Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘It’s not going anywhere,’ Paniatowski said – and realized that in admitting it to him, she was also admitting it to herself. ‘But maybe it would – if you’d only give me more to work with.’

  ‘I have to think!’ the man said worriedly. ‘I need time to think.’

  ‘Take all the time you need,’ Paniatowski told him, in a soothing voice.

  She began to count silently to herself . . . one elephant, two elephants, three elephants . . .

  She had reached ‘thirty elephants’ when the man said, ‘You need to talk to Michael Eccles.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘You’re the detective – you work it out.’

  He sounded furious, and she thought she understood why that was. He had been agonizing over what he could he tell her and what he couldn’t, and when, out of this struggle, he finally produced what he no doubt considered a precious pearl of information, she treated it – from his perspective, at least – as if it were nothing.

  ‘I need you to guide me,’ she said. ‘Is this Michael Eccles you’re talking about Elizabeth’s estranged husband?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘But he left her over twenty years ago.’

  ‘I know he did.’

  ‘And she hasn’t heard a word from him since. For all we know, he could be dead by now.’

  ‘He may indeed be dead,’ the caller agreed. ‘But if he isn’t, you could learn a great deal by talking to him.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that he might have killed Lilly Dawson or Bazza Mottershead?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No, I’m not. In fact, I’m certain that he didn’t kill either of them.’

  ‘Then does he know who did kill them?’

  ‘I can’t be sure of that – but I don’t think he does.’

  ‘So how could he possibly be of any help to the investigation?’

  ‘You’ll know that when you find him,’ the caller said.

  And then he hung up.

  ‘He’s yanking your chain – giving you the runaround,’ Beresford said, when Paniatowski had outlined the conversation with Mr X.

  ‘He’s not,’ Paniatowski told him.

  ‘Until you got that telephone call, wasn’t your plan to cast a bigger net and see just what got caught in it?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Nice analogy,’ Paniatowski said, smiling. ‘Where’d it come from? Have you just taken up fishing as a hobby or something?’

  But Beresford did not smile back, and if she’d hoped to deflect him from what he wanted to say, it was clear that she had failed.

  ‘The whole point in trying to persuade Walter Brown to talk was to widen the investigation, wasn’t it?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Paniatowski admitted – because she had little choice but to admit it.

  ‘Yet now, instead of widening the investigation, your Mr X wants us to narrow it! He’s throwing us back on the Eccles family, who – it’s already been established – have nothing to do with the case.’

  ‘Or, at least, they have nothing to do with it that we’re aware of,’ Paniatowski argued. ‘Fred Howerd may have been innocent of the rape and murder he was charged with, but he wasn’t as pure as the driven snow, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know,’ Beresford said exasperatedly. ‘And neither, if you’re honest with yourself, do you.’

  ‘We know that he liked to visit fifteen-year-old prostitutes.’

  ‘Again, we don’t. All we know is that Dyson Trypp told Clegg that the prostitute was fifteen. But he might have been lying. He might just have said it to stop Clegg from coming forward with his alibi.’

  ‘And we know that Howerd confessed he’d taken Lilly Dawson to his pigeon loft, the night before she was murdered.’

  ‘He confessed to a lot of things. He confessed to killing her, and we know that’s not true – so maybe he was lying about her being in his pigeon loft too. Maybe he only said it because that was what Mr Woodend and Sergeant Bannerman wanted him to say.’

  ‘Charlie is convinced Lilly was in the loft.’

  ‘And Charlie could be as wrong about that as, it now turns out, he was wrong about so many other things.’ Beresford sighed. ‘Look, boss, Robert Howerd’s already an extremely angry man – as anybody who saw his little performance on the news will tell you.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘And what you’re planning to do – at the instigation of an anonymous caller, who I still think is off his head – will only make matters worse.’

  ‘We can’t let members of the public like Robert Howerd influence the way we carry out our investigation,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘But he’s not just a member of the public, is he?’ Beresford demanded. ‘He’s a man who feels – entirely justifiably – that his family’s been very badly treated by the police.’

