A Death Left Hanging (29 page)

‘Well, which is it?' Sharpe asked impatiently. ‘Good news or bad?'

‘It's a bit of both. An' since I'm the one who's callin' the shots here, you'll have the bad news first. Agreed?'

‘Agreed,' Sharpe said reluctantly.

‘The bad news is that even after spendin' only three days on it, I've seen enough of the way you handled the Dodds case to know that you made a bloody lousy job of it. You failed to check on alibis; you didn't follow up on leads. You probably suppressed some evidence as well, if––'

‘Now just a minute!' Sharpe said, outraged.

‘Shut up an' listen!' Woodend ordered him angrily. ‘As I was sayin', you've probably suppressed evidence as well. I haven't found it yet, but if I keep lookin' I've no doubt I will. The result is that the case you put together was so full of holes that a decent defence counsel could have got it kicked out of court. The problem was that Margaret Dodds' counsel wasn't even
halfway
decent. Where did she find him? In the Home for Incompetent Barristers?'

‘I've no idea. I didn't choose him.'

‘No,
she
did. But you still must have thought that all your birthdays had come at once when you realized he wasn't doin' his job properly. His cross-examination of you, for example, was a perfect model of what a defence should
never
do. Did you ever stop to think
why
she'd chosen such a complete deadbeat to defend her?'

‘No, I––'

‘An' you didn't really care, did you – not as long as you got a conviction? You didn't even care if the verdict was overturned on appeal. Because the wheels of justice grind exceedin' slow, an' by the time the appeal was heard in the high court, you'd already have won your parliamentary seat. But there
was
no appeal, because Margaret Dodds didn't choose to lodge one for much the same reason as she didn't select a strong counsel for the defence. She didn't want any
doubts
raised, any
questions
asked – because she was terrified that the police would start lookin' elsewhere, for a different answer to the one they'd got already.'

‘She was guilty!' Sharpe protested.

‘No, she wasn't,' Woodend told him. ‘She was innocent – an' I can prove it, if I have to. I can completely discredit you, Lord Sharpe. I can bring you down, an' you'll drag the whole government down with you. An' I'm very tempted to do just that, but . . .'

He paused. He could hear the other man's irregular breathing. He could picture the sweat spreading under the armpits of Sharpe's shirt.

The silence continued.

‘But
what
?' Sharpe said, when he could stand the suspense no longer.

‘But Margaret Dodds has been dead these thirty years, an' there's nothin' I can do to bring her back to life now, is there? Which means that I just might be open to a deal.'

‘What kind of deal?'

‘For the last few months, I've been wearin' out the seat of my pants by sittin' on various committees. An' why? Because our esteemed Chief Constable, Mr Marlowe, would just love it if I got so pissed off that I handed in my resignation. Failin' that, he's happy to keep on movin' me from committee to committee to committee – because as long as I'm wastin' my time doin' that, I can't go creatin' havoc anywhere else.'

‘What are you complaining about?' Sharpe asked, sounding genuinely mystified. ‘You're getting your full pay, aren't you, whatever job you do?'

‘You have no idea what goes on inside my head, do you?' Woodend asked. ‘My job's neither just a meal ticket to me nor a steppin' stone to somethin' better. I like bein' a workin' bobby. I like puttin' in all the hours that God sends on a case. I enjoy livin' off a diet of bacon butties, nerves, frustrations, headaches, an' strong cigarettes.'

‘Do you want to spell out to me
exactly
what it is you want?' Eric Sharpe asked.

‘I should have thought that was obvious enough. As a result of your phone call last night, Marlowe's set up a board of inquiry to meet this afternoon, so now I want you make another phone call to persuade him to call it off. An' by tomorrow mornin', I want to be back in the field, where I belong. You do those two things for me, an' in return, I'll give you a clean bill of health on the Dodds investigation. Fair enough?'

‘You don't want me to get you a promotion?' Sharpe asked suspiciously.

