Salton Killings

by Sally Spencer

  “I think she was a very unhappy child,” he said.

  “Probably, sir,” Rutter replied, as though he thought that while it might not be a stupid remark, it was at best a pointless one.

  “You think the state of her happiness is irrelevant, don’t you?” Woodend demanded.

  “Well, yes. I mean it’s not as if she chose to be killed and . . .”

  “She may not have chosen it,” Woodend said, “but she could have invited it. I’m not sayin’ somebody killed her as a favour, to put her out of her misery, but I’ve come across stranger motives. They might not make sense to you, but I’ve never arrested a murderer yet who didn’t think he had a perfectly logical reason for doin’ what he’d done. If you’re goin’ to work with me, you’ll have to learn – and learn quickly – that in a murder inquiry we have to take everythin’ into consideration.”

  He could see that he had not got through to Rutter. He was tired of breaking in new sergeants, but if this one was going to be of any use to him, he supposed he’d better try.

  “Do you know that in some countries they still use Sherlock Holmes books as police trainin’ manuals?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” Rutter replied, puzzled.

  “An’ it’s not a bad idea,” Woodend continued. “There’s a lot in Conan Doyle – observation, deduction, analysis – but that’s only half the picture.” He reached into his other voluminous pocket, the one that had not held the sandwich, and pulled out a book. “They should use this an’ all.”

  “Great Expectations?” Rutter read, his perplexity deepening. “Dickens?”

  “Oh, not just Great Expectations,” Woodend said. “Not even just Dickens, though for my money he’s the best of the lot. Have you read the book?”

  “We studied it in school, sir.”

  “You still remember the story, do you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Right,” Woodend continued. “Imagine you were dropped in the middle of the book an’ asked to conduct an investigation. You’d be lost. Why should Pip, a workin’-class lad, have turned his back on his own folks? How could Estella, a beautiful young woman, be so cold an’ emotionless?” He chuckled. “Oh, you’d understand Miss Haversham, all right, sittin’ in a dark room in her faded, tattered weddin’ dress, hatin’ the man who never turned up to marry her. But most of us aren’t like that, wearin’ our troubles for all the world to see.”

  A ticket collector with steel-rimmed glasses was standing in the corridor. Rutter waved the travel warrant at him and he walked on.

  “That’s why Sherlock Holmes isn’t enough,” Woodend continued. “You have to dig deep into their past to find out what makes people tick. An’ it’s people that matter. You find out about crime from studyin’ them – not the other way around.”

  Rutter nodded his head as if in agreement, but the slightly nervous smile on his lips told a different story.

  ‘He thinks I’m barmy,’ Woodend thought.

  “OK, Sergeant,” he said wearily. “Give me the rest of your report.”

  “The local police have done very little so far,” Rutter continued. “All we’ve got in concrete terms is, one: yesterday, Tuesday, she got the school bus from Salton – that’s the village where she lived – and arrived at Maltham Secondary Mod. at 8.55.”

  “She couldn’t have got off the bus between the two places?” Woodend asked.

  Rutter shook his head.

  “It’s a special service. It doesn’t stop at all between the village and the school.”

  “Go on,” the Chief Inspector said.

  “Two, she never actually entered the school. When she was found to be absent at registration, her form teacher just assumed she was sick. Three, her body was discovered at about twelve twenty under a pile of salt – back in the village.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Woodend mused. “If she had a reason to be in the village, why bother going to school at all? All she had to do was not get on the bus. And if she was killed near the school, why would the murderer run the risk of taking her body back to the village?”

  Woodend looked out the window. The train was speeding through flat, green countryside.

  “Got any details of the place yet?” he asked.

  “It used to be a salt-mining village, but they don’t mine any more, they use brine extraction. There are about three hundred houses, though there were more when the pits were working. The whole thing seems a bit primitive from the description I’ve got, terraced houses, outside lavatories – you know the sort of thing.”

  “Oh aye,” Woodend said quietly, “I do.”

