Death of an Innocent (11 page)

Mrs Turner waited until her husband had closed the door behind him before saying, ‘We haven't got long, so you'd best save time by bein' straight with me right from the start.'

‘Straight with you?' Woodend repeated.

‘You're not really a reporter at all, are you?'

Woodend looked into the woman's faded, but still intelligent, eyes and decided there was no point in pretending any longer.

He grinned. ‘Was I that obvious?'

‘Well, you weren't very good at it, if that's what you mean. But even if you'd been able to carry it off better, it still wouldn't have worked. As far as my Jed's concerned, the world revolves around this farm – but I read the papers.'

‘An' you've seen my picture in them?'

‘More than once. An' my niece once pointed you out to me. She works in the police canteen in Whitebridge, an' always speaks very highly of you. Says you're not stuck up like some of the buggers in plain clothes she has to serve.'

Woodend grinned, then grew serious again and said, ‘So if you knew I wasn't who I said I was, why didn't you tell your husband right away?'

The old woman smiled. ‘Partly because of what my niece said about you, and partly because I was curious. You may not believe this, but we don't get many bobbies pretendin' to be reporters round these parts. Do you want to tell me what it's all about?'

‘I can't investigate the murder in the way I normally would because I've been suspended from duty,' Woodend confessed.

‘Suspended from duty,' the old woman repeated. ‘Did you do somethin' wrong?'

Woodend shook his head. ‘I don't think so.'

‘So if it's really nothin' to do with you any more, why are you still workin' the case?'

‘Because I think that I have a better chance of solvin' it than anybody else does,' Woodend said. ‘An' because I don't think it's right that a kid should be robbed of her life before she's had the chance to even start livin' it fully.'

The old woman nodded slowly, as if she were prepared to take his explanation at face value. ‘Have you got any children of your own, Mr Woodend?'

‘One. A girl. She's trainin' to be a nurse in Manchester.'

‘I've had six. Of course, they're all grown up now, an' have their own families.' The old woman paused. ‘My youngest granddaughter's about the same age as the poor kiddie who was killed up at Dugdale's Farm. Do you think it was Wilf Dugdale that killed her?'

‘Do you?'

‘Not a chance. Wilf has been a bit of a bugger in his time – my Jed's quite right about that – but he's no murderer.'

‘You've got somethin' you want to tell me, haven't you, Mrs Turner?' Woodend guessed.

The old woman looked down at her lap. ‘Maybe,' she said hesitantly. ‘I'm not sure.'

‘Whatever you have to say won't go beyond these four walls,' Woodend coaxed. ‘If Mr Dugdale's innocent, then what you tell me won't hurt him. An' if he's guilty, don't you want to see him behind bars?'

‘When Wilf had that big row with his dad an' moved away, he went to Rochdale,' Mrs Turner said quickly, as if she wanted to get the words out before she changed her mind. ‘The first street he lived in was called Derby Avenue. He lodged at Number Forty-six. I don't know how long he stayed there, or where he went after that.'

‘How do you know all about this, when your husband doesn't?'

Mrs Turner gave him a sad smile. ‘You've already guessed that, haven't you, lad?'

‘Perhaps I have,' Woodend agreed.

‘Wilf Dugdale was a good lookin', well-set-up, young feller forty-odd years ago,' Mrs Turner said. ‘An' I was no drudge myself.'

‘I'm sure you weren't,' Woodend agreed.

‘The difference between us – an' it was a big difference in them days – was that I was married – an' he wasn't.'

‘Is that what he had the blazin' row with his father about, just before he left home?'

‘Old Clem Dugdale had very strict morals. He wasn't goin' to harbour a sinner under
his
roof.' There was a hint of a smile on the old woman's face again. ‘Especially a sinner who wasn't a very good farmer.'

‘Did your husband ever find out what had been goin' on?'

‘Let's just say that he had his suspicions.'

‘When Wilf Dugdale moved down to Rochdale, you went to visit him, didn't you?'

‘A few times.'

‘What made you stop goin'?'

