A Death Left Hanging Page 4

  ‘And before then?’

  ‘Before then, I didn’t.’

  There was a moment’s awkward silence, then Woodend said, ‘Monika and her mother spent most of the last war being chased around central Europe by the Nazis.’

  ‘I see,’ Jane Hartley said thoughtfully.

  ‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ Monika told her.

  Woodend cleared his throat. ‘Shall we get down to the matter in hand?’ he suggested. ‘As I understand it, Miss Hartley – it is Miss, isn’t it?’

  Most other men would have asked the question in a sneering way, Jane Hartley thought. Woodend seemed only to be seeking information.

  ‘Yes, it’s “Miss”,’ she said. ‘For a while I was called Mrs Jarvis, but after the divorce I reverted to my maiden name.’

  ‘Who divorced who?’

  ‘That’s really not any of your concern,’ Jane Hartley said stonily.

  Woodend smiled good-naturedly. ‘You just been checking out our Monika here,’ he said, ‘an’ I’ve no doubt that as soon as you’ve left the station, you’ll be checkin’ me out, too. Don’t we have the right to know a little bit about you?’

  Despite herself, Jane Hartley found she was returning the smile. ‘I suppose so,’ she conceded. ‘He divorced me for mental cruelty. But that was just a matter of mutual convenience, agreed on beforehand by both sides.’

  ‘Meanin’?’

  ‘Meaning that neither of us had committed adultery, and neither of us wanted to wait the inordinate length of time it would have taken to establish grounds on the basis of desertion. We wanted a divorce because, though it was nobody’s fault, the marriage simply wasn’t working any more. Mental cruelty was the only way open to us.’

  ‘You could have divorced him on those grounds, rather than havin’ him divorce you,’ Woodend pointed out.

  ‘True, but we both knew that I was mentally tougher than he was, and therefore better able to stand the strain.’ An unexpectedly impish grin suddenly appeared on Jane Hartley’s face. ‘Besides, it didn’t do my reputation around the courts any harm to be known as a bit of a harridan.’ Her expression changed again and became very businesslike. ‘Can we deal with my reason for being here, now?’

  ‘Aye. Why not?’ Woodend said thoughtfully.

  ‘My grandfather was a vicar, and my mother was brought up in a quiet country parish,’ Jane Hartley said crisply. ‘No doubt she was expected to marry a nice young curate and become a vicar’s wife herself, but she had other plans. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, which was something of an achievement in the 1920s, when places for women were at a premium. She read philosophy – one of the most demanding courses available. She returned to Whitebridge to teach at one of the local schools, but during her first year there she met my father, and they were married.’

  ‘What was your father’s job?’

  ‘He was a clerk at the Empire Mill.’ Jane Hartley’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. ‘I know what you’re thinking – that she married below her. That was what her family thought, as well. But my mother was above such petty distinctions as social class.’

  ‘Actually, I wasn’t thinkin’ that at all,’ Woodend said mildly. ‘I was just wonderin’ if your dad knew mine. My dad was a tackler at the same mill. An’ he didn’t think much of social distinctions either – which is somethin’ that’s rubbed off on me.’

  Jane Hartley flushed slightly. ‘I’m sorry to have misread you and caused offence. I won’t make the same mistake again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, lass,’ Woodend said. ‘Get on with your story.’

  ‘When a teacher married in those days, she was obliged to resign from her post. For a while my mother stayed at home – my parents had a tied company cottage near the mill – but when I was born they soon realized that my father’s wages were no longer enough to maintain the family. So my mother got a job as assistant to the mill manager.’

  Woodend thought back, once more, to his lonely vigil outside Strangeways Prison. ‘She worked for Seth Earnshaw, did she?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right. Do you know him?’

  ‘Used to. The last time I saw him was at my dad’s funeral. I imagine he’s been six feet under for some time himself.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Jane Hartley said. ‘He’s well into his eighties, but he’s still very much alive. I get a card from him every Christmas, and another one on my birthday.’

  ‘Good of him to remember after all this time,’ Woodend said. ‘So how long was your mother actually workin’ for him?’

