Dangerous Games (3 page)

‘Oh, it was Terry's,' Mrs Pugh said.

Yes, you can convince yourself of anything, if you really want to, Paniatowski thought. But holidays require planning, and the only planning Terry Pugh seemed to be involved in was planning a way to kill himself.

‘I wasn't keen on it at first,' Mrs Pugh continued. ‘I've never been abroad, you see. I've never been further than Blackpool, to be honest. But Terry said all that sunshine would do us good. He said it would give us the strength to deal with the baby when it arrived.'

Paniatowski, in the midst of another complex manoeuvre, faltered for a split-second and nearly clipped the side of a milk cart with her wing.

‘The baby!' she repeated.

‘That's right,' Mrs Pugh agreed.

‘You're pregnant?'

‘Four months. We've been trying for years, and had almost given up hope. Terry was very excited when it finally happened. That's why I can't understand why he'd ever think of killing himself.'

And when you put it like that, neither can I, Paniatowski thought.

The man pacing up and down outside the phone box on Whitebridge High Street had been christened
Reginald
Lewis, but had never been quite able to live up to his full name and was always known as Reg. He was wearing the jacket from one suit (brown) and the trousers from another (blue). Both parts of his ensemble had been well past their best when he acquired them, and had suffered from a lack of care and attention since. The rest of his appearance did not exactly inspire confidence either. His hair was long and greasy, his skin had an unwashed look, and there was a five-day growth of beard on his chin. He looked like a tramp – and
smelled
like a tramp – but tramps were not known for their nervous energy, and as Lewis continued to pace, it was plain that he had plenty of it and to spare.

The old woman in the phone box – at whom he glared every time his perambulations took him past her – was wearing a thick coat despite the heat, and had a knitted woollen hat on her head which looked as if it might have felt more at home keeping a teapot warm. She had been talking non-stop for over ten minutes, showing no sign of reaching the end of her monologue.

Lewis felt an almost overwhelming urge to open the phone box door, grab her by her lapels, and fling her out onto the street.

But that would never do, he told himself – because there would doubtless be some do-gooder around who would feel the need to intervene, and then he would never get his phone call made.

The old woman was still in full flow. Lewis tapped on the phone box window and then pointed with the index finger of his left hand to his right wrist, where his watch would have been – if he'd owned a watch.

The woman smiled uncertainly, and mouthed something which could have been, ‘Won't be a minute.'

Lewis glared at her, and walked on.

Up until that morning, he had been handling the situation well, he told himself.

True, the letter had unnerved him when he'd first read it, he freely admitted that, but he had worked hard at convincing himself that it had been no more than a joke in bad taste – a random stab in the dark by some malicious nutter which had just happened to hit a nerve.

He couldn't argue that any longer, could he? However much he might want to, he couldn't argue that now.

The old woman finally replaced the receiver back on its cradle and stepped out of the box.

‘You want to learn to have some patience, young man,' she said, looking up at him.

‘Piss off!' Lewis growled.

The woman looked shocked. ‘I know a policeman,' she said.

‘And
I
know where you live,' Lewis lied.

The old woman scuttled away.

Lewis grinned. Frightening her did not feel as good as placing his fist right in the centre of her stupid wrinkled old-bag face might have done, but at least it was something.

The panic hit him again the second he was inside the phone box. He found locating the right loose change in his pocket an almost impossible task. Half-crowns and pennies brushed easily against his fingertips, but though he knew there was a shilling in there somewhere, it kept on eluding him.

He should have done it earlier, he told himself, as he sweated and fumbled. When he was outside, pacing up and down, he'd had plenty of time to find the right money.

He almost gasped with relief when he located the shilling. He picked up the phone, dialled the number, and heard a ringing at the other end.

‘Brown Brothers' Furnishings,' said a woman's voice.

‘I want to speak to Mr Bygraves,' Lewis told her, pushing his shilling into the slot just as the pips started.

