‘Yes, we’d certainly have heard,’ Paniatowski agreed.
FIVE
Back in the old days, the basement of Whitebridge police headquarters had been a repository for all kinds of junk that no one knew what else to do with, and only when there was a major crime was the junk cleared out and the space used as an incident room. All that had changed towards the end of the sixties. Police headquarters was to be extensively remodelled, the town council had proclaimed loudly. It would be turned into a thoroughly modern building which would meet the needs of a thoroughly modern Police Force.
An incident room – a dedicated incident room – had been central to the planning. And if that meant there was less space for other activities – if the canteen was a little smaller, and the office space more cramped – the council was sure the officers wouldn’t mind, since they would understand that the changes would lead to more effective policing.
The incident room had been opened with a great fanfare – ‘A show put on by paid officials who know nothin’ about policin’, for the benefit of elected officials, who know even less,’ Charlie Woodend had said sourly at the time – and the ceremony had received extensive coverage in the local press.
And then the officials and the press all went away, and the incident room was used for major incidents when there were any – and as a repository for junk that no one knew what else to do with when there weren’t.
The appearance of the plastic-bagged hand on the river bank had ensured that, that morning, the incident room was fulfilling the function the councillors fondly imagined it always fulfilled. Telephones had been reconnected, desks had been set up in a horseshoe pattern and the junk had been scattered – temporarily – throughout other parts of the building.
Colin Beresford was standing in the doorway, preparing himself to address the young detective constables gathered there, many of whom would probably be bubbling over with excitement at the very thought of being allowed to work on their first major case.
So this was it, he told himself. This was the moment at which he would cease to be a merely theoretical detective inspector – one who so far only existed in official records. A minute or two from now, he would be briefing his men – a minute or two from now he would become a real inspector.
He was just about to step inside the room and take command when WPC Brenda Clegg appeared.
‘There’s a phone call for you, Inspector,’ she said.
‘Whoever it is, tell them that I’ll ring them back when I can,’ Beresford replied, irritated.
‘All right, if that’s what you want,’ Clegg agreed, hesitantly. ‘But she did say that it was important.’
‘Who said it was important?’
‘The woman from the Greenside Residential Home.’
‘Oh, my God!’ Beresford groaned.
‘Is something wrong?’ Clegg asked, concerned. ‘You’ve suddenly gone quite pale.’
As well I might, Beresford thought.
‘Mr Beresford?’ the receptionist at the Greenside Residential Home asked down the phone.
‘Inspector Beresford,’ he corrected her.
‘That’s right,’ the woman agreed. ‘Would you mind holding the line for a moment, Mr Beresford? The warden would like to talk to you.’
Beresford said nothing. There would have been no point, since what had been phrased as a request was clearly an order – and anyway, the receptionist had already put down the phone.
‘How could I have forgotten?’ he asked himself. ‘How could I have bloody well forgotten? Jesus Christ, I’m getting to be as bad as my mother.’
And then – almost immediately – he started to feel guilty.
His widowed mother had shown the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease just after her sixty-first birthday.
‘And it can only get worse,’ the doctor had cautioned him. ‘I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for that, Colin.’
‘Only get worse?’ Beresford had repeated. ‘How is that possible?’
It had certainly seemed terrible enough at the time – she had seemed terrible enough – but looking back on it, he understood exactly what the doctor had meant, because now those early stages of the disease seemed like almost a golden age.
At least, back then, he could occasionally have what might pass as an intelligent conversation with her.
At least, back then, she sometimes appeared to be aware of who he was, and how they were related.
Now, all that had gone. She lived in a fuzzy world which was ordered by a fuzzy logic, and though she might sometimes fervently believe herself to be the girl she’d once been, she was no longer capable of thinking of herself as the woman she had become.
He had tried (God, how he had tried!) to hold it all together – to balance his position in the Police Force with his role as a dutiful son.
When he wasn’t at work, he was with his mother, but as the job had become ever more demanding, he’d been forced to rely more and more on the efforts of kindly neighbours.
Then, when even those neighbours’ kindliness had been stretched beyond endurance, he had had to supplement their efforts by resorting to paid help – so that now his savings were gone and he lived from hand to mouth.
So, finally, he’d agreed to do what his mother’s social worker had been urging him to do for years – had accepted that he could no longer look after her himself, and that she needed full-time residential care.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to make – because although he continually told himself that she was so unaware of her surroundings it wouldn’t matter where she was, he still felt as if he was betraying her. But he had gone ahead and made the arrangements anyway.
‘Mr Beresford?’ asked a new voice on the line – a firm authoritative voice that he recognized as belonging to the warden.
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘It’s almost ten o’clock. We were expecting you to have brought your mother in by now.’
‘I know, but . . .’
‘If you leave it much later, it will make it very difficult for us to get her properly settled down by lunch time.’
‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to bring her in at all this morning,’ Beresford told the warden.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said I’m afraid . . .’
