A Death Left Hanging Read online

  The signature at the bottom of the page was DCI Sharpe.

  It was not a perfect report by any means, Rutter thought. But given that it had been written back in the Old Stone Age of policing, it was not half bad. And it certainly suggested that, whatever Jane Hartley’s detectives might have thought, this witness at least had seen nothing that might help her case.

  Rutter put the file to one side and began a fresh search, totally ignorant of the knowledge that – some two hundred miles away from Whitebridge – thoughts of Harold Brunskill were simultaneously engaging another mind.

  Lord Sharpe stood on the Embankment, his back to the Houses of Parliament. His eyes were fixed on the grey swirling water of the Thames, but in his head he was picturing Brunskill as he had looked on that late afternoon in 1934.

  Brunskill had been a scruffy individual – battered boots, darned shirt and a greasy flat cap. He had not even bothered to shave before presenting himself at the police station. And there in the interview room – standing, because he had not been invited to sit down – he seemed so frightened that Sharpe thought there was a distinct possibility he would piss himself.

  The man had had no self-respect, the former chief inspector thought – no self-respect at all.

  ‘So you’re here to put Margaret Dodds in the clear for this murder, are you, Harry?’ Sharpe asked, deliberately injecting a nasty, threatening edge into his voice.

  Brunskill nervously fingered the cap he was holding with both his hands. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, Mr Sharpe.’

  ‘Then how would you put it?’

  ‘I . . . I just thought I’d better tell you what I saw.’

  ‘Now that was really kind and thoughtful of you, Harry. And I want you to know that, caught up in the middle of a murder inquiry as I am, I have all the time in the world to listen to toe-rags like you.’

  ‘Do . . . do you want me to say what it was I saw?’

  Sharpe sighed theatrically. ‘Yes, I suppose you might as well, now that you’re here.’

  ‘I saw the woman. She was just comin’ out of the phone box in front of St Mary’s. I looked up at the church clock. It was twenty-past eight.’

  ‘How convenient that you chose to check on the time just at that moment,’ Sharpe said, disbelievingly.

  ‘It’s the truth, Mr Sharpe!’

  ‘Now when you say you saw the woman coming out of the phone box, I assume that what you mean is that you saw a woman.’

  ‘Beg pardon, Mr Sharpe?’

  ‘A woman, not the woman.’

  ‘No, it was her all right, Mr Sharpe. Mrs Dodds. She was wearing a black an’ white check frock, just like the one she was wearin’ in the picture of her bein’ arrested in the newspaper.’

  Sharpe took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket, but despite the look of expectation in Brunskill’s eyes, he did not offer him one.

  ‘How far away from her were you, Harry?’ he asked, slipping one of the cigarettes between his lips and lighting it up.

  ‘How far? Couldn’t have been more than a few yards.’

  ‘Were you wearing your glasses?’

  ‘I don’t have no glasses, Mr Sharpe.’

  ‘So you got only a blurred picture of her at best.’

  ‘The reason I don’t have no glasses is because I don’t need ’em. I’ve never been one to wear out my eyes by readin’.’

  Sharpe took a long, thoughtful drag on his cigarette. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand, Harry.’

  ‘An’ what’s that, Mr Sharpe?’

  ‘Before today, you’ve never voluntarily entered a police station in your life. Why the sudden change of heart?’

  ‘I . . . I think it was the birth of my grandson that did it.’

  ‘Is that supposed to make sense to me?’

  ‘Probably not. You see, Mr Sharpe, he’s a beautiful little kid. He reminds me of his mother at his age.’

  ‘Very touching, I’m sure,’ Sharpe said with a sneer.

  ‘I never saw much of our Bessie when she was growin’ up, like, because I was always doin’ time. An’ if I go down again with my record, it’ll be for a ten stretch.’

  ‘At least a ten stretch,’ Sharpe agreed. ‘At the very least. Get to the point, Harry.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose out on my grandson like I lost out on my daughter. I want to take him fishin’. I want to see his eyes light up when I give him his Christmas presents.’

  ‘Do you know, I’m almost in tears.’

  ‘So I’ve got to stay out of trouble, haven’t I, Mr Sharpe? More than that – I’ve got to be a model citizen. That’s why I’m here. Because I’m doin’ my duty – just like a model citizen should.’

  Sharpe nodded. ‘A model citizen,’ he repeated. ‘So you’ve not committed any new crimes recently?’

  ‘No. I swear I haven’t. Not since little Wilf was born.’

  ‘You haven’t done any shoplifting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You haven’t received any stolen property?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about burglaries?’

  ‘I told you, I––’

  ‘Do you know that row of big houses not far from St Mary’s Church?’ Sharpe interrupted.

  ‘I’ve seen’em,’ Brunskill said defensively.

  ‘Must be lots of rich pickings for a burglar in places like them.’

  ‘Maybe there is, but––’

  ‘On the night of the murder, one of those houses was broken into. We don’t have any suspects for the crime at the moment, but now we know that you were in the vicinity at the time, well . . .’

  Sharpe let his words trail off into nothingness. Brunskill, he noted, was sweating.

