The Enemy Within (10 page)

‘It's far from unknown,' Woodend said, an element of a growl creeping into his tone.

There'd been a time when Elizabeth Driver – rising star of the
Daily Globe
–
had
been a stranger to him, but ever since she'd tried to manipulate the facts around the murder at Westbury Hall to her own advantage, she'd been an intermittent thorn in his side.

‘I take it from your reaction that you're not one of her greatest admirers,' Bryant said.

‘Miss Driver, in my opinion, is to responsible journalism what Ghengis Khan was to market gardenin'.'

Bryant laughed. ‘That's pretty much my opinion of the lady, too. So I imagine you'll be far from delighted to learn that, according to one of my old colleagues on Fleet Street who I spoke to less than an hour ago, Miss Driver is already on her way up here.'

‘I've heard better news,' Woodend admitted.

A
long row of terraced houses on one side of the street gazed across at another long row on the other side. At the top end was the pub, at the bottom end the corner shop. The houses were all two-up, two-down, except where extensions had been built on to their rears. Their front doors opened straight on to the street and their back yards could be entered from an alley. Rawalpindi Road looked exactly like a dozen or so other streets in the same area – and a hundred or so other streets in the rest of Whitebridge.

Paniatowski drove her MGA slowly down the street, one eye on the lookout for children, the other on the numbers on the front doors.

‘That's it!' she said, pointing at a house roughly halfway between the grocery store and the boozer. ‘Number Forty.'

The adjoining houses had brightly painted front doors – one red, the other blue – with sash windows to match. Number Forty's, in contrast, was an old-fashioned chocolate-brown colour, which was made all the more depressing by the fact that the paint had started to peel and flake.

‘It must be hard to get enthusiastic about home improvements when you know you've only got a few months left to enjoy them,' Paniatowski said, examining the door from the driving seat.

‘Still, you'd think her husband would make the effort – if only to show that there's always hope,' said Rutter, who always kept the outside of his house smart, even though his wife would
never
be able to see it.

‘She doesn't have a husband,' Paniatowski told him. ‘According to her hospital records, she's a widow with no children. That's probably why no one's noticed she's missing yet.'

Rutter climbed out of the passenger side of the car and had almost reached the front door before he realized that Paniatowski was not beside him. He turned to see that the sergeant was rifling through the organized chaos which was her glove compartment.

‘Are you coming or what?' he asked.

‘In a minute,' Paniatowski replied irritably. ‘When I've found my spare packet of cigarettes.'

‘I'll just hang around till you're ready, then, shall I, Sergeant Paniatowski?' Rutter asked.

‘You're an inspector, Mr Rutter, sir,' Paniatowski said, transferring her search for the elusive cigarette packet to the floor of the car. ‘You should be able to knock on a door, even without me there to hold your hand.'

How would an outsider interpret that exchange? Rutter wondered. Would he regard it as harmless banter between colleagues? Or might he take a darker view and see it as the sergeant challenging the inspector's authority by pushing back the limits of what was acceptable? Perhaps he would even come to the conclusion which Rutter had pretty much reached himself – that now they were sleeping together, Paniatowski had decided that the equality of the bedroom should set the tone for the rest of their relationship.

He shouldn't need to be asking himself these questions, Rutter thought as he took out his growing frustration on the door knocker – and the fact that he
had to
ask them was nobody's fault but his own.

He heard his knock echo down the hallway of the house, but there was no sound of footsteps in response. He knocked again, even harder this time.

The blue door to his immediate left opened, and a woman appeared on the doorstep. She was in her mid forties. Her hair was in curlers and a cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. She placed her hands squarely on her hips – a sign among northern housewives that she was looking for trouble – and turned her angry eyes on Rutter.

‘You men!' she said in disgust. ‘I know you can't control your instincts – I've got a husband of my own – but why do you always have to be so bloody loud about it?'

‘I'm a––' Rutter began.

