The Enemy Within (3 page)

‘Funny, it was the first thing that struck me.
Why
do you suppose it smells of petrol?'

‘Don't know,' the older boy said.

‘You don't like the Stott Street Gang very much, do you?' Paniatowski asked, gently.

‘They always make fun of our bonfire,' the younger boy said in a rush. ‘An' that's not fair. Theirs is bigger, but that's only 'cos they're older.'

Paniatowski gave him the sort of smile that one underdog reserves for another. ‘And you thought that if theirs just happened to burn down, so close to Bonfire Night, they'd never be able to rebuild it in time. Is that right?'

‘No . . . we . . .'

‘Where did you get the petrol from?'

‘My dad's garage,' the younger one mumbled.

‘You could have killed yourselves,' Paniatowski said. She turned to the constable. ‘Make sure their parents find out about what they'd be doing, will you, Ted?'

The constable nodded. ‘Oh, I will, Sarge. You can bank on that. I've got two holy terrors of my own at home, an' if they'd been up to anythin' like this, I'd tan their arses so they couldn't sit down for a week.'

Paniatowski wheeled round and walked back towards the bonfire. It was a crazy thing the boys had being planning to do, she thought – and she hadn't been joking when she'd said they could have been killed. She hoped that the parents would give the kids such a bollocking that they'd never hear the word ‘petrol' again without wetting themselves.

That said, she felt a grudging admiration for the kids' spirit.

The police surgeon had apparently completed her initial examination, and was standing beside the bonfire waiting to be questioned. She was younger than Paniatowski had expected, and – in the sergeant's opinion – far prettier than any woman outside Hollywood had the right to be.

They shook hands, then Paniatowski said, ‘What can you tell me?'

‘The victim's probably in her late forties,' Dr Shastri said. ‘I'd guess that she's been dead for less than two hours, though I'll have a clearer idea when I've got her on the slab.'

‘Cause of death?'

‘Her throat's been cut. It's a very neat slash, inflicted from behind. I'd say that the knife was extremely sharp, and the killer certainly seemed to know what he was doing.'

‘So you'd guess he's killed before?'

‘I would not be prepared to go that far. He could just have been lucky. Or perhaps he's been practising on dummies.'

‘But you don't really believe either of those things, do you?

‘You are quite right, of course. It looks like the work of a professional.' Dr Shastri smiled, to reveal a set of small, regular, pearl-white teeth. ‘As my old professor of anatomy in Bombay would have said, in this business you can't really call yourself a proper butcher until you've had the experience of working with some real meat.'

‘By the cringe, but it's a rare thing in these days of everybody standin' on their dignity to hear a sawbones like you bein' poetical,' said a deep voice just behind them. ‘I think we're goin' to enjoy workin' together.'

T
he police surgeon and the detective sergeant turned their heads. Standing just behind was a man dressed in a hairy sports jacket. He was a big man in every way. His head was large; his facial features looked as if they might have been blasted out of a mountainside. His heavy torso was supported by trunk-like legs and feet clad in size ten boots. He was the sort of man who caused little old ladies to take a tighter grip on their handbags, until, that was, they noticed his benign expression.

Paniatowski positioned herself between the doctor and the new arrival. ‘Dr Shastri, I'd like you to meet Chief Inspector Woodend,' she said. ‘Chief Inspector Woodend, this is Dr Shastri.'

‘A very nice introduction, Monika,' Woodend told her. ‘The court chamberlain couldn't have done it better.'

‘Thank you, sir,'

‘Call me Charlie,' he told the doctor as he shook her small delicate hand in his large paw.

‘Charlie it will be,' Dr Shastri replied, smiling. ‘And you must call me––'

‘I'll call you “Doc”,' Woodend interrupted her. ‘We always call the police surgeon “Doc”. So you think our killer knows his onions, do you?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Sorry, lass, that's probably not a term they use much in medical school. What I meant was, you think that he's – at the very least – a gifted amateur?'

