Best Served Cold Read online

  ‘The theatre will be gone by then,’ Bradley Quirk said. ‘They’re probably knocking it down even as we speak.’

  ‘This is Lancashire, where they know the value of a shilling,’ Ruth argued. ‘They don’t knock buildings down – they convert them for other uses. And we could convert it back – if only for a little while. Besides, if the old building’s gone, there are others we could use – it’s the spirit of the thing, not the bricks and mortar, which matters.’

  ‘It would cost a small fortune,’ Phil McCann said dubiously.

  Ruth smiled. ‘Anyone who doesn’t think he or she will be a huge success in twenty years’ time, put your hand up now,’ she said.

  Nobody did.

  ‘You see?’ Ruth asked. ‘We’ll all be rolling in money by then, and the odd couple of thousand will seem like small change to us. And if a couple of us aren’t quite the success we expected to be, well, I’m sure the rest will be more than willing to subsidize them.’

  The others thought about it. Their time in Whitebridge was over, and they were already re-imagining it – editing out the quarrels, frustrations and pettiness as they went – as a golden time in which a group of idealistic young people had striven to make a real cultural difference. So it would be nice to come back. It would be living proof that success had not changed them – that they were humble enough not to have forgotten their roots. It would be nice too, to treat the other members of the company as if they were all still equals – just a bunch of jobbing actors getting together for old times’ sake – though there would be a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing the others, who had not had quite the same success, pretending that they really thought nothing had changed.

  ‘So what do you all think?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘It sounds like a really great idea,’ Tony Brown – good old Tony Brown! – said.

  ‘I think it would be fun,’ Ruth’s sister Sarah agreed.

  ‘Provided my contractual obligations will permit it, then I’m in favour,’ Mark Cotton said.

  ‘I’m in, though – of course – it will never happen,’ Bradley Quirk told the rest of the company.

  But that was where he was wrong. It would happen. The button on the time clock had been hit, the countdown had already begun. And at the end of that countdown – in nineteen years and three hundred and sixty-three days – one of the assembled company would die rather horribly.

  ONE

  14th March 1977

  Apart from the odd attack of morning sickness, Monika Paniatowski had hardly noticed the first stages of her pregnancy at all. But now, as time relentlessly moved on (whether she willed it or not), she was counting in weeks rather than months and was becoming more and more aware of the small, demanding life which was growing inside her.

  She was not sleeping well – although that might have been as much for psychological as physical reasons – and simple tasks such as getting out of bed in the morning were becoming a real challenge.

  That particular morning, descending the stairs seemed a more formidable task than ever, and for one brief, mad moment, a demon in her head suggested that if she were to ‘accidentally’ lose her footing, the problem of a child she had never sought might be instantly solved.

  She gripped the banister rail more tightly.

  She could have aborted the baby in the early months. Indeed, her close friend, Dr Shastri, had urged her to do just that – and not just because of her age. But she had decided not to get rid of the child – or rather, her newly rediscovered Catholic faith had forbidden her to – and now she was stuck with the consequences. She would, she had promised herself, bring the child up carefully and responsibly, and if she could not love it, then she would at least do her best to fake that love.

  She found her adopted daughter – for whom she had no need to fake love – sitting at the dining table, already wearing her smart school uniform and eating a thoroughly sensible breakfast of Shredded Wheat.

  ‘Did you sleep any better last night, Mum?’ Louisa asked, concerned.

  Paniatowski was tempted to lie, if only to ease her daughter’s anxiety, but she had never lied to Louisa about anything, and so she said, ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Then are you sure you’re up to tracking down cold-blooded killers today?’ Louisa asked innocently.

  ‘Just at the moment, there are no cold-blooded killers to track down,’ Paniatowski replied, not realizing until almost the end of the sentence that she had walked into a trap.

  ‘In that case,’ Louisa said, ‘you can afford to take the day off. Do it for the baby.’

  She had been delighted when Paniatowski had announced that she was pregnant, but had never once asked who the father was, perhaps because she thought – wrongly – she already knew the answer, or perhaps because she sensed her mother’s reluctance to tell her.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’ Louisa asked, a little sharply.

  ‘First of all, the doctor has assured me that my going into work for another week or so will do the baby absolutely no harm at all,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘And secondly, just because there have been no murders doesn’t mean there’s no work to do. As a matter of fact, Chief Superintendent Holmes has called all senior officers in this morning for a briefing session.’

  ‘What about?’

  Paniatowski sighed. ‘Nothing much. Apparently, there’s this actor called Mark Cotton who will be in Whitebridge for a couple of weeks and—’

  ‘Mark Cotton!’ Louisa exploded. ‘In Whitebridge!’

  ‘Oh, you’ve heard of him, have you?’

  Louisa shook her head in despair. ‘Mark Cotton,’ she said slowly. ‘Vic Prince.’

  ‘It still means nothing to me,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘DCI Prince,’ Louisa said, as if she was still hoping to find some small corner of her mother’s brain that showed just a glimmering of intelligence. ‘From the television!’

