He didn’t dare go into The Grapes – they could smell the police a mile off in that sort of place. So he would have to rely on arresting Annabel once the exchange had been made. True, this was not his manor, but he thought he could justify making the arrest himself by saying that he hadn’t had time to contact the local police. Anyway, thinking through the consequences of his actions had never been his strong point. As far as he was concerned, all that would be sorted out later.
He moved away from the pub and leant against a lamp-post on the street corner. The light wasn’t working – probably vandals had broken the bulb so many times that the city council had got tired of replacing it – so Gower was virtually invisible, except from close to. On the other hand, he had a clear view of the pub. Anyone entering or leaving was illuminated by its bright lights.
He saw a coloured seaman in a woollen cap walk down the street and enter The Grapes. Black bastards, they should never be allowed into the country in the first place, he told himself. And evidently the landlord shared his opinion, because the seaman was only inside for thirty seconds before he emerged again. But he didn’t go away! Instead, he cut up the alley at the side of the pub.
About half a minute later, Annie Peterson came out, and also disappeared up the alley. Gower strode quickly after her, pulling his torch out of his pocket as he went. His beam caught them in the act – the black seaman taking the money off Annabel, her taking the package off him.
“Police!” Gower shouted. “Don’t move!”
They both began running, and so did the Detective Sergeant. The black man streaked ahead, but Annie Peterson, hampered by her high heels and tight skirt, soon came to a resigned halt. Gower charged on anyway, ploughing into Annie and knocking her off her feet. He helped her, none too gently, into a standing position again.
“You, my princess, are bleedin’ well nicked,” he said with malicious glee.
The night-time duty sergeant at the Manchester River Police headquarters, his eyes red with tiredness, looked up from his paperwork at the man in the hairy sports jacket. “Can I help you?” he asked.
Woodend produced his warrant card and held it out for the Sergeant to see. “I got a call from one of your lads. He told me you’re holding a girl called Annabel Peterson,” he said.
The Sergeant nodded. “That’s right, sir.” He stepped from behind his desk. “She’s waitin’ for you in Interview Room Three. Straight down that corridor and third door on your right.”
Woodend walked down the empty corridor, listening to the echo of his own heels. What a cock-up Annie Peterson had made of her life, he thought. What an absolute bloody mess.
He counted off the doors, reached the third one, knocked and entered. Like so many of the interview rooms he’d spent countless hours in, it was a depressing place, small and cramped, with chocolate-brown paint to waist height and institutional cream from there to the ceiling. The wooden table which took up most of the space looked incredibly rickety, and the two straight-backed chairs on each side of it had definitely seen better days.
A bovine-looking WPC, with a bored expression on her face, sat on one of the chairs, Annie Peterson on the other. Annie had a cigarette in her mouth and was using an Individual Fruit Pie aluminium plate as her ashtray. From the number of crushed cigarette ends it contained, she had obviously been chain-smoking. She was wearing one of the tartish dresses that were the uniform of her battle against the rest of the world, Woodend noted, but though her thick make-up was smudged, she had not been crying.
“Thank you, Constable,” Woodend said. “I’ll take over now. Just wait outside the door.”
The WPC rose to her feet and squeezed past the Chief Inspector. When she had closed the door, Woodend eased himself into the seat opposite Annie. She looked quiet and subdued. The fire – the aggression – seemed to have left her. She gave him a friendly smile, but one tinged with sadness.
“One last pick-up,” she said. “That’s what it was going to be. One last pick-up. I didn’t want to do it, but they told me they needed time to recruit someone to take my place. I said that was their problem, and they said it would be a pity if such a pretty face as mine ended up covered in razor scars. They meant it.”
“I’m sure they did,” Woodend agreed. “But what I don’t understand is why, in God’s name, you ever allowed yourself to get involved with people like that in the first place.”
Annabel Peterson shrugged. “It gave me freedom, I suppose. I didn’t have to depend on Robbie anymore; I didn’t have to depend on anyone.”
