Salton Killings (14 page)

“Did you ask her?”

Ripley shook his head.

“You know how many of our planes were getting shot down, back then? I stood a good chance of being killed and I thought it would be harder for her to take if we were actually married. But if I'd survived, I was gonna propose, and she'd have had me – I'm certain of it.”

“You were the last person to see her alive,” Woodend said.

“Yes.”

“Were you, Mr Ripley? Were you the last, the very last, person to see her alive?”

“You think I did it,” Ripley said. “You want to arrest me, even now. Fine! Go ahead! Do it! Hang me if you like – because I did kill her!”

Black let out an involuntary gasp. Woodend motioned him to be silent.

“I don't mean it was my hands around her throat,” Ripley said, suddenly very tired. “But it's my fault she died. That last night in the woods, there was something wrong. She was far away, worried. It was as if she was carrying a great burden and had to do it alone. I should have asked her to marry me then, but I didn't. And I've never forgiven myself.”

“Why?”

“When she said good night, it was like she was saying goodbye, almost as if she knew she was gonna die. If I'd proposed, it would have been a talisman. It would have protected her.”

“How could it possibly have protected her?” Woodend asked.

“I can't explain it. I only know in here that it would,” Ripley said, striking his heart with a clenched fist.

“What happened to you after Mary's death?”

“As soon as the cops were through with me, I was posted to Oxfordshire. I started flying combat missions immediately. I volunteered for every dangerous run there was. There were some other guys like me – hot-heads. They died – every last one of 'em. But I didn't. And then I understood why. The Lord wanted me to live so that I could serve out my penance on earth. After the war, I studied for the Mission, then came back here.”

“Why here?”

“Mary's spirit is here,” Ripley said. “In the trees, in the grass, in the people.”

“Then why not set up in Maltham, or even Salton?”

Ripley hesitated for a second, then picked up a box of Swan Vestas off the table. He struck a match, holding it at an angle until it had caught.

“A flame is a beautiful thing to see in the distance,” he said, “but get too close to it and it burns.”

He moved his finger right into the centre of the flame. Woodend looked at his face for signs of the agony he must be suffering, and found none.

“I can take the pain a whiles,” Ripley said, “but not for too long.”

He withdrew his finger, and now his features were wracked. The match fell from his hand, extinguishing itself on the way to the floor. Ripley placed the burnt and blistered finger under his armpit and squeezed.

“I wanna see the flame, feel its warmth,” he said, “but I can't stay inside it. And I can't live in Salton – it's too close, too painful.”

“So what do you think?” Woodend asked in the taxi.

Black turned to face him and the Chief Inspector could see that he was almost crying.

“It's the saddest story I've ever heard, sir.”

“Aye, it is that,” Woodend said. “But is it anythin' more than a story? If he's so bloody innocent, why did the Yanks move him to Oxfordshire just after the murder? If his arm was badly hurt, how come he could start flyin' almost immediately? If his arm
wasn't
that badly hurt, could he have strangled Mary Wilson with it? How easy is it for a missionary who holds his services in the afternoons to take a mornin' off without anybody noticin'? An' did you see that old Triumph motorbike he's got?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long d'you think it would have taken him to get from here to Salton and back on it – say, last Tuesday?”

“You were right about Harry Poole,” Rutter said. “He's got a record – for violence.”

Woodend groaned like a ham actor playing Lear.

“There's no need to sound so pleased about it,” he said. “I know I asked you to look, but I was hopin' you wouldn't find anythin'. The last thing we need in this case is another bloody suspect.”

Rutter laughed.

“Liz is the second Mrs Poole,” he said. “He married the first, Doris, when they were both sixteen.”

“Seems to have a penchant for teenage brides. What happened to Doris?”

“Well, by all accounts she was a bit of a scrubber. While Harry was out working all the hours that God sent so he could get the money together to start a pub, she seems to have spent most of her time on her back.”

