Lambs to the Slaughter

by Sally Spencer

  And now here I am, in the front parlour of a man who, only yesterday, I suspected of being Len Hopkins’ murderer, Beresford thought, as he looked around the room.

  The parlour was immaculately clean and over-furnished. Neither the armchair in which he was sitting, nor the one in which the old man was hunched, showed much sign of wear, and the walls were covered with photographs of people long dead. A fire burned cheerily in the grate, but the room still had the musty smell of a place which is only used on special occasions.

  ‘You can stuff your gas fires and your electric heaters up your backside,’ Tommy Sanders said. ‘There’s no heat like that that comes from a coal fire. I love the stuff – even if it is bloody killing me.’

  ‘You said you wanted to talk to me urgently,’ Beresford pointed out.

  ‘All in good time, lad, all in good time,’ the old man said.

  He coughed into a white handkerchief, and Beresford could see the flecks of blood.

  ‘Do you know why I’m seeing you here, rather than in the kitchen?’ Sanders asked.

  ‘Because the kitchen is where you entertain your friends, and this is serious business,’ Beresford said.

  The old man laughed. ‘Well done, lad. Nicely worked out. There’s a chance you might turn out to be a good bobby in time – but you’re not there yet, not by a long chalk. At the moment, to be honest, you’re a bit of a bloody idiot.’

  ‘I didn’t come here to trade insults,’ Beresford said.

  ‘It’s not an insult,’ Sanders said. ‘I’m just speaking the truth as I see it. I mean to say, who else but a bloody idiot would have arrested Susan Danvers for Len Hopkins’ murder?’

  Beresford stood up. ‘I think I’ll be going,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve arrested the wrong person, lad – and I can prove it,’ Tommy Sanders said.

  ‘You can prove it?’

  ‘That’s what I said. Sit down again, lad.’

  Beresford sat.

  ‘But before I prove it to you, we need to make a deal,’ the old man said.

  ‘What kind of deal?’

  ‘What I’m about to tell you could give you grounds for charging my granddaughter, Becky, with obstructing the course of justice. You have to promise me that won’t happen.’

  Jesus Christ, he was going to admit that the alibi was a fake! Beresford thought. And then he was going to explain why he had needed the alibi. Or to put it another way, he was going to confess to the murder of Len Hopkins.

  And if he did that – and if it was a true confession – it meant that despite all the evidence that seemed to be stacked up against Susan Danvers, the officer in charge of the case – Detective Inspector Colin-bloody-smart-arse-Beresford – had got the whole thing wrong.

  ‘Would this obstruction of justice have anything to do with the alibi that Becky gave you?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘It would,’ Tommy Sanders confirmed.

  So there it was. It was starting to look like he had been wrong about Susan – and Monika had been right.

  How do you feel now, Inspector Hotshot? he asked himself. Still think you’re capable of running an investigation on your own? Still think you know better than your boss?

  ‘Becky won’t be prosecuted for lying about being with you on Sunday night,’ he said. ‘You have my word on that.’

  ‘All right, then, let’s start at the beginning,’ Tommy Sanders said. ‘I . . . I didn’t see Len . . . Hopkins at the brass . . . band competition . . .’

  He was having another coughing attack, and this one was much more violent than the one he’d had earlier.

  ‘It’ll . . . it’ll pass, this,’ Sanders said between coughs, ‘but it’ll . . . take time . . . and you’re . . . you’re going to . . . have to be . . . patient.’

  ‘Take your time, Mr Sanders,’ Beresford said soothingly. ‘There’s no hurry at all.’

  Nor was there, he thought, because no man is ever in a hurry to find out just how big a bloody idiot he’s been.

  It is young Robert Sutton’s first term in Oxford and he is drinking in the Bulldog pub, across from Christchurch College, when he sees the girl sitting in the corner. She has long brown hair, and is strikingly beautiful, and when she notices him looking at her, she smiles.

