A Walk With the Dead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Recent Titles by Sally Spencer from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  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

  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

  A WALK WITH THE DEAD

  A Monica 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 2012 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

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

  First published in the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

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

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2012 by Alan Rustage.

  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.

  A walk with the dead.

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

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

  Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-372-3 (epub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8242-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-465-3 (trade paper)

  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.

  ‘The past is gone forever, and on the journey through the rest of your life, you can’t allow the dead to walk beside you and keep spewing their poison into your ears.’

  – DCI Monika Paniatowski

  PROLOGUE

  14th February 1974

  He was a practical man – good with his hands. And though, as he reminded himself now, he had made enough mistakes in his life to fill a book, he was determined that this one final act – the leaving of that life behind him – should go without a hitch.

  He grinned, with bitter humour, at the words he had inadvertently chosen.

  Without a hitch!

  Because, ironically, there would be a hitch – a hitch was a vital part of the whole process.

  At eight thirty on the dot, he heard the shutter on the peephole in the steel door slide open, and knew that the guard would be peering in at him – as if he were a wild animal or a freak. He knew this, but he did not see it, because by then he was lying in his bed, feigning sleep.

  The shutter clicked again, and he heard the guard’s heavy footfalls receding down the corridor.

  He was tempted to get out of bed immediately, but he forced himself to wait, since it was always possible that the guard might return and intervene in what he was about to do. And he didn’t want any intervention. This wasn’t a cry for help – this was a journey into oblivion.

  The footfalls stopped for perhaps twenty seconds, then continued again, as the guard checked on another inmate. Stop, continue, stop, continue, as he made his way to the end of the block, and each time, after a pause, the heavy institutional footsteps were growing fainter.

  The prisoner waited until he could hear nothing at all, then sprang from his bed. He had already ripped up his shirt and twisted it into a rope, and now it was just a matter of putting it in place. He moved his bed – taking care to make sure it made no noise – until it was under the pipe which ran along the ceiling.

  There should have been no gap between the pipe and the ceiling. Nor had there been, until he had begun – carefully and meticulously – to chip away at the plaster. It had taken him days, and every time that he made a little progress, he had worried that it would be discovered. But it hadn’t been, and now, standing on the bed and stripping away the bits of plaster he had used to disguise his work, he was confronted by a groove that was just wide enough to slide the braided shirt through.

  That done, he secured it to the pipe with a hitch knot and made a noose at the other end.

  It was unfair that he should have to do this, he told himself as he worked. He wasn’t to blame for his being here – he wasn’t to blame at all!

  He slid the noose over his head, and stepped off the bed. He began to kick – instinctively – and the thought flashed through his mind that this was, after all, a very foolish thing to do, and he should try to get his feet back on the bed again.

  Then his brain, already starved of air, shut down – and he stopped thinking at all.

  ONE

  Had the early-March wedding taken place the year before, the chances were that Monika Paniatowski would probably not have been invited, for though it was true that she knew the parents of both the bride and groom, they were – at best – cordial acquaintances. But a great deal can change in a year, and the previous June, when her old boss had retired to Spain, Monika had been promoted to the rank of detective chief inspector, which, in a provincial, inward-looking town like Whitebridge, made her a person of some consequence – whether she wished it or not.

  And this was a wedding which people of some consequence were expected to attend. The groom, Robert Freeman, was the son of Alderman Freeman, and had already made his own mark as a promising young doctor. T
he bride, Vanessa Freeman (née Clough), managed the soft-furnishings floor of the town’s biggest department store, and her father was the managing director of one of the local breweries. Add to all that the fact that the reception was being held in the banqueting hall of the Royal Victoria – Whitebridge’s poshest hotel – and it was as plain as could be that accepting the invitation was pretty much de rigueur.

  Even so, Paniatowski had tried to talk her way out of it, and might have succeeded if the big boss had not made it perfectly plain that he fully expected her to attend.

  Her fate – as far as this wedding was concerned – had been sealed two weeks earlier, in the chief constable’s office.

