Thicker Than Water

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Did you beat your wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you account for the bruising on her body?’

  ‘She did it to herself.’

  ‘You surely can’t expect me to believe that?’

  ‘She despised herself for not living up to the standards I set her. Whenever she failed me – and she often did – she would punish herself. I believe the technical term for it is self-harm.’

  ‘It would have been physically impossible for her to have inflicted some of her injuries on herself.’

  ‘I only have your word for that.’

  ‘Let’s go back to Gretchen,’ Paniatowski suggested. ‘Did you buy that motorcycle for her?’

  There was the slightest of hesitations, then Danbury said, ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Because she was your mistress?’

  ‘Because good au pairs are hard to find, and when you have found one, you do your best to keep her happy.’

  ‘It seems a very expensive way of keeping her happy.’

  ‘It would – to you. But given the mill’s turnover, it’s a mere drop in the ocean to me.’

  ‘Did you tell your wife you’d bought Gretchen the BMW?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I don’t care what you believe.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think that the motorbike might have played a key role in the chain of events,’ Paniatowski said. ‘How does this sound to you? Gretchen insists you buy the bike, and since you’re besotted with her, that’s what you do. But then your wife finds out about it. She realises you’re having an affair with the au pair, and says she’s going to divorce you. And that’s when you start making plans to kill her.’

  ‘You really are pathetic,’ Danbury told her. ‘First of all, as I’ve already told you, Jane knew I’d bought the BMW for Gretchen. But let’s just say for the moment that she didn’t know. However would she have found out?’

  ‘She could have noticed that the money was gone from the bank account.’

  ‘I handle all the money in my house. Jane never even saw the bank statements. She had no idea what was in the account.’

  ‘But if she’d had suspicions about Gretchen’s expensive toy, might she not, just once, have decided to look through the accounts?’

  Danbury shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t have dared.’

  ‘Dared?’ Paniatowski said, pouncing on the word. ‘Dared!’

  ‘Yes, dared,’ Danbury answered. ‘I make no apology for being the master of my house, and for demanding fear of my displeasure and respect for my authority from my wife and children. The men who built this town up from nothing knew all about fear and respect. I march with them, and if others choose not to, then it is those others who are out of step.’

  It sounded like a speech he had worked on, and already used several times, Paniatowski thought – which was probably exactly what it was.

  She understood him now, or rather, she understood how he understood himself. He was William Danbury – a hard man who kept himself pure in soft times, a beacon of traditional values managing to keep afloat on a sea of liberal laxity and weakness.

  ‘I’m an intelligent man, don’t you think?’ Danbury asked.

  He was trying to take control of the interview, Paniatowski realised, and if he’d been anyone else, she would have immediately reined him in. But in Danbury’s case, the interview might prove to be much more productive if she let him feel he was in charge.

  ‘I said, I’m an intelligent man, aren’t I?’

  ‘Are you?’

  Danbury snorted. ‘If you can’t see for yourself how bright I am, then you’re even stupider than I took you to be.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘If I’d wanted to kill my wife, don’t you think I’d have gone about it in a different way?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Don’t you think I’d have arranged it in such a manner that it would have been impossible for you to accuse me of the crime?’

  ‘Since your opinion of the police is that we’re incredibly stupid, perhaps you didn’t think it was necessary to come up with a more elaborate scheme,’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘I never said that all the police were stupid – only that you were. You are a woman in a job which should plainly have been reserved for a man, and you are proving to be just as inadequate as might have been expected,’ Danbury countered. He paused for a second. ‘Let me ask you another question, my “brilliant” chief inspector – have you considered the possibility, even for a moment, that someone other than me might have killed Jane?’

  ‘Of course I have, but you are our prime suspect, which is why it’s you, rather than anyone else, sitting in that chair.’

  ‘And what exactly is it that makes me the prime suspect?’

  ‘You have the means, the motive and the opportunity to have committed the murder.’

  ‘And so does Gretchen. The girl is besotted with me – and, unlike me, she is not particularly bright. Perhaps she thought, in her muddled female way, that with Jane out of the way, she could fall straight into my arms.’

  ‘You really are scum, aren’t you?’ Paniatowski asked.

  She had not meant to say the words aloud, but she was certainly not sorry that she had.

  The strain of not knowing, one way or the other, was becoming unbearable, and despite having told himself that the only sensible thing would be to wait until it was light, Alfie Clayton found himself driving towards Lower Mill Woods nearly an hour before daybreak. Yet even as he approached the woods, he was still not sure he would stop and get out of the car.

  There were two good – if opposing – reasons for simply driving on, he told himself.

  The first was that if there was nothing under the oak tree, the expedition would have turned out to be a waste of time, and he would feel a complete bloody fool.

  The second (and much more terrifying) reason was that what he feared could be under the tree might actually be there. And if it was, did he want to be the one to find it?

  ‘No, of course I don’t want to be the one to find it,’ he said aloud, though there was only his steering wheel to hear him. ‘Who, in their right mind, would want to find it?’

