Dangerous Games Page 3

  He paused for a second to light a new cigarette from the butt of his old one, then stepped through the main door of the morgue. The smell of chemicals hit him even in the vestibule, and reminded him how much he disliked visiting this place. On the other hand, he thought, there was always the consolation that his visit gave him the opportunity to talk to the lovely and charming Dr Shastri, and – like the chemicals – that was not to be sniffed at.

  Shastri was waiting for him in the post mortem room. Her colourful sari was covered by a practical white coat, but she managed to wear even this mundane article as if it were fresh off the catwalks of Paris.

  A wide smile filled her face when she saw him. ‘Ah, my favourite policeman,’ she said. ‘It was good of you to get here so quickly.’

  ‘You said it was urgent,’ Woodend pointed out.

  ‘And so it is,’ Dr Shastri agreed. She gestured with her delicate hand towards the marble slab. ‘Have you met the late Mr Pugh?’

  The body was covered with a sheet right up to the chin, and anyone who didn’t know any better would probably have assumed that the head was connected to it.

  Woodend examined Pugh’s face. He had expected there to be an expression of pure horror on it – for surely even a spilt second’s realization that he was about to decapitate himself would have been enough to produce such a look – but Terry Pugh looked surprisingly peaceful.

  ‘You are wondering why he does not look overly concerned at the thought of losing his head,’ Dr Shastri said, reading his thoughts.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m wonderin’,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘In my experience, dead men rarely mind what is happening to them,’ the doctor said.

  ‘What’s that? Are you saying that this feller was dead before he lost his head?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘How long before he lost it?’

  ‘That is rather a tricky question to answer precisely, since we do not know when he entered the canal. I would say, from the extent of the rigor mortis and livor mortis, that he has been dead for somewhere between eight and twelve hours, but even that is a very rough approximation.’

  ‘What killed him?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘A massive blow to the back of the head. Not a very original way of committing a murder, I will admit, but one that is so effective that it continues to be very popular with your average, unimaginative killer.’

  ‘Was he killed on the bridge?’

  ‘From my preliminary investigations, I would very much doubt that was where he met his end.’

  Woodend lit up a cigarette, and inhaled a mixture of nicotine and formaldehyde.

  ‘So, let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ he said. ‘He’s killed somewhere else, then his body’s taken to the bridge. Once the killer has him there, he puts a noose around his neck and throws him over the parapet. Is that about it?’

  ‘That is, indeed, about it.’

  ‘Is there any chance at all that, when the killer hanged him, he didn’t know he was already dead?’

  ‘There is always a chance of that. But in this case I would have thought it unlikely. As I said, it is a massive wound.’

  ‘What was the blow inflicted with?’

  ‘The proverbial blunt instrument. And, in all probability, that blunt instrument was made of metal. I hope to tell you more when I have conducted a more detailed examination.’

  ‘So if the killer knew he was dead, why run the risk of being caught hanging him?’ Woodend wondered, frowning. ‘What the bloody hell was he playing at?’

  Dr Shastri smiled. ‘It is when I see that expression of perplexed frustration on your face that I am glad I’m no more than a simple doctor,’ she said.

  The Chief Constable sat at his desk. Behind him, on the wall, were framed photographs of him shaking hands with important people, and framed letters of commendation which assured him that he was a very good policeman indeed. In front of him stood the large man in the hairy sports jacket and the blonde sergeant with the big nose.

  Marlowe glared at both of them in turn. ‘Murder?’ he demanded. ‘Are you sure?’

  Woodend considered the option of telling the Chief Constable that he wasn’t sure at all – that there was a distinct possibility that Terry Pugh had managed to deliver the fatal blow to the back of his head himself, driven himself to the bridge, made his car disappear, and then somehow contrived to lift his own dead body over the bridge. It was a tempting and amusing idea – but, given the circumstances, it was also a very unwise one.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it at all, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the wound myself.’

