Why would there be? he asked himself. They would all have heard the news on the radio, and assumed that Melanie Danbury had been found.
He looked up at the clock. Soon, the Manchester police helicopters that he had requested for that day’s search would be setting off from their base. The choppers would start costing the Mid Lancs police money the moment they were in the air, and at the end of the day, the chief constable would find himself presented with a whacking bill.
Barrington could all too easily imagine Pickering furiously demanding to know why the helicopters had been called in when they’d already found the body.
And what would he say in his own defence?
That the body had not been formally identified at the time?
That they still hadn’t been sure that it was Melanie that Alfie Clayton had found?
But it had to be Melanie – it simply had to be.
He picked up the phone.
‘Get me the Manchester police,’ he told the switchboard.
Dr Shastri had gone to Preston, where she was appearing as an expert witness in a major trial, and it was one of her assistants who pulled back the sheet covering the large, adult-sized trolley, to reveal the tiny dead infant beneath.
‘Oh, my God!’ Dr Lucas choked.
Paniatowski said nothing, but exactly the same words bounced around her brain like a demented squash ball.
Oh, my God … oh, my God … oh, my God …
This could have been one of my children, she thought – this could easily have been one of my children.
‘Is it Melanie?’ someone asked, in a calm, professional voice – and Paniatowski realised, much to her amazement, that the words had come from her own mouth.
Dr Lucas stared down at the dead child.
‘Could you turn her over?’ he asked the mortuary assistant.
Gently – as if he were handling a live baby – the assistant picked up the corpse and held it, face down, a few inches above the trolley.
‘Well?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘I don’t know. I think it’s her, but I’m not sure.’
‘Close your eyes for a moment,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s a technique we use to bring back people’s memories. Please just do as I ask.’
Lucas closed his eyes.
‘You’ve been called to the Danbury house because Melanie isn’t feeling too well. All right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve just parked your car in the driveway. I want you to picture what you can see as you get out of it. You walk over to the front door. Can you see the front door?’
‘Yes.’
‘You ring the bell. Who answers it?’
‘Jane.’
‘She leads you upstairs. You both enter the baby’s room. She’s lying in her cot. You pick her up. Can you picture picking her up?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you do next?’
‘I put her on the changing table, which is next to the cot, so I can get a better look at her.’
‘Is there anything wrong with her?’
‘She has a rash, but it’s a perfectly normal baby rash and there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Open your eyes,’ Paniatowski commanded. ‘Do it quickly. Is this Melanie, Dr Lucas?’
Lucas gazed at the body for a few seconds, then said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get someone else to make the identification.’
‘Jesus Christ, there is no one else!’ Paniatowski said, exasperatedly. ‘Don’t you understand that?’
‘There must surely be someone …’
‘There isn’t! So tell me – is it Melanie or isn’t it?’
‘If I said it was her, you’d call off the search, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘We would.’
‘But supposing I was wrong,’ Lucas said, in an agonised voice. ‘Supposing it was some other infant instead? Then Melanie would still be out there somewhere, but nobody would be looking for her.’
‘If I was holding a gun to your head, and you had to answer yes or no, what would your answer be?’ Paniatowski demanded.
‘On balance, I’d say it probably was her,’ Lucas replied, with some reluctance.
Paniatowski sighed. It wasn’t a good answer, but it was probably the best answer she was going to get.
Archie Danbury had been waiting outside the Fox and Hounds when it opened its doors at ten o’clock, and now – though it was still only a quarter to eleven – he was already on his third pint.
What went on between a man and his wife was nobody’s business but theirs, and that bobby had had no right to threaten him – no right at all – he thought angrily, as he sank another inch of beer.
‘But he scared you, didn’t he?’ asked a nagging, unfamiliar voice in the back of his mind. ‘He really put the shits up you.’
‘No, he didn’t scare me,’ Danbury muttered.
‘So why didn’t you give Ethel a good pasting last night? You know she was asking for it.’
The voice – this stranger in his head – was right, Archie thought as he ordered another pint. He was no longer in the mood to give Ethel a thrashing, but when he got back home, he would do it anyway – because that was what he needed to do in order to get his manhood back.
William Danbury glared at Paniatowski across the interview table.
‘For the hundredth time, I did not kill my wife and I did not kidnap my own child,’ he said.
‘I’m not here to question you,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘I’m here to give you some information.’
‘And what information might that be?’
‘We can’t be certain until we’ve run the blood tests, but we think we may have found Melanie’s body.’
The anger drained from Danbury’s eyes, but before they had time to change to another natural expression, he brought his mental shutters down, and it was like staring at a blank wall.
‘You think you’ve found her?’ he said. ‘You need to run some tests? Surely, it should be obvious whether it’s her or not.’
‘The body had been subjected to certain stresses which have made identification rather difficult,’ Paniatowski said carefully.
‘It can’t have been decay,’ Danbury said. ‘She hasn’t been missing for that long.’
‘No, it wasn’t decay.’
