‘The whole essence of the play is contained in that one scene,’ Crane was telling his students. ‘It’s brilliant, and I can’t think of any other writer – living or dead – who could have done it.’ He turned to the girl he’d addressed first. ‘Do you feel I’m deliberately persecuting you, Miss Bains?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ the girl replied, unconvincingly.

  ‘You certainly shouldn’t,’ Crane said softly. ‘Virtually everyone in the hall would have reacted as you did to the text, but there are very few with the strength of character to come through the third degree like you did. I recognized that quality in you – and that’s why I selected you for the verbal battering.’

  Still the same smooth-talking bastard you always were, Jack, Paniatowski thought admiringly.

  ‘Right, that’s it for the day,’ Crane continued. ‘Go away and have sex or get high or do whatever else you do in your free time. And if you get bored, you might even think about reading a book.’

  The students filed out, but Paniatowski stayed where she was. Crane showed no surprise at seeing her there, which meant that even though he’d given no sign of it, he must have spotted her much earlier. She gave herself a mental pat on the back for training him so well.

  ‘Hello, boss,’ he said, as he drew level with her. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘So are you,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘Still not got a glass eye, I notice.’

  Crane grinned. ‘When you reach my age, it helps having a gimmick when you want to pull women,’ he said. ‘The patch gives me a certain air that certain women find intriguing.’ He paused, and looked around him, as if to make sure that they were quite alone. ‘So tell me about the Andrew Lofthouse murder,’ he continued.

  ‘How did you know …?’ Paniatowski began.

  But it was obvious how he knew. If she’d wanted to see him socially, she’d have rung up and made an arrangement. The very fact that she was there in the middle of the day meant she had something she needed to discuss with him, and given their past together, what else could it be but the murder that was currently dominating the newspapers?

  ‘It has to be one of the old team that’s somehow got tangled up in it,’ Crane said, ‘and my guess would be DS Meadows.’

  ‘It’s her,’ Paniatowski confirmed.

  ‘Given the way she is, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later,’ Crane said.

  True enough, Paniatowski agreed silently.

  ‘I’m willing to do all I can to help her, and so is Colin Beresford,’ she said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Who could resist the opportunity to be in their very own Shakespearean tragedy?’ Crane asked.

  Louisa Rutter looked across her desk at DCI Dawson. He wasn’t the man she would have assigned to this murder, she thought, and it was just bad luck that he’d been the one on call when the murder was reported. Still, she was stuck with him, so she supposed she’d better make the best of it.

  ‘I notice you’ve only put one SOCO team on the case, Eric,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Dawson agreed, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is a priority case,’ Louisa told him, ‘which means that you can have whatever resources you need.’ She smiled. ‘Within reason, of course.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Dawson said, returning her smile with only the barest flicker of his own.

  ‘Specifically, it means you can have a couple more SOCO teams on the case, if you think it will help,’ Louisa amplified.

  ‘Masey and Casey are a good team,’ Dawson said.

  ‘I know they are. I’ve worked with them myself, and I’d go so far as to say they’re an excellent team,’ Louisa replied, ‘but it’s a big house, and I would have thought time was of the essence.’

  A look which could almost have been called relief came into DCI Dawson’s eyes.

  ‘If you don’t have confidence in me or my judgement, then I’m more than willing to withdraw from the case, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Louisa assured him hastily. ‘You’re the man on the spot, and if you say that one team is enough, then I’ll take your word for it.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No, ma’am, that’s it,’ Dawson said.

  ‘Then thank you for your time, and if you have any problems, please feel free to contact me immediately,’ Louisa said.

  Dawson stood up. ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  When he’d gone, Louisa did her best to make some sense out of what had just happened.

  Dawson knew as well as she did that it would benefit the case to have more Scene of Crime officers on the job, so why had he resisted her attempt to assign him some?

  Maybe the SOCOs weren’t the main issue at all. Maybe they were only an excuse – a mechanism – which he was using to get himself thrown off the investigation. But why would any DCI want that to happen?

  She was tempted to remove him from the case, but unless she could prove he had been guilty of gross negligence, that would reflect very badly on her.

  She felt as if she were caught in a tunnel, and though she didn’t want to go forward, it was impossible to turn back.

  Paniatowski looked around the saloon bar of the Drum and Monkey. The tables and chairs had changed since her day, as had some of the advertisements on the wall, but other than that, this was still the Drum she had known for most of her career.

  ‘I used to come here a lot in the old days,’ she said to the waiter, who had probably been in short trousers the last time she’d had a team meeting here.

  ‘Oh, did you?’ replied the boy.

  He had that professional waiter’s tone to his voice which was meant to suggest that he was frightfully interested in what she had to say, and would, under any other circumstances, have been more than willing to listen to her all day, Sadly, however, on this particular day he had a great deal to do.

  ‘I was expecting it to look different,’ she said, not willing to be abandoned quite yet. ‘I thought that by now the brewery would have converted it into a theme pub – something like a mock coaching house or a Wild West saloon.’

