Sins of the Fathers (20 page)

‘You could be right,' Rutter said.

A uniformed constable entered the canteen, and walked straight over to their table.

‘Excuse me, sir,' he said to Woodend.

‘Yes?'

‘Mrs Hawtrey and her solicitor would like to see you now.'

Woodend nodded. ‘Well, that's it then,' he told his team. ‘It's all over bar the shoutin'.'

Foxy Rowton had a thin, pointy face and restless, searching eyes, but his nickname came not so much from his looks as from the manner in which he conducted his business. Half the serious criminals in Whitebridge had his telephone number either memorized or tattooed on their arms, and there were any number of men who, thanks to his efforts, were still walking free when – if justice had been allowed to run its course – they would have been banged up long ago.

Rowton was sitting in the interview room, next to his client, with his hand resting reassuringly on her arm. He gave the briefest of nods when Woodend entered the room.

‘Please sit down, Chief Inspector,' he said, as if this whole encounter was taking place on his
own
territory.

Woodend sat, without comment. After all, why not let Rowton have his moment at centre stage when, in the few moments, he'd become no more than a minor character in the drama which was being played out.

‘My client wishes to make a short statement, then is prepared to answer any questions you may care to put to her,' Rowton said. ‘Is that acceptable to you, Chief Inspector?'

‘Aye, as long as she
does
eventually answer my questions.'

‘She will.'

‘Then I'm all ears.'

‘I was not expecting Bradley Pine to come to my house that night,' Thelma Hawtrey said, almost as if she were reading – badly – from a prepared script. ‘But though I was not expecting him, I would not have been at all surprised if he had turned up unannounced. He often did that – especially late at night.'

‘Hang on!' Woodend said. ‘You told me you'd hardly seen him at all since your husband's funeral – an' even then it had been mostly by chance.'

‘First the statement, then the questions, if you don't mind,' Foxy Rowton said, rebukingly.

‘Oh, all right! Just get on with it!' Woodend replied.

‘That is precisely what my client was attempting to do when you interrupted her,' Rowton said. He turned to that client now. ‘Do please carry on, Mrs Hawtrey, whenever you feel ready.'

‘I heard a few cars that night, but not as many as usual, probably because of the fog,' Thelma Hawtrey continued. ‘Two of them even stopped quite close to my house, but since no one rang my door bell, I assumed they were either neighbours themselves, or were visiting neighbours. I was drinking wine as I watched the television, and without really noticing I was doing it, I finished a whole bottle. I suddenly realized I was quite drunk, and decided to go to bed. When I got out of my chair to turn the television off, the nine o'clock news was just starting.'

Woodend waited for her to say more, but she had plainly reached the end of her tale.

‘Is that it?' he asked.

‘What more do you want?' Rowton asked. ‘What more
can
Mrs Hawtrey tell you than what actually happened?'

‘Well, she could give me the name of her lover, for a start.'

Rowton looked pained. ‘Is that really absolutely necessary, Chief Inspector?' he asked.

‘You bet it bloody-well is!'

Rowton nodded to his client. ‘Go ahead.'

‘For the past three years, since shortly after my husband's death, I have been having an affair with Bradley Pine,' Thelma Hawtrey said.

‘What!' Woodend exploded.

‘That was clear enough, surely,' Rowton said.

‘You were havin' an affair – an' nobody else knew about it?' Woodend asked, incredulously.

‘We were very discreet,' Thelma Hawtrey said.

‘But why, for God's sake? You were both free as birds. You could have done what you liked.'

‘This is Whitebridge, where we are ruled not by a monarch and her government, but by the tyranny of public opinion,' Foxy Rowton said.

‘An' what's that supposed to mean, exactly?' Woodend asked.

‘It means that in some circles, though not perhaps the ones that you move in, Chief Inspector, there is a very keen sense of what is appropriate behaviour and what isn't.'

‘I haven't had much of a social life since my husband's death,' Thelma Hawtrey said, ‘but if it had become generally known that I'd started an affair so soon after his funeral, I would have had no social life at all.'

