Salton Killings (19 page)

“Harry Poole?”

“Aye, he was takin' a walk along the canal. I wish he hadn't been there – I just wanted to be left with our Jessie.”

“There's probably no connection between your daughter's death and Diane Thorburn's, Mrs Walmsley,” Rutter said, “but we have to cover every possibility. I'm afraid it will be painful for you.”

Mrs Walmsley looked straight at Rutter. She had fair hair, deep green eyes and an upturned nose. Katie must have looked very much like her.

“There's not a day goes by when I don't think about our Katie,” she said. “Even now, I can't bring meself to walk along the canal. Nothin' and nobody will ever replace her.”

The noise of children playing drifted in through the window.

“But I've got three other girls,” she continued, “an' they're entitled to a life too, so it doesn't do to dwell too much on the past. Ask your questions, I can stand 'em.”

“Tell me about her.”

Mrs Walmsley smiled.

“She was a grand lass, full of the joys of life. She had lots of friends, boys and girls.” She chuckled. “Course, by the time she was twelve or thirteen, it was mainly boys. I didn't mind, she was a sensible girl. An' she was never ashamed to bring her boyfriends home for me to have a look at.”

“Did she have a special boyfriend when she died?” Rutter asked.

“Yes,” Mrs Walmsley said. “A very nice lad – from Maltham. He was about her age, too, which was unusual for her. Pete, he was called. Can't remember his other name.”

Rutter looked inquiringly at Black.

“Pete Calloway,” the cadet said. “He was in my class at school. He's an apprentice in Maltham Engineerin' now.”

“And was she with him on the day she died?” Rutter asked.

Mrs Walmsley shook her head.

“Katie had a Saturday job, at a hairdresser's in town. After she'd finished work, she went out with a friend of hers from Salton – Peggy Bryce.”

“Did she always come back along the canal?”

“As a rule. When it rains, the cartroad gets muddy and then you've to push your bike through the wood. It's much quicker along the tow path. It . . . wasn't quicker for our Katie that night.”

Mrs Walmsley turned away and Rutter noticed her surreptitiously wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

As they talked, the sergeant searched for a pattern, something that would connect Katie with romantic Mary Wilson, serious, studious Jessie Black, and lonely Diane Thorburn. There was nothing. Katie had been a happy fun-loving girl without a care – or an enemy – in the world.

The clock struck four and Rutter rose to his feet.

“It's been nice meeting you, Mrs Walmsley,” he said, and realised that he really meant it.

Mrs Walmsley smiled again – he'd noticed how often she smiled.

“Right, you rapscallions,” she shouted out of the window, “come in here an' line up. Chief Constable Black wants to say goodbye.”

Giggling and stumbling, the children rushed into the room.

Highton was just tipping what felt like his millionth shovel of salt into Sowerbury's sieve when he noticed the man standing in the doorway.

“Can I help you, sir?” he asked.

“Bit of a thankless task that, isn't it?” the man asked.

Highton was annoyed. He had only just made friends with his partner again, and now this complete stranger had come along to remind Sowerbury what a bloody awful job he had got them landed with. Really rubbing salt into the wound.

“I wouldn't say it was thankless, no, sir,” Highton said pompously. “Most police work is dealin' with small details that go to make up a complete picture. For all we know, we could be about to uncover a vital piece of evidence that will close the case.”

“But you've not found anythin' interestin' yet?”

“Like what?” Highton asked suspiciously.

The man shrugged.

Highton laid down his shovel and walked over to him. He could detect the smell of beer from two yards away.

“Could I ask your name, sir?” he said.

The man hesitated, as if simply revealing it would get him into trouble.

“Warden, Jack Warden,” he said finally. “I live in Harper Street. Number 26.”

Highton reached in his overall pocket for his notebook, and realised it was still in his uniform.

“Look, officer,” the man said, “I didn't mean to bother you. It's just that when you've got kids of your own, you worry.”

