Stone Killer (15 page)

‘Quite,' Marlowe agreed. ‘I would never, for a moment, suggest you do such a thing. But …'

‘Yes?'

‘But I
do
think there's a case for arguing that, given his attitude to this particular crisis, it might be wiser to keep Mr Slater-Burnes out of the loop for a while.'

‘Do you have an alternative strategy to the one Mr Slater-Burnes is advocating?' the Home Secretary asked.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,' Marlowe replied.

‘Then you'd better let me hear it.'

Marlowe quickly outlined the plan which had been evolving in his head for most of the day.

‘Tricky,' the Home Secretary said when he'd finished.

‘I prefer to think of it as
imaginative
,' Marlowe said.

‘Oh, it's that, all right,' the Home Secretary agreed. ‘It's
very
imaginative. What I'm not sure about is whether or not it's entirely legal.'

‘It could certainly be argued that it's not
illegal
,' Marlowe countered. ‘And even if it were, by the time any ruling's made, the crisis will be over – and you will have emerged from a very sticky situation totally unscathed.'

‘I'll consult my advisors on the whole matter,' the Home Secretary said cautiously.

‘You do that, sir,' Marlowe replied. ‘But I wouldn't take too long about it – because there's no telling when things might blow up here.'

When he put down the phone, the Chief Constable was feeling well pleased with himself. Slater-Burnes had tried to shift the responsibility for any failure on to him, he thought, and what he'd just done was to shift it squarely back again. That, in itself, was a cause for self-congratulation.

But there was more. If his scheme worked out as he thought it would, then the Home Secretary – one of the most influential men in the whole government – would be in his debt. And if he chose to run for parliament himself – which was very much on the cards – the man would have no choice but to give him his backing.

Marlowe ambled over to his drinks cabinet, and helped himself to a generous – celebratory – shot of his twelve-year-old malt. He had hated offering such a fine whisky to an uncouth lout like Charlie Woodend – a real case of putting pearls before swine – but it had been necessary at the time, and so he had clenched his teeth and done it.

Now – and as a direct result of the sacrifice of that excellent whisky – Woodend probably fondly imagined that he had his Chief Constable's full backing. The truth, of course, was quite the opposite. The truth was that the unmanageable Chief Inspector in the scruffy tweed jacket was being used as no more than a decoy in the game which was being played out. And if that decoy happened to get shot – as many decoys did – well, that was just one of the risks he ran.

Marlowe took a sip of his whisky, and chuckled to himself. The Chief Inspector would be furious when he realized just how badly he'd been duped, he thought.

C
onstable Beresford had often looked at this table in the Drum and Monkey with longing, but had never allowed himself to dream that he would actually ever sit at it. This was the table at which the giants of his world – Woodend, Rutter and Paniatowski – solved their cases. And now here he was, his elbows resting on the table as if they actually belonged there.

‘Sergeant Paniatowski thinks that if Judith Maitland
didn't
kill Burroughs, then the murderer has to be someone with a motive that has nothing to do with Judith at all,' Woodend said.

Beresford, unsure of whether or not he was expected to comment at this stage, nodded his head in what he hoped was a wise and knowing way.

‘In other words,' Woodend continued, ‘not only does Judith have no connection with Burroughs' death, but she doesn't even know the killer.' He paused and took a sip of his pint. ‘
That's
what Sergeant Paniatowski thinks. An' she may well be right. But I don't want to take the chance that she isn't.'

Was now the time to speak? Beresford wondered. And if it was, what was he expected to say?

He decided it would be wiser to settle for a second nod.

‘Do you spend much of your free time in art galleries, Beresford?' Woodend asked.

Art galleries? What was this all about?

‘Not a lot, sir,' Beresford said.

‘Not a lot?' Woodend echoed.

‘None at all, if the truth be told,' Beresford admitted.

‘Then you're missin' out,' Woodend told him. ‘You can learn a lot about life from art.'

‘If you say so, sir,' Beresford replied, dubiously.

