Sins of the Fathers (19 page)

His aversion to it came, he supposed, from his childhood. His father had run a small greengrocer's shop in London, and the family had lived above it. His mother had loathed the business, and loathed the area in which it was located, and her solution had been to pretend that none of it existed.

The flat had provided her with an escape from the real world. She had treated it almost as if it were sacred – a kind of holy hot air balloon, which allowed her to hover above, and remain totally untouched by, all the distasteful things which were going on at street level. It gradually became her life, and she would rather have lost an arm or a leg than give up even one tiny corner of it.

Thus, though Rutter could – and did – force himself to execute search warrants, he often felt, when he left the premises, as if he had been raping his mother's dream, and so generally avoided it whenever he could.

He had reached the big double gates. Large rhododendron bushes grew on either side of them, giving this part of the garden a rather funereal air – and him something of the creeps.

He was on the point of widening his search – perhaps following the progress of the walls round the small estate – when a sudden burst of sunshine hit the bushes, and he saw that, from under the foliage, something was glinting at him.

It could be anything – the silver foil wrapper of a discarded chocolate bar; a bottle which some thoughtless drunk had thrown over the wall on his ambling way back home; a coin or cheap brooch dropped by a hapless magpie and never retrieved – but he supposed that now that he was there, it was probably worth investigating it more fully.

He crouched down in front of the bush, pushed one of the branches to one side with his hand – and saw the watch. He picked it up carefully in his handkerchief, straightened up again, and moved away from the shadow of the bushes so he could examine it in better light.

He could tell immediately that it was a very expensive timepiece – far better than he could ever have afforded on a detective inspector's salary. There was a little dirt on it, but it bore none of the signs of deterioration which it would have acquired if it had been lying there a long time. Besides, it was still working perfectly. In fact, the only damage which seemed to have been done to it was that the leather strap was broken.

Rutter turned the watch over, hoping to find an inscription on the back of it, and was disappointed to discover that there wasn't one.

He took another step back, and considered how the watch might have got there.

It could, he supposed, have fallen off a man's wrist when he was opening the gates. But would it then have flown far enough to have landed where he'd discovered it? And even if it had, surely the owner would have noticed the loss of such an expensive watch before too long, and immediately gone searching in the places he might have dropped it.

Rutter wrapped the handkerchief around the watch and slipped it into his pocket. Then he knelt down again, in order to see if the rhododendron bush had any more treasures it might be willing to yield up.

‘You've been here for over an hour,' Mrs Hawtrey said. ‘If there
was
anything to find, don't you think you'd have found it by now?'

‘This is a big house,' Woodend reminded her. ‘There's lots of places in it where you could have hidden things.'

‘But I
have
nothing to hide, for God's sake!' Mrs Hawtrey protested. ‘My life's an open book.'

‘Oh, I sincerely doubt that,' Woodend told her. ‘I doubt, to be honest with you, that anybody's is.'

A door to the hallway opened, and Bob Rutter entered the living room. ‘Could I have a word, sir?' he asked.

‘Certainly,' Woodend said. ‘What's on your mind?'

‘Not here,' Rutter cautioned. ‘I think it would be much better if we talked outside.'

‘Whatever you say,' Woodend replied, following him to the door.

It was five minutes before Woodend returned to the living room, and when he did he was holding his hands palm upwards, and carrying a handkerchief in them.

‘What's that?' Thelma Hawtrey asked. ‘The Holy Grail?'

‘No,' Woodend said. ‘But for my money, it comes pretty damn close to it.' He carefully unwrapped the package, and held it out for the woman to see. ‘Does this look familiar to you?'

‘Oh, my God, it's Brad's watch!' Mrs Hawtrey gasped.

‘Do you know, I rather thought it might be,' Woodend said.

‘Where did you … where was it …'

‘Where was it found? Near the gates. Just about where the struggle must have taken place.'

‘The struggle? What struggle? I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.'

‘I've told you before that just repeatin' my words won't do you any good,' Woodend said.

‘But I really
don't
have any idea,' Mrs Hawtrey protested.

