Golden Mile to Murder (3 page)

‘I went round to see Billy's widow, Edna, this morning,' Turner told him.

‘How is she, sir?'

‘She's putting on a brave front, though I imagine she's absolutely devastated. But she has at least got one consolation. And do you know what that is?'

‘No, sir.'

‘That her husband was a first-class officer, and died as much a hero as any soldier who was killed in the last war.'

‘And so he did,' Hanson said, sounding indignant even at the possibility that anyone could even consider thinking otherwise. ‘I don't know what case he was working on when he died, but it's obvious to me that whatever it was, he was getting so close to cracking it that the villains had him killed.'

‘That's one way of looking at it,' Turner agreed.

‘And what's the other way?'

Turner hesitated for a second. ‘There have been rumours buzzing around the station,' he said. ‘No, not even that. There've been the merest
hints
of rumours. Have you heard any of them?'

‘No, sir.'

Turner sighed again. ‘There's just the two of us here, son, and this conversation is strictly off the record. So stop pissing about and open up for me.'

Hanson shrugged awkwardly. ‘I may have got a little bit of the buzz,' he admitted, ‘but I didn't pay attention to it.'

‘What if those rumours are true?' Turner demanded. ‘What if Punch really was up to what they say he was up to? If that comes to light, it'll leave the Blackpool force with its reputation tarnished, and Edna Davies will be forced to face the fact that she never really knew the man she'd been married to all those years.'

‘I hadn't thought of it like that before,' Hanson admitted. ‘But you're right – there's no question about that. So what do we do about it? Try and get Mr Woodend off the case?'

Turner shook his head. ‘That wouldn't work,' he said. ‘Dick Ainsworth's the head of CID for this county, and once that bastard's made his mind up about something, there's no changing it.'

‘Well, then . . .'

‘So we're going to have to content ourselves with just minimising the damage.'

‘And what would that entail, sir?' Hanson asked, sounding as if he were not entirely happy with the way the conversation was going.

Turner placed an avuncular hand on the sergeant's shoulder. ‘Charlie Woodend's not a man for tackling any investigation mob-handed,' he said, ‘but he will need at least one man on his team with some local knowledge. I'm going to suggest that that man is you. It will be your job to give the chief inspector all the help he needs in solving the murder – you're quite right about everybody on the force wanting the bugger who killed Punch caught – but you'll also be there to steer him away from any of the grey areas we'd much rather he didn't go into. Do you understand what I'm saying, Sergeant Hanson? Am I making myself completely clear?'

The younger detective thought about it for a few moments. ‘Yes, I think so, sir,' he said finally.

‘And you'll do it?'

Hanson nodded. ‘Whatever else may or may not have been true about Mr Davies, he was a bloody good feller to work for, and I'd like to see him buried with honour.'

Turner turned his gaze back towards the sea again. A breeze had blown up and the fluffy blue-grey waves were considerably higher than they'd been a few minutes earlier.

Everything changes, he thought. The weather. The seasons. The way people look – and what they expect out of life. If the rumours were true, then Punch Davies had certainly changed from the earnest young bobby he'd been a few years earlier into a different kind of man entirely. But then wasn't what he'd been through with his kid enough to change
anybody
? Well, whatever had happened had happened, and Punch was dead. Sergeant Hanson wanted to see him buried with honour, and so did everybody else. So what would be the
point
in raking up the muck now?

W
oodend sat at a corner table in the saloon bar of the Rising Sun, his gaze fixed vaguely on the women's toilet into which Monika Paniatowski had vanished as soon as they'd reached the pub. He took a reflective sip of his pint of Thwaites' Best Bitter. Being back in a place where they served decent ale should have put him in seventh heaven, he thought. Yet he was feeling far from happy. He'd expected his new boss – if Ainsworth was at like all the other bosses he'd ever worked for – to become antagonistic towards him over the course of time. But from the very beginning of their relationship? That was not good. And he didn't like being sent out on a case before he'd got his bearings – especially a case which was made all the more delicate by the fact that it involved another bobby.