  ‘I haven’t heard of no burglaries in any of them houses, Mr Sharpe,’ Brunskill said.

  The DCI nodded. ‘That’s because none has been officially reported – yet! But one could be reported, Harry, if you get my meaning. You do get my meaning, don’t you?’

  Brunskill bowed his head. ‘Yes, I get your meanin’, Mr Sharpe,’ he mumbled.

  ‘So let me ask you again,’ Sharpe said. ‘Where exactly were you at eight twenty on the night of the murder of Frederick Dodds?’

  ‘I . . . I was at home.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I didn’t leave the house all day.’

  Sharpe smiled. ‘That’s just what I thought you’d say, Harry,’ he told the other man.

  The deep groan of a tug’s hooter wrenched Sharpe out of his recollections and deposited him squarely in the middle of his present cold reality.

  It was thirty years since that interview with scruffy little Harry Brunskill, he reminded himself – long enough for the past to fade almost to invisibility, for words spoken and actions taken to be all but forgotten. In truth, he had thought that was just what had happened. And then he’d got that warning phone call from Chief Constable Henry Marlowe, and had felt all the certainties he’d built his life and career on begin to slip away.

  The woman had been guilty, despite the fact that some of the evidence might have seemed to suggest otherwise. Any policeman who had been assigned to the case would have come to that conclusion. And even if there was a slight, remote – almost infinitesimal – chance that she hadn’t killed her husband, did any of that really matter now?

  If she’d lived, she would probably have led an unremarkable life, whereas her death had helped him to be elected to parliament, from where he had been able to help hundreds – perhaps thousands – of women just like Margaret Dodds. Yes, it had been a more than fair exchange. If she had, in fact, been sacrificed, then it had all been for a very good cause.

  Big Ben struck the hour, and Sharpe looked up at the clock – just as Harry Brunskill must have looked up at St Mary’s clock all those years ago.

  Even now, there shouldn’t be a problem. The officer in charge of the case should, by rights, recognize the fact that Sharpe had once been in the Force himself – and thus do him the pr
ofessional courtesy of granting his investigation a clean bill of health; and no doubt most officers would. But Charlie Woodend – so Sharpe had learned from his contacts in Scotland Yard – was unquestionably not most officers.

  The mess needed to be cleared up, Eric Sharpe told himself. And it needed to be cleaned up in the right way. Because if it were not, it could bring him down. And whatever his personal wishes in the matter – however much he might wish to spare his colleagues – the situation was such that he would not go down alone.

  Nine

  Woodend had been driving around the old part of town, more or less aimlessly, for the best part of an hour. Now, as dusk began to fall, he decided it was probably time to stretch his legs a little. He turned left up Grimshaw Street, and was almost surprised to discover that the cinder track that ran from the end of the street down to the old canal was just where it had always been.

  He parked his Wolseley at the end of the track, and as he climbed out of it he felt the cinders crunch beneath his feet. He’d been back in Whitebridge for over two years, he reminded himself. Two years! And never once – until now – had he contemplated paying a visit to the part of the town in which he’d grown up.

  He wondered why that should be. Was it, perhaps, because he was not self-indulgent enough to roll around nostalgically in his past? Or could it be that looking back would only serve to remind him of how long his journey had been thus far – and how comparatively little of it there was left?

  ‘You’re gettin’ philosophical again, Charlie,’ he said out loud. ‘It’ll be the death of you yet.’

  He lit up a cigarette and turned to face the old Empire Mill. It was still the massive structure he remembered, towering over the surrounding area and making all the buildings close to it look as tiny and fragile as doll’s houses. Its original red brick had been turned black by a century of industrial filth, yet that only seemed to add to its power – transmuting it from a mere man-made object into something as solid and immovable as a mountain.

  Woodend let his gaze shift to the chimney stack, which – on the whimsy of an industrial architect now long dead – had been built as an exact replica of a bell tower that was to be found in Florence. What kind of brain had it taken to come up with such an idea – to decide to recreate one of the glories of Renaissance Italy within the confines of a dark satanic mill?

  There was nowt as queer as folk, the Chief Inspector thought – and that was a fact.

  His own father had started working at this mill at fourteen, on the very day he had left school. Back then, it had been a true symbol of British industry, turning out cotton cloth by the mile. Charlie himself had been taken around the mill as a boy, and had bathed in the warm glow of the respect that his father – who was no more than a common tackler – was shown by both workers and bosses alike. He remembered gazing up at the machinery, wondering how anything could be so powerful. He recalled, still a little guiltily, stealing for himself some of the pride that the workers took in knowing that the cloth they made covered the whole world.

  It had seemed to him then that anything so majestic was sure to go on for ever. He had, of course, been completely wrong. Even by the time Sam Woodend died – just a couple of weeks short of his fifty-second birthday – the mill had become a shadow of its old self. And now, a quarter of a century beyond that, the place stood empty against the skyline – a monument to its own former glory, a stark reminder that even the greatest empire in the world had been built on shifting sands.

  Not that the building was quite empty, he noted. For just as the corpse of a mighty beast will soon be invaded by scavengers, so too it was now possible to buy mass-produced Pakistani carpets, retread car tyres and second-hand furniture from the smaller businesses that had sprung up within the shell of the once-vast one.

