‘At least, unlike Lowry, I was discharged for doing something I believed in,’ Scranton said.
‘Lowry wasn’t discharged at all,’ Woodend pointed out.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ Scranton agreed. ‘But he would have been, if he hadn’t resigned when he did.’
‘This is all bollocks,’ Woodend said.
‘Soon after he got his medal, he started drinking heavily,’ Scranton said. ‘It was no secret. Everybody in the camp knew about it. And one day, he went too far – one day he took a chopper up when he was drunk, and crashed it.’
‘I think you’ve got it round your neck,’ Woodend said. ‘He did crash a helicopter, but that was in Malaya, as a result of comin’ under enemy fire.’
‘And he crashed a second one in Abingdon,’ Scranton insisted. ‘And that was as a result of being pissed as a rat.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Woodend said.
‘Then ask yourself this,’ Scranton countered. ‘Throughout all our political battles, why has Lowry never used the fact that I’ve got a dishonourable discharge against me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Woodend admitted.
‘It’s because he’s afraid of what I’d say in return. It’s in both our interests to keep quiet about what we did in the RAF.’
It had been a mistake to talk about Lowry, Woodend decided. It had done no more than to distract them from the main point.
‘When did you first decide to use Barry Thornley to do your killings for you?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t. Because I had nothing to do with the murders!’
‘You’re not denying you knew him, are you? That he was a supporter of yours?’
‘He may have attended a few of my meetings,’ Scranton said vaguely.
‘An’ at what point did you decide he had to die, too?’ Woodend wondered.
‘At what point did I do what?’
‘At what point did you decide he had to die?’
‘I read in the papers that his death was an accident – that he set himself on fire.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everythin’ you read in the papers – especially when you already know better,’ Woodend said. ‘Bazza’s death was meant to look like an accident, but the fire didn’t do quite enough damage to him to disguise the fact that just before he died, you’d hit him over the head.’
‘Somebody hit him over the head?’ Scranton gasped.
‘No, you hit him over the head,’ Woodend corrected him.
‘Last night?’
‘Yes, that’s when he died.’
‘At what time?’
‘You know what time.’
‘What time?’ Scranton insisted urgently.
‘It was round about nine o’clock.’
Scranton exhaled a huge sigh of relief. ‘Last night, I was addressing a meeting of the BPP in the back room of the Woodcutters’ Arms in Burnley,’ he said. ‘I got there at eight, and I didn’t leave the place until after eleven.’
Over the phone, the barman at the Woodcutters’ confirmed that Scranton had indeed been there the night before, and said he could produce at least twenty witnesses to back his claim up.
He could still be guilty, Woodend thought. Though he couldn’t have killed Big Bazza himself, he could still have ordered it to be done. But the way he’d acted in the interview room – his amazement when he’d been told that Thornley had been murdered – argued otherwise. Scranton was either one of the world’s great actors or had nothing at all to do with the killings, and the chief inspector had no doubt that it was the latter.
Now, as he and Paniatowski walked wearily back to their office, Monika turned to him and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, this was all my fault. You kept saying we didn’t know for certain that it was Scranton, and I kept insisting it was. And why? Because I let my hatred of him – and everything he stands for – blind me.’
‘I went along with you in the end,’ Woodend pointed out. ‘By the time you pulled him in, I was convinced we’d got our murderer. An’ I went on believin’ that until nearly the last minute.’
But Paniatowski herself hadn’t believed it. Though she’d played her assigned role in the interrogation to perfection, she had known in her gut, almost from the start, that Scranton was not their man.
It was his flat which had convinced her, she thought, analysing where the conviction had come from. She had used the state of it as an excuse for calling Scranton an insignificant little nobody, without fully realizing that she didn’t need an excuse at all, because the flat was positive proof of her assertion.
The big boys in the BPP in London might use Scranton for their purposes, but only as a foot soldier sent out to do the tedious work for them. They had no respect for him, because they knew – as she had found out – that he was no more than weak-willed cannon fodder.
