A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Are you married, Ed?’ Paniatowski asked, before she could stop herself.

  ‘No ma’am, I certainly am not. I’m not even involved with anyone. How about you?’

  ‘I’m semi-involved,’ Paniatowski said, wondering how Baxter would feel about that particular description of their affair.

  ‘Guessed you might be,’ Grant said. ‘It’d be a miracle if a pretty girl like you wasn’t.’

  Paniatowski found herself caught up in mixed emotions. One the one hand, she felt an urge to preen at still being called a girl. On the other, she couldn’t quite avoid the suspicion that Grant had only said what he had because he knew exactly what effect his words would have on her.

  ‘What’s it like working for the FBI?’ she asked in an effort to change the subject. ‘Did it live up to your expectations?’

  ‘It most certainly did. In fact, it exceeded them.’

  ‘And what about the famous J. Edgar Hoover?’

  ‘Mr Hoover is the FBI,’ Grant said, going almost gooey-eyed. ‘He’s an inspiration to everyone working for him. His spirit imbues the whole organization with purpose, and when my immediate boss talks to me, we both know he’s only talking as a representative of Mr Hoover. What about your boss? He’s called something like a Chief Policeman, isn’t he?’

  ‘Chief Constable,’ Paniatowski corrected the Special Agent.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  ‘And he isn’t my boss – Charlie Woodend is.’

  ‘Sure,’ Grant agreed easily. ‘But I’m sort of assuming that, like my own boss, he’s only standing in for—’

  ‘Charlie Woodend’s my boss,’ Paniatowski repeated, with a ferocity which took her by surprise. ‘I couldn’t give a tuppenny damn about any of his so-called superiors.’

  Grant laughed. ‘Well, that’s plain enough for anybody to understand. So what’s Charlie Woodend like?’

  ‘Honest,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Honest and dedicated. I’d trust him with my life.’

  Grant was starting to look at her a little strangely. ‘You sound almost as if you’re half in love with the guy,’ he said.

  ‘I what?’

  ‘When you were talking about him just now, you kinda looked as if there was something special—’

  ‘Let me assure you, Special Agent Grant, that I’m not in love with Chief Inspector Woodend now, nor have I ever been, nor am I likely to be in the future!’ Paniatowski said hotly.

  Grant held out his hands in front of him, as though getting ready to ward off an attack. ‘Hey, hold on there,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t trying to insult you. I was just making an observation.’

  Paniatowski took a deep breath. ‘Of course you were,’ she said, more calmly. ‘But you’re way off the mark.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Grant said. ‘So tell me, Monika, how do you think I’ll get on with this paragon of an English policeman?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On how well he decides you’re doing your job. If he thinks you’re playing straight with him – and are as dedicated to finding out the truth as he is – then you’ll have no problems with him at all.’

  Grant thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘I think your Mr Woodend and I are going to get along just fine.’

  Eight

  The two American military policemen were standing near the trailer which had been assigned to the Right Honourable Douglas Coutes for the duration of the investigation. They could not have been said to be actually guarding it, but they couldn’t have been said to be not guarding it, either.

  Which was rather a neat way of exemplifying Coutes’s current predicament, Woodend thought. The Minister of Defence wasn’t under arrest – but he certainly wasn’t at liberty, either.

  When Woodend knocked on the door of the trailer, a voice from inside called out that he should enter. The Chief Inspector opened the door and stepped into the trailer’s living room.

  Coutes was sitting at the table, ostensibly – and possibly ostentatiously – examining the contents of his Ministerial Red Box, which was probably still being delivered to him on a daily basis. He looked up briefly, registered the Chief Inspector’s presence, and then returned his attention to his papers.

  Woodend took the opportunity to get a proper look at the man he’d once both served under and heartily despised.

  Coutes had not been entirely untouched by the passing of the years, he decided, but that touch had been light, and any impartial observer, looking at the two of them together, would probably have guessed that the policeman was a good ten years older than the politician.

