Lambs to the Slaughter Read online

  The doctor took hold of the legs, and lifted them, thus rocking the corpse backwards.

  ‘It’s rather macabre, but I have to do it this way,’ he explained. ‘Rigor’s set in, you see.’

  The middle of Len Hopkins’ forehead had been smashed in – but only the middle.

  ‘The way I see it,’ the doctor said, ‘he was sitting there, minding his own business – if you know what I mean – when the door was flung open. Now what would you do in that situation?’

  ‘Try to close the door again?’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘And that would be easy for you to do, being a woman,’ the doctor said. ‘All you’d have to do is stand up and take a couple of paces forward, but if he’d stood up, he’d probably have fallen over – because his trousers would have been round his ankles.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Nothing’s sure in this life, but most men like to get their clothes as far away from the “operations centre” as possible. We’re as careless about performing our bodily functions as we are about most of the other things we do, you see, and certain stains can be very embarrassing.’

  ‘So what do you think he actually did?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘My guess is that he would have lifted his backside slightly and tried to pull the trousers up again, which would have both given him more freedom of movement and done something to alleviate his embarrassment. But all the time he was doing that, he would be looking at the intruder – not that he could have seen much of the man.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘This was the only lighting,’ Taylor said, pointing to a burnt-down candle on a small shelf. ‘It was bright enough for him to see by, but it wouldn’t have cast any light outside the shithouse. In other words, while the candle would have allowed the killer to see him, it wouldn’t work the other way.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  ‘Anyway, even though he couldn’t see, he was probably still looking. And that was a big mistake, because it presented the murderer with a perfect target.’

  The doctor lowered the legs, and the body returned to its former position.

  ‘How many blows were delivered?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘As far as I can tell without slicing the top of his head off, there was just the one.’

  ‘And do you have any idea what type of instrument the murder weapon might have been?’

  ‘Could have been anything with a tapered end,’ the doctor said. ‘But, as it happens, I know for a fact that it wasn’t just anything.’ He turned, and took a few steps towards the wash house. ‘Follow me.’

  Lying against the side of the wash house, almost at the party wall, was a small pickaxe. The pointed end of it was stained with what was probably blood.

  ‘If that’s not what he used for the dirty deed, I’ll eat my own scrotum,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Have you touched it?’ Paniatowski asked.

  The doctor laughed. ‘My scrotum?’

  ‘The pickaxe.’

  ‘I most certainly have not. It’s lying exactly where it was when I first noticed it.’

  Paniatowski studied the pickaxe again. It didn’t look like any she’d seen before.

  ‘It’s a short-handled pick, ma’am,’ PC Mellors explained, seeing the puzzled look on her face. ‘Miners used to use them in seams which were too narrow to swing a normal pickaxe in.’

  ‘But they don’t use them any more?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Mellors said. ‘The brute force days of mining are all but over – it’s nearly all done mechanically now.’

  ‘But the fact that it is a short-handled pick makes it the ideal weapon for murdering somebody in an enclosed space, you see,’ Dr Taylor said.

  It had once been a working tool, Paniatowski thought – from the scars on the wooden haft, there was no doubt about that. On the other hand, the haft itself had been recently polished, and the cord which was looped through the hole at the bottom of it was clean, so someone had been taking care of it since it had been retired from the mine.

  She opened the wash house door, and stepped inside. Hanging on the wall were a spade, a yard brush, a hammer and a saw, and between the hammer and the saw there was a strong hook with nothing on it.

  She returned to the yard.

  ‘Would the assailant have to have been strong to deliver the blow he did?’ she asked the doctor.

  ‘It would certainly have been an advantage, as strength is an advantage in most situations,’ Taylor said, ‘though I suspect that even a comparatively weak man could have done the damage if he’d been angry enough. But again, I won’t know for sure until I’ve taken a closer look inside his noggin.’

  Paniatowski tried to picture the scene in her mind – tried to reconstruct the event which had only been witnessed by two men, one of whom was now dead.

  The killer, pickaxe in hand, flings open the toilet door, and sees an old man with his trousers round his ankles, looking up at him.

  And what is the expression on the old man’s face?

  Is it anger?

  Is it fear?

  He cannot see the man in the doorway, but does he know who he is and why he is there? Does he know, in fact, why he is about to die?

  And what about the killer?

  What is he feeling?

  He was feeling rage, Paniatowski told herself. She could sense that rage, still in the air hours after the murder. She could almost smell it.

  So what happened next?

  The killer swings the pickaxe, and feels it jar as it connects with the middle of the old man’s skull.

  The axe has done its work, it is of no further use to him, yet instead of dropping it then and there, he keeps hold of it as he turns to make his escape.

  And what route does he choose for that escape? Not the alley – which would be the sensible course – but through the house!

  He still has the pickaxe in his hand as he draws level with the wash house.

  Has he always been intending to throw it against the wash house wall?

  No! There would be no point – absolutely no advantage – in doing that.

  So why is it still in his hand?

  It’s still in his hand because he doesn’t realize it’s there!

