The Dead Hand of History

by Sally Spencer

  She had silky reddish-brown hair, which would have looked wonderful if, instead of choosing to have it cropped like a boy’s, she’d allowed it grow naturally. She had nice eyes, too, and even applying a smidgeon of make-up to them would have enhanced their natural qualities spectacularly.

  It was almost, Paniatowski thought, as if she’d taken a conscious decision not to make the best of herself – as if her appearance was intended to be a clear and unequivocal statement that appearances didn’t really matter to her.

  Or maybe not, she corrected herself. Maybe appearances did matter to her, and maybe the look she had now – a look which almost screamed self-contained office manager – was exactly the one she had sought.

  And she was probably a very good office manager, Paniatowski decided. For while she was not the kind of woman you would ever put at the head of an expedition through the Amazon jungle, you would certainly want her to be in charge of supplies en route.

  Stan Szymborska was another case entirely. Where Jenny took great pains to show off her competence, he wore a quiet mantle of confidence. Where she would be painstaking, he would show flair. He was passing through that stage in life in which good looks gently transformed themselves into a distinguished appearance. Paniatowski wondered how his wife felt about this transformation from Greek god into Roman senator. For her own part, she found it very easy – too easy – to imagine herself in bed with him.

  ‘Tell me about Tom Whittington,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘How long had he been working here?’

  ‘Fifteen years,’ Jenny said, without hesitation. ‘It was my father who first employed him.’

  ‘And did he get on well with all your staff?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jenny said.

  But Stan did not look quite so sure.

  ‘Would you agree with that assessment of him, Mr Szymborska?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘He was our head baker – and a good one,’ Szymborska said, as if that explained it all.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You do not get to be a good head baker with knowing how to run a tight ship. Away from work, he was shy and self-effacing, but once he put on his apron, he became a different man – a man who was quite definitely in charge.’

  ‘So he wasn’t exactly popular?’

  ‘He was not disliked, if that is what you’re suggesting. A few of our workers might have resented him, once in a while, but they would probably all agree that he was fair, as well as firm.’

  ‘Was he married?’ Paniatowski asked

  ‘No,’ Jenny Brunskill replied.

  ‘Had he ever been married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he lived alone?’

  ‘Yes. He has – he had – a flat near the town centre. He was buying it with a loan which the company countersigned.’

  ‘Did he have a current girlfriend?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘We talk about the people who work in the bakery as a family,’ she said. Then she glanced at Stan Szymborska, and continued, ‘Or maybe that’s just the way I talk about them. But I still think I’m right. We are a family, though perhaps not that close – not that intrusive – a family.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that you don’t know about his love life?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying,’ Jenny agreed. ‘Are you . . .’ she continued, with a catch in her voice, ‘are you absolutely certain, Chief Inspector, it’s Tom’s hand that was found?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.’

  ‘But it seems so . . . so very unlikely. People like Tom Whittington don’t get murdered.’

  ‘There were no indications that he was in any kind of trouble, were there?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘None,’ Jenny said.

  And, this time, she got an unqualified nod of agreement from her brother-in-law.

  ‘Do you have any photographs of Tom which you can easily lay your hands on?’ Paniatowski asked.

  And the moment the words were out of her mouth, she thought, Oh my God, did I really say that – lay your hands on?

  But Stan and Jenny had not noticed – or perhaps decided it might be better to pretend they hadn’t noticed – and instead were discussing the problem she had set them.

  ‘Tom, as Stan has already told you, was quite shy,’ Jenny said. ‘He certainly wasn’t one for having his picture taken. But I suppose there might be a photograph of him in his personnel file.’

  ‘Even if there is, it will be fifteen years out of date,’ Stan pointed out. ‘What about the photograph we had taken on the last works’ outing?’

  ‘That’s clever,’ Jenny said, standing up. ‘I’ve got a copy in the office. I’ll go and get it.’

  She left the conference room, and returned, less than a minute later, with a framed group photograph.

  ‘Is this any good?’ she asked.

  Paniatowski examined the photograph. It had been taken in Blackpool, as evidenced by the fact that the Tower was clearly visible in the background.

  It had been in Blackpool that she and Charlie Woodend had first worked on a case together, a million years ago, she thought.

  She turned her attention back to the photograph. As in school photographs, the group pictured had been arranged by hierarchical considerations, so that the senior staff were in the foreground, and the more junior stood on benches behind them.

  ‘That’s Tom,’ Jenny said, pointing to a man in the front row.

  Whittington was standing next to Stan Szymborska, as befitted his position in the company, and the first thing that Paniatowski noticed was how alike the two men looked.

  They could have been brothers, she told herself.

  Then she examined the photograph again, and decided that she’d been wrong. They were not quite close enough in looks to be mistaken for siblings, but they were undoubtedly handsome in the same kind of way, and the main distinction between them was that Stan was unquestionably older.

