The Dark Lady (17 page)

“No,” Woodend agreed. “I wouldn't.”

“Mike Partridge, on the other hand, has turned out to be something of a surprise.”

“In what way?”

“Well, it turns out he does voluntary work at an old people's home in Maltham twice a week, but when I went down there and asked the matron about it, she was very cagey.”

“Strange,” Woodend said.

“I got the same response from the nurses at the hospital where he does some unpaid portering. As you can imagine, I was getting a bit suspicious by this point. Then I talked to my sergeant. He's a scoutmaster, and so is Partridge. Seems that a couple of years ago, the local paper was going to run a piece on all Partridge's good works. It was supposed to be a surprise, but he found out about it himself and he was furious.”

“Was he now?”

“He told my sergeant he didn't want any sort of recognition for his good deeds. He said that would defeat the object of doing them in the first place.”

“Interesting,” Woodend said thoughtfully. “I think I'll have a word with Mr Partridge, when I can get round to it.”

“To get back to the other thing,” Chatterton said. “Now that you've got all the evidence you need, when do you plan to arrest the Poles?”

“I'm not goin' to arrest them.” Woodend said.

“You're not?”

“It isn't my job. Besides, as desperately as they want to shift the stuff to somewhere safer, they'll not make a move as long as they think I might catch them at it. So I'm goin' to make myself as conspicuous as possible by stayin' in the bar all night—” he grinned – “which, as you know, will be a real hardship. An' in the meantime, your men can be hidin' in the woods, waitin' for them to turn up.”

“I hope you don't think that arresting the Poles is going to make your problems with Mr Blake go away, sir,” Chatterton cautioned him.

Woodend sighed. “No, I don't. If anythin', it'll make them worse, because it'll prove I was right about the Poles all along, an' leave Blake an' Hailsham lookin' like the pair of idiots we both know they are. But at least it'll stop Sexton from badgerin' me to arrest the wrong men for murder.”

I
t was six thirty in the evening by the time Bob Rutter's train pulled into Charing Cross station, and though he had been working since early morning and it was tempting to go straight home to his wife, he knew he could do no such thing until he had made at least two more calls. He hailed a taxi, and asked to be taken to 36 Hadfield Avenue, which, according to the personnel manager in BCI's Hereford plant, had been Gerhard Schultz's last address in London.

As the taxi sped along, Rutter tried to put his thoughts in order. He had learned a great deal about Mike Partridge, and even more about Simon Hailsham, but he had failed completely to find any link between either of those two men and Gerhard Schultz. And perhaps the reason he'd failed to find one was because there wasn't one to find. Perhaps if Schultz's death was linked in some way to his past, it was a different part of his past from the one the sergeant had spent the day investigating.

The taxi pulled up in front of a four-storey Victorian terraced house which had seen better days. Rutter paid off the cabby and walked up the path. There were a number of bells by the front door, and he pressed one of the two which belonged to the ground-floor flats. There was the sound of footsteps in the hallway, then the door was opened by a spotty youth with buck teeth and darting eyes, who was wearing striped pyjama bottoms and a vest.

“Yeah?” he said suspiciously.

“Police,” Rutter said, producing his warrant card.

“But I haven't done nuffink,” the youth said. “At least, nuffink I ain't already got caught for.”

“Relax,” Rutter said. “I'm not here to see you. You're too young to help me. I want to talk to somebody who was living here 1946.”

The boy thought about it. “Old Man Thompson on the second floor's lived here for a long time,” he said.

“Do you happen to know if he's at home?”

“Yeah, should be. Normally gets in from work at about half-past five.” The youth paused. “I really haven't done nuffink, you know. I can show you a proper bill for that record player.”

“But the television set's a bit dicey, isn't it?” Rutter said, taking a shot in the dark.

The boy looked shocked. “I'm only looking after that for a friend,” he protested.

“Now how did I know you were going to say that?” Rutter mused. “Second floor, you said?”