‘Oh, I think you do,' Woodend said confidently. He cleared his throat, as he always did on such occasions. ‘Thelma Hawtrey, I am arrestin' you for the murder of Bradley Pine,' he continued. ‘You do not have to say anythin' but anythin' you
do
say may be taken down an' used in evidence against you.'

T
here were three interview rooms in Whitebridge Police Headquarters. They were all rather depressing – and deliberately so – but Interview Room C, which had the smallest window and the least natural light, was the dreariest of the trio. And Interview Room C was the one in which Woodend had chosen to conduct his interrogation of Thelma Hawtrey.

Woodend looked across the table, at the woman who he had already charged with murder.

She looked very calm, he thought. No, that wasn't it at all. She didn't just
look
very calm – she
was
very calm.

‘You may as well make a clean breast of it right from the start, you know, Thelma,' he said.

‘I've done nothing wrong, and I've nothing to come clean about,' Thelma Hawtrey said firmly. ‘And I would prefer it, Chief Inspector Woodend, if you would address me as either Mrs Hawtrey or Madam.'

Woodend sighed. ‘Look, Mrs Hawtrey, you know we found Bradley Pine's watch in your garden, don't you?

‘I know you
say
that you did. But I've no proof you didn't put it there yourselves.'

‘Now why should we have done that?'

‘I should have thought that was obvious.'

‘Not to me, it isn't.'

‘Then I'll explain it to you. I've seen Henry Marlowe on the television. He's desperate for
someone
to be arrested for Bradley's murder, and you've decided that I'm the perfect candidate. But before you could arrest me, you needed some kind of proof, and
that's
why you planted the watch.'

‘Your argument might sound a bit more convincin' if it had been only the watch that we found,' Woodend said. ‘But it wasn't. We also retrieved a button that matches the ones on the jacket that Bradley Pine was wearing when his body was discovered.'

‘You could have planted that, too.'

‘An' what about the bloodstains, Mrs Hawtrey?' Woodend asked, exasperatedly. ‘Because you do know that we found bloodstains on the ground, don't you?'

‘None of which has anything to do with me.'

‘Up until now, we've been assumin' that Pine was already dead by the time he reached your house, and that he was only taken there so that you could accompany him on his last journey to the lay-by,' Woodend said.

Thelma Hawtrey smiled. ‘You almost make it sound like a funeral cortege,' she said.

‘But he wasn't dead at that point, was he?' Woodend asked, ignoring the interruption. ‘He was killed in
your
garden, by
your
lover, who'd been waitin' for him in the bushes. How'd you get him to come to your house on a night when he must have had lots of other things to do, and there was thick fog which made goin' anywhere a bit of an effort? Exactly what tale did you spin him, Mrs Hawtrey?'

‘I didn't spin him any tale, as you put it, and,
as far as I know
, he didn't come to the house.'

‘Maybe you didn't know anythin' about it, after all,' Woodend conceded. ‘Maybe it was all your lover's idea, an' he kept you completely in the dark about the murder until after the deed itself was actually done.'

He paused, to give Thelma Hawtrey time to speak, but it was clear that she wasn't going to.

‘If that is the case,' he continued, ‘then the worst thing that you can possibly do, from your own viewpoint, is to take the fall for him. So why not tell us his name, then we can go an' pick him up? I promise you, Mrs Hawtrey, that the moment he's confessed, all charges against you will be dropped, an' we'll have you back in your own home within half an hour.'

‘There is no lover, and though you have charged me with Bradley Pine's murder, you'll never make the charges stick.'

‘Won't I? What makes you think that?'

‘I still have faith in British justice. I still believe that the guilty will be punished, and the innocent will go free. And I'll go free, Mr Woodend – because I didn't do it!'

‘What about all the evidence which seems to say different?' Woodend asked quietly.

‘Look, maybe I was being unfair to you to even suggest that you planted the watch,' Thelma Hawtrey said. ‘Perhaps you've behaved properly throughout this whole sorry business, and you really did find the watch in my garden, after all. And maybe Bradley Pine was killed there, too. I honestly don't know. But it still had nothing to do with me.'

