‘I’ve just been looking through the patrol car logs,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘It wasn’t criminals they moved on – it was just people who happen to be considerably poorer than the ones who live on Milliners’ Row.’
Holmes sighed. ‘What’s your point, chief inspector?’
‘If we’d known, last night, what we know now, we wouldn’t have wasted our time asking questions there was no need to ask – so why didn’t you simply tell us back then?’
Holmes turned to gaze out of the window. ‘I didn’t want it to appear as if the area was getting special treatment,’ he said.
‘But that’s precisely what it was getting.’
‘Instead of acting so self-righteously, chief inspector,’ Holmes said, his eyes still firmly on the street below, ‘you should be expressing your gratitude that I’ve been authorising random checks as part of the new policing programme I’ve been developing, because, thanks to that, you now know that no one’s been watching the Danbury house, don’t you?’
First he’d claimed Milliners’ Row had been afforded no special attention, now, in complete contradiction of that initial statement, he was saying it was all part of an experiment. And if he felt it was necessary, Paniatowski thought, he would shift his ground again – and that would be acceptable, too, because he was a chief superintendent, and she was merely a detective chief inspector.
‘Am I right?’ Holmes demanded. ‘Has my monitoring programme provided you with useful information?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Paniatowski said, forcing the words out, and hating herself for doing it. ‘Thank you very much, sir.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Holmes told her.
No one on the force called the two civilian scene-of-crime officers by their surnames, because no one on the force actually knew what those surnames were. Instead, the two men were simply referred to as Bill and Eddie.
Bill was tall and thin, Eddie was small and round. Bill had recently grown a moustache, and Eddie – perhaps in retaliation – was cultivating a small beard. Bill dressed little better than a tramp, and Eddie fell slightly short of his partner’s high standards of sartorial excellence, but together, they were the best SOCO team that anyone on the Whitebridge force could ever remember working with.
It was Eddie who Meadows saw waiting at the gate, as she negotiated the police roadblock which had isolated the house on Milliners’ Row from the rest of the world.
Eddie looked a little disappointed when he realised that it was the sergeant who was getting out of the car.
‘Where’s your boss?’ he asked. ‘She usually comes round to check things for herself.’
‘She’s giving a press conference,’ Meadows told him.
‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ Eddie said, ‘because, you see, her and me have got a bit of a thing going between us.’
Meadows laughed.
‘Do you find that funny?’ Eddie demanded, aggrieved.
‘Well, of course it’s funny,’ Meadows said, bending her knees slightly so she could look the small fat man straight in the eye. ‘She’s not a bad-looking woman, I’ll admit that …’
‘She certainly isn’t!’
‘… but let’s face it, she’s simply not classy enough to ever pull a man like you.’
Eddie beamed with pleasure. ‘You should go far in your chosen career, sergeant,’ he said.
‘I intend to,’ Meadows replied. ‘So what have you got for me?’
‘Fingerprints, as you would imagine – positively sackfuls of them.’
‘But none of them, I take it, that you’ve lifted from the murder weapon?’
‘Sadly not. That had been wiped clean.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Bill and me have been thinking about how the killer got into the place. We’ve checked the lock on this gate, and it’s our professional opinion that it hasn’t been tampered with in any way, shape or form.’
‘But surely a professional cracksman can open a lock without you even knowing it,’ Meadows said.
‘Most locks, yes,’ Eddie agreed. ‘But this isn’t most locks. It’s a Handley and Chase. It was made in London by a locksmith who wouldn’t even have been given the job until he’d had at least ten years’ experience. Now there are men who could pick this lock – not many, but a few – but none of them could have done it without leaving a trace.’
‘I see,’ Meadows said.
‘So how did the killer get in?’ Eddie continued. ‘Well, there are three possible ways. The first is he came over the wall. Do you think you could scale that wall, DS Meadows?’
Meadows turned and studied the wall.
‘Yes, if I took a good run at it,’ she said, after she’d made a few calculations in her head.
Eddie ran his eyes up and down her athletic frame.
‘Yes, you probably could, at that,’ he admitted, ‘but most people would find it rather difficult – even quite strong men. Besides, we mustn’t forget that though the killer came in on his own, he left with the baby.’
‘No, we mustn’t forget that,’ Meadows agreed. ‘Even I couldn’t do it if I had a baby with me. Perhaps he brought some climbing equipment with him.’
‘Grappling irons and things like that?’ Eddie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘They’d leave marks on the wall that you’d spot if you looked carefully – and we have looked carefully. Anyway, even if he could get over the wall, that would solve only half his problem. Once he was in the grounds, he had to get into the house. The locks on the house were made by the same company that made the locks for the gate, and there’s no evidence of forced entry there, either. So either …?’
‘So either he had a key of his own, or somebody let him in.’
‘Exactly.’
And given that Jane Danbury had turned her back on whoever had killed her, it was likely that she had known him, so either of those two theories was possible.
‘I’d like to have a look around the house now, Eddie,’ Meadows said.
