Murder at Swann's Lake (30 page)

Woodend turned his attention back to Jenny Clough. “Tell me about what happened on Friday night,” he said.

“I'd decided to tell Dad all about Michael and me before anybody else had the chance,” Jenny said. “I knew he'd gone to the office, but when I got there, it was in darkness. I clicked the switch, but the light still wouldn't come on. And then I heard him snorin', and before I knew what I was doin', I was pickin' up the hammer and the nail.” She stopped and looked into her palms, as if they contained a mirror through which she could see her own soul. “I'm a monster, aren't I?” she asked.

“No, lass, you're not,” Woodend told her.

And he believed it. She was a loving worm who had finally turned. She was a slave to duty who had eventually found the burden too hard to bear. But she was not a monster.

“For what it's worth, I don't think you're a monster either,” Bob Rutter said softly. “Would you like to tell us the rest of it now.”

“There's no more to tell,” Jenny said simply. “I killed him. It seemed the best way at the time. He wouldn't suffer, and I'd be savin' us both from a great deal of pain in the future. Only, it didn't work out like that, did it? I killed my lovely dad so I could marry Michael, an' now he doesn't want me any more. So it's all been for nothin'. Funny the way things turn out, isn't it?”

There was so often a pattern to these things, Woodend thought. The last murderer he had arrested in Cheshire had said exactly the same thing. “Funny the way things turn out, isn't it?” And because he was also trapped in that pattern – that process – he answered now just as he had done then. “Funny? Aye, it's bloody hilarious.”

“You'll be at the trial, won't you?” Jenny asked.

“I'll have to be,” Woodend told her. “They'll be wantin' to hear my evidence.”

“When you're in the witness box, givin' your evidence, you will look at me, won't you? You won't just stare at the wall, as if I wasn't there?”

“Oh, I'll look at you,” Woodend promised. “An' if I think I can get away with it, I might even risk a quick smile.”

Annabel Peterson looked a mess. Her clothes were rumpled and soiled, her hair was bedraggled and her shoulders sagged. There were large bags under her eyes. Woodend had no idea how long she had been standing outside her father's office, waiting for him to return from Maltham, but he was willing to bet it had been a long time.

The Chief Inspector got out of the Wolsey and walked across the yard to where the girl was standing. “You wanted to have a word with me, Annie?” he asked.

Annabel nodded. “If you wouldn't mind. I know it's not part of your job to listen to me any more, but I've got things to get off my chest and I can't think of anyone else to turn to.”

“I'm a good listener,” Woodend told her.

Annie clenched her hands into tight, frustrated fists. “It's so difficult to know where to begin.”

“Why don't you start with where you were last night?”

“I went to Liverpool,” Annie said. “I went back to our old house. Don't ask me why. I just did.”

“Maybe you wanted to recapture your childhood,” Woodend suggested. “The time before you were sent to boarding school.”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “But if that's what it was, I didn't have much success. The street I grew up in isn't even there any more. It's been bulldozed to make way for a new development. I had to laugh. There didn't seem anything else to do. How's Jenny?”

“She's about as well as can be expected under the circumstances,” Woodend said.

Tears came to Annie's eyes. “It's all my fault,” she sobbed. “If I hadn't been going to take Michael away from Jenny, she'd never have tried to kill herself.”

“She'd still have killed Robbie,” Woodend said. “That had nothin' to do with you an' Michael.”

“Maybe that wouldn't have happened either if I'd been a better sister,” Annabel said. “If I'd offered her my support instead of just resenting her for being the one who got to stay at home.”

Her body was racked with sobs. Woodend put his arms around her, and she buried her head in his shoulder. “You can't go takin' all the responsibility on yourself,” he said. “There's far too many ‘ifs' in the world for that. If Robbie had let Jenny make her own mistakes instead of tryin' to protect her from undesirable men by marrying her off to Terry, she might have been able to cope better. If Michael had followed his heart instead of his sense of duty, he'd have stuck with Jenny and tried to find another way to help you. If Terry had made a better job of bein' a husband, Jenny might never have fallen for his brother. If . . . if . . . if . . . It never bloody stops. And
if
you dwell on it, it'll drive you mad.”

