Death in Disguise

by Sally Spencer

  ‘That could be arranged,’ Meadows pointed out.

  ‘Kate!’ Paniatowski said sharply.

  ‘Only joking, boss,’ Meadows assured her. ‘Still, it wouldn’t do Mr Brian Chubb any harm to realise that even the most self-righteous magistrate has to respect the law.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

  ‘That if I was in his shoes I’d be careful where I parked from now on – and I’d be very careful not to be found behind the wheel of my car with too much alcohol in my bloodstream.’

  ‘I don’t want you doing anything rash,’ Paniatowski warned.

  ‘I won’t do anything at all, boss …’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘But I do have friends in the uniformed branch who might consider it advisable to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Friends?’ Paniatowski repeated, as surprised that Meadows should have friends outside the team as she’d been when Meadows had let it slip that she might – possibly – carry photographs around in her wallet.

  ‘Well, not friends exactly,’ Meadows admitted. ‘More like acquaintances – lads with whom I share a common interest in knots and rubber masks.’

  They’d really travelled far enough down that particular road, Paniatowski decided.

  ‘What does the doctor say about Flynn?’ she asked.

  ‘That unfortunately I didn’t damage him too badly, but that he can’t be questioned until tomorrow morning at the earliest,’ Meadows said. ‘Will you be needing me at the press conference, boss?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Paniatowski said.

  Chances were, it would be a rather quiet press conference, because unlike some of the murder cases she’d handled in the past, it didn’t have that sensational element which brought the national newspapers and television reporters flooding into Whitebridge. All that would change, of course, once she revealed that the murder victim was, in fact, a famous author, and at the next press conference she gave, it would be standing room only.

  ‘So if you don’t need me, would you mind if I took a few hours off?’ Meadows asked, casually – far too casually for Paniatowski’s liking.

  ‘If I do give you some time off, what will you do with it?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Meadows said. ‘Take a hot bath. Clean my whips. Maybe watch a bit of television.’

  ‘You’re certainly entitled to a break,’ Paniatowski conceded, ‘but if I say yes, you won’t do anything that’s likely to cause me a headache, will you?’

  ‘Really, boss!’ Meadows said, outraged. ‘The very idea!’

  Hope Terrace was typical of the rows upon rows of terraced houses in Whitebridge which had sprung up in the nineteenth century to accommodate the workers at the new mills. Each house originally had two rooms downstairs and two rooms up. The rooms at the rear faced an alley, beyond which lay the backs of the houses in Paradise Street. In the back yard there had been a wash house containing a brick boiler and the house’s only tap, and a lavatory which was emptied once a week by what the town council liked to call ‘sanitary engineers’ and the locals referred to as ‘shit cart men’.

  The character of the street began to change in the middle of the 1960s. There was more money about by then, and as the older residents died off, their place was taken by young families in which the husband wore a tie to work, and the wife never appeared on the street with her hair in curlers. The plumbing was moved indoors, house extensions were built which took up most of the back yards – and for the first time in its long history, Hope Terrace could honestly be described as ‘moderately prosperous’.

  George Clegg had had a bathroom installed in the back bedroom, but had gone no further than that. There seemed to be no need – there was only him and the missus to consider, and they both liked the house exactly as it was, because it felt so cosy.

  Meadows knew nothing of Clegg’s reasoning as she dropped off the back wall and into the yard. The only thought that passed through her mind was that less rooms to search meant less time searching them, which – when you were committing an illegal act – was a good thing.

  Once in the yard, she stood perfectly still and slowly counted to twenty. There were no lights on in the back rooms close to number 33 (it was still far too early for bed) and since she was dressed entirely in black, it was unlikely she’d been seen, but since she was in the process of doing something which could cost her her career, it was wise to be careful.

  Satisfied that she’d not been spotted yet – yet! – she moved quickly to the back door. The lock presented her with no problems, but when she tried to push the door open, it wouldn’t move.

  Bolted from the inside!

  She’d hoped to get in without damaging the place, but that was clearly not an option any more. She took a small crowbar out of her bag, and began the process of prising open the door.

  At first, the bolt held firm, then, suddenly, the retaining screws surrendered, and it fell to the kitchen floor with a crash.

  It sounded loud to her, but then she was right on top of it, Meadows reasoned. If anyone in neighbouring houses was talking or watching the television, they probably wouldn’t have heard it.

  She could still back out of this, she told herself – but even as the thought passed through her mind, she knew she wasn’t going to.

  What the hell, she thought, as she pushed the door open and stepped inside. If I lose my job, I can always go back to being a member of the idle rich.

  She closed the door quietly behind her and switched on her torch. She was in a narrow corridor, just wide enough to store prams and bikes in. The door at her end of the passage led to the kitchen, the door at the other end to the front parlour.

  She decided to check out the parlour first.

  In many traditional working-class houses, the family lived in cramped conditions in the other three rooms, only using the parlour on special occasions, and that was the case here. The three-piece suite was old-fashioned, but virtually unused. The display cabinet – highly polished – held souvenirs of holidays by the sea. And the walls were covered with photographs of a woman – starting, to judge from the style of clothes, in the 1930s, and ending fairly recently.

