‘Yes, it’s looking like she abandoned Model Mary as quickly as she could,’ Meadows said. ‘But in that case, why didn’t she check out of the Royal Vic and book into a modest boarding house?’
It was a question that they simply didn’t yet have enough information to answer, so none of them even tried.
‘We also know that she spent two whole days last week in the microfiche section of Whitebridge Central Library, going through old newspapers,’ Beresford continued.
‘She was obviously doing research – but what exactly was it she was researching?’ Paniatowski said. ‘And to what end?’
The rest of the team shrugged.
‘But at least it explains all the coloured pens you found in her suite,’ Crane said.
‘Does it?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘How?’
‘When you’re doing research, not everything you find is of equal importance,’ Crane said. ‘In addition, some of the material may relate to one side of the problem, and some to another. And of course, it’s sometimes necessary to draw a connecting line between two sets of data. You can end up with a really confused mess, and colour coding just helps to make everything a little bit clearer.’
‘So we know she was approaching her research in a serious – maybe even professional – manner,’ Paniatowski mused. ‘Have you got anything else for us, Colin?’
‘Yes,’ Beresford said. ‘And I think that this is the best lead we’ve come across so far.’
George Clegg had often seen beetles on their backs – kicking their legs in the air in a futile attempt to right themselves – but he had never thought he would ever be like them.
And I’m not like them, he told himself. I’m a man, and when I die, I’m going to die like a man.
He managed to roll over onto his side, and then – by making a huge effort – to get onto his hands and knees.
What next?
He needed some support if he was ever to stand upright again, but the closest lamppost was several yards away, and even if he managed to crawl to it, there was nothing he could really hold onto.
He turned, with all the slowness and lack of grace of a manoeuvring tortoise, until he was facing the nearest house. It, like all the other houses on the street, had long sash windows which stopped less than two feet from the pavement. If he could get one hand on the window sill, and then the other, he might just be able to lever himself up.
If he had the strength!
You have to have the strength, he thought. You owe it to that girl to find the strength.
And suddenly he realised that it was not only the girl he owed. He also had a debt – though he couldn’t even begin to explain the connection – to his long-dead uncle.
Beresford unrolled the artist’s impressions of the man who had attacked Mary in the Rising Sun, and the woman who had been with her at the time, and then filled the rest of the team in on the background.
‘Mary humiliated him,’ Beresford said, ‘and he doesn’t look to me like the kind of man who’d be willing to let her get away with it. Anyway, I showed this sketch around the hotel, and the doorman, who struck me as a very reliable witness, definitely recognises him.’
The wind is blowing in from the snow-covered moors, and carries with it a ferocious cold that that seems capable of cutting through to the bone, which is why, instead of standing outside the Royal Vic, as he usually would, Wally White has positioned himself in the lobby.
He keeps his eyes firmly on the street, because if a taxi pulls up, bringing new guests, those guests will expect the doorman to be there to open the taxi door for them and make arrangements for their luggage.
Cars go past, but there is little pedestrian traffic, because the only people out in this weather are the ones who have to be.
The first time the man walks past, Wally registers no more than the facts that he appears to be a real rough bugger, and that instead of looking ahead of him, at where he is going – as most folk would – he keeps taking sideways glances at the hotel.
The second time he appears – walking in the opposite direction – Wally hardly looks at him, but the third time, the doorman starts studying him more closely.
‘He walked past the hotel ten times in total,’ Beresford said.
‘Why didn’t the doorman challenge him?’ Meadows asked.
‘On what grounds could he have done that? The man wasn’t annoying the guests – because there were none out there to annoy. He could easily have arranged to meet somebody outside the hotel, and was just waiting for them to turn up. But I’m convinced that what he was really doing was watching the hotel – or, more precisely, he was watching for Mary Edwards.’
‘Then why run the risk of drawing attention to himself?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Surely the best way to carry out surveillance would be to select a spot in which he could see the hotel, but – because of the angle – the people in the hotel wouldn’t notice him unless they were specifically looking for him. And once he’d found that safe spot, why wouldn’t he simply stay there?’
Beresford smiled with what might possibly have been a little self-congratulation.
‘Under normal circumstances, what you’ve just said is quite true,’ he agreed. ‘In fact, it’s a standard surveillance technique. But remember, boss, it was brass monkey weather out there that day, and if he’d stayed in one spot he ran the risk of coming down with a serious case of hypothermia.’
‘Do we know who he is?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘No, we don’t.’
‘So he doesn’t have a record?’
‘I’ve had one of my lads going through criminal records, but so far he’s come up with no match, so I’ve arranged with the television stations and newspapers to run the pictures this evening, with the usual gubbins about police being anxious to talk to them, etc, etc, and I’d be more than surprised if I didn’t have a name by tomorrow morning.’
‘Anything else?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘No,’ Beresford admitted. ‘That’s about it.’
‘But you’re still doing door-to-door?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ Paniatowski said.
‘I … I want to tell you who killed that woman in the hotel,’ said the strangled voice at the other end of the line.
