A Long Time Dead by Sally Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

and looking at the station now – with its Victorian cast-iron work and wooden crenellations – Woodend found himself swept up in a sudden and unexpected wave of nostalgia.
    â€˜Coxton Halt was the last place in this area I ever set foot in,’ he told Paniatowski. ‘I boarded a train there, one dark night in May 1944, an’ I’ve never been back here since.’
    â€˜How did you feel about it at the time?’ asked Monika Paniatowski, who, during her own wartime ordeal, had left more places behind her than her boss had had hot dinners.
    â€˜I suppose I left with mixed feelings,’ Woodend confessed. ‘Part of me was glad to be movin’ on, because I knew the
reason
I was bein’ transferred was that the invasion must be gettin’ very close.’
    â€˜And like the gung-ho young man you probably were back then, you just couldn’t wait to cross the Channel and into the thick of the fighting,’ Paniatowski said, a little mischievously.
    â€˜Nearly right,’ Woodend said. ‘It’s true enough that I did want the fightin’ to start. But that was only so we could get it all over an’ done with – only so I could get back to my real life.’
    â€˜What about the other part of you?’ Paniatowski asked.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Since you say you had mixed feelings about it, I take it there was a part
didn’t
want to go.’
    â€˜True enough, there was,’ Woodend agreed. ‘I hadn’t been in Haverton Camp for long, but it had been long enough for me to meet some very nice people – an’ in wartime, meetin’ nice people is one of the few things that seem to make life worth livin’.’
    Mary Parkinson had been a nice person, he thought.
    He recalled seeing her, still standing on the platform, as the train had pulled out – a small and delicate creature made even smaller and more delicate by her obvious misery.
    He wondered whether he’d made the right decision in choosing not to brief Monika on Mary – and thought that he probably had.
    Coxton Woods lay about half a mile beyond the railway station, and the road cut right through the middle of them.
    Woodend had not remembered them as being so extensive. But then, he supposed, a lot could change in twenty-one years. Some things had got older, some things had died, and some things – like the woods and Douglas Coutes’s power – had gone from strength to strength.
    â€˜So here we are on the Trail of the Red Herring,’ he told Monika Paniatowski.
    â€˜Meaning what, exactly?’ Paniatowski asked.
    â€˜Meaning that when Robert Kineally went missing, his jeep went missing as well. An’ this wood is where they found it.’
    â€˜Where
who
found it? The American military police?’
    â€˜Not them, no. Although, accordin’ to what both Forsyth and Coutes told me, they’d certainly been lookin’ for it hard enough.’
    â€˜Because they thought that if they found the jeep, they’d find Robert Kineally as well?’
    â€˜Exactly. But, as things turned out, it was actually discovered – purely by chance – by a local lad, some ten days after the search began.’
    â€˜You say it was abandoned in the woods?’ Monika Paniatowski said, thoughtfully.
    â€˜That’s right.’
    â€˜How
deep
into the woods?’
    â€˜Not very deep at all, as a matter of fact. No more than a short stroll from the station.’
    â€˜Then why …?’
    â€˜Wasn’t it found earlier?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜It was covered with American Army-issue camouflage – which they managed to trace back to Haverton Camp. So what conclusion do you think the MPs came to?’
    â€˜That Robert Kineally had camouflaged it himself. Because the longer it took his pursuers to find the jeep, the longer it would take them to realize that he’d caught a train.’
    â€˜Just so. An’