The Dead Hand of History (17 page)

‘Why?'

‘Because Seth, bein' the man he was, refused to move with the times. There were no such things as supermarkets when he started out, you have to understand. Everybody went to the corner shop, because there was no choice in the matter. But by the early sixties, the supermarkets were everywhere, an' doin' big business. And Seth just wouldn't acknowledge that. People tried to tell him he had to change, but nobody ever had a higher opinion of Seth than he had of himself, an' he simply wouldn't listen. By the time he died, which will have been six years ago now, the bakery was totterin' on the edge of bankruptcy.'

‘And then his daughters took over,' Paniatowski said.

‘An' then his daughters took over,' Roberts agreed. ‘They'd both been workin' in the bakery since they'd left school – Seth wouldn't have had it any other way – but up until the time he died, he'd been the
only one
takin' the decisions. Once he'd gone, of course, everything was different. The Brewer's Street premises were too small to run a modern bakery from, an' everybody but Seth had known that for a long time. So, within weeks, the bakery had moved to a new site. It cost an arm an' a leg, and the two sisters were up to their ears in debt, but gradually the business began to pick up again, an' now it's probably as strong as it ever was.'

‘Tell me about Linda's husband,' Paniatowski suggested.

‘Polish Stan – the delivery man?'

‘What?'

‘That's what they used to call him in the late forties, when he was runnin' his delivery service. An' there's another real success story for you. He started out with one clapped-out old van, doin' deliveries for anybody who wanted somethin' deliverin' – a sort of tramp steamer on wheels. He used to work every hour God sent. But it paid off. He bought another van, then another, an' by the time he sold his company he had quite a fleet.'

‘So if he was doing so well with the delivery service, why did he sell the company?'

‘He did it because he needed the money to buy his way into Brunskill's Bakery.'

‘This was after Seth died?'

‘No, it was a couple of years before.'

‘So why did he want to buy into what, according to you, was a failing business? Did he do it to please his wife?'

‘Linda
wasn't
his wife then. He didn't marry her until the year after Seth had popped his clogs.'

‘But they'd been going out together for a while before that?'

‘They may have been, but if they were, they kept it very quiet.'

‘Why?'

‘Seth Brunskill would never have approved of one of his daughters marrying a foreigner. To be honest with you, ma'am, I don't think he'd have approved of them marryin' anybody at all. They belonged to him, you see – just as much as the bakery did.'

‘He really doesn't sound like a very nice man,' Paniatowski said.

‘He wasn't. He was what nowadays you might call a “domestic tyrant” – which is just a fancy way of saying “bully”.'

‘Do you know anything about a man called Tom Whittington?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Tom Whittington,' Roberts repeated, running the name around his filing cabinet of a head. ‘I think I collared him about twenty years ago for nickin' a car. But, as far as I know, he's kept his nose clean since then. He works at the bakery, too, doesn't he?'

Well, he did, Paniatowski thought.

‘That's right,' she confirmed. ‘Is there no more you can tell me about him, Sid?'

‘Not a dicky-bird.'

‘You wouldn't, for example, know if he'd been having an affair with a married woman?'

Roberts smiled. ‘They say I know a hell of lot, ma'am . . .'

‘And so you do,' Paniatowski said.

‘An' so I do,' Roberts agreed. ‘But even
I
don't know everythin'.'

FOURTEEN

W
hen Jack Crane had set out from home that morning, it had been with a determination to leave the fanciful poet back in the bedsit and bring only the hard-bitten
Detective Constable
Crane to police headquarters with him. And, so far, it was working out very well, he thought, as he sat facing DS Walker across a table at the opposite end of the police canteen to where Monika Paniatowski was having her chat with Sid Roberts. So far, he'd not been able to detect even a hint of a university man in himself.

A folded map of Whitebridge lay tantalizingly on the table between them. Crane's fingers just itched to open it up, but it was Walker's map, and the sergeant was showing no inclination to look at it yet. In fact, though Walker's body was in the room, his mind seemed to be wandering freely, and – if the expression on his face was anything to go by – it was not a pleasant wander at all.

Walker took a sip of his tea, then a puff of his cigarette, and Crane – who was finding the waiting almost unbearable – decided to throw caution to the wind.

‘So where do you want us to start looking, Sarge?' the detective constable asked.

Walker took another sip of his tea, then placed his mug down squarely in the centre of the map.

‘Well, aren't you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning?' he asked sourly. ‘Just can't wait to get stuck into the job, can you?'

There was really no satisfactory answer to that, Crane thought, and so he decided to say nothing at all.

‘She's going about it in entirely the wrong way, you know,' Walker said, not even bothering to specify who ‘she' was.

‘Is she, Sarge?'

‘Yes, she most certainly is. What she wants us to do is to find the bodies. Right?'

‘Right.'

‘So the easiest way to give her what she wants – the logical way – is to pull Stan What's-'is-name in for questioning, and sweat it out of him. But ma'am isn't having any of that. Ma'am doesn't
want
to do it the easy way.'

‘There's no guarantee that even if we did pull Szymborska in, he'd—' Crane began.

‘And, of course, sending us off on a wild-goose chase has
another
advantage for ma'am,' Walker interrupted him. ‘It's a way of keeping me out of her hair while she follows up the more
promising
leads – which she only has because
I
identified the bodies for her.'

It was true that the stunt Walker had pulled with the fingerprints had meant they'd been able to quickly identify Tom Whittington, Crane thought. But the examination of the hand had also revealed baking powder under the fingernails, so it was more than likely the DCI would have discovered his identity herself by the end of the day. And it had been Paniatowski,
not
Walker, who had worked out that the woman's hand belonged to Linda.

