Dead on Cue (17 page)

‘I'll say this one thing, and then I'm saying no more on that particular matter, however much you press me,' she told him. ‘Ever since Val's death, I've been constantly reminding myself that most people never come across even
one
murder during their entire lives, and the chances of them being close to two – and in the same place – are practically zero. But there's a small part of my brain that
does
worry that there could be a second one. Of course, that could just be my morbid imagination. In fact, now I think about, I'm sure that's all it is.'

‘But . . .?' Woodend said.

‘But if there
is
another killing,' Jane Todd said, speaking rapidly as if she wanted to get the words out as soon as possible, ‘then it wouldn't surprise me at all if the victim was Larry Coates.'

W
oodend stood just inside the main entrance to the studio, and watched the last of the staff trickle out of the building. One of them was a pretty blonde woman who did not look quite English. She was chatting energetically to her newly-made friends and, though she did glance up at him, the expression on her face showed only the natural curiosity that any office worker might feel about a high-ranking policeman.

The chief inspector waited until his sergeant was outside before allowing himself to grin. Monika would do all right for herself, he thought. She was intelligent, she was sensitive and – most importantly of all – she was gutsy. He turned his mind to Bob Rutter. Had he forced his ex-bagman's promotion through too quickly?
He
didn't think so, but he got the distinct impression that Rutter sometimes did. And that worried him because he was very fond of Bob, and sometimes he – stupidly – caught himself thinking of the lad as the son he'd never had. Or was it so stupid? As the cheeky young sod had pointed out only that morning, he was older than Rutter's mother.

His mind was too full of the case to go home quite then, he decided, and instead of heading back for Whitebridge he pointed his car in the general direction of the Pennines. Nature was in retreat, he observed, as he drove across the moors. Many of the summer birds – fair-weather friends, he supposed you could call them – had already fled the country, and even the swallows, perched in large numbers on the telephone wires, would soon be taking off for Africa. He wondered what it must be like for the young birds – scarcely out of the nest – to embark on such a journey. Were they apprehensive? Or were they thrilled to be involved in such an epic adventure? Probably neither, he thought realistically. Probably, just like so many of the people he met, they were merely following their instincts

Had Valerie Farnsworth's killer merely been following his instincts? he pondered. Had he, as he saw it, merely struck out to defend himself? Or was there some deeper, more intricate motive behind the murder? And what exactly had Jane Todd meant when she'd said that if there were another killing, Larry Coates would most likely be the victim?

As they always did when he was thinking through a case, the hours seemed to slip by, and when Woodend consulted his dashboard clock he saw that there was no time left to slip home before his meeting with Rutter and Paniatowski in the Drum and Monkey.

It was a quarter to ten as Woodend drove down the lane which led to his cottage. He noticed, with some surprise, that there was no light on in his daughter's bedroom. Maybe Annie had finished her homework and decided to spend the rest of the evening with the family for a change, he thought.

He tried to remember when she'd stopped coming downstairs in the evening – when confining herself to her own room had become the norm. Was it while they still lived in London, or only since they'd moved up North? Perhaps the reason it was so difficult to pin it down was because he was so rarely at home in the evening himself.

He parked the car, and entered the house. The television was just warming up, and, from the sounds of it, Joan was busy preparing food. By the time he'd reached the kitchen itself, his wife was just pouring the contents of a saucepan on to a plate.

‘Lancashire hot-pot do you?' she asked, looking up at him.

He didn't have much of an appetite – hadn't had much of one since the start of this bloody case – but Joan had gone to all the effort of cooking for him, so he forced himself to say, ‘That sounds grand.'

‘Will you be havin' it in front of the telly?' Joan asked.

‘Might as well,' Woodend replied. ‘Is our Annie out?'

‘No. She's gone to bed.'

Woodend glanced up at the wall clock, just to check on the time. ‘Bit early to be turnin' in, isn't it?'

