Dangerous Games Read online

  Hough laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it. I still own fifty-four percent of it – and that’s more than enough to continue taking it in the direction in which I think it should go.’

  ‘An’ you have a very clear idea of what that direction should be, don’t you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Oh yes, indeed,’ Hough said.

  Yes, you certainly look like a man who knows his own mind, Woodend thought.

  ‘Let’s get back to this meetin’ you were supposed to have with Terry Pugh last night,’ he suggested.

  ‘Ah yes. I went to school with Terry, you know.’

  ‘His wife said somethin’ about that.’

  ‘We were the closest of pals, all the way through Sudbury Street Elementary School.’

  Woodend grinned. ‘I went to Sudbury Street myself, though it must have been some considerable time before you did.’

  ‘Probably so. But I don’t suppose it had changed much over the years. Anyway, Terry and I fell out of touch. I expect that was mostly my fault. After I lost the use of my legs …’ he paused for a moment, ‘… and in case you’d wondering, it was as the result of a motor accident.’

  ‘I wasn’t wondering,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘Neither was I,’ Paniatowski chipped in.

  Hough grinned again. ‘You’re a pair of liars!’ he said, without rancour. ‘But to get back to the point – after I was crippled, I didn’t want to see anybody very much. For about two years, I just sat around the house feeling very sorry for myself. I’d been a fair-to-middling athlete in my youth, you see, and losing the use my legs seemed to take all meaning out of life.’

  ‘That was understandable,’ Woodend said.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ Hough disagreed. ‘There’s never any excuse for giving in. And one morning I woke up and discovered – almost to my own surprise – that I was determined to make a new start. I can’t tell you why it should have been that particular morning – or even why it should have happened at all. It simply did. I had a little capital just sitting in the bank – a legacy from an uncle of mine – and I decided to draw it all out and buy myself an engineering company which was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.’

  ‘Are you an engineer by training?’

  ‘No, which makes the whole idea seem crazy, doesn’t it? But though I knew I couldn’t make things myself, I thought I could ensure that they were made properly. And once they were made, I was convinced I could sell them.’ He took another sip of his whisky. ‘I’m rabbiting on a bit, aren’t I? You don’t want to hear my life story. You’re here to find out about Terry Pugh.’

  ‘True,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Not that I haven’t enjoyed listenin’ to your story, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, I’m something of an inspiration, aren’t I?’ Mark Hough said, though the self-deprecation in his tone neutralized any element of arrogance the statement might have contained. ‘At any rate, I ran into Terry in the centre of town, a few weeks ago. I must admit that my first feeling was one of guilt, for having ignored him so long, but he seemed to bear me no ill will, so I soon got over that. We had a chat about old times – as you do – then we filled each other in on what we’d been doing since we last met.’

  ‘More him filling you in than you filling him in,’ Woodend guessed. ‘He’ll have read all about you in the papers.’

  ‘Possibly you’re right,’ Hough agreed. ‘But at any rate, he was polite enough to listen, and while we were talking, it suddenly struck me that we could do each other a bit of good.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘One of the biggest headaches in any expansion programme is the manpower problem. You can get men, easily enough – but you can’t always get the right men, especially at the shop floor management level. When I realized that Terry was working in a somewhat similar company to my own, it started to seem like a lucky chance that we’d met.’

  ‘So you were about to offer him a job last night?’

  ‘Not exactly. It was more a case of firming up the offer I’d already made in principle.’

  ‘An’ your job offer was based solely on the grounds that you knew him, an’ he was already in the right kind of work?’

  Hough laughed. ‘Just because I’m in a wheelchair, you mustn’t think I’m a simpleton, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I assure you, I don’t,’ Woodend protested.

  ‘Knowing Terry was part of it,’ Mark Hough said, ‘but it was what I knew about him that was important. Terry was never a great brain, but he was conscientious and hard working and reliable, even in our Sudbury Street days. So if, on top of that, he was an even half-way decent engineer, then he was a real prize.’

