The Dead Hand of History (10 page)

‘What's the matter with you?' Walker demanded. ‘Got a bone in your leg or something?'

A couple of years earlier, when he was new to the area, Crane would not have known what the sergeant was talking about, but now he understood well enough.

‘Got a bone in your leg or something' was ‘deep Lancashire' for ‘Why the hell are you still standing there when there's work to be done?'

Even so, the DC hesitated. This wasn't right, he told himself. The boss should be informed immediately of any new developments, and it was up to her to decide what to do next.

‘Come on, lad, shape yourself!' Walker called out. ‘There's not a minute to lose.'

Still, Walker
was
the sergeant, while he himself was only the constable, Crane argued. So it wasn't really up to him to judge what was appropriate and what wasn't.

‘Coming, Sarge,' he said, striding quickly – though still reluctantly – to where Walker was waiting for him.

There was a lift down to the car-park level, but Walker didn't have the patience to wait for it to arrive, and so they took the stairs instead.

‘Now you'll get to see the sharp end of policing for yourself,' Walker promised Crane, as the two men almost raced across the car park to Walker's Ford Escort.

‘Yes, now you'll see how it's done,' Walker continued, once they were in the car and he had fired the engine.

‘Can I ask you a question, Sarge?' Crane asked, as the sergeant set off at what was almost a racing start.

‘Ask away,' Walker told him.

‘Just as a matter of interest, Sarge, what's the
real
reason we aren't telling the boss what we're doing?'

Walker sighed. ‘We're not telling her because I don't think she's got the stomach to do what needs to be done,' he said. ‘We're not telling her because I'm worried she'll take the best lead we're likely to get on this case, and make a complete balls-up of it. All right?'

‘All right,' Crane said, though he didn't sound convinced.

And despite having given the reasons himself, Walker wasn't convinced either.

The truth – the
real
truth – which he was still fighting off acknowledging as best he could, was not so much that he believed Paniatowski would make a balls-up of it, as that he was frightened that she
wouldn't
.

Brunskill's Bakery claimed in its advertisements that all its products were freshly baked every day, and despite the fact that it
was
in the advertisements, the claim was actually true.

By three o'clock in the afternoon, the drivers had completed their scheduled deliveries and gone home. In the bakery itself, the ovens had been shut down, and the master bakers sat around – smoking and chatting – while their apprentices unenthusiastically cleared up. Even in the offices – though it was still two hours to clocking-off time – there was a feeling that the day's work had been done.

Jenny Brunskill did not share in this general lethargy. She had still not been able to isolate the reason for the recent decline in sales, but she was determined that she would do so before she went home.

She was going over the figures yet again when Elaine Dunston appeared with the evening paper, opened in the middle.

‘Thought you'd like to see this as soon as it arrived, Miss Brunskill,' the secretary said.

‘You're quite right, I do,' Jenny agreed. She scanned the two pages, as Elaine was leaving the office, then said, ‘Gosh, it looks even better than I'd thought it would.'

She looked across at Stan, as if expecting some reaction, but her brother-in-law said nothing.

‘It's our new advertisement!' Jenny enthused. ‘A double-page spread!'

Still, Stan was silent.

‘Of course, as you'd expect, it cost us an absolute arm and a leg,' Jenny continued, ‘but if even only one in twenty of the readers decides to buy our pies as a result of it, it will have been well worth the outlay, don't you think?'

‘Hmm,' Stan said.

‘What's the matter with you today?' Jenny asked, slightly crossly. ‘Are you coming down with the same bug as Linda did?'

‘Life is never what you think it will be, is it?' Stan asked mournfully. ‘It simply never turns out as you hoped.'

‘Oh, I don't know about that,' Jenny said. ‘I'm very happy with the way
my
life's turned out.'

‘Are you?'

‘Yes, I am.'

‘Why?'

‘I suppose my happiness is mostly due to the fact that I'm working at a job I love.'

‘A job you love?' Stan repeated. ‘Do you
really
love it?'

‘Of course I do.'

‘Or is it just that your father
told you
that you should love it?'

Jenny laughed. ‘Sometimes you do talk complete and utter nonsense, you know,' she said.

There was a knock on the door, then the door opened just wide enough for Elaine to pop her head round it.

‘I don't know whether or not you'd be interested, Miss Brunskill, but there's something really quite gruesome on the front page of that newspaper,' she said, with obvious relish.

Jenny looked at the double-page advertisement once more, her eyes ablaze with pleasure, then reluctantly folded them together so she could take a look at the ‘really quite gruesome' thing that Elaine had spotted on the front page.

‘Oh, my God!' she groaned, when she'd read it.

‘What's the matter?' Stan asked.

‘They've found a woman's hand down by the river! It was in a plastic freezer bag!'

‘Do they know
whose
hand it is yet?'

‘Whatever makes you even ask a question like that?' Jenny Brunskill wondered.

Stan shrugged. ‘Why wouldn't I ask it? What other question
could
I have asked about a severed hand?'

Elaine Dunston burst into the room again, without even bothering to knock this time.

‘The police are here, Miss Brunskill,' she gasped.

‘The police?' Jenny repeated, mystified. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Elaine?'

‘There's two of them – a detective sergeant and a detective constable. They're in the lobby. And they say that nobody can leave the premises until everybody's been questioned.'

‘Did they give you any idea of what it might be all about?'

‘No, they didn't. They said they wanted to speak to you about it first, but wouldn't it be awful if—'

‘What it's all about, madam,' said a heavy voice from the doorway, interrupting Elaine mid-flow, ‘is a severed hand.'

Even though it was still only a little after three o'clock in the afternoon, it already felt as if it had been a very long day indeed, Monika Paniatowski thought, as she looked down at the hand which Dr Shastri had just extracted from the refrigerated drawer.