‘Well, it is a school day,' Joan said, with just the smallest hint of evasion in her voice.

‘Even so, I don't remember her goin' to bed quite so early when we were in London,' Woodend said.

Joan turned away, and ran the dishcloth quickly over the top of the kitchen unit. ‘Maybe she had more reason to stay up when we were livin' down in London,' she said.

Woodend frowned. ‘Is she really unhappy in Whitebridge?'

Joan swung round to face him again. ‘You're her father.
You
tell
me
, Charlie,' she said.

‘I can't,' Woodend admitted. ‘I haven't been spendin' enough time with her lately, have I?'

‘Nothin' like enough. I've tried to fill in for you as best I can, but the older she gets, the harder it seems to be. Every girl needs a mother, but she needs a father as well, you know, and though she may not always show it, our Annie looks up to you.'

Woodend bowed his head guiltily. ‘I'll get home earlier tomorrow night, so that we can have a really good chat,' he said.

‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea,' Joan replied. ‘An' not before time, if you ask me.'

I
t was raining as Bob Rutter drove into the centre of Whitebridge that Wednesday morning, and though he was not as fanciful a man as his boss, it did seem to him as if his windscreen wipers, swishing back and to in front of him, were repeating Maria's message from the previous day.

‘
Find a role
. . .
find a role
. . .
find a role . . .
'

But how could he do that? he asked himself. What role? His path seemed to have already been determined for him. While Charlie Woodend and Monika Paniatowski were out in the field – where the real action was – he seemed doomed to be chained to a desk in Headquarters.

He might as well have gone into accountancy, he thought – at least there he would have made some real bloody money.

There were a couple of reporters waiting for him in the police car park, but they were strictly small-fry – local stringers who hoped for any small snippet of information which might move them one small step further towards their dream of working on Fleet Street. The real journalists – the ones who mattered – would be camped outside the studio, where they could ambush the stars of
Maddox Row
and perhaps get a juicy quote for tomorrow's front page.

He brushed the reporters off with a ‘no comment' and made his way into the building. His team – twelve detective constables and two sergeants – were already at their desks in DCS Ainsworth's much-vaunted ‘incident room'.

This was the first murder most of the team had worked on, and the previous day there had been a buzz of excitement about the way they went about their work. Now, nearly twenty-four hours into the case, he sensed that their enthusiasm was starting to wane. Even so, they still looked up at him expectantly – as if they hoped he'd had some blinding insight in the middle of the night.

Rutter placed himself in the middle of the horseshoe of desks, and cleared his throat.

‘Right, lads, this is Day Two of the investigation. Let's see if we can make a real breakthrough today,' he said.

The words sounded wrong to him – or rather they sounded wrong coming from
his
mouth. They needed to be spoken by someone like Charlie Woodend, not by a newly promoted inspector who was younger, and less experienced, than some of the men working under him.

He turned to one of his sergeants, a man in his early thirties called Cowgill. ‘Want to give us a progress report, Frank?' he asked.

‘The main problem is not any inconsistency in the alibis, sir – it's the complete bloody lack of them.'

Rutter nodded. ‘Spell it out for us,' he said.

‘The technical people – the electricians, sound crew, camera crew, floormen etc – are no problem. They either had specific jobs to do at the time of the murder, or they were takin' a break with their mates before they got to work. It's the people who have less clearly defined jobs – the actors, an' some of the management – that are a problem.'

‘They don't have alibis?'

‘For some of the time, yes. But each of them has a period when they
can't
account for their whereabouts.'

‘It might help us if you gave us an example,' Rutter suggested.

The sergeant looked down at his notes. ‘All right. Take Jeremy Wilcox, the director. We know that he talked to the scriptwriters – Drabble and Colligan – at some point, though they're all a bit vague about exactly when that point was. We know he had what witnesses have called “a heated discussion” with Bill Houseman, the producer, but again, it's difficult to pin down
exactly
when that occurred. An' even if we could, it still wouldn't help us much, because it would still leave a fair chunk of time when he
claims
he was alone in his office – an' we can't prove any different.'