DC Holland, manning one of the phones in the Royal Vic ballroom, wondered if the caller really was as old and distressed as he sounded.
Probably not, he decided, as he pictured a group of teenagers standing around a phone, with one of them doing the voice while the others were working hard at containing their laughter.
Still, there was a laid-down procedure to be followed, whether or not the caller was a hoaxer.
‘Before we go any further, I will need your name and address, sir,’ the detective constable said.
‘Good God, man, didn’t you … didn’t you … hear what I just said?’ the caller asked.
‘I’m afraid I must insist, sir.’
‘My name’s George Clegg, and I live at 33 Hope Terrace.’
‘Are you ringing from your home?’
‘No, I don’t have a phone at home. I’m calling from the box at the end of the street.’
Most hoaxers would have rung off by then, but maybe this one was brighter – and sneakier – than the average, and, urged on by his mates, was prepared to take the game as far as he could.
‘That’s fine, Mr Clegg,’ Holland said. ‘Now the next step is for you to tell me something about Mary Edwards which will prove to my satisfaction that you have actually had some kind of contact with her.’
‘Her name wasn’t Mary at all. It was Mag—’
‘Can you provide me with such a detail, Mr Clegg? Remember, it must be verifiable.’
‘I don’t know what you want,’ said the caller, who sounded like he was really fighting for breath now. ‘I’m not sure what you mean by verifiable detail.’
‘Well, for example, you could tell me that she had a scar across her left cheek, or that she spoke with a French
accent.’
‘She … she had a butterfly tattoo on her wrist. She said it were a northern brown argus.’
Jesus, Holland thought, this feller wasn’t just genuine – he was a hundred per cent gold-plated genuine.
‘You said you had information about who might have killed Mary Edwards, sir,’ he said.
‘I … uh …’ George Clegg replied.
And then Holland heard the sound of a heavy object falling.
‘Can you hear me, Mr Clegg?’ he asked.
There was no response.
‘Help is on its way,’ Holland promised. ‘We’ll get there as quickly as we can, so you hold on.’
‘Let’s move on to the American angle,’ Paniatowski said. ‘It’s possible – even probable – that Mary Edwards isn’t our victim’s real name at all, and that’s why, according to Kate, she went out of her way to avoid showing the desk clerk at the Royal Vic her passport.’
‘It would also explain why she paid for everything in cash,’ Crane said. ‘Her credit cards will be in her real name.’
‘Exactly,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘She didn’t want anyone to know who she really was, and since we can assume it was the killer who took away her passport, it seems he didn’t want it to be known, either. I’ve asked the Home Office for the details of any American women of roughly the right age who entered the country round about two weeks ago, but it’s a massive job collating the information, because we don’t know what her point of entry was, and we don’t know for sure if it was two weeks, or if she’d been here much longer.’
‘Shit!’ Beresford said.
‘So we’re going to try and get the information from the other side of the pond,’ Paniatowski continued, ‘which is why we have these.’
She showed them the photographs of Mary after Bunny had finished working on her.
‘She looks like a completely different person in this picture,’ Beresford said, astonished.
‘Yes – but only to the untrained, masculine eye,’ Meadows muttered softly to herself.
‘Fred Mahoney’s going to blitz the local New York papers and television with this,’ Paniatowski said. ‘He’s also asked for a set of Mary’s fingerprints.’
‘Which won’t be of much use at all, unless she has a criminal record,’ Beresford said.
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘If she’s ever had a civil service job, or applied for a driving license, the authorities will have her prints on record.’
Beresford shook his head in admiration. ‘Why can’t we have a system like that?’ he asked. ‘It would make our jobs a hell of a lot easier.’
‘And less fun,’ Meadows said.
Paniatowski related her conversation with Arthur Tyndale.
‘From what the Lone Ranger told me, it’s obvious that she saw the threat as coming from the USA,’ she said. ‘So what theories can we put on the table? One: Mary was a con artist – false name and disguise – who came to Whitebridge to pull a scam, and was killed by her intended victim.’
‘Two,’ Meadows said. ‘Basically the same as One, except that her victim was caught in a previous scam, and sent a hit man across to kill her.’
‘Three: Mary got into a fight with a feller in a pub, and he killed her for revenge,’ Beresford said.
‘The problem is, they’re all plausible,’ Paniatowski said, ‘and they’re not even comprehensive. Maybe the man in the pub wasn’t the only person Mary pissed off. Maybe there were half a dozen of them, and it was one of the others who killed her. We need to narrow down the field, and we can only do that by establishing why she was here, and what she did while she was here. So, Colin, I want the door-to-door intensified, because she couldn’t have stayed in her room for most of those two weeks, so somebody must have seen her.’
‘Got it,’ Beresford said.
‘Where are her notes?’ Crane asked, out of the blue.
‘Her notes?’ Beresford repeated.
‘She spent two whole days in the library, doing research. No one can absorb that much information in their heads – and anyway, she had all those coloured pens – so she must have taken notes.’
‘Maybe she decided the notes were no good, and threw them away,’ Paniatowski suggested.