It was, as Mike Traynor had said in the alleyway, clearly a
man
's hand. The palm was large and the skin somewhat rough. The fingers were thick, and the fingernails were clipped short. There was black hair sprouting from both above and below the knuckles.

‘As you have already surmised, this – unlike the lady's – is a working hand,' Dr Shastri said.

‘And did the same person who cut off hers also cut off this one?' Paniatowski asked.

Shastri laughed. ‘I am truly flattered by your unbounded confidence in me, my dear chief inspector,' she said, ‘but you must accept that even
I
have some limitations.'

‘Meaning that you can't say?'

‘Meaning that, if backed into a corner, I might be willing to commit myself to saying that a similar cleaver was used in both cases.'

‘But not necessarily the same one?'

‘No, not necessarily the same one. Meaning also that the two amputations are similar enough for me to be willing to accept that they could have been carried out by the same person – though it would certainly not surprise me to learn that they had been the work of two separate attackers.'

‘I see,' Paniatowski said, disappointed.

‘However, you should not despair,' Shastri said cheerfully. ‘After all, each cloud has its silver lining, it is always darkest before the dawn and every dog has his day.'

Paniatowski grinned. ‘What have you found out?' she asked.

‘Not much,' Shastri said airily. ‘In fact, the merest of trifles. But it may just help you in your inquiries.'

‘Spit it out,' Paniatowski told her.

Dr Shastri looked hurt. ‘Now that you are the Big Chief, you are far less fun to play with,' she said. ‘Very well, to cut a long story short, the first thing I discovered was a slight trace of ink on all the fingertips.'

‘Ink?' Paniatowski repeated.

‘Yes. It puzzled me at the time, and, to be honest with you, it still does. But then I stopped worrying about that, and became quite excited by what I found under the fingernails.'

‘And just what
did
you find?' asked Paniatowski, who had resigned herself to playing Shastri's game.

‘I found a white powder, and when I analysed it, I discovered that it was largely made up of polysaccharides – which is starch to an ignorant person like you – and also gluten.'

‘In other words?'

‘In other words, it is common flour – which leads me to believe that the man was a baker.'

‘What it's all about, madam, is a severed hand,' the voice had said.

Jenny looked up. The man who'd spoken was in his late thirties. He had the square build of a rugby player, with dark, flashing, suspicious eyes, and lips which would find no difficulty in expressing contempt. He was accompanied by a slimmer, younger man with a thin, artistic face, who – had his hair been a little longer – could have been mistaken for a poet.

‘I'm DS Walker and this is DC Crane,' the thickset man said. ‘We'd like to ask you some questions about Tom Whittington.'

‘Tom? He's our head baker.'

‘You don't say? Now there's what I call a coincidence – I'm here to talk about Whittington, and you actually know him.'

The man was a brute, Jenny decided.

‘Tom isn't here today,' she said.

‘I know he isn't. It would be nothing less than a bloody miracle if he was,' Walker retorted.

‘You said this was about a severed hand.'

‘And so it is.'

‘But I've just been reading the evening newspaper, and that said it was a
woman
's hand which had been found.'

‘You shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, madam, although, for once, they're right, and we
have
found a woman's hand. But we've found a man's hand, as well – one that used to be attached to the wrist of this Mr Whittington of yours.'

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!' Jenny gasped. ‘Oh, Holy Mother of God. Are you
sure
it's Tom's hand?'

‘Take it easy, Miss Brunskill,' DC Crane said soothingly. ‘Try taking a few deep breaths.'

What the bloody hell is the young idiot playing at? Walker thought angrily. I don't
want
the sodding woman taking it easy. She's more useful to me when she's on edge.

‘You can go, DC Crane,' he said.

‘But, Sarge . . .'

‘Now!' Walker said firmly. ‘You can wait for me outside.'

For a moment, Crane looked as if he was about to disobey the order, then he turned and stepped back into the foyer.

‘I asked you if you were sure it was Tom's hand,' Jenny Brunskill repeated shakily.

‘Did you know that this feller Whittington, who you're telling me you employed as your
head baker
, had a criminal record?' Walker demanded, ignoring the question.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.'

‘But you
still
gave him a job?'

‘It isn't much of a criminal record. He stole a car, when he was young. It was a foolish thing to do, but he's never repeated it. He's not been in trouble for over twenty years.'

‘So you say, madam, though in my experience a leopard never changes his spots,' Walker said. ‘But that's all pretty much by the by. The fact is that Whittington
does
have a criminal record, and that means we've got his fingerprints – which, in turn, means that we know that he's now minus one hand.'

Jenny glanced across at Stan for some sign of support in her time of distress, but her brother-in-law was gazing fixedly at the wall, and seemed to be in another world.

‘I think you're being very callous and insensitive about the whole situation,' she complained to Walker.

‘Do you, madam?'

‘Yes, I do. Tom's not just a name to us. He's someone we work with. In some ways, he's almost family.'

Walker's lip curled. ‘Then that would be the
black sheep
of the family, wouldn't it, madam?'

Paniatowski glanced down at her wristwatch, and saw that it was already three twenty-five.

‘I must go,' she said. ‘There are quite a lot of bakeries in the Whitebridge area, and they'll need checking.'

‘Give my love to Louisa,' Shastri said.

‘I will,' Paniatowski promised.

‘Give it to her today – before you forget.'

Paniatowski smiled. ‘Is that another way of saying that however busy I am with this investigation, I should still find some time to spend with my daughter?' she asked.

Shastri smiled back. ‘Oh, you are far too clever for me,' she said. ‘You see right through me.' Her face grew more serious. ‘Remember, Monika, she has no father, no aunties or uncles – there is only you.'