‘Does that make him a prime suspect, as far as you're concerned?' Rutter asked.

‘It would if there weren't a couple of dozen other buggers who were in the same situation.'

It would have made life a lot easier if someone had seen the murderer heading for Val Farnsworth's dressing room with a homicidal look in his eyes and a big electrical screwdriver in his hand, Rutter thought. But life rarely worked out as neatly as that.

‘We need to hone the list down to a few suspects,' he said. ‘and since that can't be done on the basis of alibis, we're going to have to do it on the basis of backgrounds. I want everybody who hasn't got a watertight alibi thoroughly checked out. Go back as far as you can – as far as their schooldays, if that's possible. If one of them was caught necking with a girl behind the bike sheds when he should have been in class, I want to know about it. I want information on their careers, their friends and their love lives. If they've got so much as a parking ticket, I want a report on it. If one of them had a dog which was knocked down in the road, I should be told. No detail, however insignificant it might seem to you, should be left out. Is that clearly understood?'

The constables and the two sergeants all nodded.

‘Sergeant Cowgill will assign each of you a particular suspect,' Rutter continued. ‘Are there any questions?'

One of the younger detective constables raised his hand. ‘What about the victim, sir?' he asked.

‘It goes without saying that I want her background thoroughly checked out,' Rutter said.

The constable turned to Cowgill. ‘Can I do her, Sarge?'

Several of the other constables chuckled.

‘What's so funny,' Rutter asked.

‘Young Pickup here's from Sladebury, sir,' Sergeant Cowgill explained, with a smile on his face.

‘So?' Rutter said.

The sergeant looked surprised he even needed to ask. ‘Valerie Farnsworth was originally from Sladebury herself. The only reason Pickup wants to be assigned to her is because it'll give him an excuse to nip home an' have a cup of tea with his mam.'

There were so many things he didn't know, Rutter thought, and so much he
should
know. Sometimes he felt that though the people of Whitebridge appeared to speak the same language as he did, they were, in fact, conversing in an alien tongue. He remembered the Salton case, where Woodend, a stranger to the area just as he himself was a stranger to this one, had insisted that he be assigned a young police cadet who had a detailed knowledge of the village in which the murder had taken place.

‘I'll do the background work on Valerie Farnsworth myself,' he said, ‘so if anybody wants to know where I am, I'll be in Sladebury. And there's no need for you to look so down in the mouth, Pickup,' he added, seeing the look of disappointment on the young constable's face, ‘because you'll be coming with me. As for the rest of you, you know what you've got to do, so get on with it.'

‘One question before you go, Mr Rutter,' Sergeant Cowgill said.

‘Yes?'

‘I understand that you want us to come up with as much background as we can, but it would help us if you could give us some guidelines. What,
specifically
, are we lookin' for?'

‘I'm buggered if I know,' Rutter admitted – and this time even Woodend could not have delivered the line better.

In another part of the building, Chief Constable John Dinnage sat looking at the tea and biscuits his secretary had brought him a few minutes earlier. He should eat the biscuits, he told himself, because he hadn't been able to face breakfast, and no man should start a day's work on an empty stomach. Yet though they were his favourites – chocolate digestives – even the thought of putting one in his mouth made him feel queasy.

He massaged the left side of his chest. If only this bloody indigestion would go away, he thought.

He glanced at the stack of files which seemed to grow taller every day, no matter how many hours he put in at the office. He hadn't realised, when he'd taken the job on, just
how
much work would be involved. Nor had he realised how few of his subordinates he would be able to use, either because he couldn't rely on them or – worse – because he didn't trust them. The rot started right near the top – with his own second-in-command, Deputy Chief Constable Henry Marlowe – but there were many others he was not entirely happy with, including his head of CID, DCS Ainsworth.