The Red Herring Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Sally Spencer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  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

  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

  THE RED HERRING

  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 2002 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 Ltd.

  Copyright © 2002 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: 978-0-7278-5707-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483 - 0084-6 (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 most people in the declining mill town of Whitebridge, the fear was not an immediate thing. Their heads were not pounding as they switched off their wireless after hearing the announcement. Their hearts didn’t race as they put on the kettle to make a soothing cup of tea. They noticed no tremble in their legs as they stepped outside for a breath of northern industrial air. The simple truth – and they liked simple truth in Whitebridge – was that it hadn’t really begun to sink in yet.

  In a way, they were like victims of a rail crash, who know their train has hit something, but have yet to fully grasp the implications. But however much they might have wanted to, they could not remain in ignorance for long. Slowly and steadily, like fog rising from a murky river, the reality of the situation began to engulf them, until they were encompassed by panic.

  It just couldn’t be happening, they told themselves from the centre of that panic.

  The Russian leader – the bald-headed man who’d banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations – could not have put missiles on Cuba. And even if he had, the American president – who was so handsome he might have been a film star – could not have retaliated by placing a tight naval blockade around the island.

  It just couldn’t be happening because both those things were virtually acts of war. And the world couldn’t afford a war – not now there were nuclear weapons capable of vaporising millions and millions of people in seconds.

  Yet it was happening. The chickens had all come home to roost. The wind had been sown, and whirlwind was about to be reaped. The two most powerful men in the world were each writing a suicide note, both for themselves and for the rest of humanity.

  Had any of these worried citizens of Whitebridge been told that only a few hours after the paralysing announcement there would be a man in their midst – a man faced with the same prospect of the impersonal destruction of his whole race as they were facing themselves – who would somehow find the will and the energy to destroy a single soul in a highly personal and brutal manner, they would have thought it incredible.

  But he did – and he would!

  One

  Captain Wilbur Tooley of the USAF stood in front of the mirror straightening his necktie and examining his face closely for signs of ingrained Southern Baptist guilt.

  ‘Who’s giving the class tonight?’ asked a voice behind him.

  It was not a question he welcomed, and Tooley swallowed hard. ‘The woman, I think.’

  ‘Which woman? The pretty redhead? The one we met in church?’

  Doing his best to freeze his face into a mask of innocence, Tooley turned round to look at his wife. Mary Jo had been pleasantly plump when he’d married her, but since then she’d given birth to their two kids and had never managed to lose all the extra weight she’d put on during pregnancy, so that now she was looking more and more like a round rubber ball.

  ‘Yeah, she’s the one we met in church,’ he agreed.

  ‘And what’s the class on?’

  Tooley shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘I’m not exactly sure, honey. I think it’s something about Britain searching for a new role now she’s lost an empire.’

  ‘Sounds dull.’

  ‘It probably will be.’

  ‘Do you have really to go?’ asked the round rubber ball.

  ‘It’s something officers are expected to do,’ Tooley replied.

  ‘But what if something happens to you tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘What if you don’t come back? Do you realise this could be the last night we ever spend together as a family?’

  Yes, he realised it. And yes, he knew that he ought to spend the time with his family. But it wasn’t what he wanted.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got enough on my mind when I’m in the air, without having to worry about family problems.’

  Mary Jo’s eyes moistened. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Forget it,’ Tooley told her – but he was thinking
: How can I be such an asshole?

  ‘Could you at least promise to come home straight after class?’ Mary Jo asked.

  Tooley shook his head. ‘I can’t,’ he lied. ‘There’s a ton of stuff going down. I might be needed.’

  ‘You’re needed here!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tooley muttered, echoing his wife.

  And he was. Sorry that his high principles could so quickly be overruled by his more basic instincts. Sorry that he was not half the husband he had once thought himself to be.

  Verity Beale slowed down as she approached the main gate of the air-force base, but before she had come to a complete halt the guard stepped out and waved her Mini through.

