Golden Mile to Murder (14 page)

He tried to picture the scene as it had been when Charlie Woodend was growing up. The mill's hooter sounding before first light had even broken. The sound of clogs on cobbles, as the workers made their way to the gate. The huge cacophony of noise within the mill itself – a noise so loud that, according to Woodend, the weavers had learned to lip read, which was a handy talent to have acquired when they went deaf (as, inevitably, they did) in early middle age.

Just beyond the mill was the place he had come to visit – a single-storied, somewhat ramshackle garage which, in addition to selling petrol, offered speedy repairs at economical prices.

As Rutter pulled up in the forecourt, his front wheels ran over a rubberised wire which rang a bell in the office. The man who answered the summons was wearing a blue boiler suit which encased his plump little body like a second skin. White stubble covered his chin, and a greasy cloth cap was perched on his head. He was at least sixty, Rutter thought – possibly older – but though the harsh Lancashire weather had taken a toll on his skin, his eyes were bright and sharp enough to have belonged to a much younger man.

By the time Rutter had got out of his car, the old man had drawn level with him.

‘I'm looking for the owner of this garage,' Rutter said.

‘That's me,' the old man replied. ‘Albert Grimsdyke. What can I do for thee?'

‘Police. Detective Inspector Rutter.'

Rutter reached inside his jacket pocket for his warrant card, but Grimsdyke shook his head.

‘Dunna bother theesen about no papers,' he said. ‘Tha'll be that new bobby – up from London – willt'a?'

‘How did you know that?' Rutter asked.

‘It's not easy keppin' things like that quiet in a town like Whitebridge,' the old man said. ‘What can I do for thee, lad?'

‘I'm making some inquiries – of a routine nature – at all the garages in the area.'

‘An' what tha' wants to know is if any bugger's offered me a second-hand car wi' no logbook at a knockdown price,' the garage owner said.

‘Why should you assume that?'

‘In the old days tha' could leave anythin' tha' owned out on the street, an' be sure it'd be there when tha' got back,' the old man said. ‘But times have changed. There's bin a lot o' cars pinched from round here recently, an' now here tha' ist – sniffin' around like a hound that's got a whiff o' the fox. Well, it dun't tek a genius to put them two things together, dust it?'

‘And
has
anyone offered you a second-hand car with no logbook?' Rutter asked.

The garage owner shook his head. ‘They'd ha' more sense. They'd know I'd be on the phone to the nearest cop shop afore they'd even had time to scratch their arses.'

Rutter grinned. ‘Have you always been in the garage business, Mr Grimsdyke?'

The old man took off his cloth cap and rubbed his bald head. ‘How old dust tha' think I am, lad?'

‘Fifty-eight,' Rutter said, veering on the side of the complimentary.

‘I'm seventy-two,' Grimsdyke told him, ‘an' when I were growin' up, there wasn't enough motor cars in Whitebridge to kepp one garage goin', let alone the fifteen or twenty there must be now. I started out in th' mills, like me father an' gran'father before me. What I've learned about engines, I've picked up as I've gone along.'

A new figure appeared from behind the garage – a young woman. Like Grimsdyke, she was dressed in a blue boiler suit, but in her case the curves it hugged were much more appealing.

She saw the two men talking, and made a beeline for them, but once she'd drawn level she ignored Rutter, and spoke directly to the old man.

‘Does the customer have a problem, Grandad?' she asked.

‘He's not a customer,' the old man told her. ‘He's a bobby. From London.'

The girl raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘From London?' she repeated.

‘I used to work in London,' Rutter explained. ‘Now I'm in the Central Lancs Police.'

Not quite true, he reminded himself. He
would
be a member of the local force, but not until the next day. Any investigation he was doing now was strictly unofficial – an attempt to get one jump ahead of the game.

He took a closer look at the girl's face. She was around twenty, he guessed. She had dark brown hair, a button nose and Cupid's bow mouth. There was a smear of grease on one of her cheekbones which, despite himself, he found erotic. And she was frowning as if she had found herself in a situation she would much rather have avoided.

