The Ring of Death (25 page)

‘No, please!' she thought. ‘It couldn't be anything to do with him. It just
couldn't
be.'

‘Often, in such cases, the corpses would be stripped of anything of value before they were interred, but this particular burial seems to have been a very hurried affair, which means that it is much easier to identify the bodies than it would normally be,' Forsyth continued. ‘One of the dead has been identified as a Colonel Andrej Paniatowski. That would be your father, would it?'

‘Yes,' Paniatowski gasped, feeling as if she were choking.

‘Initially, the Polish authorities were very keen to publicize their discovery. It would make the West Germans feel guilty, you see – and they just
love
making the West Germans feel guilty. Their Russian masters, however, were altogether less eager, since it would probably also revive, in the public mind at least, memories of the Katy
ń
Forest Massacre, in which they themselves murdered a goodly number of Polish officers. So, for the moment, it is as if the discovery never occurred. But it
did
occur.'

‘Why . . . why are you telling me this?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Because I thought you'd like to be able to bury your father's body in England,' Forsyth said.

‘And you're saying that you could get it for me?'

‘Yes, I am. It won't be easy – but it can be done.'

‘And what do you want from me in exchange?'

‘I want you to start behaving yourself. And I mean
really
behaving yourself. No more attempts to find out what I'm doing here. No more amateur spying excursions for your subordinate, Secret Agent Crane.'

‘If you're offering me this, I must really have you worried,' Paniatowski said.

‘Don't overrate your own importance, Monika,' Forsyth told her. ‘When a mechanism is delicately balanced as this one is . . .'

‘As
which
one is?'

Forsyth smiled. ‘There you go again – trying to be too clever by half. It'll be your downfall some day, Monika. It may even be your downfall
soon
. Now what was I saying?'

‘You were talking some shite about delicate mechanisms,' Paniatowski told him.

‘So I was. When a mechanism is as delicately balanced as this one is, even something as insignificant as a fly can tip it over. And all I am doing here – through this offer of mine – is attempting to ensure that one of the more persistent of the flies keeps away.'

‘You'd really have my father's body brought to England?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I would. And I can see, from the expression on your face, just how much that would mean to you.'

Paniatowski stood up. ‘My father was an honourable man,' she said. ‘He lived
by
his honour, and he died
for
his honour.'

‘I'm sure that's a goal we all seek to attain.'

‘And if I made a deal with you, I wouldn't be
fit
to be the custodian of his remains.'

‘So you're turning me down?' Forsyth asked, disappointedly.

‘I'm telling you that you take your offer and stick it up your tight upper-class arse,' Paniatowski replied.

TWENTY-ONE

I
n big places, like London and Manchester, people disappeared all the time, but even in a relatively quiet backwater like Whitebridge such things were not entirely unknown.

Some of these people – a few – would never be seen or heard of again, but in most cases the disappearance would be so temporary that it could hardly be counted as a disappearance at all.

A husband would go out for a drink with his mates, get legless and then be either too incapable – or too frightened – to go home. So he'd crash out on one of his friend's sofas and – when he appeared, shamefaced and overhung, at his own door sometime around noon the next day – would be amazed to discover that he'd been reported missing.

A young girl would tell her parents that she was staying with a friend overnight, when the truth was that she was going to a disco in a nearby town. She'd miss the last bus home, and – not having the money for a taxi – would have no way of returning to Whitebridge before morning.

An old man, going a bit soft in the head (as they said locally), would forget his own address and spend the night sleeping on one of the benches in the Corporation Park.

All very mundane! All very
domestic
!

Which explained why, once the duty sergeant at Whitebridge HQ had taken down the details of the first disappearance that day, he pushed the whole matter to the back of his mind.

Then a second disappearance was reported . . . and a third . . . and a fourth . . . and what had started out as a gentle trickle of mild concern was, the sergeant thought colourfully, rapidly turning into a fast-flowing river of worrying shit.

And it was at that point that he began to wonder if all these disappearances had anything to do with DCI Paniatowski's murder investigation.

Colin Beresford stared gloomily down at the thick pile of missing-person reports.

Maybe, looking back at it later, it wouldn't seem as bad as it did now, he thought.

Maybe, seen in retrospect, it would be viewed as the moment when the team got the first big break in a case which, up until that point, hadn't really been going anywhere.

Maybe!

Or maybe they'd come to acknowledge it as the point at which the investigation began its almost inevitable disintegration.

He drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk. He needed to talk to Monika about it –
really
needed to talk to her – and she was still in her meeting with Mr Forsyth.

He heard the sound of her footsteps along the corridor – that click-click-click of her high heels – and breathed a sigh of relief.

The boss was back. The boss would know what to do.

The door opened, and Paniatowski walked into the office.

‘Things are going pear-shaped, boss,' Beresford began. ‘Since eight o'clock this morning, we have seven reports of . . .'

And then he stopped.

Stopped because, even as distracted as he was, he had noticed the change in her.

Stopped because he was
shocked
by it.

It was nothing external, this change. Apart from a slightly worried, slightly abstract expression of her face, she looked much as she always did.

But as a man who had known and worked with her for a long time – and who sometimes wondered if he might actually be in love with her – he sensed something cataclysmic had happened to her in the previous half-hour.

Paniatowski sat down opposite him, and lit up a cigarette with trembling hands.

‘What the hell has that bastard Forsyth just put you through?' Beresford asked, aware that by even asking the question he might be treading in an emotional mine field.

Paniatowski shrugged. ‘Put me through?' she said with a casualness which didn't fool him for a minute. ‘Nothing!'

‘Nothing?'

