Sins of the Fathers (3 page)

‘And a very good nanny you are, sir,' said Paniatowski, who actually
did
remember the opening of the dual carriageway quite well, but had learned from previous experience that when Woodend was in the mood to blow off steam about ‘the modern world', as he somewhat disparagingly called it, the easiest thing was just to let him get on with it.

‘At long last, accordin' to the
Evenin' Courier
, two of the great mill towns of Lancashire had a connectin' road that was worthy of them,' Woodend continued. ‘Aye, an' where do you think they found the space from to make this modern wonder?'

‘They pulled down houses and despoiled the countryside,' Paniatowski said, deadpan.

‘They pulled down houses an' despoiled the countryside!' Woodend agreed. ‘Bloody good houses, some of them. Houses that had stood for two hundred years, an' would have stood for
another
two hundred if they'd been left alone. New houses went, an' all – houses that had only just gone up. An' I don't even want to talk about the huge bleedin' gash they tore through the fields and meadows!'

‘Well, that's progress for you, sir,' said Beresford, who had not been with the team long enough to have learned any better.

‘Progress!' Woodend repeated, derisively. ‘The road hadn't been opened for more than a few months before them same newspapers were complainin' that traffic was movin' along it at a snail's pace, an' sayin' that what Central Lancs really needed was a new dual carriageway to take some of the pressure off the old dual carriageway. An' what's the next step after that? A new-new dual carriageway to take the pressure off the old-new dual carriageway?'

He stopped speaking, not because he had run out of things to say on the subject but because of the flashing orange lights which had suddenly – and somewhat eerily – appeared out of the fog.

‘We've arrived, an' to prove it, we're here,' Woodend told his team.

The lay-by was long enough to accommodate half a dozen parked lorries, but there was only one there at that moment – a twelve-wheeler with the name ‘Holden Brothers Transport, Carlisle' painted on its side in large blue letters. Most of the rest of the available space was taken up by several police patrol cars, an ambulance and a Land Rover.

‘I see Dr Shastri's already here,' Woodend said approvingly as he parked behind the doctor's Land Rover. He turned his head to address the constable in the back of the car. ‘Have you met our esteemed an' intrepid police surgeon yet, Beresford?'

‘Can't say I have, sir.'

‘Then you've a real treat in store for you, lad. You're bound to fall in love with her – she could bring a statue out in a sweat – but however tempted you might feel to go romancin' her, I'd appreciate it if you'd curb the urge.'

‘I beg your pardon, sir?'

‘She's the best police surgeon that we've had in a very long while, so I don't want her fallin' for a handsome young bobby, getting' hitched to him, an' leavin' the job.'

Beresford felt himself starting to blush. Sergeant Paniatowski seemed to appreciate when Mr Woodend was joking and when he wasn't, the constable thought, but so far it was not a skill he had entirely mastered himself.

A uniformed inspector walked over to the Wolseley. ‘I've secured the site, sir,' he said.

Woodend winced.

Secured the site!

Why was it that so many bobbies now felt the need to talk like that, he wondered. At what point had good straight-forward policing become tangled up in jargon?

‘Who found the stiff?' he asked aloud.

‘The driver of that lorry. He pulled in because the fog was getting thicker. He noticed the body straight away, but thought it was just a tramp lying there at first. It was only when he got right on top of it that he could see there'd been foul play.'

‘An' where is he now?'

‘I got one of the lads to drive him into town. I thought he could use a good hot cup of tea.'

Now that
was
good policin', Woodend thought – an' not a hint of jargon in sight.

‘Right, well, I suppose we'd better go an' look at the corpse,' he said.

Emergency spotlights had been set up in a rough circle around the dead man, and kneeling next to the body was a woman wearing a heavy sheepskin jacket over a colourful silk sari.

‘How's it goin', Doc?' Woodend asked.

Dr Shastri looked up from her grisly work, and favoured him with one of her more radiant smiles.

