Dangerous Games Read online

  Paniatowski laughed. ‘A few years ago, when I was on the beat myself, I saw you face down a gang of hooligans who were armed with cut-throat razors and were just thirsting to spill your blood,’ she said. ‘You weren’t scared that day – or, if you were, you didn’t show it. So are you seriously trying to tell me now that you don’t have the bottle to tell a woman that her husband’s probably killed himself?’

  Connor looked down at the ground. ‘Different thing altogether,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve never been very good with women – and if you don’t believe me, just ask my wife.’ He looked up again. ‘I really would appreciate your help, Monika. I’d owe you big time.’

  Paniatowski sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better give me the address, Jack,’ she said, resignedly.

  Conner took a piece of paper out of his pocket with some speed, and handed it over to her before she could change her mind.

  Paniatowski climbed into the MGA, and slipped her key into the ignition. The engine fired first time, but then any engine which had had the amount of love and attention lavished on it that this one had should have shown its gratitude by starting immediately.

  ‘Funny thing, him killing himself like that,’ Sergeant Connor said from the pavement.

  ‘Bloody hilarious,’ Paniatowski replied.

  ‘I mean, I didn’t know the man myself, but he was quite a bit younger than me, and his body looked healthy enough.’

  ‘Except it didn’t have a head,’ Paniatowski pointed out.

  ‘What I’m saying is, everybody has their difficulties in this life, but however deep my own problems have been, I’ve never considered topping myself for a minute, and I don’t suppose you have, either.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve considered it, right enough,’ Paniatowski said, but she had already shifted into gear by then, and it was doubtful if Conner heard her over the roar of the engine.

  Two

  Chief Constable Henry Marlowe mounted the podium, and looked down with a serious expression on his face at the handful of local reporters who were looking back up at him.

  It wasn’t really a very good turn-out, he thought, but he supposed he must make the best of it.

  Marlowe had always liked calling press conferences. They seemed to him to be a way of appearing immensely authoritative, without necessarily knowing very much at all. And, if they were skilfully manipulated, they could be used to convey the impression of being in charge without the necessity of doing any of the tedious work that being in charge usually involved.

  But as much as he’d enjoyed them previously, press conferences had never been more important to him than they were now. His disastrous attempt to become the local member of parliament – and the ignominy of his forced withdrawal from the race – had cost him a great deal of the prestige he’d been carefully building up over the years, and if he was ever to climb back to the lofty heights he had once inhabited, he needed the press on his side.

  Marlowe cleared his throat.

  ‘There are two main reasons I have asked you to attend this briefing at such short notice,’ he said. ‘The first is that I wanted to take the earliest opportunity to scotch all the wild rumours which have been circulating around the town since early this morning.’ He paused. ‘The second is that while those wild rumours are completely untrue, the case may just be bizarre enough to be of interest to the national newspapers, and if anybody is going to file this story with them, I thought it should be the hard-working members of the local press, rather than some flash bastard from London.’

  You shouldn’t have said flash bastard, Henry, he told himself. It doesn’t go with the dignity of your office.

  But then that was how the local reporters thought of London-based journalists, and there was no doubt that they were looking quite pleased at the prospect of earning stringers’ fees from the nationals.

  ‘A headless corpse was removed from the canal early this morning,’ Marlowe continued. ‘The head has since been recovered from the bottom of the canal. The dead man’s name is Terrence Roger Pugh. His decapitation was not, as some of the rumours have suggested, the result of some strange – and no doubt foreign – ritual sacrifice. In fact, it is no more than an unintended consequence of the man’s suicide.’

  ‘So you’ve ruled out all possibility of foul play?’ one of the reporters, whose name was Arthur Williams, asked, somewhat disappointedly.

  Marlowe nodded, seriously. ‘Yes, Arthur, I have.’

  ‘Even before you’ve seen the results of the post mortem?’

  ‘How do you know I’ve not seen the results of the post mortem?’ Marlowe countered.

