Lambs to the Slaughter (21 page)

That's just typical, Higgs thought. Smalley gets to take a trip to Whitebridge, and I'm left rooting around in this old man's kitchen.

Beresford turned around, and walked down the backyard.

It still bothered him that it would have been very difficult for Tommy Sanders to have slipped the laxative into the cocoa – or into anything else in the kitchen, for that matter – unless Len Hopkins had left his front door unlocked.

And
would
Len have left the door unlocked while he was away at the brass band competition in Accrington?

Besides, Tommy had been in Accrington himself.

He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and tried to come up with another scenario which he might be able to squeeze the facts into.

After the fight in the Miners' Institute, Len comes home, and five minutes later, Tommy knocks on his door. Len is obviously surprised to see him, but Tommy says he's come to apologize for the unpleasantness earlier, which he now sees was entirely his fault, and Len accepts his apology. Then, while Len is distracted in some way – making a cup of tea, or paying a quick visit to the lavvy – Tommy slips the laxative into the cocoa.

That was
just
possible, but it was not really very likely at all, he accepted miserably.

On the brighter side, he thought, as he stepped out into the alley, he had enjoyed overhearing the conversation between the two detective constables in Len Hopkins' kitchen.

One of them had said that he was gaining a reputation as a real ram, he recalled, as a broad smile came to his face.

A real ram!

He rather liked that.

Monika Paniatowski and Lily Perkins were sitting in the waiting room in Dr Taylor's private practice. Both of them had old, well-worn magazines open on their knees, but neither was making any pretence of reading.

The consulting room door opened, and Dr Taylor stepped out.

‘I asked Louisa to stay inside for the moment, while I had a word with you,' he said.

‘Is it . . . has she . . .' Paniatowski began.

‘You can relax, Chief Inspector,' Taylor told her with a smile. ‘There is some recent bruising on Louisa's right arm, right leg and thigh, all of which are consistent with a fall . . .'

‘She fell over on the garden path last night, when she was trying to open the front door,' Lily said.

‘. . . but other than that, there is absolutely no indication she has been assaulted – either sexually or in any other way.'

‘Thank you, Doctor,' Paniatowski gasped. ‘Thank you
so
much!'

‘Would you like to see Louisa now?' the doctor asked.

‘More than anything,' Paniatowski told him.

Taylor opened the door again, and Louisa came rushing out. Paniatowski bobbed down, then mother and daughter threw their arms around each other and burst into tears.

Dr Taylor glanced at his watch. ‘Giving Louisa the once-over has meant I've rather fallen behind on my slashing and gouging this morning,' he told Lily Perkins. ‘Could I leave these two in your charge?'

‘Yes, I'll look after them,' promised Lily, who was almost crying herself.

As Taylor retreated back into his consulting room, Paniatowski pulled away from her daughter, and looked into her tear-stained eyes.

‘I want you to go back home with Lily now,' she said. ‘Would that be all right?

‘What about you?' Louisa asked. ‘Won't you be coming with us, Mum?'

‘No, I . . .' Paniatowski began.

‘Of course,' Louisa said, disappointedly, ‘you've got your murder to investigate.'

Oh my God, how can she possibly think that, even for a moment? Paniatowski wondered.

And then she realized that she could think it because her mother had never given her cause to think anything else.

‘I don't care about the murder, my darling,' she told Louisa, feeling fresh tears forming in her eyes.

‘Really?' Louisa asked.

‘Really,' Paniatowski confirmed. ‘I only care about you – and I want to find out what happened to you.'

John Tweed, the head security man at Brough's Premium Brewery, was in his late thirties and had eyes which suggested both curiosity and intelligence.

‘I was a military policeman – a redcap – and when I came out, going into security seemed the logical next step,' he said.

‘Didn't you consider joining the police?' Meadows asked.

Tweed smiled. ‘Not really,' he said. ‘No offence, Sergeant Meadows, but given the choice of living on my salary or yours, I'd much rather live on mine.'