  ‘I just want to talk to Michael Eccles,’ Paniatowski said soothingly. ‘That’s all, Colin. I just want to have a little conversation.’

  Beresford shook his head in dismay. ‘You’re dancing barefoot round a steel trap – and, sooner or later, the jaws are going to snap shut and have your leg off.’

  ‘Maybe they are . . .’

  ‘If you know that, then why don’t you walk away while you still have the chance?’

  ‘. . . but I’d still like you to check with all the regional police forces to see if they know where Michael Eccles is. And if they don’t know, I want you to ask them to keep an eye out for him.’

  ‘So you want thousands of bobbies to be on the lookout for Eccles?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How long do you think it will be before one of them mentions to a reporter that you’re interested in finding Fred Howerd’s son-in-law? And when that happens – and it will – how long will it be after that before Robert Howerd learns that you’re still conducting a vendetta against his family?’

  ‘It’s not a vendetta.’

  ‘Maybe not – but it certainly looks like one, and it smells like one.’

  ‘I’m really not prepared to discuss this any further,’ Paniatowski said, waspishly. ‘You know what I want doing – see to it that it’s done.’

  Beresford sighed again. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘But how much longer that will be the case is anybody’s guess,’ Beresford told her.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When the lorry driver had stopped to pick up a hitch-hiker on the slip-road out of Manchester, he had not known either that his potential passenger was drunk or that he was a walking advertisement for the need for a deodorant, but both these things soon became apparent once the man had climbed into the cab. Still, the driver told himself philosophically, even a drunk’s rambling conversation could help break up the monotony of the journey, and as long as he kept smoking, the smell would not be too bad.

  ‘So where are you going?’ he asked his passenger.

  ‘Whitebridge,’ Mike Eccles told him.

  ‘Do you live there?’

  ‘I used to – but it was a long time ago.’

  ‘So what made you decide to go back now? Do you have family still living there?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve got family, all right,’ Eccles said, slurring his words more obviously now. ‘I’ve got an evil bitch of a wife who I haven’t seen for twenty-one years. But I’ll be seeing her soon, won’t I?’

  ‘I imagine it’ll be a bit of a shock for her, you just turning up like that,’ said the lorry driver, who was beginning to wonder if he was doing the right thing in helping this man reach his destination.

  ‘She made a big mistake by appearin’ on the telly,’ Eccles said. ‘If she hadn’t appeared on the telly, I’d never have known.’

  ‘Known what?’ the lorry driver asked.

  But Eccles was clearly bored with this particular strand of the conversation, and wanted to move on to something else.

  ‘Nobody would have her but me,’ he said. ‘Nobody wanted her but me
. An’ do you know . . . do you know why I wanted her?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ the lorry driver said, uncertain that he really needed to hear the answer to that particular question.

  ‘I wanted her because of what I’ve got up here,’ Eccles boasted, tapping his forehead with his dirty index finger. ‘Brains,’ he amplified, in case the lorry driver had missed the point. ‘Oh yes, I knew which side my bread was buttered on – make no mistake about that.’ Then his mood suddenly changed, as drunks’ moods are apt to. ‘But it all went wrong,’ he continued, as tears began to trickle from his eyes. ‘It all went wrong, an’ it wasn’t my fault.’

  With fellers like him, whatever happened was never their own fault, the lorry driver thought.

  ‘Listen,’ he said aloud, ‘if you are going to see your wife, it might be a good idea to smarten yourself up a bit first.’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’ Eccles asked aggressively.

  ‘Well, to be honest with you, I don’t think you can exactly expect a warm welcome home under any circumstances – not after you’ve been gone for twenty-one years,’ the lorry driver said. ‘But you’ll stand a better chance if you look as if you’ve at least made the effort.’

  ‘I don’t need to make the effort,’ Eccles told him. ‘An’ d’ya . . . d’ya know why?’

  The lorry driver said nothing.

  ‘An’ d’ya know why?’ Eccles repeated.

