Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (15 page)

On the other hand, she had to admit that Louisa was spot on with what she'd said about Robert.

‘Do you like Don Roberto, Mum?' Louisa asked.

Christ, can even my daughter read my mind now?
Paniatowski wondered.

‘He's all right,' she said, non-committally.

‘I think when this case of yours is over, we should see more of him,' Louisa said.

Had Louisa got a crush on him? Had she actually got a crush on Robert Martinez?

‘I think seeing more of him might be rather difficult,' Paniatowski said. ‘In case you've forgotten, Mr Martinez is a member of parliament, so he's a very busy man. And we're both busy, too – especially you. You've got your exams in eight months, and though that might seem a long way away now, it'll be here sooner than you realize.'

‘I'm sure Don Roberto gets some free time, even if he is an MP,' Louisa said, ‘and if I was too busy with all my school work, you could always see him on your own.'

Not a crush then – an attempt at matchmaking!

‘Do you resent the fact that there's not a man around the house?' Paniatowski asked.

‘No,' Louisa said.

‘Good!'

‘But I think that you do.'

‘That's ridiculous,' Paniatowski told her daughter.

‘How many dates have you been on in the last few years, Mum?' Louisa asked.

‘Plenty,' Paniatowski said defensively.

‘Hardly any at all,' Louisa said. ‘And a woman of your age still has her biological needs, you know.'

‘If you don't mind, I'd rather we didn't discuss my “biological needs”,' Paniatowski replied.

‘Please yourself, but they won't go away, you know,' Louisa told her. ‘Or rather, they will go away, which is why you should take full advantage of them while they're still there.' And then suddenly her face changed, and she was little Louisa again. ‘I used to hope that you and Uncle Colin would get married eventually,' she continued, ‘but now he's decided to play the field as far as girlfriends go, there's not much chance of that.'

‘First of all, there was never any chance of me marrying Colin,' Paniatowski said. ‘He's my best friend, and I'm very fond of him, but I've never been attracted to him in that way.'

‘Sexually,' Louisa said, once more the almost-grown-up.

‘Sexually, if you like,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘And secondly, there's no law that says you have to have a man, you know.'

‘I won't always be here to keep you company,' Louisa said. ‘I might not even be living in the same country as you. You'll soon start to feel the need for a companion once I've gone.'

‘If I do, then I'll get myself a cat,' Paniatowski snapped.

‘You do fancy Don Roberto, Mum,' Louisa said seriously. ‘I can tell that by the way your face changes when I mention his name.'

Oh yes, I fancy him, all right
, Paniatowski thought.

‘You're treading on dangerous ground, Louisa,' she said, smiling to show that her daughter shouldn't be too concerned.

‘Am I?' Louisa asked.

‘Very dangerous ground – because if you think it's all right to meddle in my love life …'

‘You haven't got one, Mum. That's the whole point.'

‘… what's to stop me thinking that I've got the right to meddle in yours, when you finally start going out with boys?'

Louisa looked shocked. ‘You wouldn't really do that, would you, Mum?' she asked.

‘I might,' Paniatowski replied, ‘if only so that you'd know just what it felt like.'

‘I promise never to mention Don Roberto again,' Louisa said.

‘Very sensible of you,' Paniatowski agreed.

T
he team had arranged to meet in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey at ten o'clock, and it was quarter past ten by the time Paniatowski had reached the end of her briefing.

‘So this is the sequence of events,' she said, summing up. ‘They've eaten the paella. Everybody at the table is looking at the pictures Louisa took with her to Spain, and when they eventually reach Elena Vargas, she finds herself gazing down at a newspaper photograph of a husband she probably thought was long dead. And not only that, but standing beside her husband is another man who she doesn't recognize – after all, she's not seen him since he was a baby – but who has her son's name. There's no wonder she went into shock, is there?'

‘But why did she decide to run the risk of coming to England on a false passport?' Beresford asked. ‘Why didn't she just write to them?'

