Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  THE BUTCHER BEYOND

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  THE DARK LADY

  DEAD ON CUE

  DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  A DEATH LEFT HANGING

  DEATH WATCH

  DYING IN THE DARK

  A DYING FALL

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  FATAL QUEST

  THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  MURDER AT SWANN’S LAKE

  THE PARADISE JOB

  THE RED HERRING

  THE SALTON KILLINGS

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  STONE KILLER

  THE WITCH MAKER

  The Monika Paniatowski Mysteries

  THE DEAD HAND OF HISTORY

  THE RING OF DEATH

  ECHOES OF THE DEAD

  BACKLASH

  LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  DEATH’S DARK SHADOW

  A DCI Paniatowski Mystery

  Sally Spencer

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  First published in the USA 2014 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

  110 East : 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2013 by Sally Spencer.

  The right of Sally Spencer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Spencer, Sally author.

  Death’s Dark Shadow: a novel of murder in 1970’s

  Yorkshire. – (A DCI Monika Paniatowski mystery; 6)

  1. Paniatowski, Monika (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Police–England–Fiction. 3. Murder–Investigation–

  Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8347-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-488-1 (ePub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  In later years, when Detective Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski thought about the two particularly brutal killings she’d investigated in Whitebridge, back in November 1975, she would never fail to reflect that, but for a seemingly innocuous suggestion she’d made to her adopted daughter, Louisa, there would have been no murders to investigate.

  ONE

  It was a Saturday morning in late October. At one end of the back parlour-study, Monika Paniatowski was sitting at her desk and attempting to scale the mountain of paperwork she had allowed to build up. At the other end, her adopted daughter, Louisa, was sitting at her desk and wrestling with French irregular verbs.

  The arrangement had been Louisa’s idea.

  ‘I’d rather work in there than in my bedroom,’ she’d explained to Monika. ‘The study’s got a more businesslike atmosphere – and since I’m in the “business” of passing exams, it’s ideal for my purposes.’

  ‘Of course it is, sweetheart,’ Monika had agreed, doing her best to hide her smile.

  ‘Besides,’ the girl had continued, ‘even when you’re home, you’re always working …’

  ‘Not always!’ Monika had protested.

  ‘No, not always,’ Louisa conceded, trying to be fair, ‘but certainly a good deal of the time.’

  ‘True,’ Paniatowski accepted.

  ‘So it would be nice, wouldn’t it, if we were working together?’

  ‘Yes, it would.’

  And it was nice, Paniatowski thought, as she watched Louisa put her French book to one side, and reach for her writing pad.

  ‘Who are you writing to?’ she asked.

  ‘Tía Pilar.’

  A couple of years earlier, Louisa hadn’t even known she had an Auntie Pilar, but then she’d joined the Whitebridge Hispanic Circle, and Robert Martinez – who’d been running it at the time – had suggested she trace her Spanish relatives, if only as a way of improving her own Spanish. The idea had been a great success, and now Louisa wrote regularly to her great-aunt, as well to several cousins of her own age.

  ‘I’ve been looking at the map of Spain,’ Paniatowski said tentatively, ‘and it seems your great-aunt lives just outside Calpe, not far from where your Uncle Charlie and Auntie Joan live.’

  ‘I know,’ Louisa agreed.

  ‘And your Uncle Charlie is always asking us to go and stay with them,’ Paniatowski said, in a rush. ‘So I was thinking … you’ve got a half-term holiday coming up, and I’ve got some leave owing which they’re pressuring me to take soon, so why don’t we go and stay with Uncle Charlie, and you can meet all your grandmother’s family?’

  Louisa noted her choice of words – ‘your grandmother’s family’, not ‘your mother’s family’. And she was right, of course, because while Louisa had no doubt that the person who had given birth to her had been a wonderful woman – and even found herself missing her sometimes – there was no question about who her actual mum was.

  So Monika was right to phrase it like that – but even so, Louisa couldn’t help wishing that her mum was confident enough of their relationship to say something like ‘your natural mother’.

  ‘Would you like that?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Louisa wasn’t sure. Writing to them was really nice – but meeting them seemed a rather daunting prospect.

  ‘Would you like to do it, Mum?’ she countered, to buy herself time.

  ‘Yes,’ Paniatowski said. ‘I do miss seeing Charlie now he’s retired, and I think it would be very good for you to get to know a little something about your Spanis
h heritage.’

