Dangerous Games Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  By Sally Spencer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Author’s Note

  By Sally Spencer

  The Charlie Woodend Mysteries

  THE SALTON KILLINGS

  MURDER AT SWANN’S LAKE

  DEATH OF A CAVE DWELLER

  THE DARK LADY

  THE GOLDEN MILE TO MURDER

  DEAD ON CUE

  THE RED HERRING

  DEATH OF AN INNOCENT

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  A DEATH LEFT HANGING

  THE WITCH MAKER

  THE BUTCHER BEYOND

  DYING IN THE DARK

  STONE KILLER

  A LONG TIME DEAD

  SINS OF THE FATHERS

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  DEATH WATCH

  A DYING FALL

  FATAL QUEST

  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

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  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 and the USA 2007 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2007 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

  Dangerous games

  1. Woodend, Charlie (Fictitious character) – Fiction

  2. Police – England – Fiction

  3. Detective and mystery stories

  I. Title

  823.9'14[F]

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6468-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-005-1 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-44830-118-8 (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.

  This is my twenty-fifth book for Severn House, and I dedicate it unreservedly both to those loyal readers who have been with me from the start and to those who’ve joined us along the way. It couldn’t have happened without you!

  One

  The canal cut right through what had once been Whitebridge’s throbbing industrial heart, but now stood as little more than a grim reminder of the long and painful decline of the cotton industry. The barges and the narrow boats which had once jostled for position on it were long gone, for what was the point of such craft now that there were no bales of cotton to be unloaded nor bolts of cloth to be taken on board? And as the canal flowed sluggishly through a canyon of abandoned mills and converted warehouses, those same grim buildings stared down at it rebukingly – as if it were the waterway’s fault that their golden days had disappeared forever.

  There were two men ambling gently along the old canal towpath that morning in the early summer of 1965. Each carried a wicker basket in his left hand and held his fishing rod in place over his shoulder with his right. The older man was smoking a cheap briar pipe, while the younger had a Woodbine cigarette projecting from the corner of his mouth. They looked as if they might well be father and son, and – in fact – that was just what they were.

  It was the older man who first noticed the yellow cord.

  ‘Bloody rubbish!’ he snorted in disgust.

  ‘What’s bloody rubbish?’ his son asked.

  ‘That is!’ his father replied, using a finger of the hand holding the fishing rod to point vaguely ahead of them.

  The son looked up. The length of cord was hanging limply from the railing at the centre of the bridge they were just approaching.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he asked. ‘It’s only a bit of rope,’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it, you’re more than welcome to!’ the older man said. ‘But in my day, rope was rope. Indian hemp! That’s nothin’ but a bit of nylon – the same stuff your mam’s stockings are made out of.’

  ‘It’s very strong, is nylon,’ said the son, almost as if, as a member of the younger generation, he felt it was incumbent on him to defend all things modern against the crotchety attacks of his dad, who held the opinion that anything produced after 1938 was a complete waste of time.

  They had reached the bridge now, and though they could not touch the rope – since it was suspended over the middle of the canal – they could at least get a better look at it.

  ‘It’s got a bit of a loop on the end,’ the son said, puzzled.

  ‘So what?’ asked his father who, having already made his point, was becoming bored with the subject.

  ‘Well, I don’t see why anybody would have hung a bit of rope …’

  ‘A bit of nylon.’

  ‘… with a loop at the end of it, over the bridge.’

  His father shrugged. ‘It’s probably just some big daft bugger’s idea of a joke.’

  ‘But it’s not very funny, is it? An’ what’s that floatin’ in the canal up ahead? It looks to me like an old sack or somethin’.’

  ‘Folk chuck all kinds of bloody rubbish in the cut these days,’ his father grumbled. ‘No respect for anythin’, you see, lad. It was all very different when I was growin’ up.’

  They walked on, and soon the bridge was a hundred yards behind them, and the ‘object’ in the canal not more than ten yards ahead.

  The son suddenly came to a shaky halt, and began to turn quite pale.

  ‘I … I don’t think it’s a sack at all, Dad,’ he stuttered. ‘I … I think it’s a body.’

  ‘It can’t be a body, you silly sod,’ scoffed his father, who had slowed his pace, but was still walking on.

  ‘I think it … I think it is.’

  ‘If it’s a body, th
en where’s the bloody head?’

  The older man was no more than a dozen feet from the ‘object’ when he stopped walking. For a second, he was frozen, then his left hand opened and his wicker fishing basket clattered down onto the canal path.

  ‘Dad?’ the younger man said, now more worried about his father than he was about the thing in the canal. ‘Are you all right, Dad?’

  ‘Oh God!’ the older man moaned. ‘Where is the bloody head?’

  Half a dozen uniformed policemen had been stationed at various points along the canal bank. They looked bored. And so they were, since – apart from keeping nosy parkers away from the scene – they had very little to do.

  The only person in the vicinity who appeared to have any real purpose at all was a delicately-boned, golden-skinned woman. She was dressed in a colourful sari, which, when seen in contrast to the dark blue uniforms of the policemen around her, made her seem almost like a flaming bird of paradise. She had been the official police surgeon ever since her predecessor had done one favour too many for his corrupt friends, and had gone to gaol as a result. Her surname was Shastri, and though she undoubtedly had a first name, too, no one in the Central Lancs Force had ever quite plucked up the nerve to ask her what it was. DCI Woodend – who simply called her ‘Doc’ – thought she was the best police surgeon he had ever worked with, and most of his colleagues agreed.

  A second woman was approaching along the canal path. The new arrival had long blonde hair which was naturally wavy, and a rather large – though not unattractive – nose, which identified her immediately as being of central European extraction. She was wearing a business-like black-and white check suit, though the skirt was short enough to attest to the fact that she had pretty sensational legs. As she strode briskly along the canal towpath, the Beatles latest number one, Ticket to Ride, was playing in her head.

  There were times when she wished she had a ticket to ride and just didn’t care, she thought.

  The blonde woman nodded to the constables who had been posted along the path, but did not slacken her pace until she was no more than three or four feet away from the police doctor, Then she came to an abrupt halt, and her serious expression melted into a warm smile.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Shastri,’ she said.

  The doctor returned the smile. ‘And good morning to you, Sergeant Paniatowski!’

  Monika Paniatowski looked down at the headless cadaver, which was lying on a tarpaulin sheet on the ground. From his hands, she would have guessed that he was in his late twenties or early thirties – though it was no more than a guess. He was wearing a boiler suit, which had once been dark blue, but now was stained a dirty rust-coloured brown.

  ‘It is something of a surprise – though rather a pleasant one – to see you here,’ the doctor said. ‘I would have thought that an accident of this nature would have merited only the presence of a uniformed sergeant. I certainly did not expect one of Detective Chief Inspector Woodend’s brightest stars to put in an appearance.’

  ‘An accident?’ Paniatowski repeated, looking down at the corpse again – just to make sure she had seen it correctly the first time – and confirming that it was indeed lacking a head.

  The doctor laughed. ‘Oh, I understand the source of your confusion,’ she said. ‘You are wondering how he could have accidentally lost his head.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The poor man undoubtedly intended to kill himself – hanging still is the most popular form of suicide in this country, you know – but I imagine he was planning only to break his neck. I do not think he ever intended to decapitate himself. In fact, it would have come as quite a shock to him – if, that is, he had been aware of it.’ Dr Shastri laughed. ‘But how could he be aware that he had lost his head, when he had lost his head?’

  Paniatowski shook her own head slowly from side to side. ‘I sometimes worry about your sense of humour, Doc,’ she said.

  ‘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 aske
d, 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.