The Witch Maker (6 page)

Woodend surveyed the scene himself, then turned and fixed his gaze on the Black Bull.

‘I think we've all earned a drink,' he told Sergeant Paniatowski and Constable Thwaites.

‘I'm in uniform, sir,' the constable pointed out.

The Chief Inspector ran his eyes quickly up and down the other man's blue serge uniform, and grinned.

‘So you are,' he said, as if he'd only just noticed the fact. ‘Still, thirst can do strange things to a man. In my case, it's makin' me think I see you wearin' a brown suit.'

‘I don't understand, sir.'

‘Don't be thick, Constable. I'm sayin' it won't bother anybody – least of all me – if you come an' have a pint.'

‘I'd rather not, if you don't mind, sir,' Thwaites said, shaking his head. ‘I'd be much happier gettin' myself off home.'

‘An' I'd much rather you had a drink, so I can pick your brains,' Woodend told him. ‘So you'd better follow me.'

Then he pushed open the pub door and stepped inside.

Some changes had obviously been made to the Black Bull since it had evolved from being a simple village ale shop – but not a great many. Its exposed beams were low enough for the unwary to bang their heads on. Its flag floor was uncarpeted, and the bottle-glass windows gave only a hazy, distorted view of the world outside. It was, in other words, the sort of pub that Woodend couldn't normally praise too highly. So why, he wondered, did this particular boozer make him feel so ill at ease?

He walked over to the bar. ‘You take a seat while I get them in,' he told the sergeant and the constable. ‘Bitter, is it, Thwaites?'

‘I don't want anythin', sir,' the constable said firmly.

‘Please yourself,' Woodend told him.

He turned his attention to the landlord, a stocky middle-aged man with a publican's typically red face. He smiled, and was rewarded with an unwelcoming glare in return.

‘Pint of best bitter an' a double vodka, please,' he said.

‘The bitter, I can manage,' the landlord said, with some show of reluctance. ‘But there's no call for that other stuff round here.'

‘No, I don't suppose there is,' Woodend agreed. ‘Make it a gin and tonic instead, then.'

The landlord reached for a pint glass, slipped it under the tap, and pulled back the pump as if it were the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life.

‘Wilf Dimdyke says he was in here last night,' Woodend said conversationally.

‘An' so he was,' the landlord agreed.

‘Thing is, he says he didn't get here until half past eleven.'

‘That's right.'

‘Which is an hour after you should have been closed.'

The landlord shrugged, as if it really didn't matter. ‘So summons me,' he suggested.

Woodend paid for the drinks and took them over to the table where Paniatowski and Thwaites were sitting.

The Chief Inspector handed his sergeant her drink, then turned to the constable and said, ‘Yon Tom Dimdyke seems to think the killer came from outside the village. What's your opinion on the matter, Constable?'

‘He's right,' Thwaites said firmly.

‘So Harry Dimdyke was killed by one of the folk from the fairground, was he?'

‘He'd have to have been.'

‘Why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why would any of the fairground people have wanted to kill him?' Woodend said, speaking slowly and carefully, as if he were explaining matters to a particularly slow child. ‘We can rule out robbery, both on the grounds that there was absolutely nothin' worth stealin' in the barn—'

‘We don't know that for sure,' Thwaites interrupted. ‘Harry could have had somethin' valuable on him.'

‘... an' because I've never heard of a case of robbery yet in which the robber took his victim somewhere well away from the scene of the crime an' then garrotted him.'

‘Maybe it wasn't robbery, then,' Thwaites suggested. ‘Maybe one of the fairground people had a grudge against Harry.'

‘In that case, he'd have to be a
world champion
grudge-holder.'

‘I beg your pardon, sir?'

Woodend sighed. ‘Even if it's the same fair – an' we haven't established that it is yet – it's one hell of a long time since it last came to Hallerton. Now as far as I know, most fairground workers don't have the same approach to life as office clerks do. They don't put in their forty years on the same job for the sake of the gold watch they'll collect at the end.'

