Death of a Cave Dweller (19 page)

Woodend's subconscious mind tried to ignore the sound of the shrill bell at first, but when it persisted he groaned, rolled over towards the bedside table, and switched on the light.

He glanced at the clock through bleary eyes. “You stupid bastard!” he growled. “What the bloody hell are you doin' ringin' now? Don't you know it's half-past one in the bloody morning!”

But it wasn't the clock making the noise, he realised – it was the phone.

The chief inspector picked it up. “Woodend,” he barked into the offending instrument.

“I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour, sir,” said the calm, soothing voice of the hotel switchboard operator, “but I have an Inspector Hopgood on the line, and he says it's important he speak to you right away.”

“Then you'd better put him through,” Woodend told her, as he reached automatically for his cigarettes.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir—” Hopgood began.

“Yes, yes, I've been through all that already with the operator,” Woodend said impatiently. “Just tell me what's happened.”

“I don't know whether this has anything to do your case or not,” Inspector Hopgood said, “but I've just received a report from one of my lads that Jack Towers has been beaten up.”

Bloody hell fire!

“How bad is it?” Woodend asked, remembering Towers' request for police protection – and fearing it could be very bad indeed.

“They're not sure of the extent of Mr Towers' injuries yet, but at least he's conscious.”

“When, exactly, did this beatin' up occur?” demanded Woodend, now wide awake.

“About an hour ago. Down by Dukes' Dock.”

“Where's the poor bugger now?”

“In the University Hospital.”

“Send a car round to the hotel as soon as you can,” Woodend said. “I think I'd better go an' pay our Mr Towers a bedside visit.”

There was something about hospitals that was anathema to the northern working-class male, Woodend thought as he followed the pretty Jamaican nurse, who said her name was Sister Holmes, down the perfectly sterile, brightly lit corridor. He'd fought side by side in the war with men who'd never flinched in the face of a hail of German machine-gun bullets, yet had blanched at the idea of going in for a blood test. Fought with them? Hell, if he was going to be honest, he was a prime example of one himself. When he had a pain, his natural reaction – like that of his father before him – was simply to grimace and hope that, in time, it would go away.

Northern working-class women, on the other hand, were an entirely different story. For them, operations held more fascination than the FA Cup Final did for their husbands, and while talk of the surgeon's knife might put most men off their dinners, it only seemed to stimulate their wives' appetites – both for more food and more bloodthirsty details.

The sister came to a halt beside a door which looked just as anonymous as every other door they had passed.

“This is the doctors' lounge,” she said. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“Nay, lass,” Woodend said, smiling. “I'm quite sure you've got much more important things to do with your time than shepherdin' me around.”

The sister smiled back at him, giving him a brief glimpse of her perfect white teeth. “Ain't that the truth,” she agreed. “Just knock on the door, and then go straight in. The doctors here are used to being interrupted.”

Woodend watched her walk down the corridor. If he was ever sick, he decided, he could only hope he'd be looked after by someone as obviously caring as Sister Holmes. He knocked on the door, as instructed, and entered the lounge. The only person inside the room was reading a newspaper, and when he lowered it, Woodend was surprised to find that he already knew him.

“It's Doctor Atkinson, isn't it?” the chief inspector said. “We met this mornin', over at the
Mersey Sound
office.”

“That's right, we did,” the doctor agreed.

“Well, what a coincidence,” Woodend said. “I'm in a strange city, an' twice, within a matter of hours, I run into the same man. What do you reckon are the chances of that?”

“In this job, you come across so many coincidences that you start to take them for granted,” the doctor said tiredly. “I take it you're here to ask about Jack Towers.”

“Yes, I am. How is he?”

“It could have turned out a lot worse than it has, to be honest. Some of the kicks he took in his ribs could just as easily have connected to his head – and if they had, I've no doubt they would have caused brain damage.”

“So he'll be all right, will he?”

“He should be quite stiff for a few days,” the doctor said, “but there's certainly no reason to keep him in here beyond tomorrow morning.”