What had happened to bring about the change in her, Woodend wondered. While they'd been searching her house, she'd seemed as nervous as a kitten. Now, in the intimidating atmosphere of the interview room – and after she'd actually been
charged
– she seemed perfectly in control of herself.

Woodend reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Capstan Full Strength.

‘Would you care for a cigarette, Mrs Hawtrey?' he asked, offering them across the table.

Thelma Hawtrey shook her head. ‘No, thank you.'

‘Go on,' Woodend urged. ‘I'm only offerin' you a smoke, you know. It's not all part of some kind of clever trick to get you to lower your guard, I can promise you that.'

‘I never thought it was a trick,' Thelma Hawtrey said – still calm, still very much in control. ‘But it just so happens that I don't smoke untipped cigarettes.'

‘No, you don't, do you?' Woodend agreed quietly. ‘There were half a dozen opened packets of cigarettes lyin' around your house at various points, but not a single one of them was untipped. So where did all the untipped butt ends come from?'

‘What untipped butt ends?'

‘The ones that kept appearin' in your rubbish bin.'

Thelma Hawtrey's left eye suddenly began to twitch.

That question had shaken her, Woodend thought. Finally, he'd been able to come up with a question that had bloody shaken her!

‘Who … who was it who told you about the untipped cigarette ends?' she asked.

‘If it's true – an' I believe it is – then the source doesn't really matter, does it?'

‘It was that awful Chubb woman, wasn't it?' Thelma Hawtrey demanded. ‘The nosy bitch!'

‘Aye, it was her,' Woodend admitted. ‘An' we got a lot more information from her, as well – the brown ale that got drunk, when you never touched the stuff yourself; the one wine glass you washed up, while you left the other for Mrs Chubb to deal with; the bed sheets that you stripped off personally, so she wouldn't find out what you'd been doin' between them … Need I go on?'

Thelma Hawtrey was looking more than rattled – she looked as if she'd gone into shock. With what obviously took her a huge effort, she managed to fold her arms across her chest.

‘Well,
do
I need to go on?' Woodend asked.

‘I'd like to talk to my solicitor now,' Thelma Hawtrey said.

‘You can certainly do that if you want to,' Woodend agreed, ‘but once we put things on a formal footin', that's how they have to stay, an' I think you might be better off just tellin' me—'

‘My solicitor,' Thelma Hawtrey said. ‘I demand to speak to my solicitor.'

‘She's asked for Foxy Rowton,' Woodend told the rest of the team as they sat over steaming cups of industrial-strength tea in the police canteen.

Paniatowski consulted the background notes she'd started making the moment that Thelma Hawtrey had been arrested.

‘Rowton?' she said. ‘But he's not the solicitor that she normally uses to handle her affairs.'

‘No, he isn't,' Woodend agreed. ‘But maybe somebody's told her that he's the feller you go to when you're in such deep shit that it's starting to spill over the top of your wellingtons.'

‘What I don't understand is why she didn't ask for him when you first charged her,' Rutter said.

‘I think I've got an answer to that,' Woodend told him. ‘When we brought her in, she was confident that she could beat the murder charge. An' maybe she was right about that. If her lover did everythin' – killed Pine, took his body to the lay-by an' carried out the mutilation – then there'd be no
physical
evidence to tie her to the killin' at all.'

‘And so what if the murder was committed in her garden?' Paniatowski added. ‘When we find a body, we don't automatically arrest anybody who happens to be living near the scene of the crime, do we?'

‘So what was it that panicked her?' Rutter asked.

‘It was when I talked about the untipped cigarette ends that Mrs Chubb had seen in the waste bin,' Woodend said.

‘Why should that have done it?'

‘Because, although she already knew that we thought she had a lover who'd helped her to carry out the murder, she didn't think we'd ever be able to trace him. But when I mentioned the cigarette ends, she began to get some idea of the extent of the resources we've got at our disposal. From that, it was a short step to convincin' herself that if we really wanted to find him, we would. An' maybe she thinks he's the weak link in the chain. Maybe she thinks that the second we slap the cuffs on him, he'll tell us everythin' we want to know.'