‘I got pregnant with our Harold.'

‘An' whose baby was he?'

‘My husband's,' Mrs Turner said with sudden, unexpected ferocity. ‘Well, he
had
to be, didn't he? Because even if I could have got a divorce, Wilf would never have married me.'

‘So you didn't see him again?'

‘Not until he came back to the farm after his father died. An' then it was only from a distance.' A tear trickled down her wrinkled cheek. ‘It was too late for me by then, you see. I was too
old
to start again.'

The front door swung open and Mr Turner entered the room, laden down by logs.

‘Are you still here?' he asked his unwelcome guest.

Woodend rose to his feet. ‘I was just leavin',' he said. He turned back to the old woman. ‘Thank you for the cup of tea.'

‘You're welcome,' Mrs Turner said. ‘I hope you find what you're lookin' for.'

‘Me, too,' Woodend agreed.

Old farmers like Jed Turner did not shake hands unless they were buying or selling cattle, so Woodend merely nodded to him and stepped through the front door and out into the cold winter air.

He was getting somewhere at last! he thought as he lit up a cigarette. He had discovered something that all the efforts and all the resources of the Central Lancs police force had failed to come up with.

He gazed out on to the snow-covered moors – where Wilf Dugdale might, at that very moment, be lying frozen stiff – and wondered what he should do with his discovery. All his training dictated that he should immediately communicate his findings to his superior, DCC Ainsworth – but his instincts told him that would be a big mistake, both for the investigation and for his own teetering career.

He took a deep drag on his cigarette, and wondered which was the quickest way to Rochdale.

T
he housing estate was on the outskirts of Rochdale, just off the road leading to Todmorton. It consisted of row upon row of neat, semi-detached dwellings with red-tiled roofs, large bow windows and small, but well-tended, front gardens. The streets had names like Willow Close and Cedar Drive, and if such places had existed when they were both growing up, Woodend would have been willing to bet that Mickey Lee would have ended up in just the kind of home he now owned.

Woodend walked up a path flanked by garden gnomes and a flower bed which looked forlorn in the dead of winter but would, no doubt, be a blaze of colour once the spring came around again. He came to a stop at the recently painted front door and rang the bell. From the hallway he heard a tinkling musical chime announcing his arrival.

The man who answered the summons had grey, clipped hair and a perpetually worried, sulky expression etched into his face. Though they had sat next to each other all the way through Sudbury Street Elementary School, the other man could have been the senior by at least ten years, Woodend thought – and then he wondered if that was what
all
middle-aged men told themselves when suddenly faced with a contemporary.

‘Hello, Mickey,' he said.

‘Hello, sir,' the grey-haired man replied, without much enthusiasm.

Sir! That was a bad sign!

‘I wasn't “sir” to you the last time you an' I met,' Woodend said, with a conviviality that he didn't really feel. ‘It was at the federation dance, as far as I can recall.'

‘It was.'

‘An' if I remember rightly, you called me “Charlie, you miserable old bugger”.'

‘That was a social occasion,' Lee said, not willing to give an inch. ‘This isn't.'

‘So you know why I'm here, do you?'

‘I know that there's been a double murder up on the moors near Whitebridge. An' I know you'd probably be leadin' the inquiry yourself, if you hadn't been suspended.'

Bad news travelled very fast, Woodend thought – but then, what had he expected?

‘I need your help, Mickey,' he admitted. ‘To be honest, I need it pretty badly.'

‘I'm not sure that, under the circumstances, that would be appropriate,' Lee said, stony faced.

‘We've been pals since we were kids,' Woodend cajoled. ‘I even went out with your sister Joyce for a while.'

‘That was a long time ago – before I'd settled for bein' a humble desk sergeant close to home, an' you'd gone down to London to become a hot-shot chief inspector.'

‘I've pulled you out of a few nasty scrapes in your time,' Woodend reminded him.

‘An' now you've come to collect your debts?'

Woodend shrugged awkwardly. ‘It's not somethin' I like doin', but I don't seem to have any choice.'

