The Ring of Death

by Sally Spencer

  They sat in silence for perhaps half a minute, then Beresford said, ‘I’d started to tell you about what’s been happening while you were in your meeting, boss. Shall I go on?’

  ‘All right,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘At five to eight this morning, the duty sergeant got a call from a Mrs—’ Beresford began.

  ‘Actually, don’t go on,’ Paniatowski interrupted him.

  ‘Sorry, boss?’

  ‘Aren’t we due to have a meeting with DS Cousins and DC Crane sometime soon?’

  ‘Well, yes, we are – but we’ve got five minutes to spare, and that’s just long enough to get you up to speed on . . .’

  ‘If it’s only five minutes, we might as well wait until they get here,’ Paniatowski said.

  What the bloody hell was going on, Beresford wondered. Who was this stranger sitting opposite him?

  The stranger turned away from him, and gazed fixedly at the wall. Her face still gave away nothing, but he was now more convinced than ever that she was fighting a tremendous battle within herself.

  Suddenly, she swung round again, looked him straight in the eyes, and said, ‘Is it important to you where your mother’s going to be buried, Colin?’

  The question caught him completely off-guard, and all he could think to say was, ‘I beg your pardon, boss?’

  ‘Your mother is going to die eventually, isn’t she?’

  ‘Well, yes. We all are.’

  ‘And when she does die, will it matter to you whether or not she’s buried close to home?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Beresford admitted. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever really given it much thought.’

  ‘You see, it shouldn’t matter whether you can visit the grave or not,’ Paniatowski continued, and he began to understand it was not his mother she was talking about at all. ‘Because, when all’s said and done, it’s only a few old bones we’re talking about, isn’t?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but I don’t see quite where you’re going with . . .’

  ‘Yet somehow it does matter! You realize that, when you’re actually given the choice. But what if that choice comes with strings attached? What if, by choosing, you have to betray everything you ever believed in? And what kind of monster does that make the man who offered you the choice?’

  There was a knock on the door.

  Beresford waited for Paniatowski to tell Cousins and Crane to enter the room, and when it became plain that she wasn’t about to do so, he said, ‘Come in,’ himself.

  The two new arrivals took their usual seats, and Paniatowski gazed down at the desk-top.

  So what happened next, Beresford wondered.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said aloud.

  Paniatowski jumped. ‘What?’

  Beresford slid the file across the desk. ‘The information’s all in there. If you’d like to take a couple of minutes to read it, and then you can tell us what you think we should . . .’

  Paniatowski pushed the file back to him.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler if, instead of me doing that, you just briefed all three of us?’ she suggested.

  Except it wasn’t a suggestion at all.

  Beresford cleared his throat.

  ‘At five to eight this morning, a Mrs Duggan rang,’ he began. ‘She said that her husband, a teacher at the grammar school, had told her that he had to attend a parent-teacher meeting last night. She was expecting him home by ten. When he still hadn’t arrived at eleven, she went to bed – no doubt believing he’d gone out for a drink with the other members of staff, and promising herself she’d give him hell in the morning. She woke up expecting to find him in bed beside her. But he wasn’t. That was when she noticed the wardrobe door was open, and some of his clothes were missing. So what do you think she did next?’

  ‘I expect that, like most women, she keeps a bit of money hidden somewhere in the house, and she went to see if it was still there,’ Cousins suggested.

  ‘Spot on,’ Beresford agreed. ‘And it wasn’t. At nine o’clock, we had a call from a Mrs Booth. Her husband is a clerk in the town hall. She said he’s been acting very strangely since yesterday afternoon. Then, last night, he told her he had to go away for a while, but he wouldn’t tell her where he was going. She’s worried he might try to hurt himself.’

  Beresford broke off, and glanced across at Paniatowski. She looked as if she might be listening, but he couldn’t tell for sure.

  ‘We’ve had five more calls since then,’ he continued. ‘The circumstances are a little different in each case, but the basic story’s the same. So I sent officers round to each of the houses. Their instructions were to collect as much information on the missing man as they could – everything from his date of birth to where he banks his money – so we can find out what it is that connects them. I haven’t had time to do a detailed analysis myself yet, but I’ve already found one link – none of them was usually with their wives on Thursday nights.’

  Cousins coughed awkwardly. ‘I think there’s one more name you can add to that list of yours, sir – Len Gutterridge.’

  ‘DS Gutterridge?’ Beresford asked, surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I worked with him when I was in uniform. He’s a good solid bobby – the salt of the earth.’

  ‘If you’d asked me about him yesterday, I might have agreed with you,’ Cousins said. ‘But you should have seen him this morning, when he came asking me about how the investigation was going. He was as nervous as a rabbit that’s just spotted a stoat, and when I mentioned Thursday nights, it was just like I’d stuck a hot needle in him.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘What I wanted to do was pull him in for questioning then and there, but he’s a sergeant, with the same authority as me, and I had no proof of anything. So I did the best I could in the circumstances. I tried to scare him into helping the investigation, and I thought, at the time, that it had almost worked. But now I think I made a big mistake. Now, I think I should have said nothing at all to him, and just passed the information on to you and the chief inspector – because you’ve got the clout to do what I couldn’t do.’

