A Long Time Dead (19 page)

‘When did you first realize that Captain Kineally was missing?' Grant asked the MP.

‘Not until two days after he went AWOL.'

‘Two days? Why did it take so long? Surely someone in authority must have noticed he wasn't going about his normal duties.'

‘The Captain didn't have specific duties at Haverton Camp, sir. He'd been given what they called a “roving brief”, and he reported directly to a colonel in regional headquarters. So since nobody here knew what he was supposed to be doing, nobody here noticed when he wasn't doing it.'

‘I see,' Special Agent Grant said, nodding his head seriously, as if all was clear now.

‘Well, I don't,' Woodend admitted. ‘Given what you've just told us, why was it only
two
days before you noticed he was missing? Why not five days? Or a week?'

‘It wasn't Captain Kineally we missed at first, sir,' the ex-MP said. ‘It was the jeep.'

‘Come again?'

‘The jeep should gone to the motor pool for routine maintenance, and when it didn't, the master sergeant in charge of the pool informed us of the fact.'

‘So what happened next?'

‘The jeep had been made available for the captain's personal use, but it wasn't signed out to him.'

‘Then who was it signed out to?'

‘His driver, Private Birnbaum, was directly responsible for it. When we questioned Birnbaum, he admitted he hadn't seen the vehicle for two days. We put him on a charge for negligence, and launched a search for the jeep.'

‘But you didn't find it until several days after that, did you?' Special Agent Grant asked.

‘No, sir, we did not.'

‘And when you did find it, it was hidden in a wood near the local railway station?'

‘That is correct.'

If Kineally had actually used it to go AWOL, hiding it would have made sense, Woodend thought. But Kineally
hadn't
used it – because he was already dead by then.

‘It wasn't just
hidden,
was it?' Grant asked.

‘No, sir, it had been camouflaged. It was practically invisible from the air, and even personnel on the ground would have missed it unless they were very close to it.'

It was the murderer who had driven the jeep, as part of his plan to convince the military authorities that Kineally had deserted, Woodend reminded himself. So why would he hide it
so
well? Why hadn't he left it out in the open, so that the authorities would be set on the false trail as soon as possible?

‘Were you able to establish whether or not Captain Kineally had, in fact, boarded a train at the railway station?' Special Agent Grant asked.

‘No, sir, we were not. There was a great deal of rail traffic around that time, and the situation was very confused.'

‘Did you manage to find any witnesses who had seen Captain Kineally – or anyone else – drive the jeep to the woods?'

‘No, sir, we didn't.'

‘You didn't hear a rumour that it wasn't Kineally who'd left the jeep there, but a British officer?'

‘Absolutely not, sir.'

This was no way to conduct an investigation, Woodend thought.

You didn't solve crimes by sitting behind a desk, questioning witness after witness in the hope that the right answers would just magically fall into your lap. You didn't give witnesses broad hints which just might lead them to confirm your speculations.

What you
did
do was get up off your arse and go out looking for people who didn't want to be witnesses at all. Or for witnesses who didn't even
know
they were witnesses – because they had no idea of how significant the information they were holding might be.

‘Do you have any questions for this man, Chief Inspector Woodend?' Grant asked.

‘No,' Woodend replied wearily.

‘In that case, you can go,' Grant told the ex-MP.

‘Sir!' the bald man said, standing up, stamping his foot in the approved manner, and marching out of the trailer.

Grant consulted his notes. ‘Our next witness is one of the guys who worked in the cookhouse,' he said.

‘An' what particular shaft of the light do you think he'll be able to throw on the investigation?' Woodend wondered.

‘We won't know that until we've talked to him, will we?' Grant replied.

The man wasn't a policeman, Woodend thought in disgust – he was a bureaucrat.

Grant saw no need to tease out solutions to crimes. He probably believed that as long as you filled in the correct forms – preferably in triplicate – the solution would be delivered by special courier the following morning.

‘What say we take a short break?' Grant suggested, noticing Woodend's lethargic despondency.

‘What kind of short break?'

‘How about we put on sweats, and do a couple of laps of the camp? That'll get the heart pumping, the lungs opening up, and blood flowing again!'

‘You can do that, if you like,' Woodend told him, ‘but if I'm goin' to exercise my lungs, I'd rather do it by pullin' on a reflective cigarette.'

Grant clicked his tongue reprovingly. ‘You should get some
proper
exercise, you know,' he said. ‘It's very well known that a healthy body is the key to a healthy mind.'

‘Maybe it is,' Woodend said. ‘But I've found that my brain generally works better when it's not bein' bounced up and down.'

‘The brain doesn't get
bounced up and down
when you're running,' Grant said, clearly horrified by Woodend's obvious ignorance of anatomy. ‘It's held in place by—'

‘Paper clips?' Woodend interrupted.

‘No, by—'

‘Enjoy your run, lad,' the Chief Inspector said. ‘An' when you get back, we'll see if this army cook can solve our mystery for us.'

Alone in the interrogation trailer – free at last from Grant's tidy, mundane thinking – Woodend watched the smoke from his cigarette drift towards the roof, and slowly let his mind drift back in time.

He was standing on the railway station platform, watching the big station clock jerkily – and noisily – mark off the passing of another minute.

He was worried about the coming invasion. Not for himself – if he caught a fatal bullet, it would all be over in a second – but for Joan.

He hoped that if he was killed, she would get over it quickly, find herself another young chap, and settle down to a good marriage and a happy life. But there was also a part of him – a small, unworthy part, he was almost sure – which hoped that she
wouldn't
get over it, that though he would be gone physically, he might live on because she still mourned the loss of him.

