Stone Killer (13 page)

Back then, it was generally believed that respect for the law was so widespread that just a handful of bobbies was all that was needed to keep a lid on crime in the area. As the years rolled by, however, it became plain to everyone that while the police force still held on to a great deal of the moral authority it had once had, it also needed a fairly strong physical presence to back that authority up. Thus, more young men were recruited into the force, and more space was needed in which they could practise law-enforcement.

The county council had toyed with building a completely new station, but eventually abandoned that idea in favour of expanding sideways. A grocer's shop to the left and solicitor's office to the right had been the first victims of this expansion, but the businesses beyond them had also soon been absorbed by the need for more extensive policing. By the start of the Second World War, only the newsagent's on the very edge of the terrace had not been incorporated into the headquarters' building, and by the end of hostilities, even that had disappeared.

The result of all this ad-hoc expansion was that Flatfoot House – as it was known locally – looked quite a modest building from the outside, but
inside
was a maze of corridors resembling the warren of a territorially ambitious rabbit. New recruits found it took them several months to master the place well enough to move through it with complete confidence, and Monika Paniatowski was well aware that she would soon have become totally lost had she not had Chief Inspector Baxter there to guide her.

‘This is it,' Baxter said.

The door in front of which he stopped had nothing written on it, but the patch of paint at eye-level, surrounded as it was by a much darker shade of the same paint, suggested a nameplate might have hung there.

‘My old room,' Baxter said, nostalgically. ‘The scene of my earliest triumphs.'

The chief inspector opened the door to reveal the office. The desk took up most of the available space, and the top of that desk was piled high with files and documents.

‘This is just about everything that we have on the Burroughs case,' Baxter told Paniatowski.

Monika whistled softly to herself. ‘You seem to have been very thorough,' she said.

‘I was,' Baxter agreed. ‘There's a great deal on the crime itself, and on Judith Maitland's background – as you might expect – but I also had my lads go through Clive Burroughs' life history with a fine-toothed comb.'

‘Why?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Because the essence of good police-work is attention to detail?' the chief inspector asked.

Paniatowski laughed. ‘That might well be the approved theory, but we both know it's not the way things actually happen, don't we, sir?' she said.

‘Then what does happen?' Baxter wondered, as if testing her.

‘In an ideal world, we would – of course – collect every available scrap of possible evidence,' Paniatowski said. ‘But since we're permanently undermanned and always pushed for time, we have to concentrate our efforts on what seems most relevant.'

‘Sad but true,' Baxter agreed.

‘So I would have expected most of the information to have been on the prime suspect, rather than on the victim,' Paniatowski said.

Baxter was starting to look uncomfortable. ‘I wanted to be
sure
,' he said awkwardly.

‘Sure?'

‘You remember that I told your boss there was no doubt in my mind that Judith Maitland was guilty?'

‘Yes?'

‘And based on the evidence we presented at the trial, I still believe that she was.'

‘But …?' Paniatowski prodded.

‘But the small part of me which
isn't
a professional policeman – and I assure you it's a
very
small part indeed, Sergeant – found itself believing Judith Maitland, when she said she didn't do it.' Baxter shrugged, as if bewildered by his own reaction to the case. ‘There was no logic at all to that, you understand,' he continued. ‘It was just a feeling.'

‘So you looked for fresh evidence which might back up this feeling of yours?'

‘Exactly.'

‘And did you find any?'

‘Not a sausage. Not even the
smell
of a sausage, nor even the hoof-print of the pig that the sausage first came from. There may have been people who disliked Burroughs – there
were
people who disliked him – but none of them seemed to have either a strong enough motive, or the opportunity, to murder him. So while I'm happy to have you go through all the documentation, I don't hold much hope of you coming up with anything new.'

‘Did you ever consider Hal Greene a possible suspect?' Paniatowski asked innocently.

‘Hal Greene?' Baxter mused. ‘That name does sound familiar, but I'm afraid I can't quite—'

‘He's the landlord of the Philosophers' Arms.'

