A Long Time Dead (11 page)

‘I get heartily sick of almost everybody I meet asking me why I'm not in uniform,' the young man complained. ‘Even when I tell them I'm a merchant seaman, it makes no difference, because
then
they ask me if I wouldn't be of more use in the “real” navy
.'

‘They just don't understand, do they?' Woodend asked, sympathetically.

‘Too right, they don't! This country couldn't survive without the goods we bring over from America. And sailing in a convoy is no bloody cakewalk, even with naval protection. Do you know how many times ships I've been serving on have gone down?'

‘Twice?' Woodend guessed.

‘Three times!' the seaman told him. ‘Because however many battleships and cruisers you've got around you, it only takes one U-Boat to get through, and you're finished.'

‘It must have been rough,' Woodend said.

‘It bloody was! The first time, I was lucky enough to get into a lifeboat. But the second and third times, I was bobbing up and down in the water like a cork when I was rescued.'

‘An' I imagine the North Atlantic can be quite cold in the middle of winter,' Woodend said.

The seaman grinned. ‘It is a bit nippy,' he agreed. ‘Still, I shouldn't complain. At least I was rescued eventually. Some of my shipmates were
never
found
.'

‘You all deserve medals,' Woodend said, with feeling. ‘But since I'm in no position to award you one, how about a pint instead?'

‘That's very kind of you,' the seaman said. ‘And better than a medal, any day of the week.'

Up until that moment, Coutes's back had been blocking any view of Mary, but now, as he stood up and headed towards the toilets, she became clearly visible from the bar.

The seaman noticed her immediately. ‘That girl looks familiar,' he said. ‘You don't happen to know her name, do you?'

‘Mary Parkinson,' Woodend said.

‘That's right! Mary Parkinson! We were at school together, but I haven't seen her for years. She's certainly grown up a lot since we were both in Miss Eccles's class.'

‘I imagine she has,' Woodend said. ‘I imagine you have, an' all.'

The sailor grinned again. ‘You ‘reprobably right about that,' he agreed. ‘Look, if you'll guard my pint for me, I think I'll just go over there and have a quick word with her.'

There was too much general noise in the public bar of the Dun Cow for Woodend to hear what the seaman said to Mary, or Mary said to the seaman in return, but then he didn't really need to catch the actual words to be able to work out what was probably being said.

It was typical of most encounters between two people who hadn't seen each other for years – and had very little in common any more – he thought, as he watched them. They smiled, they each asked how the other was getting on, and then they covered the common ground of shared memories and old friends.

By the time five minutes had ticked away, they were running dry of conversation, and the sailor was glancing over his shoulder at the pint waiting invitingly for him on the bar. If they'd have been given another minute, they'd have found a graceful way to separate, and their unexpected meeting would have been over.

But, as chance would have it, they were not given that minute! Coutes re-entered the room, saw the sailor leaning over Mary's table, and immediately went black with rage.

The Captain tapped the sailor on the shoulder and said a few words to him, then the two men walked towards the door. Mary – innocent, young Mary – was left there alone, looking completely mystified.

Woodend still sat at the bar, wondering what to do next. On the one hand, he liked the sailor, and he did not like Coutes. On the other, Coutes was his boss and had the means at his disposal to make his life uncomfortable, whereas the sailor had no power over him at all. It was probably best, he decided, to keep well out of the whole business.

Yet even as this thought settled in his mind, he was following the other two men out into the yard.

Once outside, Woodend paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

The government imposition of the Blackout in 1939 had created a very different night-time England to the one in which he had grown up, he thought. For the last five long years, there had been no street lamps, no car headlights, no dazzlingly illuminated advertisements, and though lights might burn inside the houses and pubs, the heavy blinds on the windows prevented that same light from spilling out onto the streets. Even so, the country had not lived in complete darkness. For a time at least, the fires started by Herr Hitler's bombing raids had lit up some areas as bright as day. And the moon and stars – unbowed by bureaucratic regulation, continued to illuminate the sky as they had always done.

There was a half-moon that night, and as Woodend's eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he was able to see the drama unfolding by the skittle alley wall.

The sailor was pressed up against the wall, and Coutes was standing so close to him that their faces were almost touching.

‘Stay away from Mary Parkinson,' the Captain said, in a voice which was almost like the growl of a wild animal.

‘What are you getting so upset about?' the sailor asked, perplexed. ‘I was only talking to her as an old friend.'

‘I don't care if you were talking to her as her maiden aunt,' Coutes told him. ‘Stay away from her!'

If the situation had only been handled a little differently, there would have been no trouble at all, Woodend thought.

If Coutes had simply told the other man that Mary was his girlfriend, the sailor would, in all probability, have immediately apologized for the intrusion. But no man who had been torpedoed three times in the middle of the Atlantic winter was going to stand for being pushed around by a soldier who had yet to see any action himself.

‘I'm not in the army, you know,' the sailor said. ‘You can't tell me what to do.'

Coutes laughed unpleasantly, and stepped back.

‘Maybe I can't,' he agreed, reaching into his tunic, and pulling something out. ‘But this can.'

He had produced a knife – a bloody big one, with a wicked-looking blade which glinted in the moonlight.

‘Put that away!' the sailor said, with an edge of panic entering his voice. ‘You could hurt somebody with that.'

‘I could hurt
you
with it,' Coutes said. ‘I could do worse than just hurt you. If I slice up your stomach in just the right way, it could take you several agonizing hours to die.'

‘You wouldn't dare!' the sailor said, though he was sounding more and more as if he believed that Coutes might well carry out his threat.

‘I'm an officer and gentleman, and you're nothing but scum,' Coutes said. ‘If I claimed you attacked me, and I was only defending myself, who do you think the authorities would believe?'