  As she drove between the lines of Nissan huts which had been erected hastily during the war – and still survived to defend the fragile peace – she felt as if she were trapped in a tunnel she did not like, but from which there was no turning back.

  When had it all started, this journey through the tunnel? she wondered.

  Was it when she’d first decided that a conventional career in a City law firm was not for her? Or had it been while she’d been watching the images on television of Allied planes flying supplies into a besieged Berlin?

  She supposed that it didn’t really matter now. The tunnel was there, and she had to take whatever steps were necessary – however distasteful they might be – to keep on moving through it.

  ‘You’re doing a good job,’ she tried to reassure herself. ‘A worthwhile job. A job not many people could do well.’

  But even in the narrow confines of the Mini, the words sounded hollow to her, and she could not help wishing that, just once in a while, she could be herself and say what she really thought.

  She pulled up in front of the large hut which served as her classroom on two nights a week. Through the window she could see several rows of American airmen already sitting down and waiting for her.

  Most of them were little more than children, she thought – even younger than she was herself. And yet they each had under their control a weapon of war which could have wiped out the mighty forces of Genghis Khan with the single push of a button. It was frightening – all the more so because there was a distinct possibility that one of these young men was not at all what he seemed.

  As she walked into the lecture room, she was aware of heads turning and eyes following the gyrations of her body. It was not a new experience for her. She was well aware of the fact that with her flaming red hair and firm figure she was what the Americans called ‘a looker’. Indeed, if she hadn’t been ‘a looker’, she’d never have been assigned this particular task.

  She reached the front of the hut, mounted the podium, and turned to face her audience. There were gaps tonight, she noted – gaps left by men who would already be in the air.

  ‘I’m flattered that so many of you tonight have decided that I’m a bigger draw than Mr Khrushchev,’ she said.

  They laughed, as she’d expected them to. But there was a nervousness in their laughter – and that was only to be expected, too.

  She scanned the room and saw Wilbur Tooley – skinny, earnest Wilbur Tooley – sitting right at the back, trying his best to look at her as if she were his teacher and nothing more. She had arranged to meet him later and was already steeling herself to slip into the role he expected her to play.

  If I’d gone into the law, as Daddy wanted me to, she thought, I’d have spent my days standing up in court and pleading the innocence of clients I knew damn well were guilty. Would that really have been any better than what I’m doing now? We’re all whores – in one way or another!

  She cleared her throat. ‘The British Empire,’ she said, underlining her words with her tone. ‘In 1945, at the end of World War Two, there wasn’t a politician in Britain who didn’t believe that the Empire was as solid and durable as it had ever been . . .’

  The atmosphere in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey was even more subdued that night than it had been when the English football team had been beaten by the Argentines or the cricket team thrashed by the Australians. And there was good reason for it. After defeats, there was always the chance of a comeback, but if either Mr Khrushchev or President Kennedy once pressed down a finger on the nuclear button, there would be no next football season, and instead of playing for the Ashes, the cricket team stood a fair chance of becoming – literally – ashes themselves.

  The general gloom seemed to be shared by the man and woman occupying the corner table. The man was big, in every sense of the word – large head, broad shoulders, hands the size of shovels – yet there was a gentleness about his eyes which somehow served to soften what would have otherwise been a blunt face. The woman was blonde, younger than her companion and had a prettiness which was not quite English.

  Anyone watching them would have known immediately that they were not married, but might have suspected, from the intimacy they seemed to share, that they were having an affair. And in a way, they were, though their mutual affection stemmed from the fact that they were both in love with the same job.

  ‘Are you thinking about the missile crisis, sir?’ the woman asked.

  The man, Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend, nodded. ‘I went through six years of war so that when I had kids, they could be sure of a decent future, Monika. Well, I’ve got a kid now – my Annie – an’ it doesn’t seem right that somethin’ happenin’ the other side of the ocean could snatch that future away from her.’

