When Paniatowski entered the shop, a brass bell jangled, and the door to the back room opened to reveal a large man in his late fifties.
He was wearing an old cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, and a pair of trousers which were probably not new at the time of the Queen’s Coronation. It was the perfect uniform for a seller of old books, and it blended in like a dream with the rest of the shop.
The man’s face, unfortunately, was not quite such a good match. It was obvious that his nose had been broken at some time in the past, and his cheeks, chin and forehead bore numerous scars of ancient battles. It was the sort of face that had old ladies nervously reaching for the communication cord in railway carriages – the sort of face that mothers would hold up to their children as an example of what might happen to them if they continued to run wild.
And yet when he smiled – as he did now – the harshness melted away, and a much gentler soul was revealed.
The man peered myopically at Paniatowski for a second, then said, ‘Mrs Gaskell?’
‘No, I’m . . .’
‘You’re quite right, and I’m quite wrong,’ the man said firmly. ‘Mrs Gaskell wouldn’t suit you at all. You’d be much happier with something a little less stylized – something with a bit more zing to it. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, perhaps? I’m getting closer, aren’t I? I can always tell what people will like – even when they’re not quite sure themselves.’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not a customer,’ Paniatowski said, producing her warrant card. ‘I’m looking for Walter Brown.’
‘Ah!’ the man said, disappointedly. ‘And which Walter Brown might that be? Walter Brown the lover of old books? Or could it be Walter Brown the convicted murderer?’
Paniatowski grinned, despite the macabre nature of the question. ‘Which one are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m both, as you’ve probably already realized,’ Brown said. ‘But I imagine it’s the latter, rather than the former, that you’re interested in.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ Paniatowski admitted.
Brown nodded, perhaps a little sadly.
‘In that case, you’d better come into the back room, and we’ll have tea and biscuits,’ he said. ‘Tea and biscuits always make interrogations just a little more bearable.’
‘I was a real thug at the time I was sent down for Mottershead’s murder,’ Walter Brown said, as he poured Paniatowski a cup of Earl Grey. ‘A thoroughly nasty piece of work – and a semi-literate one, to boot. Back then, I’d as soon have cut off my own arm than open a book. Prison changed all that. At first, I only took the reading classes they offered because it was a soft option. Then something magical happened. I started to enjoy it. And by the time I came out, I’d read everything in the prison library at least three or four times. But I didn’t mind that, because there’s always something new to find in a book, however well you think you know it.’
‘You always maintained your innocence,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I still do,’ Brown told her.
‘So why did the police fix on you as their prime suspect?’ Paniatowski wondered.
‘Oh, they had reasonable enough grounds, I suppose,’ Brown admitted. ‘As I said, I was a thug. I gloried in violence. It excited me, back then, almost as much as books do now. I may not have killed anybody, but I put a number of men in hospital, and one of them could easily have died.’ He paused, and looked Paniatowski straight in the eyes. ‘I didn’t murder Bazza Mottershead – but, given more time, I might well have done.’
‘If it’s true that you were wrongly convicted, I’m surprised you don’t sound bitter,’ Paniatowski said.
‘What would be the point of that?’ Brown asked. ‘It’s over and done with, and we can’t change the past, however much we might want to. Besides, in some ways, being wrongly convicted was the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I think you might say it made me free.’
‘Could you explain that?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Willingly. I’ve paid my debt to society – not for killing Mottershead, but for all the other terrible things I did – and now I can look the world squarely in the face. And prison made me a new man – a better man, I hope. If I’d gone on as I was, I’d probably have ended up dead in some back alley, without ever having experienced the joy of books, so, on one level at least, everything that happened, happened for the best.’
‘The police must have thought they had enough evidence to arrest you,’ Paniatowski said. ‘What sort of case did they actually have?’
‘A circumstantial one,’ Brown said. He chuckled. ‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know the word “circumstantial”.’
‘Why don’t you fill in the details for me?’ Paniatowski suggested.
‘There was really bad blood between you and Bazza, wasn’t there, Wally?’ Chief Inspector Paine demands.
‘No, I liked the feller,’ Walter Brown says unconvincingly.
‘You worked with the feller – he was your fence – but you didn’t like him at all,’ the chief inspector replies. ‘Tell me, Wally, when exactly did it finally penetrate that thick skull of yours that Bazza had been cheating you for years?’
A few days before he died, Brown thinks.
‘I don’t know what yer talkin’ about,’ he says aloud.
The chief inspector laughs. ‘He always told you that the stuff you took to him was far less valuable than it actually was – and you were too stupid to know any different. But somebody must have finally tipped you the wink – and when they did, you went bloody mad.’
Yes, Brown thinks, I went bloody mad. I cornered Bazza in the lounge bar of the Pig and Whistle, grabbed him by throat, an’ told him if he didn’t pay all the money he owed me, I’d slit his bloody throat.
‘I don’t know what yer talkin’ about,’ he says, for the second time.
‘You really are thick, aren’t you?’ the chief inspector jeers. ‘We’ve got half a dozen witnesses – decent, respectable people – who are willing to swear they heard you threaten to kill him.’
