Dying Fall (20 page)

The Boss had said he would like it here, and the Boss – as always – had been right.

As the gentle breeze caressed his cheeks, Bazza closed his eyes, and found himself thinking about the day the Boss had recruited him.

‘You are a warrior of purity and freedom, operating within a secret army,' the Boss had told him. ‘And it is because the army is secret that you must have a code name. I will call you the Avenger.'

Bazza had liked the sound of that. ‘An' what should I call you?' he'd asked.

‘Since you will report only
to
me, and talk to no one else
about
me, I leave that up to you. What would you like to call me?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You may, if you wish, address me as the Leader, which is how Hitler's and Mussolini's followers addressed them.'

But Bazza hadn't cared for that name. It seemed to him to sound very
un-English
.

The Boss, seeing his obvious discomfort with the name, had smiled and said, ‘Or, if you prefer it, you may call me the Boss.'

‘Yes, I'll call you the Boss – because that's what you
are
,' Barry had said.

He admired the Boss more than any other man he had ever met. He would die for him, if needs be. And yet, he thought guiltily, despite all the admiration and devotion he felt, he had shown weakness and disobeyed the Boss's direct orders the previous night.

‘As long as you're in England, the Whitebridge police can find a way to get at you,' the Boss had said. ‘You'll be much safer abroad. But you must tell nobody where you're going. Not your mother. Not your friends. Nobody! Do you understand, Avenger?'

‘Yes, Boss,' Bazza had said obediently.

And he'd meant it. He really had. Yet somehow, when he'd been with the lads the previous night, he'd found himself unable to resist telling them.

He still wasn't sure quite
why
it had happened. Perhaps there was a part of him that wanted to make them jealous. But there was also a part of him, he had convinced himself, which had wanted to give them
hope
.

To dangle the idea of escape in front of them.

To plant in their minds the idea that maybe, one day, they could follow in his footsteps.

There was another order that the Boss had given him over the phone, just before he took off.

‘Don't get yourself noticed out there, Avenger,' he'd said. ‘Don't look for trouble, and don't get into any fights.'

And that was one order that Bazza was now sure he would have no difficulty following. Because why would he
want
to get into any fights in Malaga? He had found something that was perfect, and he was not about to do anything that might damage that perfection.

In one short week he would be going back to England to complete his mission, he reminded himself. But when that mission was over, he would not stay in Whitebridge. Instead, he would come straight back to Spain.

He would have a new life!

He would become a new man!

For the purposes of his investigation, there were still a great many tramps he needed to talk to, Pogo told himself. Yet here he was, not looking for fresh sources of information at all, but heading towards Brian's pipe.

He wondered why he was doing it, and tried to convince himself it was because he might have missed some piece of vital information the first time they talked.

But he knew, even as he was making the argument in his head, that it didn't hold water.

The fact was that Brian was too simple to be able to tell him anything useful, and lived too much in a world of his own to have noticed anything significant happening around him.

So why, then, was he wasting his time making this second visit?

As the pipe came into sight, Pogo found himself coming to the reluctant – and surprising – conclusion that he must be doing it because he
liked
the man.

Brian smiled when he saw Pogo approaching.

‘You can come in if you want to,' he said. ‘And this time there'll be no charge.'

Pogo squeezed into the pipe. ‘Are you planning to spend the night here?' he asked.

‘Maybe,' Brian replied, noncommittally.

‘I wouldn't, if I was you,' Pogo told him. ‘You're too much out in the open. Too exposed.'

‘That sounds like army talk,' Brian said.

‘It is,' Pogo agreed. ‘And there's a lot of good solid sense behind it. When there's a maniac on the loose, you need all the protection you can get. That's why I'm sleeping in the park.'

‘Don't like the park,' Brian said. ‘You see, what I need is a roof over my head, and a solid wall against my back.' He tapped the pipe gently with his knuckles. ‘This place is ideal.'