  ‘Well, have you?’

  Williams was becoming a real nuisance, Marlowe thought, and made a mental note to find some thoroughly justifiable reason to exclude him from future press conferences.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t yet seen the report,’ he admitted. ‘But I’ve had twenty-five years’ experience in this force, Arthur, and – believe me – even in my sleep, I could tell the difference between a suicide and a murder.’

  The rush hour was well under way by the time Paniatowski and her passenger set out on their journey to the police morgue. Ahead of them, commercial vans jostled each other for position, and office workers glanced down at their watches and wondered if the boss would notice if they happened to be a few minutes late.

  Paniatowski, behind the wheel of her MGA, treated all other vehicles on her side of the road with the same disdain that a top charioteer probably displayed to his opponents in the Circus Maximus, and left behind her a trail of drivers with pale faces and hands tightly gripping their steering wheels.

  Her passenger, in contrast to the other drivers, did not even appear to notice this series of near-misses and hair’s-breadth escapes. Mrs Pugh, hunched down in her seat, was totally absorbed in a new and very dark world that Paniatowski had recently introduced her to.

  ‘Why would he kill himself?’ the new widow moaned, for perhaps the tenth time. ‘Why?’

  ‘We still don’t know for sure that it is him,’ Paniatowski said, changing lanes with a speed which wrong-footed the post office van driver, who had already marked out that space for himself.

  ‘But it’s likely to be him, isn’t it?’ Mrs Pugh wailed.

  ‘Yes, it’s likely,’ Paniatowski agreed and hoped that by the time they reached the morgue Sergeant Conner’s team would have found the bloody head at the bottom of the canal, and that Dr Shastri would have temporarily re-united it with the body for the viewing.

  ‘Then why?’ Mrs Pugh asked. ‘Why would my Terry ever go and take his own life?’

  ‘We’ll probably never know for sure,’ Paniatowski said, feeling totally inadequate to deal with the situation.

  ‘Things were going so well for him, you see,’ Mrs Pugh told her. ‘They’d just told him at the factory that he was going to be promoted. The general manager said he really liked Terry’s positive attitude to his work. And we were planning our first holiday abroad. We were going to Spain. To the Costa del Something-or-other. Terry was looking forward to it.’

  Or appeared to be looking forward to it, Paniatowski thought. Or was pretending to be looking forward to it, until he found it too much of a strain to pretend any longer. We’ve all played that game at one time or another.

  ‘Whose idea was this holiday in Spain?’ she asked, mainly as a distraction.

  ‘Oh, it was Terry’s,’ Mrs Pugh said.

  Yes, you can convince yourself of anything, if you really want to, Paniatowski thought. But holidays require planning, and the only planning Terry Pugh seemed to be involved in was planning a way to kill himself.

  ‘I wasn’t keen on it at first,’ Mrs Pugh continued. ‘I’ve never been abroad, you see. I’ve never been further than Blackpool, to be honest. But Terry said all that sunshine would do us good. He said it would give us the strength to deal with the baby when it arrived.’

  Paniatowski, in the midst of another complex manoeuvre, faltered for a split-second a
nd nearly clipped the side of a milk cart with her wing.

  ‘The baby!’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Pugh agreed.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’

  ‘Four months. We’ve been trying for years, and had almost given up hope. Terry was very excited when it finally happened. That’s why I can’t understand why he’d ever think of killing himself.’

  And when you put it like that, neither can I, Paniatowski thought.

  The man pacing up and down outside the phone box on Whitebridge High Street had been christened Reginald Lewis, but had never been quite able to live up to his full name and was always known as Reg. He was wearing the jacket from one suit (brown) and the trousers from another (blue). Both parts of his ensemble had been well past their best when he acquired them, and had suffered from a lack of care and attention since. The rest of his appearance did not exactly inspire confidence either. His hair was long and greasy, his skin had an unwashed look, and there was a five-day growth of beard on his chin. He looked like a tramp – and smelled like a tramp – but tramps were not known for their nervous energy, and as Lewis continued to pace, it was plain that he had plenty of it and to spare.

