Dangerous Games (7 page)

‘By God, you're right!' Woodend said, looking around him. ‘It isn't a bus shelter at all!'

‘… and that if he wanted to remain in this rather pleasant environment, he'd have to order something to drink.'

‘But you didn't, in fact, do that?'

‘No, because the two of them stood up and left before I had the chance. The man in the boiler suit hadn't even finished his drink. There was more than half a pint left.'

‘What did this
friend
look like?' Woodend asked.

‘He was a big man, around forty-five years old. He had black oily hair, and he was wearing a rather crumpled suit in a garish pattern.'

‘Anythin' else?'

‘He was very dark – “foreign” dark, if you know what I mean.'

‘Are you saying he was coloured?'

‘Are you asking me if he was a nigger?'

‘No,' Woodend said, with a sudden sharp edge to his voice. ‘I'm asking you if he was
coloured
.'

‘No, he wasn't. But his skin was a lot darker than yours or mine. I used to know a chap in Manchester who ran a Greek restaurant. He was from Athens, and this man rather reminded me of him.'

‘So let me see if I've got this straight,' Woodend said. ‘This Greek-looking feller comes into the bar an' talks to Terry Pugh, and five minutes later, they leave together.'

‘Yes.'

‘Did Pugh look as if he wanted to go with the other man? Or did he seem to be leavin' unwillingly?'

‘I can't say. I was in the middle of serving a customer, and by the time I'd filled his order, the two of them were already leaving. So all I actually saw was their backs.'

Behind them, there was the sound of the double doors, which led in from the street, swinging open.

The assistant manager looked over Woodend's shoulder, and suddenly an obsequious smile filled his face.

‘Who's arrived?' Woodend asked grumpily. ‘Calamity Jane an' Billy the Kid?'

The assistant manager ignored him completely, and the smile on his face grew even wider as he shifted to the left, so that the new customer could get a proper look at him.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Hough!' he called out brightly. ‘What a pleasure it is to see you again so soon.'

‘Hough?' Woodend repeated. ‘Would that be
Mark
Hough?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

Woodend turned around to make eye contact with the man who Terry Pugh had supposedly been intending to meet the previous evening – and found he had a clear view right to the door.

‘I'm down here,' said a voice, and, from its tone, the speaker was clearly finding Woodend's obvious surprise quite amusing.

The Chief Inspector lowered his eyes a couple of feet, and saw that he had been right, and the man
was
greatly amused by his confusion.

‘Mr Hough, I presume,' he said.

‘Well, I'm certainly not Dr Livingstone,' the man in the wheelchair told him. ‘
He
had working legs.'

When Bob Rutter had wanted to sell the house in which his wife had been murdered, all the local estate agents he'd approached had been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of having it on their books.

‘What's wrong with it?' he'd asked one agent. ‘It's less than two years old. Any other house on that street has been snapped up almost as soon as the For Sale sign's been erected.'

‘Yes, but it isn't
any other
house on the street,' the estate agent had said, awkwardly.

‘No, it isn't,' Rutter had agreed, irritated. ‘This one has had an entire re-fit since the fire. It's only the shell that's two years old – the inside's brand spanking new.'

‘That may be true,' the agent had agreed reluctantly.

‘It
is
true!'

‘But the thing is, Mr Rutter, most people have seen too many ghost films to be comfortable about moving into a house where there's been a violent death, and I think I'd have real trouble shifting it.'

‘It's not haunted,' Rutter had said firmly.

‘Then why don't you live in it yourself?'

A good question, Rutter thought.

Because, he supposed, for him – and him alone – it
was
haunted.

He couldn't walk into the kitchen without seeing Maria preparing food, her hands feeling what her eyes could not see.

He couldn't be in the living room without remembering how they had sat on the sofa in front of the television, with him providing a running commentary for actions on the screen which his wife could not have worked out from the dialogue alone.

