The Dead Hand of History (18 page)

Colin Beresford looked down from the podium at his team. There wasn't one of them over twenty-four, he thought.

Or twenty-five, max.

They said you were getting old when policemen started to look younger, but at least most people only saw younger policemen now and again, whereas he was
surrounded
by the buggers.

He turned towards the map which had been pinned onto the blackboard beside him.

‘We'll be checking out all hotels, pubs with accommodation and bed-and-breakfast establishments in central Lancashire,' he said. ‘But that's a massive job, as you'll appreciate, so we'll be starting with the places we're most likely to get a result – which, in this case, are the country pubs. Do any of you know
why
they're the most likely?'

One of the constables raised his hand in the air.

Jesus! Beresford thought. Does he think he's back in school or something? And
if
he does, is that because – God help me – I sound so much like a bloody teacher?

‘When I've asked a question like that, there's no need to ask my permission to answer it,' he said. ‘Got that?'

‘Yes, sir,' the constable replied. ‘We'll be checking the country pubs first because that's where people normally go for dirty weekends.'

He sounded like an authority on the subject, Beresford thought, and wondered whether he really was, or if he was still a virgin.

Then he wondered how his new team would react if they knew
he
was still a virgin himself.

But enough of thinking!

‘Yes, it's where people
do
normally go for dirty weekends,' he said. ‘The more off the beaten track these places are, the less likely the couple using them are to run into anybody they know.' He grinned. ‘Not that that always works out as planned, by any means.'

The constables laughed, and he realized that they probably thought he was talking from personal experience.

Well, he certainly hadn't meant to give that impression, had he? But there was nothing he could do about it now.

‘The only photograph we have for you to show around at the moment is of the Brunskill's works outing to Blackpool,' he continued, holding the photograph up. ‘You are to ask the people you're interviewing if they recognize anybody on it. What you are
not
to do – under any circumstances – is to guide your potential witnesses in any way. If they can pick out your targets, that's great. If they can't pick them out, leave it at that.'

‘Maybe the people who we show the picture to will
need
a little help from us, sir,' one of constables said.

‘You've not been in plain clothes for very long, have you, son?' Beresford asked.

And he was thinking, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I actually called him
son
!

‘No, sir, I haven't,' the constable admitted.

‘Well, when you've had a little more experience, you'll see the sense in what I'm saying. We have to think well beyond the investigation – to the trial. We have to think about how the defence brief is likely to treat your eye witness. “Did you recognize the man in the photograph immediately?” he'll ask. “Well, no, not immediately,” the witness will admit. “So when
did
you recognize him?” “When the detective asked me if I was
sure
I hadn't seen him.” You get the point?'

The assembled constables nodded. And not
just
nodded – nodded enthusiastically, as if they really appreciated what he'd said.

Bloody hell, I've become a Wise Man, Beresford thought. When did
that
happen?

‘There's one more thing before I send you out,' he said. ‘I'm not going to tell you not to drink on the job, because we all do. It's one of the perks of not being in uniform any more.'

The constables laughed again. This time, he'd have been disappointed if they hadn't.

‘But I want you to watch how
much
you drink,' he warned. ‘You'll be on licensed premises for most of the day, and getting pissed without even noticing you're doing it will be a doddle. But if you
do
get pissed, that's it, as far as I'm concerned. No warnings! No second chances! You'll spend the rest of your careers with the Mid-Lancs Constabulary shuffling papers around in one of the offices. Believe me, you don't want that.'

And from the looks on their faces, it was clear that they
did
believe him.

So there he stood – a man who the men serving under him believed in; a man whose advice they took, and maybe even noted down.

And a man who'd still done nothing about getting his mother into residential care, he reminded himself.

FIFTEEN

P
aniatowski looked up at Chorley Court from the car park beside it – and could not stop herself from shuddering.

The Court was a mile from the town centre, and had been Whitebridge's first experiment in private high-rise living. But it had been a tentative experiment at best, the architects and engineers having lost their nerve at the last minute and deciding that instead of the eighteen storeys planned, they would cap it at twelve.

Thus, they were left with a building which, if it had been located in central Manchester, would have been regarded as little more than a pipsqueak. But this was
not
Manchester, thriving commercial capital of the north-west. This was Whitebridge, a declining mill town where previously the tallest structures had been the grim factory chimneys, and, for that reason alone, Chorley Court rapidly became something of a local landmark, which was pointed out to visitors with a good deal of civic pride.

Paniatowski had in lived in the Court herself, but had moved out eight years earlier, when Louisa had come into her life – when Louisa had
rescued
her life – and had never been back since.