  But someone had to take the responsibility, and if not the man who had the suspicion, then who?

  He parked at the edge of the woods, and got his gardening spade and torch from the boot of his car. He had wondered how hard it would be to retrace his previous day’s route – after all, it was still dark and unless you were an expert, one tree looked pretty like another – but his feet seemed to know the way, and without taking even one wrong turning, he found himself approaching the oak.

  Even from a distance, his torch could pick out the small hole at the base of the oak, with soil heaped on either side of it. So perhaps Tony had been right after all, and it had been the work of a badger or fox, burrowing itself out a new home.

  Then he reached the hole and looked down into it.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he gasped.

  He dropped his spade and torch, and even though he could no longer see into the hole, he turned away.

  He was finding that standing up was too much of an effort, so he sank to his knees. He didn’t know whether to throw up or burst into tears, and then realised that he was doing both.

  Later, he would say that he had no idea how long he had been kneeling there, retching and sobbing. It could have been as little as one minute, it could have been as much as ten, but however long it had been, it had felt like an eternity.

  But eventually the vomiting stopped, the tears dried up, and he climbed back to his feet.

  If he had been thinking clearly, he would have realised that the best thing he could do in these circumstances would be to go back to his car, drive to Whitebridge, and stop at the first police station he came to – but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and instead, he picked up first his torch and then his spade.

 
EIGHT

  When her elbow slipped along the desk, thus denying her head the support of her outstretched palm, Paniatowski realised – with a sudden jolt – that she must have been asleep.

  She groaned, and looked across at the desk clock with bleary eyes. It was more than twenty-four hours since she’d known the comfort of her bed, she realised. That couldn’t be good for anyone, she thought, and it certainly wasn’t good for a middle-aged woman who’d given birth to twins only a few months earlier.

  Her hand reached automatically for her cigarettes. Even the thought of smoking was revolting, but she lit up anyway.

  As she was contemplating drowning the taste of the cigarette with the equally loathsome taste of yet another black coffee, there was a knock on the door, and Chief Inspector Barrington walked in.

  From the ashen look on his face, it was obvious to Paniatowski that he was not the bearer of good tidings.

  ‘Fifteen minutes ago, a man turned up at Whitebridge General Hospital with a small child,’ Barrington said. ‘He wanted the doctors to do something for her – but there was nothing they could do, because she’d been dead for at least a day. We think it’s Melanie Danbury.’

  ‘What do you mean – you think it’s Melanie?’ Paniatowski demanded.

  ‘The body was buried at the base of an oak tree. Some animal – probably a badger, though it could have been a fox – had partly dug it up, and had eaten most of the face.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Paniatowski gasped.

  ‘The problem is, I don’t know what to do next,’ Barrington confessed. ‘Do I assume it’s her, and call off the search, or do we keep on looking?’

  ‘How many more children of her age have been reported missing in the area in the last few days?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Well, none.’

  ‘So chances are, it is her.’

  ‘I agree, but before we can stop looking, we really need to get some sort of formal identification. And who do we get to make that identification? The mother’s dead. The grandparents – from what I can gather – have hardly ever seen her. She was virtually never taken out of the house, so we can’t rely on the neighbours, and Mrs Danbury seemed to have no social life, so we can’t call in one of her friends. And as for Mr Danbury …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If he didn’t kill his daughter, I’ve no wish to put him through seeing her as she is now …’

  ‘And if he did kill her, he’s going to deny it’s her anyway,’ Paniatowski supplied.

  ‘Well, exactly.’

  ‘I think there might be one person who could make the identification,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘A police spokesman has confirmed that a thirty-seven-year-old man has been taken into custody and is being questioned about the murder of Jane Danbury,’ the newsreader from Radio Whitebridge announced.

  ‘Shit!’ said Paniatowski, glaring at her car radio as if it was responsible for leaking the news.

  She should have been expecting it, she supposed. Once one civilian knew about an arrest – and in this case there were three, the manager of the Royal Victoria and his two assistants – then it was not long before it became public knowledge. Still, it was a great pity that the bankers and businessmen and lawyers who made up William Danbury’s circle of admirers couldn’t have been kept in the dark about it for a few more hours.

  The newsreader droned on – there had been a demonstration against the proposed site for a new electricity substation, a local actor had landed a part in an American comedy series, Whitebridge Rovers’ gate was up ten percent over the previous year – but Paniatowski was only half-listening.

  Then, as she pulled up in front of Dr Lucas’ house, the announcer said, ‘In breaking news, a dead child has been discovered in Lower Mills Woods by Mr Alfred Clayton, a local lorry driver. Mr Clayton took the child to Whitebridge General Hospital, where the death was confirmed. As yet, the Mid Lancs police have issued no statement.’

  ‘Shit!’ Paniatowski said – and this time, it was almost a bellow.

  That information should never have been broadcast, because everyone who heard it would automatically assume that the dead girl was Melanie Danbury.

