Dying in the Dark (26 page)

‘No doubt I would – in an ideal world,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘But I write to a deadline and—'

‘The girl I have in mind was not only Lucy's closest friend, but also teaches at this school,' Miss Pringle said firmly. ‘I'm sure she wouldn't mind giving you a few minutes of her time.'

The first mention Woodend could find in the
Pemberton Guardian
of Lucy Higson, née Watkins, was a photograph taken in 1930, the year that she was born. Above a short piece announcing her birth was a grainy photograph of the proud parents holding up the baby for the world's inspection.

Lucy herself was little more than a white blob of a head wrapped in swaddling clothes, but the parents were much clearer. Lucy's mother, with a happy grin covering her face, looked very much like an old-fashioned version of the woman that Lucy had grown up to be. Her father was wearing a wide-lapelled pre-war suit, and looking much more serious. He reminded Woodend vaguely – and slightly troublingly – of someone else, though the Chief Inspector couldn't quite put his finger on who that someone else was.

There were various other peripheral references to Lucy over the next few years – she'd been Mary in the school nativity play and had won the egg-and-spoon race on sports' day – but it was not until 1952 that she featured again prominently. This time, she was photographed standing next to a soldier who looked a good few years older than she was. His name was Captain Clive Thornton, the newspaper said, and he and Lucy had decided to announce their engagement sooner than planned because the Captain was due to be posted overseas. Again, Woodend was struck by the fact that there was something familiar about the face.

The engagement did not last long. Clive was posted to Malaya, and was killed in the jungle, by communist insurgents. There was a long article in the
Pemberton Guardian
about the funeral of the dead local hero.

There was just one more photograph of Lucy to be found in the newspaper. This time she was standing next to Derek Higson, on the eve of her engagement to
him
.

And suddenly, Woodend saw the pattern! He checked back on the previous photographs, but even before he'd started the comparison, he was convinced he was right.

The three men, Lucy's father, her first fiancé and her eventual husband, could never have been mistaken for one another – could never even have been taken for brothers – but they were very much the same
type
.

Right from the beginning of the investigation, Woodend had been wondering what there had been about Derek Higson which led Lucy to want to marry him. Now he had his answer – and it was not an answer he welcomed.

‘We were about as close as close friends could be,' Mandy Miller told Paniatowski. ‘But we were very different.'

‘Different how?'

‘I could have told you, even back then, that I'd probably end up teaching art back at the old school, but Lucy always had a bit more about her. She'd got an inner strength most of us don't have. You'd only have had to see the way she handled her father's death to know that.'

‘When did her father die?'

‘When she was ten. It wasn't a long lingering illness or anything. One day he was there, and the next he was gone. The autopsy revealed he had a weak heart, but nobody had even suspected that before he actually died. It would have been a terrible thing for most girls to have gone through, but it was especially hard for Lucy, because she really did worship him. In fact, I don't think she ever got over losing him like that.'

‘What was she like as a person?'

‘Outgoing. Strong. Kind. Generous. The sort of girl I like to have in my classes, but so very rarely do.'

‘Boyfriends?'

‘Nothing serious. There were plenty of boys who would have given their right arms to go out with her, but she wasn't really interested. She said they all seemed so immature. But she had a terrific crush on my dad at one time. And on a couple of our friends' dads, now I come to think of it. Not that you can read much into that. Remember what you were like when you were thirteen or fourteen?'

‘Yes,' Paniatowski said, as the horrors of her childhood flashed briefly through her mind.

‘I'm afraid I can't tell you much about her
late
teens,' Mandy Miller said. ‘First she was sent off to boarding school, then she and her mother moved away from Pemberton. We swore we'd keep in touch, but you never do, do you?'

‘I was wondering what made her mother decide to send her off to boarding school,' Paniatowski said.

‘Oh, I think she'd
always
wanted to send her,' Mandy Miller said. ‘She just couldn't afford to until she got the legacy.'

‘What legacy?'

