‘You’re sick,’ Paniatowski said.
‘You’d better keep that bitch in jail forever,’ Danbury told her, ‘because if you let her out, I swear I’ll kill her.’
‘Well, that should teach her a lesson she won’t forget in a hurry,’ Meadows said.
‘You might want to kill your father’s wife, but you didn’t kill your own, did you, William?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘No, I didn’t. I told you right from the start that I didn’t.’
‘And you didn’t pay to have someone else kill her, either.’
‘No.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘I’m here because some idiot decided to put a woman in charge of the investigation.’
‘No, you’re not,’ Paniatowski contradicted him. ‘You’re here because you refused to give me an alibi.’
‘At the time my wife was killed, I was in my car, driving back from Newcastle …’
‘At the time your wife was killed, you were drinking in the bar of the Ribble Valley Hotel.’
‘What?’ George Fullbright exclaimed.
‘He has an alibi, Mr Fullbright – he just didn’t bother to tell you about it,’ Paniatowski explained.
‘Then why is my client still …’
‘Why is he still here? Because he didn’t bother to tell us about it, either, and it wasn’t until an hour ago that we found out from quite another source.’
‘What, in God’s name, were you thinking of, William?’ Fullbright asked, so shocked by what he’d just learned that he didn’t even seem to realise he was breaching professional etiquette.
‘I was thinking of friendship,’ Danbury said.
‘Would you like to explain to us exactly what you mean by that?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘I’ll explain – though I don’t imagine for a minute that you’ll understand what I’m saying,’ Danbury told her. ‘Friendship – male friendship – is the most valuable thing in the whole world, and the only true measure of a man is whether he will defend his friend whatever the cost to himself.’
‘A man rang up, and asked to speak to Mr Smith,’ the assistant manager from the Ribble Valley Hotel had told Paniatowski.
‘You’re sure it was a man?’
‘I’m not, no, because I didn’t take the call. But the barmaid swears it was a man.’
‘You’re protecting the man who rang you at the hotel, aren’t you?’ Paniatowski demanded. ‘The man who told you not only that your wife was dead, but how she died.’
‘No comment,’ Danbury said.
‘No comment necessary,’ Paniatowski told him.
‘Since there seems to be no grounds for detaining my client any longer, I assume you will be releasing him within the next few minutes,’ George Fullbright said. ‘Is that a correct assumption on my part?’
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski said wearily. ‘Yes, it is.’
Rain had been threatening all day, and as Paniatowski drove through the centre of town, there was an ominous rumble of thunder overhead.
By the time she reached Dr Lucas’ house, the storm had broken, and the lightning, searing its way across the sky, was bathing what she already thought of as the Gothic Mansion in its pale, eerie glow.
She parked, and waited for the rain – which was beating out a rapid drum solo on her roof – to abate a little. She could see the light in Lucas’ living room, and wondered what he was doing – and whether he had heard the news yet.
Then she noticed the curtain twitch – just briefly – and the light went off immediately after that.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she said exasperatedly.
The rain was still pouring down, but she couldn’t wait any longer.
Using her RAC Road Atlas as a hat, she climbed out of the car and sprinted over to Lucas’ front door, splashing her legs in several newly formed puddles on the way.
There was a bell-push set in the wall, but she ignored it and instead hammered on the door itself with an angry fist.
‘It’s no good pretending you’re not in there, Dr Lucas, because I know you are,’ she shouted.
The light came on in the living room again, then the hallway light lit up, and she could hear the sound of reluctant footsteps moving towards the front door.
Lucas opened the door. He looked very frightened – and Paniatowski was sure it was not the thunderstorm that was scaring him.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘Do you mind if I come in?’ Paniatowski asked, then barged past him without waiting for an answer.
‘Have you got a warrant?’ Lucas asked, following her – almost scampering after her – down the corridor.
‘I shouldn’t have thought that, given your own precarious legal position, you’d be over-bothered by legal niceties,’ Paniatowski said, over her shoulder.
A large suitcase lay on the table in the middle of Lucas’ living room. It already contained two jackets and a collection of shirts.
‘Are you going away?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Yes,’ Lucas said, ‘my nerves are rather frayed. I thought a short holiday by the sea would do me some good.’
‘Nice work if you can get it,’ Paniatowski said, looking into the case, and noting that Lucas had packed the edges with socks and underwear. ‘What’s the name of your locum?’
‘My locum?’ Lucas repeated, as if he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
‘It’s a Latin word,’ Paniatowski explained. ‘It means substitute. It’s what, in the medical world, they call a doctor who fills in for another doctor. So who’s your locum, Dr Lucas? Who’ll be looking after your patients while you’re down by the sea, resting your nerves?’
‘I … I don’t have a locum,’ Lucas mumbled. ‘I haven’t had time to arrange one.’
There was another crash of thunder above them and, for a second, the lights flickered.