And so where were they now? she asked herself, as they reached the office door. In one hell of a mess, she thought, answering her own question.
It wasn’t just that they had to start again, they would be starting with a distinct disadvantage – because by concentrating their efforts on Scranton, they’d allowed the real killer’s trail to go cold.
‘I’ll just get my coat, an’ then we’re out of here,’ Woodend said dispiritedly. ‘Drum and Monkey?’
‘Might as well,’ Paniatowski agreed, although she knew that, in their present state, drink wouldn’t help – that it would only serve to make them even more depressed.
The moment he opened his door, Woodend noticed the buff envelope on the corner of his desk.
‘It’s from Bob,’ he said, recognizing the handwriting. ‘He calls it a parting gift.’
‘I wonder what it is,’ Paniatowski said. ‘It’s too big for a cheque, and too small for a pair of carpet slippers.’
It was not much of a joke, but given the circumstances, Woodend was grateful that she’d even attempted to be funny.
‘It’s probably just paperwork, tyin’ up a few loose ends,’ he said. ‘Only Bob would ever think of callin’ paperwork a “gift”.’
‘Aye, he was a bugger for his reports,’ Paniatowski said, in conscious imitation of her boss.
And instantly, the atmosphere of gloom thickened.
Was a bugger, they both thought.
Bob Rutter was gone and never coming back, and despite the difficulties, the disagreements – the outright bloody rows – they would miss him.
‘Shall I look at it now, or should I leave it until mornin’?’ Woodend asked.
Paniatowski shrugged. ‘Whatever you want.’
‘I’ll look at it now,’ Woodend said, because he knew, just as Paniatowski did, that though they would eventually go to the pub, it was never going to be a good idea and the less time they spent there the better.
He sat down in his chair, and slit open the envelope. ‘There’s some documents an’ a letter,’ he told Paniatowski. ‘If he’s got anythin’ nice to say about you, I’ll read it out to you.’
Paniatowski grinned. ‘And if he hasn’t, you’ll make something up?’ she suggested.
‘Well, exactly,’ Woodend agreed.
Then, as he started to read the letter, the tiredness disappeared from his face, and was replaced by a look which combined amazement and concentration.
‘Bloody hell fire!’ he exclaimed.
‘What does Bob say?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Just give me a minute,’ Woodend told her. ‘I want to see if this all hangs together.’
But it was much more than a minute he needed. He took five minutes to read the entire package, and another three to check through it again.
And it was only after he had done that that he looked up at Paniatowski and said, ‘We got it all wrong, Monika. We got the whole bloody thing backwards.’
Twenty-Seven
Tel Lowry and his mother lived on the outskirts of Whitebridge, in what had once been the rectory of a very rich parish, and now went by the name of the Old House.
‘Very nice,’ Wooden
d said, as Paniatowski parked his Wolseley in front of the house at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. ‘It somehow manages to be impressive without fallin’ into the trap of becomin’ unduly ostentatious. If I had a lot of money to splash out on a house – not that that’s ever likely to happen – this is just the kind of house I’d splash out on.’
‘Are you really as relaxed about this whole thing as you sound, sir?’ Paniatowski asked.
Woodend opened his door and stepped on to the driveway. ‘Course I’m bloody not,’ he said.
A uniformed maid showed them to the conservatory, where Lowry and his mother were having their breakfast.
Having never seen her before, Woodend studied Mrs Lowry with interest. She was getting old and she was fat, but he still thought he could detect, beneath the flabbiness, the woman who – according to Bob Rutter’s notes – had left a smile on the faces of at least two wing commanders in RAF Abingdon.
Mrs Lowry was not looking at Woodend at all. Instead, she was glaring daggers at Paniatowski.
‘I thought I made it plain, the last time we met, that I neither wanted to see you nor hear of you again, Sergeant,’ she said.
