Fatal Quest

by Sally Spencer

  ‘I thought you were here about my failure to comply with the fire regulations,’ Cliff Robinson said.

  ‘An’ now you know I’m not,’ Woodend replied. ‘Is she familiar?’

  Robinson gave the photograph a cursory glance. ‘No, she isn’t.’

  ‘Look again,’ Woodend ordered him.

  Robinson made some show of examining the picture carefully this time, but when he’d finished, he said, ‘I still don’t know her.’

  ‘Now that is strange,’ Woodend mused. ‘Because she was in this club a few nights ago – and half an hour after she’d left it, she was dead.’

  Robinson’s eyes darted around the room, as if he were hoping to find that what he needed to say next was written in large letters on one of the walls. But there was no such message, so he said nothing at all, but simply stabbed at the button on the corner of his desk.

  The door opened almost immediately, and two of the club’s bouncers walked into the room.

  Like everything else about the place, they weren’t quite right, Woodend thought. True, they had the build to be bouncers, but what they were lacking was any sign of the right mental attitude.

  Real hard men exuded a dangerous air which said that while they were willing to hurt others without compunction, they were equally willing to take the same amount of punishment themselves, if that proved necessary. These two were not in that class at all. They were parodies of the real thing – cardboard cut-outs who might fool the mild-mannered clients of the Charleston Club, but would quickly curl up and die when confronted by men like Duffel Coat and his mates, who were the genuine article.

  Pearl’s photograph was still lying on the desk, but before the bouncers had time to see it, Woodend picked it up, and returned it to his pocket.

  ‘I want this copper shown off the premises, boys,’ Robinson said. ‘Now!’

  ‘You’re makin’ a big mistake,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘Listen, if you want to get your fire-safety people in here, then go ahead,’ Robinson said. ‘And if you want to close the place down, then go ahead and do that as well. There’s nothing that I can do to stop you.’

  ‘I’m not talkin’ about fire-safety regulations, an’ you know it,’ Woodend countered. ‘I’m talkin’ about a dead girl.’

  ‘And I’ve already told you – twice – that I’ve never seen the bloody girl,’ Robinson said, with a hint of desperation in his voice.

  ‘Let me spell out your options for you,’ Woodend suggested. ‘First option! You can continue to obstruct me – in which case, the next time I’m here it’ll be to arrest you as an accessory after the fact in a murder investigation. An’ how long do you think you’ll go down for that? I’d put my money on ten years, at the very least.’

  ‘You’re wasting your breath, because I don’t know anyth—’

  ‘Second option! You can cooperate with me. You’ll still go to jail – there’s no avoidin’ that now – but I’ll speak up for you at your trial, and with any luck you could be out in eighteen months.’ Woodend paused to let the alternatives sink in, then continued, ‘If I was in your shoes, I know which one I’d choose – in your shoes, I’d come clean.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Robinson replied.

  But what he really meant – what the expression on his face said more clearly than words ever could – was, ‘If I come clean, I’ll end up dead!’

  The Charleston Club’s cloakroom attendant was a heavy, middle-aged woman with a bad complexion. She took Woodend’s ticket from him without a word, then disappeared into the forest of coats.

  ‘You were workin’ here last Tuesday night, weren’t you?’ Woodend asked one of the bouncers, who’d been sticking to him like glue since they’d left Robinson’s office.

  The man shrugged. ‘Might have been.’

  Wrong answer! Woodend thought.

  Because the right answer – the answer he’d have got from one of Smithers’s or Burroughs’s men – would have been silence.

  ‘So you’ll have seen the girl yourself, then,’ the sergeant said. ‘Which makes you, along with your boss, an accessory after the fact.’

  ‘There wasn’t no coloured girl in ’ere last Tuesday,’ the bouncer countered.

  ‘Who said anythin’ about her bein’ coloured?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Not in your hearin’, I didn’t,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s true that I told your boss she was coloured, but after you came into the office, I took great care to talk to refer to her only as “the girl”.’

