B: We’ve got firm orders? Don’t you mean unless Messrs Hardcastle have got firm orders?
C: Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.
B: Why were the three of you there?
C: Mr Wilfred always works late, and I’m not allowed to go home in case he needs something doing.
B: And Entwistle?
C: He was there because Mr Wilfred was giving him a rocket.
B: A rocket?
C: A telling off – a talking to.
B: And do you know why Mr Hardcastle was giving Entwistle a rocket?
C: Yes, sir.
B: Then – for goodness sake – tell me, man!
C: John’s a tackler, sir, and—
B: By John, are you referring to Entwistle?
C: Yes, sir.
B: Then call him by his name. You’re not in the pub now, you know.
C: John – Entwistle’s a tackler and—
B: Am I supposed to know what a tackler is?
C: He’s the feller what makes sure the looms are running smoothly, and this particular day, two of them had broken down.
B: And was it Entwistle’s fault?
C: Mr Wilfred thought it was.
B: I see. So what happened next?
C: They were in the office. I was outside in the corridor, scrubbing the floor. I could hear Mr Wilfred shouting at John – at Entwistle – for what must have been at least half an hour. Then Entwistle started shouting back.
B: Let me get this clear. Entwistle, a common working man, had the temerity to shout at his employer.
JE (from the dock): I never went to see him. Why would I have gone to see him when I knew he was going to sack me?
Judge: Bailiffs, take the prisoner down – and don’t bring him back up again until he promises to behave himself. You may proceed, Sir Reginald.
B: Thank you, m’lud. You were saying, Clegg, that Entwistle was shouting at Mr Hardcastle.
C: Yes, sir.
B: And what happened then?
C: I heard like a thudding sound. Then John – then Entwistle – came out of the office and dashed down the corridor. I went into the office to see what had happened, and Mr Wilfred was lying on the floor, and there was blood everywhere. He was dead.
NINE
March 15th 1978
On nights when Paniatowski was unsure about what time she would be getting home, the twins slept in their nanny’s room. And it was as well that this was one of those nights, because if they’d been sleeping with their mother, they would undoubtedly have woken when the telephone began screeching its incessant demand to be answered at three a.m.
Paniatowski groped for the phone.
‘DCI Paniatowski,’ she mumbled.
‘Hey, lady, how come it took so long to pick up?’ demanded a voice that Paniatowski thought should rightfully belong to a mature grizzly bear. ‘Don’t you get your people trained?’
‘Who is this?’
‘Harvey Morgan.’
‘Well, Mr Morgan, none of my people are here – probably because it’s three o’clock in the morning.’
‘Boy, are you confused,’ Morgan said. ‘It’s only just ten p.m.’
‘It’s three o’clock in England,’ Paniatowski insisted.
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ Morgan said dubiously. ‘Anyhow, my secretary tells me we need to talk, so let’s talk.’
‘I wanted to ask you about Melissa Evans.’
‘You mind if I ask you a question, first?’
‘I don’t mind at all.’
‘You’re a chief inspector, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘What rank would that be in a real police force?’
In a real police force! Paniatowski thought.
‘I suppose I’d be a captain.’
‘Good, ’cos I’m too busy a man to talk to anybody but the top honcho,’ Morgan said. He sighed. ‘Melissa Evans! Yeah, it’s a great loss. She’s got God as her agent now. I only hope He handles her right.’
‘So what can you tell me about her?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Melissa is – Melissa was – the queen of the unauthorised biography. She did books on all the big names – Elvis, Teddy Kennedy, Sinatra … You’ve heard of those people in England, right?’
‘Right,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘They were big thick books she wrote – eight or nine hundred pages – and they always created a sensation because they revealed tons of things about the celebrities that nobody had before.’
‘Bad things?’
‘Sure, bad things sometimes! Nobody wants to read a book about little Peter Perfect.’
‘What made her so good at her job?’
‘The woman was an instinctive genius. She was like Albert Einstein or … what’s the name of the guy who got hit by an apple falling from a tree?… she was like William Tell.’
‘I think you mean Sir Isaac Newton.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, then she was like Sir Newton. An apple falls on your head and you think, “Jesus, how dumb was I to sit under that tree?” An apple falls on her head and it starts her thinking.’
‘Do you mean she was very good at making connections?’
‘Yeah, ain’t that what I just said? And another thing about her – you remember that Thomas Edison said genius was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration?’
‘Yes?’
‘For Melissa, it was one hundred and ten per cent perspiration! And determined? She was like a big old alligator – once she’d got her jaws clamped around something, there was no way she was gonna give up until she’d chewed right through it. Plus – and maybe this is the real secret of her success – there was something about her that made all kinds of people want to please her, so when she asked a question, she usually got an answer.’
‘How did the people she wrote her books about feel about her?’
‘Not too good. After her book on Sinatra came out, there was a rumour going round that Frank himself had called his friends in the Mob and asked them to teach her a lesson, but if anybody asks me if I believe that’s true I say no, because (a) there’s no proof he ever did that, and (b) I’ve got my family to consider.’
