The Dark Lady (19 page)

DO YOU FEEL NO SHAME?

How long had the message been in the book? Woodend asked himself. Had Schultz received it while he was still working in Hereford, or had it been sent to him in Cheshire?

Come to that, how did he know it had been sent to Schultz at all? Wasn't it possible that Schultz had written it himself, and had been intending to send it to someone else when he was killed?

Putting the letter carefully on the cabinet, Woodend picked up his whisky glass, and took a small sip.

What the bloody hell did it mean?
Think of the Dark Lady. Have you no shame?

Could it possibly be Lady Caroline Sutton the writer was referring to, or was there, as he already suspected, another Dark Lady in Gerhard Schultz's past?

Woodend was surprised to see that he had drunk all his whisky. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle, and poured himself another shot. A few minutes earlier he had been anticipating a good night's sleep, but he knew himself well enough to accept that now he had seen the note he would get very little rest.

I
t was as if the benevolent sunshine and clear blue skies under which Woodend had met Gretchen Müller the previous day had never existed. In their place hung heavy black clouds, glowering with disdain on Westbury Park. The change in the weather seemed to affect everyone and everything. People walked with less of a spring in their steps. Cats showed none of their usual alertness. Birds chirped in a mechanical way, as if they were only going through the motions. And the brightly painted houses of the park looked as dull and insubstantial as the converted army huts they secretly were.

The weather even seemed to have affected Tony, the normally cheerful bar steward, who could barely raise a smile when he brought in Woodend's fried breakfast and daily newspapers. The chief inspector picked up the
Daily Mirror
first. There was no mention of the Dark Lady of Westbury Hall on the front page, but he suspected that the story still had too much mileage in it to have been dropped completely. He was right. On page seven, next to the photograph of a man who used cigarettes as the filling for his sandwiches, was a short piece by Elizabeth Driver.

Death and the Dark Lady

The Dark Lady of Westbury Hall in quiet rural Cheshire was reported to have been sighted again last night. Legend has it that the supposed ghost of Lady Caroline Sutton only appears when a death is imminent. While some of the local people believe the story to be merely fanciful, there are others who point out that it was after her first appearance that Gerhard Schultz, a British Chemical Industries executive, was found brutally murdered in the woods near Westbury Hall, and the question on many lips is this – Is the Dark Lady's appearance no more than a reminder that there has already been one killing, or is it a foreshadowing of more deaths to come?

The girl did have spirit, but Bob Rutter, for all his middle-aged attitude, was quite right. Elizabeth Driver's stories were making the people at BCI nervous, and that had already had an impact on the investigation – so those stories were going to have to stop.

The door to the breakfast room swung open, and Inspector Chatterton walked in.

“Well, we caught the Poles,” he said, without any hint of satisfaction in his voice. “It was just like you told us it was going to be. They had their tools with them, and they were going to dismantle the still and move it somewhere safer.”

“But . . .?” Woodend asked.

“But just as you suspected yesterday, it hasn't made the chief constable any happier. He's been going round the station muttering that he's been on to the Yard again, and he's been told on good authority that your days here are very much numbered.”

Woodend nodded. “I'm goin' to have to give him Fred Foley. It won't do him any good, because the man's innocent an' you'll never be able prove otherwise – but at least it'll buy me some time.”

“You know where Fred Foley is?” Chatterton asked incredulously.

“Yes, I do.”

“But how could you? We've had men out searching for days, and we still haven't found him, yet you've never left the park.”

“I have a trick I use,” Woodend said. “An' it's this: when people tell me things, I listen.”

As Bob Rutter's taxi approached the turning for London Airport, snippets of disturbing information which he wasn't even aware that he knew kept popping into his mind:

Five members of the crew and two passengers had been killed when a British European Airways Viscount crashed on the approach to Nott's Corner Airport in Belfast.

Another Viscount had collided with an Italian fighter plane near Anzio, and crashed with the loss of all thirty-one people on board.

