The Ring of Death (14 page)

‘That's right.'

Cousins shrugged. ‘I'll have it checked out since you've asked me to, ma'am, but I think it'll be a waste of time. Knowing how to slap on three coats of emulsion paint and hang wallpaper more or less straight isn't enough to get you work in a place like this.'

No, it probably wasn't, Paniatowski agreed silently. But if he'd done some work there, it would explain how Langley came to know him – and she was more convinced than ever that Langley
had
known him.

‘What else have you got for me?' she asked.

‘Our Simon seems to have been a bit of a thug, and had a criminal record, stretching back to the time he was a teenager.' Cousins said, consulted his notebook again. ‘He was first arrested for being drunk and disorderly in 1957.'

‘He would only have been sixteen then,' Paniatowski said, doing a quick mental calculation.

‘That's right, he would,' Cousins agreed. ‘He was arrested again, for assault and battery this time, when he was nineteen, and he was put on two years' probation. When he was twenty-three, he did a thirty-month stretch for grievous bodily harm. Since then, he's not been charged with anything, so maybe he's kept out of trouble – or maybe he's just got more careful.'

‘Perhaps getting married calmed him down,' Paniatowski speculated.

But even if he had calmed down, he still didn't sound like the kind of person who Sir William Langley would invite round for cocktails, she thought.

‘Was he ever in the army?' she asked.

Cousins looked pained – or perhaps merely unwilling to disappoint her.

‘No, ma'am, I'm afraid he wasn't.'

So if he
did
know Andy Adair, it was not as a result of them having served together.

‘Does he have any
other
connection with Northern Ireland?' Paniatowski asked, grasping for a straw –
any
straw. ‘Did he, for example, work there for any length of time?'

‘If he did, Inspector Beresford's lads haven't found out about it yet.'

If Stockwell hadn't been to Northern Ireland, then the IRA connection to the murders was looking more tenuous, Paniatowski thought.

But if there
wasn't
an IRA connection, then what the hell was that bastard Forsyth doing here in Whitebridge?

Perhaps they were dealing with a
real
nutter, who selected his victims at random.

But that didn't make any sense either, because the killer had chosen to leave Stockwell's body in the grounds of Ashton Court, which meant that he'd known Sir William Langley would recognize him.

She was going round in circles, she thought. Maybe it was time to go off on a different tack, and see if that led anywhere.

She looked around the sculptures. They might be called an eclectic collection, she supposed, but
indiscriminate
definitely had a more convincing ring to it as a description.

‘Do you reckon these are valuable?' she asked.

Cousins grinned. ‘I'm no expert on such matters, ma'am, but
I
certainly wouldn't give them garden-space.'

‘Me neither,' Paniatowski agreed, ‘but then, as my daughter's always telling me, I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to the fine arts.'

She realized that she no longer had Cousins' full attention, and the reason was that some of that attention was now focused on the uniformed men conducting the search on the lawn.

‘Excuse me a minute, ma'am,' Cousins said. He raised his cupped hands to his mouth and called out loudly, ‘Can you hear me, Constable Pickering?'

The constable in question, who was slightly ahead of the other officers in the line, turned around.

‘Yes, Sarge,' he called back.

‘You're involved in a search, lad, not a race,' Cousins told him. ‘There's no prize for breasting the tape first. So stop getting ahead of yourself, and match your pace to that of your mates.'

Constable Pickering looked mortified. ‘Yes, Sarge, I will,' he said. ‘Sorry, Sarge.'

‘Don't apologize,' Cousins told him. ‘Just make sure it doesn't happen again.' He turned back to Paniatowski. ‘Shouldn't have done that while you were here, should I, ma'am?'

‘Why not?'

‘Well, it's bad enough being told off by a sergeant, but it must be even worse when you know the boss is watching.' He paused. ‘Don't hold it against the lad, ma'am. Keeping in line is more difficult than it looks.'

Paniatowski smiled. ‘I do
remember
, you know. I wasn't
born
a chief inspector.'

Cousins smiled back. ‘Course you weren't, ma'am, though there are
some
chief inspectors I could mention who act not only as if they descended straight from heaven into the job but also already had three pips on their shoulders when they did it.' He lit up a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one. ‘It's getting to be a habit this,' he said, grinning as he drew the smoke into his lungs. ‘You were asking me about whether or not I thought the statues were valuable, ma'am.'

‘Yes, I was,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘As far as the municipal ones go, I think he'd be hard pushed to
give
them away.'

‘What about the modern and classical ones?'

‘That's a different matter altogether. I've not talked to Sir William myself, but from the general atmosphere of this place I get the distinct impression that if they
weren't
valuable, he would never have bothered putting most of them on display.'

That was the impression she'd got too, Paniatowski thought.

‘So if they are valuable, what kind of security has he got protecting them?' she asked.

‘You can't see it for the trees, but there's a ten-foot wall running around the entire property,' Cousins told her. ‘That's enough to keep most people out, and anybody wanting to steal one of these monstrosities would have a bugger of a job getting it out over the wall.'

‘And how about getting a body with full rigor mortis
in
over the wall?'

‘I don't see that would be much of problem. Two fellers with ladders could manage it easily.'

