Golden Mile to Murder Read online

  Table of Contents

  By Sally Spencer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  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

  Epilogue

  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

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  THE RED HERRING

  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

  THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  A Charlie Woodend Mystery

  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 2001 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Select an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2001 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.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0052-5 (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 Marisa McGreevy,

  who knows how to make her authors feel special.

  I’ll miss you.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the people of Blackpool who helped me with background to this book, especially the staff of the Central Library. As always, I am grateful to my webmaster, Luis de Avendano, for all his splendid work in maintaining my website – www.sallyspencer.com.

  Author’s Note

  This book contains many real locations and buildings, though some of them appear under different names. The characters and events who populate them, however, are entirely products of my imagination.

  One

  Behind them shone the bright lights of Blackpool, ahead of them lay the darkness of the Irish Sea. The iron struts of the Central Pier were above their heads and under them was the warm, friable sand. Perfect, Derek Thomson thought. Bloody perfect!

  He turned to the girl sitting next to him. ‘Happy?’ he asked.

  The girl shrugged awkwardly. ‘I’m all right, I suppose,’ she admitted. ‘But isn’t it time we were gettin’ back?’

  Derek forced himself to laugh, as if the very notion were preposterous. ‘Gettin’ back?’ he repeated. ‘But it’s only half-past ten, Mavis.’

  ‘I know, but me dad always says—’

  ‘Your dad isn’t here,’ the boy reminded her. ‘Your mam neither, for that matter.’

  It was true – gloriously true. Though they had taken some convincing, both their sets of parents had finally agreed they could go on holiday together – or at least Mavis’s had agreed she could go with a bunch of her mates, while his mam and dad had let him off the leash with some lads from the factory.

  ‘Me mam warned me to be careful,’ Mavis said.

  I’ll bet she did! Derek thought. Whenever he went round to their house, he felt Ma White watching him like a hawk, as if she suspected that within this shy, bumbling boy, a secret sex fiend was lurking. It wasn’t like that at all. He loved Mavis. He really did. Hadn’t he been going out with her for nearly a year? Wouldn’t he probably end up marrying her? But he was still only nineteen, and until he finished his apprenticeship, in another two years, there was no chance of them getting wed. And was he expected to wait that long before he satisfied his ever-stronger urges? Was he to be content with the occasional unsatisfactory fumble outside the youth club until he had served his time and become a craftsman like his dad? That might have suited the older people, but this was the start of the 1960s, and it was old-fashioned to wait.

  ‘I think I should be goin’,’ Mavis said. ‘The other girls’ll be wonderin’ where I am.’

  ‘They’ll know where you are,’ Derek said. ‘An’ I bet they’re wishin’ they were here in your place.’

  ‘What? With you?’ Mavis asked, a hint of jealousy and suspicion suddenly evident in her voice.

  ‘No, not with me,’ Derek said hastily. ‘With some lad who cared about them like I care about you.’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘An’ I do care about you.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I care about you, an’ I want to go all the way with you.’

  Mavis shifted slightly away from him. ‘Nice girls don’t do that.’

  ‘Nice girls don’t sleep around,’ he countered. ‘But if they’re with somebody they love, somebody they’re goin’ to spend the rest of their lives with . . .’

  He let the sentence trail off, leaving her to fill in the rest of the details herself.

  ‘We could get married now, instead of waitin’,’ she suggested.

  ‘Your mam an’ dad would never allow it. An’ even if they would, I don’t want to spend the first few years of our married life in their back bedroom, listenin’ to your dad snorin’ all night long. I want to do things properly. When we tie the knot, it’ll be to move into a house of our own. But you see, I can’t wait that long. I’ve got these . . . urges.’

  ‘If you really loved me, you’d wait.’

  ‘It’s because I really love
you that I can’t wait.’

  She fell unnaturally quiet, and he wondered if he had gone too far – pushed her too hard. He was almost on the point of telling her he was sorry for making the suggestion and begging her to forgive him when she said, ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’ he repeated, hardly able to believe his luck.

