The Salton Killings Read Online Free PDF Page B

any standards; there was no green for cricket in the summer, no duck pond, no thatched cottages. Instead, the terraced houses – red-brick walls encrusted with grime, slate roofs once blue but now dull grey – squatted like ugly toads against the sides of the road. The dwellings had been built simply as sleeping units where exhausted miners could rest their bodies just enough to enable them to face another day’s back-breaking work, and the small neat gardens in front of each one did little to alleviate the utilitarian starkness.
    But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t life there – hopes, frustrations, passions, existence outside the machine. Someone in the village had cared enough to kill Diane Thorburn.
    Woodend started to walk up Maltham Road and the others followed. They crossed Stubbs Street and passed the sub-post office. It was only at the corner of Harper Street that the monotony of the building style was broken by a detached villa, double-fronted and with a garden running round the sides. Pre-war, Woodend estimated, but only just. He stood looking at it for a second, then moved on.
    The pub, the George and Dragon, was the last building before the salt works.
    â€œQuite right,” Woodend thought to himself. “Men who’ve been workin’ hard all day don’t want to walk far to slake their thirsts.”
    He turned to Davenport.
    â€œHarper Street and Stubbs Street,” he said. “And who exactly were Messrs Stubbs and Harper?”
    â€œBuggered if I . . . I couldn’t really say, sir.”
    It was as Woodend had suspected. Davenport had done well tracing the girl’s movements, but for the job he had in mind, the constable simply wouldn’t do.
    The salt storage shed glowered down at them, a massive wooden structure, its boards black with creosote, the roof slightly arched. There were no sightseers come to gawp ghoulishly and whisper to each other that this was the place
the body
was found, only a uniformed constable and another man in his mid-forties, wearing a grey suit and an expression which suggested a combination of jovial helpfulness and smug complacency.
    â€œChief Inspector Woodend?” the man asked, holding out his hand. “I’m DI Holland. We’ve been doing a preliminary check here. I’m sure you’ll find everything quite satisfactory.”
    The only way everything could be satisfactory, Woodend thought as they shook hands, would be if you’d caught the bloody murderer.
    He looked up at the looming double gates of the shed and the small door set into one of them. He pushed the door and it swung open.
    â€œIs it always left like that?” he asked.
    â€œIt does have a padlock, sir,” Holland replied, “but they never bother to use it. Who’d want to steal all that salt?”
    Woodend stepped through the door and saw what Holland meant. It was a huge cavern of a shed, and the salt was piled up like a large hill. Just above the level of the salt, near the top of the wall, a wooden platform stuck out.
    â€œThere’s a door there, sir,” Holland explained. “It leads out onto the bridge, just opposite Number One Pan. That’s how they tip the salt onto the pile.”
    â€œAnd the girl’s body was found . . .?”
    â€œThere,” Holland said, his finger jabbing at a point in the middle of the slope.
    â€œAnd you’re certain she was killed here?”
    â€œYes, sir. The PM found traces of salt under her nails and in her lungs.”
    Woodend bent forward and ran his hand over the surface of the salt. The shiny grains felt smooth yet at the same time prickly. He could imagine how they must have felt to the girl, rubbing against the backs of her bare legs as she twisted and turned, struggling for her life against relentless hands that were squeezing tighter, tighter, ever tighter. And then, little by little, the strength would have seeped out of her, and she must