A Death Left Hanging (7 page)

‘If they're still alive,' Rutter said.

‘Well, there won't be much use talking to them if they're dead,' Woodend said dryly. ‘In addition, we need to know which of DCI Sharpe's conclusions are worth a second examination. Got that?'

Rutter nodded. It was the kind of painstaking work he was good at, and – though he would never have admitted it – rather enjoyed.

‘Monika, I want you to come up with as much of the background as you can on Margaret Dodds an' her two husbands. An' while you're at it, see what you can discover about Jane Hartley QC.'

‘Why her?' Monika Paniatowski asked. ‘She was only a kid at the time of Dodds' death.'

‘But she's not a kid
now
,' Woodend pointed out. ‘She's a powerful woman with a lot of clout in all the right places. Whether we like it or not, she's the one we're actually workin' for – an' I always think it's a good idea to find out as much as I can about my boss.'

‘Fair point,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘What about you, sir?' Rutter asked, doing his best to keep a slight smile of anticipation from creeping to his lips.

‘What about me?' Woodend countered.

‘Will you be doubling up on anything?'

‘As a matter of fact, I will. I was brought up on gramophone records as big as hubcaps, an' tea that was so strong you could stand your spoon up in it. You two young sprogs, on the other hand, are more used to 45 rpm discs an' your frothy coffee. The world in which this case occurred is so alien to you that it's no more than a blank canvas at the moment. The deeper you get into the investigation, of course, the clearer the picture you'll have of how the central characters thought an' acted. But the background will still be empty. It'll be my job to fill that background in. Only I can't do that for the pair of you until I've regained some of my own feelin' for the time, now can I?'

‘I suppose not,' Rutter agreed.

‘So that's what I'll be doin' in my spare time – attemptin' to regain a feelin' for the time.'

Rutter gave up the battle to hide his smile. ‘In other words, what you'll be doing is “cloggin'-it” around Whitebridge, trying your best to remember just what life was like here before the war?' he suggested.

‘Exactly!' Woodend agreed.

T
he brass plate next to the front door read:

Peninsula Trading Company Ltd

Founded 1923

Branches in Whitebridge, London

Penang and Kuala Lumpur

Woodend chuckled. Whitebridge,
then
London, he noted. That was typical of the businessmen he remembered from his childhood. It wasn't that they had thought their home town to be the centre of the universe – it was that they had
known
it was.

Woodend turned to his sergeant. ‘I suppose we'd better see if anybody's in, Monika,' he said.

Paniatowski nodded. She pressed the doorbell, and listened for a ringing from inside. When it was plain there wasn't going to be one, she lifted the knocker and rapped on the door. This time she was rewarded with the sound of slightly hesitant footfalls in the corridor.

The door was opened by a man in his late sixties. He might once have had the lean and hungry face of a hard-bitten entrepreneur, but age had given him both the shape and expression of a rather absent-minded Santa Claus.

‘Yes?' the old man asked, as if he were slightly surprised to find them standing there.

‘We're here to see Mr Bithwaite,' Paniatowski said.

‘That's me.'

‘If it's not convenient at the moment, then we can––' Paniatowski began.

‘But of course it's convenient,' the old man said enthusiastically. ‘More than convenient.
Do
come in.'

‘Don't you want to know who we are, or why we're here?' Woodend wondered.

‘I suppose so,' Bithwaite said, and then – as if he were worried such an answer may have offended them – he quickly added, ‘at least, I want to know if you want to
tell
me.'

‘We're from the police,' Woodend said. ‘We'd like to talk to you about Fred Dodds.'

A puzzled look crossed Bithwaite's rosy face. ‘Fred Dodds?' he repeated. ‘But he's been dead for years.' He shrugged. ‘Still, why
not
talk about old Fred? It will certainly help to pass the time.'

He led them into an office just to the left of the front door. A big, old-fashioned mahogany desk – badly in need of polishing – dominated much of the room. On the wall behind it hung a map of the world that showed boundaries long since redrawn and empires that had faded away. The air smelled slightly of must, and the sun, which streamed in through the window, was muted somewhat by the thin layer of grime on the window.