‘Then what was it?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
Now why had she said that? Paniatowski wondered.
Why should she choose to spare the feelings of man who she was convinced had cold-bloodedly murdered his own child?
Could it be that she was having some doubts about his guilt?
Of course not! All the evidence pointed to him. There was no one else in the frame.
‘You didn’t ask me where we found the body, Mr Danbury,’ she said.
‘Does that matter?’
No – not if you already knew, Paniatowski thought. He’d never asked exactly how his wife had been murdered, either – because he’d known that, too.
‘Melanie is dead,’ Danbury said. ‘I have been mentally preparing myself for the news, and now it’s happened. The details are unimportant. They won’t bring her back.’
‘We still don’t know for certain that it’s her,’ Paniatowski cautioned.
‘Of course it’s her!’ Danbury said. ‘If another child of her age had gone missing, don’t you think the parents would have reported it straight away?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said.
‘But nowhere near as sorry as you’ll be when you realise you’ve made a mistake and have to let me go,’ Danbury said. ‘Because when that happens, I’ll have your job for what you’ve put me through. You can bank on it.’
The only reason Archie Danbury had stopped drinking was because he had run out of money, but by that time he had already sunk seven pints and convinced himself that not only had his wife earned a good thrashing, but that if that bobby came a
round to his house again, he would break the bugger’s nose for him.
He had his keys in his pocket, but he could not be bothered to fish them out, and when he reached his front door, he simply banged on it with his big fist.
He expected to hear the sound of his wife scuttling down the corridor, but instead there was only silence.
He banged again, harder this time.
Still nothing.
‘Ethel, are you there?’ he shouted, knowing his words would penetrate the thin wooden door. ‘Let me in, Ethel, before I lose my temper with you.’
Half a minute passed, and that grew into a minute, and then two.
He couldn’t believe what was happening.
He really couldn’t bloody believe it!
Finally he gave up, fumbled in his pocket for his keys, and, after a couple of attempts, managed to insert the key in the lock.
As he entered the house, he turned around and saw that several of the neighbours were watching him from the other side of the street. They were laughing at him, he thought – laughing at a man who couldn’t even control his own wife. Well, Ethel would pay for this – by God she would.
He slammed the front door behind him and stormed down the corridor. Then he reached the living room door, and came to an abrupt halt.
Ethel was standing at the far end of the room. She had his double-barrelled shotgun in her hands, and she was pointing it directly at him.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing, woman?’ he demanded.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ Ethel said.
‘Put that gun down before you do some damage,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘It’ll be much worse for you if you don’t do as I say right now.’
‘I’m not putting it down.’
‘You’d never use it on me. You know you wouldn’t,’ Archie said, stepping into the living room with some caution, but clearly intent on crossing to where his wife was standing.
He’s right, Ethel thought, as she watched him approach. I will never use it on him. I’ve made just one more mistake in a life that feels as if it’s been nothing but mistakes.
And then she thought of Jane, lying there in the lounge of her big house – the house that Archie would never allow her to visit – with her head smashed in.
Still moving slowly, Archie was almost halfway across the room. He was smiling now. It was a triumphant smile – a vicious smile.
Ethel closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.
Paniatowski could recognise an ambush when she saw one, and there was no question in her mind that the three men who were sitting in the chief constable’s office were just that.
Individually, the three men were a local estate agent-cum-town councillor, one of Whitebridge’s most senior magistrates, and the managing director of the ironworks. Collectively, they were members of the police authority.
The chief constable was also present. Pickering was trying to look as if this whole situation was as much a surprise to him as it was to Paniatowski – and maybe, she thought in fairness, it was.
‘These gentlemen requested an informal meeting with you, and I agreed to it,’ the chief constable said. ‘Do you have any objection to such a meeting, DCI Paniatowski?’
‘No, none at all,’ Paniatowski replied.
She couldn’t blame Pickering, she supposed. He was still not confirmed in his post, and it would be foolish of him to offend people with influence. So the important thing now was not that he had allowed the meeting to happen, but whether he backed whatever she said during that meeting.
It would be the ironmaster, Alderman Horace Cudlip, who took the lead, she thought.
Cudlip was approaching seventy. He was a heavy man with a walrus moustache, who wore thick tweed suits whatever the weather, and smoked a pipe. When he spoke, it was slowly and ponderously, like the mill owners in the 1930s black-and-white films. He could almost have been regarded as a comical figure, but he had a sharp mind and a great deal of influence, so it would have been a mistake to underestimate him.
‘You are probably aware, chief inspector, that as the police authority, it is not our function to intervene in the day-to-day policing activities,’ Cudlip said.
‘Yes, I am aware of that,’ Paniatowski replied neutrally.
‘Nevertheless, we do not consider it beyond our remit to offer advice when we consider that such advice might be necessary.’
What was it that Dr Lucas had said about William Danbury’s admirers?
‘These men who admire him would have done everything they could to block any prosecution mounted against William, and since some of them are in the police force, and several are members of the judiciary, the prosecution would have faltered and died before it even reached the first hurdle.’