  Which was all well and good in theory, Louisa thought, but it was precisely her largely unknown Spanish heritage – which was so different to her familiar English heritage – that frightened her.

  ‘Suppose we didn’t go to Spain over half-term,’ the girl said. ‘What would we do instead?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose we could go somewhere else,’ Paniatowski said vaguely.

  It wouldn’t work out like that at all, Louisa told herself – because even though her mum so desperately needed a break, some problem with the Mid-Lancs Constabulary would get in the way, as it usually did, and whatever plans they’d made would be cancelled. But she couldn’t cancel Spain – not if she’d already promised Uncle Charlie and Auntie Pilar that they were going.

  It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, Louisa thought, quoting one of Uncle Charlie’s favourite books.

  Indeed, the thought of going to Spain was not dissimilar to the thought of climbing the steps to the guillotine – and just as Sydney Carton had done the latter for his love of Lucie, so she would do the former for the love of her mum.

  ‘Yes, I’d really like to go to Spain,’ she said.

  The office – which in its previous incarnation had been a bar’s storeroom, and still looked like one – could only be entered through a door which opened on to an alley, but the splendid brass plate on the door would not have looked out of place on a much grander entrance.

  The plate read:

  Ojos y Oídos

  Agencia de detectives

  And underneath, in much smaller letters, were the words, ‘Eyes and Ears Detective Agency’.

  The two owners of the agency – Paco Ruiz and Charlie Woodend – had chosen the name because they’d thought it would sound intriguing, but it was also a reflection of their division of labour, since Paco’s eyes were not quite as sharp as they had once been, and Charlie – having only lived on Costa Blanca for a year and a half – had not yet mastered enough of the language to be able to conduct independent interviews in Spanish.

  Business at the agency had been quiet for a while, but that morning they had a new client, a sharply dressed man of around forty-five.

  ‘Sr Garcia says that he mainly sells hi-fi systems and tape decks,’ Ruiz was explaining.

  ‘That’d be like gramophones, would it?’ asked Woodend, who tried his best to be forward looking, but was still in mourning over the virtual demise of the steam locomotive.

  Paco grinned. ‘Yes, that would be like gramophones,’ he agreed. ‘Sr Garcia says that, over the last few years, the business has grown and grown. This is partly because the government has become more relaxed about what can be imported into Spain, and partly because, with the increased tourist trade, the locals now have more money to spend.’

  ‘So what’s his problem?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘He’s losing a great deal of stock, and he has no idea how that’s happening,’ Paco said. ‘His storeroom is at the back of his shop. The only door to the storeroom – which is made of solid steel – is through the shop itself, and he swears that he would know if the lock had been tampered with.’

  ‘Is there a window in the storeroom?’

  Ruiz consulted the client.

  ‘He says that there is a window, but it is a very small one, and there are bars on it.’

  ‘Who locks up at the end of the day?’

  Ruiz spoke to the client again.

  ‘He says he always does it himself.’

  ‘And does anybody else have a key?’

  ‘During the working day, the manager, Luis Ibañez, has one, but he hands it back to Sr Garcia when the shop closes.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Woodend mused. ‘We’ll need to look at the scene of the crime, of course, but I think it might be wise to wait until all the assistants have gone home for the day.’

  ‘Well, that’s it then,’ Paniatowski called from the kitchen to Louisa, who was in the dining room, laying the table for tea.

  ‘That’s what?’ her daughter asked.

  ‘That’s all the arrangements made for our trip to Spain. The first thing I did was to ring the Woodends. Your Uncle Charlie wasn’t there – he’s out on a case, apparently – but your Auntie Joan said they’d both be delighted to put us up for a few days.’

  Louisa felt her stomach tighten. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a bit more time to think about it, Mum?’ she asked, laying the knife and fork, with geometric precision, each side of her mother’s plate.

  ‘You’re not listening, Louisa,’ Paniatowski said. ‘All the arrangements have been made – I’ve rung the travel agency and booked the flights.’

  ‘So … so we’re really going?’

  ‘Yes, we really are going. And you know what you need to do now, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘You need to ring your Auntie Pilar and let her know the family can expect a visit.’

  Louisa’s stomach tightened even more.

  Oh dear, she thought.

  The main shopping street in Calpe was lined with orange trees. It began at the edge of the old town – located at the top of the hill, through fear of pirates – and gently sloped down to the sea.