  Rutter laughed.

  “What’s amusin’ you?” Woodend asked.

  “I was just thinking – a salt mining village called Salton. They’ve not got much imagination ‘Up Nor––’”

  He realised his mistake, and stopped dead. Too late. Woodend gave one of the wide humourless grins his subordinates in the past had come to know and dread.

  “It’s not that we lack imagination, lad,” he said. “It’s just that we’re not afraid to call a spade a bloody shovel.”

  Chapter Three

  They were the only two passengers to alight, and as the porter placed his smart new luggage next to Woodend’s battered suitcase, Rutter looked around him. The station had crenellated wooden awnings supported by solid cast-iron pillars. Long-obsolete gas lights still clung precariously to the walls. There was a ladies’ waiting room with a frosted-glass window, and a buffet which looked as if it had been shut for years. The red enamel around the Maltham sign was chipped away in places. The only other person on the platform was a plump middle-aged police constable looking uncertainly in their direction.

  “Expectin’ a bigger reception committee, were you?” Woodend asked, reading his thoughts. “Buntin’, the police band playin’ ‘Hail, the Conquerin’ Hero Comes’?”

  “Well, not exactly, sir, but I did think . . .”

  “The local brass’ll probably steer well clear of us,” Woodend predicted. “They’ll be glad enough we’re here – they’ve got a problem they can’t solve on their own. But they’ll be worried, too, in case we find out they’ve been incompetent.” He started to walk towards the waiting constable. “An’ of course, if we make a cockup, they’ll want to be as distant from us as possible.”

  The constable had clearly decided that despite the shabby jacket, Woodend was the man he had been sent to meet. He saluted.

  “PC Davenport, sir. I’m the policeman in Salton . . . where it happened. I’ve been assigned to you for drivin’ and general duties. The Superintendent sends his apologies for not bein’ here to meet you, he’s tied up with somethin’ else.”

  Woodend grunted at hearing his suspicions confirmed and pointed to Rutter.

  “Sergeant Rutter,” he said. “My right-hand man. Where’s your vehicle?”

  The Yard men and the porter followed the constable through the booking hall into the yard where the car was parked. Woodend whistled appreciatively.

  “A new Wolseley,” he said. “What’s the Chief Constable goin’ to be doin’ while I’m here? Ridin’ round on his bike?”

  Davenport opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. For a second he stood there like a podgy goldfish then tried to cover his confusion and embarrassment by unlocking the car boot. Rutter grinned, despite himself. The porter deposited the cases, Rutter gave him a shilling, and the three policemen were left alone, standing next to the expensive police car.

  “I’ve booked you into the Ring o’ Bells, sir,” Davenport said, formally and politely. “I’m afraid it’s not much, but it’s the best Maltham can––”

  Woodend slapped his hand down on the car roof with a heavy thud.

  “Let’s get a couple of things straight from the start,” he said. “One: I was brought up in a weaver’s cottage – you’ll not have seen one, but you’ll know places like it – so I don’t mind roughin’ it a bit. Besides, I’m a workin’ bobby, not a visitin’
VIP.” He opened the car door, but did not step in. “Two: I’m a bad bugger to work for. I expect results yesterday, an’ I won’t stand for anybody swingin’ the lead.”

  Davenport’s mouth flopped open to protest, but Woodend hadn’t finished yet.

  “I’m not sayin’ you’re an idle sod, Constable, I’m just layin’ down the ground rules. I expect effort an’ initiative from all my men, whatever their rank. But I’m no glory grabber. If you deserve credit, I’ll see you get it.”

  Rutter remembered the Dickens, now hidden in the Chief Inspector’s jacket again, and wondered just how much of this was Woodend merely acting the blunt northern policeman. Real or not, it was having its effect. Davenport looked dropped on, but at the same time more comfortable than he had earlier.

  They understand each other, Rutter thought. They share something I’m missing. I joined the police to avoid the Old Boy Network, and here I am, caught up right in the middle of it.

