A Long Time Dead Page 12

  ‘Tests have shown that loss of any kind of natural light tends to disorientate the subject under questioning,’ Grant said, when Woodend commented on the lack of windows.

  ‘It doesn’t do much for me, either,’ the Chief Inspector admitted. ‘What do you do when it gets hot in there?’

  ‘The same thing you’d do yourself,’ Grant said, puzzled he even needed to ask. ‘Turn up the air conditioning.’

  Turn up the air conditioning! Woodend repeated silently.

  As if there was air conditioning to turn up in any of the places he’d worked! Even the Chief Constable – who regularly and ruthlessly plundered the police budget in order to enhance his own personal comfort – would never have gone so far as to consider installing air conditioning in his office.

  ‘What does “TC1” stand for?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘Truth Centre One.’

  Good God! Woodend thought.

  ‘An’ is there a Truth Centre Two?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ Grant said. ‘But we can always fly one in from the States, if the need arises.’

  Of course they could. These fellers could fly in anythin’ they decided they needed.

  The two men entered the trailer. It contained a table and three chairs, just as an English interview room would have done, but this furniture was brand-spanking new.

  Woodend ran his hand across the smooth surface of the table.

  ‘It’s rather clinical at the moment,’ he commented, ‘but I expect it’ll feel a bit more like home when its got a few cigarette burns on it.’

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Grant told him. ‘This material was developed for the space programme. It’d take a laser beam to make any impression on it.’

  ‘You certainly do seem to have thought of everything,’ Woodend said dryly.

  ‘We like to think so,’ Grant replied, with just a hint of complacency in his voice.

  The chairs were bolted to the floor. The one on the suspect’s/witness’s side had been positioned squarely in the middle of the table, but the two interrogators’ chairs were fixed at the corners.

  ‘They’re like that so that the guy being questioned can’t look at both his interrogators at once,’ Grant explained. ‘Our psychiatrists think that gives us the edge.’

  ‘Good for them,’ Woodend said. ‘An’ where’s the bright light, to shine in suspect’s face?’

  He had been joking, but Grant took the question at face value. ‘There’s half a dozen different lights in the ceiling,’ he said. ‘They’re activated by a control panel built into the arm of the interrogator’s chair.’

  ‘Very clever,’ Woodend said. ‘Not that we’ll be needin’ them.’

  ‘Our psychiatrists believe that by varying the light intensity—’ Grant began.

  ‘Not that we’ll be needin’ them,’ Woodend repeated firmly.

  Grant shrugged. ‘Whatever you say.’

  Woodend lowered himself into the left-hand interrogator’s chair, and thought he would have felt more at ease if it had wobbled a little.

  ‘Right, let’s see our first witness of the momin’ now, shall we?’ he suggested.

  ‘Sure,’ Grant said. ‘But there’s one more thing you should understand before we begin.’

  ‘An’ what might that be?’

  ‘They don’t know why they’re here.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘As far as they’re concerned, Captain Robert Kineally disappeared in the spring of 1944, and hasn’t been seen – or heard from – since.’

  ‘Are you sayin’ the witnesses don’t know that his body has been recently discovered?’

  ‘Affirmative. They don’t even know there’s been a murder of any kind.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was decided in Washington DC – at the very highest levels of government, you understand – that until we’ve completed our investigation, as few details as possible of what actually occurred here should become generally known.’

  ‘So what do all these witnesses of yours think they’re bein’ questioned about?’

  ‘A matter of national importance.’

  ‘Meanin’ what, exactly?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it means. They won’t ask that question – and if they did, we wouldn’t tell them.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Woodend said.

  Fourteen

  The man standing uncertainly in the doorway of TC1 had once had a mop of thick black curly hair. Now, what hair he had left was pale and limp – and clustered around the bald patch on the top of his head like a petrified forest surrounding a clearing. His body, at one time wiry and hard, had gradually allowed itself to be conquered by fat, and the washboard stomach had become a hill of blubber in constant conflict with the restraints imposed on it by a tightly-buttoned khaki shirt.