‘They could have—'

‘Most of the fellers who were with the fair twenty years ago will either have left it, retired or died by now. An' even if we stretch belief to breakin' point, an' allow that one or two blokes who are here now might have been workin' for the fair the last time round, how likely is it that one of them would have waited nearly a quarter of a century to get his revenge for somethin' Harry did to him back then?'

‘Maybe it was a
family
grudge,' Thwaites said. ‘You know how clannish these carnival folk can be.'

‘A bit like the people of this village?'

‘It's not the same, sir. It's not the same at all.'

‘Let's assume for a minute that one of the fairground people
wasn't
the killer,' Woodend said. ‘Who is there in the village who might not be too unhappy to see Harry Dimdyke dead?'

‘Nobody. He was the Witch Maker.'

‘Is that the answer to every question in this village?' Woodend asked, exasperatedly. ‘That he was the bloody Witch Maker?'

Thwaites face creased, as if he really
did
want to explain – really
did
want Woodend to understand – but, despite that, he was still having trouble finding the words.

‘The village is nothin' without the Witch Burnin',' he said finally.

‘Oh come on,' Woodend said, doing his best to sound reasonable – and just missing the mark. ‘I know the Witch Burnin' brings a lot of visitors' money into the village, but that's only once in a generation, isn't it? There has to be more to this place than that.'

‘It's not a question of money, sir,' Thwaites said petulantly.

‘Still, there must be plenty of it comin' in durin' the Witch Burnin'.'

Almost as if it had been done on cue, a loud voice behind them said, ‘I've told you before, I don't want your custom. Not your custom – an' not any your mates' custom, either.'

Woodend turned. The speaker was the landlord, and he was addressing a young man with long greasy hair, a kerchief round his neck, and a gold ring in his ear, who standing at the other side of the bar.

‘I don't have to drink it here,' the young man said reasonably. ‘If you don't want me in your pub, I'll take it back to my caravan.'

‘There's sellin'-out shops in Lancaster that'll give you what you want,' the landlord told him.

‘But that's fifteen miles away!'

‘Fifteen miles or a thousand, I don't give a bugger. You'll still get nothin' from me.'

‘I don't see why you won't—'

‘I've a right under the law to refuse to serve anybody I don't want to serve. An' before you say any more, there's a police constable sittin' at that table. Do you see him?'

‘I see him,' the young man said, in a surly manner.

‘Then bugger off before I set him on you.'

The young man slunk out of the pub, and a smile which seemed both proud and complacent came to Constable Thwaites' face.

‘You see?' he asked.

‘No, I don't,' Woodend admitted.

‘Zeb won't serve the fairground people, an' neither will the shops. We don't want their money – an' we don't want them.'

‘So why are they here?'

‘The Witch Burnin's a public event, an' as such, it has to be licensed. The county council wouldn't grant that licence unless we agreed to allow it to be open to everybody – an' that includes the fair.'

‘But you'd rather nobody came?'

‘That's right. It's like I told you – there's no point to a bridge unless it runs over a river, an' there's no point to Hallerton without the Witch Burnin'.'

‘You're jokin', aren't you?' Woodend asked incredulously. ‘You have to be!'

‘It might seem like a joke to you, sir,' Thwaites told him reprovingly, ‘but that's how we see it.'

‘So everythin' that goes on around here has no purpose if it doesn't support the Witch Burnin'?' Woodend asked, trying to understand.

‘That's right, sir.'

‘Why?'

‘Because that's the way it's always been.'

‘This is the 1960s,' Woodend said. ‘There's a television in nearly every home in the land these days. There's planes that can fly you all the way to Australia in little more than a day. Bloody hell, the Yanks'll be puttin' a man on the moon in a few years.'

‘But what's that got to do with us, sir?'

Woodend sighed again. ‘Let me see if I can get this straight,' he said. ‘You claim that nobody in the village would want to kill Harry Dimdyke because he was the Witch Maker?'

