Sins of the Fathers (18 page)

‘I did hear that most of Mr Hawtrey's old friends wouldn't have anythin' to do with him after he married her. They're
Catholic
, you see,' Mrs Chubb said, mouthing the word ‘Catholic' with much the same reverential dread as some women mouthed the word ‘cancer'. ‘They don't believe in divorce, you know. They're old-fashioned in that way.'

‘So the neighbouring ladies didn't have much to do with her, and neither did her husband's old friends, but did she have any male friends of her own?' Paniatowski asked.

‘That Mr Pine, the one who got himself murdered—' Mrs Chubb stopped suddenly. ‘Hang on, is that what this is all about?'

‘Don't go worryin' your head over that,' Woodend told her. ‘Just carry on with what you were sayin'.'

‘That Mr Pine came round to the house a few times in the first couple of weeks after Mr Hawtrey's funeral, but you could tell he wasn't really welcome, an' in the end, the visits stopped.'

‘How could you tell he wasn't really welcome in the house?' Woodend wondered.

‘Well, Mrs Hawtrey was very cold an' distant with him. Not that you can altogether blame her – he was with her husband when he died, you see, an' maybe he could have done more to save him.'

‘Where did you get that idea from, Mrs Chubb?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Did it come from Mrs Hawtrey?'

‘What idea are you talkin' about?'

‘The idea that maybe Mr Pine could have done more to save Mr Hawtrey?'

‘No, I can't say I really got it from her,' Mrs Chubb said, slightly unconvincingly. ‘It was more just what I was thinking myself.'

‘You didn't really answer the question about Mrs Hawtrey's male friends,' Paniatowski pointed out. ‘
Does
she have any?'

‘Not really,' Mrs Chubb replied – just a little too quickly.

‘Lyin' to the police is a serious matter, you know,' Woodend said, in his gravest and most official voice.

‘I'm not lyin'!' Mrs Chubb protested.

‘Of course you're not. I know that. But maybe you're not quite telling us the
whole
truth?' Paniatowski suggested, gently.

‘I don't actually
know
anythin',' Mrs Chubb told her, reluctantly.

‘But you have
guessed
something?'

Mrs Chubb shrugged. ‘I notice things.'

‘Like what?'

‘When I leave that house of an afternoon, it's in a perfect condition. Everythin's neat an' tidy, an' you could eat your dinner right out of the toilet bowl, if you were so inclined.'

‘I'm sure you could.'

‘So if anythin's changed between me leavin' the house one day an' comin' back the next, I notice it.'

‘Would you care to give us an example?'

‘There's always brown ale in the fridge, even though Mrs Hawtrey doesn't much like the taste of it herself – an' sometimes, I'll find empty bottles in the rubbish bin.'

‘So she's had a visitor who drinks brown ale, and you think that must mean that's he's a man?' Woodend asked.

‘Of course it's a man!' Mrs Chubb said scornfully. ‘It's a man's drink, isn't it?' She turned to Paniatowski. ‘How many women do you know who drink brown ale?'

‘None that I can think of,' Paniatowski admitted.

‘Well, exactly!' Mrs Chubb said triumphantly. ‘And that's not all he drinks. He doesn't say no to a glass or two of wine, either.'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Mrs Hawtrey likes the odd tipple herself – not that there's anythin' wrong with that – and most mornin's I'll find a wine glass sittin' on the coffee table with her lipstick all around the rim.'

‘Go on,' Woodend encouraged.

‘But some nights, there's been
two
glasses used – an' she's washed up the second one.'

‘How can you tell?' Woodend wondered.

Mrs Chubb turned to Paniatowski again.

‘Men!' she said, with mild contempt.

‘Men!' Paniatowski agreed.

‘There's an art to washin' up, which is unknown to
all
men an'
some
women,' Mrs Chubb told Woodend, ‘and Mrs Hawtrey is one of them women who doesn't know how to do it properly. How can I tell! What a question to even have to ask me!'

‘What a question,' Paniatowski echoed obediently.

‘I can tell because the glasses that she
does
wash up are always left streaky,' Mrs Chubb told Woodend.

‘Anythin' else?' the chief inspector asked.