“I'm sure you do,” Highton said, softening. “Don't you fret, Mr Warden, we'll catch the bugger before too long.”

The man smiled, turned, and was gone. Highton returned to his work.

“Didn't look much like a family man to me,” he said.

“No,” Sowerbury agreed. “More like a gypsy. Did you see that big gold earring in his lughole?”

“The Southport Police broke it to my wife,” Black said wearily. “They were very good. They brought her an' young Phil straight back, but it's a long way to Southport an' by the time they got here the local bobbies had already . . . found . . . Jessie.”

“Wife and son away,” Woodend thought. “Is it possible he had a row with Jessie, killed her and dumped her into the canal?”

There was no doubt the man's grief was genuine, but then wouldn't any man who had killed his own daughter be weighed down with sorrow? Yet every fibre of Woodend's instinct screamed that Jessie's death was only part of a web of murder. And the crippled man in front of him could never have strangled Diane Thorburn.

“Mr Black,” he said, “God knows I don't want to cause you any more––”

“There is no God,” the sick man said, his eyes flashing with anger. “My Jessie was beautiful an' clever an' kind. But she died anyway. If there was a God, it wouldn't have happened to her, it'd be people like Hitler who'd fall in the canal when they were still kids. It's not right, it's not fair.”

“The men on the narrow boats you talked to that night,” Woodend said, “did one of them have dark hair and an earring?”

“Jackie the Gypsy?” Black asked, his apathy returning. “Aye, he was there.”

“Did you see anyone else while you were walking along the canal?”

“No.”

Woodend stood up and walked over to the Welsh dresser that ran along the far wall. There was one like it at home, filled with plates and ornaments that his wife had picked up on trips to the seaside. But this one held no souvenirs, only photographs. Jessie Black as a small child, being held by her proud father – God, he'd looked different then. Jessie in the country, swinging from a tree. Jessie as a grammer school pupil – in her new blazer; playing netball; holding up a prize. There were photographs of Phil, though not many, and none at all taken after Jessie had died, none of him standing proudly in
his
new uniform.

Time had stopped for the Blacks just as surely as it had for Dickens' Miss Haversham, frozen at the moment when hope gave way to bitter disappointment.

“You must be very proud of your son, too,” Woodend said. “He's got the makin's of a fine policeman.”

Black sighed.

“He's a good lad, our Phil. The last few years can't have been easy for him. We've not been much use to him, either of us. If our Jessie had been alive, she'd have helped him. She had time for everybody, did our Jessie. They said at the grammar school she was best pupil they'd ever taught. The prizes she won . . .”

Woodend was not sure that the man, old before his time, even heard him leave.

For their return to Salton, Rutter chose the second route of death, the one Mary Wilson had followed sixteen years earlier, when he himself was still in short trousers and Black was just a baby. The wood was lush and tranquil. It was difficult to imagine how it must have seemed to Mary as she lay on her back and felt the hands tightening around her throat. If she had lived, she would now have been the same age as Mrs Walmsley.

“She's a nice woman, Mrs Walmsley,” he said to Black. “I expect Katie would have grown up to be just like her.”

“Aye,” Black said. “She probably would. She wasn't somebody who was goin' places, not like our Jessie. She'd just have married an' had kids an' been happy enough.”

“Is that what you want for yourself, Blackie?” Rutter asked. “A wife and kids?”

“Maybe someday,” Black said sadly.

Rutter thought of his own girlfriend, Rowena, with her poise and her stockbroker-belt breeding. She would make an excellent wife for a future Commissioner of Police. But he was not sure that he wanted her any more. It seemed to him that he might be happier with someone like Mrs Walmsley, a woman who said what she thought rather than spoke for effect, who was more interested in the people around her than in how they regarded her. He was not even sure that he wanted to be Commissioner any more. People like Mrs Walmsley and Fred Foley just became names once you were stuck behind a desk.

The tone of Black's last words, though not their meaning, finally penetrated his skull.

