Final Beat of the Drum, page 18
‘Well, shit!’ he said.
He wondered what to do next. One alternative was to drive up to the house and try to bluff his way out of the situation he’d found himself in.
Another was to …
Actually, he decided, there weren’t any others.
He parked close to the ambulance, and waited for someone to approach him. When someone did, it was not a naive rookie, as he’d hoped, but a street-smart-looking sergeant.
Crane wound down his window. ‘Good evening, sergeant,’ he said.
‘Who are you?’ asked the sergeant, who had obviously decided the usual social niceties were an unnecessary luxury.
‘My name’s Crane,’ Jack said. ‘Dr John Crane.’
‘We don’t need you,’ the sergeant told him. ‘We’ve got our own medics.’
‘Well, in that case, I’ll be on my way,’ Crane said, firing up his engine.
If he could just pull off before it occurred to the sergeant to ask him what he was doing there in the first place, he just might get away with it, he thought.
‘Hello, Jack! What the bloody hell are you doing here?’ asked a cheery voice from over the sergeant’s left shoulder.
The sergeant turned, and Crane saw PC Tony Baker standing there.
Baker was a nice enough feller, Crane thought, but if you put his brain on one end of a seesaw and a field mouse’s brain on the other end, it would be Baker’s end which stayed in the air.
‘Do you know this man, Baker?’ the sergeant demanded.
‘Yes, sarge, he used to be one of us, but now he has a much cushier life teaching English at the university.’
‘I thought you said you were a doctor,’ the sergeant said.
‘I am,’ Crane confirmed, ‘but not the medical kind.’
‘So what have you got to do with our Hanging Man, Jack?’ Baker asked, totally oblivious to the tension in the air.
‘Yes,’ the sergeant said. ‘What have you got to do with our Hanging Man, Jack?’
So Hadley was not only dead, he’d been hanged.
Excellent, Crane thought. When things were already head-spinningly complicated, an extra complication was just what you bloody needed!
‘I did have a reason for visiting Mr Hadley, but it couldn’t possibly be connected with the murder,’ Crane said.
Although he was already starting to wonder if that was strictly true.
‘Murder?’ the sergeant repeated. ‘Who said anything about a murder?’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Then I must have guessed.’
‘Well, since you seem to be so good at guessing, guess what I’m going to say next.’
‘Are you going to say I should park somewhere out of the way, and stay there until the investigating officer can find the time to deal with me?’ Crane asked.
The sergeant smiled. ‘Smart lad,’ he said.
DS Boyd and DCI Dawson stood at the far end of Jim Hadley’s entrance hall. The smell wasn’t so bad there, but the ambulance men at the other end of the room, who were currently involved in the process of lowering the corpse to the hall floor, were wearing masks.
‘The man was a well-known security expert, and this place is wired up as tight as a duck’s arse, so how the hell did the killer get in without tripping the alarm?’ Dawson asked.
‘There’s a small control room under the stairs,’ Boyd said. ‘It’s there that the alarms are activated and deactivated. They’re deactivated now, which probably means that they were switched off when the killer came in.’
‘There’s no chance they could have been turned off from outside the house, is there?’ Dawson asked.
‘There wouldn’t be much point in alarms you could do that to, now would there?’ Boyd asked.
‘So Hadley deactivated the alarms himself?’
‘It’s certainly looking that way,’ Boyd said. ‘There’s no doubt it was the same killer in both cases, is there, sir?’ he asked, shifting gear.
‘None at all,’ Dawson agreed reluctantly. ‘Unless,’ he added, with a sudden hint of hope in his voice, ‘you think this was a copycat murder.’
Yes, you’d love it to be a copycat murder, wouldn’t you, Boyd thought, because if it was, you could foist this particular investigation off on some other poor bugger.
