A Long Time Dead Read online

  By Sally Spencer

  The Charlie Woodend Mysteries

  THE SALTON KILLINGS

  MURDER AT SWANN’S LAKE

  DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

  THE DARK LADY

  THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  DEAD ON CUE

  THE RED HERRING

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  A DEATH LEFT HANGING

  THE WITCH MAKER

  THE BUTCHER BEYOND

  DYING IN THE DARK

  STONE KILLER

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

  THE RING OF DEATH

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  By Sally Spencer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  Sally Spencer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2006 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2006 by Sally Spencer.

  The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Spencer, Sally

  A long time dead

  1.Woodend, Charlie (Fictitious character) – Fiction

  2.Police – England – Fiction

  3.Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9'14 [F]

  ISBN-13: 9780-7278-6363-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9168-6 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-44830-112-6 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Dave Garnett

  Prologue

  The American sitting in the back of the Buick was wearing a pinstriped suit of the style much favoured by bankers and stockbrokers in the City of London, but even an untrained observer would never have taken him for a civilian.

  It was not so much his haircut which revealed him as a military man – though, in the age of liberation which had been ushered in by the Beatles, his hair was very short even for a man of conservative tastes. Instead, it was his posture which gave him away. For whereas a lesser man might have taken the opportunity to luxuriate in the customized soft leather which had added so much to the purchase price of the vehicle, he sat ramrod stiff, his arms by his sides, his head held in place by an invisible high collar.

  ‘We’re very nearly there now, Major,’ the chauffeur said cheerfully, over his shoulder.

  ‘Good,’ his passenger replied, without, it seemed to the driver, a great deal of enthusiasm.

  The Major let his thoughts drift back to the day he was told he’d been appointed to the post of Military Attaché at the US Embassy in London. He’d considered himself lucky to be given such a plum job, and that feeling had remained – pretty much intact – until he’d received the phone call from Washington DC, a few hours earlier.

  He didn’t feel so lucky now.

  Now, he wished he’d been posted to some obscure little South American country that no one in the Administration back home would have had very much interest in.

  For some minutes, the Buick had been driving along a narrow country lane which ran parallel to an ancient chain-link fence. Now, it had almost reached a pair of large, open gates, manned by a couple of British bobbies wearing those pointy hats which the Major had always considered faintly ridiculous.

  ‘Haverton Camp, sir,’ the driver said, flicking his indicator on, and turning the wheel.

  One of the policemen, a kid who hardly looked old enough to shave, stepped into the roadway and held out his hand for the Buick to stop. The Major wound down his window, and held out his identification for the constable to see.

  ‘Major Garrett?’ the policeman asked, looking him in the eye and completely ignoring the document.

  ‘No, son, I’m Betty Grable,’ the Major replied.

  The constable looked perplexed. ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘I’m Betty Grable,’ the Major repeated. ‘If you don’t believe me, just check my ID.’

  The constable did as he’d been instructed. ‘You are Major Garrett,’ he announced. A grin spread across his face. ‘Was all that by way of teaching me a lesson, sir?’

  Garrett nodded. ‘Always put your faith in documentation over people, son. A document has no reason to lie.’

  ‘I’ll remember that, sir,’ the constable promised. ‘Shall I tell you where you can find the guv’nor?’

  ‘That would be helpful.’

  ‘Drive straight through the main camp until you reach an open space that used to be the parade ground. He’s at the far end of it, studying the crime scene.’

  ‘Appreciate it,’ Garrett said.

  The constable hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

  ‘Not at all. What is it?’

  ‘Who’s Betty Grable?’

  ‘You really don’t know?’ Garrett asked, amazed.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘She was an actress. A big, big, movie star.’

  ‘Is that right?’ the constable asked, plainly none the wiser.

  ‘You must have heard of her! She starred in the movie A Yank in the RAF! With Tyrone Power!’

  ‘And when would that have been, sir?’ the constable asked, obviously
still unenlightened.

  ‘I don’t know for sure. 1941? 1942? It was some time during the War, anyway.’

  The constable looked somewhat dubious. ‘Seems an awful long time ago, sir.’

  Yes, Garrett agreed silently, it probably did, to a boy like him. From the constable’s perspective, the Second World War must be almost ancient history. And that made the murder – which he had come all this way to see with his own eyes – ancient history too.

