Final Beat of the Drum, page 24
‘Of course, Auntie Kate.’
‘This building is wired up like Fort Knox. How did you manage to get in without setting off the alarm?’
‘Lizzie let me in through the basement door,’ Philip said.
Meadows and Paniatowski stepped out into the street, and checked the area around Overcroft House. They were looking for vans which seemed innocent enough, but had no real reason for being in that particular street. They were looking for parked cars in which the drivers and passengers seemed so unaware of their presence that they gazed right through them. And they were looking for any unusual movements on the rooftops which might indicate there was a sniper in place.
Only when they had decided that the area was free of armed police did they return to Overcroft House, and quickly bundle Philip into Thomas’s car.
‘Go to one of the smaller police stations. They’re less likely to have immediate access to firearms,’ Paniatowski said urgently. ‘Drive straight there, and as you’re entering the building, make sure they can see you’re a Catholic priest.’
‘Relax, Mum, everything will go beautifully,’ Thomas assured her.
‘I’ll come and see you as soon as they let me,’ she told Philip. ‘And I meant what I said – I really am proud of you.’
As they watched the car disappear round the corner, Paniatowski wiped a tear from her eye.
‘Given their origin, it’s quite remarkable both your sons have turned out so well,’ Kate Meadows said. ‘Do you think that might possibly be because you’ve done something right?’
Paniatowski forced a grin to her face. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘Shall we go and talk to Lizzie now?’
‘Oh yes,’ Meadows agreed. ‘Oh yes indeed.’
Lizzie was still sitting on her bed, and when they entered her room, she looked up guiltily.
‘You know what I’m going to ask you, don’t you, Lizzie?’ Meadows asked sternly.
‘No, I …’ Lizzie replied.
‘Yes, you do,’ Meadows told her. ‘I want to know how you managed to let Philip into the house without setting the alarms off.’
‘I … er … pressed the switch.’
‘What switch?’
‘The one behind the furnace.’
Meadows and Paniatowski exchanged glances, and Meadows’ glance said, ‘It’s news to me that there’s any such switch.’
‘And that switched off the alarms?’ she asked.
‘I think it just stopped the bells going off,’ Lizzie said.
‘And who showed you how to do this?’
‘Nobody.’
‘So you just found the switch yourself, and pressed it to see what would happen?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want you to tell me the truth, Lizzie,’ Meadows said.
The girl began to cry. ‘I can’t, Mrs Maybe. It wouldn’t be fair to …’
‘Fair to who?’ Meadows pressed.
‘Fair to nobody,’ Lizzie said, with sullen defiance.
The switch had been carefully installed behind the boiler. It was not too difficult to access, but unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t even be aware it was there.
‘It wasn’t here last week,’ Meadows said.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I had the boiler serviced. The technician would have noticed. And if you need any more confirmation, the plaster around it still hasn’t properly dried out.’
A wire ran from the switch to the ceiling, and followed the wall around until it reached the control box. When Meadows hit the switch, the green light in the control box went out.
‘Open the door,’ Meadows said.
The door led to the basement steps, and when Paniatowski opened it, nothing happened.
‘Close it again,’ Meadows said.
When Paniatowski had done that, Meadows flicked the switch again, and the green lights came back on.
‘I’m going up to my office,’ Meadows said. ‘Give me time to get there, then throw the switch again. Count to twenty, switch it back on, and come and join me.’
‘Will do,’ Paniatowski agreed.
Meadows was sitting at her desk. There was a deep frown on her face.
‘The monitors all went off for twenty seconds,’ she said. ‘Whoever controls that switch can cut out the security system any time.’
‘And I know why it’s there!’ Paniatowski said.
The switch was the hidden factor – the element that knit together all the other, seemingly unconnected, pieces of the puzzle into one coherent unit.
She was not alone in receiving this revelation, Paniatowski saw, because it was plain from the look on Meadows’ face that she was thinking exactly the same thing.