‘That's right, sir.'

‘Which, as far as you're concerned, means that he could never have got up anybody's nose? Which, in turn, means that nobody could ever hold a grudge against him, or want him dead?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You told me two things earlier. The first was that the Witch Maker never marries, an' the second was that the burden of his office makes him an old man before his time.'

‘That's quite correct, sir.'

‘But even dead, Harry Dimdyke looked far from clapped out. In fact, I'd go so far as to say he seemed to be a very vigorous man who'd never have been happy with a life of celibacy.'

‘I'm afraid you've lost me there, sir.'

‘Most murders have either money or sex lurkin' somewhere in their background. We ruled out one, so that must leave the other. Harry Dimdyke wasn't gettin' his oats at home, so where was he gettin' them?' Thwaites glanced down at the table. ‘I wouldn't know about that, sir,' he mumbled.

But he would, Woodend thought. He'd bloody
have to
!

‘Was he havin' an affair with somebody's wife?' the Chief Inspector pressed. ‘Is that the big secret you've been tryin' to keep from me?'

Thwaites said nothing.

‘Well?
Was
he dippin' his wick in somebody else's candle holder?'

‘I'm afraid I couldn't say, sir,' Thwaites replied stonily.

‘This is a village!' Woodend exploded, unable to keep his temper under control any longer. ‘You can't fart in a place like this without everybody knowin' about it. An' you're tryin' to tell me you don't know whether or not Harry Dimdyke was gettin' a bit on the side?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘If I think you're holdin' back on me, I can make things difficult for you,' Woodend threatened. ‘In fact, with a little bit of effort, I can make them bloody impossible. So, for your own good, can I suggest you start pullin' with the rest of the team?'

‘I know nothin' about Harry Dimdyke's private life which would assist your investigation,' Thwaites said stiffly.

‘How many more years have you got to serve before you're eligible for a pension?'

‘Four an' a half.'

‘You could lose that pension, you know. If you were kicked off the Force for misconduct, your pension rights could go right down the drain. Is that what you
want
to happen?'

Thwaites took a deep breath. ‘I
want
to live out my time in this village, sir. I'd rather do it with a pension than without one, but if it comes to a choice between one an' the other, I'll choose the village.'

‘An' what about justice?' Woodend demanded. ‘Am I the only one who wants to see Harry Dimdyke's killer arrested?'

‘We
all
want to see him arrested,' Thwaites said levelly. ‘But we know that whoever killed him, he wasn't one of us. Can I go now, sir?'

‘Aye,' Woodend said wearily. ‘Bugger off back to your cosy little police house, an' give a bit of thought to what it'd be like to lose it.'

W
oodend looked across the pub table at the chair in which – until a couple of minutes earlier – Constable Thwaites had been sitting so uncomfortably. It was strange, he thought, but the constable seemed to make more of an impression with his absence than he had ever managed to do with his presence.

‘I didn't handle our friend, the local bobby, very well, did I?' he asked his sergeant.

‘It's hard to imagine how you could have handled him worse,' Paniatowski replied.

Plain-speaking had always played a larger part in their working relationship than social niceties, Woodend thought, and all Paniatowski was doing now was speaking plainly. So he had no right to feel offended. None at all.

Yet he did. Worse, although he knew there was absolutely no justification for it, he felt a sudden urge to strike out.

‘How long have you been an expert on human relations, Sergeant?' he demanded, unreasonably.

‘Sorry?'

‘I should have thought that after the complete bloody mess you made of things over that affair with Bob Rutter, you'd have been a little tolerant of other people's failin's.'

Paniatowski said nothing. There was nothing she
could
have said. Because she recognized the underlying truth of her boss's statement – acknowledged that she and Detective Inspector Bob Rutter had indeed made a complete bloody mess of things.

It was Woodend who finally broke the silence which had fallen between them. ‘I'm goin' to make a phone call,' he said. ‘If you want another drink, order it – an' I'll pay for it when I get back.'