  ‘No harm done,’ Beresford said. ‘Based on what we’ve learned this morning, we can pull him in now.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Cousins said. ‘You can’t. I went looking for him half an hour ago. I wanted to see if, now he’s had time to think about it, he was ready to come clean. But he wasn’t in his office, and the desk sergeant told me he’d taken a sick day. Then I rang his home, and his missus, Lily, was almost in hysterics. Said he’d packed a suitcase and left. Said she’d no idea where he’d gone.’ Cousins paused for a moment. ‘I’ve been telling myself that I’m as good a bobby as I ever was before my breakdown, sir. But I’m not. I’d never have made a mistake like that a few years ago, and I’m very sorry for having let the team down.’

  ‘That’s utter bollocks!’ Beresford told him. ‘You haven’t let the team down at all, Paul. You made a judgement call, like we all do, and it just didn’t work out this time. There’s not a bobby on the Force who hasn’t had that happen to him.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ DS Cousins replied humbly. ‘I really appreciate you saying that.’

  And it had to be said, Beresford thought. But it shouldn’t have needed to be said by him. It was the boss’s job to keep up morale – and she simply wasn’t doing it!

  Was he being too critical, he wondered. He wasn’t beyond reproach himself, especially after having abandoned his central role in the incident room the day before, in favour of going off and playing detective sergeant.

  But he wasn’t the leader of the team – he wasn’t the lynchpin. If he stepped out of line, the boss could pull him back on to the straight and narrow. And she had done!

  But who was there with the necessary weight to pull her back?

  Not him!

  Not anybody!

  He reached into the folder in front of him, and handed each of the team several sheets of typed notes.

>   ‘This is all the information we have on the missing men,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to go through it, and see if you can find any link that I haven’t found myself yet.’ He looked across at Paniatowski again, hoping to see that some of her old spark had returned. ‘At least, that’s what I’d like them to do if it’s all right with you, boss,’ he added hopefully.

  ‘It’s fine with me,’ Paniatowski replied, with no discernable sign of interest that Beresford could detect.

  The first thing that DS Len Gutterridge was aware of when he regained consciousness was a pounding headache which seemed to stretch all the way from his forehead to the base of his skull.

  Then – slowly and hazily – he began to notice other things about his current condition.

  He was lying on his side – but not in a bed, because if there’d been a mattress under him, his right hip wouldn’t be complaining so much.

  His hands were behind his back, and when he tried to move them, he found he couldn’t. And he knew just why that was, because he could feel the cord biting into his skin.

  His ankles seemed to be bound together, too. Not just bound together, but bent up unnaturally into the small of his back. And when he tried to move them, he felt a pain in his wrists.

  There had to be a third cord, he realized – and that cord connected the bonds on his wrists with the bonds on his ankles.

  Hog-tied, he thought, remembering the cowboy films of his youth.

  He was still trapped in a fuzzy, undefined zone that existed between the conscious and the unconscious, but even so, he understood enough to know that this was not normal.

  ‘Need to think,’ he told himself. ‘Need to work out how I got here.’

  He had arranged to meet somebody.

  He remembered that.

  Only he couldn’t quite remember who that somebody was.

  ‘That’ll be because I’m suffering from concussion,’ he thought – and felt quite pleased with himself.

  So if he couldn’t remember who he had met, could he at least work out where that meeting had taken place?

  He was almost sure it had been on the edge of the moors.

  Step one!

  And what had happened next?

  This person had asked him to get something from his car, and it was when he was opening the door that everything had gone black.

  That would be when he was hit over the head!

  So far, so good. That was what had happened. But why had it happened? Who on earth would have wanted to hit him over . . .

  The killer! He was in the hands of the killer!

  ‘I should have listened to Paul Cousins,’ he sobbed softly to himself. ‘I should have accepted his help when he offered it.’

  What would it have mattered if, by confessing to Cousins, he had lost his job and had to spend a few months – or even a couple of years – in jail?

  That was nothing – nothing! – compared to what he feared was in store for him now.

  He had kept his eyes closed the whole time he had been thinking things through, but now he forced himself to open them.

  He was lying on a floor of compacted earth, and where it came to an end there was a solid rough-stone wall which looked at least a hundred years old.

  He was probably in an old barn, somewhere on the moors, he thought. But if it was a barn, he didn’t recognize it – was sure he had never been there before.

  He listened carefully for any noises from the outside which would tell him where he was.

  But there was nothing to hear except the silence.

  Which meant that the killer was not there, he told himself, with a sudden surge of hope.

  Because if the killer had been there, he’d have heard his breathing!

  So all was not yet lost. There was still a chance he could escape – if only he could bring himself to put his mind to it.

  The first thing to do was to test the strength of his bonds, and the best way to do that was by moving.

  He thought of rolling over onto his back, but given the way he was trussed up, that would probably be too painful. It might be easier – not quite so agonizing – if he rolled over onto his stomach, he decided.