  Her eyes rested next on the two women who were flanking the two men. There was no question here – even if they weren’t standing side by side, as Stan and Tom were – that they were sisters, though one sported a cropped pageboy hairstyle, while the other had allowed her hair to cascade over her shoulders and thus display itself in its full glory.

  Paniatowski looked at the picture again. This was a company outing, she reminded herself – which meant that everyone in the photograph worked for Brunskill’s Bakery.

  And that was when she felt her stomach perform a sudden and violent somersault.

  NINE

  A full two minutes had passed since she had first noticed the sisters in the photograph. Two minutes – or maybe even three – and Paniatowski was still not sure ho to broach the matter which would quite possibly shatter the lives of the other two people in the room for ever.

  ‘You seem very interested in the picture,’ Jenny Brunskill said, sounding perhaps a little unnerved by the intensity of Paniatowski’s concentration. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like me to point out to you?’

  There was no easy way to deal with the subject, Paniatowski decided – no way to cushion the blow, if blow there was to be.

  ‘Is that your sister?’ she asked, pointing at the woman with the long hair, standing next to Tom Whittington.

  ‘Yes, that’s our Linda.’

  ‘And she works here too, doesn’t she?’

  Jenny smiled. ‘That’s right, she does. And not just works here. She’s the real big cheese – the managing director.’

  With her stomach continuing to perform aerobatics, Paniatowski said, ‘I’d like to see her, if I may.’

  But she already knew that wouldn’t be possible, because if Linda Szymborska had been in the building, she would – as managing director – have made her presence known the second the police arrived.

  ‘I’m afraid that Linda’s not here today,’ Jenny said. ‘She was feeling sick, so she’s stayed at home. Isn’t that ri
ght, Stan?’

  ‘She’s . . . she may be at home by now,’ Stan Szymborska said.

  ‘What do you mean? By now?’ Jenny asked. ‘She was there when you left this morning, wasn’t she?’

  ‘No,’ Stan admitted. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘So where was she?’

  ‘We’ll talk about this later,’ Stan said awkwardly.

  ‘No!’ Jenny insisted firmly. ‘We will not talk about it later – we’ll talk about it now.’

  ‘We had a slight disagreement, and she stormed out of the house,’ Szymborska told her.

  ‘When? This morning? Over breakfast?’

  ‘No, the argument was last night.’

  So now the ‘slight disagreement’ had become an argument, Paniatowski noted.

  ‘Last night!’ Jenny repeated, incredulously.

  ‘Yes,’ Stan Szymborska agreed.

  ‘Then I really don’t understand what you’re saying. Surely, after she came back . . .’

  ‘She didn’t come back.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘No. I thought she’d only be gone for an hour or so, but she still hadn’t returned when I was getting ready for bed, so I just assumed that she was still annoyed, and had checked into a hotel.’

  ‘Does she often stay away all night after you’ve had a row?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Szymborska shook his head. ‘No, she doesn’t. In fact, she’s never done it before.’

  ‘I don’t know what caused this row of yours, but you’d better make up pretty damn quickly,’ Jenny said sternly. ‘The last thing we need is for two directors of the company to be at each other’s throats.’

  She still didn’t get it, Paniatowski thought. She still hadn’t managed to join up the dots.

  ‘I’m going to show you both a photograph,’ she said aloud. ‘I want you to be prepared for a shock.’

  She slid the photograph of the woman’s severed hand across the table to Stan and Jenny.

  ‘Why are you showing us this?’ Jenny wondered. ‘You don’t think . . . Oh God, you don’t think . . .?’

  ‘If you could just look at it very carefully,’ Paniatowski said, in a soothing tone.

  Jenny Brunskill gave it the briefest of glances. ‘It’s not her hand,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing like her hand.’

  ‘Please look at it again,’ Paniatowski urged.

  Jenny did. ‘If it’s Linda’s hand, where’s her engagement ring?’ she demanded aggressively. ‘Where’s her wedding ring?’

  ‘Mr Szymborska?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stan Szymborska mumbled. ‘I want to say it isn’t, but I just don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you know!’ Jenny said, in a voice which was almost a scream. ‘You’re her husband. Don’t you think you’d recognize your own wife’s hand when you saw it?’

  Szymborska rose shakily to his feet. ‘I think I have to phone home immediately,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Jenny agreed. ‘You phone home. You talk to Linda, and put an end to all this ridiculous speculation.’

  Szymborska lumbered into his office.

  ‘It’s not her, you know,’ Jenny told Paniatowski. ‘I know it’s not her. If it was, I could tell straight away.’

  But when Stan returned, two minutes later, even she must have begun to have her doubts.

  ‘She isn’t there,’ Szymborska said flatly.

  ‘Then she must have arrived back at home after you left, and gone out again since,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I spoke to the housekeeper. Linda hasn’t been home all day.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Jenny said. And then she kept repeating the words, until they became a chant in which hope battled against despair. ‘That doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t mean anything . . .’

  ‘Is there something in your wife’s office that she – and only she – will have been especially likely to handle?’ Paniatowski asked Stan Szymborska.

  ‘I . . . I should think so. Why?’

