Dying in the Dark Page 2

  If that was where she had actually been killed, then the murderer had chosen his spot well, Woodend thought. Because since the mills had closed and the barges had stopped coming, hardly anybody – apart from the occasional angler – used the old towpath any more.

  ‘I suppose I’d better go an’ take a look at her,’ the Chief Inspector said, with a heavy sigh. ‘After all, that is what I get paid for.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Go back to the car, get on the radio, an’ see if Bob’s come up with anythin’ interestin’ at headquarters yet. Then, I suppose, it’d be a good idea if you had a look at the body yourself.’

  Woodend made his way down the steps to the canal side. The towpath was made up of cobblestones set in clay, but he avoided that, walking instead along the thin concrete strip which topped the edge of the bank.

  It was a hundred yards to where the body lay. Two uniformed constables were standing guard over the woman. But they were not looking at her. Instead, they had their eyes fixed on the darkness at the other side of the canal.

  The constables heard him coming, shone their torches on him, and saluted when they saw who it was.

  ‘It’s Beresford, isn’t it?’ Woodend asked the senior of the two.

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Well, Beresford, let’s get on with it.’

  The constables shone their torches over the body. The woman’s skirt was hiked up around her waist, and her knickers had been dragged down around her ankles. From her general physical condition, it was possible to estimate that she was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. But there was no clue to her age to be gained from her face. That was just a mess!

  ‘Who found her?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘A tramp,’ Beresford said. ‘He’s well known to most of the bobbies on the beat. Wally the Wanderer, we call him, though nobody’s got any idea what his real name is.’

  ‘What was he doin’ here?’

  ‘Accordin’ to him, he was seein’ if there was any way he could get into the mill, so he could doss down for the night. I don’t blame him. It’s goin’ to be a cold bugger.’

  It was, Woodend agreed silently. The wind was blowing in hard from over the moors, and there would be ground frost in the morning.

  ‘Do we know who she is?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir. She hasn’t got a handbag – or at least we haven’t found one yet – an’ there’s nothin’ in her pockets.’

  Woodend forced himself to look at the dead woman’s face again. Whoever had killed her had gone to work on it with something sharp and heavy – an axe, he would guess, by the depth and width of the cuts.

  ‘Do we have any idea how long she’s been dead?’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t have been too long, sir. She was still warm when we arrived.’

  ‘How many of you were there?’

  ‘Three of us, sir.’

  ‘So where’s the third now?’

  ‘I told him to go an’ get a cup of tea, sir.’

  ‘Did you, now?’ Woodend said. ‘How did you approach the scene of the crime?’

  ‘Same way you did, sir. Along the concrete strip. I didn’t think there was much chance of there bein’ any footprints – the ground’s rock-hard tonight – but I didn’t want to take any chances.’

  ‘Good lad,’ Woodend said. ‘An’ make sure that goes down in your report – that I said you were a good lad.’ He sniffed. ‘I can smell somethin’ unpleasant. Puke, at a guess. Was it her, while she was bein’ attacked, do you think? Or was this bloody mess too much for even the feller who did for her to stomach?’

  Beresford looked uncomfortable. ‘It … er … it was the lad I sent off for a cup of tea who vomited, sir,’ he admitted. ‘He tried to restrain himself, but he just couldn’t hold it in. He got as far from the crime scene as he could, before he threw up. Will he be in trouble?’

  ‘Not if I have anythin’ to do with it,’ Woodend promised.

  He crouched down to examine the corpse. The woman’s skirt was a brown and white check; her blouse was white cotton. She was still wearing her heavy cloth coat, but her attacker had obviously ripped it open before he began his grisly work. Both her feet were naked, but her left shoe was lying beside her body.

  ‘Any idea where her other shoe might be?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘It’s over there, sir,’ Beresford said, redirecting the beam of his torch for a moment to a spot a couple of yards distant.

