The Dead Hand of History Read online

  The doctor shook her head. ‘I am trying to put a rein on the vices into which you have led me, Monika,’ she said. ‘And I have to report, in all modesty, that I am being quite successful at it.’

  Paniatowski nodded, lit up a cigarette herself, then said, ‘So what else can you tell me?’

  ‘I am ashamed to admit that that is the full extent of my knowledge at this moment.’

  Paniatowski looked at the palm of the hand, then turned it over and examined the back. It was, she decided, totally unremarkable.

  ‘Where are the clues?’ she demanded.

  ‘What clues?’

  ‘The kind you always seem to get in detective novels. The unusually mounted ring which some intelligent jeweller remembers having sold to a certain Mrs X. The expensive manicure which the detective knows immediately is only available in one exclusive salon.’

  Shastri smiled again. ‘Or the unusual scar which has undoubtedly been caused by a special kind of hook, and would lead you to search for a woman with an interest in deep-sea fishing?’ she suggested.

  ‘Bloody right!’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘I regret there is nothing of that nature. But were you to bring me another hand, I would be able to tell you almost immediately whether it came from the same woman.’

  Paniatowski shivered again. ‘Now there’s a cheerful thought,’ she said.

  THREE

  The car park, which was for the exclusive use of those people having business in the Mid-Lancs Police Headquarters, was located at the back of the building. It was roughly oblong, and it was covered with the sort of tarmac which has a tendency to melt a little in warm weather. It served its mundane function perfectly, and though it was not normally a place in which strong feelings were evoked, there was a definite excitement buzzing through the air of the car park on that morning.

  The feeling was being generated by a group of five men and three women who all worked for either one of the local nightly newspapers or for the BBC local radio station.

  When asked by friends, or members of the general public, about their work, these journalists would invariably say that they gained more real satisfaction from doing their current jobs than they could ever hope to achieve from reporting the news at a national level. They would say it – and some of them would even manage to smile and sound sincere – but they were lying through their teeth.

  The truth was that when they read the bylines of reporters working in London, they found the taste of bile welling up in their mouths. And that when they were forced to cover yet another wedding, christening or Women’s Institute cake-making competition, they yearned to scream out that none of this mattered – that there were real stories out there waiting to be covered.

  And so it was that when one of these real stories actually broke close to home they felt their pulses quicken – because this story just might be the story which would lift them out of the provincial furrow which they had been so painstakingly and grudgingly ploughing for so long, and finally elevate them to the position they rightly deserved.

  All of which explained why, when they spotted the bright red MGA approaching, a collective quiver ran through them.

  ‘Where do you think she’s going to end up parking that flashy motor of hers?’ asked Mike Traynor, who worked for the Lancashire Evening Chronicle, as he surveyed the still-available spaces.

  ‘Now she’s seen us all standing here, she might decide it might be wisest not to stop at all,’ replied Lydia Jenkins, the rising star at BBC Radio Whitebridge. ‘She might just drive out again.’

  Traynor dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. ‘If you think that, Lydia, then you don’t really know our Monika,’ he said.

  Without any noticeable decrease in speed, the MGA swung in a wide and easy arc around the hacks, then, finally slowing down, slid effortlessly into a narrow space some distance from them.

  The reporters, who had all been bunched together until this point, broke ranks and ran – with various degrees of efficiency, speed and grace – towards the newly parked car.

  Monika Paniatowski watched the pack of baying news hounds approach her with an assumed look of mild interest on her face – and a totally unplanned feeling of mild disquiet beginning to simmer in her stomach.

  Though she’d hoped that the press would be kept in blissful ignorance for just a little while longer, it was now plain that they already knew something had happened.

  It was, she supposed, almost inevitable that they would have got a whiff of the fact that something was afoot, given the number of bobbies who’d been involved in the operation on the river bank. But even allowing for that, she was determined that she wouldn’t go into the details of what that something actually was until she was good and ready.

  The reporters finally drew level with her.

  ‘Tell us about the hand!’ Lydia Jenkins screamed as she waved her microphone vaguely in the right direction. ‘Do you know who it belongs to yet, Chief Inspector?’

  The mild disquiet in Paniatowski’s stomach rapidly transformed itself into a bubbling broth.

  ‘The hand?’ she repeated. ‘What hand?’

  The reporters looked first at each other, and then back at her. ‘You’re surely not denying that a hand was found down by the river, are you?’ Mike Traynor asked, incredulously.

  ‘I’m neither denying nor confirming anything,’ Paniatowski said. ‘When I want to issue a statement, you’ll be called to the press room, just as you always were in the past.’

  But she was thinking, God, I sound so stiff – so formal and ill-at-ease. I’m sure Charlie would have handled it better.

  ‘Is it a woman’s hand?’ one of the reporters called out.

  ‘What happened to the rest of her?’ another shrieked.

  ‘As I said, I’ll be issuing a statement later,’ Paniatowski said, trying – and failing – to sound a little more natural.

  ‘Will you be calling on DCI Woodend for help, Chief Inspector?’ a third reporter wondered.

  Great! Monika thought. Bloody great! Will I be calling on Charlie for help? That’s just what I wanted to hear!

