Sins of the Fathers (24 page)

Actually, the chief inspector thought, ‘climbing down' was not the right way to describe the motions she'd just gone through. Other
people – ordinary people – climbed down from their Land Rovers. Dr Shastri seemed to float, and though she was not, in fact, bathed in a cloud of swirling rose petals as she descended, it almost
seemed
as though she were.

The doctor saw him standing there next to his Wolseley, and favoured him with a wide smile.

‘Ah, my dear Chief Inspector!' she said. ‘How thoughtful of you to drive all the way over here with the sole purpose of providing me with an escort from my vehicle to my place of business.'

Woodend grinned. ‘Your place of business! Sometimes, you know, you talk just like my bank manager.'

‘Yes, I suppose I do,' the doctor agreed. ‘And is there not good reason for it, considering that, in many ways, the resemblance between the bank manager and the police surgeon is quite remarkable?'

‘How do you figure that out?'

‘I should have thought it was obvious. Both of us deal with customers who would never come to see us if they weren't already dead men.'

‘True.'

‘And though the bank manager may use only cutting words, whereas I use a very sharp scalpel, we are both intent on draining whatever is left of those poor customers' blood.'

‘You really should go on the stage,' Woodend said, and – unlike when he'd used almost the same words to Foxy Rowton, the solicitor – he meant it as a compliment.

‘You seem very eager to move me into another line of work,' Dr Shastri said. ‘But ask yourself this, my dear Chief Inspector – if I were gone, seduced by the glamour of a life in the limelight, who would then be here to perform those miracles that you demand of me on almost a daily basis? And it
is
another miracle that you have come here to request, is it not?'

‘Not quite a miracle,' Woodend said.

‘No?' Dr Shastri asked sceptically.

‘It's more like a small favour.'

‘Now I am becoming most concerned,' Dr Shastri told him. ‘To ask me for a favour is one thing, but if you go out of your way to soften your request by calling it a
small
favour, I can only assume it is, in reality, the size of an elephant. Am I not right?'

‘Perhaps,' Woodend agreed. ‘But not a
full-sized
elephant. At most, it's a cute little baby.'

‘My concern is mounting by the minute,' Dr Shastri told him. ‘But let us see this beast of yours anyway.'

‘Do you happen, by any chance, to know the Cumberland police surgeon?' Woodend asked.

‘We have met.'

‘An' would you say that you're on good terms with him?'

‘Of course I'm on good terms with him. All doctors are on the best of possible terms with each other – just as all policemen are on the best of possible with their own colleagues.'

Woodend thought of his own relationship with Henry Marlowe, and grimaced.

‘Does that mean that he'd send you a copy of an autopsy report, if you asked for it?' he asked.

‘I should think so. What is the name of this deceased person you have suddenly developed a morbid interest in?'

‘He's a feller called Alec Hawtrey,' Woodend said.

The woman who answered the door of the house directly opposite Thelma Hawtrey's was called Mrs Comstock. She was somewhere in her mid-fifties, and had enough rings on her fingers to open a jewellery store.

‘It's absolutely appalling that there was a murder just beyond my gate,' she said to Rutter, with tears in her eyes.

‘Yes, it's always a shock when something terrible like that happens so close to home,' Rutter replied, sympathetically.

‘I don't know how I shall bear it,' Mrs Comstock continued. ‘All my friends will be laughing at me.'

‘Laughing at you?'

‘I can almost
hear
them telling one another that perhaps their houses didn't cost quite as much as ours did, but at least the streets in front of them aren't running with blood.'

‘I can't begin to describe how deeply, deeply, sorry I feel for you,' Rutter said.

‘We always thought we were above that kind of thing,' Mrs Comstock said, not even noticing the sarcasm. She sniffed. ‘Of course, Mr Pine wasn't actually a resident,' she continued, brightening a little, ‘so in a way, it doesn't really reflect on us at all, does it?'

‘Did you see anything?' Rutter asked.

‘When?'

‘On the night of the murder.'

