A Long Time Dead (15 page)

Grant took a deep breath. ‘The fact is, I was hoping we'd have the opportunity to spend some time together,' he confessed.

Paniatowski thought of Bob Rutter, her old lover, and Chief Inspector Baxter, her solid, stolid sometimes-part-time current lover. Neither of them could have been truly called a man of the world, but even so, Grant seemed like a stumbling, bumbling boy in comparison to them.

But that didn't necessarily make him unattractive.

‘I … uh … probably shouldn't have intruded on your free time,' Special Agent Grant said.

Paniatowski took a step back inside the trailer. ‘Come inside,' she said. ‘You open the bottle, and I'll find us some glasses.'

T
he darkness that had shrouded the earth since the setting of the evening sun was slowly conceding its dominance to the newly-born
morning
sun, already on its slow climb towards its zenith.

At ground level, small, furry nocturnal creatures scurried towards their hiding-place-homes, and small diurnal creatures slowly emerged from their sleepy burrows. In the trees, the birds had already begun their daily song of gratitude at having survived another long cold night. And Woodend, lying in his trailer-bed, reflectively scratched under his armpit.

He was not at all happy to be playing any part in this investigation, he told himself. It wasn't just that the whole situation was fraught with career-busting political possibilities – although it undoubtedly was. It wasn't even that, given the time which had passed, the murder was almost impossible to solve with any degree of certainty – though that was true as well. What really depressed him was that he was being forced to investigate his own past – interrogate his old self – and he was not at all sure that he would like what he might uncover.

Woodend rolled out of bed. He was a bath-taking man by inclination, but there was no bath in the trailer, so a shower would have to do. He wedged himself inside the shower cabinet, and – after just a
moment's
indecision – decided to ignore the inviting hot tap and use only the cold. He emerged from the shower shivering – but feeling virtuous – and after putting on his dressing gown, he decided to reward himself with his first cigarette of the morning.

He allowed the first few inhalations of the blessed nicotine to snake their way around his lungs, then padded over to the trailer's kitchen area. There didn't seem to be a teapot. However, since the caddy did not contain the loose tea he'd expected, but only little bags of the stuff (Tea bags! What
was
the world coming to?) he soon realized that a pot wasn't really necessary.

By using three tea bags in a large mug, he managed to produce a brew which was
almost
as good as the one he would have got at home, and he was just lighting up his second cigarette of the day when the phone rang.

He picked it up.

‘Woodend.'

He had expected to find himself talking to either Paniatowski or Grant – but it was neither of them.

‘How are you, sir?' asked the thin, uncertain voice at the other end of the line.

‘How are
you,
Bob?' Woodend replied.

What a bloody stupid thing to say, Charlie Woodend, he told himself angrily. How do you
think
the lad is? How would you be, if it had been Joan who'd been murdered?

‘Forget I even asked you that question,' he told Bob Rutter. ‘I know how you must be feelin'. Like shit! But it will get a
little
better, over time. I can promise you that, lad.'

‘Well, it's hard to imagine it could get much worse,' Rutter said, chillingly matter-of-factly. ‘Listen, sir, I don't know where you are – they wouldn't tell me in Whitebridge, and I had to use a bucketful of favours to even get your number out of them – but I assume that you're working on a case.'

‘Yes, I am,' Woodend said cautiously.

‘Want to talk it over?'

‘I'm not really sure I can.'

‘The thing is, I've been to see the police shrink again, and he says I'm not stable enough to return to my normal duties yet.'

‘An' he's probably right about that, don't you think? Take your time, Bob. Nobody's rushin' you. Nobody at all. You come back to work when you're good an' ready.'

‘I'm ready now,' Rutter said, desperately. ‘Whatever the shrink's opinion, I know I am.'

‘Well, I wouldn't be too sure …'

‘If I don't get back to work soon, I'll go crazy. That's why I'm ringing you now.'

‘Listen, Bob—'

‘I'm not asking for a major part in an investigation. I know that's not possible. I'd be happy just doing a little bit of the background work for the case you're involved in now.'

But what kind of ‘backroom work' could
anybody
do on a case which was as tightly wrapped up in the Official Secrets Act as this one seemed to be? Woodend wondered.

Still, it must have taken a lot of guts for Bob Rutter to force himself to make this call in the first place, and Woodend just couldn't bring himself to turn the poor feller down flat.

‘Where are you, Bob?' he asked.

‘London. I've brought the baby down here to be with her grandparents. It's for the best, I suppose. I can't look after her properly myself at the moment, the state I'm in.'

He really
did
need to work, Woodend thought, and quickly racked his brains for something – anything – he could toss to the inspector who he'd come almost to regard as a son.

‘Have you still got any of your old contacts from your days in the Met, Bob?' he asked.

‘A few. Why?'

‘Do you think you could make use of them to do some background checkin' for me?'

‘On what?'

On what indeed? Woodend wondered. He was walking through a minefield of officialdom and secrecy here, and if he put a foot wrong, the whole thing would blow up in his face.

‘Have you ever heard of a feller called the Right Honourable Douglas Coutes?' he asked.

‘Coutes? Isn't he the Minister of Defence?'

‘That's right.'

‘
He's
not been murdered, has he? Surely if he had been, it would be headline news.'

‘No, he's not been murdered.'

‘Then what …?'

‘He's peripherally involved in the case I'm workin' on,' Woodend lied, ‘but, for God's sake, whatever you do, don't tell anybody else that.'

‘Understood.'

‘An' I was wonderin' if he – or anybody close to him – might have been of especial interest to the Met, recently.'

‘It's not likely, is it?' Rutter asked.

No, Woodend thought, it's not likely at all. If Coutes is guilty of a serious crime, it's one he committed twenty years ago.

