Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  The assistant governor takes the woman to the infirmary where her father is lying, and then tactfully withdraws to the other side of the room. From where he has positioned himself, he can’t hear what they are saying – though he can see them clearly enough.

  Mrs Eccles does not kiss her father – or even just touch him – though there is nothing to stop her from doing so. Instead, she looms over the bed like a vulture and talks in a low harsh whisper. Two or three times during her monologue, the dying man does his best to shake his head, but his daughter seems to simply ignore it. Finally, she stops speaking and just stands there – waiting.

  One minute passes, and then two. In the end, Howerd gives her what could be taken for a nod, and she immediately wheels round and walks away from the bed.

  ‘How long has he got to live?’ she asks the assistant governor.

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ the man says carefully.

  ‘I know you’re not,’ Mrs Eccles agrees, with a hint of impatience – the first real emotion she has shown – in her voice. ‘But you must have some idea of how long he’ll last.’

  ‘It’s getting very near to the end,’ the assistant governor admits.

  ‘How near?’ the woman snaps.

  ‘He could last a month or two, or he could be gone in a few days.’

  Mrs Eccles nods, as if that is what she expected to hear. ‘I’ll take him,’ she says.

  ‘That’s all she said? “I’ll take him”?’ Crane asked, incredulously.

  ‘That’s all,’ the assistant governor agreed. ‘And then, without so much as a goodbye to her father, she turned and marched out of the infirmary.’

  The puzzle was finally starting to fit together, and a much clearer picture was beginning to emerge, Colin Beresford thought, as he walked towards the main exit to police headquarters, intent on grabbing a breath of fresh air while he had the chance.

  But that picture still wasn’t clear enough to get cocky about, he cautioned himself. Some of the important details were missing, and that meant that not only were there questions they hadn’t yet got answers to, but there were probably questions they hadn’t even thought to ask.

  He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he didn’t even register the fact that the desk sergeant was waving at him as he walked past, and it was only when the man called out his name that he broke his step and turned around.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘I was looking for your boss, sir, and I wondered if you might know where she was,’ the sergeant explained.

  ‘She’s gone to the morgue, to talk to Dr Shastri,’ Beresford said.

  Although why Shastri should want to talk to her, when she had no connection with the current case, was still a mystery.

  ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter. It’ll probably keep,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘What will probably keep?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘I read in the bulletin that she’s on the lookout for a feller called Michael Eccles.’

  ‘That’s right, she is.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got a Michael Eccles down in the cells. He was arrested this morning. Now, I couldn’t say whether or not it’s the Michael Eccles that you want to get your hands on, but—’

  ‘What was he arrested for?’ Beresford interrupted.

  The sergeant consulted the notes on his desk. ‘For throwing a brick through the window of a house belonging to a Mrs Elizabeth Eccles,’ he said.

  There were days when God seemed to be in a good mood with you, Beresford thought – and this might just turn out to be one of them.

  ‘He’s down in the cells, is he?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ the sergeant agreed.

  ‘Then I think I might just go and have a word with him myself,’ Beresford said.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mike Eccles was a real mess, Beresford decided, looking at him across the interview table – and the state he was in hadn’t just happened overnight, but must have taken years to cultivate.

  And this was the man who Father O’Brien had firmly believed could provide them with some of the answers to their questions, he thought. This wreck was supposed to give them insights into the whole sorry business.

  It was hard to believe that he had anything to contribute – and even harder to work out what questions to ask in order to bring that contribution to the surface.

  Well, he had to start somewhere, Beresford supposed – and the reason why Eccles was there in Whitebridge at all was as good a place as any.

  ‘You threw a brick right through your wife’s front room window,’ Beresford said.

  ‘Wasn’t me,’ Eccles replied, automatically.

  ‘You were the only person on the street when the patrol car arrived. Besides, there were at least a dozen women, peeping from behind their curtains, who saw you do it.’

  ‘She should have let me in,’ Eccles said sulkily, abandoning all pretence of innocence. ‘I was only there for what was rightfully mine.’

  ‘Really?’ Beresford asked. ‘And just what was rightfully yours?’

  ‘A lot of money. Thousands of pounds. Maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds.’

  ‘And it was rightfully yours because . . . ?’

  ‘Because I earned it.’

  ‘How?’ Beresford wondered.

  ‘I married the bitch, didn’t I? They said that was all I needed to do. After that, they told me, I could just sit back and wait till the money rolled in.’

  ‘You still haven’t said where the money was coming from?’ Beresford pointed out.

  ‘We were supposed to get part of the family fortune when her dad was made joint managing director of the firm. Only that never happened like it was supposed to, did it? Because her dad got sent to prison, and the rest of the family didn’t want anythin’ to do with us.’

  ‘I thought that they agreed to pay you a small allowance every month,’ Beresford said.