  ‘Until two years after my father’s death. Then she resigned and married Fred Dodds.’

  ‘How old would you have been when these two important events took place?’

  ‘I was five years old when my father died, seven when my mother married Dodds.’

  ‘An’nine when . . . when . . .’

  ‘When my mother was hanged,’ Jane Hartley said. ‘It’s all right, Chief Inspector, you can say the words. I’d never have got as far as I have with this thing if I’d been squeamish.’

  Woodend nodded. ‘I imagine your mother marryin’ Dodds brought about some big changes in both your lives.’

  ‘It did. My mother could give up work, and we moved from our tiny cottage to a detached house on Hebden Brow.’

  ‘Was it a happy marriage?’

  ‘How would I know?’ Jane Hartley asked awkwardly. ‘I was only a child at the time.’

  ‘You were seven when your mother got married, an’ nine when Dodds was killed. You must remember somethin’.’

  ‘No I . . . I really don’t remember anything at all.’

  Woodend sighed, and turned to his sergeant.

  ‘How old were you when you first saw the man who became your stepfather, Monika?’ he asked.

  ‘Eight,’ Paniatowski said dully.

  She knew she was being used, and knew too that if anyone but Charlie Woodend – her boss and mentor – had tried this on, she’d have told him where he could stuff it.

  ‘Describe that meetin’ for me, if you will,’ Woodend said.

  ‘It was in Berlin,’ Paniatowski said. ‘We were walking up Kurfu¨rstendamm, towards a soup kitchen. A jeep pulled up beside us. There was a sergeant at the wheel and a captain sitting in the back. The captain was Arthur Jones, the man who became my stepfather. He asked my mother if she spoke English, and when she said she did, he told her he was lost. She gave him directions, and then––’

  ‘That’s enough about Berlin,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘Do you think you know whether or not your mother’s second marriage was a happy one?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘An’ I’m not askin’ you to. All I want to find out is whether you know if the marriage was happy.’

  ‘I know.’

  Woodend turned his attention back to Jane Hartley. ‘You get the point, Miss Hartley? Monika remembers a lot. An’ so do you!’

  ‘Monika also said that she didn’t want to talk about it,’ Jane Hartley replied, cuttingly.

  ‘An’ that’s her right,’ Woodend agreed. ‘But Monika isn’t askin’ me to investigate her stepfather’s death an’ her mother’s execution.’

  Jane Hartley looked down at her hands. ‘If I tell you what I remember, do you promise it won’t bias you?’

  ‘I can’t promise anythin’. But I still need to know.’

  Jane Hartley nodded, giving in to the inevitable. ‘It seemed to be a good match at first. They appeared to be very happy. Then the arguments started.’ She shuddered. ‘They were bloody.’

  ‘Are you sayin’ that they came to blows?’

  ‘No, I’m almost sure they didn’t. But they did a lot of screaming at the tops of their voices. And I know that some of the crockery got smashed, because I kept stepping on the evidence.’

  ‘But you didn’t see anythin’ bein’ thrown yourself?’

  ‘No, I used to go and hide in the cupboard under the st
airs,’ Jane Hartley admitted, almost guiltily. ‘I’m not sure this question and answer method is really getting us anywhere,’ she continued, with a new resolve in her voice. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d prefer just to lay out the facts.’

  ‘All right,’ Woodend agreed.

  Jane Hartley took a deep breath. ‘Fred Dodds died as a result of multiple blows to his head with a hammer that was subsequently identified as being his property. He was killed in the lounge of his own home, and the police doctor estimated his time of death as between seven thirty and eight thirty. At the time he was killed, he was alone.’

  She gave Woodend a defiant, challenging look, but the Chief Inspector said nothing.

