Salton Killings (22 page)

“Are you sure she didn't?” Rutter asked.

“As God is my witness.”

“You'd always planned your life so carefully up to that point,” Woodend said. “You were goin' to start flyin' missions, become a big war hero. Then Mary told you. For once, you didn't plan. If you had, you'd have seen that it wouldn't have made any difference. God knows, there were plenty of shot-gun weddin's in those days. But you panicked instead. Your hands were round her throat before you knew it, an' Mary was dead.”

“No!” Ripley said, his head in his hands. “No, no, no!”

“Oh, I don't doubt you were sorry as soon as you'd done it,” Woodend continued, “but you persuaded yourself that as a trained pilot you could do more good by stayin' free. You'd probably die anyway. But you didn't. So after the war, you found another excuse – the Mission. Now isn't that the truth, Ripley?”

“No,” Ripley said. His large frame was no longer imposing, his voice was that of an old, old man. “Did you see action in the war, Chief Inspector?”

“Yes.”

“You remember how you felt just before it started? That emptiness in your gut, the realisation that soon you might be gone, that it would be as if you'd never existed?”

Woodend nodded. He knew the feeling, all right.

“Even if I hadn't loved Mary so much, I'd have married her,” Ripley said. “For the child – so that I could leave a little bit of me behind.”

Woodend believed him. He glanced at the khaki wall. If Ripley hadn't killed Mary, then the man who was sitting, waiting, on the other side of it, had.

Phil Black stood at the bar of the Rifleman's Arms, sipping a lemonade and nibbling thoughtfully on a cheese sandwich. He had just seen the magistrates refer a habitual petty thief to a higher court because, they said, he deserved to go to prison for at least two years and they did not have the power to impose such a sentence. They had added that being brought up into a life of crime was no excuse. A man was responsible for his own actions. Black was not convinced. He was not even sure that raised in similar circumstances himself, he would have been able to act any differently.

“Phil! How you doin'?”

He turned, and found himself looking at a tall young man in overalls who was holding a pint in his work-calloused hand.

“Pete? Pete Calloway?”

The last time they had met they had been schoolboys, but now they shook hands like fully-fledged adults.

“Are you still livin' in Salton?” Calloway asked in a tone that sounded casual but Black suspected wasn't.

“Yes.”

Calloway hesitated before he spoke again.

“Look, will you do me a favour? I'm goin' out with Margie Poole from the pub.” He lowered his voice. “Her mum knows about it, but her dad doesn't. I was goin' to meet her out of school, but the foreman says I've had enough time off recently. Could you give her a message for me when you get back?”

“Be glad to,” Black said.

The walls were a sickly green colour, but other than that the place was identical to Interview Room A. Mr Wilson sat straight-backed in his chair, looking across at Woodend.

“I am a member of the County Council,” he said. “You have no right to keep me here.”

“Why did you stop the post-mortem on your daughter?” Woodend snapped, as if he had never spoken.

“The ways of God are not the ways of . . .”

Woodend slammed his fist down hard on the table.

“Don't hide behind God,” he said. “Don't cheapen Him by using Him as a shield for your own precious piety and respectability. You
knew
, didn't you?”

Wilson lowered his head.

“Yes, I knew,” he said, “and I forbad the examination to protect my child's name – her memory.”

“When did you find out?” Woodend demanded. “When?”

A muscle twitched in Wilson's cheek, sending a tremor shooting across his face.

“Two or three days before she died.”

Woodend rose to his feet so abruptly that his chair fell backwards, clattering against the wall. His face was crimson and a vein in his forehead, previously scarcely visible, was now engorged with blood and throbbing furiously. His eyes blazed with anger, yet there was sympathy and sadness there too – but these feelings of compassion were for four dead girls, not Wilson.

