Fatal Quest (21 page)

‘True,' Joan agreed. ‘But as with them stuck-up women, it's probably not his fault that he's the way he is. An' I
do
like Peggy.'

‘I'm sure you do. An' I'm sure that she's very nice. But I expect that Mrs Cathcart …'

‘Peggy.'

‘… I expect that Peggy told you they've got a very full social calendar at the moment, didn't she?'

‘Yes, she did.'

‘Well, there you are, then.'

‘But they do have
one
free evening next week – an' that's when they're comin' round to dinner.'

I
t was as they were waiting for the rickety bus to take them back into London that Woodend sneezed for the first time.

‘Bless you,' Joan said automatically. Then she took a closer look at her husband, and asked, with mild concern, ‘Are you all right, Charlie?'

‘I'm fine,' Woodend replied.

‘Are you sure about that?

‘Yes.'

‘I only ask because you're
hardly
ever
ill.'

‘Well, there you are, then.'

‘But when you
are
ill, you're probably the world's worst patient. And do you know why that is?'

Woodend grinned, and was surprised to find that even such a minor movement made his facial muscles ache.

‘Well,
do
you know?' Joan challenged.

‘Is it because I just lie there in my bed an' expect you to wait on me hand an' foot?' he asked.

‘No, it isn't. It's because you absolutely refuse to accept there's anythin' wrong with you, an' continue to carry on as normal. An' what's the result of that?'

‘I only make myself worse?'

‘That's right. An' then I
do
have to wait on you hand an' foot. Not because you want me to – you're in no state to
want
anythin' very much by that stage – but because you're in such a mess there's no choice in the matter.'

‘Fair point,' Woodend agreed. ‘The next time I'm feelin' ill, I promise you I'll take it easy right from the start. But I'm not ill
now
.'

‘That's what you always say when you're startin' to feel proper poorly,' Joan sniffed disdainfully.

On the underground stretch of the journey home, Woodend's legs began to feel as if they'd had heavy weights attached to them, and by the time the couple reached their flat, his entire body was aching and hot.

‘You put the kettle on, an' I'll slip down the road an' pick up Pauline Anne from her mate's house,' he told his wife.

‘You'll do no such thing, Charlie,' Joan said. ‘Just look at yourself! You're positively sweatin' buckets.'

‘I do feel a bit hot,' he admitted.

‘I'll go an' pick up Annie,' his wife said firmly, ‘an' you – my lad – will get yourself straight off to bed.'

It was never wise to argue with Joan when she was in this kind of mood, Woodend knew from past experience, and anyway, truth to tell, he didn't really feel as if he had the strength to.

He lumbered heavily into the bedroom, and stripped off his clothes – which should have been a quick enough operation, but somehow wasn't. That done, he climbed into bed, and immediately fell into an uneasy sleep.

He is lying down. There is no one else in the bed with him, but he senses that there is someone else in the room.

He tries to open his eyes, and realizes that his eyelids have been glued to his cheekbones. His raises his hands, and slowly – painfully – peels the eyelids back with his fingers.

This is when he sees her standing there – a pretty half-caste girl.

‘Hello,' she says with a smile. ‘I'm Pearl Jones.'

She is wearing a red dress which is rather short, and has a neckline which, while it doesn't exactly plunge, certainly swoops down far enough to offer promise. This is the dress, he recognizes, that will eventually become her shroud.

There are so many questions he wants to ask her, but the one that immediately comes out of his mouth is, ‘Does your mother know you've got that dress?'

‘Don't you like it?' Pearl asks, pouting and feigning childlike disappointment.

‘It's very nice,' he says, not wanting to hurt her feelings, but knowing that he is going to have to be honest. ‘Very nice indeed. It's just that somehow it simply doesn't belong on a kid like you at all. That's why I asked if your mother knew about it.'

Pearl smiles again, slightly mischievously this time. ‘You've met her,' she says. ‘What do you think?'