Yes, that was it.
‘Advice,’ she said aloud. ‘Well, I’m certainly willing to listen to some advice.’
‘We recognise that you are quite within your rights to treat William Danbury as a suspect in this matter …’ Cudlip began.
‘It’s not about rights, Alderman Cudlip,’ Paniatowski interrupted him. ‘It’s about duty. It’s about seeing justice prevail.’
‘Er … quite so. But isn’t there scope for a little compassion, here? After all, William has recently lost both his wife and his daughter, so while we are not asking you to change your attitude to him for the present, wouldn’t it be possible, while the investigation proceeds, to release him on police bail?’
‘On compassionate grounds?’
‘Exactly so.’
Isn’t that a bit like the story of the barrister defending a man who’d killed both his parents, and asking the jury to feel sorry for his client because he was an orphan? Paniatowski wondered.
Less than an hour earlier, India Road had been the same nondescript mill town street it had been for generations. But that had all changed after the shooting. Now, there were police barricades in place five doors up from the Danbury house, and five doors down from it. Now, there was a line of police vehicles parked directly in front of the Danbury house, and behind the off-side of those vehicles squatted highly trained officers with pistols.
Nor was police activity confined simply to street level. At the bedroom window of every house from which it was theoretically possible to take a shot at the Danburys’ front door, there was a police marksman, armed with a high-powered rifle and more than willing to show just how good he was.
From behind one of the police barricades, Chief Superintendent Briscoe – a mountain of a man, who had a chest broad enough to display almost all the medals he had won as a Royal Marine – surveyed his deployment pattern with calm satisfaction. There were many aspects of police work that he quite enjoyed, he thought, but it was from operations like this one that he got the most pleasure.
An unmarked car pulled up just beyond the barricade, and a man in his thirties got out.
‘That’s him, sir,’ said Sergeant Cox, Briscoe’s bagman. ‘That’s DI Beresford.’
‘Is it, by God,’ Briscoe said. ‘Well, let’s see if we can find out what makes him so special.’
‘Do you know Mrs Ethel Danbury well, Detective Inspector?’ Briscoe asked Beresford.
‘No, sir, I don’t. As a matter of fact, I met her for the very first time yesterday.’
‘Hmm,’ Briscoe said pensively. ‘Well, you certainly seem to have made an impression on her.’
‘In what way, sir?’ Beresford asked.
‘We’ll get to that later,’ Briscoe said, ‘but first I’d like to fill in a little of the background. According to the neighbours – who seem to have developed nosiness into an art form – Danbury left the front door open when he came home. He went inside, and there was the sound of shots. Then Mrs Danbury appeared in the hallway and closed the door – and she had a double-barrelled shotgun in her hand. From which we can assume that she shot her husband, don’t you think?’
‘If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been in any state t
o close the front door – in fact, she’d probably have been lying on the living room floor, unconscious,’ Beresford said.
‘Are you sure it was only yesterday that you met the family?’ Briscoe asked, suspiciously.
‘Yes, sir, but it didn’t take long to work out what their home life was like.’
‘That bad, was it?’ Briscoe asked.
‘That bad,’ Beresford confirmed.
‘At any rate, we arrive on the scene, and I get my negotiator – who can normally charm the birds out of the trees – to ring Mrs Danbury. And what do you think she said to him?’
‘I’ve no idea, sir.’
‘Take a guess,’ Briscoe said – and it was more an order than a suggestion.
‘She said she wanted to talk to me,’ Beresford hazarded.
Briscoe nodded. ‘She said she wanted to talk to you – and only to you. Now why was that?’
‘Don’t take your frustration with me out on your missus, because I’ll be coming back to talk to her tomorrow, and if there’s a mark on her, there’ll be consequences,’ Beresford tells Danbury.
‘What, you’ll have me arrested?’ Danbury sneers.
‘No,’ Beresford replies. ‘I’ll beat the shit out of you.’
Mrs Danbury hadn’t been there, Beresford thought, because her husband had exiled her to the kitchen. But she must have heard the exchange through the door, and now she saw him as her defender – her champion.
‘Well, can you explain it?’ Briscoe asked.
‘Maybe she fancies me, sir,’ Beresford suggested – because there was no way that he was going to admit to a superior officer that he’d threatened to beat up a member of the public, however odious that member of the public might have been.
The chief superintendent frowned. ‘Maybe that’s it,’ he said, unconvinced. ‘At any rate, we have three possible courses of action open to us. The first is that we could storm the house – and if I thought there was anyone inside in immediate danger, that is what we would do. But Mrs Danbury assures us that her husband is dead, and since all the neighbours have reported hearing four gunshots, I think it very likely that he is.’
‘I agree, sir.’
‘The second course is that we lay siege to the place until she simply gets tired of it, gives up and comes out. I’m almost inclined to go for that one, but the danger is that, given time, she’ll decide to turn the gun on herself. What do you think?’
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