Murder at Swann's Lake

by Sally Spencer

  “Elevator heels,” he announced. “We’ve been looking for a man of around five feet eleven, when we should have been after someone who was at least three or four inches shorter.”

  Woodend shook his head despairingly. How many false leads would there be on this bloody case? he wondered. “Sit down, lad,” he said. “Sit down, an’ we’ll see if we can make any sense of this.”

  Rutter straddle the chair opposite him. “All the way back in the car I’ve been asking myself why he should wear elevator heels, and the only answer I could come up with was vanity.”

  “Did you ask the cobbler if he was wearin’ elevator heels when he took these shoes in to be repaired?” Woodend asked.

  “Yes, I did. And he wasn’t.”

  “Then it’s not vanity,” Woodend said. “If it had been, all his shoes would have built-in lifts.”

  “They’re an expensive item to buy,” Rutter pointed out.

  “Everythin’ in the flat was expensive,” Woodend countered. “Whatever else Alex Conway is, he’s not short of a bob or two.”

  “So what’s your theory?” Rutter asked.

  “I’m not sure how this will work, so bear with me,” Woodend said. “He wants to look taller when he’s in Doncaster, but anywhere else he couldn’t give a toss. An’ since he isn’t in Doncaster that often, he only needs one pair of shoes.”

  “But if being short doesn’t bother him in other places, why should it have bothered him in Doncaster?”

  Woodend picked up the passport photograph and showed it to his sergeant. “What’s the one recurrin’ theme runnin’ through all the descriptions we’ve had of him?” he asked.

  “Blond hair and pale moustache?” Rutter hazarded.

  “Spot on,” Woodend agreed. “But you’re missin’ out one important thing in that description.”

  Rutter frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not following you, sir.”

  “Why did you think he might have been a military man?”

  The light of understanding dawned in Rutter’s eyes. “Because they were always so well trimmed!”

  “Or perhaps they don’t need trimmin’ at all.”

  “A wig and a false moustache!” Rutter exclaimed. “But surely, if that were true, the librarian – Miss Noonan – would have told you about it.

  “Not after she started to suspect we might want to lock him away,” the Chief Inspector said. He took a Capstan Full Strength from the packet on his desk and lit up. “So let’s assume the hair and moustache are fake. Seen from that angle, the shoes are no more than part of his disguise. But it isn’t a disguise he wears all the time, or there’d have been more pairs of shoes. So the question is, why does he only feel the need of a disguise in Doncaster?”

  “Maybe there’s someone there he doesn’t want to recognise him,” Rutter said.

  “Like who?”

  Rutter shrugged. “Some other gangster who he’s done the dirty on in the past?”

  “Then he’s taking a hell of a chance being in Doncaster at all. Besides, he’s probably from Liverpool – he wouldn’t have known the other Alex Conway if he wasn’t – and if he’s got enemies, that’s where they’ll be.”

  “Maybe it’s to disguise himself from himself,” Rutter said suddenly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I suppose it was what Maria did which gave me the idea . . .” Rutter began. Then he stopped, and put his hands up to his head. “Oh God, my mind’s been so much on the case that I haven’t thought about her since I entered that shoe shop. Just what kind of heartless bastard does that make me?”

  “You’re not doin’ any good worryin’ about her,” Woodend said. “An’ it’s not what she’d want you do.”

  “I know.”

  “So why don’t you tell me your idea?”

  Rutter took a deep breath. “A few weeks back, she got very depressed,” he said. “There were lots of reasons for it – she was worried about her father’s health, she didn’t like her new supervisor, the situation was getting very bad in Spain. I was really concerned about her. Then, one day, out of the blue, she turned up all bright and chirpy.”

  “What’s the point?” Woodend asked.

  “It wasn’t that all her problems had magically disappeared overnight, just that she had decided to adopt a new, more positive attitude to them. She looked different too. Physically, I mean. I thought at first that it was just that she was more animated. But it wasn’t. She’d had her hair done. A completely new style. New attitude – new look.”