Maria's hand gently squeezed his lower arm. “You feel so tense,” she said. “There's really no need for it, you know.”

“I do know,” Rutter replied unconvincingly.

But he was thinking, And then there's the famous one, the one that everybody remembers.

Just over three years earlier, a BEA Ambassador had failed to clear a fence when taking off from Rhiem airport. The plane had been carrying the Manchester United team, who were celebrating qualifying for a place in the semi-finals of the European Cup.

Rutter had seen the pictures in the newspapers. The plane had been no more than a shattered shell – a twisted, distorted wreck. Eight members of the team had been killed, along with thirteen other passengers.

“You're still thinking about planes crashing, aren't you, my darling?” Maria asked.

“It's hard not to when there seems to have been so many of them,” Rutter admitted.

“Not so many at all,” Maria assured him. “Certainly not in comparison to the number of flights. I got the operator to ring BEA for me. Do you know that they carried over half a million passengers last year? Everybody's travelling by plane these days. There's even a regular service to America now.”

Rutter lit one of his corked-tipped cigarettes. Maria's assurances were all very well, he told himself, but what did they call the crash which killed all those Manchester United players? The Munich Air Disaster. And where was he flying to? Bloody Munich!

“Listen, the Comet's a very big plane,” Maria persisted. “It's got a crew of four, and it carries over sixty passengers. It's safer than a bus.”

“Buses don't hang up in the sky with no visible means of support,” Rutter said gloomily.

Maria squeezed his arm again. “I love you so much that I'd
know
if anything was going to go wrong,” she whispered softly. “I'd know – and I wouldn't let you fly.”

It was a silly thing to say, Rutter thought. Love had nothing to do with seeing into the future. In all the cases he'd investigated, the death of a loved one had always come as a complete shock to the victim's friends and family. And yet, even knowing that, he found that after Maria's soothing words he was suddenly starting to feel a little better.

Mike Partridge lived in a modern block of flats on the edge of Maltham. The place was probably owned by BCI, just as everything else in the town seemed to be, Woodend thought grumpily as he climbed the stairs to the second floor.

He rang Partridge's bell. He heard the sound of movement from the other side of the door, but after perhaps half a minute had passed, it became obvious that no one was going to open it for him.

He rang again. And then a third time. Still he was ignored, and it was only by resorting to the tactic of keeping his finger permanently on the bell that he finally brought Partridge to the door.

“What the bloody 'ell do you want?” the red-faced shift man demanded gruffly.

“I've got a few questions I'd rather like answers to,” the chief inspector replied.

“I've answered all your questions once,” Partridge countered. “That should be enough for you.”

“Maybe it would have been if you'd told me the complete truth,” Woodend said. “But you didn't, did you?”

“I don't know what you're talkin' about.”

“The last time we spoke, you did everythin' you could to create the impression that you were a bachelor. But you're not. You're a widower.”

Partridge's eyes flashed with anger. “You've been checkin' up on me,” he said accusingly.

“Well, of course I have. That's my job. Did you really expect me to do anythin' else?”

The shift man sighed. “I suppose not.”

“I don't like talkin' to people in corridors,” Woodend said. “They're nasty, draughty places. I'd much rather be inside.”

“Why should I let you into my flat?”

“Why shouldn't you let me in? Unless, of course, you've got somethin' to hide?”

Partridge shrugged, then turned around and re-entered his flat. Woodend followed him down the short hallway and into his living room. It was a sparse, soulless place. There were no pictures on the walls, and no ornaments on the mantelpiece or sideboard. The only personal touch of any kind was a framed photograph on the windowsill. Here was a man who used his flat as nothing more than a place to sleep.

Woodend walked over to the window to take a closer look at the photograph. It was of a young woman, who was proudly holding an apple-cheeked child in her arms.

“When was this taken?” he asked.

“1940,” Partridge replied dully. “The kiddie would 'ave been twenty-three if she'd lived. She might even 'ave been married. I could 'ave been a grandfather by now.”

