Dying Fall (32 page)

And it was only after he had done that that he looked up at Paniatowski and said, ‘We got it all wrong, Monika. We got the whole bloody thing backwards.'

T
el Lowry and his mother lived on the outskirts of Whitebridge, in what had once been the rectory of a very rich parish, and now went by the name of the Old House.

‘Very nice,' Woodend said, as Paniatowski parked his Wolseley in front of the house at eight o'clock on Saturday morning. ‘It somehow manages to be impressive without fallin' into the trap of becomin' unduly ostentatious. If I had a lot of money to splash out on a house – not that that's ever likely to happen – this is just the kind of house I'd splash out on.'

‘Are you really as relaxed about this whole thing as you sound, sir?' Paniatowski asked.

Woodend opened his door and stepped on to the driveway. ‘Course I'm bloody not,' he said.

A uniformed maid showed them to the conservatory, where Lowry and his mother were having their breakfast.

Having never seen her before, Woodend studied Mrs Lowry with interest. She was getting old and she was fat, but he still thought he could detect, beneath the flabbiness, the woman who – according to Bob Rutter's notes – had left a smile on the faces of at least two wing commanders in RAF Abingdon.

Mrs Lowry was not looking at Woodend at all. Instead, she was glaring daggers at Paniatowski.

‘I thought I made it plain, the last time we met, that I neither wanted to see you nor hear of you again, Sergeant,' she said.

‘DS Paniatowski isn't here because she wants to be,' Woodend said. ‘She's here because she's my bagman, an' where I go, she goes.'

‘And why are
you
here?' Mrs Lowry demanded ­aggressively.

‘I'll handle this, Mother,' Tel Lowry said. He turned to Woodend. ‘What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?'

‘Last night, we arrested Ron Scranton for the murder of two tramps an' the attempted murder of a third,' Woodend told him.

‘Then I must congratulate you,' Lowry replied. ‘But whilst it was kind of you to drive out all this way to inform me, I'm not sure it was quite appropriate. I'm the chairman of the Police Authority, not the chief constable, and it could be said that by reporting to me, rather than him, you're undermining Miles Hobson's authority.'

‘You'd probably be right, if we'd been able to make the charges stick,' Woodend said. ‘But we couldn't. We had to let him go.'

‘In which case, I can see even less reason for this visit.'

‘But
before
we let him go, he made some accusations about you that I think you should be informed of. He said, for example, that if you hadn't left the RAF when you did, you'd have been cashiered. So it was quite a stroke of luck, wasn't it?'

‘What was?'

‘That just when you were practically forced to resign, you had a job to go to?'

‘A stroke of luck?' Lowry repeated, outraged. ‘There was a tragic accident in which my father was killed and my brother was incapacitated – and you dare to call it
a stroke of luck
!'

‘It's funny the words we use, isn't it?' Woodend mused. ‘You say your brother was incapacitated, the newspapers said he needed to be permanently hospitalized. Everybody shies away from sayin' that his problems were more mental than physical – because there's still such a stigma attached to mental illness. We didn't even know ourselves what his real problem was, until my clever inspector thought to check up on it yesterday.'

‘I fail to see—' Lowry began.

‘An' it's funny you should use the word “accident” when talkin' about what happened to your father an' brother,' Woodend interrupted.

‘It
was
an accident,' Lowry said. ‘Just read the coroner's report.'

‘I have,' Woodend told him. ‘An' you're right, it was ruled an accident. But there were a number of questions which were never satisfactorily answered, not the least of which was why your father lost control of his Rolls-Royce on a clear road, in near-perfect drivin' conditions.'

‘What's your point?' Lowry asked.

‘No real point at all,' Woodend admitted. ‘I just think it's curious.'

‘You can leave now,' Lowry said.

‘Of course,' Woodend agreed. ‘Come on, Sergeant.'

He was almost at the door when he turned and said, ‘Oh, by the way, we identified the second victim. It was your brother, Brunel.'

‘Oh God!' Mrs Lowry moaned.