  ‘I was staying with my aunt – my father’s sister – at the time,’ Jane Hartley continued. ‘My mother’s absence is explained by the fact that she’d gone out for a walk. When she returned home at nine o’clock, she found her second husband lying there, and immediately called the police. She never expected to be arrested, but she was. The Crown’s case was based on circumstantial evidence. She couldn’t prove – at least to the police’s satisfaction – that she hadn’t been in the house when Fred Dodds died. Her fingerprints were on the hammer but, as you must know, she could easily have picked that hammer up without even realizing it. There was blood on her dress, but naturally she would have touched her husband to make sure that he was dead. She had no motive to kill him and––’

  ‘I thought she did,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘I thought the Crown claimed she did it for the money.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that?’ Jane Hartley demanded angrily. Then, as Marlowe had done earlier, she added, ‘You couldn’t have been a policeman at the time!’

  ‘I remember readin’ all about it in the papers,’ Woodend said, unwilling, at this stage in the proceedings, to reveal his own connection with the case. ‘I am right about the money, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re right in so far as that’s what the Crown prosecutors claimed,’ Jane Hartley agreed.

  ‘An’ you’re sayin’ they were lyin’?’

  ‘I’m saying they were wrong. Look, there had been some talk of my mother and Fred Dodds getting a divorce, and the prosecution hypothesized from that that she must have been worried about being thrown out on the street without a penny to her name.’

  ‘So he was divorcin’ her?’

  ‘It hadn’t got to that stage. It was all still talk.’

  ‘All right. But what was the talk about? What were the grounds he was thinkin’ of divorcin’ her on?’

  ‘His friends claimed that he told them he suspected her of having an affair. But he had absolutely no proof of it. He couldn’t even say who it was she was supposed to be having an affair with.’

  Jane Hartley spread out her hands in a gesture of helplessness that acknowledged the fact that she knew she was rapidly losing the battle to convince him of her case.

  ‘Look, Chief Inspector,’ she continued, ‘I have had a team of private detectives working on this, and they’ve come up with all kinds of details which bring the verdict into question.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Inconsistencies in witness statements. Evidence that there were other witnesses who might have been able to give my mother an alibi – or at least establish a reasonable doubt – but who, for some reason, were never called to the stand. Some clear indications that police investigation was hasty, slipshod and perhaps deliberately misleading . . .’

  ‘Bent bobbies tamperin’ with the evidence,’ Woodend said with a heavy sigh. ‘I’d have expected you to come up with somethin’ a little better than that old chestnut.’

  ‘But what if it’s true?’ Jane Hartley demanded hotly. ‘What if Chief Inspector Eric Sharpe really did behave in that way?’

  ‘Why should he have?’

  ‘Because he needed a conviction in a hurry, and he didn’t care who took the fall.’

  Woodend shook his head. ‘It’s true that no bobby’s ever happy about leavin’ a murder unsolved,’ he conceded, ‘but I’ve never yet met one who was in a mad rush to close the case. We like to make sure our evidence is as solid as it can possibly be, because if there’s one thing worse on a policeman’s record than failin’ to make an arrest at all, it’s arrestin’ somebody who then gets off.’

  ‘There were special circumstances in Eric Sharpe’s case. He didn’t care about whatever reputation he had within the Force, because he was planning to leave all that behind him. What he did desperately want was to become a Member of Parliament, and he was only a few months away from appearing before the local Conservative Party selection board. He knew competition was going to be stiff, and knew that if he was going to stand out above the other candidates he needed something that would give him an edge. He couldn’t have asked for anything better than Fred Dodd’s murder.’

  ‘Dodd’s murder?’ Woodend asked. ‘Or any murder?’

  ‘Dodd’s murder! My stepfather was not only an important man in this town, he was an important man in this town’s Conservative Party. The members of that selection board were all friends of his. They were bound to look favourably on the policeman who had brought his killer to justice.’

  ‘So you’re sayin’ that Eric Sharpe framed your mother just to get himself elected? That would make him––’

  ‘That would make him a murderer himself,’ Jane Hartley interrupted. ‘Is that so incredible? You must have known a lot of murderers in your time, Chief Inspector. Can you honestly say that any of their motives would have been enough to make you kill?’

  ‘I like to think that, apart from protecting my daughter, there’s no motive that would make me kill,’ Woodend said.

