A Long Time Dead (16 page)

‘So what do all these witnesses of yours
think
they're bein' questioned about?'

‘A matter of national importance.'

‘Meanin' what, exactly?'

‘It doesn't matter what it means. They won't ask that question – and if they did, we wouldn't tell them.'

‘Jesus!' Woodend said.

T
he man standing uncertainly in the doorway of TC1 had once had a mop of thick black curly hair. Now, what hair he had left was pale and limp – and clustered around the bald patch on the top of his head like a petrified forest surrounding a clearing. His body, at one time wiry and hard, had gradually allowed itself to be conquered by fat, and the washboard stomach had become a hill of blubber in constant conflict with the restraints imposed on it by a tightly-buttoned khaki shirt.

In many ways, the years had not treated Abe Birnbaum too kindly, Woodend thought, yet the vital spark – the interest in life and all it involved – was still there, if a little dimmed by age.

‘Hello, Abe,' the Chief Inspector said.

‘Charlie?' Birnbaum asked. He smiled, and the spark grew brighter. ‘Charlie Woodend?
Sergeant
Charlie Woodend. What in the name of blue blazes are you doing here, Sarge?'

‘Investigatin' matters of national importance,' Woodend said, repeating Grant's words of earlier – though without the same fervour.

An Englishman would probably have asked what the hell he meant by that, but Grant's earlier assessment of the probable American response proved to be correct, since Birnbaum just smiled wryly and said, ‘Well, it's a dirty job, but I guess somebody has to do it.'

Special Agent Grant, looking distinctly unhappy about being excluded from the conversation, cleared his throat and said, ‘Would you sit over there, please, Mr Birnbaum?'

‘Sure,' Abe Birnbaum agreed, squeezing his paunch between the table and door, and then lowering the rest of himself into the chair.

Grant consulted the notes he had spread out in front of him. ‘You are ex-PFC Abraham Birnbaum?' he asked.

Birnbaum looked first at Grant, then at Woodend, then back at Grant. ‘Is this seating plan designed so that cross-eyed guys can feel right at home?' he wondered whimsically.

‘Just answer the question as it has been put to you, please,' Special Agent Grant said firmly.

‘Sure, I'm
that
Birnbaum.' He smiled. ‘But now I'm Birnbaum the Dry-Cleaner, with outlets all over the tri-state area.' The smile still in place, he turned his attention to Woodend. ‘Was that too direct?' he asked. ‘My shrink says I should be self-confident enough about my achievements to hold off on that kind of information until people actually ask.'

Woodend grinned. ‘Glad to hear you've done well for yourself, Abe. I always knew you would.'

‘What you're doing now is of no importance,' Grant said stiffly. ‘We are only concerned with the time that you were stationed in this camp, when you were, I believe, the driver assigned to Captain Robert Kineally?'

He had dropped in the last few words into the sentence as casually as he could. But Birnbaum was not fooled – the ex-PFC's sunny smile disappeared instantly, and his eyes hardened.

‘Is that what this is all about?' he demanded. ‘So the man disappeared! Big deal!'

‘It
was
a big deal at the time – or so I've been led to believe,' Special Agent Grant said.

‘Listen, a guy goes missing like that, there could be a hundred reasons for it – reasons we can't even guess at,' Birnbaum said. ‘But it all happened over twenty years ago, for Pete's sake! Why can't you leave the poor guy alone?'

‘Just answer the question,' Grant said sternly.

‘I was
kinda
Captain Kineally's driver,' Abe Birnbaum admitted, with some show of reluctance.

‘
Kind of
his driver? What does that mean,
exactly
?'

‘It means that I was down on the payroll as his driver.'

‘But you didn't drive him?'

‘Not often. The Captain liked to drive himself most of the time.'

‘So what function
did
you fulfil?'

‘It wasn't a
function,
exactly, but I guess you could say that as I was as close as an enlisted man could be to being his confidant and buddy.'

‘His confidant and
buddy
?'