Victoria Jones is a God-fearing woman, who goes to church regularly and doesn't drink, Woodend reminds himself.

‘Of course she doesn't know about it,' he says.

‘Of course she doesn't,' Pearl agrees.

‘So what were you doin', wearin' it on the night that you … on the night that you …?'

‘On the night that I died?' Pearl asks. ‘Because I do know I'm dead. Or rather, you know I'm dead.'

‘I'm not followin' you,' Woodend confesses.

‘I'm not really here,' Pearl says. ‘I'm in the morgue. And you should have learned by now, Charlie, that even the dead can't be in two places at once.'

‘I don't understand,' Woodend says, almost pitifully.

‘Of course you don't,' Pearl agrees. ‘But you're not at your best, so that's only to be expected. Let me see if I can help you.'

She raises one arm in the air, above her head, then brings it down in a sharp arc before straightening it out again. And when it comes to a stop, she punches the air underneath with her free hand.

‘What am I doing, Charlie?' she asks.

‘Don't know,' Woodend mumbles.

‘Come on, Charlie!' Pearl says, with an anger which he recognizes – even now – as not hers, but his own. ‘You're a bright feller – a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. And you know all about charades – you had your cousin Ethel's kids in stitches when you played it with them last Christmas. So what have I just been doing?'

‘Mimin'?'

‘Yes! But what was I mimin'?'

‘Don't know.'

‘I'll do it again, but only the once,' Pearl says sternly.

She repeats the action, and this time he understands it.

‘Question mark,' he says.

‘That's right,' Pearl agrees. ‘Question mark. That's all I really am – questions that have been bouncing around in your head for some time – questions that you still haven't found an answer to.'

‘An' one of them is the question about the dress?'

‘Naturally, it is. Remember, I'm no more than a schoolgirl. But not just any schoolgirl, Charlie – I'm one who works hard, obeys her teachers, and hopes to go to Oxford. So why would I even want a dress like that?'

‘Somebody suggested to me, at the scene of the … of the …'

‘Of the crime? Say it, Charlie. At the scene of the crime! Where my body lay – my throat savagely slashed through, my life's blood staining the uneven ground? Say it – it certainly can't hurt me now!'

‘Somebody suggested, at the scene of the crime, that the reason you were wearin' the dress was probably because you were on the game.'

‘Yes, people can be just horrid about you, can't they – especially when you're dead and you can't defend yourself. But you don't believe I was on the game, do you, Charlie?'

‘No, I don't.'

‘So why did I need the dress?'

‘You needed it as a disguise. Because you wanted to pretend to be something that you weren't.'

‘Very good, Charlie! But that really raises more questions than it answers, doesn't it? And the biggest one of all is, why would I want to pretend to be something I wasn't?'

‘I don't know,' Woodend screams. ‘I just don't bloody know!'

‘You shouldn't let yourself get upset when you're not feeling well,' Pearl says, in a kindly manner. ‘Let's try something a little easier, shall we?'

‘All right.'

‘Do you think my mother loved me?'

‘I'm sure she did. She had photographs of you all over the sideboard. An' you should have seen the look of anguish that came to her face when I showed her the picture they'd taken of you at the morgue.'

‘I'm sure it must have been heartbreaking. But then – almost immediately – she changed, didn't she? She said she didn't recognize the girl in the picture at all. She insisted that whoever it was, it definitely wasn't me. Isn't that right?'

‘Yes.'

‘And what could have made her act in such an unmotherly way?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Come on, Charlie, you can find an answer if you really put your mind to it,' Pearl says – and now there is a hint of impatience in her voice.

‘Fear!' Woodend croaks. ‘She was frightened.'

‘But who was she frightened for? For me?'

‘No.'

‘Why not for me?'

‘Because you were already dead.'

‘Then it could only have been fear for …?'

‘For herself!'

‘I knew you'd get there in the end,' Pearl tells him. ‘But why was my mother afraid?'

‘Because … because she thought she might be the next one to die.'

