Death's Dark Shadow--A novel of murder in 1970's Yorkshire (17 page)

‘So what happened next?'

‘I thought I might as well go for a walk – I get too little exercise when I'm in London – and I left the house at about nine o'clock.'

‘Did you get the impression when you were leaving that anyone was watching the house?'

‘I'd never have gone out if I had. But to be honest, there could have been a whole team of watchers out there, and – the state I was in – I probably wouldn't have noticed them.'

‘Where did you go on this walk of yours?'

‘I can't tell you the exact route. I remember crossing the Boulevard at one point, and I was certainly down by the river, but my mind was somewhere else entirely, and I wasn't really thinking about where I was going.'

‘Did anybody see you on your walk?' Paniatowski said. ‘I'm sorry, but I have to ask.'

‘Of course you do,' Robert Martinez agreed. ‘Two thirds of murders are committed by members of the immediate family, aren't they?'

‘Yes, it's around that figure.'

‘Somebody may have seen me – I'm the local MP and I've had my picture plastered over half the hoardings in town, so probably most people would recognize me. But it's a chill night, and there weren't many people out and about, so I can't say whether or not I was noticed.' Martinez paused. ‘You seem to be growing tenser with every word I say.'

‘I'm just concentrating on what you're saying, that's all,' Paniatowski replied unconvincingly.

‘You don't have to feel guilty about treating me as a suspect, Monika,' Martinez told her. ‘Anybody in your position would do that.'

‘Yes, you're right, I do have to treat you like a suspect,' Paniatowski said. ‘I'd lose the confidence of my team if I didn't – but I know you didn't kill him.'

‘Don't box yourself into a corner because of what happened earlier,' Martinez cautioned her. ‘For your own sake – for the sake of your career – you need to keep an open mind.'

‘Do you seriously imagine that I think you're innocent just because we had a quick kiss in the hallway?' Paniatowski demanded angrily. ‘Do you actually see me as that weak a person?'

‘No, I don't think you're weak at all,' Martinez said. ‘So why are you ruling me out?'

Because we already know who killed your father
, Paniatowski thought –
it's just that we don't know his name or what he looks like.

But she couldn't tell Robert that without revealing details of the investigation to him – and on the scale of sins a police officer could commit, giving a civilian those kinds of details ranked just below bribery.

‘Why am I ruling you out?' she asked. ‘I'm ruling you out because, though I don't know you well, I know you well enough to be sure that you'd never torture your own father.'

‘He … he was tortured?' Robert Martinez asked.

Oh God, he wouldn't know about that
, Paniatowski thought.

He was only in his father's bedroom for a few seconds, and because Javier's hands were tied behind his back, he wouldn't have seen them.

‘There were cigarette burns on his hands,' she said.

‘Cigarette burns! On his hands!'

‘There were only a few of them. I don't think it can have gone on for long,' Paniatowski lied.

‘That's terrible,' Robert said, ‘And you're right, I'd never do that to my own father – but I can think of a few people who might.'

‘I thought you said you'd never been to Spain.'

‘I haven't.'

‘But you've met some of the people who your father knew when he lived in Spain, have you?'

‘No,' Robert Martinez said, perplexed.

‘Then I don't see …'

‘I'm not thinking clearly, am I?' Robert asked. ‘Or is it more the case that I'm trying to think like a detective – which is something that I'm so obviously unqualified to do?'

‘You think his killer is a Whitebridge man!' Paniatowski said, with sudden insight.

‘And you don't!' Robert replied – clearly shocked by the idea that it could have been anyone else.

She was digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole with every word she spoke, Paniatowski told herself.

‘What I think is entirely irrelevant to this conversation,' she said, with a fresh anger directed more at herself than at Robert Martinez. ‘I'm the police officer here. It's my job to ask the questions, and your job to answer them.'

‘Maybe we should have held this interview in a more formal setting,' Robert Martinez said.

