As Beresford headed for the door, Paniatowski walked over to the window, and saw, with dismay, that the reporters in the car park had now been joined by a camera crew.
‘That’s one problem solved, anyway,’ she heard Beresford say from the doorway.
She turned, and saw that the inspector was holding a long plastic strip in his hands.
‘This was what was causing the trouble,’ Beresford said. ‘It’s been stuck on the door so bloody long that the maintenance department had a devil of a job getting it off.’
Paniatowski didn’t bother to read what was written on it. She didn’t need to, because she’d seen it almost every day for over a decade.
This had been Charlie Woodend’s office, and the name on the strip was his. She wondered whether her own name on the door would ever look quite so convincing.
FOUR
‘I’m pleased to see you’re starting out on the right foot, Chief Inspector,’ Mike Traynor said.
It was his smile that Paniatowski found the most annoying, though there was certainly much else in the man to be annoyed with. She didn’t, for instance, like his air of superiority, especially since he seemed to have so little to feel superior about. Nor did she like the fact that – though far too old to be a callow youth, and far too young to be a dirty old man – he seemed unable to resist the temptation of continually glancing at her cleavage.
And his dandruff didn’t exactly impress her, either.
‘Starting out on the right foot?’ she repeated. ‘What exactly does that mean, Mr Traynor?’
‘Well, for openers, I couldn’t help noticing as I walked in that you’ve already had the name on the door changed – which announces to the world that you’ve well and truly arrived.’
‘That had nothing to do with me,’ Paniatowski said. ‘If anyone was announcing I’d arrived, it was the maintenance department.’
‘Of course it was,’ Traynor agreed, favouring her with a heavy wink. ‘But more important than getting your name on the door, there’s the fact that you decided to see me.’
‘That’s important, is it?’
‘More like significant, if you know what I mean.’
Paniatowski frowned. ‘No, I don’t think I do know what you mean,’ she said.
‘The very fact that I’m here shows that you know which way the wind’s blowing.’
‘Really?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Really,’ Traynor confirmed. ‘You see, Chief Inspector, a lesser woman than you might well have decided to give her first interview to local radio, but you realize that’s all that it is – local.’
‘And isn’t your newspaper local, too?’
‘You’re quite right – that’s exactly what it is. But you’re forgetting that I also work for the Daily Globe.’
‘But only as a stringer, surely?’
‘Stringer?’ Traynor repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before. ‘What’s a stringer?’
‘He’s a reporter who doesn’t actually work for a newspaper in any formal sense of the word, but has been given the right to submit any stories that he thinks might be of interest to it,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I would have thought that, being in the trade, you’d have known that yourself.’
And of course he had known – he just hadn’t known that she knew!
‘In that sense, I suppose you could call me a stringer,’ Traynor told her, looking hurt. ‘But in this life, it doesn’t matter what title you’re given,’ he continued, rallying. ‘What’s important is whether or not you have influence. And I do, because I have the Daily Globe editor’s ear.’
‘Is that right? And do you carry it around in your pocket, or do you leave it on the mantelpiece at home?’ Paniatowski asked, thinking, even as she spoke, that that sounded like a very Woodendesque remark.
‘Pardon?’ Traynor said.
‘You seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that this is an interview,’ Paniatowski said.
‘And isn’t it?’
‘No. I’m not talking to you as a reporter – I’m talking to you as someone who’s become a material witness in my investigation.’
‘Material witness? Me?’
‘How did you know about the hand?’ Paniatowski demanded, with a sudden hard edge to her voice.
‘I’m a reporter,’ Traynor countered.
‘And what is that meant to imply, exactly?’
‘It’s meant to imply that I have my ways and means.’
‘Ways and means,’ Paniatowski repeated, rolling the words around in her mouth thoughtfully. ‘In other words, what you’re saying is that you got a phone call. Was it anonymous?’
Traynor lifted his arm and rubbed the back of his head. A waterfall of dandruff cascaded down on to his collar.
‘At this juncture I am simply not prepared to reveal my confidential sources,’ he said.
‘Confidential sources?’ Paniatowski repeated. ‘How many reporters were in the car park when I arrived, do you think?’
‘Dunno. Seven or eight?’
‘It’s good to see that you have all the facts at your fingertips. There were nine! And why were they all there? Was it because you, yourself, had told them to be there?’
‘Of course not. Do I look like a complete fool?’
Not like a complete one, no, Paniatowski thought.
‘So when you talk about your confidential source,’ she said aloud, ‘what you really mean is that whoever decided to ring them up, also decided to give you a buzz as well.’
‘I suppose so,’ Traynor said sulkily.
‘Well, that is a valuable source, and well worth guarding,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I can quite understand why you’re not prepared to talk about it to me.’
‘I never said I wouldn’t talk about it,’ Traynor protested.
‘“At this juncture I am simply not prepared to reveal my confidential sources”,’ Paniatowski quoted back him.
