Sins of the Fathers (11 page)

‘As I said, I don't think the car itself will turn out to be of much use to the investigation,' Rutter told him, ‘but I think that, in leaving it where he did, the killer may have given more away than he ever intended to.'

‘Go on,' Woodend said, doing his best to take his mind off Paniatowski and re-focus it on the investigation.

‘He abandoned the Cortina there because Greenfields was close to home – not too close, but close enough.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘It was close enough for him to make the journey home on foot without running too much of a risk of being spotted by anyone else. But it was not
so
close to his base that if we carry out blanket interviewing in the area around Greenfields, we'll be bound to end up talking to him.'

Woodend scratched his head, then took a sip of his pint. ‘You just might be on to something there,' he admitted.

The phone call – coming in those awkward moments after Bob Rutter's arrival – should have felt like a godsend, Paniatowski thought, as she closed the corridor door firmly behind her. It should have seemed like the emotional equivalent of being untied from the railway tracks just before the express train arrived.

But it hadn't.

Instead, it had filled her with dread.

And though she didn't quite know why a call from Chief Inspector Baxter – for who else could it be? – should have done that, she was convinced that she would soon find out.

She lifted the phone off its cradle, and heard a click as the landlord hung up the one in the bar.

‘Monika Paniatowski,' she said.

‘It's me,' Baxter replied.

‘I wasn't expecting you to call,' Paniatowski told him, thinking – even as she spoke the words – that it seemed an inadequate response to a man who was, after all, her lover.

‘Can we meet?' Baxter asked.

‘When?'

‘If you don't mind, I'd rather like it to be some time within the next day or so.'

She needed time to get over seeing Bob Rutter again, Paniatowski thought – and a couple of days just wasn't enough.

‘Actually I do mind,' she said. ‘As things are here at the moment, it might be rather difficult to arrange.'

‘Oh?'

‘You see, we're in the first twenty-four hours of a new murder inquiry – and you know from your own experience what that's like.'

‘So are you saying that you can't spare me even half an hour of your valuable time?'

Damn him! Why was he being so persistent?

‘Half an hour?' Monika asked, stalling. ‘Yes, I suppose I could spare that. But it wouldn't
be
half an hour, would it?'

‘Wouldn't it?'

‘Of course it wouldn't. You're not living just around the corner from me, you know. It's a couple of hours drive up to Dunethorpe – and a couple of hours drive back.'

‘If that's the only problem you can see, I could come across to Whitebridge,' Baxter suggested.

Paniatowski glanced into the mirror over the phone. The last time she'd looked at herself – which couldn't have been more than an hour earlier – she'd thought she was presentable enough, but now she was a complete wreck.

‘You know what I'm like when I'm all wrapped in a case,' she said. ‘I'm just not fit to know. So I really would rather leave meeting you until we've got a result on this one.'

‘Maybe you would,' Baxter agreed. ‘But I wouldn't.'

‘Well, we can't always have what we want in this life,' Paniatowski said, trying her best to sound light-hearted.

‘Ain't that the truth,' Baxter agreed grimly. ‘We can't always have it, although sometimes – for a little while at least – we can talk ourselves into believing that we've got it.'

‘You've lost me,' Paniatowski admitted.

‘I never had you. That was the whole problem,' Baxter countered. ‘Listen, Monika, I didn't want to do this over the phone, but—'

‘Do
what
over the phone?'

‘I've met a woman.'

‘Really? I've met
dozens
of women since the last time we spoke. Dozens of men, too.'

‘You know what I mean.'

‘Yes,' Monika admitted. ‘I rather think I do. I expect she's very pretty, is she?'

‘She's pleasant enough, but she's nothing compared to you in the looks department. Hasn't got any of your brains, either. But at least I know where I am with her.'

‘I see,' Paniatowski said flatly.

‘You've no reason to sound like you think you've been badly done by,' Baxter said, with just a hint of aggression starting to appear in his voice. ‘You're the one who's always insisted that there should be no firm commitment given – from either of us.'