‘Can you just check when Mr Metcalfe's booked in for his oil change, Grandad?' she asked the old man.

‘I know exactly when it is,' the old man replied. ‘Half-past two this afternoon.'

‘You might have got the time wrong,' the girl told him gently. ‘You do that, sometimes, you know.'

‘I'm sure—'

‘Please just check it for me,' the girl said insistently. ‘The book's in the office.'

‘A' reet. If it'll kepp thee happy,' Grimsdyke agreed.

The girl watched the old man walk to the office, waiting until he was inside before she turned to Rutter, allowing her brown eyes to flash with anger.

‘Have you got any identification?!' she asked brusquely.

Rutter produced his warrant card. The girl examined it carefully.

‘What do you think you're doing bothering an old man like that?' she demanded fiercely, when she was satisfied that he really was who he said he was.

‘Could I know who I'm talking to?' Rutter countered.

‘Jenny Grimsdyke. The old man's my grandfather.'

‘I'd gathered that. Well, Miss Grimsdyke, I'm conducting an official inquiry and—'

‘But why bother the old man?' Jenny Grimsdyke repeated.

‘He is the owner of the garage, isn't he?'

‘On paper,' Jenny Grimsdyke admitted, ‘but half the time he's no idea what's going on.'

‘He seemed sharp enough to me.'

‘So you caught him on a good day.' Jenny Grimsdyke's aggressive expression melted away, and was replaced by one which could almost be called pleading. ‘Listen, would you like to know how things really are round here?'

‘Certainly.'

‘The business is struggling to keep its head above water. I'm putting in fifteen-hour days just to meet the bills. It would be better all round if Grandad retired and gave me a chance to get on with my own life.'

‘But I take it he doesn't want to do that?'

Jenny Grimsdyke snorted. ‘He built the business up from nothing. He had a few good years in the fifties – but now it's nothing again. Only he won't accept that. He loves the place. So I keep it running for him for him as best I can.' A trace of her earlier anger returned to her eyes. ‘And I don't want him bothered. Do you understand that? If you need any help in your “official inquiries”, then come to me – because I'm the only one around here who really knows what's going on.'

‘All right,' Rutter agreed. ‘In that case, I'll ask you same question I asked your grandfather. Have you been offered any second-hand cars at under their market value?'

Jenny Grimsdyke threw back her head and laughed out loud. ‘Look at this place!' she said. ‘Do you think we've got the spare cash to buy
any
car, even a beaten-up old crock?'

‘So I take it the answer's no.'

‘If I was trying to sell a stolen car, this is the last place I'd bring it,' Jenny Grimsdyke replied.

She had a point, Rutter thought.

‘Thank you for your help, Miss Grimsdyke,' he said. ‘I don't think I'll be bothering you again.'

He turned and walked back to his car. He was just climbing behind the wheel when the old man emerged from the office.

‘I was reet a' along,' Grimsdyke called to his granddaughter. ‘Mr Metcalfe's service is booked in for two-thirty.' He turned his attention to Rutter. ‘Ist thee off, lad?'

‘Yes, I am.'

The old man favoured him with a smile. ‘Well, come again,' he said. ‘Only next time tha' might be wise to bring an interpreter wi' thee.'

F
leetwood, where the hit-and-run accident had so recently occurred, was in many ways a poor relation to Blackpool – a resort which had both sands and sea, yet had never quite caught on. Some people did spend their holidays there, it was true. And there were always day-trippers who came to see what lay at the very end of the tramline. But any dreams the town might once have had of being a mecca of entertainment had long since dimmed, and now its main claim to fame lay in being the home of Fisherman's Friend throat lozenges.

Bounded as it was by the Irish Sea to the west and north, and the River Wyre to the east, Fleetwood stuck out like a raised thumb on the fist of the Fylde Peninsula, and the corner of Blakiston Street and Walmsley Street – which was where Monika Paniatowski was standing at that moment – could probably best be described as in the right-hand tip of that thumb's jagged nail.

