The Red Herring Page 6

  ‘It’ll be a while before he fancies an egg for his breakfast again,’ Paniatowski said.

  The doctor shook his head in wonder. ‘Wasn’t that a bit unnecessary, Monika?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ Paniatowski conceded. ‘But I find it helps to keep me sane if I can hit back at one of the sniggering bastards occasionally.’

  The wall phone rang. Pierson picked it up, listened for a second, then handed the receiver over to Monika.

  ‘That you, Sarge?’ asked the voice at the other end.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About the car you were lookin’ for? The victim’s black Mini? We’ve found it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the car park of a country pub on the way to Sladebury. The Spinner, it’s called. We’re there now.’

  ‘I’ll be right over,’ Paniatowski said.

  Once he’d been connected to the switchboard at Woolwich Police Station, Bob Rutter identified himself and asked to be put through to the duty inspector. He was told – just as he’d expected to be – that the duty inspector would ring him back, and the call was indeed returned a couple of minutes later.

  ‘So you really are a copper,’ said the caller, who identified himself as DI Cyril Hoskins.

  ‘You get a lot of crank calls being made down your way, do you?’ Rutter asked.

  ‘More than enough. I had a bloke ringing me up last week claiming to be the Pope.’

  ‘Maybe he really was,’ Rutter suggested, grinning.

  ‘Nah,’ Hoskins said dismissively. ‘Not unless His Holiness has acquired a south London accent since the last time I heard him on the telly.’ He paused. ‘Do I detect a bit of a London twang in your dulcet tones?’

  ‘Well spotted,’ Rutter said.

  ‘So what are you doing up there in darkest Lancashire, among all those Northern barbarians?’

  ‘Trying my best to teach them a little civilisation,’ Rutter said.

  ‘And are you having much luck?’

  ‘Not so as you’d notice.’

  Hoskins chuckled. ‘From the ones I’ve met, I’m not at all surprised. So what can I do for you, Bob – it is Bob, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right, Cyril, it is,’ Rutter agreed. ‘The thing is, we’ve had a nasty little murder on our patch, and it seems that, until recently, the victim was living on your manor. I was wondering if you could cut through all the red tape and do us a bit of legwork.’

  ‘We’re always glad to oblige other forces whenever we can,’ Hoskins said cheerfully. ‘I’ll put some of my boys on the job right away. What’s the victim’s name?’

  ‘Verity Beale.’

  ‘And what’s the last address you have for her in Woolwich?’

  ‘Ruskin Road.’

  There was a sudden pause, as if the other man had remembered something which he should have recalled a lot earlier.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Rutter asked.

  ‘Er . . . yes. Sorry,’ Hoskins replied. ‘You did say the victim’s name was Beale, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. Verity Beale.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘I’ve talked to several people who know her by that name, and it’s what’s on her driving licence.’

  ‘Hang on for a minute.’

  There was the sound of the phone being laid down, followed by the noise of several drawers being opened.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Hoskins said, when he came back on to the line a couple of minutes later. ‘Bit of a local emergency came up as we were talking, but it’s been dealt with now. You say this woman’s name is Verity Beale and she lived in Ruskin Road?’

  How many more times does he want me to repeat it, Rutter wondered. But aloud, all he said was, ‘Correct.’

  ‘We’ll look into it, like I said we would,’ Hoskins told him. ‘The only problem is, we’re a bit short-handed at the moment, so I can’t promise you we’ll get on to it right away. Would the day after tomorrow do you?’

  ‘We are investigating a murder here,’ Rutter pointed out, ‘and you know yourself that the more time that’s allowed to lapse, the less chance there is of getting a result.’

  ‘True,’ Hoskins agreed reluctantly, ‘but we are very undermanned, you see. I could probably get you something tomorrow, which is still a lot quicker than if you went through the official channels. Will that do you?’

  ‘It’ll have to, won’t it?’ Rutter said, trying not to sound too ungracious – but without much success.

