The Ring of Death (8 page)

‘Since I've refused to even confirm that he
was
working for me, that seems highly unlikely.'

‘So let me see if I've got this straight,' Paniatowski said. ‘You want me to catch the killer for you, but you don't want to tell me anything that might assist me in catching him?'

She looked down at her hand, and was surprised to discover that, without even realizing it – and certainly without appreciating it – she had drunk the vodka that Forsyth had poured for her.

Seeing the look of self-disgust on her face, the spy smiled briefly at his small triumph.

‘As I think I've already explained, in terms simple enough for anyone to understand,' he said, ‘what I
want
you to do is treat this particular case as you would treat any other, except that you will be keeping me appraised of the details.'

The air in her office was thick with cigarette smoke when Paniatowski entered it, a clear indication that her team were as worried as she had been by the unexpected summons – though they, as yet, had no idea what they should be worried
about
.

‘Do you remember a feller from London called Forsyth, Colin?' she asked her inspector.

‘Forsyth?' Beresford mused. ‘Silver hair, plummy voice, God's gift to espionage?'

‘That's the man,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘He's back with us again.'

‘Well, bugger me,' Beresford said.

He'd said the words as if Forsyth was no more than a mild irritant, like a wasp at a picnic, Paniatowski thought. But that was because Colin didn't know Forsyth as she did – had never had a real glimpse of the black depths of the man. And perhaps it was as well that he
didn't
know – that she should have to bear the true strain of Forsyth's presence alone.

She briefly outlined what the spy had told her.

‘If Sergeant Cousins is right, and we are dealing with the IRA here, then what Forsyth is doing is using us as human mine-detectors,' Paniatowski said, growing angrier by the minute. ‘We find his target, get blown to hell so he knows where it is, then he moves in. Well, I won't have it! I won't put my team at risk like that!'

‘With respect, ma'am, the only way you can avoid that situation is by doing no
investigating
at all,' Sergeant Cousins said. ‘And though I don't know you as well as the others do, I can't see you going for that option at all.'

He was right, of course, Paniatowski thought. She couldn't just walk away from an investigation. But if there had to be risk, she could at least make sure that it was as low a risk as possible.

‘I want your lads confined to purely routine tasks that can't possibly get them into trouble,' she told Beresford. ‘Any serious investigating will be done by me.'

‘By
us
,' Beresford said firmly.

‘That's right,' Cousins agreed, ‘by
us
.'

‘Count me in, too, ma'am,' Crane said.

‘I don't want you involved in the actual investigation, Jack,' Paniatowski told the detective constable.

Crane looked hurt. ‘That's not fair, ma'am.'

‘What I want
you
to do is to watch Forsyth,' Paniatowski explained.

‘Watch him, ma'am?'

‘We need to know what game he's playing. We have to find out why he won't tell us exactly what job Adair was doing for him. And that means watching him.'

‘You want me to watch a
spy
?' Crane asked, incredulously. ‘You want me to
follow
a man trained to spot the KGB?'

‘He's not that kind of spy,' Paniatowski said. ‘I don't get the impression that he's ever been one of the pieces on the chessboard of espionage.'

‘Then what
is
he?'

‘He's the bastard who moves the pieces around – and sacrifices them without a second's thought. He wouldn't spot a KGB agent if he had his rank tattooed on his forehead – and I doubt he'll spot a fresh-faced young detective constable, either.'

‘Spying on the spy master,' Colin Beresford said reflectively. ‘If it goes wrong, we could all get screwed to the wall.'

‘Meaning we shouldn't do it?' Paniatowski asked.

‘Meaning I don't think he's left us much choice in the matter,' Beresford replied.

EIGHT

T
he press briefing room was one of the ‘innovations' introduced by the previous chief constable, a man more interested in the way crime was reported than why it was committed or how it was solved. The room itself was located just off the main foyer of police headquarters. It was oblong, and had two entrances – one at the back for the hacks, one at the front for the officer who would be giving the briefing. The officer in question gave the briefing from a raised podium, which the chief constable thought gave him increased authority, but had always made Charlie Woodend feel like a shameless politician running for office.

Monika Paniatowski had never liked these press conferences, and liked them even less since the Linda Szymborska murder investigation had attracted national press attention, and, in the process, had made her a minor celebrity. Some of her colleagues, she knew, envied her this celebrity status – some of them would given their right arm to have had a little of it themselves – but, as she saw it, a detective's job was to detect, and anything which got in the way of that was to be avoided!

‘Don't get your kickers in a twist about it, boss,' Colin Beresford had advised her, when she'd complained about it to him. ‘Fame is a fleeting thing, and will soon fade away.'

And maybe it would, she thought, as she mounted the podium and looked down at the assembled journalists and the two camera crews from regional television stations – but there was no evidence of it fading away quite yet.

Unless, of course, she wasn't the reason they were there at all, she thought, with sudden concern. Because it was
just
possible there had been a leak in police headquarters –
just
possible that what had brought them all crawling out of the woodwork was some knowledge of the bizarre nature of the murder – and that really was the
last
thing she wanted.

She faced her audience with much greater calm and self-assurance than she would have been able to display even a month earlier.

‘This morning, at around five-thirty, the police were called to a piece of woodland just off the Whalley road,' she said. ‘There they discovered the body of a man, who has since been identified as Andrew Adair. Mr Adair was thirty-six years old and died as a result of wounds inflicted to his throat. We are treating his death as suspicious.' She paused for a second. ‘That's all I have to say at the moment. I am now willing to take questions, though – as always – I am not prepared to say anything which I feel may prejudice my investigation.'