  He has been grasping it tightly during his murderous attack, and he had been so caught up in his own passion that he has simply forgotten to let go.

  But now, as he reaches the wash house – perhaps four or five seconds after he has taken a life – he finally becomes aware of it.

  And it disgusts him. It horrifies him.

  He flings it away – not caring where it lands!

  He was no cold-blooded murderer, this man, Paniatowski thought. A cold-blooded murderer would not have been so disoriented by the act that he would have forgotten to let go of the murder weapon. He had killed because he felt he must – because there were forces inside him driving him to do it.

  She sensed the rage again, and wondered just what Len Hopkins could have done to engender it.

  SIX

  It had been light for over an hour when Beresford and Crane passed the chipped enamel sign which said, ‘You are now entering Bellingsworth. Please drive carefully’, but because of the heavy grey clouds hanging over the village, it was that dismal sort of light which made even the darkness which preceded it look good.

  Beresford parked at the end of the main street, which was distinguished from all the other streets in the village only by the fact that it contained two or three buildings which were not part of a row of terraced houses.

  ‘You might sometimes catch yourself thinking that Whitebridge is a bit of a dump, but compared to this place, it’s bloody Las Vegas,’ he said sourly, as they climbed out of the car.

  They had only walked a few paces when they reached the Miners’ Institute. The building, like most of the miners who used it, seemed both squat and powerful. It was constructed mainly of large blocks of roughly dressed
stone that must once have been pale – almost golden – but, over the years, had turned deepest industrial black. It had big double doors – which were painted emerald green, and provided the place with its only real splash of colour – and very small windows, which suggested that once they were inside the institute, the miners wanted to leave thoughts of the outside world behind them.

  In front of the institute there was a large free-standing noticeboard, which informed anyone who cared to look at it that – among other things – the next darts’ match was on Thursday, the racing pigeon society would be meeting the day after that in the committee room, Eddie Brown had a second-hand motorcycle (in very good condition) he was willing to sell, and the membership secretary would very much like to remind all members that their yearly subscriptions were due.

  But it was the poster in the centre of the board which drew Beresford and Crane’s attention.

  It was crude, and obviously hastily printed, but its message was more than clear.

  Why we must strike!

  We are fighting for our lives and our industry.

  Voting ‘yes’ on the strike ballot will ensure our victory.

  Come to the public meeting at the Miners’ Institute on

  Monday night, and make your voice heard.

  The poster did not invite comments, but several had been added at the bottom of it anyway.

  ‘Don’t vote yourself out of a job,’ someone had written.

  ‘Smash the capitalist system,’ a second writer had countered.

  And a third had scrawled, somewhat incongruously, ‘Jenny Talbot will do it with anybody.’

  The two detectives carried on up the street, passing a mini-market – which had formerly been two miners’ cottages, and was offering big savings on five-pound bags of potatoes and tins of pineapple chunks – a small post office, an even smaller library (which only opened on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) and what appeared to be the village’s only pub. They looked at the parish church, which was capped with an unambitious spire, at the graveyard beyond it, and at the single-storey brick-built church hall which lay beyond that.

  When they reached the far end of the village, no more than five or six minutes after they had set out, Crane said, ‘They’re worried.’

  ‘Who’s worried?’ Beresford asked.

  ‘The miners who want to have a strike. Since we saw that poster on the noticeboard outside the Miners’ Institute, I’ve counted another fifty-six just like it.’

  ‘I don’t see where you’re going with this,’ Beresford admitted.

  ‘In terms of spreading the news, there was no real need to put up the posters in the first place. This isn’t a big city, it’s a village of no more than a couple of thousand people. And I’m willing to bet that everyone in it knew about the meeting before a single poster was pasted to a single lamp post.’

  ‘Yes, they probably did,’ Colin Beresford agreed. ‘But I’m still not entirely on your wavelength.’

  ‘At the start of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks did exactly the same thing,’ Crane said. ‘They practically inundated St Petersburg – or Petrograd, as it was in those days – with posters.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The point is that it was a small party which was trying to give the impression that it was a big one which was in total control of the situation.’

  ‘You’re saying that if you really are in control of something, there’s no need to make a big song and dance about it,’ Beresford asked.

  ‘Exactly, sir.’ Crane agreed.

  And if you really weren’t in control of things, you might resort to even more desperate measures, Beresford thought – like bumping off your opponents.

  ‘We’d better start thinking about setting up our incident centre, Jack,’ he said. ‘Where – in this vast metropolis – would you choose?’

  ‘There’s only really the Miners’ Institute and the church hall,’ Crane replied, ‘and since our killer may well be a miner himself, using the Institute would be a little bit like setting up camp in the middle of enemy territory.’

  ‘So you’d favour the church hall?’

  ‘Yes, but only by default.’

  ‘We’d better go and find the bloody vicar then, hadn’t we?’ Beresford said.

  Chief Constable George Baxter gazed out of his office window at the sky above Whitebridge, where the weak winter sun was making a valiant – though probably doomed – effort to free itself of the clouds which had been masking it.