Woodend shook his head in disbelief. “That’s not it,” he said. “Or at least, not all of it. You’re a bright girl, Annie. You could have made yourself independent of Robbie in hundreds of different ways. So there has to be somethin’ else, doesn’t there? Another reason you chose to go the way you did?”
Annabel Clough looked him straight in the eyes. “Do you really want to know? she asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I think that somewhere below that hard-bitten exterior, there’s somebody I could like,” Woodend said. “All I want you to do is help me find her. Are you willin’ to do that?”
Annabel nodded. “I used to think the men I went out with accepted me for myself,” she said tiredly. “I was wrong. I was out with one of them at an exclusive country club one night and I went to the toilet. When I got back to the table, my date was talking to one of his friends. They didn’t see me, and I accidentally overheard what they were saying. Shall I tell you exactly what that was, Chief Inspector?”
“If you want to.”
“The friend said he’d heard I was a great girl, and the man I was with said, ‘Yes. She’ll let you do anything you want to her. And the best part is, she doesn’t even charge for it. Not that I’d mind paying if she asked.’ Do you know how that made me feel?”
“I can imagine,” Woodend said.
Annie shook her head vehemently. “No, you can’t. Nobody can, unless it’s happened to them. I felt so worthless. I saw that whether I took money or not, I was still nothing more than a common prostitute to him. To all of them! I rushed back to the toilet and was sick in the basin. I don’t know how long I was there, heaving my guts up, but all the time I was thinking, I want to die. I just want to die. And I swear to God that if I’d had a packet of razorblades on me, I’d have slit my wrists then and there.”
“Go on,” Woodend said sympathetically.
“But I didn’t have any razorblades, and by the time I was cleaning myself up, I’d thought of something better to do than kill myself. My ‘boyfriends’ had been using me, but now I was going to start using them. Instead of me being their plaything, I’d introduce them to a new one. I’d help them to destroy themselves, just as they’d been working so hard at destroying me.”
“But heroin, Annie!” Woodend exclaimed. “My God, there can’t be more than a few hundred heroin users in the whole of the British Isles.”
Annie smiled with what looked like genuine amusement. “That was part of its appeal to them,” she said. “They always like to feel they belong to an elite.”
“Did you kill your father?” Woodend said.
“I’ve often thought about it.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No,” Annie said. “I didn’t kill Robbie. How could I? When all’s said and done, he was my dad.”
There was the sound of a scuffle coming from the other end of the corridor, but Woodend felt no inclination to hurry towards it. Whatever was going on, it was the Manchester Police’s business, not his. And then he saw what was causing the disturbance. Two uniformed constables were struggling to restrain a frenzied young man. And that young man was Michael Clough.
The sight of Woodend had an instant calming effect on Clough. He stopped trying to break free, and became, once again, the calm, detached person Woodend had come to know. “Tell them I have to see Annabel, Chief Inspector,” he said.
“I can’t,”
Woodend replied. “There are rules, Mr Clough. Until she’s charged – and she will be charged, you know – the only person she can see is her solicitor. After that, she’ll be allowed visitors, but only from her immediate family. Of course, it shouldn’t be long before you can count yourself as one of them, should it?”
“What do you mean?” Clough asked.
“Well, you are plannin’ to marry her, aren’t you?”
For once, Michael Clough looked as if he’d been caught off-guard. “How . . . how did you know?” he asked.
“Jesus, lad, for anybody who’s got eyes to see, it’s bloody obvious,” Woodend told him.
Seventeen
Woodend had not been expecting the black Rolls Royce Silver Dawn to pull up in front of The Hideaway, but neither was he particularly surprised when it did. Men like Sid Dowd didn’t bother making appointments – if they wanted a meeting, even one with senior police officers, then that meeting usually happened.