  His sergeant might just be onto something, Woodend thought. After all, didn’t his own wife always buy a new frock when she felt she was getting into a rut? And wasn’t that new frock always a contrast to everything else in her wardrobe?

  And then there was Annie Peterson – pretty, mixed-up Annie – who always wore revealing dresses and heavy make-up, as if to convince herself that she fitted into the new life she’d chosen for herself.

  A new person – a new start. Woodend’s mind was going into overdrive. “Get me somethin’ out of the filing cabinet,” he said to his sergeant.

  “Something?” Rutter repeated quizzically. “Nothing specific?”

  “A receipt,” Woodend said impatiently. “A manifest. A letter. Anythin’ will do.”

  Maria had been dozing, but now she was awake again. She could hear the birds chirping happily in the hospital grounds, and feel the breeze which blew in through the open window, carrying with it the subtle fragrance of flowers. She wished she could see the birds and the flowers, but her world, as it had since Monday morning, contained nothing but darkness.

  “Are you there, Joan?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m here,” came a soft voice from somewhere to her right.

  “It hasn’t worked,” Maria said as calmly as she could muster.

  “What hasn’t worked?”

  “The operation. I know it. I can feel it. When they take the bandages off my eyes on Sunday, it won’t make any difference at all.”

  “There’s no point in speculatin’,” Joan Woodend told her. “Why worry yourself unnecessarily. You’ll be far better off if you just wait and see.”

  The second the words were out of her mouth, she realised her mistake. Wait and see. Oh God, what a thing to say!

  But Maria didn’t seem to notice – or if she did, pretended not to. “I think Bob was planning to ask me to marry him,” she said.

  “So do I,” Joan said candidly.

  “Do you think he’ll still ask if the operation’s a failure?”

  There was a pause which seemed to Maria to last for a thousand years, then Joan said, “Yes, I do.”

  “So do I,” Maria said, a tear slowly coursing down her cheek. “I know it wouldn’t be fair to accept. I really do. Why should he be saddled with a blind woman for the rest of his life?” She clutched her bed sheet tightly with both hands. “But sometimes I get . . . so scared . . . of being alone that I worry I might say yes.”

  Clem Green, looking no less shifty after his arrest than he had before it, was already sitting at the interview table in Maltham police station when Woodend arrived. The Chief Inspector pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.

  “Mr Chatterton called to tell me you wanted to speak to me,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Green agreed. “I’ve been thinkin’ over what you said this mornin’. I don’t see why me an’ our Burt should take the whole rap for this. I want to make a deal.”

  Woodend shook his head. “You’re too late, lad. The deal was that if you could tell us somethin’ which might lead us to Alex Conway, I’d ask the local bobbies to go easy on you. Well, we know where Conway is now, so we don’t need you any more. You should have taken your chance while you had it. Now, since they can’t send your boss to jail – on account of him being dead – they’re likely to try an’ get the maximum sentences they can for you an’ your brother.”

  Green threw back his heard and roared with laughter.

  “I woul
dn’t have thought I’d said anythin’ particularly funny,” Woodend said

  “Funny?” Clem Green spluttered. “It’s bloody side-splittin’. With my boss dead, you said! You really have got it all wrong about Robbie Peterson, ain’t you?”

  Terry Clough shuffled into Peterson’s office, looked suspiciously over his shoulder at the two uniformed officers who were standing by the door, then slid into the chair Woodend was gesturing towards. “What’s this all about?” he asked.

  Woodend held out the brown envelope which had first put him on the trail of Alex Conway. “Do you know what was in this envelope originally?” he asked.

  Clough’s eyes flickered for the briefest of moments. “I’ve no idea.”

  “A passport,” Woodend told him. “But later it had another use. Somebody drew a sketch map on it – a sketch map which showed where to drop off all those stolen cigarettes we found in the ghost train.”

  “That’s of no interest to me,” Clough said. “I told you, I kept well clear of Robbie’s rackets.”