‘Well, maybe I said it,’ Traynor admitted. ‘But I didn’t mean it. It was what I call a negotiating tactic.’
‘Along the lines of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”?’ Paniatowski suggested.
‘Well, exactly.’
‘But I don’t need to scratch your back, Mr Traynor. If you don’t want to help me – and you’re perfectly entitled to refuse – then I’m sure Lydia Jenkins will be more than willing to . . .’
‘It was a man who called me,’ Traynor admitted, in a rush.
‘Does he have a name?’
‘Everybody has a name.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I just don’t know what his is.’
‘Which means you didn’t recognize the voice?’
‘Correct.’
‘But the accent was local?’
‘Yes,’ Traynor said, uncertainly.
‘Why the hesitation?’
‘Well, the accent was local, but it wasn’t perfect. It was if the feller had come from somewhere else and sort of picked it up.’
‘How old was he?’
Traynor made a great show of giving the matter his deepest concentration. ‘Hard to know for sure. The voice was a bit muffled, like he was talking through a handkerchief.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that if I went down to the river bank, I’d find a severed hand in a plastic freezer bag, hidden in the bushes.’
‘When did he call you?’
‘Half-past seven.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Positive. I was listening to a news programme on the wireless, and they’d just given a time check.’
Paniatowski glanced down at her notes. The call from the dog-walker had been logged at seven thirty-six, so the one to Traynor had been made before the police had been notified – which, in turn, meant that whoever had tipped off the media, it hadn’t been someone on the Force.
So who had tipped them off?
There were only two possibilities.
The first was that the dog-walk
er had done it.
The second was that the caller had known where the hand was because he’d put it there himself!
‘What did you do when he’d rung off?’ she asked.
‘I finished my breakfast,’ Traynor said, as if the answer was obvious.
‘That must have taken real self-discipline.’
‘You what?’
‘I’m just putting myself in your shoes, Mr Traynor. You’re given a red-hot tip, but instead of chasing it up immediately, you force yourself to finish your breakfast. As I said, that shows tremendous self-restraint.’
‘Well, you see, Chief Inspector, I wasn’t sure whether or not to take it seriously,’ Traynor said.
‘And you thought that finishing mopping up your egg yolk might help you decide?’
‘I thought it was probably a crank call, if I’m being entirely honest with you, Chief Inspector. After all, this is Whitebridge, isn’t it? That kind of thing simply doesn’t happen here.’
Except that it apparently does – and on my first day on the job, Paniatowski thought.
‘So if you considered it unlikely there was a story in it, what were you doing in the car park?’ she asked.
‘Ah, that was because of the second call,’ Traynor explained.
‘The second call?’
‘About twenty minutes later, the feller rang me again. And this time he said that since I hadn’t gone down to the river bank already, there was no point in going now – because the bobbies had arrived, and they’d never let me through. Then he went on to say that probably the best place to get a lead on the story would be police headquarters.’
‘How did he know you hadn’t already gone down to the river?’ Paniatowski wondered.
Traynor smirked. ‘I should have thought that was obvious. If I’d gone down to the river, I couldn’t have answered the phone the second time he called.’
Paniatowski sighed. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What made him suspect that you hadn’t gone, as he probably imagined any reporter who was worth his salt would have done?’
‘The bastard was watching my house!’ Traynor said angrily. ‘He was watching my bloody house!’
I take back what I said about you not being a complete fool, Paniatowski thought.
‘And was he watching the houses of all the other reporters as well?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘None of the hacks went down to the river. All of them came here, just like you did.’
‘He wasn’t watching my house at all – he was watching the river bank!’ Traynor said, finally catching on.
‘He was watching the river bank,’ Paniatowski agreed.
And it took some nerve to do that, she thought – not just dump the hand, but stay around to see what happened next.
But why had he stayed around? Come to that, why had he left the hand there in the first place, and why had he phoned the reporters?
Was it simply that he got a kick out of moving people around, like pieces on a chessboard?
Or was it that he wanted to make sure the discovery of the hand made as big a splash as possible?
Traynor was looking as if he was about to be sick.
‘Is something the matter?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘If . . . if I’d gone there when he told me to, I might have seen him,’ the reporter said.
‘You might well,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘Still, look on the bright side.’
‘What bright side?’
‘At least you had a good breakfast.’
The street that ran along the eastern end of the Pinchbeck Estate was called River View Road, which proved that while the planners who’d named it might have lacked originality, they had at least prided themselves on their accuracy.
Positioning herself next to the red telephone box, halfway along the street, Paniatowski looked down at the river. While she could see the far bank clearly enough, her view of the near one was marred by the sharp slope – so that when the uniformed constables who were engaged in searching the bank bent down, they became completely invisible to her, and even when they were standing, she could only see them from the waist up.
So it wasn’t a perfect view, by any means, she thought, but – as far as the killer was concerned – it had certainly been good enough for his purposes.
She realized that it was the first time she had consciously used the word ‘killer’ to describe the man she was looking for.
