A Death Left Hanging by Sally Spencer Page A

remote – almost infinitesimal – chance that she hadn’t killed her husband, did any of that really matter now?
    If she’d lived, she would probably have led an unremarkable life, whereas her death had helped him to be elected to parliament, from where he had been able to help hundreds – perhaps thousands – of women just like Margaret Dodds. Yes, it had been a more than fair exchange. If she had, in fact, been sacrificed, then it had all been for a very good cause.
    Big Ben struck the hour, and Sharpe looked up at the clock – just as Harry Brunskill must have looked up at St Mary’s clock all those years ago.
    Even now, there
shouldn’t
be a problem. The officer in charge of the case should, by rights, recognize the fact that Sharpe had once been in the Force himself – and thus do him the professional courtesy of granting his investigation a clean bill of health; and no doubt most officers would. But Charlie Woodend – so Sharpe had learned from his contacts in Scotland Yard – was unquestionably
not
most officers.
    The mess needed to be cleared up, Eric Sharpe told himself. And it needed to be cleaned up in the
right
way. Because if it were not, it could bring him down. And whatever his personal wishes in the matter – however much he might wish to spare his colleagues – the situation was such that he would not go down alone.

Nine
    W oodend had been driving around the old part of town, more or less aimlessly, for the best part of an hour. Now, as dusk began to fall, he decided it was probably time to stretch his legs a little. He turned left up Grimshaw Street, and was almost surprised to discover that the cinder track that ran from the end of the street down to the old canal was just where it had always been.
    He parked his Wolseley at the end of the track, and as he climbed out of it he felt the cinders crunch beneath his feet. He’d been back in Whitebridge for over two years, he reminded himself. Two years! And never once – until now – had he contemplated paying a visit to the part of the town in which he’d grown up.
    He wondered why that should be. Was it, perhaps, because he was not self-indulgent enough to roll around nostalgically in his past? Or could it be that looking back would only serve to remind him of how long his journey had been thus far – and how comparatively little of it there was left?
    â€˜You’re gettin’ philosophical again, Charlie,’ he said out loud. ‘It’ll be the death of you yet.’
    He lit up a cigarette and turned to face the old Empire Mill. It was still the massive structure he remembered, towering over the surrounding area and making all the buildings close to it look as tiny and fragile as doll’s houses. Its original red brick had been turned black by a century of industrial filth, yet that only seemed to add to its power – transmuting it from a mere man-made object into something as solid and immovable as a mountain.
    Woodend let his gaze shift to the chimney stack, which – on the whimsy of an industrial architect now long dead – had been built as an exact replica of a bell tower that was to be found in Florence. What kind of brain had it taken to come up with such an idea – to decide to recreate one of the glories of Renaissance Italy within the confines of a dark satanic mill?
    There was nowt as queer as folk, the Chief Inspector thought – and that was a fact.
    His own father had started working at this mill at fourteen, on the very day he had left school. Back then, it had been a true symbol of British industry, turning out cotton cloth by the mile. Charlie himself had been taken around the mill as a boy, and had bathed in the warm glow of the respect that his father – who was no more than a common tackler – was shown by both workers and bosses alike. He remembered gazing up at the machinery, wondering how
anything
could be so