The Dead Hand of History (13 page)

‘Is there something in your wife's office that she – and only she – will have been especially likely to handle?' Paniatowski asked Stan Szymborska.

‘I . . . I should think so. Why?'

It was just as she'd suspected it would be, Paniatowski thought – there was no easy way to say it, no magic formula which would make it easier to take.

‘Because we'll need a set of your wife's fingerprints,' she told Stan Szymborska.

An hour had passed, but when Paniatowski re-entered the conference room, it seemed to her as if neither Jenny Brunskill nor Stan Szymborska had moved an inch since the last time she had seen them.

She opened the file she was holding, and looked down at the forensic report which she already knew by heart.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘but I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. It's Linda's hand.'

‘Oh God!' Jenny gasped. Then a look of desperate hope filled her eyes, and she said, ‘But that doesn't have to mean she's
dead
, does it?'

‘Miss Brunskill . . .' Paniatowski said softly.

‘It doesn't, does it?' Jenny asked, appealing to her brother-in-law. ‘It doesn't have to mean she's dead!'

‘What do
you
think, Chief Inspector?' Szymborska asked heavily.

‘Anything's possible,' Paniatowski replied, choosing her words with care. ‘But it would be wrong of me to offer you much hope.'

‘You're right,' Jenny moaned. ‘She's dead. She
has
to be dead. But how could it happen? Why would anybody
do
such a thing to her?'

‘I don't know,' Paniatowski admitted.

‘But you're a chief inspector!' Jenny said, with a new note of hysteria seeping into her voice. ‘You're
supposed
to know these things! It's your
job
to know these things!'

Stan put his hand on his sister-in-law's shoulder.

‘I'm sure Chief Inspector Paniatowski's doing all she can,' he said gently. ‘And neither of us should do or say anything that will make her job more difficult for her.'

Jenny took in a deep gulp of air, and nodded.

‘Is there anything we
can
do?' she asked.

‘There is one thing,' Paniatowski told her. ‘It won't be easy, but it would help.'

‘Anything,' Jenny promised.

‘Don't tell anyone that we've identified the hands as belonging to your sister and Tom Whittington.'

‘But there are people who need
to know
,' Jenny protested. ‘There are relatives and friends to be informed. People who really cared about Linda. They've a
right
to be told.'

‘I know they have,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘But I still don't want you to tell them
yet
.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's highly probable that naming the victims is just what the killer both expects and
wants
us to do.'

‘How can you say that?' Jenny asked. ‘How can you possibly know what's in his mind?'

‘I just know,' Paniatowski said, flatly.

‘But
how
?'

‘Are you sure you actually
want
me to tell you?'

‘Yes!'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘He could have just buried his victims. If he had, we'd have known they'd gone missing, but nothing more. Instead, he chose to send us their hands, which means that while he doesn't want to make it too easy for us, he still wants us to find out who they are.'

‘I still don't see why . . .'

‘He'll be expecting us to release the names, and when we don't, he'll start getting nervous. And
because
he's nervous, he might make a mistake which will lead us to him.'

There was more to it than that, of course.

In some ways, the potential witnesses in a murder investigation were rather like the audience in a theatre.

The audience followed the action on the stage, and thought they knew what was going on – thought they understood the whole world of the play. And then the lighting changed, and so did their perceptions.

The innocuous table in the corner of the set, which they had ignored up to this point, was suddenly the focus of their attention. And they knew that this table mattered – that it was significant. And even if it wasn't true – even if the only reason the table had been illuminated was because some lighting man had accidentally hit the wrong switch – they would cling to the idea of the table's importance, and feel strangely let down if it did not fulfil the hopes they had invested in it.

And so it was with a murder investigation. The more light that was thrown on the case, the more the potential witnesses built up their own stories about it – and the less the value of the statements they made.

They would tell you what they thought you wanted to know – rather than simply answer the questions that you had put to them.

They would force to the forefront of their brains an avalanche of information that they had decided would be helpful – and in the process would bury the information which really mattered.

At best, this would make them less effective as witnesses – at worst, they would become an actual impediment to the investigation.

But there was no point in telling Jenny Brunskill any of this, Paniatowski thought. She would have found it hard to grasp under normal circumstances, and in her current situation it would sound like nothing more than meaningless babble.

‘You do understand what I've been saying, don't you?' she asked. ‘I want you to tell
no one
what I've just told you.'

‘I understand,' Stan Szymborska said, in a flat, dead – yet firm – tone.

‘And you, Miss Brunskill?'

‘I understand too,' said Jenny Brunskill – but with far less conviction.

TEN

I
t was a little after quarter past seven in the evening, and the team – Paniatowski, Beresford and Walker – were sitting at their usual table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey.

‘There's absolutely no room for complacency in this investigation – or indeed in any investigation,' Monika Paniatowski said, ‘but given what we were up against from the start, we've not done too badly for the first day.'

It was the sort of thing Charlie Woodend would have said, she thought, because – as the leader of the team – he'd have felt it was his duty to rally the troops. And that was why
she
had said it, too. But she was not sure that she had displayed either the authority or the conviction that Charlie would have done in her place. And besides, there was at least a small – treacherous – part of her which kept saying that even if they
had
made progress, they would have made more if Charlie had been in charge.

‘We now not only know the names of the two victims,' she said, forcing herself to continue, ‘but we've established a connection between them – that they both worked in Brunskill's Bakery.'

