Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘An’ do you think Mr X is likely to be a spy?’

  ‘No, I don’t. In fact, the more I think about it, the less probable it seems.’ Paco paced the terrace again. ‘Could it be that Mr X is being limited by a professional code of conduct?’

  ‘You mean like a lawyer or psychiatrist?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s the best suggestion you’ve come up with yet, my old mate,’ Woodend said. ‘But it’s still not very likely, because, under English law, both lawyers and psychiatrists are obliged to reveal any knowledge they have of a crime, and if they don’t reveal it, they could go to prison themselves.’

  ‘Then, if none of those ideas are of any use to you, I am at a complete loss,’ Paco admitted.

  ‘Aye, an’ I’m at a complete bloody loss myself,’ Woodend said despondently. He turned his attention back to the large sheet of paper. ‘The anonymous caller said he couldn’t tell Monika what she wanted to know,’ he mumbled. ‘Not that he wouldn’t tell her, but that he couldn’t.’

  It was getting dark, and some of the vehicles speeding past Mike Eccles had already switched on their headlights. He had no real idea of how long he’d been standing on the spot where the lorry driver had abandoned him – he had pawned his last wristwatch, for drinking money, years earlier – but he thought it must be several hours at least.

  ‘Why won’t you stop an’ give me a lift, you bloody swine?’ he shouted after a motorist who had actually speeded up when he’d seen a vomit-stained man standing there with his thumb out.

  None of them would give him a lift, he thought miserably – and it just wasn’t fair.

  It was just under twenty miles to Whitebridge, he calculated. If he started walking now, he could easily be there by morning.

  But he didn’t want to walk.

  He didn’t see why he should have to walk.

  ‘Bloody bastards!’ he said, to the world in general.

  He needed to come up with some other plan of action, he told himself – one that didn’t require quite so much effort on his part.

  He put his hand into the pocket of his threadbare jacket, and felt his fingers brush against the half-bottle of cheap whisky that he had been hoarding for emergencies.

  ‘I’ll only have one little slug,’ he promised himself. ‘I’ll drink just enough to help me come up with a plan.’

  He glugged back most of what was left in the bottle, and immediately started to feel dizzy.

  He didn’t actually need to come up with a plan right away, he decided hazily. It was quite a warm night, and he still had a little booze left. What was wrong with bedding down by the side of the road until morning, when everything was bound to be clearer?

  Yes, he would think the whole thing through in the morning, he told himself as he lay down on the verge and squiggled in search of a comfortable position.

  And soon, when he’d got his hands on all that money which Elizabeth would be forced to give him, he wouldn’t need to think at all.

  Paniatowski had rung the team to call off the evening meeting at the Drum and Monkey.

  ‘There haven’t been any new leads since the last time we talked,’ she’d told Crane and Beresford, ‘so we might as well grab the opportunity to have an early night for once.’

  What she’d said had been accurate – as far as it went.

  The other police forces in the region had all been more than willing to cooperate in her search for Mike Eccles, but willingness was all they’d been able to offer so far, because none of them had the faintest idea where he might actually be.

  She hadn’t got the list of Mottershead’s associates from Walter Brown yet, either. When she’d called at his bookshop, towards the end of the afternoon, she discovered that he’d closed much earlier than the sign in the window promised he would, and when she’d rung his home phone number, no one had answered.

  But there was another reason for her reluctance to go to the Drum that night, and that reason – which she could barely bring herself to admit, even to herself – was Beresford.

  She couldn’t stand the thought that he might question her whole approach to the investigation again – might hold up all her arguments under the harsh light of logic, and expose them for the tattered, flawed remnants that they actually were.

  And it would have been even worse if he hadn’t done that – if, instead, he’d sat there like the loyal member of her team he was and pretended to be going along fully with everything she said.

  And so, instead of spending the evening with her lads, she had spent it with her daughter – trying to show interest in Louisa’s daily adventures and pushing to the back of her mind the thought that if she failed this time, then everything Charlie Woodend had worked for – everything Charlie Woodend was – would be destroyed.

  She had just tucked her daughter in bed – and given her the goodnight kiss which she sometimes suspected Louisa secretly considered herself too old for – when the phone rang.

  The caller was Dr Shastri, the police surgeon.

  ‘And how are you, tonight, my dear Chief Inspector?’ Shastri asked, in her usual chirpy manner.

  Paniatowski pictured the good doctor, a beautiful coffee-coloured woman, swathed in a multicoloured sari and a wicked sense of humour.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘I’ve never been better. Is there something that I can do for you, Doc?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Shastri replied. ‘My confidential sources tell me that you are re-investigating the Lilly Dawson case.’

  Despite herself, Paniatowski could not resist a smile. ‘Your confidential sources, in this case, being the local television news?’ she guessed.

  Shastri laughed. ‘Just so,’ she readily agreed. ‘And having received that information, it occurred to me that you might possibly, in the course of your investigations, have talked to Mrs Elizabeth Eccles, the daughter of the man who was falsely convicted of killing Lilly.’