‘Oh, that's right. Nasty, pretentious little pub, isn't it? All sofas and pastel shades?'

‘That's the one,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘Why should I have considered him?'

‘Because Burroughs was having an affair with his wife.'

‘Are you sure of that?'

‘I got it straight from the horse's mouth.'

‘So you think Greene might have killed Burroughs?'

Paniatowski shook her head. ‘No. Greene said he didn't find out about the affair until long after Burroughs' death. And I believe him.'

Baxter took his pipe out of his pocket, and lit up. Clouds of blue smoke filled the tiny office.

‘Well, that's certainly put me in my place, hasn't it, Sergeant Paniatowski?' he asked.

Paniatowski felt herself starting to redden. ‘I'm sorry, sir. I never meant to suggest—' she began.

‘Of course you did,' Baxter interrupted, dismissively but not unkindly. ‘You're a cocky, energetic, young sergeant, who wants to prove to the old fellers like me – who are still inexplicably clinging on to the posts of authority – that their day is almost gone. You want to make them aware that you're the new breed and you're the way of the future.'

‘I didn't want to—'

‘I don't blame you, lass. I did the same in my day. We all did. And one day, when you start feeling aches in your legs that you'd never noticed before, you'll be the butt of those kinds of comments yourself.'

Baxter was perhaps a few years younger than Cloggin'-it Charlie, Paniatowski thought, but talking to him was not unlike talking to Woodend. And perhaps he was right in what he'd said. Perhaps she was cocky. Perhaps she did tend to dismiss the old guard too easily.

She had been glad when Woodend went back to Whitebridge – leaving her on her own, to conduct the case the way she wanted to – but now she began to realize how much she missed him.

Baxter glanced at his watch. ‘It's getting late. I expect you'll want to put off making a dent in these files until the morning.'

‘No, I think I'll start now,' Paniatowski said.

Baxter nodded his head sagely. ‘Of course you will,' he agreed. ‘Given what I've just said about you, I shouldn't have expected anything else.'

Constables Colin Beresford and William Pratchett were standing behind the barricade at the southern end of Whitebridge High Street. Earlier on in the evening, they had been fully occupied in keeping the rubber-necking spectators well away from the barrier. But now – as the temperature dropped and the crowd began to thin – they could finally relax a little.

It was Pratchett – or ‘News Boy Bill', as he was widely known at the station – who initiated the conversation which the lull in activity allowed.

‘Heard the latest?' he asked eagerly.

Beresford found himself grinning. Bill Pratchett combined an eagerness for collecting gossip with an equal thirst for disseminating it, and it was only to be expected that after hours of enforced silence he was just bursting to deliver his latest bulletin.

‘Well, have you?' Pratchett demanded.

‘There's a rumour that the Rovers are about to sign a new centre-forward,' Beresford said innocently.

‘Bugger the Rovers!' Pratchett said, with the contempt of a man who could instinctively distinguish between stale news and news which was hot from the press. ‘I'm talking about the siege! And the murder!'

‘Oh, that!' Beresford said. ‘Has something been happening?'

‘
A lot's
been happening! Cloggin'-it Charlie's been over to Dunethorpe – which is where the murder actually took place.'

‘And why did he do that?'

Pratchett frowned. The function of his listeners, as he saw it, was to be in awe of what they'd learned. It certainly wasn't their place to ask him questions he didn't know the answer to.

‘Maybe they've decided to release Mrs Maitland,' he speculated. ‘Maybe Mr Woodend went over to Dunethorpe to square any new investigation which might be started with the local police.'

‘If that was the case, I'd have thought they'd send somebody more senior,' Beresford said dubiously.

‘And there's something else,' Pratchett said, attempting to reclaim the initiative. ‘
Before
Woodend went over to Dunethorpe, he paid a call on Stan the Half-Man.'

‘Who?' Beresford asked.

‘Stanley Keene, Mrs Maitland's business partner.'

‘I don't think I know him,' Beresford admitted.

‘Of course you know him,' Pratchett insisted. ‘If you've ever been on a park duty, you can't have missed him.'