  ‘An’ was he a half-way decent engineer?’

  ‘He was better than that. They were so pleased with him at his present firm that they were about to promote him. So I told him I’d more than match whatever they were offering him, and he seemed delighted. That’s why it came as such a shock to hear that he’d committed suicide. It just didn’t seem like him.’

  ‘Had you put this offer of yours in writing?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘No, it was all done over the phone.’

  ‘So you never sent him a typewritten letter?’

  ‘No.’

  Then who the bloody hell had sent him the one that his sister-in-law claimed had worried him so much, Woodend wondered.

  ‘What more can you tell me about Terry?’ he asked aloud.

  ‘Very little at all about his recent life,’ Mark Hough admitted. ‘As I said, we’d only met once in recent days, and all our telephone calls were of a strictly business nature. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel the loss as much as I’d have thought I would. Even now, when I picture him, it’s the young Terry I see. I never really knew the Terry who hanged himself.’

  He paused again, and looked thoughtful – as if an idea had suddenly struck him.

  ‘Or perhaps Terry Pugh didn’t hang himself after all,’ he continued, speaking slowly and deliberately.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘You do,’ Hough told him. ‘Why would a Chief Inspector be wasting his valuable time investigating a suicide?’

  ‘My time’s not as valuable as you seem to think,’ Woodend said, trying to make light of it.

  ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ Hough asked. ‘He was murdered, and for reasons of your own, you’re keeping quiet about it.’

  ‘No comment,’ Woodend said.

  ‘And that is a comment in itself,’ Hough told him.

  ‘Do you know why it’s so great workin’ here, Constable Beresford?’ Bob Smothers asked.

  From the man’s tone, Beresford sensed that a joke – and probably a very weak and tired one – was on the way.

  ‘No, why is it so great working here, Mr Smothers?’ he asked, playing the comedian’s dupe.

  ‘Because this company’s always on a roll!’

  Beresford did his best to sound amused, but the other men sitting around the table in the staff canteen of Whitebridge Ball Bearings Ltd had heard the line so many times before that they couldn’t even be bothered to raise a groan.

  ‘Ball bearings! On a roll! Get it!’ Smothers asked.

  ‘Yes, I thought it was very funny,’ Beresford told him. He turned to the rest of the men. ‘So you all worked with Terry Pugh, did you?’

  The men nodded.

  ‘What was he like?’ Beresford ploughed on. ‘Would you say he was a popular feller?’

  ‘He wasn’t exactly popular, but he wasn’t exactly unpopular, either,’ one of the men said.

  ‘He pretty much kept himself to himself,’ another supplied. ‘Pleasant enough with everybody, but not exactly talkative.’

  ‘He never came on company outings to Blackpool,’ a third said, almost as if he considered such a refusal little less than a grievous sin. ‘Wouldn’t join the darts team, either, even when we were a man short.’

  ‘Didn’t seem very interested in women, either,’ contributed a fourth. �
��Which was odd, because he wasn’t a bad-looking lad, an’ several of the girls in the typin’ pool were definitely interested in him.’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t have been interested, would he?’ Beresford asked. ‘After all, he was married.’

  The men sitting around the table thought this was a far funnier joke than the one Smothers had made about ball bearings, and a couple of them were almost doubled up with laughter.

  ‘Are you a virgin or somethin’?’ Bob Smothers asked, when the laugher had subsided.

  ‘No, of course not!’ said Beresford – who was.

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be surprised that when a man gets an opportunity to dip his wick, he doesn’t normally think twice about it. Most of the lads in this factory will bang anythin’ that moves. An’ there’s a few sittin’ round this table,’ Smothers grinned and looked at each of the men in turn, ‘that will bang it even if it doesn’t move. It’s a hotbed of sin, this place. Must come from workin’ with balls all day – if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I used to think old Terry was a bit of a homo,’ another man said, ‘but then I heard that he put his missus up the duff, so I must have been wrong about that, mustn’t I?’

