‘You had an affair in that shed of his?’
‘Yes, but it started long before that – before, even, Arthur moved out to the countryside. In fact, it was because of the affair that Arthur moved out to the countryside. You see, Roger found out about it, and he told Arthur’s wife. They made us swear that we’d never see each other again outside work, and then Arthur was moved beyond reach.’
‘And that’s when he came up with the idea of the shed?’
‘Yes. I tried to tell myself that he’d done it just for us, but I knew it wasn’t true. He’ll have had any number of other women there – he just couldn’t help himself. And it didn’t matter, you see, because even if I ceased to exist once I walked out of the door, while I was with him, he really loved me.’
‘Did Roger find out about the shed today?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘It was something your sergeant said.’
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry,’ Paniatowski told her.
‘It’s all right, it wasn’t Sergeant Meadows’ fault. When she told Roger that Arthur had an allotment, she had no way of knowing that I’d used an imaginary cousin and her allotment as an excuse to be with Arthur.’
‘You’ve been seeing him down at those allotments, haven’t you?’ Roger screams, once Meadows has gone.
‘No, I …’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m not lying.’
‘You’re so ashamed that you can’t tell the truth even when it’s obvious.’
‘Ashamed!’ she repeats. ‘Do you think I’m ashamed of what we did in that shed?’
‘So now you admit it?’
‘Yes, we did it – and if he was still alive, I’d do it again.’
‘Last time, before they moved to the country, we could keep it quiet,’ Roger says. ‘This time, everybody will know because of the murder.’ He clamps his hands to the sides of his head in despair, almost as if he were modelling for The Scream. ‘Everybody will know. I’ll look like a complete fool.’
‘Is that all you care about?’ she demands. ‘Appearances?’
‘What else is left for me?’ he asks. And then suddenly he is much calmer, and there is a maniac gleam in his eye. ‘I knew you’d never finish with him. That’s why I had him killed.’
It would be funny if it were not so pathetic, she thinks.
‘You had him killed?’ she says. ‘You?’
He has never hit her before, and the fact that he does now is almost as much of a shock as the blow itself.
She collapses, and he is standing over her.
‘Yes, I had him killed,’ he says.
He kicks her in the ribs. She tries to wriggle away and he kicks her again. She realizes how vulnerable her head is, and raises her arms to protect it.
‘I was there,’ Roger said. ‘There was a gap between the beam and the ceiling, and the killer threaded the rope through it. I could never have reached it, but he was such a big man that he didn’t even need to stand on tiptoe.’
He lashes out with his foot again, and this time he is aiming at her head. Her arm shields her precious brain, but not without cost – not without an excruciating pain that runs the length of her body.
‘When he’d threaded the rope through, he hauled Arthur up like he was a sack of vegetables,’ Roger screams. ‘He’d been drugged, so he couldn’t struggle, but he knew what was happening all right. There was terror in his eyes. And do you know what I did when I saw that terror? I laughed.’
He brings the heel of his shoe down hard on her toes, and she feels a pain which she knows must be greater than any human being has ever felt before.
‘I laughed,’ she hears Roger saying, dribbling as he speaks. ‘I bloody laughed.’
She passes out, and when she regains consciousness, she is tied up inside a wardrobe, and can hear a distant voice saying, ‘Are you there, Rosemary?’
There was nothing like a victory celebration in the Drum and Monkey, Crane thought, and, as the old joke went, that was what this was – nothing like a victory celebration in the Drum and Monkey.
All the necessary elements were there – the team itself, an unlimited supply of alcohol and a result. Admittedly, Roger Pemberton was still on the run, but even though he had a great deal of money in his pocket (his next act, after beating his wife half to death, had been to draw all the money out of their joint account), he had none of the skills a hardened criminal employs to avoid detection, and he could not possibly remain at liberty much longer.
So what was the problem?
‘There are so many loose ends,’ Paniatowski said.
‘There always are,’ said Beresford, ‘that’s because this is life, and there are no Hollywood script writers about to round things off nicely before the final credits roll.’
But Paniatowski was not about to be so easily mollified.
‘How did someone like Roger Pemberton manage to contact a hit man in the first place?’ she asked.
‘Maybe he subscribes to Contract Killers’ Monthly (Motto: We give it our best shot),’ Crane said, in an effort to lighten the mood, then seeing the look in Paniatowski’s eyes, he quickly added, ‘Sorry.’
‘Why did they want to make it look like a suicide?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Perhaps because Roger Pemberton worried that any murder investigation would immediately zoom in on him as a prime suspect,’ Crane suggested.
‘In which case, why did they make such a bad job of faking it?’ Paniatowski countered.
‘The hit man could reach the gap between the beam and the ceiling easily,’ Beresford said. ‘Maybe it didn’t occur to him that most other men would have difficulty.’
‘It should have done – if he was a professional.’
‘Then perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps Pemberton chose him because he was cheap – and the reason he was cheap was because he was just learning the business.’
‘Or maybe they were working with two audiences in mind, and they wanted one audience to think he’d killed himself, and the other to think he’d been murdered,’ Meadows suggested.