“Two or three days!” he said. “Are you trying to tell me that a man who built up a small fortune out of nothing, a man with a will strong enough to return to the place where he had been desperately unhappy and literally bury his past, a man fired with a sense of religion and a belief in his own righteousness, could have known that his daughter was pregnant for two or three days and done
nothing
about it?” The colour receded from his face, the vein ceased to throb, and when he spoke again his voice contained a quiet certainty. “Murder will out,” he said.

“Yes,” Wilson agreed, slumping in his chair for probably the first time in his life, “murder will out.”

Woodend signalled discreetly to Rutter that it was time to start writing, but he delivered no caution to Wilson.

“The village knew of the man, and the village mocked me in my ignorance,” Wilson said. “But finally, even I came to see that Mary had changed. She had become so . . .” he groped for the words and when he found them his expression turned bitter, “. . . so happy, so much at peace with the world. I followed her that night, at a distance. I lost her in the woods and when I found her again, the airman had already left.”

“How did you know?” Rutter asked.

Woodend, who had seen suspects clam up tight because of the wrong word at the wrong moment, shot his sergeant an angry glance. But Wilson would not have been distracted by anything. The floodgates were open – murder would out.

“I saw him walking away. He had his arm in a sling. I confronted her. ‘Has this man had knowledge of you?' ‘Knowledge? You mean, have we made love?'”

The last words were delivered in a voice that was not Wilson's, but a grotesque parody of a young girl's. And as he spoke them, the man's face changed – the lines became softer, the expression younger. Yet in both the voice and the eyes there was contempt. Mary was not dead – she was within her father. The Chief Inspector stood horrified as the seated man re-enacted the dialogue that had been burnt into his heart, branded on his soul.

“‘You don't know anything about love, anything about joy. You talk about Gentle Jesus, but your God rules with a rod of iron.'”

“‘My child . . .'”

“‘You've never treated me like your child, never loved me – but when my baby is born . . .'”

“‘The seed of the American––'”

“‘For God's sake – anybody's God – why don't you say it? I'm pregnant!'”

“‘You must marry––'”

“‘No!'”

“‘Your child will be . . .'”

“‘A bastard? It doesn't matter. It will be loved, that's all that's important. It will be loved and it will be free and it will be happy. It won't be the kind of child you tried to turn me into.'”

Wilson's hands stiffened into claws, pressing down on the invisible neck of his daughter. But now the girl was gone and the hands locked together as if in prayer.

“In a blind rage, I strangled her,” he said. “I told myself afterwards that I was God's instrument, sacrificing my only child, as Abraham would have done, for the greater glory of his Maker. It wasn't true. My daughter told me that what I had striven for all my life was worthless, that I was a failure. She held a mirror up to my face and showed me my image and because that image displeased me, I slew her. I killed her because she was right.”

“Where were you last Tuesday, when Diane Thorburn was killed?” Woodend asked.

“At the hospital. Seeing my doctor.”

“What's his name?”

“Dr Crayburn,” Wilson said, all fight – all life – knocked out of him. “He's a psychiatrist – a caster out of demons.”

It took two calls and an argument about patients' right to privacy, but the hospital finally confirmed Wilson's alibi. Not only that, but they could state, quite categorically, that when Katie Walmsley was killed Wilson had been a voluntary resident of the local mental hospital.

Woodend put down the phone in a state of depression. He had been sure, when he had spoken to Liz Poole that morning, that he had the answer. Now he knew that all he had was the killer of Mary Wilson, a man who had already paid for his crime many times over. Yet at the same time, the Chief Inspector had an uneasy feeling that somewhere in his head lurked another strand of information, which would be the key to the whole investigation.

He looked at his watch and saw that it was already after four. The kids would be out of school, heading for the village where the killer still lived – and waited. He had the answer, he was convinced of it, if only he could bring it to the surface. In exasperation he ran his hands through his hair, his fingers raking the top of his skull.

Her mum was in town and she didn't know where her dad was, so when she heard the tapping on the side window, Margie Poole opened the door herself. Her heart jumped when she saw Phil Black standing there in his police uniform. They'd found out! And now Phil had come to take her down to the police station.

