Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  A woman answered their knock on the door. Her black hair was drawn tightly in a bun, and she had the pale complexion of someone who rarely left the house. Her eyes were hostile, her mouth seemed permanently fixed in a downward turn, and her chin jutted out aggressively.

  She must have been quite a pretty woman once, Paniatowski thought, but years of giving in to resentment and bitterness had indelibly marked her face, and though she was probably no more than forty, it was not a good forty.

  ‘Mrs Eccles?’ Hall asked politely.

  ‘Who are you?’ the woman demanded rudely.

  Paniatowski produced her warrant card. ‘I’m DCI Paniatowski, and this my colleague, DCI Hall, from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Are you here about my father?’ Elizabeth Eccles asked.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Paniatowski replied.

  ‘Then you should have let me know exactly when you were coming – so I could have had some witnesses here.’

  ‘Now why would you need witnesses?’ Hall asked mildly.

  ‘Because I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you,’ Elizabeth Eccles said. ‘Because I think the only reason that you’re here is to protect your own – and anything else will just be for show.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all, Mrs Eccles,’ Paniatowski assured her. ‘We’re both here with completely open minds, and if your father was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted . . .’

  ‘He was!’

  ‘. . . then we’re more than willing to uncover any evidence which could prove that.’

  For a moment it really looked as if Elizabeth Eccles was about to slam the door in their faces. Then she seemed to change her mind and said gracelessly, ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in.’

  She led them the short distance down the hallway to the front parlour.

  It was a neat, tidy room, Paniatowski noted. A three-piece suite – in almost-neutral blue mock velvet – faced the fireplace, and both armchairs had been carefully placed at precisely the same angle to the sofa. The dark-brown hearth rug which lay stretched in front of the grate did not have a single wrinkle in it. The wallpaper had a floral pattern – which could have been cheerful, but wasn’t – and if there had ever been pictures hanging on the walls, there was no evidence of it now. The only thing that gave the place a personal touch was the line of photographs arranged along the mantelpiece.

  It was a cold room, Paniatowski thought – a room in which it was almost impossible to imagine there had ever been fun and laughter.

  ‘Sit down, if you want to,’ Elizabeth Eccles said, indicating the two armchairs. ‘I won’t be offering you tea because—’

  ‘Quite right, Mrs Eccles,’ Hall interrupted her. ‘You shouldn’t even have bothered to mention it. The last thing that either of us would want to do is to put you to the trouble.’

  And he sounded as if he meant it, Paniatowski thought – sounded as if even the idea of Mrs Eccles making all the effort of boiling the water and filling the teapot was enough to cause him acute distress.

  The phone rang in the hallway.

  ‘That’ll be my daughter ringing,’ Mrs Eccles said. ‘I’ve been expecting her to call.’

  Most women in her position would have felt the need to add something like, ‘So if you’ll excuse me for a minute . . .’ but Mrs Eccles merely left the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

  Hall chuckled. ‘This is the warm Northern welcome that I’ve been told so much about, is it?’ he asked. ‘Still,’ he continued, more seriously, ‘if she really does believe that her father didn’t kill Lilly, she was never going to take us to her bosom, now was she?’

  The photographs had fascinated Paniatowski since she’d first entered the room, and now – just as her mentor, Charlie Woodend, would have done in her situation – she stood up and walked over to the fireplace.

  The photographs appeared to have been deliberately arranged from left to right in strict chronological order.

  The one on the extreme left was of a man and a young girl. The man had his hand resting lightly on the girl’s shoulder. The girl herself stared at the camera with a look of dissatisfaction.

  So even back then, before the family had been turned upside down by her father’s arrest, Elizabeth had had a sour view of life, Paniatowski thought.

  There were a few more photographs of Elizabeth’s childhood, and in each of them she displayed the same look of peevishness.