‘Be my guest,’ the SOCO man told her. ‘And if you do find anything you’d like a second opinion on, you won’t forget to ask DCI Paniatowski to come and take a look at it herself, will you?’
Meadows laughed. ‘I won’t forget.’
They walked up the driveway towards the house that was almost as grand as the one that Meadows had once called home.
‘Have you found any vomit, Eddie?’ Meadows asked, as they approached the front door.
‘As a matter of fact, we did.’
‘Was it recent?’
‘I would say so.’
‘And was it in the garden?’
‘Yes.’
Well, there was at least one part of one witness statement that she could confirm, Meadows thought.
Before they’d set out just after dawn, the volunteers had been addressed by Chief Inspector Barrington.
‘There are two possible pitfalls with an operation like this one,’ he’d told them. ‘The first is that you start out dead keen, but after a couple of hours of finding nothing, you get careless, and overlook what could turn out to be a vital clue. The second is you do find something, and you’re so enthusiastic that you treat it so roughly that you render it useless. So those are the two key words – alertness and care. Have you all got that?’
The volunteers had nodded that they had.
‘Then good luck, and God bless you,’ Barrington had said. ‘You’ve every right to feel proud of yourselves.’
That had been over three hours earlier, and the search was now well underway. As in all searches of that nature, the more obvious places – woods, parks and abandoned buildings – were being checked out first. If that brought no results, the search would be extended to the edge of the moorland which surrounded most of Whitebridge.
Day Two – if there was a Day Two – would be both more expensive and more extensive. A helicopter would be brought in from Manchester to fly over the moors and search for signs of recent digging. Sniffer dogs – t
rained to detect the smell of death – would be used, some of them on loan from bordering police authorities. The canals and rivers would be dragged, and frogmen would be on hand in case they were needed.
Nobody wanted there to be a Day Two. What everyone prayed for was that Melanie would be found in an old mill or in a playground, frightened but otherwise unhurt.
And sometimes it did happen that way.
Sometimes the miracle came about.
But if miracles were common, they would cease to be miracles – and everyone involved in the search knew that.
FOUR
The Whitebridge Mortuary – a grim, ugly structure of post-war prefabricated concrete – had never exactly been one of Monika Paniatowski’s favourite places, but since that warm summer night in Backend Wood, she had truly loathed and feared it.
She had come to the mortuary the morning after her rape to find Shastri, the only doctor who she could trust not to insist on her reporting her humiliation. Now, the very act of entering the building brought that sunny morning right back to her mind.
She could have asked Shastri to meet her somewhere else, and Shastri would have understood and immediately agreed, but she had never made any such request, because she was a firm believer that instead of running away from your fears, you should confront them.
She had hoped, in the early days after her rape, that the mortuary would become more strongly associated in her mind with her current work, and that memories of the past – lying on the table and allowing Shastri to prod and probe her, while, outside, the birds cheerfully heralded a new day – would gradually fade away, until they were hardly there at all.
And maybe, in time, things would pan out like that – but it certainly hadn’t happened yet.
Shastri was waiting in her office, her beautiful sari all-but hidden by her pristine white lab coat.
She greeted her old friend with her magic smile, then grew more serious and asked, ‘How did the press conference go?’
Paniatowski shrugged. ‘As well as could be expected,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you a sample of William Danbury’s blood. The lab’s analysing it right now.’
‘Thank you, that was so sweet of you, Monika, but I do not really need it,’ the doctor replied.
Sweet of you, Paniatowski repeated in her head. It was typical of Shastri to make a blood sample – or a severed finger, or even, on one occasion, an eye – seem like a thoughtful gift that one friend might give to another.
‘What do you mean, you don’t need it?’ she asked.
‘Dr Lucas, who says he is the family physician …’
‘Yes, he is. I met him last night.’
‘… Dr Lucas rang me up, and asked me if I would like to know the blood types of Melanie Danbury, Jane Danbury and William Danbury. He had, he said, already obtained Councillor Danbury’s permission to release the information.’
‘And what did that information tell you?’ Paniatowski asked eagerly.
‘Firstly, the blood on the pillow does not match Melanie’s.’
‘Thank God for that,’ Paniatowski gasped.
‘It does not match William’s either. It is type O, which, as you know, is the most common blood type. Millions and millions of people in Britain are type O, and the blood could have come from any of them, but since Jane Danbury was one of those millions and millions, I think it is a fair assumption that the blood is hers.’
‘How did the blood get onto the pillow?’
‘I would speculate the killer took it upstairs on his hand. How it got there is no mystery at all – it was a very messy murder, and the killer was right beside his victim. Perhaps he felt he dare not take the time to wash his hand, or perhaps he did not even notice the blood until he was upstairs. Whatever the case, he used the pillow to wipe the blood off.’
‘What can you tell me about the murder itself?’
‘I can do little more than confirm what I told you yesterday. I do not think the first blow killed Jane Danbury, but the second would definitely have done so, yet the killer struck her two or three more times after that.’ Shastri paused. ‘What my examination also revealed, however, is that the body bore evidence of extensive physical abuse which had nothing to do with what happened to it last night.’