‘You’re not really going away at all,’ Paniatowski said. ‘What you’re actually doing is running away. Isn’t that right?’
‘I don’t want to go to jail for perverting the course of justice, chief inspector,’ Lucas said, dropping all pretence. ‘I just can’t go to jail.’
‘So what were you planning to do once you were clear of Whitebridge?’ Paniatowski wondered. ‘Get a job on some isolated farm? Join the circus? Keep running forever?’
‘I … I hadn’t thought that far ahead.’
No, he wouldn’t have.
‘I take it that what brought about all this panic was that you had a phone call from your good friend, William,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Yes,’ Lucas admitted. ‘He said he hadn’t told you anything, but he thought you might have guessed.’ He began to pace up and down. ‘Can you even begin to grasp how truly heroic he’s been? To protect me, he hid the truth from you. He understood the consequences of his actions. He could have been found guilty of murdering Jane. He could have gone to prison for a long, long time. Yet he kept quiet – because that’s the kind of man he is.’
‘Would you have let him go to jail?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Would you have allowed William to serve a long sentence in order to avoid serving a short one yourself?’
‘Of course not,’ Lucas said. ‘If he had been found guilty, I think I would have come forward.’
‘You only think?’
‘I would have come forward,’ Lucas said – but even with the emphasis, his words lacked conviction.
‘What exactly happened on the night of Jane Danbury’s murder?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘If I tell you all I know, will you promise me there’ll be no charges laid against me?’ Lucas asked.
‘Why should I want to do that?’ Paniatowski wondered. ‘What makes you so special?’
‘I’m a good doctor – a caring doctor – and I’m trying my very hardest to be a good man, too,’ Lucas said. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’
He probably was a good and caring doctor, Paniatowski thought – certainly Inspector Flowers, who was n
o fool, believed that he was.
But he was also the man who had sabotaged her investigation, and thus caused her to manoeuvre herself into a position from which she was not sure her career would ever recover.
‘I am prepared to promise you something – and it’s this,’ she said. ‘If you don’t tell me everything I want to know right now, I’ll work tirelessly to make sure both that you are charged and that you serve the longest possible sentence.’
‘Please …’ Lucas begged.
The storm was now directly overhead, and the thunder seemed to shake the whole house.
‘That’s the deal,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Take it or leave it.’
‘Before I got in the police car, all I knew was what you’d told me …’ Lucas began.
Gretchen is sitting in the back of a police patrol car, wrapped in a blanket. Lucas slides in beside her.
‘They said you asked for me particularly,’ he says. ‘Would you like me to give you something to help calm you down?’
‘I don’t want any of your medicines, but there’s something you must do,’ Gretchen whispers urgently.
‘What?’
‘You must warn Billy about what has happened. You must tell him to get away from there as soon as he can.’
‘Get away from where?’
‘The Ribble Valley Hotel. If the police find him there, they will want to know why he is there. And when he tells them he was waiting for me, they will suspect him of Mrs Jane’s murder.’
‘So you did exactly what she wanted you to do?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘I didn’t see I had any choice. What Gretchen had said made perfect sense. William hadn’t killed Jane, but if you ever found out he had a mistress, he would become your prime suspect. And when you did find out, that’s exactly what he became.’
‘You didn’t just tell him that his wife had been murdered, did you?’
‘No.’
No, he certainly hadn’t.
Once Inspector Flowers had proved that it was not one of her team who had told Danbury the exact nature of his wife’s injuries, Paniatowski had assumed that the only way Danbury could have known would have been if he was the killer himself.
It just had to be him – because no else had known the details.
Except that someone else had.
‘I’m sure it was an accident,’ Lucas had told her in a rush, standing in the hallway. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He just doesn’t know his own …’
‘Go on.’
‘I think I’ve said more than enough.’
‘Are you saying that you know who might have hurt Mrs Danbury?’
‘No, of course not. How could I know that?’
‘So you’ve no idea who could have smashed in her skull with a bronze statuette?’
‘Why did you give Danbury all the details?’ Paniatowski demanded.
‘I didn’t want to, but …’
‘Why did you give him the details?’
‘Because he insisted that I told him.’
‘And you couldn’t say no?’
‘I could never say no to William.’
‘Is there anything else that you should tell me?’
Lucas hesitated. ‘I think … I think that Jane may have had a lover.’
‘What!’
‘I was always going over to the Danburys’ house. I was the boys’ doctor, and every time one of them got a minor cut or scrape, Jane would call me. I was little Melanie’s doctor, too, and she really was quite delicate. And then, of course, Jane had her health issues …’
‘Mainly because your mate, good old William, kept beating the crap out of her and expecting you to patch her up.’
‘The point is, I did spend quite a lot of time there, and so, naturally, I saw quite a lot of Jane.’
‘Go on.’
‘Most of the time she cut a sad – almost tragic – figure …’
‘Now I wonder why that might have been.’