His thoughts escaped to the safer subject of Haverton Camp, and he realized, with some surprise, how much he would miss it. Or at least, how much he would miss some of the people he had met there. Robert Kineally, for one. He had grown attached to the American – to his particular brand of idealism which was no doubt naïve and impractical, but was also full of hope and inspiration.

The world could use a good few more people like Robert Kineally, he told himself, and it was a pity that Kineally's briefing session in London had resulted in them being unable to say goodbye properly.

Woodend looked around at the other people waiting for a train which still might be on time, but – if it was anything like many wartime trains – would probably be several hours late.

A group of sailors had gathered near the waiting room, and were standing with their legs wide apart, as if expecting the concrete beneath their feet to suddenly lurch under the assault of an unexpected wave.

Half a dozen Royal Engineers, men who would play an important – and dangerous – part in the coming invasion, were nervously swapping jokes and cigarettes.

And it was not only the military who were on the move that night.

Two men with shabby briefcases – obviously minor civil servants – were conferring gravely, probably over the kinds of matters that minor civil servants always conferred gravely over.

A woman with two small children looked despondently down the track, no doubt wondering how late the train would have to be before the kids grew tired and peevish.

A trio of land girls sat on their suitcases, passing round a bottle which might have contained cheap wine, but could just as easily have been cold tea.

They were all the sorts of characters who his literary hero, the great Charles Dickens, could have made much of, Woodend thought. Indeed, he if he were a writer himself …

He would never be a writer, he admitted – he simply did not have the temperament for it. But people did undoubtedly fascinate him, and after the war was over – if he survived it – he would have to find some other kind of occupation which would justify his study of them.

He heard a sudden suppressed sob, and turning, saw the woman huddled down on her haunches, in one of the darker corners of the station.

He walked over to her.

‘Is there a problem, Miss?' he asked awkwardly. ‘I don't mean to bother you, but if there's anythin' I can do to help, then you've only to ask.'

The woman looked up. ‘Charlie?' she said.

He recognized the voice as Mary's. ‘Whatever's happened to you, lass?' he asked.

‘I … I wish I was dead,' she told him.

‘There's no point in talkin' like that,' Woodend said, holding out his hand to her. ‘Get up, an' we'll go an' see if we can scrounge a cup of tea from the Women's Voluntary Service.'

The two women manning the WVS trolley were only too pleased to provide them with cups of the dark tepid liquid which had passed for tea since rationing had been introduced.

‘Now what's this all about?' Woodend asked Mary Parkinson, once they had taken their cups into a quiet corner. ‘What are you doin' on this station at this time of night anyway?'

‘I was waiting for a train.'

‘To where?'

‘To wherever it was going. But I've changed my mind about that now. There's absolutely no point in running away when the thing you're running from is yourself.'

‘What have you done?' Woodend asked, with growing alarm.

‘What have I done? I've let myself down! And even worse – I've let Robert down!'

‘You want to tell me about it?'

‘I'm too ashamed to.'

‘You'll have to tell somebody eventually,' Woodend coaxed, ‘an' since I'll be gone from here in an hour or so, you might as well tell me.'

Mary nodded, seeing the sense of the argument. ‘Robert has been away in London for over a week,' she began.

‘I know that.'

‘A couple of days after he left, Dougie Coutes came to see me. He said he had something very important to talk to me about, and why didn't we go out for a drink? So we went to the Dun Cow.'

‘Go on,' Woodend said.

Mary swallowed a sob. ‘Dougie said he'd known lots of Americans like Robert. Dozens of them! He said they come over to England for the first time, fall in love with the country, and convince themselves they've fallen in love with an English girl, as well.'

The bastard! Woodend thought.

‘You didn't believe a word of what he said, though, did you?' he asked.

‘Not at first, no. Or, at least, not entirely. I told Dougie that my Robert wasn't like that. He never have said he loved me if there'd been any doubt in his mind about it.'

‘Quite right, too.'

‘But you see, I'd been worried about Robert – about us – for quite some time before I even spoke to Dougie.'

‘Why, for God's sake?'

‘I couldn't really understand what he ever saw in me. His family's very rich, you know, and my dad's nothing but a simple Devon farmer Robert is such a handsome man—'

‘Only when viewed through the eyes of love,' Woodend interrupted.

‘—and I'm such a Plain Jane,' Mary continued, ignoring his comment. ‘Dougie suddenly started to look very uncomfortable. He said he'd been trying to break things to me as gently as he could, but since I wouldn't take the hint, he had no choice but to tell me the plain unvarnished truth.'

‘What plain unvarnished truth?'

‘That Robert was engaged to a beautiful young lady back in America. And … and that she'd come over to London to see him. I didn't want to believe him, but it … it all made sense.'

Aye, it would, Woodend thought. Coutes could be a convincing talker when he wanted to be.

‘Dougie drove me home,' Mary continued. ‘My parents have to get up early in the morning, so they'd already gone to bed. We – Dougie and me – went into the front parlour. And that's … that's when it happened.'

‘When what happened?' Woodend asked, though he already knew the answer.

‘The … the physical thing.'

‘He raped you!'

Mary shook her head. ‘No. He made the first move, but I didn't put up any resistance.'

‘But if he'd got you drunk—'

‘I wasn't drunk, Charlie. I'd been drinking in the Dun Cow, but I wasn't drunk.'

‘Then how …?'

‘It's hard to explain. I think I'd probably decided that there was no point in saving my virginity if there was no one I wanted to save it for. If I couldn't have Robert, I might as well have anybody. It sounds mad, doesn't it? But it didn't at the time.'

Coutes hadn't been driven by love to do what he did, Woodend thought.