A Long Time Dead

The Charlie Woodend Mysteries

THE SALTON KILLINGS

MURDER AT SWANN'S LAKE

DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

THE DARK LADY

THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

DEAD ON CUE

THE RED HERRING

DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

THE ENEMY WITHIN

A DEATH LEFT HANGING

THE WITCH MAKER

THE BUTCHER BEYOND

DYING IN THE DARK

STONE KILLER

A LONG TIME DEAD

SINS OF THE FATHERS

DANGEROUS GAMES

DEATH WATCH

A DYING FALL

FATAL QUEST

The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

THE RING OF DEATH

ECHOES OF THE DEAD

BACKLASH

LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

A WALK WITH THE DEAD

Table of Contents

Cover

By Sally Spencer

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

 

First published in Great Britain and the USA 2006 by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2006 by Sally Spencer.

The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Spencer, Sally

A long time dead

1.Woodend, Charlie (Fictitious character) – Fiction

2.Police – England – Fiction

3.Detective and mystery stories

I. Title

823.9'14 [F]

ISBN-13: 9780-7278-6363-8 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9168-6 (trade paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-44830-112-6 (ePub)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

For Dave Garnett

T
he American sitting in the back of the Buick was wearing a pinstriped suit of the style much favoured by bankers and stockbrokers in the City of London, but even an untrained observer would never have taken him for a civilian.

It was not so much his haircut which revealed him as a military man – though, in the age of liberation which had been ushered in by the Beatles, his hair was very short even for a man of conservative tastes. Instead, it was his posture which gave him away. For whereas a lesser man might have taken the opportunity to luxuriate in the customized soft leather which had added so much to the purchase price of the vehicle, he sat ramrod stiff, his arms by his sides, his head held in place by an invisible high collar.

‘We're very nearly there now, Major,' the chauffeur said cheerfully, over his shoulder.

‘Good,' his passenger replied, without, it seemed to the driver, a great deal of enthusiasm.

The Major let his thoughts drift back to the day he was told he'd been appointed to the post of Military Attaché at the US Embassy in London. He'd considered himself lucky to be given such a plum job, and that feeling had remained – pretty much intact – until he'd received the phone call from Washington DC, a few hours earlier.

He didn't feel so lucky now.

Now, he wished he'd been posted to some obscure little South American country that no one in the Administration back home would have had very much interest in.

For some minutes, the Buick had been driving along a narrow country lane which ran parallel to an ancient chain-link fence. Now, it had almost reached a pair of large, open gates, manned by a couple of British bobbies wearing those pointy hats which the Major had always considered faintly ridiculous.

‘Haverton Camp, sir,' the driver said, flicking his indicator on, and turning the wheel.

One of the policemen, a kid who hardly looked old enough to shave, stepped into the roadway and held out his hand for the Buick to stop. The Major wound down his window, and held out his identification for the constable to see.

‘Major Garrett?' the policeman asked, looking him in the eye and completely ignoring the document.

‘No, son, I'm Betty Grable,' the Major replied.

The constable looked perplexed. ‘Sorry, sir?'

‘I'm Betty Grable,' the Major repeated. ‘If you don't believe me, just check my ID.'

The constable did as he'd been instructed. ‘You
are
Major Garrett,' he announced. A grin spread across his face. ‘Was all that by way of teaching me a lesson, sir?'

Garrett nodded. ‘Always put your faith in documentation over people, son. A document has no reason to lie.'

‘I'll remember that, sir,' the constable promised. ‘Shall I tell you where you can find the guv'nor?'

‘That would be helpful.'

‘Drive straight through the main camp until you reach an open space that used to be the parade ground. He's at the far end of it, studying the crime scene.'

‘Appreciate it,' Garrett said.

The constable hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?'

‘Not at all. What is it?'

‘Who's Betty Grable?'

‘You really don't know?' Garrett asked, amazed.

‘No, sir.'

‘She was an actress. A big, big, movie star.'

‘Is that right?' the constable asked, plainly none the wiser.