‘And what about
one
man with a ladder?'

Cousins was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘So you think it's just one man, do you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Any particular reason – or is it just a feeling in your gut?'

‘It's just a feeling in my gut,' Paniatowski admitted.

Cousins shook his head wonderingly ‘And there I was thinking that it was just me.'

‘So
you
think it was only one man, as well.'

‘I do. I don't know how many men are involved in the actual killings – if I learned it was half a dozen, I wouldn't be too surprised – but when it comes to disposing of the bodies, I firmly believe it's down to one of them. The way I see it, it's his vision of how things
should
be done – and it's too
personal
a vision to share.' Cousins grinned self-consciously. ‘Which, I suppose, is just a fancy way of saying it's my gut feeling as well,' he concluded.

‘So
could
one man manage it?'

‘It would be more difficult than if there were two of them, but by no means impossible. The thing is, you see, there are large sections of the wall facing nothing but open countryside. So even if he hit difficulties, he had all the time in the world to work out a solution to them.'

‘We need to check the perimeter, to find out exactly where he
did
enter the grounds,' Paniatowski said.

‘Good idea, ma'am,' Cousins replied.

Paniatowski smiled again. ‘The way you said that, you made it sound as if
I
hadn't told you we should conduct the search, you'd never thought of it yourself,' she said. ‘Why was that?'

Cousins looked guilty. ‘It's what they call applied psychology, ma'am,' he admitted.

‘Explain yourself.'

‘With some DCIs, the very worst thing you can do is suggest we follow a particular course of action, because that pretty much guarantees that the
last thing
they'll do is follow it. So what I do, ma'am, is wait for
them
to make the right suggestion.'

‘And if they don't?'

Cousins' guilty expression deepened. ‘Well, you know . . .' he said, very vaguely.

‘No,' Paniatowski replied, ‘I'm not sure I do.'

‘If they don't come up with the idea themselves, then I suppose I usually find a way to make them
think
they have.'

‘But you won't be trying that trick on
me
again, will you, Sergeant?' Paniatowski asked.

‘No, ma'am, I've learned my lesson, and I most certainly won't,' Cousins agreed.

‘So when
were
you planning to conduct the perimeter search?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘As soon as the lads have finished the grounds, ma'am.'

‘Good.'

‘Not that I've exactly got high hopes of finding anything useful. If it had rained last night – like it was supposed to – the ground would have been sodden and we might have got some decent footprints. But it didn't bloody rain, did it?' Cousins grumbled.

If it rained last night, the bastard would either not have left the body here at all, or would have some ingenious way to cover his tracks, thought Paniatowski, who was gained a grudging respect for the killer.

‘I'm going to leave you in charge here,' she said. ‘Is that all right?'

‘Fine with me,' the sergeant said easily. ‘Where will you be if I need to contact you?'

‘From about half-past two, I'll probably be in the Drum, with Inspector Beresford,' Paniatowski said.

‘And before then?'

‘I could be anywhere, but one of things I'll definitely be doing is talking to Simon Stockwell's widow.'

‘Oh aye,' Cousins replied, looking away.

‘Is there something wrong with me doing that?' Paniatowski asked.

‘No, ma'am, not
wrong
,' Cousins said carefully, as he turned towards her again.

‘Spit it out,' Paniatowski told him.

‘You're the boss, ma'am. You have been for a few weeks now.'

‘Strangely enough, I
had
noticed that myself.'

‘Maybe you had – on one level. But sometimes, I think it's still not quite all soaked in yet.'

‘In what way?'

‘Being the boss, you've got all kinds of extra responsibilities you didn't have before. So what that means is that you can leave unpleasant little jobs like talking to Mrs Stockwell to somebody who's a bit lower down in the pecking order, if that's what you want to.'

‘And suppose I
don't
want to do that?' Paniatowski asked.

Cousins shrugged. ‘Then you go and see her yourself, I suppose. Like I said, you're the boss – which means that you make the rules and the rest of us just follow them.'

THIRTEEN

T
he Pinchbeck Housing Estate had played a small role in Monika Paniatowski's first major case as a DCI, and it had been during that investigation that Sergeant Walker –
Inspector
Walker now – had told her, with arrogant certainty, that the people who inhabited the estate were ‘the scum of the earth'.

Looking back on that particular encounter she felt ashamed that, even allowing for the fact that she was new to the job and still unsure of herself, she'd issued him with no more than a mild rebuke.

It wouldn't happen now.

Not with Walker.

Not with
anybody
.

If she could relive that moment, she'd tell the sergeant, in no uncertain terms, that his comment revealed more about his own pig ignorance and blind prejudice than it did about the people on the estate – because while there were undoubtedly some real rough buggers living there, the vast majority of the inhabitants were ordinary, decent, hard-working people.

Even so, as she approached the estate she felt her stomach knot into a tight and painful ball. But that was nothing to do with the people who lived there now – it was all tangled up with her own unhappy past.

Monika doesn't really mind the change in their circumstances. After her horrific wartime experiences, she can live quite happily in
any
place where there is a roof over her head, regular food on the table and – most importantly of all – people aren't shooting at her.

Arthur Jones, on the other hand, takes it hard. He feels humiliated. He feels
emasculated
.