The driver’s door opened, and a hard-looking young man in a smart blue suit got out. His eyes quickly swept the area around the club, looking for any source of trouble. Very professional, Woodend thought. Sid Dowd was wise to employ someone like Phil to watch his back. But just how far would Phil go in the service of his boss? Would he, if Dowd asked him to, drive a nail into an enemy’s skull? Yes, Woodend decided, he would. Probably without a second’s thought!
Satisfied that the yard was safe, Phil opened the back door of the Rolls, and Dowd, as immaculately dressed as he’d been at the funeral, stepped out with all the grace and assurance of a visiting royal.
Woodend suppressed a yawn. His visit to Manchester the night before had meant he’d only managed to grab a few hours’ sleep, and he was feeling the effect. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, he told himself. It was about time he let that keen young sergeant of his do most of the running about. Except that, unless Woodend could come up with a very good argument against his resigning, Rutter wouldn’t be around to do the running much longer.
The sound of Sid Dowd tapping lightly on the open door snapped Woodend out of his contemplation. “Come in and take a seat, Mr Dowd,” the Chief Inspector said.
Dowd sat, placed his expensive leather briefcase on his lap and snapped it open. “My lads have been workin’ very hard on your behalf,” he said.
“I appreciate their efforts.”
Dowd extracted a manila file from the briefcase. “Before we begin, can we just make sure we both understand the ground rules,” he said. “I don’t care what you do in Swann’s Lake, but you’re not to use the information I give you to arrest anybody anywhere else. Unless, of course, he’s the one who topped Robbie.”
“Agreed.”
Dowd spread the file out on top of the briefcase. “Robbie supplied several firms in Yorkshire,” he said. “Probably his best customer was Billy Morrison, in Leeds. Robbie used to send him a shipment at least once a month.”
“Let’s hear the rest of the list,” Woodend said.
It took Dowd a few minutes to reel of all the names and places. The gangster was right, Woodend thought, his lads had been working hard. By they still hadn’t come up with the name he wanted.
“You haven’t mentioned Doncaster,” he said, when Dowd had finally finished reading.
“I haven’t mentioned Halifax, either,” Dowd replied. “That’s because Robbie didn’t do business in either of them places.”
Was he lying? Woodend wondered. Was it possible that both Dowd and Conway had been involved in Robbie’s death, and that the Liverpudlian’s offer of help had been nothing more than part of an elaborate smokescreen?
“You haven’t mentioned Alexander Conway, either,” the Chief Inspector said.
Dowd looked genuinely surprised. “Clumpy Conway? He’s nothing to do with any of this. Why, he must have been dead for nigh on twenty years now.”
Woodend shook his head. “No, he hasn’t.”
“I saw his body myself.”
“An’ if I check with the Liverpool police, they’ll confirm it?”
Dowd grinned. “Not exactly. You see, we didn’t want the bobbies stickin’ their noses in where they weren’t wanted, so we didn’t give him what you might call a proper funeral.”
If Dowd was telling the truth – or at least what he thought was the truth – that would go a long way towards explaining why Sergeant Dash had so far come up with so little on Conway. On the other hand, if he was lying . . .
“He’s dead,” Sid Dowd said. “You’ve got my word on it.”
I believe him, Woodend thought. As far as he’s concerned, Alex Conway really is dead. “You want to tell me how it happened?” he asked.
For the first time since he’d entered the office, Dowd looked wary. “Still off the record?” he said.
“Still off the record,” Woodend agreed.
“It’s 1940 I’m talkin’ about,” Dowd said. “A lot of lads had been called up by the Army, which left most businesses a bit short-handed. Well, that was all right for the farmers an’ the factory managers, because they soon had women trained up to fill the gap. But I couldn’t really use women in most of my businesses, could I?”
Despite himself, Woodend couldn’t hold back a smile. “I see your dilemma,” he said.
“Anyway,” Dowd continued, “along came this new bunch of lads who figured my operation was ripe for the pickings. It was never really on – I still had more muscle on my side than they could muster – but they were a nuisance for a while. You know how it goes. They beat up some of my lads, and I had a few of theirs worked over. In the end, I think they must have decided to go for broke—”
“Where does Conway fit into all this?” Woodend interrupted.