  ‘I went over to talk to her,’ Sutton told Meadows. ‘She said her name was Brenda, and that she hated it because it was so old-fashioned. I said I thought it was a beautiful name.’

  ‘Men will say anything when they want to get into a girl’s knickers,’ Meadows said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sutton agreed, ‘they will. We had a few drinks – more than I intended; I wasn’t used to alcohol in those days – and then she suggested we went back to her flat.’ He paused. ‘It wasn’t really her flat, of course.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ agreed Meadows, who could probably have written the rest of the confession herself.

  ‘She’d appeared to be rather shy in the pub, but the moment we got to the flat, she became a completely different person. It seemed like she couldn’t wait to get me into bed. We made love for hours.’ Sutton sighed. ‘I’d never experienced anything like it before.’

  ‘But when you woke up the next morning, she was gone, was she?’ Meadows suggested.

  ‘That’s right,’ Robert Sutton agreed. ‘She was gone – but somebody else was there.’

  Sutton wakes up feeling gloriously happy, and instead of opening his eyes, he just lies there, reliving the previous night.

  And then he hears the man cough, and what had seemed like a dream rapidly turns into a nightmare.

  The man is sitting on an upright chair quite close to the bed. He is in his thirties, and though the rest of his face is virtually expressionless, his eyes are hard and cold.

  ‘Well, well, well, Mr Sutton,’ he says, ‘you have been a naughty boy, haven’t you?’

  There is a part of Sutton which wants to jump out of bed – naked as he is – and demand to know what this man is doing in Brenda’s flat. But there is another part of him which simply wants to hide under the bedclothes.

  ‘Are you interested in photography, Mr Sutton?’ the man asks. ‘Because if you are, you might like to see these.’

  He slowly and carefully lays a series of photographs on the bed. They are all in sharp focus, and are all of Sutton and Brenda. Even though he is scared – and he is very scared – Sutton feels both proud of himself and aroused.

  ‘So I went to bed with a girl,’ he says, attempting to bluster his way out of the situation. ‘What’s that got to do with you?’

  ‘You might also like to see this,’ the man says.

  He hands Sutton a birth certificate. The name on it is Brenda King, and from the date of birth, it seems she is fifteen years old.

  ‘It was probably a fake, of course,’ Sutton told Meadows. ‘I realize that now. But at the time, I was little more than a kid myself, and I believed it was all true.’

  ‘What did he want you to do?’

  ‘You’re quite the little radical, aren’t you, Robert?’ the man asks. ‘You’ve only been here a couple of months, but you’re already making an impact in the university’s Communist Party, and there’s talk of co-opting you on to the committee.’

  ‘I will not apologize for my beliefs,’ Sutton says pompously. ‘The downfall of capitalism in inevitable, and it is the duty of the intelligentsia to—’

  ‘You really don’t want to go to gaol for rape, now, do you?’ the man interrupts him.

  Sutton’s mouth is suddenly very dry. ‘No, I . . . no, I don’t,’ he croaks.

  ‘Then we’ll have to see what we can do to prevent that terrible thing happening, won’t we?’ the man says, and suddenly his voice has a kindly, almost avuncular tone to it.

  ‘He told me that if I reported back to him on everything that happened in Communist Party meetings, I’d have cleared my debt in three years,’ Sutton said. ‘That’s what he called it – clearing my debt. So I did it, and I never heard from him – or any of his ki
nd – again, until the early hours of Monday morning.’

  ‘The incident he was threatening you with happened over twenty years ago, when you were a naïve student,’ Meadows pointed out. ‘You know now it was probably all faked, so why didn’t you simply call his bluff?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Robert Sutton said. ‘He wasn’t threatening me with Brenda.’

  ‘Then what was he threatening you with?’

  ‘He was threatening me with them – the people behind him. By mentioning Brenda, he was just underlining the fact that there’s nothing they won’t do to get what they want.’

