Dangerous Games (2 page)

‘Don't,' Shastri told her. ‘Show me a pathologist who cannot laugh at his own work, and I will show you a pathologist who is ripe for an extended stay at the Funny Farm.'

‘So if he didn't intend to lose his head, why
did
he lose it?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Because both the laws of physics and the laws of anatomy dictated absolutely that he should.'

‘Go on.'

‘I would estimate that he weighed something like a hundred and fifty-five pounds – though that
is
only an estimate, since the head is still missing. The ideal distance for him to have dropped, if he wished to break his neck, was six feet five inches. The rope he used allowed a drop of something closer to twelve feet. It was almost inevitable that he and his head would part company.'

‘So where's the head now?'

‘When the police diver arrives, I confidently expect him to find it at the bottom of the canal, right next to the bridge. The body, you see, is naturally buoyant, and has floated away from the point at which the separation took place, but the head is both heavy and awkwardly shaped, and left to its own devices would have sunk like a stone.'

Paniatowski reached into her jacket pocket, took out a packet of cigarettes, and lit one up.

‘So the injuries are entirely self-inflicted?' she asked.

‘That would be my guess, though naturally I cannot tell you anything officially until I have conducted a complete autopsy.'

‘Naturally,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘And how is your lovely Chief Inspector Woodend?' Dr Shastri asked, slipping from the official to the social with the same grace with which she managed most aspects of her life.

‘Cloggin'-it Charlie?' Paniatowski replied. ‘To tell you the truth, with things being so quiet around here recently, I think he's rather bored.'

Dr Shastri smiled again.

‘He would be,' she acknowledged. ‘Mr Woodend is not a man for sitting on his hands. His mission in life is to bring murderers to justice – and the more the merrier.' She paused for a second. ‘And what about your handsome Inspector Rutter? How is he?'

Why did even a mention of her ex-lover still bring a stabbing pain to her heart, Paniatowski wondered.

‘Bob's fine – but rather preoccupied – at the moment,' she said aloud, and managed to sound almost normal.

‘Preoccupied?'

‘His daughter's going to live with him again, and that takes a lot of arranging.'

‘Ah yes, his little daughter,' Dr Shastri said, with a hint of sadness in her voice. ‘Am I right that she has been staying with her grandparents down in London since … since …?'

‘Since his wife was murdered,' Paniatowski supplied. ‘Yes, she has. But he's decided it's time for her to come home, and I think he's probably right.'

‘Though it will not be easy,' Dr Shastri said sagely.

‘Life never
is
easy,' Paniatowski replied. Then, detecting the obvious edge of bitterness in her own voice, she continued hurriedly, ‘Well, as I'm obviously not required here, I'll be off in search of real criminals I can bother. I'll see you around, Doc.'

Dr Shastri nodded her head. ‘Since murder never seems to go in the least out of fashion, that is undoubtedly true,' she agreed.

The uniformed sergeant leaning against the MGA was in his late thirties, and was called Jack Conner. Monika Paniatowski guessed that he'd been put in charge of the headless man case, and also had a fair suspicion as to why he was so obviously waiting for her now.

‘Thought that there was a good chance this vehicle might be yours, Monika,' Conner said, smiling.

‘Since we both know this is the only bright red MGA in the whole of central Lancashire, you did more than just
think
,' Paniatowski countered. ‘What can I do for you, Jack?'

‘Do?' the uniformed sergeant asked innocently.

‘Do,' Paniatowski repeated.

‘We've made a provisional identification of the stiff in the canal,' the sergeant said.

‘Is that right?' Paniatowski asked, disinterestedly.

‘Oh, it wasn't that difficult,' Connor said, as if he feared that she'd think he was attempting to take credit where none was due. ‘He had his driving licence in his overall pocket, you see. When we took it out, it was sopping wet, but still legible enough.'

He paused, as if giving Paniatowski the opportunity to say something.

