Lambs to the Slaughter (22 page)

No mother can be there all the time, Paniatowski told herself. No mother, however caring, can possibly be there
all
the time. And yet she couldn't entirely dismiss the idea that Sutton might have a point.

‘All right, perhaps you did think that Louisa had my permission,' she agreed. ‘But when you picked her up, you – as an adult – made yourself responsible for her, and that meant you were also responsible for seeing she was safely returned home again. And you didn't do that!'

‘No, I didn't,' Sutton conceded. ‘I went out for the evening, so as not to be a damper on the party, and by the time I returned, someone else had already taken her home.'

‘I want the name and address of this boy who drove Louisa home,' Paniatowski said.

‘I suppose that's reasonable,' Sutton agreed. ‘But I have no idea who he was – I have no idea who half the people at the party were – so you'll have to ask Ellie. If you'd like to call around at my house tonight, at about, say—'

‘I'm going to talk to her
now
,' Paniatowski told him. ‘And you're coming with me.'

‘No, I'm bloody not!' Sutton said, with a sudden blaze of anger. ‘If you seriously think that just because you're a police officer, I'll drop everything and follow you like some kind of faithful hound, then you don't know me.'

It had all been an act, Paniatowski suddenly realized. The initial reasonableness and the sudden anger were both part of the same act!

‘Police officer?' she asked.

‘What?'

‘You just said I was a police officer. Yet when I arrived, you pretended you had no idea who I was.'

‘And I didn't know who you were then,' Sutton said, defensively. ‘It was only during the course of our conversation that I remembered seeing your photograph in the
Evening Telegraph
on a couple of occasions, and finally put the name and the image together.'

‘You're lying,' Paniatowski said.

‘You shouldn't even be here,' Sutton said, going onto the attack. ‘It's totally inappropriate for a police officer to be investigating an incident which involves her own daughter.'

‘So it's an incident now, is it?' Paniatowski demanded.

Sutton folded his arms. ‘I assume there
must
have been an incident of
some
kind, since you're here, frothing at the mouth like a mad dog. But I know nothing about it, and I certainly have no intention of answering any more questions until they are put to me by someone acting in an
official
capacity. And even then, I shall insist that my lawyer is present.'

‘You're making a big mistake in crossing me,' Paniatowski said.

Sutton laughed. ‘Why? Because you're a chief inspector in some tinpot little police force? That doesn't frighten me. I have powerful friends, Ms Paniatowski, as you'll find out if you push this matter any further.'

‘It's a big mistake to cross
any
mother,' Paniatowski said, ignoring the comment, ‘especially one who's feeling as guilty as I am!'

The detective constable who Beresford sent to collect Hopkins' correspondence returned with a mountain of paper.

‘The man never seems to have thrown anything out, sir,' he said.

And that was good, Beresford thought, because when he didn't find what he was looking for – and he was almost sure that he wouldn't – he could assume that the reason it wasn't there was not because it had been thrown out,
but because it had never existed
.

Hopkins had kept bills stamped ‘paid' which went back ten years, Beresford discovered as he worked his way through the pile.

And he had been a prolific letter writer, too, though all the letters seemed to be on high-minded religious or political subjects, and – on first glance, at least – contained nothing of a personal nature.

There were programmes from concerts in the pile, as well as birthday cards and embossed invitations to weddings and christenings. Hopkins had kept the death certificates which had been issued for his wife and sons twenty years earlier, and a copy of the coroner's inquest report which stated that the three deaths had been no more than a tragic accident.

There was all that, but there was no trace of the letter from the Department of Education and Science, offering him a grant to study his family's history – the letter which Susan Danvers said she had seen with her own eyes.

Beresford picked up the phone, and rang the DES.

The chief constable listened without interruption to Paniatowski's account of her interview with Dr Sutton, and when she'd finished, he ran his hands through his shock of ginger hair and said, ‘Difficult.'

