Murder at Swann's Lake (24 page)

The sound of Sid Dowd tapping lightly on the open door snapped Woodend out of his contemplation. “Come in and take a seat, Mr Dowd,” the Chief Inspector said.

Dowd sat, placed his expensive leather briefcase on his lap and snapped it open. “My lads have been workin' very hard on your behalf,” he said.

“I appreciate their efforts.”

Dowd extracted a manila file from the briefcase. “Before we begin, can we just make sure we both understand the ground rules,” he said. “I don't care what you do in Swann's Lake, but you're not to use the information I give you to arrest anybody anywhere else. Unless, of course, he's the one who topped Robbie.”

“Agreed.”

Dowd spread the file out on top of the briefcase. “Robbie supplied several firms in Yorkshire,” he said. “Probably his best customer was Billy Morrison, in Leeds. Robbie used to send him a shipment at least once a month.”

“Let's hear the rest of the list,” Woodend said.

It took Dowd a few minutes to reel of all the names and places. The gangster was right, Woodend thought, his lads
had
been working hard. By they still hadn't come up with the name
he
wanted.

“You haven't mentioned Doncaster,” he said, when Dowd had finally finished reading.

“I haven't mentioned Halifax, either,” Dowd replied. “That's because Robbie didn't do business in either of them places.”

Was he lying? Woodend wondered. Was it possible that both Dowd
and
Conway had been involved in Robbie's death, and that the Liverpudlian's offer of help had been nothing more than part of an elaborate smokescreen?

“You haven't mentioned Alexander Conway, either,” the Chief Inspector said.

Dowd looked genuinely surprised. “Clumpy Conway? He's nothing to do with any of this. Why, he must have been dead for nigh on twenty years now.”

Woodend shook his head. “No, he hasn't.”

“I saw his body myself.”

“An' if I check with the Liverpool police, they'll confirm it?”

Dowd grinned. “Not exactly. You see, we didn't want the bobbies stickin' their noses in where they weren't wanted, so we didn't give him what you might call a proper funeral.”

If Dowd was telling the truth – or at least what he
thought
was the truth – that would go a long way towards explaining why Sergeant Dash had so far come up with so little on Conway. On the other hand, if he was lying . . .

“He's dead,” Sid Dowd said. “You've got my word on it.”

I believe him, Woodend thought. As far as he's concerned, Alex Conway really
is
dead. “You want to tell me how it happened?” he asked.

For the first time since he'd entered the office, Dowd looked wary. “Still off the record?” he said.

“Still off the record,” Woodend agreed.

“It's 1940 I'm talkin' about,” Dowd said. “A lot of lads had been called up by the Army, which left most businesses a bit short-handed. Well, that was all right for the farmers an' the factory managers, because they soon had women trained up to fill the gap. But I couldn't really use women in most of my businesses, could I?”

Despite himself, Woodend couldn't hold back a smile. “I see your dilemma,” he said.

“Anyway,” Dowd continued, “along came this new bunch of lads who figured my operation was ripe for the pickings. It was never really on – I still had more muscle on my side than they could muster – but they were a nuisance for a while. You know how it goes. They beat up some of my lads, and I had a few of theirs worked over. In the end, I think they must have decided to go for broke—”

“Where does Conway fit into all this?” Woodend interrupted.

“I was just comin' to that. See, it was Clumpy they decided to make a real example of. I was usin' him as a fence at the time. Well, if truth be told, he wasn't much use for anythin' else. Anyway, this new firm raided the place he was operatin' for me, put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Nasty way to go, but that was the point of it, you see – they wanted to show me they really meant business. It didn't take them long to realise their mistake. I couldn't have 'em knockin' off my fellers – even useless little sods like Clumpy. I hit back, and a week later they'd all left Liverpool with their tails between their legs.” He grinned again. “Them as still
had
their tails, that is. The ones who did for Clumpy, I handled personally.”

“Shotgun wounds,” Woodend said reflectively.