  He tensed himself, and rolled. His bonds showed no signs of giving, but at least now he could see the big, dilapidated door through which most of the light was streaming.

  Escaping from the barn would be easy enough, he thought – untying himself was the hard part.

  He rolled again, onto his left side this time – and that was when he saw the eyes.

  They were large and wide and terrified – and they were quite dead.

  He screamed, and closed his own eyes. Then, slowly and cautiously, he opened them again – because he knew he had to.

  The dead eyes were still there – but now he could see beyond them.

  To the head which housed them, with its mouth twisted in frozen, agonized fear.

  To the throat, which had been ferociously ripped open.

  To the dead man’s naked body, draped over a packing case in such a way that the hands and knees touched the ground.

  And what made it truly horrific was not the fear in the eyes, not the gash across the throat, not the way in which the corpse had been posed – it was that Gutterridge knew this man, recognized him as Edward Dunston, another member of the Langley Club.

  ‘Save me!’ the sergeant screamed. ‘Please save me!’

  He had no idea who he was addressing the scream to. It could have been God. It could have been DS Cousins. It could even have been the man who delivered his morning milk.

  It didn’t matter who it was, as long as somebody would save him!

  TWENTY-TWO

  The only sounds in Paniatowski’s office for the last half-hour had been those of pages being turned over and cigarettes being lit.

  Now, finally, DS Cousins broke the silence

  ‘There is no bloody link between the missing men, sir!’ he said exasperatedly. ‘We’ve got everybody from a builder’s labourer to a chartered accountant on this list. These men all move in entirely different circles. They could live their whole lives in Whitebridge without ever coming into contact once.’

  ‘There is one thing that connects them,’ Crane said tentatively. ‘As far as I can see, none of them are Catholics.’

  ‘Is that so surprising?’ Beresford asked. ‘Most people in this town are Protestant – if they’re anything at all. As far as I can recall, there are only three Catholic churches in the whole of the Whitebridge area.’

  ‘The thing is, sir, even though the Catholics here are in a minority, they’re not a segregated minority,’ Crane persisted.

  Beresford waited for Paniatowski to speak, and when it was clear that she wasn’t going to, he said, ‘Go on, Jack.’

  ‘You know what it’s like in Northern Ireland, if only from seeing it on the telly,’ Crane said. ‘There are Catholic housing areas and Ulster Protestant housing areas, and not only do the groups not live side by side, sometimes they don’t even dare walk down each other’s streets. And it goes beyond that. Catholic firms don’t employ Ulstermen, and Protestant firms don’t employ Catholics. Over there, you wouldn’t even think of letting a barber cut your hair before you knew which religion he followed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it isn’t like that in Whitebridge at all. I play squash, and some of the members of my squash club are Catholic. I also belong to a writers’ group, and there are Catholics in that, too.’

  ‘And the pubs aren’t segregated, either,’ Cousins said, giving his support to the argument. ‘In the Drum, a man’s worth is measured by how many pints he can sink without falling over, not which church he worships at.’

  ‘So what I’m saying is that if you take any sort of group or social gathering, you’d expect to find at least one Catholic in it,’ Crane concluded. ‘But that’s simply not true of this lot!’

  ‘It all leads back to Forsyth,’ Paniatowski said, suddenly and unexpectedly coming to life.

>   It was the way she said the name which troubled Beresford. There was vehemence to her tone which verged on hatred. It was almost as if she’d selected the Londoner as her own personal demon – and nothing else seemed to matter to her any more.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure that it does all lead back to Forsyth, ma’am,’ he said dubiously.

  ‘Well, if it doesn’t, where the hell else does it lead?’ Paniatowski demanded aggressively. ‘What’s the government’s policy on Northern Ireland, Colin?’

  ‘I suppose it’s to hold on to the province at all costs,’ Beresford said. ‘To do anything that’s necessary to prevent it from breaking away and forming a union with the Republic of Ireland.’

  ‘Exactly. And while we’ll probably never be told the full extent of the security services’ involvement in holding the province together, it’s a pretty safe bet that the involvement’s huge.’

  ‘Yes, we can agree on that, at least,’ Beresford said.

  ‘And when an ex-soldier is murdered, that bastard Forsyth immediately appears on the scene. Not only that, but he’ll go to any extreme – and I mean, any extreme – to avoid Adair’s death being linked with the IRA.’

  ‘Have you got anything in particular in mind when you say any extreme?’ Beresford wondered.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Paniatowski said dismissively. ‘The question you should be asking is why he seems willing to do it.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Beresford admitted.

  ‘And neither do I. But I do now know there’s some sort of secret society – made up entirely of Protestants – which met every Thursday night, and that now Adair and Stockwell are dead, the rest of the members are running for their lives.’

  ‘So you’re suggesting that the government was using this society to somehow further its ends in Northern Ireland?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a tenuous link, isn’t it, boss?’

  ‘Then come up with something better for me to get my teeth into,’ Paniatowski challenged.

  ‘I can’t,’ Beresford conceded. ‘But I still don’t see how a very mixed bunch of people like the ones we’ve got these reports on could have been used by the government.’