Death Watch

by Sally Spencer

  ‘He’s a busy man,’ Crawley said. ‘Anyway, we’re getting off the point again. What I want to know is whether it’s true that this shrink of yours refuses to confirm or deny that Edgar Brunton is likely to be your man?’

  ‘He’s Brunton’s doctor,’ Woodend said. ‘He feels his hands are tied.’

  ‘Well, maybe I can persuade him to have them bloody well untied,’ Crawley blustered. ‘Do you know where he is, right now?’

  Woodend nodded. ‘For the last hour an’ a half, he’s been in the cells.’

  ‘He’s been where?’

  ‘In the cells,’ Woodend repeated.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Crawley demanded. ‘Have you gone completely off your bloody head?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Woodend said, making every effort to sound as sane as he possibly could.

  ‘Then just what is your bloody game?’

  ‘Dr Stevenson wants to do the right thing, but he doesn’t think his medical ethics will allow him to,’ Woodend explained.

  ‘Yes! I know! You’ve already made that perfectly clear.’

  ‘So I’m hopin’ that, after bein’ banged up for a while, he’ll manage to persuade himself that he has no choice but to tell me what I want to know.’

  ‘And if that doesn’t work?’

  ‘Then we’ve lost nothin’ by tryin’, have we?’

  ‘Lost nothing! The man’s a university lecturer! An important figure in the community! God knows how many friends he’s got in high places.’ Crawley paused for a second to draw breath, before carrying on with his onslaught. ‘I want him released immediately, Chief Inspector. Do you understand? Immediately!’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ Woodend said firmly.

  ‘What? Are you refusing to obey a direct order?’

  ‘An’ are you willin’ to take responsibility for kickin’ loose a man who might be able to help us crack this case?’ Woodend countered. ‘Because if you are – an’ if things turn out badly as a result of it – I’ll make certain that everybody knows it was your decision.’

  For a moment, it looked as if Crawley would behave like a man and stick to his decision. But it was only for a moment. Then, the political animal which inhabited most of his soul advised him to let Woodend have his way – to let Woodend take the fall, if any fall was to be taken.

  ‘Based on your specific recommendation – which I will expect you to put in writing – I’m prepared to agree to hold Dr Stevenson in custody for a little while longer,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Woodend replied.

  ‘You’d better be right about this, Charlie,’ the superintendent hissed, ‘because if you’re wrong – if you’ve ruined Edgar Brunton’s reputation needlessly, or if Dr Stevenson decides to complain about the way he’s been treated – I’ll have you back directing traffic before you can blink.’

  ‘I’m not wrong,’ Woodend said. ‘But if I was you, sir, I wouldn’t go threatenin’ me with somethin’ that – given the job I’ve been landed with here – is already startin’ to feel like a promotion.’

  Edgar Brunton’s study, with its long bookcases full of rows of leather-bound books, looked more like a film set than a place in which someone actually worked.

  ‘However can he afford to run a place like this?’ Monika Paniatowski mused.

  Beresford shrugged. ‘Have you employed a solicitor recently, Sarge?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘Have you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have. What with Mum’s condition getting worse by the day, I thought it might be best if …’ He trailed off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Beresford told her – though it clearly wasn’t. ‘Anyway, the point is that a solicitor’s advice doesn’t come cheap.’ He grinned, as if to demonstrate that he had succeeded in putting unpleasant thoughts behind him. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that as a class solicitors are greedy – only they’ll have the shirt off your back before you’ve even had time to sit down.’

  Paniatowski smiled, and then immediately grew serious again. ‘Perhaps that’s true,’ she said. ‘But I’m starting to get the distinct impression that our Mr Brunton isn’t half as successful as he likes to pretend he is.’

  ‘Does that really matter?’ Beresford asked. ‘Do you think how much money he makes could have any relevance to this case?’

  ‘Not really,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘From what little I’ve read on the subject, sex offenders don’t only just come in all shapes and sizes – they come from all income groups as well.’

  ‘Back in the boss’s office, you were arguing that Brunton couldn’t have done it,’ Beresford said. ‘Now you’re talking like someone who has very little doubt he’s guilty. Have you changed your mind?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Why the complete turn-around?’

  ‘Because I’ve been talking to the boss on the phone, and he thinks Brunton is guilty. Doesn’t just think it – feels it deep down inside his gut. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned while I’ve been working with Charlie Woodend, it’s to put my trust in his gut.’

  Beresford nodded, then looked around the study. ‘So what are we looking for, and where do we start?’

  ‘There’s no easy answer to that,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘We won’t know what we’re looking for until we find it – and then it will be pretty obvious that that’s what we should have been searching for all along.’ She paused, then said, ‘Wait a minute! There is one thing that we should definitely be keeping an eye open for. Property deeds!’

  ‘You mean deeds to flats, and places like that?’

  ‘No, not like that at all. Flats aren’t anywhere near private enough. We’re looking for deeds to places like lock-up garages and country cottages.’