‘My dear Mr Woodend,' she said warmly. ‘What a great pleasure it is to see you.'

‘The feelin's mutual,' Woodend told her. ‘What can you tell me about the body?'

Dr Shastri clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

‘Always so eager to get down to business, with not even a hint of polite chit-chat first,' she said. ‘You are completely bereft of social skills, aren't you, you poor fellow?'

Woodend grinned. ‘Completely,' he agreed. ‘Now what about my stiff, Doc?'

‘He was killed by a blow to the back of the head.'

‘How hard was it?'

‘Very violent indeed. If you wish to replicate the effect for yourself, I suggest you get a packet of crisps – any flavour will do – place it on a flat surface, and bring the palm of your hand down on it, as hard as you can.'

Woodend grimaced. ‘So whoever delivered the blow almost certainly meant to kill him?'

‘Undoubtedly. Especially in the light of the injuries the killer inflicted on his victim
after
he had delivered it.'

‘An' what might they have been?'

Dr Shastri straightened up, and moved away from the body.

‘See for yourself, my dear Chief Inspector,' she invited

The corpse had been placed on to a large plastic sheet. It was dressed in an expensive blue lounge suit, and since it was lying on its front, the wound to the back of the head was clearly visible.

The killer must have used
massive
force to stove in his skull like that, Woodend thought, letting his eyes travel slowly from the wound itself to the shoulders of the jacket, which were stained bright red.

‘He was not killed here,' Dr Shastri said conversationally, ‘so although pieces of his brain will have been spattered everywhere, I have very little hope of being able to recover any of them.'

Behind him, Woodend heard Beresford gulping for air.

‘Easy, lad,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Think of it as no more than a piece of dead meat.'

He turned his attention back on the corpse. There had been real anger – real
hatred
– behind the attack, he thought.

‘Where are the injuries which were inflicted after he was dead?' he asked Dr Shastri.

‘Ah, I must turn him over in order for you to see the results of the
post-mortem
attack,' the doctor said, crouching down again. ‘It might be wiser for you to leave now, Constable.'

‘I'll be all right,' Beresford said, unconvincingly.

‘Very well, that is your choice,' Shastri said, and expertly rolled the corpse over on to the other end of the plastic sheet.

It was the victim's mouth that Woodend noticed first – or rather, the place where the mouth had been. All that remained now was a mush of bone, muscle and flesh.

‘Jesus!' Woodend said.

‘I think I have managed to find most of the teeth,' Dr Shastri informed him. ‘Not that I expect them to tell us anything that we don't already know. I should have thought it would be fairly obvious to anyone what had happened to him.'

‘Aye, you don't need a medical degree to see he's been given a right good hammerin',' Woodend agreed.

‘But it is the other wound which truly fascinates me,' Dr Shastri continued. ‘I do not think I have ever come across an attack quite like that before.'

‘The other wound?' Woodend asked.

Dr Shastri laughed. ‘Tear your eyes away from his face for a moment and examine his mid-section,' she suggested.

The chief inspector shifted his gaze downwards. Pine's jacket was open and largely undamaged, but his shirt had been slashed by the same cut which had ripped through the flesh and muscle it had been covering.

The incision had opened up the dead man from just below his sternum right down to his pelvis, and exposed most of his stomach and a great deal of his intestines, thereby turning what had once been an ingenious biological machine into no more than a pile of bloody offal.

‘It must have been very messy work to carry out,' Dr Shastri said, clinically. ‘To tear through someone else's stomach in this way, you need a fairly strong stomach yourself.'

Yes, that was exactly what you would need, Woodend thought, as behind him, he heard the sound of Constable Beresford throwing up.

W
oodend stood in the reception room outside the chief constable's office, waiting for the green light (set into the door-frame) to flash and buzz, as a signal that he was now permitted to enter the inner sanctum.