‘Take one of them pictures of the Madonna an' Child, which painters were so fond of in the Middle Ages,' Woodend said. ‘Your eye is drawn straight away to the Baby Jesus, which is, of course, what the artist intended to happen. But if you leave it at that, you're only gettin' part of the experience.'

‘I wouldn't really know about that, sir,' Beresford said, feeling as if he were sinking in deep, dark water.

‘Well, listen, then you will,' Woodend said. ‘If, when you're lookin' at one of them paintings, you focus all your attention on the baby, you miss out Mary an' Joseph, the shepherds an' the wise men. An' they're important to the story – because the way Jesus acted, an' the way society
reacted
to him, were functions of the times in which he was livin'.'

‘I'm afraid I'm not really much of a church-goer myself, sir,' Beresford admitted.

Woodend sighed heavily, and began to wonder if he'd picked the right man for the job.

‘I'm not much of a church-goer either, lad, but that's not the point,' he said. ‘It doesn't have to be a paintin' of the Nativity we're talkin' about. That's just an example. It could be
any
paintin' at all – from the
Mona Lisa
to that peculiar thing Élite Catering's got hangin' in its lobby. The point I'm tryin' to make is that if you focus on one particular detail, you run a risk of missin' the big picture.'

‘And that's what it would be like if we focused only on Burroughs?' Beresford asked, uncertainly.

‘Exactly!' Woodend agreed. ‘So while Sergeant Paniatowski's concentratin' on the centre of the picture, we should take a careful trip around the edges of the frame.'

‘And that would be Judith Maitland?'

‘Now you're startin' to understand where I'm goin' with all this, lad,' Woodend said, greatly encouraged. ‘You see, lookin' at it that way, we can believe that Judith Maitland didn't kill Clive Burroughs – or even want him killed – an' yet, at the same time, not completely rule out the idea that his death might in some way be
connected
to her.'

‘You mean, this ex-boyfriend of hers – the one that Major Maitland told you about – might have appeared on the scene again and killed Burroughs out of jealousy?' Beresford asked.

‘Not necessarily him – but that's the
kind
of thing I mean,' Woodend said. ‘Of course, the chances are that Burroughs' death
doesn't
have anything to do with Judith – but until we've investigated all the possibilities, we'll never know.'

‘I think I'm catchin' on, sir,' Beresford said.

‘Maybe,' Woodend agreed. ‘But there's one major aspect of workin' in the CID that you
do
seem to have missed.'

‘What's that, sir?' Beresford asked, worriedly.

Woodend grinned at him. ‘When you see your boss's glass is empty, you immediately order him another pint,' he said.

Monika Paniatowski didn't know at exactly what time she'd fallen asleep with her head on the desk, but when – with bleary eyes – she looked at her watch, she saw that it was a quarter past one in the morning.

She reached for a cigarette, lit it up, and studied the two stacks of documents which lay intimidatingly on the desk in front of her. To the left were the bank statements from Burroughs' builders' merchant's business. To the right the statements from his personal account. They all went back a full ten years – no one could accuse Chief Inspector Baxter of not being thorough. And just before she'd decided to close her eyes for a second – some considerable time earlier – she'd found things in both piles to quicken her interest.

The cheques written on the business account were mainly to meet bills submitted by wholesale suppliers, though there were also some to cover utility payments and property taxes. There had been no trouble for most of the period which they related to, but during the last year or so of Clive Burroughs' life, the bank had refused to cash several cheques on the grounds that the account contained insufficient funds.

Which would suggest, Paniatowski thought, that Hal Greene had been right when he'd said that the business was in serious trouble.

Had Judith Maitland really been the woman whom Burroughs expected to pull him out of the hole he found himself in? the sergeant wondered.

And if she had, just what kind of hold did Burroughs have over her?

Paniatowski switched her thoughts to the other pile of statements – the personal ones. As with the business statements, they mostly followed a set, regular pattern, but here, too, there was an anomaly. And in this case, the anomaly had not occurred towards the end of Burroughs' life, but a full seven years earlier.

