A Walk With the Dead

by Sally Spencer

  ‘I’m surprised you let them in,’ Meadows said.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t have,’ the assistant agreed, ‘but the manageress was out on one of her many breaks, and I didn’t want a scene.’

  ‘Did they buy anything?’

  The assistant laughed. ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘They went over to the bargain bin,’ the assistant said, pointing to a large cardboard bin in the corner. ‘They all stood in front of it, so I couldn’t see what they were doing, and that’s when I decided that however unpleasant it might turn out to be, I’d have to throw them out.’

  Meadows walked over to the bargain bin, and looked down at the mishmash of things it contained

  ‘Did they steal anything?’ she asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ the assistant admitted. ‘They certainly looked as if that was what they were intending to do, but to be honest with you, anything chucked in there has already been taken out of invoice. If it was left to me, I wouldn’t bother with having the bin at all, but Mrs Bowles, the manageress, says that even if we only get fifty pee for something, it’s better than just chucking it away.’

  Meadows took hold of the bin and lifted it off the ground.

  ‘Here, what are you doing?’ the assistant demanded.

  Meadows upended the bin, and the ‘bargains’ it had contained – shoes and tops, spangled tights and cheap handbags – all cascaded onto the floor.

  ‘Do you notice anything missing?’ she asked.

  ‘No, like I said, it’s only old junk and . . .’

  ‘Look closely,’ Meadows said, in a not-to-be-denied voice.

  ‘There were two of them wigs there yesterday, and now there’s only one,’ the assistant said.

  Meadows picked the wig up off the floor. It was made of nylon, and was bright purple.

  ‘They call them “fun” wigs,’ the assistant explained. ‘They were all the rage last year – for about three weeks.’

  Meadows shook the wig, and put it on her head.

  ‘You look quite different with that on,’ Crane said.

  ‘I think that’s rather the idea,’ Meadows told him. She turned back to the assistant. ‘You’re certain there were two of them here yesterday – before the girls came in?’

  The assistant thought about it.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said finally. ‘I noticed them while I was stuffing the spangly tights in the bin, and I remember thinking that while we might sell some of the other rubbish, we wouldn’t even be able to give them away.’

  ‘Stick one of these wigs under your jumper, and nobody would notice it was even there,’ Meadows said to Jack Crane. ‘I’d like to buy this wig,’ she told the assistant.

  ‘It wouldn’t suit you, you know,’ the assistant cautioned.

  ‘I’d like it anyway,’ Meadows replied. ‘How much do you want for it? Shall we say – a pound?’

  ‘You can have it for nothing.’

  ‘Better to pay,’ Meadows said firmly, handing a pound note over, ‘and if you want to regard it as a fair reward for information received, that’s perfectly all right with me.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘If you want to put it in your handbag, instead of the till, nobody will be any the wiser,’ Meadows said over her shoulder, as she headed for the door.

  ‘So where do we go now?’ Crane asked, once they were outside the boutique.

  ‘We go to the nearest stationer’s shop,’ Meadows told him.

  ‘I can’t see Maggie Hudson going to a stationer’s,’ Crane said.

  ‘She won’t have done,’ Meadows agreed. ‘But I need to – because I want to buy some coloured pencils.’

  NINETEEN

  Paniatowski studied the mother and daughter who were sitting across the desk from her.

  The mother – Mrs Turner – was in her late thirties, and had the look about her of a woman who was both firmly convinced of her own rightness on all matters, and energetic enough to grind down everyone else until they agreed with her. She was wearing a sensible coat and – possibly because she was in a police station – a hat with a feather in it.

  The daughter – Dolly – was thirteen or fourteen, and bore the long-suffering expression of an only child who was desperate to break away from the cage in which her domineering mother had imprisoned her for so long. She was wearing a sensible coat, too, and despite the fact that it was quite warm in Paniatowski’s office, had a scarf tightly wrapped around her neck.

  ‘The desk sergeant said you might have some information which could be pertinent to my investigation,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘For the last two days, this one’s been looking as miserable as I-don’t-know-what,’ Mrs Turner began. ‘Well, I didn’t say anything – because I’m not the kind of mother who likes to interfere – but when I caught her sobbing her heart out, I insisted on knowing the reason. And it turns out that’s what’s been upsetting her was something that happened to a friend of hers. It appears that this girl was walking through the park and—’

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if you let Dolly tell the story,’ Paniatowski interrupted.

  ‘Oh, all right, if you insist,’ Mrs Turner said, in a huff. She folded her arms across her chest. ‘Well, tell the lady what you told me, our Dolly.’

  ‘This . . . this friend of mine was attacked when she was walking through the park,’ Dolly said, hesitantly.

  ‘Of course, the first thing that I said was that the girl should come in and report it herself,’ Mrs Turner said, ‘but our Dolly – who’s always been a stubborn one – won’t even tell me her name.’

  I’m sure she won’t – because it’s a name you won’t want to hear, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘When did this attack take place?’ she asked the girl.

  ‘It was the night before last.’

  ‘So it was one night after Jill Harris was killed, and one night before Maggie Hudson was killed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what time this attack occurred at?’