Then there was his new sergeant to consider. He'd never had a female as his bagman – maybe he should call her bag
woman
– before, and he was still not sure what complications that might lead to. The fact that she was a woman had already started to modify his behaviour – if Bob Rutter had been with him, he'd have been sitting in the public bar now; with Paniatowski by his side he had felt obliged to plump for the lounge.

The toilet door swung open, and Paniatowski came out. Woodend took a closer look at the woman he would be spending much of his time with. Her blonde hair was short – almost severe. She had deep blue eyes which looked as if they could be quick to show her anger and a jaw which was firm, without being masculine. Overall, he decided, she could be said to be a pretty woman, though her nose was a little too large and her lips a little too thick to make her quite ‘English pretty'.

She noticed him watching her, and he instinctively turned away. Another difference between the sexes, he thought. A man would have assumed – quite rightly – that his new boss was assessing his character, whereas, from the look on her face, it was obvious that Paniatowski already had him marked down as a lecher.

‘I'm sorry I've been so long, sir,' the sergeant said, sitting down as far as was possible from him, given the limitations of a small, circular table.

Woodend bit back the comment that she
had
been a long time – but then women usually were – and said, ‘That's all right. I never feel lonely when I'm in the company of a pint of Thwaites Best Bitter. What are you havin'?'

‘I'd like a vodka, please.'

‘You think they'll have an exotic drink like that in an ordinary pub like this one?'

‘I know they will. I'm a regular. They stock it 'specially for me.'

Woodend nodded. He should have expected that, he thought – Monika Paniatowski looked like the kind of woman who knew what she wanted and made sure she got it.

As the Chief Inspector stood up and walked over to the bar, Monika found herself going over her first impressions of him. He was a big feller, she thought – broad as well as tall. His hair was light brown, but unlike most of the men in Whitebridge, he didn't use Brylcreem, so it looked quite unruly. His mouth was wide, and his jaw square without being brutish. He looked like a nice man. But then Arthur Jones – who she never had been able to bring herself to call ‘Dad' – had looked like a nice man, too. And so had most of the officers down at the cop shop.

Woodend returned with a double vodka and a fresh pint for himself. ‘You must be a bloody good detective,' he said disarmingly, as he sat down.

‘What makes you think that?'

‘Just before we left the station, I was lookin' over your record.'

‘And . . .?'

‘An' the number of people you've managed to rub up the wrong way is quite impressive – even by my high standard of bloody-mindedness.'

Not that every one of her superior officers who'd filed a report on her had been critical, Woodend reminded himself. There'd been one in particular who, before his transfer from the area, had consistently presented her in a positive light – had seemed, in fact, to go out of his way to protect her. The Chief Inspector wondered what the man's motives had been – and whether that was going to be just one complication he'd have to deal with when they reached Blackpool.

‘So the way I see it is this,' he continued. ‘If you have a natural talent for gettin' up your bosses' noses an' still managed to get promotion, you
have
to be bloody good.'

‘I am good,' Paniatowski said. ‘I'm the best detective sergeant in Lancashire.'

‘The best detective sergeant? Or the best
woman
detective sergeant?'

‘There is only
one
woman detective sergeant.'

Woodend grinned. ‘I rather thought that might be the case,' he admitted. He took a generous sip of his pint. ‘Since we're goin' to be workin' together, I think it's about time I started layin' down some ground rules. Don't you agree, lass?'

Lass! Paniatowski thought angrily. The first step to sweetheart, bird, judy and totty!

‘You can cut that out for a start,' Woodend said firmly.

‘Cut what out, sir?'

‘Lookin' so disapprovin'. Doin' an impression of a hen's backside with your lips. If you'd been a feller, I'd have called you “lad”. Since you're a woman, I called you “lass”. Don't go readin' anythin' into it.'