“If he's awake, I'd like to see him now,” Woodend said. “As long as it wouldn't be disturbin' the other patients, that is.”

“Oh, it won't disturb them,” the doctor assured him. “I've put Mr Towers in a single room.”

Jack Towers was sitting up in bed, and – from the ample evidence in his ashtray – chain-smoking. His right eye was discoloured, and there was a dark bruise on his jaw. Beneath his open pyjama jacket, Woodend could see the bandages wrapped tightly around his chest.

The chief inspector glanced quickly around the room. In comparison to the ward which his Joan had been in when she'd been operated on for her ‘woman's problems', it was an absolute palace. For a start there was so much space – in Joan's ward the patients in adjacent beds could have held hands with no problem, whereas if Towers had been feeling up to it, he could have done gymnastics in this room. Then there was the decoration – the walls were not painted in the usual depressing institutional cream, but in a pleasant, soothing pastel blue. There was a bowl of cut flowers on the table, and – bloody hell! – the man even had his own fourteen-inch television set.

Maybe if I was workin' in private security, I could afford this kind of luxury for
my
family, Woodend thought.

He turned his attention to Jack Towers. “Well, you've certainly been in the wars, haven't you?” he said.

“I suppose you could say that, Mr Woodend,” the Seagulls' manager agreed weakly.

Woodend pulled up a chair, placed it next to the bed, and straddled it. “Do you want to tell me what you were doin' down at the docks at well past midnight?” he asked.

Towers frowned. “If it's really necessary, I will. But I've already given all the details to that other policeman.”

“What other policeman?”

“Quite a short, thin man. I think he said that his name was Inspector Hopgood.”

“Oh aye,” Woodend said. “An' just when exactly did you have this cosy little chat of yours with the good inspector?”

“I haven't exactly been keeping track of time, but I think it must have been about an hour ago.”

Or to put it another way, a good half an hour before Hopgood phoned me at the hotel, Woodend thought – and found himself wondering just what the little shit of an inspector was up to.

“Maybe you have given all the details to Inspector Hopgood,” he said to the Seagulls' manager, “but you should have seen enough of the way I work by now to know that I never like to hear things second hand. So why don't you go through your story again, tellin' me exactly what you told him?”

“I was at home,” Towers said.

“Alone?”

“Yes,Iwasalone.Mywife . . . mywife . . .”

Your wife ran off with the coal man, Woodend thought, but aloud, to save Towers any further embarrassment, he said, “The details don't matter. We've established that you were on your own. What happened next?”

“I was just making a hot cocoa to take to bed with me, when I got this phone call.”

“Oh, you've got a private phone, have you?” Woodend asked. “I'm impressed.”

“I'm the Seagulls' manager, don't forget,” Towers said. “I need it for business.”

Woodend suppressed a smile. Needed it for business! Well, he supposed there was no harm in being optimistic – and if the Seagulls did get their recording contract, he probably really would need it.

“Who was the caller?” he asked.

“He wouldn't give his name, even though I asked several times, but he said that he knew who'd killed Eddie, and if I'd agree to meet him, he'd give me all the evidence I needed.”

“You should have told him to call the police,” Woodend said sternly. “It's our job to handle things like that.”

“I would have done, but for the fact that he sounded so frightened,” Towers told him. “You see, I was worried that if I didn't do exactly what he wanted, he'd hang up and never ring again.”

“You might have been right about that,” Woodend agreed. “Carry on with your story, lad.”

“He said we had to meet somewhere private – somewhere there would be absolutely no chance that anyone else would see us. As I told you, he seemed scared out of his wits.”

“Who suggested meeting down by docks? You?”

Towers shook his head, then winced at the pain it caused him. “He was the one who suggested it. But I saw no reason to object. It's almost home ground to me, because that's where my office is.”

Woodend nodded. “So you arranged to meet each other. How did you get there?”

“I was just in time to catch the last bus. I was going to take a taxi back. It never occurred to me I'd be making my next journey in an ambulance. Anyway, the place we'd agreed to meet was an alley near the dock – he said it would be safer for him that way.”