‘Difficult?' Paniatowski repeated, incredulously. ‘What's so bloody difficult about it?'

‘You have to try and look at the whole situation through the eyes of a police officer, rather than through the eyes of a parent,' Baxter said. ‘I know it's hard, but you have to try.'

‘All right,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘We could probably charge Dr Sutton with child endangerment, but I'm not sure we could make it stick. His brief will argue that he had reasonable grounds for assuming that Louisa had your permission, and may even slip in the suggestion that if anyone's guilty of child endangerment, it's the mother. And I've heard Dr Sutton give a lecture. He's a convincing speaker. Put him in the witness box, and he'll feed the jury a line about how he now realizes it was a mistake to leave the party, and he's very sorry it happened. And then, in his summing up, his barrister will point out that no real harm came to the girl, so what's all the fuss about anyway?'

‘No real harm was done!' Paniatowski exploded.

‘That's not what I think,' Baxter said firmly, ‘but that's certainly how it will appear in court.'

‘But Sutton's not just a well-meaning man who made one mistake – he set the whole thing up!'

‘You can't prove that,' Baxter said.

‘His seventeen-year-old daughter – who my fourteen-year-old daughter has never even really spoken to – rings up at eight o'clock in the morning, and invites her to a party. Why should she do that, unless her father had told her to?'

‘I don't know.'

‘And when I meet him, he pretends that he doesn't know who I am, even though – and I'm sure of this – he's already game-planned the way that meeting might develop, so he'll be ready to deal with anything I throw at him.'

‘My problem, Monika, is that I can't see
why
he would have done it,' Baxter said. ‘He's a middle-aged man, with a very good job and solid standing in the community. Why would he risk all that by arranging the abduction of a chief inspector's daughter? And what could he possibly stand to gain from it?'

‘I can't answer that.'

‘Nothing, Monika! He stood to gain nothing!'

‘I don't know why he did it, sir, I only know that he did do it,' Paniatowski said.

Baxter sighed. ‘I'll put a couple of men on the case, but I wouldn't want to raise your hopes by promising they'll get anywhere.'

‘I don't want a couple of men – I want DS Meadows.'

‘Why Meadows?'

Because Meadows was a Rottweiler, Paniatowski thought, and once she'd got her teeth into something, she wouldn't let go until she'd drawn blood.

‘I just think that Meadows, being a woman, is the best person for the job,' she said aloud.

‘Sergeant Meadows is currently involved in the murder investigation in Bellingsworth,' Baxter reminded her.

‘I'm prepared to wait until DI Beresford thinks he can spare her,' Paniatowski countered.

‘That could be days – or even weeks.'

‘I don't care. Sutton isn't going anywhere.'

‘All right, Monika, I'll assign DS Meadows to the case as soon as it's practicable,' Baxter promised. ‘But I want it clearly understood that Meadows will be working for the Mid Lancs Constabulary, and not Louisa's mother.'

‘That
is
clearly understood, sir,' Paniatowski said – though neither of them thought, for even a moment, that she meant it.

The woman at the DES who took his initial enquiry had promised Beresford that they would get back to him within the hour, and it was, in fact, just thirty-five minutes before someone – a man this time – was on the line.

‘I'm John Ryan, Inspector Beresford,' he announced. ‘And you're Colin, right?'

‘Right,' Beresford agreed.

‘Well, Colin, I must admit that your enquiry came as quite a surprise to us, because we simply don't award grants for that kind of personal research.'

‘And you told Mr Hopkins this in your answer to him, did you?' Beresford asked, crossing his fingers.

‘Well, no.'

‘No?'

‘We never wrote him a letter. And though correspondence does occasionally go missing, I'm almost one hundred percent certain that we never received one from him, either.'

Of course you didn't, Beresford thought.

‘Then if you didn't receive a letter from Mr Hopkins, why did one of your staff pay him a visit?' he asked – just to make certain that he had got things absolutely right.