  Baxter shifted his gaze onto the man sitting opposite him. The man’s name was Forsyth – or, at least, he said that was what it was. He was probably in his late fifties or early sixties, but his skin was almost as smooth as a baby’s. He was wearing an expensive suit and sporting an expensive manicure. He worked for a government department which he refused to put a name to, and though Baxter knew that Monika Paniatowski had clashed with him three times in the past, this was only the second time that the chief constable himself had had to deal with him.

  ‘Do you always have such dismal weather in this godforsaken part of the country?’ the visitor asked.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Baxter said. ‘It can be a bit depressing at times, but as long as it keeps you poncey southerners out of our hair, we’re more than prepared to put up with it.’

  Forsyth chuckled, though there was no hint of amusement in it.

  ‘Ah, that wonderful dry northern humour,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you how little I’ve missed it.’

  ‘So, if you don’t like the weather and you don’t like the humour, maybe you should just stay away,’ Baxter suggested.

  ‘Believe me, I’d like to,’ Forsyth admitted, ‘but there’s a job up here which needs to be done, and I’m here to do it.’

  ‘And what job might that be?’

  ‘I’m here to compile a report on industrial relations in the north of England, with particular emphasis on the proposed miners’ strike,’ Forsyth said.

  ‘You’re here to do everything you possibly can to prevent that strike from ever happening,’ Baxter translated.

  ‘And what patriotic Englishman would not wish to see it prevented?’ Forsyth asked. ‘If it does go ahead, it will do great damage to our already-struggling economy.’

  Baxter glanced down at his watch. ‘Well, thank you for dropping in, Mr Forsyth, and now – if you’ll excuse me – I’ve got work to do,’ he said.

  But Forsyth showed no signs of leaving.

  ‘It is at pits like the one in Bellingsworth that we stand the best chance of turning the tide,’ he said.

  ‘Bellingsworth!’ Baxter repeated.

  ‘That’s right – the very place to which you have recently dispatched the admirable DCI Paniatowski and her team.’

  ‘Stop playing games,’ Baxter growled.

  ‘Bellingsworth, you see, is not so strongly in the grip of the communist conspiracy as some of the other collieries,’ Forsyth said. ‘There are positive forces at work there, and one of them – an old man called Len Hopkins, who was a very positive force indeed – was, much to my annoyance, murdered last night.’

  ‘So are you saying that he was killed because he opposed the strike?’ Baxter asked.

  ‘You surely don’t expect me to do Monika’s job, as well as my own, do you, Mr Baxter?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘I don’t think he was taken out by some professional assassin, working on Moscow’s instructions, if that’s what you’re wondering. It is far more likely that he was murdered by a local hothead, inspired by the Kremlin, but acting entirely independently of it.’

  ‘If you’re asking me to pull my people off the case, and let yours take over, then you’re wasting your time,’ Baxter told him.

  ‘I’m not asking that at all. I have every confidence that Monika will find the killer, though she may need a little help from me.’

  ‘If I get even a whiff of you sticking your nose into police business, I’ll have you arrested,’ Baxter said.

>   ‘The point you seem to be failing to grasp is that the miners of Bellingsworth – on both sides of the divide – will reach the same conclusion about Hopkins’ death as I have, and at the meeting tonight—’

  ‘What meeting tonight?’

  ‘What meeting!’ Forsyth repeated, with just a hint of contempt in his voice. ‘You fondly imagine you have no need of my help – yet you don’t even know about the meeting in the Miners’ Institute to discuss the strike!’

  ‘I’ve only been on the case for a few hours,’ Baxter said, suddenly feeling rather uncomfortable.

  ‘And I have been studying Bellingsworth for weeks,’ Forsyth countered. ‘In the light of the murder, and based on the intelligence I have received, I expect there to be trouble at the meeting – and if it is allowed to get out of hand, it could seriously impede Monika’s investigation.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In all sorts of ways, not the least of which is that the miners would be less willing to talk to the police after an incident of that nature.’

  He was right, Baxter thought. The bastard was spot on.

  ‘So you’re advising me to send in reinforcements for the meeting, are you?’ he asked.

  Forsyth laughed. ‘Of course not. Sending in hooligans in uniform would only make matters worse. It is for that reason that I have asked the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch – which occasionally runs little errands for us – if he would be so kind as to send a couple of his men up to Bellingsworth.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re really here, is it?’ Baxter asked. ‘You want permission to send your men on to my patch.’

  ‘They are not my men, and I don’t need your permission,’ Forsyth said in a chilling voice. ‘You have no power over me, though I – if I seriously put my mind to it – could probably have you out of your job within a week.’

  ‘Threaten me like that again, and you’ll leave my office head first,’ Baxter said.

  ‘If you did decide to eject me in that manner, I’d have you out of your job in a day,’ Forsyth said, unperturbed. ‘But there’s no real need for antagonism on either side, Chief Constable. My only aim is to ensure that Monika comes out of this investigation covered in glory. I have a great deal of affection for her, you know, and she, for her part, is fond of me . . .’