The Dead Hand of History (26 page)

So if the direct approach would not uncover whatever conspiracy was afoot, she would have to be more oblique in her approach, she decided. And that was she was being now – more oblique!

She picked up a small wire basket, filled it with things she didn't really want and approached the cash desk.

The shopkeeper, a middle-aged man with a bushy white moustache and a red face, smiled at her.

‘I don't think I've seen you in my shop before, have I, love?' he asked.

‘No, you haven't,' Jenny agreed. ‘I used to live in Accrington. I've only just moved to Whitebridge.'

‘Accrington,' the shopkeeper repeated, as he began ringing up her purchases on the till. ‘Well, if
that
's where you've come from, you must be really congratulating yourself on moving up in the world.' He paused, wondering if he'd said the wrong thing. ‘Just my little joke, love. No offence intended.'

‘And none taken,' Jenny replied. ‘You're quite right – Whitebridge
is
much nicer than Accrington.'

‘Well, us locals like to think so, any road,' the shopkeeper said. ‘I'm Ed Handley.'

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Handley.'

‘Now, none of that,' the shopkeeper said, with mock severity. ‘If you're going to become one of my regular customers – an' I certainly hope you are – you'd better start callin' me Ed.'

‘All right,' Jenny agreed.

‘An' what might your name be?' Handley asked.

She hadn't thought of that, she told herself in a panic. She'd never even
considered
the need for an alias.

‘I'm Jenny,' she said. ‘Jenny . . . Smith.'

Handley transferred her purchases to a brown-paper bag.

‘Will there be anything else,
Jenny
?' he asked.

She took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I think I'll take a loaf of Brunskill's thick sliced.'

‘Can I make a suggestion?' Handley asked.

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘Why not try a Tompkins' large crusty loaf instead? I think you'll find it's much better bread.'

If he had spat in her face he could not possibly have offended her more, but Jenny forced herself to keep calm.

‘If Tompkins' is much better, why are you still selling Brunskill's?' she asked.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, it's more out of habit than anything else. But I've been slowly moving over to Tompkins', and now that Brunskill's is likely to close down, I'll be giving them all my business.'

Jenny shivered. It was like seeing your own obituary before you'd even realized you were dead, she thought.

‘I didn't know Brunskill's
was
closing down,' she said aloud.

‘Then you can't have been reading the papers, can you?' Handley said. ‘One of the owners of Brunskill's was murdered the other night, and another of the owners – her husband, as a matter of fact – is about to be arrested for the murder.'

‘It . . . it didn't say
that
in the paper, did it?' Jenny asked.

‘Well, no, not in so many words,' Handley conceded. ‘But if you read between the lines, it's there, clear enough. And once he
is
arrested, the business is finished. After all, who wants to buy bread from a firm that has a murderer in the family?'

TWENTY-TWO

T
he shutters were down on the main entrance to the bakery, but when Paniatowski rang the bell at the side door, her ring was answered by a small late-middle-aged man in a boiler suit.

‘I don't know who you've come to talk to, Chief Inspector Paniatowski,' the man said, ‘but whoever it is, he's gone home.'

‘Unless, of course, I've come to talk to you, Mr Monkton,' Paniatowski countered.

‘An' have you?' Monkton asked.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, in that case, I suppose you'd better come through to my office,' the nightwatchman said.

He led her down the corridor along the back of the bakery, to a room dominated by industrial shelving and a workbench, into which he had still managed to cram a couple of battered armchairs.

‘When I called it my office, I was bein' ironic,' Monkton said. ‘Is that the right word, Chief Inspector? Ironic?'

Paniatowski smiled. ‘You know it is.'

She had liked Len Monkton immediately. He was not physically prepossessing, but his eyes hinted at both intelligence and humour, and – without really trying to – he exuded an air of dependability.

They sat down, and Paniatowski said, ‘Is it true that you've worked for the bakery right from the beginning?'

‘That's correct,' Monkton confirmed. ‘I started on the day it moved into the Brewer's Street, an' I've been with it ever since.'

‘Which means that you've got more than twenty solid years' service behind you,' Paniatowski calculated. ‘Well, that is certainly something to be proud of, isn't it?'

‘Is it?' Monkton asked, looking at her a little strangely.

‘I would say so.'

‘Let's get one thing straight before we go any further,' Len Monkton said. ‘There are fellers I know who think that the longer they work at a job, the more commendable they are. But I'm not
one
of them fellers, Chief Inspector. It seems to me that if long service is the key to self-respect, then the donkeys workin' on Blackpool sands must be burstin' with it.' He paused for a second. ‘What I'm really sayin' is that while that particular line might soften up a lot of the men you want to question, it won't work on me.'

Paniatowski grinned awkwardly. ‘You're right, it
was
a line,' she admitted. ‘But I've learned my lesson, Mr Monkton, and I certainly won't try anything like that again.'

‘An' while we're into straight talkin', I'll tell you somethin' else,' Len Monkton continued. ‘If you're looking for somebody to bad-mouth Mr Szymborska to you, then you've come to the wrong place, because I'll not hear a word said against him.'

‘He's a good boss, is he?'

‘He's a good
man
, Chief Inspector. A
thoroughly
good man. An' while you might just possibly be able to talk me into believin' that the moon is made of green cheese – or even that Whitebridge Rovers have a fightin' chance of winnin' the FA Cup this year – you'll
never
persuade me that Mr Szymborska killed his missus an' Tom Whittington.'

‘So who did?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I don't know – but it wasn't him.'

‘Why don't you tell me a little about the bakery in general,' Paniatowski suggested.

‘Now why would you want me to do that?'

‘Well, one possibility is that I'm hoping to trap you into saying something you don't
want
to say,' Paniatowski replied, smiling again. ‘The other possibility is that I just want to build up a general picture of the place, because I think that might help my investigation. Why don't
you
decide which one it is?'