‘You must have heard of her! She starred in the movie
A Yank in the RAF
! With Tyrone Power!'

‘And when would that have been, sir?' the constable asked, obviously still unenlightened.

‘I don't know for sure. 1941? 1942? It was some time during the War, anyway.'

The constable looked somewhat dubious. ‘Seems an awful long time ago, sir.'

Yes, Garrett agreed silently, it probably did, to a boy like him. From the constable's perspective, the Second World War must be almost ancient history. And that made the murder – which he had come all this way to see with his own eyes – ancient history too.

The Major suddenly felt very old.

The driver edged the car through the gates, and on to a concrete road which was rutted and cracked after nearly a quarter of a century of total neglect. The road was flanked by a series of long wooden huts, so rickety that it seemed that a single jab of a finger would bring them crashing down like a row of dominoes.

‘Hard to believe that this is one of the places they launched the Invasion of Normandy from, isn't it, sir?' the driver asked over his shoulder.

‘Yeah,' Garrett agreed.

The huts petered out, and ahead of the car lay a large concrete rectangle, dappled with patches of green where the grass and weeds had forced their way through. Beyond the parade ground was another chain-link fence, and standing close to it were a small group of men.

‘Stop here,' Garrett ordered. ‘I'll walk the rest of the way.'

‘Are you sure about that, sir?' the driver asked. ‘There's no need to worry about damaging the car, you know. The suspension will take it, as long as I drive slowly.'

‘I'm
not
worried about the car,' Garrett told him. ‘I need a little time to think.'

As he marched briskly across the ruined parade ground, Garrett looked neither to the left nor to the right. Instead, he appeared to be keeping his eyes focussed on the men standing around a slight depression in the ground. But even that was not strictly accurate. He was not so much looking
at
them as looking
through
them – gazing towards a possible future he would prefer to avoid, but suspected was unstoppable.

He came to a final halt at the very edge of the shallow hole, and gazed down into it. The human skull which lay there seemed – despite its lack of eyes – to be looking up at him, and, even without teeth, appeared to be greeting him with a macabre grin.

Nor was the skull occupying the hole alone. There were other bones in evidence, too – ribs, femurs, fingers.

The men who had partly disinterred this body had had no expectation of making such a dramatic discovery, Garrett thought.

And why should they have had?

They were not archaeologists, but builders. Their intent was not to uncover the past, but to construct the future. Yet it had fallen to them to finally reveal – by total accident – the corpse of a man whom the most powerful military machine in the world had failed to find, even when the trail was fresh.

‘I'm Inspector Clarence Dudley of the Devonshire Constabulary,' said a voice.

Garrett looked up. The speaker was a man in his mid-forties. He was wearing a long white Macintosh, and the kind of bowler hat much favoured by actors playing British policemen in cheaply-made B pictures.

‘Well, there's the corpse,' Dudley said, with a banality perfectly in tune with his B picture appearance.

Garrett looked down into the hole again. ‘Are you sure this guy really
is
Robert Kineally?' he asked, his tone half-suggesting that he was hoping for a reply in the negative.

Dudley shrugged. ‘That's what it says on his identification tags,' he answered.

Major Garrett knelt down, and examined the dog tags for himself. One of them, he noted, was partly obscured by a dark brown blob, which was made up of swirling lines.

‘It's a bloody fingerprint,' Dudley said helpfully.

‘Yeah, I'd just about figured that out for myself,' Garrett replied, over his shoulder.

The second set of tags, which had no evidence of bloodstains on them, had once belonged to a Robert T. Kineally, who had been immunized against tetanus, hailed from Connecticut and had listed Martha Kineally as his next of kin.

Perhaps it wasn't him, Garrett told himself.

These were undoubtedly Kineally's
tags,
but perhaps the body was somebody else's.

Yeah, right! he thought, with self-disgust.

In his time, he'd known soldiers who would sell army equipment – and even their own weapons – if they thought that they could get away with it. But a man's dog tags were something else. They didn't
belong
to him, they were
part
of him – sometimes, when the battle was finally over, the
only
part of him which was still recognizable.