‘I heard what you said – I just found it rather difficult to believe that you’d said it. You do appreciate, don’t you, that it is most unusual – not to say highly irregular and extremely inconvenient – to have the arrangements cancelled at the last moment?’
‘I know,’ Beresford said miserably. ‘But something has come up at work, and I’m afraid that I can’t get out of it.’
‘And do you also realize that you’re not the only one who has a job?’ the warden demanded crossly.
‘Yes, I . . .’
‘And that the children of our other residents also have careers, but still find time to do what’s right by their beloved parents?’
‘Couldn’t I . . . couldn’t I bring her in tomorrow morning, instead?’ Beresford asked.
‘No, I’m not sure that you can,’ the warden said.
Which means, ‘No, you sodding well can’t,’ Beresford thought.
‘When you choose to cancel established arrangements to suit your own convenience, you must accept that any new arrangements will be made to suit ours,’ the warden told him.
‘But you can admit her some time this week?’
‘That’s possible, I suppose.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But it’s equally possible – in fact, more than possible – that you’ll have to wait until next week.’
‘Could you ring me when . . .?’
‘No, I most certainly will not ring you, Mr Beresford. I shall expect you to ring me.’
‘Fair enough,’ Beresford agreed. ‘I’m sorry for all the trouble.’
‘And so you should be,’ the warden said.
What a bloody mess, Beresford thought, as he h
ung up. He’d made an enemy of the warden who would be entrusted with caring for his mother before that caring had even begun.
But what choice had he had? He couldn’t simply desert his old friend Monika.
Not on her first day.
Not with a case like this one.
When Jenny Brunskill entered the office which she shared with her brother-in-law, she found Stan bent over his desk, looking down at the same pile of documents that he’d been looking down at when she left it.
And ‘looking down’ at them was exactly the right way to describe what he was doing, she thought. Not reading them – the pile was as thick as it had ever been – but just gazing at them blankly.
‘You don’t happen to have seen Tom Whittington this morning, do you?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Stan replied.
And from the way he said it – rather confused and perhaps a little nervous – it was clear that it was the mere sound of Jenny’s voice, rather than the question she’d asked, which had brought him back to life.
‘Tom Whittington,’ Jenny repeated. ‘I’ve been round the entire bakery twice, and I couldn’t find a single person who’d admit to having so much as caught sight of him this morning.’
Stan shrugged. ‘So what?’
‘So what? So he’s our head baker – that’s what.’
‘I was aware of that.’
‘And it’s his job to see that things are running smoothly.’
A slight, thin smile played on Stan’s lips. ‘I thought you considered that your job,’ he said.
‘It’s my job to see the paperwork keeps moving along,’ Jenny said seriously. ‘It’s my job to make sure the figures add up – although they haven’t been recently, and that’s something I want to talk to Linda about – but I don’t know anything about the technical side of things.’
‘Linda knows about it,’ Stan said, perhaps a little sourly. ‘Linda knows about everything. She’s a superwoman.’
‘But Linda isn’t here, either,’ Jenny pointed out. ‘So the only two people who can be relied on to make sure our products get on the right shelves at the right time have gone missing.’
‘So what?’ Stan said, for a second time.
‘I thought I’d just explained . . .’
‘You worry about the little things too much,’ Szymborska told his sister-in-law. ‘Relax, Jenny. Enjoy yourself, for a change.’
‘The little things?’ Jenny said hotly. ‘The little things! Our father started out with nothing. He built up this bakery from nothing. And it’s our responsibility to see that his legacy is maintained.’
‘Your father . . .’ Stan began, and then tailed off.
‘What about him?’
‘Nothing.’
Your father was a narrow-minded little man who never liked me, he thought. Your father never really built this business up at all. It was dying when you and Linda took over. Why can’t you see that for yourself?
‘Say what’s on your mind!’ Jenny demanded.
‘I was wondering why you don’t find yourself a boyfriend,’ Stan said, in an attempt to change the subject. ‘You’re a good-looking woman – a very good-looking woman. There’d be no shortage of candidates.’
‘Oh, you’re impossible, Stan!’ Jenny said exasperatedly. ‘Here I am, trying to discuss important matters with you, and you treat the whole thing as if it was no more than a joke.’
‘Your life isn’t a joke,’ Stan told her, seriously. ‘You could have a beautiful life, if you’d only put your mind to it.’
‘I’m going to look for Tom again,’ Jenny said. ‘Maybe he’ll have turned up by now.’
She swept out of the office, and Szymborska returned his attention – or rather, his lack of attention – to the papers on his desk.
He’d been lying to Jenny when he’d said that what he’d been thinking about was her life.
The truth was, he’d been thinking about his own life: about the horrific things he’d seen when he’d returned to Poland after the war – the hunger, the devastation and the imprint that the communist jackboot was already leaving on the people; about his heartbreaking decision to leave his beloved homeland for ever and settle in England; about his decision to marry Linda . . .