‘So you had a motive for murdering him,’ Paniatowski said. ‘What else did the police use to build up their case against you?’
‘I’ll make a deal with you, Wally,’ the chief inspector says. ‘You give me an alibi for the night Bazza was killed, and I’ll let you go immediately.’
But Brown has no alibi. He remembers nothing of the period between six o’clock on the evening of the murder, when he was drinking heavily in the Lamb and Flag, and eight o’clock the next morning, when he woke up among the bushes in the Corporation Park, with an empty whisky bottle at his side.
‘Come on, Wally, if you didn’t do it, just give us your alibi,’ the chief inspector says.
‘I can’t,’ Brown admits. ‘I don’t have an alibi.’
‘So they had motive and opportunity,’ Paniatowski mused. ‘What else did they have on you?’
‘Nothing,’ Walter Brown told her.
Paniatowski frowned. ‘Well, if that’s really all they had, I’m surprised they thought they had enough to charge you,’ she admitted.
‘Maybe they wouldn’t have charged me if it hadn’t been for the race,’ Brown said.
‘The race? What race?’
‘The race with Scotland Yard!’
‘I’ll be honest with you, Wally, a lot of the younger lads in the division are really pissed off that the chief constable called in Scotland Yard on the Lilly Dawson murder,’ the chief inspector tells Wally Brown.
Brown, who has no idea of what any of this can possibly have to do with him, says nothing.
‘It’s true we hadn’t made a lot of progress in that case,’ the chief inspector admits, ‘but, given time, we’d have cracked it, wouldn’t we?’
Wally Brown is obviously expected to say something, so he says, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, we’d have cracked it, all right,’ the chief inspector asserts. ‘But we’ve lost our chance, because the “experts” have arrived and
taken over. Now, I’ve nothing against Charlie Woodend – apart from the fact that he’s from the Yard – but that poncey sergeant of his is really getting up my nose.’ He reaches into his pocket, and takes out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Fancy a smoke, Wally?’
‘Please,’ Brown says.
The chief inspector lights up their cigarettes. ‘Now the question you’re probably asking yourself is, are we just going to take this lying down?’ he continues. ‘And my answer is that we’re not. You see, if we can solve our murder before they solve theirs, it’ll be obvious to anybody who are the real detectives and who are just big girls’ blouses. Are you following me, Wally?’
‘No,’ Brown says.
‘The way I see it, we can do each other a bit of good here, you and me. You can help me by confessing to the murder, and I can help you by putting in a good word for you with the judge. What do you say to that?’
‘I didn’t do it,’ Brown tells him.
The chief inspector’s eyes harden. ‘Think carefully, Wally,’ he advises, ‘because there’s a time limit to how long this offer will be on the table. If they catch their man before you confess, we’ll be left with egg on our faces, and you’ve no idea what kind of a rough time we’ll give you then.’
‘I wouldn’t confess, but they charged me anyway,’ Walter Brown told Paniatowski. ‘Funnily enough, it was shortly after that when I met Chief Inspector Woodend.’ He smiled. ‘They were taking me to the cells, and Mr Woodend was standing in the corridor. I asked him to help me, and when he said he couldn’t, I reacted like I always did in those days. I tried to hit him – and he, quite rightly, flattened me.’
Paniatowski was hardly listening to him any more.
It couldn’t be as simple as Brown had described it, she told herself. It simply couldn’t be.
‘Isn’t it possible that you were so drunk on the night Bazza Mottershead was murdered that you might have killed him, and then remembered nothing about it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Brown said emphatically.
‘But if you had a complete memory loss about that evening . . .’
‘If I’d have killed him, I’d have known. However drunk I’d been, I’d have known.’
‘When you woke up that morning, did you have a wound you couldn’t remember getting?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘I was always getting injured,’ Brown told her. ‘Like I said, I was a rough bugger. A lot of the time, I hardly even noticed it.’
‘But I’m not talking about any old injury – this would have been a new wound, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brown said. ‘In fact, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘The police found two types of blood at the Mottershead murder scene,’ Paniatowski explained. ‘Their theory was that one of them belonged to the killer. Actually, they didn’t regard it as a theory at all – they took it as a rock-solid certainty.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Brown said.
‘You must have done,’ Paniatowski replied sceptically. ‘It was in all the papers.’
‘I didn’t read the newspapers back then. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t read them.’
‘And you’re sure you had no new wounds when you woke up in the park that morning?’
‘I’d got cut a couple of weeks earlier – I’d had a slight disagreement with another of my associates – but that particular cut had all but healed.’
But not in the eyes of the police, Paniatowski thought – not if they didn’t want it to look healed.
‘The main reason I’m here is that a man rang me last night to say that you didn’t kill Bazza Mottershead,’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea, Mr Brown, who that man might be?’
‘It could have been the real killer?’ Brown suggested.
‘It wasn’t,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as I can be. He said he wasn’t – and I believe him.’
‘Well, if it wasn’t the real killer, I haven’t got a clue who it could be,’ Brown admitted. ‘I don’t see how anybody else could know, with absolute certainty, that I didn’t murder Bazza.’
