Sins of the Fathers Read Online Free PDF

and closed Marlowe’s door behind him.
    I’ll remember it, all right,
he thought,
but that’s a long way from sayin’ I’ll pay any attention to it.

Four
    W henever the chief constable was holding one of his press briefings – and how he
loved
to hold his press briefings – he would describe the room in which Woodend was now standing as ‘The Incident Room’. Once the briefing was in full flow – and his normally high opinion of himself was inflated even further – he would go so far as to talk about it as ‘The Nerve Centre of Our Investigation, Located in the Very Heart of Police Headquarters’.
    It wasn’t a description that DCI Woodend found it easy to subscribe to. The nerve centre of any investigation that he took part in was, as far as he was concerned, in his head.
    Beside, whilst he was willing to admit that he had – in common with most other Northern men from a working class background – an almost complete ignorance of the subject of human biology (that sort of thing was best left to the women, who made a sort of hobby out of it) he was pretty sure that the heart did not reside in a person’s feet, whereas the ‘Incident Room’ was quite clearly in the basement.
    In fact, the Incident Room
was
the basement. Or rather, the basement
became
the Incident Room whenever a major crime had been committed, but otherwise served as a repository for junk which didn’t seem to particularly belong anywhere else.
    The junk which had built up since the last major case had been cleared away overnight. Now the basement contained a dozen desks, set out in a horseshoe pattern so that the detective constables manning them could see both each other and the large blackboard which had been erected at the broad end of the horseshoe.
    Woodend studied the young DCs for a moment.
    Every one of them was talking energetically on the phone, and taking copious notes as he went.
    Yesterday, they had all been based in small stations dotted throughout Central Lancashire, the chief inspector thought, and the caseloads they had been handling involved such crimes as burglary, car theft, wilful damage and arson. Now they had been trawled into headquarters, and suddenly found themselves in the middle of a real murder inquiry. All of which meant that they were as excited as little children who’d discovered, on Christmas morning, that Santa had brought them
exactly
the toys that they’d wished for.
    Woodend nodded to Detective Sergeant Dix – a grey-haired veteran who was supervising the initial phases of the operation – then positioned himself by the blackboard.
    He cleared his throat. ‘For the benefit of those of you who don’t already know me, I’m Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend, an’ I’ve been put in charge of this investigation,’ he said.
    The detective constables looked up from their tasks with interest. They all
did
know him – if only by reputation.
    â€˜Finish the calls you’re makin’, then listen up to what I’ve got to tell you,’ Woodend told them.
    The detective constables galloped through their calls and replaced the receivers.
    â€˜Let’s get one thing out of the way immediately,’ Woodend said. ‘There is absolutely nothin’ glamorous about a murder investigation. It’s hard work, an’ it’s frustratin’ work, but if we all pull together, we just might get a result.’ He paused to light a cigarette. ‘At the moment, you’ve got only one task in front of you, which is to find out where Bradley Pine went last night an’ what happened to his green Cortina once he’d been killed. Is that clear so far?’
    The detective constables nodded enthusiastically.
    Kids!
the chief inspector thought, with a mixture of concern, affection – and envy.
    â€˜It’s not actually
necessary
, in operational terms, for you to be told the precise