Echoes of the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  If she kept quiet, she might be able to persuade a jury that though she’d killed her father, she’d never meant to.

  And worst of all – from Charlie Woodend’s point of view – if she kept quiet, it still mattered that someone had planted the coloured pencil in the pigeon loft.

  She had one last card to play, Paniatowski told herself – one last trick to pull. And if that didn’t work, it was all over.

  She took her handkerchief out of her pocket, and blew noisily into it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth,’ she said, when she looked up. ‘I’m so terribly, terribly sorry. I got it all wrong, didn’t I?’

  A fresh look of malicious triumph flashed briefly across Elizabeth’s face, and then was gone again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You certainly did get it all wrong.’

  ‘You were quite right when you said earlier that you’re not like me,’ Paniatowski told her. ‘I can see that now. I hated the man who abused me. I knew that it wasn’t all his fault, and that I should forgive him, yet I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. But you’re a much better woman – a much more worthwhile person – than I could ever be.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Elizabeth asked, mystified.

  ‘I understand now,’ Paniatowski said softly. ‘Really I do. I can finally see that when you killed your father, it was an act of love. You simply couldn’t stand to see him suffering any more, could you?’

  It was as if a switch had suddenly clicked in Elizabeth’s head. Her body stiffened, her eyes blazed with something akin to madness.

  ‘An act of love?’ she screamed. ‘Couldn’t stand to see him suffering? Yes, he was suffering – suffering so much that I almost decided to let him live a little longer, just so he could suffer some more!’

  ‘Elizabeth!’ Robert Howerd said.

  ‘He forced himself on me when I was just a little girl. I didn’t want him to, but there was nothing I could do about it. And, God, it hurt, it always hurt. He liked to see me suffer. And then, when I started to grow up, he decided that he didn’t want me any more – and that hurt, too.’

  ‘You knew he’d killed Lilly Dawson, didn’t you?’ asked Paniatowski, dropping all pretence – because pretence was no longer necessary.

  ‘Yes, I knew. From the moment I heard she was dead, I knew that he was responsible. But I didn’t have the details at the time. They came later, when he’d been released from prison, and I had him in my power. Then, I made him tell me everything – made him describe exactly how he’d killed Lilly Dawson and exactly how he’d killed Mottershead.’

  ‘Why would you do that, Elizabeth?’ Robert Howerd asked, in anguish. ‘For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘I wanted to know how Mottershead had died because, after what he’d done to me, I had to be sure he’d suffered.’

  ‘And what about Lilly?’ Paniatowski asked softly.

  ‘I had to be sure she’d suffered too. She deserved to – because she’d taken him away from me.’

  ‘None of this is your fault, Elizabeth,’ Robert Howerd said soothingly. ‘You’re a very sick woman.’

  But it was doubtful if, by that stage, Elizabeth was hearing any voice but her own and the ones in her head.

  ‘My father was never a particularly good Catholic,’ she said pensively, ‘but I think that he held on to his faith right up to the end.’ She smiled, and in some ways it was a beautiful smile, though it also a mad one. ‘I certainly hope he held on to it,’ she continued, and now her face transformed itself into a mask of rage and hatred, ‘because Hell has a special place for Catholics like him!’

  EPILOGUE

  Alicante and London – three days later

  Woodend didn’t like the big airports you found in places like London and Manchester, but he was really quite fond of the one in Alicante.

  It was small enough for you to feel involved, he thought. You could see the planes landing close to the terminal, and when you’d been there a few times – as he had – you started to recognize the waiters in the bars, and be recognized in return. In a way, he supposed, it was a bit like the town bus station of his youth, except that these ‘buses’ were bound for far more exotic destinations than Wigan and Chorley.

  He looked across at the barrier, and saw Joan walking towards him.

  She’d been a big girl when he’d married her, and she was even bigger now, but given the choice of spending his nights with his wife or with a film star with an hourglass figure, he’d plump for his missus every time.

  ‘It’s good to see you, lass,’ he said, kissing her and then hugging her to him. ‘An’ how’s our Annie?’

  ‘She’s champion,’ Joan said.

  Woodend grinned. There was no middle ground for folk from Lancashire, he thought, they were either ‘champion’ or they were ‘poorly’.

  ‘She sends her love,’ Joan told him.

  ‘Well, I should hope she would,’ Woodend replied.

  He picked up his wife’s bag, and led her out of the chilled terminal and into the warm air of a Spanish afternoon.