‘He smokes.'

‘How do you know? Doesn't
she
smoke?'

‘Of course she does.
Everybody
smokes! But she smokes filter-tipped, and his are untipped. Mrs Hawtrey puts
his
fag ends in the bin, but when I'm emptyin' it out, I can't help noticin' them.'

I bet there's not much you can't help noticin', you nosy old bat, Woodend thought.

‘Is that it?' he asked.

‘That's it,' Mrs Chubb agreed.

‘Are you sure?'

The charwoman fidgeted in her seat. ‘Well, there is one more thing,' she admitted, ‘but it's a bit personal, if you see what I mean, an' I don't like to talk about it.'

‘You can say anythin' at all – however personal – to us,' Woodend assured her. ‘We're a bit like doctors, in that way.'

‘Or priests,' Paniatowski added.

‘Well, Mrs Hawtrey doesn't really do anythin' at all around the house,' Mrs Chubb said. ‘Even the simplest little job – one that she could finish in a minute, while she's waitin' for the kettle to boil – she leaves for me to do in the mornin'.' She paused. ‘Not that I'm complain' in any way, shape or form,' she added hastily. ‘If she did it all herself, she wouldn't need me.'

‘Understood,' Woodend said.

‘But every now an' then, she does strip down the bed. She doesn't actually put the new sheets on – that would be too much to ask of her – but she takes the dirty sheets an' puts them in the washin' machine, so they're already half-way through their cycle by the time I arrive. An' why do you think she does that?'

‘Because she doesn't want you to see that the sheets are stained?' Paniatowski guessed. ‘Because she doesn't want you to know that she hasn't spent the night alone.'

Mrs Chubb jutted out her chin in a prim and righteous manner. ‘What people do in their own homes is their own business,' she said. ‘But I still think they could have some standards.'

R
utter spread the map of the Whitebridge area across the table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.

‘The green Ford Cortina was spotted here,' he said, indicating a point in Lower Bankside. ‘It's unfortunate that my witness can't say for sure exactly what time he saw it – and doesn't know who was driving it – but in my mind there's no doubt at all that it was Pine's car.'

‘Nor in mine, either,' Woodend agreed.

‘Now, the car was coming from the centre of town, which is here, and the body was found here, on the dual carriageway,' Rutter continued, pointing to two spots on the map. ‘Does the fact that it was ever in Bankside make any sense to either of you?'

‘No, it doesn't,' Paniatowski said. ‘If it was the killer behind the wheel, and he was taking Pine's body to be dumped, why would he go that way? The quickest route out to the dual carriageway from the centre of town is in completely the opposite direction.'

‘And if Pine himself was driving the car, what was he doing going towards Upper Bankside?' Rutter wondered. ‘We know from what the charwoman said that his relations with Mrs Hawtrey have been distinctly chilly since her husband's death, so why would he even be thinking of calling on her?'

‘No reason at all,' Woodend said. ‘But I can think of somebody else who might have had a very good reason for payin' her a visit.'

‘Her lover?' Paniatowski asked.

‘That's right,' Woodend said. ‘Her wine-drinking, untipped-cigarette-smoking, bed-staining lover.'

He paused, to take a drag on his own untipped cigarette.

‘I can see two possible ways that this whole thing could have developed,' he continued. ‘The first is that Thelma Hawtrey makes the decision to take a lover simply because she's lonely, or because she's missin' the sex. But later, when the affair's been goin' on for some time, she suddenly realizes that she can use this lover of hers to kill Bradley Pine.'

‘And the other way it could have developed is that the
only
reason she takes a lover in the first place is
so
she'll have someone to kill Pine,' Monika Paniatowski said.

‘That's right. She has no relatives she can turn to – they're either dead, or she's lost contact with them years ago. She has no male friends to speak of, either. An' even if she had, it'd be stretchin' friendship a bit too far to ask that friend to kill for her. So she has to find some other way to recruit her accomplice. An' where would be a better place for recruitin' him than in bed! I don't imagine that findin' a man willin' to sleep with her would have been much of a problem, because she
is
a good-lookin' woman.'

‘And once she's got him into bed?' Paniatowski asked.

