Golden Mile to Murder

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Whereas a bobby from Central Lancs HQ might be less than impressed with the local bigwigs, and could stir up all kinds of dirt?’

  The manager’s eyes hardened. ‘I’ll be frank with you, Sergeant Paniatowski,’ he said. ‘Before I agreed to see you, I took the opportunity to call up Sergeant Howarth. According to him, you are here to investigate the murder of Inspector Davies – and only that. The accident has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Unless it’s connected with the murder.’

  The manager laughed. ‘How could the murder possibly be connected with a case of drunk-driv—’ He came to a sudden halt.

  ‘Drunk-driving?’ Paniatowski said. ‘I don’t remember anyone mentioning drunk-driving.’

  ‘Given the nature of the accident, I think it is a fair assumption that the driver was drunk,’ the manager said. He glanced down at his wristwatch. ‘I’m running late for another appointment, so if there’s nothing else, perhaps we could end our meeting now.’

  ‘You won’t give me the list?’

  ‘Sergeant Howarth has one. Perhaps he will be willing to show you his. Failing that, I’m afraid you’ll have to get a court order.’

  And how easy would that be? Paniatowski asked herself. Considering that all the magistrates in Blackpool were probably members of the Golden Mile Association, it should be bloody near impossible.

  She stood up, and ignored the hand which was being offered to her. ‘I can find my own way out,’ she said.

  She turned the door handle and stepped into the corridor. The manager had said he had another appointment, but Paniatowski was hardly surprised to see that there was no one waiting outside.

  The sergeant made her way back to the lobby. Robert the receptionist was back behind the counter, and reading the expression on her face, he smirked again.

  Paniatowski glanced over the counter at Robert’s little kingdom – a switchboard, a desk, a safe and two filing cabinets. She wondered how far he would go to protect that kingdom of his – how many lies he would be willing to tell to pervert the course of justice.

  She stepped through the main door and out on to the promenade. A breeze had blown up, and she greedily gulped in the fresh sea air.

  The meeting with the manager had been a waste of time, as she’d known it would be. But it had been a necessary waste of time, if she were to avoid arousing his suspicions. Opening her handbag, she took out her notebook, flipped it open to the last page she had used, and scanned what she’d written.

  Councillor Conway

  Dr Pearce

  Sir Henry Rathbone

  Alderman Sutcliffe . . .

  Receptionists who wanted to keep their secrets truly secret should be more careful, she thought. More specifically, they should make sure that when they left their posts to consult the boss, they locked their filing cabinets first.

  Eighteen

  Chief Inspector Turner and Detective Sergeant Hanson sat in one of the shelters close to the Central Pier, apparently doing nothing more than watch the green and cream trams rattle by.

  Though it had been Hanson who had requested the meeting, he seemed reluctant to speak, and finally it was Turner who said, ‘Don’t you think you’d better tell me what’s on your mind?’

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can protect Mr Davies,’ Hanson blurted out.

  ‘Protect Mr Davies?’ Turner repeated, questioningly.

  ‘Protect his reputation, then.’ Hanson fumbled with his packet of cigarettes. ‘I’m a good bobby, sir.’

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘And I’ve always done my job to the best of my ability.’

  ‘Unquestionably.’

  ‘But I’m finding myself in a situation in which I can’t do my job properly any more.’

  ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘I’ve found a witness who may be able to assist the investigation.’

  ‘Isn’t that good?’

  ‘Yes! If she can help us find out who killed Punch. No, if she puts the idea into Mr Woodend’s head that he should take a closer look at what Punch was doing just before he died.’

  Turner nodded gravely. ‘I see.’

  ‘Isn’t it time we stopped trying to walk the tightrope?’ Hanson pleaded. ‘In some ways what Punch did is our fault – all our faults – because we had our suspicions and we did nothing about them. Don’t you think we should accept the consequences of that?’

  Turner put an avuncular hand on Hanson’s shoulder. ‘You’re a sergeant, and you’re seeing things from a sergeant’s viewpoint, which is only natural,’ he said. ‘But I’m a chief inspector, and I have to take a much wider look at things.’

  ‘I know that, but . . .’

  ‘When you talk about coming clean, you’re thinking in terms of a reprimand on your record – which is something you could easily bury with a couple of years of good police work. I, on the other hand, have to consider the overall consequences. Do you imagine, even for a second, that if we tell them all we suspect, those bastards in Whitebridge will just sit on their hands and wait while we put our own house in order?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Hanson admitted gloomily.

  ‘Definitely not,’ Turner countered. ‘They’ll have a couple of their hatchet men down here before you can say “Board of Inquiry”. And what will they do? They’ll turn us upside down. For all our faults, we’re an effective police force. But we won’t be when they’ve finished with us. I know. I’ve seen it all before.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Hanson asked.

  ‘Just what we have been doing up to now – trying to solve Punch’s murder without going too deeply into his background. All right?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  ‘When I uncovered the witness this afternoon, I felt elated,’ Hanson told him. ‘Then I thought – what if all I’m doing is stirring up some muck on Mr Davies? And for maybe ten minutes, I was considering not telling Mr Woodend about the witness at all. Do you know how that made me feel, sir?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It made me feel like something the cat had dragged in.’

  Woodend stood in front of the garishly painted gypsy’s booth. Most of it was covered with signed pictures of celebrities posing with Elizabeth Rose, but squarely in the centre of the display was an elaborate scroll in a glass frame:

  Are you looking for a real friend? One to whom you can tell all your worries and problems. If so, this lady is the answer to your prayers. She has helped hundreds of people in all walks of life with her sound advice and powers of concentration. Your visit is treated in the strictest confidence and you may unburden your mind to her and leave here lighter in heart then ever before.

  It was all a bit different from the fortune-tellers he remembered as a kid, Woodend thought. No mention here of ‘good luck’ or ‘tall, dark, handsome strangers’, but then he supposed that gypsies, like everybody else, had had to move with the times.

  He slid open the dark-blue velvet curtain, and stepped inside. The booth was gloomy, apart from a single light placed strategically behind the gypsy to give the outline of her body a golden glow.

  ‘Sit,’ Elizabeth Rose commanded.

  Woodend lowered himself into a chair which, despite his size, put him at a level well below that of the gypsy.

  ‘You are troubled,’ Elizabeth Rose said.

  Her voice was deep and husky. Part of that was put on for effect, Woodend thought – though another part of it he recognised was the result of the gypsy being a chain-smoker like himself.

  ‘You are troubled,’ she repeated.

  ‘Tell me, is there anyone who visits you who isn’t troubled?’ he asked. ‘Come to that, is there anybody in the whole of Blackpool – the whole of England – who isn’t troubled in some way?’

  ‘You have only one child,’ the gypsy said, ignoring his question. ‘It’s a daughter, isn’t it?’

  Woodend felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on e
nd. How could the gypsy have known that?

  ‘Answer me,’ Rose Elizabeth commanded. ‘Is the child a girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘You worry about her. You are troubled that you may have taken a decision which will ruin her life.’

  The gypsy was exaggerating things out of all proportion, Woodend told himself. It was true that Annie hadn’t exactly been enthusiastic about the idea of moving away from London and leaving her friends behind. True, too, that because her accent was more Southern than Northern she might feel slightly self-conscious in Whitebridge – at least for a while. And it could be argued that there were better times for her to change school than one year before School Certificate. But none of those things was really a big problem. She would soon make new friends – and she was bright enough for the move not to damage her academic progress.

  Sweat was forming around Woodend’s collar. He’d been more worried about his daughter than he’d been prepared to admit, he now realised. Though he’d managed to hide it from himself until that very moment, the thought must have been nagging at the back of his mind that perhaps all the changes would hurt Annie’s chances of going to university – of having the opportunities he’d never had.

  His throat felt suddenly very dry. ‘Am I right to be troubled?’ he found himself croaking.

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ the gypsy asked him.

  He was not sure that he did – not sure that knowing would make it any easier. What he really wanted to do, if he were honest with himself, was to leave the gypsy’s booth and never return, because though he had seen action in North Africa and forced himself to keep his nerve while cataloguing the heaps of dead in Dachau, he did not think that he had ever been so frightened before.

  He was not there to be intimidated by husky voices, tricky light effects and wild guesses, he argued as he gripped the sides of his chair. He had a job to do, and he had better get on with it. He took a deep breath, but instead of clearing his mind it only served to fill his lungs with the sickly-sweet smell of the booth.

  ‘What about me?’ he asked, fighting back. ‘You’ve told me about my daughter, now tell me about me.’

  ‘You are a traveller who has returned to his home,’ the gypsy said, ‘only to find that that home is no longer there. You are a ship which has lost its anchor and is now drifting helplessly on a sea of doubt.’

  If she was guessing, she was making a bloody good job of it, Woodend thought. Too bloody good. This was his interview. He was supposed to be in charge – and he clearly wasn’t.

  ‘I’m not here to ask you about the future,’ he said, running his finger around his shirt collar. ‘I’ve come to ask you about somebody else’s past.’

  ‘This, too, I know.’

  ‘So if you’ll just tell me how much I owe you for the consultation –’

  ‘There will be no charge.’

  ‘I insist.’

  ‘You cannot force me to take your money – even if you are a policeman.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Woodend demanded. ‘How did you know I was a bobby?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ the gypsy told him, and though the arrangement of the lights made it impossible to see her face, he was almost sure that she was smiling. ‘Yet I knew that you were a man of authority, a man used to asking questions – and not only of himself.’

  ‘I want to know about Detective Inspector Davies,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Ah yes, he came to me.’

  ‘An’ accordin’ to the witnesses we’ve talked to, it was more than once.’

  ‘It was three times,’ the gypsy agreed.

  ‘An’ what did he want?’

  ‘What does anyone who comes here want? Peace. Tranquillity. An answer to all life’s problems.’

  ‘Let’s be a little more specific,’ Woodend said. ‘What particular problems did Davies have?’

  ‘I am not a lawyer or a doctor,’ the gypsy said, ‘but I take my responsibilities equally as seriously as they do, and what is said in this booth is never allowed to leave it.’