  The old woman in the phone box – at whom he glared every time his perambulations took him past her – was wearing a thick coat despite the heat, and had a knitted woollen hat on her head which looked as if it might have felt more at home keeping a teapot warm. She had been talking non-stop for over ten minutes, showing no sign of reaching the end of her monologue.

  Lewis felt an almost overwhelming urge to open the phone box door, grab her by her lapels, and fling her out onto the street.

  But that would never do, he told himself – because there would doubtless be some do-gooder around who would feel the need to intervene, and then he would never get his phone call made.

  The old woman was still in full flow. Lewis tapped on the phone box window and then pointed with the index finger of his left hand to his right wrist, where his watch would have been – if he’d owned a watch.

  The woman smiled uncertainly, and mouthed something which could have been, ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  Lewis glared at her, and walked on.

  Up until that morning, he had been handling the situation well, he told himself.

  True, the letter had unnerved him when he’d first read it, he freely admitted that, but he had worked hard at convincing himself that it had been no more than a joke in bad taste – a random stab in the dark by some malicious nutter which had just happened to hit a nerve.

  He couldn’t argue that any longer, could he? However much he might want to, he couldn’t argue that now.

  The old woman finally replaced the receiver back on its cradle and stepped out of the box.

  ‘You want to learn to have some patience, young man,’ she said, looking up at him.

  ‘Piss off!’ Lewis growled.

  The woman looked shocked. ‘I know a policeman,’ she said.

  ‘And I know where you live,’ Lewis lied.

  The old woman scuttled away.

  Lewis grinned. Frightening her did not feel as good as placing his fist right in the centre of her stupid wrinkled old-bag face might have done, but at least it was something.

  The panic hit him again the second he was inside the phone box. He found locating the right loose change in his pocket an almost impossible task. Half-crowns and pennies brushed easily against his fingertips, but though he knew there was a shilling in there somewhere, it kept on eluding him.

  He should have done it earlier, he told himself, as he sweated and fumbled. When he was outside, pacing up and down, he’d had plenty of time to find the right money.

  He almost gasped with relief when he located the shilling. He picked up the phone, dialled the number, and heard a ringing at the other end.

  ‘Brown Brothers’ Furnishings,’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘I want to speak to Mr Bygraves,’ Lewis told her, pushing his shilling into the slot just as the pips started.

  ‘Are you a customer?’ the bloody woman asked.

  ‘No, I’m a friend,’ Lewis said, managing to keep to keep his voice level only by a tremendous effort of will. ‘It’s a personal matter, and I need to speak to him urgently.’

  ‘Hold the line,’ the woman said.

  It could not have been more than a couple of minutes before Lewis heard a male voice say, ‘Tom Bygraves here,’ but even that short wait had seemed like an eternity.

  ‘Have you heard?’ Lewis demanded.

  ‘Who is this?’ Bygraves asked.

  ‘For God’s sake, it’s me!’ Lewis said.

  ‘Reg? Reg Lewis?’

  ‘Yes! Have you heard about Terry Pugh?’

  ‘Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. It said on the wireless news this morning that he was dead.’

  ‘And doesn’t that bother you?’

  Bygraves hesitated for a second, then said, ‘Not really. I haven’t seen him for years. And people die all the time.’

  ‘But he didn’t just die, did he?’ Lewis asked, and now he was almost screaming. ‘He was bloody killed!’

  ‘They said on the wireless that he’d committed suicide.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. And neither do you, Tom. Terry just wasn’t the suicidal type.’

  ‘Not when we knew him, no. But that was quite a while ago, when you think about it, and people do change.’

  ‘Not Terry Pugh.’

  ‘He must have done.’