  ‘Places where he could have hidden the girl,’ Beresford said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  A team of twenty uniformed officers had been out on the moors all afternoon. The sergeant in charge had been given a list of all the villages within a fifteen- or twenty-minute drive of Whitebridge centre, and told that his team should visit every one of them.

  By the time they’d reached the fourth village, they were working like a well-oiled machine. Most of the constables were deployed to search outlying buildings – the disused barns and near-derelict cottages that seemed to ring every village. The rest of the team, the ones the sergeant considered his brightest lads, were assigned to knock on the door of every house and put a standard set of questions to whoever answered.

  The first question was accompanied by a photograph of Angela Jackson. Did she look familiar? the officers asked. Had someone like her been seen in the village recently? There were no positive responses, and the sergeant had never expected there would be – but it was at least worth a shot.

  The third question was whether they’d noticed any strangers in the village the previous day, but this, too, had received nothing but negative replies.

  The fourth question was divided into several parts, and was the big one. Had someone bought a house in the village in the last year or so – say a man in his late thirties? If such a person had bought a house, did he visit it regularly or only put in the occasional appearance? And when he was there, did he make an effort to be sociable with new neighbours, or did he seem to want to keep himself pretty much to himself?

  This question advanced the search no more than the first three had. Yes, someone had bought the cottage up the road, but they were an elderly couple. Yes, the house on the end of the row had been sold, but the new owners were very friendly, as were their four kids. Yes, someone had taken over the old bakery and converted it into a home, but the man’s name was Hardcastle, and he had a number of relatives already living in and around the village.

  Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no.

  It had been a complete waste of a day, the sergeant thought, as he ticke
d another village off his list. Wherever Angela Jackson was, she certainly wasn’t in one of the places that he and his men had visited.

  Perhaps, he thought, they should have checked on the villages further afield – the ones that were half an hour or forty minutes away from Whitebridge centre. He’d even suggested it when he was being briefed. But Chief Inspector Woodend had been adamant that wouldn’t be necessary.

  ‘For obvious reasons, I can’t give you all the details behind my thinkin’, Archie,’ he’d said to the sergeant.

  ‘Of course not, sir. I understand that.’

  ‘But you can take it from me that if she is in a village, it’ll be one that’s close to the town. It’s all a question of logistics, you see. He simply wouldn’t have had the time to take her very far.’

  So they’d done it Mr Woodend’s way, the sergeant thought. Because that was what he’d wanted, and because he was the boss.

  But what if, on this occasion, Mr Woodend was wrong?

  Thirteen

  ‘What’s happened to Inspector Rutter?’ Edgar Brunton asked, when Woodend re-entered the interview room alone.

  ‘He’s off investigatin’ another aspect of the case,’ the chief inspector said, sitting down opposite him.

  Brunton raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Don’t you want to know what aspect?’

  ‘Only if it amuses you to tell me.’

  ‘We’ve got a search warrant for your house. We’re goin’ through all your private papers.’

  ‘How very unpleasant of you,’ Brunton said. ‘I shall certainly sue you for that, once I’m released.’

  ‘Inspector Rutter’s very good at rootin’ out grubby little secrets,’ Woodend commented.

  ‘Unfortunately for you, I don’t have any to be rooted out,’ Brunton said calmly.

  ‘We’ll find the girl soon, you know,’ Woodend said. ‘We’ll find her, she’ll identify you, an’ then you’ll be buggered. So why don’t you save us the trouble? Tell us where she is, an’ it’ll go much easier for you at your trial.’

  Brunton smiled. ‘If I were guilty – which I’m not – nothing I could say now would make it easier for me later. The press would call me a monster, and the judge would bow to political pressure and impose on me the maximum sentence permissible under the law.’

  ‘Don’t you think the papers would be right to call you a monster?’ Woodend asked, curious.

  Brunton hesitated for the briefest moment, then said, ‘It’s not me that we’re talking about here.’

  ‘All right, I’ll accept, for the moment, that we’re not talkin’ about you,’ Woodend agreed. ‘So let me put it in a way that might make it easier for you to give an answer. Don’t you think the papers would be right to call whoever we’re talking about a monster?’

  Another hesitation. ‘I’m a trained lawyer,’ Brunton said finally. ‘I’d have to know all the facts before I could express an opinion.’

  ‘The girl’s been kidnapped, an’ – according to your shrink, Dr Stevenson – will have been tortured horribly by now,’ Woodend said. ‘What more facts do you need than that?’

  ‘Who told you that Martin Stevenson was my therapist?’ Brunton demanded with a sudden show of anger.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Woodend countered. ‘He is, isn’t he?’

  ‘I may have consulted him on occasion,’ Brunton admitted. ‘But what passed between us is my business and no one else’s.’

  ‘Did you tell him how you had fantasies about inflictin’ pain on children?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘Would you tell your psychiatrist if you harboured such fantasies?’ Brunton countered.

  ‘Which means that you do have the fantasies, but you didn’t describe them to him?’

  ‘Which means nothing of the kind.’ Brunton smiled again. ‘You really are getting much better at this, Mr Woodend,’ he said. ‘There’s a subtlety to your questions which was notably absent earlier.’

