Free Echoes of the Dead by Sally Spencer Page A

had scored the goal which put his club at the top of the local amateur football league (and only later realized he had done it with a broken leg).
    They wouldn’t connect him with the youth who, when the lead singer of a visiting jazz band collapsed due to a surfeit of alcohol, had had the brass balls to climb on stage and take over the vocals.
    They wouldn’t even conjure up an image of him as the callow young man, in a new suit bought on the never-never, who’d been so nervous when he took Joan out on their first date that he’d spilled his pint all over her – and then torn her dress in his desperate urge to clean up the mess.
    No, they wouldn’t see any of that at all.
    What they would see would be Chief Inspector Woodend – up from London to solve a horrendous crime which had sent the town into a state of shock and baffled the finest minds in the local constabulary.
    And he didn’t want that – he really didn’t want that.
    He lit a cigarette and signalled to the waiter to bring him another pint. When it arrived, he sat looking at it without his customary enthusiasm, and then sighed softly to himself.
    That’s what it’s going to be like from now on, Charlie, he told himself, so you’d better bloody well get used to it.

SEVEN
    T here had been a market on the spot where Whitebridge now stood since early medieval times, which – as local historians were fond of pointing out – was long before there’d even been a white bridge to name the town after. Back then, the town had been no more than a hamlet – a few dozen mud-and-wattle huts, clustered together around a ford in the river – but on market day, when peddlers came to sell their wares and tinkers to carry out their trade, it had been the busiest and most exciting place in whole of central Lancashire.
    The modern market had been built towards the end of the Victorian era. It was a solidly reassuring cast-iron structure with an arched roof. And under that roof, over three hundred traders conducted their business from tubular-steel stalls which had been specifically designed for easy erection and disassembly – but had stood rooted to the same spot for as long as anyone could remember.
    When Charlie Woodend entered the covered market at half past eight that morning – a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and a half-eaten bacon sandwich in the other – he saw that although a few of the stalls were already open for business, most were still in the process of setting up shop.
    It was a grand place, he thought, as he watched the traders at work.
    If it was fruit and veg you were after, there were at least forty stalls offering everything from the mundane potato to the still-slightly-exotic banana. If you fancied a piece of fish, the stalls displayed salmon, trout and North Sea cod in abundance. There were new clothes and second-hand clothes; cotton, thread and wool; suitcases and duffel bags; screwdrivers and spanners; old radios and new ‘antiques’.
    Anything and everything was available, just for the asking, in this wonderful market.
    His gaze fell on one of the stalls which still had its green canvas cover tightly held down by cords and clearly would not be opening that day. He ambled over to it and saw that a handwritten note had been taped to the canvas.
    â€˜HARDYS FISHMONGERS,’ the note read. ‘CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO A FAMILY BEREAVEMENT.’
    The pleasant sense of nostalgia that he been experiencing since entering this time machine of a market drained away in an instant, and was replaced with an anger which had never been entirely absent since the moment his mother had shown him Lilly Dawson’s photograph in the newspaper.
    â€˜Family bereavement’ was such a neutral, antiseptic term, almost as bland as ‘Closed for renovations’ or ‘Gone on holiday’. It gave no idea of the hell that Lilly’s family was going through,