‘Was she ever threatened?’
‘All the time. There were dozens of death threats in her mail every day of the week.’
‘From the people she’d written about?’
‘Since most of the letters were anonymous, that’s kind of hard to say, but my guess is that only a few were from the “injured” parties, and the rest were from their fans. You see, fans invest in their heroes – worshiping the guy is really all they have to live for – and when some bitch of a writer suggests that hero isn’t perfect, they really lose it. And that’s why Melissa had two bodyguards.’
‘Full-time bodyguards?’
‘Sure. They went everywhere she did – her condo in Florida, her ski lodge in Aspen, her ranch—’
‘They weren’t with her on this trip, were they?’
‘No, they weren’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she thought she’d be completely safe, back in the old country.’
‘Her family came from England, did they?’
‘With a name like Evans, the family had to have come from England, don’t you think? Or maybe even Walesland. But my guess is that was a long time ago – maybe last century – and Melissa herself was about as New York as they come.’
‘She was working on a book here in Whitebridge, wasn’t she?’
‘Yeah, I tried to talk her out of it – hell, Clint Eastwood’s so hot right now he’s hanging there like some big juicy fruit, and she was just the gal to pick him, but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘Did she tell you what kind of book she was going to write?’
‘Sorta.’
‘Sorta? What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean that s
he told me, but I was no wiser when she finished than I’d been when she started.’
There is something different about Melissa this early January morning, but Harvey Morgan is still trying to put his finger on exactly what it is.
And then he has it!
It’s defensiveness! he decides. There’s something she wants to do that she knows I won’t like, and she’s come here to slug it out with me.
‘Have you seen the reviews of my Sinatra book?’ she asks.
‘I don’t read reviews, Melissa, honey-child,’ Morgan tells her, ‘and neither should you.’
‘You’re a liar,’ she says.
He grins. ‘I’m an agent – and a good one. I don’t lie – I say what people need to hear.’
‘The Chicago Tribune calls it trash. The New York Times says it takes unauthorised biography to a new low.’
‘And if you look in the bestseller list of that very same newspaper, you’ll see that Albert is at number three – and next week it will be number one. So screw all of them.’
‘I’m a good writer,’ Melissa says.
‘You’re the best.’
‘I’m a good writer up here,’ she taps her forehead, ‘but I’ve never written down anything that is good. I’ve never put it on the page.’
‘You’re raving now,’ Morgan tells her. ‘You think John Updike wouldn’t like your sales figures? Or Philip Roth? They’d kill for them.’
‘That doesn’t work for me anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s not enough to know that what I do, I do much better than most people ever could. It’s not enough that the books have made me rich. I want to do something better – something more worthwhile.’
‘There’s no money in authorised biographies,’ Morgan tells her. ‘They’re snow jobs. Everybody knows that – and who’s going to lay out hard cash just to read a snow job?’
‘It’s not a biography that I want to write,’ she says.
‘Then what? A novel?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I could write a novel. I don’t think it’s in me.’
Morgan groans. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re going to start writing poetry,’ he says. ‘I don’t think my heart could stand it.’
‘It’s not poetry either. I want to do a literary historical reconstruction,’ Melissa says.
‘I don’t even know what that is, but already I know it’s not going to sell,’ Morgan says.
‘I want to do it both for myself – and to pay off some old debts.’
‘You’ve got debts?’ Morgan explodes. ‘You earned more last year than most people make in a dozen lifetimes – and you’ve got debts!’
‘Not those kind of debts,’ Melissa says, almost pityingly. ‘I’m talking about debts of gratitude. I’m talking about duties and obligations.’
Morgan shakes his head. ‘You’ve lost me, kid,’ he says.
‘No,’ she tells him, ‘you’ve lost me, because whatever happens to my literary historical reconstruction – even if it sinks without trace – I won’t be writing any more unauthorised biographies.’
‘And she was right about that, poor kid,’ Morgan said to Paniatowski. ‘She sure as shit won’t be writing any more of them.’
There had been a heavy frost overnight, and when Jack Crane arrived at the Alderman Crick Retirement Home at nine o’clock, the lawn in front of the home was still silver-spiky.
The home was located on the edge of Whitebridge, close to the abattoir. It had once been the Whitebridge Workhouse, where paupers had spent their final days at the tedious and soul-destroying task of unpicking old tarry ropes, strand by strand, so that they could be recycled.
An attempt had been made to brighten the place up since those long-gone dark days. The windows had been enlarged, and the walls had received liberal applications of pastel-coloured paint, but you couldn’t obliterate history entirely, Crane thought, as he walked in through the main door, and to him it was still a grim, forbidding building which reeked of carbolic soap and Victorian moral rectitude.
The man he’d come to see – Stan Addison – was already waiting for him in the supervisor’s office. Addison was well over eighty years old, and had prominent veins on both hands, with liver spots largely filling in the gaps between them. His hands shook slightly, and his eyes, although still alert, were covered with a light milky film. Until his retirement, he had been a member of the Mid Lancs police force, and he had moved into the home five years earlier, when his wife had died.
