Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire Read online

  ‘That’ll be a handful of people, at best,’ Beresford said. ‘Most of the factories and mills have been derelict for years, and since the boot factory closed down, hardly anybody has any reason to be in that vicinity.’

  Which was probably exactly why the killer chose it as a place to dump his victim, Paniatowski thought.

  And that argued at least some local knowledge.

  ‘It’s unlikely there’ll be many possible witnesses, but there might be a few,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen men fishing in that canal – though what they expect to catch is anybody’s guess. Then there are people who use the canal towpath as a short cut. If you can find out who they are, we might be getting somewhere. And I want the motorists who drive across the canal bridge on a regular basis stopped and questioned as well.’

  ‘I’ll get right on to it,’ Beresford said.

  ‘As for you two,’ Paniatowski continued, turning towards Crane and Meadows, ‘there’s bugger all for you to do at the moment.’

  ‘I could always help out with the door-to-door inquiries, boss,’ Jack Crane suggested.

  ‘Yes, you could,’ Paniatowski agreed, ‘but when this investigation really starts moving, I want your mind fresh and your feet clear of blisters – because if we’re not all completely on the ball, we’ll lose this one. And we don’t want that, do we? Not with the chief constable breathing down our necks.’

  The rest of the team nodded, because the chief constable was breathing down their necks – or, more specifically, down DCI Paniatowski’s neck – and they all knew exactly why that was.

  Dr Shastri had been a stunningly beautiful woman when she was younger, Paniatowski reminded herself – and the passing of the years had done little to rob the doctor of her looks. In fact, she seemed hardly to have aged at all – which didn’t seem quite fair when everyone around her was acquiring wrinkles and putting on the pounds.

  ‘You are wondering about the secret of my youth, aren’t you?’ Shastri asked, with a smile.

  ‘No – I don’t need to wonder, because I’ve seen the picture in your attic,’ Paniatowski replied.

  Shastri laughed, and it was like the tinkle of delicate temple bells.

  ‘I am no Dorian Grey,’ she said, ‘and my secret is really very simple – I eat sensibly, drink in extreme moderation, and I do not smoke at all. Would that you yourself, and the rest of your team – or Monika’s Marauders, as I like to call them – followed the same regime.’

  ‘Can we talk about the body now?’ Paniatowski asked, starting to feel slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘Certainly,’ Shastri agreed. ‘Your victim – Madame X – appears to have followed the same philosophy as I have.’

  ‘She wasn’t young and beautiful,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘No, she wasn’t – on the outside,’ Shastri agreed, ‘but her organs are in excellent condition for a woman of her age. I doubt she ever ate a bag of chips or a steak and kidney pie in her entire life – and which of the Marauders can say that? I suspect – though I cannot be sure – that she ate a lot of fish, and cooked with oil, rather than lard. It is what is becoming known as the Mediterranean diet.’

  ‘Are you saying that she originally came from one of the countries on the Mediterranean?’

  ‘It is more than possible. Certainly, her skin seems to have had more exposure to the sun than you would expect from a native of Whitebridge.’

  ‘What else can you tell me about her?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Always so demanding,’ Shastri said. ‘You are quite as bad – in your own way – as Chief Inspector Woodend used to be.’ She paused. ‘How is Mr Woodend, by the way?’

  ‘He’s fine – as happy as a pig in shit,’ Paniatowski said.

  But she had to admit that in the week or so that she and Louisa had stayed with him and Joan, there had been moments when he seemed to be fretting for something – and she had a good idea what that something was.

  ‘To return to the question of your cadaver,’ Shastri said. ‘She was in her mid-sixties, I would estimate. From the condition of her hands, I would say that she had been used to manual labour of some kind. She had no distinguishing marks, nor had she undergone any major operations. Her teeth were in good condition for a woman of her age, but I would say it is a long time since she visited a dentist.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘She was killed by a single – very violent – blow to the back of the head. The murder weapon was very likely a ball-peen hammer or something similar. Death would have been almost instantaneous, and there is no evidence of any other damage of either a physical or a sexual nature.’

  ‘And how long has she been dead?’

  ‘Given that the cold water prevented some of the natural processes of decomposition from taking place, it is difficult to pinpoint it exactly,’ Shastri admitted, ‘but I would say that death occurred approximately three days ago.’

  ‘In other words, she probably went into the water on Wednesday night or Thursday morning.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shastri agreed, ‘and given that most people don’t like disposing of bodies in broad daylight, I would suggest that Wednesday night was more likely.’

  ‘What can you tell me about her clothes?’

  ‘The skirt, blouse and cardigan are all mid-market brands which could have been bought from any of a dozen shops in Whitebridge and from thousands of shops elsewhere. None of them are new. In fact, I would guess they are all at least two years old. The underwear, on the other hand, is brand-new, and I’d say it has never been washed.’

  ‘Is there anything unusual about the underwear?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Shastri replied. ‘It is just as sensible as the rest of her clothes, and quite appropriate to a woman of her age.’

  So did it mean anything that the underwear was new, while the rest of her clothes weren’t? Paniatowski wondered.