  ‘But I told the reporters, only a few hours ago, that it was quite definitely suicide,’ Marlowe said angrily.

  ‘It might have been prudent to wait for Dr Shastri’s report before you held the press conference,’ Woodend said, using what was – for him – a considerable amount of tact and diplomacy.

  ‘The reason I delivered that particular briefing was because your Sergeant Paniatowski assured me …’

  ‘Sir, I never …’ Paniatowski began.

  ‘Shut up, Sergeant,’ Marlowe barked. ‘To repeat: the reason I delivered that particular briefing to the press was because I’d been assured that the man had taken his own life.’

  ‘What Sergeant Paniatowski told you, sir, was that all the indications pointed towards suicide.’

  ‘And how would you know that?’ Marlowe asked. ‘Were you listening in on our telephone conversation, Chief Inspector? Or were you perhaps in this very office, hiding under my desk?’

  Sarcasm was one of the stronger weapons in the Chief Constable’s personal armoury, Woodend thought – but even there, given his preference for the crude broad slash over the delicate cut, he was an amateur at it by Lancashire standards.

  ‘Well?’ Marlowe demanded.

  ‘I don’t make a habit of listening to other people’s calls, sir,’ Woodend said. ‘An’ as for my hiding under your desk, if you’ll look for yourself, you’ll see that there’s no room there for a feller my size. So no, I didn’t hear actually hear your conversation with Sergeant Paniatowski, but she has given me an outline of what she told you and …’

  ‘So if it’s a choice between my word and hers, you’ll take hers any day of the week?’

  Woodend said nothing.

  Marlowe wiped his brow with his linen handkerchief. ‘There may yet be a way out of this for us,’ he said.

  ‘For us?’ Woodend repeated.

  ‘We might say that we deliberately released the wrong information in order to lull the killer into a false sense of security,’ Marlowe continued, ignoring the comment. ‘I’ll apologize to the press for the deception …’ He paused for a second. ‘Or better yet, I might even say that I’ll allow them to hint in their articles that they were in on the ruse – that they, too, had played a role in bringing the killer to justice. They’d like that.’

  ‘Or you could simply admit that you’d made a mistake,’ Woodend pointed out.

  ‘Admitting that mistakes have been made would certainly be one way to deal with the situation,’ Marlowe agreed. ‘But, on reflection, I think my alternative plan is better.’ He paused again. ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘since we can’t possibly hope to keep the truth secret for long, I am going to need an arrest in the fairly near future.’

  Woodend sighed heavily. ‘As I’ve explained to you often enough in the past, sir …’

  ‘You can’t hurry an investigation,’ Marlowe interrupted. ‘It’s a bit like gardening – you have to nurture your leads before you can harvest them. Is that what you were going to say, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘More or less,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Then let me make my own position crystal clear to you,’ Marlowe said harshly. ‘If it weren’t for certain pieces of information you uncovered while you were investigating the Bradley Pine murder case, I’d probably be sitting in the House of Commons right now – as Henry Marlowe, MP, a man with a bri
lliant parliamentary career to look forward to.’

  ‘The information I uncovered was there to be found, sir,’ Woodend said, trying to sound apologetic and not even coming close. ‘And once I had uncovered it, I couldn’t ignore it – because it was that information which led me directly to the murderer.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s true,’ Marlowe agreed, ‘but the fact remains that you owe me a great deal for costing me my opportunity to make a name for myself, Chief Inspector Woodend. You owe it to me – and you’ll do whatever you have to in order to make it right.’

  ‘Listen, sir …’

  Marlowe slapped the palm of his hand down angrily on the edge of his desk. His in-tray and out-tray rattled, and his lamp flickered for a second.

  ‘This is not a matter for debate, Mr Woodend,’ he said angrily. ‘I want Terry Pugh’s killer caught – and I want him caught quickly.’