Monkton thought about it.

‘Where would you like me to start?' he asked finally.

‘Wherever you want to. I find that the beginning's usually as good a place as any.'

Monkton nodded. ‘Seth Brunskill was one of them men who confuse bein'
lucky
with bein'
smart
,' he said. ‘The simple truth was that he owed whatever success he had to just happenin' to be in the right place at the right time.'

‘But he didn't see it that way?'

‘Oh no, not Seth. As far as he was concerned, he was some sort of genius – which meant that not only did things always have to be done his way, but he had to do most of them himself – because nobody else could be trusted to do them
properly
. He was hardly ever out of the bakery. Didn't believe in holidays. Never took a day off. An' in the end, I suppose, that's what killed him.'

‘Heart attack?' Paniatowski guessed.

‘Heart attack,' Monkton confirmed. ‘He wasn't exactly what you'd have called a
young
man when he died, but it's my firm belief that if he'd slowed down a bit – if he'd just been able to learn how to delegate a little – he might still have been alive today.'

And perhaps Linda would still have been alive, too, Paniatowski thought – still living in her tin box, but still
alive
.

‘Tell me about Tom Whittington,' she suggested.

‘He was an odd feller,' Monkton said. ‘He was born a few doors down from where I live, and I've known him all his life. And yet I don't feel I ever really knew him at all.'

‘Why's that?'

‘Because
nobody
really knew him. He was an only child, you see – the son of two other only children – an' his mother died when he was ten. It was cancer that did for her. His dad, Fred, who'd been a bit of a bad bugger even before she popped her clogs, got even worse once they'd buried his wife. I think he blamed Tom for her death.'

‘Why? If she'd died of cancer, it was nobody's fault.'

‘True enough,' Monkton agreed. ‘But as far as Fred was concerned,
somebody
had to be to blame, and Tom was the closest to hand. Anyway, things went from bad to worse, and it soon got so that he'd thrash the living daylights out of Tom at the slightest provocation. An' I think that was when Tom decided that the only way to protect himself was to make himself invisible. So that's exactly what he did. He made himself invisible. An' not just to his dad, but to everybody. You'd never see him out on the street, an' my kids – who were at the same school as he was – told me that when playtime came, he'd stay in a corner, all by himself.'

‘I'm not disputing anything of what you've just said for a second,' Paniatowski told Monkton. ‘But I am finding it difficult to understand how any boy who dedicated himself to not being noticed could end up with a criminal record for stealing cars.'

‘Not
cars
,' Monkton said. ‘It was just
one
car. An' he was
talked
into
stealin' that.'

‘How?'

‘There were a couple of real tearaways who lived on our street. One was called Pete Higgins, an' the other was Brian Clegg. An' these two thought Tom was fair game for a bit of sport, so they pretended they wanted to be his mates. Some kids do that kind of thing, you know.'

‘I do know,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘Of course, though they were laughin' behind their hands at him the whole time, Tom was completely taken in by it all, an' for first time in years he started lookin' happy.'

‘Bastards!' Paniatowski said.

‘There's no doubt that's exactly what they were,' Len Monkton agreed. ‘Anyway, there was this big dance bein' held over in Burnley, an' Pete an' Brian wanted to go to it. But they had no way of getting' there, you see, so they came up with the idea of nickin' this car.' Monkton paused. ‘I only found out about all this years later, when I overheard Pete and Brian braggin' in the pub – an' by then it was too late to do anythin' about it.'

‘Understood,' Paniatowski said.

‘They got Tom to break into the car, but it was one of them who did the actual drivin', because Tom didn't know how to. He never did learn – not till the day he died.'

Which was why, when they went to the Old Oak Tree Inn as Mr and Mrs Lord, it was Linda behind the wheel of the Jag, Paniatowski thought.

‘Anyway, as bad luck would have it – at least for Tom – the owner of the car turned up just as they were drivin' away. He rang the police immediately, an' even before they'd left Whitebridge they saw a police car comin' up behind them, with its lights flashin'. But they didn't panic – you have to give them that. What they
did
do was to pull straight into a side road, an' once they'd stopped the car, Brian an' Pete legged it.'

‘But not Tom?'

‘No, they'd told him to stay with the car, and because they were mates of his – an' he trusted them – that's what he did. So, naturally, he was the one the bobbies arrested.'

‘What about the other two?'

‘Oh, the bobbies couldn't even be bothered to chase after them. There didn't seem to be any need. After all, they'd got one of the gang, an' they were sure he'd soon give up the names of the others.'

‘But he didn't?'

‘He did not. They were his mates – the first ones he'd ever really had – an' you don't betray your mates, do you? I don't know how long it took him to realize he'd been played for a mug all along, but he must have realized it in the end, don't you think?'

‘Yes, I do,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘Well, after that, he became even more withdrawn. You'd hardly ever see him at all. I'd felt sorry enough for him before, but I began to feel
really
sorry for him then. That's why I got him a job at the bakery. It wasn't so much for the money he'd earn – it was just a way of gettin' him out of the house.'

‘Miss Brunskill told my sergeant that the reason her father took him on was because he believed in giving people second chances,' Paniatowski said.

‘Miss Brunskill
would
say that,' Monkton retorted. ‘If she'd seen old Seth strangle a baby before her very eyes, she'd have found some way to convince herself that he'd only done it for the baby's own good.'

‘So why
did
Seth Brunskill take Tom on?'

‘Because he knew that since Tom had a criminal record, he could get him cheap. An' then – surprise, surprise – Tom turned out to be a natural at the job – a real bobby-dazzler of a baker. But he still kept himself to himself – he never came out of his shell again.'