‘He may have been visited, but it certainly wasn't by any of our chaps,' Ryan said.

‘You're sure of that?'

‘Listen, Colin, even if we did give out grants for research of that nature – which we don't, and never have – we certainly wouldn't send one of our chaps to . . . where did you say it was?'

‘Bellingsworth. It's in Lancashire.'

‘To Bellingsworth in Lancashire. We simply don't have the manpower for that kind of indulgence.'

‘Thank you,' Beresford said. ‘You've been very helpful.'

‘It's all part of the service, Colin, old chap,' Ryan replied, and rang off.

When Beresford put down the phone, there was a broad smile on his face.

He had cracked it!

He was convinced he had cracked it!

And within the next two hours, he would be arresting his murderer.

T
he detective constables were all out conducting house-to-house enquiries, Sergeant Orchard was on his break, and there were only four people left in the church hall. Two of these people – Susan Danvers and the police sketch artist – were sitting at a desk close to the stage. The other two – Beresford and Crane – were watching them from a distance.

‘I don't understand why you're going through all this rigmarole, sir,' Crane said.

Beresford smiled complacently. ‘Don't you?' he asked.

‘You don't seem to think the sketch will be of any use . . .'

‘It won't.'

‘. . . yet you've brought the police sketch artist all the way from Whitebridge to draw it.'

‘The sketch will be of no value in itself, but the act of producing the sketch is serving a very valuable purpose indeed,' Beresford said.

‘You've lost me,' Crane admitted.

‘Then I suppose I'd better spell it out,' Beresford said, a little wearily. ‘An interrogation is a bit like a conjuring trick. You don't want your suspect to see which direction it's taking until it's far too late. Are you following me?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Because we have the sketch artist here, Susan Danvers thinks she knows which way the questioning is going to go. She thinks we'll want to question her about the man who she says visited Len Hopkins last Thursday, and all her energy and effort is being spent on working out what questions we're likely to ask her about him, and what answers will best serve her own interest. And what that means, Detective Constable Crane, is that she's not thinking about either the brass band competition or the evangelical church, so that when I hit her with
those
questions, she'll be completely at sea.'

‘Clever,' Crane said, with reluctant admiration.

‘Yes, isn't it?' Beresford agreed.

The police artist ripped the page he'd been working on from his pad, laid it carefully on the desk, and stood up.

‘Job done!' he said.

Susan Danvers stood up, too.

‘Could you sit down again, please, Miss Danvers,' Beresford said, walking quickly towards her.

‘Why?' Susan Danvers asked. ‘You said you wanted me to describe the man, and I've done that.'

‘There are a few more questions we still need to ask you,' Beresford told her, sliding into the seat the sketch artist had been using.

‘But I've already told your chief inspector everything I know,' Susan said uneasily.

‘She's not here, and we need to go over some of the details,' Beresford told her. ‘Do, please, sit down, Miss Danvers – you're making me tired just looking at you standing there.'

Slowly and reluctantly, Susan Danvers sank back into her chair.

Beresford picked up the sketch. ‘Now this is what I call a fine piece of work,' he said. He turned slightly. ‘Come and look at this, Jack.'

Crane walked over to them, carrying a chair in his hands. He put the chair down next to Beresford's and sat.

‘I see what you mean,' he said, ‘it is a very fine piece of work. Of course, the artist's pretty good – we already knew that – but it's all the detail you've given him that really makes it.'

‘I'll always been good with faces,' Susan said.

‘Are you sure the nose is quite right?' Beresford wondered. ‘Might it not have been a little larger than it is in the sketch?'

‘His nose was
just
like that,' Susan Danvers said firmly.

‘Well, you're the one who saw him, so I suppose you should know,' Beresford said. He glanced down at the sketch again. ‘It really is a remarkably vivid portrait, considering that you only saw the man who visited Len Hopkins for a few seconds, as he passed you on the street.'