‘Is that because they know that if we’re going to crack this case we need space,’ Paniatowski wondered, noting their behaviour, ‘or are they just steering clear of the lepers?’
She couldn’t blame them if it was the latter. Two girls had been killed now, and while there was nothing she could have done about the first murder, she couldn’t dismiss the feeling that she should have been able – somehow – to prevent the second.
‘The murderer will have made mistakes when he killed Jill Harris – because murderers always do,’ she said aloud. ‘Now he’s killed a second time . . .’
‘We don’t yet know it was the same man in both cases,’ Sergeant Meadows interrupted.
‘Yes, we do,’ Paniatowski said firmly.
And so they did, for though it was still possible that there had been two killers, they all accepted – at a gut level – that Jill and the unnamed girl had been killed by the same man.
‘Now he’s killed a second time, and he will have made more mistakes,’ Paniatowski ploughed on. ‘All we have to do is discover what those mistakes were.’
It all sounded so simple when she put it like that, though none of them thought for a second that it was.
‘Let’s start with the obvious question,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Is there anything connecting the two girls? Is it at all possible that this second girl was a secret lesbian, too?’
‘It’s possible – but very unlikely,’ Meadows said.
‘And what makes you reach that conclusion?’
‘The second victim didn’t take enough pride in her appearance to have been a lesbian.’
‘Oh, come on now,’ Colin Beresford said. ‘I’ve seen some of the lezzies parading on their Boulevard in their combat trousers and boots, and you can’t tell me that . . .’
‘With respect, sir,’ Meadows said, in a voice which suggested a marked lack of respect, ‘you may have seen them, but you haven’t really looked at them. They sometimes do dress aggressively, and perhaps you personally don’t find that particularly attractive – I imagine they’d be pretty horrified if you did find it attractive – but their clothes are well cared for. The girl who was found in the park tonight had no pride in anything.’
‘The sergeant’s right, sir,’ Crane said. ‘If you look at Jill Harris, with her Miss Selfridge’s top, and then compare it with the way that this second girl . . .’
‘All right, I get the point,’ Beresford interrupted brusquely. ‘And there’s no need to look like that, Sergeant Meadows, because I’m a bloody good bobby, even if I do act a bit like a caveman, now and again.’
‘A bit like a caveman?’ Meadows repeated. ‘Now and again?’
‘That’s enough, Sergeant,’ Paniatowski said.
‘Sorry, boss,’ Meadows said, looking down at the table.
The team was under more pressure than it had ever been before – and the cracks were starting to show, Paniatowski thought.
‘So we’re now all agreed the second victim probably wasn’t a lesbian, aren’t we?’ she said.
Meadows nodded, and so did Beresford.
And completely out of the blue, Jack Crane said, ‘This is all my fault.’
‘What’s all your fault?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘If I hadn’t suggested the lesbian connection, the investigation would have gone in an entirely different direction, and we might have arrested the real killer by now.’
‘For God’s sake, Crane, grow up!’ Beresford said. ‘You’re supposed to be a police officer – act like one. You made a mistake, but we all went along with it, so stop snivelling.’
‘And that’s quite enough from you, Inspector,’ Paniatowski said. She turned to Crane. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she told him. ‘If anybody’s to blame, it’s me, because I’m in charge, and so I have to shoulder the responsibility. But we’re not here to parcel out blame anyway. Our only task is – and always has been – to catch the killer. So there’ll be no more backbiting. Is that clear?’ She waited for the others to nod, then she continued, ‘So, if the second girl wasn’t a lesbian, what does connect the two victims?’
‘I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s always possible they went to the same school, or had the same friends,’ Crane suggested.
‘There’s no chance they went to the same school,’ Meadows said. ‘I’ve visited Fairfield High, and I can tell you that the girl who was killed tonight wouldn’t have lasted a day there before she was expelled. And as far as having friends in common, do any of us seriously believe that someone who liked neat, pretty, little Jill Harris would also want to make friends with a girl who had a skull tattooed on her thigh?’
No one did.
‘They might just have been murders of opportunity,’ Beresford said. ‘Perhaps both girls were simply unlucky enough to have been in the park at the same time as the murderer was.’
‘But why would he want to kill them?’ Paniatowski asked. ‘He doesn’t fit the profile of a sex offender or a psycho – so what is driving him?’
The phone rang behind the bar.
‘It’s headquarters, Chief Inspector,’ the landlord called out. ‘I’ll switch the call through to the phone in the corridor, shall I?’
The rest of the team watched as Paniatowski crossed the room and opened the door to the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Jack, I shouldn’t have been so harsh just now,’ Beresford said, once the door had swung closed behind her.
‘I’m sorry, too, Inspector,’ Meadows said. ‘You may be a caveman, but at least you’re our caveman – and if we don’t pull together on this, we’ll all sink without trace.’
‘Especially the boss,’ Crane said.
‘Yes, especially her,’ Beresford agreed.
The door swung open again, and Paniatowski emerged, looking grim.
‘We may have a lead on the identity of our second victim,’ she said, when she reached the table. ‘A woman called in, after seeing the sketch on the news. She says that the girl’s name is Maggie Hudson, and that she herself is Maggie’s social worker.’