‘Please
put the knife away,' the sailor said
.

‘No, I don't think I will,' Coutes said calmly. ‘But I'm not going to kill you, after all. It's not necessary. All I have to do is put you in hospital for a few weeks. That should be more than enough to deter any other lout round here from thinking that he might try sniffing around in places he has no business to.'

‘That's enough, sir,' Woodend said.

‘Mind your own bloody business, Sergeant!' Coutes shouted over his shoulder.

‘I said, that's enough,' Woodend repeated. ‘If you really fancy havin' a go at somebody, then let this feller leave, an' have a go at me.'

Coutes hesitated for a second, then said to the sailor, ‘Get out of here, you piece of shit!'

The sailor slid clear of the wall, but instead of making a run for it while he had the chance, he looked to Woodend for further instructions.

‘You go,' Woodend said. ‘I can handle him.'

The sailor went – though into the dark night, rather than back to the pub where his pint was waiting for him.

Coutes turned around, the big Prussian knife still in his hand. ‘Do you really think you could handle me, Sergeant?' he asked sneeringly.

‘There's only one way for both of us to find out, now isn't there?' Woodend asked evenly.

For an instant, it looked as if Coutes were planning to lunge, then he straightened up and slid the knife back into its scabbard.

‘It's not wise of you to cross me, Sergeant Woodend,' he said. ‘Not wise at all.'

‘You'll thank me for it in the morning, when you've sobered up, sir,' Woodend told him.

He knew, even as he spoke the words, that Coutes was not drunk, but he said them anyway: to give Coutes an out – an excuse for his bad behaviour.

No, Coutes wasn't drunk. He never was. Alcohol was not his drug – it was power over others which intoxicated him. And that made him more dangerous than even the most violent heavy drinker.

Woodend put the photograph of the knife to one side, and turned his attention to a set of pictures of the shallow grave, with Robert Kineally's skeleton still in it.

‘Who took these?' he asked Special Agent Grant. ‘Was it the local police force?'

‘Yes, it was,' the FBI man replied, then added, almost as if it surprised him, ‘and they seem to have made a good job of it.'

They had, Woodend agreed, looking at the collection of bones, some of which must have been disturbed by earth movements over the years, others by the digging which had finally uncovered them.

‘The rest of the shots in that pile were taken by our own boys in Washington DC, once the jigsaw had been fitted back together again,' Grant continued.

Woodend grimaced at the Special Agent's choice of words, then found himself wondering why he had reacted in such an uncharacteristic way.

Maybe the problem was that these were not pictures of just any old skeleton to him, he thought. Maybe it was because, in looking down at these bones, he could not help putting flesh and muscle on them.

He had always known he liked Robert Kineally, but until now, he had never realized quite how much affection he had felt for the man – never understood how a confirmation of Kineally's death would bring with it such a great sense of loss.

Doing his best to shrug aside personal feelings, he picked up the batch of photographs taken in Washington, once the ‘jigsaw' had been completed.

He remembered Kineally as being around six feet two inches tall, and the ruler which lay beside the reconstructed skeleton proved that his memory had not been playing tricks on him.

Once they had photographed the skeleton as a whole, the FBI photographers had taken close-ups of each distinct part. Woodend examined these now – the skull, grinning obscenely, bereft of Kineally's perfect teeth; the teeth themselves, which had been reassembled separately, in order to match them to the dental records; the fingers; the toes …

‘Take a look at the ribcage,' Grant suggested, when he noticed what the Chief Inspector was doing.

Woodend flicked through the glossy pack of death shots until he found what he was looking for.

‘Is it the third rib down on the left hand side you particularly wanted me to look at?' he asked.

‘That's the one,' Grant agreed. ‘The bone's chipped.'

‘I can see that.'

‘And the lab back in DC says there's a perfect match between the injury inflicted and the knife we found in the grave.'

Coutes's knife, Woodend reminded himself.

‘If I slice up your stomach in just the right way, it could take you several agonizing hours to die,'
Douglas Coutes had told the sailor.

But the wound which had killed Robert Kineally had not been meant to make him suffer. It had been intended to dispatch him with maximum efficiency – to rob him of his life with a minimum of fuss.

There were more shots of bones in the grisly pile – perhaps a hundred or more of them.

Kineally had been a very fit man back in '44, Woodend thought, flicking through them. He could well have lived on to a ripe old age. And who knew what great things he might have achieved if he'd been allowed to?

It didn't seem right that he was dead – and that bastard Douglas Coutes was still alive.

‘Do you need our help for anything specific at the moment, or are you happy to plough through this pile of documents on your own for a while, Special Agent Grant?' Woodend asked.

Grant looked shocked. ‘You want to
leave
?' he asked.

‘If you'd rather we didn't—'

‘Oh, I don't mind at all,' Grant assured him. ‘Whatever you'd processed yourselves, I'd have double-checked it myself later, anyway. It's just that …'

‘Yes?'

‘It's just that I'm surprised you'd want to go anywhere else, when all the action is here.'

Woodend looked down at the stacks of dusty pages. ‘All the action?' he repeated.

‘Sure,' Grant reaffirmed. ‘Mr Hoover says there's tremendous amounts to be learned from following a paper trail.'

‘Does he now?'

‘He says that the guys who make the big dramatic gestures out on the streets – like Eliot Ness did in Chicago in the 'thirties – might get all the glory, but it's agents like us who do the real work.'

‘Eliot Ness was generally believed to be
quite
effective at enforcing the law,' Woodend said gently.

‘Oh, sure, maybe he did OK when it came to tracking down criminals—'