  “Right,” Woodend said. “Now we’ve got that clear, we can get down to business.”

  “The hotel, sir?” Davenport asked, and while the respect was still there, the caution had gone.

  “Bugger that for a game of soldiers,” Woodend said, easing his solid bulk into the car. “The first thing I want is a pint. It’s thirsty work, travellin’. After that, we’ll get in a bit of cloggin’ round the scene of the crime.”

  The road from Maltham to Salton was straight as a die.

  “It’s new,” Davenport explained, speaking over his shoulder as he drove. “There was subsidence on the old one. Undermined by all the old salt workin’s.”

  “And it’s called . . .?”

  “Maltham Road, sir.”

  Woodend turned to Rutter, who was sitting next to him.

  “Maltham Road,” he scoffed. “Not got much imagination ‘Up North’, have they, Sergeant?”

  Rutter made a gruff sound that could have been a laugh or an apology. He wished he could travel back in time a few hours and start again. He was sure that every unwise comment he had made to the Chief Inspector had been taken down and would be used in evidence against him.

  “So this is the route the school bus takes, is it?” Woodend asked.

  “Yes, sir. That’s how Diane Thorburn left the village, but it isn’t how she got back.”

  “Isn’t it?” Woodend asked, sounding interested. “Why do you say that?”

  Davenport overtook a bubble car that was crawling along the road like a sluggish beetle.

  “I did some checkin’ at the bus terminus. The village is the quickest route from Maltham to Ashburton – that’s the nearest big town – but the buses don’t go through it because the bridge over the canal can’t take the weight. So they do a sort of loop instead, through Claxon and up the Ashburton Road. It meets Maltham Road about a mile north of the village, at a place we call Four Lane Ends.”

  “And?” Woodend asked.

  “Well, that’s how she got back, sir. Caught the five past nine outside her school, got off at Four Lane Ends and walked back down to Salton. The conductor remembers her well. Wondered why she wasn’t in school. Said she seemed very nervous – sort of jumpy, like.”

  A railway line crossed the road at the edge of the village, and as they approached it a solidly built woman wearing an apron was pushing one of the heavy gates along its metal groove to close off the track.

  “Shouldn’t have to wait long, sir,” Davenport said. “This is only a spur up the salt works.”

  “This bus that Diane Thorburn took,” Woodend said. “It would reach Four Lane Ends at . . .?”

  “Nine thirty, sir.”

  “So,” Woodend mused, “if we estimate half an hour for her to walk back to the village – an’ that’s bein’ generous – she’d have been back here by ten.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  The engine, puffing, and pulling a line of goods wagons behind it, crossed the road. The woman in the pinny emerged from the small cottage next to the line and began to swing the gates open again.

  “You’ve done a good job, Constable,” Woodend said.

  He could see Davenport’s shoulders rise as his chest swelled, and caught a glimpse of a self-congratulatory smile in the rearview mirror.

  “Now would you mind tellin’ me what the bloody hell the girl was doin’ comin’ back to the village in the first place?”

  The shoulders drooped, the smile disappeared. Davenport edged the car forward.

  They passed a small black and white sign announcing Salton and a larger one warning motorists of the danger of steam vapour for the next half mile. To the left, Woodend saw a neat square building that could only be the police house.

  “Park here,” he instructed Davenport.

  “DI Holland’s waitin’ for you at the salt store, sir.”

  “Aye,” Woodend said. “Well it won’t do him any harm to wait another ten minutes. I feel like stretchin’ me legs.”

  The Wolseley pulled into the kerb. Woodend stepped out and looked around him. Across from the police house stood the church, a nondescript nineteenth century edifice. At the other end of the village the huge black chimney of Brierley’s Salt Works belched out smoke like an angry dragon.