  The Major suddenly felt very old.

  The driver edged the car through the gates, and on to a concrete road which was rutted and cracked after nearly a quarter of a century of total neglect. The road was flanked by a series of long wooden huts, so rickety that it seemed that a single jab of a finger would bring them crashing down like a row of dominoes.

  ‘Hard to believe that this is one of the places they launched the Invasion of Normandy from, isn’t it, sir?’ the driver asked over his shoulder.

  ‘Yeah,’ Garrett agreed.

  The huts petered out, and ahead of the car lay a large concrete rectangle, dappled with patches of green where the grass and weeds had forced their way through. Beyond the parade ground was another chain-link fence, and standing close to it were a small group of men.

  ‘Stop here,’ Garrett ordered. ‘I’ll walk the rest of the way.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, sir?’ the driver asked. ‘There’s no need to worry about damaging the car, you know. The suspension will take it, as long as I drive slowly.’

  ‘I’m not worried about the car,’ Garrett told him. ‘I need a little time to think.’

  As he marched briskly across the ruined parade ground, Garrett looked neither to the left nor to the right. Instead, he appeared to be keeping his eyes focussed on the men standing around a slight depression in the ground. But even that was not strictly accurate. He was not so much looking at them as looking through them – gazing towards a possible future he would prefer to avoid, but suspected was unstoppable.

  He came to a final halt at the very edge of the shallow hole, and gazed down into it. The human skull which lay there seemed – despite its lack of eyes – to be looking up at him, and, even without teeth, appeared to be greeting him with a macabre grin.

  Nor was the skull occupying the hole alone. There were other bones in evidence, too – ribs, femurs, fingers.

  The men who had partly disinterred this body had had no expectation of making such a dramatic discovery, Garrett thought.

  And why should they have had?

  They were not archaeologists, but builders. Their intent was not to uncover the past, but to construct the future. Yet it had fallen to them to finally reveal – by total accident – the corpse of a man whom the most powerful military machine in the world had failed to find, even when the trail was fresh.

  ‘I’m Inspector Clarence Dudley of the Devonshire Constabulary,’ said a voice.

  Garrett looked up. The speaker was a man in his mid-forties. He was wearing a long white Macintosh, and the kind of bowler hat much favoured by actors playing British policemen in cheaply-made B pictures.

  ‘Well, there’s the corpse,’ Dudley said, with a banality perfectly in tune with his B picture appearance.

  Garrett looked down into the hole again. ‘Are you sure this guy really is Robert Kineally?’ he asked, his tone half-suggesting that he was hoping for a reply in the negative.

  Dudley shrugged. ‘That’s what it says on his identification tags,’ he answered.

  Major Garrett knelt down, and examined the dog tags for himself. One of them, he noted, was partly obscured by a dark brown blob, which was made up of swirling lines.

  ‘It’s a bloody fingerprint,’ Dudley said helpfully.

  ‘Yeah, I’d just about figured that out for myself,’ Garrett replied, over his shoulder.

  The second set of tags, which had no evidence of bloodstains on them, had once belonged to a Robert T. Kineally, who had been immunized against tetanus, hailed from Connecticut and had listed Martha Kineally as his next of kin.

  Perhaps it wasn’t him, Garrett told himself.

  These were undoubtedly Kineally’s tags, but perhaps the body was somebody else’s.

  Yeah, right! he thought, with self-disgust.

  In his time, he’d known soldiers who would sell army equipment – and even their own weapons – if they thought that they could get away with it. But a man’s dog tags were something else. They didn’t belong to him, they were part of him – sometimes, when the battle was finally over, the only part of him which was still recognizable.

  So whether Garrett liked it or not – and he most definitely didn’t – he was forced to accept that he was now staring down at the last mortal remains of Robert Kineally. Which the State and Defence Departments were just gonna love, because what they really needed at that particular, delicate moment was flack from Senator Eugene Kineally.

  The high-level meeting had started out amicably enough, but it was now in its third hour, and tempers were becoming heated.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what’s the problem here?’ the four-star American General was demanding. ‘First we fight a bloody war for you, then we step in to protect you from the goddam Ruskies. And what do we want in return? All we’re asking for is a tiny piece of land, which, even in a rinky-dink country like this one, you’d never even miss.’

