Dying in the Dark (3 page)

Which made her what?

A scarlet woman!

A home-breaker.

A callous bitch who was bringing further pain to a woman who had had more than her fair share of suffering.

Yet she was honest enough with herself to admit she could have ridden that out if she'd had to. Of course, the guilt – the deep shame – would go with her to her grave, but if she'd had Bob for herself, she would probably have been able to live with it.

But she wouldn't get Bob, would she? Not if Maria succeeded in taking his only child off him!

Oh, she could imagine what he'd say – ‘It really isn't your fault I've lost the baby, Monika. I don't blame you at all.'

But it wouldn't be true!

Even if they moved in together after Maria had left him – even if they
married
once his divorce papers came through – the relationship would be poisoned, and, in the end, Bob would grow to hate her.

So what good could be rescued from the whole sad business?

None at all! Not one bloody thing!

Her fingers had been getting hotter and hotter, but she hadn't noticed it, and it was only now – when her cigarette had burned down so far that it had started to singe her flesh – that she cried out and dropped the bloody thing.

She reached into her pocket, took out a handkerchief, and wrapped it around the burned fingers. This wasn't pain, she told herself. Not real pain.
Real pain
was what she was feeling inside.

Woodend had stood up again, and appeared to be talking to the constables. She supposed she'd better go and join him, she thought. The murder would at least give her something to do – would focus her mind on something
solvable
.

T
he Woodends lived in an old, stone handloom-weaver's cottage on the edge of the moors. Once there had been three of them, then Annie had grown up, and gone away to Manchester to study nursing.

So now there were just two, Woodend thought – as he lay in bed studying the patterns made by the overnight frost on the window – a middle-aged couple already sliding down the gentle slope to retirement. Charlie and Joan, soon to become
Darby
and Joan.

At least, he
hoped
that's what they were bloody well doing! But he couldn't be sure. The simple truth was that Joan's heart attack in Spain had scared the crap out of him. The doctors had assured him it was only a mild one, but that was no consolation at all, because that seemed to be almost on a par with being only a
little bit
dead.

He was doing all he could to ease the situation. He'd offered to employ a cleaner, but Joan had turned the idea down.

‘
If you think I'm havin' another woman doin' my jobs an' rummaging through my things, Charlie Woodend, you've got another think comin'
,' she'd told him.

He'd tried to do some of the work around the house himself, but by the time he got home, it had all been done.

‘
What do you expect me to do all day, while you're out catchin' criminals? Sit here twiddlin' my thumbs?
' she'd demanded, when he'd remonstrated with her.

Still, at least he'd persuaded her to go and stay at her sister's house for a couple of weeks. At least she'd get some rest while she was there.

It must be terrible to lose your wife, he thought, as he swung his legs out of bed and felt the soles of his bare feet make contact with the cold linoleum.

Terrible?

It must feel like the end of the bloody world!

The frost had not come alone, but had brought ice with it for company, and the moorland roads which fed into Whitebridge were treacherous. Twice, Woodend was forced to slow to a virtual halt, and join the stream of traffic creeping past accidents caused by less prudent drivers. Once, he himself was nearly in a collision with some bloody idiot. The result of all this was, inevitably, that he arrived at the police car park a full twenty minutes later than he'd intended to.

Another black mark against me, he thought as he walked across the car park towards the main entrance of the headquarters.

Another entry for Mr Marlowe's little black book, under the heading, ‘Things I've got against Charlie-bloody-Woodend'.

Rutter and Paniatowski were where Woodend had expected them to be – sitting at their desks in what Chief Constable Marlowe liked, at press conferences, to refer to as ‘the very nerve centre of our murder investigation'.

