A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘You wanted us to talk about our Mary,’ Mr Parkinson said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She was the apple of both our eyes, you know. She was a lovely, lovely girl.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve heard. That’s what everybody else I’ve talked to says about her,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘It was a terrible tragedy that she should lose her life so young,’ the old man continued.

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ Paniatowski told him.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t her fault! How could it be her fault? She died of pneumonia.’

  ‘Nobody in the village really believes that, you know,’ Paniatowski said gently.

  ‘I don’t care what them evil-minded people think,’ the old man said bitterly. ‘They can say whatever they like about her, but they’re wrong. Our Mary caught pneumonia. That’s what she died of – and that’s what it says on the her death certificate.’

  ‘The doctor who signed it was a friend of yours, wasn’t he?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, we’d known old Doc Adams for years.’

  ‘And he’d have written anything on the death certificate that you’d asked him to, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I want you to leave!’ the old man said, as fiercely as his weak voice would still allow. ‘I want you to go right now.’

  ‘There’s no shame in what she did,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Your friends will all understand. They won’t think any less of her because of it.’

  The old man raised a shaky hand, and pointed it across the room. ‘There’s the door, Miss,’ he said. ‘If I still had the strength to throw you out through it myself, I’d do it.’

  ‘There were two great wrongs done back then,’ Paniatowski said desperately. ‘One was to your daughter, and the other was to someone else. We can’t do anything to help Mary any more, but at least we can still right that second wrong. And if you helped me to do that, by telling me the truth, I’m sure Mary would sleep more peacefully in her grave.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ the old man asked. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to give you any more details about that second wrong,’ Paniatowski said. ‘You’ll just have to trust me on it.’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’ the old man asked. ‘Why should I help you, if it means blackening my darling daughter’s name?’

  To hell with the Official Secrets’ Act! Paniatowski thought. To hell with all the politics and red tape!

  ‘Did you know an American Army captain called Robert Kineally, Mr Parkinson?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, we knew Robert. He was a wonderful young man. He was in love with our Mary, you know.’

  ‘He disappeared shortly after she died,’ old Mrs Parkinson said, speaking for the first time. ‘I don’t think he could bear to stay around here after our Mary was gone.’

  ‘He didn’t disappear,’ Paniatowski told them. ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered!’ Mrs Parkinson gasped.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ her husband said. ‘If he’d been murdered, somebody would have told us.’

  ‘Nobody knew,’ Paniatowski explained. ‘They’ve only just found his body – buried at the old camp. And now we need to find his killer.’

  ‘Poor Robert,’ the old woman said mournfully.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened,’ her husband agreed. ‘But how will talking about our Mary help you to find the murderer?’

  ‘I wish I could give you a clear answer to that, but I can’t,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘We’re blundering around in the dark here, and even if you can shed only a little light, it might help us to find our way.’

  ‘It’s very painful for us to talk about it,’ the old man said, as tears began to run down his sunken cheeks.

  ‘You owe it to Mary,’ Paniatowski said, hating herself for putting them through so much suffering, but knowing she had no choice. ‘You have to do what she would have wanted you to do.’

  The old couple exchanged agonized glances, then the father said, ‘Before Mary died – before Mary killed herself – she wrote two letters. The first one was to me and her mother. She … she said she was sorry for all the pain she knew she’d cause us by going like that, but she was so desperately unhappy, and she didn’t see any other way out.’

  ‘Did you keep the note?’ Paniatowski asked.

  The old man feebly shook his head. ‘No, we didn’t keep it. We couldn’t bear to. So when I’d lit the bonfire, I burned it, along with all the … the blood-soaked bedding.’

  ‘And what about the other letter?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘What did she say in that?’

  ‘We don’t know. It was in a sealed envelope.’

  ‘And you didn’t open it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If Mary had wanted us to read it, she wouldn’t have sealed it in the first place. Anyway, it wasn’t addressed to us.’

  ‘So what did you do with it?’

  ‘In her letter to us, she asked us to post it for her. She’d even put a stamp on it. It was her last wish. It seemed … it seemed that the least we could do was to respect it.’

  ‘Do you remember who you posted it to?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Just a hint of anger appeared in the old man’s watery eyes. ‘I may be old and I may be frail – but I’m not quite senile yet,’ he said. ‘Of course I remember who I posted it to.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I never meant to imply—’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ the old man told her. ‘But it doesn’t matter. Nothing much matters now.’

  ‘So it was addressed to …?’

  ‘It was addressed to Robert. Who else would our Mary have written to in the last few precious moments of her life?’

  Twenty-One

  Inspector Tom Wright had been no more than accurate when he’d talked about the excellence of the security system which was installed Douglas Coutes’s flat, Bob Rutter thought.

  The front door was made of a hardwood – possibly mahogany – which would have made it a formidable obstacle even without the steel plate that was probably embedded in it. The locks, with which Lily Hanson was drunkenly fumbling at the moment, would not have looked out of place on the strong-room door of a major bank. The average burglar would have taken one look at this door, and then moved on. Even the expert cracksman – and there were few enough of those about – would have thought twice before taking it on.