  ‘Ah, he’s a television cop!’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘He’s the television cop,’ Louisa told her, ‘and he’s the sexiest thing on two legs.’

  Paniatowski was seized by conflicting emotions. On the one hand, she was pleased that she and her daughter had such an open relationship that Louisa felt free to make such a comment. On the other, she was not entirely happy that a sixteen-year-old should have such thoughts at all – even in the privacy of her own head.

  ‘How old is this Mark Cotton?’ she asked.

  Louisa shrugged, as if she thought that, of all the irrelevant questions asked since the beginning of time, this was the most pointless.

  ‘Forty-two or forty-three,’ she suggested.

  ‘I thought girls of your age were supposed to fancy young pop singers,’ Paniatowski said, slightly worriedly.

  ‘I do,’ Louisa agreed. ‘And I wouldn’t give most men of his advanced age a second glance. But Mark is different. He has a certain magic about him that very few people ever have.’ She paused. ‘It’s not just me, you know.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘It’s not just me that goes weak at the knees at the very thought of him. Nearly all the girls in my class feel the same way. And women who are even older than you go wild for him, too. Prince is the most popular series on television. It has over twenty million viewers.’

  ‘Even so, I still don’t quite see what all the fuss is about,’ Paniatowski confessed.

  ‘Last week, he was due to sign his autobiography at Foyles on Charing Cross Road,’ Louisa said. ‘That’s a book shop – in London.’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘Thank you, my darling, but your explanation was totally unnecessary. I may well be an uncultivated barbarian, as you seem to think, but I’m not quite that uncultivated.’

  Louisa grinned back. ‘Oh really?’ she asked. ‘Anyway, as your carefully honed police officer’s mind will have noted, I said he was due to sign his autobiography.’

  ‘Yes, I did note that,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘It never happened. It couldn’t happen, beca
use the crowd started building up at dawn, and it soon got so big that it was blocking all traffic within half a mile of the bookstore. People said it was like the heyday of the Beatles.’ She grinned again, mischievously this time. ‘Whoever they were. According to the reports, there were all kinds of people there – students, lawyers, real policemen, grannies waving their knickers above their heads—’

  ‘Now I’m sure that’s an exaggeration,’ Paniatowski interrupted.

  ‘Grannies waving their knickers above their heads,’ Louisa repeated firmly. ‘In the end, the police had to contact Mark’s manager and ask if he’d be willing to postpone the book signing until they had enough men available to deal with the crowd.’ She paused. ‘What I don’t see is why a superstar like Mark Cotton would ever think of coming to a dump like Whitebridge.’

  ‘You shouldn’t run down your home town,’ Paniatowski said – rather guiltily, because she’d sometimes caught herself doing just that.

  ‘Quite right, Mum. Sorry, Mum,’ Louisa said contritely. ‘But why is he coming here?’

  ‘I believe he’s going to be in a play,’ Paniatowski said.

  And then it suddenly occurred to her that if Louisa – who she now realized was a big fan of Mark Cotton – didn’t know he was coming to Whitebridge, then possibly she wasn’t meant to know – and neither was anyone else.

  ‘You’ll have to keep quiet about this until there’s been an official announcement,’ she added.

  Louisa nodded her head solemnly.

  ‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘I’m good at keeping secrets. Can we get tickets for the play?’

  ‘I don’t know. If what you say about him is true, they won’t be easy to get hold of.’

  ‘Surely, a respected pillar of the community, a woman with considerable local influence could—’ Louisa began.

  ‘No, she couldn’t,’ Paniatowski interrupted.

  ‘But I have to see the play,’ Louisa protested. ‘We’re studying it for A level.’

  Paniatowski smiled. ‘Five minutes ago you didn’t even know this Cotton feller was coming to Lancashire at all, and yet suddenly you know what play he’s going to be in.’

  ‘We are doing three plays, so there’s a fair chance it will be one of them,’ Louisa said sheepishly.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll find out when the tickets go on sale, and then I’ll ask one of the lads down at the station – as a personal favour – to be there when the box office opens.’

  ‘In uniform?’ Louisa asked hopefully. ‘Because if he’s in uniform—’

  ‘Not in uniform.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Louisa replied with a shrug, ‘I suppose that’s better than nothing.’ Then she smiled. ‘You’re a star, Mum. And it’ll be good for the baby, you know – because a lot of experts believe that it’s brilliant to expose them to culture, even before they’re born.’

  Now why did she have to go and destroy the cosy atmosphere by mentioning the baby, Paniatowski wondered.

  It was the general opinion in the village that after so many years of debilitating illness, death must have come as a welcome release for Margaret Audley. And it was a welcome release for Ruth Audley, too, though you could see from the look of total misery on her face that she didn’t think so herself. The way she’d cared for her mother for nearly ten years had been nothing short of saintly. But it had taken its toll – she’d been a young woman when she’d started nursing her, and now she was distinctly middle-aged.

  Her younger sister – that Sarah – was hardly ever seen in the village. She probably helped support her mother and sister financially, and she could well afford that since she was on the television, but there was no substitute for the personal touch, now was there? Still, what could you expect – Sarah had been wild, wilful and overindulged when she was a kid, and there was no reason to think she was any different as an adult.