  ‘They don’t want to spend any money on the place,’ the waiter told her. ‘There’s not much point if it’s going to be demolished.’

  ‘Demolished!’ she repeated, surprised at how shocked she was. ‘When is it going to be demolished?’

  The waiter shrugged. ‘This year? Next year? Five years from now? It all depends when the fat cats who own the brewery get a big enough offer from the fat cats who want to build expensive flats. But whatever happens, its fate has been decided, and sooner or later, it’s coming down.’

  The news depressed Paniatowski, though she couldn’t say exactly why, and it was with some relief that she saw Jack Crane walk into the bar.

  Crane looked around him. ‘That was quite a Machiavellian move, boss,’ he said, not without some admiration.

  ‘What was?’ wondered Paniatowski, genuinely mystified.

  ‘Holding the meeting here. I wouldn’t call it emotional blackmail exactly, but it’s certainly cashing in on our natural desire to relive past triumphs.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ Paniatowski said.

  That wasn’t quite true, she now realized. But Jack, for all his brain power and emotional intelligence, had still got the whole thing backwards. She hadn’t done any of this to motivate them – she’d done it in an effort to convince herself that it could still be done.

  It was a little awkward at first, and as Meadows told her story, Paniatowski started to think this had all been a mistake. Then, as they began discussing what lines of investigation the police would probably follow, and how their own lines could run in parallel – thus avoiding the two getting tangled up – she realized that they had started to find their old rhythm, and a little over an hour after the meeting started, they all knew what they had to do.

  ‘Is there anything else before we call it a day?’ Paniatowski asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Meadows said. ‘There are two things that keep nagging away in my brain.’

  ‘And what are they?’

  ‘The first is that someone told Andrew Lofthouse where to find his wife, and I don’t know who that someone is.’

  ‘Lots of people must have known,’ Beresford said.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. None of the staff or clients knew her real name, and since she never left Overcroft House, there was no chance of anybody seeing her on the street.’

  ‘Didn’t the police know where she was?’ Crane asked.

  ‘Yes, they did. I have to register it with them. It’s part of our licensing conditions.’

  ‘Well there you are then,’ Beresford said. ‘We don’t like to think there are bent bobbies, but there always have been and there always will be. It doesn’t even have to be a police officer. A civilian clerk could have got hold of the information.’

  ‘But if he was going to risk his job by telling Lofthouse, he’d expect some kind of reward, wouldn’t he?’ Meadows asked.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘That didn’t happen in this case. Lofthouse told me he found out through an anonymous letter. So we really have two questions in one. Firstly, who found out? And secondly, why did he want Lofthouse to know?’

  They sat in silence for a while, then Paniatowski said, ‘Beats the hell out of me. What’s your other worry, Kate?’

  ‘It’s Lofthouse himself. I just can’t work him out.’

  ‘Is there something in particular that’s bothering you?’

  ‘The whole S&M-wife-beater thing. Some men are into S&M, and some men get off on beating up their wives, but the two simply don’t mix.’

  In the old days, Colin would unthinkingly have jumped in with both feet at this point, Paniatowski thought, and hopefully marriage and fatherhood have made him a little more sensitive.

  Alas, they hadn’t!

  ‘I don’t see what your problem is,’ Beresford said. ‘It seems to me that a man who would get pleasure from kicking the shit out of his wife would also enjoy whipping her.’

  ‘They’re two entirely different things, sir,’ replied Meadows, showing uncharacteristic patience with him. ‘The wife beater doesn’t usually get any pleasure out of the fact – he hits his wife because he’s angry with life. He has to take his frustration out on something, and his wife is both handy and complication-free. Wouldn’t you say that’s true?’

  Beresford thought back to the wife beaters he had come across during his time with the police.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he admitted.

  ‘The sadist is different. He takes pleasure from inflicting pain, but he’s not a psychopath, and it’s usually his intention to bring pleasure to his partner, too. In that way, it’s an act of intimacy – often, even, of love. That’s why it’s incompatible with being a wife beater.’

  ‘Then maybe he’s a fake sadist,’ Beresford suggested. ‘Maybe he only pretended to be, so he could follow you into that club.’

  Meadows shook her head. ‘He’s the genuine article. He’s into both sadism and masochism – as many of us are.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ Beresford persisted.

  ‘I just know,’ Meadows said cagily.

  ‘If you were the one asking the questions, you wouldn’t take that as a satisfactory answer,’ Beresford pointed out.

  ‘Look, this is the world I live in, so you’ll just have to take my word for it,’ Meadows said.

  She sounded angry, Paniatowski thought. But it seemed like the sort of anger that people sometimes used as camouflage or diversion.

  ‘Tell me again what happened when you went back to his house,’ she said.

  Meadows sighed, as if she suddenly tired of the whole situation. ‘He said that if I didn’t do the things he wanted me to do, he would tell my board of governors he’d seen me in the club,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of things are we talking about here?’

  ‘The sort of things Colin would regard as being perverted,’ Meadows said, and the anger had, if anything, gone up a notch. ‘But it really doesn’t matter what they were, does it? The important thing is that I refused to do them.’