Dr Shastri nodded. ‘Yes, I would have to say that he was.'

From somewhere close by came the unexpected sound of a tinny mechanical bell.

‘What the hell was that?' Woodend asked.

‘Sounded to me like an alarm clock,' Paniatowski replied.

‘An' where is it?'

‘Inside the bonfire?'

There had been the smell of smoke in the air before the clock went off – smoke from the countless cigarettes which were being puffed at all over Mad Jack's Field; smoke which the wind carried from the shift-work factories on the edge of town and the rows of terraced houses whose owners still stuck stubbornly to using solid fuel. But this smoke had an entirely different taste to it.

It was
wood
smoke! Woodend thought. More than that – it was the kind of wood smoke which is thrown out as the flames lick persuasively around branches which have, as yet, refused to co-operate with the conflagration.

The Chief Inspector had only just completed his analysis when there was a loud ‘whoosh', and one side of the bonfire burst into bright, dazzling flame.

The sudden heat – cutting through the chill November air – pricked against the skin of everyone close enough to feel the effect. The roar of the flames – and already it
was
a roar – filled their ears like the warning of an angry lion.

The flames spread rapidly, greedily devouring the petrol that the older of the boys had thrown on the bonfire earlier. Twigs inside the inferno crackled. Thicker timbers groaned their resistance. Bright red sparks were already dancing above the apex of the bonfire to form a glowing halo.

In the distance, a woman screamed. Somewhat closer, a panicked man shouted that someone should call the fire brigade. No one had expected this. No one knew what was really going on.

Dr Shastri was still close to the blaze, Woodend noted – far too close for a woman who was dressed from head to foot in the kind of loose, flammable material that flames thrive on.

The Chief Inspector took a step nearer the doctor, grabbed her arms in his powerful hands, and swung her clear of the fire as if she weighed no more than a doll. Once he'd placed her on the ground again, Woodend turned quickly back to the bonfire. The flames had spread rapidly, so that now they formed a fiery canopy over the hollowed-out middle. It could only be a few seconds – at the very most – before bits of flaming wood began falling on the corpse which was still lying there.

Paniatowski had seen the same danger as he had, and was kneeling down in order to do something about it.

Woodend pulled her back from the flames. ‘Leave the body to me!' he shouted.

‘But, sir . . . !'

‘Get all these other silly buggers safely out of the way!'

Woodend moved closer to the fire, and sank down on to one knee. He tried to see straight ahead, but the intense heat and smoke made normal vision impossible. His hands groped blindly in front of him, and the right one brushed against what could only be the dead woman's ankle.

He knew that, to make the cleanest job possible of pulling the dead woman clear, he should probably locate her other ankle with his free hand, but his brain – which was registering the fact that his eyeballs felt as if they were frying – counselled speed over elegance.

Wrapping his thick fingers firmly around the ankle he already had hold of, he took a step backward.

The dead body wouldn't move! The bloody thing was snagging against something!

He was tempted to take a deep breath before trying again, but the only effect of that would be to draw even more of the sodding smoke straight into his bloodstream.

His cheeks felt on fire now, and he could smell cooking meat which he hoped wasn't him. Behind him he could hear a distorted voice – it sounded like Paniatowski's – screaming that he should come away. He ignored it. One more pull, he told himself – one last big effort on his part – and he would have the corpse free of the inferno.

It came away with such ease this time that, for a moment, he almost lost his balance. He swayed, and in the second or so it took him to readjust his weight, the fiery arch collapsed into the hollow.

The bonfire swayed dangerously, then a part of it began to topple forwards. Woodend dragged the corpse clear of this new danger – but not before the blonde, curly hair which topped the victim's head had caught on fire.

Paniatowski was suddenly by his side, her jacket in her hands. As a coughing fit coursed through Woodend's body and forced him to double up, he saw his sergeant drop to her knees and use her jacket to smother the victim's head.

