The Dark Lady (8 page)

“It was bad enough havin' to work with the Germans as fellow shift workers an' drink in the same bar as them,” he said. “But then Gerhard Schultz arrived. A man who played more than his part in killin' your countrymen and enslavin' your country. A man who now had power over you. You didn't risk your life in Arnhem to be ordered about by a Kraut. Your comrades had given their lives to make sure such a thing could never happen again.”

“I should have killed him,” Rozpedek said. “It's what any true patriot would have done. But to my eternal shame, I left the extermination of that vermin to someone else.”

“One of the other Poles?” Woodend asked.

Rozpedek looked thunderstruck. “Are you asking me if I knew he was going to be killed?” he demanded.

“More or less,” Woodend agreed.

Rozpedek shook his head vigorously. “I swear to you that I had no idea he would be murdered.”

“An' what about any idea you might have had
since
the murder?” Woodend pressed on. “Has any of your friends said anythin' to make you think that they could have been involved?”

“No,” Rozpedek said. “But even if they had done, I would not tell you.” He stood up, walked over to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself another shot of vodka. “I do not know who killed Gerhard Schultz, but whoever he is—” he raised the glass and knocked back the vodka – “I salute him.”

W
oodend stood in the doorway of Westbury Social Club bar and looked around him. The German and English tables were fully occupied – Karl Müller presiding over the former, and the red-faced Mike Partridge in charge of the other. There was only one person at the Polish table, a thin-faced young man who must have missed the war by a good ten years.

“I'm goin' to have a quick word with that Polish lad sittin' all on his lonesome over there,” the chief inspector told his sergeant. “An' while I'm havin' my chat, you could do a lot worse with your time than get the ale in.”

As he crossed the room, he was aware of several sets of hostile eyes following him.

Aye, well, I've never been much of a one for enterin' popularity contests, he thought.

He reached the Polish table and, uninvited, sat down. “I'm Chief Inspector Woodend from Scotland Yard, as you probably remember from earlier,” he said to the young Pole. “Now if the answer to this question is no, you probably won't understand a blind word I'm sayin' in the first place, but are you one of the ones who don't speak any English?”

“I am Mariusz Wasak,” the Pole replied. “My parents left Poland when I was baby, and I have been in England for most of my life, so the language is no problem to me.”

“But despite the fact that you don't remember your homeland, you're still a Pole at heart, aren't you?” Woodend guessed.

“I am a Pole to the very bottom of my soul,” the young man replied with a sudden intensity, “and one day, when the communists have finally fallen, I will return to my homeland.”

“If I was you, I wouldn't hold my breath while I was waitin' for that to happen,” Woodend advised him. “Can I just get one thing clear? You were one of the ones who went back to Zbigniew Rozpedek's house on the night of the murder, weren't you?”

Wasak raised a surprised eyebrow. “You pronounce his name better than most Englishmen seem to manage,” he said.

“I always try to pronounce people's names correctly,” Woodend told him. “It's the least they've got a right to expect. Now would you mind answerin' the question please, Mr Wasak?”

The young Pole nodded. “Yes, after the bar closed, I went back to Zbigniew's house.”

“An' what did you do when you got there?”

“Why do you need to ask me? Surely Zbigniew must have told you that himself.” Woodend whistled softly. “I've just left his house, but you already know about it,” he said.

The Pole gave him a thin smile. “When you have been here in Westbury Park a little longer, you will learn that there are very few things which can be kept secret,” he said.

“There's one secret nobody seems to know the answer to,” Woodend countered, “who the bloody hell killed Gerhard Schultz? Anyroad, to get back to my question, it doesn't matter what Mr Rozpedek told me – I'm askin'
you
what you did when you got back to his house.”

“We played cards.”

“An' what game did you play exactly? Was it snap? Or are you more inclined towards happy families?”

“We played poker,” the young Pole said. “I lost seven shillings and elevenpence.”

Woodend scratched the edge of his nose with his index finger. “It's always fascinatin' to me how people who don't know any better think that addin' little details to the story they tell the police will give those stories an aura of authenticity,” he said. “Tell me, how long did it take you to lose your seven shillin's an' elevenpence?”

“It took me until long after Herr Schultz had been beaten to death in the woods.”

Woodend sighed. “Just answer the question, please.”

“The poker game went on until at least four thirty in the morning. It may even have been five o'clock.”

“Were you all drinkin' as well?”

“Of course we were drinking. We are Poles. When there are three or four of us together, it is impossible
not
to drink.”

“Then you must have had thick heads when you turned up for work the next mornin'. I'm surprised your foreman didn't notice anythin' an' report you to his supervisor.”

Wasak shook his head, as if he despaired at the depth of the chief inspector's ignorance.

“We are all shift workers in a chemical plant which operates around the clock,” he said. “Often we have to work at the weekend, and when that happens we are given time off in lieu. This was one such occasion. There was no work for any of us the day after Schultz was murdered.”

“So between about quarter past eleven an' four thirty in the mornin' – or it might have been five o'clock – you were all together?”

“That's right.”

“And nobody left durin' that time?”

“As far as I can remember, we all went to the lavatory at some point during the game.”

They were hard work, these Poles, Woodend thought. It wasn't that they were all as thick as two short planks, just that they acted as though they were.

“You all went to the bog, but nobody was gone more than a couple of minutes. Is that it?” he said, spelling it out.

“Yes, that is correct.”

The chief inspector rose to his feet. “Well, if you'll excuse me, Mr Wasak, there's a drink waitin' for me on the bar,” he said. “By the way, who won this gin rummy game of yours?”

“Poker,” the Pole corrected him. “Zbigniew was the big winner. And it was poker.”

“Aye, so it was,” Woodend agreed.