‘So what’s our next move?’ Meadows asked.
‘We look at the security tape from the day you had your encounter with Andrew Lofthouse,’ Paniatowski said, ‘and I think I already know what we’ll find.’
‘So do I,’ Meadows told her.
TWENTY-TWO
The first thing Louisa Rutter noticed when her mother appeared at her office door was that Monika was holding her old leather briefcase, which she had carried with her on all her investigations, and which Louisa had assumed she’d thrown out years ago.
Then, before she had time to question her mother about the bag, the guilt hit her.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ she said.
She threw her arms around Monika and was shocked to realize something she had known, objectively, all along – that she was now much taller and more substantial than her mother.
How did this happen, she wondered – and felt her guilt intensify.
‘I should never have done it,’ she continued, and she was almost in tears. ‘I should never have made you responsible for bringing Kate in. But I was so angry with you.’
‘It’s all right, don’t worry about it,’ Monika said soothingly. She gently disengaged from Louisa’s grasp, then held out the briefcase. ‘I want you to take a look at what’s inside this.’
Louisa glanced up at the clock. It was ten minutes to twelve.
‘Where’s Kate?’ she asked. ‘Down in Booking?’
‘No,’ Monika replied. ‘She’s in the Drum and Monkey, which is where I’ll be soon.’
She couldn’t allow herself to be angry with her mother again, Louisa thought – not five minutes since she’d apologized for the last time.
‘I gave her until twelve noon,’ she said levelly. ‘I think I was being very reasonable.’
‘Kate’s not coming in,’ Monika said. ‘She has no reason to, because she didn’t kill either Andrew Lofthouse or James Hadley.’
Oh God, please don’t let her be going soft in the head, Louisa thought.
‘I know that Kate’s an old friend, Mum, and I’m very fond of her, too,’ she said softly. ‘But the evidence makes her the prime suspect, and the fact that you don’t want her to be the killer doesn’t mean she isn’t.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Monika said. ‘But the thing is, love, I know who the killer actually is.’ She patted the briefcase. ‘It’s all in here.’
‘Mum …’ Louisa began.
‘Read it for yourself, and you’ll see I’m right,’ Monika said confidently. ‘You can close the case by teatime, Louisa. It won’t be easy, because a lot of the evidence is circumstantial, but I’ve got confidence in you.’ She turned towards the door. ‘If you want me, I’ll be in the Drum. We’ll be having an inquest, just like we did in the old days, but it’s likely to evolve into the mother and father of all piss-ups.’
When the Drum had opened its doors at eleven, Crane and Beresford were already waiting. Meadows had joined them half an hour later, and now the three of them were sitting round a table located approximately where their old table had been.
‘So why didn’t you tell us from the beginning what happened when you went back to Andrew Lofthouse’s home?’ Beresford asked Meadows.
‘I did tell you,’ Meadows said defensively. ‘I told you that I was disgusted with the whole business, and so I left.’
‘But you didn’t give us the details,’ Beresford pressed. ‘And because you refused to do that, it seemed to us as if you were lying.’
‘Leave it, sir,’ Crane said.
But Beresford was not in a mood to ‘leave it’.
‘Don’t you see you only brought suspicion down on yourself?’ he asked.
‘Of course I see,’ Meadows said impatiently. ‘I see it now, and I saw it at the time.’
‘In which case …’
‘In order to protect my secret identity, I was willing to participate in auto-erotic strangulation. If you were in my shoes, don’t you think you’d find that humiliating?’
‘I wouldn’t be in your shoes,’ Beresford said. ‘Besides, I thought that was what you did. I thought you thrived on humiliation.’
‘That humiliation is ritualistic and agreed on. What happened to the sarge was more like rape,’ Crane said. ‘And if you persist in this line of questioning, sir, I shall be obliged to clock you one.’
