‘You need to talk to Uncle Colin,’ Louisa said.
‘It’s always nice to talk to Uncle Colin, but why should I need to?’ Paniatowski asked, continuing to play the game to the bitter end.
‘You’re in a mess, Mum,’ Louisa said. ‘Even I know that – and I’m only a kid.’
‘Yes, I’m in a mess,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘What you really need is to talk to Uncle Charlie about it,’ Louisa told her. ‘But Uncle Charlie isn’t here any more, so Uncle Colin will have to do.’
After her talk with her daughter, Paniatowski didn’t need anyone else to confirm that she’d ‘lost it’ at the press conference, but if she had, there’d been ample confirmation in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey that night.
It wasn’t that the regular drinkers were looking at her in a strange or pitying way – it was more a case of them not looking at her at all.
But she knew what they were thinking.
Charlie Woodend would have handled Traynor better!
Charlie Woodend would have handled the investigation better!
If Charlie had still been in charge, the guilty man would have been banged up long before now!
Beresford’s pint was sitting in its rightful place on the team’s usual table. The inspector himself, however, was some distance from it, examining – with apparent fascination – what Paniatowski would have taken for a shoe-shine machine, but for the fact that it seemed to have a television screen mounted on its top.
She walked over to him, and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Well, that – whatever it is – certainly seems to have grabbed your attention,’ she said.
‘It’s called Pong,’ Beresford said enthusiastically. ‘It was only installed this afternoon.’
He moved slightly to the side, so that she could get a better view. Not that there was much to see, she thought. The background was black, but everything else – two square zeros at the top, a broken white line running down the middle, a smaller white line at each end of the screen and a square dot which bounced back and forth – was white.
‘It’s what they call a video game, and it’s based on ping-pong,’ Beresford explained. ‘Do you fancy a game?’
‘Not really,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Oh, come on, boss,’ Beresford urged her. ‘It’ll help to take your mind off things.’
Paniatowski sighed resignedly. ‘All right.’
Beresford reached into his pocket and took out what the government was insisting everybody call a two-and-half new pence coin, but he knew was actually a sixpence in real money. He slid it into the slot.
‘What are the rules?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Simplicity itself,’ Beresford told her. ‘You turn that knob, and your bat moves up and down. The objective is to keep returning my serves.’
The square ball bounced across the screen, and Paniatowski missed it. The number at the top of Beresford’s side of the screen changed from a chunky zero to a one.
‘Gotcha!’ Beresford said.
She didn’t care, she realized. Though she was normally the most competitive of games players, she had no real interest in winning this one.
Beresford served again, and this time she managed to send the ball hurtling back at him.
‘Now you’re getting the hang of it,’ Beresford said.
But what was the point, she wondered. What was the point of anything?
Her heart was not in it, but her reflexes refused to let her give up the struggle, and in the next half-minute she notched up five points to Beresford’s four.
‘Big tough woman!’ Beresford said, with a grin on his face.
But she wasn’t, she thought. She was wielding the bat in this game, but in the game that really mattered – the game being played out at police headquarters – she wasn’t wielding anything at all. Instead, she was the ball, a helpless object being bounced back and forth between the press and the chief constable, between the suspect she didn’t want to arrest and the evidence which suggested that perhaps she should.
At the end of the game she had won by eight points to six.
‘Another?’ Beresford suggested.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s quite enough excitement for one day.’
They walked back to the table, and sat down.
‘Are you expecting Sergeant Walker to be putting in an appearance tonight?’ Beresford asked.
Paniatowski shook her head. ‘He left me a message to say that he’s suddenly come down with a bad case of the flu, and he’s gone to bed.’
‘A bad case of spinelessness, more like,’ Beresford retorted. ‘After the way he ratted you out to Mike Traynor this afternoon, he simply daren’t face you.’
‘We don’t know for certain that it was him who ratted me out,’ Paniatowski countered.
‘Of course we do,’ Beresford said dismissively. ‘There were only three of us who knew enough of the story to brief Traynor like that, and since you and I didn’t do it, it just has to be Walker.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But we’ll never be able to prove it.’
‘Whether you can prove it or not, you simply don’t have any choice but to get rid of him.’
Paniatowski shook her head again. ‘Can’t be done. At least, not yet. The chief constable’s made that perfectly clear.’
‘Then when can it be done?’ Beresford asked.
‘Maybe when I solve this case,’ Paniatowski replied.
Or if I solve this case, she thought.
‘Give me some good news, Colin,’ she continued. ‘Tell me your team’s uncovered something that will gladden my heart at least a little.’
‘I don’t think I’ve got much to offer in the heart-gladdening stakes, but here goes,’ Beresford said. ‘Several people we questioned remembered seeing a Jag in the centre of town on the night of the murder. Two of the witnesses said it was being driven by a woman, two more said there was a man behind the wheel and the rest weren’t close enough to say who was driving.’
‘So who was driving it?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘Linda – which would confirm that what Stan said about her leaving the house in a huff was the truth? Or Stan, who made up the whole story about her leaving, and was ditching the car in a desperate attempt to back it up?’
