The Dark Lady (6 page)

The steward shrugged. “Now an' again, when they've had a few drinks, there'll be an argument – usually about the war, of course – but it's never come to blows. Leastwise, it hasn't come to blows in here. They all like the subsidised beer they get in the club too much to do anythin' which might make me recommend to the committee that they should be barred.”

“Right,” Woodend said. “It's time to get this show on the road.” He turned to face the BCI shift men. “Can I have your attention, please,” he called out in a loud voice.

At the individual tables, muttered conversations gradually petered out. Woodend waited until he had total silence, then said, “I expect some of you are not happy about bein' here. That's perfectly understandable. But the plain fact is that you were the last people, apart from the murderer, to see Gerhard Schultz alive. Now, that doesn't make you automatic suspects, but you must appreciate that it doesn't rule any of you out, either.”

He stopped to light a Capstan Full Strength. The killer could be one of these men, he thought – in fact, it was highly likely that that was the case.

“If the guilty party is in this room,” he continued, “I'm tellin' him one thing right now – it might take me a while, but I'm goin' to find him. For the rest of you, I'm simply appealin' for your help. Anythin' you might have seen that was a little unusual, tell me about it. Anythin' you might have heard that could provide me with a pointer, let me know.”

He paused to give his words time to sink in, and noticed that one of the Poles had leant across the table and was talking to one of his friends in a low voice.

The chief inspector nodded his head in the Pole's direction. “What's yon bugger's name?” he asked Tony.

“Zbigniew Rozpedek.”

“Excuse me for interruptin', Mr Rozpedek,” Woodend said, “but if you'd like to share your thoughts with us, sir, instead of just tellin' them to your mate, I'm sure we'll be very grateful.”

Rozpedek looked up. He was around forty – as most of the men in the room were – and had a large nose and fiery eyes.

“I do not have thoughts to share,” he said defiantly.

“You seemed to have enough a minute ago.”

“I am merely translating what you said for my cousin.”

So some of these sods didn't even speak English, Woodend thought. Things were just getting better and better.

“The way you can help is that
you
know what's usual around here an' what's not,” Woodend continued to the men in general. “That's not an advantage I have as somebody comin' in from the outside. So what I'm goin' to do now is give you a couple of minutes to rack your brains for any little incident that evenin' which was out of the ordinary.”

He could have asked them to think in silence, but he didn't. Instead, he studied the way they exchanged whispers. What all four tables had in common, he decided, was that each of them had a natural leader to whom the others turned for guidance.

On the Polish table that leader was Zbigniew Rozpedek, the man who may or may not have been translating Woodend's remarks for his cousin. The Italian table was under the control of the heavily moustached Luigi Bernadelli. A red-faced balding man, who Tony said was called Mike Partridge, ran the English table. And in charge of the Germans was a thin, intense man whose name was Kurt Müller.

Woodend let a full five minutes elapse before saying, “All right, that should have been plenty of time for you all to remember. Is there anyone with somethin' he'd like to tell me?”

“It was a perfectly normal night,” said Kurt Müller. “We stayed here until closing time, and then we all went home.”

And by “we” he doesn't mean everybody in the room, Woodend thought. The only people he's speaking for are the Germans.

“We didn't notice anything either,” said Mike Partridge, and Luigi Bernadelli and Zbigniew Rozpedek nodded their heads in agreement.

Woodend sighed. This was the response he'd been expecting, but it still came as a disappointment.

“You may remember somethin' later,” he said, “an' if you do, don't be shy about comin' forward. In the meantime, as soon as my sergeant's taken down your names and addresses, you can go.”

Rutter took his notepad out of his pocket, and pulled up a chair at the Polish table. Woodend lit up another Capstan Full Strength, and headed for the door. A walk around the park would clear his head, he decided – not that he'd got much in his head which needed clearing yet.

He stepped into the corridor and saw a woman standing by one of the tall windows. From her stance, it was obvious that she was waiting for someone. And in all probability, Woodend thought, that someone was him.

