Salton Killings (13 page)

“Dunno, I just fancied it,” McLeash said, lying again.

“Get on to the Yard,” Woodend said. “I want a complete list of girls murdered at places on or near the Trent and Mersey Canal in the last twenty years.”

Rutter put down his pen and pushed his report to one side.

“Anything else, sir?”

“Everything they can get me on Jack or John McLeash. Birth certificate if there is one, background, his dockets from the Wolverhampton Police and the Prison Authority. Tell 'em to find out who he bought his boat from, and how much he paid for it.”

Rutter made neat, concise notes on the pad in front of him.

“An' when you've done that, get yourself up to Brierley's. If they keep records – which I bloody well doubt – I want to know each an' every time
The Oriel
's stopped there since 1939.”

As Rutter was reaching for the telephone, it rang. He picked it up.

“Yes,” he said, irritation evident in his voice. “Yes, yes, I see.”

He was writing again, no longer tidily, but in large, extravagant scrawl.

“He is? How do you spell that?”

Woodend had to restrain himself from walking across to the desk and reading his sergeant's notes upside down.

“He's what? No, it doesn't sound likely to me, either.”

The Chief Inspector masked his impatience by glancing out of the window. The blinds across the street had already been drawn in preparation for Diane Thorburn's funeral.

“Right,” Rutter said. “Yes, I've got that. Good work, Davenport.”

He placed the phone back on it's cradle.

“Ripley?” Woodend asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“From the tone of your voice, I take it he's not dead.”

“No, sir. He's alive and well and living in Manchester.”

“Manchester?” Woodend said. “I shouldn't have thought there was much scope there for an oil tycoon.”

“He's not in oil, sir. He's a Baptist missionary.”

The women stood alone at their front gates, or else in small groups in the alleyways between the terraces. Most were still wearing their pinafores, though many had put coats on over them. They looked down the street expectantly, and hugged themselves against the cold.

The hooter blew at Brierley's. A noise to wake the dead, Woodend thought, except it won't, and the men trooped out of the works and crossed the road to the George.

At twelve fifteen, the black Rolls Royce hearse appeared at the bottom of Maltham Road. It made a stately progress to the salt works, turned round, and parked in front of the Thorburn house. The men emerged from the pub and stood in the forecourt, looking on silently. The last man out, recognisable even in the distance by his sandy hair and lack of a cap, was Harry Poole. He locked the door behind him.

The sun had failed in its battle with the heavy grey clouds, and in the distance there was the rumble of thunder.

The front door of the terraced house opened and the front pall-bearers – black suits, white shirts, black ties – appeared. They manoeuvred their burden awkwardly through the narrow space, and then edged slowly forward. The polished wooden coffin looked tiny and pathetic on their shoulders, like the box in which an expensive doll might have come.

“But then she hadn't even finished growin',” Woodend said under his breath. “Poor little mite.”

The back of the hearse was opened and the coffin slid smoothly in. The vehicle moved away, followed by the cars carrying the mourners. The men from the pub stepped into the road and marched, four abreast, behind the funeral cortege.

“A good send-off,” Woodend said. “Aye, they know how to do things proper in a village.”

Rutter glanced at him to see if he was being facetious and saw that he was in deadly earnest.

As the men passed the watching officers, Woodend noticed a familiar face.

“That's McLeash,” he said, pointing to the gipsy with the earring, a black armband wrapped around the sleeve of his bright check jacket.

Rutter was not listening. His attention was riveted on a man in a suit which, though shiny at elbows and knees, was clean and well-pressed. The wearer's hair was neatly combed and his chin was nicked in several places, evidence of a recent and unaccustomed shave. Fred Foley, who only three hours earlier had been a wreck, for whom all days ran together, had managed to pull himself together enough to attend this final ritual.

At the edge of the village, almost as if there were some invisible barrier, the men stopped and turned around. They had marched down as a single unit, paying its last respects, but they returned as individuals, strolling along with their hands in their pockets, cigarettes dangling from their lips.