  Then, in the centre of the mantelpiece, there was her wedding photograph. Elizabeth looked older than she had in the earlier pictures, but not that much older. Nor could she have been described as a radiant bride, for though she had all the trappings necessary – the white dress, the bouquet – she still managed to appear as if life had somehow cheated her.

  What was most noticeable about the photograph, however, was the groom. He was dressed appropriately – in a smart suit – and was standing as close to his bride as men are supposed to when marrying the woman of their dreams, but it was impossible to say how he actually felt about the occasion, because his whole face had been neatly cut out of the picture.

  Elizabeth Eccles was certainly not the first woman to cut her partner’s face out of a picture, just as she had cut the partner himself out of her life, Paniatowski thought. It was a very natural reaction in the first wave of anger.

  But once the anger had cooled a little, most women in Elizabeth’s place would surely have torn the photograph up. Or – at the very least – have put it away at the bottom of a deep drawer.

  Yet she had done neither of those things. Instead, she had placed the photograph at the very centre of her display, where she could not fail to see it every time she looked in the direction of the mantelpiece.

  Beyond the central wedding picture, there was a series of photographs of an older Elizabeth and a girl who, as the pictures progressed, grew from a child into a young woman.

  This would be the daughter, Paniatowski thought – the one who was on the phone at that moment. She looked rather like her mother, though she was prettier, and did not have the same haunted look. So perhaps, after all, some good had come out of what had clearly been a disastrous marriage.

  The parlour door clicked open before Paniatowski had time to return to her seat.

  ‘What are you doing, snooping around by the fireplace?’ Elizabeth Eccles demanded from the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry, I just . . .’ Paniatowski said, caught off-guard.

  ‘There’s no need to apologize, Monika,’ Tom Hall said firmly.

  ‘Monika, is it?’ Mrs Eccles asked, pouncing on the words. ‘So that’s how it is – you’re all mates together.’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Mrs Eccles?’ Hall suggested.

  ‘Because I don’t want to,’ Elizabeth Eccles replied.

  And, instead of sitting, she crossed the room and positioned herself with her back to the fireplace, as if to protect her precious photographs from Paniatowski’s unwanted attention.

  ‘I wish you’d sit down, Mrs Eccles. It really would be much more comfortable,’ Hall said.

  ‘I’m comfortable enough where I am,’ Elizabeth said.

  But she didn’t look as if she’d ever been comfortable in her entire life, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘Have you any idea of what the kind of investigation you want us to undertake will involve?’ Hall asked, in a soft tone.

  ‘Of course I haven’t. How could I?’ Elizabeth Eccles said aggressively, almost as if it were their fault that she didn’t know.

  ‘The reason I ask is that you seemed to be offended that DCI Paniatowski was looking at your photographs just now.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be? It’s none of her business.’

  ‘Ah, but, you see, it is. Once the investigation’s underway, we’ll be taking your family’s whole life apart – because that’s how we’ll establish whether your father was guilty or innocent.’

  ‘Everything your father ever did – and everyone he ever talked to – will be examined
in the most minute detail,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Now maybe you don’t want that, Mrs Eccles – and I could quite understand it if you didn’t – but it’s the way we have to work, and if you think you’ll find that too much of a strain, you’d better say so before the investigation goes any further.’

  And she was thinking, Pull back now, Elizabeth. You’ve buried your father – now let’s bury the case.

  ‘I really don’t see why it should be necessary to rake through all the ashes of my father’s life,’ Elizabeth Eccles said.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Hall agreed. ‘But then you’re not a police officer, are you? Take it from me, Mrs Eccles, there’s no other way but the one we’ve outlined to you.’

  For a full minute, the battle between her desires and her uncertainties was played out on Elizabeth Eccles’s face.

  Then she took a deep breath and said, ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘Does that mean that you still want us to go ahead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paniatowski sighed. ‘Then we’d better make a start,’ she said. ‘Now, am I right in thinking that at the time Lilly Dawson went missing, you were—’

  ‘Lilly Dawson!’ Elizabeth Eccles interrupted bitterly. ‘Lilly Dawson! I’m sick of hearing her name! Everybody talks about what a tragedy her murder was – how poor little Lilly suffered so much. But nobody wants to know about what the murder did to my life, do they? Nobody wants to hear how much I suffered.’