‘The reason it took us so long to get that identification was that Brunel was a name he very rarely used. In his later years, he was known as Brian, and when he worked at the factory, he went by the name of Barclay.'

‘His father called him Brunel after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but he hated the name,' Mrs Lowry said, in a dry, flat voice which showed she was in a state of shock.

‘Whereas you, sir, stuck to the name you'd been given,' Woodend said to Lowry. ‘All the other Tels I've ever known were christened Terence. But not you. You're named after Thomas
Telford
, another great engineer. It was my clever inspector who worked that out, too.'

‘Get out!' Lowry said. ‘Leave us alone with our grief.'

‘I suppose it's time I stopped playin' games,' Woodend said. ‘I must inform you that orderin' me to leave isn't an option that's available to you. In fact, there
are
only two options open, an' the first is that you agree to answer my questions.'

He said no more, but began a silent count … one elephant, two elephants, three elephants …

He had reached fifteen elephants when Lowry said, ‘And what, according to you, is my other option?'

‘Your other option is to stand up, so I can put the handcuffs on you,' Woodend said.

‘You're threatening to
arrest
me?'

‘It's not a threat, it's a promise.'

‘I'll have your job for this!' Lowry snarled.

‘Possibly you will,' Woodend agreed. ‘But that's in the long term. What's your decision about what happens
now
?'

‘To avoid the indignity of wearing handcuffs, I'll answer your questions,' Lowry said, ‘but I'm warning you—'

‘Yes, I know, you'll have my job,' Woodend interrupted him. ‘Why did your father treat you so badly, Mr Lowry? Why did he send your brother to a private school, while you had to settle for bein' educated locally? Why wouldn't he let you join the family firm? Because that's the way it happened, wasn't it? It was not a case of you wantin' to strike out on your own – it was a case of you
havin
'
to
, because there was no place for you at Lowry Engineerin'.'

Something had happened to Lowry while Woodend had been talking. It was not just that his air of authority had disappeared – though it had. He had actually regressed, and though his body was still that of a grown man, his face belonged to a small, puzzled boy.

‘All I ever wanted to be was an engineer,' he said. ‘And the irony is that my brother had no interest at all in engin­eering. I kept the name I'd been christened with, but he changed his. Yet I was the one excluded from the firm, and he went into it only because he was pressured to do so.'

‘But why join the RAF?' Woodend wondered. ‘And why become a helicopter pilot? That's surely got to be one of the most dangerous jobs you can have in a combat zone.'

‘I wanted to do something that would finally make my father proud of me,' Lowry said.

Woodend nodded. ‘But even that didn't work, did it?' he asked. ‘You went into battle. You won a medal. An' when that medal was presented, your father didn't even bother to turn up for the ceremony.'

‘No,' Lowry agreed dully. ‘No, he didn't.'

‘So you became a drunk, an' crashed your helicopter as a result. The career you'd worked so hard to build up was over, an' you saw it as all your father's fault. It must have been at that point that you stopped tryin' to please him – an' started to hate him.'

‘This has nothing to do with my brother's murder, if indeed, it
was
my brother who was murdered,' said Lowry, regaining a little of his old strength.

‘It
was
your brother, an' it has
everythin
' to do with his murder,' Woodend said. ‘But let's get back to your father. Do you know
why
he was so cold with you?'

‘No.'

‘Your mother does. Tell him, Mrs Lowry.'

‘No,' the old woman gasped. ‘No, I won't.'

‘Then I will,' Woodend said. ‘When you were four years old, Mr Lowry, your father tried to have your birth certificate amended. The amendment was never actually made, but all the paperwork connected with it is still there, an' that's another thing that Inspector Rutter found.'

‘I don't understand,' Lowry said.

‘He wanted to have one of the columns changed. Where is said “Father's name”, he wanted it to say Alfred Granger.'

‘Uncle Alf?' Lowry said. He turned to his mother. ‘Is this true? Is
he
my real father?'

‘That's what your father – that's what Joseph – thought.'

