‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for over two hours – but nobody knew where you were!’ Baxter said. ‘In fact, Chief Inspector, nobody had seen you for two days! Now why was that?’
‘I’ve been to Spain,’ Paniatowski said.
And from the look on his face, she could see that not only had he already guessed that, but that the visit was the source of his anger.
‘Been to Spain,’ Baxter repeated. ‘Without my permission!’
‘I was following up on a lead in the unofficial investigation which you’d kindly foisted on me, and I wasn’t aware I needed your permission to do that,’ Paniatowski countered.
‘Following up on a lead?’ Baxter repeated incredulously. ‘What you mean is that you’ve been to see your old mate Charlie Woodend.’
‘That’s correct, sir,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘My old mate Charlie Woodend was the lead.’
Baxter shook his head slowly from side to side, and she could see the anger draining away from him and being replaced by something much closer to worry.
‘If you won’t work with me, Monika, then I can’t protect you,’ he said.
And, as so often happened, she was unsure whether he was now the chief constable (talking to one of his senior officers), or gingery George Baxter (in whose muscular arms she’d once lain).
‘Why should I need protecting?’ she asked.
‘Because, while you’ve been away, the course of the investigation has taken a turn for the worse,’ Baxter said gravely.
How could it have taken a turn for the worse? Paniatowski wondered.
What could possibly be worse for the investigation than the discovery that Charlie had probably sent the wrong man to prison for twenty-two years?
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘While you were away on your little Spanish jaunt, DCI Hall went to see Elsie Dawson – Lilly’s mother.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do you think? To see if he could throw any new light on the case.’
Paniatowski felt her stomach somersault. ‘And did he?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid he did.’
‘Afraid he did?’
‘In Charlie Woodend’s report on the case, it is clearly stated that he found one of Lilly Dawson’s coloured pencils in Fred Howerd’s pigeon loft. You remember reading that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘The assumption at the time was that Lilly had dropped it there herself, on the Friday night before she disappeared.’
‘And it’s a perfectly sound assumption. She was only there once, so that must have been when she dropped it.’
‘Did you own a set of Lakeland coloured pencils when you were a child, Monika?’ Baxter asked.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And how did you feel about them?’
Paniatowski found her mind travelling back to a different time – a time when kids couldn’t have all they wanted just when they wanted, when pennies had to be counted and gifts were treasured.
Her stepfather has made one of his unwelcome visits to her bed the night before, and perhaps her mother knows about it – or at least suspects – because, this morning, she hands her a totally unexpected gift.
Monika takes the small rectangular parcel, wrapped in reused wrapping paper, and feels her heart start to beat a little faster. She thinks she knows what is inside, but she tries not to hope too hard that she’s right, in case those hopes are dashed.
She fingers the edges of the parcel. They are hard. It feels like tin! So maybe – just maybe – she has finally been given what she has admired in the stationer’s window for what feels like a whole lifetime.
‘Well, aren’t you going to open it?’ her mother asks – and there is a hint of sadness in her voice which suggests she does know.
Monika wants to rip the paper off, but that will mean it can never be used again, so instead she forces herself to carefully peel back the sticky tape.
When she removes the paper, she sees the lake on the front of the tin. It is a beautiful lake, with the bluest water surrounded by the greenest trees.
She doesn’t open the box immediately. For the moment, it is enough to just absorb the picture. But eventually she does, and inside are pencils which are every colour of the rainbow and more.
Sitting in Baxter’s office, more than thirty years later, the memory was enough to bring a smile to her face, despite the unease she was still feeling.
‘How did you feel about them?’ the chief constable repeated.
‘I thought they were most wonderful things that there’d ever been,’ she admitted.
‘And did your mother ever let you take them out of the house?’ Baxter asked, deceptively innocently.
Paniatowski laughed. ‘Of course not! They were far too valuable for that. I kept them in my bedroom and—’
Oh my God, she thought. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .
‘DCI Hall asked Mrs Dawson if Lilly was allowed to take her pencils out of the house, and she said, no, she wasn’t,’ Baxter told her. ‘And you know what that means, don’t you, Monika?’
She did!
She bloody did!
But she didn’t want to admit it.
‘Perhaps you’d better explain it to me, sir,’ she said.
‘If Lilly didn’t leave the pencil in the pigeon loft, then someone else did – someone who’d been into her bedroom and picked it up. And that someone could only have been Charlie Woodend.’
‘Or Bannerman!’ Paniatowski said fiercely.
‘Woodend left Bannerman downstairs while he went to search Lilly’s bedroom.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Paniatowski said flatly.
‘You mean, you don’t want to believe it,’ Baxter countered.
‘If what Mrs Dawson now says is true, why has she kept quiet about it all this time?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Why didn’t she mention the fact that the pencils were never allowed to leave the room at the trial?’
‘The question of the pencil never came up at the trial,’ Baxter said. ‘There was no need to enter it into the evidence, because Howerd had already confessed to the crime.’