  So the attack had occurred where the body was found, Woodend thought. And when morning came, and it was light enough to do a proper search, they’d no doubt find the buttons from her coat.

  He stretched forward and ran the edge of the woman’s skirt through his thumb and forefinger.

  Acceptable quality, he decided. Not too cheap, yet not too expensive.

  There was nothing flashy about the clothes, which there certainly would have been if the woman had been on the game. In fact, it was quite a tasteful – almost restrained – outfit.

  You couldn’t tell everything from clothes, but Woodend was prepared to bet that when they did eventually learn the woman’s identity, she would turn out to be a secretary or a clerk in a local government office.

  ‘Do you think she’s been raped, sir?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Well, he didn’t drag her knickers down so he could wipe his nose on them,’ Woodend snapped.

  And almost immediately he felt ashamed of himself, because this constable was a good lad, eager to learn his trade, and didn’t deserve to be spoken to in that manner.

  ‘I’d guess she’s been raped, but you can never tell,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to wait until the medical examiner’s had a look at her.’

  But raped or not, what had she been doing walking along a deserted towpath on a cold autumn evening? And if her attacker had been no more than a rapist, why had he reduced her face to a pulp after he had got what he wanted?

  The last thing Whitebridge needed, the Chief Inspector thought, was a nutter on the loose.

  He stood up again. ‘Let me have another look at her face.’

  Beresford shone his torch on the mess of blood, shattered bone and ripped flesh. ‘It is a terrible sight, though, sir, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Woodend agreed.

  He’d seen worse – much worse – but that still didn’t make looking at this particular poor bloody woman any easier.

  No one had been reported missing, Bob Rutter told Monika Paniatowski when she radioed through to headquarters. There had been the usual number of concerned citizens calling in, of course – the woman who claimed that her neighbours were sheltering Adolf Hitler, the man who swore blind that he had seen a flying saucer land behind the gas works – but none who claimed to have heard a scream coming from the direction of the canal, or who had seen a wild-looking feller carrying a blood-stained instrument.

  It had, in other words, been a complete waste of time even going through the motions.

  But then most police-work was a complete waste of time, Paniatowski thought – and any bobby not prepared to sift through one hell of a lot of chaff in the hope of finding one grain of wheat would be well advised to seek some other line of work.

  From her vantage point on the bridge, she could just make out the shapes of the three men standing by the body. Even if the other two had not been wearing their pointed helmets, it would have been easy to pick out Woodend, because – as other officers, who were no midgets themselves, would tell you – the man was built like a brick shit-house.

  Paniatowski watched Woodend lean down over the corpse. She should go and join him, she thought, but first she would have a cigarette.

  As the smoke curled its way around her lungs, she found her mind returning to Bob Rutter’s problems.

  She should be happy about what was happening in Bob’s marriage, she told herself. So why wasn’t she?

  Partly, she supposed, it was due to guilt. She liked Maria. She admired Ma
ria. And what had she done? She had deliberately embarked on an affair with the woman’s husband.

  Which made her what?

  A scarlet woman!

  A home-breaker.

  A callous bitch who was bringing further pain to a woman who had had more than her fair share of suffering.

  Yet she was honest enough with herself to admit she could have ridden that out if she’d had to. Of course, the guilt – the deep shame – would go with her to her grave, but if she’d had Bob for herself, she would probably have been able to live with it.

  But she wouldn’t get Bob, would she? Not if Maria succeeded in taking his only child off him!

  Oh, she could imagine what he’d say – ‘It really isn’t your fault I’ve lost the baby, Monika. I don’t blame you at all.’

  But it wouldn’t be true!

  Even if they moved in together after Maria had left him – even if they married once his divorce papers came through – the relationship would be poisoned, and, in the end, Bob would grow to hate her.

  So what good could be rescued from the whole sad business?

  None at all! Not one bloody thing!

