The Dead Hand of History

by Sally Spencer

  That was his opinion, at any rate – and his opinion should count for something, because, having spent nearly thirty years in the Police Force, he had learned how to become almost frighteningly objective.

  ‘You’re starin’ at me, Dad,’ Annie said accusingly. ‘An’ I bet you’ve not heard a word I said.’

  ‘I heard it all,’ Woodend replied indignantly, perhaps half a second before he realized that his daughter was quite right, and – indulgent father that he was – he had no idea what she’d been talking about.

  ‘You heard it all?’ Annie repeated sceptically.

  ‘Definitely,’ Woodend replied, ‘but could you be just a little indulgent to your poor old father for once, an’ say it again?’

  ‘I’ve pulled a double shift,’ Annie said. ‘I didn’t want to – what with you only being here for a few days an’ all – but we’re very short-handed in the hospital at the moment, so I couldn’t really turn it down. Will you an’ Mum be all right on your own?’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Woodend assured her.

  Annie seemed far from convinced. ‘This isn’t Whitebridge, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s London – the big city!’

  Woodend smiled. Why did the young think that only they could handle things? he wondered. What did they think their parents had been doing before they were born, if not experiencing life?

  ‘I was poundin’ the streets of this city an’ collarin’ villains when you were still in nappies,’ he said. ‘An’ by the time you started primary school, I knew the East End like the back of my hand.’

  Now I’m starting to sound like a borin’ old fart, he thought. An’ I’ve only been retired for two days!

  ‘I’ll get back as soon as I can,’ Annie promised, heading for the door. She turned again, before stepping out into the corridor. ‘There’s a newspaper on the table, if you want to read it.’

  ‘Thanks, love,’ Woodend said – but she’d already gone.

  The newspaper was lying face down, and so it was the back page – the sports results – which he read first.

  Whitebridge Rovers were doing very well, he noted.

  Well, that was just typical of them, wasn’t it? For over a decade he’d faithfully turned out every other Saturday – investigations allowing – to watch them get thrashed by the visiting team. And now, when he was finally moving away, they’d suddenly decided to improve!

  He flipped the newspaper over, and saw the screaming headline of the front page.

  Hands of Horror!

  There was a further, smaller headline beneath it.

  Terror stalks Whitebridge

  By Mike Traynor, Special Correspondent

  ‘Put it down, Charlie,’ he told himself.

  But even as the thought was crossing his mind, he was beginning to scan the article.

  ‘I thought I’d hidden that,’ he heard his wife say, from the bathroom doorway. ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Annie gave it to me.’

  ‘Well, obviously I didn’t hide it well enough,’ Joan said. ‘And now, I suppose, the damage has already been done.’

  ‘There’s been a particularly nasty murder back home,’ he said. ‘Two nasty murders, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Yes, the damage has been done,’ Joan confirmed. ‘I know there’ve been two murders, Charlie. That’s why I hid the paper.’

  ‘An’ Monika’s been given the case.’

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t she have been? She is a chief inspector now, if you remember.’

  ‘I do remember,’ Woodend agreed. ‘The thing is, it says here that she’s got DS Walker for a bagman.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, he’s not a bad bobby, in his own way, but he’s what you might call a male chauvinist pig.’

  Joan laughed. ‘Male chauvinist pig?’ she repeated. ‘You want to be careful, Charlie – you’re starting to sound frighteningly modern.’

  ‘But you get the point, don’t you?’ Woodend asked earnestly. ‘He’s simply not the man Monika needs at the moment.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate her,’ Joan warned. ‘She’s a clever lass, and she’ll soon learn how to handle him.’

  ‘I think I’d better just give her a quick call,’ Woodend said, trying to sound casual.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing, Charlie Woodend,’ Joan said firmly.

  ‘She might want a bit of advice.’

  ‘Well, if she does – an’ I do say if – she’s got the number, an’ she only has to ring you.’

  ‘But she might feel a bit awkward about doin’ that.’

  ‘An’ how awkward do you think she’ll be likely to feel if you ring her up without her askin’ you to? If I was in her shoes, I’d take that as a sign that you’d got no confidence in me. An’ that’s the very last thing that Monika needs to feel at this moment.’

  His wife was right, he thought. He hated the fact that she was right – but she was.

  ‘She’ll do a good job,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t she? I’ve taught her all I know.’

  ‘Well, there you are, then! Happy now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  But he wasn’t.

  In three days’ time he would be starting his new life in Spain, and could finally leave Whitebridge CID behind him. But he hadn’t quite left it behind yet, and he wasn’t sure what troubled him more – the thought that Monika needed his help and wasn’t getting it, or the possibility that she didn’t need his help at all.

  Sid Roberts was sitting by himself in the police canteen, tucking into one of those northern animal-fat-based breakfasts which – while they may well be bad for the heart – are scientifically proved to provide an excellent stomach lining for any man contemplating sinking a few pints of best bitter later in the day.