  George Clegg’s wife, Meadows thought – you couldn’t have exactly called her pretty, but she looked very, very, sweet.

  She stepped back into the corridor, and closed the door behind her. She had not noticed that though the curtains looked tightly drawn, there was in fact, a small chink in them.

  Edna and Jim Atherton were on their way to the local pub when Edna came to a sudden halt and, pointing across the road, said there was someone in the front room of number 33.

  ‘You’re imagining things, woman,’ Jim said.

  And then he saw for himself that there was a beam of light dancing through the air.

  ‘Do you think it’s a burglar?’ Edna asked.

  ‘Well, at this time of night it’s certainly not the gas man,’ Jim replied, taking off his jacket, handing it to his wife, and beginning to roll up his right shirtsleeve.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ Edna demanded.

  ‘I’m going across the road to sort yon bugger out.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. There could be a whole gang of them, for all you know.’

  ‘Oh aye, a whole gang of them,’ Jim said. ‘It’d need a whole gang to properly burgle George Clegg’s front room.’

  ‘You never know,’ Edna countered. ‘Anyway, what we should be doing is calling the police.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Jim conceded.

  The duty sergeant who took the call got straight on to the dispatcher.

  ‘There’s been a report of a suspected break-in at 33 Hope Terrace,’ he said. ‘Why does that address ring a bell?’

  ‘It’s the home address of George Clegg – the feller who was rushed into hospital this afternoon.’

  ‘It makes you despair of humanity, doesn’t it?’ the sergeant asked. ‘They’re like vultures, some
people.’

  ‘Would you like me to send a patrol car round to Hope Terrace?’ the dispatcher asked.

  ‘Is there only one car available?’

  ‘No, there’s three, actually.’

  ‘Then send them all – I want this bastard!’

  The sideboard in the kitchen was where George Clegg kept everything he still had left to care about. On the top shelf were Christmas decorations, faded letters tied with a blue ribbon and a box of jewellery. The bottom shelf was devoted to photograph albums, stacked up in neat towers. In fact, the whole sideboard was neatly organised – so neatly that it was hard to believe that the organiser had been a man.

  And that was what made the gap particularly significant!

  The gap in question was between two of the photograph album towers. There was no need for it to be there. It served no useful purpose at all.

  But it had served a purpose! Meadows thought. It had held something – and she was prepared to bet that something was a box.

  Was there anything she could say about the box?

  Yes!

  The box had contained something very important, or it would not have earned its place in the sideboard.

  And it could have only recently been removed from the sideboard, because that was the only way to explain why the meticulous George Clegg had not rearranged things into a more pleasing symmetry.

  There was a loud banging on the front door, and a voice called, ‘Police! Open up!’

  Meadows glanced out of the kitchen window and saw a dark shape on the top of the wall that could only be a uniformed constable.

  They had her hemmed in.

  She stood up, and headed for the stairs.

  As Paniatowski had predicted, the press conference had not excited a lot of interest, and there were only a handful of journalists and one local camera crew. What came as a surprise, however, was that one of the journalists present was a man called Mike Traynor.

  Traynor did not cut an attractive figure. He had the sort of eyes that a hen sees coming out of the darkness, just before she’s pulled off her perch by a pair of strong jaws, and he shed so much dandruff that his sloping shoulders could have been used as a ski run for mice. He had been reporting on crime in Whitebridge and the surrounding district for as long as Paniatowski had been on the force, and initially there’d been little to distinguish him from any of the other hacks.

  Then – suddenly – his career had taken off. He had filed a series of exclusive stories which had left his competitors feeling dazed and battered. And even when the other reporters had the same stories he did, he supplied extra juicy details which made them seem like incompetent amateurs. Now, he was the regional crime editor for one of the big national newspapers, and though he still lived in Whitebridge, he was rarely there.

  So what the hell was he doing covering a local murder which would scarcely raise a ripple of interest in London? Paniatowski wondered.

  She stepped onto the podium, and took her seat behind the desk, next to the chief constable.

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ Pickering said. ‘I am Chief Constable Keith Pickering, and sitting next to me is Detective Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski. DCI Paniatowski will issue a brief statement, and then there will be time allotted for a few questions.’

  Paniatowski picked up her prepared statement.

  ‘A thirty-four-year-old man was arrested late this afternoon, and is being questioned in connection with the murder in the Royal Victoria Hotel,’ she said. ‘I’d now like to deal with the question of the identity of the victim. We have suspected, for some time, that the name she was using was not her own, and now we have positively identified her as Miss Melissa Evans. Miss Evans was thirty-eight years old, and lived in New York City.’

  ‘The Melissa Evans?’ one of the female journalists gasped. ‘The woman who wrote those sensational biographies of Frank Sinatra, Elvis and—’

  ‘That is correct. Miss Evans was indeed a biographer.’

  ‘But what was someone like her doing in Whitebridge?’