‘I know what you are,' the woman interrupted. ‘Hasn't she told you yet that you should use the back door when you come visitin'? That's what all the other randy sods do!'

‘Is that what you think he is?' asked Paniatowski, who had now found her cigarettes and joined Rutter on the pavement.

The sergeant's arrival served first to confuse the other woman, then to tell her that she had made a big mistake.

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, blushing. ‘I thought your friend was. . .'

‘A randy sod?' Paniatowski supplied.

‘No, I . . .' The woman's eyes narrowed with a sudden suspicion. ‘You're not Jehovah's Witnesses, are you?' she demanded. ‘Because if you are, you're wastin' your time. She'll want no truck with you – an' neither do I!'

She was quick to start closing the door, but not quick enough to stop Rutter preventing the manoeuvre with a strategically placed foot.

‘Police!' Paniatowski said, producing her warrant card.

‘Police?' the woman echoed.

‘Could we have your name, please?'

‘Ryder. Thelma Ryder.
Mrs
Thelma Ryder.'

‘What did you mean about Mrs Stubbs' visitors going to the back door, Mrs Ryder?' the sergeant asked.

‘Nothin'. I . . . nothin'.'

‘Just exactly what kind of visitors are we talking about here?' Paniatowski persisted.

The other woman shrugged her thin shoulders, and the ash which had been building up on her cigarette end broke free and fell to the ground.

‘Well . . . you know . . .' she said vaguely.

‘No, I don't know,' Paniatowski told her. ‘I'm convent-educated, you see. The nuns kept us away from the seamier side of life. That's why I need to have everything spelled out for me now.'

‘It's . . . it's a bit awkward to explain.'

‘Try!'

‘Well, ever since her husband died, Betty's been a bit strapped for cash, an' so last year she started entertainin' gentlemen callers.'

‘Are you trying to say that she was on the game?'

‘I wouldn't put it quite like that.'

‘Then how would you put it?'

‘Like I said, she was entertainin' gentlemen callers.'

Paniatowski reached into her handbag and produced the photograph she'd picked up from the morgue. ‘Is this her?'

The other woman peered at the picture. ‘Looks a bit pasty, doesn't she?' Thelma Ryder asked. Then the obvious thought hit her. ‘It's not . . . She hasn't . . . I mean, I heard about the murder on the wireless, but I never imagined . . .'

‘Tell me more about the visitors,' Paniatowski said.

‘What do you want to know about them?'

‘We could start with how many of them there were.'

‘I used to see quite a lot of them goin' in. Then the neighbours complained and she started lettin' them in through the back door, so I wouldn't really know any more, would I?'

‘Wouldn't you?' Paniatowski retorted. ‘What can you see when you look out of your back bedroom window?'

‘The yard.'

‘Whose yard? Yours? Or Betty Stubbs'?'

‘Well, both of them.'

‘And are you seriously trying to tell me that a woman with your natural curiosity didn't notice when her next-door neighbour had visitors?'

Mrs Ryder looked down at her doorstep. ‘I might have noticed the occasional visitor when I was upstairs dustin',' she admitted.

Paniatowski sighed. ‘How many of them were there?' she asked with mock weariness.

‘It depended,' Mrs Ryder mumbled. ‘There could be four or five of them on pay day, but in the middle of the week there might only be one or two. An' she hadn't been seein' as many recently.'

No, she wouldn't have been – not with her cancer – Paniatowski thought. ‘What kind of men visited Mrs Stubbs?' she asked.

‘Ordinary-enough lookin' fellers, I suppose. Middle-aged men, most of them. Some of them wore overalls, but there were quite a few who were dressed up in suits, or at least jacket and trousers.'

Paniatowski could picture them – downtrodden men who took what they couldn't get at home from a woman in no position to refuse them.

‘Did you recognize any of them?' she asked.

‘No!' Thelma Ryder said quickly.

A lie – obviously – but one that could be put on the back burner until they'd gleaned the rest of the information that Mrs Ryder would be willing to give up voluntarily.