Beresford stiffened. ‘Do you think you could?’ he demanded. But he almost immediately relaxed again, and a grin came to his face. ‘Yes, you probably could,’ he conceded. ‘Time catches up with all of us in the end.’ He turned to Meadows. ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I’m about as subtle as a rhino with a hangover, but I do care about you, you know.’
‘I know you do,’ Meadows said. She sighed. ‘But now I’ve started, so I might as well tell you the rest. I went out to the moors, when I left Lofthouse’s house. I’m not sure why. I think it was maybe because I had half a mind to kill myself, and the moors seemed like a perfect spot to end the Tragedy of Kate Meadows.’ She smiled. ‘I didn’t kill myself.’
Beresford smiled back. ‘We noticed,’ he said. ‘We’re good at spotting things like that.’
‘But I did kill Zelda,’ Meadows said.
‘You did what?’ Beresford exploded.
‘I burned Zelda’s costume. It was painful for me, but one of us had to die, and she drew the short straw.’
The bar door opened, and Paniatowski walked in.
‘How did it go, boss?’ Crane asked, when she’d sat down.
Paniatowski shrugged. ‘I gave her the file, and left her to read it. There was nothing else I could do.’
‘Do you think she’ll follow through with it?’ Beresford asked.
‘We put together a good case, so she’d be a fool not to,’ Paniatowski said. ‘And none of my children are fools.’
‘So where do you think she’ll begin?’ Meadows asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Paniatowski admitted. ‘But in her shoes, I’d start with the solicitor.’
Louisa smiled across her desk at the stumpy woman in the smart suit.
‘It was very good of you to spare me the time, Ms Maitland Williams,’ she said.
The solicitor shrugged awkwardly. ‘I’m an officer of the court,’ she said. ‘It’s my duty to assist the police in any way I can.’
She was nervous, Louisa thought, but that was only to be expected. Anyone – even a solicitor and part-time magistrate – would feel apprehensive when asked to put in an appearance at the local nick.
Louisa was nervous too, because Maitland Williams was the corner stone of the case she was trying to build, and if the theory that Monika had come up with was wrong – or it was right, but she couldn’t get the solicitor to admit it – then the whole structure was doomed to collapse.
‘You should note that no record – either written or taped – is being made of this conversation,’ she said. ‘In addition, you should know that the conversation is not being held under caution.’
Maitland Williams laughed uneasily. ‘How formal that sounds, Louisa,’ she said. ‘Anyone would think we’d only just met, whereas, in fact, we’re certainly close acquaintances, although I’d prefer to think of you as a friend.’
‘I have no friends when I’m in this office,’ Louisa said. ‘For that reason, I will call you Ms Maitland Williams, and I would like you to call me chief superintendent.’
‘Oh,’ the solicitor said. ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it.’
It was a promising response, Louisa thought, trying not to get too expectant. If the solicitor had laughed her comment off and told her she sounded so stiff she must have a broom handle stuck up her arse – or if she had taken umbrage and left – it would probably have shown a clear conscience, whereas her submissiveness would strongly suggest she had something to hide.
‘You had a relationship with Andrew Lofthouse, didn’t you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I was his company’s solicitor,’ Maitland Williams said.
Louisa clicked her tongue in disapproval. ‘You, more than most people, should appreciate how important it is to be honest with the police.’
‘All right, we had an affair,’ Maitland Williams admitted.
‘An affair that involved numerous visits to the Hellfire Club?’
Maitland Williams looked down at her feet. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you enjoy it there, Cecilia?’ Louisa asked softly.
‘No, I didn’t,’ the other woman confessed. ‘But it was what Andrew wanted to do, and afterwards …’
‘Yes?’
‘Afterwards, he could be so tender.’
It was so pathetic that it was hard not to feel sorry for her, Louisa thought.
‘Let’s move on,’ she said, briskly. ‘I called Companies House about an hour ago, and it seems that Whitebridge Bottling and Distribution is no longer registered in the UK. Why is that?’
‘It’s registered in the Isle of Man now.’
