The Enemy Within (24 page)

‘The Fairbairn Sykes,' Woodend supplied.

‘Exactly. It was standard issue for the commandos, and we found such a dagger in Richard Quinn's bedroom during our search.'

‘But do you know it was the knife which was used in the killin's?'

‘You certainly believe it is, and no doubt the lab will soon confirm that we are right. Now we'll go on to motive. In this case it is very simple. Richard Quinn hated his mother for marrying his stepfather – we will produce witnesses who will confirm that fact – and he wanted to see her punished.'

‘Then why didn't he do just that? Why did he bother to kill the other two women first?'

Marlowe brushed the question away with a wave of his hand. ‘Quinn had a nervous breakdown at the end of his period of service in Malaya. Who knows what goes on in his poor sick mind now? Perhaps the fact that the other women were also suffering from cancer made it easier for him to identify them with his mother. Perhaps he was only using them for practice, and it was pure coincidence that they had the same disease as Constance Bryant.'

‘There's absolutely nothin' coincidental about this bloody case!' Woodend protested. ‘The killer planned the whole operation long in advance. An' why would a trained commando need practice? That kind of trainin's so thorough that it's like learnin' to ride a bike – once you have learned, you never forget.'

‘You obviously consider that you know the way he thinks much better than I do,' Marlowe said. ‘In which case, could you please explain to me why the murderer – if he wasn't Quinn – put his victims in the bonfire.'

‘I don't know,' Woodend admitted.

‘Neither would I – if the murderer
was
anybody else,' Marlowe said. ‘But if it was
Quinn
, then I can explain it very easily. He was brought up in India, you see, which means that he will have been aware of the Indian tradition of suttee.'

‘The British banned that practice over a hundred years ago.'

‘Nevertheless, it is deeply ingrained in the Indian consciousness, and no doubt young Richard would have learned of it. Would you like to explain to me exactly what suttee involves, Chief Inspector?'

‘When a man died, he was cremated on a funeral pyre,' Woodend said dully. ‘An' once the pyre was burnin' properly, his wife was expected to throw herself on to it after him.'

‘Bonfire, funeral pyre – there's very little difference between the two,' Marlowe said. ‘Now do you see where I'm going?'

‘No,' Woodend said.

‘You don't see because you don't
want to
, Chief Inspector! Very well, I'll spell it out for you. Richard Quinn adored his father, and when the father died he expected his mother to die too – or, at very least, to go into perpetual mourning. But that didn't happen. She met Dexter Bryant, and made a new life for herself. And Richard couldn't tolerate that. In placing his mother on the bonfire, he was only correcting the balance – doing to her what she, symbolically or otherwise, should have already done to herself years before.'

‘Doesn't all that strike you as just a little
too
neat an' tidy? Just a little
too much
like a cleverly constructed crime novel?' Woodend asked.

‘No,' Marlowe said. ‘It strikes me as an explanation which has the ring of truth about it.'

‘All right, I can see we're never goin' to agree on that,' Woodend said, ‘so would you mind if we looked at it from another angle?'

‘No, as long as that will ensure you leave my office sooner than you would otherwise have done.'

‘You've covered means an' motive. What about opportunity? Can you place Richard Quinn anywhere near the scene of any of the murders?'

‘We will,' Marlowe said complacently.

‘Meanin' you haven't even tried yet. Meanin' that you've charged straight in, like bulls in a bloody china shop, without even botherin' to put a proper case together first.'

For once, Marlowe looked a little uncomfortable. ‘We could have waited, but we had the press to consider.'

The press! Of course! The bloody press! Always the bloody press!

He'd been asking the wrong questions, Woodend suddenly realized. He'd got himself so bogged down in the details of the case that he'd completely ignored the much bigger picture.

‘How did you get your sights fixed on Richard Quinn as a suspect in the first place?' he asked.

‘That scarcely matters now that we've put together our case and the arrest's been made,' Marlowe said airily.