There's no maybe about it
, Paniatowski thought.
I've screwed up.

‘Who do you think might have killed your father?' she asked, in an attempt to pull something out of the hat which might perhaps justify her stupidity.

‘I'm not going to point the finger at anybody in particular – because I just don't know,' Robert Martinez said firmly.

‘But you do think there were some men here in Whitebridge who hated him enough to torture him?'

Robert Martinez sighed. ‘When he was in Spain, my father must have experienced life at its harshest,' he said. ‘The lesson he learned from that was that you have to be tough to survive, and that compassion is a weakness which will probably bring you down. And even after all his years in Whitebridge, he could never quite bring himself to unlearn that lesson.'

‘Meaning that he cheated people – that he stole from them?'

‘I wouldn't go that far,' Robert Martinez said. ‘But it's more than possible that there are men who think he cheated them – who are obsessed by the idea – and who wanted to make him confess to it before they killed him.' He paused again. ‘I know I'm here to answer questions, but could I ask just one?'

‘It depends what it is,' Paniatowski replied cautiously.

‘When did my mother die?'

There could be no harm in telling him that.

‘As far as we know, she was killed sometime last Wednesday – probably in the late afternoon.'

Robert Martinez let out what could only have been a gasp of relief.

‘Then I couldn't have saved her,' he said.

‘What do you mean by that?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘I was in London all last week. We were drafting a bill on political refugees, and we were working round the clock. So I wasn't in Whitebridge – and I couldn't have saved her.'

‘Even if you had been here, it probably wouldn't have made any difference,' Paniatowski pointed out. ‘You didn't know she was coming – and you wouldn't have recognized her even if you'd seen her on the street.'

‘You're right, of course – on a purely logical level,' Robert Martinez agreed. ‘But I'm a son who's lost his mother, and logic doesn't really come into it.'

‘I have to go,' Paniatowski said. ‘Do you think you'll be all right on your own?'

‘Not really,' Martinez admitted. ‘I don't think I'll ever be quite right again. But I'll find a way to cope with it – because that's what people do.'

R
obert Martinez had been going out with Lynn Jones, the deputy headmistress of a local girls' school, for years. It had been a very old-fashioned – almost traditional – courtship, and everyone who knew them had automatically assumed that they would eventually end up getting married. And, in fact, Robert had proposed to Lynn, just days after having been selected by his constituency party as prospective parliamentary candidate for Whitebridge.

‘If you're elected, I'd have to give up my job, and we'd be spending most of our time in London,' Lynn had said. ‘And I'm a northern lass to my core, Robbie – I like living in Whitebridge.'

‘You could keep your job, and we'd see each other at the weekends and when parliament isn't in session,' Martinez had replied.

‘I'd rather have no husband at all than a part-time husband,' Lynn had countered. ‘You've already got work – everybody says what a marvellous job you've done since you've taken over Sunshine Holidays – so why would you want to become an MP?'

‘I want to do some good.'

‘But you're already doing good. Can you tell me the name of any other coach operator in Lancashire who lends his buses out to charities anything like as often as you do?'

‘No, but …'

‘And then there's your work at the battered wife shelter and the animal refuge – there's dozens of organizations that you support in one way or another.'

‘It's not enough,' Robert had said. ‘This country didn't have to give me a home, but it did, and I feel under an obligation to do the best I can for it in return. Being in Westminster will give me that opportunity. I can help hundreds of battered wives' shelters and hundreds of animal refuges if I'm an MP.'

And since neither of them would budge on the matter, they had parted. But it had been an amiable parting – so amiable that they both realized they had probably never actually been in love.

In fact, other than them not sleeping together any more, it was barely a parting at all. Lynn had worked long and hard on Robert's election campaign, and Robert had continued to take Lynn out for dinner whenever he was in Whitebridge. So it had been only natural that, when the police had informed Robert that he could not go back into his house, since it was now officially a crime scene, he should ring up Lynn and ask her if she could give him a bed for the night.