For a whole month in the late 1950s, the statements revealed, Burroughs had been writing a weekly cheque to Piccadilly Holdings Ltd. What the cheques were to cover was explained in a bill stapled to one of them. Mr and Mrs Burroughs, it appeared, had been staying at the Westside Hotel in Manchester, which was part of the Piccadilly Holdings chain.

Now why would they have done that? Paniatowski wondered.

It surely couldn't have been a holiday. Manchester had its charms, it was true, but they weren't enough to occupy the Burroughses for a whole month! Bloody hell, even
London
would start to lose its appeal after a couple of weeks!

Perhaps he'd used the hotel for business purposes, then.

But in that case, why hadn't it been paid for out of the business account, rather than the personal one?

Besides, most deals could be done perfectly satisfactorily over the phone. And even if this one couldn't be – even if whoever he was dealing with had insisted on face-to-face meetings – Burroughs surely wouldn't have gone to the expense of living there on a full-time basis, when his own home was less than a couple of hours' drive away?

Paniatowski groaned. A new idea had just come into her mind, and had made what looked like a promising lead quite melt away.

It said ‘Mr and Mrs Burroughs' on the hotel bill, she thought, but it hadn't been Mr and Mrs Burroughs at all. The ‘Mrs Burroughs' had been just one of Clive's long list of conquests. The hotel had been nothing more than the base they'd used for their affair.

She lit a new cigarette from the stub of her old one, and wondered where this new and unwelcome insight left her.

Nowhere. Nowhere at all.

This whole thing has been a waste of time, she thought. I might as well have gone back to Whitebridge and slept in my own bed.

Bob Rutter would have made more sense out of the statements than she ever could. Bob loved this kind of work – thrived on sitting at a desk and reading people's lives through what they spent and where they had gone.

She wished he was sitting beside her at that moment – patiently explaining, as only he could, what she had missed in the statements, and the questions she should be asking about what
wasn't
there.

She wished that she'd never fallen in love with Bob Rutter. Or that he'd never fallen in love with her. Or that he'd fallen
in
love with her and
out
of love with his wife.

But most of all, she wished that Maria had never been murdered: because while everything else that had happened could have been reversed – or at least overcome – that had changed things for ever.

Bob would never stop grieving and feeling guilty. Neither would she – his one-time lover. And Charlie Woodend – who had almost learned to forgive them both
before
Maria's death – had taken two steps back, and was now almost a hostile stranger.

‘Nobody loves poor little Monika,' she said softly. ‘Nobody at all.'

‘I always think that when you start talking to yourself, it's time to call it a day,' said a voice from the doorway.

Paniatowski looked up, and saw the bulky form of Chief Inspector Baxter standing there.

‘I … I thought you would have gone home long before now, sir,' she said weakly.

Baxter smiled warmly. ‘It's not only you young uns who can put in the hours when the occasion calls for it,' he said. ‘Even us old farts can make the effort once in a while.'

He wasn't really an old fart at all, Paniatowski thought, looking at him closely for perhaps the first time.

He was older than her, certainly, but he was several years younger than Woodend, and she had never considered Cloggin-it Charlie to be actually
old
.

‘What would you say to the idea of a drink, Sergeant Paniatowski?' Baxter asked.

‘I'd love it,' Monika admitted. ‘But I would have thought the canteen would be closed by now.'

‘And you would have thought right,' Baxter agreed. ‘It pulled down its shutters over two hours ago. But while power may have its responsibilities, it also has it perks.'

‘Perks?'

Baxter patted his jacket pocket. ‘I just happen to have a key to the canteen in here. So if you want a good strong coffee, I'll make it for you myself.'

‘I'm not sure I—'

‘And if you fancy something stronger, there'll be no problem with that, either.'

‘A coffee would be nice,' Paniatowski said. ‘Provided it's got a vodka chaser.'