‘And how likely is it that a girl who has her own social worker would know Jill Harris?’ Beresford asked.
‘It’s not likely at all,’ Paniatowski said.
George Baxter was sitting at the desk of his office/bedroom in Dunston Prison. In front of him was a wad of photocopied timesheets which Chief Officer Jefferies had finally – and reluctantly – handed over to him.
It had puzzled him right from the start of his inquiries that not a single officer had been on duty during more than one of the attacks on Jeremy Templar – that seemed statistically unlikely, given the limited number of officers and the limited number of shifts – but now, having spent over an hour studying the timesheets, he thought he had his answer.
What he had found during his examination was a pattern – or rather, he corrected himself, a non-pattern. Officer Fellows, for example, had been there when Templar was attacked in the showers, because he’d been on the morning shift. He should also have been there when Templar had been assaulted in the yard, because that incident had occurred during the afternoon shift, and that week Fellows had been on the afternoon shift. Yet though he had worked that shift on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and was back on it again on Friday, he had worked the morning shift on Thursday – the day that the attack actually took place.
It was plain what had happened. The sheets had been doctored after the event – probably when the Home Office had ordered an inquiry. It was plain, too, why it had been done. Jefferies was spreading the responsibility (or diluting the blame, depending on how you looked at it). And it was the natural instinct of a leader to try and protect his men – Baxter had done the same himself, on some occasions.
But the real question was – as it had been right from the start – what was he protecting them from? Was he attempting to prevent them from being punished for something they had had no control over? Or was he merely doing his best to mask their incompetence?
Baxter sto
od up, and walked over to the window. There was a three-quarters moon that night, and in the pale glow he would clearly see the high walls which ran around the prison. He could see beyond them, as well – to the road that stretched out across the dark empty moors, a thin strip of tarmac leading away from this unnatural world and back to civilization.
What motivated a man to apply for a posting in a desolate place like this, he wondered.
It was true that some of the officers had local connections – Officer Higgins, for example, could not have been born more than twenty miles from the prison, if his accent was anything to go by. But there were others – Fellows, Robson and Jefferies, to name but three – who were clearly not even native Yorkshiremen, yet had pulled up their roots and planted them afresh on this semi-barren heath.
It was a mystery, Baxter told himself – but then so much about Dunston Prison was mysterious.
Until a few hours earlier, Maggie Hudson had lived on the Pinchbeck council estate – but now, of course, she didn’t live anywhere.
The estate was often referred to in town council meetings and official documents as a ‘mixed’ area – and what that actually meant was that while many of the residents were honest, industrious folk – who were just about getting by in life through hard work and determination – there was a sizeable minority which was drunken, lazy, dishonest and just plain vicious.
Monika Paniatowski knew all about the estate, and as she drove towards it behind the wheel of her bright red MGA, she gave an involuntary shudder.
‘Is something wrong, boss?’ asked Meadows, who was sitting in the passenger seat.
‘No,’ Paniatowski said quickly.
Nothing at all was wrong – except that she had been brought up on this estate herself, under the same roof as her sexually abusive stepfather, and each street – each lamppost – held memories of a time when killing herself had started to seem like a pretty good option.
It was getting late, and as they drove down Oak Tree Avenue – a street on which there was no evidence of oak trees – there were few lights on in the downstairs windows of the houses. Number eleven Oak Tree Avenue, however, was the exception to the rule. Here, the front room was ablaze with illumination, and despite the windows being closed, the music being played inside could be heard halfway down the street.
Paniatowski pulled up next to the house, and she and Meadows got out of the car. As they walked up the path – which was so overgrown with weeds it was almost as slippery as a skating rink – an upstairs window in the next-door house slid open, and a woman bawled out, ‘Are you the bobbies?’
‘Yes, we are!’ Paniatowski shouted back
‘Well, about time,’ the woman screamed. ‘I’m sick to my back teeth of complaining, and nothing being done.’
Then she slammed the window closed again.
The noise of the music – Gary Glitter’s ‘I’m the Leader of the Gang’ – was so overpowering that Paniatowski was hammering on the door for at least a minute before anyone answered – and even then, it was only a small, dirty child, who should have been in bed hours earlier.
‘Mam wants to know what the bloody hell you want at this time of night?’ the little girl said, looking up at them.
‘I’m called Monika,’ Paniatowski said, bending down and looking into her eyes. ‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’
‘Diane,’ replied the girl, who seemed puzzled at being addressed by an adult in such a friendly manner.
‘We’d like to come in, Diane,’ Paniatowski said softly. ‘Would that be all right?’
The girl shrugged. ‘Suppose so,’ she said, then turned and walked back down the litter-strewn hallway.
Baxter was still at the window, thinking about his other problem – the one in Whitebridge.
He had been far from happy at the idea of Monika Paniatowski handling one child-murder after her recent experience, so he was even less enthusiastic about her handling two, and when he had heard about the second murder, his immediate instinct had been to make another visit to Lancashire, and have a second talk with his DCI. Then, having thought it through, he decided there were a number of reasons why that would be a mistake.
