The Dead Hand of History (27 page)

Until Linda Szymborska came along, Paniatowski thought. Until she
seduced
him in much the same way as Pete and Brian had.

TWENTY-THREE

W
hat's the homework situation like tonight?' Paniatowski asked down the phone, with a jauntiness she certainly didn't feel. ‘Any of that Al-Jebra, which has Lily so worried?'

‘No, it's just geography tonight,' Louisa said. Then she added, with some disgust, ‘We have to draw a
map
!'

Paniatowski laughed. Her daughter was marvellous with words, but maps and Louisa just did not get on.

‘I should be home in about half an hour, so maybe we can do it together,' she suggested.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line, then Louisa said, ‘There's no bingo tonight, so Lily doesn't mind staying with me.'

‘Lily doesn't
have
to stay with you,' Paniatowski replied. ‘I've just told you, I'll be home in half an hour.'

Another pause.

‘Are you sure that's a good idea, Mum?' Louisa said, finally.

‘What do you mean, am I sure it's a good idea?'

‘They showed your press conference on the telly, Mum,' Louisa said reluctantly.

‘I was awful, wasn't I?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I . . . I wouldn't say you were
awful
, exactly,' Louisa said, obviously choosing her words carefully. ‘And that nasty man who was asking you questions didn't help – he was really unfair.'

‘Anyway, how has my press conference got anything to do with my coming home?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I think you should go to the Drum and Monkey instead,' Louisa said seriously.

‘What is this?' Paniatowski asked, pretending she thought the whole thing was a joke – though she knew full well it wasn't. ‘Is my
own daughter
advising me to get drunk!'

‘You need to talk to Uncle Colin,' Louisa said.

‘It's always
nice
to talk to Uncle Colin, but why should I
need
to?' Paniatowski asked, continuing to play the game to the bitter end.

‘You're in a mess, Mum,' Louisa said. ‘Even I know that – and I'm only a kid.'

‘Yes, I'm in a mess,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘What you really need is to talk to Uncle Charlie about it,' Louisa told her. ‘But Uncle Charlie isn't here any more, so Uncle Colin will have to do.'

After her talk with her daughter, Paniatowski didn't need anyone else to confirm that she'd ‘lost it' at the press conference, but if she had, there'd been ample confirmation in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey that night.

It wasn't that the regular drinkers were looking at her in a strange or pitying way – it was more a case of them not looking at her
at all
.

But she knew what they were thinking.

Charlie Woodend would have handled the
investigation
better!

Beresford's pint was sitting in its rightful place on the team's usual table. The inspector himself, however, was some distance from it, examining – with apparent fascination – what Paniatowski would have taken for a shoe-shine machine, but for the fact that it seemed to have a television screen mounted on its top.

She walked over to him, and tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Well, that – whatever it is – certainly seems to have grabbed your attention,' she said.

‘It's called Pong,' Beresford said enthusiastically. ‘It was only installed this afternoon.'

He moved slightly to the side, so that she could get a better view. Not that there was much to see, she thought. The background was black, but everything else – two square zeros at the top, a broken white line running down the middle, a smaller white line at each end of the screen and a square dot which bounced back and forth – was white.

‘It's what they call a video game, and it's based on ping-pong,' Beresford explained. ‘Do you fancy a game?'

‘Not really,' Paniatowski said.

‘Oh, come on, boss,' Beresford urged her. ‘It'll help to take your mind off things.'

Paniatowski sighed resignedly. ‘All right.'

Beresford reached into his pocket and took out what the government was insisting everybody call a two-and-half new pence coin, but he knew was actually a sixpence in real money. He slid it into the slot.

‘What are the rules?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Simplicity itself,' Beresford told her. ‘You turn that knob, and your bat moves up and down. The objective is to keep returning my serves.'

The square ball bounced across the screen, and Paniatowski missed it. The number at the top of Beresford's side of the screen changed from a chunky zero to a one.

‘Gotcha!' Beresford said.

She didn't care, she realized. Though she was normally the most competitive of games players, she had no real interest in winning this one.

Beresford served again, and this time she managed to send the ball hurtling back at him.

‘Now you're getting the hang of it,' Beresford said.

But what was the point, she wondered. What was the point of
anything
?

Her heart was not in it, but her reflexes refused to let her give up the struggle, and in the next half-minute she notched up five points to Beresford's four.

‘Big tough woman!' Beresford said, with a grin on his face.

But she wasn't, she thought. She was wielding the bat in this game, but in the game that really mattered – the game being played out at police headquarters – she wasn't wielding anything at all. Instead, she was the ball, a helpless object being bounced back and forth between the press and the chief constable, between the suspect she didn't want to arrest and the evidence which suggested that perhaps she should.

At the end of the game she had won by eight points to six.

‘Another?' Beresford suggested.

‘No, thank you,' she said. ‘That's quite enough excitement for one day.'

They walked back to the table, and sat down.

‘Are you expecting Sergeant Walker to be putting in an appearance tonight?' Beresford asked.

Paniatowski shook her head. ‘He left me a message to say that he's suddenly come down with a bad case of the flu, and he's gone to bed.'

‘A bad case of
spinelessness
, more like,' Beresford retorted. ‘After the way he ratted you out to Mike Traynor this afternoon, he simply daren't face you.'

‘We don't know for certain that it was him who ratted me out,' Paniatowski countered.

‘Of course we do,' Beresford said dismissively. ‘There were only three of us who knew enough of the story to brief Traynor like that, and since you and I didn't do it, it just has to be Walker.'