‘No, we didn't. We only got back from our holiday – from our
vacation
, I should say – yesterday afternoon. We went on a cruise, in the Caribbean, you know. Very expensive, but absolutely delightful.'

‘Do you have any holiday snaps that you could show me?' Rutter asked, and then, before the bloody woman could reply that she had, he quickly added, ‘No, you won't have, will you? They won't be back from the chemist's yet.'

‘Our
photographs
of the excursion are being developed in a professional laboratory, to the highest possible standards,' Mrs Comstock said, missing the point yet again.

‘Well, much as I'd love to stay and chat some more, Mrs Comstock, I do have a murderer to catch,' Rutter said, before turning and starting to walk back down the drive.

‘We used to go to Spain for our vacations, you know,' Mrs Comstock called after him. ‘But we had to stop that, because every Tom, Dick and Harry goes there now.'

‘My chief inspector went to Spain himself, last year,' Rutter said, over his shoulder.

‘Well, that just goes to prove my point, doesn't it?' Mrs Comstock asked, stepping back into her expensive hallway and closing her polished oak door behind her.

Rutter walked down the driveway, then paused at the gate to look up and down the street.

This was not a promising area to trawl for eye-witnesses, he thought. The distance between the houses – the separation of one property from the next – was far too great for that. But when you really
needed
to find someone who'd seen what happened, you just had to hope – against the odds – that someone actually had.

‘W
e've stumbled across somethin' very big here, Monika,' Woodend said gravely to his sergeant, ‘somethin that goes far beyond the boundaries of a single murder. What we've got here is a conspiracy – an' I've absolutely no idea why it should have happened.'

Paniatowski nodded, but said nothing.

‘I can understand why Bradley Pine killed Alec Hawtrey,' Woodend continued. ‘He did it in order to protect the life he'd built up for himself and his relationship with Thelma. But what I simply can't get my head around is why Ron Springer – who used to be a bloody good bobby – should have allowed himself to be involved in the cover-up.'

‘Hang on, aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself, here, sir?' Paniatowski asked. ‘You can't say for certain that Pine
did
kill Hawtrey.'

‘Can't I?' Woodend asked. ‘Not even after Jeremy Tully's letter? What was that about, if it wasn't about murder?'

‘Fair point,' Paniatowski conceded. ‘But I'm still a long way from being convinced that whatever happened on that mountainside in Cumberland – even if it
was
murder – has anything to do with us.'

‘We're
police officers
,' Woodend said.

‘Yes, we are,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘And our job at the moment is to catch Bradley Pine's murderer.'

‘So if I was a surgeon who'd cut somebody to remove his appendix an' found he'd got stomach cancer, I should ignore the cancer an' just finish the job I'd originally set out to do, should I?'

‘It's not the same thing,' Paniatowski said.

‘It's exactly the same thing,' Woodend insisted. ‘If we're in the process of investigatin' one crime, an' see another bein' committed, we don't just turn the other way.'

‘But the crime you're talking about isn't being committed
now
. It happened nearly three years ago. The trail's cold.'

‘You might be right that the murder trail's cold,' Woodend countered, ‘but the trail leadin' to the cover-up is anythin' but. That stays hot for as long as the cover-up exists. I want to follow it, Monika. I
have to
follow it. And I'm not sure I can do it without your help.'

‘But it didn't even happen on our patch,' Paniatowski protested. ‘Following that trail would be just like advancing into enemy territory under heavy fire. And if anything went wrong, we could take a real fall for this, Charlie.'

‘So you're sayin' you don't want anythin' to do with it?' Woodend asked disappointedly. Then he shrugged. ‘Well, I can't entirely blame you for that, lass,' he continued, ‘an' I want you to know that I won't hold it against you in the future.'

‘I'm not saying I don't
want
anything to do with it,' Paniatowski told him. ‘I'm saying I shouldn't
have
anything to do with it.' She paused for a second. ‘But if you're going to stick your head above the parapet, I don't suppose I have any choice but to stick mine up next to it.'