‘I want you to help me,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Help you?’ Walter Brown repeated, suddenly wary. ‘How could I help you?’
‘You could give me a list, with the names on it of everyone else you can remember who associated with Mottershead – especially anybody who might have had a grudge against him.’
Brown laughed. ‘It’d a long list,’ he said. ‘Bazza had a real talent for making enemies – and some of them really hated him. That’s how he got to be Bazza the Claw.’
‘Bazza the Claw?’
‘It’s what some of the lads used to call him in the old days.’
‘Why? Because he’d claw every penny out of you that he possibly could?’
‘Oh, he’d do that right enough, but that wasn’t the reason. They called him the Claw because his right hand did look a bit like a claw.’
‘Arthritis?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘That’s right – but what started the arthritis off in the first place was that somebody had broken every bone in that hand.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. It happened a long time before I even met him. I’m only mentioning it now to give you some idea of just how popular he was.’
‘Will you give me the names I want?’ Paniatowski asked.
Brown fell silent for a moment, then he said, ‘Maybe.’
‘Why the reluctance, when all I want to do is clear you?’
‘Is that all you want to do?’
‘No,’ Paniatowski admitted – because she knew that with this man, she would never get away with lying. ‘I have some other purpose as well. But I really do want to see justice done in your case.’
‘Why?’ Brown asked, his suspicion deepening. ‘Because that’s part of your job?’
‘Yes, but if it wasn’t part of my job, it wouldn’t be the kind of job I’d have wanted in the first place.’
‘I like you, Chief Inspector Paniatowski,’ Brown said. ‘I really do. And I think I trust you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But after everything that I’ve been through, you’ll understand why I don’t trust you that much, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘I do understand.’
‘The last thing I want to do is to get some other poor innocent sod into trouble – and I’m afraid that if I give you a list, that’s just what will happen,’ Walter Brown told her.
‘It won’t,’ Paniatowski said firmly. ‘I promise you it won’t.’ She waited for a moment, before adding, ‘Will you give me the names?’
‘I need time to think about it,’ Brown told her. ‘Come and see me again tomorrow.’
It would be a mistake to push him too far, she realized.
‘All right,’ she agreed.
‘Have a look at what I’ve got on my shelves on your way out,’ Brown said, ‘and if anything catches your fancy, take it as a gift.’
It was morning in Spain, too, though a far warmer, more caressing kind of morning than the one in Whitebridge.
Charlie Woodend was sitting on his terrace, a large sheet of plain paper spread out on the table in front of him, and a box of coloured pencils – bought specially for the occasion – lying next to his ashtray.
In the centre of the sheet, he’d written the single word ‘Who?’ and around the edges of the page were a list of names, most of them crossed out with a violence that said much about the frustration he was feeling.
‘Still no luck on working out who your anonymous friend might be?’ asked Paco Ruiz, who’d been for a walk around the garden, in the hope that a change of scene might stimulate his brain.
‘No luck at all,’ Woodend replied. ‘All we really know is who it can’t be. It can’t, for example, be that slimy shit from Scotland Yard, DCI Hall, can it?’
‘No, that doesn’t seem likely,’ Paco agreed.
‘His aim was to save Bannerman by stitching me up, an’ after he’s made such a good job of it, there’s no way that he’d suddenly decide to throw me a lifebelt.’
‘Who else have you eliminated?’ Paco asked.
‘It can’t be one of the local Whitebridge police, either.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of the way this Mr X spoke to Monika. As near as she can remember it, he said, “Is anythin’ bad goin’ to happen to those policemen of yours who investigated the Lilly Dawson murder.” You get the point?’
Paco nodded. ‘If he’d been a cop, he’d have said something like, “Are they going to be pulled up in front of a disciplinary board?”’
‘Exactly.’ Woodend agreed, lighting up a Ducados. ‘An’ he wouldn’t have talked about “those policemen of yours”, either. He’d have said, “our lads”.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Then there’s the fact that he claimed to know who actually did kill Lilly. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that he was around at the time – an’ the time was twenty-two years ago, remember – but it certainly makes it a strong possibility.’
‘So the man who you’re looking for is at least in middle age?’ Paco Ruiz asked.
‘I think he must be.’ Woodend frowned. ‘But what’s really got me bothered – above all else – is that when Monika asked him to name the killer, he said, “I can’t do that.” Not, “I won’t do that”, but “I can’t”. Now why can’t he?’
‘It is possible that the reason he “can’t” is because he’s implicated in the murder himself?’ Ruiz suggested.
‘That was the first thought that came into my head,’ Woodend admitted.
‘But now you’ve rejected it?’
‘Yes, an’ I’ll explain why in a minute. But first, I want you to think back to the days when you were a homicide bobby in Madrid.’
Ruiz did as he’d been instructed. And immediately, he could feel the stifling heat of summer envelop him as he crossed the Puerta del Sol on the trail of a killer, and the freezing cold of winter as he stood on the bank of the Manzanares River, chatting to the shivering prostitutes while he waited to meet a contact.
‘Are you there?’ Woodend asked.
Echoes of the Dead Page 18