Salton Killings

by Sally Spencer

  She was dead, she wouldn’t have felt a thing, but the thought of it still made Woodend shudder. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a packet of Capstan Full Strength. He offered one to Holland, and to Davenport and Rutter who had joined them. Only Rutter refused. Davenport produced a box of England’s Glory, struck a match, and held it in front of Woodend. When the Chief Inspector took his first drag, he could taste the salt almost as strongly as the acrid smoke.

  “Don’t they ever take salt out of this place?” he asked.

  “You get the occasional narrow boat taking some away in bags,” Holland said, “but mostly it’s left where it is until late autumn, when the lorries come for it to salt the roads.”

  “She could have been here for months,” Woodend said thoughtfully. “The killer would have known that, too. Let’s get out of here.”

  After the gloom of the store, the light was blinding, but he was glad to be out breathing the fresh air, away from the smell of salt and death.

  “What else did the PM find?”

  “Cause of death – strangulation. Time of death – between one and two hours before the body was discovered.”

  “In other words, between ten fifteen and eleven fifteen.”

  “Yes, sir. No evidence of bruising or injury not consistent with the struggle. No evidence of sexual assault.”

  “Was she a virgin?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Woodend scratched the back of his neck pensively.

  “I’ll need some extra help,” he said.

  Holland coughed.

  “I’ve been instructed by Superintendent Giles to tell you that we will offer you any assistance within our means,” he said.

  Sounds like he’s reelin’ off a set speech, Woodend thought.

  “However, sir,” Holland continued, “he asks you to bear in mind that we’re not a big force and that the manpower shortage . . .”

  “I don’t want a lot of men,” Woodend cut in. “No point in a village this size. But I do need a local lad, somebody who knows the village.”

  “You’ve got Davenport, sir.” Holland said confidently. “Knows the place like the back of his hand. Been here four years.”

  “You weren’t brought up in a village yourself, were you, Inspector?” Woodend asked.

  “No sir,” Holland answered – in tones which implied ‘certainly not’. “I’m a Manchester man.”

  “Well I was,” Woodend said, “an’ I understand what makes ’em tick. You can’t know a village just by livin’ in it for four years – or even forty. To really know it, your grandparents have to have lived there. You have to have been brought up breathin’ in the past. I need somebody like that, somebody from here, but with police trainin’.”

  Both men turned expectantly to Davenport. The constable was looking at the ground.

  I’ve hurt his pride, Woodend thought, questioned his competence.

  But he’d had it to do. When he had time, he’d do his best to make up for it.

  “There’s nobody in the Force that was brought up here, sir,” Davenport said slowly. “At least, not a proper bobby. There is a police cadet, Phil Black, who lives on Stubbs Street.”

  “Better than nothin’, I suppose,” Woodend said. “Could you have him parcelled up and sent round tomorrow – say about noon?” he asked Holland.

  “Well . . . yes, sir, if that’s what you want,” Inspector Holland said. “Is there anything else you need?”

  “Aye. I don’t want the shed guarded any more, but I do want it locked – securely. Do you still do all your patrollin’ on foot, or have you got any mobile units in Maltham?”

  “We’ve got four crime cars,” Holland said proudly.

  “Right. I want ’em to make random checks on this place. An’ I don’t want any more salt tipped until the investigation is over. They’ll have to confine themselves to makin’ blocks or else store it somewhere else. Fix it, will you?”

  Holland shook his head. His complacency was badly shaken, his joviality now no more than a distant memory.

  “Difficult, that, sir,” he said. “Mr Brierley won’t like it and he’s got a lot of influence with the––”

  “If he doesn’t like it, he can bloody well lump it,” Woodend snarled. “And he may have clout, but so do I.” He dropped his voice to a tone of sweet reasonableness. “I just don’t want to bring in the heavy guns unless I’m forced to.”

  “But why do you want it closed, sir?”