  ‘We have still to ascertain that.’

  Mike Traynor, a broad grin spread across his face, raised a lazy hand high in the air.

  ‘Yes, Mr Traynor?’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘It’s not her,’ Traynor said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The woman you have in your mortuary isn’t Melissa Evans.’

  ‘I can assure you, Mr Traynor, that we do not announce someone’s death without first checking out our facts very carefully. The New York police department is certain that the prints of the woman in the mortuary are a perfect match for those of Melissa Evans.’

  ‘It’s not her,’ Traynor repeated.

  ‘You sound very confident, Mr Traynor.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And what do you base this confidence on?’

  ‘I base it on information that I recently received from a thoroughly reliable source.’

  Leave it there, Paniatowski ordered herself. Don’t let him goad you into saying something you might regret.

  But it was too late for that, because the words were already spilling out of her mouth.

  ‘A thoroughly reliable source,’ she heard herself say. ‘Now that is interesting. I suppose I could, if I wanted to, list the occasions on which your “thoroughly reliable sources” have proved to be thoroughly unreliable, but we all have homes to go to, and most of us would rather like to get there before midnight.’

  The other journalists, who were no fans of Traynor, laughed appreciatively, but the man himself did not look at all put out.

  No more, Monika, Paniatowski told herself. Shut up now!

  ‘Sometime in the next few hours, when you realise you’ve made a big mistake, you’re going to feel very foolish, Mr Traynor,’ she said.

  ‘Not as foolish as you’ll feel when you discover I was right all along,’ Traynor told her.

  Constables Kay and Watson had been dispatched on any number of fools’ errands as a result of phone calls from over-imaginative neighbours, and they’d half-suspected that their visit to 33 Hope Terrace would prove to be just one more. The jemmied back door suggested otherwise, and the bag of tools, sitting on the kitchen table, absolutely confirmed that this was the real thing.

  The burglar was clearly not in the kitchen, and when they checked the front parlour he proved not to be there, either.

  ‘He must be upstairs,’ Kay said.

  ‘Forced to be,’ Watson agreed.

  He wasn’t. They searched the bathroom, and they checked under the bed and inside the wardrobe, but there was no sign of him.

  ‘He must have made his escape before we even got here,’ Kay said, slightly despondently.

  ‘And left his tools behind?’ Watson asked sceptically. ‘There isn’t a burglar living who’d leave without his precious tools.’

  ‘So where is he, then?’ Kay asked.

  Watson’s eyes scoured the room one more time, and then looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘The loft!’ Watson said, with sudden inspiration. ‘He’s got to be in the bloody loft.’

  The press conference ran on for another five minutes, but after the dramatic confrontation between Paniatowski and Traynor, the heart had pretty much gone out of it.

  The chief constable waited until the journalists had filed out of the room, then turned to Paniatowski and said, ‘You are quite sure that the dead woman is called Melissa Evans, aren’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘Fred Mahoney is a good solid cop, and he would never send me information that was unreliable.’

  ‘Because, you see, if it turns out that Traynor was right and you were wrong, you’re going to look a complete bloody fool, especially after the way you went for him.’

  ‘It’s Traynor who’s got it wrong.’

  ‘And since I was sharing the platform with you, I’m going to look a complete bloody fool as well.’

  ‘It won’t happen,’ Paniatowski sa
id. ‘But even if it did, I don’t see why you should take any flak. I was the one who insisted it was Melissa Evans – you didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Pickering agreed, ‘I didn’t say anything which could be taken to be a wholehearted endorsement of what you said. It’s not myself – Keith Pickering – that I’m worrying about, Monika. I have broad enough shoulders to take any amount of ridicule. But as chief constable, I represent the force, and anything that reflects badly on me also reflects badly on the Mid Lancs Police.’

  Oh shit! Paniatowski thought.

  Most of the terraced houses in Whitebridge had interconnecting lofts, and it should have been possible to get from one end of the street to the other by walking along the rafters.

  It wasn’t possible on this row. Eleven doors down from number 33 – number 13, unlucky for some – the owner had obviously decided that since he was having an extension built, he might as well have a party wall put in the loft as well, and when she hit this party wall, Kate Meadows could go no further.

  She hunkered down on one of the rafters, and gave serious consideration to what she should do next.

  There were, as far as she could see, two choices.

  She could stay where she was, and hope that the uniformed bobbies, who were now buzzing around like bluebottles, would be too thick to think of looking for her in the loft.

  Or she could open the nearest trap door, and then drop in – literally – on the family who called number 13 home.

  It was the sound of the trap door at number 33 being raised that decided her. She opened the trap door, and lowered herself into it.

  Her legs were already dangling over the upstairs landing when the torch beam hit her.

  ‘I can see him,’ Constable Watson shouted excitedly. ‘I can bloody see him. Tell the lads on the street.’

  Shit! Meadows thought.

  She dropped down onto the upstairs corridor. It was a harder – more awkward – landing than she would have liked, but she didn’t think she’d done herself any serious damage.

  No time to hang about.