‘Lucy had a great-uncle living in Australia. When he died, he left all his money to Lucy and her mother. By all accounts, it was an absolute fortune. People around here used to joke about how they'd never realized they'd been rubbing shoulders with a future millionaire.'

‘So Lucy's mother was suddenly rich?'

‘Not her mother, so much. She was left comfortably off, but most of the estate went into trust for Lucy, until she was twenty-one.'

‘So Lucy's a rich woman in her own right?'

‘Loaded!' Mandy Miller said, sounding surprised. ‘Didn't you know that?'

The pub in the centre of Pemberton was called the Barley Mow. It had thick stone walls, and a log fire was burning merrily in the grate. Under normal circumstances, Woodend would have relished being there, but at that moment he was hardly aware of his surroundings at all.

‘We started out with two basic assumptions,' he said gloomily to Paniatowski. ‘The first was that Lucy Higson married Derek because of his money. Now we know that's not true. If anythin', it was the other way round. That upholsterer I talked to said what saved New Horizons from goin' belly-up was Lucy's managerial skills. An' that may have been part of it. But I'd be willin' to bet that a fair amount of her cash went into the business, too.'

‘I wouldn't be at all surprised,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘An' our second theory's been proved to be just as wrong,' Woodend continued. ‘We assumed that Lucy was a lesbian by nature, an' that marryin' Derek was a cover for that. Well, we couldn't have been more off-target, could we? There's no evidence at all that Lucy showed any inclination to fancy girls when she was growin' up. On the other hand, there's every indication to suggest that what she was lookin' for in a mate was a father-figure. An' Derek Higson fits that description to a T. Which tells us what?'

‘That she probably
does
love her husband just as much as she appears to,' Monika Paniatowski said. ‘That she probably wasn't having an affair with Pamela Rainsford at all. That it was another woman who Pamela was seeing. A woman she
nicknamed
Lulu for some reason of her own – though now she's dead we'll never know what that reason was.'

Woodend nodded. ‘It's like a house of cards, isn't it?' he said. ‘You take away one of the bottom ones, and the whole bloody structure collapses.'

‘In other words, if Lucy didn't kill Pamela, she had no reason to kill Maria, either?'

‘Exactly,' Woodend agreed. ‘The Cortina GT parked on Ash Croft probably didn't belong to Lucy at all. There's absolutely no reason why it should have. It might not even have been supplied by Melton's-bloody-Motors. The fact is, we've been relyin' on it bein' a local car, but it could have come from anywhere.'

‘So what do we do now?' Paniatowski asked.

‘What
can
we do now?' Woodend replied. ‘We go back to Whitebridge with out tails between our legs.'

‘Never mind,' Paniatowski said, trying to sound optimistic. ‘Tomorrow is another day.'

‘Aye, it is,' Woodend agreed. ‘It's the day that Paul Melton informs the Chief Constable that I nicked his list of GT owners. It's the day I find myself under suspension, pendin' the settin' up of a board of inquiry.'

T
hey didn't say much on the journey back to Whitebridge, because there wasn't a lot to say.

They had no leads.

No new ideas to bounce off each other.

Nothing.

And the closer they got to home, the more an air of despondency descended on them, until it was almost suffocating.

They would never crack this case, Woodend told himself, as they drove back into the depressingly persistent rain.

They would never find out who killed sweet, helpless Maria. Bob Rutter would spend the best years of his life rotting away in some stinking gaol for a crime he never committed. And after so many close scrapes with the Chief Constable, he would finally go down in flames himself.

It was already dark by the time they reached Whitebridge centre, and the rain showed no signs of easing off.

‘Do you fancy a quick one at the Drum an' Monkey?' Woodend asked his passenger.

‘Not really,' Paniatowski replied.

‘Neither do I, as a matter of fact,' Woodend admitted. ‘But I think I might as well go an' have one anyway, because I don't particularly feel like doin' much of anythin' else, either.'