‘We both know the answer to that,’ Beresford said.
‘Yes, we do, don’t we?’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘What about Stan’s movements on the morning after his wife’s murder?’
‘We haven’t come up with a single witness who can place Szymborska either at the river bank early in the morning, or outside the newspaper offices later on. So even though we know he wasn’t where he claimed to be on either occasion, we have no way of proving it.’
‘You’ve searched his house?’
‘Oh yes. We didn’t even need to get a warrant to do it. He was most cooperative – said that if it would help us to catch his wife’s murderer, we could tear the whole place apart. And we did pretty much take him at his word – but we still didn’t find anything.’
No, you wouldn’t have done, Paniatowski thought.
Because while Stan Szymborska might be an emotional man, he was also a careful and intelligent one, and he’d never have invited them in if there’d been anything to find.
‘Do you remember how Charlie Woodend used to say that solving a murder was very like doing a jigsaw puzzle?’ she asked.
Beresford nodded. ‘The pieces are there,’ he said, imitating Woodend’s voice, ‘and all you have to do is collect them up and fit them together.’
‘Which should be easy in this case,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Because it’s probably the least complicated puzzle we’ve ever come across. There are only three pieces to it, and they fit together so perfectly that it’s almost impossible to imagine how any other piece could fit in.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Beresford agreed. ‘There’s absolutely no room for any more on top of the box.’
&nbs
p; ‘So let’s examine them one by one, to see if that gets us anywhere,’ Paniatowski suggested, with a hint of desperation to her voice. ‘The first piece is Stan Szymborska. In his dreams, he’s cutting off hands, which may just be a part of his fantasy life. On the other hand, given the dreams are set in a brutal prisoner-of-war camp where he was a prisoner himself, it’s more likely that the dreams are actually a memory of something which really happened.’ She paused to light up a cigarette. ‘What else do we know about him?’ she continued.
‘That he’s a very passionate man,’ Beresford said. ‘Even twenty-five years later, the thought of being in bed with him was enough to bring a smile to Miss Hope-Gore’s lips. And we know he was deeply in love with Linda – so deeply that he was prepared to wait until after her father died before declaring that love to her.’
‘The second piece is Linda. We know she was obsessed with her father. Stan said she’d escaped from that obsession with his help – that he took her hand . . .’ Paniatowski shuddered. ‘Took her hand!’ she repeated. ‘Now there’s a bloody irony, if I ever heard one.’
‘Go on, boss,’ Beresford said, sounding a little worried.
‘That he took her hand and led her out into the sunshine. But I don’t think she ever escaped from that box of hers.’
‘So you think Stan’s lying?’
‘No, I don’t. I think he really believes it, because he has to believe it. But I’ve seen her office. It’s not clean and modern, like the rest of the bakery. It’s a throw-back to the days when her father was in charge – a shrine to his memory. She worked directly under that huge scowling picture of the miserable old bastard every single day, for God’s sake. And what Stan doesn’t know – or isn’t prepared to admit – is that he looks a bit like the old man himself, which is probably why she agreed to marry him in the first place!’
‘And when the marriage – for whatever reason – started to lose its magic for her, she began an affair with a man who also resembled her father,’ Beresford pointed out.
‘And that brings us neatly on to the third piece of the puzzle – Tom Whittington. The man was a loner – an outsider. But he wasn’t a loner through choice, was he?’
‘No,’ Beresford agreed. ‘When Pete Higgins and Brian Clegg offered him their friendship, he jumped at the chance.’
‘He was even prepared to do things he knew were wrong, in order to keep that friendship.’
‘And when Linda Szymborska decided she wanted to start an affair with him – which he also knew was wrong – he found it impossible to resist.’
‘There’s an almost tragic inevitability about the whole thing,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Put sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate together, add a match and you’ve got an explosion. Put Linda, Stan and Tom together, add an affair and you’ve got a bloody murder. We know what happened. We know why it happened. And we can’t prove a bloody thing.’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ Beresford said cautiously. ‘There are things we still don’t know or can’t explain.’
‘Like what?’
‘For example, we have no idea why Stan decided to leave one hand in the bushes on the river bank, and place the other in a bin outside the newspaper office.’
‘No, we can’t explain that,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But I’m willing to bet that if we ever find out exactly what went on in that prisoner-of-war camp, we’ll have the answer to that, too.’ She took a sip of her vodka. ‘How are we ever going to pin the murders on Stan?’
Beresford shrugged. ‘By following standard procedures,’ he said. ‘By continuing to investigate as carefully and methodically as we can . . .’
‘An approach which, so far, has got us precisely nowhere!’
‘. . . and by hoping that, eventually, we’ll get a lucky break.’
What Colin was saying made perfect sense, Paniatowski thought. Even the great Charlie Woodend himself had put his faith in lucky breaks occasionally. But he had never just sat back and waited for the luck to happen. Instead, he found ways to encourage it to appear.
‘We need to do something that will stir up the stew pot,’ she said aloud.
‘Sorry, boss?’
