Stone Killer (6 page)

‘When did she have this sudden an' unexpected change of heart of hers?' Woodend asked.

Keene thought about it. ‘I think it must have been about a year ago,' he said finally.

‘Just around the time she met Burroughs?'

‘Yes, I suppose it was,' Keene said. Then the import of Woodend's words struck home. ‘Have you talked to Judith yourself?' he asked, sounding disappointed and possibly betrayed.

‘Not yet,' Woodend confessed.

‘You should,' Keene told him earnestly. ‘And if, after having talked to her, you can still believe she's guilty of this terrible crime, then you're simply not the judge of character I took you to be.'

D
unethorpe, where the Burroughs murder had taken place, lay just the other side of the Lancashire–Yorkshire border, in a lush rolling dale. The town itself was pleasant enough, too, with an old, stone-built centre ringed by new brick-built housing estates, but Woodend began to scowl immediately he had driven past the town's welcome sign.

‘Something the matter, sir?' Monika Paniatowski asked.

‘It's all a bit too pretty-pretty for my likin',' Woodend grumbled. ‘Where are all the dark satanic cotton mills an' decayin' canals?'

‘True,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘Yorkshire really does seem to have missed out when it comes to blots on the landscape, doesn't it?'

‘Besides,' Woodend continued, ‘you should know by now that I never feel happy on enemy territory.'

Paniatowski grinned to herself. She was all too well aware of her boss's half-mock, half-serious antipathy to Yorkshire.

It wasn't the Wars of the Roses – when the House of Lancaster had battled with the House of York for the English crown – that made him suspicious of tykes, he had once explained to her. It wasn't even that Yorkshire would selfishly insist on winning the County Cricket Championship every year – which meant her neighbours never even got a look-in. It was the Yorkshiremen themselves. They were dour, they were tight with their money – and if they did have a sense of humour, then it was certainly not one which would be recognized as such anywhere else in the civilized world.

Paniatowski took it all with a pinch of salt, having heard Yorkshiremen make pretty much the same complaints about Lancastrians.

Anyway, she told herself, if there was one thing that you had to say about Charlie Woodend, it was that he always took people as he found them, and that their accident of birth, position in society or previous history was of no interest to him. He was, in other words, the most tolerant and open of men – whether he was willing to admit it or not.

Except in the case of adulterers, she thought, as they pulled up on the forecourt of Dunethorpe Central Police Station. She wasn't sure that he was so tolerant of adulterers any more.

The policeman who'd been in charge of the Clive Burroughs murder case was Chief Inspector Baxter. He was a big, pipe-smoking man with wild grey hair, and his office looked just as chaotic as Woodend's own.

‘Cards on the table?' he asked, the moment that his two visitors had sat down.

Woodend nodded. ‘Cards on the table.'

‘There's a lot of bobbies who'd really resent some bugger coming in from the outside with the sole purpose of worrying over the bones of one of their old investigations,' Baxter said.

‘True,' Woodend agreed, guardedly.

‘But I'm not one of them,' Baxter continued. ‘If I've made a mistake, I want it uncovered.' He paused to light his pipe, and the room was suddenly filled with wispy blue smoke. ‘Of course, if you do happen to prove me wrong in this particular case,' he added, ‘then it certainly won't do my prospects of promotion any bloody good.'

‘No, it won't,' Woodend confirmed.

‘But I'm not sure I'm interested in promotion any more,' Baxter said. ‘After twenty long hard years of studying superintendents as a breed, I think, on the whole, that I'd rather not become one of them.'

‘Amen to that,' Woodend replied, with feeling.

‘Having said that – and bearing in mind how important it is for the situation in Whitebridge that you
do
prove me wrong – I have to admit that I'm not over-optimistic about your chances of success.'

‘That's Yorkshire for, “You've no chance at all,”' Woodend explained to Paniatowski.

Baxter smiled. ‘I wouldn't put it as strongly as that,' he said. ‘But I do have to tell you that this was not one of those cases I ever lost sleep over. Judith Maitland may not have deserved twenty years for something she did in the heat of the moment, but there's no doubt in my mind that she actually did do it.'

‘Can you fill us in on the details?' Woodend asked.

‘Be glad to,' Baxter replied.

It was just after midnight when the young constable on the night-shift patrol noticed that the gate to the builders' merchant's yard was slightly open. Looking beyond it, he saw the office door was also a little ajar, and his first thought was that he'd come across a burglary in progress. He resisted the impulse to call for back-up – why share the credit when you don't have to? – and instead he unsheathed his truncheon and strode, with all the confidence of youth and inexperience, towards the office door.

The place was in darkness, but by groping along the wall with his hand, he located the light switch. He flicked it on – and soon wished he hadn't.

Clive Burroughs was lying on the floor, in what looked at first to be a large puddle of red paint. It took the constable's brain no more than a second or two to work out that the paint was, in fact, blood, and it took his body only slightly longer than that to react to the news by heaving up the contents of his stomach on to the office floor.

‘The moment I saw the corpse, I was almost certain it was a crime of passion,' Chief Inspector Baxter said.

‘An' why was that?' Woodend asked.

‘It was so messy. Burroughs would have been down – and probably dead – after the first blow, but his assailant kept on striking the top of his skull until there was nothing left but mush and bone splinters. Whoever had hit him didn't just want him out of action – there was real hatred behind the attack.'

‘It's a tough thing, the human skull,' Woodend mused. ‘Could a woman really have had the strength to reduce Burroughs' skull to a pulp?'

‘There are cases on record of women who lifted up the front end of cars to rescue their trapped children,' Baxter said. ‘Most women are capable of great feats of strength when they're very worked up.'

That was true enough, Woodend thought.

‘What happened next?' he asked.

‘That was when the witness turned up,' DCI Baxter said.

