A Long Time Dead

by Sally Spencer

Case closed! Crime scene gone!

  Woodend knocked on the trailer door, and Grant opened it.

  ‘Oh, hi!’ the Special Agent said, without much warmth. ‘What can I do for you, Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Charlie,’ Woodend corrected him. ‘Or you can even call me “Chuck”, if you’re happier with that.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Charlie?’ Grant said.

  ‘There’s a tradition that us English bobbies like to maintain,’ Woodend told him. ‘When we have a result, we like to get together over a few drinks and sort of wind down.’

  Grant frowned. ‘As you can see for yourself, Charlie, I’m really rather busy and—’

  ‘Too busy to give me half an hour of your time?’ Woodend asked, sounding surprised – and not a little hurt. ‘Too busy to have a quick drink with one of your colleagues? I thought that in the Agency they taught you to respect the traditions of the country in which you’re operating.’

  ‘In the what?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Sorry, did I say the Agency?’ Woodend apologized. ‘What I meant to say was the Bureau! So what do you think? Shall we have a drink together, and chew over the fat?’

  ‘I … er … I’m afraid that I don’t have any kind of alcohol in the trailer,’ Grant said.

  ‘No problem there, my old mate,’ Woodend replied, reaching into his pocket and producing a square bottle. ‘I’ve brought my own booze with me. An’ look, Ed, in your honour I made sure that it was the finest Kentucky bourbon. Now you wouldn’t want to turn that down, would you? It’d be a bit like insultin’ the Stars an’ Stripes, don’t you think?’

  Grant sighed, and gave in to the inevitable.

  ‘But we’ll have keep it strictly to the half hour limit,’ he said. ‘I can’t possibly spare any more time than that.’

  ‘Fine,’ Woodend agreed. ‘Half an hour should be all I need.’

  Monika Paniatowski parked Woodend’s Wolseley on the garage forecourt, and walked around the side of the building, towards the repair shop.

  The van was standing just inside the door. It was no longer the Post Office red which it had been only a few hours earlier. Now it was a bright yellow colour, and the words ‘South Eastern Electricity Board’ had been sprayed on both its sides and bonnet.

  It had been a rush job, Paniatowski thought, and it showed. Once she was close to it, she could see imperfections almost too numerous to count. But in the dark – and from a distance – it would probably pass muster.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ the mechanic asked.

  ‘Lovely,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘It’s not dry to the touch yet.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. I’m not a cat.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I don’t have any intention of rubbing my body all over it.’

  The mechanic blinked several times, as if he’d just been blessed with a vision of Paniatowski’s completely naked body covered in the South West Electricity Board yellow paint.

  ‘And you’re sure painting the van in the electricity board’s colours is legal?’ he asked.

  Was it? Paniatowski wondered.

  Probably.

  If you had the permission of the company involved.

  Which she and Woodend didn’t!

  ‘I’m a detective police sergeant,’ she said, as if that answered his question. ‘You know that for a fact, because I showed you my warrant card when I wrote out the cheque.’

  ‘That’s true,’ the mechanic agreed. He hesitated for a moment. ‘I was wondering …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a dance in Exeter tomorrow night, and I was … well, I got to thinking that if you’re still around …’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘You would?’

  ‘But my husband’s always been an awfully jealous kind of man, and ever since he’s taken up heavyweight boxing, he seems to have no control of his temper at all.’

  ‘You didn’t say you were married,’ the mechanic grumbled.

  ‘Didn’t I?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘It must have slipped my mind. But I’ll tell you what – if you’re prepared to take the risk of getting on the wrong side of the Bone-Crusher, then so am I.’

  ‘The Bone-Crusher?’ the mechanic repeated.

  ‘That’s my husband’s nickname,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Can’t imagine where he got it from, but everybody calls him that – even the people who duck down alleys and hide behind cars when they see him coming. Anyway, as I was saying, if you’re willing to take the risk—’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just remembered that I’m doing something else tomorrow night,’ the mechanic said hastily.