  But he knew what she meant. Over the years he had met any number of murderers whose explanations of the motives which had driven them to kill had seemed so totally trivial that he’d been tempted to believe that they were nothing more than a shield behind which to hide the real motive. But rarely had that turned out to be the case – because however pathetic the reasons had seemed to him, they had been truly compelling in the eyes of the killer.

  ‘Besides, I’m not saying that Sharpe actually ever saw things in such stark terms,’ Jane Hartley continued. ‘He probably convinced himself that my mother really was the murderer and that tinkering with the evidence was necessary, if justice was to be served.’ She looked straight into Woodend’s eyes. ‘We can convince ourselves of anything if we really want to, can’t we?’

  ‘Aye, we can,’ Woodend agreed, meeting her gaze with his own. ‘We can convince ourselves that we’re different to all the other people who’ve lived through the same sort of experience that we have. We can convince ourselves that the police, and the prosecutor an’ the judge an’ the jury were all wrong – an’ that only we are right.’

  Jane Hartley did not even blink. ‘Perhaps that’s true,’ she said. ‘Perhaps my mother really did kill her second husband. But if that is the case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to prove, should it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult to prove? After thirty years?’ Woodend asked. ‘It should be bloody near impossible. Besides, are you really sure that you want me to prove anythin’? As things stand, you can remember your mother as a victim of mistaken justice. That’s tragic enough – but it’s probably a lot easier than knowin’ for a fact that she was a cold-blooded killer who murdered her own husband for his money.’

  ‘Perhaps she was cold-blooded, but she certainly wasn’t stupid,’ Jane Hartley said. ‘She’d won a scholarship to Oxford. She’d been a teacher, and had run Mr Earnshaw’s office practically single-handed. If she really had wanted to kill Fred Dodds, don’t you think she would have contrived to do it in such a way that she wouldn’t automatically become the prime suspect?’

  She had a point, Woodend decided, and realized that the same thought had been nagging away in the back of his mind ever since that morning outside Strangeways Prison. Still, Jane Hartley was taking a big gamble in opening up the whole can of worms again
.

  ‘Are you certain you want to know the truth?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure you’re strong enough?’

  ‘I’m sure!’ Jane Hartley said.

  Then you’re an exceptional case, Woodend thought – because in your place I don’t think I’d have the courage.

  Four

  The landlord of the Drum and Monkey glanced into the public bar and saw that the corner table was occupied by Paniatowski and Woodend. A moment later a third person joined them, the youthful inspector who always looked as if he should be a company director rather than a bobby.

  So the old firm was back in business, the landlord thought. Well, he’d known they couldn’t be kept down for ever.

  He signalled to his new barman to come over to him. ‘See them three buggers sittin’ in the corner?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Roberts?’

  ‘Well, they’ll be wantin’ a pint of best bitter, a half of bitter an’ a vodka as soon as you can. An’ take’em a repeat order every twenty minutes, whether they ask for it or not.’

  The barman looked dubious. ‘You sure about that? What if they feel like a change from their usual drinks? People do, you know.’

  ‘Then the age of miracles will truly have to come to pass before my very eyes,’ the landlord said.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘Listen lad, the Beatles may eventually stop having hits, the sky may fall down on us, the government may even start listenin’ to the ordinary feller in the street one day – but whatever happens, that table over there will still want a pint of best bitter, a half of bitter an’ a vodka.’

  ‘You know best, Mr Roberts,’ the barman said.

  ‘You’re bloody right I do,’ the landlord agreed. ‘That’s why I’m the one standin’ behind the bar an’ you’re the one waitin’ on tables.’

  Woodend looked at his team. ‘We’re out on a limb with this one,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’ll certainly be no novelty for us, will it?’ Detective Inspector Bob Rutter replied.

  ‘The best solution all round would be if we could prove that Margaret Dodds really did kill her husband,’ Woodend said. ‘That would certainly let Lord Sharpe off the hook. An’ while Jane Hartley might not like our findings, she’d have no grounds for causin’ any more trouble or holdin’ a grudge against us. The problem is, there’s a lot to be said for Miss Hartley’s argument that her mother would have had to be incredibly stupid to think she could kill her husband in that manner an’ hope to get away with it. So where does that leave us?’