Two small leather armchairs, both of them losing a little of their horsehair stuffing, were positioned in front of the desk, and it was on these that Bithwaite bade his guests to sit.

‘I'd order up some coffee for you, but I'm afraid my girl Friday only comes in two days a week – and this doesn't happen to be one of those days,' he said apologetically.

‘I take it business isn't doin' too well,' said Woodend sympathetically.

Bithwaite smiled. ‘If business was going any slower, it would be moving in reverse. The sort of work we used to do before the war has been gradually taken over by the big corporations. There's no room in this world of ours for a Merchant Prince any more. You'd have to be a Merchant
Emperor
to survive now.'

‘I'm sorry,' Woodend said.

‘Don't be,' the older man told him. ‘I did well enough
before
the war. Even up to the middle fifties I was making a comfortable living. And I have a very nice little nest-egg tucked away for when I do eventually retire.'

‘Then why are you . . .?'

‘Why am I still working?'

‘Well . . . yes.'

‘Because I still enjoy it, I suppose. This place may not look like much now, but it's a monument to my working life and, sitting here behind my desk, I can remember how things used to be. And that is what you wish to talk about, isn't it? How things used to be?'

Woodend grinned good-naturedly. ‘That's right, sir. What can you tell us about Fred Dodds?'

‘Oh, I could tell you many things,' Bithwaite said. ‘Where would you like me to start?'

‘How about when you first met him?'

‘That would be when he and his partner interviewed me for the post of Chief Clerk, towards the end of 1923.'

‘His partner?' Woodend said. ‘I don't remember readin' anythin' about a partner in the papers.'

‘That's because, by the time Mr Dodds died, the partnership between him and Mr Cuthburtson had been dissolved for over three years.'

‘Is that so?' Woodend asked pensively.

‘It is indeed. The break-up came as quite a surprise – at least, it did to me.'

‘An' why was that?'

‘They'd seemed ideally matched, you see. Mr Cuthburtson was a staid, unimaginative sort of man, with both feet firmly on the ground. Mr Dodds, on the other hand, had a certain flair – a certain cavalier attitude – about him.'

‘Wasn't that a problem?'

‘No, not at all. In fact, it was a positive advantage. You needed both kinds of men in the sort of business this was back then.'

‘Why is that?'

‘Well, for example, Mr Cuthburtson hated the idea of travel. He had a young family, which he wanted to get home to every night. Besides, he was always at his happiest dealing with the detailed paperwork – he loved reading all those columns of figures. Mr Dodds was just the reverse – hated figures, was prepared to pack a suitcase at the drop of a hat. A perfect partnership in many ways. And what made the eventual break-up even more surprising was that they weren't just partners – they were great friends as well.'

‘Great friends?'

‘Absolutely. Of course, they both had their own lives to lead, but that didn't preclude them socializing with each other. Mr Dodds was living on his own at the time, and so Mr Cuthburtson used to invite him round to his house every Sunday for luncheon. And in return, Mr Dodds would take the entire Cuthburtson family out on occasional expeditions to the seaside or the Lake District.'

‘So if everythin' was so tickety-boo, why
did
the partnership break up?' Woodend asked.

‘I never found out,' Bithwaite confessed. ‘As I said, it was all very sudden. One moment everything was going along swimmingly. The next they were not only dissolving their agreement – they couldn't even stand the sight of one another. They even went so far as to refuse to be in the same room when the final papers were signed.'

‘You must have
some
suspicions about what went wrong,' Woodend persisted.

‘Not really,' Bithwaite replied. ‘The best theory I could come up with was that Mr Cuthburtson was fiddling the books in some way, and Mr Dodds found out about it. But since Mr Dodds never took any interest in the accounts himself, it's hard to see how he
could
have found out.'

‘Still, from what you say, if anybody
did
force anybody else out of the business, it was Dodds forcin' out Cuthburtson,' Woodend said.