  “Yes, you did say that,” Woodend agreed. “But you were lyin’ through your teeth. Harold Dawson is prepared to swear that you and he were both involved in the blackmailing of Hideaway customers. So is Gerry Fairbright – an’ he should know, because he was of them.”

  Terry Clough’s shoulders slumped. “All right, I admit it,” he said. “But you don’t know what Robbie Peterson was like. He’d have killed me if I hadn’t helped him.”

  Woodend leant back in his chair. “When Robbie left Liverpool, he had every intention of going straight,” he told Clough. “An’ do you know somethin’? That’s exactly what he did.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talkin’ about,” Clough protested.

  “Harold Dawson told me Robbie was too smart to be seen to be involved in the blackmail. Gerry Fairbright told me Robbie had just decided to up the amount of money he paid out every week. Neither of those things was true. All the people involved in the various rackets thought they were workin’ for Robbie, but they weren’t. They were workin’ for you. You only said Robbie was behind it because while they might think of double crossin’ a nobody like Terry Clough, it would never enter their heads to do the same to a hard case like Robbie Peterson.”

  “Who told you all this?” Clough demanded.

  “Clem Green,” Woodend said. “You made the mistake of tellin’ him and his brother what the real situation was. An’ I think I know why you did it. Everybody else involved in the rackets saw you only as Robbie’s dogsbody, and while that was very useful, it was also gallin’ not to have the respect you felt you deserved. You had to have somebody who knew you were the real boss, and you chose the Greens.”

  “Robbie was an idiot,” Clough said. “There’s a fortune to be made around here if only you’ve got the sense to see it.”

  “Robbie didn’t want a fortune,” Woodend told him. “The club and the attractions were bringin’ in enough to keep him more than happy. I don’t even know why you wanted one – unless you thought that you’re bein’ rich would impress your wife.”

  Terry Clough jerked as if he’d been given an electric shock. “I could have taken her places,” he said. “Maybe even abroad. We could have had the best of everythin’.”

  Woodend shook his head sadly. “You really don’t know Jenny at all, do you? Or maybe it’s a case of thinkin’ the way you do because it’s too unpleasant to think any other way. But let’s get back to the envelope.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’ll tell you what I think happened,” Woodend said. “You were sittin’ in this office and the phone rang. You picked it up and it was one of your mates from across the Pennines wantin’ to fix up another drop. Only it was to be at a different place this time, and he needed to explain how to get there. You picked up the first piece of paper which came to hand, which happened to be this envelope. Careless of Robbie to leave it around, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t see why,” Clough said sullenly. “It was only a used envelope. It wasn’t even addressed to him.”

  “No,” Woodend agreed. “It was addressed to Alex Conway. That’s why the name sounded familiar when I mentioned it to you. Anyway, you drew the map – the police boffins should have no difficulty provin’ it’s your handwriting – but then you were careless, too. You lost the envelope. Have you any idea where you lost it?”

  “No,” Clough admitted. “It was just that when I came to look for it, I couldn’t find it.”

  “Well, wherever it was, Robbie finds it,” Woodend continued. “And given his dodgy background, he knows immediately what it’s for. I imagine all this happens last Friday night, just before he’s due to do his act in the club. So what does he do with the envelope? He sticks it in the back of the filing cabinet, intendin’ to confront you with it later. But that never happens, does it? Because an hour later, he’s dead.”

  Terry Clough jumped to his feet. “You’re accusin’ me of killin’ him, aren’t you?” he screamed.

  Woodend shook his head. “No, I’m not accusin’ you, so why don’t you just calm down? You couldn’t have murdered Robbie. You an’ your brother were down by the lake at the time, havin’ an argument over women. But even without a murder charge, you’re in plenty of trouble, lad.”

  Terry Clough looked down the floor. “So what happens now?” he mumbled, almost to himself.

  “Now you join your friends the Green brothers in Maltham nick,” Woodend told him.

  Twenty

  The police car which brought Michael Clough to The Hideaway arrived only ten minutes after the one taking his brother into custody had left. The two detectives watched through the window as Clough got out of the car and, taking his time, walked towards the office.