  ‘But you will be gentle with me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ he assured her, though since what was about to happen was almost as big a mystery to him as it was to her, he was not entirely sure what being gentle entailed.

  ‘I won’t get pregnant, will I?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘No, of course you won’t. I’ve taken precautions.’

  She giggled. ‘You mean you’ve got a packet of them things from the barber’s?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, you’d better put one on, then, hadn’t you?’

  He recalled all the Sunday afternoon conversations he’d had with his brother, Fred, when the older lad had come back from one of his heavy lunchtime drinking session at the pub.

  ‘You have to be careful with birds,’ Fred had told him, as they lay sprawled across the beds in the room they shared. ‘Thing is, they want it, but they don’t want it at the same time, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’

  ‘They might quite fancy the idea, but it’s the whatjamecallit – the reality – that puts ’em off. So you have to keep the reality at bay until it’s too late.’

  ‘An’ how do I do that?’

  ‘Well, for starters, don’t stand in front of ’em while you’re slidin’ the rubber on your John Thomas. Do it in the lavvy.’

  But there was no lavvy under this pier.

  Derek climbed to his feet. ‘What’s the matter?’ Mavis asked. ‘Have I said somethin’ to put you off?’

  ‘No. I just thought I’d better go an’ make sure that there’s nobody else around.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ the girl agreed.

  He walked away from her, towards the sea. The pier rested on cast-iron pillars, and between their bases ran thick reinforcing bars, so that every few yards he was forced to take a high step. It was going to happen! he told himself. His little Mavis was actually going to allow him to put his thing in her – like a proper grown-up.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the packet of prophylactics which he had bought – after much hesitation and embarrassment – a few days earlier. He extracted one, lifted the tin foil wrapper to his mouth, and gently bit along the edge. Experience would have taught him to stand still while he performed such a delicate task, but instead he kept on walking and, his mind on the wrapper, he misjudged the position of the next reinforcement bar. He felt his ankle slam into the bar, and a split second later he was flying forward. Too late, he put his arms in front of him to break his fall, and his chest hit the sand with a heavy thud.

  Lying there, gasping, he assessed his situation. He was winded, though not too badly. The rubber had flown out of his hand, but he still had two more in the packet – and nobody did it more than twice in a night, did they? What really had him bothered was that his right hand had landed on something hard and sticky. He wondered what it could be. Had a dog crapped on one of the rocks, or was his hand resting in some drunk’s vomit?

  He gingerly removed the hand from whatever the sticky substance was, and felt his fingers brush against something which stuck out above the gunge – a triangular outcrop which could almost have been a nose. He raised his head and gazed in horror at the black shape which lay in front of him. At one end of it was the round bit which his hand had explored. At the other end, there was what were undoubtedly a pair of feet pointing up to the sky.

  All thoughts of carnal knowledge disappeared from his mind. Derek pulled himself up into a crouching position – and emptied the contents of his stomach out on to the sand in front of him.

  Two

  It felt strange to be in Whitebridge again after over twenty years away, Charlie Woodend thought as he made his way down Cathedral Street. Very strange indeed. It was in this town that he’d signed up to fight Hitler back in 1939, a course of action which had led him to the burning deserts of North Africa and from there to the D-Day landings and the horrors of the Nazi death camps. It was true he’d been back a number of times since then, but it had always somehow seemed as if he were a visitor, rather than someone coming home. Well, now it was to be home again. The new job – which had been thrust on him rather than sought – had ensured that.

  Woodend looked around him. The old covered market was still doing thriving business. The tripe shops – something you never saw down South – still offered delicacies such as pigs’ trotters. And every time you breathed in, you still filled your nostrils with the smell of malt and hops from the town’s three breweries. Yet there had been changes, too. There was much more traffic than there had been when he was a lad. People dressed differently, too. Clogs had been the preferred footwear before the war, and many women had still worn dark woollen shawls. Now the folk who passed him were brightly dressed and almost indistinguishable from the Londoners he’d grown used to living amongst over the previous fifteen years. So perhaps you never really could go back, he thought – because back wasn’t there any longer.

