Lambs to the Slaughter Page 7

  ‘Books, though,’ Eddie said. ‘A lot of books.’

  Yes, Paniatowski thought, a lot of books.

  So many books crammed on to the bookshelves in the parlour that the shelves were bending under their weight.

  Books in the kitchen, books in the bedroom, and books in the spare bedroom that looked on to the yard.

  Books on Marxism and capitalism, sociology and the history of the working class, a Bible and a set of religious commentaries.

  And pamphlets, too – stacks of them. National Coal Board bulletins, reports issued by the Fabians, briefings from The Economist . . .

  A forest of information!

  Len Hopkins, it appeared, had not only been a voracious reader, but a serious one.

  ‘I’d like you to get an inventory to my sergeant as soon as you can put one together, Eddie,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘No problem,’ the SOCO replied. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I’d also like you to look at the lock on the front door, and see if it’s been tampered with.’

  ‘Locks are Bill’s forte, aren’t they, Bill?’ Eddie said.

  ‘Locks are my forte,’ Bill agreed.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ Paniatowski said.

  She opened the back door, stepped into the yard, and walked all the way down to the lavatory.

  This was where the killer had been standing, she told herself.

  And then he had gone back towards the house – and she knew that for certain, because he had abandoned his weapon by the wash house.

  But why had he gone back to the house? Why risk making his escape down the street, where he might have been spotted from any of the windows of the other houses, when he could have simply disappeared into the back alley, where he would be protected by the high walls?

  ‘If you knew that, Monika, you’d probably be half way to knowing who killed him and why he was killed,’ she told herself.

  She went back into the house, to find lanky Bill squatting down next to the front door, examining the lock.

  ‘Was it forced, Bill?’ she asked.

  ‘It was not,’ the SOCO said. ‘This lock’s never been treated with anything but loving care.’

  ‘Is there a chance it was picked, then?’

  ‘I suppose anything’s possible,’ Bill conceded, ‘but if it was, the feller who did it had more skill than any burglar I’ve ever come across.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be a latch on this door,’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘There isn’t. This is a very old-fashioned lock. If you’re inside, and the door is locked, you’ll not get out without a key.’

  Did the killer have a key? Paniatowski wondered.

  And if he didn’t have one, had he tried to open the door when making his escape, failed to, gone back into the yard, and left via the alley?

  Of course, it was always possible he didn’t need a key at all, because the door hadn’t been locked.

  Her head hurt!

  ‘If you could step aside for a minute, I’d like to go outside and get a breath of coal-filled air,’ she said to the SOCO.

  ‘No sooner said than done,’ Bill replied, springing to his feet like an eager grasshopper.

  Paniatowski stepped out on to the street and saw that Meadows was approaching.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to Susan Danvers’ doctor,’ the sergeant told her. ‘He says that as long as we’re not too rough on her, we can talk to Susan whenever we want to.’

  Colin Beresford had been striding around the village for over half an hour. For the first ten minutes or so, he had been telling himself that all he was doing was following the advice of his old boss ‘Cloggin’-it’ Charlie Woodend, and getting a feel for the place. Then he realized that if anyone had asked him exactly where he’d been – and exactly what he’d seen – he would have had no idea.

  He should never have handled the vicar in the way that he had, he told himself for perhaps the fiftieth time.

  He could see that now.

  And he wouldn’t have handled him that way even a few weeks earlier.

  But somehow, without him even noticing it was happening, he had become a new man. And this new man wasn’t about to take crap from anybody. This new man wanted to be in control of each and every situation.

  This new man was even starting to resent Monika – and to think that he could do a better job than she could.

  It wasn’t true, of course. It wasn’t just that Monika had more experience than he did – she also had a certain flair which he was not sure he would ever be able to emulate.

  Yes, he could see that now, too.

  At this moment.

  But at this moment he was the ‘old’ Colin Beresford, and he didn’t know when the new one would take control of him again.

  There were ways in which he reminded himself of his mother, in the early stages of her Alzheimer’s. He had been shocked when she’d been diagnosed with the disease in her fifties, because he had always thought of it as an old person’s illness, but the doctor had told him that while it was rare to contract it before the age of sixty-five, it did sometimes happen, even to someone in their thirties.

  In their thirties!

  It was worrying! It was definitely worrying!

  Stepping into Susan Danvers’ front parlour was like entering a time warp, Paniatowski thought. The sofa and armchairs were at least thirty years old, and the mirror on the wall – which had a stylized painting of a lady occupying half its surface – had ceased to be in fashion sometime in the thirties. The parlour was clean – scrupulously so – but it seemed cared for, rather than cared about, and if the room was a shrine to the past, then it was a past which was not filled with golden memories.

  Susan herself was in her late fifties. She was short and stocky, and had a broad face and slightly bulbous nose. She looked like a kind woman – a sensitive woman – but it was quite obvious that, even when she was much younger, she had never been a pretty one.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked, after Paniatowski and Meadows had sat down.

