Death of a Cave Dweller (17 page)

Rutter smiled back. “They told me when I was assigned to you that you were a hard man,” he said.

“I've put a lot of effort into buildin' up that reputation, lad,” Woodend told him.

Maria Rutter made her way slowly along the street, counting her steps as she went and tapping the lampposts with her white stick to check she was still on track. She was aware of all the noises around her – the sound of footsteps, the buzz of the traffic, the occasional snatches of conversation. She could even tell when someone had stepped to the side to let her pass. But she had no idea of what any of these people who made way for her looked like, or how they were dressed.

She laughed – almost without bitterness – at the thought that there could be a crowd of thousands surrounding her, and as long as the people who made up that crowd held their breaths and kept perfectly still, she would know absolutely nothing about it.

She had reached the corner, and turned to the left. Her destination was five doors down the road, and she knew just how many measured steps it would take her to reach it.

It would have been easier to make this journey with Joan Woodend at her side, and she was sure that Joan would have been perfectly willing to accompany her, but she couldn't bear the thought of having someone else with her when she learned what she had set out to learn.

She clanked her white stick against the railings, and, having fixed her exact location, walked up to the door. Just to be certain – it was always best to be certain when you were blind – she reached up and felt for the number.

Five, her fingers read. That was right. She found the door handle, turned it, and carefully stepped over the threshold.

“Ah, Mrs Rutter, isn't it?” said a cheerful female voice from out of the darkness which permanently filled her world. “You're right on time. The doctor is expecting you.”

Bob Rutter had gone off to compile the information he needed for his identikit picture of the girl who had been on the sofa with Steve Walker, but Woodend still had most of a pint left, so instead of wandering across the road himself, he lit another Capstan Full Strength.

It was as he took the first puff that he started to feel old again. Rutter had worked with him for a little under two years, but he was sure that when their partnership began he could match his sergeant's halves with his pints, drink for drink. Now he was falling behind. He'd be starting to go bald next, he thought gloomily.

It was his training which made him notice the woman standing at the bar – or perhaps it was the fact that she was the only woman in this all-male preserve. Not that that seemed to bother her, he thought. She seemed perfectly at home surrounded by postmen and warehouse workers. But something was bothering her – and from the way she kept glancing in his direction, he rather suspected that that something was him.

He took a closer look at her. She was around forty-five, he guessed, with bright red hair and deep green eyes. Judging from her build, she was probably the sort of woman who had a tendency to put on weight, but if that were the case, she was fighting the tendency very successfully. Certainly from where he was sitting, she seemed to have all the right curves in all the right places. A very attractive woman, Woodend thought, even as he admitted to himself that Bob Rutter would, at best, see her as nothing more than a mother figure. And though he was sure he'd never seen her before, there was definitely something familiar about her.

The woman knocked back the gin and tonic she ordered, swivelled round, and headed in his direction. When she reached his table, she sat down uninvited and said, “I don't want you messin' up my son's career.”

“Now why would I want to do that, Mrs Foster?” Woodend asked – because up close it was obvious that she was Pete Foster's mother.

“Why should you want to?” the woman repeated. “Because that's just the sort of thing that people like you do.”

He was getting tired of being classified by nearly everyone he met. First of all there'd been the kids in the club – and, to a certain extent, his own sergeant – seeing him as something of a dinosaur. Now there was this mother who automatically assumed that he embodied the qualities of every insensitive flatfoot she'd ever met.

“You sound like you're speakin' from bitter personal experience, Mrs Foster,” he said.

“I am,” the woman replied. “I used to be a singer in a jazz band. The Tom Hartington Quintet, featuring Ellie Thompson, the Duchess of the Blues. That was me,” she added, unnecessarily. “Ellie Thompson.”

“You know, I think I might have seen you once,” Woodend said. “Did you ever play Accrington Working Men's Club?”

The comment seemed to knock the woman off her stride, but only for a second.

“We played in a lot of working men's clubs,” she said, “but we'd almost put all that behind us when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“When one of your bloody lot put his size-nine boot in, an' messed it all up for us.”

“One of the band got into trouble with the police, did he?” the chief inspector asked.

“We were just about to hit the big time when they arrested Tom,” Ellie Foster said. “They claimed he was dealin' in stolen property.”

“An' was he?”

Ellie Foster shrugged. “Everybody in the country was on the fiddle just before the war.”

“I wasn't,” Woodend said.

“You would say that,” Mrs Foster retorted tartly. “Anyway, whatever Tom was doin', he was doin' for the good of the band – just to keep us goin'. But did the judge see that? Did he hell as like! He sent Tom down for two years. Well, that was it. The band split up, an' I never got the chance to make a name for myself again. Now let me tell you, Mr Policeman, I'm not about to stand aside an' let the same thing happen to my son.”

“Are you suggestin' that Pete had somethin' to do with Eddie Barnes's death?” Woodend asked.

The woman snorted. “Of course I'm not, you bloody fool! But that's not the same as sayin' you won't find a way to bugger up this record contract, one way or another.”

“They haven't got it yet,” Woodend pointed out, mildly.

“But they will get it – I know they will – if you'll just leave them alone,” Mrs Foster said.

Woodend took a sip of his pint. “You don't really care whether we find Eddie Barnes's killer or not, do you?” he asked.

“I liked Eddie – even if he did sometimes stir up trouble between Pete an' Steve – an' I'm sorry he's dead,” Mrs Foster said.

“You've no idea how many people have started a sentence like that,” Woodend told her. “The thing is, there's always a ‘but' on the end.”

“But my Pete's worked damned hard to get where he is today,” Ellie Foster said. “We've
both
worked damned hard. An' I'm not about to see it thrown away now.”

“That sounds just a little bit like a hooded threat to me,” Woodend said.

