Echoes of the Dead (31 page)

‘Nothing wrong with what?'

‘With what you are experiencing at the moment. Among men of your tender age, the rampant Oedipus complex is much more prevalent that you might imagine – but do not fear, you will no doubt grow out of it in time.'

‘I . . . err . . . I'd better go and find your clerk, ma'am,' Crane said.

‘Yes, I think you better had,' Shastri agreed.

And as he walked away, Crane was almost certain he could hear the sound of Shastri gently chuckling to herself.

The senior clerk was somewhere in her fifties – which Crane considered
really
old – but, even so, he simply could not stop himself from noticing that she still had rather shapely legs.

‘Bloody hell, if I'm not careful I'll be fancying my own granny next,' he thought, as he followed her down the corridor.

The archive was a large, daunting room lined with metal filing cabinets which reached from floor to ceiling, but the clerk with the good legs – who said her name was Mrs Walton – seemed totally
undaunted
, and went straight over to a cabinet in the corner.

‘When you've worked here for as long as I have, there's nothing you can't find,' she said, sensing his wonder.

‘How long would that be?' Crane asked.

‘Twenty-three years,' Mrs Walton told him, then added dryly, ‘and, do you know, it's been such fun that it's just seemed like one long roller-coaster ride.'

Twenty-three years! Crane repeated silently. He'd been just a baby when she'd first started filing things away in this place.

Mrs Walton slid the cabinet door closed, and held the file up to the light.

‘You're lucky,' she said.

‘Lucky?'

‘The police surgeon at the time this autopsy was carried out was called Heap. We used to call him
Shit
Heap.'

‘Really,' Crane said, feeling himself start to blush.

‘He was a pig of a man – forever looking for excuses to brush up against any woman who came close to him – and as a doctor he would have made a good hatstand,' Mrs Walton said.

‘He wasn't very good?'

‘He
might
have been good, if he'd made the effort, but he couldn't be bothered. You've never seen reports as sloppy as the ones he wrote.'

‘Didn't anyone in the Whitebridge police ever complain about him?' Crane asked.

‘No, they were as sloppy as he was,' Mrs Walton said. ‘Actually, that's not quite true,' she amended. ‘Do you know DCI Woodend?'

‘Not personally, no.'

‘
He
once gave Heap a right bollocking. He was working for Scotland Yard at the time, and he wasn't at all happy about the way Heap had written up some report or other. I don't think it was so much what he said to him as the way that he said it, but Heap crept around the place like a frightened mouse for a week after that, and I still have to laugh when I think about it.'

‘And I'm
lucky
that he was the one who wrote the report, am I?' Crane asked, remembering why he was there.

Mrs Walton laughed. ‘No,' she said. ‘Quite the contrary – you're lucky he
didn't
.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It was his assistant, Dr Wells, who sliced Mottershead up – and there was a man who
did
know what he was doing.' She walked across the room, and handed the file to Crane. ‘I'll leave you to it, then. Happy reading.'

Bazza Mottershead had died as a result of having his throat cut – probably with a razor – but he had not given in without a struggle, as was clearly revealed in his autopsy report. The sleeves of his jacket had been slashed in several places, suggesting that what had occurred had been a fight, rather than an attack, and this was confirmed by the presence of another man's blood at the scene of the crime.

So what had happened had probably been unplanned, Crane thought, as he read the report. The murderer had not
intended
to kill Mottershead, at least not at that point in time – because if he had, he'd have chosen a method which involved him in much less personal risk. It was likely that they'd had an argument which had unexpectedly turned into the fight. Mottershead had either been the first to produce his weapon – which was probably also a razor – or had pulled it out when he saw the weapon in his killer's hand. They'd circled each other, and though it had been the killer who had struck the lethal blow, it could have easily been the other way around.

But the fight that had resulted in Mottershead's death was not Crane's main concern. He was there to search for indications of an injury which had been inflicted earlier than the fight – possibly as much as several
days
earlier.

He scanned the main findings of the report, praying he'd find the evidence on which much of Paniatowski's theory rested.

And there it was!

‘
The subject also had several scratch marks on his left arm, which are consistent with being inflicted by human nails
,' he read.

‘Nice one, boss!' Crane exclaimed, holding up an imaginary glass in salute to Paniatowski.

For years, Paniatowski had thought of her ex-lover as a great big ginger teddy bear, and even during their meetings in his office – as chief constable and chief inspector – it was sometimes a little difficult to banish the image. But watching him on the television screen in her
own
office was a different matter, she thought. On television, where there was none of their personal history to cloud her vision, she could see him for what he really was – a man whose authority and integrity were undeniable.

‘So you're saying that by the end of the day, you expect charges to be brought against ex-Chief Inspector Woodend?' one of the reporters at his press conference was asking.

‘Am I?' Baxter asked, looking slightly bemused. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘But surely, you said—'

‘I said that by the end of the day I hope to have satisfactory answers to all the questions that you – and the general public – have been asking,' Baxter interrupted. ‘Following on from that, it is possible that charges will be laid against certain police officers, but I am not prepared to go further at the present time.' He stepped away from the podium. ‘That's all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming.'

There was no point in watching any more. Paniatowski stood up, walked over to the television, and switched it off.

‘Mr Baxter carried that off very well,' Beresford said, from behind the desk.

‘He carried it off brilliantly,' Paniatowski countered. ‘And – make no mistake – we owe him for it.'

