woodend shook his head. ‘I don't think so. He'd have to be a very stupid man indeed to believe he could get away with that.'

‘Why?'

‘Because only a very stupid man would fail to understand that at some point we'd detect a pattern – and that once we'd detected it, we'd be bound to catch him in the act eventually.'

‘Perhaps he
is
stupid,' Hough suggested.

‘Not goin' by his form so far.'

‘His form?'

‘There were any number of bridges he could have hung Terry Pugh from, but he chose the one where he was least likely to be interrupted. An' when it came to selectin' a buildin' site on which to execute Reg Lewis, he picked one that was guarded by one old man who didn't even have a dog with him. So you see, he's far from stupid. In fact, he's bloody clever.'

‘Maybe you're right,' Hough agreed reluctantly. ‘In which case, I don't envy you your task in tracking him down at all.'

‘So what we always come back to is this: that a careful, logical killer like this one must have seen some connection between his victims. An' what
is
the connection?'

Hough shrugged. ‘Beats me.'

‘I think it has to be tied in with somethin' they both did while they were on Cyprus,' Woodend said. ‘What do you think of that as a theory?'

‘It's certainly an interesting one,' Hough conceded.

The moment had finally come to put
the question
. Woodend looked Hough straight in the eyes and said, ‘Can you think of somethin' they might have done together that could have engendered that kind of hatred, Mr Hough?'

‘No, I can't' Hough said.

Both Woodend and Paniatowski had been going over the interview in their minds on the drive back to police headquarters, but it was not until they were crossing the car park that Woodend said, ‘What do you think?'

‘I think he was being reasonably honest and straightforward for most of the interview,' Paniatowski replied, ‘but I also think that he was lying when he said he couldn't think of anything Pugh and Lewis might have done which could have caused their deaths.'

Woodend nodded. ‘Good, then we're in agreement.'

‘What I don't see is
why
he would lie,' Paniatowski said.

‘There could be a hundred reasons,' Woodend told her. ‘Maybe he's so ashamed of not having said somethin' earlier that he simply can't bring himself to say it now. Maybe he doesn't want the truth to come out, because he thinks that now the two of them are dead, all it will do is cause unnecessary sufferin' to Terry Pugh's widow. Maybe he's worried that people will think he was involved in whatever it was that went on. Maybe he
was
involved, if only on the periphery. We're never goin' to know for sure, until we find out exactly what it was that Pugh an' Lewis did.'

‘And how do you propose that we do that?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘For a start, there's the lads on Hough's list to interview. After them, there's the other lads from Whitebridge, whose names Hough can't remember, but who will still be listed by the War Office. An' if we've still come up with nothin', I suppose we could always widen our search.'

‘Widen it how?'

Woodend stopped to light a cigarette. He didn't want to talk about how he planned to widen the search yet – partly because he hadn't yet thought through all the implications, and partly because if he did decide to go ahead, he still hadn't worked out how the bloody hell he
could
do it.

‘Widen it how?' Paniatowski repeated, sounding intrigued.

‘I think we're gettin' ahead of ourselves,' Woodend said. ‘Before we go on to pastures new, we should make sure we've sifted through all the cow pats in the field we're about to leave behind.'

‘That's almost poetry,' Paniatowski said.

Woodend grinned. ‘Thank you.'

‘Almost – but somehow not quite. It's the ball that bounces off the crossbar, instead of going straight into the net; the arrow that gets caught in a crosswind and just fails to miss the target; the …'

‘I think I get the picture,' Woodend interrupted, still grinning.

‘So what particular cow pat would you like to talk about?' Paniatowski asked.

‘The interview with Mark Hough. Is there anythin' else you'd like to say about it?'

Paniatowski opened her handbag and took out her own cigarettes. ‘Not really,' she admitted. ‘Except to say that I came away from it feeling very sorry for Mr Hough.'

‘Because he's in a wheelchair?'

‘No. He seems to have come to terms with that.'

‘Then why?'

‘Because of his secretary.'

‘Because of his secretary? What's she got to do with it? I think she's a very nice lass.'

Paniatowski grinned. ‘You made that more than apparent,' she said, then, deepening her voice so it sounded a little like Woodend's, she added, ‘”An' if we're
not
the detectives, who are you then?”'

Woodend looked suddenly sheepish. ‘Did I really say that?' he asked.

‘You know you did.'

‘Aye, well, there's no fool like an old fool,' Woodend conceded. ‘But you have to admit, the girl's got
something
.'

‘Oh, I will admit,' Paniatowski said. ‘And it's probably because of the something that Hough's so deeply in love with her.'

‘Deeply in love with her?'

‘Don't tell me that you didn't notice any of the banter that passed between them.'

‘I
did
notice it – an' to tell you the truth, it made me feel slightly uncomfortable – but I thought that was no more than affection.'

Paniatowski shook her head in wonderment, ‘Most of the time, I'm almost in awe of the way that you can read people, Charlie, but there a few occasions – and this is one of them – when you can be really thick.'

‘So he's in love with her,' Woodend said, accepting his sergeant's assessment. ‘How does
she
feel about
him
?'

‘That's harder to say. She's certainly very fond of him. But as for actually
loving
him, I certainly
hope
she doesn't.'

‘Why's that?'

Paniatowski sucked greedily on her cigarette, as if she were drawing in new – and necessary – energy from it.

‘Because if she loves him, that will only make matters worse all round,' she said.

‘Will it?'

‘Yes. You don't know what it's like to love somebody – and believe that they love you – but at the same time have to accept that you can never have the kind of relationship that any couple in love are entitled to expect.'

‘No, you're quite right, I don't,' Woodend said.

But you do, don't you? he added silently, as they started walking towards the back entrance of police headquarters.

T
he lifts to the upper floors of police headquarters were halfway between the duty desk and the back door, and so it was perfectly possible to go from car park to office without once crossing the path of either a member of the public or a junior officer. The Chief Constable, Woodend was sure, found this arrangement totally admirable, but it did not suit him. His own habit, before taking the lift, was to walk the extra few yards to the duty desk, and have a quick word with whichever of the half a dozen veteran sergeants was manning it. That late afternoon, however, he decided to abandon his usual practice for once, because the sergeant on duty seemed to have his hands more than full.