‘I'd much prefer it if you'd call me “Sergeant”, sir.'

Woodend shook his head wonderingly. ‘All right, have it your way,
Sergeant
. First off, I expect the men on my team – the
people
on my team – to work bloody hard. Round the clock, if that's what's called for. Secondly, I expect them to use their own initiative an' not come runnin' to me to get their noses wiped every five minutes. An' thirdly, I expect them to put up with my bad moods – just as I've had to put up with the bad moods of
my
bosses on the way up. Understood?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Paniatowski, woodenly.

‘Now the other side of the coin is that I'm more interested in catchin' criminals than I am in impressin' men with pips on the shoulders of their uniforms,' Woodend continued. ‘Which means that if you make a breakthrough in an investigation, I won't start pretendin' it was my idea all along – unlike some buggers I could mention. My last sergeant got promoted up to inspector in record time. Did you know that?'

‘No, sir, I didn't.'

‘An' you could follow in his footsteps – if you play your cards right.'

He sounded decent, Paniatowski thought. He sounded fair. They all did in the beginning. But the night would come when he'd had too much to drink and he'd let his hand rest on her shoulder, then begin an artful journey down towards her breasts.

And if she resisted – as she would – he'd just repeat all the taunts she'd heard a thousand times before.

Come on, Monika, it's only a bit of fun!

What's the matter? Don't you like men?

You could do yourself a bit of good by being nice to me.

Either that or – for all he'd just said – the jobs he'd give her would be ones which were considered suitable for
women
police officers rather than
real
ones. Oh, she'd seen it all before.

‘You've still got your doubts about me, haven't you, Sergeant?' Woodend asked.

Paniatowski looked straight into her new boss's eyes, and noticed for the first time how dark – almost black – they were.

‘If I do have reservations, sir, can you really blame me?' she asked.

Woodend shook his head. ‘No, I suppose not. It can't be easy bein' the only female detective sergeant in Lancashire.' He drained the remains of his pint. ‘Would you like to know why I think Chief Superintendent Ainsworth has put the two of us together?'

Paniatowski thought about it for a second, and then nodded.

‘It's because I'm my own man, an' you're your own woman,' Woodend told her. ‘It's not an easy path to follow – it means we've got to be twice as good as anybody else just to stay even – but it's the path we've both chosen.'

‘Are you saying that Mr Ainsworth assigned me to you because he thinks we'll make an excellent team?' Paniatowski asked.

Woodend shook his head. ‘No, sergeant. I'm sayin' he put us together because no other bugger really wants to work with either of us.'

T
he black police Humber made its way along the A59, skirting old mill towns and passing through lushly green countryside which never failed to surprise visitors from the South with their preconceptions of what the black industrial North looked like.

Had he been on his own, Woodend would have automatically sat next to the driver, but since he had WDS Paniatowski with him, the chief inspector had chosen to travel in the back. Even before the car left Whitebridge, Woodend realised this was a mistake. There was plenty of room in the rear seat of the Humber, but Paniatowski pressed her body firmly against her door, leaving a large – uncomfortably obvious – gap between them.

What was going through her mind? Woodend wondered. Did she really imagine he'd make a pass at her under the watchful eye of the driver? In fact, why should she imagine he'd make a pass at her at all? Oh, he'd had his chances in his time – Liz Poole, the mature and gorgeous landlady of the George and Dragon, whose daughter had been involved in the Salton case, came immediately to mind – but he'd always resisted them. And having turned down Liz, he certainly wasn't to chance his arm with a slip of a girl like Paniatowski.

He lit up a Capstan Full Strength and took a thoughtful drag. The trouble with Paniatowski was that she was an unknown quantity – and he wasn't sure yet whether this was because she was a woman, or because she was a Pole, or due to something else entirely. All of which was going to add extra difficulties to the investigation – which was exactly why that bastard Detective Chief Superintendent Ainsworth had assigned her to him!