  Nine

  ‘Irealise that the announcement of this tragic event must have come as a great shock to all of you here,’ the deputy headmaster said.

  He paused for a moment, and ran his index finger across his pencil-thin moustache.

  ‘A great shock,’ he repeated. ‘But as callous as this might sound, I think we must all accept that, even in the face of it, normal life still has to go on.’

  Positioned just behind Hargreaves’s shoulder, Woodend scanned the faces of the audience the deputy head was addressing. All these teachers were strangers to him, and most of them would remain strangers, but there were a few, his instincts told him, whom he would have much more contact with before this case was over. He had already picked out two of them – men who, by their reactions to the news, stood out from the rest of the group.

  One, a thin, gaunt-faced young man, seemed absolutely stricken. The other, slightly older and wearing heavy-framed glasses, had initially adopted the same look of surprise and disbelief as his colleagues, but soon he was glancing nervously down at his watch, as if he had a pressing appointment which was far more important than anything he might hear about the violent death of a woman he had worked with.

  ‘In just over half an hour the bell will ring for the start of afternoon classes,’ the deputy headmaster continued, ‘and once it does, I must ask you to remind yourselves that you have been entrusted with the education of several hundred young minds, and that that must be your first duty and consideration. Are there any questions?’

  One of the teachers raised his hand, almost as if he were back on the pupils’ side of the classroom, and when Hargreaves nodded at him, he said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘You will have noticed Mr Woodend standing just behind me,’ the deputy head said. ‘I have no doubt we will be seeing a great deal of him and his team over the next few days, and I would like you to co-operate fully with the police, while, at the same time, sticking as closely to your normal classroom routine as possible. Any more questions?’ He waited for more hands, and when there were none, he said, ‘In that case, I suggest you spend as normal a lunchtime as is possible under the circumstances.’

  While he’d been addressing it, the staff had been a single entity, with its whole attention focused on the deputy headmaster. Now that entity was shattered, as the teachers broke up into their familiar cliques.

  But not all of them followed a herd instinct, Woodend noted. The teacher with the heavy glasses who had been consulting his watch made straight for the door. And the gaunt man who had seemed consumed with grief at the news of Verity Beale’s death sat alone, his head in his hands.

  Woodend made his way across to the gaunt man. ‘I’m sorry to intrude, Mr . . .?’ he said.

  ‘Barnes,’ the man replied, looking up. ‘Simon Barnes. Do you want to talk to me?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Where should we . . . I mean, there must be somewhere quiet where we can . . .’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Hargreaves would have no objection to us using his office,’ Woodend said gently.

  There were already half a dozen vehicles on the Spinner’s car park when Monika Paniatowski arrived, but seeing two uniformed constables standing there, the owners had all, perhaps wisely, decided to leave their cars as far away from the black Mini as possible.

  Paniatowski herself parked her MGA on the road, and walked over to the two uniformed officers.

  ‘How many of these have arrived since
you got here?’ she asked, indicating the other cars with a backward-pointing thumb.

  One of the constables shrugged. ‘Two?’ he said. ‘Or it may have been three.’

  Paniatowski sighed. ‘No more,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon, Sarge?’

  ‘I don’t want any more cars parking here until either we’ve established that this is a wild goose, or the lab boys have been over the entire area.’

  ‘That won’t be popular,’ the constable said.

  ‘I don’t really give a bugger whether it’s popular or not,’ Paniatowski told him.

  She walked around the front of the Mini. Between the end of the car park and the road was a flower border, which was edged with red bricks partly buried in the soil. She was not the least surprised to see that one of the bricks was missing. This was where it happened, she told herself. If it wasn’t the place where Verity Beale had been murdered, it was certainly where she had been knocked unconscious.

  She turned back to the constables. ‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘To minimise contamination of the scene, I want a clear path – about a yard wide – marked out from the road to the pub door. And I want you to make sure that anybody who comes to the pub sticks to it.’