‘Sure. The Captain didn't go in much for social distinctions. He said that we were both citizens of the greatest country in the world, and that's what counted the most.' Birnbaum, seeing the look of growing scepticism in Grant's eyes, turned to Woodend, and said, ‘You knew him, Charlie. You tell the Special Agent that I'm right.'

How do you explain the time of your youth to a man who spent his youth in quite another time, Woodend wondered. How do get him to understand what it felt like to know that you might be dead soon – and that history would judge you not on something you might have achieved in the future, but on what you were doing right now?

‘American officers tended to be much more informal in their relationships with their men than our British officers were in their relationships with us,' he said, ‘but even allowin' for the extra informality, Captain Robert Kineally was still exceptional.'

‘Exceptional?' Grant repeated, almost as if he considered it to be a dirty word.

‘He once told me that bein' born with a silver spoon in your mouth was no excuse for talkin' like it was still there,' Woodend amplified.

‘He seems to have been something of a radical,' Grant said, sounding troubled.

‘I suppose you could say he was, in a way,' Woodend agreed.

‘But not a Commie?' Grant asked, worriedly.

‘No,' Woodend said. ‘Not a Commie. Not a Bolshevik, murder-lovin', baby-eater.'

‘That's OK then,' Grant said, relieved. He switched his attention back to Birnbaum. ‘Captain Kineally disappeared, didn't he?'

‘That's right,' Birnbaum said cautiously.

‘Tell me about it?'

‘What's to tell? One morning I went to his room – like I did every morning in case he had any duties for me – and the guy just wasn't there.'

‘What did you think?'

‘Think?'

‘When you saw that he wasn't there?'

‘I thought maybe he was hiding in the closet.'

‘You did?'

‘Course not! I thought he'd gone off to someplace else, and he'd soon be back.'

‘And when he
didn't
come back, as you'd expected him to? What did you think then?'

Birnbaum shrugged. ‘Not much, I guess.'

‘Not much! You must surely have thought
something
,' Grant said, exasperatedly.

‘I guess I thought about going over the sea to France,' Birnbaum said. ‘I guess I thought that in a few weeks – or maybe a few days, if I was unlucky – I'd probably be dead. That made whatever had happened to Captain Kineally seem kinda unimportant.'

‘Were there any indications beforehand that Kineally was going to disappear?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Did he seem worried about anything in particular? Was he showing any signs of being nervous?'

‘Not especially.'

Abe Birnbaum was lying, Woodend thought.

But the problem was that he had no idea
why
Birnbaum was lying. Or even what he was lying
about
. Perhaps, he decided, it was time to come at the interrogation from another angle.

‘Can I ask a couple of questions?' he asked Grant.

‘Surely,' the Special Agent agreed, sounding almost relieved at the thought of someone else taking over.

Woodend looked Birnbaum squarely in the eyes. ‘Tell me, Abe, do you remember a woman called Mary Parkinson?' he asked.

‘Sure,' Birnbaum replied, turning to face Special Agent Grant.

‘Is that all you want to say about her?' Woodend wondered. ‘That you remember her?'

‘I guess I could add that she was Captain Kineally's girl – for a little while, anyway.'

‘And
before
she was his girl?'

‘What do you mean?' Birnbaum asked.

You know what I mean, Abe, Woodend thought. You know
exactly
what I mean!

‘Was she, to your personal knowledge, involved with anybody else?' he asked.

‘Not exactly involved,' Birnbaum said. ‘Not in the way she was with the Captain. But she was kinda stepping out with another guy. A Brit by the name of Coutes. But why are you asking me about that? You should remember him well enough yourself, Sarge. You were the bastard's go-fer.'

‘So Kineally stole this girl from another man – this Captain Coutes!' Grant asked, suddenly interested again.

‘It wasn't like that!' Abe said indignantly.

No, Woodend agreed silently. No, it hadn't been like that at all.

It was a typical evening in the Dun Cow, a few nights after Woodend and Kineally had the run-in with Harry Wallace and his big, ugly friend, Huey. It was also the start of the third week of Captain Coutes's concerted campaign to get Mary Parkinson into his bed.

