A Walk With the Dead (19 page)

‘What you're really asking me is if it could have been the same killer, aren't you?

‘Yes.'

‘In each case, the killer had quite large hands, but a lot of men do, and if you were to ask me if DC Crane would have left a similar pattern of bruising if
he'd
choked this girl to death, then I'd have to say yes. And there's not much scope for variation in manual strangulation, so it would be almost impossible for the killer to have left his “signature” on his victim.'

‘I see,' Paniatowski said despondently. ‘Can you at least tell me how long she's been dead?'

‘The body's still warm, so I'd say it's between two and three hours – but again, I'll have a much better idea when I've opened her up.'

Crane felt an unexpected burden of guilt suddenly descend on him. Three hours ago, Liz was just opening a bottle of Bordeaux. Two hours ago, they were having a chat about the jolly times they had had in Oxford. And at some point between those two things, this girl was having the life choked out of her.

It wasn't his fault, he told himself. He couldn't have known. Yet he could not shake the feeling that he was partly responsible – that instead of recapturing his youth, he should have been out looking for this killer.

The ambulance men had arrived, and were carefully lifting the body onto a stretcher.

‘I'd appreciate it if you could get the results of the autopsy to me as quickly as possible, Liz,' Paniatowski said.

Duffy nodded. ‘Understood. I'll work through the night, if that's what's necessary.'

Well, that was his cosy evening buggered, Crane thought.

What in God's name is the matter with me? he asked himself. One second I'm weighed down with guilt, and the next I seem to have lost all perspective on what's actually important.

It was meeting Liz again that had done it, he decided – meeting her again had turned his world upside down.

The ambulance men lifted the stretcher off the ground, and carried it towards the waiting ambulance. Dr Duffy followed them.

Paniatowski turned to Crane. ‘I've got something I have to do right now, but it shouldn't take me more than an hour, and I'll see you all in the Drum,' she said heavily.

‘Are you going to see Bill Horrocks?' Crane guessed.

‘Yes, of course I'm going to see Bill Horrocks,' Paniatowski snapped waspishly. ‘What
else
would you expect me to do?'

‘Would you like me to come with you, boss?' Crane asked.

Paniatowski shook her head. ‘No,' she said. ‘This is something I have to do alone.'

Paniatowski was sitting in the interview room – awaiting what she was almost sure would be a confirmation of her failure – when the door opened and the custody sergeant ushered in William Horrocks.

Horrocks had put on years since that morning. His eyes were hollow, his gait faltering, and had there not been a chair at the table for him to sink down into, he might well have collapsed.

‘You're going to prison, Bill. You do understand that, don't you?' Paniatowski asked.

Horrocks nodded – it was no more than a tiny movement of his head, but even that seemed to take him a great deal of effort.

‘And it won't be like the last time you were sent there,' Paniatowski continued. ‘They won't be opening the gate and letting you out after just three years. It'll be twenty years – maybe more – before you see the light of day again. Do you understand
that
?'

Horrocks nodded again.

‘I need to hear you say it, William,' Paniatowski told him.

‘Yes, I understand,' Horrocks croaked.

‘So tell me again what you did.'

‘I don't want—'

Paniatowski slammed her hand down on the table.

‘Tell me!' she said.

‘I saw the girl in the yellow top in the park . . .'

‘What time was this?'

‘About five o'clock.'

‘And what did you do?'

‘I followed her into the bushes, and I strangled her.'

‘Did she fight back?'

‘A little. But I was much too strong for her.'

‘I can understand you killing her, William,' Paniatowski said. ‘After all, you were only following God's instructions. But did He also tell you to smash her face in so badly that she was almost unrecognizable?'

‘No, He . . .'

‘Then why did you do it?'

‘She . . . she was struggling. I had to do something to stop her struggling.'

‘I thought you said she couldn't really fight back, because you were much too strong for her.'

‘That's true.' Horrocks' brow furrowed as he searched for an answer to the apparent contradiction. ‘I don't know why I did it,' he said, giving up on the task. ‘I . . . I think I must have panicked.'