  Another minute passed before Coutes looked up again, and when he did, he said, ‘Well, well, well, this is quite like old times, isn’t it?’

  Woodend thought back to their first meeting in the officers’ mess, all those years earlier.

  ‘Quite like old times?’ he repeated. ‘Insofar as you’ve kept me standin’ here like a puddin’, waitin’ until you feel inclined to speak to me, then I suppose it is. But a lot’s changed, as well.’

  ‘Like what, Sergeant Woodend?’

  ‘For a start, I’m a Chief Inspector now.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Coutes agreed.

  He sounded, Woodend thought, as if he believed that a man in his position had no need to apologize for any mistakes he might make over another man’s rank – or over anything else, for that matter – and possibly that was just what he did believe.

  ‘I didn’t do it, you know,’ the Minister continued.

  ‘Didn’t do what?’

  ‘I did not kill that man,’ Coutes said emphatically. ‘I did not kill him, and I did not place his body in a shallow grave.’

  And Woodend – who knew from experience that Coutes would lie without a second’s thought when the situation demanded it – was surprised to discover that he didn’t think the Minister was lying this time.

  ‘How did your knife come to be in the grave with the corpse?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I can only assume it was there because the real murderer put it there.’

  ‘How would he get his hands on it in the first place? Did you lose it? Or did he steal it from you?’

  ‘He stole it. I’d never have been careless enough to lose that knife. I was very fond of it.’

  ‘So when exactly was it stolen?’

  ‘I’d guess it was five or six weeks before the Invasion, which would make it a week or two before Robert Kineally disappeared.’

  ‘Where was it stolen from?’

  ‘From here, of course. From this delightful little camp we liked to call home.’

  ‘I assume, in that case, that there’ll be some written record of the theft.’

  ‘Written record? What are you talking about? Why would there be any written record?’

  ‘Because, if you’d reported it missin’, I imagine some clerk or other would have made a note of it.’

  ‘I didn’t report it missing.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It would have reflected badly on me.’

  ‘It would?’

  ‘Of course. An officer who is held in so little respect by his men that they think they can steal from him with impunity, will very soon become a figure of ridicule.’

  ‘But whoever stole it wasn’t one of your men. If it disappeared here, it must have been stolen by one of the Yanks.’

  ‘We were all part of the same glorious army of liberation – or so you used to tell me with monotonous regularity. Besides, the American officers looked down their noses at us Brits often enough as it was. I certainly didn’t want to give them a further excuse to feel superior.’

  ‘Pity, though, isn’t it?’ Woodend mused. ‘If you had reported the knife missing, you’d probably be in the clear now.’

  ‘If I had reported it missing, the Americans would now be claiming I only pretended it was stolen,’ Coutes countered. ‘Whoever decided to frame me back then had thought the whole thing through fairly c
arefully.’

  ‘So you still think that the murderer had some kind of personal grudge against you?’

  ‘I don’t think he would have lost any sleep over me taking the blame for his crime, but his main aim in pointing the finger at me was probably to take the pressure off himself. And if we’re talking about grudges, then the person who he must have had the biggest grudge against was surely Robert Kineally.’

  ‘You had a bit of a grudge against Kineally yourself, didn’t you, Mr Coutes?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that,’ Coutes said. ‘We had our disagreements, as any officers faced with a difficult situation will, but I—’

  ‘A grudge,’ Woodend interrupted firmly. ‘A bloody big grudge. Which brings us right back to Mary Parkinson.’

  ‘As I think I told you over the phone, she meant nothing to me,’ Coutes said wearily.

  ‘Not as a person, she didn’t,’ Woodend agreed. ‘You never did care much about people as people. But as a challenge, I think she was much more important than you’re now willin’ to admit.’

  They had been in the Dun Cow public house when they first saw her. Woodend would not, by choice, have spent his free time in Coutes’s company. But in the army it was the officers who decreed when an NCO’s time was free, and Captain Coutes had decided – by a very narrow margin – that he would rather drink with Woodend than drink alone.