  Her fingers had been getting hotter and hotter, but she hadn’t noticed it, and it was only now – when her cigarette had burned down so far that it had started to singe her flesh – that she cried out and dropped the bloody thing.

  She reached into her pocket, took out a handkerchief, and wrapped it around the burned fingers. This wasn’t pain, she told herself. Not real pain. Real pain was what she was feeling inside.

  Woodend had stood up again, and appeared to be talking to the constables. She supposed she’d better go and join him, she thought. The murder would at least give her something to do – would focus her mind on something solvable.

  Two

  The Woodends lived in an old, stone handloom-weaver’s cottage on the edge of the moors. Once there had been three of them, then Annie had grown up, and gone away to Manchester to study nursing.

  So now there were just two, Woodend thought – as he lay in bed studying the patterns made by the overnight frost on the window – a middle-aged couple already sliding down the gentle slope to retirement. Charlie and Joan, soon to become Darby and Joan.

  At least, he hoped that’s what they were bloody well doing! But he couldn’t be sure. The simple truth was that Joan’s heart attack in Spain had scared the crap out of him. The doctors had assured him it was only a mild one, but that was no consolation at all, because that seemed to be almost on a par with being only a little bit dead.

  He was doing all he could to ease the situation. He’d offered to employ a cleaner, but Joan had turned the idea down.

  ‘If you think I’m havin’ another woman doin’ my jobs an’ rummaging through my things, Charlie Woodend, you’ve got another think comin’,’ she’d told him.

  He’d tried to do some of the work around the house himself, but by the time he got home, it had all been done.

  ‘What do you expect me to do all day, while you’re out catchin’ criminals? Sit here twiddlin’ my thumbs?’ she’d demanded, when he’d remonstrated with her.

  Still, at least he’d persuaded her to go and stay at her sister’s house for a couple of weeks. At least she’d get some rest while she was there.

  It must be terrible to lose your wife, he thought, as he swung his legs out of bed and felt the soles of his bare feet make contact with the cold linoleum.

  Terrible?

  It must feel like the end of the bloody world!

  The frost had not come alone, but had brought ice with it for company, and the moorland roads which fed into Whitebridge were treacherous. Twice, Woodend was forced to slow to a virtual halt, and join the stream of traffic creeping past accidents caused by less prudent drivers. Once, he himself was nearly in a collision with some bloody idiot. The result of all this was, inevitably, that he arrived at the police car park a full twenty minutes later than he’d intended to.

  Another black mark against me, he thought as he walked across the car park towards the main entrance of the headquarters.

  Another entry for Mr Marlowe’s little black book, under the heading, ‘Things I’ve got against Charlie-bloody-Woodend’.

  Rutter and Paniatowski were where Woodend had expected them to be – sitting at their desks in what Chief Constable Marlowe liked, at press conferences, to refer to as ‘the very nerve centre of our murder investigation’.

  The reality of the ‘nerve centre’ fell far short of the rhetoric. But then it was bound to. A dusty basement was a dusty basement. However many desks were laid in a horseshoe shape – however many extra phones were installed – no one was ever going to mistake it for the plush FBI offices out of which Hollywood B-picture cops always seemed to operate. Even the blackboard – scrounged from somewhere or other, and set up at the front of the room – failed to give the place the professional air that Mr Marlowe would have wished, and instead merely reminded most people who saw it of their gladly relinquished schooldays.

  Still, Woodend reflected, it at least made the Chief Constable happy, and – to a certain extent – kept him off the backs of the bobbies who were actually trying to solve the case.

  Woodend himself had never cared for this way of working. He liked to have a team backing him up, but he preferred it to be a small team that he knew well – and would have trusted with his life.

  Nor was he one to sit around in a room all day – even if it did have a blackboard with several different-coloured chalks provided! Where he wanted to be was out and about. Immersing himself in the atmosphere of the area in which the crime had been committed. Collecting odd scraps of information which he might – or might not – be later able to fit into the overall picture. This was how he solved his cases. This was how he gained his insights into who had committed the crimes and – even more interestingly from his point of view – why they had committed them.

