Free The Salton Killings by Sally Spencer

Rutter thought, recalling his mind-improving thirty-nine guinea trip to Italy the previous year. Frozen bodies, stopped dead in the middle of whatever it was they were doing.
    Except that none of the three men in the room were dead, just still and silent. Woodend sat with his elbows on the table, chin in his hands, oblivious to all around him. The two uniformed men, Davenport and the young cadet, sat uncomfortably in the other chairs. Woodend was not moving because he was thinking, the others because they daren’t. Rutter coughed discreetly, and the Chief Inspector looked up.
    â€œOh, you’re back, are you, Sergeant?” he asked. “Find out anythin’ useful, did you?”
    Rutter had been thinking about how to present his findings all the way from Maltham. He had a bombshell to drop, but he wasn’t going to release it yet. He deserved to get credit for the other work he had done before he revealed his main discovery. He wanted to avoid seeming like an eager young recruit, running to his chief with the news. And a tiny devil inside him was eager to see if anything could shock Woodend out of his stolid calmness – he hadn’t got to be Head Boy of a middle-class grammar school without a sense of theatre.
    Rutter pulled out his notebook and looked around for something to sit on. Black, as if awoken from a dream, suddenly jumped to his feet.
    â€œHave my seat, sir . . . er . . . Sergeant,” he said and coloured.
    Rutter almost blushed himself, he couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than the cadet. He hesitated, then sat. Black stood awkwardly in the corner.
    â€œFor Christ’s sake,” Woodend said heavily, “we’re conducting a murder investigation, not playin’ bloody musical chairs. Go an’ get us another seat from your livin’ quarters, can you, Davenport?”
    The constable rose, and Rutter opened his notebook.
    â€œYou asked me to find out about the narrow boat people first, sir,” he said.
    All the way through his report, Rutter was aware that Woodend was looking at him oddly. It was as if he was being tested, without knowing the rules of the game or the final objective. And the strangest thing of all was that, for the first time in their association, he got the definite impression that Woodend approved of him.
    â€œRight,” the Chief Inspector said when he had finished giving the details of Fred Foley, the local pervert who had done time for throwing a girl in the canal. “Now we’ve got that out of the way, perhaps you could tell us about Mary Wilson.” And he smiled.
    How had he found out? The local boy! Rutter had thought the Chief Inspector had been mad to insist on Black, but already the cadet had proved useful, uncovering something that he might have missed if he had not been so tenacious.
    He saw now what Woodend had meant about demanding results. He had expected his sergeant to uncover the details of the second murder. There would have been hell to pay if he hadn’t. And the Chief Inspector had let him play his game, only bursting his bubble at the end.
    â€œIt was in the war,” Rutter said, trying to sound as if he had not been knocked off-balance. “In 1942, there was an American training camp just the other side of the woods. Mary Wilson was seventeen. She got friendly with one of the airmen, a lieutenant called Ripley.”
    â€œA lot of girls did,” Woodend said. The Americans had nylon stockings, chewing gum, cans of meat, all kinds of goods unobtainable elsewhere. “We used to say that the trouble with the Yanks was that they were over-paid, over-sexed and over here.”
    â€œThis was much more than a one-night stand,” Rutter continued, “but they were very discreet. They had to be – her father would never have approved.”
    â€œBut you can’t hide that sort of thing from everybody,” Woodend interrupted. “Not in a