  The cloakroom attendant had completely disappeared from sight, but from the way in which the coats on the rails jangled, it was clear she was still somewhere in the middle of the melee.

  ‘Can’t yer get a move on wiv this bloke’s coat, yer fat slag?’ the bouncer called out nervously.

  ‘I’m doing my best, but it’s right at the back,’ the woman replied. ‘And ’oo are yer calling a slag?’

  ‘There are men who can take prison time in their stride, but I can tell right away that you’re not one of them,’ Woodend told the bouncer. ‘The lifers will eat you for breakfast. A few days behind bars an’ you’ll wish you were dead. Give it a few months, an’ dead is probably exactly what you will be.’

  ‘Wot the bleeding hell are yer doin’ back there, Shirley?’ the bouncer croaked.

  The fat attendant finally emerged.

  ‘Is this it?’ she asked, holding up Woodend’s overcoat.

  ‘That’s it,’ Woodend agreed, reaching automatically into his jacket pocket for some loose change.

  The bouncer clamped his hand on Woodend’s arm.

  ‘She don’t want no tip from you,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a mind-reader,’ Woodend told him. ‘But what I do know is that if you don’t let go of my arm, you’ll be a mind-reader minus his front teeth.’

  The bouncer quickly relinquished his grip and backed away.

  ‘Nobody ’ere wants anyfing from you,’ he said, almost in a mumble. ‘The only fing we want is for yer to leave.’

  And, apparently, as quickly as possible, Woodend thought. Because this man – like his boss – was very frightened.

  The pub was called the Pride of London, but there was nothing to be proud about in this particular establishment. It was uncared for and forlorn, and under normal circumstances, Woodend wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the place. But these were not normal circumstances. He needed something to quickly wash away the taste that the Charleston Club had left in his mouth – and he didn’t even care, at that point, if it came in a dirty glass.

  The day had started out promisingly, he thought, as he took a deep swallow from the pint he’d been served. But after that initial promise, it had gone downhill rapidly, and was turning into one cruel disappointment after another.

  Because although he now firmly believed that Pearl Jones had gone to the club, and had been killed by one its customers – a large man with his hat pulled down over his eyes – he had no way of proving any of it.

  And worse than that, he didn’t even have the faintest glimmering of who that man might be!

  He took his cigarette packet out of his jacket pocket, and discovered that it was empty.

  Well, that was just about par for the bloody course, wasn’t it, he asked himself. And to top it all, he’d be willing to bet that this pub didn’t even sell Capstan Full Strength.

  It didn’t.

  ‘No call for ’em, guv,’ the barman explained. ‘Most of the people round ’ere are ’appy enough wiv Player’s Weights.’

  Good for them, Woodend thought viciously. But I need somethin’ with more of a nicotine kick to it.

  Perhaps there was a spare packet of Capstan in his overcoat pocket, he told himself. It was unlikely, but it was certainly worth checking.

  It was then that he found the note. It was hastily written in pencil – in what looked like a largely uneducated hand – on a torn scrap of paper. It was
not a long note, but the few words it contained were enough to send Woodend’s pulse racing.

  A man called Smivvers done it, the note read.

  Twenty-Three

  For Woodend’s purposes, the street lamp could not have been better located. It stood on the main road at the top end of the alley, and the further he walked away from it, the weaker the effect of its light became. Thus, when he was halfway down the alley, he was all but invisible to the people leaving the Charleston Club by the back door, yet he still had a clear view of them.

  The first to leave were the band, a quartet of musicians who spent their evenings churning out turgid, uninspired tunes which at least had the advantage of being instantly recognizable. A few minutes later, a couple of the waiters and two of the bouncers left, but it was not until two fifteen in the morning that the person Woodend had been waiting for finally appeared.

  The fat woman closed the door quickly behind her, but then, instead of hurrying up the alley, as the others had done, she simply stood there, looking lost.

  It was almost, Woodend thought, as if she’d been dying to escape from the club, but now that she had, she had no enthusiasm for what lay ahead of her.

  He waited for a moment, to make sure that no one else was coming out of the club, then began to walk towards her.