‘Ah, I get it – they’ve made it an offshore company!’ Louisa said. ‘But what I still don’t see is why a company based solely in Whitebridge should need to register offshore.’
‘For a favourable tax position.’
‘In other words, tax evasion,’ Louisa said.
‘No, tax avoidance,’ Maitland Williams said. ‘Talk evasion is illegal, tax avoidance isn’t.’
‘I should imagine changing the registration was a job for the accountants, rather than the solicitor,’ Louisa said. ‘Is that right?’
‘There was a little legal work involved,’ Maitland Williams said cautiously.
‘We’ve questioned the bouncer at the Hellfire Club, and it seems that Andrew stopped taking you there about eight weeks ago. Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ Maitland Williams said, sounding miserable again.
‘And about two weeks later, Jane Lofthouse booked herself into the battered women’s home,’ Louisa mused. ‘So tell me, why did Andrew dump you?’
‘I never said he’d dumped me.’
‘But he did, didn’t he? And you must have been dreading it all along, because you knew he was out of your league. You’d have done anything to hold on to him. So you went to the Hellfire Club to please him, even though you hated it yourself, and when he asked you to do something illegal, you agreed. But it was all a waste of time, wasn’t it, because after you’d done what he wanted – the only thing you had to offer that he was even vaguely interested in – he dropped you.’
This was it, she thought – crunch time. Monika’s theory was that if Lofthouse was prepared to go through the whole courtship ritual, he must have really needed Maitland Williams’ help with something significant – and the most significant thing to have happened in the Whitebridge Bottling and Distribution Company was the transfer of its assets to offshore status.
And that theory had better be right, because if it wasn’t. …
Louisa took a deep breath. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘I never did anything illegal,’ Maitland Williams said, and she was almost in tears.
She was telling the truth, Louisa thought, with a sinking feeling – or if not the truth, something close enough to it to make no bloody difference.
And yet for an innocent woman, Maitland Williams was acting remarkably like a guilty one.
‘Maybe you didn’t do anything illegal, but you certainly did do something that was unethical – and I want to know what it was,’ Louisa said, taking a last, desperate shot in the dark.
‘I didn’t …’ Maitland Williams began.
But the look of panic in her eyes told Louisa that she was finally on the right track. ‘What will the forensic solicitor find when he reviews your work?’ she demanded. ‘What will strike him as unusual?’
‘Nothing. I …’
‘Tell me now, and you may just get away with it – hold out on me and I’ll ruin you,’ Louisa said.
‘The ownership of the company was transferred. Andrew got everything,’ Maitland Williams said, in a rush.
Bingo!
‘And did Jane agree to this?’
‘She … she signed the documents.’
‘But did she know what was in them?’
‘If she wasn’t sure about them, she should have got her solicitor to check them.’
‘She thought you were her solicitor,’ Louisa said angrily.
‘What … what will happen to me?’ Maitland Williams mumbled.
‘Very little,’ Louisa said. ‘I’d like to charge you for the part you played in two murders – because you did play a part, have no doubt about that – but I can’t do it. I’d like to charge you for your part in cheating Jane Lofthouse out of the business she worked so hard to build up, but I can’t do that, either. But I promise you I’ll do whatever I can to see you ostracized from Whitebridge society. Now get the hell out of my office.’
Paniatowski switched off her phone and laid it back on the pub table.
‘Cecilia Maitland Williams has just admitted that she helped Lofthouse grab control of the company,’ she said.
‘The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew that something was wrong,’ Colin Beresford said. ‘As I may have pointed out before, she simply wasn’t attractive enough to be of interest to a man like Andrew Lofthouse. I know you still don’t like it, Kate, but it’s human nature – or male nature, at least. You almost never see a handsome man with a plain woman. And Lofthouse was a very handsome man, wasn’t he, Jack?’
‘Yes, he was,’ Crane agreed. He winked at Meadows. ‘I’d go so far as to say that if he’d been around in your bachelor days, sir, he’d have been real competition for you.’