  ‘Sir …’

  ‘You can go now,’ the Chief Constable said, looking down at the paperwork lying on his desk.

  Four

  At this stage in most murder inquiries, a team of officers would already be hard at work, turning the basement of Police Headquarters into what Henry Marlowe liked to call ‘the nerve centre of our investigation’. But since there was, as yet, no official inquiry – since Terry Pugh’s death was still ‘officially’ a suicide – no such transformation had begun, and instead Woodend had convened what he always thought of as his ‘inner’ team, at their usual table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.

  The team consisted of four people – Woodend himself, Monika Paniatowski, Inspector Bob Rutter, and Colin Beresford who had recently been promoted to detective constable. It was a team Woodend trusted – one he wouldn’t have changed even if he’d been given the choice. But, like any team, its effectiveness was sometimes challenged by both internal conflicts and individual problems.

  The relationship between Monika and Bob was probably the most straining of its difficulties. They had been lovers, and though they had broken off their affair before Rutter’s blind wife was murdered – and though the murder itself had absolutely nothing to do with their relationship – they still both sometimes acted as if they felt responsible for Maria’s death.

  And that was not the half of it, Woodend thought, taking a slug of his first pint of the day. Bob Rutter had started ‘seeing’ Elizabeth Driver …

  ‘She’s a friend!’ Rutter had told Woodend, when he’d asked. ‘No more than that.’

  … and Driver was the chief crime reporter for a daily tabloid newspaper which specialized in lurid headlines, and was rarely inclined to let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

  Woodend had had a number of encounters with Driver over the years – all of which had left a bad taste in his mouth – and didn’t like the idea of the friendship developing at all.

  But his reaction to Rutter’s relationship with Driver was nothing when compared to Monika Paniatowski’s. She resented the hell out of it, for while she didn’t want Bob Rutter back herself – or said she didn’t want him back – she certainly didn’t want a scheming, unscrupulous bitch like Driver to have him.

  The problems that the fourth member of the team, DC Colin Beresford, found himself facing were of quite a different nature. His mother was only just sixty-one – ‘And I’m not so far from that myself,’ Woodend thought unhappily – but she had been struck down by Alzheimer’s disease, and though Beresford was – for the moment – managing to balance looking after her with handling his job, there was no doubt that at some point in the none-too-distant future, something was going to have to give.

  Woodend put his pint down on the table with a slight thud, which served to call the meeting to order.

  ‘This investigation is going to be a tricky one,’ he announced, ‘especially since our esteemed Chief Constable has made it quite clear that he wants us to pretend that it’s a suicide we’re investigating.’

  ‘When he said that, why didn’t you just tell him to stuff it, sir?’ Beresford asked.

  Woodend sighed, and then smiled with a sort of paternal indulgence at the newest member of the team.

  A couple of months earlier, Beresford would never have spoken out like that, he thought. Back then, he would have sat at the table as quiet as a mouse, over-awed at even being in the presence of these three local CID legends. Now, he was starting to chance his arm – which was a good thing, because ‘yes’ men were of no bloody use to Woodend – but he still had a lot to learn about the realpolitik of being at the sharp end of dealings with the Chief Constable.

  ‘If I was to tell Mr Marlowe to stuff it every time I disagreed with him, I’d end up sayin’ virtually nothin’ else to the bugger,’ he explained to Beresford.

  ‘I’m sure that’s true, sir, but …’

  ‘You have to choose your battles, lad,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘You have to save your energy for when the fight really matters – an’, at the moment, this one doesn’t.’

  ‘I see,’ Beresford said.

  He didn’t, of course, Woodend thought. But the longer he worked with the team, the more he would understand that what sounded like a surrender was in fact no more than common sense.

  ‘What impressions do you have of the killer, so far?’ he asked the team in general.

  ‘He’s a careful thinker,’ said Bob Rutter. ‘He plans things out well in advance.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘The fact that he picked that particular bridge.’