‘When you’ve invested two days of your life in research, you don’t throw your notes away,’ Crane said. ‘You might tell yourself that, from a logical viewpoint, they’ll never be any use, but there’s always a nagging voice in your head that warns you they just might be. In fact, you almost convince yourself that the moment you’ve chucked them out, fate will arrange it so that you do need them.’ He smiled. ‘Trust me on this – trust someone who’s got a trunk full of notes he just can’t bring himself to dump.’
‘If you’re right, then the killer took the notes as well as the passport,’ Paniatowski said. She pushed her sandwiches to one side, and reached into her handbag for her packet of cigarettes. ‘Jack, I want you to go down to the central library and find out what fascinated Mary about newspapers that were published over fifty years ago, in 1924.’
Crane’s face fell at the thought of being stuck in the library when he could have been out on the street.
‘I really talked myself into that bloody job, didn’t I, boss?’ he said, mournfully.
‘No, I was always going to send you to the library, because it’s a part of the “why” she was here,’ Paniatowski said. ‘All you’ve just done is to make this particular task seem even more important.’
‘I don’t see how I go about it, boss,’ Crane admitted. ‘The average newspaper is probably about thirty pages long, and there are six of them every week for fifty-two weeks a year.’
‘True,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘If it had been actual physical newspapers she’d been looking at, there might be some evidence of that. She might have underlined something, or made a note in the margin. You’re not supposed to, but a lot of people do. But it’s not paper, is it? It’s microfiche – so how am I supposed to work out what, in particular, she was interested in?’
‘Fair point,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘Let’s see if we can narrow things down. If Mary was collecting small, isolated pieces of information – recipes, say, or births, marriages and deaths – then you’re never going to find out what she was looking at. But my guess is that she didn’t come all this way, spend so much money, and don a disguise, for that sort of thing. She came to look at one big story – which she may have intended to use in her scam, if there was, in fact, a scam – and it took her two days to look at it properly. So find that big story – there can’t be many of them.’
‘What if your supposition is wrong?’ Crane asked. ‘What if she came here to check her ancestry, so births, marriages and deaths were exactly what she was looking at?’
‘It’s not ancestry,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Are you sure?
‘I’m sure. If it had been tracing her roots, she wouldn’t have confined herself to just one year. But you’re quite right, Jack, it could all be a dead end. That’s police work for you – like the princess has to kiss a lot of frogs before she finds her handsome prince, we have to sift through a lot of shit before we uncover the nugget of truth.’ She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘Right, that’s it. As soon as you’ve finished your sandwiches, you can get back to work.’ She stood up – leading by example. ‘Oh, there is just one more thing – what’s in your sandwiches, Kate?’
‘It’s cucumber,’ Meadows replied, ‘sliced so finely you could read a 1924 newspaper through it.’
Yes, Paniatowski thought, it would have to have been something like that, wouldn’t it?
Paniatowski and Beresford were sitting in the cafeteria of Whitebridge General hospital. The tea they were sipping was no better than that served up in the police canteen, but at least it was a different sort of awful.
‘There are two things that make George Clegg a credible witness,’ Paniatowski said. ‘The first is that he not only knew about the tat
too, he knew it was a northern brown argus – and he could only have got that information from Mary Edwards. The second is that he knew that wasn’t her real name.’
‘Did he say what her real name was?’ Beresford asked.
‘Sort of,’ Paniatowski told him.
She took a small tape recorder out of her jacket pocket, and pressed the play button.
‘Now the next step is for you to tell me something about Mary Edwards which will prove to my satisfaction that you have actually had some kind of contact with her,’ said a tinny voice belonging to DC Holland.
‘Her name wasn’t Mary at all. It was Mag …’
‘Can you provide me with such a detail, Mr Clegg? Remember, it must be verifiable.’
Paniatowski pressed rewind for a second, then hit the play button again.
‘… that you have actually had some kind of contact with her.’
‘Her name wasn’t Mary at all. It was Mag …’
‘He was obviously in some physical distress when he was making the call, but it sounds like “Mag” or “Marg”, which could mean that he believes she’s called Margaret,’ Paniatowski said.
‘If Holland had just cut through the bloody procedure …’ Beresford said, angrily.
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘You can’t bollock them when they don’t follow procedure, and bollock them when they do.’
‘True,’ Beresford agreed. ‘Do you think he really does know who killed Mary?’
‘I don’t know. But what I do know is that he was having a heart attack, yet he battled his way to the phone box. And when he got there, he didn’t ring for an ambulance for himself – he rang us to tell us what he knew. So, at the very least, we have to think that he believes he knows who the killer is, don’t we?’
‘I suppose so,’ Beresford said. ‘What condition is he in?’
‘Not good. He was unconscious when the ambulance reached the phone box, and he still hasn’t come round. The doctor thinks he may never come round, but they’re not talking about switching off the life-support system quite yet. I want a detective constable in twenty-four-hour attendance at his bedside, just in case he does regain consciousness. And make sure you only use good people, Colin – I don’t want anyone in there who thinks it’s a soft option.’
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