But aloud, he said, ‘There’s no chance of that, sir. The modus operandi is exactly the same – kill the victim with a blow to the back of the head, strip him naked, then hang him over the banister. The only difference is that this one wasn’t decapitated, and the reason for that is probably that the killer didn’t throw Hadley over the rail as he threw Lofthouse. Instead, he must have lowered him – which would suggest he’d never intended to pull Lofthouse’s head off, and wanted to avoid doing the same with Hadley.’
‘Still, it could have been a copycat,’ Dawson said.
‘It couldn’t,’ Boyd contradicted him. ‘We released the fact that Lofthouse had been killed before he was strung up, but we never specified how. And we didn’t mention that he was naked, or that he’d been washed down with surgical spirit. Well, Hadley is certainly naked, and I’m willing to bet the doc will say he’s been washed down. And then there’s the rope – I’m convinced it will turn out to be the same sort as the rope used on Lofthouse.’
He was right, Dawson thought despairingly – both men had been killed by the same person. And that changed everything, because while he might get away with not solving one murder – especially with Chief Superintendent Towers covering his back – he wouldn’t get away with failing to solve two, even with the Lord God Almighty as his sponsor.
And where did that leave him? It meant he had no choice but to try his best to get a result. He could only pray that Chief Superintendent Towers would see it that way, too.
‘We need to find out what connects the two victims, and what it was that they both did – or both knew – that would make our killer want to see them dead,’ he said. ‘Do you agree, sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Boyd said, clearly knocked off balance by his boss’s sudden attack of professionalism. ‘And since the pattern has been repeated, I’d like to look into the sadomasochistic angle – if you’ve no objections, that is,’ he added, taking advantage of Dawson’s change of heart while it lasted.
‘No, I have no objections,’ Dawson said. ‘In fact, sergeant, I think it’s a good idea.’
A uniformed sergeant appeared in the doorway. He stepped to one side to allow the ambulance men to wheel the stretcher out of the room, then walked over to the detectives.
‘Excuse me interrupting you, sir,’ he said to Dawson, ‘but we’ve got an ex-bobby outside who turned up twenty minutes ago, and seems unwilling to provide a satisfactory explanation as to why he’s here. Do you want us to take him down to Whitebridge Central, or will you have a word with him on site?’
‘We’ll start with having a word with him here – and see where it goes from there,’ said the newly-decisive DCI Dawson.
The two policemen approached Crane’s car from the rear, so he had no idea they were even there until they opened the back doors and slipped inside.
‘They tell me you’re an ex-bobby,’ DCI Dawson said.
‘I am,’ Crane confirmed.
‘Good, that means we can cut out all the preliminary bullshit and get right to the heart of the matter,’ Dawson said. ‘Do you want to tell us why you’re here?’
‘I’m doing some work for the university sociology department,’ said Crane, who had decided that if he was going to lie through his teeth, he should at least make his story consistent with the one he’d used at Lofthouse’s plant. ‘The department is conducting a survey, and I was going to ask Mr Hadley if he would be willing to cooperate with it.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘Not even vaguely?’
‘I’ve never met him. I don’t even know what he looked like.’
‘The last time we saw him, he looked a mess,’ Dawson said.
‘Was he dead before he was hanged, like the last one was?’ Crane asked.
‘Who says he’d been hung?’ Dawson demanded.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Crane said.
‘You seem very interested in him considering that you say you’d never met him and you didn’t even know that he was dead until one of our men told you. Have I got that last bit right, by the way?’
‘What bit?’
‘That you didn’t know he was dead until one of my men told you.’
‘Yes, you have. After all, I’d never have driven out here if I’d known he was dead, would I?’ Crane said.
Idiot! he rebuked himself.
He should have known that you should never say more than is absolutely necessary when talking to the police – because given half a chance, they’d twist your words and use them against you.
Should have known? He did bloody know, because he’d been in the game himself.
