Best Served Cold

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Get the ushers to evacuate the theatre,’ she said. ‘Make sure they tell the audience that there’s absolutely no need for panic, but that they must leave as soon as possible. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And somebody get me a knife, so I can cut this poor bastard down!’

  By the time Dr Shastri arrived at the theatre, uniformed constables had been posted at each of the exits to ensure that no one entered or left the building. Two more constables stood at either end of the stage, securing the crime scene. And a fifth constable was in the bar, looking on as the Whitebridge Players took advantage – for purely medicinal reasons – of the fact that though the till was closed, the bar was still very much open.

  Shastri was wearing her usual colourful sari and heavy sheepskin coat. She discarded the coat, and walked over to the centre of the stage, where the body was lying.

  ‘Who cut him down?’ she asked.

  ‘I did,’ Meadows said. ‘I gave him CPR. I knew it was a waste of breath, but I did it anyway.’

  ‘Would he have died instantly?’ Beresford asked.

  Shastri looked down at the body. ‘It depends on your definition of death,’ she said. ‘When one or more of his cervical vertebrae were fractured, he would have been instantly paralysed, and maybe even unconscious. After a short time, his brain would have died, but his heart – which is vitally important but still no more than a pump – could have continued to beat faintly for up to half an hour.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Beresford said.

  Shastri looked at Meadows, and smiled. ‘Men are such squeamish creatures, aren’t they?’ she asked.

  ‘They are indeed,’ Meadows agreed.

  Shastri looked up at the platform.

  ‘I take it that’s where he dropped from.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how far were his feet from the stage when the rope stopped him falling?’

  ‘About four feet,’ Meadows said.

  Shastri shrugged. ‘Well, it could have been worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ Beresford repeated. ‘Worse! I very much doubt that he’d have agreed with you.’

  ‘I meant from the perspective of the people observing it,’ Shastri said. ‘Unless the weight-to-drop ratio is calculated very precisely – and I assume that was not the case here – there is always a fair chance that instead of just being hanged, the victim will be decapitated. And I’m sure you’ll agree, Inspector Beresford, that while seeing someone hanging there can be upsetting, the sight of his head bouncing around on the stage would be even more distressing.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Colin Beresford said, feeling – if not actually looking – rather greenish.

  Shastri crouched down and moved her fingers expertly over the dead man’s neck.

  ‘It was probably the third cervical vertebra which took the strain, though I won’t know for certain until I’ve opened him up,’ she said. She ran her eyes up and down his trunk. ‘He appears to have been wearing some kind of harness.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Beresford agreed. ‘It was supposed to restrain him before the rope started to bite.’

  ‘A task at which it appears to have been singularly unsuccessful,’ Shastri said. She rolled the corpse over. He was a big man, and she was a small woman, but she made it seem easy. ‘It looks to me as if the reason the harness failed was because someone – and presumably not the victim – had weakened it by cutting into it,’ she said.

  NINE

  29th March 1977

  When Louisa came down to breakfast the next morning she looked rather pale, and for once she did not have her usual appetite for the ‘sensible’ breakfast which she always insisted on having.

  Still, that was hardly surprising, Paniatowski thought – and considering that the girl had seen a man murdered before her very eyes the night before, it could have been much worse.

  ‘What do you want to do today, sweetheart?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I’d like to go to school,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Are you sure? If you’d rather stay at home with me, then you can. Or we can go out for a drive.’

  Louisa gave her a thin smile. ‘Haven’t you got a murder to investigate?’ she asked.

  ‘You must be joking!’ Paniatowski said. ‘First of all, I’m a witness, which pretty much rules me out as far as leading the investigation goes. And secondly, murder inquiries can last for weeks – or even months – so the chief constable would never dream of putting in charge someone who might be rushed off to the maternity hospital at any time.’

  ‘I still think I’d like to go to school,’ Louisa said.

  It was possibly for the best, Paniatowski thought. The mundane normality of school was probably just the thing she needed to blank out the horrors of the night before.

  ‘If you’re going to school then I’d prefer to drive you, rather than have you take the bus,’ she said. ‘You’ve no objection to that, have you?’

  ‘Why would I object to being driven to school by a pregnant lady in a flashy sports car?’ Louisa asked, grinning.

  She’d have to get a different car when the baby was born, Paniatowski thought. She hadn’t considered that before. In fact there were so many changes she would have to make that she hadn’t really considered yet.

  ‘If you need me at any time during the day, you must promise to call me,’ she said sternly to Louisa.

  ‘Call you where?’ her daughter asked. ‘Will you be at police headquarters?’

  ‘No, certainly not,’ Paniatowski said firmly. ‘Call me here. I’m going to take the day off.’

  The phone in the corridor rang.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Paniatowski said, rising heavily to her feet. ‘You try and finish your breakfast.’

  When she picked up the phone, the voice on the other end of the line said, ‘DCI Paniatowski?’

  ‘Yes. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘This is the switchboard, ma’am. The chief constable would like to see you in his office as soon as possible.’