‘Can't I?'

‘You must have seen him hanging around the public lavatories. Nasty little poof. Couldn't pass himself off as a real man if he was standing on stilts. Bloody hell, he must be nearly forty, and he still lives with his—'

Pratchett swallowed the rest of the sentence. It looked painful.

‘Still lives with his …?' Beresford prompted.

Pratchett looked desperately around him. ‘I think there's some bloody kids at the other end of the barrier,' he said, unconvincingly. ‘I'd better go and shoo them off.'

Beresford watched the other constable hurry away.

‘So this Stan the Half-Man still lives with his mother,' he said softly to himself. ‘Well, he's not the only one, is he?'

He didn't know how Keene felt about living under the matriarchal roof as he slid into middle age, but he was only too well aware of how difficult it was to take yourself seriously when you were a 24-year-old police constable who was doing the same thing.

And even if you could pull off that particular trick, the constable thought – even if you did manage to see yourself as a police officer, first and foremost – it was bloody difficult to persuade the rest of the world to follow suit.

Beresford thought wistfully of the numerous other young officers who'd come to him for advice – because it was obvious to them that he was
bloody
good at his job – but who'd stopped coming the moment they'd learned he was still sleeping in the same bedroom he'd grown up in. It really wasn't easy to be viewed as a mentor one minute, and nothing more than a big kid in a uniform the next, he thought, but he didn't see what he could actually
do
about it.

A car pulled up, and the duty sergeant got out of it. Beresford clicked his heels smartly together, and gave a salute which would not have disgraced a passing-out parade at Police College. But he probably still looked to the sergeant as if he was a lad in fancy dress, he thought gloomily.

‘You're relieved, Beresford. Get yourself back to the station,' the sergeant said.

‘Is somethin' the matter, Sarge?' the constable asked.

‘That depends on how you look at it. Some might regard what's about to happen to you as a golden opportunity. On the other hand, there's others who'd start thinkin' about movin' into another line of work entirely.'

‘What
is
happenin' to me?' Beresford asked.

‘Didn't I say?'

‘No, you didn't.'

The sergeant pulled a comical face. ‘It appears that Cloggin'-it Charlie wants you for a sunbeam,' he said.

The documentation on Clive Burroughs was as extensive as Chief Inspector Baxter had promised it would be. There were his discharge papers from the Army at the end of his National Service. There was his application for a driving licence and copies of his marriage certificate, his daughter's birth certificate, and the divorce papers which his wife had once filed, but later withdrawn. And there were bank statements – endless bank statements which stretched all the way back to the day he had first opened an account.

It was, indeed, a daunting task, and for a moment Paniatowski was tempted to leave it all until the morning. Then she thought of the amused smile that Chief Inspector Baxter would wear on his face if he learned that, despite what she'd said to him earlier, she'd gone home – and she felt her resolve suddenly stiffen.

She reached into her handbag, and extracted a packet of cigarettes and a miniature bottle of vodka. It was going to be a long night, she told herself.

‘It's the classic success story,' Woodend said to Constable Beresford. ‘So classic, it's almost a cliché in itself. The leadin' lady breaks her leg just before the curtain's about to go up on the first night, the understudy steps into her shoes – an', just like that, a star is born.'

‘Pardon, sir?' Beresford said.

‘Or, to put it more prosaically,' Woodend said, ‘Inspector Rutter's out on sick leave, Sergeant Paniatowski's workin' mainly out of the Dunethorpe nick, an' I need somebody to do some of the legwork for me here in Whitebridge. Are you up to the job?'

‘Too bloody right, I am!' Beresford said, before he could stop himself. ‘What I mean, sir, is … er …'

‘I think I get the message,' Woodend said. ‘But what I'm offerin' you isn't all glamour an' glitz, you know. In fact, there's no bloody glamour an' glitz at all. Until this case is cracked, you'll be workin' sixteen or seventeen hours a day, and most of what you do will turn out to be a complete bloody waste of time.'