The reality of the ‘nerve centre' fell far short of the rhetoric. But then it was bound to. A dusty basement was a dusty basement. However many desks were laid in a horseshoe shape – however many extra phones were installed – no one was ever going to mistake it for the plush FBI offices out of which Hollywood B-picture cops always seemed to operate. Even the blackboard – scrounged from somewhere or other, and set up at the front of the room – failed to give the place the professional air that Mr Marlowe would have wished, and instead merely reminded most people who saw it of their gladly relinquished schooldays.

Still, Woodend reflected, it at least made the Chief Constable happy, and – to a certain extent – kept him off the backs of the bobbies who were actually trying to solve the case.

Woodend himself had never cared for this way of working. He liked to have a team backing him up, but he preferred it to be a
small
team that he knew well – and would have trusted with his life.

Nor was he one to sit around in a room all day – even if it did have a blackboard with several different-coloured chalks provided! Where he wanted to be was out and about. Immersing himself in the atmosphere of the area in which the crime had been committed. Collecting odd scraps of information which he might – or might
not
– be later able to fit into the overall picture. This was how
he
solved his cases. This was how he gained his insights into who had committed the crimes and – even more interestingly from his point of view –
why
they had committed them.

He knew this habit of his – wearing out his boots almost as much as he wore out his brains – had earned him the nickname ‘Cloggin'-it Charlie' back at the Yard, and that the nickname had followed him to Whitebridge. He knew, too, that though the name was never used to his face, it was used often enough behind his back. But it didn't bother him. In fact, he was quite proud of it. For while his method of working might make him a dinosaur in the eyes of some of his superiors, his arrest record also made it clear to them that at least he was a
successful
dinosaur.

Paniatowski and Rutter, who were both on the phone, didn't see him enter the room, and so he had time to examine them at leisure.

God, they both looked rough, he thought.

And not the kind of ‘rough' that came from working up to eighteen hours a day for weeks on end. No, their ‘rough', it seemed to him, came from an inner turmoil which had nothing to do with the job.

The two detectives hung up, so nearly at the same time that they might have been part of a synchronized phoning team.

‘Has the handbag been found yet?' Woodend asked, sitting down opposite his two favourite police officers.

‘No,' Rutter said. ‘Nor has anything else which might have helped to identify the victim. In fact, there was nothing at all on the canal path which could be connected to the murder in any way, shape or form.'

Woodend sighed. ‘We'll just have to go about it the hard way, then. Any reports of missin' persons?'

‘None,' Rutter said.

‘At least, none that have come in since last night,' Monika Paniatowski amplified.

‘So what does that tell us?' the Chief Inspector asked.

‘Well, if no one's noticed she isn't there, she probably lived alone,' Rutter said.

‘Which means she's single,' Paniatowski added.

‘Or divorced,' Woodend said.

‘She's not been missed at work, either,' Rutter said. He glanced up at the clock. ‘Which either means that she doesn't – didn't – work factory hours or she didn't work at all.'

‘You've both seen the body, have you?' Woodend asked, and when Rutter and Paniatowski nodded grimly, he said, ‘What do you make of it?'

‘The man's clearly a complete bloody lunatic,' Paniatowski said.

‘Do you agree with that, Bob?' Woodend asked.

Rutter thought about it for a moment. ‘Either that, or she'd done something that hurt him so much he just couldn't restrain himself from lashing out, even when she was dead,' he said finally.

Bloody hell fire, Woodend thought, I've known this lad since he was a fresh-faced young sergeant, wet behind both ears – an' I'd never have expected him to say anythin' like that!

‘I'm not quite sure what you mean there, Bob,' he said, trying not to sound too troubled. ‘Exactly what
kind
of thing do you think she might have done to hurt him?'

‘I've no idea,' Rutter confessed. ‘And I certainly don't condone what he's done—'

‘Well, that
is
a relief,' Woodend interrupted.

‘… but I can well imagine a man being driven to that degree of desperation,' Rutter persisted stubbornly.

‘Can you indeed?' Woodend asked. ‘Then I have to tell you, you've got a broader imagination than I possess.'