‘The meeting was very straightforward. I asked him about the story in the
Globe
, and he admitted he'd planted it in an attempt to scotch any speculation about an IRA link to Adair's murder.'

She delivered the words in a flat, unemotional – almost
dead
– tone of voice. And that wasn't the Monika who Beresford knew. The Monika
he
knew would have been furious!

‘Are you sure there wasn't anything else said?' he risked asking.

‘If there'd been anything else, I'd have told you,' Paniatowski replied, with a growing irritation in her voice which he suspected she was using to mask something else.

They sat in silence for perhaps half a minute, then Beresford said, ‘I'd started to tell you about what's been happening while you were in your meeting, boss. Shall I go on?'

‘All right,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘At five to eight this morning, the duty sergeant got a call from a Mrs—' Beresford began.

‘Actually,
don't
go on,' Paniatowski interrupted him.

‘Sorry, boss?'

‘Aren't we due to have a meeting with DS Cousins and DC Crane sometime soon?'

‘Well, yes, we are – but we've got five minutes to spare, and that's just long enough to get you up to speed on . . .'

‘If it's only five minutes, we might as well wait until they get here,' Paniatowski said.

What the bloody hell was going on, Beresford wondered. Who
was
this stranger sitting opposite him?

The stranger turned away from him, and gazed fixedly at the wall. Her face still gave away nothing, but he was now more convinced than ever that she was fighting a tremendous battle within herself.

Suddenly, she swung round again, looked him straight in the eyes, and said, ‘Is it important to you where your mother's going to be buried, Colin?'

The question caught him completely off-guard, and all he could think to say was, ‘I beg your pardon, boss?'

‘Your mother
is
going to die eventually, isn't she?'

‘Well, yes. We all are.'

‘And when she does die, will it matter to you whether or not she's buried close to home?'

‘I don't know,' Beresford admitted. ‘I can't say I've ever really given it much thought.'

‘You see, it
shouldn't
matter whether you can visit the grave or not,' Paniatowski continued, and he began to understand it was not his mother she was talking about at all. ‘Because, when all's said and done, it's only a few old bones we're talking about, isn't?'

‘Yes, ma'am, but I don't see quite where you're going with . . .'

‘Yet somehow it
does
matter! You realize that, when you're actually given the choice. But what if that choice comes with strings attached? What if, by choosing, you have to betray everything you ever believed in? And what kind of monster does that make the man who
offered
you the choice?'

There was a knock on the door.

Beresford waited for Paniatowski to tell Cousins and Crane to enter the room, and when it became plain that she wasn't about to do so, he said, ‘Come in,' himself.

The two new arrivals took their usual seats, and Paniatowski gazed down at the desk-top.

So what happened next, Beresford wondered.

‘Ma'am?' he said aloud.

Paniatowski jumped. ‘What?'

Beresford slid the file across the desk. ‘The information's all in there. If you'd like to take a couple of minutes to read it, and then you can tell us what you think we should . . .'

Paniatowski pushed the file back to him.

‘Wouldn't it be simpler if, instead of me doing that, you just briefed all three of us?' she suggested.

Except it wasn't a suggestion at all.

Beresford cleared his throat.

‘At five to eight this morning, a Mrs Duggan rang,' he began. ‘She said that her husband, a teacher at the grammar school, had told her that he had to attend a parent-teacher meeting last night. She was expecting him home by ten. When he still hadn't arrived at eleven, she went to bed – no doubt believing he'd gone out for a drink with the other members of staff, and promising herself she'd give him hell in the morning. She woke up expecting to find him in bed beside her. But he wasn't. That was when she noticed the wardrobe door was open, and some of his clothes were missing. So what do you think she did next?'

‘I expect that, like most women, she keeps a bit of money hidden somewhere in the house, and she went to see if it was still there,' Cousins suggested.

‘Spot on,' Beresford agreed. ‘And it wasn't. At nine o'clock, we had a call from a Mrs Booth. Her husband is a clerk in the town hall. She said he's been acting very strangely since yesterday afternoon. Then, last night, he told her he had to go away for a while, but he wouldn't tell her where he was going. She's worried he might try to hurt himself.'

Beresford broke off, and glanced across at Paniatowski. She
looked
as if she might be listening, but he couldn't tell for sure.

‘We've had five more calls since then,' he continued. ‘The circumstances are a little different in each case, but the basic story's the same. So I sent officers round to each of the houses. Their instructions were to collect as much information on the missing man as they could – everything from his date of birth to where he banks his money – so we can find out what it is that connects them. I haven't had time to do a detailed analysis myself yet, but I've already found one link – none of them was usually with their wives on Thursday nights.'

Cousins coughed awkwardly. ‘I think there's one more name you can add to that list of yours, sir – Len Gutterridge.'

‘
DS
Gutterridge?' Beresford asked, surprised.

‘Yes.'

‘But I worked with him when I was in uniform. He's a good solid bobby – the salt of the earth.'

‘If you'd asked me about him yesterday, I might have agreed with you,' Cousins said. ‘But you should have seen him this morning, when he came asking me about how the investigation was going. He was as nervous as a rabbit that's just spotted a stoat, and when I mentioned Thursday nights, it was just like I'd stuck a hot needle in him.'

‘So what did you do?'

‘What I
wanted
to do was pull him in for questioning then and there, but he's a sergeant, with the same authority as me, and I had no
proof
of anything. So I did the best I could in the circumstances. I tried to scare him into helping the investigation, and I thought, at the time, that it had almost worked. But now I think I made a big mistake. Now, I think I should have said nothing at all to him, and just passed the information on to you and the chief inspector – because you've got the clout to do what I couldn't do.'