“Is your dad around?” Black whispered, and when she shook her head, he said, “I've got a message from Pete. He wanted to meet you out of school, but he couldn't. He'll see you in the wood at about five o'clock. The usual place. He said you'd know what that meant.”

Margie nodded gratefully.

“Thanks, Phil,” she said, “it was very good of you to come.”

Black blushed, turned awkwardly and retreated down the alley. It was hard to believe he was the same age as her Pete. Pete was so strong, so confident. Pete would tell her what to do about Diane's secret. She just wished he hadn't said he'd meet her in the wood – the place where Mum's best friend, Mary, had been killed. She shrugged off the objection. It was Mr Wilson who'd murdered all those girls, everybody said it was. The wood was quite safe now.

She frowned as she realised there was another problem. If she just went, Mum would be worried sick when she got back from Maltham. But if she left a note saying she'd gone to meet Pete, her dad might find it. She hit on an inspiration. She would write a note, but she'd put it in the bar where her mum would see it when she opened up at half-past five. She scribbled a hasty message, placed a pint pot on top of it, and went to the shed to get her bike.

From the upstairs window, fists clenched into tight balls, her father watched her progress.

It had been a bright afternoon, but now the sun was being suffocated by heavy grey clouds. Jackie McLeash sat on his cabin roof, chain smoking cigarettes and thinking about his problem. He had been gazing into the water and it was only chance that made him look up and see the girl riding her bike up the slope to the towpath. She was not close and he only had a side view of her, but even at that distance he could tell it was Margie. He waited until she was moving away from him, then nipped out his cigarette and put the dimp in his pocket. In one graceful movement he slipped off the boat and began to jog along the towpath after her.

“The Mary Wilson case knocked everything askew,” Woodend said to Rutter across the desk in Salton Police House. “It happened sixteen years ago, so we assumed that anyone in the war couldn't have been the killer, and that whoever he was he had to be at least in his mid-thirties. The army's nobody's alibi any more, an' since Jessie Black only died seven years ago, the murderer could be much younger than we thought – say in his early twenties. In other words,” he added gloomily, “we've considerably widened the field.”

“Now we've eliminated Mary, can we find a link between the other three girls?” Rutter asked.

Woodend scratched his head.

“There's still more things dividin' them than there are unitin' them,” he said. “Diane was Catholic, the other two were C of E. Katie had a boyfriend, the others didn't. Jessie went to the grammar school, the other two were at the secondary mod.”

“They were all fifteen. That's one way they were all different to Mary.”

“There's any number of girls of the same age in the village,” Woodend said. “There must have been when Jessie an' Katie died too. There has to be somethin' else that makes them special.”

Margie cycled carefully along the towpath, steering between the bigger, slippery stones. She was a good swimmer, but she still didn't want to end up in the canal. If Mr Wilson had still been around, it wouldn't have mattered how good a swimmer she was; he'd have held her under until her lungs filled with water and she sank.

The rubber tyres swished through the clay, the bicycle frame rattled as she ran over a stone that was just a little too big.

She thought about Pete. He had been Katie Walmsley's boyfriend as well. He never talked about it much, just said that it had been a tragic accident. She wondered how he would feel when he found out that Katie had really been murdered. He probably needed her now more than she needed him. The poor boy! Funny, she had never thought of him as a boy before, he had always seemed much more grown up than her. She laughed aloud at the idea. The sound echoed across the empty canal and was lost in the trees on the other side.

She became aware of the quietness that surrounded her. There were no birds singing cheerfully in the trees, no chugging from narrow boats. The only noises were the ones she made herself, the click of her bike, the short, shallow breaths as she pushed the pedals round. She felt all alone, a million miles from the nearest living thing.

She was almost at the wood. She could see the tops of the first trees, their green leaves dull under a grey sky. And suddenly, her eyes detected a movement up ahead, a dim black figure which had been standing on the canal side and then was gone.