‘You’d never have driven out here if you’d known he was dead,’ mused Dawson, proving Crane’s point. ‘I’m not sure about that. You might have been revisiting the scene of your crime. A lot of killers do.’ He chuckled. ‘Just taking the piss out of you, son, bobby-to-ex-bobby. You’re still quite a long way from becoming our prime suspect. Still,’ he shrugged, ‘you never know how things might turn out.’
There was nothing Crane could say that would make his position any better, so he said nothing at all.
‘Just as a matter of interest, do you happen to have an alibi for last night – say between the hours of eight and two in morning?’ Boyd asked.
‘Yes, I do,’ Crane replied.
There was a silence which lasted for perhaps twenty seconds, then Boyd said, ‘Are you going to tell us what it is?’
‘Of course – as soon as you can give me a good reason why I should,’ Crane replied.
There was another silence, but this one lasted no more than ten seconds before Boyd spoke again.
‘So you say you’re a sociologist.’
‘No, I said I was helping out the sociology department,’ Crane replied.
‘Why would they ask for your help?’
‘The professor thought that since I knew this area well, I might have more luck in getting people to cooperate than she would.’
‘Than she would,’ Dawson said. ‘So the professor’s a woman, is she?’
Yes, lots of women hold important positions now, Crane thought. There’s even a woman chief superintendent in Mid Lancs Police, who, once upon a time, called me Uncle Jack.
But this time, he was wise enough not to put his thoughts into words.
‘If we check with this professor, she’ll confirm what you’ve just told us, will she?’ Boyd asked.
‘Yes, she will,’ Crane said confidently.
Dawson opened the car door, and stepped out.
‘Right, you’re free to go,’ he said, ‘but if you’re planning to take any excursions beyond the Lancashire border, you’d be wise to let me know.’
There were three of them in the Drum and Monkey – the vodka, the fruit juice and the pint of best bitter. The other beer drinker should have been there, too, but something seemed to have delayed Jack Crane.
‘We’d best get started,’ Paniatowski said, glancing at her watch. ‘I’ll kick off.’
She picked up a couple of pages of notes from the table, stared down at them with a look of surprise on her face, then reached into her pocket for her reading glasses.
‘I only used to need specs when my eyes got tired, but it’s all the bloody time now,’ she complained. She ran her eyes up and down the page. ‘I collected most of this information over the phone. It’s far from ideal – face-to-face contact is always much better – but we simply haven’t got the manpower. I talked to the bosses of several companies that Whitebridge Bottling either dealt with or competed with.’ She paused. ‘Actually, that’s not strictly true. Most of the people I talked to were no longer in charge.’
It was not until she had started making the calls that she’d realized just how much out of the loop she actually was – just how many of the current movers and shakers she either didn’t know or had known as very junior members of the organizations they were now heading. So she had found herself having conversations with men whose voices were starting to quaver and whose memories were starting to fade. It was called making the best of the situation, she supposed.
Or maybe it was simply clutching at straws.
‘There was pretty much of a consensus among both the customers and the competitors,’ she said. ‘They all liked Miss Bright – that’s what they mostly called Jane Lofthouse – but there wasn’t the same warmth of feeling for her husband.’
‘Did they think he was a crook?’ Beresford asked.
‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that,’ Paniatowski replied. ‘They didn’t like him and they didn’t entirely trust him. They certainly thought he was capable of pulling a fast one, but it was likely to be an unscrupulous fast one, rather than an illegal one. I didn’t get the impression that any of them – or any of their successors – would want to see Andrew Lofthouse dead. Of course,’ she spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness, ‘you miss the nuances over the phone. It’s a bit like doing brain surgery, when the only tool you have is a garden spade.’
‘I think he is a crook,’ Beresford said. ‘Why else would he be knocking off that solicitor?’ He held up a restraining hand to Meadows. ‘And please don’t give me any of the usual crap about looks only being skin deep, and some women having beautiful souls. I’ve talked to the woman, and there’s nothing beautiful about her soul. I think Lofthouse needed somebody with legal training to break the law, which she did out of gratitude for him slipping her a length now and again.’
