A Long Time Dead (17 page)

‘I don't think it
is
too hard to say – not if you really put your mind to the problem,' Woodend persisted.

Birnbaum pursed his brow, and made a great show of searching through the darkest corners of his memory.

‘Captain Kineally was away in London for a week,' he said finally. ‘It was some kind of briefing session with the top brass, I think. I guess he broke up with Mary Parkinson as soon as he got back.'

‘Which would have been just a couple of days before he disappeared into thin air?'

‘I guess so.'

‘There seems to be an awful lot of guessing going on.'

It was very difficult to be certain, with only a side-on view of the man's face, but it seemed to Woodend that Birnbaum was deliberately twisting his features into what could only be called a look of bemused innocence.

‘I said, there seems to be an awful lot of guessing going on,' the Chief Inspector repeated.

Birnbaum turned to face him, and Woodend could see his suspicions had been correct – ‘bemused innocence' was the look the other man had been striving for, and he'd
almost
got it right.

‘But why are you asking
me
all this stuff, Sarge?' the American asked, establishing eye contact – but only briefly. ‘You were here yourself when they broke up.'

‘No, I wasn't,' Woodend corrected him.

‘Oh, that's right,' Birnbaum agreed, making a very poor show of looking as if he'd only just remembered that fact. ‘You were shipped out of here shortly before then, weren't you? Where did they send you to, Sarge? You never told us before you left.'

‘I couldn't tell you. Any troop movements – even the movements of just one soldier – were top secret at the time.'

‘And there was me thinking you were just being unfriendly,' Birnbaum said, with an unconvincing grin.

‘Bollocks!' Woodend said. ‘You knew as well as I did that I couldn't talk about where I was going.'

‘Maybe I did,' Birnbaum agreed. ‘Maybe I've just forgotten that I knew. But the war's been over for a long time, Sarge, so why not satisfy my curiosity now. Where
did
they send you?'

‘They sent me to the Isle of Wight,' Woodend said, noting that with the change of subject Birnbaum was relaxing a little. ‘It was a grand place. A little world all of its own. You should try and visit it while you're over here this time.'

‘Maybe I will,' Birnbaum said, now much more at his ease.

‘So tell me, Abe,' Woodend continued, in a soft coaxing tone, ‘why
did
Robert Kineally and Mary Parkinson break up?'

Birnbaum jerked violently, as if a charge of electricity had been sent through the chair on which he was sitting. ‘Who … who knows?' he asked.

‘Did Mary Parkinson break up with Robert Kineally? Or did Kineally break up with her?'

‘Maybe it was a bit of both, Sarge,' Abe Birnbaum suggested. ‘You know yourself what wartime romances were like – blazing passion one second, and cold blankets the next.'

Not that wartime romance, Woodend thought.
That
wartime romance was very special.

‘You're not under oath at the moment, Abe,' he said, ‘but you may well be at some time in the future, so I—'

‘Under oath?' Birnbaum interrupted. ‘What are you talking about? Why would I be under oath?'

‘—so I'm going to give you a second chance to answer my question, and this time, I want you to be completely honest with me.
Do you know why Robert Kineally and Mary Parkinson broke up
?'

‘No, I don't know that,' Birnbaum said, with a slightly squeaky wobble in his voice.

‘I thought you were supposed to be his buddy,' Special Agent Grant said suspiciously. ‘I thought he told you everything.'

‘Nobody tells anybody
everything
,' Birnbaum replied.

Woodend's thoughts took him back to that damp night in May 1944 – back to that drab railway station, only a few miles from where he was sitting at that very moment.

He had seen Mary.

He had listened to Mary.

And what she had told him had seared right through his heart.

There'd been a moment, he remembered now, when he had almost decided not to get on the train at all – a moment when he had seriously considered returning to Haverton Camp and hurting someone very badly.

But such heroics were the province of the matinee idols of the silver screen. Ordinary fellers, like Sergeant Charlie Woodend, had responsibilities which made any such dramatic gestures impossible. He had felt for Mary and Robert – felt for them deeply – but he still had his duty to perform for his country, his family and his Joan.

He had climbed on the train, when it pulled into the station, knowing he was doing the right thing. But there was a part of him which had regretted the action – and still did.

If Mary had told Kineally what she had told him that night, he thought – and there was no guarantee that she had – it was more than likely that Kineally had told Birnbaum.

‘One last question,' he said to Birnbaum. ‘And again, I would caution you to think very carefully before you answer.
Did the break-up have anything to do with Captain Coutes
?'

‘Search me,' Birnbaum said.

And this time there was absolutely no question that he was lying.

T
he map which Monika Paniatowski held in her hands was curling at the corners, and yellowed with age. It had the words ‘TOP SECRET' stamped in one corner of it, in bold black capital letters. And she supposed that once, back in the days when this American military camp had played a small – but significant – part in the huge gamble which was the Invasion of Normandy – ‘top secret' must have been exactly what it was.

She closed her eyes, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to be stationed in this place in 1944 – to be part of an army which had never once fired a shot in anger, but knew it would soon be facing up to troops who had been hardened by five years of bloody war.

There must have been euphoria and despair, hope and fear, she thought. But it was impossible to conjure up such feelings now – when all that was left was a few decaying huts and the odd strip of crumbling concrete.

She strode quickly over to one of the barrack blocks. This one, according to the map, was where the officers had been billeted. Logically, therefore, this must also have been the one where Robert Kineally spent his last night, before being stabbed to death by a German World War One Army knife, and then hastily buried in a shallow grave.

She studied the map again, and gauged the distance from the hut to the site of the grave. A few hundred yards, at least. And in between the barrack block and the fence had been several other buildings, now long gone – the military stores, the cookhouse, the armoury.