  ‘If there is a war, we’ll be a prime target in this area, won’t we?’ Detective Sergeant Monika Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Aye, thanks to the aircraft factory an’ Blackhill air-force base, we certainly will,’ Woodend agreed. ‘It’s a real bloody mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Whose fault do you think it is?’

  Woodend shrugged. ‘Nobody’s. An’ everybody’s. Khrushchev didn’t put them missiles on Cuba because he actually wants to fire them at America. They’re only there as a bargainin’ chip – somethin’ he’s prepared to give up if Kennedy will promise never to invade Cuba. But if Kennedy does make that promise, it’ll look as if he’s only backin’ down because he’s weak.’ The chief inspector stopped to light up a Capstan Full Strength. ‘Have you ever played poker, Monika?’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘Yes, I’ve played it. How else do you think I could afford to run a car like mine on my salary?’

  Woodend returned her grin, though he did not really feel very cheerful. ‘Then if you’re a player yourself, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s mainly a game of nerve and bluff.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The cards you hold in your hand are important, but often they’re not as important as how far you’re prepared to go with them. Your aim is make your opponent drop out as early as possible. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. And sometimes the stakes get so high that none of the players feel they can back out – whatever it costs them.’

  ‘And you think that’s what’s happening over Cuba?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Woodend replied solemnly.

  Paniatowski took a sip of her vodka. ‘Look on the bright side, sir,’ she said.

  ‘An’ what might that be?’

  ‘You always fret when we’ve not got much work on, but by tomorrow morning we might have a nice gruesome murder to distract us from any thoughts of the end of the world.’

  ‘Aye,’ Woodend agreed, perking up a little. ‘Aye, I suppose there’s always a chance of that.’

  Two

  Nobody now remembered why, when the Second World War broke out, it was decided to construct the air base close to the edge of an aspiring forest known locally – whatever it said on the Ordnance Survey maps – as Dirty Bill’s Woods. But someone, somewhere, obviously had taken the decision, and so, though the runway was some distance from Dirty Bill’s, the main entrance to the residential section of the camp was less than a hundred yards away from the first line of trees.

  The guard on duty at the main gate that night liked
the fact that the wood was there, since it provided a distraction from what was otherwise a very boring duty. Sometimes he would imagine that Jane Mansfield, wearing an impossibly skin-tight dress, was lurking behind one of the oaks, waiting to ambush him and demand that he give her what no other man in the world could supply. On other, less fanciful, occasions, he contented himself with merely watching the cars containing courting couples turn off the road which ran through the wood and carefully negotiate their way between the gaps in the trees until the occupants were far enough away from the road to get down to serious business.

  There was a car there that night. He’d seen its headlights just after he had lifted the barrier to allow the good-looking dame with the flaming red hair into the camp. Which meant, he calculated, that the couple in the car had been humping for nearly an hour now. He envied them. Or, at least, he envied the man – as he envied any man getting his rocks off while he himself was forced to stand by the guardhouse, defending Western civilisation.

  The sentry turned to face into the camp, and saw a number of men emerging from the lecture hall. So the redhead had finished talking about English dukes and princes – or whatever the cockamamie subject had been that night – and now the aviators were heading for the luxury of their club. It usually irritated the guard that they led such a pampered existence, while a p.f.c. like himself was not even allowed through the door, but tonight he was not so sure that they had got the best deal. Come the morning, and those guys could find themselves flying over enemy territory under hostile fire, and by one of those reversals of fate would find themselves shifting abruptly from a situation in which they didn’t know they were born to one in which they wished they never had been!

  One of those pissant Brit automobiles – the redhead’s black Mini – was approaching the gate. The guard stepped forward to raise the barrier. Instead of saluting, he gave the driver a wide grin, and felt a slight thrill run through him as she grinned back.

  The Mini roared off into the night, but instead of lowering the barrier again, the guard began to slowly count to ten. He had reached seven when the Chevrolet Invicta appeared. Now there was an automobile, he thought to himself. Its engine was seven times the power of the vehicle it was following, and the Mini would have fitted into its trunk.