Salton Killings (6 page)

The door opened, and a pale, haggard May Thorburn stood facing him. Davenport removed his helmet.

“My condolences, Mrs Thorburn,” he said. “Could I come in for a minute?”

The woman backed away without speaking, and Davenport stepped inside.

“Even Catholic
houses
are funny,” Davenport thought. “They smell different.”

He looked up at the large, garishly coloured picture of Jesus on the wall, his feet bare, a halo glowing around his head, his heart, blood red, clearly visible through his brown robe. He couldn't imagine that hanging in his own kitchen.

Sid Thorburn was in an armchair, miserably hunched up. When he saw who had arrived, he rose shakily to his feet.

Jesus Christ, Davenport thought, he's aged twenty years!

He rebuked himself for blaspheming in the presence of the picture, then said aloud, “It's a sad day, Sid.”

“We always did our best for her,” Thorburn said, “always looked after her. An' now this has to happen. Would you like to see her?”

“Aye,” Davenport said. “Aye, I would.”

Thorburn led him into the front room, smarter than the rest of the house, used only for christenings, marriages – and deaths.

The coffin was laid between two dining chairs. Candles burnt beside it. Davenport gazed down at the dead girl. They had done a good job on her at the undertakers. You couldn't tell, looking at the body, that it had been ripped open and the vital organs removed. The hair had been arranged in such a way that you'd never guess that the top of the head had been sawn off, the brains taken out and the space filled with newspaper.

The eyes were closed, and that changed the whole face. When they'd been open, they'd always made her seem . . . well, miserable was the only word for it.

“She looks very peaceful,” he said.

“Aye, she'll be in heaven now,” Thorburn said, sighing heavily. Tears came to his eyes. “I know God'll look after her, but couldn't He have let us have her with us just a little while longer?”

Davenport put his arm around the grieving man's shoulders and led him back into the kitchen.

“There's a few questions I have to ask,” he said gently.

“We've already talked to that Inspector of yours.”

“These are different,” Davenport explained. “I've been sent by a
Chief
Inspector – from London.”

Thorburn shrugged his shoulders resignedly.

“What d'you want to know?” he asked.

“Diane's friends. Who she used to knock about with. What she did in her spare time.”

Sid Thorburn's eyes suddenly gleamed, and Davenport realised that despite his grief, he was about to deliver a lecture.

“We're Catholics,” he said. “Now I'm not sayin' owt against the Church of England, there's good an' bad in all religions. But we do have certain standards. Our Diane is – was – only fifteen, and we didn't allow her to go gallivantin' round like some parents I could mention.” He waved his hands in a gesture of self-justification. “We weren't over-strict, like; we did let her go out as long as we knew which girls she was goin' with an' as long as she was back home by eight o'clock.”

Most girls of her age were allowed to stay out until the end of the second house of the pictures in Maltham, Davenport thought. With the sort of restrictions her parents imposed on her, it must have been impossible for Diane to have any life at all.

“So what about friends?” Davenport asked.

Thorburn's mouth twitched, as if he were uncomfortable with the subject.

“Our Diane didn't make friends easily,” he said. “She was what you might call choosy. Oh, she knew everybody in the street, and she'd talk to girls in her class, but she only had one proper friend – Margie Poole. A really nice lass.”

“Yes, she is,” May Thorburn echoed.

Her voice startled Davenport. She had been so quiet, so shadowy, that he had forgotten she was even in the room. He turned to look at her and watched, disconcerted, as her face twisted into a mask of hatred.

“A good girl, Margie Poole,” she said. “Not like that wicked, wicked mother of hers.”

The canal towpath was of hard clay, mottled with cobblestones made smooth and shiny by the hoofs of generations of tow-horses. The horses had gone forever, Woodend thought sadly. It was all diesel now, farting little engines that chugged and coughed their way from one place to another. There was no grace in it any more, no majesty.