‘No offence taken,' Meadows assured him. ‘Tell me about the brass band competition.'

‘It went like a dream – very little trouble at all,' Tweed said. ‘Of course, you wouldn't expect trouble, would you? Brass bands are a strange combination of the macho and the gentle, but it's the gentle which usually prevails. Besides, I took precautions beforehand.'

‘What kind of precautions?'

‘I talked the brewery into producing a beer especially for the competition. I called it Championship Ale. It proved to be very popular.'

Meadows grinned. ‘Let me guess – it wasn't as strong as the regular beer?' she suggested.

‘It wasn't as strong as the regular beer,' Tweed agreed, ‘so anyone who knocked back six pints on Sunday was nowhere near as intoxicated as if they'd knocked back six pints in their local.'

‘You said there was very
little
trouble,' Meadows reminded him. ‘That means there must have been
some
.'

‘Nothing to write home about,' Tweed told her. ‘A couple of heated arguments, one or two minor scuffles, but my lads were ready for it, and they soon sorted them out.'

‘It's precisely that kind of minor incident that I'm particularly interested in,' Meadows said. ‘I'd like to know if you recognize any of the people in these photographs.'

She reached into her briefcase, and laid all the photographs she'd managed to collect on the desk. It was a pathetic collection, she acknowledged to herself – a few group photographs that she'd scrounged from the Miners' Institute, plus some she'd taken from Len Hopkins' house – but, for the moment, it was the best she could do.

‘Anyone here who looks familiar?' she asked, showing Tweed a photograph of the Miners' Institute Bowls Club, which had Tommy Sanders sitting squarely in the centre of it.

Tweed studied the photograph carefully.

‘I don't really think so,' he said finally.

‘Then do you recognize him?' Meadows said, laying several pictures from Len Hopkins' album in front of him.

‘Can't say he rings a bell, either,' Tweed said, after examining the first couple of photos in the pile.

Well, it had always been a long shot, Meadows thought. Even if Hopkins and Sanders had clashed at the competition, the chances of anybody from outside Bellingsworth noticing it were minimal.

Tweed picked up another photograph.

‘Now, her, I
do
recognize,' he said. ‘Not that it will probably be much help to you.'

‘Let me see that,' Meadows said, with a hint of expectancy creeping into her voice.

The picture had been taken on the seafront at Blackpool – the Tower was clearly visible in the background – and there were two people framed in it, a man and a woman.

The man was Len Hopkins. He was staring into the camera, and it was almost impossible to tell what he was thinking. There was no such problem with the woman. She was looking up at Hopkins, and the expression on her face was one of near-adoration.

Tweed must be mistaken, Meadows thought. Susan Danvers had specifically told DCI Paniatowski that Hopkins hadn't taken her to the competition.

‘Are you sure she was there?' she asked Tweed.

‘Have you got any more pictures of her?' the head of security asked.

Meadows flicked through the pile, and found two more. In one of them, Hopkins was smiling, in the other he wore an expression similar to the one in the Blackpool photograph. In both, Susan had the same look of love on her face.

‘Yes, that's her,' Tweed confirmed. ‘But she didn't look quite like that when I saw her.'

‘Go on,' Meadows encouraged.

‘I noticed her initially because, unlike everybody else, she wasn't part of a group,' Tweed said. ‘It's a very sociable thing, a brass band contest, but she was there all on her own. And the reason she's stuck in my mind,' he continued, ‘is because I don't think I've ever seen anybody look quite as miserable as she did last Sunday.'

T
he admiring comments on his virility had kept Beresford buoyed up until he had reached the High Street. Then his doubts about the case – and his own ability to solve it – had returned with a vengeance, and by the time he reached the church hall, he was feeling very down.

If it hadn't been for the laced cocoa – or whatever else it was that had been mixed with the laxative – he would have had a rock solid case against Tommy Sanders, he told himself. But then, he supposed, if it hadn't been for the laced cocoa, the murder wouldn't have been exactly
this
murder at all.