  ‘It’s not my main aim in life to have a man like you give me a mark out of ten for my performance,’ Woodend told him.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Brunton said. ‘We all want to influence other people. We all want to impress them.’

  ‘An’ we all want to have power over them?’ Woodend suggested.

  ‘That too,’ Brunton conceded. ‘It’s going to be much harder to find the girl than you seem to think it will be,’ he continued.

  ‘Because you’ve done such a good job of hiding her?’

  ‘Because there are literally thousands of places – perhaps hundreds of thousands – where her abductor could have decided to hide her. You simply haven’t got the manpower to search them all. And even if you had, the courts would never issue the blanket warrant that would be necessary to carry out all the searches, because while an Englishman’s home is not actually his castle, he does, at least, have a reasonable expectation of refuge in it.’

  ‘Do you know what really convinces me that you’re our man?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘No, but I could take a guess,’ Brunton said. ‘Perhaps it’s your jealousy that’s making you reach such a far-fetched conclusion.’

  ‘My jealousy?’

  ‘Exactly! A jealousy fuelled by the fact that my standing in the community is so much higher than yours, and that while I am paid large fees for my services, you are forced to scrape by on a wage.’

  Woodend shook his head. ‘It’s not that at all. It’s the fact that you seem to feel absolutely no compassion at all for this poor kid that’s gone missin’.’

  ‘Come, come, Chief Inspector, aren’t you being a little hypocritical now?’ Brunton asked. ‘Most people are not really very concerned about anything that doesn’t affect them directly. They’ll pretend they are, of course, especially if others are watching them. But that’s all it is! A pretence!’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘You know it is. Hundreds of thousands of children are starving in Africa, even as we sit here chatting. Now, I don’t wish those children any harm – if I was offered the opportunity to machine-gun a line of them to death, for example, I would quite properly refuse – but neither do I care enough about their predicament to do anything to improve it. And, if you’re honest, neither do you.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ Woodend said.

  ‘You don’t believe that you don’t care?’

  ‘I don’t believe that if you were offered the choice of lettin’ them kids live or killin’ them off, you’d be able to resist the temptation of killin’ them off – because that would really show your power, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t understand me at all,’ Brunton said.

  ‘Wrong!’ Woodend told him. ‘It’s you that doesn’t understand yourself. But maybe you will, eventually.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Brunton asked, clearly – and consciously – imitating his interrogator.

  ‘Yes,’ Woodend said. ‘I think there’s a very strong chance of it. After all, the prison shrink will have at least thirty years to help you find the real you.’

  ‘Brunton really doesn’t make that much money, you know,’ Monika Paniatowski said, looking up from the pile of statements, receipts, and bills resting on the desk in the study.

  ‘What was that again, Sarge?’ asked Beresford, who had spent the previous two and a half hours going through Brunton’s extensive book collection in search of hidden documents, and was now so punch-drunk that though he heard Paniatowski’s words, they made no sense to him.

  ‘Brunton. He doesn’t make that much money. His social calendar is full to bursting – lunch with a town councillor, a game of golf with an important local businessman …’

  ‘Well, there you are then, Sarge – he’s rubbing shoulders with all the right people.’

  ‘Yes, but when you compare that social calendar with his list of clients, there are not many names that appear on both. Most of his friends, like Jeremy Smythe, take their business elsewhere, and most of clients are nowhere near prosperous enough to e
at where he eats, and probably wouldn’t be allowed in the golf club – except through the tradesmen’s entrance.’

  And then there was Brunton’s office, she thought – overflowing with folders from the cases he was supposedly dealing with. But why was it overflowing? He had plenty of clerical staff on hand, who could have filed them away. There could only be one reason for the mess. The folders were there for display. They were there because he wanted to create the impression that he was busier than he actually was!

  ‘Maybe he’s already made all the money he ever needs to make,’ Beresford suggested, closing one book, placing it back on the shelf, and reaching for the one next to it. ‘Maybe his work’s more like a hobby to him now.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Paniatowski replied, unconvinced. She checked her watch. ‘I’m getting stale,’ she said. ‘Let’s take a five-minute break, shall we, Colin?’

  ‘Good idea,’ Beresford said, quickly slamming the book back onto the shelf and walking away from it before the sergeant had time to change her mind.

  He looked around for somewhere to sit down. He wanted to be close enough to talk comfortably to the sergeant, but also in such a position that he didn’t constantly catch himself staring down at her legs. The chair on the opposite side of the desk seemed perfect.

  Paniatowski pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket, and offered them to Beresford. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Will that be all right?’ Beresford asked dubiously.

  ‘You mean, will the grand Mrs Brunton object to the air in this room – which should carry with it only the aroma of the finest Havana cigars – being polluted by the stench of cheap cigarettes smoked by common police officers?’

  ‘More or less,’ Beresford agreed.

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘I’m sure she’ll object. She may even lodge a complaint. But we didn’t ask to be here – the only reason we are here is because her husband’s a pervert – and I’m dying for a smoke.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Beresford said.

  They lit up, and took that first comforting drag which should in theory assuage the need, but in practice only leads to a craving for more of the same.