This place is a
death trap
, Pogo thought.

‘There must be plenty of pipes like this in other towns,' he said. ‘Maybe even nicer than this one.'

Brian sniffed. ‘There probably are,' he agreed.

‘So why don't we go and look for them – you and me,' Pogo suggested. ‘We could start out now, and by tomorrow we could be in Bolton or Burnley.'

‘Can't be done,' Brian said flatly.

‘We don't have to walk,' Pogo cajoled. ‘I've still got a bit of money left. We could take a bus.'

‘They won't let
us
on a bus,' Brian said dismissively.

‘Maybe not on the first two or three we try,' Pogo agreed. ‘But eventually we'll find a kind-hearted bus conductor with a nearly empty bus, and he'll say it's all right. And even if we have to walk, we can take our time, and it's not that bad once you get used to it.'

‘It's not the walking that bothers me about going,' Brian said.

‘Then what is it?'

‘I can't leave this town until I've done my bit of business.'

‘And what bit of business might that be?'

‘I can't remember. That's the problem. But it will come back to me, in time.'

‘And what if it doesn't come back?'

‘It will. I remembered it before. That's what brought me here. But somehow, on the way, it slipped out of my mind.'

‘Are you sure it was this town you meant to come to?' Pogo asked. ‘It could have been one of the others.'

‘It was
this
town,' Brian said firmly. ‘
Whitethorpe
.'

‘Whitebridge,' Pogo corrected him.

‘That's what I meant.'

Pogo turned his head, and looked around him. The pipe was in the middle of a piece of wasteland, and the nearest house was more than a hundred yards away. It would be so easy for the Germans … for the
killer
, he corrected himself … for the killer to sneak up on poor unsuspecting Brian and drench him with petrol.

‘Would you mind if I hung around tonight?' he asked.

‘Thought you said that you wanted to spend the night in the park,' Brian replied.

‘I can change my mind, can't I?'

‘Suppose so,' Brian agreed. ‘Only, the thing is, there's not enough room in this pipe for both of us to sleep.'

There was
plenty
of room, Pogo thought. But despite their blossoming friendship, Brian still wanted a little privacy in the night. And why wouldn't he?

‘I'd make room if I could, but it just can't be done,' Brian said.

‘I didn't say I wanted to stay in the pipe,' Pogo pointed out. ‘I just asked if you minded if I hung around.'

‘But where will you sleep?'

‘I've no intention of sleeping,' Pogo said.

Nor had he. His plan was to stay awake all night, keeping watch over Brian – protecting a holy innocent who seemed incapable of protecting himself.

T
he lawn outside the Woodend's kitchen window was covered with a layer of shimmering frost, and the robin redbreasts, perched on the bare branches of nearby trees, shivered and ruffled their feathers.

It was a cold, bleak start to what promised to be a cold, bleak day, and as Joan Woodend flicked fat over the breakfast eggs in the frying pan, she found herself wishing – not for the first time – that she and Charlie could spend their winters somewhere a little warmer.

She turned around to face her husband, who was enjoying a pre-breakfast cigarette.

‘Food on the table in two minutes,' she warned.

‘Grand,' Woodend replied. ‘I'm really lookin' forward to it.'

And there was no doubt he was, Joan thought. But despite the fact that she knew he genuinely loved her cooking, she calculated that, in all their years of married life, she had made less than a couple of hundred such meals for him.

It wasn't that Charlie didn't eat breakfast – like many northern men, a fried heart-attack special was his favourite meal of the day – but he normally had it on the job, either in the police canteen or at a cafe close to the scene of his latest murder investigation.

Which was why she found it strange that, that morning, he was not only eating his breakfast at home, but had not glanced at his watch once.

‘There's a bit of a lull in the investigation – at least in the part that I'm involved with,' Woodend said, seeing the questioning look in Joan's eyes as she transferred the fried egg, bacon, sausage and black pudding from the frying pan to the plate which she'd laid in front of him.