As she'd been speaking, she'd also been scanning the audience for potential problems, and had soon found one sitting right there on the front row.

Mike Traynor – staff reporter for the
Lancashire Evening Chronicle
, and stringer for at least two of the more sensational national newspapers.

Mike Traynor – his collar drowning in dandruff, his foxy eyes searching for a weakness in her statement that he could use as the basis of an attack.

Their history was short, but bitter.

Paniatowski would never forgive him for the way he had questioned her conduct of the Szymborska case – her first investigation as a DCI.

Traynor, for his part, would never forgive her for solving the case so successfully that he'd been forced by his editor to publish a grovelling apology.

But it was not Traynor who made the initial attempt to breach her defences and trick her into admitting to something she'd rather have kept herself. Instead, the initial salvo was fired by Lydia Jenkins, rising star of the local radio station.

‘So Adair's throat was
slashed
, was it?' Jenkins asked, innocently.

‘Slashed!' Paniatowski repeated silently. ‘Yes, you could call it that. In fact, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say it had been ripped to bloody shreds!'

‘As I told you, Lydia, he died as a result of injuries sustained to his throat,' she said aloud. ‘And I'm afraid that's as far as I'm prepared to go at the moment.'

‘Was he a local man?' asked Bill Haynes, a journalist from the
Telegraph
, the
Chronicle
's main rival.

Now
that
was a question she'd been expecting, Paniatowski thought. Local papers were always most interested in local people. In fact, the formula was quite simple – the death of one local man equalled the death of two other Lancastrians, four northerners, fifty southerners or a hundred foreigners.

‘He was living locally, but originally he came from Oxfordshire, and had recently been a serving member of the armed forces,' Paniatowski said.

Mike Traynor raised his sweaty paw in the air for permission to speak, and Paniatowski nodded to him.

‘Was there anything unusual about the crime?' Traynor asked.

‘We like to think that murder is
always
unusual,' Paniatowski told him. ‘We'd be in a pretty poor state of affairs if it wasn't.'

But she was thinking, ‘Does he know anything the others don't know? Has his snitch on the Force leaked the fact that Adair was naked, and was positioned on his hands and knees?'

‘Yes, murder
is
unusual,' Traynor agreed reasonably. ‘What I meant was, are there any particularly unusual
circumstances
surrounding this murder?'

Did
he know? Did he bloody
know
?

‘What is it you're expecting, exactly?' Paniatowski asked. ‘Evidence of witchcraft, perhaps? Nazi memorabilia scattered all over the area? Singed grass where an alien flying saucer landed?'

‘Well, no,' Traynor said uncomfortably, as the reporters on either side of him sniggered quietly. ‘I just wondered if maybe . . .'

He didn't know a thing, Paniatowski thought, with relief.

Not a bloody thing.

‘There are other aspects to the case which are unusual,' she conceded, ‘but I'm certainly not prepared to release the details yet. Are there any other questions?'

All the other reporters had their eyes fixed on Mike Traynor, waiting to hear what his comeback would be.

Traynor himself seemed to be blissfully unaware of their interest – or of his own humiliation – and instead appeared to be casually lighting up a cigarette.

But that was only on the outside. Inside, he was boiling with rage.

He would fix this bitch good and proper, he promised himself. He would fix her if it was the last thing he ever did.

The houses which made up Palmerston Terrace had been erected hurriedly, in the previous century, to accommodate the families who had abandoned the countryside in order to work in the booming cotton industry.

Each house had been built with two rooms upstairs and two rooms down. The focal point of these dwellings had been the kitchen, in which a blazing fire – kept burning even during the summer months – served both to warm the cottage and heat the oven in which most of the cooking was done. The front room – the parlour – was reserved for weddings and funerals, until the family grew to such an extent that it was no longer possible to cram any more kids in the bedrooms upstairs, at which point it became an extension dormitory. There was a back yard which contained the washhouse and the cottage's only tap, and a smaller building which the authorities referred to as the ‘sanitary closet' and the people who actually used it called ‘the lavvy'.

Over the years, the houses had been modified somewhat. Most of them now had an inside bathroom – at the expense of one of the upstairs bedrooms – and electric stoves had replaced the old coal-fired range. But the exteriors of the cottages had changed little, and any of the original inhabitants, staring up at them from the cobbled street, would have felt quite at home.

No. 32 Palmerston Terrace was where Andy Adair had spent the last few months of his life, and so had ceased to be merely one house sandwiched in the middle of a row of identical houses, and had become the focus of interest of the police investigation.

Not that there seemed much of anything to be actually interested
in
, DS Cousins thought, as he watched his team carefully combing through Adair's personal effects.

Adair had owned one good suit, two jackets and three pairs of trousers, all of which were hung neatly in the wardrobe. His socks, vests and underpants had been stored in drawers, with military precision and neatness. If he had been a reading man there was no evidence of it in the cottage, and if he had been a writing man he was clearly one who did not retain his correspondence.

In other words, Cousins told himself, the team knew no more about the man now than they had when they had first entered the cottage.

He looked out of the parlour window and saw two middle-aged women standing together on the opposite side of the street. They both had brooms in their hands – as if they felt the need to justify their presence – but it was clear that their interest was less in sweeping than it was in watching how events were unfolding in No. 32.

Cousins stepped out of the front door and walked across the street to where they were standing.

‘Are you in charge?' asked one of the women, before he had a chance to speak himself.

‘Yes, I am,' Cousins confirmed.

‘So what's going on?' the woman demanded.

‘Oh, you've got a cheek, you have, Edna,' the other woman said, though she did not actually
sound
disapproving.