  ‘You didn’t even argue with him, did you?’ Meadows asked contemptuously. ‘You didn’t even try to put up a fight?’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Sutton replied. ‘I told him that I wasn’t going to do it. I said that even if he continued to assure me that nothing bad would happen to Louisa Paniatowski, I would never play a part in the abduction of a child.’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  ‘He reminded me that I’d got a daughter of my own – and that’s when I knew I had no choice.’

  Meadows was starting to feel sorry for the man, but there was still a job to do, and she pushed all pity aside.

  ‘What made them switch the day of the party from Friday to Monday?’ she asked.

  ‘It wasn’t switched,’ Robert Sutton said. ‘It was always going to be on Monday.’

  ‘But when Ellie called Louisa on Monday morning, she told her that it would be Friday.’

  ‘The man said we had to do it that way, because if Ellie had told Louisa it was being held on Monday, Louisa would have said she couldn’t go, because Tuesday was a school day.’

  ‘But by the time you switched the days, Louisa would be so looking forward to it that she’d be prepared to break the rules?’ Meadows guessed.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And did he tell you what you were supposed to do if her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party on a Monday?’

  ‘He told me not to worry about the mother. He said she’d be somewhere out in the sticks, investigating a murder.’

  ‘And he said this to you at four o’clock on Monday morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At four o’clock on Monday morning, even Monika Paniatowski hadn’t known she’d be investigating a murder, Meadows thought. At four o’clock on Monday morning, Len Hopkins’ body hadn’t even been found.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The coughing fit had gone on for over half an hour, and the bottom of the enamel bowl which Tommy Sanders held shakily on his lap was spattered with spots of red and black.

  He looked up at the waiting Beresford.

  ‘This is how it will all end,’ he gasped. ‘One day, I’ll start coughing and I’ll never stop. I’ll spew up what’s left of my life into this bloody bowl, and then I’ll be gone.’

  ‘If you’d like me to come back later . . .’ Beresford began.

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying, lad?’ Tommy asked. ‘There might not be a later, so let’s get it over with now.’

  The sick man was right, Beresford thought – he could go at any time.

  ‘Do you mind if I take notes, Mr Sanders?’ he asked, wishing he’d brought a tape recorder, so that he could have on record what would be – for him – a necessary humiliation.

  ‘I don’t mind what you do, lad, as long as you listen,’ Tommy said. ‘Now where was I? Oh yes, I was telling you that I didn’t see Len Hopkins at the brass band competition.’ The old man paused for a moment. ‘No, that’s not strictly true,’ he continued. ‘I did see Len, though it was only at a distance. But there was someone else I saw—’

  ‘I couldn’t really give a toss about what happened at the competition,’ Beresford interrupted. ‘It’s the events of the night which followed it that I’m interested in.’

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, he regretted saying them. He had broken one of the cardinal rules of questioning, he told himself – you never hurried a suspect, not even if you were desperate – as he was – to learn if you’d made a mistake.

  Tommy was glaring at him through watery eyes. ‘I’ll tell my story in my own way, and at my own speed, lad,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t want to listen, then you can just piss off.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Beresford said.

  ‘And so you should be,’ Tommy agreed. He was about to say more, then shook his head with frustration. ‘Now see what you’ve done,’ he continued, after a few moments, ‘with all your interrupting. I’ve completely lost my train of thought.’

  ‘You were saying that you didn’t see Len close up at the competition,’ Beresford prompted.

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t see him close up – but I did see Susan Danvers. She was standing all by herself, behind the refreshment tent, and she was sobbing her eyes out. So I asked her what was wrong, and she said that bastard Len had kicked her out, just because his bloody pastor had told him to.’

  And that gave you one more reason – on top of the political one you already had – to drive a pickaxe into Len’s skull, Beresford thought.

  But how had he managed to lace Len’s cocoa with laxative?

  Easy! Susan had a key to Len’s front door, Tommy had asked her for it, and she had handed it over. So maybe Susan had been part of the murder plot after all – and if that were the case, arresting her would begin to look, in retrospect, like a very smart move by a young inspector in charge of his very first major investigation.