  ‘No,’ the lorry driver admitted. ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Because that family owes me!’ Eccles said. ‘Because, by marryin’ that bitch, I made them respectable.’

  If he’d made them respectable by marrying her, it was hard to imagine what they’d been like before the wedding, the lorry driver thought.

  ‘Stop!’ Eccles said, with a sudden urgency. ‘Stop right now! I gotta . . . I gotta throw up.’

  The lorry driver checked in his side mirror, and indicated he was about to pull in.

  ‘Quick,’ Eccles gasped, as he swallowed in an effort to postpone the inevitable.

  The lorry came to a halt.

  Eccles opened the door, missed his footing halfway down, and fell into a crumpled heap on the grass verge. For a moment, he just lay there. Then he rolled over, forcing himself back on to his knees, and the moment he’d done that, his body – finding itself in the optimum position for vomiting – restrained itself no more.

  The lorry driver watched, with increasing disgust, as Eccles spewed up the results of his morning’s drinking on to the vegetation. He considered himself a tolerant man by nature, he thought, but, really, he’d had enough. He reached across and closed the passenger door shut, then slid into first gear and pulled away.

  Still on his knees, Eccles heard the sound of the lorry moving off, and just managed, between bouts of retching, to gasp the word ‘bastard’.

  Edward Wilberforce looked first at the man sitting opposite him and then at the document which lay on the desk between them.

  ‘I have been your family’s solicitor for a good many years now, Robert,’ he said.

  ‘I know you have,’ Robert Howerd agreed.

  ‘Over those years, I have done my very best to offer you advice which was both cautious by nature and in your best long-term interest.’

  ‘And you’ve made a splendid job of it,’ Howerd told him.

  ‘I have also, despite occasional misgivings about the wisdom of a particular course of action you have chosen, always obeyed the instructions you gave me to the letter.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And that is what I’ve done on this particular occasion, Robert, though with more misgivings than I can ever remember before.’ Wilberforce tapped the document on the desk. ‘This, in my opinion, is neither prudent nor in your best interest.’

  ‘It’s what I want,’ Howerd said firmly.

  ‘But surely we can find some compromise – some middle ground,’ the solicitor suggested.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I simply do not see why . . .’

  ‘The Howerd family follows the teachings of the Holy Catholic Church,’ Robert said. ‘It always has.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I have tried to be true to my faith, though I have sinned many times, because man, by his very nature, is imperfect—’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m sure we’re all guilty of a few sins, now and again,’ interrupted Wilberforce, who – as a staunchly social member of the Church of England – was finding the whole direction the conversation was taking to be slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘We must do penance for our sins,’ said Howerd, not to be put off. ‘And the greater the sin, the greater must be the penance.’

  ‘I quite understand that.’

  ‘And this,’ said Howerd, tapping the document as Wilberforce had done earlier, ‘is my penance.’

  The sun was slowly sinking behind the mountains. Soon the twilight would descend, and with it would come the chorus of tiny insects whose job it was to close the day. Yet the day was far from drawing to a close for Charlie Woodend, who was still sitting on his terrace, gazing at the sheet of paper with the names written on it.

  ‘Why don’t you take a break, Charlie?’ asked Paco Ruiz, concerned for his friend. ‘We could both go down to Pedro’s bar, and play dominoes with the boys for an hour or so.’

  ‘I don’t have time for a break,’ Woodend replied, more curtly than he would normally have done. ‘My reputation’s at stake here.’

  ‘I know,’ Ruiz agreed. ‘But perhaps, if you thought about something else for a while—’

  ‘An’ it’s not just mine that’s threatened,’ Woodend interrupted him. ‘It’s Monika’s. I know her. She’ll go out on a limb for me – she always has – an’ there’s a good chance that if I go down, I’ll drag her down as well. An’ I simply can’t have that, Paco.’

  ‘She’s not just an old colleague to you, is she?’ Ruiz asked softly. ‘You love the woman, don’t you?’