It was an old, old story, Woodend thought.

“And one night Harry caught her on the job?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. This particular lover was a local hard case, been inside for GBH. The station sergeant said he was a really big feller, too.”

Woodend remembered Poole's anger the previous evening in the George. It had transformed him from a sulky, insignificant little man into something to be feared.

“Harry went for the lover anyway,” he said.

“He did more than just go for him, sir, he made a real mess of him. Broken jaw and three cracked ribs. And when he'd finished with the man, he turned on his wife and gave her a thorough working over.”

“Did he do time for it?”

Rutter shook his head.

“The attitude down at the local nick was that Doris and her lover deserved what they got. Besides, they themselves were dead against charges being pressed. The station sergeant thinks they were too scared of what Harry'd do to them when he came out.”

“Beatin' up your wife is a very different kettle of fish to stranglin' a young girl,” Woodend mused. “Although, come to think of it, Mary Wilson must have been about the same age as his wife when she died.”

“And Diane Thorburn wasn't that much younger,” Rutter added.

The killer stood on the canal path in the shadow of the salt store, metal cutters clutched tightly in his hand. He had prayed for a cloudy sky, but it was a clear night and the moon shone brightly on the patch of scrub.

Light or dark, he would have to go in. He didn't want to, God knows he didn't, but there was no choice. Any day now, Woodend might order a search. It would take a while, but they would eventually find what he had left behind. And then they would know. He couldn't let that happen – not while his work was still unfinished.

He edged his way along the side of the store, his back against the wall, terrified that the Chief Inspector would suddenly appear, demanding to know what he was doing there, what he had in his hand. He moved slowly, lifting and lowering each foot carefully, avoiding the holes and clumps of grass which might trip him. It seemed to take an age.

And then he was there, at the corner of the building. The small, locked door only feet away from him. But what hazards lay in that short distance? He would be in the open – exposed. Anyone walking up Maltham Road would see him; any passing car would illuminate him in its headlights.

He stuck his head cautiously round the corner. The street was deserted. He listened, concentrating his whole mind on detecting sounds of danger. The crickets chirped in the grass, the old wooden building creaked. He could hear his own breathing, irregular and nervous. But there was no noise of an approaching car, no heavy crunch of footsteps.

“Move!” he ordered himself. “Move!”

He was in front of the door before he realised it, the metal cutters on the lock. He squeezed and they slipped off.

“Again! Do it again!”

He pressed and pressed, and still the lock did not give. The hands that had been so sure, so steady, when he was killing, were failing him now. His head was thumping, his heart racing. He clenched his teeth and forced his aching hands to one last effort. The lock broke.

He looked desperately over his shoulder, expecting to see people running, coming to investigate the crack that had sounded to him as loud as an explosion. The street was still empty. He drew the bolt back quickly, opened the door, and disappeared into the salt store.

Constable Yarwood drove slowly down Maltham High Street. There had been the usual Friday night crowd about – queuing outside the cinemas and the Maltham Variety Theatre, popping in and out of pubs, sitting on benches and eating their fish and chips – but nothing had happened.

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” he said in a pseudo-American accent, “an' not a bloody one in Maltham.”

“What's eatin' you, tonight,” asked his partner, Constable Downes.

“I'm bored,” Yarwood replied, striking the steering wheel repeatedly with the flat of his hand. “Bored, bored, bored.”

“How about a run out to Salton?” Downes suggested.

“What the hell for?” Yarwood asked. “It's a bigger dump than Maltham. Apart from that murder, nothin's happened there for the last two hundred years.”

“It's to do with the murder,” Downes explained. “It was on the sheet. That big-shot bobby from London wants us to do a random check on the place where the body was found. Fancy it?”

“Aye, all right,” Yarwood said, signalling a left turn. “There's nothin' doin' here.”

“True enough,” his partner agreed.