He ran his eyes quickly up and down her. She was twenty-three or twenty-four and smartly dressed in a black and white check suit which played down her natural curves. Her hair was short, blonde, and tightly permed. She was wearing glasses with heavy frames, but Woodend would have put money on the lenses being nothing but plain glass. She was, he decided, a pretty girl who was doing her best to play down her prettiness.

The girl took a step towards him, and pulled a notepad out of her bag. “Chief Inspector Woodend?” she asked.

“That's right, lass.”

She frowned, as if she didn't like being called a lass. “I'm Elizabeth Driver,” she said crisply. “I represent the
Maltham Guardian
.”

She put such stress on the words “
Maltham Guardian
” that she might have been announcing she worked for an important paper like the
Daily Mirror
. Woodend forced himself to suppress a grin.

“An' what can I do for you, Miss Driver?” he asked.

The girl licked the lead of her pencil. “Well, obviously, I'd like to know how your inquiries are going.”

“I've only just started my investigation, la . . . Miss Driver,” Woodend said. “Right now, if you've read your own paper, you probably know more about the murder than I do.”

Elizabeth Driver smiled, but it was such an engineered, calculated smile that Woodend could almost hear the gears clicking it into place.

“You wouldn't by any chance be holding out on me, would you, Chief Inspector?”

Woodend shook his head. “It's always been my policy to co-operate with the press whenever possible.”

“The thing is, covering this murder case is a really big opportunity for me,” Elizabeth Driver told him – and the earnest, eager expression which came to her face suddenly made her look no more than about fifteen. “If I can get some of the national newspapers to take up my stories on the investigation, it could be my ticket out of the provinces.”

“I wouldn't get my hopes up too high, lass,” Woodend advised her. “This murder might be creatin' quite a stir round here, but it won't cause even a ripple in the nationals.”

“That's where you're wrong,” Elizabeth Driver told him. “It's going to create a huge splash.”

“Trust me on this one,” Woodend said. “I've investigated two other murders in Cheshire, an' neither of them has merited more than a small paragraph tucked away at the back of the papers.”

Elizabeth Driver was smiling again, and this time her smile could only be described as triumphant.

“What you say may have been perfectly true for those other cases you've worked on,” she told him, “but they were completely different.
They
didn't involve the Dark Lady, did they?”

T
he sun had sunk behind the trees and, unseen by the two men who were strolling through the park, was casting its dying glow over the still waters of Westbury Mere. An outside observer – and there were several peeping from behind the curtained windows of the huts – would have said that the taller of the men was doing no more than stretching his legs and reflecting on United's chance of winning the Cup, whilst the shorter stuck to his heel like a devoted dog. But the outside observer would have been wrong about both of them.

From previous experience, Rutter knew that there were two situations in which Woodend's mind worked at its best. The first was when he had a pint in one hand and a Capstan Full Strength in the other. The second was when ambling, apparently aimlessly, through the area where whichever crime they were investigating had been committed. And on both sets of occasions, the best thing his loyal bagman could do was to take a back seat until Cloggin'-it Charlie's synapses had made their own – often unique – connections.

“What do you think of Simon Hailsham?” the chief inspector said, completely out of the blue.

“I find his whole attitude rather supercilious,” Rutter replied.

“Supercilious,” Woodend repeated. “That's one of them big words like ‘rhinoceros', isn't it?” He laughed. “But I know just what you mean, lad. He's typical of your officer class. What's really got me bothered about him, though, isn't high-handedness – it's the conversation he an' Schultz had just before Schultz got topped.”

“Why's that, sir?”

“Because, accordin' to Tony the bar steward – who doesn't seem to be a lad who misses much – the only things they talked about were the redundancies at the plant, an' the so-called Dark Lady.”

“So what's wrong with that? They worked together, so it was natural they'd discuss BCI, and the Dark Lady had, supposedly, just made a rather dramatic appearance.”

