Stone Killer (20 page)

‘He didn't mean it,' Keene said.

‘Mean what?'

‘All those names he called me. He must have seemed like a vicious bully, but that's not really Thomas at all. He's a very decent man, you know. It's just that he's under a lot of pressure.'

‘That's very forgivin' of you,' Woodend said.

‘And when he threatened to shoot me – to spatter my pathetic little body all over the walls – he didn't mean that, either. I
knew
he didn't mean it. I was almost sure I'd have been perfectly safe to stay there. But I still ran away. I just couldn't help myself.'

‘There's very few people who
wouldn't
have run, under those circumstances,' Woodend said.

Tears were forming in Keene's pale eyes. ‘Do you really think so, Chief Inspector?' he asked.

‘I'm sure of it,' Woodend said.

Stanley Keene took a deep breath. ‘If you want me to go back into the bank, I will,' he said. ‘It won't be easy for me, but I'm almost certain that I can force myself to do it.'

‘There'd be no point in your goin' back in,' Woodend said. ‘He won't talk to you again. I'll consider myself lucky if he'll even talk to
me
.'

‘If only I'd been able to handle it differently,' Keene agonized.

‘You did your level best, Mr Keene, an' that's all any of us can do,' Woodend said.

‘So what happens now?' Keene asked. ‘Now that I've failed so miserably.'

Woodend looked around him – at the sharpshooters on the roofs, at the barricades at the end of the street.

‘What happens now?' he said. ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Keene, I've absolutely no bloody idea!'

B
ack in her temporary office in the rabbit warren which was Dunethorpe Central Police Station, Monika Paniatowski gazed down despondently at the stack of documents Chief Inspector Baxter had so assiduously collected on the Burroughs case.

There was a nagging feeling in some far corner of her mind that she'd missed something. That at some point the previous evening – either just before she'd fallen asleep, or shortly after she'd woken up – she'd come across a document which, if she'd been feeling sharper, she would instantly have homed in on.

The problem was that she had no idea which document in the large pile it could be, or even which aspect of the late Clive Burroughs' life it related to. Yet it was there – she was almost
certain
it was there.

She heard a gentle tapping on the open door, and when she looked up she saw that Chief Inspector Baxter was standing there.

‘Woke up this mornin', and found my baby gone,' he sang in a voice that sounded passably like Mick Jagger's.

He was making a joke of it, Paniatowski thought. But just below the surface, there was clearly a rebuking edge to his tone. And joke or not, she didn't like being referred to as his ‘baby'.

‘Yes, I did slip out rather quietly,' she admitted, sounding – even to herself – ridiculously prim. ‘I didn't want to disturb you.'

Not
quite
true. What she hadn't wanted to do was to
talk
to him – not until she'd got all her feelings about the previous night properly sorted out.

‘Never mind, we'll make up for it by going somewhere nice for lunch,' Baxter said.

‘I'm not sure I'll have time for lunch, sir.'

Baxter's smile turned to a frown. ‘
Sir?
You didn't call me “sir” last night, Monika.'

‘That was then, this is now,' Paniatowski said, smiling to blunt the apparent sharpness of her words.

‘I'm not sure I know what you mean,' Baxter said – though it was perfectly clear from his expression that he did.

‘
Then
, we were two lonely people, seeking a bit of comfort in each other's arms,' Paniatowski clarified. ‘And maybe we will be again. But
now
, we're two working bobbies, both snowed under with our current assignments, as working bobbies always are.'

‘Is that really how you see us?' Baxter asked wonderingly.

‘As working bobbies?'

‘As nothing more than two lonely people.'

‘You don't seem to have ever seriously considered Mrs Burroughs as a suspect,' Paniatowski said.

‘What?!'

‘You investigated the case amazingly thoroughly, you've collected mountains of background material, but you don't seem to have ever seriously considered Mrs Burroughs as a suspect.'

‘Ah, I see. That's a way of telling me not to bring our personal life into the office,' Baxter said.

‘When I'm working on a case, I don't
have
any personal life,' Paniatowski countered.

Or even when I'm
not
working on a case, she added silently.

‘So what happened last night, if it wasn't a personal life?' Baxter wondered.

‘I really would much prefer to talk about the investigation, sir,' Paniatowski said, insistently.

Baxter nodded. ‘All right. If that's the way that you want to play it, Monika.' He paused and took a deep breath. ‘In answer to your question, no, I didn't really consider her a suspect,
Sergeant Paniatowski
.'

‘Why not? She had plenty of reasons to despise her husband, and stood to gain a great deal of money from his death.'

‘All that's true enough. But I already had my
prime
suspect – locked up in the cells.'

‘So what happened to your prime suspect's overall? According to your theory, she was wearing it when she killed Burroughs.'

‘That's true.'

‘Yet you never found it.'

‘She must have destroyed the overall before we picked her up in the lay-by. Given the time element, she'd certainly had ample opportunity to do so.'

‘That would imply she took it with her when she left the crime scene.'

‘Of course.'

‘The nightwatchman said she didn't.'

‘You're putting words into the witness's mouth. What the nightwatchman actually said was that he didn't
see
her carrying it. That certainly doesn't mean that she wasn't.'

‘So he was observant enough to notice that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes, but yet somehow completely missed the fact that she was carrying a bloodied overall in her arms?' Paniatowski asked sceptically.

‘It's possible.'

‘But not likely.'

Baxter ran his fingers through his wiry, greying hairs. ‘You should know yourself that if you ask six different witnesses to describe an incident, you'll get six vastly different versions of what actually happened,' he said.

‘You disappoint me, sir,' Paniatowski said. ‘I thought you were my kind of bobby. But you're not, are you?'

‘Aren't I?'