  In many ways, the years had not treated Abe Birnbaum too kindly, Woodend thought, yet the vital spark – the interest in life and all it involved – was still there, if a little dimmed by age.

  ‘Hello, Abe,’ the Chief Inspector said.

  ‘Charlie?’ Birnbaum asked. He smiled, and the spark grew brighter. ‘Charlie Woodend? Sergeant Charlie Woodend. What in the name of blue blazes are you doing here, Sarge?’

  ‘Investigatin’ matters of national importance,’ Woodend said, repeating Grant’s words of earlier – though without the same fervour.

  An Englishman would probably have asked what the hell he meant by that, but Grant’s earlier assessment of the probable American response proved to be correct, since Birnbaum just smiled wryly and said, ‘Well, it’s a dirty job, but I guess somebody has to do it.’

  Special Agent Grant, looking distinctly unhappy about being excluded from the conversation, cleared his throat and said, ‘Would you sit over there, please, Mr Birnbaum?’

  ‘Sure,’ Abe Birnbaum agreed, squeezing his paunch between the table and door, and then lowering the rest of himself into the chair.

  Grant consulted the notes he had spread out in front of him. ‘You are ex-PFC Abraham Birnbaum?’ he asked.

  Birnbaum looked first at Grant, then at Woodend, then back at Grant. ‘Is this seating plan designed so that cross-eyed guys can feel right at home?’ he wondered whimsically.

  ‘Just answer the question as it has been put to you, please,’ Special Agent Grant said firmly.

  ‘Sure, I’m that Birnbaum.’ He smiled. ‘But now I’m Birnbaum the Dry-Cleaner, with outlets all over the tri-state area.’ The smile still in place, he turned his attention to Woodend. ‘Was that too direct?’ he asked. ‘My shrink says I should be self-confident enough about my achievements to hold off on that kind of information until people actually ask.’

  Woodend grinned. ‘Glad to hear you’ve done well for yourself, Abe. I always knew you would.’

  ‘What you’re doing now is of no importance,’ Grant said stiffly. ‘We are only concerned with the time that you were stationed in this camp, when you were, I believe, the driver assigned to Captain Robert Kineally?’

  He had dropped in the last few words into the sentence as casually as he could. But Birnbaum was not fooled – the ex-PFC’s sunny smile disappeared instantly, and his eyes hardened.

  ‘Is that what this is all about?’ he demanded. ‘So the man disappeared! Big deal!’

  ‘It was a big deal at the time – or so I’ve been led to believe,’ Special Agent Grant said.

  ‘Listen, a guy goes missing like that, there could be a hundred reasons for it – reasons we can’t even guess at,’ Birnbaum said. ‘But it all happened over twenty years ago, for Pete’s sake! Why can’t you leave the poor guy alone?’

  ‘Just answer the question,’ Grant said sternly.

  ‘I was kinda Captain Kineally’s driver,’ Abe Birnbaum admitted, with some show of reluctance.

  ‘Kind of his driver? What does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means that I was down on the payroll as his driver.’

  ‘But you didn’t drive him?’

  �
��Not often. The Captain liked to drive himself most of the time.’

  ‘So what function did you fulfil?’

  ‘It wasn’t a function, exactly, but I guess you could say that as I was as close as an enlisted man could be to being his confidant and buddy.’

  ‘His confidant and buddy?’

  ‘Sure. The Captain didn’t go in much for social distinctions. He said that we were both citizens of the greatest country in the world, and that’s what counted the most.’ Birnbaum, seeing the look of growing scepticism in Grant’s eyes, turned to Woodend, and said, ‘You knew him, Charlie. You tell the Special Agent that I’m right.’

  How do you explain the time of your youth to a man who spent his youth in quite another time, Woodend wondered. How do get him to understand what it felt like to know that you might be dead soon – and that history would judge you not on something you might have achieved in the future, but on what you were doing right now?

