Salton Killings (20 page)

Rutter, Davenport and Black were waiting for him in the office. He had some interviewing to do and he wanted Rutter with him, but he had no real use for the other two. He was on the point of telling them to take the day off when he remembered what it was like to live on a uniformed copper's wages.

“You're due some free time,” he said, “but I think you'd be better havin' tomorrow.”

Davenport, the veteran, caught on immediately. Black looked mystified.

“Sunday workin',” the constable explained to the cadet. “Overtime.”

“Sergeant Rutter and I will be out most of the mornin',” Woodend said. “Davenport, go through the files again, see if you can come up with somethin' – it doesn't matter how bloody tenuous. Blackie,” he searched around for something for the cadet to do, “you go an' give them a hand at the salt store. Sergeant, it's time we paid a few visits.”

They walked down Stubbs Street. There was not even the slightest breeze, and the sails on the ornamental windmill in the Blacks' front garden were perfectly still.

“It's not that I don't trust your judgement, Bob,” Woodend said. “But the last time you saw Foley, we hadn't found out about Jessie and Katie, so it didn't seem so important that he had pushed the other girl into the canal.”

“But what's the motive, sir?” Rutter asked.

“Motive? Christ knows!” They reached Foley's wilderness and stopped. “Look, we're sure there
is
a motive, somethin' these girls had in common, but we've no bloody idea what it is. So we're goin' to have to concentrate on means an' opportunity, and Foley had both.”

“I think it's a waste of time, sir,” Rutter said. “You've not seen him. He's a broken man. He couldn't kill anyone.”

“Checked up on his war record, have you?” Woodend asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And exactly how did Friend Foley fight for his King and country?”

“He was a commando.”

“Then killin'll not be much of a novelty to him,” Woodend said drily, rapping on the door. “I'm goin' to put him through it. It's not somethin' I like doin', but there's times when it's necessary. You get to play the good guy.”

Rutter nodded, knowing exactly what was required.

When Foley opened the door, Woodend walked straight past him into the kitchen. He looked around the dirty room in disgust, then pointed to the dusty armchair.

“Sit down, Foley,” he ordered.

The man meekly obeyed.

“My Sergeant,” Woodend sneered, “who is an impressionable young man, easily fooled, tells me you can't tell one day from another.”

“I . . . it's not . . . when you live like I do . . .”

“You remembered when Diane Thorburn was goin' to be buried, didn't you?”

“Aye,” Foley said, and for once there was a little pride in his voice. “I did.”

“The girl you pushed into the canal . . .” Woodend snapped, changing the subject.

“I didn't push her in. I––”

“After you'd pushed her in, when she was bobbin' up an' down, didn't you get the urge to hold her there, to feel your power over her?” His voice had risen to a red anger. “Didn't you?”

“I . . . I didn't feel anythin' – just panic – if I could have gone back ten minutes I'd never . . .”

“Jessie Black, Katie Walmsley,” Woodend said, his voice now icy cold.

For a moment, Foley looked puzzled, then realisation sunk in.

“They were accidents,” he protested.

“You mean you never intended to kill them, just push them in – like the other time?”

“I mean I had bugger-all to do with them.”

Woodend moved with vision-blurring speed. One second he was standing at the far end of the kitchen, the next he had Foley by the lapels and had hauled him out of the chair.

“You watch your language when you're talkin' to me,” he said, his face almost touching the other man's.

He released his grip and pushed. Foley fell back into the chair.

“Mary Wilson wasn't an accident, was she?” Woodend demanded. “You meant that, all right.”

“I didn't do anythin' to Mary, either,” Foley said. “I was a different man in them days. You wouldn't have known me.”

“We saw you when they they brought Diane's coffin out, Mr Foley,” Rutter said, softly, reasonably. “You were dressed up. You were on time. A lot of care for a girl you had no interest in.”

Tears were forming in Foley's eyes.

“I never said I had no interest in her.”

“Tell us about it, Mr Foley.”

The seated man wiped his nose on his dirty shirt sleeve.