  That was the trouble with men, Paniatowski told herself, as she drove the van out of the repair shop. They wanted you – but they didn’t want the pain that having you might involve.

  She laughed. She had quite enjoyed her amusing little interchange with the mechanic, she thought.

  Which was just as well, because there wouldn’t be a great deal to laugh at from now on. In fact, if Woodend was right, everything was just about to turn very nasty indeed.

  ‘Have you ever heard of an English writer called E. M. Forster?’ Woodend asked Grant, when the drinks had been poured, and they were sitting, facing each other, across the table.

  ‘Sure,’ Grant agreed. ‘I studied him at college. He was worth half a credit, if I remember correctly. What about him?’

  ‘He once wrote, “If I had to choose between betrayin’ my country and betrayin’ my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘I’m not sure I could subscribe to that idea at all,’ Grant said.

  ‘No, I suspect you couldn’t,’ Woodend agreed. ‘I don’t think Abe Birnbaum could, either, although – without havin’ any real idea of what was goin’ on – that’s exactly what he did.’

  ‘Birnbaum betrayed his country?’

  ‘In a manner of speakin’. What Birnbaum actually did was to inadvertently put a spanner in the works of an operation run by an agency representin’ his country,’ Woodend explained. ‘Tell me, Ed, my old mate, what’s the secret of your eternal youth?’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Accordin’ to FBI records, you’re fifty-seven years old, but you don’t look a day over thirty.’

  ‘What is this?’ Grant demanded.

  ‘Also accordin’ to FBI records, the last assignment you had before this one was cleanin’ out the toilets in the Department of Justice,’ Woodend continued. ‘So this particular job is a real promotion for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve got your facts wrong!’ Grant protested.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Woodend said. ‘My source is right there in the FBI payroll department.’

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ Grant said, shifting his ground. ‘FBI agents will often use an alias when they’re out on assignment.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ Woodend said mildly. ‘FBI agents are just ordinary bobbies with guns an’ an unnatural fear of anybody mildly liberal. Now the CIA’s an entirely different matter.’

  ‘You think I’m CIA?’

  ‘I’ve absolutely no doubt about it.’

  ‘And could you explain to me how the Company would get itself involved in a criminal investigation?’

  ‘Ah, that’s an easy one,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s not involved in a criminal investigation, because there hasn’t actually been any crime – at least, not at Haverton Camp.’

  ‘This is crazy talk,’ Grant told him.

  ‘Let me tell you what I’ve pieced together, an’ then you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong,’ Woodend continued, unperturbed. ‘Your government wanted the Right Honourable Douglas Coutes, MP, to do somethin’ for it. I don’t what that somethin’ was, but the details don’t really matter. Anyway, whatever it was, Coutes absolutely refused to play along. So somebody – possibly in the State Department, but more likely in the CIA – decided that what you really needed to do was to get
some leverage on him.’

  ‘The CIA would never—’ Coutes began.

  ‘Never involve itself in dirty tricks?’ Woodend interrupted. ‘We’re talkin’ here about an organization that planned to kill Fidel Castro, by either givin’ him an explodin’ cigar or a fatal disease. In comparison to that, what the Company’s done to Douglas Coutes is no more than a harmless jape.’

  ‘Castro’s a Commie,’ Grant said. ‘The Company would never think of using dirty tricks against a British politician. Britain is our ally!’

  ‘But even allies need to be strong-armed now an’ again, if only for their own good,’ Woodend countered. ‘Would you like me to go on, or should I just write down everythin’ I know an’ post it to the Prime Minister?’

  ‘I suppose I should hear the rest of the story, if only so I can point out how deluded you’ve been,’ Grant said.

  ‘You started out by examin’ Coutes’s recent history, but you didn’t have much luck there. It’s true that the man has the morals of a tom-cat – which looked promisin’ at first – but the problem is, he doesn’t care who knows it. How can you shame a man who abandons his mistress because she’s the wrong side of thirty and then – totally indifferent to how much pain an’ sufferin’ it might cause her – employs her as a servant?’