  ‘Yes, I talked to her,’ Paniatowski said, as an image of the sour-faced Elizabeth floated across her mind.

  ‘And was it a long discussion you had with her, or no more than a few words?’ Shastri asked.

  ‘It was quite a long discussion.’

  ‘In that case, my dear Monika, I wonder if you could find the time to visit the morgue some time tomorrow,’ Shastri said.

  ‘What’s it all about?’ Paniatowski wondered.

  ‘It is a little difficult for a simple Indian doctor like myself to explain over the phone,’ Shastri told her. ‘It would be much better for us to talk face to face, if you can possibly spare the time.’

  With the clock relentlessly ticking off the hours until she had to submit her report – and the chief constable breathing down her neck while it did so – time should have been the last thing she had to spare, Paniatowski thought.

  Yet she could not honestly say – without any new leads – that this was the case at all.

  Besides, even if she’d been busy, she would still have had to make time to see Shastri, because the doctor had been a good friend and a good colleague over the years, and had rarely asked for any favours in return.

  ‘Monika?’ Shastri said questioningly

  ‘I’ll be there,’ Paniatowski promised. ‘I can’t say exactly when it will be, but I’ll be there.’

  ‘What a sweet little thing you really are,’ Shastri said. ‘I shall look forward to seeing you, then. And will you do one more thing for me?’

  ‘Of course.

  ‘Please give my love to Louisa, and say I look forward to seeing her, too, though in slightly cheerier surroundings than the police morgue.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Paniatowski told her.

  ‘Then there is no more to be said, except to wish you goodnight and sweet dreams.’

  ‘Sweet dreams!’ Paniatowski repeated to herself as she hung up the phone.

  Dark nightmares would be closer to the mark, she suspected

  TWENTY-THREE

  Charlie Woodend awoke to the sound of s
eagulls engaging in a heated discussion on the roof of his villa.

  There was something to be said for being a seagull – or any other wild creature for that matter – he thought. It wasn’t an ideal existence, obviously – the diet was incredibly monotonous, it was almost impossible to get health insurance, and you were in constant danger of vicious little kids with airguns taking potshots at you as you flew over them – but at least, by being a seagull, you never ran the risk of having your reputation destroyed or of seeing your life’s work turned to ashes before your eyes.

  ‘It’s nice that you can still be whimsical, Charlie,’ he told himself, as he climbed out of bed. ‘Well done, lad.’

  But the whimsy, edged as it already was with a sense of grim reality, did not last him even as far as the kitchen.

  ‘Think, Charlie, think!’ he urged himself as he filled the kettle. ‘Who couldn’t tell you something, even if he wanted to?’

  In the distance, he could hear the sound of the church bell tolling. It was a very un-English sound, he thought, as different from the church bells back home as it could possibly be. There, in Anglican England, a peal of six or eight beautifully constructed bells created a melodious sound which gently drifted across the verdant countryside and reminded the faithful that, if it was not too much trouble, God would rather like their presence in His house. Here, in Catholic Spain, it was a single bell – little more than an upturned bucket, in Woodend’s opinion – which harshly and uncompromisingly called the worshippers to mass.

  The kettle had boiled. Woodend poured the steaming water into the pot, and was just lighting up his first cigarette when he suddenly froze.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said.

  Paco had been quite right to advise him to stop thinking about the anonymous caller and turn his mind to something else for a while – because he’d done just that, and it had worked.

  Now he had the answer, it was so obvious that he almost couldn’t believe it had taken so long to occur to him – because of all the answers he could have come up with, it was the only one which truly fitted.

  He wished that he could be whisked back to Whitebridge in a second, so that he could follow up the sudden insight himself.

  But since that was not going to happen, he thought, he’d better talk to Monika as soon as possible.

  The bookshop door was open, and Walter Brown was sitting behind the counter, quietly reading. He was aware she was there, but did look up until he had finished the paragraph.

  ‘I called you at home last night, but you didn’t pick up the phone,’ Paniatowski said reproachfully, before she could stop herself.

  And then she thought, Don’t pressurize him. For God’s sake, don’t pressurize him.

  ‘I didn’t answer the phone because I wasn’t there to answer it,’ Brown told her. ‘I went for a long walk. I visited all the places that I knew as a younger man – as a different man. I thought doing that might help me to decide whether or not to give you the list you wanted.’

  ‘And did it help?’ Paniatowski asked calmly, though what she really wanted to do was grab him by his cardigan and scream, ‘Give me the bloody list!’

  ‘Yes, it helped,’ Walter Brown said. Then he added, with a slight smile, ‘I decided that I’m going to trust you to do the right thing – even though you are a police officer.’

  The list! a voice in Paniatowski’s head thundered. Hand over the bloody list!

  Brown’s smiled widened. ‘I can see that you’re more than eager to read it, so here it is,’ he said, holding up a piece of paper which been lying on the counter.

  As Paniatowski took the list from him, she could not fail to notice the slight tremble in her hand.

  Calm down, she ordered herself. It’s only a few names. It may not lead anywhere.

  ‘Would you allow me to ask you about the people on this list?’ she said to Brown.