  Roberts was pushing sixty. He had a shock of white hair, and a complexion which looked as if it had been constructed out of sandpaper. There was a popular saying around the HQ that he’d been a uniformed sergeant since Adam was a lad. But Monika Paniatowski, watching him from the doorway, didn’t buy that at all. If Roberts had been on foot patrol in the Garden of Eden, in her opinion, Adam would have been given a clip round the ear and sent on his way – and the forbidden fruit would have stayed on the tree, where it belonged.

  Still, there was no disputing the fact that Sid had been there a long time, and there was not a single member of the Whitebridge force who could remember a time when he hadn’t had those three stripes stitched on his sleeve.

  Several times, over the years, his superiors had suggested he apply for a promotion, but he’d always rejected the idea. He liked being a sergeant. He liked the perspective on his home town that the rank gave him. And while life might be said to be passing him by, it certainly didn’t do so without him noticing every little detail of it.

  Paniatowski walked over to Roberts’ table. ‘Mind if I take a seat, Sid?’ she asked.

  Roberts looked up from his eggs and fried bread. ‘You’re more than welcome, ma’am.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ Paniatowski said, with a smile on her lips.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Roberts repeated.

  ‘Why don’t you call me Monika, just like you did back when you were training me up?’ Paniatowski suggested.

  Sid Roberts shook his head. ‘Nay, lass, that wouldn’t be right. You’re a detective chief inspector now, an’ the proper respect for rank is one of the cornerstones of good policin’.’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘You do know you’re talking complete bollocks, don’t you, Sid?’ she asked.

  ‘Everybody talks a bit of bollocks now and again, ma’am,’ Roberts replied mildly.

  ‘Yes, they do,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But the difference between you and most of the others is they don’t realize they’re doing it, and you do. Proper respect for rank! Cornerstones of policing! Bollocks of the first order! Remember, Sid, I’ve worked with you. I’ve watched you put chief superintendents in their place. I’ve seen them walk away from an encounter with you with their heads bowed, f
eeling as if they were about five years old.’

  ‘I think you must be confusin’ me with somebody else,’ Roberts said seriously, though there was laughter in his eyes. ‘So what can I do for you this mornin’, ma’am?’

  ‘Tell me about the Brunskill family.’

  ‘The ones who own the bakery?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How far do you want me to go back?’

  ‘Begin with the father.’

  Roberts nodded. ‘The Brunskill family fortune started, like most family fortunes in this town, with the mills.’

  ‘He was a mill worker?’

  ‘Nay, lass, Seth Brunskill was a pie maker, but his business was with the mill workers. At first, when he didn’t have a pot to piss in, he used to load an old hand-barrow up with pies and sell them at the mill gates at dinner time. He did so well that eventually he could afford to buy himself a horse an’ cart, an’ after that he splashed out on a motor vehicle.’

  ‘And from then on, the business went from strength to strength,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Who’s tellin’ this story, ma’am – me or you?’ Roberts asked sharply.

  ‘Sorry,’ Paniatowski said, bowing her head contritely.

  ‘He got to the point – I think it must have been somewhere around 1953 – when he could afford to employ other people to do his sellin’ for him. An’ it was about that time, too, that his wife topped herself.’

  ‘She committed suicide?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does anyone know why?’

  ‘Not officially, but if you was to ask me to guess, I’d say it was because livin’ with a mean-spirited bastard like Seth Brunskill had become such a strain that she simply didn’t feel she could carry on any longer.’

  ‘It must have devastated her daughters.’

  ‘I very much doubt it. They took their lead from the way their father behaved, you see, and he regarded his wife as no more than a redundant baby-making machine.’ Roberts took a sip of his tea. ‘Now where was I? Oh yes, after he’d buried his wife, one the first things he did was to buy his new bakery . . .’

  ‘The one Brunskill’s have now?’

  ‘Nay, lass, that’s the new new bakery. The one I’m talkin’ about is down on Brewer’s Street. Anyway, for the next few years, it didn’t seem he could put a foot wrong, but then the business started to go into decline.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Seth, bein’ the man he was, refused to move with the times. There were no such things as supermarkets when he started out, you have to understand. Everybody went to the corner shop, because there was no choice in the matter. But by the early sixties, the supermarkets were everywhere, an’ doin’ big business. And Seth just wouldn’t acknowledge that. People tried to tell him he had to change, but nobody ever had a higher opinion of Seth than he had of himself, an’ he simply wouldn’t listen. By the time he died, which will have been six years ago now, the bakery was totterin’ on the edge of bankruptcy.’

  ‘And then his daughters took over,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘An’ then his daughters took over,’ Roberts agreed. ‘They’d both been workin’ in the bakery since they’d left school – Seth wouldn’t have had it any other way – but up until the time he died, he’d been the only one takin’ the decisions. Once he’d gone, of course, everything was different. The Brewer’s Street premises were too small to run a modern bakery from, an’ everybody but Seth had known that for a long time. So, within weeks, the bakery had moved to a new site. It cost an arm an’ a leg, and the two sisters were up to their ears in debt, but gradually the business began to pick up again, an’ now it’s probably as strong as it ever was.’