  Paniatowski felt the bile rising in her throat. There was only one reason anyone was ever called in for an ‘as-soon-as-possible’ meeting with the chief constable, and that was because they were in trouble – and she had a pretty good idea why she was in trouble.

  Noting that her hand was trembling slightly, she replaced the phone on its cradle, and returned to the living room.

  ‘So if I need you at any time during the day, I’m to call you at headquarters,’ Louisa said mischievously. ‘Have I got that right?’

  ‘You cheeky little madam!’ Paniatowski said.

  She was trying to sound light-hearted, and hoped she had succeeded – because the last thing Louisa needed at that moment was to be worrying about her.

  Acting Chief Constable Pickering was not alone, but instead was sharing his desk space with Chief Superintendent Holmes.

  ‘We’ve had a report that you were in the theatre last night, when Mark Cotton was murdered,’ Holmes said.

  ‘I was,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘And that instead of taking charge, you went home. Wasn’t that a rather irresponsible thing to do?’

  It was as she’d suspected when she got the phone call, Paniatowski thought. George Baxter was no longer there, but his lackeys were carrying on the campaign of persecution he had instigated.

  ‘I had my daughter with me at the theatre,’ she said. ‘She saw the murder. I thought it best to get her home. Besides, there was another officer present – a very competent officer – and I was confident she could deal with it.’

  ‘Ah yes, DS Meadows,’ Holmes said. ‘Might it not have been wiser to entrust your daughter to her, and conduct the initial investigation yourself?’

  ‘With the greatest respect, sir, she’s not Kate’s daughter – she’s mine,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘But even so …’

  ‘I’m perfectly satisfied with DCI Paniatowski’s explanation of her conduct,’ the acting chief constable said. ‘In fact, I’m sure
that, in the circumstances, she did exactly the right thing.’

  Holmes shot the chief constable a look of surprise, as if he hadn’t been expecting that at all.

  Pickering had just pulled the classic good-cop bad-cop routine on her, Paniatowski thought, but Holmes, who hadn’t been informed of that, had been expecting it to be more like a bad-cop worse-cop scenario.

  ‘I’d like you to take charge of the investigation into Mark Cotton’s death, Monika,’ Pickering said.

  ‘But I’m a witness,’ Paniatowski told him.

  ‘Strictly speaking, I suppose that’s true,’ Pickering conceded. ‘But another way of looking at it is that the act of murder was all in the preparation, and that Cotton was already a dead man once he’d decided to put the noose around his neck. Hence, all you actually saw was a corpse, which makes it no different to any of your other investigations.’

  ‘That’s stretching it a bit, isn’t it?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Pickering gave a dry chuckle. ‘Not as much as Mark Cotton’s neck was stretched.’

  ‘And besides, I’m about to give birth,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Well, we certainly wouldn’t want you to have to conduct your investigation from the maternity ward,’ Pickering said, laughing again, to show that he was still joking, ‘but once your investigation is rolling, I’m sure Inspector Beresford can take over if necessary.’

  ‘I respectfully request not to be assigned this case, sir,’ Paniatowski said in her most formal voice.

  ‘Request denied,’ Pickering replied. ‘Look at it this way, Monika, the fact that I’m insisting you take charge just shows how much confidence I have in your ability, doesn’t it?’

  So that was that.

  ‘You set me up there, sir,’ Holmes said resentfully, the moment that Paniatowski had gone.

  ‘Did I?’ Pickering asked. ‘How?’

  ‘When I told you that DCI Paniatowski had left the theatre instead of taking charge – which, as the senior officer present, was her clear duty – you agreed that we’d call her in for a bollocking.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Pickering contradicted him. ‘I said we’d have her in for a talk – which is just what we have done.’ He paused. ‘It was George Baxter who started this campaign against DCI Paniatowski, and the fact that you’re carrying on with it suggests to me that either you think he was right, or that you’re hoping to win some brownie points from him when he returns.’

  ‘Sir, that’s simply not—’

  ‘I haven’t finished speaking,’ Pickering interrupted him sharply. ‘I, on the other hand, am banking on George Baxter not returning to his post, and on me replacing him on a permanent basis. So what you must decide, CS Holmes, is whether to continue backing your old chief constable or whether you transfer your allegiance to the new one.’

  ‘You of course have my unqualified support, sir,’ Holmes said, then he added sulkily, ‘but you might have told me what you were doing.’

  ‘I needed to soften her up before assigning this case to her, and you contributed to that process admirably,’ Pickering said. ‘But if I’d told you what I was doing beforehand, you wouldn’t have been half as effective.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is why you seem so keen to have her conduct this investigation at all, sir,’ Holmes said.

  ‘This is not just a high-profile murder, it’s the high-profile murder of a man who played a detective on the television – and that’s where the distinction between real life and fiction starts to blur,’ Pickering said.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m following you, sir,’ Holmes admitted.

  ‘How long do you think it will be before some tabloid journalist starts speculating about the length of time it would have taken the great DCI Prince to solve the murder? My guess would be, they’ve already started.’

  ‘Possibly you’re right,’ said Holmes, who had never even considered the possibility.