“Take it any way you like,” Mrs Foster said indifferently. “All I will say is this. I know quite a lot of senior officers on the Liverpool force, an' there's a few of them who've not been shy in lettin' me know that they'd like to spend more time with me. If I was nice to them – an' I can be very nice when I want to be – I'm sure they'd help me any way they could. Which means they could make life very difficult for you.”

“Suppose I was to ask you out for a few drinks,” Woodend said. “Would you say no?”

Mrs Foster tilted her head to one side, in a coquettish manner. “I don't know,” she said. “I might say yes – just to see how we got on together. Why? Are you about to invite me out?”

Woodend shook his head. “Nay, lass,” he said. “I've never been much of what you might call a philanderer, an' even if I was, I think I might be a bit more particular than to go out with somebody like you.”

For a moment, it looked as if she were about to strike him, then she took a deep breath and said, “You've no idea what it's like to feel something's almost in your grasp, then to watch it slip away.”

“What's gone is gone,” Woodend told her. “You can't make your dreams come true by livin' them out through someone else.”

Ellie Foster stood up. “Maybe you can't,” she hissed. “But it's better than nothin'.”

She turned, and strode towards the door.

Well, that encounter had answered a couple of questions, Woodend told himself. He knew now where Pete Foster got his ambition from. And he also knew why the young guitarist was anxious, at all costs, to avoid conflict – brought up by a mother like that, who wouldn't be? What he still didn't know was the extent to which Pete would go to please his mother. Would he, for example, go as far as killing Eddie Barnes because he feared that if Eddie left the group, Steve Walker might go as well?

The cigarette in his mouth suddenly tasted like
dried camel dung. The longer he was involved with this case, the
more suspects he threw up – and the more confused he got. He
felt like he was sure Maria Rutter must feel – groping
around in a world of darkness, trying to build random sounds and
sensations into a pattern which would so easily form into a
complete picture if only he could see. If only he was young enough
to see.

O
nly a little under an hour and a half ago, the club had been full of frantic girls, bopping to the music of Mickey Finn and the Knockouts. Now the stage was empty, and the only people in the place were a chief inspector from Scotland Yard and the group members and hangers-on who had also been there the night before Eddie Barnes died.

Woodend was sitting next to the snack bar, behind the rickety old table which normally served as the entrance desk. From there, he had a good view of his suspects – and that was what they were, he reminded himself, because any one of them could have killed Eddie – who sat on the hard seats facing the stage.

He switched his attention from the tunnel to the young man who was seated directly opposite him. Steve Walker's face was a complete blank, but, as always, Woodend detected that just below the surface lurked both anger and a willingness to be amused.

“The last time we talked you forgot to mention the fact that you were with a girl that night,” the chief inspector said.

“I didn't forget,” Walker contradicted him. “I just couldn't be bothered to tell you about it.”

“
Why
couldn't you be bothered?”

A shrug. “There didn't seem to be any point. She was just a judy, like dozens of other judies. I don't even remember her name – if I ever knew it.”

“What a very convenient memory you do have,” Woodend said. “You don't remember her name, even though you must have been introduced – or at least introduced yourself.”

Steve Walker laughed loudly, with what sounded like genuine amusement.

“Introduced!” he repeated. “Who do you think me an' the judy are? Lord an' Lady Muck? I'm not the sort of feller who goes up to a girl an' says, ‘Good evening, my name is Steven Ponsonby Walker. May have the pleasure of this foxtrot?' An' she wasn't the kind of girl to expect me to, either.”

Woodend sighed. “So how did it happen?”

“I'd seen her in here a few times before, maybe even talked to her once or twice. I don't remember. Anyway, that night, when I was standin' at the snack bar, she came up to me an' asked if I could show her what it was like backstage. Well, I knew just what she was after – an' that suited me, too – so I said yes. We had a quick screw behind the curtain, an' that was all there was to it. It's got nothin' to do with Eddie's murder.”

“Hasn't it?” Woodend asked. “When you were on the sofa, you were very close to Eddie's amplifier.”

Steve Walker chuckled. “What are you suggestin' now? That she only let me poke her because it would give her a chance to fiddle with the amp?”

“That's one possibility,” Woodend said noncommittally.

“You've been readin' too many cheap detective books,” Steve Walker told him. Then a look of sudden shocked realisation came to his face. “Or are you suggestin' that
I
used
her
as an excuse to get near the amp?”

“That's another possibility,” Woodend admitted.

“Yesterday you were warnin' me off tryin' to find out who killed my best mate, an' today you're accusin' me of doin' it myself!” Walker said angrily. “What's made you change your mind about me?”

“I haven't necessarily,” Woodend replied. “But there's a lot of things I know now that I didn't know yesterday.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“I didn't know about the fight in the pub about a month ago, for one thing. An' I still don't know what it was that made Rick Johnson attack Eddie Barnes. Maybe you can help me out there.”

“I would if I could, but I don't know myself,” Steve Walker said, regaining a little of his self-control. “An' that's the honest truth.”

“Did they have an argument before Rick Johnson started throwin' his punches?”

“If they did, it was a very short argument. Listen, here's how it went. Eddie an' me were in the pub together. I wanted a piss, so I went to the bogs. I couldn't have been gone more than a couple of minutes – three minutes at most – but when I came back Rick was already layin' into Eddie.”

“An' Eddie didn't tell you why it had happened?”

“He said he didn't want to talk about it.”

Woodend shook his head. “You were his best mate, an' he still wouldn't tell you. I find that very hard to credit.”

Walker's eyes were moist, and Woodend thought he was probably doing his best to hold back the tears.

“Most people think Eddie was a weak-willed sort of feller,” he said. “But he wasn't like that at all. He was a gentle kid, there's no arguin' with that, but he could be as stubborn as buggery when he wanted to be.”