He dropped Paniatowski off at headquarters, and drove on alone to the pub. He had no plans for what to do when he'd finished drinking, so maybe he'd just keep on drinking until some sort of plan came to him.

He was at the bar, ordering his first pint of best bitter, when he felt a tap on the shoulder.

‘Hello, hello, hello. I'm afraid I must ask you to accompany me to the police station,' said a voice behind him, in the mock-pompous way that uniformed policemen always speak in cheap films, but rarely do in real life.

Woodend turned round. The man who'd addressed him had a roundish red face, and thinning red hair. They were of an age, Woodend guessed, and the other man seemed vaguely familiar.

‘Don't you want to ask me
why
you have to accompany me to the station?' the man said.

‘Why do I have to accompany you to the police station?' Woodend asked, playing along with the obvious gag because he really couldn't be bothered to do anything else.

‘Why do I have to accompany you to the police station,
officer
?' the other man said.

‘Why do I have to accompany you to the police station, officer?' Woodend repeated dutifully.

‘Because I can't find my way on my own.' The red-faced man laughed. ‘The old jokes are always the best, aren't they, Charlie?'

‘I'm sorry, but—' Woodend began.

‘You surely haven't forgotten who I am, have you?' the red-faced man asked, in a tone of voice which fell neatly between amazement and umbrage.

‘Yes, I think I must have done – but I'm almost certain that we've met before.'

‘Met! Met? I should say we have! We
met
, as you put it, every school day for nine years. I'm Terry Dawes!'

Of course he was, Woodend thought.

Foxy Dawes! The school bully! The nasty little bastard whose teeth he'd once knocked out.

‘How are you doin', Foxy?' he asked.

Dawes frowned. ‘Nobody's called that for years,' he said. ‘As a matter of fact, I'd rather you didn't call it me now.'

‘Well, I'll do my best not to,' Woodend promised, ‘but old habits die hard, don't they,
Foxy
?'

Terry Dawes looked like a man considering whether or not he should take offence.

‘The thing is,' he said, plainly having decided not to, ‘I was reading in the paper about how the grammar school is having a reunion, and I asked myself why the toffs should have all the fun.' He waited for Woodend to make some comment, and when it was plain that none was forthcoming, decided to plough on. ‘It's been nearly forty years since we said goodbye to the dear old school, you know, Charlie—'

‘The
old
school, anyway,' Woodend interrupted.

‘… and I saw no reason at all why we shouldn't copy the snobs from the top of the hill and have a reunion of our own.'

‘Didn't you?' Woodend asked, noncommittally.

‘I did not,' Dawes said over-emphatically. ‘I had a bit of trouble tracking down some of the lads, but a famous man like you was easy enough to find. Just popped into the police station, and announced I was an old friend of yours, They said right away that I'd probably find you here. Apparently you've become a world champion at quaffing the wheat and the hop, and this is well known to be your favourite watering-hole.'

‘You weren't strictly tellin' them the truth at the station, were you now, Foxy?'

‘Wasn't I?'

‘No, you weren't. There's a lot of words I could think of to describe our relationship, but “friends” isn't one of them.'

Dawes looked a little downcast. ‘I wouldn't have put it quite like that,' he said.

‘I would,' Woodend told him. ‘So you're organizin' a reunion, are you? What do you hope to get out of it personally?'

Dawes tried to seem shocked by the question, and didn't quite make it. ‘Nothing,' he said. ‘Nothing at all.'

‘Pull the other one,' Woodend said. ‘You always had an angle, even when you were a nipper. So if you're goin' to all this trouble, you're doin' it for a reason. My guess is that you're either sellin' or beggin'. Which one is it?'

‘I wouldn't call it
begging
,' Dawes said haughtily. ‘Far from it, in fact. I thought I might take up a few minutes of the meeting to make my old friends aware of a unique business opportunity in wholesale carpeting, but that would be to their advantage, rather than mine. After all, a lot of you must have quite a bit of spare cash lying about doing nothing, and most people would welcome the chance to double or triple it in less than a year.'