The killer knelt in the salt, half way up the slope, groping around. The palms of his hands itched, his fingertips were sore, salt had managed to force its way under his nails.

It was a hopeless task, he thought, searching for such a small thing in this mountain of salt. It could be just below the surface or buried a foot or more down. The boys, the foreman, the police, the ambulance men – any one of them could have dislodged it, causing it to shift further into the mound.

He clawed at the salt in frustration. Why, oh why, hadn't he checked more carefully after the murder!

He heard the sound of a car coming up Maltham Road and held his breath, waiting for the change in engine noise as it began its climb up the bridge. It never happened. Instead, the vehicle slowed and came to a halt right in front of the store. Its headlights, full on the double gates, found chinks in the wood and cast tiny splinters of yellow light over the mound of salt.

The killer slid down the slope, looking around him for a place to hide.

“We might as well do a proper job while we're here,” Downes said, getting out of the car.

He had his torch in his hand, but he didn't need it. With the lights on, it was as bright as day. He walked over to the inset door and looked at the lock. It was hanging lopsidedly. He lifted it with his hand and saw that it had been cut through. The bolt had been drawn back too. He pushed the door and it swung open. Switching on his torch, he stepped inside.

He directed his beam at the dark roof a hundred feet above his head, then lowered it onto the glistening salt.

“I know you're in here,” he said, and his voice echoed around the rafters – in here – in here – “so you'd better give yourself up now and save us all a lot of bother.”

The metal cutters came down heavily on the back of his skull, and he blacked out.

Yarwood wondered what his partner was doing. How had he managed to get into the salt store anyway? Wasn't it supposed to be locked?

“Suppose I'd better go an' see what he's up to,” he grumbled, reaching for the door handle.

He did not notice the arm suddenly appear through the doorway of the store, nor did he see it throw the metal cutters with all its might. But he heard the sound of the breaking windscreen, and felt the small, sharp shards of glass as they flew in at him, embedding themselves in his body, cutting through his flesh.

My eyes! he thought. Sweet Jesus, don't let any of it have gone in my eyes.

There was blood, nothing but blood. He was sure he was going to faint.

“I don't want to be blind!” he screamed. “I don't want to be blind.”

In sheer panic, he raised his bleeding hands to his bleeding face.

Woodend was on his third pint. His purpose in going to the George had been to study Harry Poole, the man with so much pent-up anger in him that he could inflict grievous bodily harm on his ex-wife and her lover. The Chief Inspector was out of luck – Harry had another one of his headaches and Liz was behind the bar.

Still, there's no great loss without some small gain, Woodend thought, savouring the taste of good northern ale and smiling at the lovely Mrs Poole.

He'd left the other three in the Police House, going over reports, cross-checking references, looking for some hidden strand that would tie everything together.

“Jack it in,” he'd advised them. “Your brains have taken in as much as they can for one day. You'll not come up with anythin' new tonight.”

They had been so absorbed in what they were doing that he was not sure they had even heard him.

Keen buggers, he said to himself, even Davenport, who should have grown out of it by now.

Yet he knew he was afflicted with the same disease himself and that, much as he enjoyed looking at Liz Poole, he was sorry that it was not Harry on duty instead.

The door suddenly flew open, crashing against the bar and rattling the glasses stacked on it. In the doorway stood Black, wild-eyed and gasping for breath. His uniform jacket was crumpled and there were blood stains on the left lapel.

“Salt store, sir,” Black said when he caught sight of Woodend.

“Calm down, lad,” the Chief Inspector said. “What about the salt store?”

“Two officers from Maltham . . . been attacked . . . one's at Constable Davenport's . . . the other's still in there . . . Sergeant Rutter's gone up there and––”

Woodend pushed past him and sprinted up Maltham Road.

He arrived just behind Rutter and Davenport. The constable had a heavy police torch in his hand. Woodend snatched it and advanced towards the door. He was halfway through the opening when he felt a restraining hand on his shoulder.