The path was bone dry, but some of the stones were so slippery that he almost lost his balance.

“Must be a bugger in the rain,” he said to himself. “You'd have no problem fallin' into the water.”

The land to his left sloped downwards. It looked a normal enough scene, grass, scrub and a occasional clump of trees, but beneath its apparent solidity, the earth was honeycombed with shafts, hacked out by sweating miners leading blind pit ponies. In places, the ground had begun to subside and was fenced off by stark wooden poles with cruel strands of barbed wire stretched tightly between them. And inside these compounds bushes and flowers were being sucked slowly, inexorably, down towards the great gaping hollows below.

He reached the wood. It was so far below the level of the canal bank that the tops of the trees only reached his waist. Woodend stretched to reach the nearest branch and plucked a leaf. It felt cool and fresh in his fingers; moist, full of juicy life, but now he had pulled it from the tree, it would die.

Something glinting in the sun made Woodend blink. He looked around, but could see nothing that could have caused the reflection. He moved his head to the side, and caught the glint again. It was coming from the long grass at the edge of the path. He bent down to take a closer look. The shiny object was a jam jar, sparkling clean, its label neatly removed. A pile of small stones had been heaped around it, presumably to stop it blowing over. And in it, their stems covered with water, were six freshly cut tulips.

Now why the bloody hell would anybody bother to do that? Woodend asked himself.

The sun was climbing, and the Chief Inspector was beginning to feel hot. He took off his jacket, loosened his knitted tie and, when he saw a steep path leading down into the wood, decided to take it. It would be cooler under the trees.

There had been woods near his Lancashire home too – he supposed that was how his family had originally got their name. He had played in them as a child and later, towards the end of the Depression, had courted his wife there. It all seemed so long ago. They had been married in 1940, when he was called up, and now had a thirteen-year-old daughter conceived in the first flush of passion after five years separation. His own little Pauline would be wandering through the woods soon, with a handsome lad who would make her father feel as jealous as hell. But Diane Thorburn wouldn't – ever. Someone had decided that she would never have the chance of experiencing the joys and heartbreaks of growing up. Someone had taken on himself the power of God, and ended her life.

“I'll get you, you bastard,” Woodend said angrily.

They had got off on completely the wrong foot, Rutter thought. Partly, he admitted, it had been his fault. He was fully aware that his apparent air of confidence and direction sometimes offended people. He had developed it in his early days at the grammar school, when it was all he had going for him, and now he found it difficult to give it up. He would try, he promised himself, really try to be quieter, more deferential, less crisp.

But Woodend was also part of the problem. He had been antagonistic from the start. True, he'd been rough with Davenport when they first met too, but their relationship had soon settled down. Because they were both sec. mod. boys, because they were both northerners. It was just like the grammar school; inverted snobbery this time, but snobbery neverthless. If he was ever going to convince Woodend that he was good, he would have to be the best. Very well, he had done it before and he could do it again. He squared his shoulders and marched up to the mock-Tudor building that served as Maltham Police Headquarters.

Inspector Holland was in the canteen, a cosy oak-panelled room, enjoying his mid-morning cup of tea and bun. Rutter sat down opposite him and passed across the list of boats moored outside Brierley's the previous Tuesday.

“
The Daffodil
,
The Bluebells of Scotland
,
The Iris
and
The Oriel
,” Holland read, between mouthfuls of pastry. “Keen on flowers, these lot, aren't they? What does
Oriel
mean?”

“Search me, sir,” Rutter said, although the name did sound vaguely familiar. Wasn't it something to do with applying for university?

Holland dunked his bun in his tea.

“I'll put out an APB on 'em,” he said, “but they'll be a bugger to track down. They're like Romanies – go where they want, when they want.” He lowered his voice as people do when they are going to say something heretical. “Between you and me, I'd be happier if we ran things like they do on the continent – files on everybody. It was the worst thing we ever did, scrappin' identity cards after the war.”

