Murder at Swann's Lake (10 page)

‘The flat in Cardigan Street must cost nearly that. So where's the money been coming from, Annabel? Your dad?'

‘I wouldn't touch a penny of Robbie's money.'

‘Your mum, then?'

‘It'd still be Robbie's money.'

‘You're not on the game, are you?'

‘No. Haven't you heard? I give that out for free.'

‘Then where's the extra money comin' from, Annie? You must be getting' it from somewhere!'

She needed help. Needed it badly. She picked up the phone, which was sitting on a small table beside her, and dialled.

“Can I help you?” asked a crisp, efficient voice.

Annabel gave the operator the number, then listened with growing desperation to the ringing tone. Where are you, Michael? her mind screamed. Where the hell are you?

“I'm afraid there's no answer,” the operator said. “Please try again later.”

The line went dead. Annabel slammed the receiver onto its cradle, stood up and began to pace the room. Bloody, bloody Michael Clough. Always there when she didn't want him, not answering his bloody phone when she really did.

She stopped in front of the sideboard, and slid open the top drawer. Lying in it was a photograph which she'd long ago torn in two, and yet had never been able to bring herself to throw away completely.

She held the two halves together now, so that they formed a complete picture. A man and a girl were standing together in front of what had once been a Victorian cotton magnate's mansion, but since just after the First World War had functioned as a very expensive girls' boarding school. The man was dressed in a suit which proclaimed that while he probably had a great deal of money to spend, he had very little taste. He had his arm resting on the girl's shoulder and was smiling proudly. The girl herself, dressed in her school uniform, wore an expression which was a mixture of dismay and anxiety.

“How they all laughed after you'd left, Robbie,” she told the photograph. “You thought you'd cut a fine figure, didn't you? But you hadn't. They teased me about it for months. You were a joke they never got tired of.” She looked into the distressed eyes of the girl she'd once been, then back at the smiling face of the proud father. “You knew I was unhappy there, didn't you? But you refused to take me away, because you wanted to make me into a lady. Well, look at me now!”

But he couldn't look at her now – because he was dead.

The two pieces of the photograph were still in her hands. It would have been easy for her to damage it further – to rip and rip in a frenzy of destruction until only pieces of glossy black and white paper were left. But she didn't do that. Instead, she placed the two halves back in the drawer, and, wiping a tear from her cheek, returned to her chair.

Detective Sergeant ‘Toad' Gower drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel of his old Morris Oxford, which was parked in front of Number 20 Cardigan Road, just up the street from Annabel Peterson's secret flat.

“When's the bitch going to come out again?” he asked his dashboard.

He should have had a full team on a case like this, he thought. Six or seven men, so that he could run a proper round-the-clock surveillance operation. With resources like that, he'd probably already have all he needed to make his case. But he didn't have a team. Hell, ever since he'd been suspended the day before, he didn't even have official status.

He thought about the board of inquiry he was soon to appear before. He'd beat the charge of illegal entry, just as he'd beaten the charges at all the other inquiries, for one simple reason – because the pencil pushers who sat in judgement of him knew that nobody else could get the results he could. And if additional proof of his indispensability were necessary, he'd give them Annie Peterson's head on a platter. True, he didn't exactly know what she was up to yet – but he was sure she was up to something.

Terry Clough had none of his brother's self-assurance, Woodend thought. While Michael was an independent thinker and a rebel, Terry was nothing more than Robbie Peterson's lieutenant, his right-hand man, and now that Peterson was gone, Clough looked completely at sea.

“Tell me an' my sergeant here about the night of the murder,” the Chief Inspector said.

“There's not much I can say,” Clough replied. “I was down at the lake with my brother when Robbie was killed.”

“Talkin' about personal matters?”

“That's right.”

“An' I'm willin' to bet you're not prepared to go into more detail about them than that.”

“Why should I? What me an' our Michael talked about don't have nothin' to do with the murder inquiry.”

