Death of an Innocent (9 page)

‘Most people around here seem to think he is. It's Terry Taylor.'

‘Of Taylor's Caterin'?'

‘Aye,' Woodend agreed. ‘Not to mention Taylor's Department Store, Taylor's Bookmakers an' T. A. Taylor an' Associates, builders of this parish. I've just been up near his latest project – the Moorland Village. That's why it was a bit of a surprise to see him.'

‘So you're involved in this latest murder, are you?' the landlord asked. ‘I thought it said in the paper that a feller called Harris was in charge.'

It would no doubt also soon say in the papers that he himself had been suspended – and was under investigation, Woodend thought. But he didn't feel like going into the details with the landlord just at that moment.

‘Aye, Harris is in charge of the inquiry,' he said, ‘but we're all . . . you know . . . part of the same team.'

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he cursed himself for being so cowardly and evasive. A man should never be ashamed of the truth of his situation – because it was only one step from that to being ashamed of himself. And what was the point in lying, anyway? Why not bring his suspension out into the open right now, since, whatever he said, it would soon be general knowledge.

‘Pint of your usual?' the landlord asked.

Woodend nodded automatically, but his mind was already being distracted by the man who had just emerged from the toilets and taken the free seat at Terry Taylor's table. What made him worthy of scrutiny was that he was a very unlikely drinking companion indeed for the builder. Whereas Taylor's suit had a muted elegance about it, the other man was wearing a loud check jacket which might possibly have been expensive, but certainly had no style about it. And there were other contrasts, too. Taylor had a corpulent figure and face which bore witness to long business lunches followed by several expensive French brandies. His guest, on the other hand, had a hard, wiry body and tight, pinched features.

‘So are you makin' any progress in this murder up at the farm, Charlie?' the landlord asked.

‘You know I can't tell you anythin' about the nature of police inquiries,' Woodend said. Then he realized he was just avoiding the issue again. ‘The fact is,' he continued, ‘I don't
know
anythin'. My boss has decided I'm a bit too direct for his likin', an' I've been suspended. It's only temporary, of course – until the misunderstandin's been cleared up – but still, it means I haven't got much to do with the investigation.'

‘Oh . . . I see,' the landlord said. ‘Well, if you'll excuse me, Charlie, there's other customers to serve.'

And by taking two or three quick side-steps, he removed himself to the other end of the bar.

So this was what it was like to be a leper, Woodend thought grimly. This was how bent bank managers must feel when their respectable neighbours realize that they've come under investigation. Except that there was a difference, he told himself, a
big
difference – because bent bank managers knew that they'd done something wrong, and he was convinced that he hadn't.

He drained his pint. ‘Another one when you're ready, Arthur,' he called across the bar.

The landlord jumped slightly, then turned to his barmaid and said, ‘Can you serve Mr Woodend, Elaine?'

The barmaid nodded. ‘Pint of best, Charlie?'

‘That's right,' Woodend answered, thinking: No sudden change in
your
attitude to me, is there, Elaine? But then you don't know what Arthur knows about me. Yet!

Elaine slid his pint across to him, and Woodend, for want of anything better to do, turned his attention back to Terry Taylor and his companion. They really did look an incongruous pair, he thought, but he'd been a policeman long enough to know that incongruous pairings were nothing out of the normal.

There could be any number of reasons why Taylor had chosen to spend his time with the man in the flashy jacket. He might be one of Taylor's sub-contractors, negotiating a deal for supplying windows for Moorland Village. On the other hand, he could be Taylor's customer – one of those spivs who had made so much money just after the war, and now wanted to spend some of it on a lavish, garish house with Greek columns everywhere and a swimming pool in the basement filled with champagne. If that
was
the case, then maybe the tasteless Merc outside belonged to him.

Other possibilities presented themselves to his fertile imagination. The man could be a private detective who Taylor had hired to watch his wife. Or – and Woodend felt a grin coming to his lips as the thought occurred to him – he could be a private detective who
Mrs
Taylor had hired to watch her husband, and who Taylor was now attempting to buy off.

The conversation at the table had been fairly amiable up to that point, but now it was obviously becoming heated. Taylor's jaw had set as hard as his double chins allowed, and the man in the flashy jacket had started to wag his finger like a pedantic schoolmaster.

Woodend found himself putting words in their mouths and playing out their imaginary conversation in his mind.

‘
The pictures are very explicit, Mr Taylor. I couldn't even have imagined half the things you did with that blonde lady friend of yours.
'

‘
Surely everybody's entitled to a little fun now and again?
'

‘
Of course they are, Mr Taylor. But you're old enough to know that fun has to be paid for.
'

If that really was what they were talking about, then the conversation was verging on blackmail. But blackmail very rarely became a police matter, because most of the victims, while not exactly
willing
to stump up the money demanded, usually preferred that to the alternative.

Fun
did
have to be paid for, Woodend thought, suddenly sombre again.
Everything
in life had to be paid for. And he himself was now paying the bill for being the sort of policeman who did his job the way he'd decided it
should
be done, rather than sticking to the rules laid down by some stuffed shirt who hadn't come into contact with a real criminal for years.

Terry Taylor stood up, so violently that he knocked his stool flying over behind him.

‘Don't you
dare
threaten me!' he said loudly – and then, realizing that his words must be carrying across the whole pub, he made his voice drop again to a harsh whisper.

The man in the check jacket did not appear to be the least intimidated by Taylor's outburst of temper. As he looked up at the flabby builder, the expression on his face was one of mild – though cold – amusement.

Taylor wheeled round, and headed towards to the bar. It was when he was about halfway there that he caught sight of Woodend. For a second it looked as if he would stop dead in his tracks, then he forced a friendly smile of recognition to his face and kept on walking.

‘Didn't see you there, Chief Inspector,' he said jovially.