‘I need to talk to DCI Hall,’ Paniatowski said frantically. ‘Where is he?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘He was here to establish whether or not Howerd was guilty as charged – and he considers that he’s done that, so he’s returning to London.’
Returning, Paniatowski thought. Not has returned, but is returning.
‘Is he taking the two o’clock express train?’ she asked.
‘He didn’t say, one way or the other, but that would certainly be the logical train for him to take.’
Paniatowski looked at her watch. It was twenty-five to two.
‘I have to go,’ she told the chief constable.
‘This interview is not over, Chief Inspector,’ Baxter said sternly. ‘It will not be over until I decide it is.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I have to go,’ Paniatowski replied.
Then she turned and rushed out of the room.
EIGHTEEN
He was standing on the central platform, a cigarette in one hand and plastic coffee cup in the other. He did not look quite so chunky as the last time she had seen him, but that could have been accomplished – she now realized – by a simple change of posture. He had abandoned the scruffy sports jacket and flannel trousers, too, and was wearing a sharp blue suit.
He saw her approaching him, and smiled.
‘I’ve not exactly been expecting to see you here, Monika,’ he said, ‘but I always knew you would turn up for a fond farewell if you possibly could.’
‘How could you do it?’ Paniatowski demanded angrily.
‘It was easy,’ Hall said complacently.
‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘How could you treat a fellow officer like that?’
But Hall was not interested in discussing the ethics of policing, she thought, looki
ng into his eyes. He had his script for this possible encounter well prepared, and he was determined to stick to it.
‘The trick I pulled on you wasn’t a very complicated one,’ Hall said. ‘All I did was talk to some old hands at the Yard who still remember Charlie Woodend – Bannerman amongst them – and then adopt a few of the characteristics of your old mentor. It was a weak disguise, at best, and I doubt it would have fooled most people. But it took you in, because you wanted to be taken in – because, in times of crisis, you really miss your Uncle Charlie.’
He was right on both counts, of course, Paniatowski told herself. It probably wouldn’t have taken in most people – and she did miss Charlie.
‘So, when it boils down to it, you were never anything more than one of Bannerman’s arse-crawling lackeys?’ she said.
‘I’m nobody’s lackey,’ Hall replied, with a sudden edge to his voice.
He was angry that she wasn’t sticking to the script that he’d envisaged, she thought – angry that, instead of basking in her grudging admiration, he was being showered with her contempt.
‘So if you’re not a lackey, just what are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m a man who played it straight for over thirty years, and never rose above the rank of chief inspector. I’m a good cop – a very good cop – who would like to retire soon, and would prefer to do it on a superintendent’s pension.’
‘And Bannerman can make that possible?’ Paniatowski said.
‘And Bannerman can make that possible,’ Hall agreed.
‘So it was always your intention to nobble Charlie Woodend, was it?’ Paniatowski said.
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Hall replied, and now he was managing to sound a little hurt. ‘Give me credit for a little human decency.’
‘You’ll have to earn it first,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘So if the plan wasn’t to nobble Charlie, what was it?’
‘The original plan was to prove Fred Howerd was guilty as charged,’ Hall said. ‘That would certainly have been the best solution all round. Or, failing that, I intended to bury any evidence which pointed in the other direction. Which is why, as you’ll appreciate, I was rather knocked off balance by Mrs Eccles’s revelation that her father actually had an alibi.’
‘Yes, I can see that must have been something of an inconvenience for you,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I badly miscalculated the way I handled Terry Clegg,’ Hall admitted, ‘but, in my own defence, I have to say it would have been a tricky situation for anybody to handle.’
‘When did you decide to pull that stunt on the top floor of the car park?’
‘As we were leaving the market. It was obvious to me that Clegg would crack the second you started questioning him, and I couldn’t have that, because I knew that once he had told you Howerd did have an alibi, you’d feel obliged to investigate it further.’
‘So what was the point of threatening to throw him over the edge?’
‘I didn’t threaten to throw him off – not in so many words. I was very careful about that.’
Paniatowski sighed. ‘All right – what was the point of implying you might throw him off the edge?’
‘I thought it might scare him into demanding to see a lawyer. If he’d done that, everything would have worked out fine, because any lawyer worth his salt would have told our friend Clegg that as long as he kept his mouth shut, we wouldn’t be able to touch him.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been much easier simply to suggest the idea of a lawyer to him?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Much,’ Hall replied. ‘But you’d have overheard, and wondered why I was doing it. And at that stage of the game, the last thing I needed was for you to have doubts about me.’
‘But now that doesn’t matter,’ Paniatowski said.
‘But now it doesn’t matter,’ Hall agreed. ‘Still, things did look distinctly sticky for a while, and I could see my superintendent’s pension disappearing right down the plughole. The problem is, you see, that Bannerman’s had something of a rocky ride recently, and he can’t afford any more slip-ups.’
‘And that’s why it’s just not enough for him to be seen as part of an investigation which made the perfectly understandable mistake of getting the wrong man?’
‘Exactly! What he wants – what he needs – is complete exoneration from any wrongdoing.’