‘But will it do the trick?' asked Crane, pacing back and forth in what little space the office allowed for pacing. ‘Will it actually make our feller do what we
want
him to do?'

‘I don't know,' Paniatowski admitted. ‘But we'll soon find out.'

They lingered in the car park of the Drum and Monkey much longer than they would normally have done. They took their time over lighting their cigarettes, and then feigned an animated conversation, while all the time surreptitiously looking around them.

‘Can you see him?' Beresford asked anxiously.

‘No, I can't,' Paniatowski admitted. ‘But he's not stupid, and the fact that we can't see him doesn't mean he's not there.'

He
had to be
there, she told herself. He simply had to be.

But what if he wasn't? What if he'd missed seeing the news conference? Or had seen it, and then decided there was simply nothing more he could do?

If either of those things had happened, then the gamble she'd made, using Charlie Woodend's already shaky reputation as her stake, hadn't worked, and all she'd actually succeeded in doing was to push that reputation even closer to the brink.

‘If he
is
there, he's already had more than enough opportunity to see us,' Beresford said.

‘There's no harm in giving it a while longer,' Paniatowski said.

‘There bloody is,' Beresford countered. ‘It's starting to look suspicious that we've been here even
this
long.'

He was right, Paniatowski was forced to admit to herself.

‘Well, then, let's get this show on the road,' she said aloud.

They crossed the car park and entered the pub though the door which led straight into the public bar, but while Paniatowski then headed for the usual table, Beresford and Crane kept on walking towards the other exit.

Paniatowski sat down and looked at her watch. How long should she give it before accepting that the plan had failed, she wondered.

Fifteen minutes?

Half an hour?

She would give it a whole forty-five minutes, she decided – and if it still hadn't worked by then, it was
never
going to work.

‘There's another phone call for you, Chief Inspector,' the barman shouted across the room.

She checked her watch again. Less than three minutes had passed.

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘He must really be feeling desperate,' she thought.

‘I saw the press conference that the chief constable gave,' Mr X said angrily. ‘He said he was going to have Chief Inspector Woodend arrested.'

‘I didn't hear him say that,' Paniatowski replied.

‘All right, he
as good as
said it,' the anonymous caller countered.

‘I suppose he did,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘Can't you stop it?'

‘Not with the little you've told me.'

‘Not with the little I've told you,' Mr X said bitterly. ‘Do you know what anguish and soul searching it's taken for me to tell you even as much as I have done? Can you even begin to comprehend how I've had to wrestle with my own conscience – how I've woken in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat?'

‘It's not my problem,' Paniatowski said bluntly. ‘I'm not the one who's done wrong. I'm not the one who's looking for some way to atone for my sins. I'm just the poor bloody chief inspector who has to try and find a way to stop what
you
started.'

There were seven public phone boxes within easy walking distance of the Drum and Monkey. Crane had been assigned the four which were bunched close together, while Beresford had given himself the three outlying ones.

It was Beresford who found Mr X. It was not difficult. He would have stood out at any time – even in a crowd – and, alone in a phone box, he was no more than a sitting duck.

Beresford knocked on the window with his knuckles.

The caller turned around, and mouthed the words, ‘I'm on the phone.'

That was pretty much what you'd expect someone in a phone box to say, Beresford thought, as he took out his warrant card.

He held up the card, and knocked again.

The caller, his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, opened the door slightly.

‘This is a very important call that I'm making, officer,' he said in a voice which had a slight lilt to it.

‘Would you step out of the box, please, sir,' Beresford replied, in his best official tone.

‘A very important call,' the man said urgently. ‘In fact, it's a matter of life and death.'

‘A matter of
death
, certainly,' Beresford agreed.

‘What?'

‘If you can prove to me that it's not Chief Inspector Paniatowski that you're talking to, I'll apologize and be on my way,' Beresford said. ‘But if it is the chief inspector – and we both
know
it is – then I'd like you to step out of the box.'

The other man nodded his head in defeat. Then he opened his hand, and simply let the receiver fall, before finally stepping out of the box.

The phone was swinging back and forth like a pendulum. Beresford grabbed it, raised it to his mouth, and said, ‘We've got him, boss.'

TWENTY-FOUR

T
he priest had not moved so much as an inch for some considerable time. His hands, resting uncomfortably on the interview room table, were so tightly clenched together that they had turned an almost deathly white. His mouth was determinedly closed. Even his eyes – focussed on the opposite wall, as if searching for inspiration or guidance – were still.

‘You do know that you're way out of your league, don't you, Father O'Brien?' Paniatowski asked, conversationally.

O'Brien said nothing.

‘Oh, I'll admit that you were smart enough to work out that if you kept ringing me at police headquarters, we'd probably have put a trace on the line,' Paniatowski continued, ‘but it really
wasn't
very clever, once you'd seen me go into the Drum and Monkey, to make the calls from a phone box which was quite so close to the pub.'

‘I have nothing to say,' the priest told her.

‘Haven't you?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Then I'll just talk to my inspector, won't I?' She turned to Beresford. ‘As I was telling the good Father on the phone, just before you collared him, he has to take direct responsibility for this whole bloody mess – because
he
was the one who demanded that we re-open the Lilly Dawson investigation. Well, we gave in to his demands, and we
did
re-open it, so he should have been feeling very pleased with himself, shouldn't he?'

‘He certainly should,' Beresford agreed. ‘I know I would be, if I'd been in his place.'

‘And perhaps, initially, he was. But the feeling didn't last. And do you know why that was?'

‘I haven't got a clue,' Beresford said.