The Dark Lady (5 page)

“Group Captain Simon Hailsham at your service,” he said, holding out his hand to Woodend.

“Charlie Woodend,” the chief inspector replied. “Are you still in the airforce, Group Captain? I could have sworn that somebody or other told me you were the personnel manager at British Chemical Industries.”

“So I am,” Hailsham agreed. “Using the old title is a bit of a bad habit, I suppose, but it's a hard one to break.”

“You've had sixteen years to try,” Woodend said.

For a second or two, it looked as if Hailsham was searching for a good comeback line; then he seemed to abandon the idea and decide to change the subject instead.

“I expect the reason you wanted to speak me so urgently is that I was probably one of the last people to see poor old Gerhard Schultz alive,” he said.

“Aye, somethin' like that,” Woodend replied, taking a generous sip from his glass.

Hailsham appeared to notice the drink for the first time, and shook his head disapprovingly.

“Strictly speaking, you shouldn't have been served that pint, you know,” he said. “This is a members-only club.” Then, perhaps realising how pompous he must have sounded, he laughed, far too loudly. “That's only my little joke, Chief Inspector. I don't suppose there's much chance of the law catching
you
breaking the rules, is there?”

“No, there isn't,” Woodend agreed, declining the opportunity of joining in the merriment. “So what exactly can you tell me about the late Herr Schultz, Mr Hailsham?”

“What would you like to know?”

“Well, you could start with how long he's been in this country. If you know, that is.”

“Oh, I know, all right,” Hailsham said. He raised a finger in the bar steward's direction. “A gin and tonic, when you have a moment, Anthony.” Having ordered his drink, he turned his attention to Woodend. “Gerhard's been here – or perhaps I should say
had
been here – since 1941.”

Woodend raised a quizzical eyebrow. “He arrived here in the middle of the war, did he? What was he? Some kind of refugee?”

Hailsham laughed again. “No, nothing of the sort. Far from it, in fact. He was a fighter pilot, like me. We both fought in the Battle of Britain – ‘Their Finest Hour', and all that sort of rot. For all I know, I may have been the one who shot him down, not that he'd have borne me any ill will if I had. Comradeship of the skies, you see.”

“What happened after he was shot down?”

“They put him in a POW camp, of course. Somewhere near the south coast, I believe. He was released in 1946. I should imagine his English was probably quite good by then, and he told me he'd developed quite a liking for these sceptred isles of ours, so he decided to stay on. Applied for a job in our Hereford factory. Got it.” He winked. “He was probably helped by the fact that the personnel officer down there was another flyer.”

“Cronyism of the skies,” Woodend said, almost – but not quite – under his breath.

The remark flustered Hailsham, as it had been intended to. “Yes, well, anyway, he worked there until a few weeks ago, when he was transferred up here. He's been living in the club, but I know he was thinking of looking for a house.”

“Family?” Woodend asked.

“I imagine he's still got some relations back in Germany.”

“But not in Britain?”

“Certainly none that I know of. From what he said, I got the distinct impression he liked to play the field as far as things went with the fair sex. Would have been quite successful at it, I imagine. Good-looking chap with plenty of money in his pocket can't really go wrong when it comes to women, can he?”

The bar steward placed the gin and tonic on the bar with a little more force than was absolutely necessary, but Hailsham didn't seem to notice. He picked up the drink and took a sip.

“Yes, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he hadn't left quite a string of broken hearts behind him down in darkest Hereford,” he continued.

“Well, that's certainly somethin' to be proud of,” Woodend said dryly. “Schultz was brought up to Cheshire to be the company's new hatchet man, wasn't he?”

Hailsham gave him a sudden sharp look. “Who in heaven's name told you that?”

“As the German officers say in all those old war films, ‘It is I who am asking the questions',” Woodend replied.

The personnel manager forced a grin to his face. “Gerhard was here to examine the viability of our operation and make recommendations as to how it could be improved,” he said.

