Dying Fall

Table of Contents

Cover

By Sally Spencer

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Part One: The End of an Era

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Two: Laying Down the Burden

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

The Charlie Woodend Mysteries

THE SALTON KILLINGS

MURDER AT SWANN'S LAKE

DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

THE DARK LADY

THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

DEAD ON CUE

THE RED HERRING

DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

THE ENEMY WITHIN

A DEATH LEFT HANGING

THE WITCH MAKER

THE BUTCHER BEYOND

DYING IN THE DARK

STONE KILLER

A LONG TIME DEAD

SINS OF THE FATHERS

DANGEROUS GAMES

DEATH WATCH

A DYING FALL

FATAL QUEST

The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

THE RING OF DEATH

ECHOES OF THE DEAD

BACKLASH

LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

A WALK WITH THE DEAD

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

 

First published in Great Britain and the USA 2008 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2008 by Sally Spencer.

The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Spencer, Sally

A dying fall

1. Woodend, Charlie (Fictitious character) - Fiction 2. Police - England - Fiction 3. Murder - Investigation - Fiction 4. Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

823.9'14[F]

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6609-7 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-059-4 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-44830-120-1 (ePub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

T
he moment the weak watery sun had finally set in the darkening sky, the temperature began to plummet, and by midnight a freeze had set in which made the ground crack and groan. It was a bad night to be homeless, and Nature – in her cruel, unrelenting winter mood – had not finished yet.

A wind sprang up – the kind of wind which is not content merely to chill those who stand in its path, but instead must hunt and harry its victims, turning corners with apparent ease and rushing forcefully through almost-invisible gaps in walls.

The old tramp, huddled in a corner in the disused cotton mill, felt this wind cutting into his flesh – working its way slowly and stealthily towards his bone – and shivered.

It was on nights like this that men like him died. It was on mornings
following
nights like this that bodies were discovered curled into stiff frozen balls.

The tramp rummaged through the pockets of his dirty, threadbare overcoat. In the left pocket, his arthritic fingers grasped a box of matches and the cigarette ends he had picked up off the street. From his right, he produced the bottle of methylated spirit he had bought earlier in the day.

He sighed. He had something to drink, and something to smoke. What more could any man want?

He unscrewed the bottle, and was on the point of raising it to his lips, when the sudden – and totally unexpected – thought came to his mind that this would be
his
last night on earth – that he would die before dawn broke, and someone would find his frozen body in the morning, just as he had found so many others in the past.

It was then that he heard the stealthy, shuffling sound, and realized that he was not alone.

‘Who is it?' he called out in a hoarse, fearful voice.

There was no answer.

‘I've got a knife!' he said. ‘And I'll use it if I have to.'

Minutes passed in silence.

It had been nothing but a rat, dragging its dropsied belly along the ground, the tramp persuaded himself.

He raised the meths bottle and took a swig. A shudder ran through his body, but he felt no desire to vomit, as he had the first few times he'd forced himself to swallow the noxious liquid.

He heard the shuffling sound again, and knew that it wasn't – couldn't be! – a rat, after all.

And then he saw the dark figure moving towards him.

‘Go away!' he said, in a voice which was half-command, half-plea.

But the dark figure kept on coming – could almost touch him now.

The tramp began to struggle to his feet. But he had left it too late – far too late! – and he was still on his knees when he felt the heavy boot smash into his chest.

He fell back into the corner, his head banging against the wall, his spine jarring as it hit the floor.

The dark figure's arms began to rock rhythmically, there was a swooshing noise – and, suddenly, the tramp was soaked in a cold liquid.

But it was not water he was being doused with, the tramp told himself.

Water didn't
feel
like this.

Water didn't
smell
like this.

‘Please, no!' he gasped.

His attacker struck a match.

Now, for the first time, the tramp could see his face. And
what
he saw in it filled him with horror – because though the face itself was human, the expression it had contorted itself into was not.

The man's eyes were blazing with hatred and anger. His nose was flared like that of a wild animal moving in for the kill. And the twist of his mouth said – more clearly than words could ever have done – that compassion and mercy were strangers to him.

‘Don't …!' the tramp croaked.

But he knew he was wasting his time, because this man was driven by contempt – for his victim, for the world in general, and even for himself.

So his earlier forebodings had been right, he thought with that one small rational part of his brain which had not yet been engulfed in panic. He
would
die that night.

But his death would not be the slow, gradually numbing one brought on by the cold. Instead, it would be swift, and hot and agonizing.

Even the idea of it was enough to drive a man mad.

But there was no time for such madness to develop, because his attacker threw the match at him, and soon every nerve in his body was screaming with agony.

A
dozen corporation buses – each one packed with hunched, coughing smokers in flat caps – trundled along half a dozen arterial roads towards factories in which screeching hooters were already announcing the imminent start of the day's work. In the shops, assistants were busy polishing the windows and counters, as a prelude to opening the doors through which the customers would soon begin to walk. And in the old abandoned cotton mill which formed part of Whitebridge's industrial graveyard, two men stood on the threshold of the former manager's office, looking down with disgust at what lay on the floor.

One of them, Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend, was a big feller who looked like he had been hurriedly – and carelessly – carved out of a piece of very hard rock. He was dressed in his customary hairy sports jacket and cavalry-twill trousers, and had a Capstan Full Strength cigarette tightly held between two nicotine-stained fingers in his right hand. His companion, Inspector Bob Rutter, was younger, slightly smaller – and much more elegant. He was dressed in a smart blue suit, and though he, too, had a cigarette in his hand, it looked more like a prop, and less like a natural appendage, than his boss's did.

Woodend sniffed. The air was thick with the smell of cooked meat – and the source of the smell lay in a charred mound next to the large hole in the wall which had once contained a window.

‘Bastard!' Woodend murmured, almost to himself.

Rutter nodded. ‘The fire started there,' he said, pointed to a piece of blackened concrete in one corner of the room.

‘Aye, there was one hell of a wind last night, an' he'd have been hunkerin' down to get what protection from it he could,' the chief inspector replied.

‘We think he jumped to his feet, and tried to make it out of the window,' Rutter continued.

‘More than likely.'

‘Which was, of course, precisely the
wrong
thing to do. By exposing himself further to the wind, he would only have fuelled the fire. What he
should have
done was roll over and over on the ground.'

‘The man must have been a complete bloody moron, mustn't he?' Woodend said.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?'

‘I said he must have been a complete bloody moron to do exactly the wrong thing.'

‘I'm not sure I would go quite that far myself, sir. What I was doing was merely pointing out that …'

‘Mind you, it
is
a little hard to think straight when you can feel your flesh meltin' on the bone.'

His boss was angry, Rutter thought. And the source of that anger was that he was taking this case personally. It was something he often did – and it was both his greatest strength
and
his greatest weakness.

‘What's our main purpose, Bob?' Woodend asked. ‘Why are we in this job at all?'

‘To see that justice is served?' Rutter suggested.

‘To protect those who are least able to protect themselves,' Woodend said. He paused, to light up a fresh Capstan Full Strength from the still-smouldering stub of the one he'd just been smoking. ‘I'll have the swine who did this,' he continued, blowing smoke down his nose. ‘I don't care how clever he's been – I'll have him.'

Chief Constable Henry Marlowe looked down at the official request which was lying on his desk, and then up at the big man in the hairy sports coat who was standing in front of it.