Lee sighed theatrically. ‘Well, now you're here, I suppose you'd better come inside.'

He led Woodend down a neat hallway into a carpeted lounge which had three plaster ducks flying on the wall.

‘Joyce not around?' Woodend asked.

‘She's doin' shift work up at the hospital.'

‘Our Annie's trainin' to be a nurse,' Woodend said. ‘She started in September.'

‘Joyce
has
to work, you see,' Lee said, as if Woodend had never spoken. ‘We can't get by on just a sergeant's pay.'

Then why don't you do something about it? Woodend thought. Why didn't you put in for promotion while you had the chance? But Mickey Lee had never been one to show much initiative.

‘Would you like a beer?' Lee asked. ‘I think there's a couple of bottles in the fridge.'

It was tempting, but Lee was just the sort of man to regard one beer as enough to square off all accounts.

‘As you've already pointed out to me, Mickey, this isn't a social visit,' Woodend said.

Lee nodded. ‘So why
are
you here?'

‘We're lookin' for an old farmer, a feller called Wilfred Dugdale⎯' Woodend began.

‘What's all this “we” business?' Lee interrupted him. ‘I know the
Whitebridge police
are lookin' for him – I read that in the papers – but since you've been suspended, I can't see what it has to do with you.'

‘I'm conductin' my own investigation.'

‘You're
what
?'

‘You heard me the first time.'

Lee shook his head. ‘The whole of the Central Lancs police can't find this feller, an' yet you think you can do it on your own? Grow up, Charlie.'

It wasn't going to be easy, Woodend thought, but at least Lee was calling him ‘Charlie' again.

‘I know somethin' they don't know,' he said. ‘Dugdale used to live at Forty-six Derby Road, Rochdale.'

‘Then it's your duty to make whoever's in charge of the case aware of that as soon as possible.'

Woodend sighed. ‘I'm out on a limb,' he admitted. ‘If I can come up with somethin' which will help to solve these murders, I might just be able to stop my career from goin' down the drain. But knowin' that the feller used to live in Rochdale isn't nearly enough.'

‘You want me to find out what I can about this Dugdale feller, do you?'

‘That's about the long an' short of it.'

Lee shook his head again. ‘I'm five years away from drawin' my pension. I've got an unblemished record, you know . . .'

‘I'm sure you have.'

‘. . . an' I'd like to keep it that way.'

‘I'm not askin' you to do much,' Woodend said. ‘All I want is for you to come up with a bit of background on him. What he did for a livin'. Who he associated with. That kind of thing.'

‘In case you've forgotten, the man's right at the centre of an investigation into a serious crime.'

‘I know he is, Mickey. I wouldn't be interested in him if he wasn't, now would I?'

‘If the bosses back in Whitebridge find out I've been askin' questions about somethin' which is no concern of mine . . .'

‘They won't.'

‘But if they do . . .'

‘Then you could turn it to your own advantage – say you were only tryin' to do your bit to help the investigation.'

‘An' just
how
would I go about justifyin' that?'

‘Jesus, it shouldn't be too difficult,' Woodend said exasperatedly. ‘Use your initiative.'

But as he'd reminded himself earlier, even at school Mickey Lee hadn't had much initiative.

‘Spell it out for me,' Lee said.

‘All right,' Woodend said wearily. ‘You can tell them that when you read about Dugdale in the papers, you remembered seein' his name in some report or other an'⎯'

‘What if they ask me to produce the report in question?'

‘Show them a report on another Dugdale. Or on a Duggins or Dugson. Tell them that you made a genuine mistake. Bloody hell, man, they're not goin' to come down on you like a ton of bricks for showin' a little enthusiasm for your job, even if it doesn't lead anywhere.'

‘I'm not so sure of that.'

‘Anyway, like I said, that won't happen. The brass in Whitebridge might have bloody big ears, but even theirs aren't large enough to hear a few casual conversations goin' on in a station twenty miles away from their offices.'

For a moment it looked as if Lee would agree, then he said, ‘I know I owe you a few favours, sir – but this is
too
big a risk.'