  The man at the far end of the table, who looked to be round about Terry Pugh’s age, had kept silent so far, but now he said, ‘It was his National Service that changed him.’

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’ Beresford asked.

  There were several cries of, ‘Oooh, sir!’ from the other workers, and Bob Smothers said, ‘You never told me you been knighted, Albert!’

  ‘The name’s Albert Knox,’ the man told Beresford.

  ‘In what way did his National Service seem to change Terry Pugh?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘I knew Terry before he got his call-up papers, which is more than any of the other buggers around this table can say,’ Albert Knox told him. ‘He was a bit of a lad, in them days. You know what I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘A heavy drinker?’ Beresford guessed.

  ‘Oh, he was some boozer, all right – a ten-pint-a-night man, when he could afford it. But there was more to it than that. He was never exactly on the lookout for trouble, but if it came his way, he’d get stuck in without a second’s thought. An’ if a shift worker was puttin’ in a bit of overtime at the factory, he was always more than willing to put in a bit of overtime with the shift worker’s wife.’

  ‘But the army changed all that?’

  ‘Like you’d never have thought possible. When he came out, he’d quietened down a lot.’

  ‘That’s what two years in the army does for you,’ Bob Smothers said. ‘Teaches you a bit of self-discipline. Makes a man of you. The worst thing the government ever did was to abolish National Service.’

  His words clearly annoyed Albert Knox. ‘You weren’t in the army yourself, were you, Bob?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ Smothers admitted, suddenly looking rather uncomfortable.

  ‘Then you’ve no idea what you’re talkin’ about, have you?’ Albert Knox asked.

  ‘I was perfectly willin’ to go,’ Smothers said defensively, ‘but I had flat feet, you see, so they wouldn’t take me.’

  ‘You’re lucky you’re young enough to have just missed it,’ Knox said, ignoring Smothers and talking directly to Beresford. ‘It was a waste of two years of my life. They say it’ll make a man of you, but what it really tries to do is to turn you into an unthinkin’, unfeelin’ machine.’

  ‘Hey, that’s a bit strong,’ Bob Smothers protested.

  ‘Still, I shouldn’t complain,’ Knox said, continuing to ignore him. ‘It’s true that they made me paint stones white, an’ then, when I’d finished that to their satisfaction. paint ’em black. But I was never under fire, like some poor buggers were, forced to defend an empire we should have got shut of years ago.’

  ‘The Empire was the envy of the world,’ Smothers said.

  ‘You’re talkin’ through your arse, as usual, you big stupid bastard,’ Knox told him.

  ‘Did Terry Pugh seem especially unhappy in the last couple of weeks?’ Beresford interjected, eager to get the conversation back on course before a fight broke out.

  ‘Now you mention it, I think I’d have to say that he did,’ a man with a squint, who was sitting next to Albert Knox, chipped in. ‘It was probably the letter that did it.’

  ‘What letter?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘He had this letter in his boiler suit pocket. He’d take it out two or three times a day, an’ read it, though he must have known it by heart. An’ he always looked worried after he’d done that.’

  ‘Any idea what the letter was about?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘No. He didn’t show it to me, an’ I didn’t ask him about it. But I can tell you that it was all crumpled, like he’d balled it up to throw it away, then thought better of it – an’ I think it was typed, rather than written.’

  ‘It’ll have been a solicitor’s letter, then,’ Bob Smothers said. ‘“Dear Mr Pugh, I must inform you that Miss Big Tits from the typin’ pool has a bun in the oven, an’ is claimin’ that you are the father”.’

  He checked around the table to see if his latest sally into humour was receiving the appreciation it deserved, but the other men seemed almost as fed up with him as Albert Knox was.

  ‘If it had been a solicitor’s letter, it would have been on a big sheet of paper,’ the man with the squint said. ‘But this was just an ordinary size – the size you might use if you were writin’ a letter yourself.’