‘Travelling on a false passport wasn't much of a risk at all, because, according to Charlie Woodend, the communist party have got pretty adept at forging,' Paniatowski said. ‘And if she'd written a letter, there's a good chance that it would never have got through. Franco may be dead but, so far, nothing much seems to have changed, and there's still strict censorship in Spain.'

‘And if the censor happened to see that she was writing to a man who is – presumably – still wanted for the murder of an officer and two soldiers, she'd be in deep trouble,' Meadows added.

‘But I don't think that was her main consideration,' Paniatowski said. ‘In fact, I don't think the decision to come to England was logical at all. She was acting on pure instinct. It's been thirty-six years since she's seen her husband and her son.' She paused. ‘Just think about that. None of you had even been born the last time she held her baby.'

‘Jesus!' Beresford said.

‘Exactly,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘And then she suddenly finds out not only that they're both still alive, but where they're actually living. And what's her first thought? That she wants to see them as soon as possible!'

‘I think I can see why she didn't write from Spain,' Beresford said. ‘What I don't understand is why she didn't call them once she'd arrived in England.'

Kate Meadows gave an audible sigh.

‘Am I being particularly thick again, Sergeant Meadows?' Beresford demanded.

‘No, sir – not thick, exactly.'

‘Then what?'

‘Perhaps just a little unimaginative.'

‘Then why don't you explain to me where you think my reasoning is going wrong?' Beresford suggested.

‘It wasn't just that she thought they were probably dead, they probably thought she was, too,' Meadows said.

‘That's true,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘Right up until the point that he identified the body, Javier Martinez was insisting that the chances were that she'd been killed a long time ago.'

‘So the last thing she wants is to ring him up and baldly announce to her husband that she's alive,' Meadows said. ‘What she does want to do is to break it to him as gently as she can, to look into his eyes as she's telling him, and then to hug him to her.'

‘But she never made it,' said Crane sombrely.

‘Which means that she must have been killed soon after she arrived in Whitebridge, and before she had a chance to pay her husband a call,' Paniatowski said. ‘Do we think the killer was local or an outsider?'

‘An outsider,' Beresford said firmly. ‘My lads have spent all afternoon checking the Spaniards on the list that Robert Martinez gave us. None of them come from the same part of the east coast of Spain as Elena and her family. Besides, as far as we know, nobody in Whitebridge had any idea she was coming.'

‘So she was followed here?' Paniatowski asked.

‘She must have been.'

‘In which case, why didn't the murderer kill her before she ever got to Whitebridge?'

‘He may not have had the opportunity.'

‘What about motive?'

‘I think it might have been political,' Crane said. ‘I've been reading the papers to find out exactly what's happening in Spain.'

‘That'd be the highbrow papers, would it?' asked Beresford, with just a little inverted snobbery. ‘The
Guardian
and
The Times
?'

‘That's right,' Crane agreed. ‘And also the
Telegraph
, the
Economist
and the
Washington Post
. What they all seem to be saying is that now Franco's dead, a lot of the right-wingers are in a state of near-panic. So maybe they've decided to kill off a few of their enemies, before those enemies have a chance to turn on them.'

‘But surely Elena was only small fry,' Paniatowski said.

‘Get enough small fry together, and they start to become a significant force,' Crane argued.

‘Even so, just killing one old woman's not going to change a lot,' Beresford said.

‘How do we know they have only killed one old woman?' Crane asked. ‘How do we know there haven't been a string of murders of communist party officials, all over Spain?'

‘If there had been, we'd have heard about …' Paniatowski began. ‘No,' she corrected herself, ‘we wouldn't have heard, because of the censorship.'

‘I don't think it's about politics at all,' Meadows said. ‘I think it's about the gold.'

‘There is no gold,' Paniatowski said. ‘Javier Martinez told me that himself – and if anybody should know, he should.'

‘There doesn't
have to
be any gold,' Meadows said. ‘All that matters is that there are people who
think
there is.'