  ‘I’ve just received an invitation to Robert Freeman’s wedding,’ George Baxter had said, as he puffed away at his pipe, and filled the area around his large head with light blue smoke. ‘It’s on the ninth of March.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been invited too, sir,’ Paniatowski had told him. ‘It all seems rather rushed, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I suspect there are good reasons for that,’ the chief constable said. He grinned. ‘Doctors are very good at handing out advice on how to use contraception responsibly, but they don’t necessarily always follow that advice themselves.’

  ‘Ah!’ Paniatowski had said. She paused for a moment. ‘I think I’ll find some excuse for crying off. I don’t really know the happy young couple, and weddings can be such a bore.’

  ‘Alderman Freeman has always been very helpful to – and supportive of – the work of the Mid Lancs police,’ said the chief constable, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘One of us should certainly be there to show our support for him.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going . . .’

  ‘I’d be more than willing to go to the wedding if I could, but I can’t – which means, of course, that you positively must attend.’

  Paniatowski had looked at her former lover through suspicious eyes. She both admired and respected Baxter as a policeman, but there were times when (perhaps because of their joint past history) she couldn’t help seeing the big ginger-haired man with a yard-brush moustache as no more than a gigantic teddy bear – and it was the teddy bear she was seeing now.

  ‘Can’t go, or don’t want to go, sir?’ she asked innocently.

  ‘Can’t go, Chief Inspector – as you’d know yourself if you ever bothered to read my memos,’ the teddy bear said firmly. ‘The Home Office wants me to conduct an inquiry over in Yorkshire, starting on the eleventh of March.’

  ‘How convenient for you, sir,’ Paniatowski said, not quite under her breath. ‘What kind of inquiry will you be conducting?’

  ‘You really should read the memos, you know. I’ll be investigating the death of one Jeremy Templar, who hanged himself in his cell at HM Dunston Prison last month.’

  ‘And it will be a full-scale inquiry, will it?’ Paniatowski asked, still not sure whether or not her boss was attempting to pull a fast one over his attending the wedding.

  ‘It depends what you mean by full-scale,’ Baxter replied. ‘On the one hand, I’ll be the only one involved, but on the other, I’ll be expected to stay there until I’m satisfied I can write a fair and balanced report.’

  ‘But why do they even need to bring in someone from outside?’ Paniatowski persisted.

  ‘I suppose it’s because there are special circumstances attached to the suicide. Templar was attacked by the other prisoners several times before he took his own life. I haven’t got all the details at my fingertips, but I believe he was scalded in the dining room, beaten up in the showers, and stabbed in the leg while he was exercising in the yard.’

  ‘I assume he was a sex offender, then,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Baxter agreed. ‘In most prisons, as you probably know, there’s some status attached to being an armed robber – and even more to being a murderer – but if you’re inside for a sex offence, then God help you, because a lot of the cons have got kids of their own.’

  ‘Hang about,’ said Paniatowski, who’d been doing some rapid calculations, ‘you said your inquiry starts on the eleventh, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, the wedding’s on the ninth, so there’s really no reason that you can’t attend it.’

  ‘I’ll need the weekend to travel over to Yorkshire and settle in,’ Baxter said, a little uncomfortably.

  ‘Yes, I can quite see how you’ll need time to “settle in”,’ Paniatowski agreed, ‘because Yorkshire’s completely unfamiliar territory to you, isn’t it?’ She paused. ‘Well, not completely unfamiliar,’ she amended, ‘because you did spend over twenty years working for the Yorkshire Constabulary.’

  ‘You’re never quite insubordinate, are you, Monika?’ Baxter asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ Paniatowski agreed sweetly. ‘Never quite.’

  And so it had been agreed – or, at least, settled – that she would go to the wedding, as a representative of the Mid Lancs Police, but right up until the last minute, she’d been hoping that work – in the form of a murder – would get in the way of it. Not that she wanted anyone to be murdered, she would mentally add whenever the thought came into her mind, but there would be a murder eventually – that was inevitable – and it would suit her if it happened on the morning of the wedding, rather than a couple of days after it.

  But there had been no murder, and so here she was – dressed in an appropriate wedding outfit – at the nuptials of two perfectly nice people who she was not particularly interested in.