‘I lied to you just now,' Paniatowski said. ‘Her face was completely unmarked.'

‘Then maybe I've remembered it wrong,' Horrocks said helplessly.

‘You didn't kill her, did you?' Paniatowski demanded.

‘I saw her in the park . . .' Horrocks mumbled.

‘I know you saw her in the park. You wouldn't have known about the yellow top if you hadn't.
But you didn't kill her, did you
?'

‘No,' Horrocks admitted. ‘I didn't kill her. I wanted to. God wanted me to. But she looked so small and helpless that I just couldn't.'

‘So why did you confess? Why did you condemn yourself to twenty years inside?'

‘Because if I hadn't confessed, it would have been admitting to you that I was a coward.'

She'd put that idea in his head, she realized.

If you didn't obey the Lord's command, then you are a coward and a sinner
, she'd said.
There's simply no other way of looking at it
.

‘Why would it matter if I knew you were a coward?' she asked.

‘I thought you'd tell my Thelma,' Horrocks said. ‘And if she knew I was a coward, she'd never come back to me.'

T
here was no invisible cordon around the team's table in the Drum and Monkey that night, but there might as well have been. All the other regular drinkers were giving the table a wide berth, and few – if any – were even glancing in that direction.

‘Is that because they know that if we're going to crack this case we need space,' Paniatowski wondered, noting their behaviour, ‘or are they just steering clear of the lepers?'

She couldn't blame them if it was the latter. Two girls had been killed now, and while there was nothing she could have done about the first murder, she couldn't dismiss the feeling that she should have been able – somehow – to prevent the second.

‘The murderer will have made mistakes when he killed Jill Harris – because murderers always do,' she said aloud. ‘Now he's killed a second time . . .'

‘We don't yet know it was the same man in both cases,' Sergeant Meadows interrupted.

‘Yes, we do,' Paniatowski said firmly.

And so they did, for though it was still possible that there had been two killers, they all accepted – at a gut level – that Jill and the unnamed girl had been killed by the same man.

‘Now he's killed a second time, and he will have made more mistakes,' Paniatowski ploughed on. ‘All we have to do is discover what those mistakes were.'

It all sounded so simple when she put it like that, though none of them thought for a second that it was.

‘Let's start with the obvious question,' Paniatowski said. ‘Is there anything connecting the two girls? Is it at all possible that this second girl was a secret lesbian, too?'

‘It's possible – but very unlikely,' Meadows said.

‘And what makes you reach that conclusion?'

‘The second victim didn't take enough pride in her appearance to have been a lesbian.'

‘Oh, come on now,' Colin Beresford said. ‘I've seen some of the lezzies parading on their Boulevard in their combat trousers and boots, and you can't tell me that . . .'

‘With respect, sir,' Meadows said, in a voice which suggested a marked
lack
of respect, ‘you may have
seen
them, but you haven't really
looked
at them. They sometimes do dress aggressively, and perhaps you personally don't find that particularly attractive – I imagine they'd be pretty horrified if
you
did find it attractive – but their clothes are well cared for. The girl who was found in the park tonight had no pride in anything.'

‘The sergeant's right, sir,' Crane said. ‘If you look at Jill Harris, with her Miss Selfridge's top, and then compare it with the way that this second girl . . .'

‘All right, I get the point,' Beresford interrupted brusquely. ‘And there's no need to look like that, Sergeant Meadows, because I'm a bloody good bobby, even if I do act a bit like a caveman, now and again.'

‘A
bit
like a caveman?' Meadows repeated. ‘Now and again?'

‘That's enough, Sergeant,' Paniatowski said.

‘Sorry, boss,' Meadows said, looking down at the table.

The team was under more pressure than it had ever been before – and the cracks were starting to show, Paniatowski thought.

‘So we're now all agreed the second victim probably wasn't a lesbian, aren't we?' she said.

Meadows nodded, and so did Beresford.