  Probably not, she decided.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to know?’ Shastri asked.

  ‘Her address would be nice,’ Paniatowski said, ‘but I don’t suppose even a miracle worker like you can provide me with that.’

  ‘Alas, no,’ Shastri agreed. ‘But I am sure the estimable Inspector Beresford will soon provide you with that information.’

  Yes, she could only pray that he would, Paniatowski thought – because the clock was ticking.

  FIVE

  There was a brilliantly blue sky that Sunday morning, and the winter sun – while not exactly aggressively hot – did at least give the impression that it was prepared to make some effort to warm the town up.

  And slowly but surely, Whitebridge did begin to feel a little less chill. Icicles, hanging from roof guttering, dripped, quivered and then fell; pavements and roads became a little less lethal; and at the scene of the crime – if the crime had, actually, been committed there – a channel of greenish water ran through what had been the middle of Tommy Maddox’s defective skating rink.

  Tommy Maddox had inadvertently handed them a break, Paniatowski thought, as she sat at her desk, smoking her sixth cigarette of the day. If the boy hadn’t been foolhardy enough to try and skate across the frozen canal, the body could have lain there until the ropes finally rotted away, and the lump of decayed meat – hardly recognizable as a human being at all by that time – had been allowed to rise to the surface.

  Yes, that had certainly been a lucky break, but they didn’t seem to have had much luck since. The door-to-door inquiries had turned up nothing positive, and though there’d been a fair number of responses to the newspaper and television reports, these had all proved, on further investigation, to have been filed by the lonely, the loony and the merely confused.

  She was dreading her next meeting with the chief constable. In the old days, those meetings had, on the whole, been very productive, for though they had once been lovers, they had mostly managed to put that fact to one side, and behave like professionals.

  But everything had
changed since his wife’s suicide.

  His wife’s accident, Paniatowski corrected herself – the coroner had ruled it an accident.

  George Baxter blamed himself for his wife’s death, but he also blamed his ex-lover – even though their affair had been long over before he had ever met Jo.

  It wasn’t logical of him, of course, but you couldn’t really blame a man consumed by grief and guilt for not being logical, Paniatowski told herself.

  But whether she understood his situation or not – and she did understand it – it didn’t make those meetings any easier.

  Beresford appeared in the doorway, but it was clear from the expression on his face that he had nothing positive to tell her.

  ‘I’ve managed to scrounge up a few more officers from the other divisions,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to use them to widen the scope of the door-to-door inquiries?’

  ‘Do you really need to ask?’ Paniatowski replied.

  It was impossible for anyone to be invisible in a close-knit and downright nosy town like Whitebridge, she thought, so there would be people who knew the dead woman.

  But maybe some of those people didn’t read the newspapers, watch television, or live in an area that had already been canvassed. Maybe some of them were away on business, or visiting family in another town.

  The victim would be identified eventually, Paniatowski was sure of that. But the problem was, the longer it took, the colder the trail grew.

  At lunchtime the team all came together at their usual table in the Drum and Monkey.

  ‘I’d like to start by hearing your theories on why it’s proving so difficult to identify our victim,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Maybe she’s agoraphobic,’ Beresford suggested. ‘She never left the house, so nobody recognizes her.’

  ‘Surely, there’d be friends and family who’d know who she was,’ Paniatowski argued.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Beresford countered. ‘Agoraphobia is a mental illness, and some people are unenlightened enough to consider mental illness shameful.’

  Like I did, he thought. When my mother’s Alzheimer’s got bad, I was ashamed of her – and it wasn’t her fault.

  ‘Go on,’ Paniatowski encouraged gently, sensing his pain.

  ‘If she was ashamed of it – or if her husband was ashamed – it’s very unlikely she would have had any contact with other people. And perhaps her husband had finally had enough of the strain of it all, and decided to kill her.’

  ‘Another possibility is that she belonged to some strict sect or other religious group which believes that women should never be allowed to leave the house,’ Crane said.

  ‘If that was the case, she’d at least have had contact with other members of the sect,’ Paniatowski pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but she may have done something which so offended the other members that they were complicit in her murder,’ Crane said.

  But it was hard to see how a seemingly harmless old woman could have done something so offensive that it merited her death, Paniatowski thought.

  ‘What do you think, Kate?’ she asked her sergeant.

  ‘The problem with those two theories is that they’re both based on the assumption that no one – or at least very few people – could identify her,’ Meadows said.

  ‘And despite the newspaper reports, the television appeals, and the door-to-door canvassing, no one has identified her,’ Beresford said, in the aggressive–defensive tone he sometimes adopted when he suspected that Meadows was getting at him. ‘So doesn’t that suggest we may be thinking along the right lines?’

  ‘No,’ Meadows countered, ‘because if the killer thought she couldn’t be identified, he wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to hide the body.’

  Whatever direction they went in, they always came back to the same point, Paniatowski thought.

  This was anything but a random killing, and it seemed as if the murderer was convinced that when the body was identified, the motive would be clear – and that once the motive was clear, the man who had that motive would find himself firmly in the spotlight.