  Still, she told herself as she sipped on her Polish vodka (it had been thoughtful of them, by the way, to have ordered that vodka in especially for her) the whole ritual could have been worse. The church service had been as short as it decently could be, the best man’s speech had not been as buttock-clenchingly embarrassing as it might easily have been, the dancing was about to begin, and soon she would be able to slip inconspicuously away.

  ‘You look like you’re waiting for a chance to make a bolt for the door,’ said a voice.

  Paniatowski jumped slightly, startled by the fact that the speaker had found it so easy to read her mind – or, at least, her body language.

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t sneak on you to the alderman – because I’m planning on making a similar escape myself,’ the voice continued.

  The woman responsible for these remarks was probably in her middle twenties, Paniatowski guessed. She had brown curly hair, intelligent green eyes, a nose with a slight – though attractive – tilt, and a wide generous mouth which was now set in a good-natured smile.

  ‘How dare you even suggest that I’m planning to leave soon?’ Paniatowski asked, grinning back at her. ‘I fully intend to stick with this reception until the bloody bitter end.’

  ‘Liar,’ the other woman said. She held out her hand. ‘I’m Liz Duffy.’

  The chief inspector took the hand. ‘Monika Paniatowski,’ she said. ‘So what makes you one of the privileged few invited to attend the joining together of these two wholesome young people?’

  ‘I’m a quack,’ Liz said. ‘A junior partner – a very junior partner – at the practice where Robert also works. And you?’

  Paniatowski’s grin widened. ‘I’m a civic dignitary.’

  ‘Ah! And what part of civic society are you dignified in?’

  ‘I’m a—’

  Liz held up her hand to stop Paniatowski speaking. ‘Don’t tell me – it’ll be much more fun for me to guess. Are you some sort of big wheel in social services department?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. You’re nowhere near self-righteous enough to be working there. Are you a mandarin in the town-planning department, then? No, you don’t have the necessary arrogance.’ Liz clicked her fingers. ‘I’ve got it – you’re a member of the constabulary. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a bobby,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘And since you’re important enough to have been invited to this posh do, you m
ust be at least a chief inspector,’ Liz speculated.

  Paniatowski laughed. ‘Right again,’ she agreed.

  ‘Which makes you living proof that meritocracy exists – even in darkest Lancashire,’ Liz said. ‘Though I don’t suppose you got where you are now without something of a struggle.’ She paused. ‘What branch are you in?’

  ‘CID.’

  ‘Then we may end up working together, because I’ve just been appointed assistant to Dr Taylor, the police surgeon.’

  ‘The acting police surgeon,’ Paniatowski said, more sharply than she’d intended, because although she liked Dr Taylor, she missed her old friend Dr Shastri, who was on an extended sabbatical in India.

  ‘So since I’ve only been in the area for a while – and you seem positively crammed with local knowledge – why don’t you fill me in on who’s here?’ Liz suggested.

  Paniatowski gave her a quick rundown on the assembled guests – the local solicitors and businessmen, the owners of fancy hairdressing salons and assistant town clerks . . .

  ‘So, as you’ll appreciate, the crème de la crème of Whitebridge society are all gathered together,’ she concluded.

  ‘Or perhaps, since this is Whitebridge, it might be more accurate to call them the top of the milk?’ Liz suggested.

  Paniatowski laughed again. She really did like this young doctor, she thought, and talking to Liz was certainly helping to while away the time before she could decently exit.

  ‘Who’s the sad-looking girl in the corner?’ Liz asked.

  Paniatowski followed the direction of her eyes. The girl was indeed in the corner – as far away from the festivities as it was possible to be. She was around thirteen or fourteen, Paniatowski guessed, which made her about as old as her own adopted daughter, Louisa. And Liz was right – she looked thoroughly miserable.

  Paniatowski felt a sudden shiver run through her. Ever since the day two months earlier when Louisa had been kidnapped and missing for a few hours, Monika had not been able to look at a girl of her daughter’s age without bringing the terrifying experience vividly into the forefront of her mind.