‘They?’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘Exactly what “they” are you talking about, Kate?’
Meadows looked quite startled – and no one at the table had ever seen that expression on her face before.
‘I have no idea where that came from!’ she admitted, a little shakily. ‘And I certainly have no idea who “they” might be. But if there was a “they”, what I just said would have made perfect sense, wouldn’t it?’
‘If the moon was made of cheese, astronauts would make sure they took a jar of pickled onions up there with them,’ Beresford said.
‘Very witty, sir – one of your best,’ Meadows countered. She shivered. ‘For a second back there, it felt like somebody was walking over my grave. Then I remembered I’ve asked to be buried at sea,’ she concluded, with a grin which looked only partly forced.
‘What about the American – Proudfoot?’ Paniatowski asked, partly to shatter the unexpected – and inexplicable – tension that had suddenly built up, but mostly because it was a question that had to be asked. ‘What the bloody hell was he doing there?’
‘Maybe checking up that the hit man had done what he and Pemberton had paid him to do,’ Beresford said, out of the blue.
‘Go on,’ Paniatowski told him.
‘We keep forgetting how important Wheatstone and Pemberton are,’ Beresford said.
‘Pemberton’s not important,’ Crane said. ‘He’s a technician – a high-level technician, admittedly, but still no more than an assistant.’
‘But Dr Pemberton, his wife, is important,’ Beresford said.
‘Agreed.’
‘And he will have been invited to all the things that she was invited to, won’t he?’
‘Like what?’ Paniatowski asked.
Beresford waved his hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know. I’m nowt but a simple bobby from the sticks. Ask Crane and Meadows. It’s
more their world than it is mine.’
‘Scientists do get invited to a lot of international conferences,’ Crane said.
‘And foreign embassies often throw receptions so their visiting nationals who have distinguished themselves in one way or another can meet the local bigwigs,’ Meadows added.
‘All right,’ Beresford said, ‘Proudfoot and Pemberton meet at some sort of conference or reception. Wheatstone is there, too, and Pemberton notices that Proudfoot is glaring at him. What’s that all about, Pemberton asks, and Proudfoot says it’s nothing. But later, in the bar, when they’ve both had too much to drink, Proudfoot admits that he met Wheatstone at a previous conference – and Wheatstone slept with his wife!’
‘So they agree to kill him?’ Crane says.
‘That’s exactly what they do. They decide to hire a hit man, and they also agree that they’ll both be there when Wheatstone is executed.’
‘Why do they do that?’ Meadows wondered.
‘Two reasons. The first is that they both really want to see Wheatstone die. The second – maybe more important – is that it gives each one a little more security by tying the other into the act.’
He looked around the table to see how they were all taking it.
‘We’re still listening,’ Paniatowski said.
‘With bated breath,’ Meadows added.
‘It’s supposed to happen when it did actually happen – the night before you found the body, boss. But then Proudfoot’s flight is delayed. That creates a lot of problems at this end. The first is that they’ve already drugged Wheatstone, and there’s a chance that if they leave it too long, the drug will wear off. Secondly, the longer they stay there, the more risk they run. And thirdly, the hit man can’t wait around, because he needs to be somewhere else.’
‘So Pemberton decides to go ahead with the murder without Proudfoot?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘So Pemberton decides to go ahead with the murder without Proudfoot.’ Beresford agreed. ‘Once that’s done, Pemberton and the hit man leave. They think about meeting Proudfoot at the airport, and decide it’s too dangerous. They rule out the idea of leaving him a message, for the same reason.’
‘So when Proudfoot lands – hours later than he should have done – he doesn’t know what’s happening?’ Meadows asked.
‘Exactly. Maybe they’ve already killed Wheatstone – or maybe they’re waiting until he arrives. They might even have abandoned the plan altogether. He has to know, and so he picks up his hire car and drives up to Barrow Village, where you catch him in the act.
‘Brilliant!’ Meadows said. ‘Absolutely brilliant.’ She held up her hands in front of her, to silence Beresford before he spoke. ‘I’m not taking the piss, Colin, I promise you I’m not. I really do think it’s brilliant.’
Yes, it was very clever, Paniatowski agreed, but it still didn’t explain how the American Embassy knew Proudfoot had been arrested without him even making his phone call. Yet that could probably be explained away too, given a little more thought and a little more information.
Roger Pemberton could provide that information, she thought. He was out there now, but he could not stay out there for long.
They would catch him, and all the loose ends would be tied up.
And if they didn’t catch him?
It was not a question that really needed to be asked, because it was impossible to imagine him disappearing off the face of the earth.
But he did.
PART THREE
The French Connection
September 1978
EIGHTEEN
‘Is it possible that one day in the near future, when all your team are gathered around you, you will open your mouth and say “Arthur Wheatstone”?’
The unexpected appearance of Forsyth in the room in which she was lying – perhaps, indeed, the room in which she was dying – had cast the Wheatstone murder case in an entirely new mould. Now she knew he had been hovering in the background, like a great evil goblin, throughout the entire investigation, every word that had been spoken needed to be re-examined, and every incident viewed from as many angles as possible, in order to establish whether it had actually happened or only appeared to have happened.