  ‘We do,’ Hall said. ‘Why don’t you tell us?’

  ‘When they shut my father up in that terrible prison, I thought that things couldn’t get any worse. But I was wrong! Some of the neighbours – people I’d known all my life – stopped speaking to us. But they weren’t as bad as the ones who did speak – because I wouldn’t repeat to anybody the things that they said to us.’

  Hall nodded. ‘You have my sympathy. Some people can be very cruel,’ he said.

  Charlie Woodend might have said the same thing, Paniatowski thought. But if he had said it, he would have meant it – and she was not sure that Tom Hall did.

  ‘My mother’s nerves were completely shot to pieces by it all,’ Elizabeth continued, in full bitter flow now. ‘And one day, she decided she just couldn’t take it any more and drowned herself.’

  ‘Terrible,’ Hall murmured.

  ‘My grandfather and my Uncle Robert should have given me the support that I needed in my times of trouble – but they just didn’t want to know,’ Elizabeth Eccles whined.

  Uncle Robert, Paniatowski thought.

  Would he be the owner of the RJH 1 number plate?

  ‘So, after it happened, the rest of the Howerd family cut you off completely, did they?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’ Elizabeth said angrily. Then she paused for a moment before adding, with great reluctance, ‘Not completely, no. After my rat of a husband deserted me, their chief accountant came to see me, and said that for the sake of the baby they’d decided to pay me a small monthly allowance. But that was it! That was as far as it went!’

  ‘When exactly did your husband leave you?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Shortly after my mother killed herself. He said he couldn’t stand the shame of belonging to the family any more. The shame of belonging to the family! As if we’d dragged him down! Well, let me tell you, he was nothing before I married him – he was less than nothing.’

  ‘Are you still in contact with him?’

  ‘I’ve not heard a word from him since the day he left me. He might be dead, for all I know. I hope he is.’

  ‘You really should try to put it all behind you,’ Hall advised.

  The comment seemed to do no more than enrage Elizabeth further.

  ‘I had put it behind me – at least, as much as I could,’ she said in a voice that was almost a scream. ‘And then my father – that poor, dying man – came to live with me. And it started all over again – the looks, the comments, the . . . the hatred. That’s why I sent my daughter away – because I didn’t want to put her through what I was going through.’ She paused again, but only for a moment, as she drew breath. ‘Do you see now what a wicked thing Chief Inspector Woodend did?’ she demanded. ‘And not only to my father, not only to me, but to my daughter – because God alone knows what effect all this has had on her.’

  ‘If your father was guilty of the crime, then Mr Woodend was only doing his job in arresting him,’ Paniatowski pointed out.

  ‘But I know he wasn’t guilty,’ Elizabeth Eccles said.

  Hall smiled, benevolently and reassuringly. ‘You loved your father, so naturally you want to believe that that he could never have done anything as terrible as to take a young girl . . .’

  ‘You’re not listening,’ Elizabeth told him. ‘I didn’t say I believed he wasn’t guilty – I said I knew he wasn’t.’

  ‘How could you know?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I know because he told me he had an alibi for the time that Lilly Dawson went missing. He spent the whole afternoon and evening of that day in Bolton, with a friend of his.’

  ‘Did you check out this alibi yourself?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Of course I didn’t! I’m not a policeman!’

  ‘Then we’re back to belief again,’ Hall pointed out, reasonably. ‘He said he had an alibi, and you believed him. But think about it, Mrs Eccles. If he really did have an alibi, why didn’t he produce it at the time? Surely, any man would – rather than go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit?’

  ‘He told me it wasn’t as simple as that. He said that after what the policeman had told him, he didn’t dare produce his alibi.’