  ‘So maybe it was from Miss Big Tits herself,’ Bob Smothers said, still trying to squeeze an acceptable joke out of his less-than-adequate material.

  ‘Did anybody else here happen to see Terry Pugh reading this letter?’ Beresford asked.

  Several of the men admitted that they had – so it seemed likely that Pugh had read the letter more than the two or three times a day that the man with the squint had observed – but none of them could throw any light on what the letter might actually have said.

  Still, Beresford assured himself, he had made progress of a sort, and even if the letter didn’t mean anything to him, it just might mean something to Woodend.

  Eight

  From her vantage point, in the bay window of the lounge in Bob Rutter’s new home, Elizabeth Driver watched Rutter walk around his car, checking that all the doors were properly locked.

  She smiled to herself. It was a smile that her colleagues in London would have immediately recognized – a smile which would have made most of them break out into a sweat. Because when she smiled like that, it meant her latest scheme was right on the track, and someone – quite possibly one of them – was about to have his life – or at least his career – seriously damaged.

  Rutter had finished checking the doors, and now tried the boot, to make sure that was locked too.

  He was a very careful man, Elizabeth Driver thought. A meticulous man. The sort of man who knew – down to the last penny – how much money there was in his bank account; who took his suits back to the dry cleaner’s exactly a month after he had last collected them from the same establishment; who would have checked that the water pipes in his new house were properly lagged before the ink had even had time to dry on the contract.

  So it was ironic that when such a careful man did make mistakes, they were such monumental ones. And Rutter had made not just one, but two.

  The first had been over his affair with Monika Paniatowski. It hadn’t been a mistake to have the affair, as far as Driver was concerned. There was nothing wrong with grabbing your pleasure where you could. No, the mistake had been to feel guilty about it, once it was over. Because guilt slowed you down – guilt could stop you doing what you wanted to do the next time an opportunity arose. And if you couldn’t do exactly what you wanted, then what was the point of life?

  As for his second mistake, he wasn’t even aware that he’d made it yet, though it was already of such proportions that it towered above the first one as an elephant does over
a rabbit.

  This second mistake was to welcome his own destruction by allowing the enemy right into the heart of his camp – and not only allowing her in, but giving her a key to the front door.

  He had lowered his guard to her – this careful man – because he thought they shared a secret which bound her to him, and made her safe. He thought that she was writing a book about his life with Maria, an honest book which would serve as a penance for the way he had behaved to his blind wife before her murder. He was quite wrong about that, of course. Such a book would never be written.

  But there would be a book, and he, by making it possible for her to see into the workings of Central Lancs Police, would all unknowingly be helping her to write it. It would be a blockbuster of a book, exposing the Whitebridge force as not only incompetent, but also vastly corrupt, and her own newspaper had already promised to buy the serial rights.

  She had worried, for a while, that the Lancashire force might actually turn out to be not quite as corrupt and incompetent as she might have hoped, but she had long since left that concern behind her. After all, it was not the truth she was searching for, but something that had the appearance of being the truth – and the myriad authentic details that Rutter could feed her with would provide her with the ideal camouflage for a score of outrageous stories of her own concocting.

  She heard the key turn in the front door lock, and then Rutter stepping into the hallway.

  ‘I’m in here, Bob,’ she called out.

  When he entered the living room, she inclined her head a little, so that he could kiss her lightly on the cheek.

  Later on in her book’s development, she thought, it might be necessary to go much further with their physical intimacy. Later on, it would probably be necessary to actually sleep with him.

  The prospect did not bother her. She’d gone to bed with dozens of men – some of them really quite repulsive – in the interests of her career. And Rutter was not repulsive at all. In fact, he was so dishy that she felt an urge to seduce him at that very moment.

  She forced herself to hold back. The role she was playing for Rutter’s benefit called for her to act more like a penitent nun than a raging nymphomaniac. Besides, a good commander never throws all his soldiers into the first battle – he saves his elite troops for the final devastating assault.