His brother had briefed him well, Woodend decided. “All right,” he said. “If you won't tell me what you an' Michael were arguin' about, at least fill me in on those two lads who work on the ghost train.”

“The Green brothers. What about them?”

“Have they got criminal records?”

“I don't know.”

“Come on, son,” Woodend said. “One quick call to Maltham nick an' I'll have the information anyway. All I want you to do is save me a little time. Is that too much to ask?”

Clough shrugged. “Yes, they've both got form,” he said sullenly.

“Have they done any time inside?”

“Eighteen months apiece.”

“What had they done to earn that?”

“I think Robbie said they'd been handlin' stolen property.”

“So knowing that about them, why did he give them jobs?”

Michael Clough would have come up with some guff about Robbie wishing to rehabilitate them just as he'd supposedly rehabilitated himself. His brother merely said, “I don't know.”

“It couldn't have been because he was usin' them in one of his rackets, could it?” Woodend asked.

“I don't know what you're talkin' about,” Clough replied.

“You're sayin' that Robbie wasn't involved in any rackets?”

“I'm sayin' that if he was, I didn't know anythin' about it. Look, I might have been a bit bent in the past—”

“How bent?”

Clough grinned nervously. “I'm not goin' to tell you that, now am I?” he asked, trying to pretend he though the Chief Inspector's question was no more than a joke.

“I'm not interested in bangin' you up for somethin' you did when you were in Liverpool,” Woodend said patiently. “All I'm tryin' to do is what your brother would probably call, ‘put things in context'. So why don't you just tell me what were you involved in?”

“I used to be one of Robbie's collectors,” Clough admitted.

“You want to spell that out a bit more?” Woodend suggested.

“I used to go round to the pubs an' clubs that were payin' Robbie for security, an' collect the money every week.”

“That's it? No strong-arm stuff? No robberies?”

Clough shook his head. “Maybe I would have got into that eventually, but just before I married Jenny, Robbie had a quiet word with me. He said he didn't want to run the risk of his daughter's husband goin' to prison, so he'd find me a job which was legit. He also said that if he ever heard of me doin' anythin' crooked, he'd have both my legs broken.”

Which, seen without the benefit of rose-coloured glasses, was pretty much what Michael Clough had said. “So I take it Robbie approved of you marryin' his daughter, then,” Woodend said.

“It was his idea.”

“It was
what
?”

Clough shrugged again. “His idea. I mean, I'm not sayin' I don't love her or anythin' like that, but he was the one who first suggested it.”

And Woodend thought he knew
why
Robbie had suggested it. His wife despised him, and his younger daughter wanted nothing to do with him. So all he was left with was his darling Jenny, and he didn't want to lose her. What better way to make sure he still kept her affection than by marrying her to a nonentity like Terry Clough – a man who would never be serious competition for him.

“Did Robbie have any enemies?” Woodend asked.

“Not down here.”

“But in Liverpool?”

Another shrug. It was almost habitual. “When you've been involved in the rackets, like Robbie was, you're bound to have crossed a good few people in your time.”

“Do you know a man called Alex Conway?”

Clough frowned. “I don't think so.”

“But you're not sure.”

“I've never met anybody called that, but I think I may have heard the name. Robbie could have worked with somebody called Conway in the Forties.”

And he could still have been working with him until a couple of days ago, Woodend thought – right up to the point when Robbie got that nail in his temple.

The Chief Inspector lit a cigarette, then realising he'd not offered one to Clough, slid the packet across the table. That was the trouble with this feller, he decided. He was so insignificant that you hardly noticed he was there – even when you were talking to him.

“Is the club openin' tonight?” Woodend asked.

“I expect so.”

“But you don't know for sure? Aren't you in charge, now that Robbie's dead?”

“I'm the assistant manager, like I always was, but my mother-in-law is the boss now.”

Of course she was. Doris probably wouldn't allow Terry Clough to clean the windows without supervision.