  Louisa was eating her afternoon tea at the kitchen table when she heard the key turn in the front door, and looking up at the clock was surprised to discover that it was still not quite half-past five.

  ‘You’re home early, Mum,’ she shouted.

  ‘It’s been a quiet day at the office,’ Paniatowski said from the hallway.

  ‘It’s been a quiet day at the office?’ Louisa repeated with mock-incredulity. ‘How can it have been quiet, Mum, when you’re in the middle of a murder investigation?’

  ‘The truth is that there’s not much I can do, because the case is in the doldrums for the moment,’ Paniatowski admitted, entering the kitchen and sitting down opposite her daughter. ‘What’s that you’re eating?’

  ‘It’s called pan con tomate,’ Louisa said. ‘You get a piece of French bread, cut it down the middle, toast it, pour olive oil over it, and then rub it with sliced tomato. Tía Pilar showed me how to do it.’

  Her Auntie Pilar seemed to have shown her quite a lot in a very short time, Paniatowski thought – and, worryingly, Louisa seemed to have embraced it all very enthusiastically.

  Taking her daughter to Spain had been her idea, she reminded herself, and it had been a good thing – the right thing – to do.

  She became aware that Louisa had said something to her, but she had no idea what it was.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ she said. ‘Could you repeat that?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the sketch, Mum,’ Louisa said.

  ‘What sketch?’

  ‘The one that’s been in all the papers – the one of the dead woman who was fished out of the canal.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be bothering yourself with that kind of thing at your age,’ Paniatowski said, with just a hint of disapproval in her voice.

  ‘If I’m going to be a detective, then it’s never too early to start,’ Louisa countered.

  If I’m going to be a detective, Paniatowski repeated silently.

  When Louisa had first mentioned the idea of joining the police force, she had thought it was no more than a whim – something that would quickly fade away when some more glamorous profession presented itself to her – but it had been over a year now, and the girl still seemed quite determined.

  It’s not that I don’t want her to be a bobby, Paniatowski told herself regularly. It’s flattering, in a way, that she wants to follow in my footsteps. But I could never be a brain surgeon or a famous writer – and I really do believe that Louisa could be either of those things.

  But at least there was some consolation to be drawn from the fact that if Louisa became a police officer, she’d stay in England, rather than following a completely new life in a foreign country.

  Paniatowski felt a wave of shame wash over her. She had always said that all she ever wanted was for Louisa to be happy – and if Louisa could be happier in Spain than she was in England, then that was just fine.

  Honestly it was.

  ‘You’re off picking daisies again, Mum,’ Louisa said.

  ‘You’re right, I was,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘You’re determined to talk about the sketch whatever I say, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I do think it’s quite important,’ Louisa said seriously.

  ‘All right, let’s have it,’ Paniatowski said, lighting up a cigarette and giving in to the inevitable.

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure about it, but I think that I may have met her,’ Louisa said.

  ‘It is only a sketch, you know, Louisa,’ Paniatowski pointed out. ‘It’s meant to be a memory jogger, rather than an accurate portrait.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What normally happens is that people look at the picture and say to themselves, “That’s a bit like Mrs Smith.” And then they think, “Where is Mrs Smith? I haven’t seen her around recently.” And that’s when they contact us. Sometimes it is Mrs Smith, and sometimes it turns out to be someone quite d
ifferent. As I said, it’s only a sketch.’

  ‘Could I see the photograph of her?’ Louisa asked.

  ‘I don’t have a photograph of her,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘She didn’t have a handbag, and since we have no idea where she lives …’

  ‘Ah!’ Louisa interrupted – and it was a very significant ‘ah’ – ‘you don’t know where she lives.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘I really would like to see the photograph, Mum,’ Louisa said insistently.

  ‘I’ve told you, we haven’t got one.’

  ‘Not one of her alive, no,’ Louisa agreed. ‘But you’ll have one – probably several – of her dead.’

  ‘Yes, I do have photographs of the body – but I’ve no intention of showing it to you.’

  ‘You let me see Grandad and Granny, when they died,’ Louisa pointed out. ‘You let me look right down into their coffins – and I was much younger then than I am now.’

  ‘That was entirely different,’ Paniatowski countered. ‘They were your Spanish family, and it was the proper thing to do. You were paying them your respects. This woman, on the other hand, is a murder victim who was in the water for at least three days …’

  ‘Don’t you harbour a secret ambition that I might eventually decide to become a doctor?’ Louisa asked cunningly.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Paniatowski, who thought she’d been very discreet about her flights of fancy.

  ‘Don’t you?’ Louisa persisted.

  ‘I’ve considered the possibility that your thoughts might turn in that direction eventually,’ Paniatowski said, suddenly on the defensive.

  ‘So if I do decide to become a doctor, you’ll have no objection to me cutting up bodies in three years’ time – but you won’t even show me a picture of a dead woman now,’ Louisa said.

  Paniatowski sighed and opened her briefcase. ‘Here you are,’ she said, laying the photograph on the table. ‘And I hope that makes you happy!’

  Louisa examined the picture from one angle, and then from another.

  ‘She’s rather puffed up,’ she said.