Echoes of the Dead (24 page)

‘With respect, Ma'am . . .' Beresford began, in a stilted, wooden voice.

‘Respect is what it's all about,' Paniatowski interrupted him. ‘Either you respect my gut on this matter or you don't. And if you
don't
, then – no hard feelings, Inspector – you're of no use to me in this investigation.' Her face suddenly softened and she smiled sadly at him. ‘Really, Colin, I
do
mean that – no hard feelings at all.'

Damn the woman! Beresford thought angrily. Why did she seem to have so much power over him? Why was it always so easy for her to pull him in the direction in which she wanted him to go?

And then he shrugged, smiled back at her, and said, ‘Well, if it's one of your famous gut feelings, I suppose there's no point in arguing with it, is there? So where do we start?'

‘We start with Walter Brown. He's always said he didn't kill Mottershead – let's find out who he thinks did.'

‘Wouldn't it just be easier to track down Mr X, boss?' Crane asked tentatively. ‘He says he knows who did the killings, and you say you believe him. So if we can just get our hands on him, we'll have the answer to all our questions.'

‘And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride,' Paniatowski said, throwing his earlier comment back at him. ‘Sorry, Jack,' she continued, looking guilty. ‘You're right, of course – he would be able to answer all our questions. The only problem is, as you've already pointed out, he's
anonymous
.'

‘We should still be able to narrow down the number of people it
could have
been,' Crane pointed out.

‘Or we could put someone else on that particular line of inquiry,' Paniatowski replied.

‘Who?' Beresford asked.

‘Who do you think?' Paniatowski replied.

And then she picked up the phone, and dialled a number in Spain which she knew by heart.

TWENTY

I
t was a chill early morning, but Monika Paniatowski's brisk pace, as she walked down Whitebridge High Street, had less to do with the temperature than with the fact that she knew that if she once lost her self-imposed sense of momentum on this case, she would never get it back.

She turned off the main road, and was soon swallowed by a series of lanes which were just wide enough for two horses and carts to pass each other. This was the old part of town, the few remaining blocks of historic Whitebridge which the developers had yet to get their itchy hands on.

Browns' Second-Hand Books was located on Primrose Lane. To its left there was a joke shop – or joke
emporium
, as the faded sign above it proclaimed – which had severed rubber hands, devil masks and itching powder on display in the window. On the other side was a tobacconist's, which had as its display a large – and sun-bleached – cardboard model of a brand of cigarettes which the manufacturers had stopped making years earlier.

The bookshop itself presented a pleasing contrast to the quiet desperation of the two businesses that it was sandwiched between. Its window, unlike theirs, had been cleaned in the recent past, and the books on display had clearly been placed there with care, if not with a great deal of presentational skill.

When Paniatowski entered the shop, a brass bell jangled, and the door to the back room opened to reveal a large man in his late fifties.

He was wearing an old cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, and a pair of trousers which were probably not new at the time of the Queen's Coronation. It was the perfect uniform for a seller of old books, and it blended in like a dream with the rest of the shop.

The man's
face
, unfortunately, was not quite such a good match. It was obvious that his nose had been broken at some time in the past, and his cheeks, chin and forehead bore numerous scars of ancient battles. It was the sort of face that had old ladies nervously reaching for the communication cord in railway carriages – the sort of face that mothers would hold up to their children as an example of what might happen to them if they continued to run wild.

And yet when he smiled – as he did now – the harshness melted away, and a much gentler soul was revealed.

The man peered myopically at Paniatowski for a second, then said, ‘Mrs Gaskell?'

‘No, I'm . . .'

‘You're quite right, and I'm quite wrong,' the man said firmly. ‘Mrs Gaskell wouldn't suit you at all. You'd be much happier with something a little less stylized – something with a bit more zing to it.
The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot, perhaps? I'm getting closer, aren't I? I can always tell what people will like – even when they're not quite sure themselves.'

‘I'm sorry, but I'm not a customer,' Paniatowski said, producing her warrant card. ‘I'm looking for Walter Brown.'

‘Ah!' the man said, disappointedly. ‘And which Walter Brown might that be? Walter Brown the lover of old books? Or could it be Walter Brown the convicted murderer?'

Paniatowski grinned, despite the macabre nature of the question. ‘Which one are you?' she asked.

‘I'm both, as you've probably already realized,' Brown said. ‘But I imagine it's the latter, rather than the former, that you're interested in.'