‘The old lady was actually on the zebra crossing when she was knocked down, was she?' Monika asked.

‘Right slap-bang in the middle of it,' the man next to her confirmed.

Monika looked first to her left and then to her right. The road was as straight as an arrow in both directions.

‘Can you give me some more details?' she asked.

Detective Sergeant Colin Howarth nodded. He was a youngish man, perhaps no more than a year or two older than Paniatowski herself, but unlike the white-haired Sergeant Collins, who still took his job seriously, Howarth had an air about him which suggested he was already mentally coasting towards retirement.

‘The vehicle involved in the accident was travelling south,' the local sergeant said.

‘How can you be sure of that?'

‘The victim took the impact of the crash on her right side. We know what point she started out from and where she was going to, so unless she'd turned back on her own tracks – which she had no reason to do at that time of night – she was crossing from this side of the road to the other when the vehicle hit her, which must mean that the car was coming from over there,' he pointed up the road, ‘and heading out of Fleetwood.'

‘What else have you got?'

‘From the extent of her injuries, we know that the vehicle hit the poor old biddy at considerable speed – possibly as high as sixty miles an hour. She was thrown right up into the air, as you'd imagine.'

‘Must have done her a lot of damage.'

‘It killed her!'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘What I mean is, the injuries which led to her death must have been quite horrific.'

‘Broke at least a couple of dozen bones, I think.'

You think? Paniatowski repeated to herself. You
think
. You should bloody
know
!

‘And then there was the cut on her back,' Howarth added.

‘What cut on her back?'

‘It was about two inches long and a quarter of an inch wide.'

‘And what caused it?'

‘The pathologist is still working on that.'

Getting information out of Howarth was like pulling teeth, Paniatowski thought.

‘Any forensic evidence?' she asked.

Howarth shrugged. ‘A few paint scrapings. A bit of glass.'

‘And have you learned anything from them?'

‘The boffins in Whitebridge are working on it, but they haven't been able to identify them yet. And even if when they can, I don't see what good it will do. Say the paint comes from a Vauxhall Victor. Do you have any idea how many Victors there are in Lancashire alone?'

‘What about witnesses?' Paniatowski said – almost snapped.

‘There were none that we could find. It was gone midnight, you see. The pubs had all been closed for well over an hour, and everybody who'd been out drinking had gone home to bed.'

‘Except for the victim and the driver,' Paniatowski pointed out.

‘Yes, except for them.'

‘What was
she
doing out so late at night?'

‘Her daughter and son-in-law had been attending some sort of company dinner in Preston. She was babysitting her grandchildren. The son-in-law offered to drive her back home, but she said it wasn't far, and she'd be perfectly all right walking. And so she would have been, if some nutter hadn't ploughed into her.'

‘You think he'd been drinking?'

‘Seems likely, doesn't it? It's hard to see how he could have missed seeing her on the crossing if he'd been sober.'

Paniatowski opened her handbag and took out her cigarettes. ‘Do you have
any
real leads?'

‘None,' Sergeant Howarth admitted. ‘We've conducted a door-to-door inquiry that's taken in half the population of Fleetwood, and I've had my lads ring up every garage within a twenty-mile radius to check if anybody's tried to book in a car that had some unexplained damage. And it all got us absolutely nowhere.'

‘But you
are
still investigating it?'

‘Of course we are,' Howarth replied, without much conviction. ‘But like I said, unless a surprise witness suddenly comes forward – or the driver suffers a bout of remorse and gives himself up – I can't see us getting a result on this one.'

‘Was that Inspector Davies' opinion, too?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Sort of.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘To tell you the truth, I don't think Mr Davies cared much about the case one way or the other.'

‘And why was that, do you suppose?'

‘I think he had other things on his mind.'

‘Such as?'

‘I've absolutely no idea,' Howarth said – and Paniatowski was sure that he was lying.

Monika flicked her lighter open and lit a cigarette. ‘Thank you for your help, Sergeant,' she said.