‘No.'

‘You're quite sure about that?'

‘It wouldn't be a promotion – not what I mean by one, anyway – if you got it for me.'

‘You're a fool!' Sharpe said scornfully.

‘You've told me that before, an' even then you weren't the first – not by a long way. Do we have a deal or don't we?'

‘We have a deal.'

‘Good,' Woodend said. ‘Listen, Lord Sharpe, we're both havin' such fun that I'd love to stay chattin' to you all day. The thing is, though, I've got this sudden urge to take a very hot shower and then wash my mouth out with soap an' water.'

‘You self-righteous bastard!' Sharpe said.

‘It's been nice doin' business with you, an' all,' Woodend said, replacing the receiver on its cradle.

He lit another cigarette – his forty-first of the day – and thought back to that early morning thirty years earlier. The two groups of people facing each other outside Strangeways Prison (the hangers and the anti-hangers) had both been absolutely certain that they knew what was right, even though – by logic – at least one of them must have been wrong. And young Charlie Woodend, sent to the prison on a mission he was not to understand for another three decades, had made a decision then and there not only to become a policeman but to become a
certain kind
of policeman.

Was he still that kind of policeman? he wondered. Could the kind of policeman he'd planned to be back then ever have made the call to Eric Sharpe? Had he, at some point, lost his way? Or was it merely that the path he'd chosen to follow was far more complex and intricate than the younger Woodend could ever have imagined?

He lit his forty-second Full Strength from the butt of his forty-first. In a way, he was in the same situation that Margaret Dodds had found herself in all those years ago, he thought. Like her, he was a prisoner of the circumstances he'd found himself trapped in.

‘An' then there was Jane Hartley to consider,' he said softly to himself.

Yes, when everything else had been weighed and balanced, when all the plusses and negatives had been held up for comparison, there had still been Jane Hartley to consider.

J
ane Hartley glared at Monika Paniatowski across Woodend's desk.

‘Why isn't your chief inspector here?' she demanded. ‘Can't he be
bothered
to see me? Or is it just that he asked you to do it because you've attended some kind of special course on how to fob people off?'

‘Nobody's trying to fob you off, Miss Hartley,' Paniatowski said. ‘And if you still want to see Mr Woodend later, he's more than willing to make himself available.'

‘If I
still
want to see him? Why
shouldn't
I still want to see him?'

‘Perhaps you will,' Paniatowski said evenly. ‘But then again, after we've had our little chat, perhaps you won't.'

‘Maybe
you
can afford to sit around having “little chats” – when where you should really be is out on the streets, catching criminals – but don't ask me to do the same. I'm far too busy for “little chats”.'

‘You've petitioned for your mother's case to be reopened on two separate occasions, with a gap of over twenty years between them,' Paniatowski said. ‘What, do you think, prompted you to make your requests at those specific times?'

‘“Specific times”!' Jane Hartley mocked. ‘My, but aren't we using big words for a mere detective sergeant. I would have thought you'd have to be at least a superintendent before you were allowed to say “specific times”.'

She'd always known that this interview was going to be a difficult one, Paniatowski reminded herself. She'd always understood that there was a part of Jane Hartley that would fight her tooth and claw – that would do or say anything – in order to avoid having to face the truth.

‘The first time you petitioned for a review was when you were just about to get married,' the sergeant said. ‘The second time was shortly after your Aunt Helen died. That's often the way it goes. Something dramatic happens – and it forces to the surface the very thing we've been trying so hard to hide from ourselves.'

‘You're talking gibberish,' Jane Hartley said. ‘You've got two minutes to start making sense.' She made an ostentatious show of glancing down at her watch. ‘Two minutes – or I'm leaving. And you can be certain of one thing, Sergeant – you don't waste my valuable time and get away with it. I'll make complaints about you at the highest level.'