“A lot of the children in Southampton were evacuated to the countryside, but your family stayed with you,” Woodend said. “Why was that? Wasn't there anywhere you could send her?”

“Oh yes, there was somewhere I could 'ave sent her. My wife 'ad a sister who lived in the country. She invited Doris an' the kiddie to go an' live with 'er, but Doris decided to stay with me.”

“Tell me about your girlfriend – the Dark Lady.”

If the chief inspector had been expecting Partridge's ruddy face to go suddenly pale, he would have been disappointed, because the expression which filled it at that moment was far more complex than simple guilt.

“She was Jamaican,” he said. “I'd seen a few coloured merchant seamen down at the docks, but I'd never met a black
woman
before. I loved my wife, but this was different. Lucinda was so . . . so . . .” He waved his hands, frustrated at his lack of ability to express himself. “She didn't think things through. She just did what she wanted to do. She was . . . what's the word?”

“Spontaneous?” Woodend supplied.

“That's it. Spontaneous. She loved life, an' was determined to squeeze the last drop out of it. I fell for 'er in a big way. I wanted 'er, but at the same time I wanted my family.” He laughed bitterly. “That was 'ow I was in those days. Always wantin' to 'ave my cake an' eat it too.”

“After your family was killed, did you think of settin' up house with your Dark Lady?” Woodend asked.

Partridge shook his head. “She wanted to, but I couldn't. I . . . just . . . couldn't.”

“So you joined the army instead,” Woodend said. “You didn't have to – the job you were doin' was considered vital war work, so you'd never have been called up – but you wanted to go into battle, didn't you?”

“No, I wanted to die,” Partridge corrected him. “I
expected
to die. But all I got was a bullet in the leg.” He paused, as if a thought had suddenly struck him. “I can see where this is leadin' now,” he said, anger entering his voice again. “My wife an' little daughter were killed by a German bomb, an' when a German flier came to Westbury Park, I just couldn't bear it. So I killed 'im. Isn't that what you're about to tell me?”

Woodend shook his head. “I might have thought that, but for what you said to Horace Greenwood.”

“Horace?” Partridge repeated. “You talked to him?”

“No, my sergeant was the one who saw him. But that's neither here nor there, is it? It's what he told us that's important. He visited you in hospital after the D-Day landin'.”

“I remember that.”

“An' all you would say to him was, ‘It's my fault. It's all my fault.' He thought you were talkin' about the men who'd died durin' the invasion – men you'd promised would come through it all in one piece. But I don't think you were meanin' that at all. Am I right?”

Partridge bowed his head. “Yes, you're right,” he agreed. “I lied earlier, when I told you that my wife 'ad decided not to go an' stay with her sister in the country. She wanted to go, an' I talked 'er out of it because what
I
wanted was to have 'er an' the baby there when I came home from work. It wasn't the Germans who killed her – it was me. I killed them both.”

“An' ever since then, you've been tryin' to atone for it,” Woodend said sadly. “You've not looked at another woman since your wife died. You do a lot of charity work, but you don't claim any credit for it. An' you can't see anybody in trouble without wantin' to help them, can you?”

“No,” Partridge admitted. “I can't.”

“The night Gerhard Schultz was killed? You didn't come straight home, did you?”

“Why would I?” Partridge asked, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. “What is there 'ere to come 'ome
to
?”

“So what did you do instead?”

“I'm not really sure. I suppose I must have just walked around the park, thinkin'.”

From beyond the bedroom door came the muffled sound of a dog barking.

“I wouldn't have put you down as the sort of feller to keep a pet, Mr Partridge,” Woodend said.

“It was a stray, wanderin' the streets. A poor, 'alf-starved thing. I was sorry for it.”

Woodend shook his head disbelievingly. “I've never known a man who kept a dog say he had nothin' to come home to. An' I've never known a man who had a dog who wouldn't introduce it to his visitors.” He took his Capstan Full Strength out of his pocket, and lit one up. “Come on, Mr Partridge! Isn't it time we stopped playin' games an' brought Fred Foley out here?”