She had no happy memories of the place. She had not really known any of the other owners, nor – she suspected – had they known each other. It had never been a community, in any sense of the word, but had served its residents in much the same way as the cave had served Stone Age man – by providing them with a reasonably secure bolthole in which to sleep at night and lick their wounds.

Now, looking up at the building, she was surprised to discover that she could no longer be sure which of these flats had been hers.

She lit a cigarette and began to walk across the forecourt towards the foyer. And as she walked, she found herself wishing that Tom Whittington had used the loan which Brunskill's Bakery had counter-signed to buy a flat somewhere with less painful memories attached to it.

She found the porter/caretaker behind his desk in the lobby. He was a man in his early sixties. His false teeth were not quite the right size for his mouth, and though his uniform jacket was quite presentable, the holed grey cardigan he wore under it somewhat marred the effect.

Paniatowski told him what she wanted, and he led her to the back of the foyer, where the lifts were located.

As he stabbed at a button to summon one, Paniatowski said, ‘I think I'll take the stairs instead.'

The porter/caretaker sniffed disapprovingly. ‘The flat you want is on the ninth floor,' he pointed out.

‘I don't mind,' Paniatowski replied. ‘I could use the exercise.'

But that wasn't it at all, she told herself.

She wasn't going to take the stairs for the benefit of her calf muscles. She was doing it order to postpone the moment when she finally arrived at Tom Whittington's door.

‘Where do you want me to start?' DC Mellor asked DC Crane, as they stood facing the row of derelict terraced houses which had once been a living, breathing road called Paradise Street.

‘You could start at this end, and I could start at the other, and we'll meet in the middle,' Crane said. ‘How does that sound to you?'

‘Fine,' Mellor said easily. ‘Whatever you want. You're the boss.'

The words echoed in Crane's ears as he walked along the road.

‘
You're the boss.
'

And he supposed that, given Walker's abdication of his responsibilities, that was exactly what he was.

It felt strange to be the senior member of the team, he thought – strange, but far from unpleasant.

The closer he got to the far end of the street, the more he found himself dwelling on what his sergeant had said earlier.

‘
You don't shit in your own backyard
,' Walker had proclaimed, with absolute certainty.

It had sounded convincing at the time, but thinking about it now, Crane was not quite so persuaded.

Most murders
did
happen in a domestic setting, he told himself, and while the old bakery couldn't be considered in any way domestic, it was at least
familiar territory
to both the two victims and their probable murderer.

He decided to run a couple of possible scenarios through his mind.

Too fanciful! Crane told himself, in disgust.

Far too fanciful!

The poet raising his ugly head again, and squeezing the policeman out of the picture completely.

Well, how about something much more down-to-earth?

Better, Crane decided, but though this scenario was grittier, there was still a fancifulness lying among the grit.

So perhaps Sergeant Walker – the experienced bobby, the veteran police officer – had been right all along. Perhaps the last place you
would
expect to undercover the scene of this particular crime was in the old bakery.

But just say he was
wrong
! Just think what a feather in his cap it would be for the young detective constable who was proved to be
right
!

And the beauty of it was that
whichever
way it turned out, he personally couldn't lose, Crane thought. If the bakery was the place where the crime had been committed, he could shout it from the rooftops. If it wasn't, all he had to do was keep quiet, and no one would ever know how just
how
fanciful he'd been.

He would definitely go to the old bakery, he decided. He would go first thing the following morning, before the proper search – the official search – had even begun again.

The porter/caretaker was waiting for Monika Paniatowski at Tom Whittington's front door, and was breathing as heavily as if
he
'd been the one who'd walked up nine flights of stairs.

‘You didn't mention
why
you wanted to look around the flat?' he said, with artful casualness.

So he had not yet made the connection between the second severed hand and the visit by the police, Paniatowski thought. But he probably would soon – and even if he didn't, all would become clear to everyone when she gave her late-afternoon press conference.

She had thought long and hard before taking the decision to release the names. She didn't want to do it – it was too early in the drama to drench the stage with light – but she had reluctantly decided that she had no choice.

The problem was Jenny Brunskill. She, like her brother-in-law, had promised to say nothing, but Paniatowski had little confidence in that promise.

It would not have been more than an hour, she guessed, before Jenny Brunskill had rung a friend, and – after swearing her to secrecy – had tearfully poured out the whole tragic tale. And the friend, in turn, would have rung another friend and extracted the same promise – so that already, even this early in the morning, there were probably at least a score of people who already knew that Linda Szymborska had been murdered.