  ‘An allowance!’ Eccles repeated in disgust. ‘An allowance was no good to me. I didn’t want to live in a terraced house for the rest of my life. I wanted expensive cars an’ a big mansion with its own swimmin’ pool.’

  ‘So you left your wife and set off to find your fortune elsewhere?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ Eccles agreed – failing completely to see the obvious incongruity between his statement and his present condition.

  ‘And now you’re back in Whitebridge,’ Beresford said.

  ‘I am. I’ve come back to claim what’s due to me.’

  Just what kind of creature was this he was dealing with here, Beresford wondered angrily.

  His own mother had been struck down with Alzheimer’s disease in her early sixties, and for years he had tended to her, at whatever the personal cost to himself. It had been hard – very hard – but he had done it because he knew what was right. Yet Eccles felt under no such obligation to his family. The bastard had not got exactly what he wanted, so he had simply taken off. And now . . .

  Calm down! Beresford told himself. When you’re conducting an interview, you have to stay calm.

  But even as one part of his brain was issuing this instruction, there was another part of it – outraged at Eccles’s behaviour – which knew that he was fighting a losing battle.

  ‘You’ve got a real brass neck on you, haven’t you, Mike?’ he asked, with a mixture of anger and contempt.

  But both the tone and the nature of the words themselves seemed to go completely over the other man’s head.

  ‘What do you mean – a brass neck?’ Mike Eccles asked.

  ‘What I mean is that a proper man wouldn’t expect anything if he’d behaved as disgracefully you have,’ Beresford said, heatedly.

  ‘Disgracefully?’ Eccles said, with evident surprise. ‘Me?’

  He was beyond redemption, Beresford thought. He would never see himself as other men saw him, and it was pointless to even try to make him.

  ‘A proper man wouldn’t complain that the allowance he was getting f
rom his wife’s grandfather wasn’t enough to keep him in the style he’d expected,’ he said, trying – despite everything – to hold up a mirror in which Eccles could see his own worthlessness. ‘A proper man would think it was his duty to get a job, so he could support his wife and daughter himself.’

  ‘Say that last bit again,’ Eccles told him.

  ‘I said a proper man would think it was his duty to get a job, so he could support his wife and daughter himself.’

  Eccles grinned, revealing a mouthful of rotting teeth.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he said.

  ‘I have a problem which I think you may be able to help me with,’ Dr Shastri told her visitor.

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘You have a problem? The great Dr Shastri has a problem?’ she said. ‘The age of miracles has come at last.’ Then she saw that Shastri was looking unusually serious, and added, ‘I’m sorry, Doc, what is this problem?’

  ‘Did you know that I was the one who carried out a post-mortem on Frederick Howerd?’ Shastri asked.

  ‘No, I didn’t. But now you’ve told me, I must admit I’m surprised that you didn’t assign a straightforward case like his to one of your staff.’

  ‘I decided to conduct the autopsy myself because I was told the cause of death was almost certainly lung cancer,’ Shastri said.

  ‘I’m not following you,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘I had a number of students observing me that day, and several of them were already – totally foolishly, in my view – heavy smokers.’

  ‘Ah, and the autopsy was more to do with them than it was to do with Fred Howerd,’ Paniatowski said, understanding.

  ‘Just so,’ Shastri agreed. ‘In fact, my dear Monika, I contemplated inviting you along, since you, too, could have done with a salutary lesson.’

  Paniatowski lit up a cigarette. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said innocently.

  ‘Since it was more a demonstration for the benefit of students than it was an examination to determine the cause of death, I was even more thorough than I normally am,’ Shastri continued.

  ‘I see,’ Paniatowski said – though she didn’t.

  ‘Let us move on,’ Shastri suggested. ‘Let us widen the discussion, and talk in general terms.’

  I wasn’t aware it was a discussion we were having, Paniatowski thought, but she nodded anyway.

  ‘I have carried out a number of autopsies on the cadavers of the terminally ill,’ said Shastri, ‘and I am often faced with the same dilemma.’

  ‘And what dilemma might that be?’

  ‘Though I have no personal experience of taking care of a dying relative, I can imagine how hard it must be,’ Shastri said. ‘The pain of those about to leave the world must, to a certain extent, be shared by those who are watching them leave it. And that is not the only problem. The dying often need constant attention, and those administering it are only too well aware that whatever they do, it is ultimately pointless, and death will claim his victory.’ Shastri shook her head. ‘The whole process must be completely exhausting. So it is hardly surprising, is it, that some of those loving carers eventually lose all perspective, and behave in a way which they would not normally even contemplate?’

  ‘Go on,’ Paniatowski said.