  ‘An’ how you’ve been, Charlie?’ Joan asked, as they walked towards the car. ‘What have you been gettin’ up to while I’ve been away?’

  ‘Nothin’ much,’ Woodend told her. ‘Paco came round once or twice . . .’

  ‘Now that does surprise me!’

  ‘. . . an’ we usually ended up wanderin’ down to the bar for a few games of dominoes.’

  ‘I worry about you sometimes, Charlie,’ Joan confessed.

  ‘Worry about me? Why?’

  ‘Well, all them years that you were out solvin’ murders, you were usin’ your brain, weren’t you?’

  ‘Well, it certainly helped to,’ Woodend admitted as he opened the boot of the car.

  ‘An’ now that you hardly seem to be usin’ it at all, I’m concerned that it might just waste away.’

  Woodend thought back to the time – only four days earlier – when he had been sitting on his terrace – the large sheet of paper spread out in front of him – trying desperately to work out who Monika’s anonymous caller could possibly be, and why he kept insisting that he couldn’t tell her what she wanted to know.

  ‘You’ve gone all quiet all of a sudden, Charlie,’ Joan said.

  Woodend slammed the boot of the car closed.

  ‘I was just thinkin’,’ he told her. ‘Maybe you’re right about using my brain again – perhaps I should take up crossword puzzles.’

  ‘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.’

  The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police switched off the tape recorder. ‘Well?’ he said.

  The man sitting opposite him – who was in his late forties and was on the edge of looking distinguished – thought for a moment, then said, ‘Where did you get that from, sir?’

  ‘It was sent, anonymously, through the post, Mr Bannerman, but I don’t think there’s any doubt about who sent it, is there?’

  ‘No,’ Bannerman agreed. ‘I don’t think there is.’

  ‘And that is DCI Hall’s voice on the tape, isn’t it?’

  ‘It would never stand up in court,’ Bannerman said.

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ the Commissioner replied. ‘It wouldn’t even stand up before a disciplinary board, where the burden of proof is much less stringent.’

  ‘So we can forget it, can we?’ Bannerman asked hopefully.

  ‘To all intents and purposes, yes, we can most certainly forget it,’ the Commissioner agreed.

  Bannerman breathed a silent sigh of relief. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

  ‘But it does lead us on to another somewhat related matter,’ the Commissioner continued.

  ‘And what might that be, sir?’

  ‘I assume tha
t in the career path you have mapped out for yourself, you’re planning – at some time in the near future – to apply for the position of chief constable somewhere in the shires, and that after that you’ll have your eye on my job when I step down.’

  ‘Yes, that is roughly the plan,’ Bannerman agreed.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I must tell you that I don’t feel I’m in a position in which I can support any such application for promotion. And I should further add that, while you will remain an assistant commissioner here in the Met, you will certainly go no higher, and it might be an idea to look for alternative employment in private industry.’

  ‘I see,’ Bannerman said. ‘Might I ask what’s caused you to reach this decision, sir?’

  ‘I’m afraid I no longer have the confidence in your judgement that I once had, Ralph.’

  ‘Because of what happened twenty-two years ago, when I was a young sergeant?’ Bannerman demanded. ‘Look, sir, whatever I did back then affected nothing – Howerd was guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned.’

  ‘That’s true,’ the Commissioner agreed. ‘And I’m sure there’s not a high-ranking officer at the Yard who didn’t make some kind of mistake on his way up the ladder. I certainly know there are a few skeletons in my closet. But it’s not what you did twenty-two years ago that we’re talking about now.’

  ‘Then what are we talking about?’

  ‘You had carte blanche to send whoever you wanted up to Lancashire to bury your mistakes. And you chose an officer who blabbed the whole thing out to a turnip-top chief inspector in a provincial railway station.’

  ‘Hall had been a very good man up to that point,’ Bannerman protested. ‘I can’t imagine what made him—’

  The Commissioner raised a hand to silence him. ‘It doesn’t matter that he was a good man up to that point,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter that no serious damage was done. What does matter is that you made a serious error of judgement in selecting him, and that means, in turn, that I can never again have the confidence to entrust you with the more “delicate” aspects of policing which pass through this office.’

  ‘But, sir . . .’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bannerman, that will be all,’ the Commissioner said coldly.

  Bannerman rose heavily to his feet. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he replied, trying – with no success – to mask his misery.