Fatal Quest Read online

  But there was one child who would have no future, he thought with rising anger – one child whose future had been drained out of her, as if she were no more than a stuck pig, on a sordid bomb site.

  The sudden and unexpected ringing of the telephone in the living room filled the silent flat with a noise which sounded loud enough to waken the dead. Woodend glanced anxiously down at his small, precious daughter, saw that she was still sleeping peacefully and retreated from her bedroom as quietly as he could.

  Once in the hallway, he clicked his daughter’s door gently closed and turned to face the instrument which had dared to shatter the peace.

  He was sure the call must be a mistake – who the bloody hell would be ringing him at half-past two in the morning? – but since the only way to silence the infernal racket seemed to be pick up the receiver, that was what he did.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Woodend?’ asked a man’s voice.

  Not a mistake, he told himself.

  And not the Yard, either – because the first thing someone from the Yard would do would be to identify himself.

  ‘Yes, I’m Woodend,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yer ’ave been a busy boy, ain’t yer?’ the caller replied.

  ‘Who is this?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘Fing is, yer don’t want ter go takin’ this case too seriously,’ the other man continued.

  ‘What are you talkin’ about?’

  ‘The girl, you wally.’

  ‘The murdered girl?’

  ‘Unless yer can fink of any uvver.’

  ‘If you’ve got any information on the murder, it’s your duty to report it.’

  ‘I ain’t got any information, as such, but what I ’ave got is a bit of advice for yer.’

  ‘Go on,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Yer want to tread carefully.’

  ‘An’ what does that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means that nobody expects yer not to investigate the case wot’s been assigned to yer. That’s yer job, after all. That’s ’ow yer earn yer crust and keep a roof over yer ’ead.’

  ‘Get to the point!’

  ‘All I am saying is, if yer know what’s good for yer, yer won’t do that job too thoroughly.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat,’ Woodend growled.

  ‘Now yer catching on, Charlie boy,’ the other man agreed. ‘It’s a threat. Start making too many waves, and somefink very nasty could ’appen to yer.’

  ‘An’ who’ll be makin’ this “very nasty” thing happen to me?’ Woodend wondered. ‘You?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘I hope it is you. I hope we get a chance to meet face to face. Because if we do, I’ll rip your heart out.’

  The other man sighed. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn yer,’ he said.

  And then he hung up.

  Three

  By morning, a favourable wind had blown away the smog, and with its departure the events of the previous evening had assumed an almost dreamlike quality.

  Except that they hadn’t been a dream at all, Woodend said to himself, as he marched along the Victoria Embankment, towards the imposing red-brick building that was New Scotland Yard.

  Because even though the visible signs of the smog had gone, its sulphurous fumes still hung heavily in the air as a reminder.

  And even though the poor coloured girl would, by now, be housed in much less sordid surroundings than the ones in which she’d initially been discovered, she was still dead!

  He reached the main entrance to the Yard, and nodded to the two constables on duty there.

  ‘How are you, Sarge?’ one of them called out to him.

  ‘Fine,’ he answered.

  But he wasn’t – he bloody well wasn’t!

  DCI Bentley’s office space was divided into two unequal sections by a wooden partition wall. The larger of the sections – the outer office – contained five desks, and was inhabited by Woodend and four detective constables. The smaller section, known unofficially as the Wolf’s Lair – a name it shared, only partly ironically, with Hitler’s mountain retreat – was reserved for the exclusive use of Bentley himself.

  Somewhere in the dim and distant past the chief inspector may well have lived up to his lupine nickname, Woodend thought, as he stood in the doorway of his guv’nor’s office, studying the man himself. The photograph hanging on the wall behind him – in which he was shaking hands with a minor royal – certainly seemed to suggest there had been a time when he had been lean and hungry, capable of single-mindedly stalking his prey for days on end. But the man that he had become – the man with his feet up on the desk, flicking through the newspapers – had none of these qualities.

  Bentley had put on a lot of weight in the years since the photograph had been taken, weight he had either not noticed or decided to ignore. His hair had thinned dramatically, but he continued to plaster it with as much hair cream as he had done when he’d had a full thatch, so that now the pink skin on his scalp glowed with a sheen of grease. And as his cheeks and jowls had expanded, his features had retreated, leaving him with piggy eyes and a tight, disapproving mouth.

  The chief inspector lowered his newspaper and glanced across at the clock on the wall.

  ‘A quarter to eight,’ he grunted. ‘So this is how you carry on when I’m not here, is it, Sergeant – not bothering to put in an appearance until it’s practically time to take a tea break?’

  That was rich, coming from a man who rarely turned up himself before ten o’clock, Woodend thought, but he contented himself with saying, ‘I had a late night, sir. There was a murder I had to investigate.’

  Bentley sighed, theatrically. ‘So there was,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose you’d better tell me about it.’

  Woodend gave him a concise summary, and when he’d finished, Bentley said, ‘Was there anything on her to identify her?’

  He’d only been half-listening, Woodend thought – half-listening at best.

  ‘No, sir, as I’ve already explained, she didn’t have a handbag, or even a purse,’ he said.