  As he began to emerge from the shadows, the fat woman noticed him, clutched her handbag tightly against her flabby bosom, and said, ‘’Oo’s there? What d’yer want? I’ll call the police.’

  ‘I am the police,’ Woodend said, drawing ever closer to her. ‘An’ I’d like a word with you, Shirley.’

  ‘Why would yer want ter talk to me?’ the fat woman asked, with a hint of panic in her voice. ‘I don’t know nuffink.’

  ‘You know a great deal,’ Woodend contradicted her. ‘An’ you want me to know it, too. That’s why you wrote me the note.’

  ‘What note?’

  ‘The note I found in my overcoat pocket.’

  ‘It don’t have nuffink to do wiv me.’

  ‘It was the quality of the paper the note was written on that I noticed first,’ Woodend said, almost reflectively. ‘It’s not the sort of paper you could buy in Woolworths – it’s more the kind that a business which was tryin’ to create a good impression would have. But it had been torn roughly in half, so that only the bottom half of the sheet was used. Now why was that?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘I think it was because the top half had the words “Charleston Club” printed on it,’ Woodend said. ‘Shall I tell you what else I noticed?’

  ‘If yer want to.’

  ‘It looked as if it had been written by somebody in a hurry, somebody who was expected to be doin’ somethin’ else at the time – like findin’ a coat, for example. But even without any of the other evidence, I’d have known you were the one who put it in my pocket – because nobody else had the opportunity.’

  ‘I’ve set yer off on the right road, ’aven’t I?’ the fat woman asked, abandoning all pretence that she didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Can’t that be enough for yer?’

  Woodend shook his head regretfully. ‘Nowhere near enough. Is there somewhere we can talk?’

  The woman glanced nervously back at the club door. ‘My flat ain’t far from ’ere,’ she said. ‘We could go there.’

  It was not so much a flat as a cramped bed-sit, but Shirley had made some effort with the place, putting up pleasant curtains and hanging cheery, sentimental pictures on what little wall space was available.

  There was a hotplate on a small table in the corner of the room. Shirley heated up a kettle on it.

  ‘’Ow d’yer like yer tea?’ she asked, as she reached for the caddy.

  ‘Make it good an’ strong,’ Woodend told her. ‘We could be here for quite some time.’

  When the tea had been brewed and poured, Woodend produced a half-pint bottle of whisky he had bought from the off-sales at the Pride of London, and added a generous dollop to each cup.

  For a while they sat sipping the tea in silence, Shirley reluctant to speak, and Woodend reluctant to push her to.

  It was unlikely she’d ever been a pretty woman, Woodend told himself as they drank, but when she was younger, she must have had nice eyes.

  He pictured that younger Shirley, and the eyes which must once – against all the odds – have expressed the hope that her life would turn out to be as joyful as she wanted it to be. But that hope had long since left her, and now she was a middle-aged woman, working at a dead-end job and living in a scabby bed-sit.

  Shirley looked up at him, with those eyes of hers brimming over with sadness.

  ‘’Er name was Pearl, wasn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right, it was,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘It made me ’appy just to look at ’er.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Because she ’ad spirit. Because she knew what she wanted, and she was determined that she was going to get it.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me what happened to her, Shirley?’ Woodend asked softly.

  ‘If I do, yer can never say that it come from me.’

  ‘I promise you, I won’t.’

  The fat woman still hesitated.

  ‘You’ve got my word on it,’ Woodend said, and seeing that that was still not enough, he added, ‘I swear it on my daughter’s life.’

  The sad eyes seemed to be reflecting on what it would be like if she had a daughter of her own – and how binding any oath she took on that daughter’s life would be to her.

  Shirley took a deep breath.

  ‘The bloke come into the club last Tuesday night,’ she said. ‘’E ’ad ’is lady-friend wiv ’im, and when ’e ’anded over the coats, ’e was in a very good mood – like ’e’d been looking forward to this night out all week.’