‘Does that mean that you don't know what to do next?' Joan asked.

‘Far from it,' Woodend replied. ‘I've got a lot of ideas, but until my prime suspect comes back from Spain, they're pretty much left floatin' in the air.'

He said no more, and she didn't want him to. They had never discussed his work. It was something he did – something that was a big part of him – but, like muddy shoes, Joan had always felt his investigations should be left in the doorway of their home.

‘How's young Colin?' Joan asked, going back into the kitchen to cook up some fried bread before the lard in the frying pan had had time to cool down.

‘I'm very pleased with him,' Woodend told her between mouthfuls of sausage dipped in egg yolk. ‘He's comin' on really well.'

Joan smiled to herself as she turned the bread over in the pan. ‘He's become a bit of a protégé of yours, hasn't he?' she said.

‘I suppose he has,' Woodend agreed.

‘You've taken him under your wing, just like you took Bob under it, years ago. An' how's Bob doin'?'

‘He's goin' down to Oxfordshire, to see if he can get any leads there,' Woodend said, avoiding the question. ‘Anyway, to get back to Beresford, he's doin'
so
well that I'm thinkin' of pushin' for him to be made up to sergeant as soon as I possibly can.'

‘Won't that put Monika's nose out of joint a bit?' Joan asked, with a hint of concern in her voice.

‘I shouldn't think so,' Woodend said. ‘Monika's not the kind of girl to resent other people gettin' on, if they deserve to.'

And anyway, he thought, by the time Beresford was ready to be made up to sergeant, it was more than likely, despite Bob's recent surge of interest in the case, that there would be an inspector's post going spare on the team for Monika.

Beresford was as uncomfortable with the trilby hat as he had been with the hard mods' braces, though for a different reason.

The braces – apart from itching damnably – made him look far too young, and robbed him of the gravitas he wished to display as an officer of the law. The hat, on the other hand, was something that old men wore, and did not at all fit in with the image of a rising young detective constable he was attempting to cultivate.

Yet the hat had to stay – there was simply no choice in the matter – because while he was just about credible as a plainclothes policeman in the trilby and his best suit, there was no way he could have carried it off with his best suit and a shaven head.

His assignment that morning was to track down the travel agency which had sold Big Bazza's ticket to Spain, and it was at the third agency he visited that he struck lucky.

‘Yes, I remember it,' the rather sweet girl behind the counter said. ‘Be hard not to, wouldn't it?'

‘Why's that?' Beresford wondered.

‘Well, most of our clients book their holidays
months
in advance. Some even book the next one the moment they get back from the one they've just been on. But this gentleman …' She paused and looked around the agency.

‘Yes?' Beresford said.

‘To tell you the truth, he wasn't much of a gentleman at all,' the girl continued, in a much lower voice. ‘In fact, he seemed like a bit of a lout, to me.' She paused again, looked at him sideways, then said, ‘It's a bit hot in here. Wouldn't you be more comfortable if you took your hat off?'

‘I'm fine,' Beresford said, unconvincingly. ‘So he asked for a ticket to Spain, did he?'

‘No,' the girl said. ‘He asked for a ticket to anywhere, as long as it was abroad.' She lowered her voice again. ‘I don't think he had much of an idea about foreign travel.'

‘So what made you choose Spain for him?'

‘We'd just had a cancellation, so that was easiest and quickest. And to be honest with you, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on him.'

‘Why was that?'

‘Because I was sure that when it came to actually paying, he'd make some excuse and leave.'

‘But he didn't?'

‘No, he didn't. He reached into the pocket of those tight jeans of his, and pulled out a wad of notes. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Anyway, he paid, I issued the ticket, and that was it.'

‘He didn't say anything else?' Beresford asked hopefully.

‘Like what?'

‘Like where he'd got the money from?'

‘No, he didn't. I think he found the whole process a bit intimidating, and he couldn't wait to get it over and done with.'