‘I don’t get many visitors these days, lad,’ he told Crane. ‘Me son’s in Australia, me daughter’s in Canada, and most of me old mates popped their clogs long ago. So it’s nice to see you, even if it is only police business what’s brought you here. What can I do for you?’
‘Do you remember a murder in 1924?’ Crane asked.
‘Are you talking about the Wilfred Hardcastle murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘That was my first case as a detective sergeant, so naturally, I remember it very well.’
‘Could you tell me about it?’
‘Wilfred Hardcastle and his brother Oswald ran one of the biggest mills in Whitebridge. Well, I say they ran it, but it was really just Wilfred, because Oswald was a bit of what you might call a wastrel, and had no interest in the mill beyond the dividends it paid him.’
‘What sort of a reputation did Wilfred have?’ Crane asked.
‘He was what, back then, they used to call “firm but fair”. He knew what was right, and there was no point in arguing with him, because he had a direct line to God. Folk used to say that him and God agreed on almost everything most of the time, and that if they ever did have a bit of a falling out, that was only because God had got it wrong.’
Crane laughed, and then, seeing the puzzled expression on Addison’s face, realised that he’d just heard an example of the kind of deep Lancashire humour that you weren’t supposed to laugh at. He wondered if, as an outsider, he’d ever really understand the North.
‘He wasn’t a man for giving second chances, Wilfred Hardcastle,’ Addison continued. ‘If you made one mistake, you were out. That said, if you kept your head down, and did things just the way he thought they should be done, he was a better boss to work for than most of the mill owners round here.’
‘Tell me about the day of the murder,’ Crane said.
‘It was after the mill had shut down for the day, and there were only three of them there – Hardcastle, Tom Clegg and John Entwistle. Hardcastle had called Entwistle into his office, so that he could give him a bollocking about the looms breaking down. Anyway, Tom Clegg comes running into the police station to tell us he’s found Wilfred Hardcastle dead, and that it’s John Entwistle who’s killed him. My inspector sends somebody to Entwistle’s lodgings, but he’s not there, so we institute a general search, and we find him down by the canal, where he’s gone to try and establish an alibi.’
‘Can we go back a bit?’ Crane asked.
‘Yes, all right.’
‘On the stand, Entwistle said the looms didn’t break down at all, but had, in fact, been sabotaged.’
‘How do you know that?’ Addison demanded.
‘It was in the transcript, which I read last night.’
‘You’re a keen young bugger, aren’t you?’ Addison asked, in a voice which made it quite clear he was not exactly paying Crane a compliment. ‘Yes, he claimed the looms had been sabotaged, all right. Well, he had to say something, didn’t he?’
‘And did you have it checked out?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you send an expert to look at the looms, to try and ascertain if they had been sabotaged?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘We didn’t need to – we had more than enough evidence to convict John Entwistle, so why go to all the trouble of uncovering a lie that could have no real effect on the case?’
But if it wasn’t a lie, it would have an effect, Crane thought, because if somebody had delibe
rately sabotaged the looms, then you needed to ask yourself why he’d sabotaged them, and the reason could have been that—
‘Are you still with me, lad?’ Addison asked.
‘Sorry,’ Crane said. ‘You were talking just now about having more than enough evidence to convict Entwistle. What was the evidence that you were referring to?’
‘Well, we had Tom Clegg, who was virtually an eyewitness …’
‘Tell me about Tom Clegg,’ Crane said.
‘Tell you what about him?’
‘What was your impression of him?’
‘He wasn’t quite right in the head, if you ask me. I’m not saying he was a loony, or anything like that, but he was slow on the uptake, and you got the impression he didn’t see the world in quite the way everybody else did.’ Addison paused. ‘Have you got a cigarette, son?’
‘Sure,’ Crane said, offering the packet and lighting the old man’s cigarette for him.
‘The other thing about him was, he was a bit girly,’ Addison said.
‘Girly?’
‘You know, sensitive – and a bit timid.’
‘Is that right,’ said Crane, who liked to think he was rather a sensitive soul himself.
‘You couldn’t imagine him in the middle of a rugby scrum, or trying to talk a girl out of her knickers. He was the sort of lad who’d be bullied at school, and would end up begging one of the bigger lads to protect him.’ Addison stopped speaking, as if he’d just realised that he’d been running down someone he should have been building up. ‘But he was a good witness – a very good witness,’ he continued, clearly trying to compensate. ‘He knew exactly what he’d seen, and he stood in that witness box and gave his evidence like a good Christian should.’
‘He retracted that evidence later, though, didn’t he?’
‘No, he didn’t – you’re quite wrong about that!’ Addison said, his voice suddenly aggressive. ‘Tom Clegg gave his evidence – under oath – in the witness box, and the only way he could have retracted it properly was to stand in that same witness box a second time – under oath again – and say that he’d been lying. That would have been a retraction – all we got was a note.’
The trial is due to re-start at ten o’clock, and at five to ten Stan Addison is summoned to the judge’s chambers.
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