‘You didn't have access to my case notes. You could have asked for them – you'd have been perfectly entitled to – but you never did. You were startin' from scratch. So what made you single out Quinn from the tens of thousands of other men in Whitebridge? How could you have become so convinced he was your man that you'd go to the lengths of doin' a full background check on him?'

‘I'm sure Mr Newton will give you any of the details he considers it appropriate you should know.'

‘He was fingered, wasn't he?' Woodend said.

Marlowe made no reply. He didn't need to – because his face said it all.

‘How was it done?' Woodend asked. ‘An anonymous letter? No, your informant wouldn't have taken the risk of bein' dismissed as a crank. Besides,' he continued, beginning to understand more and more of what must have gone on behind the scenes, ‘there'd be a price attached to the information, now wouldn't there?'

‘I don't see how you could make that assumption.'

‘I can make it because if the Force didn't investigate Quinn's background – an' it's quite obvious that it didn't – then somebody else did. An' that somebody had to have the resources to do the job properly. So who could that
somebody
possibly have been?'

‘You're making a fool of yourself with all these wild speculations,' Marlowe said.

'A journalist!' Woodend exclaimed, as if the idea had come as sudden inspiration, instead of having been developing in his head for the previous couple of minutes. ‘An' if I had to make a bet on
which
journalist it was, I'd put my money on Elizabeth Driver.'

‘You don't know what you're talking about.'

‘So if tomorrow's
Daily Globe
runs a bigger story on this case than any other newspaper does – an' if it seems to have inside knowledge of what went on – that'll just be coincidence, will it?'

‘Coincidences happen.'

‘You can't let the newspapers run your investigations for you!' Woodend said, outraged. ‘You can't make a case based on headlines. Police work's about dozens of small details which finally mesh together to give you the answer you've been searchin' for.'

Marlowe smiled, now sure of his ground again. ‘And what dozens of small details do you have to offer me, Chief Inspector? Which of your dozens of small details point a finger at the murderer?'

‘I admit we're not there yet,' Woodend replied, knowing it was a weak response, yet not having the ammunition which would enable him to produce any other.

‘Whereas DCS Newton has his murderer,' Marlowe said. ‘Consider yourself off the case, and go back to your office to await a fresh assignment.'

‘I want to continue my investigation.'

‘I'm afraid that won't be possible.'

‘Look,' Woodend said, trying to sound reasonable, ‘it's always conceivable that you've made a mistake. An' if you did, that could prove very embarrassin' later on. Whereas, if you were to just let me keep diggin'––'

‘I've already told you what I want you to do.'

‘If you take me off the case, I'll go public,' Woodend said. ‘I'm sure there's any number of other newspapers which will be most interested to discover how the
Globe
got its exclusive.'

‘If you do that, you'll be finished,' Marlowe growled.

‘Aye, probably – an' there's a good chance that you will be too,' Woodend countered.

‘That sounds like a threat.'

‘Good! That's what I intended it to sound like.'

Marlowe had been running a pencil through his hands. Now he snapped it in two. ‘You do realize what you're asking, don't you?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you do realize that the fact we may have got most of our information from the
Globe
– and I'm still not admitting that we did – will be of no interest to anyone if you can't prove that Richard Quinn wasn't the killer?'

‘Yes.'

‘And that that will leave you totally defenceless? A deer caught in the cross-hairs? A fox cornered by the hounds?'

‘You've made your point.'

Marlowe's smile returned, and this time it was broad and triumphant. ‘Very well,' he said. ‘Find me a different killer – or put your own neck in the noose.'

T
he landlord of the Drum and Monkey stood behind the bar counter, polishing glasses and casting the occasional furtive glance at the table in the corner.

Something was wrong, he thought. Very wrong!