‘No, I didn't think you did,' Woodend replied. ‘Are you havin' any trouble, Mr Taylor?'

‘Trouble?'

‘Only it seemed to me that you didn't exactly enjoy whatever it was you were hearin' over there.'

The smile drained away from Taylor's face. ‘I don't like people watching me when I'm having private conversations.'

‘Then maybe you shouldn't have them in public places,' Woodend suggested.

‘And as for troubles,' Taylor continued, walking towards the door but determined not to leave without delivering a parting shot, ‘if the rumours I've been hearing about you are true, then I'd say you've got too many troubles of your own to go worrying about anybody else's.'

T
here had been no fresh fall of snow that morning, but there was no sign of a thaw, either, and as Woodend negotiated the slippery path from Crown Rise to the duck pond in Corporation Park, he was starting to feel hemmed in by the banks of complacent, glistening crystals.

He had spent a bad night, haunted by dreams of disgrace and even, at one point – God help him! – of execution. Some time during the night – he had not bothered to check the clock to see when it was exactly – he had climbed out of his clammy bed and, uncharacteristically, had poured himself one large whisky after another. Now, several hours later, he still suffering from the hangover, and the excessive light which nature had laid on was beginning to seem like a personal insult.

He stopped, and looked around him. Several stumps of Sunday-snowmen grinned at him through their crumbling pebble-mouths. A large dog ran happily towards the park gates, kicking up a trail of snow behind it and ignoring its owner's loud appeals for it to come back that minute. A couple of old-age pensioners tottered cautiously forward, using their walking sticks to test the ground ahead of them for icy booby-traps. Of any stern-faced men with open police notebooks, there appeared to be no sign.

‘Paranoid,' Woodend told himself. ‘You're gettin' paranoid, Charlie Woodend.'

But, as the old joke went, it was hard
not
to be paranoid when everybody was against you.

He had reached the duck pond. Most of it was frozen over, but someone – probably a council workman – had broken the ice around one edge, and the ducks, impervious to the cold, had taken to the water. The municipal cafe lay just ahead. In the summer months – if you were prepared to accept that Whitebridge
had
a summer – the cafe did a thriving trade, but now the green metal shutters were bolted down all around the bar.

There was a bench just beyond the cafe, and on it was a blonde-haired woman who seemed to be using her open paper more as a disguise than a source of information.

Woodend sat down beside her. ‘Got any good news for me today, Monika?' he asked.

‘
Good
news?' Paniatowski repeated, still hiding behind her newspaper. ‘You've got to be joking!'

‘Then you'd better tell me the
bad
news, hadn't you?'

‘DCI Evans isn't working alone. He's brought a whole team in with him, and they've all been asking questions about you.'

‘What kind of questions?'

Paniatowski shrugged, and her paper rustled. ‘They're all pretty much on the same lines as the ones that Evans asked me yesterday. How much did you pay for your house? Where did you go on your holidays? Do you have any expensive hobbies? That kind of thing.'

‘They're not still tryin' to prove that I'm bent, surely to God?' Woodend asked.

‘You're a pretty good detective, sir,' Paniatowski replied. ‘What do
you
think?'

‘
I
thought they'd have given that up as a non-starter by yesterday afternoon at the latest.'

‘Then you thought wrong.'

Was there a hint of doubt creeping into her voice? Woodend wondered. Was even Monika starting to believe that where there was smoke there must be at least a
small
fire?

‘How's the case developin'?' he asked.

‘Are you sure that you still want to bother your head with that after what I've just⎯'

‘Has anythin' new broken since the last time we spoke about it?' Woodend snapped.

‘We've got no more answers than we had yesterday,' Monika Paniatowski said resignedly, ‘but we certainly seem to have come up with one hell of a lot more questions.'

‘Well, at least that shows the investigation's goin' somewhere,' Woodend said. He paused, to give Paniatowski space to speak, and when it became obvious that she wasn't going to take the opportunity, he forced himself to press on. ‘Do you want to tell me what these questions of yours are about?' he asked.

‘They're about Wilfred Dugdale, mainly,' Paniatowski said, sounding reluctant.

‘
What
about Dugdale?'

‘His family has been farming the same piece of land for the last three generations, but Dugdale himself has never been much of what you might call a son of the soil.'

‘Meanin'?'

‘He never showed much enthusiasm for farming when he was growing up – at least, according to some of his older neighbours – and shortly after his twenty-first birthday he jacked it in all together and moved away from the area.'

‘When did he come back?'

‘Not until after his father had died, which was around seventeen years ago. He'd have been in his early fifties himself, by that time.'

‘An' what was he doin' durin' the missin' years?'

‘Nobody we talked to seemed to have the slightest idea – or the slightest interest, for that matter.'

‘Do you know why he came back at all? Was it because he realized
somebody
had to run the farm?'

‘That may have been his original plan, but if it was, he didn't stick to it for long. He made a half-hearted attempt at farming the land for a year, then he sold all his equipment – ploughs, tractor, animals, the whole caboodle – and he hasn't planted a crop or milked a cow since.'

Woodend thought about the farmhouse, with all its expensive furniture. ‘So what's been his main source of income since he gave up farmin'? Have you checked to see if he's been drawing the dole?'

‘It was one of the first things we did. The Ministry of Labour has never heard of him. And I'll tell you something else that's very strange – he's of pensionable age now – he has been for more than two years – but he's never bothered to draw his entitlement.'

‘So where does his money come from?'

‘Nobody knows. The favourite theory back at the station is whatever he did while he was away, he made himself a fortune from it, and has been living on the interest ever since.'

But why would a man who was independently wealthy – or at least very comfortably off – ever decide to return to the draughty stone farmhouse of his childhood? Woodend wondered. ‘Anythin' else?' he asked.