  ‘Did you recognize him?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘No, I don’t fink ’e’d ever been to the club before. And to tell you the truth, Charlie, ’e didn’t look like most of the reg’lar punters wot we get in. ’E seemed too … too …’

  ‘Posh?’ Woodend suggested.

  Shirley shook her head. ‘No, definitely not posh. But ’e looked like ’e ’ad money, and that ’e was used to getting what ’e wanted when ’e wanted it. Anyway, ’e ’adn’t been in the club for more than a few minutes when ’e come back to the cloakroom again, and this time ’e ’ad the coloured girl in tow.’

  ‘How did she seem?’

  ‘Scared. Scared about the idea of going wiv him, but also scared of telling him she didn’t want to go, if yer know wot I mean.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Did the girl have a camera with her?’

  ‘Not as far as I could tell.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘So, ’e gets ’is coat – but not ’ers – an’ the two of ’em leave the club. Then, ’alf an hour later, ’e comes back on ’is own, picks up ’is lady-friend, and leaves again. But as ’e’s going out, the uvver blokes are coming in.’

  ‘What other blokes?’

  ‘A couple of real ’ard cases. I ’adn’t seen neivver of them before, eivver, but yer could tell from the way that our bouncers were fawning all over ’em that they must ’ave ’ad some kind of reputation. So anyway, these ’ard cases stand by the door wot leads out onto the street, an’ whenever anybody leaves, they take down their names and addresses.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody object to that?’

  The fat woman laughed. ‘You didn’t see ’em,’ she said. ‘They wasn’t the sort of blokes you’d fink about arguing wiv. If they told yer to pull yer own nose off, yer’d do it wivvout a second’s fort.’

  ‘Did they talk to you?’

  ‘Oh yeah, they talked to me, all right. But not at first. At first, they stood staring at me. Must ’ave been a couple o’ minutes before one of ’em spoke.’

  ‘They were doin’ that to unnerve you,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Yes, well, it bleedin’ worked, didn’t i
t?’ Shirley asked. ‘By the time ’e did speak, me legs ’ad turned to jelly.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘’E said, “Yer’ve been ’ere all night, ’ave yer?” An’ I said yes, I ’ad. Then ’e said, “Yer must ’ave a fair number of people coming and going, during the course of the night.” I just nodded at that, ’cos my mouf was feeling drier than I ever remember it feeling before. Then ’e says, “And was one of these people a darkie girl?” and I nodded again.’

  ‘An’ how did he react to that?’

  ‘’E glared at me. Then ’e turns to ’is mate and says, “I fink she’s wrong about that. I don’t fink there was any niggers in ’ere tonight.” An’ the uvver ’ard man says, “My mate finks yer’ve made a mistake. Is ’e right? Ave yer?” Well, I knew what was expected of me, so I said, “Yes, I must ’ave been mistaken.” I didn’t dare say nuffink else.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ Woodend said soothingly.

  ‘Anyway, the first bloke takes a roll of dosh out of ’is pocket, peels off a quid, and puts it on the counter. “Yer a smart woman,” he says. “Take this and buy yerself somefink nice.” I didn’t want ’is money, but I took it anyway, an’ told ’im “Fank you.”’

  ‘You just did right.’

  ‘“An’ remember,” he sez, “if yer know what’s good for yer, yer didn’t see no nigger.”’ Shirley paused. ‘They must ’ave been saying more or less the same fing to all the punters, don’t you fink?’

  ‘I’m almost sure they were.’

  ‘Anyway, it was two days later that I saw the picture in the paper. I knew it was the same girl straight away, and I almost phoned the Old Bill. Then I fort about wot them two blokes had said, an’ I told myself not to be such a bleedin’ idiot, ’cos the uvver coppers wouldn’t ’ave kept my name out of it, like wot you’ve promised yer will, Charlie. It would ’ave been splashed all over the papers the next morning, and the morning after that, I’d ’ave been found floating in the river.’

  She was probably right about that, Woodend thought.

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right,’ he said. ‘The man asked for his coat, but he didn’t ask for the girl’s?’