The Salton Killings by Sally Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œSo what about friends?” Davenport asked.
    Thorburn’s mouth twitched, as if he were uncomfortable with the subject.
    â€œOur 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.”
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œA 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.
    â€œMust 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