‘You're right, of course,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘But we'll never be able to prove it.'

‘Whether you can prove it or not, you simply don't have any choice but to get rid of him.'

Paniatowski shook her head again. ‘Can't be done. At least, not yet. The chief constable's made that perfectly clear.'

‘Then when
can
it be done?' Beresford asked.

‘Maybe when I solve this case,' Paniatowski replied.

Or
if
I solve this case, she thought.

‘Give me some good news, Colin,' she continued. ‘Tell me your team's uncovered something that will gladden my heart at least a little.'

‘I don't think I've got much to offer in the heart-gladdening stakes, but here goes,' Beresford said. ‘Several people we questioned remembered seeing a Jag in the centre of town on the night of the murder. Two of the witnesses said it was being driven by a woman, two more said there was a man behind the wheel and the rest weren't close enough to say
who
was driving.'

‘So who
was
driving it?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Linda – which would confirm that what Stan said about her leaving the house in a huff was the truth? Or Stan, who made up the whole story about her leaving, and was ditching the car in a desperate attempt to back it up?'

‘We both know the answer to that,' Beresford said.

‘Yes, we do, don't we?' Paniatowski agreed. ‘What about Stan's movements on the morning after his wife's murder?'

‘We haven't come up with a single witness who can place Szymborska either at the river bank
early
in the morning, or outside the newspaper offices later on. So even though we
know
he wasn't where he claimed to be on either occasion, we have no way of proving it.'

‘You've searched his house?'

‘Oh yes. We didn't even need to get a warrant to do it. He was most cooperative – said that if it would help us to catch his wife's murderer, we could tear the whole place apart. And we did pretty much take him at his word – but we still didn't find anything.'

No, you wouldn't have done, Paniatowski thought.

Because while Stan Szymborska might be an emotional man, he was also a careful and intelligent one, and he'd never have invited them in if there'd been anything to find.

‘Do you remember how Charlie Woodend used to say that solving a murder was very like doing a jigsaw puzzle?' she asked.

Beresford nodded. ‘The pieces are there,' he said, imitating Woodend's voice, ‘and all you have to do is collect them up and fit them together.'

‘Which should be easy in this case,' Paniatowski said. ‘Because it's probably the least complicated puzzle we've ever come across. There are only three pieces to it, and they fit together so perfectly that it's almost impossible to imagine how any other piece
could
fit in.'

‘That's true enough,' Beresford agreed. ‘There's absolutely no room for any more on top of the box.'

‘So let's examine them one by one, to see if that gets us anywhere,' Paniatowski suggested, with a hint of desperation to her voice. ‘The first piece is Stan Szymborska. In his dreams, he's cutting off hands, which
may
just be a part of his fantasy life. On the other hand, given the dreams are set in a brutal prisoner-of-war camp where he was a prisoner himself, it's more likely that the dreams are actually a memory of something which really happened.' She paused to light up a cigarette. ‘What else do we know about him?' she continued.

‘That he's a very passionate man,' Beresford said. ‘Even twenty-five years later, the thought of being in bed with him was enough to bring a smile to Miss Hope-Gore's lips. And we know he was deeply in love with Linda – so deeply that he was prepared to wait until after her father died before declaring that love to her.'

‘The second piece is Linda. We know she was obsessed with her father. Stan said she'd escaped from that obsession with his help – that he took her hand . . .' Paniatowski shuddered. ‘Took her hand!' she repeated. ‘Now there's a bloody irony, if I ever heard one.'

‘Go on, boss,' Beresford said, sounding a little worried.

‘That he took her hand and led her out into the sunshine. But
I
don't think she ever escaped from that box of hers.'

‘So you think Stan's lying?'

‘No, I don't. I think he really believes it, because he
has to
believe it. But I've seen her office. It's not clean and modern, like the rest of the bakery. It's a throw-back to the days when her father was in charge – a shrine to his memory. She worked directly under that huge scowling picture of the miserable old bastard
every single day
, for God's sake. And what Stan
doesn't
know – or isn't prepared to admit – is that he looks a bit like the old man himself, which is probably why she agreed to marry him in the first place!'

‘And when the marriage – for whatever reason – started to lose its magic for her, she began an affair with a man who also resembled her father,' Beresford pointed out.

‘And that brings us neatly on to the third piece of the puzzle – Tom Whittington. The man was a loner – an outsider. But he wasn't a loner through choice, was he?'

‘No,' Beresford agreed. ‘When Pete Higgins and Brian Clegg offered him their friendship, he jumped at the chance.'

‘He was even prepared to do things he knew were wrong, in order to
keep
that friendship.'

‘And when Linda Szymborska decided she wanted to start an affair with him – which he also knew was wrong – he found it impossible to resist.'

‘There's an almost tragic inevitability about the whole thing,' Paniatowski said. ‘Put sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate together, add a match and you've got an explosion. Put Linda, Stan and Tom together, add an affair and you've got a bloody murder. We know
what
happened. We know
why
it happened. And we can't prove a bloody thing.'

‘It's not
quite
as simple as that,' Beresford said cautiously. ‘There are things we still don't know or can't explain.'

‘Like what?'

‘For example, we have no idea why Stan decided to leave one hand in the bushes on the river bank, and place the other in a bin outside the newspaper office.'

‘No, we can't explain that,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘But I'm willing to bet that if we ever find out exactly what went on in that prisoner-of-war camp, we'll have the answer to that, too.' She took a sip of her vodka. ‘How are we ever going to pin the murders on Stan?'