‘Which means there was no choice but to set up Charlie Woodend to take the fall?’
‘I knew you’d get there in the end, Monika! Well done! He needed exoneration, and I’ve got it for him – because the only thing he looks guilty of now is naively trusting his superior.’
‘How long have you known about the red pencil?’
‘Oh, right from the start. It was the one thing that Bannerman was really worried about.’ Hall clamped his hand over his mouth, and when he removed it again, he was grinning. ‘Oh dear, I should never have said that,’ he continued, in mock horror. ‘Still, this is no more than a bit of idle banter between colleagues, so what’s the harm in it?’
‘Everything’s a joke to you, isn’t it?’ Paniatowski demanded.
‘That’s right,’ Hall agreed. ‘And if you’re intending to keep on wading through this lake of shit that we fondly call a career, you’d better start treating it as a joke, too.’
‘Tell me about what happened to the pencil,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Can’t do that, because I don’t know myself, with any certainty,’ Hall said, not even trying to sound convincing. ‘But I can hypothesize, if you like.’
‘Hypothesize then,’ Paniatowski said, stony-faced.
‘Picture the scene, if you will. A newly appointed chief inspector and a hungry detective sergeant visit the mother of a murder victim. The chief inspector – who fancies himself as a dab hand at solving crimes by simply soaking up the atmosphere – goes up to the murder victim’s room. Once he’s left, the sergeant says something which upsets the mother – he has a natural talent for that kind of thing – and the woman has to go outside for a breath of fresh air. Are you still with me?’
‘I’m still with you,’ Paniatowski said.
‘The chief inspector, meanwhile, is looking around the girl’s room, and he sees something there that upsets him so much that he has to rush to the toilet and spew up his ring.’ Hall paused. ‘Bannerman and I had a good laugh at that, back at the Yard.’
‘You would.’
‘Anyway, the sergeant, hearing the disturbance, goes upstairs to see what’s happened. Then, when he realizes that what his boss is doing is throwing up, he thinks he might just have a look in the girl’s bedroom himself. That’s when he sees the pencils – and what particularly attracts him to them is that they have the girl’s teeth marks on them. “Hello, that might come in useful,” he tells himself. He pockets the pencil, and goes back downstairs before his boss has finished his business in the lavvy. Then later, when they’re in – for example, and still hypothetically speaking – a pigeon loft, he takes the opportunity to drop the pencil on the floor. Perfectly sound police work, you might say . . .’
‘I wouldn’t,’ Paniatowski interrupted.
‘. . . except that, years later, it turns out that he’s planted it on the wrong man. Well, you can’t expect him to take the blame for it, can you – not when his old boss has retired, and so has nothing more to lose, while he’s still got a bright future ahead of him.’
‘Nothing more to lose?’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘Charlie could go to jail for this!’
‘Theoretically, I suppose he could,’ Hall agreed airily. ‘But it’s not likely, is it? I would imagine that, even now, your chief constable is looking for ways to cover the whole thing up.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you really knew George Baxter,’ Paniatowski told him.
‘Well, even if he decides to institute legal proceedings, it could take years to bring it to court, and Woodend could be dead by then,’ Hall said, as if he still saw no real problem. ‘Besides, if the worst comes to the worst – and
I don’t for a minute think that it will – we don’t have an extradition treaty with Spain, so all old Charlie has to do is sit tight.’
There had been something about the whole conversation – perhaps Hall’s bravado, or perhaps his refusal to take things seriously – which had had a familiar ring about it to Paniatowski, and now she had finally managed to pin it down.
‘I know why you’re doing this,’ she said.
‘Doing what?’ Hall asked.
Paniatowski said nothing.
For a moment, Hall just stood there, shifting his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other, then he said, ‘I’m doing it because you asked me to – and a gentleman always tries to give a lady what she wants.’
‘You’re doing it because you’re feeling bad – because you realize that there’s no difference between you and all those scumbags you’ve spent your life glaring at across the interview table,’ Paniatowski told him.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Hall said.
But he did!
She could see that he did!
‘What do you normally say to those scumbags when you’re trying to get them to come clean?’ she asked. ‘“Come on, lad, tell us you did it. You know you’ll feel much better once you’ve got it off your chest.” Is that what you say, Tom?’
‘Maybe,’ Hall admitted.
‘And they often do feel better, don’t they? And why is that? Because you’ve convinced them that you’ll understand! Because, though you don’t actually say it, you’ve given them the impression that, in their place, you might have done exactly the same thing!’
‘So what?’
‘Can you picture that look of guilty relief in their eyes, as they’re making that confession that you’ve coaxed out of them, Tom? And do you know that if I held a mirror in front of you now, you’d see that same look in your own eyes?’
In the distance, they could hear the sound of a klaxon, as the train approached the station.
‘You’re talking a load of bollocks, Monika!’ Hall said. ‘Complete and utter bollocks.’
But he knew that he did not sound convincing – even to himself.
Echoes of the Dead Page 16