Backlash (34 page)

‘I
could have
killed myself,' Kershaw said.

‘No, you couldn't. You're a good driver, and you weren't panicked at all. You were in complete control of yourself, and you timed it just perfectly.'

She moved on to the filing cabinet.

‘And then there was your insistence on being part of the investigation. What could be more natural than a distressed husband who
wanted
to be part of the investigation? But you're too good a policeman not to know that would never be allowed.'

‘Oh, so I'm a good policeman now, am I?' Kershaw asked, sarcastically.

‘You've
always
been a good policeman,' Paniatowski replied. ‘I've never denied it.' She flicked through a file and replaced it in the cabinet. ‘What else did you do? Oh yes, you forced your way into the morgue, demanding to see the body, because you thought it might be your wife's. But you knew it wasn't – because you knew
exactly
where she was.'

‘And where
was
she?'

‘We'll come to that later. And, of course, Sergeant Lee caught you going through your old case files. He thought you were looking for the man who might have kidnapped Elaine, but what, in fact, you were looking for, was a man you could convincingly
fit up
for the kidnapping. You didn't find one, but then you remembered Taylor Brown, who hadn't been one of your cases at all, but would do just perfectly.'

‘It's not a question of remembering anything. He and his scumbag partner – who you still haven't caught – kidnapped my wife,' Kershaw said.

‘And so that's why you went to see him in the cells – to find out what he'd done with her?'

‘Yes.'

‘You went to see him in the cells to make it
appear
as if you wanted to know what he'd done with your wife. And then you hit him. You expected to be disciplined for that, but given your circumstances, it was never going to be more than a slap on the wrist – and it all added to your credibility.'

‘You planted Elaine's nightdress in Taylor Brown's garden,' Beresford said, ‘but whereas a lesser man would just have left it there, you made it look as if he'd tried to destroy it.'

‘You'll live to regret turning on me, Colin,' Kershaw said.

‘Well, that's enough foreplay,' Paniatowski said. ‘Let's get on with the main event.'

‘Your flippancy is not appreciated,' Kershaw said sternly.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, sir,' Paniatowski said. ‘I'll phrase it another way, shall I? We'd like to go down to the basement now.'

The basement looked exactly as it had done the last time they were there. There was the dartboard in one corner, with the bar next to it, the poker table with its straight-backed chairs, the large television with its easy chairs, and the bookcase on the far wall crammed with books on sport.

And there was still a large empty space at the foot of the stairs, too.

‘This is where you're going to put the cabinet which will hold your sporting trophies, isn't it?' Paniatowski asked.

‘It's where I
was
going to put it,' Kershaw said. ‘Such things seem of no interest now.'

‘So when it arrives, you'll just send it back?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I expect so. I haven't really thought about it.'

‘He must have ordered it,' Paniatowski said to Beresford.

‘What do you mean, boss?'

‘If he expects he'll send it back, he must already have ordered it.'

‘That makes sense,' Beresford agreed. ‘Who did you order it
from
, sir?'

‘I don't remember.'

‘But you must have the invoice around here somewhere.'

‘I expect so.'

‘Then we'd like to see it,' Paniatowski said.

For the first time since they'd entered the house, Kershaw was looking rattled.

‘Perhaps I got confused,' he said. ‘God knows, after all that's happened, I'm entitled to be.'

‘Confused about what?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Confused about the trophy case. Maybe I only
meant
to order it.'

‘Or maybe you never thought of ordering it at all,' Paniatowski suggested. ‘Maybe you simply didn't have the space for it until the night Elaine died.'

‘What are you talking about?' Kershaw demanded.

‘How wide would you say that bookcase is, Colin?' Paniatowski asked, ignoring him.

‘Must be at least three feet,' Beresford said.

‘Do you think you could move it on your own?'

‘No problem, boss. Especially if I took all the books off it first.'

‘There are some very rare and valuable books in that bookcase,' Kershaw said. ‘You leave them alone.'

‘Funny, isn't it?' Paniatowski mused. ‘His trophies mean nothing to him now that his wife's dead, but he still cares about his books. Shift it, Colin!'

Beresford walked over to the bookcase, took hold of one end, and gave it a tentative tug.

‘I don't think I'll have to take the books off it,' he said. ‘It appears to be on some kind of a hinge.'

It would have to have been, Paniatowski thought. Logic determined that it would have to have been. But she still felt a huge wave of relief when Beresford confirmed it.

‘Open it,' she said.

‘Before you do that, there's something I want to say,' Kershaw told her. ‘I loved my wife, and she loved me.'

‘I don't doubt it,' Paniatowski said.

And she didn't. It had been obvious, when talking to her sister and mother, that Elaine had loved Kershaw. And though she had once thought that Kershaw had planned to murder Elaine, she now realized that the anonymous note he had dropped through Crane's letterbox told quite a different story.

‘I never did anything to Elaine that she didn't want me to do,' Kershaw said. ‘She liked to be hurt – and she liked having power over me.'

‘Power over you?' Paniatowski repeated incredulously. ‘You were the one with the whip.'

‘I told you once that the only reason I wanted to break you down was so I could build you up again – mould you,' Kershaw said. ‘Do you remember that?'

