A Long Time Dead (25 page)

She could only see the back of his head, but she was sure, from the tone of his voice, that there was an arrogant grin plastered over the front of it.

‘Miss you!' she repeated. ‘Miss you? To tell you the truth, I don't think I'll miss you at all.'

She was not lying. She felt no particular affection for the man. Or even any affection at all! The plain fact was that, on a purely social level, his company bored her.

‘You'll miss the sex, though, won't you?' Grant said. ‘They don't call us Special Agents for nothing.'

He was right about that. She hated to admit it – but he was right. She had slept with plenty of men in her time, but never one who had roused her to the heights that Grant had.

‘The sex
has
been good,' she admitted, ‘but what you should never forget, Special Agent, is that it takes two to tango.'

They both fell silent for a while, then Grant said, ‘Since you seem so interested in the progress of the investigation, how much longer do
you
think it's gonna last?'

‘Not long.'

‘Is that right? And what do you base this belief of yours on? Woman's intuition?'

‘Not at all,' she said, resisting the temptation to turn him over and knee him – as hard as she possibly could – in his FBI-approved testicles. ‘It's based on something much more substantial.'

‘And what might that be? You haven't been reading the entrails again, have you?'

He was insufferable, she thought. Really insufferable. Even for the best sex in the world, it wasn't worth putting up with this.

‘We've found evidence,' she said. ‘Do you know what that means – “finding evidence”? It means going out and looking for it, rather than just sitting behind your big FBI desk, and waiting for it to come to you.'

‘And what does this evidence you've uncovered – by going out and looking for it – actually show?' Grant asked.

This wasn't going to be an easy thing to say, Monika Paniatowski thought. Admitting to this insufferable prig that he'd been right all along wasn't going to be easy at all.

‘It would seem to support all the previous evidence,' she said, through gritted teeth.

‘And what does that mean exactly, Detective Sergeant? That you think Coutes is our killer?'

‘Yes.'

‘Now that
is
interesting,' Grant said thoughtfully.

‘What is?'

‘That just as you two English bumpkins have started to see the investigation through my eyes, I've done a complete back-flip and – much to my surprise – have started seeing it through yours.'

‘You don't think he
is
the killer?'

‘Nope!'

‘But you must agree that all the evidence points to—'

‘All the evidence is far too neat – far too clean. Coutes always claimed he was set up by somebody else, back in 1944, and the more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to believe him.'

W
oodend was standing on the platform at Coxton Halt Railway Station, worrying about the way he was dressed. He was in the army – he was sure of that – so why the bloody hell was he wearing a hairy sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, rather than a khaki uniform?

He smiled with relief when he saw the girl approaching him, because he knew that even if the uniform dilemma could not be resolved, here, at least, was one problem he could handle.

‘I phoned my wife yesterday,' he told Mary Parkinson.

The girl frowned. ‘How could you have done that? You're not married, Charlie.'

He suspected she was right about that, but he wasn't going to let a little thing like reality deflect him from his purpose.

‘I asked her about your little problem,' he ploughed on. ‘You know what I'm talking about, don't you?'

‘Yes, Charlie. Of course I know what you're talking about.'

‘And do you know what she said? She said that under no circumstances are you tell Robert anything about what happened between you and Coutes until the war's over. Have you got that? Until the war's over, you're not to say a word!'

Mary Parkinson smiled, and Woodend noticed for the first time that not only was her face a deathly pale, but there was blood dribbling out of the corner of her mouth.

‘It's too late to say that now, Charlie,' she told him, lifting up her hands so he could see her lacerated wrists. ‘Far too late!'

In shock, he turned quickly away from her, only to have fresh horrors revealed to him a little further down the platform, where Kineally and Coutes were standing.

Kineally was holding himself stiffly and awkwardly, as was only to be expected from a man who had just been beaten up. Coutes was much more relaxed, and had his big Prussian knife in his hand.

Coutes saw that Woodend was looking at them, and held out the big knife to him.

‘Do you want to do it, Sergeant?' he asked.

‘No!' Woodend heard himself gasp. ‘No!'

Coutes looked perplexed. ‘Really?' he asked. ‘I must say, I can't understand your refusing. After all, Sergeant, you're the one who's made all this necessary!'

The train steamed into the station, a huge angry monster with its whistle ringing deafeningly.

Ringing? Woodend thought hazily. Why would it ring? Whistles whistled. That's how they got their name.

‘Come on, Sergeant,' Coutes urged. ‘Be a man! Take responsibility for your actions.'

The ringing would simply not go away, and Woodend reached groggily for the bedside phone.

‘Yes?' he croaked.

‘It's me, sir,' said the voice on the other end of the line.

The guilty calling the guilty, on a phone line of deep regret, Woodend thought.

Except that Bob didn't
sound
particularly guilty. There was new life to his voice that morning – a whole new enthusiasm – as if he were finally emerging from a long deep tunnel.

‘Since you're ringin' me at the crack of dawn, I assume that you've got somethin' really interestin' to report,' Woodend said, groping around on the bedside cabinet for his cigarettes.

‘I don't know how interesting it is,' Bob Rutter admitted chirpily. ‘How could I know, when you've kept me so much in the dark? But I certainly do have
something
to report.'

‘Fire away,' Woodend said, striking a match and lighting his first Capstan Full Strength of the day.

‘I was in Coutes's London flat last night,' Rutter said, just as the Chief Inspector had inhaled.

Woodend choked.

Had it been a mistake to give the lad this job, he wondered, as a coughing fit wracked his body.

Had he pushed him too far, too soon?

‘Are you all right, sir?' Rutter asked.

‘I'm fine,' Woodend rasped. ‘But I'm not so sure about you. You didn't
break
in, did you?'

