Salton Killings

by Sally Spencer

  The idea depressed him.

  “Apart from forgettin’ to remind me to buy some corned-beef butties at the station buffet, you’re not a bad sergeant,” Woodend said, cutting through his musings. “I’ll be asking for you again.”

  Rutter grinned.

  “Aye,” he said, in plain imitation of his chief. “Aye, I’d like that.”

  Woodend grinned back.

  “If you weren’t such a serious young sergeant so hell-bent on gettin’ on that you’d never dream of bein’ rude to a senior officer,” he said, “I just might suspect you of takin’ the piss.”

  Epilogue

  Thirty years is a long time. Woodend was retired and devoted most of his energy to reading Dickens and watching the cacti grow in the garden of his modest Spanish villa.

  Harry Poole was dead and his widow ran the pub alone, taking occasional comfort from an ageing itinerant Oxford graduate who had once saved her daughter’s life. The Blacks were dead too: he had gone first, full of regret that he had never valued his son’s love, his son’s achievements, until it was too late.

  “So now I am an orphan,” thought Phil Black, middle aged and balding, as they stood on Manchester’s Piccadilly station, wearing a tight suit over a quarter of a century out of date. “I have no obligations any more, nothing to live up to, nobody to please but myself.”

  He had been sick, very sick, but now they said he was cured and had let him out into the world with forty pounds in his pocket and the address of the Salvation Army Hostel.

  There had been so many wasted years, but it was still not too late to do useful work. He remembered back to his days in the Maltham Magistrates’ Court – the poor wretches clinging helplessly to the heavy oak dock, people for whom the world was too large and menacing a place. Their eyes had begged for forgiveness and understanding, and instead they had received cold, impartial justice. There would be more like that at the hostel, and he would help them make their lives a fraction more bearable.

  He walked across to the buffet and ordered a sandwich and a cup of tea. The woman who handed them over the counter hardly looked at him. Yes, he decided, Manchester was a very good place to be, not like the village at all, but big and anonymous.

  He munched at his food and watched an express pull in at the platform. Everything had changed. When they locked him away in the Institution, there had been only steam engines and a journey to London had seemed like a major expedition. Now, with the electric trains, you could go anywhere in the country in just a few hours. Once he had settled in, he might take a few excursions himself.

  He sipped his tea. It was hot and sweet, the way Jessie used to make it.

  He had been very foolish in the past, he had been bound to get caught in the end. But the past no longer mattered – they had taught him that at the Institution. They had taught him something else too – during the electrotherapy sessions and later, when he was getting better, in long discussions with the psychiatrist – you didn’t have to do something you didn’t want to do, just because it made other people feel better. What was important, the doctor had said again and again, was to do what you wanted, because how could you have any respect for yourself as a person – as a personality – if you were just somebody else’s tool?

  Well, he knew now what he wanted to do, to help those less able to take care of themselves – the down and outs, the winos. And he wanted to take excursions on those new trains. There were thousands of young blondes in the cities, and millions of men to suspect – they wouldn’t catch him this time.