Lambs to the Slaughter (27 page)

Coppersedge and Sutton exchanged anxious glances, but said nothing.

‘Well?' Meadows asked. ‘
Is
that the way you want to play it?'

‘What would you be charging my client with?' Mr Coppersedge said cautiously.

‘I've been thinking about that, and I've decided that facilitating paedophilia has a nice ring to it,' Meadows told him.

Coppersedge relaxed. ‘You'll never make that charge stick,' he scoffed. ‘The girl was not sexually assaulted in any way.'

‘How do you know that?' Meadows wondered.

‘Well, was she?' Coppersedge asked, avoiding the question.

‘No, she wasn't.'

‘Then there you have it,' the solicitor said complacently.

‘Ah, but you see, Dr Sutton didn't
know
that she wouldn't be molested when he set the whole thing up,' Meadows pointed out. ‘And you don't get off a charge of bank robbery just because you find out when you open the safe that there's no money in it.'

‘It's not the same thing at all,' the solicitor protested.

‘Isn't it?' Meadows asked. ‘Maybe you're right. I wouldn't know, because I'm not as clever as you. But the one thing I am sure of is that if Robert here doesn't take a deal, his daughter will – because if there's only one seat in the lifeboat, Ellie will make damn sure she's got her pert little bottom on it.'

‘Ellie?' Sutton gasped.

‘Oh, I'll be arresting her, too. Didn't I mention that?'

‘But you can't!'

‘Of course I can. She was the one who invited Louisa to the party – she's as guilty as you are, Robert.'

‘This is blackmail!' the solicitor said.

‘It's a statement of intent,' Meadows countered.

Sutton really was sweating now.

‘If . . . if I tell you what I know, will I go to gaol?' he asked.

‘I couldn't even begin to guess at that until I know what it is that you know,' Meadows said. ‘But whatever punishment you receive, it will be considerably reduced if you cooperate.'

Sutton glanced at his solicitor, and Coppersedge nodded to confirm that was true.

‘And what will happen to Ellie?' Sutton asked.

‘If I'm happy with what you tell me, I'm willing to give Ellie a free pass,' Meadows said.

Sutton took a deep breath. ‘I got a phone call at four o'clock on Monday morning,' he said. ‘The man who called told me to organize a party and to make sure that Louisa was there.'

‘What's the man's name?'

‘I don't know. I didn't ask, and he didn't tell me. It wouldn't have been his real name, anyway.'

‘Well, that sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?' Meadows asked Coppersedge. ‘A man you don't know asks you to do something thoroughly reprehensible, and you agree immediately.' She turned back to Sutton. ‘Did he offer you money?'

‘No – he reminded me that I had once known a girl called Brenda. And that was all he
needed
to say.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?' Meadows demanded.

‘It's a long story.'

‘I like stories,' Meadows said, ‘and as far as I'm concerned, the longer they are, the better. So let's hear it, Robert.'

The note from Tommy Sanders had arrived a few minutes after Paniatowski had left. In it, Sanders said that he wished to talk to Beresford as soon as possible, on a matter of some urgency, and that Beresford should not go to the back door, because the old man would be waiting for him in his front parlour.

The words ‘front parlour' had been underlined.

And now here I am, in the front parlour of a man who, only yesterday, I suspected of being Len Hopkins' murderer, Beresford thought, as he looked around the room.

The parlour was immaculately clean and over-furnished. Neither the armchair in which he was sitting, nor the one in which the old man was hunched, showed much sign of wear, and the walls were covered with photographs of people long dead. A fire burned cheerily in the grate, but the room still had the musty smell of a place which is only used on special occasions.

‘You can stuff your gas fires and your electric heaters up your backside,' Tommy Sanders said. ‘There's no heat like that that comes from a coal fire. I love the stuff – even if it is bloody killing me.'

‘You said you wanted to talk to me urgently,' Beresford pointed out.

‘All in good time, lad, all in good time,' the old man said.

He coughed into a white handkerchief, and Beresford could see the flecks of blood.