‘Are you a customer?' the bloody woman asked.

‘No, I'm a friend,' Lewis said, managing to keep to keep his voice level only by a tremendous effort of will. ‘It's a personal matter, and I need to speak to him urgently.'

‘Hold the line,' the woman said.

It could not have been more than a couple of minutes before Lewis heard a male voice say, ‘Tom Bygraves here,' but even that short wait had seemed like an eternity.

‘Have you heard?' Lewis demanded.

‘Who is this?' Bygraves asked.

‘For God's sake, it's me!' Lewis said.

‘Reg? Reg Lewis?'

‘Yes! Have you heard about Terry Pugh?'

‘Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. It said on the wireless news this morning that he was dead.'

‘And doesn't that bother you?'

Bygraves hesitated for a second, then said, ‘Not really. I haven't seen him for years. And people die all the time.'

‘But he didn't just
die
, did he?' Lewis asked, and now he was almost screaming. ‘He was bloody killed!'

‘They said on the wireless that he'd committed suicide.'

‘I don't believe that. And neither do you, Tom. Terry just wasn't the suicidal type.'

‘Not when we knew him, no. But that was quite a while ago, when you think about it, and people do change.'

‘Not Terry Pugh.'

‘He
must
have done.'

There was something in those last four words that made Lewis realise that, of the two of them, Bygraves was probably the more frightened – so frightened, in fact, that he was doing all he could to deny the glaringly obvious reality of the situation.

And that knowledge, strangely, made Lewis suddenly feel much calmer and much more in control.

‘It could be you or me next,' he said darkly.

‘What you're suggesting is absurd!' Bygraves said, and now there was clear evidence of hysteria in his tone. ‘This is England, for God's sake! We don't have revenge killings here!'

‘Did I mention revenge killings?' Lewis asked cunningly. ‘Did I
once
use the word “revenge”?'

‘No, but if you're calling me like this …'

‘I'm not the only one who got a letter, am I?' Lewis asked. ‘You've had one, too.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about!' Bygraves protested.

But he did! He definitely did!

‘When did it arrive?' Lewis asked. ‘Mine was about two weeks ago. Did yours come at the same time?'

There was a longer pause this time, then Bygraves said, ‘I … I did receive an anonymous letter.'

‘Well, then?'

‘But I just thought it was the work of some crank.'

‘That's what I thought, as well. Or, at least, that's what I
wanted
to think. But we have to face facts, don't we?'

‘Sweet Jesus, what are going to do?' Bygraves asked, and Lewis was almost certain that he was crying now.

‘We have to work as a team, like we used to,' Lewis said. ‘We have to figure out who's behind this.'

‘You don't think we'll
know
the man, do you?' Bygraves asked, incredulously.

‘We might,' Lewis said weakly.

He heard the other man take a deep breath, as if he were trying to pull himself together.

‘His connection isn't to us, you bloody fool – it's to what happened
back then
,' Bygraves said. ‘He'd probably never even
met
Terry Pugh before he killed him. And if he gets us, too … if … if he does to us what he did to Terry, we'll be dying at the hands of a stranger.'

Lewis looked around him, wildly. The High Street was busy at that time of day, and any number of people were walking past the booth – shoppers, and office workers on their break; delivery men and sales representatives; school kids nicking off class, and nuns going about their holy business. And though he couldn't see him, it was possible that the killer was out there too – watching him, looking for just the right opportunity to make his move.

‘So what
are
we going to do?' he asked. ‘Just sit around and wait for him to get us?'

‘They used to say that if a bullet had your name on it, there was nothing you could do,' Bygraves said fatalistically.

‘And what does that mean, for Christ's sake?'

‘It means that all any of us can do is pray we're not the next one on his list. It means that the only hope we have is that he'll be caught before he works his way round to us.'