‘But there were some days – especially the ones on which William was going to be away overnight – when she seemed much happier.’
‘That was probably because she knew she didn’t have a beating to look forward to.’
‘No, it was more than that. Much more. She would wear one of her favourite dresses, and have taken special care over her hair. And you could tell from the way she moved that she was looking forward to something.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Not quite. Once, when I’d gone up to see Melanie, I came downstairs again while she was on the phone. She was laughing and talking in the sort of voice women sometimes use when they’re talking to a special man. Then she saw me, and hung up immediately. She said it was a wrong number, but you don’t call someone who’s rung up by mistake “darling”.’
‘If all this is true, why wait until now to tell me about it?’ Paniatowski demanded.
Lucas looked down at the floor. ‘I’d rather not say.’
‘How do you think you’d manage in prison?’ Paniatowski asked, mercilessly.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I suppose you might just about get by in a nice, soft, white-collar open prison, but if you were locked up in one of the others – the ones that the real hardened criminals are sent to – you’d be eaten alive. And if you persist in holding anything back from me …’
She left the threat dangling. She knew that to get what she wanted, that was all she needed to do.
‘If I’d told you about it the first time you interviewed me, it would soon have become common knowledge that Jane had been unfaithful to William.’
‘Yes, it probably would – especially if we’d tracked down the man she was having the affair with.’
‘Yes, especially then. There would have been articles in newspapers, then a trial, and sooner or later, William’s father would have heard about it, and he would have despised his son for failing to control his woman properly. That would simply have killed William.’
‘Let me see if I’ve got this straight,’ Paniatowski said, hardly able to believe what she’d heard – and still nurturing a vague hope that she’d misinterpreted it. ‘You decided that it was better that Jane’s murderer should go free than that William’s father should learn she’d been unfaithful. Is that right?’
‘It’s the choice that I’m sure William would have made himself. Jane was dead, and there was nothing he could do about that – but to lose his father’s respect would be devastating.’
‘But now his father’s dead.’
‘Yes.’
‘And William won’t mind that lots of other people will know Jane was unfaithful?’
‘He’ll mind, but their opinion won’t matter a tenth as much – a hundredth as much – as his father’s would have done. And anyway, he’s taking the boys to Canada to start a new life out there. So perhaps now that the situation’s changed, it will be possible to get a little justice for Jane.’
‘And what about Melanie?’ Paniatowski asked angrily. ‘If you’d told us all this before, it might have been possible to track down her kidnapper before he killed her.’
She was shocked to hear herself say those words. It was the first time she had talked about the little girl’s death without adding some hopeful qualification.
‘I thought about it,’ Dr Lucas said. ‘I really did. But by the time I learned she’d gone, she’d already been missing for over two hours. And we both know that means she was dead before you even started looking, don’t we?’
The thunder was more muted now. The raging storm had passed by.
‘Yes,’ Paniatowski agreed, because in nearly all cases of this kind, hope was illusory. ‘Yes, we both know she was dead by then.’
Paniatowski was so tired that twice, on the way home, she almost fell asleep at the wheel.
When she had returned to work, she had promised herself that she would never put in more than a ten-hour day. She’d known at the time that the promise was not worth the mental space it was imprinted on, but she
had hoped that she would manage to have at least a few hours a day with Louisa and the twins.
But what had happened during her first week back on the job?
She had spent no more than a couple of hours at home in the previous thirty-six. She had slept at her desk for perhaps three disjointed hours more.
And it had all been for nothing!
She had been forced to release her prime suspect, who had never been one of her biggest fans, but who now probably hated her with a vengeance. And who could blame him for that?
She had alienated at least three members of the police authority, and possibly Chief Constable Pickering, too.
And she was no further on in the investigation than she had been at the very start.
She could, she supposed, arrest Dr Lucas for perverting the course of justice, and – with a little luck – she might even manage to get him banged up for a fair stretch. But what would be the point of that? How would locking him away help either her investigation or her reputation?
She pulled up in front of her home. She could see a bright light burning in Louisa’s bedroom, and the more muted, orange glow of the night-light in the room she shared with the twins.
Home – the promise of a normality she was desperate to embrace, but too exhausted to appreciate.
She took a deep breath and prepared herself to meet her family and grovel to her housekeeper.
She loved her job – it could be tiresome, frustrating and sometimes even heart-breaking, but she loved it – and she was not sure she could go on doing it any more.
ELEVEN
Saturday, 8th October 1977
It had stopped raining sometime in the middle of the night, but it was a truce, rather than an armistice, and just before dawn the clouds opened again with a vigour and ferocity which led the sheep out on the moors to huddle more closely together, and caused the town cats – out on their early morning patrols – to dash for the nearest available cover.
It was still raining when the volunteers turned up at Whitebridge police headquarters to resume the search for little Melanie Danbury.
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