  Lily, after more fumbling, finally got the door open. ‘Just wait here for a minute, will you, Sweetie?’ she said.

  ‘Have you changed your mind about inviting me in?’ Rutter asked, in a flirtatious voice that sounded nothing like his own.

  ‘Changed my mind? No, not for a minute,’ Lily assured him. ‘Only an idiot would slam the door in the face of a good-looking boy like you.’

  ‘Then why keep me waiting out here?’

  ‘Because I’ve got to disable the security system before you can come in.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really! If I don’t do that, the sensors will detect more than one person in the hallway, and the alarms will go off.’

  ‘And we wouldn’t want that,’ Rutter said.

  Lily giggled. ‘No, we wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Not just when we’re getting really close to the interesting bit.’

  Lily disappeared into the flat, leaving Rutter with a moment to himself for reflection.

  This kind of behaviour wasn’t like him at all, he thought. He didn’t make up stories about himself, and then feed them to people he was investigating. He never pretended to be something he wasn’t. That was the sort of thing that only the wonderful – irrepressible – Monika Paniatowski could get away with.

  And yet despite all his qualms – despite the odd prick of conscience – he was, for the first time since he’d been told about his wife’s death, actually beginning to enjoy
himself.

  Lily appeared in the doorway again.

  ‘It’s safe to come in, now,’ she said. She threw her arms out in an expansive gesture. ‘Welcome to my humble home.’

  Rutter followed her into the flat. She led him down the corridor, and from there to a large, luxurious living room.

  ‘At last!’ Lily said. ‘We’re finally in my little home, and now we can really start to get comfortable.’

  But almost as soon as the words were out, she began to look very uncomfortable in herself.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she continued, speaking through a mouth which she was keeping almost entirely closed.

  She turned, and staggered back into the corridor. Rutter heard another door open, then close again, and guessed it led into a bathroom. He waited for a few moments, then followed her out on tiptoe.

  The second he entered the corridor, he could hear the sound of the woman vomiting her heart up into the toilet bowl. Which meant, he estimated, that he had at least five minutes to look around.

  Still walking on tiptoe – though given that Lily Hanson was retching so loudly, he doubted she’d have heard an elephant stampede – he began opening the other doors.

  There was a large, palatial bedroom, which Douglas Coutes must have shared with Lily before her fall from favour – and to which he now, no doubt, took his newer conquests, with little regard for how it must make his poor neglected housekeeper feel.

  There was a second bedroom, which had so few personal touches in it that he assumed it was reserved for guests.

  And there was a third bedroom – much smaller and meaner than the others – which stank of alcohol, and served not only as a refuge for the inebriated Lily, but also as a constant reminder of the rejection and humiliation she had been made to endure at the hands of Douglas Coutes.

  He continued checking out the rooms, keeping one ear cocked for signs that the housekeeper had recovered enough to emerge from the bathroom.

  There was a large kitchen, and a small sitting room. There was a second bathroom.

  It was all so ordinary, he told himself – so opulent, yet conventional – that he was beginning to think the whole expedition was nothing but a complete waste of time.

  And then, he reached the room at the far end of the corridor. It was the biggest one in the entire apartment – and easily the most interesting and self-indulgent.

  This was Coutes’s study. There was no doubt about that. There was a huge teak desk at one end of it, and a full-sized snooker table at the other. Two pieces of modern sculpture flanked the big window which looked out on to the street, and the expanse of polished parquet between the desk and snooker table was broken up by several expensive oriental carpets.

  But it was the walls which immediately attracted Rutter’s interest. Almost every inch of available space on them had been taken up with glass-fronted display cases.

  The cases were works of art in themselves, delicately constructed from the finest woods, by the most skilled of craftsmen. And they were full of knives. Hundreds of them!

  Some of the knives, Rutter recognized – a Fairbairn-Sykes Commando knife, a Bowie knife, an Indian Khukri dagger.

  Others were new to him, though he could make an informed guess as to their origins – that one a Bronze Age dagger, that one a Medieval dagger, and the one in the corner something Japanese.

  But that still left a fair number of exhibits about which he had no clue whatsoever.

  He heard the toilet flush, and hurriedly returned to the lounge. By the time Lily appeared again, he was standing by one of the bookcases, studying the titles with apparent fascination.

  ‘Had a bit of tummy trouble,’ Lily Hanson said weakly. ‘Hope that won’t put you off.’

  ‘No,’ Rutter said, setting his face into a mask of interest and concern, and turning to look at her. ‘It won’t put me off at all. That kind of thing can could happen to anybody.’

  She looked less green than she had earlier, and, after puking up her load, had obviously made some effort to repair her make-up.

  ‘A drink,’ she said. ‘That’s what we could both do with now. A good stiff drink.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea?’ Rutter asked.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Lily asked, exhibiting a flash of that aggression that habitual drunks are often prone to.