Diane Thorburn had gone beyond the bounds of the village and out of their lives.

“Get the car,” Woodend said. “We're goin' to the funeral.”

The smell of incense was too rich for a man of Woodend's Methodist background, and he did not attend the service. Instead, he waited in the churchyard, looking up at the impressive crenellations that ran along the edge of the roof, and the gargoyles which clung to the guttering. Our Lady's-in-Ashburton was a much more imposing edifice than the simple church in Salton.

There was no one from Salton at the funeral with the exception of Diane's parents, her reluctant best friend Margie Poole and Margie's mother. Liz Poole, with her delicate skin, looked very fetching in black, Woodend thought.

As the ropes were placed under the coffin and it was lowered into the grave, Liz leant over her daughter, stroked her hair, and whispered soothing words into her ear. Margie's face was a gross mask of suffering, yet it was not grief that Woodend read there, but guilt and fear.

The priest intoned the prayers, the weeping mother cast the first handful of soil onto the coffin and the gravediggers began their work. Soon, the mahogany box, containing the shell of what had once been a human being, was covered with rich, dark, Cheshire earth. Wreaths were laid, and the mourners began to gather around Diane's family. One man, previously hidden by the rest of the mourners, was left standing alone by the side of the grave.

Woodend had been wrong when he had thought there was no one else from Salton there.

The Chief Inspector approached him cautiously. He had proved unpredictable in previous encounters and the Thorburn's deserved better than that there should be a scene at the funeral. Still, there were questions that had to be asked.

“Good afternoon, Mr Wilson,” he said. “I'm surprised to see you here.”

Wilson had been gazing at the grave, now he looked up. His eyes were watery and far away.

“I have come to see the child laid to rest,” he said.

Woodend realised that Wilson did not recognise him, would probably, at that moment, not have recognised his own brother.

“I got the impression you were strict C of E, sir,” he said carefully.

“And so I am,” Wilson replied. “The papacy is an abomination, a wickedness, the instrument of the anti-Christ.” His voice was no more than a whisper. “But the Lord will not punish an innocent child, ensnared in the errors of her elders. He will raise her up to His glory, and she will sit at His feet and marvel.”

Today he was no Old Testament prophet, Woodend thought, just a sad, sad man.

“Heaven is our reward,” Wilson continued, “but first we must live our lives on earth. Three score years and ten, the Bible promises us. Yet all around us we see young flowers cut down before they have bloomed.” He shook his head. “There have been too many young deaths – too many.”

Woodend watched him walk away, an erect man whose shoulders heaved with what could only be sobs.

“Too many young deaths,” the Chief Inspector said softly to himself, “too many.”

Black was waiting for them at the Police House. He had little to report. Diane Thorburn had got off the school bus and vanished into thin air. It was only what Woodend had expected. The girl had been meticulous in the rest of her planning, she would not have fluffed this crucial stage.

The Chief Inspector's stomach rumbled and, looking at his watch, he saw that it was well past dinner time.

“Would you go an' ask Mrs Davenport if she'd be kind enough to cut up some butties for me an' Sergeant Rutter, Blackie?” he said. “Corned beef for me, if she's got it, bread cut thick.”

“You're not havin' a sit-down dinner, then, sir?”

“No time. We've got to go to Manchester to see this Lieutenant Ripley.”

“Manchester?” the cadet said. “Harry Poole comes from Manchester.”

“Does he, by God!” Woodend made a mental note to find time to sit down with Black and draw up a list of everybody who had not been born in the village. “In that case, you an' Davenport had better come too.”

As the Wolseley glided smoothly into the centre of the city, Woodend remembered the pictures he had seen on the television only three months earlier of the smouldering wreckage of the plane that had been carrying the United team home from Munich; the crowds standing in stunned silence, watching the arrival of the coffins of the eight dead men in Manchester; the scenes by the bedside of manager Matt Busby as he fought for his life. They were the finest team in the country, he thought, and wondered if the club would ever recover.