  “He doesn’t seem very concerned that we’ve called him in,” Rutter commented.

  “Aye, there’s nothin’ defensive about yon bugger,” Woodend agreed. “But that’s the big difference between him an’ his brother. Terry’s quite rightly suspicious of authority, but Michael likes it – because it gives him somethin’ to rail against. If we weren’t what we are – the establishment – he couldn’t be what he is – the rebel.”

  When he reached the open doorway, Clough stopped and knocked on the jamb, but the mocking expression on his face showed he was doing it more out of irony that politeness.

  “Come in an’ take a seat, Mr Clough,” Woodend said. “We’ve got a fair bit to get through.”

  As soon as the young teacher had sat down, Woodend slid the passport application form across the desk to him. “You’ll not deny that’s your signature, will you?” he asked, jabbing with his finger at a point halfway down the form.

  “No, it’s mine all right,” Clough agreed.

  “An’ you knew when you were fillin’ it in that the person who was applyin’ for the passport wasn’t really Alex Conway?”

  Michael Clough laughed. “Of course I did.”

  Woodend turned the form around and examined the photograph which was stapled to it. “That wig and false moustache aren’t bad,” he admitted. “The heavy glasses probably helped as well. They certainly fooled us for a while. But then neither of us had ever met Robbie Peterson in the flesh. If we had, I expect we’d have seen the resemblance right away.”

  “It wasn’t meant to fool anyone who knew him,” Clough said haughtily. “It wasn’t a disguise.”

  “I know it wasn’t a disguise,” Woodend replied. “The wig an’ the glasses were more like actors’ props – they were helpin’ him to become a different person.”

  “I’m underrating you again,” Michael Clough said apologetically.

  “It was my sergeant who came up with the original idea. All I did was think it through to its logical conclusion,” Woodend told him. “The way I see it, when Robbie was in Liverpool, he thought all he had to do to start a new life was get out of the rackets an’ move somewhere else. Am I right?”

  “You know you are.”

  “But it didn’t
work out like that, did it? It wasn’t just that he brought his family with him – he brought his reputation as well. The villains in this area knew all about him – so did the police. And though the vicar an’ the ‘decent’ families around Swann’s Lake might not have known about his criminal activities, they could see immediately that he was not their sort of person. So there was no seat on the parish council for Robbie, an’ no invitations to genteel tea parties for him and Doris.”

  “I told him it wouldn’t work,” Michael Clough said, “but he just wouldn’t listen.”

  “No, he had to find out the hard way,” Woodend agreed. “And he learned a valuable lesson from it. Robbie Peterson would always be constrained by the past, but Alex Conway, because he had no past, could be whatever he wanted to be.”

  “How did you find out about it?” Michael Clough asked.

  “We compared his handwriting from one of the invoices with the handwriting on the passport application form,” Rutter said. “We’re neither of us experts, but it’s a close enough match.”

  “We’d have found out before if Robbie hadn’t been wearing shoes with elevator heels,” Woodend said.

  Clough looked perplexed. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “No, you wouldn’t, not havin’ been in on the investigation,” Woodend said dryly. “ ‘Conway’s’ neighbour, a sweet old bird called Miss Tufton, told my sergeant that she saw Robbie Peterson enterin’ ‘Conway’s’ flat once. She only got a brief glimpse of him, but it was enough for to her to identify him from a photograph. The conclusion we drew from that was that Robbie and ‘Conway’ were in some sort of racket together. If it hadn’t been for the differences in their heights, we might have come to another conclusion – that what Miss Tufton had, in fact, seen was ‘Conway’ without his disguise.”

  “Will I face charges?” Michael Clough asked.

  “For makin’ a false declaration on the passport form? No, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point now that Robbie’s dead.” Ignoring Clough’s reproaching glances, Woodend lit up a Capstan Full Strength. “So you’re still goin’ to marry Annie, are you?” he asked.