But why wouldn’t she think of him as a killer? Because what were the chances that the man who had cut the woman’s hand off would let her live to tell the tale?
‘Are there any other phone boxes in the immediate vicinity?’ she asked DS Walker, who she’d already briefed on her conversation with the obnoxious Mike Traynor.
Walker thought about it. ‘None that you’d call really close, ma’am,’ he said finally. ‘The nearest is outside a pub four or five streets further into the estate. It’s called the . . . the . . .’
‘The Black Bull,’ Paniatowski supplied.
‘Oh, so you know the place yourself, do you, ma’am?’ Walker asked slyly.
‘Yes, I know it,’ Paniatowski replied.
Know it all too well, she thought.
It was in the Black Bull that her stepfather had regularly got drunk, before coming home and doing those unspeakable things to her which still gave her nightmares.
‘Do you think this is the phone box the killer made his calls from?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Undoubtedly, ma’am,’ Walker said, without hesitation.
‘He couldn’t have just dumped the hand and gone somewhere else to place the calls?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because there were two rounds of calls.’
‘Go on,’ Paniatowski encouraged.
‘If there’d only been one round of calls to the press, he could have made them from anywhere. But it’s the second round – the ones he made twenty minutes later, just after our lads arrived – which give him away. Because if he’d been making the calls from somewhere else, he wouldn’t have known the police had arrived, would he?’ Walker paused, and smiled. ‘You’d already worked all that out yourself, hadn’t you, ma’am?’
‘Yes, I had,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘So why ask me?’
‘I wanted to see if our minds ran along the same lines – and it seems as if they do.’
‘So he leaves the hand in the bushes, phones the press and then just waits,’ Walker said. ‘That takes a lot of balls, don’t you think?’ He paused, as if he’d suddenly realized that he’d said the wrong thing. ‘Sorry, ma’am, didn’t mean to use bad language.’
‘I’m a working bobby,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘I’m used to bad language. And you’re right – it did take a lot of balls.’
‘And even when the police arrive – which he can’t have been expecting – he doesn’t panic,’ Walker continued. ‘Instead, he uses the same phone box he’s used previously, to call the press again. And it must have been the same box, because he simply wouldn’t have had time to reach another one.’
‘It must also have been the box that Mr Harper used to make his call, once his dog had discovered the hand,’ Paniatowski mused. ‘Did Harper report seeing anyone else hanging around?’
‘Sorry, ma’am, I didn’t ask him about that,’ Walker said. ‘Well,’ he added apologetically, ‘it never actually occurred to me the killer would hang around once he’d got rid of the hand.’
‘No, in all fairness, I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me, either,’ Paniatowski conceded. ‘But I still want him questioned again – more thoroughly, this time.’
‘I’ll get right on to it,’ Walker told her. He paused again, as if weighing his words very carefully. ‘I think that we’re looking for a man with military training, ma’am.’
‘And just what’s made you reach that conclusion, Sergeant?’ Paniatowski wondered.
‘It’s hard to p
in it down exactly,’ Walker admitted. ‘But there’s something about the precision behind the planning – and the fact he knew how to improvise when that plan of his unexpectedly went wrong – which definitely suggests a military man to me.’
‘I’m not convinced,’ Paniatowski said.
‘With the greatest respect, ma’am, that’s because you’re a woman,’ Walker countered.
Of course it was, Paniatowski thought. What did women know about anything? What right had they to even be in the man’s world that was the Police Force? And worst of all, how dare they presume to lead a serious investigation?
‘How would my being a man make me any more convinced?’ she asked, keeping her temper reined in – but only just.
‘If you’d been a man, you’d have done national service,’ Walker explained. ‘And if you’d done your national service when I did, the chances are you’d have been sent to Korea, to deal with the commies.’
‘Oh, you’re the one who was sent off to fight the Red menace, were you?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘I always wondered who it was.’
‘Sorry if I gave the wrong impression, ma’am,’ Walker said. ‘I was only an acting corporal – a minor cog in the wheel.’
Well done, Monika, Paniatowski told herself. Really well done! You’ve only been in the job for a couple of hours, and you’re already bullying and belittling your subordinates.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ she said. ‘Go on with your theory.’
‘We were given basic training under combat conditions before we ever went out there, so we thought we knew what to expect,’ Walker said. ‘But we were dead wrong, because there’s a big difference between having blanks shot over your head and being exposed to real bullets. The first time we came under fire, I panicked, and if it hadn’t been for my sergeant, who’d experienced it all before, and kept me in line, I swear I’d have done a runner. The second time was easier, and by the third I’d learned how to handle the situation.’
‘So you’re saying it’s not just that the killer kept his nerve, but that, in your opinion, he’d been trained to keep his nerve?’
‘Something like that, ma’am,’ Walker agreed. ‘Of course, he doesn’t have to have been battle-hardened by being in the services, it could simply be that this isn’t his first murder. But if he had done this kind of thing before, we’d have heard about it, don’t you think?’
The Dead Hand of History Page 4