Woodend's lungs began exacting their full revenge for what he had put them through. His chest heaved. His head swam. All the noises around him melded into a single, unpleasant cacophony, and he began to doubt that he would ever breathe normally again.

The attack passed, and Woodend cautiously straightened up.

Paniatowski was barking instructions into her police radio. ‘Get a fire engine here, Bob! Quick as you can! Get a bloody fire engine!'

‘Who were you talkin' to?' Woodend asked, coughing again – though not as badly this time. ‘Was it Rutter?'

Paniatowski nodded. ‘Yes. How are you feeling, sir? Up to carrying on for a while longer?

‘Just about. As long as I don't make any sudden moves.'

‘Then you'd better see this.'

Paniatowski bent down and picked something off the ground. Straightening again, she held it for her boss to inspect.

Woodend did his best to focus his still-streaming eyes on the object. Part of it was black and frizzled, the rest yellow and curly. In other circumstances, he thought, he would probably have recognized it immediately for what it was. But these weren't other circumstances. His brain was still too fuddled, his body still complaining about being poisoned. He hadn't been sick yet, but he was in absolutely no doubt that he soon would be.

He made another attempt to identify just what it was that his sergeant was showing him.

A cap of some kind?

No, that wasn't it!

Yet from its shape, it seemed as if it had been specifically designed to be moulded to the shape of the human head.

He was now probably steady enough on his feet to run the risk of looking down again, he decided. He turned his eyes from Paniatowski's hand and cautiously tilted his head so they were fixed on the ground.

The woman's body was still where he had left it when the coughing fit had struck him, but it no longer looked quite the same. She'd had blonde hair before, he remembered. Blonde hair which had caught fire as he'd pulled her free. Now, though, there was no sign of burning on her head: she was completely bald.

And suddenly he understood exactly what it was that Paniatowski was holding in her hand.

J
amie Clegg sat at his desk in the Mid Lancs
Evening Courier
office, reflecting on the unexpected twists and turns that life could suddenly come up with.

Take this office as a case in point, he told himself. Though it was almost nine o'clock at night, there were at least half a dozen people still working there. Yet only a year earlier not a single desk would still have been occupied – even by a keen young reporter like him.

Of course, it had to be said in all fairness to himself that there wouldn't have been much point putting in the extra hours back then. The
Courier
had been quite happy, in what now seemed like those far-off days, to continue to occupy the same boring niche which it had occupied so comfortably for the previous sixty or seventy years.

All that had changed when the Editor died. After his funeral – splendidly covered in a six-page spread by the
Courier
– the paper's ownership had passed into the hands of his niece. And it was her husband, Dexter Bryant, who had taken over as Editor.

Dexter Bryant!

Just the name had brought a shudder of anticipation to Jamie's thin, but eager, frame.

Dexter Bryant – possibly the most successful crime reporter that Fleet Street had ever known! Dexter Bryant – who was so good at pointing the police in the right direction that many people felt he should have held a high rank in the Force himself. It was Bryant who had speculated about the motives behind the Dulwich Public Convenience Murders – and been proved triumphantly right. It was Bryant whose stories filled the front pages of the national newspapers day after day.

He had hit the office like a whirlwind.

‘Local news doesn't have to mean
boring
news,' he'd told the staff. ‘Human interest is the same everywhere, and there are stories every bit as interesting in Whitebridge as there are in New York. All we have to do is get off our backsides and find them.'

‘The paper's doing all right as it is, Mr Bryant,' one of the older reporters had grumbled.

‘Is it?' Bryant had countered. ‘Is it really? Then why is it only the
Mid
Lancashire
Courier
? Why aren't we selling it in places as far away as Warrington and Lancaster?'

‘They're a funny lot of folk in Warrington and Lancaster. They wouldn't be interested.'

‘Yes they would – if we gave them something to be interested
in
! Why are all our advertisements for second-hand cars and ironmongers? Why can't we attract adverts from national companies? I'll tell you why! Because we don't work hard enough to please them. But that's all about to change.'