Golden Mile to Murder

by Sally Spencer

  The Mile ran from the Tower to the Central Pier and was rightly considered by just about everyone to be the heart of the town. There were garishly painted amusement arcades here, full of one-armed bandits which greedily gobbled up the pennies and occasionally condescended to spit out a shilling’s worth of change in return. There were bright-red ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines, over which pimpled youths bent, licking their lips as they cranked the handles and their eyes devoured flickering black-and-white pictures of half-naked women. A dozen or more small shops offered cartoon postcards of huge women in bathing costumes with crabs firmly affixed to the rears, and blondes with improbable bosoms and silk-stocking legs. Photographs could be developed here, and all the equipment necessary for making sandcastles purchased. Anyone with a shilling in his pocket could go and see ‘The Sensational Severed Living Hands of Patma’ or ‘Tanya, the Tattooed Girl’. Anyone with an urge to gamble could sit in for a game of bingo.

  Grand, Woodend thought, as he weaved his way through the crowd, sniffing the fried onion at hamburger stalls and the tart smell of vinegar which drifted over from the whelks. Absolutely grand! Yet something was missing – something which would have enhanced his pleasure was simply not there. And then he realised what that something was. He felt incomplete working on a case without Bob Rutter by his side.

  He imagined the conversation they would have had:

  ‘Now this is what you call a holiday resort, Bob,’ he could hear himself saying. ‘Take Brighton, which all you southerners seem to think is so bloody marvellous. It’s only got one buggerin’ little pier, hasn’t it – whereas Blackpool now, Blackpool’s got three.’

  And no doubt Rutter would have smiled in his slightly superior grammar-school-boy way and replied, ‘But it hasn’t quite got the style of somewhere like Brighton, has it, sir?’

  No, it bloody hadn’t! But it had got a style all of its own, and he would have made quite sure Rutter understood that.

  He couldn’t imagine ever talking to Monika Paniatowski in the same light-hearted way. Perhaps that was his failure – or perhaps it was hers – but whatever the reason, he felt he had lost something valuable when he had lost Bob Rutter as his bagman.

  Woodend came to a halt in front of a small, open-fronted shop which was sandwiched between two gaudy amusement arcades and had a sign over it announcing that it sold ‘The World Famous Blackpool Rock’.

  The chief inspector ran his eyes over shelf upon shelf of lurid pink tubes wrapped in cellophane, and felt the sticky-sweet taste of childhood gently oozing into his mouth.

  ‘Take some sticks home for the kids?’ suggested the shopkeeper, a middle-aged man with a slight cast in his left eye.

  In point of fact, I was almost on the point of buyin’ one or two sticks for myself, Woodend thought.

  But aloud, he said, ‘A couple of years ago I might have, but I’m sure my daughter thinks she’s far too grown-up for that kind of thing now.’

  The man with the squint shrugged his shoulders fatalistically. ‘You’re not very brown,’ he commented. ‘Just startin’ your holiday, are you?’

  He’d never have been asked the question if it had been the promenade at Brighton he’d been wandering along, Woodend thought. That was the difference between the North and the South – southerners minded their own business, but in the North they regarded everybody’s business as their own.

  ‘I’m not on holiday at all, as it happens,’ he said. ‘I’m workin’.’

  A southerner, even if it he had raised the first question, would have let the matter rest there, but the rock seller said, ‘Oh aye, an’ what kind of business are you in?’

  ‘I’m a bobby,’ Woodend told him. ‘From Whitebridge.’

  ‘The big city, hey? Well, there can only be one reason you’re down here, can’t there?’

  ‘Can there? An’ what might that be?’

  ‘You’re here to find out who killed poor Mr Davies, aren’t you?’

  Poor Mr Davies, Woodend repeated to himself. ‘Did you know Inspector Davies at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Not what you might call well – but well enough. I had a break-in a couple of years back – I’d been stupid enough to leave some cash in the shop overnight – an’ it was Inspector Davies, Sergeant Davies as he was then, who investigated it.’

  ‘What was your impression of him?’

  ‘Very favourable. He was my kind of bobby.’

  ‘An’ what kind of bobby is that?’

