Echoes of the Dead (25 page)

‘When you woke up that morning, did you have a wound you couldn't remember getting?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I was always getting injured,' Brown told her. ‘Like I said, I was a rough bugger. A lot of the time, I hardly even noticed it.'

‘But I'm not talking about any old injury – this would have been a
new
wound, wouldn't it?'

‘I don't know,' Brown said. ‘In fact, I have no idea what you're talking about.'

‘The police found two types of blood at the Mottershead murder scene,' Paniatowski explained. ‘Their theory was that one of them belonged to the killer. Actually, they didn't regard it as a
theory
at all – they took it as a rock-solid certainty.'

‘I didn't know that,' Brown said.

‘You must have done,' Paniatowski replied sceptically. ‘It was in all the papers.'

‘I didn't read the newspapers back then. To tell you the truth, I
couldn't
read them.'

‘And you're sure you had
no
new wounds when you woke up in the park that morning?'

‘I'd got cut a couple of weeks earlier – I'd had a slight disagreement with another of my associates – but that particular cut had all but healed.'

But not in the eyes of the police, Paniatowski thought – not if they didn't
want
it to look healed.

‘The main reason I'm here is that a man rang me last night to say that you didn't kill Bazza Mottershead,' she said. ‘Do you have any idea, Mr Brown, who that man might be?'

‘It could have been the real killer?' Brown suggested.

‘It wasn't,' Paniatowski said.

‘Are you sure?'

‘As sure as I can be. He
said
he wasn't – and I believe him.'

‘Well, if it wasn't the real killer, I haven't got a clue who it could be,' Brown admitted. ‘I don't see how anybody else
could
know, with absolute certainty, that I didn't murder Bazza.'

‘I want you to help me,' Paniatowski said.

‘Help you?' Walter Brown repeated, suddenly wary. ‘How could
I
help you?'

‘You could give me a list, with the names on it of everyone else you can remember who associated with Mottershead – especially anybody who might have had a grudge against him.'

Brown laughed. ‘It'd a long list,' he said. ‘Bazza had a real talent for making enemies – and some of them
really
hated him. That's how he got to be Bazza the Claw.'

‘Bazza the Claw?'

‘It's what some of the lads used to call him in the old days.'

‘Why? Because he'd claw every penny out of you that he possibly could?'

‘Oh, he'd do that right enough, but that wasn't the reason. They called him the Claw because his right hand
did
look a bit like a claw.'

‘Arthritis?' Paniatowski asked.

‘That's right – but what started the arthritis off in the first place was that somebody had broken every bone in that hand.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know. It happened a long time before I even met him. I'm only mentioning it now to give you some idea of just how popular he was.'

‘Will you give me the names I want?' Paniatowski asked.

Brown fell silent for a moment, then he said, ‘Maybe.'

‘Why the reluctance, when all I want to do is clear you?'

‘
Is that
all you want to do?'

‘No,' Paniatowski admitted – because she knew that with this man, she would never get away with lying. ‘I have some other purpose as well. But I really
do
want to see justice done in your case.'

‘Why?' Brown asked, his suspicion deepening. ‘Because that's part of your job?'

‘Yes, but if it
wasn't
part of my job, it wouldn't be the kind of job I'd have wanted in the first place.'

‘I like you, Chief Inspector Paniatowski,' Brown said. ‘I really do. And I think I trust you.'

‘Thank you.'

‘But after everything that I've been through, you'll understand why I don't trust you
that
much, won't you?'

‘Yes,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘I do understand.'

‘The last thing I want to do is to get some other poor innocent sod into trouble – and I'm afraid that if I give you a list, that's just what will happen,' Walter Brown told her.

‘It won't,' Paniatowski said firmly. ‘I promise you it won't.' She waited for a moment, before adding, ‘
Will
you give me the names?'

‘I need time to think about it,' Brown told her. ‘Come and see me again tomorrow.'

It would be a mistake to push him too far, she realized.

‘All right,' she agreed.

‘Have a look at what I've got on my shelves on your way out,' Brown said, ‘and if anything catches your fancy, take it as a gift.'

It was morning in Spain, too, though a far warmer, more caressing kind of morning than the one in Whitebridge.

Charlie Woodend was sitting on his terrace, a large sheet of plain paper spread out on the table in front of him, and a box of coloured pencils – bought specially for the occasion – lying next to his ashtray.

In the centre of the sheet, he'd written the single word ‘Who?' and around the edges of the page were a list of names, most of them crossed out with a violence that said much about the frustration he was feeling.

‘Still no luck on working out who your anonymous friend might be?' asked Paco Ruiz, who'd been for a walk around the garden, in the hope that a change of scene might stimulate his brain.

‘No luck at all,' Woodend replied. ‘All we really know is who it
can't
be. It
can't
, for example, be that slimy shit from Scotland Yard, DCI Hall, can it?'

‘No, that doesn't seem likely,' Paco agreed.

‘
His
aim was to save Bannerman by stitching me up, an' after he's made such a good job of it, there's no way that he'd suddenly decide to throw me a lifebelt.'

‘Who else have you eliminated?' Paco asked.

‘It can't be one of the local Whitebridge police, either.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because of the way this Mr X spoke to Monika. As near as she can remember it, he said, “Is anythin' bad goin' to happen to those policemen of yours who investigated the Lilly Dawson murder.” You get the point?'

Paco nodded. ‘If he'd been a cop, he'd have said something like, “Are they going to be pulled up in front of a disciplinary board?”'

‘Exactly.' Woodend agreed, lighting up a Ducados. ‘An' he wouldn't have talked about “those policemen of yours”, either. He'd have said, “our lads”.' He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Then there's the fact that he claimed to know who actually
did
kill Lilly. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that he was around at the time – an' the time was
twenty-two years ago
, remember – but it certainly makes it a strong possibility.'