  ‘It would ruin an American politician,’ Grant said.

  ‘But not a British one,’ Woodend pointed out. ‘John Profumo, who used to be our Minister for War, didn’t lose his job because he was consortin’ with prostitutes – he lost it because he lied to Parliament about consortin’ with prostitutes. An’ Coutes isn’t even married, so nobody in the government would give a hang about what he does in his private life.’

  ‘You’re so decadent over here,’ Grant said in disgust.

  ‘Now you are talkin’ like an FBI agent,’ Woodend told him, ‘but I still don’t believe you are one. Anyway, after you failed to turn up any sex scandal you could use, you probably turned your attention to Coutes’s financial dealin’s. But you didn’t find anythin’ there, either. Coutes isn’t really interested in money. Never has been. I realized myself, over twenty years ago, that power is his drug – an’ not power as a means of gettin’ somethin’ else, but power for its own sake. So, havin’ failed on two fronts to get the goods on him, what were you to do next?’

  ‘You tell me,’ Grant said.

  ‘You started diggin’ back even deeper into his past. An’ it was probably at that point that some bright spark in Langley came across the disappearance of Robert Kineally. That was a truly wonderful discovery, wasn’t it? Because Robert just happened to be the brother of Senator Kineally. An’ Senator Kineally, without him havin’ any real idea of what was goin’ on, could be manipulated into lendin’ all of his considerable political weight to your scheme.’

  ‘You really are a remarkable case study in paranoia, Chief Inspector,’ Grant said.

  ‘It’s hard not to be paranoiac when everybody’s out to get you,’ Woodend told him, with a grin.

  ‘Nobody’s out to get you.’

  ‘Aren’t they? Ten minutes ago, I was your mate, Charlie. Now I’m “Chief Inspector” again. But I digress.’

  ‘This whole story of yours is just one big digression.’

  ‘I’m bettin’ that things really started to gel when you tracked down Huey Bascombe in Fulsom Prison,’ Woodend continued, ignoring the comment. ‘Because, you see, what Huey was able to tell you filled in a lot of the larger gaps in your initial plan.’

  ‘And what did Bascombe allegedly tell us?’

  ‘For a start, he told you that Coutes an’ Kineally had a big fight, just before Kineally disappeared. So there’s your motive, handed to you on a platter. Then he told you that his mate, Harry Wallace, had stolen Coutes’s knife – which gave you a murder weapon.’

  ‘So you believe the part about Wallace taking the knife, do you?’

  ‘Aye, I believe it, right enough. Why wouldn’t I, when it’s what actually happened?’

  ‘And how can you be so sure that it did happen?’

  ‘We’ll get to that in a minute,’ Woodend promised. ‘The next step in your little scheme was to track down Harry Wallace. But either you didn’t find him, or he was already dead. Whatever the case, you didn’t have Coutes’s knife, which was a pity. But then you decided that didn’t really matter. You were already workin’ on producin’ a duplicate set of Kineally’s dog tags, so why not make a duplicate of Coutes’s knife as well?’

  Grant shook his head. ‘I don’t know where you get it all from,’ he said. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Of course, neither the knife nor the dog tags would stand up to a thorough examination in our labs at Scotland Yard, but since our labs were never goin’ to get to see them – since they were supposedly goin’ to be sent back to your labs – that didn’t matter either.’

  ‘Are you claiming that the knife and the dog tags didn’t go back to our labs?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, one way or the other. But if they did, they certainly weren’t tested thoroughly, because the results of the tests – includin’ the one which revealed it was Coutes’s bloody fingerprint on the dog tag – had been written weeks earlier, possibly even before the “evidence” itself had been manufactured.’ Woodend paused. ‘But not findin’ the knife did cause you one problem.’

  ‘And what problem was that?’