Annabel eased herself out of his grip and took a couple of steps back. “Thank you for that,” she said emotionally.

Woodend shook his head. “It's only common sense, lass,” he said. “What will you do now? Marry Michael and settle down to life as a teacher's wife?”

“No,” Annie told. “I really was in love with him, you know. Perhaps I still am. But it's no good – after what's happened, I could never be happy with him again.”

“So what
will
you do?”

“If I manage to stay out of gaol . . .” she forced a smile to her face, “. . . there's that ‘if' word again . . . then I'll come back home. My mother's going to need my support in all sorts of ways – and there'll be plenty of work to do around the club. And then there's Jenny. With Robbie dead, and Terry in gaol, I'm all she's got.”

“You and Michael.”

Annie laughed, with bitter irony. “That's right, you can always rely on Michael to sort out other people's problems for them, can't you? Well, not this one. You think I feel guilty? You should see him. He's so eaten up with his own guilt he's no good for anything at the moment.” She sighed. “Men
talk
tough, but when it comes down to it, it's usual the women who have to
be
tough.”

Woodend nodded. “I'll not contradict you there, lass,” he said.

The three policemen were in the buffet at Maltham Railway Station, drinking lukewarm tea and munching on rock cakes which tasted as if they had been made out of real rock. Rutter was leaving for London immediately. Woodend would stay behind to clear up the paperwork. Inspector Chatterton had just come along for the ride.

“I was hooked on the idea of a professional killer,” Woodend was explaining to Chatterton. “I tried to keep an open mind – I always do – but there was somethin' about the killin' that suggested the cold, professional approach. It wasn't, of course – if there was any coldness, it was the coldness of desperation. But as long as I had my fixation, I couldn't see the simple truth. The light had failed, the room was in darkness. Gower tried to cross it and fell over – because he didn't know the layout. And why didn't Gower put his torch on? It would have been seen by anybody crossin' from the club to go to the toilets. And that was true of whoever used a torch! Only someone who knew the room well could have got to the desk without goin' sprawlin' over the coffee table Doris had just bought. And only three people
did
know it that well.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Terry, Doris and Jenny.”

I should have worked it out for myself the moment Maria told me what it was like to be blind, Rutter thought. She had difficulty getting around in a flat she'd lived in for two years in the darkness. It would have been impossible for anyone else. And Robbie Peterson's office was exactly the same.

“I follow your reasoning, sir,” Chatterton said. “But how could you be so sure it wasn't one of the other two – Terry or Doris – who did the killing?”

“Terry had an alibi,” Woodend reminded him. “He was down by the lake, givin' his brother a black eye.”

“And Doris?”

“Most of the time, Doris couldn't stand her husband. But that had been true for years. Why should she suddenly, last Friday, take it into her head to kill him? No, it had to be the result of an extraordinary event, and it was Jenny, not Doris, who'd had her life upset.”

“Even so, I don't think, under the same circumstances, I'd have been as sure as you seemed to be when we talked last night,” Chatterton said.

“There was somethin' else,” Woodend admitted. “The first time I spoke to Jenny in Robbie's office, she seemed distressed, but reasonably calm. It was the same the second time, when she brought me them beans on toast. But the third time was different. She was all right for the first few seconds, then she suddenly went hysterical, and after that she wouldn't go in there at all. She said the place reminded her too much of her dad. But surely the house – which had in it the furniture Robbie used in life, includin' his favourite chair – would have had much more effect on her than an office filled with police furniture?”

“It
was
where her dad actually met his death,” Chatterton pointed out.

“True,” Woodend agreed. “But we still come back to the original question. Why wasn't she bothered the first two times? What had changed between them an' her third visit?”