Coutes and Mary were sitting at a table. Woodend was positioned at the bar, in case – so Coutes had informed him – he needed a driver But whatever the Captain might claim, he wasn't
just
there as a driver at all, Woodend thought. No, he had quite another – unspoken – function altogether
.

For a man like Coutes, success was only real if it was acknowledged as such by others, the sergeant had long ago decided. Thus, he did not only have to seduce Mary, he had to be
seen
to do it. And that was Woodend's assigned role – the envious observer, the man who not only held a grudging admiration for his captain, but wished he could actually
be
Coutes himself
.

Except that things were not working out quite as planned, Woodend thought with wry amusement. Certainly Mary was being pleasant enough to Coutes, and was likely to see him again if he asked her – but she seemed no nearer being overcome by his charms than she had been at the start of their relationship.

Woodend felt a friendly hand on his shoulder, and turned round to see Captain Robert Kineally standing there.

‘Does your mother know you're out on your own?' Woodend asked, good-naturedly.

Kineally grinned. ‘I'm not out on my own,' he said. ‘I'm with my good friend, Sergeant Chuck Woodend, who's about to give me further lessons in the English way of life, with special reference to its pub culture.'

‘It'll cost you,' Woodend told him.

Kineally's face took on an unnatural expression, a clear indication that he was about to attempt some kind of accent.

‘Course it'll cost me,' he agreed. ‘So what say I buy you a pint of bitter beer as a down-payment, my old cock sparrow?'

‘Is that supposed to be a
Cockney
accent?' Woodend asked, amused
.

‘Too right it is. An' why wouldn't it be from a bloke wot was born wivin the sound of Bow Bells?'

‘You might fool a passin' Eskimo, but I don't think that you'd have much success with anybody else,' Woodend told him. ‘And it's not “bitter beer” – it's just “bitter”.'

Kineally's grin widened. ‘So much to learn, so little time to learn it before we're sent to France,' he said.

And then he noticed Mary Parkinson for the first time, and his mouth fell wide open.

‘I've never seen you look at Captain Coutes like that before,' Woodend said mock-innocently.

‘Is she his girl?' Kineally asked. ‘I mean, is there anything serious going on between them?'

Keep out of it, Charlie! a voice in Woodend's head warned him. Keep right out of it!

The voice was right, he thought. He'd already crossed Captain Coutes enough, without compounding matters. And Mary Parkinson was a grown woman, easily old enough to make her own decisions. She had not asked to be rescued, and she had no right to expect that she would be. His best course of action, therefore, was to claim complete ignorance.

‘I don't think Mary's very keen on Captain Coutes, if you want the truth,' he heard himself say. ‘An' Coutes doesn't want her for herself – to him she's just one more potential conquest.'

Kineally nodded gratefully. ‘I think I'll just go and say “hi” to my fellow officer,' he told Woodend.

And then he was gone.

Looking back on it later, Woodend would see it all as rather like one of those defining scenes from a Hollywood romantic film.

The young officer walks over to the table, the girl looks up, their eyes meet – and it's love at first sight.

Of course, the analogy was not perfect – Kineally was nowhere near handsome enough to play a Hollywood lead, and Mary was sweet rather than beautiful – yet as he took her hand, Woodend could almost hear an orchestra striking up a lush, romantic song in the background.

And the sergeant was not alone in sensing that something special was happening between the two of them.

Captain Coutes – seeing his own carefully mapped-out plans disintegrate before his very eyes – shot Kineally a look which clearly said he wished the other man was dead.

‘You told us that Kineally went out with Mary Parkinson
for a while
,' Woodend reminded Birnbaum. ‘That would imply, wouldn't it, that they broke up before he went missing?'

‘Yeah, I guess it would.'

‘So when, exactly, did this occur?'

‘It's kinda hard to say, exactly,' Birnbaum replied, his eyes still focussed on Grant, rather than on Woodend.