  Why indeed? Because of a tingle at the back of his neck as he stood inside, looking up at the great pile of salt. Because of an instinct, developed over a score of investigations which told him that the salt store held the key – or at least a key – to the murder. How could he explain that to a small-town copper who spent most of his time dealing with minor theft and domestic disturbances?

  “It’s standard procedure in a case of this nature,” he said. “Surely you know that?”

  Holland was frozen for a moment, then nodded his head to indicate that of course he knew it – it had merely slipped his mind for the moment.

  Bloody idiot! thought the Chief Inspector.

  Woodend had conducted murder inquiries from caravans, primary schools and barns. This time it was Constable Davenport’s office in Salton Police House. He surveyed the room. There was a desk and three straight chairs, a battered typewriter and an old filing cabinet which looked as if it was there more for appearance than any practical purpose. Two slick government posters were pinned to the noticeboard, the first warning of the dangers of rabies, the second proclaiming that “coughs and sneezes spread diseases”. Just below them was a cruder, hand-drawn advertisement for a nearby village fair. Woodend pulled them all down and threw them into the bin. The place still didn’t look much like a nerve centre, but as the investigation progressed, as reports were filed and charts made to cross-check information, it would take on a much more businesslike air.

  He sat down at the desk, facing his new team, and reached for his Capstan.

  “Have one of these, sir,” Davenport said, offering him a slimmer, shorter Park Drive.

  Rutter also had his hand in his pocket, and produced a packet of Tareyton.

  “‘If you haven’t smoked Tareyton, you haven’t smoked’,” Woodend quoted, slightly disgustedly. “Cork tipped. They’ll never catch on, you know, Sergeant.”

  Cigarettes were lit, and Woodend opened the business.

  “No evidence of sexual assault. How do you interpret that, Sergeant Rutter?”

  “A straight psychopath rather than one with sexually deviant tendencies?” Rutter asked.

  Woodend winced at the terminology.

  “Aye, he could have been an ordinary nutter,” he said. “Do you get many strangers in the village, Constable?”

  “Not really, sir. It’s like I was sayin’ earlier about the bridge. Buses can’t go over it, and that seems to cut us off. Course, people do come if they’ve got business with Brierley’s.”

  “And they are . . .?”

  “Well, there’s the salt wagons, but they only usually come in the autumn. An’ then there’s the railwaymen.”

  “A lot of them?”

  “Only the fireman, driver and guard. Brierley’s do their own loadin’. Oh, an’ of course there’s the narrow boats.”

  “Were there any here yesterday?”

  “I don’t know for definite, sir, but there are some here most days.”

  Woodend turned to Rutter and saw that the sergeant already had a fresh, white notebook in front of him and was holding a new, sharp pencil in his hand.

  “First thing tomorrow mornin’,” the Chief Inspector said, “I want you up at Brierley’s, checkin’ which boats were there on Tuesday. Then take yourself off to Maltham Central and find out where they are now. Get in touch with other Forces if you need to.”

  “He probably will, sir,” Davenport chipped in. “The Trent and Mersey runs all the way from . . .” he realised his mistake, but could find no way out
of it, “the . . . er . . . Trent to the Mersey.”

  “Thank you, Constable,” Woodend said. “I’d just about managed to work that out for myself. When you’ve done that, Sergeant, run a check on all known child molestors in the Maltham area.” He turned his attention back to Davenport. “I want you to talk to the dead girls’s parents. I know your inspector’s already done that, but he’s been mainly concerned with movements. I want to know about her interests and her friends. Especially her friends. Lassies of that age tell their mates everything.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “That’s about it for today.”

  As they stood up, a questioning look flickered across Rutter’s face. It was only there for a second, but Woodend caught it, and read it correctly.

  “As to what I shall be doin’, Sergeant, I shall be walking round the village and gettin’ the – what’s that posh word they’ll have taught you in grammar school? – the ambience of the place.” He paused. “Would you excuse us for a second, Constable?”