  ‘And once this identification with Prince is established, expectations are raised,’ Pickering continued. ‘Prince would have solved the murder in an hour (including advertisements) in actual time, and in a day or two in dramatic time. But real investigations aren’t like that. There are promising leads which simply don’t work out, and blind alleys that you don’t even know are blind alleys until you reach the end of them.’

  ‘True,’ Holmes agreed.

  ‘So whoever conducts this investigation is going to come under constant criticism from the press, and if that officer makes even the tiniest of mistakes, then God help him or her, because the hacks will be on him or her like a pack of rabid dogs. And that will not only be bad for the officer concerned – it will be bad for the whole police force.’

  ‘I still don’t see …’

  ‘But the press will find it very hard – perhaps even impossible – to savage an officer who’s eight months’ pregnant.’

  Holmes smiled with grudging admiration. ‘You’re rather good at this job, aren’t you, sir?’ he said.

  ‘I’m learning,’ Pickering replied.

  The barriers were still in place across the street, and the crowd standing behind them was even larger than the night before.

  Some of the women were sobbing quietly to themselves. Some were holding on to each other for comfort. And others wandered around like zombies – their eyes blank, their mouths hanging open – unable to fully grasp that the unthinkable had actually happened.

  There was a long queue of fans carrying flowers, and the inspector on duty was allowing them through the barrier in groups of ten, so that they could make their pilgrimage to the theatre under the escort of two constables and tracked by the cameras of at least three television networks. Once they reached the theatre, they laid their offerings against the wall, said a few words, and backed away. The bank of flowers was already impressive.

  ‘I keep thinking some of them will get fed up and go away, ma’am,’ the inspector told Paniatowski. ‘But it hasn’t happened yet. They don’t seem to feel the cold. They don’t seem to need to pee. I’ve never seen anything like it in my time on the force.’

  ‘And these are mainly his northern fans, Joe,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Just wait till the southerners and Scots get here.’

  ‘Now that is a cheerful thought,’ the inspector said – and shuddered.

  Paniatowski drove slowly down the single lane the inspector had kept open, and parked in front of the theatre.

  As she got out of her MGA, one of the girls laying flowers broke free from the rest and rushed over to her.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ she asked. ‘Have you touched him?’

  She looked about nineteen, Paniatowski thought – only a little older than Louisa.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him,’ she said.

  ‘But will you?’

  The girl’s eyes widened, and she suddenly seemed quite mad.

  ‘Yes, I probably will see him,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ the girl asked, in what was almost a scream. ‘Can I touch him too?’

  One of the constables on escort duty strode rapidly across and put his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Now you know the rules,’ he said sternly. ‘We only let you through the barrier because you promised to behave yourself. You really shouldn’t be bothering the DCI.’

  It was doubtful if the girl even heard him, and when he tried to move her, her feet remained anchored to the ground.

  ‘Let me see him,’ the girl implored. ‘Please – just for a few minutes!’

  ‘It can’t be done, and, trust me on this, you wouldn’t like to see him as he is now,’ Paniatowski said gently.

  The girl started crying, and when the constable spun her around and frogmarched her away, she offered no resistance.

  A number of uniformed officers were conducting a detailed search of the auditorium, while Meadows and Beresford, sitting in the front stalls, looked on.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to park your arses and do bugger all, I suppose you might as well
choose the best seats in the house,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘There’s nothing for us to do, boss,’ Beresford said easily. ‘We’ve covered all the preliminaries, haven’t we, Sergeant Meadows?’

  ‘We have,’ Meadows agreed.

  ‘So now we’re just waiting to hand over to the team which will actually be running the case.’

  ‘That team’s already here,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Is it?’ Beresford asked. He looked around him, double-checked to make sure, then turned back to Monika. ‘You surely don’t mean …?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But you’re …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, bugger me,’ Beresford said.

  ‘So what have you done so far?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘We’ve arranged for the uniforms to make an initial search, as you can see for yourself.’

  ‘And what have you asked them to look for?’

  ‘Nothing very specific. I didn’t want to go treading on the investigating team’s toes. But now we are the investigating team, I suppose I’d better give it some thought.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘What else have you done?’

  ‘We’ve sent the cast to their lodgings – which are, conveniently, just down the street. We’ve told them they can go out for an hour or two, but not more – and that under no circumstances must they talk to reporters. And we’ve got Geoff Turnbull, who’s the stage manager, and Edgar Gough, who was in charge of Cotton’s personal security, waiting in the bar.’

  ‘What made you single out those two as the starting point of the investigation?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘One of them can tell you how it was done, and the other can tell you who couldn’t have done it,’ Meadows told her.

  ‘Then I’d better go and talk to them, hadn’t I?’ Paniatowski said.

  The bar looked like practically every other small theatre bar in the western world – which was to say it had aimed at being artistic, but only succeeded in being slightly pretentious.

  Geoff Turnbull and Edgar Gough were sitting at opposite ends of the room. They could have been talking earlier and just got bored with each other’s conversation, but they were such totally different people that Paniatowski didn’t really think that was likely.