‘She'll have played the poor bugger like a violin for months – maybe even years. An' just when he's so hopelessly in love with her that he can't bear to live without her – when he's prepared to do anythin' at all to keep her – she tells him exactly what her price for stayin' with him is.'

‘That would explain why she's been keeping him a secret from everyone else all this time,' Paniatowski said. ‘She will have seen that we couldn't possibly suspect the man of murder if we didn't even know he existed!'

‘I'm still more than a little bit troubled about the
nature
of the attack,' Bob Rutter said.

‘In what way?'

‘Dr Shastri said there'd been a lot of anger – as well as a lot of force – behind the fatal blow.'

‘So?'

‘Why would the lover have been angry with Pine?'

‘He wasn't angry with Pine,' Woodend said. ‘He was angry with Mrs Hawtrey, for talking him into carryin' out the murder. Or maybe he was angry with himself – for agreein' to it. Whichever was the case, it was Bradley Pine who bore the brunt of the anger.'

‘Perhaps,' Rutter conceded. ‘But even allowing for that, I still don't see why he would have driven the Cortina – presumably with Pine's body in the back – up to Mrs Hawtrey's house. Surely, once he'd done the deed, he'd have wanted to dump the corpse as soon as possible.'

‘You'd think so, wouldn't you?' Woodend said. ‘But remember that the body wasn't just dumped – it was mutilated as well.'

A look of pure horror came to Rutter's face. ‘And you think that she … that she …?'

‘I think she wanted to do that part of the business herself. I think that once he'd killed Pine, her lover went to her house to pick her up, and they
both
drove out to the dual carriageway, where Mrs Hawtrey first smashed Pine's mouth in, and then slit his stomach open.'

‘If that's true, she's not just a murderer – she's a complete bloody monster!' Rutter said.

‘If that's true, she certainly is,' Woodend agreed. ‘An' once we've got a warrant from a friendly magistrate to search her house, we just might have the evidence to
prove
she is.'

Woodend stood in the centre of the large living room of the house in Lawrence Road. He had hardly moved at all for several minutes. Thelma Hawtrey, in contrast, seemed unable to keep still, and was continually pacing from one end of the room to the other, then back again.

‘This is bloody outrageous!' she said angrily, as she passed by Woodend for fifteenth or sixteenth time. ‘You have absolutely no right to invade my house in this manner.'

‘We've got every right,' Woodend replied evenly. ‘An' since you've seen the search warrant for yourself, you
know
we've got every right.'

There was the sound of banging overhead.

‘They're in my bedroom now,' Thelma Hawtrey said bitterly. ‘They're destroying my home, and I still have no idea what you're looking for.'

‘If it'll make it any easier for you to bear, I'll
tell
you what we're lookin' for,' Woodend said. ‘We're lookin' for evidence.'

‘Evidence!' Mrs Hawtrey repeated. ‘Evidence of
what
?'

‘Any kind of evidence. But it would be especially nice if we could find somethin' that would not only reveal your lover's identity to us, but also give us an indication of where we might find him.'

‘My lover?' Thelma Hawtrey said. ‘You want to find the identity of my
lover
?'

‘You don't really think that the trick to soundin' innocent is simply to repeat everythin' I say, do you?' Woodend asked. ‘Because I'll tell you right now, it doesn't work.'

‘Is that really what you said? That you're looking for my lover?'

‘In fact, Mrs Hawtrey, the more you try that particular trick, the less effective it becomes.'

‘Even if I did have a lover, why would you want to find him?' Thelma Hawtrey asked.

‘Oh, that's an easy one to answer. We want to find him because we think he helped you murder Bradley Pine.'

Thelma Hawtrey laughed, hysterically. ‘That really is too funny for words, you know,' she said.

‘Well, I certainly hope you'll still be findin' it amusin' when you're both standin' in the dock,' Woodend countered.

Rutter had started by searching the area around the part of the driveway which was closest to the house, and was gradually working his way towards the point at which it let out on to the road outside. He had chosen this particular task himself, not because he expected to find anything out there – he was sure that he wouldn't, since Pine had almost certainly been killed elsewhere – but because rummaging through other people's homes had always been one of the aspects of police work that he most disliked.