‘Sopping wet, eh?' she obliged.

‘But legible enough,' Conner said, in the tone of a man who had just realized he was going to have to work rather harder if he was ever to get the result he wanted. ‘Turns out the stiff was called Terrence Roger Pugh. He was twenty-nine years old, and he didn't live far from here.'

‘And you told me all that without consulting your notebook once,' Paniatowski said, with mock admiration.

‘The thing is, what with having to find Pugh's head and everything, I've got rather a lot on my plate at the moment,' Connor said awkwardly.

‘Why don't you just tell me what it is you want me to do?' Paniatowski suggested.

‘It probably wouldn't take you more than a few minutes,' Conner told her. ‘And it
is
on the way back to the station.'

‘
What's
on the way back to the station?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘Terrence Pugh's home, of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘The thing is, somebody needs to call on his wife, tell her we've found a body that's probably his, and drive her down to the morgue.'

‘And couldn't one of your team do that?'

‘Like I said, they're all busy,' Conner said, looking over Paniatowski's shoulder as a way of avoiding her eyes.

‘Am I right in assuming that when you've got a shitty job like this on your hands, you normally send WPC Murray to do it for you?' Paniatowski asked innocently.

‘Well, it's certainly true that Brenda Murray's done her share of talking to grieving widows,' Conner admitted.

‘So why can't Brenda do it today?'

‘Well …'

‘It couldn't perhaps be because she's on sick leave, could it?'

Conner shrugged, acknowledging that she had hit the nail squarely on the head. ‘Women are so much better at dealing with emotional situations than men are, aren't they?' he said hopefully.

Paniatowski laughed. ‘A few years ago, when I was on the beat myself, I saw you face down a gang of hooligans who were armed with cut-throat razors and were just thirsting to spill your blood,' she said. ‘You weren't scared that day – or, if you were, you didn't show it. So are you seriously trying to tell me now that you don't have the bottle to tell a woman that her husband's probably killed himself?'

Connor looked down at the ground. ‘Different thing altogether,' he muttered. ‘I've never been very good with women – and if you don't believe me, just ask my wife.' He looked up again. ‘I really would appreciate your help, Monika. I'd owe you big time.'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘I suppose you'd better give me the address, Jack,' she said, resignedly.

Conner took a piece of paper out of his pocket with some speed, and handed it over to her before she could change her mind.

Paniatowski climbed into the MGA, and slipped her key into the ignition. The engine fired first time, but then any engine which had had the amount of love and attention lavished on it that this one had
should
have shown its gratitude by starting immediately.

‘Funny thing, him killing himself like that,' Sergeant Connor said from the pavement.

‘Bloody hilarious,' Paniatowski replied.

‘I mean, I didn't know the man myself, but he was quite a bit younger than me, and his body looked healthy enough.'

‘Except it didn't have a head,' Paniatowski pointed out.

‘What I'm saying is, everybody has their difficulties in this life, but however deep my own problems have been, I've never considered topping myself for a minute, and I don't suppose you have, either.'

‘Oh, I've
considered
it, right enough,' Paniatowski said, but she had already shifted into gear by then, and it was doubtful if Conner heard her over the roar of the engine.

C
hief Constable Henry Marlowe mounted the podium, and looked down with a serious expression on his face at the handful of local reporters who were looking back up at him.

It wasn't really a very good turn-out, he thought, but he supposed he must make the best of it.

Marlowe had always liked calling press conferences. They seemed to him to be a way of appearing immensely authoritative, without necessarily knowing very much at all. And, if they were skilfully manipulated, they could be used to convey the impression of being in charge without the necessity of doing any of the tedious work that being in charge usually involved.

But as much as he'd enjoyed them previously, press conferences had never been more important to him than they were now. His disastrous attempt to become the local member of parliament – and the ignominy of his forced withdrawal from the race – had cost him a great deal of the prestige he'd been carefully building up over the years, and if he was ever to climb back to the lofty heights he had once inhabited, he needed the press on his side.