Even in the dead of night, the killer – whether he was Coutes or one of the Americans – had taken a very big chance in making that journey with the body slung over his shoulder.

Unless, of course, Captain Robert Kineally hadn't actually been dead at that point!

Unless the killer had somehow persuaded his victim to accompany him to the chosen spot, and murdered him there!

If that
was
what had happened, what excuse had the killer come up with to persuade Kineally to go with him? Whatever it was, Kineally would have had to have trusted the man, or he would never have agreed.

She wondered what Woodend would make of her reasoning, when she talked to him about it later.

And then, frowning without even realizing it, she wondered what Woodend would think if she told him what had happened between her and Grant the previous evening.

She
wouldn't
tell him, she decided.

It was her own business who she saw in her free time – who she
slept with
in her free time. And though she doubted that Woodend would actually express disapproval –
he
probably thought it was her own business, too – she could eliminate even the
possibility
of unpleasantness by keeping the matter to herself.

A couple of men had appeared by the wire, close to the site of the shallow grave. They were not soldiers, and – from their clothes – she guessed that they were not even Americans.

So what the hell were a pair of British civilians doing wandering around close to a crime scene? Paniatowski lit up a cigarette, and began to walk quickly towards them.

The two civilians – one skinny as a rake, the other much inclined towards plumpness – watched Paniatowski's approach with growing appreciation.

‘Like it?' the fat one asked.

‘Well, let me put it this way, I certainly wouldn't kick it out of bed,' the skinny one replied.

Then they saw the document that the woman was holding in her outstretched hand.

‘What do you make of that?' the thin one asked.

‘Looks like a warrant card to me,' the fat one said.

‘I think you're right,' his friend agreed.

‘Bit of a passion killer, really.'

‘You can say that again.'

Paniatowski drew level with them, and came to halt. ‘I'm Detective Sergeant Paniatowski,' she announced. ‘And you are …?'

‘I'm Ben Tilley, and my good friend here is Lew Boardman,' the fat man said.

‘And what do you think you're doing here?'

‘We think we're surveying,' Tilley told her.

‘Surveying?'

‘It's what we do. We're charted surveyors, so it's become a bit of habit, really. It's how we put food on the table, clothe our young ones and keep a roof over our heads.'

‘You are aware that this is a crime scene, aren't you?' Paniatowski asked severely.

‘We should be,' Tilley replied. ‘We're the unfortunate devils who found the body.'

‘Cost us half a day's work, that did, what with answering questions and filling in forms,' Boardman added.

‘So you do
know
that you shouldn't be here?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Shouldn't be here?' Boardman repeated. ‘But we've got permission. In writing!'

‘Who from?'

‘That American chappie,' Tilley said. ‘You know the one I'm talking about. He's around your age. And he never uses a short word when he can find a long one instead.'

‘Grant!' Boardman supplied.

‘That's right, Grant,' Tilley agreed. ‘He said that his team had done all the investigating it needed to—'

‘“Had carried out all the necessary investigatorial procedures,”' Boardman corrected him.

‘—had carried out all the necessary investigatorial procedures,' Tilley amended, ‘and there was no reason why we couldn't get back to doing the job we're paid for.'

It made sense, Paniatowski thought. All the evidence had been bagged and sent back to the States, so there really
was
no reason to keep these men from their work any longer.

‘So you found the skeleton, did you?' she asked.

‘She's a clever girl to have worked that out, isn't she?' Boardman asked Tilley.

‘She didn't need to work it out, Lew,' Tilley replied. ‘We just told her ourselves.'

‘Still, it was
quite
clever of her to
remember
we'd told her, wasn't it?' Boardman said.

Paniatowski sighed. ‘Were there just the two of you here at the time?' she asked.

‘No, there was another chappie here as well,' Tilley said. ‘You see, the developers—'

‘New Elizabethan Properties,' Boardman chipped in.

‘—are based in London.'

‘And they decided they didn't trust local people – people on the ground – to do a decent job.'

‘Why should they, when it's well known that down here we all marry our cousins and do unspeakable things to sheep in the dead of night?'

‘So they sent somebody from their head office to look over both our shoulders.'

‘Full of himself, he was.'

‘I should say he was. Thought he knew it all. Thought he could teach his grandmother to suck eggs.'

‘He didn't look quite so clever when we uncovered the body, though, did he?'

‘He certainly didn't. He turned quite green. Or maybe it was purple.'

‘Looked like he was going to throw up.'

‘We drove him down to the railway station, didn't we?'

‘We did.'

‘And we haven't seen hide nor hair of him since.'

‘So now it seems that we
can
be trusted to work alone.'

‘Which suits us down to the ground. We don't mind finding the odd skeleton.'

‘We've come across a lot of worse things than that in our job, we can tell you.'

‘Not that we would. We'd never describe any of them to a sweet innocent girl like yourself.'

Paniatowski had abandoned her stern expression a long time ago, and now was finding it hard not to laugh. ‘Are you a natural double act?' she asked. ‘Or have you had to work on it?'

‘Bit of both,' Boardman said.

‘If we looked like Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, we'd probably be different,' Tilley told her.

‘But since we're more like Laurel and Hardy, we just have to play the cards we've been dealt,' Boardman added.

‘Am I speaking to Chuck Woodend?' asked the American voice at the other end of the transatlantic telephone line.

What was this?

A ghost?

A spirit?

A voice from the ether?

Woodend's mouth was suddenly as dry as a desert, and a crazed drummer began to beat out a frenetic tattoo in his head. No one had called him ‘Chuck' since 1944, he thought, and even then, only
one
man had ever used the name.

‘Hello? Can you hear me?' the American asked.

‘Woodend here,' the Chief Inspector croaked.