  ‘Are you listening to me, lad, or are you off in a dream world of your own?’ Tommy demanded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Beresford said. ‘Go on with your story.’

  ‘I can’t describe how sorry I felt for her at that moment. Anyway, it was obvious to me that she was in no state to be left on her own, so I asked her if she’d like to come round here for a while when we got back to the village, and she said she would.’

  ‘Did she come back on the coach with you?’

  ‘No, she couldn’t have faced that – not with all those people she knew looking at her – so we both came back on the regular service bus.’ He paused again. ‘Don’t you believe me, lad?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Beresford admitted. ‘I thought everybody in the village was very keen on the brass band competition.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘And yet you were willing to leave before the end?’

  Tommy shrugged. ‘The results had already been announced, so it was all over, bar the shouting. Besides, the state Susan was in, I couldn’t let her make the journey all by herself. And if you still doubt I’m telling the truth, just ask the other people who took the coach if they saw me on the return trip, and they’ll tell you they didn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t realize before that Susan was such a good friend of yours,’ Beresford said.

  ‘She isn’t,’ Tommy said. ‘I knew her, of course – I know most people in this village – so we’d nod to each other if we passed in the street. But that was about as far as it went.’

  ‘Then I don’t see . . .’

  ‘You don’t see why I’d have gone to all that trouble for a casual acquaintance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tommy shook his head sadly. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said. ‘It might not make sense to you at the start, but it should do by the time I get to the end.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Beresford said, determined not to repeat his earlier mistake of rushing the old man.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing when the roof of a coal seam collapses,’ Tommy said. ‘You can tell it’s going to happen before it actually does – I can’t explain how, but you do – and you know there’s nothing you can do about it. When it does come down, the whole seam rocks as if it was being shaken by an angry giant, and the air gets so thick that you can’t see your hand in front of your face.’

  ‘That happened to you, did it?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘It happened to me,’ Tommy agreed. ‘
For a few seconds, I was in shock, and then I realized that I was one of the lucky ones, because I hadn’t been buried alive. After a while, the air started to clear a bit, and I could see the caved-in section about a dozen yards away from me. Now what I was supposed to do in them circumstances was make my way to the cage and wait for the rescue team to arrive. They’ve got all the right equipment, you see. They shore up the roof as they go along, to make sure it doesn’t collapse on them.’

  ‘But you didn’t do that,’ Beresford guessed.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Tommy agreed. ‘I was going to, but then I heard this voice. It wasn’t a voice I recognized – I found out later that the feller had only been taken on a couple of days earlier – but it was calling out, “Help me, please help me.” I knew it was madness to go any closer to the cave-in, but I did it anyway, and I pulled him clear.’ Tommy paused. ‘Do you get the point, lad?’

  Beresford nodded. ‘When you heard his cry for help, you felt you had no choice but to go and help him.’

  ‘And when I heard Susan’s cry for help, I didn’t stop to ask myself whether she was a mate or not, I went to help her,’ Tommy said.

  Beresford nodded for a second time, and realized he was feeling slightly ashamed of himself.

  ‘So you returned to Bellingsworth on the service bus,’ he said, doing his best to sound like a crisp and efficient police officer again.

  ‘That’s right. I brought her back home, and we had a cup of tea and a bit of a chat. Then, when it got to about half past six, I asked her if she fancied coming to the Miners’ Institute to celebrate the victory, and she said she’d rather not, but she didn’t mind if I went. So I left her here, and went on my own.’

  The key! a voice screamed in Beresford’s head. Tell me when she gave you the key to Len Hopkins’ front door!

  ‘You know what happened next,’ Tommy continued. ‘I got into a fight with Len. Now there’s a real comic turn for you – two old men battling it out. Anyway, at the time, I thought I’d lost my temper with him over the strike, but looking back on it, I think I hit him because I was so angry about what he’d done to Susan.’

  And that was when you finally decided that you were going to kill him! Beresford’s inner voice yelled.