  ‘Aye, I do,’ Woodend admitted. ‘But don’t get me wrong,’ he added hastily, ‘the kind of love that I have for Monika has nothin’ at all to do with her bein’ a woman.’

  Paco snorted sceptically. ‘Are you saying that you’re not in the least attracted to her?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, of course I’m attracted to her,’ Woodend replied. ‘A man would have to be blind not to be attracted to her. But I’ve never let that get in the way of our relationship.’

  ‘Never?’ Paco asked – and the scepticism was still there.

  Woodend sighed. ‘All right, there was one time when I suppose it might have happened.’

  The other man said nothing.

  ‘Do you want to hear about it or not?’ Woodend demanded.

  Paco smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘We were involved in a particularly unpleasant case. A young girl had been found dead in a moorland farmhouse, an’ – for reasons I won’t go into now – there were some powerful people in Whitebridge who didn’t want the murder lookin’ into too closely. So what they did to bring the investigation to a grindin’ halt was to try an’ fit me up on corruption charges. An’, I have to say, they made a pretty good attempt at it. There was a real possibility that I’d go to jail.’

  Paco nodded. ‘I get the picture.’

  ‘An’ it was then, when things were at their nastiest, that we almost fell into bed together,’ Woodend said.

  ‘I see,’ Paco said.

  ‘It would have been an act born out of desperation – and nothin’ more,’ Woodend said firmly. ‘It would have been Monika offerin’ me the only comfort she still had left to offer me, an’ me takin’ it, because I was more frightened of goin’ to prison than I’d ever been under enemy fire. But, by God, lookin’ back, I’m glad we didn’t do it – because it would have ruined everythin’ that we’d worked so hard to build up between us.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Paco said – and now the scepticism was gone, and he was being deathly serious.

  Woodend lit up a fresh Ducados. ‘I
want to tell you somethin’ now that I’ve never told anybody before – an’ the reason I want to tell you is so that you’ll really understand Monika, an’ how I feel about her,’ he said.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Paco told him.

  ‘Monika was abused as a child,’ Woodend said heavily. ‘Her bastard of a stepfather first started climbing into her bed when she was ten or eleven – she’s not sure which – an’ it went on for years. That experience would have destroyed most girls, but somehow Monika managed to summon up the spirit to overcome it. She had the balls to stick with her job in the Force, too, at a time when most bobbies thought that all female officers were good for was makin’ the tea, filin’ the reports an’ talkin’ to grievin’ relatives. An’ now she’s a chief inspector.’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Paco said.

  ‘She’s come so far,’ Woodend said. ‘That’s why I can’t let her down. That’s why I’ve got to stick at this thing until I come up with an answer.’ He gazed at the sheet of paper again – at the list of names he had written and then rejected. ‘The anonymous caller – Mr X – told her he couldn’t give her the killer’s name,’ he said for the fiftieth time. ‘What was stoppin’ him? What would stop you?’

  ‘I suppose I might have made a promise to someone not to say anything,’ Paco suggested.

  ‘An’ would you have felt bound by that, even if you knew it meant shelterin’ a murderer?’

  ‘Probably not. But I might have felt that way if the promise I’d made wasn’t just an ordinary promise – if, say, it was an oath.’

  ‘You’re thinkin’ of the Freemasons, aren’t you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Woodend shook his head. ‘Unlike a lot of bobbies, I’ve not got a lot of time for the funny handshake and bare bollock brigade, but I’ve still got enough respect for them to know they’d never try to hide somethin’ like this. What else can you suggest?’

  ‘I might have felt constrained if I thought it was for the general good.’

  ‘An’ what do you mean by that, exactly?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Charlie,’ Paco admitted. ‘I’m still playing around with the idea.’ He strode to the end of the terrace, then turned around and continued, ‘Let us say, for example, that I was a member of the security service, and, as a result of that, I knew that the killer’s continued liberty was essential for the good of my country. Under those circumstances, I think I might choose to sacrifice the one for the many, and hold my silence.’