  ‘Still, even without formal identification, putting a name to her shouldn’t be much problem, should it?’ Bentley asked.

  ‘Shouldn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not. After all, there can’t be that many niggers in London who match her description, now can there?’

  ‘There can’t be that many coloured girls, no,’ Woodend agreed. ‘I read somewhere that the entire coloured population of the British Isles doesn’t come to much more than eleven thousand.’

  It was a mild rebuke, and he knew it, but it was as far as he dared go with the man who held his future in his hands, and he could only hope that Bentley would take the hint.

  ‘And most of the niggers who aren’t too bone idle to earn an honest day’s pay have jobs on the docks, don’t they?’ Bentley said, with complete disregard. ‘So the chances are that this particular girl will have lived near the docks.’

  ‘That’s probably true,’ Woodend agreed, resignedly.

  ‘Then all you have to do is go around the dockland police stations with her photograph and find a local copper who knows her. And once you’ve done that, I expect the same local copper will be able to tell you who killed her.’

  ‘How would he know?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘He’ll know because he knows these people,’ Bentley said, speaking more slowly now that he’d realized he was dealing with an idiot. ‘And because he knows them, he’ll also know which of them it was that this girl managed to rub up the wrong way.’

  ‘So you’re assumin’ she was killed by a coloured man, are you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Bentley said. ‘It’s the only logical assumption to make, and I don’t see why you’re not making it, too.’

  ‘I don’t think that the woman who reported the murder was coloured,’ Woodend said.

  ‘What does that prove?’ Bentley asked dismissively. ‘She doesn’t have to have been coloured to have seen the murder and then
report it, now does she? Where’s your problem with that?’

  ‘She didn’t see it at all, sir. She was told about it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why would a coloured man tell a white woman that he’d just committed a murder?’

  ‘To impress her,’ Bentley said easily.

  ‘To impress her!’

  ‘He was probably trying to get into her knickers, and thought that he’d have more of a chance if he gave himself a dangerous edge.’

  ‘Do you really believe that’s possible, sir?’ Woodend asked, incredulously.

  Bentley shrugged. ‘Well, I admit it’s not something you or I would have done if we were trying to get our ends away,’ he said, ‘but then these jungle bunnies don’t think like us, do they?’

  An’ I don’t think like you, Woodend thought – but if I ever start to, I promise I’ll shoot myself.

  ‘Mitre Road’s a fair way from the docks,’ he pointed out. ‘What was the victim doin’ there at all, unless it had something to do with white people?’

  Bentley sighed again. ‘Do you know what the trouble with you keen young coppers is?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It’s that you’re always trying to make things seem far more complicated than they actually are.’

  For a moment Woodend considered telling Bentley about his second phone call, the one in which the caller – again, obviously white – had warned him not to investigate the girl’s death too enthusiastically. But he’d just be wasting his breath, he decided – because the chances were that the chief inspector would either tell him it was of no importance or – worse – would suspect him of inventing the whole thing in an effort to advance his own theories.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any real harm in you indulging in your flights of fancy for a while – as long as, ultimately, they don’t get in the way of good police work,’ Bentley said magnanimously. ‘So you just go ahead. Come up with as many ridiculous theories about white men being involved as you like. But I think you’ll find, when you’ve completed your investigation, that I was right all along – and it was a nigger wot done it.’

  ‘Did you say my investigation, sir?’ Woodend asked, almost sure he must have misheard.

  ‘That’s exactly what I said,’ Bentley confirmed. ‘I’m putting you in sole charge.’

  ‘But it’s a murder case, sir!’

  ‘No doubt about that. She certainly didn’t cut her own throat.’

  ‘An’ I’m only a sergeant.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Bentley agreed. ‘And there are plenty of DCIs in this place who wouldn’t trust their sergeants to do a job like this. But I’m not one of them, you see. I realize that if you’re ever going to develop your skills as a detective, you’ll need the experience of handling a case on your own. So I’m giving you the chance now.’

  Or to put it another way, since the victim in this case was only a ‘nigger’, he couldn’t be bothered to get off his fat arse and investigate the case himself, Woodend thought.

  ‘Thank you, sir, I appreciate the confidence you’re showin’ in me,’ he said.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Bentley told him. ‘But bear in mind, I shall expect an arrest by lunchtime.’

  ‘By lunchtime!’ Woodend repeated.

  Bentley chuckled throatily. ‘Just my little joke, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Some time tomorrow will be early enough.’

  The doctor who had carried out the post-mortem on the dead girl was fresher, younger – and seemed altogether less callous – than the one who had examined the body at the scene of the crime.

  ‘I expect you’re surprised that we’ve managed to get the whole business of the PM over and done with so quickly,’ he said to Woodend, as he led him through the morgue.

  ‘Yes, I am rather, sir,’ the sergeant admitted.

  Sir! he repeated silently, with just a hint of self-disgust.

  What he’d wanted to call the other man was not ‘sir’ at all, but ‘Doc’, as a more seasoned detective would have done. But somehow, despite the fact that they were more or less the same age, he simply hadn’t been able to force the word out.