“My sergeant and I would like to join,” Woodend said. “So if you wouldn't mind, we'll be needing some membership application forms.”

Terry Clough tried an ingratiating smile. “You won't need a membership card to get in, Chief Inspector,” he said.

“Oh, but I will,” Woodend told him. “There's one thing you'd better learn about me quickly, Mr Clough. I always play things by the book.”

The Red Lion was less than half a mile away from The Hideaway. It had ivy climbing up its walls, and had probably been built in the days when there was actually a Swann family living in Swann's Lake.

“Well, this is where you'll be staying,” Inspector Chatterton said as he and the two detectives walked across the car park to the front door. “Like I told you before I booked it, it's only a pub.”

Woodend raised his eyebrows in comic exasperation. “Only a pub?” he repeated. “Did they send you overseas durin' the War, Inspector?”

“No,” Chatterton said. “I never got the chance.”

“Then count yourself lucky,” Woodend told him. “I went through the lot. The Western Desert. The D-Day Invasion. Crossin' the Rhine. An' apart from wantin' to see my missus again, the only thing that kept me goin' sometimes was the thought of gettin' home to my local pub.”

Chatterton laughed. “Very good, sir.”

Bloody fool! Woodend thought. “I'm not jokin',” he said. “I mean it. You know what they say about nookey, Inspector? They say there's no such thing as a bad jump – it's just that some are better than others. Well, it's the same with pubs. I've never seen a bad one yet.”

They reached the door and were greeted by a small, round woman with a jolly red face.

“This is Mrs Thorpe, the landlady,” Chatterton announced.

They shook hands. “I've made up your beds,” Mrs Thorpe said. “They're nice rooms, in easy reach of the lavatory. Now I expect you're hungry after a hard day's work. What would you say to a nice plate of bacon, liver and onions?”

“I'd say, ‘Grand',” Woodend told her. He grinned at Chatterton. “See what I mean, Inspector? It's times like this when I can almost believe it was worth gettin' shot at.”

T
he Hideaway's organist leant over the microphone. “This next number's by The Crickets, an' it's called ‘That'll Be The Day',” he said, with some attempt at showmanship.

“The Crickets!” Woodend said disgustedly to his sergeant as the organist played the opening bars.

Rutter grinned. “Something wrong with the name, sir?”

“When I was a lad, I used to listen to a band called Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven,” Woodend replied. “Louis Armstrong was their leader, there were seven of them, an' the music they played was hot. See what I'm gettin' at, Sergeant? That name made sense, which – unless they rub their legs together on stage – this band's doesn't.”

He turned to face the dance floor again. The organist looked as if he would have been much happier playing the music of an earlier era, but nevertheless his efforts had already enticed several couples onto the dance floor, the older ones doing their best to incorporate the beat into a rather uneasy foxtrot, the younger ones treating it as an invitation to jive.

“Tell me, Sergeant,” Woodend said, “do you really think this so-called music's got a future?”

“Oh yes,” Rutter replied enthusiastically. “Rock ‘n' roll is here to stay.”

The Chief Inspector sighed. “You know, lad, sometimes you make me feel very old,” he said.

Woodend picked up his pint of best bitter. This was his third, which meant, he estimated accurately, that he'd probably been in the club for just about an hour. He held the beer up to the light. A grand pint – fifty times better than they served down south, and at one and tuppence, a real bargain. He liked being in Cheshire. It wasn't as good as his native Lancashire – nothing ever would be – but it wasn't bad. He liked the club, too, and it gave him a slightly malicious satisfaction to know that his sergeant – who was only drinking halves – was nothing like as comfortable there as he was.

A man in a shabby grey suit, who had been hovering near the bar, made his way over to their table. “You'll be the two detectives from London,” he said. “Chief Inspector Woodend and Sergeant Rutter, is it?”

“That's right,” Woodend agreed. “And you'd be . . . ?”