‘Do you know why I'm seeing you here, rather than in the kitchen?' Sanders asked.

‘Because the kitchen is where you entertain your friends, and this is serious business,' Beresford said.

The old man laughed. ‘Well done, lad. Nicely worked out. There's a chance you might turn out to be a good bobby in time – but you're not there yet, not by a long chalk. At the moment, to be honest, you're a bit of a bloody idiot.'

‘I didn't come here to trade insults,' Beresford said.

‘It's not an insult,' Sanders said. ‘I'm just speaking the truth as I see it. I mean to say, who else but a bloody idiot would have arrested Susan Danvers for Len Hopkins' murder?'

Beresford stood up. ‘I think I'll be going,' he said.

‘You've arrested the wrong person, lad – and I can prove it,' Tommy Sanders said.

‘You can
prove
it?'

‘That's what I said. Sit down again, lad.'

Beresford sat.

‘But
before
I prove it to you, we need to make a deal,' the old man said.

‘What kind of deal?'

‘What I'm about to tell you could give you grounds for charging my granddaughter, Becky, with obstructing the course of justice. You have to promise me that won't happen.'

Jesus Christ, he was going to admit that the alibi was a fake! Beresford thought. And then he was going to explain why he had
needed
the alibi. Or to put it another way, he was going to confess to the murder of Len Hopkins.

And if he did that – and if it was a true confession – it meant that despite all the evidence that seemed to be stacked up against Susan Danvers, the officer in charge of the case – Detective Inspector Colin-bloody-smart-arse-Beresford – had got the whole thing wrong.

‘Would this obstruction of justice have anything to do with the alibi that Becky gave you?' he asked cautiously.

‘It would,' Tommy Sanders confirmed.

So there it was. It was starting to look like he
had
been wrong about Susan – and Monika had been right.

How do you feel now, Inspector Hotshot? he asked himself. Still think you're capable of running an investigation on your own? Still think you know better than your boss?

‘Becky won't be prosecuted for lying about being with you on Sunday night,' he said. ‘You have my word on that.'

‘All right, then, let's start at the beginning,' Tommy Sanders said. ‘I . . . I didn't see Len . . . Hopkins at the brass . . . band competition . . .'

He was having another coughing attack, and this one was much more violent than the one he'd had earlier.

‘It'll . . . it'll pass, this,' Sanders said between coughs, ‘but it'll . . . take time . . . and you're . . . you're going to . . . have to be . . . patient.'

‘Take your time, Mr Sanders,' Beresford said soothingly. ‘There's no hurry at all.'

Nor was there, he thought, because no man is ever in a hurry to find out just how
big
a bloody idiot he's been.

It is young Robert Sutton's first term in Oxford and he is drinking in the Bulldog pub, across from Christchurch College, when he sees the girl sitting in the corner. She has long brown hair, and is strikingly beautiful, and when she notices him looking at her, she smiles.

‘I went over to talk to her,' Sutton told Meadows. ‘She said her name was Brenda, and that she hated it because it was so old-fashioned. I said I thought it was a beautiful name.'

‘Men will say anything when they want to get into a girl's knickers,' Meadows said.

‘Yes,' Sutton agreed, ‘they will. We had a few drinks – more than I intended; I wasn't used to alcohol in those days – and then she suggested we went back to her flat.' He paused. ‘It wasn't really her flat, of course.'

‘Of course it wasn't,' agreed Meadows, who could probably have written the rest of the confession herself.

‘She'd appeared to be rather shy in the pub, but the moment we got to the flat, she became a completely different person. It seemed like she couldn't wait to get me into bed. We made love for hours.' Sutton sighed. ‘I'd never experienced anything like it before.'

‘But when you woke up the next morning, she was gone, was she?' Meadows suggested.

‘That's right,' Robert Sutton agreed. ‘She was gone – but somebody else was there.'

Sutton wakes up feeling gloriously happy, and instead of opening his eyes, he just lies there, reliving the previous night.