“An' you weren't in the least bit suspicious?”

“No. I never thought he'd turn violent. On the phone he'd seemed too scared to hurt a fly.”

“So you walked into it like a lamb to the slaughter?”

“He was waiting for me half-way down the alley. He was standing under a lamppost, but the light wasn't on.”

“No,” Woodend said dryly. “It wouldn't have been. He'd probably taken care of that before you arrived.”

“He had a cap pulled down over his eyes. He wasn't much more than a black shape, really. I walked straight up to him, and I said, ‘I'm Jack Towers. Are you the man that called me?'”

“Is that when he hit you?”

“Yes. He punched me in the face.”

“An' you went down?”

“No,” Towers said. “Not at first. I did a fair bit of boxing when I was at school, so I'm not completely useless in a fight. The moment he'd hit me, I swung back at him. I must have got a couple of good punches in myself before he knocked me to the ground.”

“Did he say anythin' while he was doin' his best to kick the livin' crap out of you?”

Towers laughed, but there was not much amusement behind it. “Oh yes, he said something all right. He said that this was no more than a friendly warning, and that if I didn't get the Seagulls out of Liverpool by the end of the week, he'd kill another of them.”

“You're sure those were his exact words,” Woodend asked. “He'd kill
another
of them.”

“It's hard to be sure of anything at all when someone's trying to break all your ribs,” Jack Towers said bitterly. “But yes, I think that those were the exact words he used.”

“What can you tell me about him, Mr Towers?”

“That's about it,” the manager said helplessly.

“No,” Woodend said. “There has to be more. I know it's difficult to think under these circumstances, but please try. Can you remember what his voice was like, for example?”

Towers pursed his brow. “That's hard to say. On the phone it sounded panicked – and a little high-pitched – but I know now that was just an act. When he was threatening me in the alley, it was much gruffer, but I think that might have been put on, too.”

“Close your eyes an' try to imagine the voice if it wasn't pretendin' to be frightened or gruff,” Woodend suggested.

Towers did as he'd been told, but after a couple of seconds he said, “This isn't helping.”

“You can hear the voice in your head, can you?”

“Oh yes.”

“But it still doesn't remind you of anyone you know? It doesn't even sound vaguely familiar?”

“I'm afraid not.”

“Well, at least you tried, lad,” Woodend said. “Let's go on to something else. How tall was he?”

“I couldn't say exactly,” Towers said, opening his eyes again, “but I'd guess that he was five feet nine or five feet ten.”

“Build?”

Towers gave a twisted grin. “I would say he was heavily built. His fist certainly felt like it had some weight behind it.”

Woodend looked at his watch. Bloody hell, it was already nearly three o'clock in the morning.

“I'll leave you in peace now, Mr Towers,” he said. “I don't expect I'll be seeing you again for a day or two.”

Towers seemed surprised by the statement. “Won't see me for a day or two? Why?” he asked. “Are you going away, Chief Inspector? At this stage of the investigation – when the killer's actually threatened to murder another one of the Seagulls by the end of the week?”

“No, I'm not goin' away,” Woodend replied. “But I would have thought that you might feel the need to take a bit of a rest.”

“A rest!” Towers repeated. “I can't afford a rest, Chief Inspector. It's only ten days to the audition. The boys are going to need me.”

Doctor Atkinson was standing in the corridor, holding a mug of coffee in his hand. He looked a little anxious, Woodend thought, then decided that the expression on Atkinson's face was probably nothing more than exhaustion.

“Did he say anything?” the doctor asked.

Woodend gave him a quizzical look. “He answered my questions, if that's what you mean,” he said. He took out his cigarettes, then noticed the large, boldly printed no-smoking sign on the wall and slipped them back into the pocket of his hairy sports jacket. “It's a nice room you've put Mr Towers in,” he commented. “They reckon it's grim up north, but I don't think we have anythin' as luxurious as that down in London.”