“So you don't know when you'll be able to get your hands on them, sir?”

Holland took a slurp of his tea.

“You may be in luck,” he said. “Wolverhampton Council's stockin' up on salt at the moment. That's probably where these narrow boat people took it. They may just unload and come straight back.”

“And how long should that take?”

Holland pursed his brow and began to do calculations on his fingers. His lips moved as he counted.

“Sometime tomorrow, I should say.” He looked at the bare place in front of Rutter. “I'm sorry, Sergeant. Where's me manners. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Rutter was on the point of saying no, he didn't have time, he was investigating a murder. Then a warning voice in his head whispered, “Slow down. Get in training for Woodend.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said, smiling at Holland. “Very kind of you, I'm sure.”

From the wood, the path took the Chief Inspector through the scrub he had observed from the canal. It was a twisting, turning track, much less direct than the route along the towpath. The chimney at Brierley's, now operating at full pelt, came into sight first, and then the rest of the works – stark, square, black with industrial grime. As he got closer still, he could distinguish the houses, the backs of those on Maltham Road, the ends of the terrace that made up Harper Street.

He couldn't see over the brick walls that enclosed the back yards, but he knew what they would contain. There would be a wash house with the dwelling's only tap, a brick boiler that would be fired up every Monday, washing day, and a tub into which steaming water would be poured so the clothes could be dollied. At the end of the yard would be the outside lavvy, so sneeringly referred to by Rutter, which people ran to on cold winter evenings and sat on, shivering, until they had done what they had to. He himself lived in a suburban semi with an inside toilet, his wife had a washing machine with an electric wringer. If promotion to superintendent ever came through and he found himself earning the dizzy sum of £1,315 a year, they might even think of buying a detached house. But he hadn't forgotten what it was to live like the people of Salton.

The walk had given him a thirst and at five to eleven he was stationed outside the George and Dragon, listening in anticipation for the sound of the bolts being drawn back. Across the road, a group of pre-school children were playing hopscotch on the pavement. Woodend watched with pleasure as a small girl leant forward, licking her lips with concentration, and threw her piece of slate at a chalked square several feet away from her.

“In!” she shouted gleefully, and set off on one foot to retrieve it.

It was not unusual to see children in the road only two days after a murder, but Woodend would not have been surprised, either, if the street had been deserted. You never knew how a community would react to the killing of a child. In some, there was almost instant hysteria, with parents virtually barricading themselves and their offspring in the house. In others, people acted as if nothing had happened and, though they did not know it, they were in a state of shock. But sooner or later a woman would snap out of it, and rush from her home screaming her child's name, and the waves of her terror would awaken the other mothers. The Chief Inspector hoped to God that he could solve the killing before that happened in Salton.

A tall man, dressed in black, suddenly appeared at the crown of the humpbacked bridge. The sun, shining behind him, seemed almost to give him an aura. He stopped and glanced into the canal, then began to stride down the bridge towards the village. As he got closer, Woodend could see him in more detail. Not only were his suit and trilby black, but so were his tie and thick waistcoat. Woodend wondered how he could stand to be so heavily dressed on such a warm day.

The man was tall and lean, and though the white hair which flowed from under his hat suggested age, he held himself ramrod stiff. He came to a halt in front of the children. His shadow fell over them and they stopped their game and gazed silently up at him.

“Little children,” he said, “you know not what you do.”

He was trying to speak softly and gently, Woodend thought, but there was an intensity behind his words that turned them into the wrath of God.

“Do not play the Devil's games,” the man boomed. He stretched out his arm. “Go seek out your mothers, that they might lead you to Jesus.”

Still mute, the children turned and began to walk slowly down Maltham Road. By the time they had crossed Harper Street, they were skipping.

An' as soon as they're out of sight, down Stubbs Street, Woodend thought, out'll come the chalk again.

The man watched the children for a while, then swung round to look at the pub.