A Long Time Dead (5 page)

‘No, I'm not saying that,' Forsyth replied. ‘Although, if you do wish to take your own sergeant with you, I can certainly see no harm in it.'

‘Ah, then we're back to this vague word “presences” that you were bandyin' around earlier,' Woodend said.

‘Yes, we are,' Forsyth admitted. ‘I'm truly sorry to have to tell you this, Chief Inspector Woodend, but Senator Kineally doesn't really trust the British police force—'

‘Don't tell me that – it'll only make me cry,' Woodend said sarcastically.

‘—but you shouldn't be too offended, because he doesn't trust the American military police, either.'

‘Well, that's all right then. So who
does
he trust?'

‘He trusts the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's why you'll be working in tandem with one of their special agents. Don't worry, he's a good man – I've seen his service file.'

‘Was he there, in Haverton Camp, at the time Robert Kineally disappeared?' Woodend asked. ‘Is
that
why the Yanks have chosen him?'

‘No, he wasn't there,' Forsyth said. ‘As a matter of fact, he didn't even serve in the War.'

‘Why not?

‘He was far too young at the time.'

‘Too young!'

‘But he did attend Harvard University. And he has an excellent post-graduate degree in law.'

Woodend groaned. ‘At least Bob Rutter only went to grammar school,' he said, almost to himself.

‘What was that?' Forsyth asked.

‘Education's a wonderful thing, but you can sometimes have too much of it – especially in my line of work.'

‘I'm sure that's not true,' Forsyth said.

‘That's easy enough to say when you've never actually been involved in a murder investigation yourself,' Woodend countered.

‘I am to take it, then, that you have an objection to working with the special agent?'

‘Now why ever would you think that?' Woodend asked. ‘Let's look at the facts for a minute, shall we?'

‘All right.'

‘First of all, I'll be investigating a twenty-year-old case,' Woodend said, beginning to count off the points on his fingers. ‘Secondly, at least half the witnesses will probably be dead by now – and the rest will have as vague a memory of the whole affair as I have myself. An' thirdly, I'll be under pressure to come up with one answer by the British government, an' another quite different one by this Senator Eugene Kineally. Have you got all that?'

‘Yes, I think so.'

‘Now, as you would imagine, given those circumstances, I'll be absolutely delighted to be workin' with some feller from the FBI – a man who wasn't long out of nappies when the murder happened, an' probably has no idea what it was like to live through those times. In fact, “delight” isn't a strong enough word for it. Workin' with this feller will be like the icin' on the bloody cake for me.'

‘I'm pleased to note that you're adopting such a positive attitude,' Forsyth said, with a face so straight Woodend was sure that only a civil servant could have managed it.

R
unning a petrol station on the A49, just south of Ludlow, could scarcely have been called the world's most challenging or stimulating work. But as Wilfred Tattersall, the owner of that particular station, liked to tell his cronies in the local pub, any job was no more and no less than what you made of it.

‘I don't just fill their tanks and check their oil, you know,' he'd say, when he'd had a few drinks.

‘No, of course you don't, Wilf – sometimes you clean their windshields and put air in their tyres, as well,' one of his drinking companions would invariably counter.

‘I use my time at the station to improve my knowledge of human nature,' Tattersall would continue, ignoring the interruption.

‘You use your time to be a nosy parker, more like.'

‘And what's
wrong
with being a nosy parker?' Tattersall would reply with dignity. ‘Albert Einstein was a nosy parker. So were Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.'

‘And which petrol company did
they
work for?' his so-called friends would ask, smirking into their pints.

But their scepticism did not bother Wilfred Tattersall – at least, not a great deal, and not all the time – and he continued in his quest of observing people and trying to work out just exactly what it was that made them tick.

The couple he served that Wednesday mid-morning – travelling in a Wolseley which had seen better days – provided him with ample material for speculation, since, unlike the commercial travellers and lorry drivers who made up much of his business, they were not easily classifiable.

For a start, he thought – as he gazed in at them through the windscreen that he was lethargically washing – they were showing no inclination at all to talk to each other. Yet there appeared to be none of the frostiness between them which suggested they'd had a row – a luxury that men and women often found themselves indulging in when they were forced to spend a long time in each others' company.

Nor did the two of them emanate any of the easy intimacy some married couples displayed – nor yet show the mutual contempt which other couples often opted for.

Even so, there was definitely something going on between them – the woman studied the man, as if attempting to anticipate his needs; the man was conscious of this scrutiny, and seemed to take it as his due.

‘You'll be wearin' that windscreen away if you rub at it much longer,' the man said.

‘Just finishing up now,' Tattersall replied, realizing that, in his fascination with this pair, he did seem to have been cleaning at the same spot for at least a couple of minutes.

Stepping away from the front of the Wolseley, Tattersall made a decision to mentally separate the subjects of his study – to confine each to a different chamber of his curious mind – in the hope that if he could understand each individually, he would be able to make more sense of them when he joined them together again.

The man – a big middle-aged bugger, whose head scraped against the car roof – was wearing an old sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, which blended in well with the essential shabbiness of his vehicle. His lined face suggested he had seen much during his life – and would have preferred to have forgotten most of it – yet there was no sense of world-weariness about him. Rather, the philosopher of the petrol pumps decided, he was a man who had accepted that while there was a great deal about the earth which was rotten, it was still in the hands of every individual to do a little to improve things.

The woman was younger – not above thirty. She was dressed well – not expensively, but with style. She had blonde hair, and though her nose was perhaps a little large, she had a pretty face and a stunning body. There were no visible signs of despair on her face, and yet, for reasons he could not quite put his finger on, the attendant saw her as essentially a tragic figure.

The man got out of the car and stretched his legs. ‘Do you sell newspapers?' he asked.