‘But
how
could he have thought it? Were you having an affair with Uncle Alf?'

‘You've no idea what it was like being married to Joseph,' Mrs Lowry said. ‘I was a young woman, full of passion and the joy of life, and he was a cold, cold man, practically a machine.'

‘And my father – your husband – found out?'

‘We got careless. He caught us in bed together,' Mrs Lowry said simply.

‘You should have told me this a long time ago,' Lowry said anguishedly. ‘It would have explained a great deal. It would have made life so much
easier
.'

‘So there you were, your career in ruins, an' all because of the man you still thought of as your father,' Woodend said. ‘It was at that point, wasn't it, that you decided to claim your rightful inheritance? Your difficulty was that you knew your father would never allow it – so he had to go.'

‘Are you saying I
killed
him?' Lowry demanded.

‘Well, of course I am,' Woodend replied.

‘Based on one inconclusive accident report?'

‘Based on what had happened before the accident, which we've already discussed, an' what happened later, which we'll get to eventually.'

‘You'll never be able to prove any of these wild accusations,' Lowry said.

‘You're probably right,' Woodend agreed. ‘But I'd still like to speculate on what happened, if you don't mind. It's possible you never intended to kill your brother. That's something only you will ever know. But the fact is that he was in the car, and he survived the crash. Now
why
was that a problem for you?'

‘It's your fantasy,' Lowry said. ‘You tell me.'

‘I'm guessin' again,' Woodend admitted, ‘but once more, it's a guess based on what happened later. My theory is that Brunel saw you tinkerin' with his dad's car. It didn't mean much to him at the time – maybe you were able to explain it away – but as the Rolls veered out of control, he must have realized why it was happenin'. But fortunately for you, he'd lost his mind, an' – as a consequence – had forgotten what it was that he'd seen.'

‘With every wild accusation you make, you're digging yourself deeper and deeper into a big hole,' Lowry said.

‘So Brunel was locked away in Stanton Hall,' Woodend continued. ‘You must have thought you were safe enough with him in there, because, after all, he was a nutter. But all the time Brunel was in that place, he was tormented by the fact that he knew there was somethin' he needed to do, but he couldn't quite bring it to mind. Then, two years ago, he escaped – an' he was never recaptured. Now why didn't we read about that in the papers?'

‘Go to hell!' Lowry said.

‘I'll tell you why,' Woodend said, unperturbed. ‘Since Brunel was a
voluntary
patient, there was no legal requirement to report him missin', an' it was neither in your interest, nor in Stanton Hall's interest, for it to become public knowledge.' He paused for a second. ‘But you must have lain in bed at night worryin' about it, Mr Lowry.'

‘I was naturally concerned about what had happened to my brother.'

‘But as worried as you must have been by the disappearance, you must have been literally terrified when he turned up again in Whitebridge.'

‘I didn't
know
he'd turned up in Whitebridge.'

‘Oh yes you did. One of the tramps we interviewed reported seein' a man in a blue suit, goin' round checkin' on the tramps. DC Beresford thought it must have been a council official. But it wasn't, was it? It was you. You'd caught sight of Brunel earlier – maybe as you were drivin' through town – an' you wanted to find where he'd got to.'

‘More lies,' Lowry said.

‘Brunel had come back to Whitebridge to see if anythin' about the place would jog his memory. And there were things that did just that. He recognized the Engineers' Arms, for example. And then there was a big expensive Bentley which, accordin' to his mate Pogo, he seemed particularly fascinated by. That particular car didn't give him the answer he was lookin' for. But what if it had been a Rolls-Royce, instead? Then the floodgates might really have opened. And you couldn't risk that – so Brunel had to die.'

‘Is this true?' Mrs Lowry asked. ‘Did you kill your own brother?'

‘Of course not,' Lowry told her.

Mrs Lowry rose shakily to her feet. ‘I need … I need to lie down,' she croaked.

‘Help her, Monika,' Woodend said.

Paniatowski put an arm around Mrs Lowry's shoulder and ushered her gently towards the door.