  ‘Tell me about Linda’s husband,’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘Polish Stan – the delivery man?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they used to call him in the late forties, when he was runnin’ his delivery service. An’ there’s another real success story for you. He started out with one clapped-out old van, doin’ deliveries for anybody who wanted somethin’ deliverin’ – a sort of tramp steamer on wheels. He used to work every hour God sent. But it paid off. He bought another van, then another, an’ by the time he sold his company he had quite a fleet.’

  ‘So if he was doing so well with the delivery service, why did he sell the company?’

  ‘He did it because he needed the money to buy his way into Brunskill’s Bakery.’

  ‘This was after Seth died?’

  ‘No, it was a couple of years before.’

  ‘So why did he want to buy into what, according to you, was a failing business? Did he do it to please his wife?’

  ‘Linda wasn’t his wife then. He didn’t marry her until the year after Seth had popped his clogs.’

  ‘But they’d been going out together for a while before that?’

  ‘They may have been, but if they were, they kept it very quiet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Seth Brunskill would never have approved of one of his daughters marrying a foreigner. To be honest with you, ma’am, I don’t think he’d have approved of them marryin’ anybody at all. They belonged to him, you see – just as much as the bakery did.’

  ‘He really doesn’t sound like a very nice man,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘He wasn’t. He was what nowadays you might call a “domestic tyrant” – which is just a fancy way of saying “bully”.’

  ‘Do you know anything about a man called Tom Whittington?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Tom Whittington,’ Roberts repeated, running the name around his filing cabinet of a head. ‘I think I collared him about twenty years ago for nickin’ a car. But, as far as I know, he’s kept his nose clean since then. He works at the bakery, too, doesn’t he?’

  Well, he did, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. ‘Is there no more you can tell me about him, Sid?’

  ‘Not a dicky-bird.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, for example, know if he’d been having an affair with a married woman?’

  Roberts smiled. ‘They say I know a hell of lot, ma’am . . .’

  ‘And so you do,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘An’ so I do,’ Roberts agreed. ‘But even I don’t know everythin’.’

  FOURTEEN

  When Jack Crane had set out from home that morning, it had been with a determination to leave the fanciful poet back in the bedsit and bring only the hard-bitten Detective Constable Crane to police headquarters with him. And, so far, it was working out very well, he thought, as he sat facing DS Walker across a table at the opposite end of the police canteen to where Monika Paniatowski was having her chat with Sid Roberts. So far, he’d not been able to detect even a hint of a university man in himself.

  A folded map of Whitebridge lay tantalizingly on the table between them. Crane’s fingers just itched to open it up, but it was Walker’s map, and the sergeant was showing no inclination to look at it yet. In fact, though Walker’s body was in the room, his mind seemed to be wandering freely, and – if the expression on his face was anything to go by – it was not a pleasant wander at all.

  Walker took a sip of his tea, then a puff of his cigarette, and Crane – who was finding the waiting almost unbearable – decided to throw caution to the wind.

  ‘So where do you want us to start looking, Sarge?’ the detective constable asked.

  Walker took another sip of his tea, then placed his mug down squarely in the centre of the map.

  ‘Well, aren’t you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning?’ he asked sourly. ‘Just can’t wait to get stuck into the job, can you?’

  There was really no satisfactory answer to that, Crane thought, and so he decided to say nothing at all.

  ‘She’s going about it in entirely the wrong way, you know,’ Walker said, not even bothering to specify who ‘she’ was.

  ‘Is she, Sarge?’

  ‘Yes, she most certainly is. What she
wants us to do is to find the bodies. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So the easiest way to give her what she wants – the logical way – is to pull Stan What’s-’is-name in for questioning, and sweat it out of him. But ma’am isn’t having any of that. Ma’am doesn’t want to do it the easy way.’

  ‘There’s no guarantee that even if we did pull Szymborska in, he’d—’ Crane began.

  ‘And, of course, sending us off on a wild-goose chase has another advantage for ma’am,’ Walker interrupted him. ‘It’s a way of keeping me out of her hair while she follows up the more promising leads – which she only has because I identified the bodies for her.’

  It was true that the stunt Walker had pulled with the fingerprints had meant they’d been able to quickly identify Tom Whittington, Crane thought. But the examination of the hand had also revealed baking powder under the fingernails, so it was more than likely the DCI would have discovered his identity herself by the end of the day. And it had been Paniatowski, not Walker, who had worked out that the woman’s hand belonged to Linda.

  So, all in all, the sergeant was being rather unfair – but only a fool would think to point that out.

  ‘I’m not trying to be funny, but I think you’re being overly pessimistic, Sarge,’ Crane said.

  ‘You think I’m being what?’

  Mistake! The university man had not been left at home at all! Instead, he found a way to smuggle himself on to the journey to work. And now, once at work, he was recklessly sticking his bloody head above the parapet.

  ‘I think there’s a very good chance that, if we approached the job properly, we actually could find the bodies,’ Crane said.

  ‘Oh, do you?’ Walker said. ‘And would you mind explaining to your poor thick old sergeant just how we “approach the job properly”?’

  ‘Well, we can start by deciding which areas we can rule out of the search,’ Crane suggested.

  ‘And how would we do that?’

  ‘We’re agreed that the murderer wouldn’t want an audience while he was chopping off the hands, aren’t we?’