“I never even spoke to her,” he said, “but I used to watch her on the street. She was always alone, even when she was with the other kids. That's why I wanted to see the little lass off, because she was lonely an' unhappy – just like me.”

“When I joined the Squad,” Woodend said as they headed up Maltham Road, “I was assigned to Chief Inspector Brookes. He was a simplistic old bastard an' nasty with it. Our first case was a hatchet murder – husband an' wife both chopped up. The bodies were discovered by their only son. Before we even got to the scene of the crime, Brookes had decided the boy had done it.”

Rutter wondered where all this was leading.

“The boy's name was Simon. He seemed a nice lad, sensitive. He was trainin' to be a concert pianist, an' he had these beautiful slim hands. Brookes pulled him in and persuaded him he didn't need a solicitor. Well, the state he was in, you could have convinced him of anythin'. Brookes put him through the most vicious verbal interrogation I've ever seen. For fourteen hours I watched him tearin' that kid's personality apart. I knew the lad was innocent, an' I knew that after Brookes had finished with him, he'd never be the same again. I made a protest in the end, an' Brookes told me that if I didn't like it, I could just bugger off.”

They drew near the George. Woodend stopped.

“We'd better have a word with Harry Poole later,” he said. “Anyway, I did bugger off, straight to the bogs where I puked up my ring. Then I went downstairs to write out my resignation. I was about halfway through it when Simon broke down and told Brookes where he'd hidden the axe an' his blood-stained clothin'. See the point?”

“Sir?”

“I saw the look on your face when Foley was cryin'.
I
don't think he did it, either, but you can never afford to cross anybody off your list just because they seem too pathetic or too obvious.”

The roses were red, and though they had stems on them, the artist had not included any cruel, spiky thorns. Each flower was identical to the rest, and Margie had counted a hundred and thirty of them, getting two-thirds of the way down her bedroom wall, before her concentration wavered. She felt like a prisoner in a flowery cell. She had to get out, whatever her mum said. She just couldn't breathe in the pub.

The door bell rang. She went to the window and looked down on the tops of two heads. The policemen! They hadn't believed her!

She tiptoed to the bedroom door and opened it as quietly as she could. Her hands felt cold and she was trembling.

“. . . just a few questions, Mr Poole,” drifted up the stairs.

“Dad, dad,” she prayed, “please don't let them. Please!”

“Why do you want to question me?” she heard her father ask.

Him! Him! It wasn't her they wanted to see.

“Just routine, sir. Now, if you wouldn't mind . . .”

She closed the door again. She had escaped, but for how long? Part of her wanted to rush downstairs and confess, get it all over with, but she knew she was not brave enough. If only she could talk to Pete – he would know what to do.

The walls seemed to be pressing in on her. She had to get out. She would wait till the pub closed for the afternoon, then sneak out of the back door.

“Are you accusin' me?” Poole demanded.

He was angry, but it was a very different sort of anger to the type he had displayed when he had caught Liz talking to Woodend. Then, he had seemed huge and powerful, an erupting volcano. Now, he was just an insignificant little man being petulant.

“All I'm asking you, sir,” Woodend said, “is to tell me where you were between ten and eleven on Tuesday.”

“Here,” Poole said, “same as I always am.”

“And your wife can support you in that, sir?”

“No,” Poole admitted. “She'd gone shoppin' for clothes in town. She didn't come back until after she'd met Margie from school.”

Yes, Woodend thought, you could see she took a lot of care over choosing her clothes.

“So you can't really prove that you never left the pub,” he said.

“No,” Poole sneered. “But you can't prove I did, can you?”

Highton and Sowerbury stuck to their original method – one with the shovel, one with the sieve. Black was working on his own, putting the sieve on the ground, filling it, then picking it up to shake the salt through. Even so, his pile was nearly as big as theirs.

“He's right keen, yon bugger,” Highton said. “Does he think we're gettin' paid piece rate or what?”

“They say the feller that killed Diane also did for his sister,” Sowerbury whispered.

Highton shook his head sympathetically. His quiff bobbed.