  ‘By all means, ask,’ Brown replied, as if he’d been anticipating the question. ‘But you must accept – right from the start – that if I don’t want to give you answers, I won’t.’

  ‘That’s understood,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  Walter Brown’s handwriting was large, clear and almost childlike, and though she’d cautioned herself that it would be a few names, the list was, in fact, very long.

  Paniatowski scanned the names. She recognized a few of them from the days when she’d been in uniform, and in regular contact with Whitebridge’s petty criminal fraternity, but this list was history, rather than news, and most of the names were unknown to her.

  This wasn’t going to help, she thought with sickening realization. In her desperation, she’d pinned most of her hopes on this list – and it wasn’t going to lead her anywhere!

  And then she saw a name which made her heart beat a little faster.

  ‘What’s Fred Howerd doing on this list?’ she asked, almost breathlessly.

  ‘You asked me for the names of all Mottershead’s known associates, and that’s what I’ve given you,’ Brown told her.

  ‘But Fred Howerd was . . .’

  ‘A little wild in his youth, but later a successful market trader who would one day inherit his half-share of his father’s business?’ Brown asked, with obvious amusement.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘You’ve really no idea what Fred was actually like, have you, Chief Inspector?’ Brown asked.

  ‘Then enlighten me,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘There are men who are just naturally bent – who couldn’t resist the opportunity of stealing a penny from a poor orphan, even if they already had a thousand pounds in their pocket – and Fred Howerd was one of them.’

  ‘Are you saying he was a thief?’

  ‘Not exactly a thief. He was more of a fence, I suppose. To be strictly accurate, he was the last stage in the fencing process.’

  ‘Could you explain that?’

  ‘Fred sold electrical goods on the market, but they didn’t belong to him, they belonged to his father – and his father took most of the profit.’

  ‘Yes, it’s natural that he would.’

  ‘But let’s just suppose that, as well as doing that, he used his father’s business to sell goods the old man hadn’t provided him with.’

  ‘Stolen goods! You’re saying Fred dealt in stolen goods?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. If I nicked anything new – or even nearly new – Mottershead would pass it on to Fred, who’d sell it off at a slight discount.’ He chuckled. ‘And do you know what’s ironic – some of the stolen goods that Fred sold from his father’s stall had actually been stolen from his father!’

  ‘So Fred fenced the goods and then split the profits with Mottershead?’

  ‘Yes, and the real beauty of the racket was that Howerd Electrical had a reputation in Whitebridge for absolute honesty – the old man was a God-fearing Catholic, you know – so it never occurred to anybody that some of the goods might be a bit dodgy.’

  And so Fred had abused his position and cheated his father, Paniatowski thought.

  Worse than that, he had risked his father’s reputation, because if he’d been caught, there would have been plenty of people who would think the old man was in on it.

  A sudden fresh wave of depression washed over her. She had discovered a minor racket which had been played out nearly a quarter of a century earlier – but where did that get her?

  ‘Did Howerd ever have a falling out with Mottershead, like the one you had?’ she asked hopefully.

  Brown shook his head. ‘They never exchanged a cross word, as far as I know.’

  ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it, that Mottershead cheated Howerd just as he cheated you, and that Howerd found out about it?’

  ‘Mottershead would never even have dreamed of cheating Fred,’ Brown said, with conviction.

  ‘How can you be so sure of that?’

  ‘Would you cheat your best friend?’

  ‘They were best friends?’ Paniatowski asked, incredulously.

 
; ‘Maybe friends is the wrong word,’ Brown admitted, ‘but it’s difficult to find the right one.’ He waved his hands helplessly in the air, then grinned, and added, ‘Do you know, there are some days when I really wish I was Tolstoy.’

  And there are some days when I wish I was one of those detectives you read about in mystery novels, who always seem to know all the answers immediately, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ she assured Walter Brown. ‘Just take your time.’

  ‘I used to know two fellers called Brian King and Eric Dewhurst,’ Brown said. ‘They were very keen fly-fishermen – almost fanatical about it, if the truth be told. They spent nearly all their free time together, but apart from the fishing, they had nothing at all in common. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Brian liked dancing, but Eric had two left feet. Eric was a supporter of the Rovers, but football left Brian cold.’ Brown chuckled. ‘You’d only got to look at their wives to really see how different they were – they’d never have gone in for wife swapping, that pair, because each one thought his own wife was gorgeous and that his mate’s wife wouldn’t have looked at all out of place in a horror movie. And then there was—’

  ‘I get the point,’ Paniatowski interrupted. ‘They’d never have been friends under normal circumstances, but their mutual interest – their mutual obsession – in fly-fishing held them together.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Walter Brown agreed. ‘It created a sort of invisible bond between them – a bond that outsiders, who didn’t share their obsession, couldn’t possibly understand.’

  ‘And Howerd and Mottershead had the same kind of bond?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘So what was it they were interested in?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really know,’ Walter Brown confessed. ‘Whatever it was, they never talked about it when there were ever any other people around – which is more than you could say for Brian and Eric, with their bloody fly-fishing.’