‘No. I'll admit that you did a superb job of collecting up all the available evidence, but does that really count for much when you've already made up your mind about the case? You weren't really conducting an investigation at all, were you? You were just going through the motions.'

Baxter shook his head again, almost despairingly. ‘You may have all the drive and energy of youth – you may have a very quick brain – but you've still got an awful lot to learn about detective work.'

‘Maybe I have. But you could claim that about anybody. Even an old dog should try to learn a
few
new tricks occasionally,' Paniatowski said cuttingly.

Baxter looked hurt. ‘In life, as distinct from popular fiction, the obvious suspect is almost always the right one,' he told her.

Charlie Woodend would never have said anything like that, Paniatowski thought.

Cloggin'-it Charlie approached every new case with a totally open mind. For him, evidence was a broad light which helped to illuminate the whole picture, not a narrow beam which focused on one aspect of it.

Why hadn't she seen that when they'd been having their argument the previous day? she wondered.

Then she realized that it wasn't so much that she
hadn't
seen it as that she'd chosen to ignore it – chosen to cast Woodend in the role of dinosaur, because a dinosaur's opinion of you didn't really matter.

She saw now that having just almost lectured Baxter on his inability to keep the personal and professional sides of his life distinct, she'd been falling into exactly the same trap with Woodend. And what was even worse, she'd let her personal feelings
warp
her professional judgements.

‘If you don't mind, sir, I have to make a phone call in connection with my investigation,' she said.

‘And you'd rather I wasn't here when you did it?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Right then,' Baxter said, turning to face the corridor. ‘I'll see you around, Sergeant.'

‘About lunch?' Paniatowski said.

‘Yes?' Baxter asked over his shoulder.

‘I really don't have time today, but if I'm still here tomorrow, it's certainly something we could think about.'

Woodend made use of the phone when he had to, but he didn't care for it. He liked to study the face of the person he was talking to, and a disembodied voice emerging from a piece of moulded plastic was no substitute for that at all. Thus, whilst he was pleased that Monika Paniatowski had phoned in her report – because he had been just a
little
bit concerned about her mental balance – he couldn't help wishing that she was sitting opposite him instead.

‘You might just be on to somethin' there,' he said, after Paniatowski had told him about Judith Maitland's uniform. ‘Good work.'

‘Yes, it was, wasn't it?' Paniatowski's voice crackled at him from the other end of the line.

Cocky young bugger, Woodend thought. Still, it was nice that she felt she
could
be cocky again.

‘What's your view on this month that Burroughs spent in Manchester?' he asked.

‘It was a long time ago,' Paniatowski said. ‘Besides, I think I know what he was doing there – and it has nothing to do with the case.'

Woodend lit up a cigarette, but said nothing.

‘It hasn't, has it, sir?' Paniatowski asked, with a note of uncertainty creeping into her voice.

‘Hasn't what?'

‘Hasn't anything to do with the case?'

‘Probably not,' Woodend conceded. ‘But if you want to learn somethin' new about a feller, you shouldn't study the ordinary things he'd done – you should look at the
extraordinary
ones.'

‘So are you saying that I should go down to Manchester to chase this lead up?'

‘If you were given all the resources you needed to do the job properly, then you most certainly should,' Woodend replied. ‘But we both know that's never goin' to happen – that you're always goin' to have to juggle with what you've actually got. An' since you already seem to have enough balls in the air to keep you busy, there's no point in goin' lookin' for any more.'

‘So what do you think I
should
do?'

It was nice that she was asking his advice again, Woodend thought. ‘If I was you, I think I'd pay another visit on the grievin' widow,' he said.

‘And what should I do when I see her? Ask her straight out if she picked up a hammer and battered her husband's brains in?'

Woodend chuckled. ‘Aye, why
not
do just that?' he said. ‘She's bound to break down an' confess immediately.'

‘You think so?'

‘Of course. You should have seen enough of Perry Mason on the telly to know that's what
always
happens.'

Paniatowski laughed. ‘But on the off-chance that it doesn't, maybe I should try a slightly different approach,' she suggested.

‘Perhaps that
would
be wise,' Woodend concurred. ‘You might be best to build on the pally relationship you already seem to have established with her. You could try givin' her the impression that you think the whole investigation's a waste of time, for example. That should relax her, an' with her guard down, she just might say somethin' very interestin'.'

‘It's a thought,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘Well, if there's nothing more, sir, I think I'll—'

‘Hang on just a minute,' Woodend said.

‘Yes?'

‘Was there any particular reason why you didn't check in with me before you left for Dunethorpe this mornin'?'

There was a significant pause on the other end of the line, then Paniatowski said, ‘As a matter of fact, sir, the reason I didn't come to see you was because I wasn't actually
in
Whitebridge at all this morning.'

‘No?'

‘No. I spent the night here in Dunethorpe.'

She was suddenly sounding unnaturally casual, Woodend thought – and wondered why that should be.

‘Booked yourself into a hotel, did you?' he asked. ‘Well, given the way the minds of our bean-counters work, I hope you settled for a modest bed-and-breakfast, rather than drownin' yourself in three-star luxury.'

The pause was even longer this time.

‘I didn't actually check into a hotel at all,' Paniatowski admitted. ‘DCI Baxter gave me a mountain of material to look at, and I spent the night at the station, working my way through it.'

Now that just didn't ring true, Woodend told himself.

‘So you had no sleep at all?' he asked.

‘I … er … managed to grab a couple of hours at my desk.'

‘Well, don't overdo it, Monika,' Woodend advised. ‘I need my bagman to keep her mind razor-sharp. You're no bloody good to me when you're completely knackered.'

‘I won't work straight through the night again,' Paniatowski promised. ‘In fact, I was planning to come back to Whitebridge early enough to make sure I get a good night's sleep in my own bed.'