Dying in the Dark (6 page)

‘I was wondering if you had any records on a Pamela Rainsford,' Paniatowski said.

‘Why? What's she done?' Conner asked.

‘You sound as if you know her.'

‘I do. Or at least, I did before she moved away. She was married to a mate of mine – Constable Tony Rainsford.'

‘And he deserted her, didn't he? Walked out one morning and never came back?'

There was a pause on the other end of the line, then Conner said, ‘Who's been spinnin' you that line?'

‘It isn't true? He didn't walk out?'

‘He did not. Tony
moved
out, but right up until the day she left Bradford, she always knew where she could find him.'

‘
Why
did he move out?'

‘Why does anybody leave their wife?'

‘There's dozens of reasons. What was his?'

Another pause. ‘To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure,' Conner admitted. ‘When most men are bein' given grief by their womenfolk, it's usually impossible to make them shut up about it. But not Tony. He never said a word. But we could tell somethin' was wrong, anyway.'

‘How?'

‘The last couple of years they were together, he'd come on duty lookin' so rough you'd swear he'd been dragged through a hedge backwards.'

‘Was that because he was drinking heavily?'

‘Definitely not. Not at that time, anyway.'

‘Then what
was
his problem?'

‘Like I said, he didn't talk about it. But if you ask me, I'd have to guess that there was somethin' wrong in the bedroom department.'

‘That's right, blame it on the woman!' Paniatowski said, not quite sure whether Conner's comment had amused her or angered her. ‘Women are such frigid bitches, aren't they? They'll never give a man what he really wants – what he really needs.'

It was anger, she decided, as she heard herself speak the last few words. Definitely anger.

‘I think you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, Monika,' Conner said. ‘I think it was
him
what was havin' problems keepin' up with
her
.'

‘So she was sleeping around?'

‘I don't think so. If she had have been, we'd probably have known about it down at the station. An' if that
had
been the case, I imagine he'd have cited it in the divorce proceedin's.'

‘So he was the one who divorced her?'

‘That's right.'

‘And what grounds?'

‘I believe it was mental cruelty.'

‘I'd like to speak to him,' Paniatowski said.

‘I'm afraid you're a bit late for that.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He's dead. Killed in a car crash a few months after Pamela left, poor bugger. It was the drink that got him, of course. He went from virtually teetotal to bein' a ravin' dipso in no time at all. I think that despite it all – whatever the “all” actually bloody was – he must have still loved her.'

‘You're sure it was drink that caused the crash?'

‘Absolutely certain. I examined the wreck of his car myself. It smelled like a bloody distillery.'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘Well, thanks for your help anyway, Bill,' she said.

‘You never did get around to tellin' me why you were askin' about her,' Connor pointed out.

‘She was murdered last night.'

‘Oh,' Connor said.

‘You don't sound at all surprised,' Paniatowski told him.

‘How can you say that! I'm right shocked!' Conner protested. ‘Honestly I am.' He paused for a second time. ‘But you're not far off the mark, in a way,' he admitted. ‘I never imagined she'd end up like that, but I'm not really surprised that she has, if you know what I mean.'

‘No, I'm not sure that I do,' Paniatowski admitted.

‘Well, there was always somethin' a little bit
dangerous
about Pamela,' Conner explained. ‘I couldn't put my finger on it exactly, but she always gave the impression she was livin' on the edge.'

A procession of other young women and girls streamed through the office to be questioned by Woodend and Paniatowski. They varied from the very pretty to the downright unattractive, from the clearly quick and intelligent to the plainly dull and plodding. Some showed their obvious distress, while others were very subdued. And there were even a few, Woodend thought, who were secretly – and guiltily – thrilled to be involved even peripherally in a sensational murder. The only thing they
all
had in common was that they had very little to add to what Jenny Thomas had already said.

‘Pamela never talked much about her private life,' a blonde invoice clerk said.

‘Wasn't that unusual?' Woodend asked.

‘I suppose it was, now I think about it.'

‘But it never occurred to you before?'

‘Well, no,' the invoice clerk admitted. ‘Pamela wasn't like most of the girls who work here, you see. She seemed to have her own set of rules.'

‘I think this latest boyfriend of hers was something special,' said a brunette shorthand-typist who wore her hair in an elaborate beehive.

‘What makes you say that?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Sometimes she'd start getting very edgy when it got near to clocking-off time. You know the sort of thing. She didn't seem to be able to concentrate properly, and couldn't stay in any one place for more than a few seconds.'

‘And what did you think that meant?'

‘Well, that this boyfriend – whoever he was – was taking her somewhere special – somewhere expensive.'

Or somewhere
exciting
, Paniatowski thought – though she had no idea why that particular idea had popped into her head.

Neither Woodend nor Paniatowski thought to order lunch, but at one o'clock it duly arrived, delivered on two dull tin trays by a couple of the office juniors. Woodend, deep in thought, only started to appreciate just how good the meat and two veg was when he'd almost finished it.

The trays were taken away, and the questioning continued along much the same lines as it had before lunch.

‘I
liked
Pamela, but I couldn't say I really
knew
her,' confessed a wages' clerk who – being older than most of the other women – was starting to go grey. ‘It's Jenny Thomas you should really be talking to. She was Pamela's best friend.'

Woodend pictured the look in Jenny Thomas's eyes when she'd been explaining how Pamela would quickly drop her when she'd taken up with another man.

With friends like her, he thought, who needs enemies?

I
t was half-past five when Bob Rutter, standing next to the blackboard in the ‘nerve centre', announced to his team that while he expected them to carry on with their inquiries for at least two or three more hours, he had other matters to attend to, and was going home.

‘Going home, sir?' repeated one of them, an eager young detective constable called Bates.

