Salton Killings (3 page)

“Chief Inspector Woodend,” he said in a confident tone he had been carefully cultivating. “Bob Rutter, DS.”

They shook hands, then Woodend stood back. He ran his eyes up and down Rutter's body in an ostentatious inspection.

Rutter carried out a surreptitious examination of his own on his new boss. Hair – light brown, no Brylcreem, unruly. Nose – nearly, but not quite, hooked. Mouth – wide. Jaw – square without being brutish. All in all, a pleasant but unremarkable face. Except for the eyes. They were dark, almost black, and the lids were like camera shutters, constantly clicking and registering.

“Six foot, twelve stone three pounds,” Woodend said eventually.

“Twelve stone five pounds, sir,” Rutter answered.

Woodend shrugged, as if he had been close enough.

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

The Chief Inspector looked pained.

“Dear God,” he said, almost to himself, “they're gettin' younger every day. Ever worked on a murder case before?”

“No, sir. I've only just been made up to sergeant.”

Woodend shook his head.

“They've given me another virgin. Typical, absolutely bloody typical. They tell me you're a grammar school boy an' all.”

Time was passing. Rutter suppressed his urge to look up at the clock again.

“That's right, sir.”

“An' that you could have gone to university.”

“I was offered a place, yes.”

“So why didn't you take it?”

Because seven years as a greengrocer's son in a posh grammar had convinced him, even though he ended up as head of school, that the Old Boy Network would work against him in the professions. Whereas the police . . .

“I thought the Force offered good career prospects, sir.”

“You mean you thought we were all so bloody thick that a smart lad like you could leapfrog his way to the top.”

It was too close for comfort, but before Rutter had time to reply the Chief Inspector was moving.

“Come on lad,” he shouted over his shoulder. “If we don't make tracks, we'll miss this bugger.”

They walked past the engine, black and fierce, hissing steam.

“They're plannin' to do away with these, you know,” Woodend said. “Replacin' 'em with diesel an' electric.”

Rutter laughed lightly.

“Well, that's progress, sir.”

“Progress.” Woodend mouthed the word with disdain. “Electric trains are all right for kids to play with, but they'll never be suitable for transportin' grown men around.”

It was going wrong, Rutter thought, they had got off to a bad start. It worried him. If there was one thing worse than having to work with Woodend, it would be working with him and not getting on. He didn't want his career ruined by this northern throwback.

“This is the carriage, sir,” he said. “I've reserved us a whole compartment so we can work undisturbed on the journey.”

“Oh, you have, have you?” Woodend asked, climbing up the step. “An' what makes you think at this stage of the investigation we've got anythin' to work
on
?”

Rutter smiled confidently at the retreating back. Their relationship could be turning a corner.

Once in the right compartment, Woodend heaved his case onto the rack, sat down, and kicked his shoes off. Rutter placed his own case beside him.

“I've had the details telephoned down from Maltham, sir,” he said, “and I've managed to construct a preliminary report.”

He tapped his case to show where it was.

Woodend didn't look pleased. The pained expression came over his face again.

“Oh, you're one of them buggers, are you?” he asked. “Armchair detective? Think a murder's like a chess puzzle that can be solved from the comfort of your own home?”

Rutter wouldn't have put it as crudely as that, but yes, as a matter of fact, that was what he did think. There was no reason why detection couldn't be treated as a science. The days of the bull-headed, strong-arm copper – the jackboot school of investigation – were passing. He thought it wiser to say nothing to his new chief.

“There's only one way to crack a murder,” Woodend continued, “cloggin' it round the houses, gettin' the feel of the place first.” He gave Rutter a penetrating stare. “I do hope I'm not goin' to find it tiresome workin' with you, Sergeant.”

“I hope so too, sir,” Rutter said flatly.

Woodend put his hand in his pocket and extracted a package wrapped in greaseproof paper. “All right lad, we'll have a look at your preliminary report just as soon as I've finished eatin' a preliminary corned-beef butty.”

Each killing got harder. Last Time, with Kathleen, all he had had to do was kneel on the canal bank, holding her head under. He could still remember how cold the water had felt on his wrists. She had struggled. God, she had struggled. The green canal had been white with foam, the waves like the wash of a narrow boat. It had done her no good. There had been fewer and fewer bubbles, and then none at all. He had felt better almost immediately.

Last Time, they had said it was a tragic accident. He had known they would, they had said that about Jessie, too.

This Time, with Diane, it had all been more complicated. He had had to swear her to secrecy, but he could not be sure she had not talked, had not told Margie more than he had instructed her to. Killing her in the village, rather than on a lonely canal bank, had been a risk. Someone could have seen him and might remember. But he had had no choice, that was the way it had had to be done.

This Time, they knew it was not an accident. This Time, they would investigate. And it would not be in the hands of the Maltham Constabulary either. He knew how the police worked. They would call in some smart boys from London, if they hadn't done so already. They would be all over the village, asking questions, checking on movements.

They would make things very difficult, because the control, the timetabling for the killings, was not in his hands. He could vary it a little, postpone it for a week or two. He hadn't needed to kill Diane just then. But still, there was a limitation, a framework in which he was forced to operate. He did not choose the victims and the Finger was already pointed again. There would be a next time – and it would have to be soon.

Woodend was not a believer in this new-fangled sliced bread. His corned beef was trapped between two thick doorsteps of cob. As he munched his way manfully into it, he flicked through the papers he'd bought at WH Smith's station stall.

“They all mention it,” he mumbled, “but only the
Daily Herald
gives it space on the front page. Well,” he added sourly, “it's not as if it happened somewhere important – like Islington.”

“I expect you're glad to be going back home for a while, sir,” Rutter said.