“Yeah.”

As Rutter climbed the stairs, he heard the young man scurrying back to his warren. He smiled to himself. He was not a betting man, but he would have been prepared to wager that by the time he came downstairs again, the dodgy television would be at least three streets away.

He stopped suddenly, as the realisation hit him that he would never have had anything like the same conversation with the spotty youth a couple of years earlier. Back then, he would have been much stiffer and more formal. Working with Woodend had certainly changed him. Christ, he was even starting to
sound
like Cloggin'-it Charlie. He sighed loudly – another Woodendian thing to do – and carried on climbing the stairs.

He knocked on the door on the second-floor landing. A man opened it. “Mr Thompson?” he asked.

“That's me.”

‘Old Man' Thompson was all of forty. He was of slight build, and had wispy blond hair which almost touched the collar of the bright-green silk dressing gown he wore over his shirt and trousers. His eyes were a faded blue, and there was wariness about them even before Rutter reached into his jacket pocket and produced his warrant card.

“I suppose you'd better come in,” Thompson said resignedly.

“At times like this, most people normally say something like, ‘What's this all about, Officer?'”

“Why should I bother saying that?” Thompson replied. “I know what it's all about. You want to ask me about Gerhard.”

The living room into which Rutter followed the other man had a pleasant, comfortable feel about it – and certainly didn't seem to belong in a dilapidated terraced house. The carpet was a deep rich mustard colour, the curtains were heavy, and looked as if they might be velvet. The canary was chirping in its cage, and the goldfish was swimming in endless circles around its glass home; both blending in well with the general colour scheme. In the fireplace was one of those new-fangled electric fires with artificial coal and glowing, light-bulb-powered embers.

“Would you care for a cup of tea?” Thompson asked. “I've just brewed it. It's a special China blend they make up for me in a shop in Knightsbridge. It's rather delicate.”

“A cup of tea would be very nice,” Rutter told him.

Thompson walked over to his kitchenette, and poured the tea into fine bone-china cups. “Would you like a slice of lemon with it?” he asked. “Or are you one of those people who insist on taking it with milk?”

“I think I would rather prefer milk.”

Thompson tut-tutted. “It ruins the flavour, you know, but I suppose it's a case of
chacun à
son goût
.” He crossed the room and handed Rutter a cup. “Well, sit down, dear boy. One can't possibly savour a good cup of tea – even tea with milk in it – when one is standing up.”

Rutter sat, and so did Thompson.

“Yes,” the man in the dressing gown continued, more serious now, “I've been expecting a visit from the police ever since I read about Gerhard's death in the newspapers.”

“Did you know him well?”

“Very well. At least for a while.”

“When did you meet him?”

“When he first moved into the house. That would have been sometime in 1946, just after he was released from the prisoner-of-war camp.”

“And you soon became friends?”

“That's right.”

“Do you know, I've talked to a number of people about him,” Rutter said. “but you're the first one who'll admit to having been his friend. Now why do you think that is?”

“I can't speak for his other relationships, only about the one I had with him. We knew we were going to get along with each other right from the start. It's hard to explain exactly how we knew, but it was as if there was some kind of spark between us.”

“What sort of thing did you do together?”

“Oh, nothing out of the ordinary. Sometimes I'd cook him a good square meal – he couldn't so much as boil an egg himself, poor lamb – and sometimes we'd share a bottle of inexpensive wine. And talk! We seemed to talk about everything under the sun.”

“Why did he come to London?” Rutter asked, taking out his packet of cork-tipped cigarettes.

“I'd rather you didn't smoke, if you don't mind,” Thompson said. “The smell does tend to cling to the soft furnishings and it makes me feel quite nauseous. Now what was your question again?”

“Why did he come to London?” Rutter repeated, slipping the cigarettes regretfully back in his pocket.

“He was looking for work. He thought there'd be more opportunities in the big city.”

“And were there?”

