A Death Left Hanging (11 page)

W
oodend had been driving around the old part of town, more or less aimlessly, for the best part of an hour. Now, as dusk began to fall, he decided it was probably time to stretch his legs a little. He turned left up Grimshaw Street, and was almost surprised to discover that the cinder track that ran from the end of the street down to the old canal was just where it had always been.

He parked his Wolseley at the end of the track, and as he climbed out of it he felt the cinders crunch beneath his feet. He'd been back in Whitebridge for over two years, he reminded himself. Two years! And never once – until now – had he contemplated paying a visit to the part of the town in which he'd grown up.

He wondered why that should be. Was it, perhaps, because he was not self-indulgent enough to roll around nostalgically in his past? Or could it be that looking back would only serve to remind him of how long his journey had been thus far – and how comparatively little of it there was left?

‘You're gettin' philosophical again, Charlie,' he said out loud. ‘It'll be the death of you yet.'

He lit up a cigarette and turned to face the old Empire Mill. It was still the massive structure he remembered, towering over the surrounding area and making all the buildings close to it look as tiny and fragile as doll's houses. Its original red brick had been turned black by a century of industrial filth, yet that only seemed to add to its power – transmuting it from a mere man-made object into something as solid and immovable as a mountain.

Woodend let his gaze shift to the chimney stack, which – on the whimsy of an industrial architect now long dead – had been built as an exact replica of a bell tower that was to be found in Florence. What kind of brain had it taken to come up with such an idea – to decide to recreate one of the glories of Renaissance Italy within the confines of a dark satanic mill?

There was nowt as queer as folk, the Chief Inspector thought – and that was a fact.

His own father had started working at this mill at fourteen, on the very day he had left school. Back then, it had been a true symbol of British industry, turning out cotton cloth by the mile. Charlie himself had been taken around the mill as a boy, and had bathed in the warm glow of the respect that his father – who was no more than a common tackler – was shown by both workers and bosses alike. He remembered gazing up at the machinery, wondering how
anything
could be so powerful. He recalled, still a little guiltily, stealing for himself some of the pride that the workers took in knowing that the cloth they made covered the whole world.

It had seemed to him then that anything so majestic was sure to go on for ever. He had, of course, been completely wrong. Even by the time Sam Woodend died – just a couple of weeks short of his fifty-second birthday – the mill had become a shadow of its old self. And now, a quarter of a century beyond that, the place stood empty against the skyline – a monument to its own former glory, a stark reminder that even the greatest empire in the world had been built on shifting sands.

Not that the building was
quite
empty, he noted. For just as the corpse of a mighty beast will soon be invaded by scavengers, so too it was now possible to buy mass-produced Pakistani carpets, retread car tyres and second-hand furniture from the smaller businesses that had sprung up within the shell of the once-vast one.

Woodend turned his back on the mill to face the streets that surrounded it – row upon row of terraced houses running in long, straight lines. They no longer served as the homes of mill workers, but the road names still reflected their golden past – Calcutta Street, Rawalpindi Row, Bombay Terrace. They, too, were living on borrowed time. Soon they would be gone – cleared away to make space for housing estates with every modern convenience.

And a good thing too, the Chief Inspector thought – though he could not but feel a pang of regret for the sense of community that would, inevitably, be destroyed in the process.

He walked to the end of one of these cobbled streets – streets built for clogs, not shoes with leather soles – and reached a pub called the Red Lion. It, at least, did not look much changed since the days when he himself had stood at the counter – puffing on a Park Drive and trying desperately to act as if he were eighteen. He pushed the door open and entered the public bar.

As Bob Rutter drove around the corner, he saw his young-executive semi-detached house up ahead of him. In the earlier years of his marriage, it had not been unusual for him to find the house in complete darkness. It wasn't that the place had been empty – Maria would invariably be waiting for him, with his evening meal bubbling away on the stove – it was simply that the electric light was neither a help nor a hindrance to his wife. But things had changed since the baby had been born. Now, looking up at the nursery window, he could see a night light burning.