  There were a number of women in the saloon bar that night. Some of them were Land Girls, mostly big, beefy lasses, who had taken over the agricultural work of the men who had gone into the army, and daily gave the lie to the popular belief that men were always the stronger sex. There were some local girls, too, on the lookout for Yanks who would sweep them off their feet and take them back to their ranches in Texas once the war was over.

  ‘Slags, the lot of them,’ Coutes pronounced, after surveying all the available women. ‘I couldn’t poke one of them unless she had a paper bag over her head and I had a clothes peg on my nose.’

  Woodend took a half-hearted sip of his pint – beer consumed in Captain Coutes’s presence never did taste quite right – but said nothing.

  ‘Have you got some tart of your own, back home, that you’re slipping it to, Sergeant Woodend?’ Coutes asked.

  ‘I rather think that’s my own business, sir,’ Woodend replied, hating to sound so stiff and wooden, but knowing that wooden words were a wiser response than smashing Coutes in the face.

  ‘Didn’t they teach you, during your basic training, that you should always answer an officer s question – whatever that question might happen to be?’ Coutes asked.

  ‘An’ didn’t they teach you, durin’ officer trainin’, that if you goad a worm long enough, it will eventually turn – and that could be dangerous when the worm has access to a bayonet?’ Woodend countered.

  The way the conversation was going, things could have turned nasty – especially for Woodend – but at that moment the door of the bar opened, and Mary Parkinson walked in.

  Mary was nineteen at the time, and the daughter of a local farmer. She had a classic English peaches-and-cream complexion, and her blonde hair cascaded on to her shoulders in ringlets. She was wearing a floral dress which hugged her dainty figure. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even very pretty, in the conventional sense. But she had an aura – a kind of inner glow – which made Woodend think she was one of the loveliest sights he’d ever seen.

  ‘Now there’s a piece of totty well worth getting your knob out for,’ Coutes said.

  Mary glanced around the bar, and – not seeing the person she was obviously expecting to find there – first looked disappointed, and then a little lost.

  ‘I’m in luck,’ Coutes said, rising from his seat.

  He walked over to where Mary was standing.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked the girl.

  ‘I … I was supposed to be meeting my cousin, but she isn’t here,’ Mary said. ‘I don’t know quite what to do now. To tell you the truth, I’m not really used to public houses.’

  ‘Perhaps your cousin’s been delayed. Why don’t you come over to our table and wait for her?’ Coutes suggested smoothly.

  ‘I don’t know if I should,’ Mary said hesitantly.

  ‘She’ll be disappointed if she does arrive and finds that you’re not here,’ Coutes pointed out. ‘And if she doesn’t turn up, my sergeant over there will drive you home. Now what harm could there be in that?’

  ‘None, I suppose,’ Mary said, allowing Coutes to take her by the elbow and steer her across to the table.

  ‘I’m Dougie,’ Coutes said, when they’d sat down. ‘And this is my sergeant, Charlie.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Charlie,’ Mary said coyly.

  Coutes ordered the drinks – a pink gin for himself, a pint for Woodend, a port and lemon for Mary – and then duly set about trying to impress the girl.

  Woodend, for his part, stared into the corner of the room, and wished he were somewhere else entirely. But all the time Coutes continued with his patter, Woodend could feel the girl’s eyes on him.

  Finally, when the captain took a pause for breath, Mary said, ‘And what about you, Charlie? Have you got a girlfriend?’

  It would have been easy to say ‘no’ to this girl who made his heart beat faster just by saying his name, Woodend thought. But he had already made his choice – made his commitment – and wandering off the path he had chosen was not something he could bring himself do.

  ‘Yes, I have got a girlfriend,’ he heard himself say. ‘Her name’s Joan. We’re hopin ‘to be married when the war’s over.’

  ‘Well, that is nice,’ Mary said, though she sounded just a little disappointed. She stood up. ‘Excuse me for a minute,’ she continued, and headed for the women’s toilets.

  ‘So what do you think, Sergeant?’ Coutes asked, in a tone of leering confidentiality.