‘That's true,' Paniatowski admitted. She paused for a second. ‘So is this goodbye then?'

‘I wouldn't put it in quite those terms,' Baxter said. ‘We still like each other, don't we?'

‘Yes, I suppose we do.'

‘So there's no reason why we still can't meet up now and again for a drink, is there?'

‘No reason at all,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘But we won't, will we?'

For several seconds, Baxter was silent, then he said, ‘No, I don't really think we will.'

‘So we might as well just say our goodbyes to each other now, and have done with it.'

‘Goodbye, Monika,' Baxter said – and she thought she could hear a slight catch in his throat.

‘Goodbye,' Monika replied. ‘And thanks for trying so hard.'

‘To do what?'

‘To make things between us work.'

She was crying as she hung up the phone, but she was not entirely sure why. She had never loved Baxter, and though she had enjoyed the sex life they had shared, she'd known the earth to move much more with other men.

So why the tears, she wondered.

She supposed it could be for no other reason than that she was suddenly feeling very, very alone.

‘So you think the killer is almost certainly a Whitebridge man?' Woodend asked Rutter.

‘Yes. Or if he's not, he's at least
living
in Whitebridge at the moment.'

Woodend took a drag on his cigarette, and then nodded.

‘I think I'd agree with you on that,' he said. ‘If I wanted to kill somebody who lived in another town, I certainly wouldn't wait till there was a thick fog before I drove over there to do it.'

‘The question is, how
far
would he be prepared to walk before he reached his safe haven,' Rutter said. ‘Half a mile? A mile? I suppose it would depend on how strong his nerve was and what calculations he'd made about the risks … about the risks …'

Rutter stopped speaking, and gazed with horror in the direction of the corridor.

Woodend turned his own head, and immediately understood his inspector's reaction.

Monika Paniatowski was standing framed in the doorway between the bar and the corridor. It was obvious from the expression she'd forced on to her face that she was trying to appear to be her normal self – but she looked totally destroyed.

T
he three men leaning against the factory wall had all been enthusiastic players in the cinder pitch football match earlier in the lunch break, but now they seemed content to merely look on while others grabbed the glory.

Well, that wasn't really very surprising, was it, Beresford asked himself. When you were getting on in years – and these men, he guessed, must be somewhere in their late thirties – you simply didn't have the stamina any more.

One of the men had a shock of red curly hair. The second was completely bald, and his pink head gleamed in the early afternoon sun. The third had a duck-tail quiff which was held in place by an impressive amount of grease, and made him look a little like Elvis Presley might have done if Elvis had been wearing a boiler suit, smoking a Woodbine, and working in a mattress factory.

Separately, the trio would probably have passed largely unnoticed and unremarked, but standing together as they were, they looked like some kind of a comedy act – the Three Stooges of Whitebridge, or Hawtrey-Pine Holdings's answer to the Marx Brothers.

Beresford ambled over to them in the casual way he thought a detective, totally at ease with the situation, probably would.

‘Mind if I join you?' he asked.

‘Why, are we comin' apart?' said the ginger-haired man, then laughed loudly, as if he'd cracked the most original joke in the world.

Charlie Woodend would have come back with a clever line instantly, Beresford told himself, but all he could think to say was, ‘No, I just thought you might be willing to answer a few questions for me.'

‘What kind of questions?' the ginger man asked. ‘What's the capital of Russia? I can tell you that. It's Moscow! What's the longest river in the world? Easy! It's the Nile. Who really runs Hawtrey-Pine Holdings? Another absolute doddle! The Vatican!'

‘The Vatican?' Beresford repeated.

‘Ignore him,' the bald man said wearily. ‘That's the only thing to do when he starts ridin' that particular hobby horse.'

‘Hobby horse, is it?' the ginger man asked, aggrieved. ‘Well, just look at the facts, will you? Mr Hawtrey was a Roman Catholic, Mr Pine was a Roman Catholic. Mr
Tully
was a Roman Catholic.'

‘Leave off,' the bald man said. ‘This is
supposed
to be our break. We're
supposed
to be havin' a good time.'