‘But it's now three years since your husband died,' Woodend said. ‘Surely there was no need to keep it a secret any longer.'

‘Not from my side, no,' Thelma Hawtrey agreed. ‘But there was from Bradley's. The electors of Whitebridge would not look favourably on a candidate who had a mistress.'

‘Then why didn't you get wed?'

‘We could have done that, I suppose. Bradley wanted to. But I have no wish to be married again to anyone – and certainly not to Bradley.'

‘No?'

‘No!'

‘Why not?'

‘Mainly because I didn't love him. In fact, I'm not sure that I even
liked
him that much.'

‘Then why …?'

‘But he was a stallion in the bedroom, and – in some strange way – that helped to ease the grief I was feeling for Alec.'

‘This is bollocks!' Woodend said. ‘You think that you can keep your real lover hidden away from me by confessin' to an affair you never had. Well, I'm not buyin' it!'

‘Mrs Hawtrey and Mr Pine were not always as discreet everywhere else as they had to be in places where they were both well known,' Foxy Rowton said.

‘Meanin' what?'

‘We found excuses for us both to be away from Whitebridge at the same time,' Thelma Hawtrey said. ‘Bradley would say he had to attend a mattress conference somewhere, and I would come up with some other convenient reason to explain my absence. Then we'd spend a few days in a hotel together, as man and wife. London was one of the places we went to. Brighton was another.'

‘An' I suppose you're about to tell me you can prove that, are you?' Woodend asked sceptically.

‘Yes, she is,' Foxy Rowton said. ‘The last time they went away together was only three weeks ago, just before the start of the election campaign.'

Mrs Hawtrey smiled. ‘Bradley said he needed a break before the campaign started to hot up,' she said.

‘They stayed in the Grand Hotel in Great Yarmouth for the weekend,' Rowton continued. ‘You'll find Mr Pine's name down in the register, and I'm sure that if you show Mrs Hawtrey's photograph to the hotel staff, they'll be more than willing to identify her as the woman they knew as
Mrs
Pine.'

Woodend had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Both Thelma Hawtrey and her solicitor sounded so sure of what they were saying that it simply had to be true.

‘So the only way Mrs Hawtrey could have got her lover to kill Mr Pine was if she'd persuaded Mr Pine to hit himself over the back of the head, and then drive himself out to the lay-by, which – considering he was already dead – would have been no mean feat,' Rowton said.

‘You're a very funny man,' Woodend told the solicitor. ‘You should be on the stage.'

Rowton looked suitably modest. ‘I bet you say that to all the solicitors who manage to run rings round you,' he said.

H
oly Trinity Catholic Orphanage for Boys had been established in a large country house which stood shivering at the foot of the Pennine Hills. Its design had been grand in concept but crude in execution, and the result was a heavy sandstone structure which squatted instead of soared, and had probably once been a Victorian wool-millionaire's misguided idea of gracious living.

The director's office, to which Woodend was shown, was panelled in dark oak and filled with heavy furniture which had been out of style long before the Second World War. There were photographs of groups of boys on the walls, and a display case holding sporting trophies and thus proclaiming to the whole world that even orphans can sometimes win prizes.

The director himself, Father Swales, was in his late sixties. His face was heavily lined, and his gnarled hands gave evidence of advanced arthritis, but his pale eyes suggested kindness as well as authority, and his welcoming smile was that of a man who was far from giving up on life.

‘You wanted to ask about Bradley Pine,' he said.

‘That's right,' Woodend agreed.

The director shook his head sadly. ‘Poor Bradley. To have come so far and yet have died in such a violent manner.'

‘You remember him well, do you?'

‘Oh yes, even after twenty-five long years, I remember him. But I must admit, it is far from clear to me how my memories of him will help you to catch his murderer.'

‘I'm not sure, either,' Woodend admitted.

But apart from the line of inquiry he was now following, what other options were open to him?