  ‘You couldn’t be sure Huey Bascombe was tellin’ the truth. He said Harry Wallace had stolen the knife, but what if he hadn’t? What if you planted the duplicate knife, an’ then Coutes could produce the genuine one? Now that would have been embarrassin’, wouldn’t it? So you had to make sure Coutes really didn’t have the knife any more. That’s why, despite the risks of trippin’ off a very sophisticated alarm system, you broke into Coutes’s flat – because you needed to take a close look at his weapon collection. And when your operatives reported back to you that what should have been one of the prize pieces in the collection wasn’t there in the case, you knew that Huey Bascombe had been completely straight with you, an’ you were ready to start the final stage of the operation.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘You conned a surveyor from New Elizabethan Properties into makin’ certain that the skeleton was discovered.’ Woodend paused. ‘I was wonderin’ how you made it look as if the ground hadn’t been disturbed for years, when, in fact, you must have been tinkerin’ with it only a few days earlier.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Grant said.

  ‘Did you have to lay new turf when you’d finished? Or did you take the old turf up with such care that you could put it back without anybody noticin’? Were chemicals involved? I’m told you can do marvellous things with chemicals.’

  ‘This is beyond fantasy!’

  ‘So you won’t tell me, eh?’ Woodend asked philosophically. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s only technical details – an’ as you’ve been pointin’ out all along, one thing you Yanks do have is the technology.’ He lit up a cigarette, and inhaled with relish. ‘Anyway, the next thing you did was to have Coutes brought down here, an’ let him sweat for a couple of days while the so-called “evidence” was buildin’ up against him. An’ then you made him an offer.’

  ‘What kind of offer?’

  ‘You said that if Coutes agreed to do whatever it was your government had been wantin’ him to do all along, you’d get him off the hook by producin’ somebody else to take the rap for killin’ Kineally. An’ you did. With the help of Bascombe, you produced Harry Wallace.’

  ‘Are you saying that Wallace didn’t kill Kineally?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ Woodend told him. ‘An’ not only didn’t he kill Kineally, he didn’t kill the man whose skeleton you dug up from the shallow grave near the perimeter fence, either.’

  ‘What are you talking about now?’ Grant demanded.

  ‘I don’t exactly know how you got your hands on that skeleton. It could have come from a teaching hospi
tal. You might have filleted some dead tramp you’d picked up off the street. Knowing the lengths you seem willing to go, you might even have dug it up in a graveyard. But the source isn’t important. The simple fact is, that skeleton isn’t Robert Kineally’s.’

  Monika Paniatowski stood in the shadows by one of the remaining trailers. She was feeling nervous, and desperately wanted a smoke – but she was only too aware that if the flare of the match didn’t give away her position, the glow from the cigarette which followed it undoubtedly would.

  So far, the Target had shown absolutely no sign of wishing to go anywhere at all. So perhaps Woodend was wrong about him. Perhaps he was wrong about the whole case.

  Cloggin’-it Charlie had been wrong before, she reminded herself.

  But not often. And not as wrong as that.

  Besides, the way he had explained things this time had made perfect sense. In fact, his explanation was the only one which made any sense at all.

  The door of the trailer opened, and the Target stepped out. She’d been expecting him to be holding some kind of travelling bag, but he wasn’t. Instead, he was carrying something long and thin, wrapped up in a blanket.

  ‘I’ll never doubt you again, Charlie Woodend,’ Paniatowski said softly to herself. ‘From now on, I’ll take everything you say – however outlandish it might seem – as gospel.’

  The Target got into the car parked next to his trailer, and turned the ignition key. The engine refused to fire.

  He would try at least a couple more times, then wait to allow his carburettor to dry out, Paniatowski thought.

  Then he’d try again, and when the engine still wouldn’t start, he’d decide that his spark plugs had probably come loose. And he’d be right, because they were loose. She’d made sure of that herself.

  Once the Target had discovered the problem, it would only take him two or three minutes to fix it, and he’d be ready to go.

  But by then, they’d be ready too.

  Thirty-One

  Glancing down at his watch, Woodend saw that exactly two minutes had passed since he had told Grant that Harry Wallace had been responsible neither for Robert Kineally’s death nor the death of the man ‘found’ in the shallow grave.