The witness was the night-watchman from the garden centre opposite Burroughs' Builders' Merchant. He had not only seen Burroughs himself drive up, but also the arrival of a white Vauxhall van with the words ‘Élite Caterers' painted on the side of it.

The van had been parked in front of Burroughs' for fifteen minutes, the watchman claimed, then a woman had rushed out of the building, climbed into it, and driven away at some speed. The next vehicle to appear on the scene had been the police patrol car, about half an hour later.

Baxter did a quick mental calculation. Half an hour between the woman's departure and the body being discovered, plus another forty minutes between that moment and this discussion with the night-watchman. If the woman had been in as much of a hurry as the watchman said she was, she could be as much as fifty miles away by now.

‘It's probably a pointless bloody exercise, but alert all patrols to be on the lookout for this white van anyway,' he told his bagman.

‘But it wasn't a pointless exercise at all, was it?' Woodend asked.

‘No,' Baxter agreed. ‘It certainly wasn't.

It was a police car on a routine patrol of the main Dunethorpe–Huddersfield road which spotted the van. It was parked in a lay-by, and all the lights were off. The patrolmen pulled in behind it, and approached the van with caution.

Their caution proved unnecessary. The van contained only one person – a woman – and she was slumped over the wheel.

One of the officers tried the driver's door, and discovered that it wasn't locked. When he opened it, the first thing that hit him was the overpowering smell of whisky.

The officer prodded the woman gently on the shoulder. ‘Are you all right, love?' he asked.

The woman raised her head slightly. ‘He's dead,' she moaned. ‘He has to be dead.'

‘But she didn't actually say she'd killed Clive Burroughs?' Woodend asked.

Baxter shook his head, then relit his pipe. ‘No, she didn't say that. She
never
admitted killing him. Right up until the end of the trial, she insisted that he was already dead when she got there.'

‘Did she give you any reason for why she had visited Burroughs so late at night?'

‘She claimed it was nothing more than a business meeting.'

‘What kind of business meeting?'

‘She said Burroughs had called her, and told her he wanted her to cater his daughter's birthday party.'

‘Maybe he had.'

‘His daughter had had a birthday only three weeks earlier. Besides, she's only four years old, and Élite Catering is far too grand to even consider doing kids' parties.'

‘Even for a friend?'

‘That's just the point. Judith Maitland insisted throughout that Burroughs wasn't a friend at all – that he really was no more than someone she did business with.'

‘I'm going to have to ask you to step out of the van, madam,' the patrol-car driver said.

‘Go away!' Judith Maitland said.

‘I'm afraid I can't do that, madam. If you require assistance, I will willingly provide it. But with or without assistance, you're still going to have to get out of the van.'

Judith Maitland tried to climb out of her seat several times – and failed. In the end, it was a combination of assistance and manhandling which got her out on to the lay-by, and once she was there it was immediately apparent that she could not stand unaided.

‘Have you been drinking, madam?' the constable asked.

Judith did her best to focus her bleary eyes on him. ‘Well, of course I've been drinking. Wouldn't you have had a drink, if your whole world had just fallen apart,' she said, slurring her words.

‘What, exactly, is that supposed to mean, madam?'

‘Why did it have to happen?' Judith asked, addressing her remark more at the dark night which surrounded them than at the constable. ‘When everything was going so well – when it was all going to work out – why did
that
have to happen?'

And then she burst into tears.

‘Not quite the admission of guilt you would have liked, though, was it?' Woodend said.

‘True,' Baxter agreed. ‘There was no “You've got me bang to rights, Officer. Put the cuffs on me.” But what she
did
say was certainly enough to convince the jury that she was the one who did it.'

‘Did you find any physical evidence to tie her in with the murder?' Woodend asked.

‘None.'

‘But surely, in a violent attack of that nature, there would have been bloodstains on her clothing?'

‘If they'd been the clothes she was wearing when she committed the murder, yes.'

‘But you don't think they were?'

‘Élite Catering issues all its employees with a uniform. It consists of an overall, a pair of light, washable canvas shoes, and a plastic cap of the sort people use in the shower. Judith Maitland always carried a set of these clothes with her – nobody disagrees about that – but there was no sign of them in the van.'

‘So you think that was what she was wearing when she allegedly killed Clive Burroughs?'

‘Exactly.'

‘And that she dumped the uniform somewhere, shortly after leaving the scene of the crime?'

‘Just so.'

‘But you never found it?'

‘No, we did not.'

‘There's something that's rather puzzling me here,' Monika Paniatowski said.

‘And what's that?' Baxter wondered.

‘I've only skimmed through the transcript of the trial, but I don't remember finding any reference at all in it to her overall.'

‘No, you wouldn't have, because there isn't one,' Baxter said.

‘And why is that?'

‘It wasn't
necessary
to include it in the evidence. We had a strong enough case without it.'

Woodend lit a cigarette and took a thoughtful drag. ‘Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you start this conversation by sayin' that you were goin' to put all your cards on the table?' he asked.

‘Yes, I did,' Baxter agreed. ‘And I've done just that.'

But though his voice was still steady enough, he did not look exactly comfortable with the assertion.

‘Now that
is
interestin',' Woodend said.

‘What is?'

‘I've been wrackin' my brains for some other example where the investigatin' officers deliberately excluded some of the evidence from the prosecution's case because they'd decided it wasn't really necessary. An', do you know, I can't come up with a single one. In Whitebridge, we normally throw everything but the kitchen sink into the evidence, just to make sure we've got as watertight a case as we possibly could have.'

‘Normally, we'd do that in Dunethorpe, too,' Baxter agreed, his evident discomfort growing by the second.

‘So what happened in the Burroughs case?'

Baxter took out a knife and scraped the bowl of his pipe before speaking again.