An awkward, uncomfortable silence descended over them. Half an eternity seemed to pass before Paniatowski said, ‘Have we been sent the medical findings yet, sir?'

‘No, we haven't,' Woodend answered gratefully. ‘But I bet that if I pop down the morgue, the doc will give me at least her
preliminary
findings.'

The snap of cold weather had not deterred Dr Shastri from wearing her sari that morning – albeit, while she was outdoors at least, under her trademark sheepskin jacket. Seeing her now, Woodend was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the clinical coldness of the doctor's morgue and the vibrancy and colour of her attire.

‘So what have you got for me, Doc?' he asked.

Dr Shastri clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

‘I have only had the cadaver in question for a few hours, yet here you are already, demanding results,' she said. ‘The trouble with you, Chief Inspector, is that you expect miracles.'

Woodend grinned. ‘Why shouldn't I expect them, when you always deliver them?' he asked innocently. ‘As I never stop tellin' people, you're the best police surgeon we've ever had.'

Dr Shastri smiled back. Her teeth were small, brilliantly white and even. ‘You seem to think that flattery will get you everywhere,' she said.

‘And won't it?'

‘I am ashamed to admit that it will,' the doctor said, shaking her head as if amazed at her own gullibility.

She reached for a cardboard file which was lying on her desk, opened it and scanned the contents.

‘I would say that your victim was twenty-eight or twenty-nine,' she said. ‘Cause of death was strangulation.'

‘Her knickers were around her ankles when she was found. Had she been raped?'

Dr Shastri frowned. ‘Technically – and probably legally, as far as I know – I suppose she had been. I, myself, would prefer to think of it as violation.'

‘Meaning what, exactly?'

‘There had certainly been penetration – quite violent penetration, as a matter of fact – but the instrument used was not a penis.'

‘Then what the bloody hell
was
it?'

‘A fairly broad object without any sharp edges.'

‘Like the handle of the axe he chopped up her face with?'

Dr Shastri shook her head. ‘No. Anything wooden – even if it had been very smooth – would almost certainly have left splinters. Since there were none in evidence, I would have to conclude that it was either a bottle or some metal object.'

‘Can't you be more specific?'

‘Given time – and luck – I might be able to be more definite, but I would not hold your breath whilst you're waiting.'

‘Was she already dead when he did this to her?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Then why didn't she call out? Why didn't she scream?'

‘She probably couldn't. There were traces of gum mixed in with the mush which was all that was left of her face. I would guess her killer had put some kind of adhesive tape over her mouth.' Dr Shastri paused in order to light up a long, thin, purple-coloured cigarette. ‘I imagine your next question is, why she didn't struggle?' the doctor continued.

‘It is,' Woodend agreed.

‘She couldn't. Her hands were tied behind her back.'

‘She could have lashed out with her legs.'

‘Her ankles were bound together, too, though not so tightly as to make the penetration impossible.'

‘Her wrists and ankles weren't tied when the body was discovered,' Woodend said.

‘In which case the killer must have removed her bonds once he had finished his work.'

‘Why?'

‘You're the detective,' Dr Shastri said. ‘You tell me.'

‘Can you give me any idea of what she was tied up
with
? Was it some kind of rope or cord?'

‘Almost certainly not. Like the instrument used for penetration, rope or cord would have left traces behind. And there were none.'

‘So what the hell was it?'

‘They are making ingenious use of plastics these days,' Dr Shastri said. ‘My guess is that it would have been some kind of man-made bond. No doubt it will be found close to the scene of the crime.'

‘We haven't turned up anythin' so far, which means that we probably never will.'

‘In that case, I will give the matter more thought.' Dr Shastri flashed Woodend a meaningful look.
‘When I have the time
.'

‘Point taken, Doc,' Woodend said. ‘Another question. I appreciate there was probably considerable vaginal damage, but were you still able to ascertain whether or not she was a virgin before she was attacked?'