“True,” Woodend agreed. “All very true. But from my experience, whenever you get two war veterans together the first thing they do is start swappin' yarns, especially when there's some alcohol involved. Yet there you had a couple of fliers, both of whom had fought in the Battle of Britain, an' the subject never came up.”

“The Germans did lose both the Battle of Britain and the whole war,” Rutter pointed out. “Perhaps Hailsham was merely being tactful.”

“Aye, tactful,” Woodend said thoughtfully. “The thing is, tact doesn't strike me as bein' one of Simon Hailsham's main strengths.” He stopped to light up a cigarette. “But let's put that aside for the moment – I think it's time we did a bit of visitin'.”

Rutter took his notebook out of his pocket. “Who do you want to see?” he asked.

“One of the Poles. No, on second thoughts, I'll tell you what: let's start with the Italians. We'll have a word with that Bernadelli feller – you know, the one with a moustache like a scrubbin' brush.”

Bob Rutter scanned his list. “This is Elm Avenue, and he lives at number thirty-two, so we must be very close to his house,” he said.

“Then it seems like it was meant to be, doesn't it?”

They crossed the road and knocked on Bernadelli's door. A woman opened it. Woodend's eyes clicked, registering the details: late thirties; hair greying, but still an attractive face; wearing a bright floral pinafore which was spotlessly clean and faultlessly ironed.

“Are you Mrs Bernadelli, madam?” Rutter asked.

“Yes, that's me,” the woman replied.

She had what the sergeant had come to recognise, during the course of his other two investigations in the area, as a Cheshire accent – and there was a slight tremble in her voice.

“We'd like to have a few words with your husband, if he's at home,” Woodend said.

She should have been expecting it, once she'd seen who the callers were, but the woman still managed to look shocked. “You haven't . . . I mean you don't think he's the one who . . .?”

“We just want a talk,” Woodend said gently. “Nobody's accusin' him of anythin'.”

An expression of relief appeared on the woman's face. “You'd better come in, then,” she said.

They walked down a narrow passageway, then turned left into the living room. Woodend's gaze swept the lightwood three-piece suite, the veneered teak table and the seventeen-inch television set. He noticed that the carpet, like Mrs Bernadelli's pinafore, had a floral motif, and that the brass ornaments on the sideboard had been recently polished.

“I must say, you've got the place lookin' very nice indeed, Mrs Bernadelli,” he said.

The woman positively simpered. “Well, I do like to keep things ‘just so' for my Lou,” she said. “He works very hard, an' when he comes home he's entitled to a bit of comfort.”

Rutter shook his head slightly, in silent admiration. A minute earlier this woman had been terrified of Woodend, and now he had her eating out of his hand. And as had been the case when he'd complimented Tony the bar steward on his beer, he'd managed to soft-soap the woman while, at the same time, being completely sincere.

“An' where's your husband now?” Woodend asked.

“He's on the lavatory,” Mrs Bernadelli said. “We've got one inside, you know,” she added proudly.

Woodend smiled. “It's a bit different from when we were growin' up, isn't it eh? I remember how I used to hate that journey to the bottom of the yard on a cold winter night.”

“Me, too,” the woman agreed. “Your candle was always blowin' out, wasn't it?”

“Course, the worst thing was when they used to come round an' empty the pans on a Thursday,” Woodend continued. “The stink was terrible. I used to feel sorry for them sanitary engineers.” He winked at her. “Not that sanitary engineers was what we called them.”

The woman giggled. “We didn't used to call them that either.”

“Still, we've put that behind us now, you an' me, haven't we, lass?” Woodend continued.

Making her identify with him, Rutter noted. Pulling down the barriers between policeman and potential suspect's wife.

“We've been lucky, Lou an' me,” Mrs Bernadelli said. “You have to say, BCI's really looked after us. Lou's got a steady job, an' we've got this house. Yes, we've been
very
lucky.”