T
he sign outside the police morgue said that there was no waiting in the area at any time, but for the moment it was partially hidden by the old Wolseley which had parked right in front of it.

As the driver of the Wolseley climbed out of his vehicle, it would have been instantly obvious to anyone watching that he was what people in Lancashire would call ‘a big bugger'. In fact, he was tall enough to scrape his head on the inside of the car roof if he wasn't careful, an occasional occurrence which he blamed – if only half-heartedly – for the thinning of his hair around the crown.

The rest of the package which made up DCI Charlie Woodend was consistent with his frame. He had a broad face which was more than amply filled by a big nose and a large mouth. It was the sort of face which looked as if it had been carved with tools that were not quite sharp enough to do really delicate work, and were wielded by an artisan who had long ago lost of his enthusiasm for his craft. But, as if to balance this, Woodend had intelligent eyes which were capable of showing great kindness and understanding, as well as great anger and steely determination. He was wearing a hairy sports jacket and cavalry twill trousers, and very few people could ever remember him ever wearing anything else. And between his nicotine-stained fingers burned the Capstan Full Strength cigarette that he would have felt almost naked without.

Woodend slammed the door of the Wolseley, but did not lock it. Nor did he bother to leave a sign on the dashboard announcing that he was a policeman on official business. That was the advantage of owning a car most drivers wouldn't be seen dead in, he thought – people soon learned that it was yours, and understood that they moved it at their peril.

He paused for a second to light a new cigarette from the butt of his old one, then stepped through the main door of the morgue. The smell of chemicals hit him even in the vestibule, and reminded him how much he disliked visiting this place. On the other hand, he thought, there was always the consolation that his visit gave him the opportunity to talk to the lovely and charming Dr Shastri, and – like the chemicals – that was not to be sniffed at.

Shastri was waiting for him in the post mortem room. Her colourful sari was covered by a practical white coat, but she managed to wear even this mundane article as if it were fresh off the catwalks of Paris.

A wide smile filled her face when she saw him. ‘Ah, my favourite policeman,' she said. ‘It was good of you to get here so quickly.'

‘You said it was urgent,' Woodend pointed out.

‘And so it is,' Dr Shastri agreed. She gestured with her delicate hand towards the marble slab. ‘Have you met the late Mr Pugh?'

The body was covered with a sheet right up to the chin, and anyone who didn't know any better would probably have assumed that the head was connected to it.

Woodend examined Pugh's face. He had expected there to be an expression of pure horror on it – for surely even a spilt second's realization that he was about to decapitate himself would have been enough to produce such a look – but Terry Pugh looked surprisingly peaceful.

‘You are wondering why he does not look overly concerned at the thought of losing his head,' Dr Shastri said, reading his thoughts.

‘That's exactly what I'm wonderin',' Woodend agreed.

‘In my experience, dead men
rarely
mind what is happening to them,' the doctor said.

‘What's that? Are you saying that this feller was dead
before
he lost his head?'

‘Indeed.'

‘How
long
before he lost it?'

‘That is rather a tricky question to answer precisely, since we do not know when he entered the canal. I would say, from the extent of the rigor mortis and livor mortis, that he has been dead for somewhere between eight and twelve hours, but even that is a very rough approximation.'

‘What killed him?' Woodend asked.

‘A massive blow to the back of the head. Not a very original way of committing a murder, I will admit, but one that is so effective that it continues to be very popular with your average, unimaginative killer.'

‘Was he killed on the bridge?'

‘From my preliminary investigations, I would very much doubt that was where he met his end.'

Woodend lit up a cigarette, and inhaled a mixture of nicotine and formaldehyde.

‘So, let me see if I've got this straight,' he said. ‘He's killed somewhere else, then his body's taken to the bridge. Once the killer has him there, he puts a noose around his neck and throws him over the parapet. Is that about it?'

‘That is, indeed, about it.'

‘Is there any chance at all that, when the killer hanged him, he didn't know he was already dead?'