Dying Fall (3 page)

The basement of police headquarters had been converted into what the chief constable liked to call ‘the nerve centre of a major investigation', but as yet there were none of the customary trappings – desks set in a horseshoe configur­ation, blackboard at the front, dozens of phone lines being installed – because this time most of the area was needed as a holding pen for all the tramps who had been picked up in the police swoop.

There were around two dozen of them, Woodend noted, surveying the scene. They were all kitted out in a similar fashion – wearing clothing long discarded by others and now encased in grime – but otherwise they were a fairly disparate crew, because while it was true that the majority were between forty and sixty, there were also both older and younger men – and three women.

Thirty years earlier, it would have been surprising to find even two or three tramps sleeping rough in the centre of town, the chief inspector thought. Back then, the tramp was a country-dweller. He would sleep in barns, and sometimes lend a hand on one of the thousands of small farms which were still in existence. And even if he didn't work for his keep, the tenant farmers would give him
something
, because they would have regarded him as much a part of the natural life of the countryside as the rabbits and birds. Now the traditional farms had mostly gone, swallowed up by much larger ones where all the heavy work was done by machinery, and there was little room for casual labour – or even casual acquaintanceship.

Woodend turned to Detective Constable Colin Beresford, who – it was widely believed around police headquarters – had much greater access to his boss's ear than his lowly rank would indicate.

‘Did you have any difficulty rounding them up?' he asked.

‘A few of them were a bit awkward, mainly the ones who were so out of their heads that they had no idea what was actually going on,' Beresford said. ‘But on the whole, they were no trouble. After all, they've taken the line of least resistance for most of their lives, so why should they change now?'

‘Until you've had a little more experience of life yourself, don't be so sweepin' in your generalizations, lad,' Woodend said, with an unaccustomed harshness in his voice.

The tone flustered Beresford. ‘Sorry, sir, I never meant to suggest …'

‘Forget it, lad,' Woodend said. ‘But,' he cautioned, ‘don't let me catch you jumpin' to conclusions again.'

The chief inspector turned to face the tramps. ‘I'm very grateful to you for agreein' to cooperate with this investigation,' he said in a loud voice which caught all their attentions, ‘an' I'd like to make one thing clear from the start, which is that none of you are a suspect in this murder, in any way, shape or form.'

Some of the tramps looked relieved, some showed no emotion at all, and some – and Beresford had probably been right about this – were so out of their heads that they had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The reason you're all here is because you're potential witnesses,' Woodend continued. ‘Now you may think you have nothin' of value to contribute to the investigation – an' maybe you're right – but it's also possible that you might just have noticed somethin' in the past few days which won't mean anythin' to you, but could tell
us
a lot. That's why you'll each individually be taken to another room, an' asked a few questions by one of my men. Once that's happened, you'll be given a packet of cigarettes an' will be allowed to leave. Thank you for listenin'.'

He turned away, and saw Monika Paniatowski looking at him with a troubled expression on her face.

‘You're letting them go?' she asked, disbelievingly.

‘That's right,' Woodend agreed.

‘Even though this could well be nothing more than the first in a series of killings?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Even if it is,' Woodend confirmed.

‘So it's your intention to put them back out on the street. to be used as live bait?'

Woodend shook his head. ‘Nay, lass. I'm puttin' them back out on the street because we don't have the facilities to hold them, an' even if we had, there's no legal justification for doin' it. In other words, I'm puttin' them back out on the street because I have no bloody choice in the matter.'

The more gruesome the murder, the more it appealed to Elizabeth Driver's readership, and hence to Driver herself. Which was why, even as Woodend was addressing the tramps in police headquarters, she was behind the wheel of her Jaguar, and heading towards Whitebridge at speed.

As she drove, she was thinking not only about the case of the dead tramp – ‘Horror of Grilled Vagrant' suggested itself as a headline – but also about her own relationship with Woodend's team in general, and with Detective Inspector Bob Rutter in particular.

The core of that relationship was the book she had decided to write – was
contracted
to write – about the Whitebridge Police. It was going to be a sensational exposé, and the fact that there might be nothing sensational
to
expose about the Force had not bothered her for a second, since she considered truth to be a commodity to be used sparingly.

In order to write that book, she'd needed an insider in the Force, and she'd seen Bob Rutter – weakened first by the break-up of his adulterous affair with Monika Paniatowski, and then by the murder of his blind wife, Maria – as the ideal candidate. When she'd approached him initially, she'd offered the bait of writing an inspirational book about his dead wife, and – wracked with guilt as he was – he'd fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

For the first few months of their relationship, she'd deliberately avoided any physical contact, since she'd felt it would have been unwelcome to a man grappling with his own conscience. But once she'd sensed that the time was right, she'd gone ahead and seduced him.

And it had been so easy!

So very easy!

Other steps in her plan had not run quite so smoothly. Rutter had his daughter living with him now, and the little brat – for reasons of her own – had shown as much disdain for Driver as she'd shown affection for Monika Paniatowski.

And then there had been the career of Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend, who was to be the cornerstone of her book. That had taken a dip which had almost resulted in a fall, and – as much as she hated to do anything to help her old enemy – she'd been forced to write an editorial praising him. Still, she consoled herself, that wouldn't last for long, and when his merely
postponed
fall did inevitably come, it would be all the greater.

She'd made one change to her plans which had quite surprised her. Initially, she'd intended to bring Rutter down with the rest of Woodend's team, but now she found that she didn't actually
want
to. Affection was another of those qualities she didn't have much use for, yet she'd grown fond of Rutter, and liked the idea of keeping him around on a perman­ent basis.