‘Yes, you have to say that luck's certainly been on our side so far,' Walker commented.

But he didn't mean that at all, Paniatowski thought.

What he'd actually
wanted
to say was, ‘If we have made a good start, then that's all down to me – because I'm the one who led us to Brunskill's Bakery in the first place.'

But he
couldn't
say that, could he? Not without reminding the others of the corners he'd cut, and the breaches of discipline that involved.

So all he'd done had been to draw the picture – and let Paniatowski and Beresford fill in the caption for themselves.

‘Can I ask a question, ma'am?' the sergeant asked.

‘You don't need to ask my permission,' Paniatowski told him. ‘That's not how we work on this team – especially when we've left the office behind us and we're in the Drum.' She paused to light up a cigarette. ‘So what was it you wanted to ask, Ted?'

‘I was just wondering why we hadn't arrested the Polack yet,' Walker said. Then he remembered – belatedly – that
Paniatowski
wasn't exactly a Lancashire name, and quickly added, ‘What I mean is, I was wondering why we hadn't arrested Mr Szym . . . Mr Szym . . . why we haven't arrested Stan.'

‘Do you think he's our man?' Paniatowski asked.

‘No question about it in my mind. After all, he is the husband, and he doesn't have an alibi for any of the time between leaving the bakery last night and turning up for work this morning.'

‘No, he doesn't,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘And, as you know yourself, ma'am, in cases like this, it's nearly always the husband who did it.'

That was true, Paniatowski thought – very depressing, but true enough nonetheless.

‘Let's face it,' Walker continued, ‘you've got to really hate somebody to cut their bloody hands off, haven't you – and where else do you find that kind of hatred but in marriages?'

‘How do you see Tom Whittington's death fitting into the scheme of things?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘Oh, that's an easy question to answer,' Walker said. ‘He was Linda Thingy's lover.'

‘Linda
Szymborska
's lover.'

‘That's right.'

And that, too, was probably all too depressingly true, Paniatowski thought. It was only too easy to see how Linda would have been attracted to Tom, who was – whichever way you looked at it – little more than a younger version of the man she'd chosen to marry.

‘So it was a crime of passion?' Beresford asked.

‘Absolutely,' Walker agreed.

‘But crimes of passion are normally committed in the heat of the moment,' Beresford said.

‘Ah, I see what you're getting at, Inspector,' Walker replied. ‘Since we know that the note Stan sent to Traynor will have taken him some time to prepare, it can't have been in the heat of the moment at all.'

‘Exactly,' Beresford agreed.

‘So it's more of a
cold
passion we're talking about here.'

‘A cold passion?'

‘One that probably has much more to do with pride than it does with love.'

‘That makes sense,' Beresford said, reluctantly. ‘But what was the point of the pantomime
after
the murder?'

‘What pantomime?'

‘Why did he cut their hands off?'

‘Maybe that's what they do in Poland when they find out that the wife's been having it off with somebody else.'

‘What exactly do you think Poland is like?' Paniatowski asked, angry over what she saw as an attack on the reputation of a country she had not lived in since she was a small child. ‘Do you see it as some kind of exotic Third World country, Sergeant?'

‘Well, no, not exactly exotic,' Walker said.

‘And why did he draw attention to what he'd done?' Beresford asked, like a dodgy plasterer hurriedly smoothing over the cracks. ‘Why phone the press after he'd dumped the first hand, and send a note to Mike Traynor, telling him where the second hand was?'

Walker shrugged. ‘Who knows? You have to remember that foreigners just don't
think
like us.' He realized that he'd put his foot in it again. ‘I didn't mean you, ma'am. You're different, aren't you?'

‘Am I?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Of course you are. You've been living here for so long that you're
almost
English.'

‘Stan Szymborska's been living here a long time as well,' Paniatowski pointed out. ‘He was stationed here during the war, and
after
the war – weighed down by the medals he'd won as a fighter pilot – he came back.'

‘I'm not disputing he did his bit in helping to defeat Hitler,' Walker conceded, ‘but that doesn't mean he wasn't capable of killing his wife, does it?'

‘No,' Paniatowski agreed, ‘it doesn't.'

‘And if you recall, ma'am, I did point out this morning, right after the first hand was discovered on the river bank, that I thought there was a
military
mind behind it.'

Yes, there was no disputing that, Paniatowski thought.

‘If Linda Szymborska
was
having an affair with Tom Whittington,' she said aloud, ‘then someone will have known about it, however careful they've been about not being seen together.' She turned to Beresford. ‘And we need to find out
who
that someone is, Colin.'

‘You're thinking they must have had a secret rendezvous somewhere?' Beresford asked.

‘Exactly.'

‘I'll have all the hotels in a twenty-mile radius checked out first thing in the morning.'

‘In that case, you'll need this,' Paniatowski said, placing a plain brown envelope on the table.

‘What is it?'

‘A photograph of Brunskill Bakery's annual outing to Blackpool. I want you to have copies made and shown to all the hotel receptionists.'

Beresford studied the picture for a moment. ‘Individual photographs would probably be better,' he said.

‘But we haven't
got
individual photographs yet,' Paniatowski told him. ‘In fact, given that Tom Whittington appears to have been both shy and a bit of loner, we don't even know if there
is
an individual photograph of him. Besides, look on the positive side of things.'

‘The positive side?'

‘If a receptionist at one of the hotels can pick out two people from a
group
– rather than from individual photographs – it's a pretty good indication that we're on solid ground.'