  Davenport made his way awkwardly to the door, and closed it behind him. Woodend, resting one hand on the wall, looked Rutter straight in the eye.

  “Listen lad,” he said, “you may not like the way I work, but you’re stuck with it. An’ make no mistake about it, I want to catch this killer just as much as you do. Because if he is a nutter, he may strike again, an’ I don’t want anybody’s death on my conscience.”

  Chapter Four

  The banshee wail of Brierley’s hooter echoed around the village, shattering the early morning peace. Slowly, the men began to drift into work. They were small, square and dark – born of Celtic mining stock. They wore flat caps, pulled down hard over their eyes, and most had Woodbines protruding from the corners of their mouths.

  Woodend, stationed just opposite the salt works, followed their progress with interest. They reminded him of the folk back home, not so much in their appearance as in their attitude, their approach to life – conservative, unambitious, plodding. They had been born in this village, and they would die here, he thought to himself. The only real difference between them and the generations of salt workers who had gone before them was that, thanks to the war, they were at least aware that there was a wider world outside.

  He smiled at the memory of himself, still in his demob suit, sitting in his local and being called a liar by one of his father’s friends.

  “Well, I’m not sayin’ tha’ weren’t in Rome,” the old man had said, “only our Billy was there, and he never saw thee.”

  He wondered briefly what would have happened if there hadn’t been a war. Would he have ended up like Davenport, a village bobby in the North of England? And wouldn’t he have been happier doing that? There were times when he thought he would; times when his battles with bureaucracy weighed heavily on him, when his clashes with his superiors ceased to merely annoy and began to oppress him. And he was tired of being on perpetual probation, of knowing the Commander was looking over his shoulder, just waiting for him to make a mistake.

  But his Methodist conscience would never allow him to squander his talents in some country backwater. Whatever the Brass thought, he was bloody good at his job and, in a case like this one, he was absolutely the best man available.

  “Don’t get too big-headed, Charlie,” he said softly to himself.

  At eight o’clock, the women bag sewers arrived. They wore overalls and turbans; some had not even bothered to change out of their carpet slippers. Many of them were smoking, and waved their cigarettes about in hands that had varnished nails but were hard and strong from years of stitching. Just like mill girls.

  “They may look like hags now,” Woodend said to the invisible companion he sometimes found it useful to have travel around with him, “but you just wait till they’re all dressed up for a night out at the Maltham Palais.”

  The men had walked separately, looking straight ahead or down at the ground, but the women were in pairs, chatting and glancing around them. Several noticed Woodend, and pointed him out to their friends. They knew who he was, all right. There were no secrets in a village.

  By twenty past eight, the school kids were lining up by the church, one queue for the juniors, another for the seniors. At half-past, the buses arrived, the neat files broke up in disorder, and the children pushed and shoved to get on the bus first.

  A few minutes later, the shrifters arrived – the old women and non-working wives with children in tow. They went straight to the waste ground by the side of the works, where the ashes from the previous day’s firing had been tipped. With their old rake-heads and grate-scrapers, they began to rummage through the clinker, looking for pieces of coal that the furnace had failed to combust. As they bent and scraped, picking up a lump here, another there, Woodend looked on with admiration.

  Half an hour of that would break my bloody back, he thought.

  By ten past nine, the women had salvaged all there was to be had and, their old shopping bags bulging with half-burnt fuel, made their way home.

  The village was silent. There was not a soul on the street.

  “It must be the quietest time of the day,” the Chief Inspector mused.

  The pub was closed, the post office had only just opened. The workers at Brierley’s were panning the salt or sewing the bags; the housewives were washing the dishes or black-leading the grate. The village would have looked just like this when Diane Thorburn appeared over the humpbacked bridge and made her way towards the salt store. And who had been there to greet her? One of the men from the salt works, who had found an excuse for slipping away from the pan? Or someone else who was not a slave to regular working hours?