  Sr Garcia’s shop was halfway up the hill. It had a double frontage, and – perhaps as a reaction to a government which had deliberately kept the country isolated from the fashions and trends of the rest of Europe for so long – it was conspicuously and aggressively modern.

  The storeroom, on the other hand, was still very much a part of old Spain. It was a large, rectangular room, full of crude shelving which was crammed with music centres and tape decks, and – as Sr Garcia had promised them – there was only one door and a small, barred window opening to the outside.

  ‘If they didn’t come through the door – and having seen it, I’m almost sure they didn’t – then they must have entered through the ceiling, the floor or one of the walls,’ Woodend said.

  But the floor was solid concrete, and the ceiling and the walls showed no signs of having been breached.

  ‘I had a very interesting murder involving a locked room, once …’ Woodend began. And then he stopped himself.

  That kind of reminiscence was fine when he and Paco were sitting on his terrace (a bottle of Veterano brandy between them), and were reliving Ruiz’s time as a homicide inspector in Madrid and his own as a DCI in Whitebridge, but when they were on a case – even a simple robbery like this one – they needed to keep themselves professional.

  ‘Maybe the goods went out through the window,’ Ruiz suggested.

  ‘To pass them out through the window, they’d first have had to get into the storeroom through the window themselves,’ Woodend said, ‘and even a small kid couldn’t squeeze through that space.’

  ‘So maybe it was an inside job,’ Ruiz suggested. ‘Maybe one of the employees came into the storeroom during working hours, and passed the equipment to an accomplice who was waiting outside.’

  That would be rather risky, Woodend thought – but it would certainly be possible.

  ‘What’s the smallest thing that went missing?’ he asked.

  Ruiz consulted his notes.

  ‘A tape deck.’

  ‘See if you can find one.’

  Ruiz handed Woodend a box, and Woodend took it over to the window, but before he even tried to push it through, he could see that it would never fit.

  ‘There’s a lot of packing in that box,’ Ruiz said. ‘Perhaps, if we removed that, we could slide the tape deck through.’

  Woodend opened the box. The deck had come all the way from Japan, and in order to ensure its safe arrival in Calpe, the manufacturers had encased it in polystyrene blocks, and filled what little space was left with shredded packing.

  Woodend stripped it all away, and held the deck up to the barred window. It still wouldn’t fit.

  ‘They must have removed the bars,’ he said.

  Ruiz shook his head. ‘Whoever did it would be taking a big enough ch
ance just passing the equipment through the window during working hours,’ he said. ‘It would be impossible to remove the bars – and then put them back in place again – without being noticed.’

  From a logical point of view, Paco was right, Woodend thought, but murder – crime, he corrected himself, not murder, bloody crime! – did not always conform to the rules of logic.

  ‘Let’s go and look at the window from the outside,’ he said.

  The cabaña had been built close to the port. Its original purpose was to store fishermen’s nets, but ever since she had lost her job, it had been Elena’s home.

  And as a home, it was not so bad, she told herself. True, it was only one room, but why would a woman like her need more than one room? True, too, it had no windows at all – just gaps in the brickwork to let air in – but if she wanted more light, she had only to step outside on to the quay, where there was the sun in daytime and street lamps by night. And so what if she had to fetch all her water from the standpipe next to the harbour master’s office – that was good exercise.

  All in all, it was perfectly satisfactory. She had a bed, she had a table and chair, hooks on which to hang her few clothes, enough crockery and cutlery for her simple needs, and a small paraffin heater for when the weather turned cold. She had the friendship of the fishermen, who would sometimes give her something from their catch. She had the support of the local communist party, which had recently done her the honour of electing her its secretary. And while any woman might want more – that was only natural – none had the right to expect more.

  Yet even though she truly did believe all this, she still felt a little awkward when Doña Pilar paid an unexpected call on her that afternoon, because she had been a guest in Doña Pilar’s home, and knew that it was a fine farmhouse which had its own bathroom.

  ‘The reason that I have called is to tell you that I have just had a phone call from my English great-niece, Doña Elena,’ Pilar said. ‘You will have heard me talk about her.’

  ‘I have indeed,’ Elena agreed.

  ‘It seems that she will be coming to visit me soon, and I thought it would be nice to have a party for her.’

  ‘Is it wise to have a party – of any kind – while the Caudillo is still so ill?’ Elena asked.