She wouldn't be faithful to him, of course – the very idea was ludicrous – but it would be nice to have him there when she wanted him, like a particularly comfortable pair of shoes.
He
might baulk at the idea at first, especially after she had just destroyed the careers of his boss and his ex-lover, but she was confident enough in her own abilities to believe that she could twist things round in such a way as to make it look like it wasn't her fault at all.

And if that failed, there was always the bedroom in which to win him over – because, when all was said and done, he was still only a
man
.

The road sign ahead said that Whitebridge was now only twenty miles away. Elizabeth Driver turned her thoughts back to the story that lay ahead of her, and then to THE BOOK, now almost finished, which was nestling comfortably in the boot of her car, next to her portable typewriter.

T
he man sitting opposite DC Colin Beresford could have been anywhere between forty and sixty years old. He was wearing a tattered overcoat which was far too long for him and dragged along the ground when he walked. The coat had once been brown, but was now so streaked with dirt that the overall effect was grey. Under it was evidence of several other layers of clothing, which looked equally disgusting. The tramp had lost most of the hair on his head, but had grown a long, straggly grey beard to compensate for it. He was blind in one eye, and there were only a few rotting teeth left in his mouth.

And he stank!

‘Could you tell me your name?' Beresford asked gently.

‘Tommy,' the tramp said.

‘And your second name?'

The tramp looked at him strangely, as if he had no idea why the policeman should even want to ask such a question, then said, ‘Moores. Tommy Moores.'

‘And are you a Whitebridge man, Mr Moores?' Beresford inquired.

‘Where's Whitebridge?' Moores asked.

‘Here,' Beresford explained. ‘You're in Whitebridge now.'

The information seemed to be of no interest to the tramp.

And why should it be? Beresford asked himself. To Tommy Moores, the name of the place he was in was un­important. When he thought about the town at all, he would think of it in terms that would mean little to people who lived in the mainstream – a restaurant where the bins were particularly worth scavenging, church steps on which he would be likely to find a good number of discarded cigar­ettes, the cheapest place to buy meths …

‘So you're
not
from here?' Beresford asked.

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Then where
are
you from?'

‘Somewhere else.'

Beresford suppressed a sigh. ‘But you live here now?'

‘Don't live anywhere,' the tramp replied. ‘Travel.'

‘All right,' Beresford said patiently. ‘How long have you been in Whitebridge
this
time?'

‘Don't know,' the other man said.

And he probably didn't, Beresford thought. He was probably nothing more than an unthinking force of nature, staying somewhere for a while and then moving on for no other reason than because that was what he did.

‘Where do you sleep when you're in Whitebridge?' he asked.

‘Here and there,' Moores said vaguely.

‘Do you ever sleep in the old Empire Cotton Mill?' Beresford wondered.

The tramp thought about it for a second. ‘Big brick building?' he asked. ‘Close to the canal?'

‘That sounds like the place,' Beresford agreed.

‘I've slept there,' the tramp admitted.

‘But did you sleep there last night?'

‘Might have done. Don't know.'

‘And other tramps slept there as well, didn't they?'

‘A few.'

‘So what can you tell me about them?'

‘Nothing.'

‘But you must have talked to them, mustn't you?'

The tramp gave him a puzzled look. ‘Why would I do that?' he asked.

Indeed, Beresford thought, why
would
he do that? What could he possibly have to say to his fellow tramps, and what could they possibly have to say to him?

‘Have you noticed anything unusual recently?' he asked, shifting his line of questioning.

‘Like what?' Moores asked.

‘Like strangers turning up at the places where you sleep. Strangers who aren't tramps. Norm—'

He'd been about to say ‘normal people', but cut himself off just in time. Not that it would have mattered if he hadn't, he told himself. Tommy Moores wouldn't have recognized an insult if he'd heard one. He seemed beyond all that.

‘There was a man in a suit,' the tramp said.

‘Go on,' Beresford encouraged him.

‘The other night, when I was in the big brick building, a man in a suit came in.'

‘What did he look like?'

‘I told you, he was wearing a suit.'

‘Was he young? Middle-aged? Old?'

‘Yes,' the tramp said.

Beresford sighed again. ‘And what did he do, this man in a suit?'

‘He looked at me.'

‘And then?'

‘And then he went away.'

‘And he didn't say anything to you?'

‘No.'

‘You're not being very helpful, Mr Moores,' Beresford said, chidingly.

‘Aren't I?' the tramp asked, with a show of indifference.

‘A man's been killed,' Beresford pointed out. ‘A tramp like yourself. The killer may well strike again, and when he does, you could be his next victim. Doesn't that bother you?'

‘No,' Moores said. ‘Why should it?'

‘Being burned to death is a very painful way to go,' Beresford said.

For the first time in the interview, Moores looked him straight in the eye, and for a moment Beresford caught a glimpse of the intelligence and interest in life he must once have had.

‘And you don't think I'm in pain already?' the tramp asked.

Dr Shastri met Woodend at the door of the police morgue. There was a smile on her face, and the edges of her colourful sari were just visible under her green medical gown.

‘My dear Chief Inspector,' she said. ‘What a pleasure – though hardly an unexpected one – to see you.'

‘The feelin's mutual,' Woodend said.

And he
meant
it, for though he hated the smell of the morgue, he loved spending time with the exotically beautiful – and breathtakingly competent – police surgeon. Shastri, it seemed to him, was the ideal combination of a doctor who approached her work with a soul which was pure and strangely innocent, and yet, at the same time, had a mind which was as sharp and cutting as one of her own finely honed scalpels.

‘Oh, what
has
happened to my manners?' the doctor wondered, as she led him into her office.

‘Your manners?' Woodend repeated.

‘Indeed! Though I have had ample opportunity to do so, I have not yet thanked you for providing me, yet again, with a specimen which would put a lesser woman off her food for days.'