Rutter laughed. ‘No, I didn't. If you'd seen the security system protecting the flat for yourself, you'd soon have realized that it would have taken a better man than me to
break
in.'

‘So how
did
you manage to get your foot through the door?'

‘I was invited in.'

‘An' are you goin' to tell me
who
invited you in? Or would you prefer me to guess?'

‘I could certainly tell you, if you absolutely insisted on it,' Rutter said, obviously still enjoying himself, ‘but I rather think you'd be much better off not doing that.'

‘Maybe you're right,' Woodend agreed. ‘So, however you managed to talk your way in, what did you find out once you were there?'

‘I'll have to give you a little of the background, first,' Rutter said, milking the story for all it was worth.

‘Fair enough,' Woodend said.

‘A few weeks ago, there was an attempted burglary at Douglas Coutes's flat. It was a really professional job. The burglars eventually triggered one of the alarms and fled the scene, but the interesting thing is that
when
they set it off, they were in the process of examining the display cases – which contain Coutes's collection of knives.'

‘Knives!' Woodend repeated, suddenly feeling much more awake.

‘Knives,' Rutter reaffirmed, ‘He's got hundreds of the things.'

Professional burglars?

Examinin' Coutes's knife collection?

It was more than just interestin', Woodend thought – it was bloody fascinatin'.

But that was not the same as saying that it had any connection at all with this investigation, now was it?

‘You're sure the burglars didn't take any of the knives away with them?' he said, searching for some kind of connection, however tenuous.

‘I'm absolutely certain they didn't. They couldn't have – not without damaging the display cases.'

‘I see,' Woodend said, disappointedly – though he was not quite clear what he was being disappointed
about
.

‘I wouldn't be at all surprised if they hadn't been planning to take some of them
before
the alarm went off,' Rutter said encouragingly.

Well, that was something, at least.

‘You didn't happen to see a World War One German Army dagger in one of the cases, did you?' Woodend asked.

‘I don't know. What would it have looked like?'

‘It'd be a big bugger, with a channel runnin' down the middle of it to drain off the victim's blood.'

‘No, I'm sure I didn't see one like that.'

And neither had Coutes, or so he claimed. At least, not since late in April 1944.

‘You've done well, Bob,' Woodend said.

‘But have I been of any
use
?' Rutter asked hopefully.

‘Definitely,' Woodend lied. ‘If nothing else, you helped us to eliminate certain possibilities.'

‘Will you be needing me to do anything else in connection with this investigation?'

That was unlikely, Woodend thought. Highly unlikely.

‘I don't know,' he said aloud. ‘I'll ring you if I do.' Then he added, to give the statement verisimilitude, ‘If you're going to be away from your parents-in-laws' house for any length of time, make sure you leave them a number where I can contact you.'

‘I'll do that,' Rutter said happily. ‘It's great to be back on the job with you, sir.'

‘It's great to
have
you back,' Woodend told him.

The first of the morning's ‘witnesses' to be brought to the interrogation trailer was a big man in his middle forties, with a rough – though ancient – scar running down his cheek.

He arrived under an escort of two military policemen, and was wearing handcuffs. Woodend thought he looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn't actually put a name to the man's face.

‘Sit down over there, Bascombe,' Special Agent Grant said, indicating the chair at the opposite side of the table.

Bascombe! Woodend let the name roll around his mind, but it still didn't ring any bells.

As Bascombe took his seat, the Chief Inspector watched him with interest. In his own experience of handling prisoners, Woodend had found that they tended to be very self-conscious about wearing cuffs, and usually kept their hands on their laps. Bascombe showed no such inclination to hide his shackles, and instead placed his hands squarely on the table.

A hardened criminal, the Chief Inspector thought. But where
had
he seen the bloody man before?

And then it came to him!

The last time they had met had been in the skittle alley of the Dun Cow, when Bascombe had tried to attack Kineally with a brick, and Woodend had dropped the bastard with a powerful punch to his stomach.

‘Your name is Huey Clarence Bascombe,' Special Agent Grant asked, reading the name off the sheet in front of him.

‘Yeah,' the man agreed.

‘And what is your current address in the United States?'

‘A sweet little place what goes by the name of Fulsom Prison, Fulsom, California.'

‘Are you an inmate of that prison?' Grant asked.

Bascombe looked down at his manacled wrist, and grinned. ‘What do you think, Special Agent?'

‘Just answer the question,' Grant said sternly.

‘Yeah, I'm an inmate.'

‘You were imprisoned for carrying out an armed robbery on a drug store? Is that correct?'

‘No.'

‘No? Then why
were
you imprisoned?'

‘Cuz I got caught.'

‘How long a sentence were you given?'

‘Ten years.'

‘And how many of those years have you now served?'

‘Eight.'

‘Which means you still have two years left to do?'

‘That's what the math says.'

‘You won't be getting any time off for good behaviour?' Special Agent Grant asked.

Bascombe smiled unpleasantly. ‘Good behaviour's for faggots,' he said. ‘I'm a man.'

‘A man who still has two full years behind bars to look forward to,' Grant pointed out.

‘I can do the time if I have to,' Huey Bascombe told him. ‘I can do it easy. But maybe there's no need to. Maybe I can squeeze some kinda deal out of you two guys.'

‘And why should we give you a deal?'

‘For helpin' you out.'

Grant smiled, almost benignly. ‘You appear to have completely the wrong impression of the position that you find yourself in, Mr Bascombe,' he said. ‘You seem to think, if I'm reading what you've just said correctly, that you hold all the cards. Is that right?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Well, you don't,' Grant said, switching from the benign to the harsh in the flickering of an eye. ‘
We
hold them. The whole deck belongs to
us.
And you'll help us to the best of your ability – not to improve your own situation, but in order to prevent that situation from becoming any worse.'