Dead End

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Maybe that was exactly what it was,’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘No, because he never knew about it. The call which came into the mortuary would have been transferred to him if he’d been available, but since he wasn’t, it was switched directly to me.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly a mystery,’ Paniatowski said as she stepped out of the main door.

  ‘But no doubt you think it’s a very small one in comparison with the one you’re involved with.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Paniatowski admitted, caught off-guard.

  Shastri grinned. ‘There are no small mysteries,’ she said, deliberately misquoting Stanislavski, ‘only small investigators.’

  Paniatowski entered the public bar of the Drum and Monkey at twenty past nine.

  ‘What’s it to be tonight, Chief Inspector?’ the barman called out. ‘Tonic water or vodka?’

  She knew what Louisa would say – but then Louisa wasn’t trying to crack a murder, was she?

  ‘Vodka,’ she heard herself say. ‘Make it a double.’

  Meadows was already there, and a couple of minutes later, Beresford walked in.

  ‘Where’s Crane?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘He was booked to read his poetry at the Bamber Bridge Institute,’ Beresford said. ‘If he’d cancelled, it would have been the second time, so I told him we could do without him tonight.’ He paused, uncertainly. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Paniatowski said.

  Jack Crane was probably a better police officer for his poetry, although if you followed that argument to its natural conclusion, Meadows was a better officer for her sado-masochism. And maybe she was. Who was to say? It was hard to see how Colin’s ambition to sleep with every available woman in Whitebridge improved his performance (out of bed) but maybe his carnal hunting instincts made him a better bobby.

  And me, she thought. What about me?

  Maybe she should take up watercolour painting or pottery.

  But she knew that wouldn’t work. She wasn’t one of those people who resented work getting in the way of her interests. It was quite the reverse, in fact, and she could just picture herself moulding a pot and wishing the phone would ring to summon her to a nice juicy murder.

  ‘How are things in Barrow Village going, Colin?’ she asked.

  Beresford took a sip of the pint that the barman had started to pull for him the second he walked through the door.

  ‘It’s one of the cleanest houses we’ve ever had to deal with,’ he said. ‘Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen you could cater a wedding from, and only four sets of prints lifted so far – all of them identified.’

  ‘The victim, his wife, their cleaner …’ Paniatowski speculated.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What about the fourth set?’

  ‘They’re yours.’

  Of course they were, Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘What else?’ she asked.

  ‘As is already obvious from the prints, they weren’t the most neighbourly of couples. They kept themselves to themselves, but their rows were so loud that people in houses several doors up the road were aware they were going on.’

  ‘What were these rows about?’

  ‘That, they couldn’t hear – or are not prepared to admit they could, because that would suggest they were nosey parkers, rather than innocent bystanders. But they do say that the rows went on for hours, and when they ended, Arthur Wheatstone would sometimes drive off, and they wouldn’t see him for a couple of days.’

  ‘Is there anything else to be learned from the house?’ Paniatowski asked hopefully – but without much hope.

  ‘Could be,’ Beresford said. ‘We’ll see what the SOCOs come up with in the morning.’

  ‘Fine, let’s move on,’ Paniatowski suggested. ‘Did anybody in the village notice any unusual activity last night?’

  And she was thinking, dear God, was it only last night it happened, and only fourteen hours since I found the body? It seems like half a lifetime ago.

  ‘Don’t get too downhearted, because we’ve only managed to doorstep half the village today, but—’

  ‘But no,’ Paniatowski interrupted.

  ‘But no,’ Beresford agreed. ‘The only person who’s seen the very big feller and his partner is your mate ex-Inspector Cole, and if I was you, boss, I’d start asking myself if he’s really that reliable.’

  ‘He’s reliable,’ Paniatowski said firmly. ‘I had my doubts at first, but everything he told me has panned out, so if he says he saw a big feller and a little feller, then they were there.’

  A man entered the bar and headed straight for their table. He was around forty years old and mildly reminiscent of Kirk Douglas, Paniatowski thought, although he was a little darker than Douglas. He was wearing a stylish leather jacket, and had an impressively chunky gold ring on his index finger.

  ‘Chief Inspector Paniatowski?’ he asked, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Greg Steel.’

  Paniatowski shook the hand. Steel had a firm grip, but not a grip of steel, which was reassuring.

  ‘Do you think we could have a few moments in private, Chief Inspector?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Paniatowski told him. ‘There’s a free table over there. I’ll join you in a moment.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Beresford whispered once Steel had gone.

  ‘He’s the head of personnel at BAI.’

  ‘And what does he want?’

  ‘That’s just what I’m about to find out.’

  Steel was smoking a Benson and Hedges, and Paniatowski looked at it with lust in her heart. She’d been trying to cut down – Louisa again – but when he offered her the packet, her hand seemed unwilling to resist.

  ‘I’m sorry not to have met you at the plant,’ Steel said, as he lit her cigarette, ‘but I was on my way back from France.’

  ‘Ah yes, signing the deal for the new super fighter.’