  ‘Just after half-past eight.’

  ‘You’re sure that was the time?’

  ‘Yes, the clock on the cathedral had just struck.’

  ‘So it had already been dark for quite a while?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What exactly was this friend of yours doing in the park, on the night after a murder?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wasn’t she frightened to be there?’

  ‘No, because she had her . . . she had her . . .’ Dolly began.

  Then she clamped her mouth tightly shut.

  ‘Had her what?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Dolly struggled for an answer. ‘She had her whistle with her,’ she said finally. ‘She knew that if anybody attacked her, she could blow her whistle.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘Did she what?’

  ‘Did she blow her whistle?’

  Dolly looked down at the table. ‘No – she screamed, instead.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened during the attack.’

  ‘She . . . she was walking towards the gate. The man crept up behind her. She didn’t even know he was there until he grabbed her round the throat, and started to choke. It was terrible. I . . . I . . . couldn’t breathe.’

  ‘You couldn’t breathe?’ interrupted her mother, who had only just realized what Paniatowski had known almost from the first moment the woman and girl had walked into the room.

  ‘I meant her,’ Dolly said quickly. ‘She couldn’t breathe!’

  ‘Take that scarf off,’ her mother ordered her.

  ‘I’ve got a sore throat, mum.’

  ‘Take it off – right now!’

  Slowly and reluctantly, Dolly unwrapped the scarf. The marks around her throat had started to fade, but they were undoubtedly bruises.

  ‘You told me you were at Jackie Earnshaw’s house the other night,’ her mother said.

  ‘I . . . I w
as,’ Dolly said feebly. ‘I was taking a short cut home, back through the park.’

  ‘The park’s not a short cut,’ her mother said, showing signs of hysteria. ‘It’s right out of your way.’

  ‘You need to calm down, Mrs Turner,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘And you don’t even own a whistle,’ the mother said.

  ‘Do you want to find out what happened to Dolly or not?’ Paniatowski asked urgently. ‘Do you want to know what damage was done? Because if you do want to know, you’d better just shut up and listen.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ Mrs Turner began. ‘You’re not—’

  ‘Now!’ Paniatowski said firmly.

  For a moment, it looked as if the mother would continue to argue, then she lowered her head, and began to sob softly to herself.

  ‘How did you get away, Dolly?’ Paniatowski asked softly.

  ‘I . . . I kicked him,’ the girl said. ‘I think I must have hurt him, because he fell over.’

  ‘And then you ran away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was lying, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘Or was it him who ran away?’ she asked, taking a stab in the dark.

  ‘Yes, it was him,’ Dolly admitted.

  ‘And what do you think made him do that?’ Paniatowski prodded.

  ‘He . . . he heard somebody coming.’

  ‘Somebody?’

  Dolly glanced nervously at her mother, who seemed to have gone into shock, then mouthed the words, ‘My boyfriend.’

  ‘You can’t keep it a secret any longer, you know,’ Paniatowski said, kindly but firmly. ‘Is he a big lad – this boyfriend of yours?’

  ‘Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Because he must have been quite big, to frighten your attacker off, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, he’s . . . he’s quite big.’

  ‘I’ll need his name,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘But why? He didn’t have anything to do with it.’

  ‘He might have seen something that you didn’t – something that could help us catch the man who attacked you.’

  Dolly started to cry. ‘He didn’t. He didn’t see anything. He told me he didn’t see anything. And I daren’t give you his name.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just can’t! That’s all!’

  ‘It really is important,’ Paniatowski cajoled.

  ‘Tell her his name!’ said Mrs Turner, suddenly coming back to life. ‘Tell her the bloody bastard’s name!’

  Paniatowski sighed. Another minute or two, and the girl might well have given her the name, but the mother’s intervention had closed off all possibility of that. She would reveal the name in the end, of course – but it might take days.

  Meadows and Crane were back in the central piazza.

  ‘My guess is that the next thing Maggie did after leaving the shop – pardon me, after leaving the boutique – was to go to the ladies toilets on the second floor,’ Meadows said.

  ‘And why would she have done that?’ Crane wondered.

  ‘Because it’s the nearest thing to a Bat-cave she’d have been able to find,’ Meadows said.

  ‘A Bat-cave?’

  ‘In the daytime, Bruce Wayne is like any other mild-mannered millionaire, but at night he descends into the Bat-cave and re-emerges as a superhero,’ Meadows said, in a pseudo-Hollywood accent. ‘In Maggie’s case, she would have gone to the toilets, put on the wig, and admired herself in the mirror.’

  ‘And stepped out of the ladies’ loo as a superhero?’

  ‘In her own terms, yes.’

  ‘And then she’d start looking around for bank robbers to arrest, and fair maidens to pull out of the path of approaching trains?’ Crane asked.

  ‘I’m being serious,’ Meadows told him. ‘Putting on the disguise would have empowered her. She’d have become a completely new person, much freer from restraint.’

  And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? Crane thought. Because when you go out on your fetishist dates, you’re not DS Kate Meadows any more – you’re Zelda, a dark force of the night.