‘Elegantly phrased,’ Meadows said dryly. ‘But I’m not saying you’re wrong in this case.’
The door opened, and Crane entered the bar. He looked rough.
‘What’s happened?’ Paniatowski said.
Crane told them about how he got his lead on Hadley, and how he had gone to Hadley’s house and found the police there.
‘Well, it’s looking less likely that Hadley killed Lofthouse,’ Beresford said.
‘And more likely that they were both killed by the same man,’ Crane said.
‘Talk me through that,’ Paniatowski said.
‘They were both prosperous middle-class businessmen, and they both lived alone in large houses,’ Crane said. ‘We don’t know all the details of the murders – the police will be holding some of them back – but we do know they were both hanged in their own homes, probably when they were already dead. It has to be more than a coincidence.’
‘Could the hangings have been part of a sadomasochistic ritual, Kate?’ Paniatowski asked.
‘Sadomasochists do hang each other – or rather they assist their partners to hang themselves – but it’s all carefully controlled, because no one is supposed to die,’ Meadows said. ‘I’ve never heard of hanging people after they’ve died. We’re not into necrophilia.’
‘Maybe it was done to misdirect the police,’ Paniatowski said. ‘Maybe the killer wanted the police to think the murders were connected to sadomasochism, even if they weren’t.’
‘If DCI Dawson does latch on to the S&M angle, you’re going to be in deep shit, Sarge,’ Crane said to Meadows. ‘Because the first thing he’ll do is question the people at the Hellfire Club, and that could well lead them to you. In your situation, I think I’d get rid of the Zelda costume.’
‘I’ve already done that,’ Meadows said.
The expression which suddenly appeared on Meadows’ face both shocked and horrified Paniatowski. She’d seen the same expression – an odd mixture of surprise, guilt and fear – on the faces of many criminals when they realized they’d given too much away – but she’d never seen it on the face of one of her own officers before.
‘When did you get rid of the Zelda stuff?’ she asked.
‘Does it matter?’ Meadows replied, defensively.
‘Yes, it does,’ Paniatowski said firmly. ‘You should know as well as anyone sitting around this table that the details are always important.’
Meadows shrugged. ‘After I left Lofthouse’s place, I drove out to the moors and burned the costume and the wig.’
‘But that was before you knew Lofthouse had been killed,’ Paniatowski said, worriedly.
‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ Meadows replied, and her voice had grown unexpectedly apathetic.
‘So if you didn’t know he was dead, why did you burn it?’
Another shrug. ‘I was sick of it. I wanted it gone.’
‘Do you have an alibi for last night, Sarge, between the hours of eight and two?’ Crane asked.
‘What! Are you accusing me of killing Hadley now?’
‘No, I’m not – but Dawson might.’
‘I was in Overcroft House,’ Meadows said wearily. ‘I went to bed early.’ She looked at each of their faces in turn. ‘I didn’t kill Lofthouse, and I didn’t kill Hadley.’
‘We know you didn’t,’ said Paniatowski, and wished she could sound more certain.
Chief Superintendent Towers was already at the Grapes when Dawson arrived.
This wasn’t going to be easy, Dawson thought – it wasn’t going to be easy at all.
But surely, Towers wouldn’t cause a scene in the pub, with everybody looking.
Would he?
‘Sit down,’ Towers said. He signalled for the waiter, then turned to Dawson. ‘I hear there’s been another murder. Is it connected to the first?’
‘We think so.’
The waiter arrived. ‘My friend’s buying tonight,’ Towers told him. ‘Isn’t that right, Eric?’
‘Er … yes,’ Dawson agreed. ‘We’ll have two glasses of Bell’s.’
‘He means we’ll have two glasses of Glenlivet twelve-year-old malt,’ Towers said. ‘And you’d better make them doubles.’
The waiter went back to the bar.
‘So, you were the one who wanted this meeting,’ Towers said. ‘Shall I guess why you wanted it?’