There was no disputing that Thelma Hawtrey's revelations had been a blow, and that they'd unravelled what he'd thought was a cast-iron case as if it were no more than a ball of string. So now he was like a gambler, who puts his last pound on the outsider in the last race of the day – or a centre-forward who hopes against hope that his misplaced shot will magically rebound into the goal-mouth in the few remaining seconds of the game.

‘I like to build up a picture of the victim in my head,' he explained to the director. ‘It helps me to see the world as he might have seen it – and sometimes, it leads me to his killer.'

The director nodded. ‘Very well, if you think it might help you, I will do my best to paint a picture for you of the boy I knew,' he promised. ‘Bradley was eleven when he came to us, and had already known more despair, at that tender age, than most of us will experience in a lifetime.'

‘You're sayin' he'd had a rough childhood?'

‘He had a
vile
childhood. His own mother died when he was just a baby. His father married again, and he and his new wife had another child – a little girl. It could have been a shining bright new start for all of them.'

‘But it wasn't?'

‘His father and his stepmother had skills by which they could have earned a very decent living – he was a motor mechanic, she was a ladies' hairdresser – but they were hopeless alcoholics, and so neither of them held a job down for very long. Bradley and his little half-sister were both badly neglected by them, and sometimes – when the drink took one of the parents the wrong way – they were actually physically abused.'

Woodend remembered what Monika Paniatowski told him about cigarette-burn scars on Bradley Pine's arms.

‘How did he come to be an orphan?' he asked.

‘Bradley's parents died in a car crash – doubtless they were both drunk at the time – and since he had no other relatives able or willing to take care of him, he was sent here.'

‘An' how did he settle in?'

‘Remarkably well. The orphanage is, by its very nature, a highly structured society, and structure was something that had been sadly lacking in Bradley's previous life. He embraced the order he found here. His locker was the tidiest and best set-out that I think I have ever seen.'

‘An' that was a habit which stayed with him,' Woodend said, thinking of the arrangement of both Pine's office and his home.

‘He also developed a remarkable self-discipline,' the director continued. ‘Once he had decided there was something he wished to achieve, he would work towards that goal with a slow, single-minded determination. He exhibited absolutely none of the impatience that most children – and indeed, a great many adults – would have shown in his situation.'

‘In other words, he was a bit cold an' ruthless,' Woodend suggested.

‘I suppose you could apply that term, if you feeling uncharitable,' the director said, with a hint of mild rebuke in his voice, ‘but I would much prefer to describe him in the way I just have. At any rate, I was not at all surprised to learn that he had risen to be a partner in the company we placed him in as a fifteen-year-old boy. Of all the orphans who have passed through this institution, he was the one of whom I expected the most.'

‘What can you tell me about his friends?' Woodend asked.

‘He didn't have any,' the director replied, without a second's hesitation. ‘And that was not because the other boys wouldn't accept him, but because he wouldn't accept them.'

‘Why was that?'

‘I suspect it was because he thought he didn't
need
them.'

‘Everybody needs somebody.'

‘Indeed they do, and in his case, the person he seemed to need was his sister, who had been placed in St Claire's Orphanage, in the care of Sister Martha and her nuns.' The director paused for a moment. ‘I think that little girl was the only person in the whole world who Bradley ever really cared about.'

‘What was the age difference between them?'

‘Round about four years. I suspect Bradley had to be both mother and father to her, almost from the moment she was born. And it was perhaps because of that – and perhaps because of what they had had to endure together – that they had developed an amazing bond with each other.'

‘An amazin' bond,' Woodend repeated, musingly. ‘How would you know that? Did he tell you?'

The director laughed. ‘As if he would have confided in me! As if he would have confided in
anybody
! No, Chief Inspector, he didn't tell me – I observed it for myself.'

‘So you allowed Bradley Pine an' his sister to see one another sometimes, did you?'

‘Not at first. Sister Martha and I discussed the matter when the children arrived at our respective orphanages, and we came to the conclusion that to allow them to meet would have a disturbing effect on both of them. We even feared that, in order to be together, they might contemplate running away. It wouldn't be the first time something like that had happened with orphans who'd been separated.'