‘If you had to make a guess at how many
different
“gentlemen callers” she had, what figure do you think you'd come up with?'

‘Hard to say. Some stopped callin' after a while, but then there were always new ones an'––'

‘Just a rough figure. That's all I expect,' Paniatowski said.

‘Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.'

So, without looked into any other motives for Betty Stubbs' death, they already had a score of potential killers to investigate, Paniatowski thought.

Cloggin'-it Charlie was going to love that.

A
s the train began to slow down on its approach to Whitebridge Station, Elizabeth Driver took her pocket compact out of her handbag and examined her face in the mirror.

She was too much of a realist to try and pass as beautiful, she told herself. On the other hand, it would certainly have been the grossest kind of false modesty to regard the image she was seeing in the mirror as anything other than highly attractive.

‘And highly available!' she mouthed at her reflection.

That was what they said back in the offices of the
Daily Globe
, anyway:

‘She's like the village bike, everybody's had a ride on her!'

‘She's had more pricks in her than a second-hand dartboard!'

While she might have argued with the crude way the thoughts had been phrased, she had no quarrel with the general assertion. She
was
available, though – as some of those same colleagues who'd made an unwanted pass at her had learned to their extreme physical discomfort – not
universally
so.

And why
shouldn't
she be available? She had no real objection to the sex act, and if using it helped to further her career, who could blame her?

The train passed the chipped enamel Whitebridge sign, then slowed to a crawl. Ignoring the fact that she was sitting in a non-smoking carriage – and that the only other passenger in it had already informed her that he suffered from asthma – she lit up a cigarette.

She always had mixed feelings about returning to this grubby little mill town stuck out in the arse end of nowhere. On the one hand, a sensation of keen anticipation raced excitingly through her blood. On the other, a mood of dull dread could sometimes press down so heavily on her shoulders that she had fight the temptation to catch the very next train back to London. She didn't wonder where these feelings came from. She didn't have to – because she knew. They both had their origins in one single source – Chief Inspector Charlie-Bloody-Woodend.

Once, at the start of their brittle and usually hostile relationship, she'd offered to go to bed with Woodend – and he'd actually had the nerve to turn her down!

Of course, she'd been a blonde then, she thought, excusing her failure. Now that her hair was jet-black – now that she looked more like a 1930s vamp – his jaded middle-aged fancy might find it more difficult to resist her.

‘Not that he'll get the bloody chance!' she said aloud – and with some vehemence.

‘What?' her fellow passenger asked.

‘Nothing.'

The man coughed. ‘Look, if you could just go out into the corridor to smoke . . .'

‘Piss off!' Elizabeth Driver said.

And it wasn't just that Woodend had
turned her down
, she thought. It was that he still refused to admit that it had been a mistake. If he'd apologized to her for his stupidity – or perhaps his lack of nerve – she could have put the whole matter behind her. If he'd shown how sorry he was by feeding her information which he denied the other reporters, she might even have considered giving him a second chance to bed her. But he refused to fall under her spell. Worse still, whenever she'd tried to outflank him on an investigation, he'd always seemed to be one step ahead of her, with the inevitable result that while he solved his case, she lost her scoop.

That was where the dread came from – from the knowledge that he'd always beaten her in the past, and might well do so again.

But there was also the anticipation – the thought that history could be reversed and she might one day be able to get one over on him. And this time, there was a distinct possibility that she could – because this time she just might have Dexter Bryant on her side.

She hardly knew Bryant. He had been one of the true aristocrats of Fleet Street when she'd been nothing more than a humble serf. But situations changed. He'd come down a few steps in the world, while she had risen a few. Now they might possibly be able to meet somewhere in the middle.

There was no reason why an alliance between them shouldn't work, she told herself. They were, after all, both crime reporters. They had a mutual interest in wanting to break a sensational – and often fairly accurate – story before anybody else could. They were a natural team.