‘Another of Charlie Woodend’s little theories was that looking for clues was a bit like staring into a stew pot. He said that when you look into the pot, you know that there must be all kinds of juicy things cooking away, but all you can actually see are the bubbles on the surface. So what you need to do, according to Charlie, is give the pot a serious stir, and see what rises to the top.’
‘And you have an idea about what you might do to stir the pot?’ Beresford asked.
‘Yes, I do. It’s just come to me.’
There was something about the way she said the words which immediately made Beresford feel uneasy.
‘What does it involve?’ he asked.
‘Well, the first thing it involves is an early morning visit to Borough Councillor Polly Johnson JP.’
‘I suppose you’d better tell me about it,’ Beresford said, without a great deal of enthusiasm.
Paniatowski outlined her scheme, and when she’d finished, Beresford said, ‘But you do realize, don’t you, that you haven’t any real grounds for doing that?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Paniatowski agreed.
‘And you are aware that the whole thing could blow up in your face?’
‘I am.’
‘I’m still not convinced you’ve thought it through properly,’ Beresford said. ‘The press could decide that they’ll go to town on it. And if they do, they could crucify you.’
‘Well, you really are my little ray of sunshine tonight, aren’t you?’ Paniatowski said.
‘And if there’s enough of an outcry, even the chief constable won’t be able to protect you,’ Beresford pressed on.
‘No, he won’t.’
‘I have to say that what you’re proposing sounds like an act of desperation to me,’ Beresford told her.
Paniatowski smiled thinly. ‘Maybe that’s because it is an act of desperation,’ she said.
TWENTY-FOUR
Fred Handley always opened his general store at seven o’clock in the morning. There wasn’t much passing trade at that time of day, but since he had to be there himself to take deliveries, he thought he might as well catch what little there was.
The woman’s arrival, at seven-oh-three, surprised him, partly because it was so early, and partly because it was only a few hours since he’d last seen her.
‘It’s Jenny, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘That’s right,’ Jenny Brunskill agreed.
‘So what brings you back so soon? Did you forget something when you were here yesterday?’
Jenny laughed, as if he’d made a joke.
‘Oh no, nothing like that. But I’ve got some time on my hands, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to stock up a bit.’
Stock up? Handley thought. At this bloody awful time of the morning?
But he nodded encouragingly anyway, because he always approved in principle of people stocking up – just as long as they did it at his shop, rather than one of the big supermarkets.
‘So what can I get you?’ he asked.
‘I think I’ll just look around, if you don’t mind,’ Jenny said, slightly awkwardly.
‘I don’t mind at all,’ he assured her. ‘Make yourself right at home, love.’
He didn’t expect her to be there for long, because in a shop the size of his, there wasn’t much looking around to do. Yet Jenny seemed intent on making a thorough job of it, carefully studying each shelf before moving along to the next – and at half-past seven, she was still there.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular, love?’ Handley asked.
‘No, like I told you, I’m just getting a feel for the place,’ Jenny Brunskill replied. ‘Although now I come to think of it, I will be needing a loaf of your thick sliced bread.’
‘Would that be Brunskill’s or Tompkins’?’ Handley asked, with a thro
aty chuckle.
Jenny smiled at him. ‘Tompkins’,’ she said. ‘You’ve got such a smooth tongue in your head that you’ve talked me into it.’
Handley reached to the shelf and put a loaf on the counter. ‘It’s there when you want it.’
‘Is that fresh today?’ Jenny asked.
‘Of course it’s fresh,’ Handley said.
‘But fresh today?’ Jenny repeated.
‘Well, no,’ the shopkeeper admitted. ‘But bread like this stays good for days, you know.’
‘When will today’s loaves be delivered?’ Jenny persisted.
Handley checked his watch. ‘I imagine it should be sometime in the next half-hour or so. But you don’t want to . . .’
‘I’ll wait,’ Jenny said firmly.
In her youth, Polly Johnson had always woken up as fresh as a daisy, sprung out of bed immediately and – much to her late father’s annoyance – been singing at the top of her voice by the time she reached the foot of the stairs.
But those days were long gone. She was Councillor Polly Johnson JP now, and as both the years and her responsibilities had taken something of a toll, she liked, instead of jumping in with both feet, to ease herself gently into the day.
She was easing herself into it that morning when she heard a tap on her kitchen window, and looked up to see Monika Paniatowski.
Polly opened the door for her unexpected visitor.
‘Nice to see you, Monika,’ she said, doing her best to erase from her voice the grumpiness she still thought she was perfectly entitled to feel.
‘Nice to see you, too, Councillor Johnson,’ Paniatowski replied.
‘Tea?’
‘Yes, please, I’d like it with . . .’
‘No milk, no sugar and a slice of lemon.’
‘You remembered.’
Polly nodded. ‘I’m like a mother to you.’
She went to the counter, selected a medium-sized mug and picked up her teapot.
‘So it’s like that, is it?’ she asked, as she filled the mug almost to the top with the recently brewed, steaming black liquid.
The Dead Hand of History Page 20