  Woodend strode up the bridge. The door to Number One Pan was open, and he could see the steam rising from the bubbling brine. He turned to face the double doors that led onto the platform high in the salt store. They had been locked, just as he had instructed. The back of his neck tingled again. There was something about the place – he knew there was. He took the dog-legged path that led from the salt store down to the canal bank.

  Davenport knocked respectfully on the Thorburn’s back door. He had never been in the house before. Few villagers ever had, because the Thorburn’s were outsiders – Catholics. Not, he told himself, that they were actively disliked, but most folks in Salton considered papists just a little bit odd.

  The door opened, and a pale, haggard May Thorburn stood facing him. Davenport removed his helmet.

  “My condolences, Mrs Thorburn,” he said. “Could I come in for a minute?”

  The woman backed away without speaking, and Davenport stepped inside.

  “Even Catholic houses are funny,” Davenport thought. “They smell different.”

  He looked up at the large, garishly coloured picture of Jesus on the wall, his feet bare, a halo glowing around his head, his heart, blood red, clearly visible through his brown robe. He couldn’t imagine that hanging in his own kitchen.

  Sid Thorburn was in an armchair, miserably hunched up. When he saw who had arrived, he rose shakily to his feet.

  Jesus Christ, Davenport thought, he’s aged twenty years!

  He rebuked himself for blaspheming in the presence of the picture, then said aloud, “It’s a sad day, Sid.”

  “We always did our best for her,” Thorburn said, “always looked after her. An’ now this has to happen. Would you like to see her?”

  “Aye,” Davenport said. “Aye, I would.”

  Thorburn led him into the front room, smarter than the rest of the house, used only for christenings, marriages – and deaths.

  The coffin was laid between two dining chairs. Candles burnt beside it. Davenport gazed down at the dead girl. They had done a good job on her at the undertakers. You couldn’t tell, looking at the body, that it had been ripped open and the vital organs removed. The hair had been arranged in such a way that you’d never guess that the top of the head had been sawn off, the brains taken out and the space filled with newspaper.

  The eyes were closed, a
nd that changed the whole face. When they’d been open, they’d always made her seem . . . well, miserable was the only word for it.

  “She looks very peaceful,” he said.

  “Aye, she’ll be in heaven now,” Thorburn said, sighing heavily. Tears came to his eyes. “I know God’ll look after her, but couldn’t He have let us have her with us just a little while longer?”

  Davenport put his arm around the grieving man’s shoulders and led him back into the kitchen.

  “There’s a few questions I have to ask,” he said gently.

  “We’ve already talked to that Inspector of yours.”

  “These are different,” Davenport explained. “I’ve been sent by a Chief Inspector – from London.”

  Thorburn shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

  “What d’you want to know?” he asked.

  “Diane’s friends. Who she used to knock about with. What she did in her spare time.”

  Sid Thorburn’s eyes suddenly gleamed, and Davenport realised that despite his grief, he was about to deliver a lecture.

  “We’re Catholics,” he said. “Now I’m not sayin’ owt against the Church of England, there’s good an’ bad in all religions. But we do have certain standards. Our Diane is – was – only fifteen, and we didn’t allow her to go gallivantin’ round like some parents I could mention.” He waved his hands in a gesture of self-justification. “We weren’t over-strict, like; we did let her go out as long as we knew which girls she was goin’ with an’ as long as she was back home by eight o’clock.”

  Most girls of her age were allowed to stay out until the end of the second house of the pictures in Maltham, Davenport thought. With the sort of restrictions her parents imposed on her, it must have been impossible for Diane to have any life at all.

  “So what about friends?” Davenport asked.

  Thorburn’s mouth twitched, as if he were uncomfortable with the subject.

  “Our Diane didn’t make friends easily,” he said. “She was what you might call choosy. Oh, she knew everybody in the street, and she’d talk to girls in her class, but she only had one proper friend – Margie Poole. A really nice lass.”