And then he hears the man cough, and what had seemed like a dream rapidly turns into a nightmare.

The man is sitting on an upright chair quite close to the bed. He is in his thirties, and though the rest of his face is virtually expressionless, his eyes are hard and cold.

‘Well, well, well, Mr Sutton,' he says, ‘you have been a naughty boy, haven't you?'

There is a part of Sutton which wants to jump out of bed – naked as he is – and demand to know what this man is doing in Brenda's flat. But there is another part of him which simply wants to hide under the bedclothes.

‘Are you interested in photography, Mr Sutton?' the man asks. ‘Because if you are, you might like to see these.'

He slowly and carefully lays a series of photographs on the bed. They are all in sharp focus, and are all of Sutton and Brenda. Even though he is scared – and he is very scared – Sutton feels both proud of himself and aroused.

‘So I went to bed with a girl,' he says, attempting to bluster his way out of the situation. ‘What's that got to do with you?'

‘You might also like to see this,' the man says.

He hands Sutton a birth certificate. The name on it is Brenda King, and from the date of birth, it seems she is fifteen years old.

‘It was probably a fake, of course,' Sutton told Meadows. ‘I realize that now. But at the time, I was little more than a kid myself, and I believed it was all true.'

‘What did he want you to do?'

‘You're quite the little radical, aren't you, Robert?' the man asks. ‘You've only been here a couple of months, but you're already making an impact in the university's Communist Party, and there's talk of co-opting you on to the committee.'

‘I will not apologize for my beliefs,' Sutton says pompously. ‘The downfall of capitalism in inevitable, and it is the duty of the intelligentsia to—'

‘You really don't want to go to gaol for rape, now, do you?' the man interrupts him.

Sutton's mouth is suddenly very dry. ‘No, I . . . no, I don't,' he croaks.

‘Then we'll have to see what we can do to prevent that terrible thing happening, won't we?' the man says, and suddenly his voice has a kindly, almost avuncular tone to it.

‘He told me that if I reported back to him on everything that happened in Communist Party meetings, I'd have cleared my debt in three years,' Sutton said. ‘That's what he called it – clearing my debt. So I did it, and I never heard from him – or any of his kind – again, until the early hours of Monday morning.'

‘The incident he was threatening you with happened over twenty years ago, when you were a naïve student,' Meadows pointed out. ‘You know now it was probably all faked, so why didn't you simply call his bluff?'

‘You don't understand,' Robert Sutton said. ‘He wasn't threatening me with Brenda.'

‘Then what was he threatening you with?'

‘He was threatening me with
them
– the people behind him. By mentioning Brenda, he was just underlining the fact that there's nothing they won't do to get what they want.'

‘You didn't even argue with him, did you?' Meadows asked contemptuously. ‘You didn't even
try
to put up a fight?'

‘You're wrong,' Sutton replied. ‘I told him that I wasn't going to do it. I said that even if he continued to assure me that nothing bad would happen to Louisa Paniatowski, I would never play a part in the abduction of a child.'

‘And what did he say to that?'

‘He reminded me that I'd got a daughter of my own – and that's when I knew I had no choice.'

Meadows was starting to feel sorry for the man, but there was still a job to do, and she pushed all pity aside.

‘What made them switch the day of the party from Friday to Monday?' she asked.

‘It wasn't switched,' Robert Sutton said. ‘It was always going to be on Monday.'

‘But when Ellie called Louisa on Monday morning, she told her that it would be Friday.'

‘The man said we had to do it that way, because if Ellie had told Louisa it was being held on Monday, Louisa would have said she couldn't go, because Tuesday was a school day.'

‘But by the time you switched the days, Louisa would be so looking forward to it that she'd be prepared to break the rules?' Meadows guessed.

‘That's right.'

‘And did he tell you what you were supposed to do if her mother wouldn't let her go to a party on a Monday?'

‘He told me not to worry about the mother. He said she'd be somewhere out in the sticks, investigating a murder.'

‘And he said this to you at four o'clock on Monday morning?'