  Elizabeth Eccles looked down at the floor – as if she were ashamed of her father, not because he had committed the crime he was accused of committing, but because he hadn’t had the courage to produce the alibi which would clear him.

  ‘I don’t want to sound at all discouraging, Mrs Eccles,’ Hall said softly. ‘Honestly, I don’t. We will investigate the case, just as we promised we would. But I have to say that nothing you’ve told us so far has been of much help. You see, it’s still a question of belief on your part – you believe your father didn’t kill Lilly, and you believe he had an alibi. But, really, you don’t have anything to back up either of those assertions.’

  Elizabeth Eccles’s head snapped back up again.

  ‘I don’t have anything to back it up – but he does,’ she said angrily.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man my father was with – the one who can give him an alibi. Have you talked to him? Have you bothered to find out what he has to say?’

  ‘No, we haven’t talked to anybody but you at this stage of the investigation,’ Hall admitted. ‘And before we can talk to this man – if he exists – we really need a name. And you can’t give us one, can you?’

  ‘Who said that I couldn’t?’ Elizabeth Eccles asked.

  ‘Well, no one,’ Hall admitted, clearly knocked off balance. ‘I just assumed that your father hadn’t told you who he was, and so you couldn’t tell us.’

  ‘He told me the day before he died,’ Elizabeth Eccles said. ‘The man you need to talk to is called Terry Clegg. He has a stall on Whitebridge Market, close to where Dad’s used to be.’

  THIRTEEN

  Paniatowski could have booked an unmarked vehicle out of the police car pool, but instead she chose a patrol car with a broad red stripe running around its middle and a metal grill separating the back seat from the front.

  ‘I’ve noticed that most civilians – even the ones who are totally innocent of anything – feel very uncomfortable about travelling in the back of police cars,’ she said to Tom Hall, as they drove towards the town centre.

  ‘And that’s just how you want Terry Clegg to feel?’ Hall asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Hall chuckled appreciatively. ‘I can see the way your mind’s working, Monika – and I like it,’ he said. ‘Twenty-two years is a long time. Clegg could lie
about the alleged trip to Bolton, and we’d have no way of knowing that he was lying. So what you want to do – from the very beginning – is to put him in a position in which he thinks that lying simply isn’t an option.’

  ‘Yes, that is what I want to do,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘But it won’t be easy.’

  ‘That’s the understatement of the year,’ Hall told her. ‘Won’t be easy? It’ll be like skating on thin ice – with a blacksmith’s anvil in your arms.’

  They pulled into the multi-storey car park next to the market, and left the patrol car on the ground floor.

  Just before they entered the market, Hall put his hand on Paniatowski’s arm and said, ‘Listen, Monika, this is your patch, not mine – so unless I think I’ve got real contribution to make, I’ll keep quiet and leave the talking to you. Are you happy with that?’

  They worked well together, Paniatowski thought. Maybe not as well as she’d worked with Charlie Woodend – but well enough. They were two of a kind.

  ‘I’m happy with it,’ she said.

  Clegg’s Pork Butchers was in the centre of the market, a few stalls away from where Howerd’s Electrical Goods had once been. There were two men standing behind the stall. One was in his early twenties, and had a thin moustache. The other was in his mid-fifties and had a receding hairline, a skin which was almost as pink as some of the meat he was slicing up, and huge forearms.

  ‘There are no prizes for guessing which one of them is Terry Clegg,’ Hall said. ‘What do you think, Monika? Will he be a tough nut to crack?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘But there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?’

  They waited until the customer Clegg had been serving walked away, then moved in.

  ‘Mr Clegg?’ Paniatowski asked.

  The butcher looked up, but even then the cleaver in his hand did not stop slicing.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, with a broad smile. ‘Terry Clegg – your friendly neighbourhood family butcher, servin’ the general public with top quality meat since 1949.’

  He was the sort of man who really liked to be liked, Paniatowski decided – the sort who would do almost anything, even something he didn’t particularly want to do, rather than cause offence.