‘Let's hear your theory,' Paniatowski said.

‘There are certain people in Spain who've heard the story about the gold, and who know that Javier was the man who was supposed to have it,' Meadows said. ‘They also know that Elena is his wife, and when they get to hear she's coming to England, they assume it's to join him, and they see that as a good way to track him down.'

‘There was no need to track him down,' Beresford said. ‘He's been living quite openly, under his real name, for the last thirty-six years, and if they'd bothered to check, they'd soon have found that out for themselves.'

‘Yes, but they wouldn't have bothered to check – because if he'd had the gold, as they thought he did, they'd assume he'd have changed his name,' Meadows said.

‘If they were that keen to get their hands on the gold, wouldn't they have checked anyway, just to be sure?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘I'm not saying they've been obsessing about it for the last thirty-six years,' Meadows said. ‘It's more the kind of thing they might have talked about when they'd had a few drinks. One of them might say, “If only we knew what Javier Martinez had done with the gold.” And another would reply, “Yes, if we could get our hands on that, we'd be sitting pretty.” Then they forget about it until the next time they get drunk. But when they hear that Elena is coming to England, the little game they've been playing suddenly becomes more serious.'

‘So they follow her from Spain, because they want to find Javier, and once she's reached Whitebridge, they kill her?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Why would they do that?'

‘Perhaps she saw them following her,' Meadows suggested. ‘Or perhaps they just wanted her out of the way, because they knew they needed time to watch Javier and work out where he might have hidden the gold. Whatever the reason, they didn't want her to be found, because that would have tipped Javier off – which is why they dropped the body in the canal.'

‘What you're all overlooking is that it may have nothing to do with politics or money at all – that it's all to do with revenge,' Beresford said. ‘We know that Javier killed at least three people …'

‘He didn't kill the lieutenant,' Paniatowski pointed out.

‘No, but the lieutenant wouldn't have died in a burning building if Javier hadn't knocked him out,' Beresford said.

‘Fair enough,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘We know he killed at least three people, and he probably killed a lot more, and maybe one of their friends or relatives wanted to pay him back.'

‘So, essentially, your theory is like Kate's, except that it's revenge, not gold, that's the motive,' Paniatowski said.

‘I suppose so,' Beresford agreed.

‘And they killed Elena in case she warned him?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm not saying that any of your theories is definitely right,' Paniatowski said, ‘but if there's even a glimmer of truth in even one of them, Javier Martinez's life is in danger. So as soon as we've finished up here, Colin, I want you to get on to HQ and make sure there are regular patrols going past his house.'

‘Right,' Beresford said. ‘And would you like me to inform Javier Martinez himself?'

‘No, I'll do that,' Paniatowski said.

And she found herself thinking,
Why did I say that? Am I just looking for an excuse to talk to Robert Martinez again?

‘So what's our next move?' Beresford asked.

‘We need to trace Elena's movements from the second she first set foot in Britain,' Paniatowski said. ‘That means, for a start, checking all the seaports and airports.'

‘It's a big job,' Beresford said.

‘Yes, it is,' Paniatowski agreed, ‘but the more accurate a picture we build up of her journey here, the more likely it is that we'll be able to establish if she was being followed – and if she was, who was following her.'

‘The problem is, the time she spent in Britain is only the end of the trail,' Meadows said. ‘If the motive for the murder has its origins in Spain, then Spain should be the focus of the investigation, and since we can't investigate in Spain …'

‘We can't,' Paniatowski said, reluctantly giving in to the inevitable, ‘but Charlie Woodend can.'

It was nearly a quarter to twelve when Paniatowski finally got home again, and as she stepped into the hallway, she wondered if it was now a little too late to ring Javier Martinez.

No, of course it wouldn't be too late. No man minds being disturbed if it's to be told that his life is in danger. Besides, after the traumatic evening he'd had, he was unlikely to be asleep yet.