  ‘No, thank you, we’re fine,’ Paniatowski replied.

  ‘I could do with one myself, and it’ll not take a minute,’ Susan insisted.

  ‘My sergeant will make it, won’t you, Kate?’ Paniatowski said.

  ‘Be glad to,’ Meadows confirmed.

  Susan shrugged. ‘Well, I’m not really used to being waited on, but if you’re sure . . .’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Then the tea caddy’s on the shelf, the kettle’s on the hob, and the tap’s in the backyard. If you can’t manage . . .’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Meadows said, standing up and walking into the kitchen.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about Len Hopkins,’ Paniatowski asked Susan Danvers.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  Paniatowski smiled. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’

  ‘All right then. I started working for Mr Hopkins a couple of months after his wife and two sons were so tragically taken from him. They died in a car crash, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I did know that. How did you get the job? Did he ask you personally, or did you see an advertisement?’

  ‘Neither. It was my idea.’

  ‘Your idea?’

  Susan shrugged again. ‘Well, it was obvious he had no clue of how to look after himself, wasn’t it. What miner does? It’s their job to hack coal – which is dirty and dangerous work – and to bring home a pay packet every Thursday. And then, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve done all they need to do – and quite right, too.’

  Women’s lib didn’t seem to have made much impact on this village, Paniatowski thought, but then that was hardly surprising, because mining communities were a world of their own – close-knit and traditional.

  ‘Go on,’ she encouraged.

  ‘The pay wasn’t much,’ Susan Danvers continued, ‘but I needed something to keep me occupied after Mother died . . .’

&nbs
p; ‘You looked after your mother, did you?’

  ‘She was an invalid for many years. I’d like to be able to tell you that she bore her suffering with fortitude, but I’ve never been one for sugar-coating the pill, and the truth is that she was the most cantankerous and ungrateful old bugger – and that’s swearing – that you could ever hope to meet. Anyway, she did finally die, and, like I said, I needed something to fill my time. And as you can probably imagine, there aren’t that many opportunities for gainful employment in a place like this.’

  Meadows returned with the tea, and Susan Danvers took a sip.

  ‘Is it all right?’ Meadows asked.

  Susan Danvers nodded. ‘You make a good strong cuppa, lass,’ she said. ‘Are you from a mining family yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Meadows said, although that was not quite true, because her family had once owned a coal mine.

  ‘What exactly was your relationship with Mr Hopkins?’ Paniatowski asked Susan.

  ‘I’ve just told you, I was his cleaner,’ the other woman replied sharply. ‘Well, more like his housekeeper, if truth be told.’

  There was much more to it than that, Paniatowski sensed.

  She patted the pocket where she kept her cigarettes, and felt her fingers drum against the packet of Benson and Hedges.

  ‘Damn, I seem to have left my ciggies in the car,’ she said. ‘Could you go and get them for me, please, Sergeant.’

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ Meadows said, reading the message in her eyes.

  Paniatowski waited until Meadows had closed the front door firmly behind her, then said, ‘I can see that you’re an intelligent woman, Miss Danvers.’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ Susan Danvers said, pretending to take it as a good-natured joke, but clearly decidedly uncomfortable with the comment.

  ‘You are intelligent,’ Paniatowski insisted. ‘You know you are, don’t you?’

  Susan nodded, almost imperceptibly. ‘I was all set to go to the teacher training college when Mother got taken ill,’ she said. ‘Now that was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it – Mother getting ill just as I was about to leave home?’ She sighed, heavily. ‘I think I would have made a good teacher, if I’d been given the chance.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘So we’re agreed that you’re a clever woman, are we?’

  ‘Well, I’m not stupid,’ Susan Danvers conceded.

  ‘Then you’ll understand that what I’m trying to do now is to build up a picture of Mr Hopkins and the life he led – and the reason I’m doing that is because it may help me to find his killer. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you’ll also understand that when I ask you a question, there’s a purpose behind it, and however awkward you might find it to answer that question, I’d appreciate it if you were honest with me.’

  Susan Danvers sighed. ‘Len was a good-looking man when he was younger,’ she said, ‘but, more importantly than that, he was a nice man.’

  ‘So when you started working for him, you hoped it might lead to something else?’ Paniatowski guessed.

  Susan looked at the floor. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘He first took me to bed a couple of years after I started working for him,’ Susan said. She paused. ‘Have you ever read any of those romantic novels about handsome young doctors and beautiful young nurses?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I have,’ Paniatowski admitted.

  ‘A good-looking girl like you wouldn’t need to,’ Susan Danvers told her, with only the merest hint of bitterness. ‘But I’d read hundreds of them by the time I went to work for Len, so though I was still a virgin when we first went upstairs, I thought I had a vague idea of what to expect.’

  Paniatowski smiled. ‘And what were you expecting?’

  ‘A wave of pleasure which would sweep me off my feet – a real river of passion,’ Susan smiled sadly. ‘It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like a tiny, tiny stream. Sex isn’t supposed to be like that, is it? I’m only asking you because, apart from what I did with Len, I don’t have any experience in the matter.’