‘Obviously. But again, why did she think she might be next?'

‘Because the killer was punishin' her for somethin' she'd done to him?'

Pearl clicks her tongue disapprovingly.

‘You disappoint me, Charlie,' she says. ‘The words you've just used might have come out of your mouth, but it wasn't you speaking them. It's that idiot DCI Bentley I seem to be having a conversation with now.'

‘I know,' Woodend admits. ‘And I'm very sorry.'

‘So let's take a couple of steps backwards, and see if we can make more sense of it,' Pearl suggests. ‘If I'd been murdered to punish my mother, she wouldn't have been afraid that she'd be killed herself, would she?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because the point of the punishment would be to let her go on livin', knowin' that she'd been at least partly responsible for your death.'

‘Exactly. And if she was the one who the killer wanted dead, why not just kill her, and leave poor innocent little Pearl out of it?'

‘Are you sayin' that if she had been killed …'

‘Or has been killed, Charlie, because you don't know, do you, whether she's still alive or not?'

‘… or has been killed, it's for an entirely different reason to the one that led to your death?' Woodend asked.

‘I'm not saying anything, Charlie,' Pearl replies. ‘How can I, when we've already established that I'm not really here?'

He could hear two voices. They sounded as if they were coming through a wad of cotton wool, but they were still clear enough for him to be able to tell that one of them was a woman's voice, and the other a man's.

‘He's burnin' up, Doctor,' the woman said, worriedly.

‘It's only to be expected, and it's all to the good,' the man replied. ‘This is a very nasty case of the flu your husband has come down with, and the best thing for him is just to lie there and sweat it all out.'

‘But I feel so helpless!' said the woman – who Woodend had now identified as Joan. ‘Isn't there
anything
I can do to make it easier for him?'

‘Nothing at all,' the doctor assured her. ‘But there's absolutely no need for you to worry about him. All he needs is complete rest for a couple of days, and he should be right as rain.'

When Woodend opened his eyes, the light streaming in though the window made them prickle. But that didn't matter, he told himself. The important thing was that it was morning, and he should already be at work.

‘Where's Pearl?' he asked.

‘Pearl?' the doctor repeated. ‘Is she your daughter?'

‘No, she's … she's …' Woodend said, and then discovered that he wasn't entirely sure
who
she was at the moment. ‘She was … she was here,' he concluded lamely.

‘Well, I can assure you that she's certainly not here now, and if I were you, I'd forget all about this Pearl of yours for a while,' the doctor said. Then he turned to Joan, and mouthed, ‘Delirious.'

The man was a complete idiot, Woodend thought woozily.

‘I have to get up,' he said. ‘I've got to go to the Yard.'

‘You're stayin' right there in bed, Charlie,' Joan said, placed a restraining hand on his chest.

As if that could stop him, Woodend thought. Joan was no lightweight, but the idea that she could keep a man of his size down when there was a job to done was plainly ludicrous.

And then, to his amazement, he found that she could – that he simply didn't have the strength to resist her.

‘Go to sleep now, Charlie,' Joan said softly. ‘You need to go to sleep.'

‘Can't sleep,' Woodend told her. ‘Not sleepy at all.'

But, without even realizing it, he was already beginning to doze off.

T
he overnight rain had frozen into a wafer-thin sheet of ice, turning the Thursday-morning Embankment into one of nature's booby traps. Most of the people on their way to work treated this temporary hazard with proper respect, abandoning their usual broad strides in favour of a cautious shuffle, but the big man in the heavy overcoat did not seem aware that there was any danger at all – hardly seemed aware, in fact, that he was even
on
the Embankment.

‘Three days!' Woodend kept repeating to himself, as he approached Scotland Yard. ‘I've wasted three days. In bed!'

His woollen scarf – which Joan had insisted on wrapping tightly around his neck before she allowed him out – had begun to itch almost from the moment he left the flat, but he had been so preoccupied that he had not even thought to loosen it.