  ‘Well, I just don’t think it’s entirely wise, given your tummy trouble,’ Rutter said.

  ‘A little drink is exactly what I need,’ Lily Hanson told him. ‘A little drink will just set me up for the frolics that we’ve been promising each other ever since we left the pub.’

  She walked across to a large cabinet set into the wall. She seemed a little less shaky than she had been earlier.

  ‘Are you sticking to whisky?’ she asked.

  ‘Might as well,’ Rutter replied. He waited until she was concentrating on mixing the drinks, then added, ‘I have to say that with all the security you’ve got installed here, it must have taken some very determined burglars indeed to even consider breaking in.’

  Lily froze. ‘Burglars?’ she asked warily. ‘Who said anything about burglars?’

  ‘You did,’ Rutter told her. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure that I do.’

  ‘When you were disabling the alarms, you told me that you’d been broken into.’

  ‘I said that?’ Lily asked doubtfully. She shook her head, as if attempting to clear it. ‘Suppose I must have done, if you know all about it.’

  ‘You said the burglars got past two of the alarms, but were caught out by the third,’ Rutter said, pushing his luck.

  ‘That’s right, I did say that,’ Lily agreed.

  ‘So where was the third alarm situated? It can’t have been with the others, can it?’

  ‘No. It’s attached to display cases in Douglas’s … in my … study,’ Lily said. ‘Don’t want to talk about burglars any more. Upsets me.’

  ‘Then we won’t,’ Rutter promised.

  ‘Drinks are done,’ Lily said. ‘Take a seat.’

  Rutter considered the sofa for a second, then selected the armchair opposite. Lily looked disappointed, but made no comment.

  They took a preliminary sip of their drinks, then Lily said, ‘You are going to take me to bed later, aren’t you?’

  After all the loneliness – all the despair – it was tempting to say that he would, but Rutter found himself shaking his head.

  ‘You’re not?’ Lily asked.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Rutter agreed.

  Lily’s jaw quivered, and tears appeared in her eyes. ‘It’s because I’m ugly, isn’t it?’ she wailed.

  ‘You’re not ugly at all,’ Rutter replied.

  And he meant it. Somewhere, beneath all that make-up and all the excesses, there lay a pretty face – a face it was still possible to salvage.

  ‘Then, if you don’t think I’m ugly, why won’t you sleep with me?’ Lily demanded.

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair to take advantage of you, not when you’re not feeling well.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s fair and what isn’t,’ Lily said, almost screaming the words. ‘I’m the one who decides what’s fair!’

  Rutter stood. ‘I really think I’d better go,’ he said.

  Lily looked up at him pathetically. ‘Please don’t leave me!’ she implored him.

  ‘My staying wouldn’t be good for either of us,’ Rutter told her as he walked towards the door.

  ‘You’re just like Douglas!’ Lily screeched after him, as he stepped into the corridor. ‘You’re just like all the men I’ve ever known. You’re nothing but a complete bloody bastard!’

  Perhaps she was right, Rutter thought, as he headed towards the lift. Or perhaps, by walking away as he had done, he had at last begun his own long climb back to decency and honour.

  Twenty-Two

  Abe Birnbaum – ex-GI driver and now major player in the tri-state dry-cleaning world – was about to get ready for
bed when he heard a loud pounding on his trailer door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he asked.

  ‘Woodend,’ replied the furious voice from outside.

  Birnbaum unlocked the door. Looking down at his visitor, the thought came to him that although he’d always thought of Woodend as a big man, he’d never known quite how big he could be when he was angry.

  ‘Is there a problem, Charlie?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t “Charlie” me,’ Woodend said, pushing Birnbaum back into the trailer, and immediately following him. ‘Sit down, you bastard. I want some answers, and I want them now. An’ you’re goin’ to give them to me – even if I have to break every bone in your body to get them.’

  Birnbaum sat, and realized he hadn’t been quite as frightened as this for a long while – that the last time his bowels had turned to water, as they were doing now, was during the Normandy Landings.

  ‘Why did Robert Kineally and Mary Parkinson break up?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘They didn’t,’ Birnbaum confessed. ‘Everything was fine before he went to London – and by time he came back, she was dead.’

  ‘But he got a letter from her, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he got a letter.’

  ‘An’ what did she say in it?’

  ‘She told him she’d slept with Coutes. She said she was so ashamed of herself that she couldn’t bear to go on living any more.’

  ‘And what did Kineally do when he’d read it?’

  ‘What would you have expected him to do? What would you have done yourself, in his place? He went out looking for Coutes.’

  Kineally confronts Coutes in the Dun Cow’s skittle alley.

  ‘Mary’s dead!’ he says.

  ‘I heard,’ Coutes replies. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘It’s all your fault.’

  ‘My fault?’

  ‘You seduced her – you son-of-a-bitch – and she couldn’t live with the shame of it.’

  Coutes laughs. ‘I assure you, there was no seduction involved. She was at least as willing as I was. And if every woman I’d slept with killed herself because of it, the countryside would be strewn with dead bodies.’