‘I was eighteen when my mother died,' Paniatowski said in a strange, almost dreamlike voice. ‘Until then, I'd always thought that the reason
my
stepfather ran away when I was eleven was because he couldn't face the responsibilities of family life any longer. But standing there, looking down at my mother's body, I saw the truth at last. I couldn't help it. It was as if her death had broken a dam somewhere in my mind, and the truth just came flooding out, whether I wanted it to or not.'

‘You've already wasted one of the two minutes I gave you,' Jane Hartley said sharply.

‘He came back for my mother's funeral,' Paniatowski continued. ‘He knew he was running the risk of being arrested – his brother had told him that I finally knew the truth – but he still came. So he must have cared about my mother in some way, mustn't he? That's the trouble with monsters – they're never quite monstrous enough.'

‘It's so smoky in here,' Jane Hartley said. ‘Haven't you people ever heard of ventilation?'

‘I can open the door to the corridor, if that will make it any better,' Paniatowski suggested.

‘No, no! That would waste even more time.'

‘We stood opposite each other – my stepfather and I – across my mother's open grave. He wouldn't look at me. In my memory, I'd pictured him as a giant. Now I saw him for what he really was – a shabby little man, grown old before his time. I was a fit young woman by then. I could probably have snapped him in half if I'd wanted to. Yet despite all that, he still managed to terrify me.'

‘I don't have to listen to any more of this, you know,' Jane Hartley said uneasily.

But she made no move to leave.

‘He sexually assaulted me – continually and unmercilessly – during the years we lived in the same house,' Paniatowski said. ‘And being by that grave was like getting in a time machine and travelling back to my childhood. It wasn't just that I could remember what he'd done – I was actually reliving the way I'd felt at the time. And do you know – can you guess, Jane – what my strongest feeling had been?'

Jane Hartley put her hands over her ears. ‘I'm not here to listen to your sick ramblings,' she gasped. ‘I'm . . . it's . . .'

Paniatowski reached across the desk, grabbed the other woman's wrists, and pulled her hands clear of her head.

‘I'd thought that it was all my fault, Jane,' she said. ‘I thought that somehow I was the one who was doing wrong. You can understand that feeling, can't you?'

‘No!' Jane Hartley croaked. ‘No, I can't!'

But she could!

She could!

‘Do you like it when I do that, Jane? It's nice, isn't it?'

‘No, it's . . .'

‘You know you want it. You know I wouldn't be doing it if you didn't want it. It's all your idea – not mine. You're leading me on.'

How long had it gone on for? A week? A month? A year? She didn't know. But it seemed as if it had been that way for ever – had always gone on and
would
always go on.

Her mother had found out, as she was bound to do inevitably, and then the arguments had begun.

‘You need help, Fred. Medical help.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘You're a sick man.'

‘Sick! You're the one who's sick. Here I am, doing my best to win your daughter's affection – trying as hard as I can to replace her dead father – and you go and accuse me of being some kind of pervert.'

‘I can't take any more of this.
Jane
can't take any more of this. I'm leaving you. I'm getting a divorce.'

‘Please don't do that. It's not like you think, I promise. I was just giving Jane a cuddle, and if I've given the wrong impression, then I'm very sorry.'

‘Stay away from her. Stay away from my daughter.'

‘If that's what you want, of course I will. But like I said, you're making a mistake.'

‘If you touch her again, I'll kill you.'

‘Your Aunt Helen thought the only reason you were staying with her was to give your mother a break,' Paniatowski said. ‘She didn't know about your stepfather, did she?'

‘No, she didn't. She couldn't have, because if my mother had told her . . . if she'd been told . . .'

‘If she'd been told she would never even have considered leaving you alone with Fred, that night she got the unexpected invitation to the dinner-dance.'

Aunt Helen helps Jane on with her coat. ‘I'll pick you up again in the morning and take you to school,' she says as she fastens the buttons with her swift, sure fingers. ‘And tomorrow afternoon we'll have a special tea to make up for the fact that I've messed you around tonight. All right?'