‘My first rule of thumb is collect up as much information as I can, however irrelevant it might turn out to be later,' he said, improvising wildly around the truth. ‘Havin' worked with me as closely as you have, you should know that better than anybody.'

‘I suppose I do.'

‘But you're probably right, Bob. A long-shot like this isn't worth wastin' your time—'

‘I'll do it,' Rutter said firmly.

‘No, now I've had time to consider it, I think—'

‘I
want
to do it.'

‘You can't tell your pals in the Met the reason
why
you're interested in Coutes,' Woodend warned.

‘No problem there, is there – since I don't actually know myself,' Rutter countered.

‘But you're goin' to have to come up with some sort of story to explain away your questions.'

‘I'll think of something.'

This was crazy, Woodend thought. If things went wrong, they could both be accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act. If things went wrong, they could both be sunk without trace.

‘Well, tread carefully, lad,' he said reluctantly.

‘I always do tread carefully in my professional life,' Rutter said. ‘It's only in my private life that I bugger things up.'

‘You mustn't go heapin'
all
the blame on yourself—' Woodend began – but he was talking to a dead line.

There was an energetic knocking on the trailer door, and when Woodend opened it, he found a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Special Agent Grant standing there.

‘The first of our witnesses arrived at the camp some time in the night,' the Special Agent said.

‘Thanks for tellin' me,' Woodend said.

‘So I thought we could roll up our sleeves and get started straight away,' Grant said.

Woodend sighed. ‘You can die of over-enthusiasm, you know,' he said. ‘But fortunately, there is a cure.'

‘A cure?' Grant repeated.

‘Aye,' Woodend told him. ‘It's called “growin' older”.'

Woodend had conducted more interrogations in his career than he now cared to remember. And the interview rooms in which he'd conducted them – whether in London, Whitebridge or some other provincial city or town – had all been pretty much-of-a-muchness.

The only window in these rooms would generally be close to the ceiling and rather small, thus ensuring that the man being interrogated could neither be distracted by looking out of it, nor seek to put an end to his ordeal by jumping through it. The walls of the rooms were almost invariably painted in two colours – chocolate brown to waist height, and sickly cream from there to the ceiling. The table and chairs could come in a variety of mismatched styles, but were united by the fact that they had all had a long history of service, and only found their way to this room when no one else – not even the most junior of junior officers – was prepared to tolerate using them any more.

The trailer which Special Agent Grant had set aside for interrogations in this case was – to say the least – from another world. It differed from all the other trailers the Americans had brought with them in that it had no windows, and it bore the sign TC1 on its side in bold black letters.

‘Tests have shown that loss of any kind of natural light tends to disorientate the subject under questioning,' Grant said, when Woodend commented on the lack of windows.

‘It doesn't do much for me, either,' the Chief Inspector admitted. ‘What do you do when it gets hot in there?'

‘The same thing you'd do yourself,' Grant said, puzzled he even needed to ask. ‘Turn up the air conditioning.'

Turn up the air conditioning! Woodend repeated silently.

As if there was air conditioning
to
turn up in any of the places he'd worked! Even the Chief Constable – who regularly and ruthlessly plundered the police budget in order to enhance his own personal comfort – would never have gone so far as to consider installing
air conditioning
in his office.

‘What does “TC1” stand for?' Woodend wondered.

‘Truth Centre One.'

Good God! Woodend thought.

‘An' is there a Truth Centre Two?' he asked.

‘Not yet,' Grant said. ‘But we can always fly one in from the States, if the need arises.'

Of course they could. These fellers could fly in
anythin
' they decided they needed.

The two men entered the trailer. It contained a table and three chairs, just as an English interview room would have done, but this furniture was brand-spanking new.

Woodend ran his hand across the smooth surface of the table.

‘It's rather clinical at the moment,' he commented, ‘but I expect it'll feel a bit more like home when its got a few cigarette burns on it.'

‘That won't happen,' Grant told him. ‘This material was developed for the space programme. It'd take a laser beam to make any impression on it.'

‘You certainly do seem to have thought of everything,' Woodend said dryly.

‘We like to think so,' Grant replied, with just a hint of complacency in his voice.

The chairs were bolted to the floor. The one on the suspect's/witness's side had been positioned squarely in the middle of the table, but the two interrogators' chairs were fixed at the corners.

‘They're like that so that the guy being questioned can't look at both his interrogators at once,' Grant explained. ‘Our psychiatrists think that gives us the edge.'

‘Good for them,' Woodend said. ‘An' where's the bright light, to shine in suspect's face?'

He had been joking, but Grant took the question at face value. ‘There's half a dozen different lights in the ceiling,' he said. ‘They're activated by a control panel built into the arm of the interrogator's chair.'

‘Very clever,' Woodend said. ‘Not that we'll be needin' them.'

‘Our psychiatrists believe that by varying the light intensity—' Grant began.

‘Not that we'll be needin' them,' Woodend repeated firmly.

Grant shrugged. ‘Whatever you say.'

Woodend lowered himself into the left-hand interrogator's chair, and thought he would have felt more at ease if it had wobbled a little.

‘Right, let's see our first witness of the momin' now, shall we?' he suggested.

‘Sure,' Grant said. ‘But there's one more thing you should understand before we begin.'

‘An' what might that be?'

‘They don't know why they're here.'

‘Come again?'

‘As far as they're concerned, Captain Robert Kineally disappeared in the spring of 1944, and hasn't been seen – or heard from – since.'

‘Are you sayin' the witnesses don't know that his body has been recently discovered?'

‘Affirmative. They don't even know there's been a murder of
any kind
.'

‘Why?'

‘It was decided in Washington DC – at the very highest levels of government, you understand – that until we've completed our investigation, as few details as possible of what actually occurred here should become generally known.'