  Woodend turned his back on the mill to face the streets that surrounded it – row upon row of terraced houses running in long, straight lines. They no longer served as the homes of mill workers, but the road names still reflected their golden past – Calcutta Street, Rawalpindi Row, Bombay Terrace. They, too, were living on borrowed time. Soon they would be gone – cleared away to make space for housing estates with every modern convenience.

  And a good thing too, the Chief Inspector thought – though he could not but feel a pang of regret for the sense of community that would, inevitably, be destroyed in the process.

  He walked to the end of one of these cobbled streets – streets built for clogs, not shoes with leather soles – and reached a pub called the Red Lion. It, at least, did not look much changed since the days when he himself had stood at the counter – puffing on a Park Drive and trying desperately to act as if he were eighteen. He pushed the door open and entered the public bar.

  As Bob Rutter drove around the corner, he saw his young-executive semi-detached house up ahead of him. In the earlier years of his marriage, it had not been unusual for him to find the house in complete darkness. It wasn’t that the place had been empty – Maria would invariably be waiting for him, with his evening meal bubbling away on the stove – it was simply that the electric light was neither a help nor a hindrance to his wife. But things had changed since the baby had been born. Now, looking up at the nursery window, he could see a night light burning.

  Maria was waiting for him at the front door. They kissed, then he followed her down the hall. She was so well aware of the obstacles in her own little kingdom, he thought, that anyone who had not met her before could be excused for assuming that she could see. He knew there had been people who’d never imagined that he would marry her once she’d gone blind. Perhaps she’d even thought it herself. But he’d never had any doubts. He’d loved her then, and he loved her still.

  ‘Dinner will be about fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘I expect you’d like a beer first.’

  ‘I’d sell my soul for one,’ he admitted.

  She brought his drink, then sat down next to him. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

  She could always tell when he was troubled. ‘It’s just something Cloggin’-it Charlie said to me today,’ he admitted.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Do you think I’m unfair to Paniatowski?’

  ‘Unfair?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s not the right word. Do you think I’m unduly antagonistic to her? Am I less tolerant of her than I would be of another sergeant?’

  ‘Do you know any other female sergeants to be tolerant of?’

  He’d been thinking in terms of rank, not sex, and Maria’s comment took him by surprise. ‘Are you saying I’m against her because she’s a woman?’

  ‘Perhaps. You don’t fancy her, do you?’

  ‘Of course not! Why do you ask that?’

  ‘It’s just that sometimes the way the pair of you act reminds me of school children.’

  ‘I don’t see any comparison at all,’ he said, slightly huffily.

  ‘Perhaps if you hadn’t attended an all-boys school you would. In a normal school, you could always tell when a boy had a crush on a girl, because he’d be horrible to her. He’d punch her on the arm, or dip her pigtail in the ink well.’

  He could either be amused or annoyed. He decided on amusement. ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’

  ‘I didn’t think I was. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Do you think that wicked old witch Sergeant Paniatowski is trying to steal your big boy away from you?’ he asked, lapsing into baby talk.

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘The only crush I feel for Paniatowski is a desire to crush her windpipe now and again. And that’s mild in comparison to what I suspect she’d like to do to me.’

  Maria smiled. ‘I was on the point of becoming silly, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rutter agreed. ‘But there’s no need to apologize for it. I like it if you get jealous occasionally. It shows I’m wanted.’

  They had wine with their dinner – a Rioja specially imported for Maria’s father. They talked about the baby and the Margaret
Dodds case. It was towards the end of the meal that she said, ‘Do you think there is any chance you’ll be able to take Sunday off?’

  ‘It all depends on how the case goes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I thought we might drive out into the countryside,’ Maria said. ‘Like we used to.’

  Like they used to!

  They’d climb to the top of a hill, and claim all they saw below them as their personal fiefdom. They could still do that, he supposed. True, Maria couldn’t see, but she could smell and hear. And when he described things to her, she could draw on her old memories. But it just wasn’t the same any more. She could imagine a skylark, but she couldn’t see the particular skylark he was watching – couldn’t share in this unique moment with him.

  Didn’t it distress her that they had lost something they once had together? he wondered. Because it certainly bloody well distressed him!

  ‘Well, what about it?’ Maria asked. ‘Do you fancy a drive in the country on Sunday?’

  Rutter felt a sudden stabbing pain in his chest. ‘I told you, it depends on how the case goes,’ he said, sounding harsher than he’d intended.

  Most of the drinkers in the Red Lion that night had probably been no more than babies when the Empire Mill had finally shut down its machinery, Woodend thought. But there was one very old man – sitting alone in the corner and sipping slowly and carefully at a glass of Guinness – who looked vaguely familiar.

  The Chief Inspector bought a pint of bitter and a bottle of stout, then made his way over to the table.

  ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.

  The old man ran his watery eyes up and down the Chief Inspector’s frame. ‘Tha’s Sam Woodend’s lad, Charlie,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, I am.’

  The old man nodded. ‘I’ve read about thy doin’s in the paper. Tha’s a big, important bobby now, isn’t tha?’