‘So the man who you're looking for is at least in middle age?' Paco Ruiz asked.

‘I think he must be.' Woodend frowned. ‘But what's really got me bothered – above all else – is that when Monika asked him to name the killer, he said, “I can't do that.” Not, “I won't do that”, but “I can't”. Now
why
can't he?'

‘It is possible that the reason he “can't” is because he's implicated in the murder himself?' Ruiz suggested.

‘That was the first thought that came into my head,' Woodend admitted.

‘But now you've rejected it?'

‘Yes, an' I'll explain why in a minute. But first, I want you to think back to the days when you were a homicide bobby in Madrid.'

Ruiz did as he'd been instructed. And immediately, he could feel the stifling heat of summer envelop him as he crossed the Puerta del Sol on the trail of a killer, and the freezing cold of winter as he stood on the bank of the Manzanares River, chatting to the shivering prostitutes while he waited to meet a contact.

‘Are you there?' Woodend asked.

‘I'm there,' Ruiz told him.

And in some ways, he thought, it was almost as if he'd never been away.

‘Can you remember how many murder cases you had to deal with, while you were in Madrid?' Woodend asked.

‘Far too many,' Paco replied.

‘An' do you remember any of them?'

‘I remember them all.'

‘Me, too,' Woodend said. ‘So this is my question – did you ever, in the course of any of those investigations, come across somebody who was implicated in a murder himself, but whose main concern seemed to be to point the investigation in a direction which might get one of the policemen involved out of trouble?'

‘Of course not,' Ruiz said. ‘None of the criminals I had to deal with ever bore the police anything but ill-will.' He grinned. ‘But then, perhaps your English criminals are of a somewhat gentler nature than our Spanish ones?'

‘If they are, I never noticed it,' Woodend replied, returning the grin. ‘But this feller – this anonymous caller – really
is
on my side,' he continued, growing more serious again. ‘I can sense he is, even from this distance. An' that must mean that while he knows about the murders, he had nothin' to do with them himself.'

‘That makes sense,' Ruiz agreed.

‘So what are we left with?' Woodend asked. ‘We've got a man who's probably in late middle age. He knows about not
one
murder but
two
– an' murders, furthermore, which have absolutely nothin' in common, because one's a sex crime an' the other's a typical underworld killin'. An' this man – this Mr X – seems willin', possibly at some risk to himself, to come to my aid.'

He looked out towards the sea, as if he hoped to see some inspiration gently floating towards the shore.

‘Knowin' all that,' he continued, ‘it should be easy enough to narrow it down, shouldn't it? Even if we can't come up with a specific name, we should at least be able to produce a profile of the kind of person who'd be willin' to help me in these circumstances. An' we can't.'

‘That's true,' Ruiz agreed. ‘As you would say yourself, Charlie, “We simply haven't got a bloody clue”.'

‘But it's far from bein' an
insoluble
puzzle,' Woodend said, with a hint of self-anger in his voice. ‘I'm absolutely convinced of that. We only have to ask the right questions, an' everythin' will become clear. The problem is, we've no idea what the right questions are.'

TWENTY-ONE

‘
I
't has been announced that Rex “Rubber Legs” Norton has died peacefully at his home in Blackpool, aged eighty-three,' said the local newsreader, speaking from the wall-mounted television in the chief constable's office. ‘Rex, who was born and raised in Whitebridge, had an uncanny ability to bend his legs into seemingly impossible – and amazingly comic – positions, which made him a great favourite of audiences on the pre-war music hall circuit.'

The very fact that George Baxter even
had
a television in his office was a sign of the times, Monika Paniatowski thought. When she'd joined the Force, the telly was something you watched to relax, when you were off duty. If you needed to contact the media back then – and they hadn't even
called it
‘the media' in those days – you did it over a pint in their favourite pub. But it wasn't like that any more – local television had started flexing its muscles, and any officer in charge of a major investigation ignored it at his or her peril.

‘Accrington's new home for stray animals admitted its first two guests today,' the newsreader said, going all misty-eyed, ‘and the fox terrier puppies, Bobby and Billy, already seem to be making themselves at home.'

Paniatowski shifted uneasily in her seat as a grinning kennel maid held up the two puppies for the camera's inspection.

‘Would you mind telling me exactly why I've been summoned here, sir?' she said.

‘Just be patient for a moment, Chief Inspector, and all will be revealed,' Baxter replied.

Chief Inspector! He'd called her ‘Chief Inspector'. And that wasn't a good sign.

‘We like to think we can have confidence in the police, but is that confidence really justified?' asked the newsreader, as her facial expression instantly transformed itself from sentimental to serious. ‘In the past few years, a number of criminal cases in which there has been a miscarriage of justice have come to light nationally. And today, Mr Robert Howerd, the managing director of the Howerd Electrical chain of shops, has made allegations which may well lead to the re-investigation of yet another case – this time, very close to home.'

The scene changed to another studio, in which three people – Robert Howerd, Elizabeth Eccles and another, younger woman – were sitting stiffly side by side on a sofa, and gazing into the camera.

‘Tell us what happened to your brother, Mr Howerd,' said a soft off-screen voice.

‘My brother Frederick was arrested twenty-two years ago for the rape and murder of a little girl who he hardly knew,' Robert Howerd said in a voice edged with anger.

‘But surely, he confessed to committing the crime, didn't he?' the off-screen voice asked provocatively.

‘He did indeed confess,' Howerd replied. ‘But we have reason to believe that the confession was coerced from him by the policeman who was in charge of the investigation.'