Maria was waiting for him at the front door. They kissed, then he followed her down the hall. She was so well aware of the obstacles in her own little kingdom, he thought, that anyone who had not met her before could be excused for assuming that she could see. He knew there had been people who'd never imagined that he would marry her once she'd gone blind. Perhaps she'd even thought it herself. But he'd never had any doubts. He'd loved her then, and he loved her still.

‘Dinner will be about fifteen minutes,' she said. ‘I expect you'd like a beer first.'

‘I'd sell my soul for one,' he admitted.

She brought his drink, then sat down next to him. ‘What's the problem?' she asked.

She could always tell when he was troubled. ‘It's just something Cloggin'-it Charlie said to me today,' he admitted.

‘What about?'

‘Do
you
think I'm unfair to Paniatowski?'

‘Unfair?'

‘Perhaps that's not the right word. Do you think I'm unduly antagonistic to her? Am I less tolerant of her than I would be of another sergeant?'

‘Do you know any other female sergeants to
be
tolerant of?'

He'd been thinking in terms of rank, not sex, and Maria's comment took him by surprise. ‘Are you saying I'm against her because she's a
woman
?'

‘Perhaps. You don't fancy her, do you?'

‘Of course not! Why do you ask that?'

‘It's just that sometimes the way the pair of you act reminds me of school children.'

‘I don't see any comparison at all,' he said, slightly huffily.

‘Perhaps if you hadn't attended an all-boys school you would. In a
normal
school, you could always tell when a boy had a crush on a girl, because he'd be horrible to her. He'd punch her on the arm, or dip her pigtail in the ink well.'

He could either be amused or annoyed. He decided on amusement. ‘You're not jealous, are you?'

‘I didn't think I was. Now I'm not so sure.'

‘Do you think that wicked old witch Sergeant Paniatowski is trying to steal your big boy away from you?' he asked, lapsing into baby talk.

‘No, but . . .'

‘The only crush I feel for Paniatowski is a desire to crush her windpipe now and again. And that's mild in comparison to what I suspect she'd like to do to me.'

Maria smiled. ‘I was on the point of becoming silly, wasn't I?'

‘Yes,' Rutter agreed. ‘But there's no need to apologize for it. I like it if you get jealous occasionally. It shows I'm wanted.'

They had wine with their dinner – a Rioja specially imported for Maria's father. They talked about the baby and the Margaret Dodds case. It was towards the end of the meal that she said, ‘Do you think there is any chance you'll be able to take Sunday off?'

‘It all depends on how the case goes. Why do you ask?'

‘I thought we might drive out into the countryside,' Maria said. ‘Like we used to.'

Like they used to!

They'd climb to the top of a hill, and claim all they saw below them as their personal fiefdom. They could still do that, he supposed. True, Maria couldn't see, but she could smell and hear. And when he described things to her, she could draw on her old memories. But it just wasn't the same any more. She could imagine a skylark, but she couldn't see the
particular
skylark he was watching – couldn't share in this unique moment with him.

Didn't it distress her that they had lost something they once had together? he wondered. Because it certainly bloody well distressed him!

‘Well, what about it?' Maria asked. ‘Do you fancy a drive in the country on Sunday?'

Rutter felt a sudden stabbing pain in his chest. ‘I told you, it depends on how the case goes,' he said, sounding harsher than he'd intended.

Most of the drinkers in the Red Lion that night had probably been no more than babies when the Empire Mill had finally shut down its machinery, Woodend thought. But there was
one
very old man – sitting alone in the corner and sipping slowly and carefully at a glass of Guinness – who looked vaguely familiar.

The Chief Inspector bought a pint of bitter and a bottle of stout, then made his way over to the table.

‘Do you mind if I join you?' he asked.

The old man ran his watery eyes up and down the Chief Inspector's frame. ‘Tha's Sam Woodend's lad, Charlie,' he said.