  A brief memory of her time with Louisa’s father flashed across Paniatowski’s mind.

  ‘No, sex isn’t supposed to be like that,’ she agreed.

  Susan nodded sadly. ‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it was my fault – I was willing to do whatever Len wanted me to do. But I don’t think it was his fault, either. The simple truth is that he missed his wife too much to ever give me and him a real chance.’ She took a handkerchief out of her handbag and dabbed her eyes. ‘Anyway, what started out as a trickle soon dried up completely, but I didn’t mind – or, at least, I told myself that I didn’t mind. He did still need me, you see, and that has to count for something, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it does,’ Paniatowski agreed. ‘What can you tell me about his movements yesterday?’

  ‘Not a great deal,’ Susan admitted. ‘I made him his breakfast, and then I didn’t see him again until . . . until I found him this morning.’

  ‘You didn’t make his tea?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘No,’ Susan said, suddenly evasive.

  ‘Wouldn’t you normally do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t yesterday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  Susan sighed again. ‘He went to see the brass band championship in Accrington.’

  ‘And you didn’t go with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there any particular reason you didn’t go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he normally ask you to go with him to something like that? Wouldn’t he want you to go with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he didn’t ask you this time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She could ask as many questions as she wished to on this particular subject, and the answer would never be much more than a monosyllable, Paniatowski decided.

  ‘Let’s move on to this morning, then,’ she suggested. ‘What exactly happened?’

  Susan took a deep breath. ‘I arrived at his house at my usual time,’ she said. ‘Len is normally . . . Len was . . . normally up by then. When he came downstairs, the first thing he’d do would be to switch on the parlour light and unlock the front door. Then he’d go into the kitchen to wait for me to arrive. But the parlour light wasn’t on this morning, and the door was locked, so I had to use my key.’

  ‘Did you normally enter the house through the front door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought most people round here used the back door.’

  ‘Len didn’t like me walking down the back alley in the dark. I told him nothing was going to happen to me in this village, but he said it was better to be safe than sorry. He . . . he could be quite protective – quite caring – sometimes.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I went through to the kitchen. Len’s cocoa mug was there on the table – he always made himself a cup of cocoa before he went to bed – so I boiled up a kettle and made a pot of tea, and while I was waiting for it to brew, I washed out the mug with the hot water that was left.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There was still no sign of Len, and I didn’t want the tea stewing, so I went to the foot of the stairs, and called out, “Your tea’s ready!” And when he didn’t answer, I started to get worried, because he’s normally such a light sleeper.’

  ‘So you went upstairs?’

  ‘Yes, I did. And that’s when I really started to get worried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His bed didn’t look slept in, and he hadn’t touched his water jug. But it was the fact that his clothes weren’t there that really scared me.’

  ‘Where should they have been?’

  ‘On the chair. When he got undressed at night, he
always folded his clothes – well, sort of folded them, anyway – and left them on one of the bedroom chairs. Then, in the morning, I’d decide what needed washing, and what could be hung back up in the wardrobe. But, you see, the clothes weren’t on the chair.’

  ‘You didn’t think he might simply have put them on again when he got up?’

  ‘No, because I always laid out a fresh set of clothes on the second chair before I went home, and those were the ones he put on in the morning.’ Susan smiled sadly. ‘He always used to say I bullied him, but I think he rather liked it.’

  ‘The fresh set of clothes were still on the second chair, were they?’

  ‘Yes, and that had to mean that he’d never been to bed. So I rushed downstairs again, and went straight down to the lavvy – because that was the only place he could have been.’

  ‘If you thought that was where he was, why didn’t you just wait until he came back into the house?’

  ‘Because I knew by then that something was wrong.’ Susan paused. ‘I screamed when I found him in the lavvy – with his trousers round his ankles – but there was part of me that was already expecting it.’

  And then, as Paniatowski had been anticipating for some time, she burst into tears.

  NINE

  The van from Whitebridge had arrived ten minutes earlier. It had already been unloaded, and now the driver and his mate were positioning the desks in the approved horseshoe pattern, while two engineers from the Post Office were laying the cabling necessary to ensure that each desk had a phone. The room still looked more like a church hall than an incident centre – but it was getting there.

  ‘You’ve done well to talk the vicar round so quickly,’ Beresford told Crane, and then added candidly, ‘I left you with a bit of a bloody mess to deal with, didn’t I, Jack?’

  ‘Yes, that was a clever move on your part, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, what you pulled was the classic good-cop bad-cop routine, wasn’t it? The vicar was so pleased you’d gone that he’d have been prepared to give me pretty much anything I wanted.’

  ‘I don’t need you finding ways to excuse my screw-ups, Jack,’ Beresford said sternly.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Crane replied contritely.

  Beresford smiled. ‘But thanks for trying, anyway.’ He checked his watch. ‘Can I leave you in charge here?’