  Steel laughed. ‘George Jackson may have tried to give you the idea that we in personnel are the core around which all else in the company revolves, but I have no such illusions. Have you ever heard the expression, “I’m talking to the engineer, not the oily rag”?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Well, I see us very much as the oily rag.’

  ‘And yet here you are, taking up both my valuable time and your own,’ Paniatowski said.

  He chuckled. ‘Did George pull that Official Secrets line on you?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘He loves that. It makes him feel so important. But he can’t always distinguish between what’s secret and what isn’t, so I’m here to answer some of the questions that he wouldn’t.’

  ‘And voluntarily, too,’ Paniatowski said.

  He smiled again. ‘That’s right.’

  There was definitely a tingle of electricity between them, Paniatowski thought, but she’d given up falling for men connected with cases she was investigating.

  Still, no doubt Louisa had been right when she’d said that what her mother needed was a permanent man (Louisa was right about most things, the cocky little bitch), and maybe when this case was over …

  ‘So what do you want to know?’ Greg Steel asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Paniatowski said, arriving back in real life with a jolt. ‘Jackson refused to say whether or not Wheatstone was working on the new Anglo-French plane that you’ve just sold to the Saudis.’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘Then what was he working on?’

  ‘He was working on a project for the Americans, and—’

  ‘What? Are you telling me that you’re building planes with both the French and the Yanks?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Steel said. ‘We’re equal partners with the French, despite the fact that the plane has been given a French name. And the Americans don’t like that one bit.’

  ‘They don’t like it that the plane’s got a French name?’

  ‘No, they don’t like it t
hat we’re partnered up with the French. The Americans like to be in control of everything, you see, which is one of the main reasons that President de Gaulle took France out of NATO. Now they’re truly independent, and the Yanks are so annoyed they don’t even send them a birthday card anymore. And working on this plane makes us semi-independent – at least in this one sphere – and the Americans don’t like that, either.

  ‘But we still work with the Americans on the other plane?’

  ‘No, it’s very much an American plane, and we don’t work with them, we work for them. Essentially, we’re subcontractors, or, to put it in its most basic terms, day labourers. We labour for the Americans, they pay us, and what is produced is theirs.’

  ‘Exactly what kind of work was Arthur Wheatstone involved in?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘It’s something very complicated involving string and lots of elastic bands,’ Steel said, with a smile.

  ‘In other words, you won’t tell me.’

  ‘In other words, that really is where the Official Secrets Act begins to raise its ugly head.’

  ‘But you can tell me who he was working with?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And you’ll have no objection to me questioning them?’

  ‘As long as it doesn’t touch on their work, you can question them about anything you want to.’

  ‘Have you heard of an American called Robert Proudfoot?’ Paniatowski asked, doing her best to disguise the fact that she was studying him for some reaction.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Steel said.

  And either he was a bloody fine actor or he was telling the truth.

  ‘What made you ask that?’ he wondered.

  ‘He wasn’t working alongside Wheatstone?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘And again, what would make you think that?’

  ‘Well, since we’ve already established that Arthur was working with the Americans …’

  A sudden look of realisation came to Steel’s face. ‘I see where you’re going wrong. This is all Hollywood’s fault,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In the movies, you’ve got all the scientists together in one big lab, and they’re all looking puzzled. Then one of them says something like, “If nothing else is working, why don’t we try using bat testicles, a xylophone and a left-handed ballpoint pen?” The others say it’s worth a shot, and in the next scene you’ve got them all huddled over a big box with flashing lights and tubes. Well, maybe it did work like that once, but not anymore. Everything is done through computer-aided design these days. He probably never met the Americans he was “working” with, and chances are that any practical work to test his theories will have been carried out in specialized laboratories in Wisconsin or South Carolina.’

  ‘So he was a theoretical scientist,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Yes, I think I can admit that much,’ Steel conceded.

  ‘So he, and the people he works with, wouldn’t have been able to lay their hands on any rare chemicals?’

  ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Just something the police doctor said.’

  ‘I don’t want to tell you how to do your job—’ Steel said.

  ‘Now there’s a relief,’ Paniatowski interrupted him.

  ‘… but it seems to me that in searching for a motive for his death, you’re concentrating perhaps a little too heavily on his professional life.’

  ‘So what is it about his private life that I should look into?’ Paniatowski wondered.

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ Steel said.

  ‘You don’t do coy well,’ Paniatowski told him.

  Steel grinned, self-consciously. ‘No, I don’t, do I?’ He put his hands together, almost as if he were in prayer. ‘My problem is, you see, that I have certain suspicions about certain actions that certain persons may have taken, but it does not go beyond that – certainly not far enough to convince me that I should point the finger at another man.’ He paused. ‘Or, indeed, at a woman.’

  ‘You have a civic duty to tell me what you know, Mr Steel,’ Paniatowski pointed out.