  ‘I think you’re wastin’ your time,’ Woodend said frankly. ‘If you want to get your end away so badly, why don’t you cosy up to one of them girls at the other end of the bar. Buy them a few drinks, an’ they’ll probably let you do what you like with them.’

  ‘You’re forgetting what I said earlier about the paper bag and the clothes peg,’ Coutes told him.

  ‘Mary’s not goin’ to give in to you,’ Woodend said.

  ‘I know she isn’t,’ Coutes agreed.

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘At least, she’s not going to give in to me tonight. Maybe not even this week. But eventually – who knows?’

  ‘Why not just leave her alone?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Because, before the war, I used to ride to hounds, and I got rather a taste for the thrill of the chase,’ Coutes said.

  Woodend did not know what to do or say even at that moment, and as the weeks went by – as Coutes’s plan seemed to be coming closer and closer to fruition – he began to feel even more helpless.

  He supposed he could have told Mary just what kind of man Coutes really was, but after the snow job the captain had given her, he doubted she’d believe him. It was, he thought, like watching an impending train crash – knowing exactly what was going to happen, yet being powerless to prevent it.

  What he did not know – what neither of them knew – was that an obstacle would suddenly appear on the track to derail Coutes’s train just short of what seemed its inevitable destination.

  And that that obstacle would come in the form of Captain Robert Kineally.

  ‘If push comes to shove, you can always claim that you killed Robert Kineally in self-defence,’ Woodend suggested. ‘Yes, I think you could make out a reasonable case for that.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him at all,’ Coutes said coldly.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Woodend agreed, ‘but if I could see I was goin’ to be convicted of killin’ somebody, whatever happened, I think I’d rather plead to a lesser charge than a greater one.’

  ‘You’re enjoying all this, aren’t you, you bloody bastard!’ Douglas Coutes dem
anded.

  ‘“Enjoyin’ it” isn’t exactly the right phrase,’ Woodend replied. ‘But I have to admit I’m gettin’ some satisfaction out of seein’ you suffer, after what you did to Mary Parkinson.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything to her at all,’ Coutes said. ‘At least, nothing illegal. If I had, don’t you think Kineally would have seen to it that I was brought up on a charge? Nothing would have made him happier than to see me spend the next fifteen years in gaol. But he took no such action. And why? Because he knew he’d never make anything stick!’

  ‘Even so, he might still have the last laugh on you,’ Woodend pointed out. ‘The dead hand of Robert Kineally could yet see you where he’d have liked you to be back in 1944.’

  ‘I wish we were both still in the army,’ Coutes said. ‘If we were, I’d make you suffer for this insolence. By God, I would!’

  ‘You don’t have to tolerate my insolence if you don’t want to,’ Woodend reminded him. ‘The only reason I’m involved in this investigation at all is because you wanted me to be involved. So you’ve only to drop a word in the right ear, an’ I’ll be out of here before you can say “court martial”.’

  ‘It’s tempting,’ Coutes admitted.

  ‘Then follow your instincts,’ Woodend urged him. ‘Tell whoever it is who set the wheels in motion to bring me to Haverton Camp that you don’t want me here any more.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I will do that,’ Coutes said. ‘You’ve had your satisfaction in seeing me suffer. Now I’d like to get my revenge by completely turning the tables on you.’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re talkin’ about,’ Woodend told the Minister.

  ‘Then I’ll explain in such a way that even a simpleton like you can understand. You didn’t like me from the very moment we met, did you?’

  ‘No, it was dislike at first sight.’

  ‘But, as time passed, it went beyond dislike. You grew to truly despise me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Very true. But I can’t take all the credit for that – you made it really easy for me.’

  ‘So when you prove me innocent of this murder – and you will prove it – it will be like thrusting a dagger in your own gut. And when you see me walk away – more powerful than I’ve ever been – it will be twisting that dagger round in the wound. And I’ll enjoy watching that, Sergeant Woodend. Believe me, I’ll really enjoy it.’