  The weather had kept quiet for the whole week after Margaret Audley’s death, but on the day of her funeral the skies opened, and, to make matters worse, a frenzied wind began to blow in from the sea. At the graveside, mourners struggled to prevent their umbrellas from turning inside out, and once the vicar had commended the departed soul to God, they had to undertake the messy and potentially dangerous journey back to the path over the quagmire that the churchyard had become.

  It was a relief for Sarah and Ruth to reach the shelter of the funeral car, and yet, because they had not really had time to talk since Sarah’s return, it was also a little awkward.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Sarah asked, finally breaking the silence.

  Ruth shrugged. ‘Well, you know …’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sarah agreed. ‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t arrive until it was all over. The producer asked me if I could put it off for a couple of days – just until we’d got the series in the can – and I said yes. But if I’d known she was dying, then, of course, I would have—’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself,’ Ruth said. ‘If you’d come running every time it looked like Mother was about to breathe her last, you’d never have been away from the place.’

  Sarah knocked on the glass partition with her gloved hand. ‘You can go now,’ she said.

  The driver nodded gravely, and started the engine. He pulled away, and the vehicle made its way slowly down the tree-lined avenue with all the solemnity appropriate to the occasion.

  ‘I know this might not seem like quite the right moment to ask you this,’ Sarah said, ‘but time’s getting short, and I was wondering if you’d like to come to Whitebridge with me.’

  ‘Whitebridge!’ Ruth repeated, incredulously.

  ‘The only reason you said you couldn’t come when you were first asked was because of Mother, and now …’

  Sarah waved her hand helplessly in the air.

  ‘And now, Mother’s dead,’ Ruth supplied.

  ‘Well, yes. So will you come?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But I’d really like you to.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was true. Sarah considered that for someone in her profession, loyalty and affection were weaknesses, but she was prepared to make an exception for Ruth. She really did love her sister, though she was honest enough to admit to herself that when the love sometimes became a little inconvenient, she would not hesitate to put it on hold.

  ‘It’s you I’m thinking of,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m absolutely convinced it would do you good to get away from the house for a while.’

  And besides, she added mentally, Phil McCann almost begged me to try and persuade you – and it would be no bad thing to have him in my debt.

  ‘It’s such a long time since I’ve done anything like that,’ Ruth said, wavering.

  ‘I’ll give you three reasons why you should come with me,’ Sarah said. ‘One: you need to get back in the saddle. Two: it might be good for your career, because the BBC is making a documentary about it. And three: since this was all your idea in the first place, it would be pretty poor form on your part not to turn up.’

  ‘Is that why you’re going to Whitebridge – because it might be good for your career?’ Ruth asked.

  ‘No. I’ll be doing it just for fun.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘You don’t see it as a stepping stone to something else?’

  ‘I don’t need a stepping stone any more.’

  ‘Why? Have you been cast in something good?’

  ‘I’ve been cast in something very juicy indeed!’

  ‘How wonderful! Tell me more!’

  Sarah smiled enigmatically.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she promised.

  She looked out of the window. It had stopped raining and – against all the odds – the sun had come out.

  She turned to her sister again. ‘It’s funny that Mother died when she did, don’t you think?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

&n
bsp; ‘Well, it’s almost as if she chose to die then, so you’d be able to make it to Whitebridge after all. That would have been so like Mother – she never wanted to be any trouble to anyone.’

  TWO

  Monika Paniatowski’s pregnancy had thrown the top floor of Whitebridge police headquarters into a panic. If George Baxter, the chief constable, had been in post at the time, the matter would have been dealt with immediately and decisively. Baxter, who unfairly held Paniatowski partly responsible for his wife’s death, would have fired the DCI immediately, and then fought her reinstatement tooth and nail through the employment tribunals. But Baxter was not there. There were certain concerns over his health – no one had actually said out loud that he had had a nervous breakdown – and he was away on sick leave, which meant that the problem landed on the desk of Tom Pickering.

  Pickering had examined it from all angles. There might be a case for dismissing Paniatowski on the grounds of moral turpitude, but he was only too well aware that there were male officers in his division who had had children with women who were not their wives, and was that really any different from an officer having a child with a man who was not her husband? This was, after all, the 1970s.

  Plus, there were the internal and local politics to consider. Monika Paniatowski had her enemies in the force – what high-ranking officer didn’t? – but she was rather popular with the lower ranks. And the general public – tired of grim, grey chief inspectors – loved her, so while there had been a few anonymous letters calling her a harlot (or worse), most of the people who read the Evening Telegraph, or saw her ever-burgeoning figure when she gave television press conferences, were firmly on her side.

  So, taking it all-in-all, Pickering decided that a man occupying a temporary post – but one which he had some hopes would eventually become permanent – should not make more waves than he absolutely had to.

  Jerry Talbot, who had once been Mark Cotton’s understudy, and Phil McCann, who now had his own leather chair at the bank, were sitting in a pub overlooking the Thames. They had not seen each other for years, and were only meeting now because McCann had requested it.