And completely out of the blue, Jack Crane said, ‘This is all my fault.'

‘What's all your fault?' Paniatowski asked.

‘If I hadn't suggested the lesbian connection, the investigation would have gone in an entirely different direction, and we might have arrested the real killer by now.'

‘For God's sake, Crane, grow up!' Beresford said. ‘You're supposed to be a police officer – act like one. You made a mistake, but we all went along with it, so stop snivelling.'

‘And that's quite enough from
you
, Inspector,' Paniatowski said. She turned to Crane. ‘It's not your fault,' she told him. ‘If anybody's to blame, it's me, because I'm in charge, and so I have to shoulder the responsibility. But we're not here to parcel out blame anyway. Our only task is – and always has been – to catch the killer. So there'll be no more backbiting. Is that clear?' She waited for the others to nod, then she continued, ‘So, if the second girl wasn't a lesbian, what
does
connect the two victims?'

‘I know it sounds unlikely, but it's always possible they went to the same school, or had the same friends,' Crane suggested.

‘There's no chance they went to the same school,' Meadows said. ‘I've visited Fairfield High, and I can tell you that the girl who was killed tonight wouldn't have lasted a day there before she was expelled. And as far as having friends in common, do any of us seriously believe that someone who liked neat, pretty, little Jill Harris would also want to make friends with a girl who had a skull tattooed on her thigh?'

No one did.

‘They might just have been murders of opportunity,' Beresford said. ‘Perhaps both girls were simply unlucky enough to have been in the park at the same time as the murderer was.'

‘But why would he
want
to kill them?' Paniatowski asked. ‘He doesn't fit the profile of a sex offender or a psycho – so what
is
driving him?'

The phone rang behind the bar.

‘It's headquarters, Chief Inspector,' the landlord called out. ‘I'll switch the call through to the phone in the corridor, shall I?'

The rest of the team watched as Paniatowski crossed the room and opened the door to the corridor.

‘I'm sorry, Jack, I shouldn't have been so harsh just now,' Beresford said, once the door had swung closed behind her.

‘I'm sorry, too, Inspector,' Meadows said. ‘You may be a caveman, but at least you're
our
caveman – and if we don't pull together on this, we'll all sink without trace.'

‘Especially the boss,' Crane said.

‘Yes, especially her,' Beresford agreed.

The door swung open again, and Paniatowski emerged, looking grim.

‘We may have a lead on the identity of our second victim,' she said, when she reached the table. ‘A woman called in, after seeing the sketch on the news. She says that the girl's name is Maggie Hudson, and that she herself is Maggie's social worker.'

‘And how likely is it that a girl who has her own social worker would know Jill Harris?' Beresford asked.

‘It's not likely at all,' Paniatowski said.

George Baxter was sitting at the desk of his office/bedroom in Dunston Prison. In front of him was a wad of photocopied timesheets which Chief Officer Jefferies had finally – and reluctantly – handed over to him.

It had puzzled him right from the start of his inquiries that not a single officer had been on duty during more than one of the attacks on Jeremy Templar – that seemed statistically unlikely, given the limited number of officers and the limited number of shifts – but now, having spent over an hour studying the timesheets, he thought he had his answer.

What he had found during his examination was a pattern – or rather, he corrected himself, a
non-pattern
. Officer Fellows, for example, had been there when Templar was attacked in the showers, because he'd been on the morning shift. He should also have been there when Templar had been assaulted in the yard, because that incident had occurred during the afternoon shift, and that week Fellows had been
on
the afternoon shift. Yet though he had worked that shift on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and was back on it again on Friday, he had worked the morning shift on Thursday – the day that the attack actually took place.

It was plain what had happened. The sheets had been doctored after the event – probably when the Home Office had ordered an inquiry. It was plain, too,
why
it had been done. Jefferies was spreading the responsibility (or diluting the blame, depending on how you looked at it). And it was the natural instinct of a leader to try and protect his men – Baxter had done the same himself, on some occasions.