Now, at a quarter to six the following morning, the two of them found themselves facing each other across Lynn's kitchen table.

‘There's not much point in asking you whether you had a good night's sleep, is there?' Lynn asked, sipping at her cup of coffee. ‘You can't have been in bed for more than four hours – and I heard you tossing and turning for most of that.'

‘I'm sorry,' Robert said. ‘I never meant to disturb your sleep.'

‘Don't you go worrying about me,' Lynn said sternly, in her best deputy headmistress voice. ‘I'm not the one whose life was turned upside down yesterday. But I do think you need more sleep, Robert, so maybe, when I've gone off to work, you could try and snatch another two or three hours.'

Robert Martinez shook his head. ‘I've no time for more sleep. I've got to get out and start talking to the Spanish community.'

‘Whatever for?'

‘They may be able to throw some light on my mother's murder.'

Lynn shook her head wonderingly.

‘Now how could they possibly do that?' she asked.

‘I've been thinking about it, and it seems to me that if she was in Whitebridge for any length of time – and that length of time could be as little as a few hours – she might have come into contact with one of them,' Martinez explained. ‘Someone might, for example, have met her in a shop. Or perhaps sat next to her on a bus, and realized that she was Spanish, too.'

‘That would be a very big coincidence,' Lynn said, sceptically.

Yes, it would be a very big coincidence, Martinez thought – but very big coincidences were the only things he had to work with.

‘And anyway, won't they have already been questioned by the police?' Lynn asked.

‘Yes, they will – but they might be willing to tell me things they wouldn't tell the police.'

‘You're wasting your time, you know,' Lynn said.

Robert sighed. ‘Yes, I probably am,' he agreed.

If the police canteen had been open at that god-awful hour, they would never have chosen to meet at the transport café on the A59, but since it wasn't – and the café was – that was where the team assembled at six-fifteen on the morning after Javier Martinez's murder.

Even given the lack of options available, it hadn't been a brilliant choice, Paniatowski thought, looking around her. There were good transport cafés and there were bad ones, and the River View Café – which didn't even have a view of the river – fell squarely into the second category.

It smelled of fried bacon, chip fat, disinfectant and hand-rolled cigarettes; the counter staff stood grim and silent, counting down the minutes until their shifts ended; and the tea urn sighed plaintively, as if it had all but given up hope of being moved to somewhere classier.

‘Right, we'd better get started,' she said, trying her best to inject a positive note into what was undoubtedly a negative situation. ‘What have you got for us, Inspector?'

‘Not a lot,' Beresford admitted. ‘Most of the people who live on Tufton Court like to get to bed earlier, and the only one who says he saw anything at all was a Mr Hodgeson, who got up to let the cat in at about eleven forty-five, and noticed a man entering the Martinez house through the front door.'

‘That would be Robert Martinez himself,' Paniatowski said. ‘What did Mr Hodgeson do then?'

‘Once the cat was safely inside, he went straight back to bed.'

‘Which is a pity,' Paniatowski mused, ‘because if he'd stayed up a few minutes more, he might have seen another man leaving the house and heading up Tufton Court.'

‘I think it's unlikely he did leave that way,' Beresford said. ‘Why run the risk of exposing yourself on the Court, when you could slip quietly away down the service road?'

‘That's true,' Paniatowski agreed. She forced herself to smile. ‘That's the trouble with murderers, isn't it? They go out of their way to make things difficult for us.'

‘You'd almost think they didn't want us to catch them,' Meadows said – and her smile was forced, too.

‘Did we learn anything interesting from the roadblocks?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Yes, we learned that there are still some people around who think they can drive a car when they're too pissed to walk,' Beresford said. ‘But nobody who was stopped and questioned came even close to fitting the profile of a possible killer. So we're left with only two possibilities – either the murderer had already managed to leave the area, or that he's still in Whitebridge.'