  ‘He seemed serious about his job. Like he really cared about catchin’ the feller who’d robbed me. Like he wouldn’t sleep at night if he didn’t get a result. You don’t mind payin’ your taxes when you know the money’s goin’ to make up the wages of people like Mr Davies.’

  ‘An’ did he actually catch the robber?’

  ‘He did. Got him for a string of other burglaries along the front as well. Of course, the bugger denied it – well, they always do, don’t they? – but Mr Davies assured me he was the man, right enough.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a pity they have to promote men like him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Woodend wondered.

  ‘Well, they lose touch with the ordinary people, don’t they? After the robbery, Sergeant Davies often used to drop round to check that everythin’ was all right, an’ have a bit of a chat. But that stopped once he got made up. I don’t want to suggest he got snobbish or anythin’,’ the shopkeeper added hastily, ‘I just think he was so busy with his new responsibilities that he didn’t have the time to stop an’ talk any more.’

  ‘So you hadn’t seen him recently?’

  ‘Not to speak to.’

  ‘But you did see him,’ Woodend persisted.

  ‘Just walkin’ past, like. He’d wave to me, but he’d never come over.’

  ‘An’ how often would that be?’

  ‘Difficult to say for sure. There was a long while after he got promoted when we didn’t see him round here at all, but lately he seemed to have been poppin’ up every other day.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Woodend said thoughtfully.

  Tommy Bolton was having THE DREAM again. That was what he always thought of it as when he woke up – THE DREAM. In capital letters. This time, he’d decide later, it was worse than it had ever been. The things he touched seemed so solid, the smell of the night air was so agonisingly realistic. And though he did not know he was dreaming, he knew that he was still only about a quarter of the way through a terrible and terrifying sequence of events – and that there was nothing he could do but stay with them until the end.

  It was the loud knock on his dressing-room door that saved him from his own subconscious.

  ‘On in ten minutes, Mr Bolton!’

  Bolton opened his eyes. When he’d fallen asleep on the couch, he’d been fully stretched out, but at some time during the course of THE DREAM, he’d raised his knees, so that now he was almost in a foetal position.

  It’s a wonder I didn’t go arse over tip, and end on the bloody floor, he thought as he swung his body off the couch.

  He walked over to his dressing table and examined himself in the mirror. His eyes were red from sleep and booze, but the audience would think that was make-up – a part of the act which had made Tommy ‘Now Where Was I?’ Bolton popular up and down the country. He was so popular, in fact, that he had finally received the ultimate accolade – being booked to top the bill for an entire summer season in Blackpool, the mecca of entertainment. And not just in any old theatre, he reminded himself. Not in some backstreet show with a load of old has-beens – but on the Central Pier, supported by a host of rising stars.

  He lit a cigarette, and looked at his reflection again. Who would ever have thought that little Sid Dawkins, the rag-and-bone man’s son from Moss Side, would turn into Tommy Bolton, a man who already owned a detached bungalow in Lytham St Anne’s outright, and had a bank account which was steadily climbing towards five figures.

  ‘Why did you have to bugger it up?’ he asked his reflection
angrily. ‘You were sitting pretty. Why couldn’t you just take a little more care?’

  Because, he supposed, when everybody around you told you that you were the king of the world, you started to believe them. So that excused one mistake.

  But two?

  The second mistake had been so incredibly stupid that however much he tried to convince himself otherwise – and he’d tried very hard indeed – he knew that he had no one to blame but himself.

  There was another knock on the door. ‘On in five minutes, Mr Bolton.’

  The comedian from Moss Side adopted a comical, bemused expression. ‘Now where was I?’ he asked the mirror. ‘Oh yes, I was telling you about my Aunt Gladys, and how she came to lose her knickers on a day trip to Skegness.’

  Nine

  Woodend looked around the long Formica table at the team which had been assembled to work under his supervision. Sitting closest to him was Sergeant Hanson. Woodend approved of the intelligent grey eyes and serious expression which looked back at him – an expression which suggested Hanson was a conscientious bobby who knew his own patch. Next to Hanson was the bullet-headed Constable Brock, and Woodend got a distinct feeling that this wasn’t a man he’d like to meet in a dark alley. From the opposite side of the table, Constable Stone looked expressionlessly back at him, his sandy hair and slightly rounded face making him seem like a big lazy ginger tomcat. Constable Eliot, sitting next to Stone, had a fresh, young face, but from the frown on his unlined forehead he was obviously deeply troubled by something or other. Finally, at the far end of the table, Sergeant Paniatowski sat in splendid isolation.