  ‘Somethin’ special about it, is there?’

  ‘Yes, I think there is. Or if not ‘special’, something that makes it different to all the others.’

  ‘An’ what might that be?’

  ‘It’d be easier to show you what I mean than to tell you,’ Rutter said. He produced a map of Whitebridge from his pocket, and spread it on that section of the table which was free of drinks. ‘The canal enters the town here, and leaves it here,’ he said, tracing out the blue line with his finger. ‘Between those two points, it’s crossed by six road bridges, which means that if the killer wanted to hang his victim from a canal bridge, he had half a dozen choices.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘Locke Bridge is close to the Locke housing estate, and takes a lot of foot traffic as well as vehicles,’ Rutter continued. ‘Taylor Bridge has Taylor Street on both sides of it, and the same could be said of that. But what’s Hulme Bridge surrounded by?’

  ‘Factories and warehouses,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Exactly. If the killer had chosen Locke Bridge, there’d always have been the chance of him being spotted by a late-night dog walker. If he’d chosen Taylor Bridge, he could have been seen by someone who couldn’t sleep, and just happened to be looking out of their bedroom window. But by choosing Hulme Bridge, he could be pretty sure that between midnight – when the last customers of the local pubs had all finally gone home – and six o’clock in the morning – when the first workers started to turn up – he’d have the area to himself.’

  ‘You might well be right about that being the reason he chose Hulme Bridge, rather than one of the others,’ Monika Paniatowski said. ‘But what I don’t see is why he needed to choose any bridge at all?’

  ‘Meanin’ what, exactly?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘His aim was to kill Terry Pugh, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a fair assumption, given the damage he did to the back of Pugh’s skull.’

  ‘In which case, the moment he’d struck the blow, he’d achieved all he’d set out to do, hadn’t he? So why do any more than that? Why not leave Pugh where he met his death?’

  ‘Perhaps because that particular location might have given us some clue as to who the murderer is.’

  ‘All right then, why not drive out to the moors and dump the body there? Or simply weigh it down with bricks and throw it into the canal? What I’m really saying is, why would he even consider the risk involved in hanging Terry Pugh from the bridge?’

 
‘A fair point,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Maybe this killer regards his victim in much the same way as Bradley Pine’s killer regarded him. You remember what happened to Pine, don’t you?’

  The team all nodded.

  Pine had been found on a lay-by, with his mouth smashed to a pulp, and his stomach slit open. Beresford had been sick, and even Monika Paniatowski had looked slightly queasy. So the sight of that particular corpse was not something that any of them were likely to forget in a hurry.

  ‘So you think the killer hanged Pugh as a way of humiliating him, do you?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Woodend told her.

  ‘Does that also mean that you think the decapitation was intentional?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say that. If the killer had wanted to cut Pugh’s head off, he could have done it with an axe, somewhere there was no chance of his being spotted. Going on the bridge was a risk – we’re all agreed on that – however much he minimized that risk by choosing the right bridge. The actual process of hanging was what he was interested in, though not knowing anything about the mechanics of a successful hanging, the decapitation probably came as a surprise to him.’

  ‘Then I still don’t understand why he did it,’ Paniatowski persisted. ‘Bradley Pine’s mutilation could have been regarded as humiliating. Leaving the victim’s body naked in the main square – like in that case in Yorkshire – is humiliating. But hanging’s no more of a humiliation than having your head bashed in. In fact, there’s something almost clinical – almost judicial – about hanging.’

  She was right, of course, Woodend thought.

  ‘We’re chasin’ our own tails here,’ he said. ‘Let’s set aside the question of the unnecessary hanging for a while, and concentrate on how we go about catchin’ the bastard who did it. Any suggestions?’

  ‘Post a team on the bridge,’ Rutter said crisply. ‘Have them display a large placard which asks anyone who crossed the bridge between the hours of midnight and five a.m. to pull over and give their details to the officers.’