She had to discover what it was he thought she knew – or could work out – that might be a danger to his operation.
But what was his operation?
Had he come to Lancashire just to execute Wheatstone?
Nah, a simple execution was way below the pay grade of someone like Forsyth. Besides, he would have found it crude and offensive and – probably most importantly of all – boring. If he had been in charge of such a monochrome job, he would just have phoned it in.
But that wasn’t to say that Wheatstone’s death had nothing to do with the mesmeric net which Forsyth wove and then used to capture those he needed to use.
What else?
Chief Superintendent Snodgrass had been one of Forsyth’s creatures.
‘You thought you’d go and find a simple suicide, and turn it into a murder,’ he’d said, without ever having been anywhere near the crime scene itself.
Snodgrass – or someone else Forsyth could trust – was supposed to get to the garage first, and make it look like suicide.
Then, when Dr Shastri …
No, not Shastri! She wouldn’t have been there, because an unknown admirer – who probably went by the name of Forsyth – had sent her a ticket for her favourite orchestra.
Baxter had assured her Wheatstone hadn’t been spying for the Russians, and she believed him, because why would anybody lie about that?
So why had Wheatstone been executed – and why did it have to look like suicide?
She wished she knew what Forsyth thought she knew. She wished she knew why he thought she was such a danger.
She wished, too, that the lights in the ceiling weren’t quite so bright, because it was hard to think with them blaring down on her.
And then her brain all but exploded.
The lights! it told her. You can see the bloody lights.
I know I can, she thought.
She wondered if she could speak, because if she could, she was going to shout as loudly as she was able.
She wondered if she could move her arms, because if she could, there must be a button somewhere, and she would press it and press it until the nurses came running in, and she could give them the good news.
And then she thought of Forsyth, and realized that if he found out what had happened, she was as good as dead.
Colin Beresford was aware that the water in baths in the northern hemisphere drained clockwise, and that in the southern hemisphere it drained anti-clockwise, but he had no idea why it should happen that way. He knew that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was a much more valuable painting than Edvard Munch’s The Scream, but he couldn’t understand what made it more valuable – or, come to that, what made either of them so much better than the rather pleasant picture of a hay wain which he could have picked up for twenty quid in his local furniture store.
It didn’t bother him that he didn’t know the answer to these and a myriad other questions, but there were a few which did bother him – which would suddenly appear like an itch, and would not be content until he’d scratched them – and one of those which recurred the most was why he – Shagger Beresford – did not fancy Dr Shastri.
It was not that he was racially prejudiced – he’d never bedded a Pakistani or Indian woman, but he’d certainly lusted after them.
It was not that she was unattractive – she was film star gorgeous.
And if, because of her work, a little of the scent of death clung to her, well, it clung to him, too, because of the nature of his work.
So could it be …
‘Unless you learn to concentrate, you may remain an acting DCI for the rest of your career, Colin,’ said a sharp female voice.
‘Sorry, Doc, I was miles away,’ he confessed.
‘Well, you have not missed much – just
me spouting out reams of scientific gobbledygook, which I do to make people think I am clever.’
‘But you are clever!’ Beresford protested.
‘Thank you, Colin, I will treasure your kind words to my dying day.’ Shastri paused. ‘And speaking of dying, would you like me to talk about Leeks and Carrots Man now?’
‘Err, yes,’ Beresford agreed, and then, seeing the glint in Shastri’s eyes, added, ‘please – yes, please.’
‘Leeks – I feel I know him well enough now to call him by just his first name – was in his late thirties to early forties.’
‘When was he killed?’
‘It’s difficult to pin down exactly,’ Shastri said cautiously, ‘but I would say between two and six years ago.’
‘You can’t be more precise than that?’ Beresford asked, disappointedly.
‘Would it make you happy if I was?’
‘Very happy.’
‘All right, then, he was killed on the 7th of July 1977, at eight thirty-five in the evening, so he may – or may not – have just seen a particularly exciting episode of Coronation Street.’
‘You’re taking the piss,’ Beresford said.
‘Forgive me,’ Shastri said penitently, ‘but I have just bought a book entitled 101 Ways to Annoy a DCI, and I just had to try it out.’
‘So, two to six years?’ Beresford said.
‘Two to six years,’ Shastri agreed. ‘To continue, as you know, his fingertips had been sliced off …’
‘Would you say they were removed professionally? I mean, is there any indication that the killer had medical training?’
Shastri laughed. ‘The killer didn’t remove a heart or a lung, you know,’ she said. ‘He snipped the fingertips off. A child could have done that. Now where was I? Oh yes. He was buried quite deeply, and, I would say, quite soon after death. That is a factor in our favour, as is the fact that all this took part in Lancashire, where – as you know yourself – it can be as cold as a witch’s tit. These and other factors have slowed down decomposition, and enabled me to say with some certainty that whilst he was quite a heavy drinker and smoker, he was in very good health up to the point at which he was struck on the back of the head. A micro-second later, of course, he could not have been in worse health,’
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