A Long Time Dead (6 page)

‘What does that mean, exactly?' Paniatowski wondered. ‘That once you've told me all about her – and how she fits into this case – I'll feel inclined to think that Coutes is guilty?'

‘More or less.'

‘I still think I should know.'

‘An' I don't,' Woodend said firmly. ‘It's bad enough that I should be prejudiced against the bastard right from the start, without you gettin' in on the act as well.'

‘But if I don't have the full picture—'

‘Talk about somethin' else,' Woodend said, in a tone which was not quite an order – but came perilously close to it.

‘They want me to back off!' Senator Eugene Kineally told his Chief of Staff, that crisp Washington DC morning which was to see the first of the cherry blossom come into bloom. ‘Those sons-of-bitches at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue are pressuring me to back off!'

It was undoubtedly true that they were, the Chief of Staff thought. And, in some ways – given the international situation – he could quite sympathize with the White House's position. But if this Administration – or indeed
any
administration – really believed that it could bully Eugene Kineally into submission, then it didn't know him at all.

Kineally had been so badly wounded at the Battle of Guadalcanal, in February 1942, that his doctors told him he would never walk again. They had further hinted that his best course of action would be to grab his disability pension with both hands, and settle down to a life as a chronic invalid. Kineally had treated that advice with the contempt he felt it deserved. In November 1944, leaning heavily on a walking stick, he had been elected junior senator for Connecticut by a margin which left his opponent reeling with shock. Now, twenty-one years later, he was the senior senator for his state, the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in the Senate, and though he still walked with a slight limp, his leg only really troubled him when he was either very tired or very angry.

This was not a man, then, the Chief of Staff thought, who was going to be pushed around by anybody lower down the scale than the Lord God Almighty – and even against God, he might resist a
little
.

‘I want justice for my kid brother,' the Senator said, ‘and if I don't get it, I'll block every piece of legislation this penny-ante Administration tries to force through the Senate.'

‘They are doing what you wanted them to,' the Chief of Staff reminded him. ‘They may not like it – they'd probably reverse it if they possibly could – but they are
doing
it.'

The Senator grimaced, as a shooting pain passed through his leg. ‘The FBI's already on the case, is it?' he asked.

‘Mr Hoover's told us that he's already sent one of his best teams over to England.'

‘And how are the Brits taking it?'

‘Very well – under the circumstances. They've assigned one of their own investigators to the case.' The Chief of Staff consulted his notes. ‘A Chief Inspector Charles Woodend. It seems he knew your brother.'

‘Chuck Woodend!' the Senator exclaimed. ‘Sergeant Chuck Woodend!'

‘You've heard of him?' the Chief of Staff asked, amazed.

‘Damned right, I've heard of him,' the Senator replied.

T
he first official acknowledgement that Haverton Camp actually existed did not appear until the Wolseley and its occupants were only a few miles from the place itself. And when it did come, it was in the form of an old and battered signpost which – as if to make up for the previous lack of information – indicated the camp both to the north and the south.

‘That's because it's on a loop,' Woodend explained. ‘You can't approach the camp directly, you see. You have to go through either Haverton Village or Coxton first.'

‘Which is quicker?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Through Haverton Village,' Woodend said.

‘Then should I—'

‘But I think we'll go via Coxton.'

‘Any particular reason for us going the long way round?' wondered the sergeant, who had been behind the wheel for over three hours and was about ready for a break.

‘Aye, there is,' Woodend told her. ‘It'll give you the opportunity to see for yourself what we now know to be the Trail of the Red Herring.'

Coxton was a pretty village which since the arrival of the railway, some time in the nineteenth century, had been doing its very best to pretend it was actually a small town. The station which was the basis for such pretensions was located at Coxton's southern end, and looking at the station now – with its Victorian cast-iron work and wooden crenellations – Woodend found himself swept up in a sudden and unexpected wave of nostalgia.

‘Coxton Halt was the last place in this area I ever set foot in,' he told Paniatowski. ‘I boarded a train there, one dark night in May 1944, an' I've never been back here since.'

‘How did you feel about it at the time?' asked Monika Paniatowski, who, during her own wartime ordeal, had left more places behind her than her boss had had hot dinners.

‘I suppose I left with mixed feelings,' Woodend confessed. ‘Part of me was glad to be movin' on, because I knew the
reason
I was bein' transferred was that the invasion must be gettin' very close.'

‘And like the gung-ho young man you probably were back then, you just couldn't wait to cross the Channel and into the thick of the fighting,' Paniatowski said, a little mischievously.

‘Nearly right,' Woodend said. ‘It's true enough that I did want the fightin' to start. But that was only so we could get it all over an' done with – only so I could get back to my real life.'

‘What about the other part of you?' Paniatowski asked.

‘What?'

‘Since you say you had mixed feelings about it, I take it there was a part
didn't
want to go.'

‘True enough, there was,' Woodend agreed. ‘I hadn't been in Haverton Camp for long, but it had been long enough for me to meet some very nice people – an' in wartime, meetin' nice people is one of the few things that seem to make life worth livin'.'

Mary Parkinson had been a nice person, he thought.

He recalled seeing her, still standing on the platform, as the train had pulled out – a small and delicate creature made even smaller and more delicate by her obvious misery.

He wondered whether he'd made the right decision in choosing not to brief Monika on Mary – and thought that he probably had.

Coxton Woods lay about half a mile beyond the railway station, and the road cut right through the middle of them.

Woodend had not remembered them as being so extensive. But then, he supposed, a lot could change in twenty-one years. Some things had got older, some things had died, and some things – like the woods and Douglas Coutes's power – had gone from strength to strength.