Thompson shook his head. “Not the right sort of work, anyway. He'd been an officer, a war hero – he had the Iron Cross, you know – and he found himself working behind a bar. But I will say this for him – he wasn't bitter. He said there was dignity in any kind of honest labour.”

“How long did he work in the pub?”

“Not long. He had a stroke of good luck. Or, at least, that's what I used to believe.”

“And what do you think now?”

“Now I think that men like Gerhard – men of action – make their own luck. Anyway, he met a man in the pub where he was working . . .”

“The personnel manager from BCI Hereford.”

“That's right. And he was offered a job on the spot. He was very excited about it. He carried the letter the man sent him around in his wallet, almost as if it were a love letter, and now and again he'd take it out and read it. Not that it was anything special – it just said it had been a pleasure to meet him in the pub and put the job offer in writing. But it was his big chance, you see. For all he talked about the dignity of all labour, I think there was a small part of him which did find it humiliating to work in a bar.”

“You must have been happy for him yourself,” Rutter said.

“Not really. I was a bit depressed about the thought of him going away, if the truth be told. But Gerhard said there was no need for the blues, because it wasn't as if Hereford was the other side of the world, and we'd still see each other most weekends.”

“And did you?”

“I'll get to that in a minute,” Thompson said. “About a week before he was due to leave for Hereford, he got a letter from Germany, and after he'd read it, he told me he had to go away for a couple of days on business.”

“To Germany?”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“He said the business was in Liverpool. Anyway, that was the last I ever saw of him.”

“He didn't come back?”

“Oh, he came back all right,” Thompson said, a bitter edge creeping into his tone. “He came back in the middle of the night. Like a thief. He didn't have that many belongings – it was a furnished flat he was living in – but what he did have, he packed up. He wasn't supposed to vacate the flat for another week or so, but he left the landlord a whole month's rent in lieu of notice.” He paused to sip his tea, and Rutter noticed the moisture in his eyes. “He didn't leave anything for me though,” he continued, “not even a note.”

“Didn't you write to him?” Rutter asked. “After all, it would have been easy enough for you to find out the address of theBCI factory in Hereford.”

Thompson sighed. “No, I didn't write to him.”

“Why not?”

“What would have been the point? Leaving the way he did, he was as good as saying our friendship was over.”

“You felt betrayed?” Rutter suggested.

“Yes, I suppose that is one way of putting it. But it was all a long time ago – I'm over it now.”

Are you? Rutter wondered. Are you really?

Rutter's luck seemed to be in. The pub where Gerhard Schultz had worked briefly was called the Eagle and Child, and the landlord, Wally Stubbs, had been there ever since the end of 1945. He was lucky, too, to have arrived at a quiet time, so that Stubbs was more than willing to talk to him.

“So you were the person who gave Schultz a job in the first place?” the detective said.

“That's right,” Stubbs agreed.

“Didn't it bother you, employing a German flier so soon after the end of the war?”

“Might have done if he'd been one of the ones who'd flown a bomber,” Stubbs admitted. “The Blitz were still very much in people's memories at that time. Well, they'd only to look around them and see all the bombsites to be reminded. But a fighter pilot was a different matter. There was a bit of glamour about him. Even a lot of the people who were rabid anti-Germans had a grudging admiration for blokes like Gerhard.”

“So he got on well with your customers?”

“There were a few miserable old sods who muttered into their beer about me hiring a Kraut, but it didn't bother most of the regulars. Gerhard was a very good barman, you see. You only had to order a drink from him the once, and the next time you came into the pub it'd be waiting on the counter for you. He always had a pleasant manner about him, and if you had a bit of misery you wanted to spill out, he made a good listener.”

A man in a flat cap, with a greyhound on a lead, walked up to the bar. “No danger of gettin' a drink, is there, Wally?” he asked.

The landlord grinned at him. “Be right with you, Stan.” He turned to Rutter. “If you'll excuse me for a minute.”