He'd once handled an investigation involving a shotgun. The victim in that case had taken it full in the face, too, and he was so messed up even his own mother wouldn't have recognised him. Conway was not the idiot Dowd imagined him to be, the Chief Inspector thought. Far from it, he was a calculating man who had faked his own death in Liverpool, only to emerge again in Doncaster, eighteen years later.

“I expect his head was a bit of mess, then, was it?” Woodend said.

“Worst case I've ever seen,” Dowd replied, matter-of-factly. “His brains, what few he had, were spattered all over the walls.”

“Then how did you know it was Conway's body you saw?” Woodend asked, pouncing.

Dowd shrugged, as if he'd never really given the matter any thought. “Well, there were his clothes – he was never much a dresser – an' his general physique,” he said finally.

Woodend nodded. “His clothes an' his general physique? An' that's all.”

Dowd laughed. “You're sayin' he did a switch, aren't you?” he asked. “That it was some other poor sod who got killed?”

“It's a possibility, isn't it?”

The Liverpudlian shook his head. “There weren't two like him,” he said. “I'd have recognised him even if that shotgun had cut him in two an' only left the bottom half.”

Weren't two like him? Recognisable from his bottom half alone? And the nickname? Woodend saw his most promising line of inquiry melting away before his eyes. “Spell it out for me?” he said roughly. “How could you be so sure the dead man was Clumpy Conway?”

“I was sure because of his club foot,” Dowd replied.

Woodend sat at his desk with his head in his hands, listening to the purr of Sid Dowd's Rolls Royce as it passed the window. What a bloody disaster of a morning it had been, he told himself. He desperately needed to talk to Alex Conway, but he was no nearer finding him now than he'd been at the start of the investigation – because the man he was looking for wasn't really Conway at all. He had merely borrowed the name from a dead man he'd probably known back in Liverpool.

The Chief Inspector stood up. He really needed Bob Rutter to bounce his ideas off, he thought, but Rutter was away pounding the streets of Doncaster.

“Who will have known Conway apart from Robbie Peterson?” he asked Rutter's empty chair.

The Green brothers! They delivered the stolen goods to
all
of Robbie's partners. They would be able to tell him where to find Conway. But what was the probability they would co-operate with the police? Not a chance in hell!

“Unless . . .” Woodend said, pacing the floor, “. . . unless I had some lever I could use to put pressure on them.”

He needed to tie them in with Robbie Peterson's rackets. But how could he do that now Robbie was dead?

The cigarettes! he thought. The bloody stolen fags!

He lit a Capstan Full Strength as his mind raced along this new track. What Robbie Peterson had been, in fact, was a wholesaler, and – criminal or not – he would have to keep his goods in stock until there was a demand, just like all other wholesalers. So even though he was dead, his warehouse must still be around. And once he'd found the warehouse, he might find some way to connect it to the Green brothers – which was just the lever he'd need.

“So where were you hiding the stuff, Robbie?” he asked the empty office. “Where would
I
hide it if I was you?”

The Chief Inspector found Doris Peterson sitting at her kitchen table. There was a bowl of water in front of her, and she was shelling peas into it. Woodend did his best to hide his surprise.

“Didn't expect to see a gangster's moll doin' anythin' as domestic as this, did you?” Doris asked, seeing right through his masked expression. “Brassy blonde turned housewife. It makes you think.”

“Yes, it does,” Woodend admitted.

“I've had the good times while they were there for the takin' – bathin' in champagne an' all that sort of thing,” Doris told him, “but I've never neglected my family. I wasn't brought up that way.” She paused from her shelling and gazed thoughtfully into the water. “I miss him, you know,” she continued. “Robbie. I never thought I would. But I do. I got used to havin' him around, an' now he's not here any more, it's like there's a big gap in my life.”

Woodend nodded sympathetically. “I think it might help us to find his murderer if we knew more about his rackets,” he said.

Doris's face hardened. “I've told you the last time you asked, I know nothin' about them.”

“I'm sure you don't,” Woodend agreed. “But you knew
Robbie
, and you know Swann's Lake.”