“To see who they could get away with sackin',” Woodend translated for his sergeant.

“We . . . er . . . do have a certain excess capacity,” Hailsham said. “We took on a lot of new people in the boom just after the war, but there simply isn't as much demand now.”

“Did Mr Schultz enjoy your story about the Dark Lady of Westbury?” Woodend asked.

“How do you know about that?” Hailsham said, shooting the bar steward a suspicious glance.

“I was talkin' to one of the customers who was standing near you that night,” the chief inspector lied.

Hailsham looked a little mollified. “As a matter of fact, no, he didn't really enjoy it. I'd even go so far as to say that he seemed quite shocked when I first mentioned her.”

“Would you care to be a bit more explicit, Mr Hailsham?” Woodend suggested.

“Well, I just said something like, ‘What do you think of the Dark Lady?' and he went quite pale. It was quite disturbing, so I asked him if anything was the matter and he just shook his head – as if he were finding it hard to speak. But the strange thing is, the moment I started to explain the legend to him, he seemed to calm down again. And by the time I was halfway through the story, I'd say that he was completely back to normal.”

“An' then he said he felt like takin' a walk?”

“That's right. He was from Bavaria, you see, and a lot of them are great walkers.”

“So he didn't seem worried?”

“No, as I said, there was only really that moment when I first mentioned the Dark Lady when he seemed to lose his equilibrium. Just before he left, he even made a luncheon date with me for the next day.”

“Did you leave at the same time he did?”

“No, I hung around for a while.”

“How long is a while?'

“Couldn't have been more than five minutes.”

“An' then what did you do.”

“I drove back home to the bosom of my family, of course. The kids were both safely tucked in bed by that time, but my good lady was still up. She knows, from discussions we've had in the past, that I like her to be waiting for me when I get home.” He gave a sudden start, as if something had just occurred to him. “You surely don't suspect me, do you?”

“Here's another film cliché to add to your collection, sir,” Woodend said. “I suspect no one – and I suspect everyone.”

“But Gerhard and I were chums,” Hailsham protested. “You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather when they told me at the office that he'd been murdered.”

“You'd have to say that, sir, even if you were as guilty as Judas bloody Iscariot,” Woodend pointed out.

Behind his glass, Rutter was smiling. This, he thought, was vintage Woodend. Rattling the bars of the cage to see how the lion would react. Shaking the tree to see what fell out.

“I'll have you know that I'm a personal friend of the chief constable,” Hailsham said.

“An' I once arrested a triple axe murderer who'd been to Rome an' kissed the Pope's ring,” Woodend countered. “What's your point, Mr Hailsham?”

The personnel manager knocked back the rest of his drink. “I thought the police already had a suspect,” he said.

“Somebody's been tellin' tales out of school,” Woodend tut-tutted. “Possibly your good friend the chief constable. Well, as a matter of fact, the local bobbies do seem to have a suspect, Mr Hailsham – but he's certainly not one that I'll be takin' seriously.”

“In that case, if you're looking for someone else to investigate, you should start with the Poles.”

“An' why would that be?”

“Because the Poles hate the Germans with a passion, and Gerhard Schultz was a German, you bloody fool!” Hailsham snapped.

He turned and strode angrily to the door.

“I thought you might just be ready for another pint,” the bar steward said to the chief inspector, as Simon Hailsham slammed the club door furiously behind him.

“You must be a mind reader,” Woodend said, reaching in his pocket for some change.

“This one's on the house,” Tony told him. “I've been waitin' for years for somebody to talk to that prat like you just did.”

Maria Rutter, who until less than a year earlier had been Maria Jiménez, twisted round in her armchair in an effort to get comfortable.

From upstairs, she could hear the sound of Ute, the Rutters' new German au pair, doing the vacuuming. The girl was very good at cleaning – very thorough – or at least, that was what Bob said. But there was no disputing that she was also incredibly noisy.