  The middle managers were gathered around the large table in Warren Tompkins’ office, and sat in silence – almost holding their collective breath – while Tompkins himself took a leisurely gaze out of the window at the bread-delivery vans parked below.

  Tompkins turned to face the team. He was a heavily built man, but one who knew how to use his excess weight to its best advantage. With his customers – especially the important ones – he was a jovial fat man, a friendly uncle figure who charmed them, and left them with the feeling that he was much more concerned about their interests than he was about his own. With his employees, however, the flab became a mountain of malice which threatened – if they displeased him in any way – to roll over on them and bury their careers.

  ‘Five years ago, I was a sergeant-cook in the army,’ he announced. ‘A sergeant-cook, for Christ’s sake!’

  The middle managers nodded, in a way which they hoped their boss would view as both serious and interested. But it wasn’t an easy trick to pull off, because they had heard this same story countless times before, and they could pretty much have delivered the rest of it themselves.

  ‘And look at me now,’ Tompkins continued. ‘I own this bakery, lock, stock and barrel. It’s a big business by a lot of people’s standards – and a lot of people would say that the sergeant-cook had done very well for himself. But I don’t see it that way at all. For me, it’s only the start.’

  He paused, and the managers all nodded again.

  ‘And how did I build up this big business of mine?’ Tompkins asked.

  The other managers turned towards the dispatches supervisor – whose turn it was to respond – and right on cue, his raised his hand.

  ‘Yes?’ Tompkins said.

  ‘By playing by no rules but your own, sir,’ the dispatches supervisor said dutifully.

  ‘By playing by no rules but my own
,’ Tompkins repeated. ‘And that’s how I want you to play it.’

  (Once, a year earlier, the assistant personnel officer had said, ‘You mean that you want us to play it by our own rules, sir?’ He had intended it as no more than a joke, but when he received his dismissal notice at the end of the week, it had no longer seemed the least bit funny. Since then, everybody had stuck to the script that Tompkins had dictated.)

  ‘I’m not saying you should do anything that might be described as dodgy,’ Tompkins told them. ‘In fact, if I find you cutting corners, you’re for the chop. But I am saying that if you play it right along the straight and narrow, you’ll never meet your quotas – and if that happens, you’re out as well. Have I made myself clear?’

  The managers nodded again.

  ‘Right, you can go,’ Tompkins said curtly.

  The managers rose to their feet, and as they walked towards the door they tried to convey the impression that their eagerness to leave was more related to a desire to return to the work they loved than to an urge to quickly put the maximum distance between themselves and their boss.

  One man, however, remained seated, and seemed perfectly happy to do so. His name was Dick Cutler, and he was in his mid-thirties. He had a bullet-shaped head, and a jagged scar running along his left cheek which was a souvenir of his thuggish youth. His official title within the Tompkins Organization was Assistant Maintenance Manager, but he knew very little about maintenance and a great deal about intimidation. He was, in fact, the company’s attack dog – its hatchet man. He had been with Tompkins from the start, and the organization’s success was due, in no small part, to his efforts.

  Once the rest of the managers had left – the last one closing the door firmly behind him – Tompkins turned his attention to Cutler.

  ‘I wanted to ask you, in general terms, about that thing we were discussing the other day,’ he said.

  ‘You mean the—’ Cutler began.

  ‘I mean the thing,’ Tompkins interrupted.

  ‘Right,’ said Cutler, who did not count either quick-thinking or subtlety among his talents. ‘The thing.’

  ‘Well?’ Tompkins demanded. ‘When’s it going to start?’

  Cutler grinned, and the scar on his cheek puckered. ‘It’s already started,’ he said.

  Though Charlie Woodend had been both her hero and her mentor, Monika Paniatowski had always considered his habit of pacing up and down the office to be slightly over-dramatic. Now, filling his shoes for the first time, she not only understood why he’d done it, but found herself doing exactly the same thing. But what she still didn’t understand was how he’d appeared to have all the space in the world for his agitated perambulations, while she herself seemed to be constantly running the risk of banging into the furniture.

  She tried to clear her mind for more important matters, but all that did was to shift her attention from the desks and filing cabinets and focus it instead on an irritating scratching noise which had been coming from beyond her office door for some time.

  No, not from beyond it, from the actual door itself – about halfway up.

  What was the bloody noise?

  She stopped pacing, and looked out of the window. She had hoped the reporters would already have left the scene, but they were still there, bunched around her car.

  ‘Who tipped them off about the hand, Colin?’ she demanded. ‘Was it the man who found it – the one who was walking the dog?’

  DI Colin Beresford shook his head. ‘He swears he hasn’t talked to anybody – and I believe him.’

  So it had to be somebody on the Force, Paniatowski thought. Somebody, perhaps, who resented her for getting her promotion.

  Well, that certainly narrowed it down!

  The scratching at the door continued.

  ‘There’s not a dog out there, is there?’ Paniatowski asked.

  Colin Beresford grinned. ‘Shouldn’t think so, boss. Not unless it’s a very big dog.’

  Paniatowski lit a cigarette.