‘I do,' Tattersall replied, excited by the thought of gleaning new information from his subject's choice of reading matter. ‘Which one would you like? The
Daily Mail
? Or are you more of a
Telegraph
man?'

‘I'll take a copy of every paper you've got.'

‘Including the
Daily Worker
?'

‘
Especially
the
Daily Worker
.'

‘It's the official newspaper of the Communist Party, you know,' Tattersall said, almost as a warning.

‘So I've heard,' his customer told him.

When Tattersall returned with the armful of newspapers, he saw that the woman had now slid across into the driver's seat.

‘I'd never have put the big bugger down as a man who'd allow a woman to drive his car,' the garage owner told himself. ‘But then again, I'd never have thought he'd buy the
Daily Worker
, either.'

The man paid for the petrol and the papers, then climbed into the passenger seat. The woman slipped the car into gear and pulled away at what was almost a racing start.

As the Wolseley disappeared down the road, Tattersall took off his cap and scratched his bald head. The pair of them were a team of some kind, he decided – and they were facing a problem which neither of them was quite sure how to handle.

As they drove further south, the stack of newspapers on Woodend's lap gradually diminished in size. But it was not until they were approaching a roadside sign which welcomed them to glorious Devon that the Chief Inspector finally threw the last of the papers over his shoulder, to join the pile which had already accumulated on the back seat.

‘Well?' Monika Paniatowski asked.

‘I didn't believe that feller Forsyth, when he told me him and his people could keep a tight lid on the whole affair,' Woodend told her. ‘But, bugger me, if he hasn't gone and done just that!'

‘So there's no mention of Haverton Camp in the papers?'

‘Oh, there's a mention – it would have rung alarm bells in some quarters if there hadn't been – but it's the right
kind
of mention.'

‘The right kind of mention?'

‘Take the
Daily Express,
for example. There's a couple of paragraphs, buried deep inside it – right next to an advert for laxatives, as a matter of fact – which report that a body's been discovered at the camp. But there isn't even a hint that the Right Honourable Douglas Coutes might be involved. An' the
Daily Worker
, which would dearly love to do anythin' that might embarrass the government, hasn't given it any column space at all. Too busy expoundin' the principles of Marxist-Leninism, I expect.'

‘None of which makes our job any easier, does it?' Monika Paniatowski asked. ‘I mean to say, how are we expected to question the witnesses about Coutes, without them figuring out that he's the prime suspect?'

‘It'll require footwork that'd leave Fred Astaire himself in awe of us,' Woodend said. ‘But since we've both signed the Official Secrets Act, we have to find
some
way to make it work.'

‘And what if, despite all the obstacles, we
do
prove that Coutes was, in fact, the murderer?'

‘Ah, then it's what the Americans would call “a whole new ball game”,' Woodend explained. ‘If Coutes is guilty, all bets are off. The D Notices are withdrawn, the papers can print what they like, and the government will just have to come to terms with the harsh reality that one of its most senior members is a killer. Which, accordin' to our friend Mr Forsyth, will create an international crisis, the depth of which nobody can yet even begin to gauge.'

‘So it would be best, all round, if Douglas Coutes turned out to be completely innocent?'

‘Undoubtedly.'

‘And do you think that he is?'

‘That's not what the evidence uncovered so far would seem to suggest,' Woodend said cautiously.

‘But what's your gut instinct, sir?'

‘I don't know if I have one,' Woodend admitted. ‘Douglas Coutes was a real nasty piece of work when I knew him – but the world is full of nasty pieces of work, an' not all of them turn into killers.'

‘So it's possible he
was
framed, as he claims?'

‘Yes.'

‘But unlikely?'

‘The only thing that Coutes has got goin' for him is that he's not a
stupid
man by any means,' Woodend mused. ‘An' if he
is
guilty, he made not one, but two, incredibly stupid mistakes – the first at the time of the murder, an' the second much later.'

‘The one at the time would have been using his own knife to kill the American?' Paniatowski suggested.

‘Yes, that's right,' Woodend agreed. ‘I saw him with that knife myself, an' there must have been dozens of other people in Haverton Camp who'd done the same. So why not use some other weapon instead? Why not a bayonet, for example? That would have done the job – an' he could certainly have got his hands on one, easily enough.'

‘Yes, I imagine he could,' Paniatowski said.

‘An' even if he
did
use his own knife,' Woodend continued, ‘whatever would have possessed him to leave it in the grave with his victim?'

‘He could have panicked,' Paniatowski suggested. ‘Killers do make incredible mistakes when they lose their nerve.'

‘True enough,' Woodend agreed. ‘But Coutes never struck me as the panicking sort.'

‘What about the second mistake he might have made?' Monika Paniatowski asked.

‘That was very recent. In his position as Minister of Defence, he must have been consulted on the matter of selling Haverton Camp to a firm of property developers.'

‘And if he'd known that Kineally's body was buried there, he'd have done all he could to block the sale?'

‘Exactly. But accordin' to what Forsyth's told me, Coutes showed very little interest in the sale at all. So either he
is
innocent or he's
so
arrogant that he thought that even if the body was discovered, he'd get away with it.'

‘Which is highly unlikely, because of the knife,' Monika Paniatowski pointed out.

‘Which is highly unlikely because of the knife,' Woodend agreed. ‘So what we're left with, Sergeant, is a situation which doesn't add up
however
you rearrange the clues.'

‘You mentioned a girl,' Paniatowski said.

‘Did I?' Woodend asked, sounding suddenly troubled.

‘I think you said that her name was Mary Parkinson.'

‘I should never have brought that name up.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I'd like you to keep an open mind about this case, Monika, an' if I start tellin' you all about Mary Parkinson, it'll slam at least a couple of your mental doors tight shut.'