The tragedy had rocked the city, yet as the car made its way down Deansgate, everything seemed to be back to normal. That was the way of things. Life was a huge pond, and individual deaths only caused a tiny ripple which soon flattened out. So it would be with Diane Thorburn. Her parents would grieve, but the rest of the village would soon adjust and almost forget her. Unless the killer struck again.

The prosperous centre was soon behind them and they were in Colleyhurst. The place depressed Woodend. There were no trees, no parks, to break the monotony of the skyline, just endless rows of decaying brick terraces, slipping into valleys, climbing up hills. The people depressed him too – thin, neglected, defeated. When Harold Macmillan talked about people never having it so good, he had not been thinking about this part of Manchester.

Woodend consulted his map.

“Pull over,” he ordered Davenport. “We'll walk from here.”

He climbed out of the car, followed by Black, then bent over again to address Rutter.

“When you've finished your job, wait for us at Manchester Central. We'll get a taxi.”

If such a thing existed in this God-forsaken hole.

The Baptist Mission was a long, green Nissen hut in the middle of a bomb site. Woodend and Black picked their way over the rubble to the door at the left hand side. A large cross was suspended over it, with a crucified Jesus sweating carved blood. The edges of the cross had been picked out in sixty-watt light bulbs. The double doors were padlocked, but a notice fixed to them stated that when the Mission was closed the Reverend Ripley could be found in his own quarters at the other end of the building.

They walked the length of the hut and came to a second door. Woodend knocked.

“Walk right in,” a voice called out.

Woodend opened the door and stepped inside.

The room took up only a small section of the whole structure. At one end of it were a small stove and a sink, at the other an army cot and a cheap, pre-war, wooden wardrobe. In the centre was an old wooden table, at which a man in a dog collar was sitting. The man stood up and extended his hand.

“Gary Ripley,” he said. “Welcome in the name of the Lord to one of his humbler houses.”

Woodend was taken aback. He wasn't one of those people who imagined that all vicars were weak and puny. There had been one in Preston who was the strongest – and most vicious – prop-forward he had ever come up against. But this man was immense, at least six seven in his stockinged feet and as broad as a barn.

He must once have been very handsome – but his features had been all but destroyed by the lines, which ran across his forehead, around his eyes and down to his mouth. They were natural, yet they looked almost like scars, as deeply etched as those on the suffering Christ over the Mission's main door.

“I have not seen you before, brother,” Ripley said, warmly, welcomingly, then he noticed Black, loitering uncertainly on the doorstep, and an element of concern entered his voice. “Are you police? Has one of my flock transgressed?”

“Yes, sir, I am a policeman,” Woodend said, signalling to the Cadet that he should enter, “but it's Mary Wilson I'm here to talk about.”

The effect was instantaneous. Ripley slumped back into his chair and buried his head in his hands. He spoke in cracked, dry tones, so different to those a few seconds earlier.

“That was nearly twenty years ago,” he said. “What can you possibly want to know about it now?”

“We could start with how you met her.”

Ripley took his hands away from his face. He was not crying, but his eyes were red.

“I had my whole life planned out,” he said. “After I graduated from Texas State, I was gonna join Ripley Oil, find a nice ex-Homecoming Queen, get married and raise a family. By now, I'd have taken over from Dad.”

“But then you were called up,” Woodend said.

“What? You mean drafted? No, I enlisted, some time in late 1940. I could see FDR was gonna take us into the war, and I didn't want to miss out.”

“Why?”

“It's kinda hard to say. Spirit of adventure? Yeah, in a sorta way. Religion? No, God only existed on Sundays. I think mainly I was just payin' my dues for all the good things life had given me.”

Woodend was prepared to believe him – at least this far.

“Go on,” he said.

“Well, I did my basic training in Fort Worth, then got posted to Salton. And that's where I met Mary.”

“What was she like?”

Ripley smiled, a sad, tender smile that did a little to obviate the lines.

“She was the most beautiful, wonderful person I ever met. From the second I first saw her, I knew I wanted her for my bride.”