He was anticipating a long wait, since this was the style of the man he had been summoned to see. Henry Marlowe measured his own importance by the fact that he
could
keep his subordinates waiting, and Woodend had no doubt that even once he was inside the office itself, the chief constable would prolong the wait by pretending to study whatever documents – however irrelevant to the matter in hand – that he happened to have on his desk at that particular moment.

The chief inspector looked out of the window. The fog which had plagued Whitebridge the previous day had almost completely lifted, and the late spring sun was making its first appearance in nearly a week. Birds were swooping and diving in the air over the police car park, and squirrels were busy scuttling around the bases of the nearby trees.

Life was renewing itself everywhere, Woodend thought fancifully, though – thanks to a person or persons as yet unknown – Bradley Pine would most definitely not be taking part in that particular process.

The green light buzzed.

It was probably a technical fault, Woodend thought, glancing down at his watch and noting that he had been standing there for no more than a couple of minutes. Or perhaps it was human error – a case of Marlowe pressing the button accidentally. Whichever it was, the chief constable couldn't be willing to see him already. But since the light undoubtedly
had
flashed – and his was not to reason why – he knocked on the door, then turned the handle and stepped inside.

Marlowe looked up from his paperwork immediately – another first! – and said, ‘I'd like a progress report on the investigation into Bradley Pine's murder, Chief Inspector.'

Woodend scratched his ear. ‘There hasn't
been
any progress to speak of,' he admitted. ‘The patrol cars have been alerted to look out for Pine's vehicle, but since the body wasn't discovered until most people were gettin' ready for bed, there wasn't much more we could do.'

This was the point at which the bollocking should come, Woodend thought. This was the point at which Marlowe should tell him that any halfway decent chief inspector would already have had the murderer under lock and key.

But that didn't happen. Instead, Marlowe said, ‘Being the first senior officer at the scene of the crime does not automatically give you the right to be put in charge of the investigation, you know.'

‘I appreciate that, sir,' Woodend replied.

‘However, after having given the matter due consideration, I
have
decided to assign the case to you,' Marlowe continued, ‘though naturally, taking into account both the prominence of the victim and the particularly gruesome manner of his death, there will be some conditions attached.'

‘What sort of conditions?' Woodend wondered.

‘I want this murder cleared up as soon as possible.'

‘Which means?'

‘Within the week.'

‘I can't promise that,' Woodend told the chief constable. ‘Conductin' a murder investigation's isn't like runnin' a bus company, where you know the route you goin' to have to cover, an' you can draw up some kind of timetable for how long it should take you.'

‘Well, of course I realize that, but—'

‘In fact, it's much more like gardenin'.'

‘Gardening!' Marlowe exclaimed. ‘How could it possibly be like gardening?'

‘Because you can do all kinds of things to encourage the seeds to begin sproutin', but until they actually do
,
you can't even think of beginnin' to think of harvestin' them.'

The chief constable shook his head – slowly, and almost despairingly. ‘There are times when you don't sound at all like an officer working in a modern police force,' he said.

‘There are times when I don't
feel
much like one, either,' Woodend admitted. ‘Listen, sir, you've often enough made it quite plain that you don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to lead an enquiry—'

‘And you've often enough given me ample grounds for that belief—'

‘—so why don't you simply assign the case to somebody you
do
have confidence in?'

Marlowe swallowed hard.

‘It's true that there have been times when your approach has made me seriously doubt your competence,' he said, ‘but there have also been times – especially in dealing with crimes of a bizarre nature – when you seem to have been able to solve cases which have quite baffled most of your colleagues.'

It was not a wise move to grin at his boss's obvious discomfort, but Woodend did it anyway.

‘Thank you, sir,' he said. ‘That means a lot to me – especially comin' from you.'

‘I don't know
why
you should have been so successful in those cases,' Marlowe continued, hurriedly. ‘Perhaps, after all, it was no more than a matter of luck.'