  ‘American officers tended to be much more informal in their relationships with their men than our British officers were in their relationships with us,’ he said, ‘but even allowin’ for the extra informality, Captain Robert Kineally was still exceptional.’

  ‘Exceptional?’ Grant repeated, almost as if he considered it to be a dirty word.

  ‘He once told me that bein’ born with a silver spoon in your mouth was no excuse for talkin’ like it was still there,’ Woodend amplified.

  ‘He seems to have been something of a radical,’ Grant said, sounding troubled.

  ‘I suppose you could say he was, in a way,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘But not a Commie?’ Grant asked, worriedly.

  ‘No,’ Woodend said. ‘Not a Commie. Not a Bolshevik, murder-lovin’, baby-eater.’

  ‘That’s OK then,’ Grant said, relieved. He switched his attention back to Birnbaum. ‘Captain Kineally disappeared, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Birnbaum said cautiously.

  ‘Tell me about it?’

  ‘What’s to tell? One morning I went to his room – like I did every morning in case he had any duties for me – and the guy just wasn’t there.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Think?’

  ‘When you saw that he wasn’t there?’

  ‘I thought maybe he was hiding in the closet.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Course not! I thought he’d gone off to someplace else, and he’d soon be back.’

  ‘And when he didn’t come back, as you’d expected him to? What did you think then?’

  Birnbaum shrugged. ‘Not much, I guess.’

  ‘Not much! You must surely have thought something,’ Grant said, exasperatedly.

  ‘I guess I thought about going over the sea to France,’ Birnbaum said. ‘I guess I thought that in a few weeks – or maybe a few days, if I was unlucky – I’d probably be dead. That made whatever had happened to Captain Kineally seem kinda unimportant.’

  ‘Were there any indications beforehand that Kineally was going to disappear?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did he seem worried about anything in particular? Was he showing any signs of being nervous?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  Abe Birnbaum was lying, Woodend thought.

  But the problem was that he had no idea why Birnbaum was lying. Or even what he was lying about. Perhaps, he decided, it was time to come at the interrogation from another angle.

  ‘Can I ask a couple of questions?’ he asked Grant.

  ‘Surely,’ the Special Agent agreed, sounding almost relieved at the thought of someone else taking over.

  Woodend looked Birnbaum squarely in the eyes. ‘Tell me, Abe, do you remember a woman called Mary Parkinson?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Birnbaum replied, turning to face Special Agent Grant.

  ‘Is that all you want to say about her?’ Woodend wondered. ‘That you remember her?’

  ‘I guess I could add that she was Captain Kineally’s girl – for a little while, anyway.’

  ‘And before she was his girl?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Birnbaum asked.

  You know what I mean, Abe, Woodend thought. You know exactly what I mean!

  ‘Was she, to your personal knowledge, involved with anybody else?’ he asked.

  ‘Not exactly involved,’ Birnbaum said. ‘Not in the way she was with the Captain. But she was kinda stepping out with another guy. A Brit by the name of Coutes. But why are you asking me about that? You should remember him well enough yourself, Sarge. You were the bastard’s go-fer.’

  ‘So Kineally stole this girl from another man – this Captain Coutes!’ Grant asked, suddenly interested again.

  ‘It wasn’t like that!’ Abe said indignantly.

  No, Woodend agreed silently. No, it hadn’t been like that at all.

  It was a typical evening in the Dun Cow, a few nights after Woodend and Kineally had the run-in with Harry Wallace and his big, ugly friend, Huey. It was also the start of the third week of Captain Coutes’s concerted campaign to get Mary Parkinson into his bed.

  Coutes and Mary were sitting at a table. Woodend was positioned at the bar, in case – so Coutes had informed him – he needed a driver But whatever the Captain might claim, he wasn’t just there as a driver at all, Woodend thought. No, he had quite another – unspoken – function altogether.

  For a man like Coutes, success was only real if it was acknowledged as such by others, the sergeant had long ago decided. Thus, he did not only have to seduce Mary, he had to be seen to do it. And that was Woodend’s assigned role – the envious observer, the man who not only held a grudging admiration for his captain, but wished he could actually be Coutes himself.