“Back home?” Woodend sounded exasperated. “We're goin' to Cheshire, lad, I'm a Lancashire man!”

Rutter looked mystified.

“You bloody southerners just lump it all together. ‘Up North' you say, in a funny accent. An' by that you mean anywhere north of Watford. Lancashire an' Cheshire are as different as . . .” he groped for an example, “England and France. Well,” he added honestly, “America and Canada anyway.”

Still, he
was
pleased to be going. It wouldn't be like home, but it was a bloody sight better than Kent.

He finished eating, crumpled the greaseproof paper into a ball and placed it in the bin. When he had brushed the last remaining crumbs off his knees, he favoured Rutter with a look of rapt attention, like a dog waiting for its ball to be thrown.

“Right, Sergeant,” he said, “let's have it.”

Rutter already had a pristine new green cardboard file on his knee. If he noticed he was being mocked, he gave no indication.

“What have you already found out from the papers, sir?” he asked.

“Never mind that,” Woodend said. “You've done the work, you've earned the right to show off. Give me the lot.”

“The dead girl was fifteen, sir,” Rutter began crisply. “She was in her last year at the local secondary mod., had only a few weeks to go.”

He leaned across and handed Woodend a photograph. It was the same one that had been in the
Sketch
, except that in the newspaper they had shown only her face, cutting out the rest of her body and the people standing next to her.

Diane was standing on the beach at Blackpool – he could see the Tower behind her and a donkey just to her left – with one parent on either side. She was wearing a swimsuit that seemed to Woodend to be rather too old-fashioned, too all-enveloping, for such a young girl. Her blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders. She looked pretty, he thought, but then most of them did at that age.

She wasn't smiling, and she wasn't looking at the camera. Instead, her attention was concentrated on her father. What did her expression remind him of? Woodend closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the image.

That was it! He'd been with the allied army on the push into Germany, a sergeant by that time. His section had been one of the first to reach Belsen. The emaciated faces of the prisoners had been distressing, but it had been the eyes that had really got him – haunted and hunted. Diane Thorburn had eyes like that.

Her father's hand was resting on her shoulder. Woodend knew he couldn't possibly see it in a black and white photograph, yet he
felt
that the hand was not really resting at all. Instead, it was restraining, squeezing the life out of the poor kid.

“I think she was a very unhappy child,” he said.

“Probably, sir,” Rutter replied, as though he thought that while it might not be a stupid remark, it was at best a pointless one.

“You think the state of her happiness is irrelevant, don't you?” Woodend demanded.

“Well, yes. I mean it's not as if she chose to be killed and . . .”

“She may not have chosen it,” Woodend said, “but she could have invited it. I'm not sayin' somebody killed her as a favour, to put her out of her misery, but I've come across stranger motives. They might not make sense to you, but I've never arrested a murderer yet who didn't think he had a perfectly logical reason for doin' what he'd done. If you're goin' to work with me, you'll have to learn – and learn quickly – that in a murder inquiry we have to take
everythin
' into consideration.”

He could see that he had not got through to Rutter. He was tired of breaking in new sergeants, but if this one was going to be of any use to him, he supposed he'd better try.

“Do you know that in some countries they still use Sherlock Holmes books as police trainin' manuals?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Rutter replied, puzzled.

“An' it's not a bad idea,” Woodend continued. “There's a lot in Conan Doyle – observation, deduction, analysis – but that's only half the picture.” He reached into his other voluminous pocket, the one that had not held the sandwich, and pulled out a book. “They should use this an' all.”

“
Great Expectations
?” Rutter read, his perplexity deepening. “Dickens?”

“Oh, not just
Great Expectations
,” Woodend said. “Not even just Dickens, though for my money he's the best of the lot. Have you read the book?”

“We studied it in school, sir.”

“You still remember the story, do you?”

“More or less.”

“Right,” Woodend continued. “Imagine you were dropped in the middle of the book an' asked to conduct an investigation. You'd be lost. Why should Pip, a workin'-class lad, have turned his back on his own folks? How could Estella, a beautiful young woman, be so cold an' emotionless?” He chuckled. “Oh, you'd understand Miss Haversham, all right, sittin' in a dark room in her faded, tattered weddin' dress, hatin' the man who never turned up to marry her. But most of us aren't like that, wearin' our troubles for all the world to see.”

A ticket collector with steel-rimmed glasses was standing in the corridor. Rutter waved the travel warrant at him and he walked on.

“
That's
why Sherlock Holmes isn't enough,” Woodend continued. “You have to dig deep into their past to find out what makes people tick. An' it's people that matter. You find out about crime from studyin'
them
– not the other way around.”

Rutter nodded his head as if in agreement, but the slightly nervous smile on his lips told a different story.

‘He thinks I'm barmy,' Woodend thought.

“OK, Sergeant,” he said wearily. “Give me the rest of your report.”

“The local police have done very little so far,” Rutter continued. “All we've got in concrete terms is, one: yesterday, Tuesday, she got the school bus from Salton – that's the village where she lived – and arrived at Maltham Secondary Mod. at 8.55.”

“She couldn't have got off the bus between the two places?” Woodend asked.

Rutter shook his head.

“It's a special service. It doesn't stop at all between the village and the school.”

“Go on,” the Chief Inspector said.

“Two, she never actually entered the school. When she was found to be absent at registration, her form teacher just assumed she was sick. Three, her body was discovered at about twelve twenty under a pile of salt – back in the village.”

“It doesn't make sense,” Woodend mused. “If she had a reason to be in the village, why bother going to school at all? All she had to do was not get on the bus. And if she was killed near the school, why would the murderer run the risk of taking her body back to the village?”

Woodend looked out the window. The train was speeding through flat, green countryside.

“Got any details of the place yet?” he asked.