He couldn't stand in the garden without recalling that everything he had planted there had been chosen for its smell alone, because though the colour and delicacy of certain plants had once given Maria great pleasure, it was a pleasure which her blindness had robbed her of.

In the end, he had sold the house – though for considerably less than would have been paid for the houses on either side of it – and bought a large Victorian semi-detached at the other end of town.

At the time of the sale, he felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

Now, as he parked his car outside the house in which he hoped to make a new home for himself and his daughter, he was no longer sure that he had done the right thing.

Now, it seemed to him that selling the old house had been a cowardly act – that a real man would have stayed in it, and battled the demons of rebuke and regret on their own territory.

He saw the blue E Type Jaguar parked just up the street, and thought – somewhat guiltily – of the heated exchange between himself and Monika Paniatowski, which had followed him telling Woodend that he needed to take a couple of hours off that afternoon.

‘
Why's that
?' Paniatowski had asked. ‘
Have you got a date
?'

‘
As a matter of fact, I have, in a way
,' he'd replied coldly. ‘
I'm interviewing nannies for Louisa
.'

Which had been perfectly true – as far as it went. But what he'd neglected to mention was that he'd asked Elizabeth Driver – the owner of the blue E Type Jag – to sit in on those interviews.

M
ark Hough had all-but perfected the art of being in a wheel-chair, Woodend thought, as he watched the man skilfully manoeuvre his machine around the maze of pub tables, before bringing it to a sharp and very precise halt when he reached the table in the corner.

He was about the same age as Terry Pugh, but because of his bushy beard, which was flecked with grey, he might possibly have been taken for a few years older. He had a powerful torso, but the very breadth of it seemed only to draw attention to the withered legs beneath it.

Woodend had known several cripples who had self-consciously hidden their legs – covering them with a thin blanket even in the heat of summer – but Hough's legs were there for all to see, and even the expensive well-cut trousers could not hide just how wasted they were.

Woodend and Paniatowski followed Hough to the table, and sat down opposite him.

Mark Hough looked with something akin to real envy at Woodend's frothing pint.

‘I used to enjoy best bitter myself,' he said, ‘but it goes through the system far too quickly, and since going for a pee is no longer the joy it used to be, I stick to malt whisky now.'

He picked up the whisky Woodend had bought for him, took a small sip of it, and placed it on the copper-topped table.

‘I rang your headquarters as soon as I heard the news about Terry,' he continued. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do, in the circumstances. But, by the same token, I don't honestly see how I can be of much use to you.'

‘You'd arranged to meet Terry Pugh last night?' Woodend said.

‘I had.'

‘Why in this particular pub?'

‘Because it's close enough to my factory for me to be able to wheel myself down, and thus not have to bother anybody else.'

‘Your factory?' Woodend repeated thoughtfully. ‘Wait a minute, you're not
the
Hough of Hough Engineering, are you?'

‘Guilty as charged,' Hough admitted.

‘I read in the paper that you've just gone public,' Woodend said.

‘Well remembered,' Hough said.

‘What made you do it? Were you feelin' the pinch?'

‘Far from it. There's a worldwide demand for precision engineering valves, and mine are some of the best on the market. The order book's full to overflowing, and it didn't take me long to realize that I either had to turn away business or expand my capacity. But expansion always takes capital, Chief Inspector, and rather than go cap in hand to the bank, I thought I'd issue shares.'

‘But you refused to sell to large investors, didn't you?' Woodend asked, remembering why it was that the article in the newspaper had managed to stick in his mind. ‘You told all the merchant banks an' insurance companies that were sniffin' around the company to go an' take a runnin' jump.'

‘That's exactly what I told them,' Hough confirmed. ‘I have great confidence in my company's future, and I saw no reason why a bunch of bloated capitalists based in London should profit from it, when I could just as easily ensure that the ordinary man in the street up here made a few bob instead.'

‘You say “your company”, but now you've sold the shares, it isn't actually your company any more, is it?' Woodend asked.