He'd been watching these three at work for over two years, long enough to have become an expert on them. And while he'd seen the detectives in all kinds of moods – elation and depression, mystification and triumph – he'd never seen them looking as they did at that moment. They seemed to have lost their team spirit – their sense of common purpose. They seemed, not to put too fine a point on it, to be a team no longer.

‘Let me be sure I've got this straight,' Bob Rutter said. ‘What you've done is to blackmail the Chief Constable into letting you continue investigating the case, even though an arrest has already been made. Is that right?'

‘Close enough.'

‘But why?'

‘I don't like journalists settin' the pace an' direction of an investigation, especially when the journalist in question happens to be somebody like Elizabeth Driver.'

‘But what if Richard Quinn really
is
guilty?' Monika Paniatowski asked. ‘Have you thought of that?'

‘He's not,' Woodend said.

‘You've only seen him twice,' Paniatowski pointed out. ‘The first time was at the Dirty Duck – and only from a distance – and the second was just after he'd tried to hang himself. I simply don't see how – based on that – you can be so positive that you're right.'

‘You had to have been there to properly understand what I'm sayin',' Woodend argued. ‘The lad's a mess. He'd never have been able to convince Betty Stubbs that he knew a doctor who could cure her cancer. He couldn't have persuaded Lucy that he was goin' to run away with her. It's just not in him.'

‘He tried to top himself,' Rutter said. ‘Couldn't that have been because of remorse?'

‘Yes, if he'd really killed his mother – and
only
his mother. But we're all agreed our killer's not like that. He's a long-term planner with nerves of steel. The man who organized those three murders so carefully wouldn't have botched a suicide attempt in the way he did. Besides, he
told
me he didn't kill Constance, an' I believed him.'

‘He said something, in a state of shock, which might possibly be interpreted as a denial,' Rutter said. ‘But it's not the
only
possible interpretation of his words.'

‘Are you sure you've not just been swayed by personal factors?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Like what?'

‘Like the fact that you've got so much against Elizabeth Driver that you can't bear the thought that she might be right – even by accident?'

‘The lad didn't do it,' Woodend said stubbornly. ‘I'd stake my reputation on it.'

‘You
are
staking your reputation on it,' Paniatowski reminded him. ‘You're staking your
career
on it.'

The twists and turns of life never ceased to amaze him, Woodend thought. Only the day before, Rutter and Paniatowski had been on the defensive in his company because of their affair. Now
he
was on the defensive because, once again, he'd put his neck on the line.

‘I'll ask DCS Newton to assign the pair of you to another investigation,' he said.

‘No you bloody won't,' Paniatowski said angrily. ‘We've stuck together so far, and we'll stay stuck together – even if you are steering the ship on to the rocks.'

‘Talk to her,' Woodend said, appealing to Rutter.

‘I agree,' Rutter replied. ‘If we go down, we'll all go down together.'

Woodend shook his head. ‘It's not that I'm unaffected by your kamikaze instincts,' he said, ‘but you wouldn't be much use to me anyway. Somewhere out there, there's a bloody big clue that will lead me straight to the right answer. If I find it, solvin' the case will be a doddle on my own. If I don't find it, it wouldn't matter if I had the whole of the Mid Lancs CID behind me – I'd still get nowhere.'

‘And where are you hoping to find this bloody big clue of yours?' Rutter asked sceptically.

‘I'm not sure,' Woodend admitted. ‘But the offices of the
Courier
are as good a place to start as any.'

‘Why there?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Because Constance Bryant didn't just
leave
her house last night – she was
lured out
. Which means that she had to have a special relationship with the killer, just like the other two victims did. Her husband has no idea what it might be, but somebody at his office might. That's why I want to talk to everybody who works there.'

‘And thus, as ever, does the drowning man clutch at a straw,' Paniatowski said sadly.

Woodend had gathered all the
Courier
's staff in the newspaper's reception area, where they stood in a semicircle. It was a bit of a squeeze, but at least it enabled him to see how they interacted with each other.