  ‘How do we mark it out?’ one of the constables asked.

  ‘You could use chalk,’ Paniatowski suggested.

  ‘But we haven’t got any chalk, Sarge. It’s not somethin’ we normally carry with us.’

  Paniatowski sighed again. ‘This is a pub. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And pubs have dartboards. And when you play darts, you need to mark the score up. And what you mark it up with is chalk. So the chances are, the barman will have all the chalk you need.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ the constable admitted.

  ‘You amaze me,’ Paniatowski said. ‘If anybody comes looking for me, I’ll be in the bar, talking to the landlord.’

  She turned and headed for the pub door. The two constables followed her progress with their eyes.

  ‘Nice arse,’ the first one said.

  ‘Nice legs, too,’ the second agreed. ‘But what a ball-buster that woman really is.’

  ‘Aye, she is. That’s probably why she’s a sergeant an’ we’re still constables,’ his partner said.

  Though they were sitting close to each other in the deputy head’s cramped office, the gaunt teacher seemed hardly aware of the big policeman’s presence.

  ‘Was Miss Beale what you might call your girlfriend, Mr Barnes?’ Woodend asked softly.

  The other man looked up. ‘What?’

  ‘I asked you if Miss Beale was your girlfriend.’

  Barnes shook his head emphatically. ‘No. No. She was nothing like that to me.’

  ‘Then what was she to you?’

  ‘She was . . . an ordinary friend. I don’t mean that she was ordinary in herself. In fact, she was very special. What I mean is that––’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Woodend told him. ‘You met her in this school, did you?’

  ‘That’s right. We both teach . . . we both taught . . . history. But that’s not what really brought us together.’

  ‘Go on,’ Woodend said encouragingly.

  ‘I’m a member of the local Baptist church. I don’t know what impression you’ve got of the Baptists – people often do have very odd ideas about us – but the church is a very welcoming place, open to the rich and the poor alike. People travel for miles to worship there. We even have some Americans from the air-force base who––’

  ‘If you don’t mind me sayin’ so, I think that you’re gettin’ a bit off the point, sir.’

  Barnes nodded. ‘Quite right,’ he agreed. ‘I’m always telling the boys to stick to the subject, and there I go myself, off at a complete tangent.’

  ‘It’s not always easy to think clearly when you’re upset,’ Woodend said. ‘You were tellin’ me about you an’ Miss Beale.’

  ‘It must have been the first week of term she came up to me and asked me about the church. She said she hadn’t thought much about religion since well before she went to university, but she was starting to feel an aching void in her life, and she felt that God might fill it for her. Then she asked if she could come to church with me the following Sunday.’

  ‘How did she know you attended the church?’

  ‘She must have overheard colleagues talking about it.’

  ‘An’ why would they have done that?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Other people’s religion isn’t usually a topic for conversation.’

  ‘Mine is. For some of my colleagues, my faith serves as little more than fodder for their humour.’

  ‘Aye, there are always a few ignorant buggers around, wherever you go,’ Woodend said. ‘Was Miss Beale already a Baptist?’

  ‘No, she’d been brought up in the Church of England, but she’d found it hadn’t given her what she needed.’

  ‘Did she find what she needed in the church?’

  ‘She’d only been attending for a few weeks, so it’s difficult to say for certain what effect it was having, but she was starting to get to know some of congregation, and given time . . .’

  ‘Did you see much of her aside from at church?’

  ‘We’d go for a coffee afterwards. Sometimes a group of us would go somewhere for lunch.’

  ‘But on other days? Outside school?’

  ‘She didn’t really have the time. She was working very hard. Giving classes in other institutions.’

  ‘Aye, I’ve heard about that,’ Woodend said. ‘Why was that? Short of money, was she?’

  ‘I don’t think she was doing it for the money. She loved to teach. She loved to impart her knowledge to others.’

  ‘Sounds like she’s a great loss,’ Woodend said.