‘DS Paniatowski isn’t here because she wants to be,’ Woodend said. ‘She’s here because she’s my bagman, an’ where I go, she goes.’
‘And why are you here?’ Mrs Lowry demanded aggressively.
‘I’ll handle this, Mother,’ Tel Lowry said. He turned to Woodend. ‘What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?’
‘Last night, we arrested Ron Scranton for the murder of two tramps an’ the attempted murder of a third,’ Woodend told him.
‘Then I must congratulate you,’ Lowry replied. ‘But whilst it was kind of you to drive out all this way to inform me, I’m not sure it was quite appropriate. I’m the chairman of the Police Authority, not the chief constable, and it could be said that by reporting to me, rather than him, you’re undermining Miles Hobson’s authority.’
‘You’d probably be right, if we’d been able to make the charges stick,’ Woodend said. ‘But we couldn’t. We had to let him go.’
‘In which case, I can see even less reason for this visit.’
‘But before we let him go, he made some accusations about you that I think you should be informed of. He said, for example, that if you hadn’t left the RAF when you did, you’d have been cashiered. So it was quite a stroke of luck, wasn’t it?’
‘What was?’
‘That just when you were practically forced to resign, you had a job to go to?’
‘A stroke of luck?’ Lowry repeated, outraged. ‘There was a tragic accident in which my father was killed and my brother was incapacitated – and you dare to call it a stroke of luck!’
‘It’s funny the words we use, isn’t it?’ Woodend mused. ‘You say your brother was incapacitated, the newspapers said he needed to be permanently hospitalized. Everybody shies away from sayin’ that his problems were more mental than physical – because there’s still such a stigma attached to mental illness. We didn’t even know ourselves what his real problem was, until my clever inspector thought to check up on it yesterday.’
‘I fail to see—’ Lowry began.
‘An’ it’s funny you should use the word “accident” when talkin’ about what happened to your father an’ brother,’ Woodend interrupted.
‘It was an accident,’ Lowry said. ‘Just read the coroner’s report.’
‘I have,’ Woodend told him. ‘An’ you’re right, it was ruled an accident. But there were a number of questions which were never satisfactorily answered, not the least of which was why your father lost control of his Rolls-Royce on a clear road, in near-perfect drivin’ conditions.’
‘What’s your point?’ Lowry asked.
‘No real point at all,’ Woodend admitted. ‘I just think it’s curious.’
‘You can leave now,’ Lowry said.
‘Of course,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Come on, Sergeant.’
He was almost at the door when he turned and said, ‘Oh, by the way, we identified the second victim. It was your brother, Brunel.’
‘Oh God!’ Mrs Lowry moaned.
‘The reason it took us so long to get that identification was that Brunel was a name he very rarely used. In his later years, he was known as Brian, and when he worked at the factory, he went by the name of Barclay.’
‘His father called him Brunel after Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but he hated the name,’ Mrs Lowry said, in a dry, flat voice which showed she was in a state of shock.
‘Whereas you, sir, stuck to the name you’d been given,’ Woodend said to Lowry. ‘All the other Tels I’ve ever known were christened Terence. But not you. You’re named after Thomas Telford, another great engineer. It was my clever inspector who worked that out, too.’
‘Get out!’ Lowry said. ‘Leave us alone with our grief.’
‘I suppose it’s time I stopped playin’ games,’ Woodend said. ‘I must inform you that orderin’ me to leave isn’t an option that’s available to you. In fact, there are only two options open, an’ the first is that you agree to answer my questions.’
He said no more, but began a silent count … one elephant, two elephants, three elephants …
He had reached fifteen elephants when Lowry said, ‘And what, according to you, is my other option?’
‘Your other option is to stand up, so I can put the handcuffs on you,’ Woodend said.
‘You’re threatening to arrest me?’
‘It’s not a threat, it’s a promise.’