  She was smoking too much, she told herself – but there were good reasons for it.

  ‘Why?’ she wondered.

  ‘What do you mean – why?’ Beresford asked. ‘Why did a case like this have to land on your desk on your first day?’

  Paniatowski shook her head. ‘No, not that. Although, now you mention it, God knows I’d have preferred a nice little armed robbery or a cosy domestic murder over a crime which is so sensational – so bloody gothic – that the press have already started watching every move I make.’

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  ‘Why did the killer – if he has actually killed her – cut the woman’s hand off? And even if he had a good reason for doing it – at least, good enough to satisfy the workings of his own twisted mind – why did he then put it in a plastic bag and leave it down by the river?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Beresford admitted. And then he looked a little shamefaced, and added, ‘Sorry, that doesn’t help very much, does it?’

  ‘He could have buried the hand on the moors,’ Paniatowski continued. ‘Or lit a bonfire and burnt it. Or since he was already by the river, he could have simply thrown it into the water. But he didn’t do any of those things, did he? And I’m wondering why.’

  ‘Maybe it was because he wanted the hand to be found?’ Colin Beresford suggested.

  ‘But that just leads us to yet another why,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Why did he want it found?’

  Maybe because he’s playing some sick kind of game with the police, she thought. Or worse – maybe because he’s playing some sick kind of game with me, personally!

  ‘How’s work going with setting up the operations centre?’ she asked her inspector.

  ‘The phones are being installed, we’ve put in requests for detective constables to be drafted in from other areas in the division and the whole thing should be operational within an hour.’

  Paniatowski nodded. ‘Good. And once it is operational, I’d like you to run it yourself, Colin.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d much rather work with you, Mon . . . ma’am,’ Beresford said.

  There was something in both the words themselves, and in their tone, that seemed to strike a raw nerve with Paniatowski.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’

  ‘I’m not an inspector any more – and you’re not a sergeant. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve joined the grown-up world now – so we have to start acting like we’re grown-ups ourselves.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Beresford muttered, looking down at the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry, Colin, I shouldn’t have put it like that,’ Paniatowski said, as a wave of guilt washed over her. ‘What I meant to say was that I need someone I can really trust in the operations centre – and that means you.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Beresford said.

  ‘We’ve been through a lot together, you and me,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Cases we thought we’d never solve. Cases where we’ve put our own jobs on the line, so we could solve them.’

  ‘That’s true, ma’am.’

  ‘So when we’re alone together like this, there’s no need to keep calling me “ma’am” as if you were a trained parrot.’

  ‘Yes, there is – when you think about it,’ Beresford replied firmly. ‘As you just pointed out yourself, we’ve joined the grown-ups’ world now.’

  Paniatowski was on the verge of saying that didn’t matter – that they were still Colin and Monika in the privacy of the office – when she realized that Beresford was right, and it actually did matter.

  ‘We need to run a complete check on any person – on any woman – who’s gone missing in the last few days within a thirty-mile radius of Whitebridge,’ she said crisply.

  ‘It’s already under way, boss,’ Beresford assured her.

  ‘And it’d probably be a smart idea for me to set up a meeting with the chief constable.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Wha
t about a press conference, Colin? How soon do you think I need to hold one?’

  ‘It seems to me that the sooner you do it the better. The pack have already smelled blood and they’re not going to be easy to handle even if you do throw them a few bones – but they’ll be a bloody sight worse if you don’t.’

  ‘All right, set it up for me,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘But before I address them as a group, I think I need to have a few quiet words with just one of them.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘I’ve been wondering about that myself. What I’m looking for is a reporter who’d cheerfully cut his own granny’s throat if he thought it would get him a good story.’

  ‘Then pick one at random,’ Beresford suggested.

  ‘But, at the same time, I’m also looking for one who isn’t quite the fearless news hound that he fondly imagines himself to be. Which of them would you recommend?’

  ‘I’d go for Mike Traynor of the Evening Chronicle,’ Beresford said, without much hesitation.

  Paniatowski nodded. ‘He’s the one I would probably have picked out myself,’ she said. ‘Ask Mr Traynor to come up and see me – but don’t let any of the others see you asking.’

  ‘Now that sounds a bit of a challenge, boss. How am I supposed to manage it?’

  Paniatowski grinned. ‘You’re a bright lad – you’ll think of something,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Beresford agreed, with a slight sigh. ‘Because I’m a bright lad, I probably will.’

  The scratching outside the door continued.

  ‘And on your way down, do you think you could find out what’s causing that bloody irritating noise?’ Paniatowski asked exasperatedly.

  ‘Another challenge!’ Beresford said. ‘You really do work me, Chief Inspector, don’t you?’

  But what he was really saying, Paniatowski thought, was, ‘It’s all right, Monika, we may just have had a few bumpy minutes, but I want you to know that I’m still on your side.’

  ‘Of course I work you,’ she said. ‘In this life, you’re either use or ornament – and you’d make a bloody awful ornament.’

  But that wasn’t true, either, she thought – Beresford was a good-looking lad, and still almost as fresh-faced as when he’d first joined the team as a detective constable.