Marlowe cleared his throat.

‘There are two main reasons I have asked you to attend this briefing at such short notice,' he said. ‘The first is that I wanted to take the earliest opportunity to scotch all the wild rumours which have been circulating around the town since early this morning.' He paused. ‘The second is that while those wild rumours are completely untrue, the case may just be bizarre enough to be of interest to the national newspapers, and if anybody is going to file this story with them, I thought it should be the hard-working members of the local press, rather than some flash bastard from London.'

You shouldn't have said
flash bastard
, Henry, he told himself. It doesn't go with the dignity of your office.

But then that was how the local reporters thought of London-based journalists, and there was no doubt that they were looking quite pleased at the prospect of earning stringers' fees from the nationals.

‘A headless corpse was removed from the canal early this morning,' Marlowe continued. ‘The head has since been recovered from the bottom of the canal. The dead man's name is Terrence Roger Pugh. His decapitation was not, as some of the rumours have suggested, the result of some strange – and no doubt foreign – ritual sacrifice. In fact, it is no more than an unintended consequence of the man's suicide.'

‘So you've ruled out all possibility of foul play?' one of the reporters, whose name was Arthur Williams, asked, somewhat disappointedly.

Marlowe nodded, seriously. ‘Yes, Arthur, I have.'

‘Even before you've seen the results of the post mortem?'

‘How do you know I've not seen the results of the post mortem?' Marlowe countered.

‘Well, have you?'

Williams was becoming a real nuisance, Marlowe thought, and made a mental note to find some thoroughly justifiable reason to exclude him from future press conferences.

‘As a matter of fact, I haven't yet seen the report,' he admitted. ‘But I've had twenty-five years' experience in this force, Arthur, and – believe me – even in my sleep, I could tell the difference between a suicide and a murder.'

The rush hour was well under way by the time Paniatowski and her passenger set out on their journey to the police morgue. Ahead of them, commercial vans jostled each other for position, and office workers glanced down at their watches and wondered if the boss would notice if they happened to be a few minutes late.

Paniatowski, behind the wheel of her MGA, treated all other vehicles on her side of the road with the same disdain that a top charioteer probably displayed to his opponents in the Circus Maximus, and left behind her a trail of drivers with pale faces and hands tightly gripping their steering wheels.

Her passenger, in contrast to the other drivers, did not even appear to notice this series of near-misses and hair's-breadth escapes. Mrs Pugh, hunched down in her seat, was totally absorbed in a new and very dark world that Paniatowski had recently introduced her to.

‘Why would he kill himself?' the new widow moaned, for perhaps the tenth time. ‘Why?'

‘We still don't know for sure that it
is
him,' Paniatowski said, changing lanes with a speed which wrong-footed the post office van driver, who had already marked out that space for himself.

‘But it's
likely
to be him, isn't it?' Mrs Pugh wailed.

‘Yes, it's likely,' Paniatowski agreed and hoped that by the time they reached the morgue Sergeant Conner's team would have found the bloody head at the bottom of the canal, and that Dr Shastri would have temporarily re-united it with the body for the viewing.

‘Then why?' Mrs Pugh asked. ‘
Why
would my Terry ever go and take his own life?'

‘We'll probably never know for sure,' Paniatowski said, feeling totally inadequate to deal with the situation.

‘Things were going so well for him, you see,' Mrs Pugh told her. ‘They'd just told him at the factory that he was going to be promoted. The general manager said he really liked Terry's positive attitude to his work. And we were planning our first holiday abroad. We were going to Spain. To the Costa del Something-or-other. Terry was looking forward to it.'

Or
appeared
to be looking forward to it, Paniatowski thought. Or was
pretending
to be looking forward to it, until he found it too much of a strain to pretend any longer. We've all played that game at one time or another.

‘Whose idea was this holiday in Spain?' she asked, mainly as a distraction.