  The civil servants flanking the Right Honourable Douglas Coutes, Minister of Defence, stiffened. The minister himself bit back the first words which had come to his mind, and forced a reasonable expression to invade his face.

  ‘No one here disputes that you need land to site your military bases on, Jack,’ he said smoothly. ‘It’s merely a question of which particular pieces of land we give you.’

  ‘From the point of view of defending this country – your country – the choice of a location is obvious,’ the General countered.

  Coutes pressed the fingertips of both hands together, in what was a gesture of either contemplation or prayer. ‘You’re looking at the matter from a purely military perspective, Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Damn right, I’m—’

  ‘Which is perfectly understandable, given your particular brief. But we, the government, have to consider the political fall-out of any decisions that we make, too. And not only would the site you propose despoil a great deal of open countryside – which would undoubtedly enrage both the nature freaks and any number of other bunches of crazies – but it would also, and much more significantly, mean the compulsory purchase of property belonging to some of our most important and influential families.’

  ‘Important families? Dukes and earls? Those kinda guys?’ the General asked, aggressively.

  ‘Those kinda guys,’ Coutes agreed dryly.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that, even today, they’re still calling some of the shots?’

  ‘More than you could ever imagine,’ Coutes said. ‘Our last prime minister was, I scarcely need remind you, an earl. And even out of power, the aristocracy is a force to be reckoned with.’

  ‘Jesus!’ the General snorted in disgust.

  ‘No country – not even your own great republic – is immune from such influences,’ Coutes said. ‘Your home-grown “movers and shakers” may not have titles, but their modus operandi is probably very similar to those of the lords you seem to despise.’

  ‘Latin, already,’ the General said, his disgust deepening.

  There was a discreet knock on the door, and Coutes’s Principal Private Secretary slipped into the room. ‘There’s a phone call for you, Minister,’ he said. ‘It’s Mr Braithwaite.’

  ‘Tell him I’m in a meeting,’ Coutes snapped.

  ‘I will, if you insist, but I rather think you should take this call,’ the PPS said emphatically.

  The minister sighed heavily. ‘All right. Have the call transferred through to here.’

  The PPS raised a warning eyebrow. ‘Perhaps it might be wiser to have your conversation with Mr Braithwaite in private
,’ he suggested.

  Back in his own office, Coutes wrenched the phone from its cradle, and jammed it against his ear.

  ‘What’s this all about, Braithwaite?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’ve been getting some disturbing signals from our intelligence sources in Washington DC,’ the caller said.

  ‘About the military base?’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Braithwaite asked, astonished.

  ‘How did I know? How did I bloody-well know? I know, you bumbling idiot, because this Calderdale Camp issue has been dominating my life for the last two months.’

  There was an awkward – almost embarrassed – pause at the other end of the line.

  ‘Actually, it’s not Calderdale I’m talking about, Minister,’ Braithwaite said, almost apologetically. ‘I was referring to Haverton Camp.’

  ‘But that’s been closed for years!’ Coutes exploded.

  ‘I realize that, but …’

  ‘They shut it down soon after the Invasion of Normandy. The Ministry might still own the land, but that’s just a legal technicality.’ Coutes paused. ‘Come to think of it, didn’t the Chancellor get me to agree to selling it to some development company with plans to turn it into a garden city?’

  ‘That’s quite correct, Minister, but—’

  ‘So why bother me with it now? Are you under the impression that because I served there briefly myself, I’ve developed some sort of sentimental attachment to the bloody place?’

  ‘No, I … Minister, the signals from Washington concern a Captain Robert Kineally. Does that name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Not a great deal, no,’ Coutes said.

  ‘You don’t remember him?’

  ‘Of course I remember him, but then I remember what I had for breakfast, and that doesn’t mean a great deal to me, either.’

  ‘It’s … er … being said that you didn’t get on with him very well,’ Braithwaite said uncomfortably. ‘In fact, it’s being suggested that a high level of animosity existed between the two of you.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand the sanctimonious little prig. So what? There were a number of people I didn’t get on with back then. Anyway, as far as I recall, the bastard disappeared just before the invasion of Europe.’

  ‘So he did, Minister. But not, it would seem, of his own free will. And now that he’s turned up again—’