‘Yes, I think I'd have to agree with you there.'

So Cuthburtson loses the business he's helped to establish, and a couple of years later Fred Dodds is found beaten to death by somebody who obviously hated his guts, Woodend thought. He wondered if there was anything in DCI Sharpe's records about
that
.

‘Do you happen to know where Cuthburtson lives now?' asked Paniatowski, whose mind seemed to be running along roughly the same lines.

‘No, but I can tell you where he and his family went after the partnership broke up,' Bithwaite said.

‘An' where was that?' Woodend asked.

‘Canada.'

‘Canada!'

‘That's right. Within a couple of months of the final papers being signed, they'd emigrated. I think that perhaps Mr Cuthburtson wanted to leave the unpleasant memories of the past behind him. You know, make a clean start in some completely new place.'

‘An' nobody's heard from him since?'

‘I haven't, certainly.'

‘Did you become a partner after Cuthburtson had gone?'

Bithwaite laughed. ‘Good heavens, no. I might have taken a lot of the burden of Mr Cuthburtson's work on my own shoulders, but my position in the company was essentially unchanged until I bought the whole thing outright.'

‘An' when was that?'

‘After Mr Dodds death.'

‘Bought it outright, after Mr Dodds' death,' Woodend repeated. ‘The company was very much a goin' concern back then, from what you've said.'

‘That's right.'

‘So it must have been very expensive.'

‘Not really,' Bithwaite said.

‘No?'

‘There was a depression on. People were cautious. They thought twice before investing whatever cash they'd managed to salvage from the Great Crash in a new business. And a certain amount of superstition came into it, too. The owner had been brutally murdered – perhaps the business itself was unlucky.'

‘But those considerations didn't bother you?'

‘To a certain extent, they did. But remember, I'd seen the business from the
inside
. I knew that, even in hard times, I'd have to be the unluckiest man alive
not
to make it work. Besides, the executors of the will eventually dropped the asking price so much that I just couldn't resist it.'

‘Tell us more about Dodds as a man,' Woodend suggested.

Bithwaite gave the matter some thought. ‘He could be very charming,' he said. ‘Quite the gentleman, in fact. But there were occasions when he forgot himself – and then his rough edges tended to show through.'

‘Rough edges?'

Bithwaite looked embarrassed.

‘How can I express this without seeming like a snob?' he wondered aloud. ‘I'm not exactly out of the top drawer myself, but my father was a senior clerk in a highly respected solicitor's office, and I was educated at King Edward's Grammar School. Whereas Mr Dodds . . . Mr Dodds . . .'

‘Whereas Mr Dodds' father was a mill worker, an' he went to an elementary school?' Woodend suggested.

‘I couldn't say about that. I don't
know
what his father did for a living, because the family weren't from round here. But Mr Dodds' rough edges must have come from somewhere, and I would seriously doubt that his father was the kind of man one could comfortably have invited to dinner.'

‘Where
was
Mr Dodds from?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Simcaster, I believe. He always
claimed
he'd attended Simcaster Grammar School.'

‘But you think he was lyin'?' Woodend said.

‘I suppose I had no real reason to disbelieve him,' Bithwaite admitted. ‘He just didn't have the
stamp
of a grammar school boy on him.' He paused for a second, as if he'd suddenly retrieved a long-forgotten memory. ‘He used to sit there examining his hands.'

‘He did what?'

‘He'd sit behind his desk, examining his hands. Especially his fingernails. It was almost as if he couldn't quite believe they were really clean.'

‘What about women?' Woodend asked.

‘
What
about them?'

‘Unattached man with plenty of money. Loads of charm – even if he wasn't quite a gentleman. Your Mr Dodds seemed to have had all the qualities to make him a perfect ladies' man.'

‘I really wouldn't know about that,' Bithwaite said, almost haughtily. ‘He certainly never brought any “ladies” here. In fact, I wasn't even aware of the existence of the lady who became
Mrs
Dodds until a week or so before the wedding.'