  But wisely, all he said aloud was, ‘So even with the wig on, Maggie wouldn’t start thinking about leaping over tall buildings?’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with anything original,’ Meadows said, perhaps a little sadly. ‘She’d be more likely to follow her normal pattern of behaviour – but with less concern about the risks involved.’

  ‘She’d do some more shoplifting,’ Crane said.

  ‘Exactly – she’d go straight from the Bat-cave to Aladdin’s cave.’

  ‘To where?’ Crane asked.

  ‘To Woolworths,’ Meadows said.

  The Woolworths manager studied the photograph of Maggie Hudson for a few moments, then said, ‘She looks vaguely familiar, but if I thought I’d seen her yesterday, I would – like any other law-abiding citizen – have contacted the police the moment the appeal for information appeared on the television news.’

  Meadows reached into her handbag and produced a second photograph – one which was identical to the first, save for the fact that she’d drawn a purple wig on it.

  ‘How about her?’ she asked.

  ‘Good God!’ the manager said. ‘It’s the same girl, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Meadows agreed.

  ‘It’s so obvious when you have the two pictures side by side, but without the second to compare to the first . . .’

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you,’ Meadows said soothingly. ‘It’s a mistake most people would have made. Do you now think that she might have been here yesterday, after all?’

  ‘She was here,’ the manager said, positively. ‘And she had two other girls with her.’

  ‘Could you describe them?’ Crane asked.

  The manager frowned. ‘They all looked rather slutty, though one of them could have been quite pretty,’ he said finally.

  That would be Polly, Crane thought.

  ‘They tried their hand at a spot of shoplifting, did they?’ Kate Meadows asked.

  ‘They did indeed,’ the manager confirmed, ‘though it wasn’t actually the girl in the wig who stole – it was the pretty one.’

  ‘Tell us exactly what happened.’

  ‘The pretty girl went over to the stationery counter, and started stuffing pens into the sleeve of her cardigan – though why any of those girls would want a pen is quite beyond me.’

  ‘They didn’t want them,’ Meadows said. ‘They wanted to steal them – which is not the same thing at all.’

  ‘I expect you’re right. At any rate, the store detective – who was standing by the bras and knickers at the time – saw what was going on, and strode quickly towards the pretty girl. And that’s when the other girl – the one in the wig – stepped in the way and blocked his passage.’ The manager suddenly reddened. ‘Actually, she did more than just obstruct him. What happened next was really rather unpleasant.’

  ‘What did happen next?’

  ‘She . . . well, she . . . it was all rather crude, and I’d rather not talk about it in the presence of a lady.’

  Meadows made an elaborate show of looking around her. ‘No ladies here, as far as I can see,’ she pronounced.

  ‘Rather than have me describe it, wouldn’t it be easier to just look at the tape?’ the manager asked, growing more embarrassed by the second.

  ‘The tape?’ Meadows repeated.

  ‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know about it,’ the manager said, visibly relieved to be changing the subject. ‘I’m talking about the tape from the closed-circuit television camera.’

  ‘I’m still not with you,’ Meadows admitted.

  ‘It’s a German invention – they used it to monitor the launch of their V-2 rockets during the war,’ said the manager – and from the new tone that had entered his voice, it was clear that he was merely repeating a lecture he had heard at some company booster conference. ‘Yes, it was the Germans who developed
it, but it was the Americans – naturally – who saw its fuller potential. The New York Police Department installed some of these cameras in Times Square last year, in an effort to cut down on crime, and one of the directors in our head office – which is also in New York – thought they might help us reduce shoplifting.’

  ‘So all Woolworths stores have these cameras installed, do they?’ Crane asked.

  The manager laughed at his obvious naivety. ‘Certainly not! That would be a huge undertaking. But it was decided to run a number of pilot schemes in selected Woolworths stores. We were chosen to be one of those stores, which was, of course a great honour, but – when you think about it – hardly surprising. Woolworths UK has always been an innovator, you know. It was in the Liverpool Woolworths that the first lunch counter was introduced, and now all the Woolworths in America have one, so you could say that we—’

  ‘So you’ve got this encounter with Maggie Hudson on recording tape?’ Meadows interrupted.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said the manager, a little miffed at being cut off mid-flow. ‘It’s a rather expensive process, so I don’t suppose we’ll carry on recording everything once the pilot scheme is completed, but for the moment at least, head office is interested in seeing just how it is working out, and—’

  ‘We’d like to see the tape,’ Meadows said.

  And she was thinking, There’s just a possibility that the killer could be on it! There’s just the remotest possibility that this is where he made the decision to kill Maggie!

  ‘If you come back in the morning, I’ll arrange for our store detective – a very sound chap called Sam Houghton – to show it to you,’ the manager said.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself quite clear,’ Meadows replied. ‘I’d like to see it now.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ the manager said frostily. ‘It’s Sam Houghton’s day off.’

  ‘And will he be at home?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. He’s a very keen walker, and he’s probably in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales at this very moment.’

  It had been a mistake to interrupt the man in the middle of his party piece, Meadows thought. She should have listened quietly, the expression on her face saying there was nothing in the whole world that she found more fascinating than the minutiae of retail marketing.