‘I'm afraid it is,' Paniatowski admitted.

Brown nodded, perhaps a little sadly.

‘In that case, you'd better come into the back room, and we'll have tea and biscuits,' he said. ‘Tea and biscuits
always
make interrogations just a little more bearable.'

‘I was a real thug at the time I was sent down for Mottershead's murder,' Walter Brown said, as he poured Paniatowski a cup of Earl Grey. ‘A thoroughly nasty piece of work – and a semi-literate one, to boot. Back then, I'd as soon have cut off my own arm than open a book. Prison changed all that. At first, I only took the reading classes they offered because it was a soft option. Then something magical happened. I started to enjoy it. And by the time I came out, I'd read everything in the prison library at least three or four times. But I didn't mind that, because there's always something new to find in a book, however well you think you know it.'

‘You always maintained your innocence,' Paniatowski said.

‘I still do,' Brown told her.

‘So why did the police fix on you as their prime suspect?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘Oh, they had reasonable enough grounds, I suppose,' Brown admitted. ‘As I said, I was a thug. I gloried in violence. It excited me, back then, almost as much as books do now. I may not have killed anybody, but I put a number of men in hospital, and one of them could
easily
have died.' He paused, and looked Paniatowski straight in the eyes. ‘I didn't murder Bazza Mottershead – but, given more time, I might well have done.'

‘If it's true that you were wrongly convicted, I'm surprised you don't sound bitter,' Paniatowski said.

‘What would be the point of that?' Brown asked. ‘It's over and done with, and we can't change the past, however much we might want to. Besides, in some ways, being wrongly convicted was the best thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I think you might say it made me free.'

‘Could you explain that?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Willingly. I've paid my debt to society – not for killing Mottershead, but for all the other terrible things I did – and now I can look the world squarely in the face. And prison made me a new man – a better man, I hope. If I'd gone on as I was, I'd probably have ended up dead in some back alley, without ever having experienced the joy of books, so, on one level at least, everything that happened, happened for the best.'

‘The police must have thought they had enough evidence to arrest you,' Paniatowski said. ‘What sort of case did they actually have?'

‘A circumstantial one,' Brown said. He chuckled. ‘Back then, of course, I didn't know the word “circumstantial”.'

‘Why don't you fill in the details for me?' Paniatowski suggested.

‘You
worked
with the feller – he was your fence – but you didn't
like
him at all,' the chief inspector replies. ‘Tell me, Wally, when exactly did it finally penetrate that thick skull of yours that Bazza had been cheating you for years?'

‘You really
are
thick, aren't you?' the chief inspector jeers. ‘We've got half a dozen witnesses – decent, respectable people – who are willing to swear they heard you threaten to kill him.'

‘So you had a motive for murdering him,' Paniatowski said. ‘What else did the police use to build up their case against you?'

‘I can't,' Brown admits. ‘I don't
have
an alibi.'

‘So they had motive and opportunity,' Paniatowski mused. ‘What else did they have on you?'

‘Nothing,' Walter Brown told her.

Paniatowski frowned. ‘Well, if that's
really
all they had, I'm surprised they thought they had enough to charge you,' she admitted.

‘Maybe they wouldn't have charged me if it hadn't been for the race,' Brown said.

‘The race?
What
race?'

‘The race with Scotland Yard!'

The chief inspector lights up their cigarettes. ‘Now the question you're probably asking yourself is, are we just going to take this lying down?' he continues. ‘And my answer is that we're not. You see, if we can solve our murder before they solve theirs, it'll be obvious to anybody who are the
real
detectives and who are just big girls' blouses. Are you following me, Wally?'

‘I wouldn't confess, but they charged me anyway,' Walter Brown told Paniatowski. ‘Funnily enough, it was shortly after that when I met Chief Inspector Woodend.' He smiled. ‘They were taking me to the cells, and Mr Woodend was standing in the corridor. I asked him to help me, and when he said he couldn't, I reacted like I always did in those days. I tried to hit him – and he, quite rightly, flattened me.'

Paniatowski was hardly listening to him any more.

It couldn't be as simple as Brown had described it, she told herself. It simply couldn't be.

‘Isn't it possible that you were so drunk on the night Bazza Mottershead was murdered that you might have killed him, and then remembered nothing about it?' she asked.

‘No,' Brown said emphatically.

‘But if you had a complete memory loss about that evening . . .'

‘If I'd have killed him, I'd have known. However drunk I'd been, I'd have
known
.'