Maria tried to form a picture in her mind of what the girl looked like, but with only the sound of Ute's voice to guide her, it was an impossible task. If she could have run her hands over the au pair's face, as she would have done with a child's, then she would have some idea. But so far she'd been too embarrassed to ask Ute's permission to do so.

You've got to be more assertive, more like you used to be before all this happened, she told herself angrily. The way you act now, it's almost as if you're ashamed of being blind.

And why should she feel ashamed? Her blindness had come as the result of an injury she'd sustained from a police truncheon while protesting against General Franco's authoritarian regime outside the Spanish embassy. It was an affliction, but it was also a badge of honour.

There was the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. “I haf finished ze cleaning, Mrs Rutter,” said a heavily accented voice. “Vud it be all right if I vent out now?”

Did she have a fat face or a thin one? Was she pretty or plain? Maria supposed she could always ask Bob, but there was that reticence again. As if she didn't want to put anyone – even her husband – to any trouble. As if she were hoping that if she said nothing, they would forget she couldn't see.

“Ute, would you mind if I touched . . .” Maria began.

“If you touched vot?” Ute asked, when it became plain that Maria wasn't going to finish the sentence.

No, she wasn't ready yet, Maria decided. She needed more time to prepare herself.

“I'm confused,” she said, sounding it. “What I really meant to ask you was if, while you're out, it wouldn't be too much trouble to nip into a shop and buy a packet of tea.”

“But I bought tea only yesterday.”

“Of course you did,” Maria agreed. “Where are you going? Anywhere exciting?”

“I am going to church, as I do most days,” Ute said in her flat, emotionless voice.

What was the expression on her face at that moment? Were her eyes full of dreamy devotion at the thought of communing with her God? Or did she have the resigned look of someone who went to church only because that was what she had been conditioned to do?

“There's a ten-shilling note in my purse,” Maria said. “Take it. Buy yourself something nice.”

“Zat is not necessary.”

“Please, I want you to have it.”

“You are most kind.”

As she listened to the au pair's footsteps retreat up the hallway, and heard the familiar sound of the front door opening, Maria shifted her position again. Her back was bothering her quite a lot, which was a nuisance, but bearable. What was really troubling her was the thought of how she would cope once the cause of that backache – the baby she was carrying inside her – was born.

Standing with his back to the bar, Woodend surveyed the group of twenty men he'd summoned to the club to be questioned about what had happened on the night that Gerhard Schultz had died.

Groups
of men, he corrected himself, not
a
group. Because that was what they were – four distinct groups of men, each huddled protectively around their own table.

There had been a kind of artless choreography about the way these groups had formed. The first person to arrive – a large man with the sort of bushy moustache once favoured by Joe Stalin – had looked around him, then selected a table which, while not exactly at the very back of the room, was well away from where Woodend was standing.

“What's that bugger's name?” the chief inspector had asked Tony the bar steward.

“Luigi Bernadelli.”

“An' what's his job?”

“He's a shift worker on the production line, like most of the other fellers who you'll be talkin' to.”

The second man to enter the room had seemed to have no doubts as to where to sit. The table he had chosen was at the opposite end of the room to the one Bernadelli had selected.

“Heinz Schnieder,” Tony had said, out of the corner of his mouth. “You know, like the baked beans.”

And so it had gone on. The Germans, so it seemed to Woodend, had no objection whatsoever to sitting close to the English, but they made quite sure that they kept well away from the Italians. The Poles, on the other hand, didn't mind being near the Italians, as long as, in doing so, they managed to maintain a distance between themselves and the Germans.

“Is it always like this?” Woodend asked Tony.

“Pretty much,” the bar steward said. “This place is a bit like four different clubs that just happen to meet under the same roof. There's some mixin', I suppose, but not enough to write home about. On the whole, they prefer to stick to their own kind.”

“Has there ever been any trouble?”