“Hey up,” Sowerbury said, “I think I've found somethin' else!”

“Another bloody French letter?” Highton asked in disgust.

“No, this is metal.”

Black stopped work and went over to look.

The object was a piece of bent wire a little over an inch long, rounded at the top, broader and longer at the bottom. A strip of flesh-coloured elastic hung from it.

“What is it?” Black asked.

The two constables grinned. Sowerbury took the rounded end between his fingers and swung it back and to.

“It's a trapeze,” he said.

“A trapeze?”

“Aye – for a flea circus.”

The older men fell about laughing. Black's look of perplexity increased.

“Honestly,” Highton finally managed to splutter out, “you can tell you don't have much fun on a Saturday night. It's a suspender clip.” He became more serious. “Couldn't be the dead girl's, could it? You were at school more recent than us, Blackie. What kind of stockin's do they wear?”

“Wool, I think,” Black said, blushing furiously, “grey knee socks.”

“Not the girl's then,” Sowerbury said, dropping the clip into his pocket. “Must belong to whoever had the johnnie inside her.”

But Black had already lost interest and had returned to his sieve.

Peggy Bryce, Katie Walmsley's best friend, lived on Maltham Road, right next to the pub. She was a bright attractive eighteen-year-old, her dark brown hair set in an elaborate perm. Unlike Margie Poole, she showed no reluctance to speak.

“Tell us about the day Katie died,” Woodend said.

If he couldn't find a pattern in what the girls
were
, maybe there was one in what they'd
done
.

“We both had a Saturday job in Maison Enid – that's a big hairdressin' salon in Maltham,” Peggy said. “Enid only let us sweep up at first, but then she started trainin' us in cuttin' and permin'. She was dead pleased with us an' she said we could both have jobs when we left school. I still work there, I'll have come out of my time soon, but Katie . . .” Her face clouded over. “Anyway,” she continued, forcing a smile, “after the shop closed we went to the pictures. We'd been tryin' to look like Marilyn Monroe till then, but Audrey Hepburn was in this particular picture, and we thought she looked great – you know, big eyes, dead good make-up, short hair. When we got home my mum an' dad were out, so I said why didn't we go into the house an' try the Audrey Hepburn look.” She blushed. “To tell you the truth, we'd sneaked into a pub in town for a couple of Babychams, an' we were both feelin' a bit tiddly. So I sat her down an' cut her hair for her, an' she did the same for me.”

No pattern, Woodend thought, no pattern at all. Jessie had died on her way home from school, Katie after an evening with her friend. God alone knew what Diane Thorburn had been doing. No, he corrected himself, the murderer knew too, because he had planned it, every step of the way.

“Then we tried the make-up on,” Peggy continued. “That was a real disaster, I don't think we had the faces for it. All that eye-liner made Katie look just like a corpse.” She shuddered as she realised what she'd said. “But the hair looked good,” she added hurriedly. “Of course, it would be dead old-fashioned now, but that was then.” She patted her curls self-consciously, while examining Woodend with a professional eye. She grimaced. “You really could do with a bit of a tidy-up. Do you want me to do it for you?”

“No, thank you,” the Chief Inspector said, aware, even without looking at him, that Rutter was grinning.

“It won't take a minute. I've got the brushes and scissors . . .”

“What did you do next?” Woodend asked.

“What? Oh sorry. Katie said she should probably be gettin' off home, so I walked her as far as the canal path. Then she rode off an' . . . I never saw her again.”

“Were there any narrow boats moored under the bridge that night?”

Peggy pursed her brow.

“There could have been. There usually are.”

“Do you know Jackie McLeash?” Rutter asked.

“Come again?”

“Jackie the Gypsy,” Woodend elucidated.

“Oh yeah,” Peggy smiled. “We used to play around his boat when we were kids. He's a really nice feller.”

Woodend cleared his throat.

“Did he ever touch you – interfere with you?”

“I don't think so,” Peggy said. “He used to help us on an' off his boat, but he never put his hand where he shouldn't. Anyway, he's not interested in little girls, he's . . .”