‘I appreciate it, Monika,' Woodend said. ‘You're a good friend an' a good colleague.'

‘I'm a bloody fool, is what I am,' Paniatowski replied. ‘So what do you want me to do? March straight into Cumberland Police Headquarters and demand to know the truth?'

‘No,' Woodend said. ‘If I thought that would work, I'd do it myself rather than sendin' you. What you need to do instead, Monika, is to approach the whole matter from a completely different angle.'

‘And what angle might that be?'

‘Superintendent Springer assured me that there was absolutely nothin' abnormal about Alec Hawtrey's death – that, in fact, it was absolutely typical of the sort of thing that could happen to folk if they didn't take sufficient care on that mountainside.'

‘So?'

‘So I'd like you to go up there yourself – an' find out if the mountain rescue team agrees with him.'

The house next door to Mrs Comstock's was called ‘Xanadu', though there was nothing of the ‘stately pleasure-dome' about its very conventional frontage.

The man who answered Rutter's knock on the door was in his late sixties. He had a shiny bald head and a large nose, under which rested a trim military moustache. He was dressed in a blue blazer with a badge on its pocket which depicted crossed rifles. He had stout brogues on his feet, and a silken cravat expertly knotted around his neck.

In some ways, he immediately reminded Rutter of Mr Morrisson – the vigilante with the notebook who patrolled Lower Bankside – but whereas Morrisson
hoped
other people would take him seriously, this man had the definite air of someone who clearly
expected
it.

The man ran his eyes quickly up and down Rutter, almost as if he were standing on parade, then said, ‘Got the look of a policeman about you. Is that what you are?'

‘That's right, sir,' Rutter began, reaching into his jacket for his warrant card. ‘I'm a detective inspector in the—'

‘Don't bother fetching out your papers, as if I was some sort of office-wallah,' the other man said dismissively. ‘You say you're a policeman, and I believe you. What's your name?'

‘Rutter.'

‘It's a pleasure to meet you, Inspector Rutter. My name's Thompson. Lieutenant Colonel Thompson, to be strictly accurate, though I suppose you may as well forget the rank now I've left the Army. I've been expecting you since you took away that awful woman from across the road. I suppose you did
have to
let her go again, did you?'

Rutter smiled, despite himself. ‘Yes, I'm afraid we did, sir. It turns out she hadn't done anything wrong.'

‘Poppycock!' Colonel Thompson said.

‘Poppycock?'

‘Bound to have done
something
wrong – we all have – but if she didn't kill that Pine chap, you were probably quite correct to release her.'

‘You said, a moment ago, that you'd been expecting me, sir,' Rutter said. ‘Why was that?'

‘Because I saw both the murderer and his victim.'

‘Where?'

‘Where do you think? Over there. Right in front of the awful Thelma's house.'

Was Thompson the sort of witness that bobbies conducting an investigation would give their eye teeth for, Rutter wondered. Or was he simply a nutter? At the moment, he was putting his money on the man being a nutter.

‘If you
did
see them over there, why didn't you report it immediately?' he asked.

‘Didn't know
what
I'd seen at the time, did I? Until I read in the morning paper that Pine had been croaked almost on my own doorstep, I thought that I'd been witnessing no more than the tail-end of a drunken party.'

‘Go on,' Rutter said cautiously.

‘I was out in the garden the other night, when I saw a green Cortina parked in front of Thelma Hawtrey's house.'

‘What were you doing out in the garden?' Rutter wondered.

‘Can't a man stand around on his own property when he wants to?' Thompson asked.

‘There was a thick fog that night. It wouldn't have been very pleasant to be outside.'

Thompson snorted. ‘Don't know the meaning of unpleasant weather till you've served in India.'

‘Even so …'

‘You're not going to let go of this until I give you an explanation you're happy with, are you?' Colonel Thompson asked.

‘No. I'm afraid I'm not.'

‘All right, I suppose I'd better come clean. My dear lady wife's quite a sweet old thing in her own way, but she does have some very strange ideas.'