So, all in all, the sergeant was being rather unfair – but only a fool would think to point that out.

‘I'm not trying to be funny, but I think you're being overly pessimistic, Sarge,' Crane said.

‘You think I'm being
what
?'

Mistake! The university man had not been left at home at all! Instead, he found a way to smuggle himself on to the journey to work. And now, once at work, he was recklessly sticking his bloody head above the parapet.

‘I think there's a very good chance that, if we approached the job properly, we
actually
could find the bodies,' Crane said.

‘Oh, do you?' Walker said. ‘And would you mind explaining to your poor thick old sergeant just
how
we “approach the job properly”?'

‘Well, we can start by deciding which areas we can
rule out
of the search,' Crane suggested.

‘And how would we do that?'

‘We're agreed that the murderer wouldn't want an audience while he was chopping off the hands, aren't we?'

‘No, I'm not sure that we are,' Walker said.

‘Aren't you?' Crane asked, incredulously.

‘No, I'm not.
I
think that
he
probably thought that the more folk there, the merrier it would be. He probably even sold tickets for it.' The sergeant grimaced. ‘
Of course
he wouldn't want a bloody audience! Any idiot knows that.'

‘What he'll actually have wanted is to commit the murders as far away from any other people as possible,' Crane pressed on. ‘So we can rule out all areas where there's a heavy population density.'

‘A heavy population density?' Walker repeated. ‘Do you mean somewhere where there's a lot of people?'

‘That's right.'

‘So why didn't you just bloody say so?'

‘Housing estates are out,' Crane ploughed on. ‘So are public places like bus stations, which might have been deserted at the time of the murders, but certainly wouldn't have been the morning after. The same is true of working factories. So what are we left with?'

‘You tell me,' Walker said.

‘
Abandoned
housing and
derelict
factories.'

‘Brilliant!' Walker said.

‘Do you really think so, Sarge?' Crane asked

And the moment the words had left his mouth, he knew he'd made another mistake.

‘Brilliantly
bleeding obvious
,' Walker said. ‘Do you really think that none of that had crossed my mind?'

‘Well, no, Sarge, I . . .'

‘But what's
also
crossed my poor, tired mind is that there are thousands of abandoned houses and hundreds of derelict factories in this dump of a town that we call home, so we could be searching for ever and
still
never find what we were looking for.'

Walker moved his mug to the corner of the table, opened the map and spread it out.

Crane saw, to his chagrin, that the sergeant's mind had not only been working on the same lines as his, but that Walker had actually marked on the map most of the areas that he would have marked himself.

Chagrin!
he thought. That's another of those words I should have left at home.

‘There'll be eight of you on the job,' Walker said, ‘and so I've decided to divide you into four teams of two, each with its own sector.' He paused. ‘Do you like that word, DC Crane?
Sector
?'

‘Yes, Sarge, I . . .'

‘It's very modern, isn't it? Very up-to-the-minute policing. You must have been surprised to hear it come out of
my
mouth.'

‘Look, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot this morning, and if that's my fault, I'm very sorry,' Crane said.

‘The search will start with the most likely places first,' Walker said, ignoring him. ‘And them likely places will be here,' he stabbed his finger at the map, ‘here, here and here.'

‘You've err . . . not included Brewer's Street in any of the sectors you've marked,' Crane pointed out hesitantly.

‘And I suppose you think that I
should
have included it, do you?' Walker growled.

‘Well, yes, Sarge, I do. You see, historically, Brewer's Street's connected to the Brunskill family, and that might mean—'

‘It's connected
historically
, is it!' Walker asked. ‘How? Did Brunskill the Conqueror land his Viking boats on Brewer's Street? Did Henry the Eighth Brunskill have one of his wives' head cut off there?'

‘I only meant that Brunskill's old bakery was on Brewer's Street,' Crane said, in a subdued voice.

‘So what?'

‘So it's home ground to them. And when you're thinking about doing something that will completely shake up your world, you often feel more confident if you can do it on ho—'

‘Tell me, Detective Constable Crane, if you were going to commit a murder, would you do it in your own front parlour?' Walker asked, shaking his head in disgust as he spoke.

‘Well, no,' Crane admitted.

‘Then maybe you'd do it in the front parlour of the house that you
used
to live in?'

‘No, not that, either.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because there'd be a . . . a . . .'

‘A direct link to you?'

‘Yes.'

‘And that's just how the Polack's mind will have been working. Nobody shits in their own backyard unless they're complete idiots – and Stan, for all he might be a murderous bastard, is far from being that.'

‘I suppose you might have a point, Sarge,' Crane conceded.

‘Thank you,' Walker said. ‘You don't know what it means for an old, worn-out bobby like me to hear a few words of faint praise from a bright young feller such as yourself.'

I've put my foot in it
again
, Crane thought.

‘I didn't mean . . .' he said.

‘Of course, if DCI sodding Paniatowski had said the same thing, you'd think she was a bloody genius.'

‘I really never meant to offend you, Sarge,' Crane said weakly.

‘Then you'd better pick your words more carefully in future,' Walker advised him. ‘Now are you quite clear about how this operation will be run, because you're the one who'll be running it.'

‘Me!' Crane exclaimed.

‘You,' Walker agreed.

‘But shouldn't you be the one who's actually coordinating the whole thing, Sarge?'

‘In theory, yes, I should,' Walker agreed. ‘But rather than wasting
my
time by chasing after some will-o'-the-wisp, I intend to make much better use of it.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Following up some of the juicier leads that ma'am's been trying to snatch away from me.'