  ‘That’s exactly what she is,’ Barnes agreed sadly. ‘A great loss.’

  The landlord of the Spinner examined Paniatowski suspiciously. ‘You don’t look like a bobby to me,’ he said.

  Paniatowski gave him what was a pretty fair impersonation of a good-natured grin.

  ‘I know I don’t,’ she said. ‘For a start, my little feet would be lost in size-ten boots. But I’m the Law, all right. I can show you my warrant card if you like?’

  The landlord reluctantly returned the grin. ‘No, I don’t think that will be necessary.’

  ‘Tell me about the Mini,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘People quite often leave their cars here overnight,’ the landlord told her. ‘They realise they’ve had a bit too much to drink, you see, an’ they cadge a lift off one of their mates. But normally when that happens, they ring me up first thing in the mornin’, to tell me they’ve left it an’ ask if it’ll be an inconvenience if it stays here until they’ve got time to pick it up. I was expectin’ the same thing to happen with the Mini, but when it got to eleven, an’ there was still no call, I thought I’d best ring the station.’

  ‘In case it was stolen?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the landlord agreed. ‘I didn’t really think it was, because the woman who drove it here looked very respectable. But it’s always better to be safe than sorry, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re sure it was a woman who drove it here?’

  ‘Absolutely positive. I’d just taken a couple of empty beer crates to the storeroom across the yard, an’ when I was makin’ my way back to the pub, she was just pullin’ in.’

  ‘And you remember when all your customers arrive, do you?’ Paniatowski asked sceptically.

  ‘No, but the reason I remember her is because she has this long red hair. Flamin’ red, it is.’

  ‘Was she alone?’

  ‘There was nobody else in the car with her, if that’s what you mean. But she’d arranged to meet somebody.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘A few minutes later, after she’d gone into the best room an’ I was back behind the bar, a big American car arrived. The moment she saw it pull up, she
ordered a drink for the driver. Bourbon was what she asked for. We don’t get much call for that kind of thing round here.’

  ‘An American car and a glass of bourbon,’ Paniatowski mused. ‘Do you think the man was an American?’

  ‘I’m sure he was. He was wearin’ a sports jacket like I’ve never seen in the shops round here. You know the kind I mean – really flashy. An’ he had an accent which came straight out of Gone with the Wind.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Tall, skinny, short hair. He wasn’t in uniform, but I’d guess from the way he carried himself that he was from the base.’

  ‘How long were the two of them here?’

  ‘They arrived at about a quarter to ten, I’d guess. The Yank left about an hour later.’

  ‘But not the woman?’

  ‘No. She was here until at least half-past––’ The landlord came to abrupt halt. ‘What I mean to say is––’

  ‘It wouldn’t come as any startling revelation to me if I learned you’d been serving after time,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Most country pubs do. Well, they’ve got no choice, have they? They’d never make a living if they didn’t.’

  The landlord nodded gratefully. ‘That’s true enough,’ he admitted. ‘What with all the taxes the government puts on drinks, and havin’ to pay the bar staff a small fortune to keep them––’

  ‘So what time did she leave?’ Paniatowski interrupted.

  ‘As I was sayin’, it must have been at gone half-past eleven. I let her out myself.’

  ‘How many other customers were there in the pub at that time?’ Paniatowski asked.

  The landlord shrugged. ‘Well, you know.’

  ‘I told you, I’m not the least bit interested in doing you for serving drinks after time.’

  ‘There must have been around a dozen customers,’ the landlord admitted. ‘Most of them were regulars.’

  ‘But the pub had been fuller when she arrived?’

  ‘That’s right. We’d had a busy evenin’.’

  ‘How did the redheaded woman and her American friend seem to be getting along?’

  An awkward expression came to the landlord’s face. ‘I . . . er . . . can’t say I really noticed.’

  Paniatowski grinned again. ‘Pull the other leg – it’s got bells on.’