‘That's right, I am.'

The old man nodded. ‘I've read about thy doin's in the paper. Tha's a big, important bobby now, isn't tha?'

‘Well, a bobby, anyway,' Woodend admitted.

‘So why is tha standin' there like a long streak o' piss? Take the weight off thy feet, lad.'

Woodend sat down. ‘I've bought this for you,' he said, sliding the Guinness across the table.

‘Aye, I didn't think tha'd bought it for tha'sen,' the old man said. ‘Tha doesn't remember me, does tha?'

‘Not the name,' Woodend admitted.

‘I'm Zachariah Clegg. I used to go whippet racin' with thy dad. One year I nearly had a regional champion.'

‘Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?' Woodend said.

Clegg glanced down at the Guinness. ‘I'm not so green as to have thought that come free,' he said. ‘What is it tha want to know, lad?'

‘I was wonderin' if you remembered Robert Hartley.'

‘Which Robert Hartley? I've known a number of'em in my time. Is't tha talking about him whose wife was hanged for the murder of her second husband?'

‘That's the man.'

‘Aye, I remember him,' Zachariah Clegg said. ‘He were a good-lookin' man, were Rob. Clever, an' all. He could have ended up as one of the bosses if he'd set his mind to it. But he never had the drive, tha sees, even though his missus did all she could to push him forward. So he ended up clerkin' in the office, an' earnin' not much more than a mill hand.'

‘Margaret had ambitions for him, did she?' Woodend asked.

‘I've just said as much, haven't I? She were a teacher when they met. An' I think she set her cap at him more because of what he could
become
than because of what he were then.'

‘So he must have been somethin' of a disappointment to her?'

The old man sighed. ‘Life's full of disappointments, lad,' he said. ‘If that whippet of mine hadn't gone an' got lame just before the big race over in Accrington––'

‘How did Rob Hartley die?' Woodend interrupted.

‘It were an accident.'

‘What kind of accident?'

‘A tragic one.'

‘They all are,' Woodend said, stifling his impatience. ‘How did this particular tragic one occur?'

‘It were the booze what caused it. Rob'd not been much of a drinker when he were a lad, but for the last couple of years of his life, he were hittin' the bottle regular – an' not just after workin' hours neither. Anyway, this partic'lar afternoon he must have done a fair amount of cork sniffin', because when the head clerk sent him down the mill floor on some errand or other, he missed his footin' on the steps an' broke his neck.'

‘He couldn't have been pushed, could he?'

The old man gave him a hard stare. ‘What makes thee ask that?'

‘I'm a bobby,' Woodend said. ‘It's my job to be suspicious whenever there's a sudden death.'

‘Well, tha's wastin' thy time on this one,' Zachariah Clegg said. ‘He fell, right enough. There was more than dozen witnesses.'

‘Was there any compensation for his widow?'

‘There might well have been, if it hadn't been all his own fault. But tha couldn't very well put the blame on the mill when he were lyin' there stinkin' like a distillery.'

‘So his widow got nothin'?'

‘She still had her own job. She worked for Mr Earnshaw, tha knows.'

‘So I've heard.'

‘An' I have heard tell that the gaffer slipped her a few extra bob now an' again, out of the goodness of his heart an' from his own pocket. Still, without her husband's wages comin' in an' all, her an' the kiddie wasn't exactly livin' in the lap of luxury.'

‘It was lucky for her that she met Fred Dodds then, wasn't it?' Woodend said.

‘Lucky!' the old man said contemptuously. ‘I suppose
some
folk might call it luck.'

‘An' what would
you
call it?'

‘Tha never asked me what caused Rob Hartley to start drinkin',' the old man said.

‘No, I didn't,' Woodend agreed. ‘What was the reason?'

‘There's some as believe it was because he were disappointed that he didn't get that promotion what he put in for.'

‘But you think that's wrong?'

‘I think it were
her
that were disappointed.'

‘I'm not sure I'm followin' you,' Woodend admitted.