“How will that help?” Doris asked suspiciously.

“If he'd been dealin' in stolen cigarettes, would he have kept them close to him, or would he have been happy to warehouse them in, say, Manchester?”

Doris popped another pod, and tipped the peas into the water. “Robbie wasn't big on trustin' most other people. If he been storin' nicked fags, he'd have wanted them close enough for him to be able to go an' check on them every day. Maybe even two or three times a day.”

“You've got some holiday bungalows around the lake, haven't you?” Woodend asked.

“There's nothin' there,” Doris said firmly.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I checked,” Doris said. “I told you I didn't know if Robbie was involved in anythin' criminal, but if he was, I wanted it to die with him. So I checked. There's nothin' in any of the bungalows that shouldn't be there.”

“Do you mind if the local bobbies have a look for themselves? Not that I don't trust you. It's just that it'll give Inspector Chatterton's lads somethin' to do.”

“They can look if they like,” Doris said indifferently. “But like I told you, they won't find nothin'. Even if there
had
been somethin', I'd have chucked it in the bloody lake.”

Woodend returned to Robbie Peterson's office with Doris's words ringing in his ears. Robbie wouldn't want to be too far away from the stolen goods, she'd said, but he hadn't been keeping them in any of the bungalows. He wouldn't have kept them around the club or the house, either – not unless he got a thrill out of running incredible risks.

“So where else would he hide crates of booze and thousands of cartons of cigarettes?” Woodend asked Rutter's empty chair.

And once he'd put the question into words, the answer was obvious.

Detective Sergeant Rutter found that the bruising to his ribs caused him to walk more stiffly that he would normally have done, but other than that, he had come away from the battering outside the pub with far less damage than he'd expected. It had been stupid to provoke the fight, he thought, yet it had served as a release – an escape from the emotional pain he had been feeling since he'd heard the terrible news about Maria. And perhaps, in a way, he was trying to share her pain. Or maybe that was too fanciful.

He forced thoughts of his fiancée from his mind. He had a job to do – a job which he had always considered important, but now, as he entered his last few days as a policeman, took on even greater significance. He had already visited five cobblers' shops in Doncaster without even a whiff of success, but, as was the usual case in this kind of work, he was driven on by the thought that it was always possible the very next one would give him exactly what he needed.

He paused in front of the shop. Johnson's High Class Boot and Shoe Repairers was spelt out in a half-circle of gold letters on the front window. It was an old-fashioned establishment which had seen better days. People today preferred to drop off their shoes at the local branch of Timpson's, Rutter thought. Besides, the sort of shoes they were making now didn't really merit the craftsmanship that Mr Johnson was probably capable of.

He opened the door and heard a brass bell tinkle above his head. The sound brought a man scurrying from the back of the shop. He was aged and shrunken, with a bald head and half-moon glasses perched precariously on his nose. But his hands looked strong, and Rutter noticed the ridges of hard skin on his thumbs.

“I'm looking for a man who might have brought a particular pair of shoes in here to be repaired fairly often,” Rutter said, showing the cobbler his warrant card. “He's about five feet eleven tall. And he has blonde hair and a blonde moustache – both of them neatly trimmed.”

“Foreign accent?” the cobbler asked.

“Foreign? You mean, like French or something?”

The old man shook his head. “Nay, lad. Like yours. Not Yorkshire. Well, not quite as foreign as yours. From Liverpool, or somewhere like that.”

Rutter felt his pulse start to race. The Alex Conway whose birth certificate Sergeant Dash had come up with had been born in Liverpool – which would explain how he came to know Robbie Peterson. “He might well be a Liverpudlian,” he told Mr Johnson.

“Well, there's a turn up for th' books,” the old man said, giving a dry, rasping chuckle.

“Have I said something funny?” Rutter asked, bemused.

“If he's the man I think he is, then you're dead wrong on the height,” the cobbler explained. “But sithee, that's hardly surprisin'.”

“What do you mean by that?” Rutter said, but the old man had already turned and was making his way, crab-like, back into the bowels of the shop.