‘I’ll have your job for this!’ Lowry snarled.
‘Possibly you will,’ Woodend agreed. ‘But that’s in the long term. What’s your decision about what happens now?’
‘To avoid the indignity of wearing handcuffs, I’ll answer your questions,’ Lowry said, ‘but I’m warning you—’
‘Yes, I know, you’ll have my job,’ Woodend interrupted him. ‘Why did your father treat you so badly, Mr Lowry? Why did he send your brother to a private school, while you had to settle for bein’ educated locally? Why wouldn’t he let you join the family firm? Because that’s the way it happened, wasn’t it? It was not a case of you wantin’ to strike out on your own – it was a case of you havin’ to, because there was no place for you at Lowry Engineerin’.’
Something had happened to Lowry while Woodend had been talking. It was not just that his air of authority had disappeared – though it had. He had actually regressed, and though his body was still that of a grown man, his face belonged to a small, puzzled boy.
‘All I ever wanted to be was an engineer,’ he said. ‘And the irony is that my brother had no interest at all in engineering. I kept the name I’d been christened with, but he changed his. Yet I was the one excluded from the firm, and he went into it only because he was pressured to do so.’
‘But why join the RAF?’ Woodend wondered. ‘And why become a helicopter pilot? That’s surely got to be one of the most dangerous jobs you can have in a combat zone.’
‘I wanted to do something that would finally make my father proud of me,’ Lowry said.
Woodend nodded. ‘But even that didn’t work, did it?’ he asked. ‘You went into battle. You won a medal. An’ when that medal was presented, your father didn’t even bother to turn up for the ceremony.’
‘No,’ Lowry agreed dully. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘So you became a drunk, an’ crashed your helicopter as a result. The career you’d worked so hard to build up was over, an’ you saw it as all your father’s fault. It must have been at that point that you stopped tryin’ to please him – an’ started to hate him.’
‘This has nothing to do with my brother’s murder, if indeed, it was my brother who was murdered,’ said Lowry, regaining a little of his old strength.
‘It was your brother, an’ it has everythin’ to do with his murder,’ Woodend said. ‘But let’s get back to your father. Do you know why he was so cold with you?’
‘No.’
‘No,’ the old woman gasped. ‘No, I won’t.’
‘Then I will,’ Woodend said. ‘When you were four years old, Mr Lowry, your father tried to have your birth certificate amended. The amendment was never actually made, but all the paperwork connected with it is still there, an’ that’s another thing that Inspector Rutter found.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Lowry said.
‘He wanted to have one of the columns changed. Where is said “Father’s name”, he wanted it to say Alfred Granger.’
‘Uncle Alf?’ Lowry said. He turned to his mother. ‘Is this true? Is he my real father?’
‘That’s what your father – that’s what Joseph – thought.’
‘But how could he have thought it? Were you having an affair with Uncle Alf?’
‘You’ve no idea what it was like being married to Joseph,’ Mrs Lowry said. ‘I was a young woman, full of passion and the joy of life, and he was a cold, cold man, practically a machine.’
‘And my father – your husband – found out?’
‘We got careless. He caught us in bed together,’ Mrs Lowry said simply.
‘You should have told me this a long time ago,’ Lowry said anguishedly. ‘It would have explained a great deal. It would have made life so much easier.’
‘So there you were, your career in ruins, an’ all because of the man you still thought of as your father,’ Woodend said. ‘It was at that point, wasn’t it, that you decided to claim your rightful inheritance? Your difficulty was that you knew your father would never allow it – so he had to go.’
‘Are you saying I killed him?’ Lowry demanded.
‘Well, of course I am,’ Woodend replied.
‘Based on one inconclusive accident report?’
‘Based on what had happened before the accident, which we’ve already discussed, an’ what happened later, which we’ll get to eventually.’
‘You’ll never be able to prove any of these wild accusations,’ Lowry said.
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