‘An' I'm just
supposed
to stand here an' listen to you hintin' that I'm some kind of nutter, am I?' the ginger man asked. ‘Well, you don't need to take my word for anythin', because the facts speak for themselves. You can go right through the payroll an' find the same thing – anybody with a cushy job belongs to the Church of Rome. It's a wonder to me that the Pope's not got a job here.'

‘Maybe he has,' said the Elvis impersonator, in what was probably an attempt to defuse the situation by making a joke of it. ‘Perhaps the only reason we don't see him ourselves is because he works the night shift.'

‘Was Mr Pine a good boss?' Beresford asked, doing his best to steer the conversation towards something more fruitful.

‘He was all right – as bosses go,' the Elvis impersonator said.

‘An' as bosses go, he went,' the ginger man said, chuckling.

The bald man shook his head, rebukingly. ‘Let's have a little decorum, shall we?' he suggested. ‘The poor bugger's not even cold yet.'

‘Which is more than you can say for the state Mr Hawtrey was in, when they took him off that mountainside,' the ginger man said, still laughing.

‘Now that's
not
right,' the bald man said sternly. ‘Mr Hawtrey was a bloody good bloke, an' even if you've no respect for Mr Pine, you could at least show a little towards him.'

‘Don't get all high an' mighty with me,' the ginger man said. ‘It wasn't me what killed Hawtrey – it was Pine.'

‘Pine
killed
Hawtrey?' Beresford asked, shocked.

‘You'll be givin' the lad the wrong impression if you're not careful,' the bald man said hastily.

‘That I won't,' the ginger man countered, totally unrepentant. ‘Pine didn't stick a knife in him, or blow his head off with a shotgun – or do anythin' at all like that – but he still killed him, right enough.'

‘What he means to say, is that he thinks Mr Pine should never have persuaded Mr Hawtrey to go on that mountain climb with him an' Mr Tully,' the bald man explained to Beresford. He glared at the ginger man. ‘Isn't that right?'

‘More or less,' the ginger man agreed, reluctantly. ‘Pine an' Tully were in their thirties – fit young men who could handle it when things went wrong. But Mr Hawtrey was the wrong side of fifty – an' he couldn't.'

‘You can't go puttin' all the blame on Mr Pine's shoulders,' the Elvis impersonator said. ‘From what I heard, there was originally supposed to be just the two of them on the climb – Pine an' Tully – an' the only reason that Mr Hawtrey ended up accompanying them was because he invited
himself
along.'

‘Why would he have done that?' the ginger man demanded.

‘You
know
why he did it. It was because he wanted to impress his wife!'

‘So now you're sayin'
Thelma
wanted him to climb that mountain?'

‘Course I'm not. Why should she want him to? It's not a woman's thing, is it? But he thought that by goin' on the climb with them, he could prove to her that he could keep up with men who were much closer to her age than he was himself.'

‘I still think it was all Pine's fault,' the ginger man said.

‘You would,' the Elvis impersonator responded. ‘But sooner or later you'll have to face the fact that the way Mr Pine tried to keep Mr Hawtrey alive on the mountain makes him nothing less than a bloody hero.'

‘If he
did
try to keep him alive,' the ginger man said. ‘We've only Pine's own word for it.'

‘As a matter of fact, you couldn't be wronger about that,' the Elvis impersonator said. ‘Mr Pine said very little about what went on up that mountain. Nearly everythin' we do know about it came from Mr Tully.'

‘Well, he would stick up for Pine, wouldn't he? He's another bloody Catholic.'

‘An' I suppose the committee of inquiry – which decided that Pine did more than could have been expected of any man – was made up of Catholics as well, was it?' the mock Elvis asked.

‘Wouldn't surprise me at all,' the ginger man said. ‘Anyway, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in anythin' Tully said, if I was you. He was a bloody wreck when they brought him down.'

‘So would you have been, if you'd damn near died of exposure,' the bald man said. ‘But you are right about one thing – he was never the same man again.'