  ‘Because of the smog, things have been pretty quiet around here, you see,’ the doctor continued. ‘But we know from experience that that’s just the lull before the storm. By this afternoon, we’ll be swamped with bods whose respiratory systems have packed up. So, bearing that in mind, I thought I’d get your girl out of the way while I had the chance.’ He slid open a refrigerated drawer. ‘There she is. Want to take a closer look at her?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, si— Doc,’ Woodend said.

  The doctor pulled back the sheet, and the sergeant looked down at the victim.

  The girl’s face was frozen in a death mask which seemed to combine horror with panic, but even that could not entirely disguise the fact that she must have been quite pretty in life.

  ‘What can you tell me about her?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘She was probably sixteen or seventeen,’ the doctor said. ‘Whoever killed her did a professional job – her throat was cut with a single slash, rather than being hacked at. And if you asked me what the killer used, I’d put my money on it being a cut-throat razor.’

  Shades of Jack the Ripper, Woodend thought, remembering what the other doctor had said the night before.

  ‘Yes, my guess would be a razor,’ the doctor repeated. ‘Which is a rather old-fashioned sort of weapon to employ, don’t you think?’

  It was, Woodend agreed. Modern criminals preferred to use flick knives, or – when they could get their hands on them – guns.

  ‘The girl was healthy and well nourished,’ the doctor continued. ‘It’s true there’s evidence of contusions on her legs, but I don’t think that’s something you should be particularly concerned about.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not the kind of bruising you’d expect from a deliberate beating. My guess would be that it’s evidence of some kind of sporting injury – most probably hockey.’

  Hockey! The more he learned about this girl, the more of an enigma she became, Woodend thought.

  ‘Was she a virgin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  Not a prostitute, then.

  But despite some of the evidence pointing that way, Woodend had never really thought that she was.

  ‘Was she sexually interfered with in any way, before – or after – she died?’ he asked.

  The doctor shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. There’s not a trace of bruising around her private parts.’

  The knowledge that she’d at least been spared that humiliation should have made her death a little easier to take, Woodend told himself – but it didn’t.

  ‘I’d like to look at her things, now, if that’s all right with you,’ he said.

  ‘No problem at all,’ the doctor replied. ‘I’ll get one of the porters to take you to where they’re stored.’

  The porter was an old man with a pronounced limp, and as he led Woodend slowly down the corridor, he chatted away about the experience of working in the morgue during the War.

  ‘At the height of the Blitz, with all them bombs dropping on London every night, we had so many bodies in this place you could hardly move for them,’ he said. ‘If I’d have been of a mind to, I could have done in the missus and got clean away with it, because the doctors were so run off their feet that they’d never even have noticed it wasn’t natural causes wot had laid her out.’

  Woodend grinned. ‘But I take it that you weren’t of a mind to?’ he said.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ the porter agreed, shaking his head seriously. ‘With all that was going on, you see, I was far too busy. An’ besides,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘I’d have missed her cooking.’

  The room in which the dead girl’s effects had been stored was at the end of the corridor. There was only one piece of furniture in it – a metal table close to the door – and around the walls there were cardboard bo
xes stacked to waist height.

  ‘Some of these boxes have been here for years,’ the porter said. ‘We all know nobody’s ever going to claim them, but we have to keep them anyway, just in case anybody does.’

  ‘What about the personal effects that I’m interested in?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘They’re over there,’ the porter said, pointing at the table. ‘All neatly laid out for you.’

  Neatly, but almost heartbreakingly, Woodend thought.

  There was a red dress (covered in dark brown stains which could only be blood), a brassiere, a pair of knickers, a suspender belt, a pair of nylon stockings (heavily laddered), and the girl’s shoes.

  Woodend picked up the stockings, and – though he knew it was hardly appropriate – found his mind drifting back to what would turn out to be his last home leave before the end of the War.

  He had arranged to take Joan out dancing, and had arrived at her back door at seven o’clock with a bunch of freshly cut daffodils in his hands.

  ‘They’re lovely, Charlie!’ Joan had said.

  ‘An’ so are you!’ he’d exclaimed.

  And so she was. Not lovely like the glamorous models in the pin-up magazines – legs all the way up to their arses, and breasts which threatened to break out of their confinement any second – but lovely in a quieter, fresher way, lovely enough for him to want to spend the rest of his life with her.

  And then he’d noticed that she was wearing stockings – nylon or silk, he was not sure which – and he’d felt his stomach knot up. Because there was one way – and one way only – that she could have got her hands on them.

  ‘You haven’t been gettin’ too friendly with any of the Yankee soldiers, have you?’ he’d asked, though he’d been dreading her answer.

  ‘Of course not, Charlie,’ Joan had replied.

  ‘Then where did you get them stockings from?’

  ‘I’m not wearin’ stockings,’ Joan had told him, with laughter dancing in her eyes.

  ‘I’m not blind, you know,’ Woodend had said, feeling a helpless anger growing inside him.

  ‘No, but you’re not very observant, either,’ Joan had countered. ‘I said I’m not wearing stockings, and I’m not. I’ve dyed my legs.’