“Sorry, Blackie. What did you say?”

“Maybe someday,” the cadet repeated. “But duty comes first. I've still got me mum an' dad to consider.”

“Your father's semi-paralysed, isn't he?” Rutter asked.

“Yes,” Black said, “he can't move about much. But that's not what I'm talkin' about. The physical things, an' the money – they're easy. It's the . . . the emotional things. I spend a lot of time tryin' to persuade them that life's worth livin'. I'm not very good at it, but it takes all the love I've got – there's none left over for a woman.”

“There's got to be a link,” Woodend said, pushing aside uneaten the Lancashire Hotpot that Mrs Davenport had made in his honour. “There's got to be.”

“None of the girls had been in any trouble with the police,” Rutter offered, thinking as he said it how lame it sounded.

“No, none of them was a one-legged Ruritanian bareback rider either,” Woodend said. “Nor is any other kid in the village. It's not what they shared with the rest that matters, it's what they shared with each other.” He took a final swig of his tea. “There's somethin' about them that was special to the killer. If we knew what that ‘somethin'' was, we'd have our man. Let's go through it again – all the reports, all the interviews, everythin'.”

They worked until their heads were pounding and their minds had filled with cotton wool – and they were no wiser at the end than they had been when they started.

The killer had seen the Wolseley leave the village, and knew that by now the two London detectives were safely back in Maltham. He approached the salt store, cautiously, through the scrub land, and in the light of the waning moon saw the uniformed policeman standing there. He lay down in the grass and waited. A patrol car pulled up. The man inside exchanged a few words with the constable on duty, and then drove off again. The killer looked at his watch and did not move. Half an hour later, the car returned.

So – regular checks. Even if he could overpower the constable, who would be on his guard against attacks after what had happened to the other two, he would not have time to search the store thoroughly. Tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, they would find the thing he had left behind – and it would be all over.

He could almost hear the footsteps of the warders echoing along the corridor as they came to fetch him. He could feel the leather fastening his hands together and the black eyeless hood being slipped over his head. As they hurried him along the corridor, he might perhaps soil himself – he had heard that condemned men often did.

They would have weighed him the day before, and then practised with sacks of sand that were exactly his weight, to make sure they had got the drop right. They would stand him on the platform and place the thick rope over his head and around his neck. He would hear the creak of the lever and the banging of wood as the trapdoor gave way.

Oh, they would catch him and they would hang him. Of that he was sure, had always been sure. He wished that the village was full of girls he could drown, strangle, knife, so that though his work would not be completed – it would never be completed – he might at least accomplish a little more of it before he was arrested. But there was only one girl in the whole of Salton whose time had come. Somehow, before he was caught, he must find a way to murder Margie.

There was something strange about Maltham Road that morning, Woodend thought as he stood at the crest of the humpbacked bridge, gazing down. Earlier, it had seemed a normal enough Sunday: the single bell ringing, announcing the nine o'clock service; the congregation – fewer than there would have been before the war – dressed in their best clothes and making their way to the brick church. All perfectly ordinary. But now . . .

It was strange because it was so quiet, he realised suddenly. When the worshippers had emerged from the church, they had not stopped to chat in the early morning sun, but had hurried straight home. And since then, not a single person had come out onto the street.

Of course, it was Sunday, the only day of rest, and it was only natural that working folk would want an extra hour or two in bed. But the kids wouldn't! Kids were always up with the lark, running around, playing, shouting. Not today – there was not a child of any age to be seen.

So Diane Thorburn's death had finally sunk in, probably due to the visits they had paid to the Blacks and the Walmsleys. And fear had settled on the village.

In his mind's eye he could see inside the houses, beyond the neatly painted windows and the flowery curtains. The kids, straining at the leash, wanting to be outside – free. The parents, grim and thin-lipped, deaf to their children's pleas, imagining themselves walking slowly and tearfully behind small coffins, just as the Thorburns had done. He made his way back towards the Police House.