  It was not necessarily the team he would have chosen for himself, Woodend thought – in fact, most of the time he preferred to work with no team at all – but he supposed he was stuck with them and there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘How far has the investigation progressed so far?’ he asked Sergeant Hanson.

  ‘Hardly at all,’ the local sergeant admitted. ‘We’ve questioned people who might have been on the prom at the time of the murder, but everybody claims to have seen nothing. We’ve sent Mr Davies’ clothes up to Whitebridge for forensic examination, and we’re still waiting for the results. We should have the autopsy reports sometime in the morning.’

  ‘No facts, then,’ Woodend said. ‘Does anybody have any theories?’

  ‘The general belief around the station is that Mr Davies was killed by someone he was investigating. Either that or by somebody he’d locked away in the past and who was still harbouring a grudge.’

  ‘Let’s talk about his case load,’ Woodend suggested. ‘He was workin’ on three investigations at the time of his death, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. A car-theft ring, the Poulton-le-Fylde cat burglaries and the hit-and-run in Fleetwood. But in the first two of those, he was merely the supervising officer. The men actually conducting the cases were both sergeants.’

  ‘Were you one of them?’ Woodend asked.

  Hanson shook his head. ‘No sir. I worked with Mr Davies a lot in the past, and I probably would have been on one of the teams if I’d been here when they were set up – but I’ve only just come back off leave.’

  Woodend closed his eyes for a second, as if he were absorbing all this new information. ‘What strikes you about the type of cases Mr Davies was involved in?’ he asked, when he’d opened them again.

  ‘That they were a pretty mixed bag?’ Hanson suggested.

  ‘Yes, they were – but you’re missin’ the point.’ Woodend turned his attention to the woman sitting at the very end of the table. ‘Do you have any suggestions, Sergeant?’

  ‘They were the sorts of crimes which could have been committed in any medium-sized town, sir,’ Monika Paniatowski said.

  ‘Exactly!’ Woodend agreed. ‘But this isn’t just any medium-sized town. In fact, it isn’t one town at all. There are two Blackpools. There’s the one that runs from the promenade to no more than six or seven streets back – the Blackpool that the holidaymakers know an’ love. An’ there’s the other one, where Inspector Davies – an’ probably most of you lot – live. Different places – different sorts of crime. An’ the crimes Mr Davies was investigatin’ belong to your part of town. Holidaymakers have nothin’ to do with car theft, because they arrive by coach or train. And they’re not likely to have their televisions nicked from them in Blackpool, because they haven’t brought them with them. We’re talkin’ resident crime here.’

  ‘True,’ Hanson agreed, ‘but I don’t see why—’

  ‘So if he’d been topped in one of the areas where he was conductin’ his investigations, your theory that he was killed by some criminal who was scared of bein’ collared by him might make sense. But – for God’s sake – he was killed on the Golden Mile.’

  ‘I don’t see the difficulty there, sir,’ Hanson said. ‘Maybe the killer had been following Mr Davies for some time, and the first chance he got to strike was when the DI went under the Central Pier.’

  ‘An’ just what business did he have goin’ under the Central Pier in the first place?’ Woodend demanded.

  ‘Maybe he just wanted to look at the sea, sir,’ the baby-faced DC Eliot suggested.

  ‘You mean he might have felt a sudden impulse to breathe in the air – blow the cobwebs away?’

  ‘Something like that, sir.’

  ‘That theory might hold water if it was a one-off,’ Woodend conceded. ‘But you do know that Mr Davies has been spendin’ quite a lot of his free time on the Golden Mile, don’t you?’

  The four local men exchanged uneasy, questioning glances, then Hanson said, ‘No, sir. We didn’t know that.’

  ‘Well, you bloody well should have!’ Woodend told him. ‘So now we’re left with a big question, an’ it’s this: if all Mr Davies’ investigations were concerned with residential crime, what was he doin’ visitin’ the Golden Mile so often?’