Chatterton closed his eyes and tried to think, but it was no good. “I don't know, sir.”

“What did you bring me?” Woodend asked, a trifle impatiently.

“A couple of desks, a—”

“After that. After we'd got all the office furniture.”

Suddenly Chatterton understood. “I brought you a duplicate of the hammer which killed Robbie,” he said.

“Exactly,” Woodend agreed. “I thought it might help me reach into the killer's mind if I got the feel of it. Well, it did no such thing. So I put it in the rack. Now to most people it would have looked completely inconspicuous – just blendin' in with the other tools. You'd be more likely to notice that there was a gap than that there was a full complement of tools. But if you'd taken a hammer from the same position on the rack only a few nights earlier – and used it to kill your father – you'd notice it all right. That's what Jenny did – and that's why she suddenly broke down.”

The buffet windows rattled, as a huge steam locomotive pulled into the station. Woodend rose to his feet. “I expect you'll want to say your goodbyes to Inspector Chatterton now, Sergeant,” he said, as he headed towards the door.

Rutter shook hands with the Inspector, then followed his boss out onto the platform. Woodend already had one of the doors held open. The Sergeant climbed into the train, then pulled down the window.

“I hope Maria's operation is a success,” Woodend said. “But if things do turn out badly, you know you can always rely on me and Joan for a bit of emotional support.”

“Thanks, sir,” Rutter replied.

“And about that other matter,” Woodend continued. “Don't leave the Force. We need lads like you.”

“Is that right?” Rutter asked bitterly. “Or do you need people like Superintendent Jackson, who'll do anything in their power to protect their men from paying for the actions?”

“We need people like
you
,” Woodend said firmly. “But since you've brought up Jackson, let me ask you a question. If he'd been on this case, how do you think he'd have handled Jenny's interrogation?”

“Since she wasn't one of his ‘lads', he'd have gone at her like a bull in a china shop,” Rutter said. “She'd have been a wet rag within five minutes.”

“And would you have gone about it in the same way?”

“You know I wouldn't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can't condone what she did, but at least I have some kind of sympathy for her. I can understand the pressures she was under, and I can see that in her place – as wrong as it was – I might have done the same thing.”

Woodend nodded. “She asked us if she was a monster, an' we said no. But over the next few months she's goin' to be surrounded by people who think that's
exactly
what she is. Don't you think it'll help her a bit – when all she gets to see is uniforms and grim, unyielding faces – to know that there are at least a couple of bobbies who'll shed the occasional tear for her?”

“That's not much of a consolation for a woman on a murder charge, is it?” Rutter asked.

“No,” Woodend agreed. “But, by God, it's better than nothin'.”

The guard waved his flag and blew his whistle. The iron monster hissed steam and chugged out of the station. Woodend stood motionless on the platform and watched it until it was out of sight.

It was a mild November morning, but there no feeling of crisp air and warm sunshine inside the Church of St James the Minor. Woodend shifted uneasily in his pew. He didn't like churches which smelled of incense – didn't like churches which were so grand and vaulting that the sound of your footsteps echoed around the roof. And he didn't like wearing his best clothes, either – his starched shirt collar was almost cutting his neck in two.

He changed position again. “Behave yourself, Charlie,” his wife hissed. “Everybody's lookin' at you.”

Woodend grinned, and glanced around him.
Nobody
was looking at him. All eyes were focussed, just as they should have been, on the front of the church. The Chief Inspector directed his own gaze in the same direction. Bob Rutter looked splendid in his morning coat – absolutely splendid.

I'm just about old enough for him to be my son, Woodend thought. If it hadn't been for the War, maybe he and Joan
would
have had a son of Bob's age. But there
had
been a war, and Rutter
wasn't
his son. Instead, he had a daughter who he loved with all his heart.

He reached into his pocket and fished out the article which had appeared in the previous evening's paper. He'd already read it three or four times, but since he'd used up so many favours bringing about the event it reported, he thought he'd earned the right to look at it again. The headline read: