A Walk With the Dead (28 page)

‘I do. She was a girl called Jane Williams, wasn't she?'

‘Susan Williams,' Baxter corrected him.

‘That's right,
Susan
Williams.'

‘You didn't happen to do a story on the family, did you?'

‘I did not,' Small said. ‘For her own protection, the girl was never named in open court, and my editor made it perfectly plain that the family was off-limits as far as we were concerned.'

That was disappointing, but not entirely unexpected, and Baxter had already thought out another course he could follow.

‘I don't suppose you remember where the Williams family lived, do you?' he asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I do remember that. They're from Edgbaston, just like me.'

‘And how many parish churches are there in Edgbaston?'

Small chuckled. ‘Being an ungodly journalist, I'm not entirely sure, but I should imagine there are three or four. Why, for heaven's sake, would you want to know that?'

‘Let's just say I've suddenly developed an interest in ecclesiastical architecture,' Baxter said. ‘Now be a good chap, and look up the telephone numbers of the vicarages.'

The explanation for Jeremy Templar's suicide lay far beyond the narrow confines of Dunston Prison, Baxter thought as he waited for the reporter to return, but if he was ever to prove that, he would have to find links that stretched across both time and space.

There were, in fact, five parish churches in Edgbaston, and after Small had given him the numbers, the two men promised that they really would make an effort to get together soon, and the reporter hung up.

The vicar of St Augustine's was unable to give Baxter the information he needed, as were the vicars of St George's, St Wilfred's and St Bartholomew's. It was only on his fifth call – to St Luke's – that he hit pay dirt.

‘I can't say I actually remember that particular christening – I've conducted so many, you know – but since the family are regular members of my congregation, I assume I must have officiated at it,' the vicar said.

‘And do you have copies of the baptism certificates?' Baxter asked.

‘Oh yes, indeed,' the vicar said. ‘My wife is a stickler for that kind of detail, and makes sure they're all properly filed.'

‘Where do you keep them? Are they in the church?'

‘No, they're in a filing cabinet in my study. As a matter of fact, I'm looking towards it right now.'

‘I need one detail from that certificate,' Baxter said. ‘Do you think you could give it to me?'

‘I don't see why not,' the vicar replied. ‘What particular detail are you interested in?

Baxter told him.

The vicar promised to be right back, but it was five minutes before he came on the line again.

‘I'm awfully sorry to have kept you waiting,' he said. ‘I'm really not very good with paperwork. I expect my wife would have found what you wanted in a moment, but she's out at a meeting of the Women's Institute.'

‘But you have found it now?' Baxter asked, reining in his impatience.

‘I have – and you were quite right about the name. How on earth did you know?'

‘A lucky guess,' Baxter said.

And so it was – though it was a guess that fitted so perfectly all the facts he had already acquired that he would have been surprised if he'd been wrong.

‘I'd like to copy down all the details on that certificate, if you don't mind,' he said.

‘I don't mind at all,' the vicar assured him.

Jack Crane only left the Green Dragon at closing time. By then, he had lost count of how many pints of best bitter with whisky chasers he had consumed, and when the cold night air hit him, he realized that he was drunker than he had ever been before.

As he walked back towards his bedsit, he made a conscious effort to try and stop weaving in wide arcs from one side of the pavement to other, but with only limited success.

Yes, he was drunk, he told himself. He was drunk, and Liz – beautiful, wonderful Liz – was leaving Whitebridge for ever.

He wondered why it was that shits like Simon had all the luck that was going in life, and then he turned a corner and wondered what it was he had just been wondering about.

Walking suddenly seemed to be a terrible effort, especially since the ground refused to stay still, and the night sky was slowly and sickeningly revolving around his head.

He stumbled into a lamppost, and heard a loud clang reverberating around his brain as his head made contact with the dull grey metal.

He clutched the lamppost for support, and tried to work out what his next move should be.

If a policeman came along now, he could well find himself – DC Jack Crane, rising young star of the Whitebridge police force – being arrested for being drunk and disorderly. That wouldn't look good on his record, but he somehow couldn't bring himself to care. Nor did he care that in the morning he would have to face the anger of DCI Paniatowski, a woman whose good opinion he had – until that night – valued as a precious jewel.

His stomach issued a warning of what was soon to come. He relinquished his grip on the lamppost, and sank to his knees.

As the bile rose, and he began to vomit into the road, it occurred to him that perhaps he didn't want to be a policeman any more.

There was no darkness like the darkness of the moors, Jo Baxter thought, as she sat in her stationary car on the edge of the moorland road.

Yes, the moors were fringed with towns, and if you looked towards the far horizon, you would see a pinkish glow.

But out here, in the very centre of it all, there was just a blackness which was as dense as treacle, as mysterious as the womb.

Perhaps she should have had children, she thought.

Perhaps if she'd had children, everything would have been different.

But it was too late to have kids now – her doctor had confirmed that at her last visit.

So there she sat, a woman entering early menopause, married to a man who would rather have been married to someone else.

She looked into the darkness again, and found it comforting. She wondered if death was like that, not a glowing tunnel leading to a new life, not haloes and everlasting bliss, but something much better – a reassuring nothingness.

She switched on the engine and pulled away. Her headlights picked out the thin strip of road that led to the next town, where, no doubt, there were hundreds of people just as miserable as she was.

Slowly but surely, she increased the pressure on the accelerator pedal, so that soon the car was racing along.

The headlights began to annoy her. By cutting their way through the darkness like that, they were denying her the mystery – the lack of
anything
– that she so craved.

She switched off the headlights and increased the pressure on the accelerator.

That was better!

She did not see the bend in the road, or perhaps she had just not been looking for it.

The car left the asphalt surface. It plunged down a sharp slope, skidding on the heather, bouncing over the large stones.

She felt totally indifferent to what was happening to her, yet her instincts kicked in anyway, and made her pull on the steering wheel and stab down on the brake pedal.

But it was already too late to take remedial action. Before it had ever reached the bottom of the slope, the car flipped over, and then – because it still had momentum – it flipped back again.

By the time it finally came to a juddering halt, it had completed three and a half somersaults.

I
t was still only seven thirty in the morning, a time at which – for most of those on the outside – the alarm clock would only just have begun its persistent weekday harassment.

In Dunston Prison, however, the day was already well under way. The first batch of prisoners had emptied out their slops at just after seven, the second batch were now making their way carefully down the iron stairs with their buckets. The dining room was open for business, and prisoners wearing chefs' hats were ladling nutritious but unappetizing porridge into tin bowls which other prisoners held out before them. It was a Thursday, but it could just as easily have been a Monday or a Friday, because that was the thing about prison – every day was just like the one that had preceded it, and would be exactly the same as the one that followed it.

Baxter was sitting at his desk, thinking about the interview he'd had with Lennie Greene – and reflecting on just how wrong he'd got it.

When he'd asked Greene if he'd personally authorized the attacks on Templar, Greene had simply replied, ‘I didn't try to stop them.'

When he'd pointed out that power was not just about deciding who got beaten up, but also who
didn't
– and that if Greene didn't have the latter power, then he had no real power at all – Greene had just said, ‘What happened to Templar was nothing to do with me.'

And when he wanted more details of the attacks – and threatened to withdraw his offer of the precious Open University course if he didn't get the answer – Greene had said, almost in tears, ‘I can't do it. It'd be a step too far.'

So he'd come away from that interview with the firm belief that Greene was no more than a figurehead, and that there was another prisoner behind him who was secretly pulling the strings.

Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Greene was the king rat, all right, but as he had pointed out himself, he was not an absolute monarch.

Baxter looked at his watch. It was now seven fifty-nine, and the previous day he had ordered Chief Officer Jeffries to bring him the originals of the time sheets by eight o'clock at the latest.

At eight on the dot, Jeffries opened the door without knocking, and marched into the centre of the room. He had nothing in his hands.

‘I can't give you the time sheets that you wanted,' he said. ‘They've gone missing.'

‘I'm not in the least surprised to hear you say that,' Baxter replied. ‘You've no doubt calculated that while you'll be disciplined for losing the time sheets, that's nothing like as bad as what would happen to you if you actually handed them over to me.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' Jeffries said.

‘Of course you do,' Baxter countered. ‘But it doesn't really matter that you haven't brought them. Now that I know what I'm looking for, I also know how to find it – and all the time sheets would have done is save me a little time.'

‘Is that right?' Baxter asked, with a sneer.

But the arrogance in his voice stood in marked contrast to the worried look that was gradually enveloping his face.

‘I've had the whole thing wrong for most of the time I've been in this prison,' Baxter said. ‘I freely admit that. But I've finally got it right.' He paused. ‘Would you like me to tell you what I used to think, and what I think now?'

‘I don't care, one way or the other,' Jeffries said.

But he did care – he wanted desperately to know just what it was that Baxter knew!

‘I used to think that you had a number of officers working for you who were so piss-poor at their jobs that they had no idea of how to protect Jeremy Templar from the prisoners who wanted to hurt him. I used to think that when an inquiry was ordered, you saw it as your first duty to protect your men, and so you altered the time sheets to make it seem as if those piss-poor officers had not been working on more than one shift during which there'd been an attack. And the other thing I used to think was that while your actions were misguided, they were at least understandable.'

‘It's a chief officer's primary responsibility to take care of his men,' Jeffries said.

‘It's a chief officer's primary responsibility to see that the job's done properly,' Baxter countered. ‘But let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that you're right and I'm wrong. That raises an interesting question, doesn't it?'

Baxter reached for his pipe, tamped down the half-burned tobacco, and lit up. Then he sat back in his chair, and waited.

‘What question does it raise?' Jeffries asked, after perhaps half a minute had slowly ticked by.

‘If you saw it as your primary responsibility to protect your men, then why
didn't
you protect them?'

‘I
did
protect them,' Jeffries said.

‘So you're admitting that in order to protect them, you deliberately doctored the time sheets?' Baxter asked.

Jeffries said nothing, but it was clear from his expression that he was weighing up his options.

The chief officer recognized that the battle was lost, but he was still trying to save
something
, Baxter thought. So now he was fighting a rearguard action – giving ground, but only when he was forced to.

He had claimed to have lost the time sheets in order to avoid having it proved that he had doctored them. Now he was about to admit to having doctored them, but was still hoping that the reasons he had done it could be kept hidden.

‘You know how it is,' Jefferies said, in a voice that seemed to be trying to suggest that, when all was said and done, he and Baxter were almost colleagues, and had similar problems. ‘Some of the lads weren't quite up to the task, but they're getting better all the time, and I'd hate to see them lose their jobs. Yes, I did cook the books just a little, but only to shield them.'

‘You hypocrite,' Baxter said harshly. ‘You weren't trying to cover up for them, you were only covering up for yourself – because you were on duty every single time Templar was attacked.'

‘Now that is a load of old bollocks,' Jeffries said.

‘I'll go further,' Baxter told him. ‘If you
hadn't
been on duty, the attacks would probably never have occurred.'

‘So you're accusing
me
of being piss-poor incompetent now, are you?' Jeffries asked.