  Of course, it probably was Melanie, but that was still to be confirmed.

  She got out of the car, walked to the front door and rang the bell.

  It was Dr Lucas himself who opened the door. Though it was still early in the morning, he was fully dressed.

  It was obvious he was angry, and the anger showed not just in his face, but in his whole body. He seemed much taller and more solid than the last time they’d met – and much more purposeful, too.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No, you bloody well can’t come in. My best friend has just lost his wife, and must be out of his mind worrying about what’s happened to his little daughter. And what do you do – you arrest him! It was him you arrested, wasn’t it? He is the thirty-seven-year-old man who it said on the radio just now was helping the police with their enquiries?’

  ‘Yes, it’s him,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Then you can go to hell!’

  She could come straight out with the reason she was there, she thought, but even for a doctor, who was used to death, what she was about to ask him to do wouldn’t be easy, and she’d much prefer to broach the matter more gently – and inside the house.

  ‘Please let me come in,’ she said. ‘We really do need to talk, Dr Lucas. It’s important.’

  Perhaps it was the urgency in her tone that made his anger drain away, she thought, or maybe it was simply that he found the anger too exhausting to sustain for long.

  Whatever the reason, his shoulders suddenly drooped, his mouth slackened, and he was once again the well-meaning and slightly weedy Dr Lucas she was getting to know.

  ‘I’ve been under a lot of strain,’ he said, in a tone she recognised as suitable for framing an apology. ‘I spent most of the night with Pete Hutton, you see.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, of course there’s no reason why you should know. He’s a patient of mine, and he’s in the terminal stages of cancer.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought there was much you could do for him.’

  ‘There isn’t. I was there mostly for Betty’s sake. She’s his wife, and she has no relatives to turn to, so I thought she would appreciate the support. I sometimes think I’m more of a priest than a doctor.’ Lucas laughed, though there was very little humour in it. ‘But that’s no excuse for laying into you. I’m sure you think you’re doing the right thing, even if I know you’re doing the wrong one.’

  He led her down the hallway into the living room.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?’ he asked. ‘It may take some time, because Mrs Dale isn’t up yet, and I don’t know where she keeps everything. Still, I expect I can manage.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Paniatowski assured him. ‘You didn’t hear the end of the news bulletin, did you?’

  ‘No,’ Lucas admitted. ‘As soon as I heard that William had been arrested, I switched it off.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘We think we’ve found Melanie Danbury’s body.’

  The colour drained from Dr Lucas’ face, and he seemed to be fighting for breath. He looked around for something to grab hold of, and settled on the back of the nearest armchair.

  ‘But … but you can’t have found her!’ he gasped. ‘You simply can’t have!’

  ‘You must have known that it was always a possibility,’ Paniatowski said softly.

  ‘Yes, but just because something’s possible doesn’t mean you think it’s going to actually happen,’ Lucas said. There was a slightly hysterical note in his voice, but his colour was returning, and he was feeling confident enough to relinquish his grip on the armchair. ‘I mean, it’s William’s daughter we’re talking about here!
’

  And that, on its own, should have been enough to protect her, should it? Paniatowski wondered. That, alone, should have raised her above the dangers that mere ordinary mortals have to face?

  ‘Poor William!’ Lucas said.

  Bugger poor William – what about poor Melanie? Paniatowski wanted to scream at him.

  But instead, she said, ‘We’d very much appreciate it if you would look at the body, and try to make a formal identification.’

  ‘Try to make it?’ Lucas said. ‘Why should I need to try?’

  She told him what the badger had done.

  ‘That’s just terrible,’ Lucas moaned. ‘William will be destroyed when he hears about it.’

  ‘Since she was your patient, we thought you might be able to base your identification on something other than her face,’ Paniatowski said. ‘You might recognise a scar or a birthmark, for example, which other people wouldn’t even know about, and …’

  It was obvious that Lucas was not listening – or rather that he wasn’t listening to her.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked, in a much louder voice.

  ‘What? No, nothing’s the matter. I thought I heard the phone ring, that’s all. I’m expecting Betty Hutton to call me any minute now. What were you saying, chief inspector?’

  ‘I was asking you if Melanie had a scar or birthmark that might make identification easier.’

  ‘No, there’s nothing like that.’

  ‘But it is possible you’ll be able to give us a positive identification, if it does turn out to be Melanie?’

  ‘I’m … I’m willing to give it a try,’ Lucas said uncertainly. ‘But first I’ll have to ring Betty Hutton, to tell her where I’ll be.’

  ‘All right,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘And if she wants to talk, I’ll have to let her. I can’t just hang up on a woman whose husband is dying before her very eyes.’

  No, Paniatowski thought, he probably couldn’t.

  ‘I’ll wait in the car,’ she said.

  Chief Inspector Barrington looked out of his office window at the car park below. There had been a long line of volunteers queuing up there the previous morning, but now there was not a soul to be seen.