  ‘But not to reveal my merest thought, Detective Chief Inspector Paniatowski,’ Steel countered. He stood up. ‘I will leave you with one question that may assist you in your inquiries,’ he said. ‘And it is this; why would Wheatstone and his wife want to live out there in the middle of the moors? And before you say it, it isn’t because he couldn’t afford anything like as nice a house in town. The truth is, he could afford it easily. So what made him choose to live where he did? Or was it his choice at all?’

  And then, with a parting gesture which resembled either touching his forelock or offering a mock salute, he was gone.

  The regional news went to town on the murder, as was only to be expected. Camera crews had been up in Barrow Village all day, and the result was short film clips of the Wheatstone house, the neighbours’ houses, the community centre (which Beresford had commandeered as his incident room) and surrounding moorland.

  There was also an interview – of sorts.

  DI Beresford – half a dozen microphones in front of him – is looking far from at his ease.

  ‘Is it true, DI Beresford, that the murderer attempted to make it look like a suicide?’ asks a disembodied voice.

  ‘The statement we issued earlier said we suspected foul play,’ Beresford answers. ‘That does not automatically mean that there was foul play, or that what we are dealing with here is a murder disguised as a suicide.’

  ‘But what do you think?’ the voice persists.

  ‘I think there may have been foul play,’ Beresford says.

  ‘Don’t you think the public has the right to know what’s going on?’ another voice asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Beresford says, ‘but it also has the right to expect that when it does get the information, it will be carefully verified fact, rather than wild speculation.’

  ‘Do you think that Arthur Wheatstone’s murder has something to do with the fact that he was a famous scientist?’ another voice asks.

  ‘Was he?’ Beresford says. ‘I hadn’t heard of him until this morning. Had you?’

  ‘Well, no,’ the reporter admits.

  ‘Can’t have been that famous then, can he?’ Beresford asks. ‘And there you go again, talking about “murder” when all I’ve said is “death”.’ He checks his watch. ‘We expect there to be a press briefing sometime tomorrow. Until then, no further information will be released. Thank you all for coming.’

  ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’ Meadows asked. She put her hand to her mouth as if she’d just realized she’d made a big mistake. ‘Sorry, that really wasn’t very respectful, was it? What I should have said was, “Who’s a pretty boy then, sir!”.’

  ‘Your problem, Sergeant Meadows, is that you’ve never had to do what I do, so you just don’t appreciate how bloody difficult it is.’

  ‘Shut up, the pair of you!’ Paniatowski said. ‘I want to watch this.’

  On the screen, the anchorwoman was leading into the next story.

  ‘It is ironic that on the same day as this tragedy, BAI should have heard some of the best news it has had for a long time,’ she says. ‘Let’s go over now to Peter Hayes, our transport and commerce correspondent, who, I know for a fact, considers himself something of an expert on all matters aeronautical.’

  The screen splits, with the anchorwoman on the left side and Hayes on the other.

  ‘I was just telling our viewers what an expert you are on the aircraft business,’ the anchorwoman says.

  Hayes tries to smile, and doesn’t quite make it.

  ‘That was very kind of you,’ he says, ‘but then your kindness is legendary. There are people in the studio who hide when they see you coming, because they just can’t take any more of your kindness.’

  ‘In the morning, they’ll both do their best to pass all this off as playful banter which they didn’t get quite right,’ Meadows said, ‘but it’s much more personal than that.�
��

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Paniatowski agreed, hiding a smile. ‘Now perhaps you’ll start to understand what it’s like having to nanny the pair of you.’

  ‘Oh, come on, boss,’ Meadows said.

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ Beresford protested.

  ‘So, feel free to correct me if I’ve got this wrong,’ the anchorwoman says, ‘but didn’t you tell us a couple of weeks ago that there was no way on earth that this deal could go through.’

  ‘I think I said that the plane didn’t have what the Saudis wanted,’ Hayes says, gritting his teeth.

  ‘Not enough ashtrays, perhaps?’ the anchorwoman prods.

  ‘Yes, it could be something like that,’ Hayes says. ‘On the other hand, it could be a sophisticated navigation system which allows them to operate at low level, at night, even when they are not in communication with their base.’

  ‘Is that what they wanted?’ the anchorwoman asks.

  Hayes sighs. ‘Nobody knows, because it’s all been kept secret,’ he explained, ‘but the general consensus among the experts is that it has to be something like that.’

  ‘So it’s no more than a guess?’

  ‘I suppose so, but it’s an educated one.’

  ‘It all sounds very complicated and sophisticated.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘It can’t be that complicated if BAI couldn’t provide it two weeks ago, but now they can.’

  ‘You refuse to understand, don’t you? You’re just a … oh, I just give up on you.’

  ‘Well, that was more than just a clash of personalities,’ Beresford said. ‘That was a lovers’ tiff in cinemascope.’

  ‘Directed by Cecil B DeMille, with Charlton Heston as the reporter, and Bette Davis as the anchorwoman,’ Meadows chipped in.

  ‘Do you think either of them will still have a job by this time tomorrow?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘The woman will be gone, but the man will probably survive it, because, after all, he is a man.’