  It was just as she’d suspected it would be, Paniatowski thought – there was no easy way to say it, no magic formula which would make it easier to take.

  ‘Because we’ll need a set of your wife’s fingerprints,’ she told Stan Szymborska.

  An hour had passed, but when Paniatowski re-entered the conference room, it seemed to her as if neither Jenny Brunskill nor Stan Szymborska had moved an inch since the last time she had seen them.

  She opened the file she was holding, and looked down at the forensic report which she already knew by heart.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. It’s Linda’s hand.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Jenny gasped. Then a look of desperate hope filled her eyes, and she said, ‘But that doesn’t have to mean she’s dead, does it?’

  ‘Miss Brunskill . . .’ Paniatowski said softly.

  ‘It doesn’t, does it?’ Jenny asked, appealing to her brother-in-law. ‘It doesn’t have to mean she’s dead!’

  ‘What do you think, Chief Inspector?’ Szymborska asked heavily.

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ Paniatowski replied, choosing her words with care. ‘But it would be wrong of me to offer you much hope.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jenny moaned. ‘She’s dead. She has to be dead. But how could it happen? Why would anybody do such a thing to her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘But you’re a chief inspector!’ Jenny said, with a new note of hysteria seeping into her voice. ‘You’re supposed to know these things! It’s your job to know these things!’

  Stan put his hand on his sister-in-law’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure Chief Inspector Paniatowski’s doing all she can,’ he said gently. ‘And neither of us should do or say anything that will make her job more difficult for her.’

  Jenny took in a deep gulp of air, and nodded.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ she asked.

  ‘There is one thing,’ Paniatowski told her. ‘It won’t be easy, but it would help.’

  ‘Anything,’ Jenny promised.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone that we’ve identified the hands as belonging to your sister and Tom Whittington.’

  ‘But there are people who need to know,’ Jenny protested. ‘There are relatives and friends to be informed. People who really cared about Linda. They’ve a right to be told.’

  ‘I know they have,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But I still don’t want you to tell them yet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s highly probable that naming the victims is just what the killer both expects and wants us to do.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Jenny asked. ‘How can you possibly know what’s in his mind?’

  ‘I just know,’ Paniatowski said, flatly.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Are you sure you actually want me to tell you?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Paniatowski sighed. ‘He could have just buried his victims. If he had, we’d have known they’d gone missing, but nothing more. Instead, he chose to send us their hands, which means that while he doesn’t want to make it too easy for us, he still wants us to find out who they are.’

  ‘I still don’t see why . . .’

  ‘He’ll be expecting us to release the names, and when we don’t, he’ll start getting nervous. And because he’s nervous, he might make a mistake which will lead us to him.’

  There was more to it than that, of course.

  In some ways, the potential witnesses in a murder investigation were rather like the audience in a theatre.

  The audience followed the action on the stage, and thought they knew what was going on – thought they understood the whole world of the play. And then the lighting changed, and so did their perceptions.

  The innocuous table in the corner of the set, which they had ignored up to this point, was suddenly the focus of their attention. And they knew that this table mattered – t
hat it was significant. And even if it wasn’t true – even if the only reason the table had been illuminated was because some lighting man had accidentally hit the wrong switch – they would cling to the idea of the table’s importance, and feel strangely let down if it did not fulfil the hopes they had invested in it.

  And so it was with a murder investigation. The more light that was thrown on the case, the more the potential witnesses built up their own stories about it – and the less the value of the statements they made.

  They would tell you what they thought you wanted to know – rather than simply answer the questions that you had put to them.

  They would force to the forefront of their brains an avalanche of information that they had decided would be helpful – and in the process would bury the information which really mattered.

  At best, this would make them less effective as witnesses – at worst, they would become an actual impediment to the investigation.

  But there was no point in telling Jenny Brunskill any of this, Paniatowski thought. She would have found it hard to grasp under normal circumstances, and in her current situation it would sound like nothing more than meaningless babble.

  ‘You do understand what I’ve been saying, don’t you?’ she asked. ‘I want you to tell no one what I’ve just told you.’

  ‘I understand,’ Stan Szymborska said, in a flat, dead – yet firm – tone.

  ‘And you, Miss Brunskill?’

  ‘I understand too,’ said Jenny Brunskill – but with far less conviction.

  TEN

  It was a little after quarter past seven in the evening, and the team – Paniatowski, Beresford and Walker – were sitting at their usual table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.

  ‘There’s absolutely no room for complacency in this investigation – or indeed in any investigation,’ Monika Paniatowski said, ‘but given what we were up against from the start, we’ve not done too badly for the first day.’

  It was the sort of thing Charlie Woodend would have said, she thought, because – as the leader of the team – he’d have felt it was his duty to rally the troops. And that was why she had said it, too. But she was not sure that she had displayed either the authority or the conviction that Charlie would have done in her place. And besides, there was at least a small – treacherous – part of her which kept saying that even if they had made progress, they would have made more if Charlie had been in charge.