As if to convince himself of the rightness of his decision, he began to count the reasons off on his thick, ginger-haired fingers.
One: to do so would be a signal to Monika – and to all the other officers in Whitebridge HQ – that he did not have confidence in a detective chief inspector he had personally promoted.
Two: by undermining Monika, he would also be undermining her effectiveness, making it less likely that she would get a result.
Three: he had an important job to do in Dunston Prison, especially if, as Officer Robson seemed to think, Jeremy Templar had not been guilty of the crime for which he been imprisoned.
And four . . .
There was no four, he tried to tell himself, but self-deception had never been his forte.
And four, he thought firmly, marking it out on his index finger: he was not prepared to sneak in and out of Whitebridge like a thief in the night, so Jo would soon learn he’d made that second visit, and his wife’s recriminations would start all over again.
‘You could always go and see her, too,’ he said aloud.
But even if he did that, she would still be convinced that his main reason for returning to Whitebridge was to see Paniatowski. She would never be able to accept that it was DCI Paniatowski and not Monika that he had gone to talk to.
Perhaps he should have gone straight back home the moment Jo had hung up on him, he thought, but he had believed at the time – and still believed – that to have done that would only have strengthened her suspicions, because no man goes running home unless he has something to hide.
He opened the window, and breathed in the crisp, chill night air.
From somewhere in the distance, he heard a hooting sound.
An owl?
Out on the moors – where there were no barns and no trees?
Perhaps it had got lost, he thought. Or perhaps it had been caught in a particularly strong wind, and blown off course.
Both those things were entirely possible, but given that what he didn’t know about owls was enough to fill a book, there was probably another explanation he couldn’t even begin to guess at.
Whatever the case, he was certain that he and the owl shared a feeling of bewilderment at suddenly being in a totally unfamiliar environment.
‘But at least the bloody owl can see in the dark,’ he muttered.
He returned to the desk, took a small sip of his whisky, and wished that life wasn’t always so bloody complicated.
Meadows and Paniatowski had followed little Diane into a living room which was a social worker’s vision of hell. There was more garbage on the floor here, too, (including a number of aluminium trays that had once held Chinese or Indian takeaway food), and the whole place stank of sweat and urine. Two other children, even smaller than Diane, were playing lethargically on the dirty floor, while their mother – a grossly fat woman – lounged on a battered sofa.
Meadows crossed the room, and switched off the hi-fi.
‘Here, what do you think you’re doing?’ demanded the woman – who looked so much like the dead girl that she could only have been her mother.
Paniatowski held out her warrant card. ‘We’re from the police, Mrs Hudson,’ she said.
‘I’ve kept telling the kids to turn the noise down, but they just won’t listen to me,’ Mrs Hudson said, slurring her words.
‘Do you have a daughter called Maggie?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘What’s she done?’ the fat women demanded. ‘Just tell me, and I’ll get her dad to give her a real good belting when he gets back from the pub.’
She’d be wasting her time being sensitive with this one, Paniatowski thought, reaching into her bag and producing a picture of the dead girl in the park.
‘Is this your daughter?’ she asked, thrusting the photograph under Mrs Hudson’s nose.
The fat woman squinted at the picture. ‘She don’t look right,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s dead,’ Paniatowski said bluntly. ‘She was murdered, sometime this afternoon.’
‘Oh God, that’s terrible,’ Mrs Hudson said, screwing up her face. Then she reached down for a can of lager that was lying on the floor, and took a generous swig.
‘When did you last see her, Mrs Hudson?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Don’t know,’ the fat woman confessed. She turned to Diane for help. ‘Did our Maggie come home for her tea?’
‘We didn’t have no tea,’ the little girl reminded her. ‘No dinner, neither.’
‘Don’t you be so cheeky, or you’ll be feeling the back of my hand,’ her mother rebuked her. ‘Was our Maggie here or not?’
‘We haven’t seen her since yesterday,’ Diane told Paniatowski. ‘She sometimes stays with her friends.’
And I certainly don’t blame her for that, Paniatowski thought.
‘You’ll have to come down to the morgue to identify the body,’ she told Mrs Hudson.
‘Couldn’t you wait until her dad gets back, and take him instead?’ the other woman asked.
‘There’ll be a patrol car round in fifteen minutes to pick you up,’ Paniatowski said, in disgust. ‘Be ready for it when it arrives.’
‘Are you sure it couldn’t be her dad?’ the fat woman whined. ‘I’ve not really been very well, you see. I’m under the doctor.’ Then she added, as if to clinch her case. ‘I’m on seven kinds of pills.’
‘If you’re not ready when the patrol car arrives, I’ll see to it personally that you spend a night in the cells,’ Paniatowski promised.
‘There’s no need to go cutting up nasty like that,’ Mrs Hudson replied, clearly offended.
‘We’ll see ourselves out,’ Paniatowski said, turning towards the door.
‘Just a minute!’ Mrs Hudson called after her.
Paniatowski swivelled round. ‘Yes?’
‘Will there be any compensation?’
A Walk With the Dead Page 15