  He came to a halt in front of a large red sandstone building. It had arched windows which seemed to glare disapprovingly down at the street, and over the door a stone mason – probably long dead by now – had carved the words ‘Whitebridge Police Headquarters’ in stern gothic lettering.

  You’ll be seein’ a lot of this place, Charlie, Woodend told himself.

  A balding sergeant with a well-clipped moustache was standing behind the duty desk. He gave Woodend’s hairy sports coat and cavalry twill trousers the once over, then said indifferently, ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  Woodend nodded. ‘I’m the new DCI.’

  A look of surprise came to the sergeant’s placid face. ‘You’re Chief Inspector Woodend, are you?’ he asked dubiously.

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend agreed.

  He was not surprised that the sergeant was surprised – most people would have expected a senior officer like him to appear in a suit. Aye, well, lounge suits had never been his style, and the bobbies in Whitebridge were just going to have to get used to that.

  ‘If you’d like to show me to my office, an’ then get somebody to give me the guided tour –’ he suggested.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Just as soon as you’ve had your meetin’ with Chief Superintendent Ainsworth.’

  ‘What! He wants to see me right away?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the sergeant agreed. ‘Said you were to report to him the minute you turned up.’

  The door, like all the others in the building, was painted institutional chocolate brown. Woodend knocked, waited for the barked command to enter, then turned the handle. His first impression of the office he stepped into was one of neatness. Neat rug, perfectly aligned to the walls. Neat notice-board, all the messages squared and with a drawing pin in each corner. Neat desk, holding only a telephone, one in-tray and one out-tray, and an onyx ashtray.

  He turned his attention to the man sitting behind the desk. Ainsworth had greying hair, suspicious brown eyes and the florid complexion of someone who either drank too much or got angry very easily. His new boss was older than he was himself, Woodend guessed – but only by a couple of years.

  Ainsworth stood up, revealing the fact that he was only a little over the minimum requirement for the force. ‘Chief Inspector Woodend?’ he asked, in a dry, tight voice.

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  The DCS shook Woodend’s hand and waved him to a chair.

  ‘When I heard you were called Ainsworth, I imagined you were a local lad,’ Woodend said. ‘But you’re not, are you, sir?’

  ‘No,’ Ainsworth replied. ‘I’m originally from Kent.’ He scowled. ‘Any objection to that?’

  ‘No
t really,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s just that the reason I came up here in the first place was to get away from you Southern buggers.’ He grinned, to show he was joking. ‘No offence meant, sir.’

  Ainsworth did not return his smile. Instead he reached into his drawer and produced a sheaf of papers.

  ‘You didn’t come up here to get away from southerners, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘You came because the Yard didn’t want you, and because my chief constable – for reasons best known to himself – did.’ He flicked through the papers in front of him, and selected the one he wanted. ‘You were in the army, I see.’

  ‘Aye, it seemed like a good idea, what with a war goin’ on an’ everythin’,’ Woodend replied.

  ‘But you never rose above the rank of sergeant.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And why was that? Were you never offered promotion?’ Ainsworth asked, a slight sneer playing on his lips.

  ‘Oh, I was offered it, but becomin’ an officer would have meant leavin’ my lads, an’ I’d grown quite attached to them.’

  ‘I was a major by the time the war ended,’ Ainsworth said, making the statement seem almost like a challenge.

  ‘Good for you,’ Woodend said. ‘Did you see much action, sir?’

  ‘Wars aren’t just won by the death-and-glory boys, you know,’ Ainsworth replied. ‘An army marches on its stomach, as the old saying goes.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ Woodend agreed, displaying uncharacteristic tact.

  Ainsworth gave him a searching stare, and then returned to his notes. ‘I’ve been reviewing your recent cases, Mr Woodend, and I have to tell you that your usual methods of investigation simply will not be tolerated here,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘This is a thoroughly modern police force. When we investigate a murder, we do it using the crime centre we have established in this station as our base of operations. That idea does not seem to find favour with you.’

  He paused, giving the new man a chance to speak, but Woodend said nothing.