‘So here we are on the Trail of the Red Herring,' he told Monika Paniatowski.

‘Meaning what, exactly?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Meaning that when Robert Kineally went missing, his jeep went missing as well. An' this wood is where they found it.'

‘Where
who
found it? The American military police?'

‘Not them, no. Although, accordin' to what both Forsyth and Coutes told me, they'd certainly been lookin' for it hard enough.'

‘Because they thought that if they found the jeep, they'd find Robert Kineally as well?'

‘Exactly. But, as things turned out, it was actually discovered – purely by chance – by a local lad, some ten days after the search began.'

‘You say it was abandoned in the woods?' Monika Paniatowski said, thoughtfully.

‘That's right.'

‘How
deep
into the woods?'

‘Not very deep at all, as a matter of fact. No more than a short stroll from the station.'

‘Then why …?'

‘Wasn't it found earlier?'

‘Yes.'

‘It was covered with American Army-issue camouflage – which they managed to trace back to Haverton Camp. So what conclusion do you think the MPs came to?'

‘That Robert Kineally had camouflaged it himself. Because the longer it took his pursuers to find the jeep, the longer it would take them to realize that he'd caught a train.'

‘Just so. An' for anybody who didn't know he was already dead and buried, it'd be a perfectly logical conclusion to reach. Anyway, as far as the American MPs were concerned, that pretty much ended their part of the investigation into his disappearance. Wherever he'd gone after he boarded the train, he was now somebody else's problem.'

‘Which is, of course, just what the killer must have wanted them to think,' Paniatowski stated.

‘Too right. And the ruse worked for
twenty-one
years! But not any more.
Now
, the FBI will claim it was Coutes who drove the jeep, in an effort to cover his own tracks.'

‘Though
whoever
killed Kineally would probably have done the same thing,' Paniatowski pointed out.

‘True,' Woodend agreed.

But I'd so like it to be Douglas Coutes, he thought to himself. I really
want it
to be Douglas Coutes.

‘What was your impression of Robert Kineally as a person?' Paniatowski asked.

A smile – half-warm, half-regretful – found its way to the Chief Inspector's lips.

‘I liked the feller,' Woodend said. ‘I liked him a lot.'

Captain Robert Kineally was tall, and had the kind of even white teeth that British dentists would dream about but never expect to see. His face was pleasing, rather than handsome, but – above all – it was earnest.

‘I guess I'm what you might call a relationships kinda guy,' he explained to Woodend and Coutes over pints of warm beer at the Dun Cow, which was the nearest pub to Haverton Camp.

‘A relationships kinda guy,' Coutes repeated, with something bordering on contempt.

‘Sure,' Kineally agreed, missing the tenor of Coutes's words completely. ‘The way I look at the situation, we're all in this big battle against the Nazis together, and I kinda see it as my job to ensure that everybody becomes friends and stays friends.'

Coutes took a sip of his beer, grimaced, pushed it to one side, and ordered a pink gin.

‘Very nice – but a million miles from the truth,' he said.

‘Yeah?' Kineally asked.

‘Yeah,' Coutes mimicked. ‘What your job really boils down to, Captain Kineally, is passing on messages from your boss to us, so that we can pass them on to our bosses.'

Kineally looked troubled by the statement. ‘Is that
all
you see it as, Captain Coutes?' he asked.

‘No,' Coutes replied.

‘I'm sure glad about that,' Kineally said, looking relieved.

‘The other part is a little more complex,' Coutes continued. ‘When your bosses screw up – and they
will
screw up, trust me on that – then it's your job to convince us they haven't actually screwed up at all.'

‘And what's your job?' Kineally asked, looking troubled again.

‘Our job is to pretend to believe whatever pathetic reason you come up with to excuse your boss's incompetence. Of course, it works the other way round as well, and you'll have to practice pretending to believe the excuses that we come up with to explain away
our
boss's cock-ups.'

‘There's surely more to it than that?'

‘Not at all. Neither of our countries wants to lose more men than it has to in the fighting, and so we're splitting the risk. Which means that, even if we come to hate each other, we have to put on a united front. And that's what we're here for – to paper over the cracks.'

Kineally's frown deepened. ‘See, I think there's a more positive role that you and I could play,' he said.

‘And that is …?'

‘I think we could work to make our armies understand each other a little better.'

‘They don't
need
to understand each other,' Coutes said disgustedly. ‘They're here to learn how to fight. And while they're learning how to fight, they should also be learning how to obey orders without question.'

‘You make them sound like machines,' Kineally said, sounding increasingly bewildered.

‘I wish that's what they were,' Coutes told him. ‘Machines are much easier to handle. Big guns stay in position and fire when they're told to. Squaddies, on the other hand, are born with a tendency to cut and run.'

‘Squaddies?' Kineally repeated.

‘Ordinary soldiers,' Woodend supplied.

‘Oh, grunts,' Kineally said. ‘Yeah, it's the grunts I'm mostly concerned about. I'm from Connecticut, which can be a pretty sophisticated kinda place, and I've travelled to Europe before. But most of the men who make up our army have never left the States. Hell, most of them have never even left their own state – or their own
part
of their own state. And suddenly they're the other side of the pond, having to deal with a people whose English they can hardly understand, and a way of life which they've only ever seen in old movies.'

‘So what?' Coutes wondered.

‘I'd like them to get something out of the experience of being over here,' Kineally said. ‘When they go into battle, I'd like it if they were fighting not only for their own country but also for the ordinary decent folks they've met while they were over here in Britain.'

‘If you want to make that your hobby, then by all means go ahead,' Coutes said coldly. ‘But don't ever confuse it with the job you're actually meant to do. And don't try to drag us into it.'