  There was something in those last four words that made Lewis realise that, of the two of them, Bygraves was probably the more frightened – so frightened, in fact, that he was doing all he could to deny the glaringly obvious reality of the situation.

  And that knowledge, strangely, made Lewis suddenly feel much calmer and much more in control.

  ‘It could be you or me next,’ he said darkly.

  ‘What you’re suggesting is absurd!’ Bygraves said, and now there was clear evidence of hysteria in his tone. ‘This is England, for God’s sake! We don’t have revenge killings here!’

  ‘Did I mention revenge killings?’ Lewis asked cunningly. ‘Did I once use the word “revenge”?’

  ‘No, but if you’re calling me like this …’

  ‘I’m not the only one who got a letter, am I?’ Lewis asked. ‘You’ve had one, too.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Bygraves protested.

  But he did! He definitely did!

  ‘When did it arrive?’ Lewis asked. ‘Mine was about two weeks ago. Did yours come at the same time?’

  There was a longer pause this time, then Bygraves said, ‘I … I did receive an anonymous letter.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘But I just thought it was the work of some crank.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, as well. Or, at least, that’s what I wanted to think. But we have to face facts, don’t we?’

  ‘Sweet Jesus, what are going to do?’ Bygraves asked, and Lewis was almost certain that he was crying now.

  ‘We have to work as a team, like we used to,’ Lewis said. ‘We have to figure out who’s behind this.’

  ‘You don’t think we’ll know the man, do you?’ Bygraves asked, incredulously.

  ‘We might,’ Lewis said weakly.

  He heard the other man take a deep breath, as if he were trying to pull himself together.

  ‘His connection isn’t to us, you bloody fool – it’s to what happened back then,’ Bygraves said. ‘He’d probably never even met Terry Pugh before he killed him. And if he gets us, too … if … if he does to us what he did to Terry, we’ll be dying at the hands of a stranger.’

  Lewis looked around him, wildly. The High Street was busy at that time of day, and any number of people were walking past the booth – shoppers, and office workers on their break; delivery men and sales representatives; school kids nicking off class, and nuns going about their holy business. And though he couldn’t see him, it
was possible that the killer was out there too – watching him, looking for just the right opportunity to make his move.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ he asked. ‘Just sit around and wait for him to get us?’

  ‘They used to say that if a bullet had your name on it, there was nothing you could do,’ Bygraves said fatalistically.

  ‘And what does that mean, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘It means that all any of us can do is pray we’re not the next one on his list. It means that the only hope we have is that he’ll be caught before he works his way round to us.’

  Three

  The sign outside the police morgue said that there was no waiting in the area at any time, but for the moment it was partially hidden by the old Wolseley which had parked right in front of it.

  As the driver of the Wolseley climbed out of his vehicle, it would have been instantly obvious to anyone watching that he was what people in Lancashire would call ‘a big bugger’. In fact, he was tall enough to scrape his head on the inside of the car roof if he wasn’t careful, an occasional occurrence which he blamed – if only half-heartedly – for the thinning of his hair around the crown.

  The rest of the package which made up DCI Charlie Woodend was consistent with his frame. He had a broad face which was more than amply filled by a big nose and a large mouth. It was the sort of face which looked as if it had been carved with tools that were not quite sharp enough to do really delicate work, and were wielded by an artisan who had long ago lost of his enthusiasm for his craft. But, as if to balance this, Woodend had intelligent eyes which were capable of showing great kindness and understanding, as well as great anger and steely determination. He was wearing a hairy sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, and very few people could ever remember him ever wearing anything else. And between his nicotine-stained fingers burned the Capstan Full Strength cigarette that he would have felt almost naked without.

  Woodend slammed the door of the Wolseley, but did not lock it. Nor did he bother to leave a sign on the dashboard announcing that he was a policeman on official business. That was the advantage of owning a car most drivers wouldn’t be seen dead in, he thought – people soon learned that it was yours, and understood that they moved it at their peril.