‘She’d been attacked before?’
‘Yes, and not just once. Jane Danbury had been beaten – if not systematically, then at least regularly – over a considerable period of time.’
‘How badly had she been beaten?’
‘Her left cheekbone has been fractured at some point, her collarbone and two of her toes have been broken. All those things could, I suppose, have been the result of accidents, but the bruising on her body – some of it old enough to have almost faded away, some which cannot be more than two or three days old – must have been inflicted deliberately.’
‘So you’re saying she was a battered wife?’
Shastri shrugged. ‘I could not be specific about that, because anyone could have done it, could they not? But in cases like this, as we both know, it is almost always the husband.’
The architect who had designed the Danbury house had been bloody good at his job, Meadows decided. The rooms were elegantly proportioned, and the way the building had been constructed meant that one pleasing space flowed naturally into another. Yet the interior decorating choices made by the Danburys – or more specifically William, because it just had to be him – had spoiled the whole effect. The hunting prints, the stuffed animals, the heavy leather and oak furniture, all combined to make the house not so much a home as a shrine to clumsy masculinity.
The theme was present even in the master bedroom. There was not a touch of femininity about it. But perhaps the most interesting thing about this bedroom was that it did not contain a double bed, but twins – and twins, moreover, which were so far apart that it was impossible to reach over from one bed and touch the other.
The boys’ bedroom was decorated with prints of explorers and boxers, military leaders and astronauts. It was clear from both the style and the expensive frames that the boys had not chosen the prints themselves, but they had probably been chosen with the boys in mind – a source of inspiration that they would see first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
It was Melanie’s room that really surprised her. Most girls’ bedrooms that she’d seen had been wallpapered with cosy themes – fairy princesses, Disney characters or the like – but Melanie’s room was painted rather than papered, and the paintwork seemed to pre-date the girl’s birth by at least three or four years. There were toys, it was true, but the dolls looked cheap and the teddy bear was of such poor quality that its stitching was coming undone. Melanie’s cot was clearly second-hand, and her wardrobe was made of chipboard.
It was all very interesting, Meadows thought, and she had already half-formulated a theory even before she found the home movie in William Danbury’s study.
Dr Lucas lived on the border – officially unacknowledged, but generally recognised – between a 1950s council estate and a 1960s lower middle-class housing development.
Lucas’s house itself was older than either of the two estates. It was a late Victorian stone-built dwelling, and was rather over-elaborate for a structure of its size. Its original owner had likely been a successful shopkeeper who had more aspirations than he had capital, Paniatowski decided. He would have been the sort of man who would think that gargoyles would give the place a touch of class, would want extensive servants’ quarters though he could afford to employ no more than two servants, and would order the construction of a large wine cellar which would remain largely empty through lack of funds to stock it properly.
There was ivy growing up the gable end of the house, but rather than being trained to enhance the shape of the building, it had clearly been given licence to go where it wished.
Dr Lucas looked both unsurprised and rather nervous when he saw Paniatowski at his door, but that was easily explained by the fact that, as an intelligent man, he woul
d have worked out that she must have talked to Shastri by then.
‘Do come in, chief inspector,’ he said, leading Paniatowski into a living room which smelled of old leather and just a hint of damp.
Paniatowski looked around. The furniture – a dark, heavy sideboard, ugly leather armchairs and a truly hideous tiled coffee table – would already have started looking old-fashioned when Lucas was still a child.
‘Take a seat, chief inspector,’ Lucas invited, and once she was sitting in one of the overstuffed armchairs, he added, ‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?’
It was a delaying tactic, she realised, but since refusal would give him even more scope for delay – ‘Are you sure? Would you like a fruit juice instead? Or perhaps you’d prefer a glass of wine?’ – she simply said, ‘Coffee would be nice.’
Lucas walked over to the door which led into the corridor.
‘Would it be possible for us to have two cups of coffee, Mrs Dale?’ he called out.
He came back into the room and sat down in the armchair opposite Paniatowski.
‘So what can I do for you, chief inspector?’ he asked.
Oh no, Paniatowski thought, you don’t get off as easily as that. Before we get down to the matter that we both know brought me here, you could do with a little more time stewing in your own juice.
‘How long have you had this practice, doctor?’ she asked.
‘Six years,’ Lucas said, ‘although I’ve actually been working here for nine. I came as assistant to Dr Wilton – he was rather old, and was finding the practice too much on his own – and when he retired, I bought him out.’
‘Including this house?’
‘Yes – and the furniture. I could hardly restrain myself from laughing at the expression on your face when you came into the room. You couldn’t imagine why I’d bought this stuff myself. Well, now that mystery is explained. It’s Dr Wilton’s furniture. I keep meaning to replace it, but somehow I can never find the time.’
He was babbling, she thought. He wanted to put the hard questions off as long as possible, although, in a way, he would be relieved when they finally got to them.
‘You must have been – what – around thirty when you bought the practice?’ Paniatowski said.
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