Then, in the middle of the dark night of his failure, two lights suddenly appeared. The first was a call from Crane, who was still in Brigden, the second, a call from Meadows in Accrington. And when he put the phone down after talking to Meadows, he had a whole new perspective on the murder.

The revelation that the cocoa had been spiked was not an impediment to making his case, he now realized – it was a sturdy cornerstone on which he could build it.

He needed just one more piece of information – a piece of information that Monika Paniatowski had wrongly called a loose end – before he was ready to make his move.

The university was one of the new crop which had sprung up in the ambitious years of the early sixties. It was sited on its own campus, midway between Whitebridge and Bolton, and had been designed by an architect who had obviously believed that if you used enough concrete and plate glass, you could easily dispense with both imagination and creativity.

Paniatowski, walking across the spacious piazza which was supposed to create a feeling of the Mediterranean in damp Lancashire, noticed neither the curly roof of the building to her right, nor the fountain which was bubbling lethargically to her left. All her attention was focussed on the history department which lay ahead of her, and the man who – she'd been told in the registry – occupied an office on the second floor of it.

She entered the building, and walked up the stairs. She kept urging herself to calm down, because the best way to accomplish what she wanted to accomplish was to approach this investigation as if it were any other.

‘But it's
not
any other investigation,' she said aloud, to the empty stairwell. ‘It's
nothing like
any other investigation!'

Dr Robert Sutton's office was located halfway down the second floor corridor.

There was a handwritten sign on the door which said, ‘I'm in. Please knock and enter.'

Paniatowski grasped the handle, flung the door open, and stepped inside.

Sutton was sitting at his desk. He was in his mid-forties, had sandy hair and was wearing a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows.

On the wall behind him were expensively framed posters of Karl Marx and Che Guevara, and in between them a third, more recent one, had been tacked up, which said simply, ‘Support the Miners' Right to Strike!'

The police officer part of Paniatowski's mind noted this, and quickly decided that Sutton was trying just a little
too
hard to establish his left-wing credentials. But it was the civilian part of her mind which was in control – and that part was fighting the urge to rip the man's head off.

Sutton looked up at Paniatowski, over the top of his half-moon glasses.

‘I'm a great advocate of informality in all situations,' he said mildly, ‘but even allowing for that, I don't think it's being
too
authoritarian of me to expect you to knock before you come in. Who are you, anyway?'

‘I'm Louisa Paniatowski's mother,' Monika told him.

‘Oh?' Sutton said, quizzically. ‘Is that a fact? And you've come to see me because . . .?'

‘Because I want to know what the hell happened to my little daughter last night.'

‘Since I don't know your daughter from Adam – or perhaps, more correctly, I should say, from Eve – I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea what happened to her,' Sutton said. He paused. ‘Wait a moment. I think I
do
know who you're talking about. Isn't Louisa the name of Ellie's little friend?'

‘She went to your daughter's party. You were the one who picked her up from home.'

‘That's right, I was.'

‘You took my
fourteen
-year-old daughter to your
seventeen
-year-old daughter's party!'

‘It's not for me to question my daughter's choice of friends, however strange I may think that choice is. Ellie said she wanted Louisa to be there, and I assumed Louisa had her mother's permission.'

‘You assumed!' Paniatowski bellowed.

‘Wouldn't you assume it, in my place?' Sutton asked. ‘I drive up to the house and hoot my horn – not once, but twice. When the girl comes out, she is wearing her party dress, so I
naturally
take it that she has her mother's permission. If you didn't want her to go the party – as you now seem to be claiming – why didn't you simply, at that point, stop her from leaving the house?'

Paniatowski felt a sinking feeling in her stomach.

‘I wasn't there,' she said, before she could stop herself.

‘Ah, you weren't there!' Sutton said, seizing on the admission. ‘So who's
actually
responsible for her going to the party? Is it her friend's father? Or is it her own mother?'