He walked back to the bar, aware of the eyes on him once again. Bob Rutter, who had already started to sip his own half of bitter slid a brimming pint over to his boss.

“Did you find out anything useful from your little chat, sir?” the sergeant asked.

Woodend shook his head. “I get the distinct impression that at least half the people livin' on this camp don't give a toss whether or not I find Gerhard Schultz's killer,” he said. “An' what's even worse, about half of the rest would much rather I didn't.”

Rutter lit up one of his cork-tipped cigarettes. “That's hardly surprising, is it?” he asked. “Being a time-and-motion man has never been the most popular occupation in the world.”

“True enough,” Woodend agreed. “You know what's really got me foxed, Sergeant?”

“No. What?”

“This whole Dark Lady business.”

“You mean you think there really might be a ghost?”

“No, course I don't think that. But what I want to know is why even the mention of this particular spook should have put the wind up Gerhard Schultz.”

“Maybe he did believe in ghosts,” Rutter suggested. “Maybe he was scared to death of them.”

“So, bein' scared to death, he goes wanderin' off on his own in the dark?” Woodend asked sceptically. “Besides, I think you're forgettin' exactly how that Simon Hailsham feller phrased it. He said that it was when he first mentioned the Dark Lady that Gerhard Schultz was worried. As soon as he'd explained that she was nothin' but a local ghost, the German calmed down.”

“So you're saying that Schultz must have thought the words applied to something else?”

“Exactly.”

“But what?”

“He hadn't read his Dickens, but maybe he was a Shakespeare fan,” Woodend speculated.

“A Shakespeare fan?” Rutter repeated, mystified. “What's Shakespeare got to do with this?”

Woodend shook his head in mock disgust. “You young coppers amaze me sometimes,” he said. “For all your fancy grammar-school education, you still know bugger all. Shakespeare wrote a lot of sonnets – that's like limericks, only with more lines.”

Rutter made a wry, long-suffering face. “Thank you for putting me right on that point, sir.”

“He was married, as you probably know, to a woman called Anne Hathaway, but a lot of these poems were written to a woman who wasn't exactly his wife. Well, over the years she's come to be known to the people who've studied him as his Dark Lady.”

“I don't see where this is leading us,” Rutter confessed.

“Say Gerhard Schultz had a woman in his past who he thought of as
his
Dark Lady – a woman he'd treated badly, an' either felt guilty about or was afraid of. When Simon Hailsham mentions the name, Schultz thinks that's who he's talkin' about, an', naturally, he's very shocked. Then he realises it's only a local legend that Hailsham's talkin' about, an' he calms down immediately. How does that strike you as an idea?”

“It's a possibility I wouldn't be willing to dismiss out of hand,” Rutter said cautiously.

The chief inspector took a gulp of his beer. “I like havin' you around on an investigation, lad,” he said. “An' there's two main reasons for that. The first one is that you're a good person to bounce ideas off. The second is that when I let my enthusiasm for a theory send me in chargin' off in all directions at once – an' don't deny it, lad, because I do . . .”

Rutter grinned. “Quite honestly, it would never have occurred to me to deny it, sir.”

Woodend frowned, but only for a second. “When I let my enthusiasm run away with me, you're there to pull me back. So we make a bloody good team – an' we've got the results to prove it – but it looks like we're goin' to have to split up on this case.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“There's a strong possibility that the killer is local. Not poor old Fred Foley – though where he's disappeared to is a mystery in itself – but somebody from the camp. He could be one of the Italians, like I said to Bernadelli. Or one of Poles. But this whole Dark Lady business has got me thinkin', an' I've realised the murderer could just as easily be somebody out of Schultz's past. Somebody he knew down in Hereford, for example. An' that's our problem, you see. We don't really know anythin' about his past.”

“So you want me to go down to Hereford?”

“It's either that, or leave it up to the local Mr Plods,” Woodend said. “An' I've a lot more confidence in you than I have in them.”

Rutter grinned again. “I don't know if you intended it, but that was almost a compliment.”

“Aye, it was –
almost
,” Woodend agreed. “An' I did intend it. But don't get too cocky, lad, because I'll certainly not be makin' a habit of it.” He knocked back the remains of his beer, and stood up. “I think I'll go for a walk before I turn in for the evenin'.”

It was a mild summer night, and though the moon was on the wane, there was sufficient light for Woodend not to need a torch. He walked through the park, looking at the curtained windows and wondered, as he often found himself doing in situations like this one, about the secret lives which were acted out once front doors had been firmly closed. He reached the edge of the park and turned on to the country lane which led to the main road which, in turn, eventually led to the town of Maltham.

It was then he saw it.

It was standing perfectly still no more than a hundred yards from him, in the direction of the canal. It was a bloody big horse, he thought, a fact which only served to make the cloaked figure sitting on its back look even smaller and more fragile than she probably was.

Making as little noise as he possibly could under the circumstances, he began to walk rapidly up the lane. He covered the first ten yards, then ten more. He heard the horse snort, but neither it nor its rider moved. He wished he'd brought a torch with him after all, but it was too late to go back for one now.

In the woods on either side of him, he could hear the noises of the night – the rustling as small furry creatures made their way through the grass, the hissing and buzzing of insects, the chirping of the crickets.

He had left the park well behind him, and with it all outward signs of the modern world. He could, with just a tiny leap of the imagination, picture himself in a very different world, one in which everyone knew their place – just like in the hymn – from the farm labourers in their simple hovels to the rich landowners up at the big house.

But Sir Richard Sutton had apparently not known
his
place in the established order. He had strayed from the path, bringing feelings of betrayal and humiliation down on his poor wife's head. And he had paid the price for that. But then, so had she. Two lives had been wasted that terrible night, and now, a hundred and fifty years later, there had been a third death – not more than a few minutes' walk from the place in which the first tragedy had taken place.