  ‘Even if it meant you losing your job?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then …?’

  ‘And then I left.’

  ‘And he was alive when you left him,’ Beresford said.

  ‘What are you saying?’ Meadows hissed. ‘Are you implying that I killed him?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Beresford said hastily. ‘We know you would never do anything like that.’

  But did they?

  Paniatowski was beginning to wonder. Kate Meadows was their colleague and their friend, but they hadn’t seen much of each other during the previous few years, and people changed over time.

  Colin Beresford had changed, for example. He kept his trousers firmly zipped in the presence of any woman but his wife. And he drank nettle beer, for God’s sake! She would never have believed it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

  So what if Kate had changed too? What if her job had become more important to her than another person’s life? What if she had killed Andrew Lofthouse to silence him?

  But if that were the case, why had she asked for help?

  Because what better way to throw a spanner in the works – to lay down a smokescreen – than to alter the equation by bringing the old team into play?

  TWELVE

  When discussing the merits of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church as opposed to the protestant cathedral, it was often pointed out that while St Mary’s, perched atop Woodstock Hill, was closer to God, the cathedral, located in the centre of town, was much more convenient for the bus station.

  Many people assumed that St Mary’s was part of the nineteenth-century gothic revival, but in this they were wrong. It had been built four hundred years earlier, and it had an energy and spirit about it which later imitations somehow failed to capture. It seemed to be striving to touch the heavens, at the same time as it was attempting to entice the heavens down to its level, and it had been Monika Paniatowski’s parish church since the day she’d been told she was pregnant and had rediscovered her lost faith.

  Monika was standing in front of the altar. A statue of the crucified Christ was in her direct line of vision, but she had turned to the left, and was offering her devotions to the long-suffering Virgin Mary.

  She was the only one in the church at that moment, but knew that in around about five minutes, Father Brendon would appear, and head to the vestry, where he kept his late afternoon tipple of Irish whiskey. When he did, she would ask him if they could pop into the interrogation box for a few minutes, and since he was not a man to be enslaved by routine, she was sure he would have no objection.

  She heard the door clank open, and turned around expectantly, but the man walking towards her was not red-headed and middle-aged, with his well-rounded figure shrouded by a cassock. Instead, he was still in his twenties, tall, well-built, and blessed with jet black hair and deep soulful eyes. He was wearing a dark suit, and the only thing that identified him as a priest was the dog collar round his neck.

  He was a very handsome boy – a very handsome man – Paniatowski told herself for perhaps the thousandth time, and she could think of half a dozen girls whose hearts – and hopes for the future – had been shattered when he’d weighed the pull of God against the pull of the world, and decided it was really no contest.

  He walked briskly down the aisle to the place where she was standing, and smiled warmly at her.

  ‘What are you doing here at this time of day?’

  She shrugged, awkwardly. ‘I was just passing by, and I thought I’d drop in,’ she said.

  The priest’s smile broadened. ‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘You were hoping to catch Father Brendan on his Bush Mills run, and talk him into going into the magic box.’

  He called it the magic box, she called it the interrogation box, she thought. Both terms would be frowned on by the church authorities, and yet each, in its own way, described the essence of the confessional.

  ‘Yes, I was going to ask him if he would hear my confession,’ she said, embarrassedly.

  ‘Would you like me to hear your confession?’ he asked.

  ‘Jesus Christ, no!’ she said, before she could stop herself. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ she mumbled. ‘I shouldn’t have …’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he said sternly. ‘As a properly brought up Whitebridge lass, what you should have said, “Eee, by ’ecky thump, I couldn’t go in there with thee, lad”.’

  He was laughing at her, as he always had done, but she didn’t mind that.

  Didn’t mind it! She positively revelled in it, because that was how most people communicated in Central Lancs, and it was important that he should still want to communicate with her, because it showed he still cared.

  ‘Seriously, why don’t you want me to hear your confession?’ he asked.

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’ she asked. ‘It’s because you’re my bloody son!’

  ‘I may be your son out there, but once in here, I’m the father and you’re the child,’ he said. ‘Besides, since I’m only really a conduit between you and God – since what I say to you will be the words He’s putting in my mouth – it shouldn’t matter what relation I was to you. I could be your father, or your uncle, or your husband …’ He paused, and grinned again. ‘No, that last one wouldn’t work, would it?’

  ‘Everything you’ve just said makes perfect sense, but it still seems rather incestuous to me.’

  ‘How about this, then?’ he suggested. ‘We nip round the corner to the café, and over a cup of tea, you tell me what’s worrying you so much that you want to see a priest at this time of day.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Paniatowski agreed.

  The sign over the door said: Sand Witch.

  It was a pleasant, conventional café, with a bell which jangled when you opened the door. The curtains and tablecloths were made of gingham, and sitting under glass on the counter were cakes which ranged from coconut tarts to macaroons.

  There were no other customers, and they chose a table next to the window. In response to the bell, a waitress appeared from the back room. She was a well-groomed woman in her early thirties, and when she saw who her customer was, a wide smile came to her face.

 

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