  Salton wasn’t a pretty place by any standards; there was no green for cricket in the summer, no duck pond, no thatched cottages. Instead, the terraced houses – red-brick walls encrusted with grime, slate roofs once blue but now dull grey – squatted like ugly toads against the sides of the road. The dwellings had been built simply as sleeping units where exhausted miners could rest their bodies just enough to enable them to face another day’s back-breaking work, and the small neat gardens in front of each one did little to alleviate the utilitarian starkness.

  But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t life there – hopes, frustrations, passions, existence outside the machine. Someone in the village had cared enough to kill Diane Thorburn.

  Woodend started to walk up Maltham Road and the others followed. They crossed Stubbs Street and passed the sub-post office. It was only at the corner of Harper Street that the monotony of the building style was broken by a detached villa, double-fronted and with a garden running round the sides. Pre-war, Woodend estimated, but only just. He stood looking at it for a second, then moved on.

  The pub, the George and Dragon, was the last building before the salt works.

  “Quite right,” Woodend thought to himself. “Men who’ve been workin’ hard all day don’t want to walk far to slake their thirsts.”

  He turned to Davenport.

  “Harper Street and Stubbs Street,” he said. “And who exactly were Messrs Stubbs and Harper?”

  “Buggered if I . . . I couldn’t really say, sir.”

  It was as Woodend had suspected. Davenport had done well tracing the girl’s movements, but for the job he had in mind, the constable simply wouldn’t do.

  The salt storage shed glowered down at them, a massive wooden structure, its boards black with creosote, the roof slightly arched. There were no sightseers come to gawp ghoulishly and whisper to each other that this was the place the body was found, only a uniformed constable and another man in his mid-forties, wearing a grey suit and an expression which suggested a combination of jovial helpfulness and smug complacency.

  “Chief Inspector Woodend?” the man asked, holding out his hand. “I’m DI Holland. We’ve been doing a preliminary check here. I’m sure you’ll find everything quite satisfactory.”

  The only way everything could be satisfactory, Woodend thought as they shook hands, would be if you’d caught the bloody murderer.

  He looked up at the looming double gates of the shed and the small door set into one of them. He pushed the door and it swung open.

  “Is it always left like that?” he asked.

  “It does have a padlock, sir,” Holland replied, “but they never bother to use it. Who’d want to steal all that salt?”

  Woodend stepped through the door and saw what Holland meant. It was a
huge cavern of a shed, and the salt was piled up like a large hill. Just above the level of the salt, near the top of the wall, a wooden platform stuck out.

  “There’s a door there, sir,” Holland explained. “It leads out onto the bridge, just opposite Number One Pan. That’s how they tip the salt onto the pile.”

  “And the girl’s body was found . . .?”

  “There,” Holland said, his finger jabbing at a point in the middle of the slope.

  “And you’re certain she was killed here?”

  “Yes, sir. The PM found traces of salt under her nails and in her lungs.”

  Woodend bent forward and ran his hand over the surface of the salt. The shiny grains felt smooth yet at the same time prickly. He could imagine how they must have felt to the girl, rubbing against the backs of her bare legs as she twisted and turned, struggling for her life against relentless hands that were squeezing tighter, tighter, ever tighter. And then, little by little, the strength would have seeped out of her, and she must finally have realised that she was dying, that nothing could save her now.

  Woodend prodded the mound and found his hand sank in quite easily. He withdrew it again: grains of salt clung to his skin and rolled down his shirt sleeve. The Chief Inspector knelt down, cupped his hands and began to shovel salt from one spot to another. How long would it all take, killing the girl and then covering her up? Five, ten minutes at the most. But even in that short time, there would have been the risk that workmen would appear on the platform with the salt truck. Unless . . . unless the killer had been sure he would not be disturbed at that time of day. It all pointed to a local crime, but Woodend had suspected that right from the start. The killer had known that Diane Thorburn would be there. It had all been planned well in advance.

  “How deep was she buried?” he asked.

  “Not very,” Holland replied, “but that didn’t really matter. If the kids hadn’t uncovered the body, more salt would have been tipped on her. By the end of the day, she’d have been under a foot of it. By the end of the week . . .” he gestured vaguely.