  Except that things were not working out quite as planned, Woodend thought with wry amusement. Certainly Mary was being pleasant enough to Coutes, and was likely to see him again if he asked her – but she seemed no nearer being overcome by his charms than she had been at the start of their relationship.

  Woodend felt a friendly hand on his shoulder, and turned round to see Captain Robert Kineally standing there.

  ‘Does your mother know you’re out on your own?’ Woodend asked, good-naturedly.

  Kineally grinned. ‘I’m not out on my own,’ he said. ‘I’m with my good friend, Sergeant Chuck Woodend, who’s about to give me further lessons in the English way of life, with special reference to its pub culture.’

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ Woodend told him.

  Kineally’s face took on an unnatural expression, a clear indication that he was about to attempt some kind of accent.

  ‘Course it’ll cost me,’ he agreed. ‘So what say I buy you a pint of bitter beer as a down-payment, my old cock sparrow?’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a Cockney accent?’ Woodend asked, amused.

  ‘Too right it is. An’ why wouldn’t it be from a bloke wot was born wivin the sound of Bow Bells?’

  ‘You might fool a passin’ Eskimo, but I don’t think that you’d have much success with anybody else,’ Woodend told him. ‘And it’s not “bitter beer” – it’s just “bitter”.’

  Kineally’s grin widened. ‘So much to learn, so little time to learn it before we’re sent to France,’ he said.

  And then he noticed Mary Parkinson for the first time, and his mouth fell wide open.

  ‘I’ve never seen you look at Captain Coutes like that before,’ Woodend said mock-innocently.

  ‘Is she his girl?’ Kineally asked. ‘I mean, is there anything serious going on between them?’

  Keep out of it, Charlie! a voice in Woodend’s head warned him. Keep right out of it!

  The voice was right, he thought. He’d already crossed Captain Coutes enough, without compounding matters. And Mary Parkinson was a grown woman, easily old enough to make her own decisions. She had not asked to be rescued, and she had no right to expect that she would be. His best course of action, therefore, was to claim complete ignorance.

  ‘I
don’t think Mary’s very keen on Captain Coutes, if you want the truth,’ he heard himself say. ‘An’ Coutes doesn’t want her for herself – to him she’s just one more potential conquest.’

  Kineally nodded gratefully. ‘I think I’ll just go and say “hi” to my fellow officer,’ he told Woodend.

  And then he was gone.

  Looking back on it later, Woodend would see it all as rather like one of those defining scenes from a Hollywood romantic film.

  The young officer walks over to the table, the girl looks up, their eyes meet – and it’s love at first sight.

  Of course, the analogy was not perfect – Kineally was nowhere near handsome enough to play a Hollywood lead, and Mary was sweet rather than beautiful – yet as he took her hand, Woodend could almost hear an orchestra striking up a lush, romantic song in the background.

  And the sergeant was not alone in sensing that something special was happening between the two of them.

  Captain Coutes – seeing his own carefully mapped-out plans disintegrate before his very eyes – shot Kineally a look which clearly said he wished the other man was dead.

  ‘You told us that Kineally went out with Mary Parkinson for a while,’ Woodend reminded Birnbaum. ‘That would imply, wouldn’t it, that they broke up before he went missing?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess it would.’

  ‘So when, exactly, did this occur?’

  ‘It’s kinda hard to say, exactly,’ Birnbaum replied, his eyes still focussed on Grant, rather than on Woodend.

  ‘I don’t think it is too hard to say – not if you really put your mind to the problem,’ Woodend persisted.

  Birnbaum pursed his brow, and made a great show of searching through the darkest corners of his memory.

  ‘Captain Kineally was away in London for a week,’ he said finally. ‘It was some kind of briefing session with the top brass, I think. I guess he broke up with Mary Parkinson as soon as he got back.’

  ‘Which would have been just a couple of days before he disappeared into thin air?’

  ‘I guess so.’