  Shastri hesitated. ‘This conversation is being held in confidence, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Very well, then. If there are any questions as to the actual cause of any particular death, I am required by law to report them to the appropriate authorities.’ She hesitated again. ‘Yes, that is what I am required to do, but sometimes, having considered the circumstances of those left behind, I ignore that requirement. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Paniatowski told her gravely. ‘But I promise you that the moment I leave this room, I’ll forget I ever heard it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Shastri said. ‘And now I would like you to tell me about Mrs Eccles.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Was she, in your opinion, a good and caring daughter, who would have done everything in her power to make her father’s last few days on earth as comfortable as they could possibly be?’

  ‘You’re suggesting that Fred Howerd didn’t die from lung cancer at all, aren’t you?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Shastri countered. ‘I’m merely asking you if Mrs Eccles was a good daughter.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Paniatowski persisted.

  ‘Yes,’ Shastri admitted.

  ‘So what did kill him?’

  ‘The autopsy revealed that he died as the result of being injected with a massive dose of morphine,’ Shastri said.

  ‘The sergeant, hearing the disturbance, goes upstairs to see what’s happened,’ said the tinny voice from the small tape recorder on the chief constable’s desk. ‘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 the floor.’

  Paniatowski reached across the desk and switched the recorder off. ‘I could have played you this before, but there didn’t seem much point,’ she said.

  ‘And there’s still not much point now,’ George Baxter said. ‘I can think of at least four good reasons why it was a waste of time my even listening to it.’ He began to count them off on his fingers. ‘One: you didn’t have official authorization to make the recording. Two: there are no witnesses to confirm that it was, in fact, you who made it. Three: Hall says nothing that he can’t explain away as being no more than a joke in bad taste. And four: you can’t prove that the whole tape isn’t a complete fake.’ He laid his hand back on the desk. ‘In other words, as a piece of evidence, it has absolutely no value at all.’

  ‘I know that,’ Paniatowski said. ‘But you believe it shows Charlie Woodend’s innocence, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I believe it – as a man,’ Baxter said. ‘As a man, I’m more than willing to accept that Charlie Woodend is as pure as the driven snow and that Bannerman is a real snake in the grass. But, don’t you see, that doesn’t make any difference – because, as a chief constable, I still know Fred Howerd was wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and that has to be investigated. And if the evidence points to Charlie Woodend fitting him up – and apart from this tape, which is no evidence at all, it does – then Charlie will just have to take the fall.’

  ‘I think I may have found a way for you to be able to forget all about the pencil and still be able to sleep at night,’ Paniatowski said.

  Baxter shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘You’re wrong about that,’ he said. ‘I know you’re so desperate to save Charlie Woodend that you’ll believe almost anything yourself, Monika, but there’s no way in hell that I could ever even contemplate overlooking that pencil.’

  ‘The pencil doesn’t matter,’ Paniatowski said. ‘The pencil doesn’t change anything.’

  Baxter looked at her pityingly. ‘A lot of this is my fault,’ he said. ‘It was a big mistake to put you in charge of this investigation. It’s all been far too much of a strain on you – I can see that now – and that’s why, effective from this moment, I’m sending you on sick leave.’

  ‘The pencil doesn’t change anything,’ Paniatowski repeated firmly. ‘And once I’ve explained to you what really happened back in 1951 – and what really happened only last week – you’ll see that for yourself.’

  Baxter sighed. ‘I’ll give you five minutes for this explanation of yours, but you’ll have to promise to do something in return.’

>   ‘What?’

  ‘When the five minutes are up, you’ll hand me your warrant card . . .’

  ‘My warrant card!’

  ‘. . . and I will keep it here – in my desk drawer – until I decide you’re fit enough to return to your normal duties.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ Paniatowski protested.

  ‘Those are my terms,’ Baxter told her. ‘Take them or leave them.’

  ‘I’ll take them,’ Paniatowski said resignedly. ‘What choice do I have?’

  Baxter had promised her five minutes, but the conversation which followed went on for nearly an hour. When Paniatowski had finally finished explaining, Baxter said, ‘It’s just a theory. You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It all hangs together, though, doesn’t it?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘There is a certain logic to it,’ Baxter agreed, reluctantly, ‘but there’s also very little you can actually prove. Most of the evidence is circumstantial, at best.’

  But he was weakening, Paniatowski thought – he was definitely weakening, and the time had come to go for all or nothing.

  She took her warrant card out of her pocket, and placed it on the desk, as she’d promised she would.

  ‘Tell me honestly, sir, do you think I’ve got it right?’ she asked.

  He could have swept up the warrant card in his big hands and placed it in his desk drawer. But he didn’t.

  Instead, sounding as if the words were being dragged from him, he said, ‘Yes, Chief Inspector, I do think you’ve got it right.’

  The warrant card – the magic key to the life she loved – was still sitting there on the desk, but she did not trust herself to look at it.

  ‘So, in the light of that, might I ask what action you are proposing to take, sir?’ she said.

  ‘The only way you’re ever going to make your case is by getting a confession,’ Baxter said.

  ‘The only way I’m ever going to make my case is by getting a confession,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Does that mean I’m still on the case?’