  He knew this habit of his – wearing out his boots almost as much as he wore out his brains – had earned him the nickname ‘Cloggin’-it Charlie’ back at the Yard, and that the nickname had followed him to Whitebridge. He knew, too, that though the name was never used to his face, it was used often enough behind his back. But it didn’t bother him. In fact, he was quite proud of it. For while his method of working might make him a dinosaur in the eyes of some of his superiors, his arrest record also made it clear to them that at least he was a successful dinosaur.

  Paniatowski and Rutter, who were both on the phone, didn’t see him enter the room, and so he had time to examine them at leisure.

  God, they both looked rough, he thought.

  And not the kind of ‘rough’ that came from working up to eighteen hours a day for weeks on end. No, their ‘rough’, it seemed to him, came from an inner turmoil which had nothing to do with the job.

  The two detectives hung up, so nearly at the same time that they might have been part of a synchronized phoning team.

  ‘Has the handbag been found yet?’ Woodend asked, sitting down opposite his two favourite police officers.

  ‘No,’ Rutter said. ‘Nor has anything else which might have helped to identify the victim. In fact, there was nothing at all on the canal path which could be connected to the murder in any way, shape or form.’

  Woodend sighed. ‘We’ll just have to go about it the hard way, then. Any reports of missin’ persons?’

  ‘None,’ Rutter said.

  ‘At least, none that have come in since last night,’ Monika Paniatowski amplified.

  ‘So what does that tell us?’ the Chief Inspector asked.

  ‘Well, if no one’s noticed she isn’t there, she probably lived alone,’ Rutter said.

  ‘Which means she’s single,’ Paniatowski added.

  ‘Or divorced,’ Woodend said.

  ‘She’s not been missed at work, either,’ Rutter said. He glanced up at the clock. ‘Which either means that she doesn’t – didn’t – work factory hours or she didn’t work at all.’r />
  ‘You’ve both seen the body, have you?’ Woodend asked, and when Rutter and Paniatowski nodded grimly, he said, ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘The man’s clearly a complete bloody lunatic,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Do you agree with that, Bob?’ Woodend asked.

  Rutter thought about it for a moment. ‘Either that, or she’d done something that hurt him so much he just couldn’t restrain himself from lashing out, even when she was dead,’ he said finally.

  Bloody hell fire, Woodend thought, I’ve known this lad since he was a fresh-faced young sergeant, wet behind both ears – an’ I’d never have expected him to say anythin’ like that!

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean there, Bob,’ he said, trying not to sound too troubled. ‘Exactly what kind of thing do you think she might have done to hurt him?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Rutter confessed. ‘And I certainly don’t condone what he’s done—’

  ‘Well, that is a relief,’ Woodend interrupted.

  ‘… but I can well imagine a man being driven to that degree of desperation,’ Rutter persisted stubbornly.

  ‘Can you indeed?’ Woodend asked. ‘Then I have to tell you, you’ve got a broader imagination than I possess.’

  An awkward, uncomfortable silence descended over them. Half an eternity seemed to pass before Paniatowski said, ‘Have we been sent the medical findings yet, sir?’

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ Woodend answered gratefully. ‘But I bet that if I pop down the morgue, the doc will give me at least her preliminary findings.’

  The snap of cold weather had not deterred Dr Shastri from wearing her sari that morning – albeit, while she was outdoors at least, under her trademark sheepskin jacket. Seeing her now, Woodend was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the clinical coldness of the doctor’s morgue and the vibrancy and colour of her attire.

  ‘So what have you got for me, Doc?’ he asked.

  Dr Shastri clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

  ‘I have only had the cadaver in question for a few hours, yet here you are already, demanding results,’ she said. ‘The trouble with you, Chief Inspector, is that you expect miracles.’