  ‘I’m conductin’ a murder inquiry,’ Woodend told her.

  ‘Then you have heavy responsibilities, too,’ the gypsy replied. ‘But what Mr Davies told me can be of no help to you.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Woodend countered. ‘You’re not in a position to judge.’

  ‘Perhaps not, in any sense you would recognise. But I am in a position to see.’

  ‘I could take you in for questionin’,’ Woodend warned her.

  ‘You would learn nothing.’

  ‘Or I could get the local police to make your life uncomfortable. Post a couple of uniformed bobbies outside your booth, and you’d be surprised how quickly your business drops away.’

  ‘It is a brave man – or a foolish one – who threatens a gypsy,’ Elizabeth Rose said.

  And despite himself, Woodend felt his heart miss a beat.

  ‘Perhaps we could reach a compromise,’ he suggested.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the gypsy agreed.

  ‘Would it be possible to talk – in general terms – about what Inspector Davies said to you?’

  ‘You have much in common with him. He, too, was troubled over his daughter – worried that he had failed her, as you worry you have failed yours.’

  ‘But his daughter’s retarded,’ Woodend protested, aware, as he spoke, that the policeman in him was receding and the father was reasserting himself. ‘She couldn’t have gone to university. There was nothin’ he could really do for her.’

  ‘How little you know,’ the gypsy rebuked him. ‘How little you understand.’

  ‘Do you know who killed Inspector Davies?’ Woodend asked, forcing himself to put the interview back on track. ‘Did you know beforehand that he was goin’ to be killed? Do you have a picture of the murderer in your mind?’

  Elizabeth Rose laughed softly. ‘It is not so simple,’ she said. ‘To reach the future, we must all walk down a long, dark passage. For those like me – who have better eyes than most – it is possible to pick out vague shapes at the end of that passage, and to draw intelligent conclusions from them. But those conclusions are sometimes wrong.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me anythin’?’ Woodend persisted. ‘The man’s age? Why he felt Davies had to die?’

  ‘Mr Davies had to die because he was in the way,’ the gypsy said. ‘But I am telling you nothing that you don’t know already. In every murder case, the victim has to die because he is in the way.’

  It was a relief to be out on the prom again – to see Blackpool Tower standing just where it had when he was a child, to hear the reassuring rattle of the trams and the cries of the bingo callers. Woodend lit up a Capstan Full Strength and let the smoke snake around his lungs.

  He found himself thinking about Annie, who was probably at that very moment packing up her room – the room which had been hers for fifteen years – ready for the move to Whitebridge. Any difficulties she experienced as a result of his decision, he would deal with, he promised. If she was lonely, he would find out which were the best youth clubs in town and drive her there himself. If she were falling behind in her studies, he would hire her a private tutor. And if things were still not working out, he would sacrifice his own career, move back to London, and take a job in private security.

  Those options – or any even vaguely resembling them – had not been open to Punch Davies. When he had gazed into his daughter’s blank eyes and known that – however much he tried – he could never really reach her, it must have broken his heart.

  The sight of a uniformed constable reminded Woodend of why he was in Blackpool, and for the third time in less than half an hour, he forced himself to cast aside his own worries and anxieties, and think like a policeman. There would have been no point in taking the gypsy in for questioning, he argued. However much pressure he had put on her, she’d have said no more at the station than she’d told him freely in her booth. Yet even as these thoughts raced around his head, he found
himself wondering how much he was being guided by bobby’s logic – and how much by a fear of the unknown!

  Nineteen

  Monika Paniatowski had been expecting it to be something of an effort to return to the basement after the incident with the contraceptive, but even so she was surprised by just how difficult it was turning out to be. As she walked down the steps she was straining her ears for sounds of the local DCs – for sounds of the enemy – but the only noise they seemed capable of picking up was the unreasonably loud clatter of her own reluctant heels.

  Bang, bang, bang! Bang, bang, bang!

  She stopped halfway down the stairs, telling herself she’d done it so that she could hear more clearly – but knowing that what she was really doing was putting off the moment when she’d have to face whoever was down there.

  What if it was Brock? No one should have to deal with a slimy creep like him after a hard day’s work. But perhaps she wouldn’t have to! Perhaps he’d learned his lesson.

  She shook her head, angry at her own attempt at self-deception. Men like Brock never learned. They were like jack-in-the-boxes – however often you slapped them down, they came bouncing back up again.

  Monika took a deep breath and forced herself to press on. Three more steps and she reached the basement level. Two more steps and she was inside the incident room. And Brock was not there! The only member of the team sitting at his desk was Sergeant Hanson.

  Monika nodded to him – and he nodded back.

  She walked over to her own desk. She needed paper, and without even thinking about it, her hand reached for the drawer. Then she did think about it – and felt her body freeze.

  ‘It’s all right – you won’t find anything unpleasant in there,’ said Hanson’s voice behind her.

  She felt the use return to her limbs at the same moment as a fresh wave of anger surged through her. She swung round, furious at herself for her moment of weakness – and even more furious that she had let it show.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ she said.