‘Yes! Have you any objection to that,
Chief Superintendent
Bates?' Rutter demanded aggressively.

‘No, sir, but …'

‘But what?'

‘But nothin', sir.'

But it's not like you to shirk your duty, sir, Rutter supplied silently, on Bates's behalf. It's not like you to leave up to others work that you should be doing yourself.

True enough. It
wasn't
like him. But his life was falling apart, and it was much more important to make one last effort to save it than it was to catch whoever had killed Pamela Rainsford.

It only took him ten minutes to drive from the centre of Whitebridge to the new suburb in which his family – for the moment, at least – lived. He was close to home when he saw the illuminated billboard, and though he'd been expecting it, he still frowned.

Welcome to Phase Two of the Croft Estate
Two hundred exciting new executive houses
Show-house now open
Prices reduced

‘Phase Two!' he said disgustedly.

There had
been
no Phase Two – or even any talk of one – when he had bought his house in Elm Croft a couple of years earlier. One of the things which had attracted him to that particular property was that it was on the edge of the estate, with an uninterrupted view of the moors.

‘And there's no chance there'll be any more building in front of it, is there?' he'd asked the estate agent, before handing over his deposit.

‘There's
always
a chance,' the agent had replied, in the exaggeratedly frank way that such agents had. ‘When you think about it, Mr Rutter, there's always a
chance
you'll be struck by a meteorite or win a couple of hundred thousand quid on the football pools. But it's not something you can spend your life worrying about, now is it?'

‘Even so—' Rutter had said doubtfully.

‘You soon learn
never
to say “never” in my line of work,' the agent interrupted, ‘but as far as I know, all that land beyond the estate is owned by an old farmer who'd rather cut off his own leg than sell a square inch of it.'

The old farmer's determination to hold on to his land – if such determination had ever actually existed – crumbled little more than a year after the Rutters had moved in, and the bulldozers arrived less than a week after that.

Furious, Rutter had gone to the Croft Estate office and demanded to know what they hell was going on.

The
new
plan, he was told, was to build three more ‘crofts' – Birch Croft, Sycamore Croft and Ash Croft.

‘But you need have no worries about feeling hemmed in,' Mr Sexton, the building manager, assured him. He pointed to a plan on the wall of his office. ‘The next row of houses will be facing the other way, so the bottom of your garden will be touching the bottom of the garden of the corresponding house in Birch Croft. And it'll be a
big
garden, Mr Rutter.' He laughed. ‘You'd almost need to mount an expedition to get from the Birch Croft house to yours.'

Rutter failed to see the humour. ‘When does work on Birch Croft actually start?' he'd asked.

‘Oh, not for a while yet.'

‘But the bulldozers are already there.'

‘Ah, I see what you mean. It's Ash Croft – what you might call the outer ring of houses – which we'll be building first.'

‘And why might that be?'

‘Because they'll be the easiest ones to sell. Because they'll be the ones with the …'

He stopped suddenly, as if he'd said more than he'd intended to.

‘The ones with the uninterrupted view of the moors,' Rutter said, finishing the sentence off for him.

‘Well, yes, that's right,' Sexton admitted.

‘Just like I had, when your agent sold me my house.'

Sexton shrugged. ‘What can I tell you, Mr Rutter? Times change. Things move on. It's the way of the world.'

‘So because you want to sell the houses on Ash Croft first, I'll be forced to live next to a building site for at least a year?'

‘You'll soon get used to it,' Sexton said, with the indifference of a man who held all the cards. ‘Besides, it probably won't be anything like as noisy as you seem to think it will.'

Now, nine months later, Ash Croft was completed – though the houses had not been selling half as quickly as Mr Sexton had clearly anticipated. And soon – out of the morass the builder had created while constructing it – Birch Croft and Sycamore Croft would begin to rise.

Rutter had gradually come to terms with the situation. Sexton had been right about the fact that the large gardens would mean there was a considerable distance between the two rows of houses, he told himself. And anyway, an uninterrupted view of the moors was not something a man on a detective inspector's salary could reasonably expect.

But now, driving home on a day in which his world seemed to be unravelling like a ball of string, he began to take a darker view again. In his mind, the Croft Estate was now symbolic of his whole approach to life – proof that when he had two courses of action open to him, he would always choose the wrong one.

Maria was on the hall phone when Rutter entered the house through the back door. Standing in the kitchen, he couldn't distinguish the words. But he could tell that she was speaking Spanish, so it was more than likely that she was talking to one of her parents.

He opened the kitchen door and stepped into the hallway just as Maria was replacing the phone on its cradle. He coughed, as he always did, to let her know that it was him, and not some intruder.

‘What time is it?' she asked.

‘Just after six.'

‘Then why are you home so early? I thought you had a new murder case to investigate.'

‘We do. It's some poor bloody woman who—'

‘I am not Monika Paniatowski,' Maria said cuttingly. ‘I get no pleasure from hearing the grisly details of your work. My only interest is to wonder how you could bear to drag yourself away from your precious investigation.'

God, what a bloody mess he'd made of things! Rutter thought. What a bloody, bloody mess.

‘I came home early because I'd already instructed the team on exactly what to do, and—' he began.

‘I told you, I have no interest in your work,' Maria interrupted.

‘I know that. I was just explaining to you how I came to be free for the rest of the day.'

‘But why should you even
want
to be free for the rest of the day?'

‘I thought we might spend some time together. I thought we might try to talk things through.'

‘There is nothing to talk about,' Maria said coldly. ‘Besides, how do you know I'm not busy myself?'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Oh, I see how your mind works. Why should the poor blind woman have any plans of her own? Isn't she just supposed to stay quietly at home until her lord and master deigns to return?'