But most of all, he was thinking about the last few terrible hours of the previous day, and the first few terrible hours of the present one.
When Chief Constable George Baxter held briefing sessions with any of his senior officers, he did not do it from behind the protective cover of a large imposing desk, as his predecessor had done. That was simply not his style. Instead, he led them across to the corner of his office, where two easy chairs – but not that easy – faced each other over a plain coffee table.
It was in one of these chairs that Paniatowski was sitting at that moment, looking across the table at the solid man with red hair and a bushy red moustache, who was unquestionably a very masculine man, but who, nevertheless, had always reminded her of a big ginger teddy bear.
‘This isn’t exactly the ideal case for you to kick off your new career with, is it, Monika?’ Baxter asked.
‘No, sir,’ Paniatowski agreed awkwardly.
She always felt awkward in Baxter’s presence.
When she’d first heard that the Yorkshireman had been appointed chief constable of mid-Lancashire her stomach had turned over, because though coming in from the outside, he was a stranger to everyone else in the division, he was certainly no stranger to her.
Those feelings of awkwardness had never gone away, even though Baxter had now been his post for five years. If anything, they’d got worse recently, because at least when Charlie Woodend had been there, she’d been able to avoid seeing much of the chief constable. But now Charlie was not there – and meetings such as this one would inevitably become a regular occurrence.
‘Just what exactly is the killer’s game, do you think?’ Baxter asked.
‘I really don’t know, sir,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘It’s too early in the investigation to even make a guess at it. But whatever it is, he wants what he’s doing to be noticed.’
Baxter nodded. ‘But you think you can handle it?’
‘Yes, sir, I believe I can,’ Paniatowski said with more conviction than she actually felt. ‘But I’d like to make a few changes in my team.’
Baxter raised a sandy eyebrow. ‘Isn’t it rather early to be thinking of making changes?’
‘Perhaps it is,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But given the nature of the case, I need a team I can rely on absolutely.’
‘And who can’t you rely on?’
‘Sergeant Walker.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you say that,’ Baxter told her. ‘He has a reputation for being a very competent officer.’
Yes, and the reputation is probably well founded, Paniatowski thought. He’d certainly been able to work out for himself why the killer had to have used the telephone box at the top of the slope, and no other. And while she didn’t quite buy into the theory that the killer must have had some military training, she couldn’t entirely dismiss it, either.
And yet . . .
And yet, she still didn’t trust him. For all that he’d expressed his enthusiasm for working as part of her team, she was far from convinced that enthusiasm was genuine. In fact, she was inclined to believe that he had no respect for women in general – and for her in particular.
She hadn’t liked him calling Dr Shastri a Paki, either. Nor had she appreciated him lumping together all the inhabitants of the Pinchbeck Estate – the estate on which she’d grown up – as the scum of the earth.
‘I’m sure that Detective Sergeant Walker would make a really excellent bagman for some other DCI, but I’m not convinced that it will work out with me,’ she said.
‘Make it work,’ Baxter said firmly.
‘But, sir . . .’
‘I can’t afford to be seen to be doing you any favours, Monika. Not with our history.’
‘Our history!’ Paniatowski re
peated silently – and bitterly.
They had met when she’d been investigating a case which had links to his patch in Yorkshire, and they had – unthinkingly and almost carelessly – become lovers. But though she had liked him – and even admired him – she had never managed to transfer the passion he raised in her in bed to a passion for him as a man out of it.
It was he who had broken off the relationship, and she hadn’t blamed him. The blame was entirely hers. She was convinced of that. She should have tried harder to love him – should have brushed aside thoughts of Bob Rutter, her first and only true love, and accepted George for what he was.
‘When all’s said and done, sir, our history’s just that, sir – history,’ she told Baxter.
‘I take it from what you’ve just said that you are unaware that there are a number of people in this building – perhaps even a large number – who know all about our previous relationship.’
‘Yes, sir, you’re right, I am unaware of that. In fact, I’m not sure there’s any truth in it. How could they know? Our courtship—’
‘Is that what it was, Monika?’ Baxter asked, with a small, ironic smile playing on his lips. ‘Our courtship?’
‘Our affair, then,’ Paniatowski said, feeling an anger beginning to build up inside her. ‘Or our bit of mindless casual sex on the side, if that’s how you’d prefer to think of it.’
‘I think, on the whole, that I’d prefer to think of it as our affair,’ Baxter said quietly.
‘Fine. Our affair was carried out entirely in Yorkshire. By the time you came to Whitebridge, we’d broken up. So how can anybody know?’
‘They know. Word gets around. Don’t ask me how it gets around, because I couldn’t tell you. But it does! Of course, what we once were to each other didn’t matter as long as you were Charlie Woodend’s protégé, but the moment there was a possibility you might be promoted to DCI, the rumours started to fly. There are plenty of people who believe that I only pushed your promotion through because of what happened between us.’
The Dead Hand of History Page 5