“I was just comin’ to that. See, it was Clumpy they decided to make a real example of. I was usin’ him as a fence at the time. Well, if truth be told, he wasn’t much use for anythin’ else. Anyway, this new firm raided the place he was operatin’ for me, put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nasty way to go, but that was the point of it, you see – they wanted to show me they really meant business. It didn’t take them long to realise their mistake. I couldn’t have ’em knockin’ off my fellers – even useless little sods like Clumpy. I hit back, and a week later they’d all left Liverpool with their tails between their legs.” He grinned again. “Them as still had their tails, that is. The ones who did for Clumpy, I handled personally.”
“Shotgun wounds,” Woodend said reflectively.
He’d once handled an investigation involving a shotgun. The victim in that case had taken it full in the face, too, and he was so messed up even his own mother wouldn’t have recognised him. Conway was not the idiot Dowd imagined him to be, the Chief Inspector thought. Far from it, he was a calculating man who had faked his own death in Liverpool, only to emerge again in Doncaster, eighteen years later.
“I expect his head was a bit of mess, then, was it?” Woodend said.
“Worst case I’ve ever seen,” Dowd replied, matter-of-factly. “His brains, what few he had, were spattered all over the walls.”
“Then how did you know it was Conway’s body you saw?” Woodend asked, pouncing.
Dowd shrugged, as if he’d never really given the matter any thought. “Well, there were his clothes – he was never much a dresser – an’ his general physique,” he said finally.
Woodend nodded. “His clothes an’ his general physique? An’ that’s all.”
Dowd laughed. “You’re sayin’ he did a switch, aren’t you?” he asked. “That it was some other poor sod who got killed?”
“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
The Liverpudlian shook his head. “There weren’t two like him,” he said. “I’d have recognised him even if that shotgun had cut him in two an’ only left the bottom half.”
Weren’t two like him? Recognisable from his bottom half alone? And the nickname? Woodend saw his most promising line of inquiry melting away before his eyes. “Spell it out for me?” he
said roughly. “How could you be so sure the dead man was Clumpy Conway?”
“I was sure because of his club foot,” Dowd replied.
Woodend sat at his desk with his head in his hands, listening to the purr of Sid Dowd’s Rolls Royce as it passed the window. What a bloody disaster of a morning it had been, he told himself. He desperately needed to talk to Alex Conway, but he was no nearer finding him now than he’d been at the start of the investigation – because the man he was looking for wasn’t really Conway at all. He had merely borrowed the name from a dead man he’d probably known back in Liverpool.
The Chief Inspector stood up. He really needed Bob Rutter to bounce his ideas off, he thought, but Rutter was away pounding the streets of Doncaster.
“Who will have known Conway apart from Robbie Peterson?” he asked Rutter’s empty chair.
The Green brothers! They delivered the stolen goods to all of Robbie’s partners. They would be able to tell him where to find Conway. But what was the probability they would co-operate with the police? Not a chance in hell!
“Unless . . .” Woodend said, pacing the floor, “. . . unless I had some lever I could use to put pressure on them.”
He needed to tie them in with Robbie Peterson’s rackets. But how could he do that now Robbie was dead?
The cigarettes! he thought. The bloody stolen fags!
He lit a Capstan Full Strength as his mind raced along this new track. What Robbie Peterson had been, in fact, was a wholesaler, and – criminal or not – he would have to keep his goods in stock until there was a demand, just like all other wholesalers. So even though he was dead, his warehouse must still be around. And once he’d found the warehouse, he might find some way to connect it to the Green brothers – which was just the lever he’d need.
“So where were you hiding the stuff, Robbie?” he asked the empty office. “Where would I hide it if I was you?”
The Chief Inspector found Doris Peterson sitting at her kitchen table. There was a bowl of water in front of her, and she was shelling peas into it. Woodend did his best to hide his surprise.
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