Hough laughed. ‘Don't you believe it. I still own fifty-four percent of it – and that's more than enough to continue taking it in the direction in which I think it
should
go.'

‘An' you have a very clear idea of what that direction should be, don't you?' Woodend asked.

‘Oh yes, indeed,' Hough said.

Yes, you certainly look like a man who knows his own mind, Woodend thought.

‘Let's get back to this meetin' you were supposed to have with Terry Pugh last night,' he suggested.

‘Ah yes. I went to school with Terry, you know.'

‘His wife said somethin' about that.'

‘We were the closest of pals, all the way through Sudbury Street Elementary School.'

Woodend grinned. ‘I went to Sudbury Street myself, though it must have been some considerable time before you did.'

‘Probably so. But I don't suppose it had changed much over the years. Anyway, Terry and I fell out of touch. I expect that was mostly my fault. After I lost the use of my legs …' he paused for a moment, ‘… and in case you'd wondering, it was as the result of a motor accident.'

‘I wasn't wondering,' Woodend told him.

‘Neither was I,' Paniatowski chipped in.

Hough grinned again. ‘You're a pair of liars!' he said, without rancour. ‘But to get back to the point – after I was crippled, I didn't want to see anybody very much. For about two years, I just sat around the house feeling very sorry for myself. I'd been a fair-to-middling athlete in my youth, you see, and losing the use my legs seemed to take all meaning out of life.'

‘That was understandable,' Woodend said.

‘No, it wasn't,' Hough disagreed. ‘There's never any excuse for giving in. And one morning I woke up and discovered – almost to my own surprise – that I was determined to make a new start. I can't tell you why it should have been that particular morning – or even why it should have happened at all. It simply did. I had a little capital just sitting in the bank – a legacy from an uncle of mine – and I decided to draw it all out and buy myself an engineering company which was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.'

‘Are you an engineer by training?'

‘No, which makes the whole idea seem crazy, doesn't it? But though I knew I couldn't make things myself, I thought I could ensure that they were made properly. And once they
were
made, I was convinced I could sell them.' He took another sip of his whisky. ‘I'm rabbiting on a bit, aren't I? You don't want to hear my life story. You're here to find out about Terry Pugh.'

‘True,' Woodend agreed. ‘Not that I haven't enjoyed listenin' to your story, anyway.'

‘Yes, I'm something of an inspiration, aren't I?' Mark Hough said, though the self-deprecation in his tone neutralized any element of arrogance the statement might have contained. ‘At any rate, I ran into Terry in the centre of town, a few weeks ago. I must admit that my first feeling was one of guilt, for having ignored him so long, but he seemed to bear me no ill will, so I soon got over that. We had a chat about old times – as you do – then we filled each other in on what we'd been doing since we last met.'

‘More him filling you in than you filling him in,' Woodend guessed. ‘He'll have read all about you in the papers.'

‘Possibly you're right,' Hough agreed. ‘But at any rate, he was polite enough to listen, and while we were talking, it suddenly struck me that we could do each other a bit of good.'

‘In what way?'

‘One of the biggest headaches in any expansion programme is the manpower problem. You can get men, easily enough – but you can't always get the
right
men, especially at the shop floor management level. When I realized that Terry was working in a somewhat similar company to my own, it started to seem like a lucky chance that we'd met.'

‘So you were about to offer him a job last night?'

‘Not exactly. It was more a case of firming up the offer I'd already made in principle.'

‘An' your job offer was based solely on the grounds that you knew him, an' he was already in the right kind of work?'

Hough laughed. ‘Just because I'm in a wheelchair, you mustn't think I'm a simpleton, you know,' he said.

‘I assure you, I don't,' Woodend protested.

‘Knowing Terry was part of it,' Mark Hough said, ‘but it was
what
I knew about him that was important. Terry was never a great brain, but he was conscientious and hard working and reliable, even in our Sudbury Street days. So if, on top of that, he was an even half-way decent engineer, then he was a real prize.'