  ‘Maybe he went there to relax?’ DC Brock suggested.

  ‘Not a chance,’ Woodend said. ‘When people want to relax, they go lookin’ for a change. Now if he’d been spendin’ his free time in the Lake District or the Forest of Bowland, I could understand it. But the Golden Mile? Never.’

  ‘With respect, sir, I don’t think you can simply dismiss the theory that he—’ Hanson began.

  ‘When did you last pay a visit to the Golden Mile on anythin’ other than business?’ Woodend interrupted.

  ‘That’s different, sir,’ Hanson said. ‘I’ve got my prize racing pigeons to consider.’

  ‘An’ didn’t Mr Davies have any hobbies?’

  ‘I believe he flew model aeroplanes, sir,’ Constable Stone volunteered. ‘He was county champion one year.’

  ‘Well, there you are then,’ Woodend said triumphantly. ‘Obviously, his visits to the Golden Mile had somethin’ to do with police business. Does any of you have any idea what that police business might be?’ The four local bobbies shook their heads. ‘Then we’d better find out, hadn’t we?’ Woodend continued. ‘I want you lot coverin’ every inch of the Mile. I want to know how often he was there, who he talked to, and what he talked to them about. Sergeant Hanson will co-ordinate.’

  Sitting at the far end of the table, Paniatowski felt her hackles rising. She was his sergeant. She should have been doing the co-ordinating. But then, of course, Sergeant Hanson was a man, and she was only a woman. It was to be expected that, whatever impression Woodend had attempted to create of being egalitarian earlier, he would eventually show his true colours and put Hanson in charge.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Woodend continued. ‘I’ll be coverin’ the same ground you are.’ He caught the frown on Hanson’s face. ‘Anythin’ wrong with that, Sergeant?’

  Hanson shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I suppose not, sir. It’s just that most of the senior officers I’ve worked with tend to leave the job on the streets to their men and concentrate on the bigger picture.’

  ‘Or to put it another way, you don’t like the ide
a of me checkin’ up on you?’ Woodend said.

  ‘There’s that as well, sir,’ Hanson admitted.

  Woodend nodded understandingly. ‘I can see how it might worry you,’ he conceded. ‘But you’ve got the wrong end of the stick again. I always trust the men who are workin’ for me – at least until they give me a reason not to – so you won’t have me breathin’ down your necks. But I’ll still be doing what I do best – which is buildin’ up the big picture by lookin’ at the small details myself.’ He checked his watch. ‘It’s just about tea time. You lads grab somethin’ to eat, then hit the streets. I’ll expect your preliminary reports first thing in the mornin’.’

  The four Blackpool men and Paniatowski rose to their feet. ‘Not you, Monika,’ Woodend told his new sergeant. ‘I’ve got somethin’ else in mind to keep you busy.’

  I’m sure you have, Paniatowski thought bitterly. Tea has to be made, doesn’t it? Reports have to be typed, don’t they? I should have anticipated this.

  Woodend waited until the rest of the team had left the room, then said, ‘What I want you to do, Sergeant, is investigate Inspector Davies’ investigations.’

  It sounded better than brewing up, Paniatowski thought – but was it anything other than a way of keeping her away from the main thrust of the case?

  ‘What do you hope to achieve from that, sir?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice level.

  ‘Maybe nothin’,’ Woodend admitted. ‘But while I’m startin’ to think that Davies’ death is tied in with somethin’ on the Golden Mile, it’s just possible that the local lads are right, an’ it’s connected with one of his other cases.’

  ‘If it’s just a possibility, why aren’t you letting the local men handle it and using me in the main inquiry?’ Paniatowski asked, the anger now clearly evident in her tone.

  Woodend sighed. ‘Blackpool Tower’s a bloody big buildin’, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Paniatowski agreed, mystified.

  ‘We first spotted it when we were miles away. Yet once you get into the town itself, it’s an entirely different matter. You can be a few hundred yards away from it an’ yet you can’t see it, because you’re at street level an’ the other buildin’s are blockin’ your view. Do you see what I’m gettin’ at?’