Paniatowski glanced across at Beresford, but her inspector seemed to have been struck temporarily deaf.

‘Yes, I remember that,' she said.

‘Elaine showed me that was not the way to true happiness. I didn't have to break her. I didn't want to break her. Yes, I was the one with the whip, but she was the one who decided when I could use it.'

She was a very different kind of woman to me, Paniatowski thought. And perhaps – despite the meek little mouse she was when he married her – she was a much stronger one.

‘Go on,' she said aloud.

‘She knew how much I desired her,' Kershaw continued, ‘and that showed in everything she did – the way she looked, the way she spoke, the way she walked. She had a confidence – a certainty about herself – that few men could resist. Wherever she went, men's eyes followed her.'

Paniatowski looked at Beresford, and Beresford – who had been to her barbecue, and now seemed to have got his hearing back – just nodded.

‘Do you want to tell me how it happened?' Paniatowski asked.

Kershaw shrugged. ‘Why not? Once you open up the bookcase, it won't matter anyway.'

‘
Any chance of you slipping home for a while,' she purrs seductively into the telephone.

‘
I'd like to,' Kershaw admits, ‘but there's a firm rule in my team that unless there's a real emergency . . .
'

‘
Who made that rule?' Elaine asks.

‘
I did.
'

‘
Then if you made it, you can break it.
'

‘
You're wrong about that, my love. It's precisely because I made it that I can be the last one to be seen to break it.
'

‘
Then don't be seen to break it,' Elaine says. ‘Slip away quietly.
'

‘
I don't think I—
'

‘
But it's been such a long time since we did it,' Elaine says huskily.

‘
I'll see what I can do,' Kershaw says, weakening.

‘
I'll be very gentle,' he promises.

‘
There's no need,' she tells him. ‘I'm fine. It's been over a week since you've had any fun – let yourself go!
'

‘
That's lovely,' she gasps.

‘I had to do something,' Kershaw told Paniatowski. ‘I couldn't see everything that I'd worked for all my life go to waste.'

‘And what you did was to come up with the idea of a serial killer,' Paniatowski said. ‘Your initial thought was to make Elaine his first victim, and someone else his second. But if you did that, the police would already have been investigating you by the time the second body turned up – and who knows what they might
already
have found. So how much better it would be if the idea of the serial killer was established
before
Elaine's body was discovered.'

‘What do you expect me to say?' Kershaw asked.

‘Nothing,' Paniatowski told him. ‘Nothing at all. Open the bookcase, Colin.'

Beresford swung the bookcase open, to reveal the room which lay beyond it.

It was not a big room – possibly only a little larger than the kitchen range and fireplace which had once stood there – but it contained much of interest. There were manacles on the wall, with whips hanging next to them. There was a clothes rail, from which were suspended many of the articles Elaine had bought from Brian Waites. And there was a large chest freezer.

‘That used to be next to the stairs, didn't it?' Paniatowski asked, pointing at the freezer.

‘Yes.'

‘It's where you stored the fish you caught on your expeditions with good old Georgie Baxter.'

‘Yes.'

‘You moved it into your little torture chamber . . .'

‘Don't call it that!'

‘. . . took out all the fish – which you later dumped – and set it to super-freeze. And when you thought it was cold enough, you put Elaine inside. And that's where she stayed, all the time that twenty or thirty policemen were tramping all over the house, looking for clues to where she might have gone.'

‘But before you did your stunt of crashing into the roundabout, you went out and picked up a prostitute who was roughly Elaine's size,' Beresford said. ‘You brought her back here, gave her a quick – but extremely cruel and violent – whipping, smothered her, and put her in the freezer with Elaine.'

‘It was a question of measuring one life against another,' Kershaw said.

‘Was it?' Beresford asked – and any trace of the admiration he might once have had for Kershaw was now quite absent.

‘Of course it was,' Kershaw replied. ‘The girl I killed was achieving nothing with her life, and would probably have been dead in a couple of years anyway. I thought her death would enable me to continue being a powerful force for good in the community.'

‘You flayed Elaine's back to cover up the scars of her previous beatings,' Paniatowski said.

‘That wasn't Elaine!' Kershaw told her. ‘It was a cadaver. Elaine was long gone from me by then.'

‘You can't have entirely believed that, or you'd simply have just dumped her somewhere, just like you dumped poor Grace,' Paniatowski said. ‘But you didn't do that. You laid her out on a table in the mill, and you covered her with a white sheet. And then you sent me an anonymous note, to make sure that we'd find her before the rats did!'

‘You're right,' Kershaw agreed. ‘I couldn't bear the thought of the rats getting at her.'

‘By the way, how long was it before you decided the freezer was cold enough to put Elaine into it?' Paniatowski asked.

Kershaw shrugged. ‘I don't know. An hour? An hour and a half?'

‘Had rigor set in?'

‘No,' Kershaw said, puzzled. ‘But it often doesn't in that time. Why do you ask?'

‘Forensic science has come a long way since the last time you investigated a murder,' Paniatowski said. ‘If Elaine had been dead for an hour and a half before she was frozen, I think Dr Shastri would have been able to tell.'