A Walk With the Dead (4 page)

‘I don't know,' Mary Harris said, obviously almost in tears.

‘Take a deep breath, and tell me exactly what's made you so worried,' Paniatowski continued.

There was the sound of air being gulped in at the other end of the line, then Mrs Harris said, ‘She wasn't here when I got home.'

‘She might just have gone out to see some of her friends,' Paniatowski suggested.

‘Not in her Miss Selfridge top,' the other woman moaned.

‘What do you mean?'

‘She bought this top from Miss Selfridge's. She saved up for it, and it's her pride and joy.'

‘She looked pretty miserable at the reception, so she probably put it on to cheer herself up.'

‘She wouldn't do that, would she? Not when our Vanessa wasn't there to see it!' Mary Harris said exasperatedly.

‘I don't think I'm quite following you.'

‘She only wears it when she goes out with her Auntie Vanessa, but Vanessa's not there to see it – she's already set off on her honeymoon.'

‘Come on, Mum, I'm getting bored waiting for you,' Louisa called from the living room.

Paniatowski covered the phone mouthpiece. ‘Won't be a minute, love,' she promised.

Then, removing her hand again, she said, ‘If you're worried, you should report all this to your local police station, Mrs Harris.'

‘I've already done that. The sergeant I spoke to told me it's far too early to report her as missing, and that I should wait until after her bedtime before calling again.'

‘And that is probably the best thing to do.'

‘But it'll be too late by then,' Mrs Harris sobbed. ‘I just know that it will be too late. So if you could just come round . . . if you could see for yourself . . .'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘You'd better give me the address,' she said.

Louisa looked up expectantly when Monika returned to the living room, then, reading the expression on her mother's face, her own face flooded with disappointment.

‘You have to go out,' she said – and it was more of a statement than a question.

‘I'm sorry, love,' Paniatowski said contritely. ‘A girl's gone missing.'

‘Like I did,' Louisa said.

‘Like you did,' Paniatowski agreed.

‘But I was back home again – safe and sound – within a couple of hours,' Louisa pointed out.

‘I know you were, but it doesn't always work out like that,' Paniatowski told her.

‘Couldn't somebody else deal with it?' Louisa asked hopefully.

‘No, love, it has to be me,' Paniatowski said.

Because nobody else would be
prepared
to deal with it after the girl had been gone for such a short time, she thought – nobody else would be willing to give up the comfort of their home on a Saturday night for what was probably a wild goose chase. But she
had
to go, because she knew exactly how Mrs Harris must be feeling – and no one should ever have to feel like that.

And besides, she admitted reluctantly, if she'd talked to the girl at the wedding reception, this might never have happened.

‘Call up some of your mates, and ask them if they'd like to come round,' she suggested to her daughter. ‘You can take anything you want from the fridge, and if you've pigged out and eaten all the ice cream, I promise I won't say a word when I get back.'

‘All my friends will have made their plans for the evening by now,' Louisa said despondently.

Of course they would have, Paniatowski agreed silently.

‘Then I'll ring your Uncle Colin, and ask him to drop round,' she said, with a hint of desperation in her voice.

‘He'll already be out chasing girls,' Louisa told her.

Paniatowski smiled. ‘You don't miss much, do you?' she asked.

Because her daughter was quite right – DI Colin Beresford, after years of seemingly showing no interest in women, had suddenly, for no apparent reason, become what in Whitebridge they called ‘a bit of a lad'.

Louisa's eyes narrowed. ‘This isn't an
official
investigation, is it, Mum?' she asked.

‘What makes you say that?' Paniatowski wondered.

‘I couldn't hear what you were saying on the phone, but I could hear the
way
you said it, and it didn't sound to me like you were talking to one of your bobbies. So my guess is that you were speaking to the mother of this girl.'

She
really
didn't miss much, Paniatowski thought.

‘So if it's not an official investigation, there's no reason why I can't tag along with you,' Louisa added.

‘That's out of the question,' Paniatowski said automatically.

‘
Why
is it out of the question?'

‘It would probably upset you.'

‘Because the mother will be upset?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you think I've never seen anybody upset before? Do you think I've not noticed how upset
you
are, when you're investigating some horrible murder.'

‘That's not the same,' Paniatowski said.

‘No, not
exactly
the same,' Louisa conceded. ‘But I really want to see how you work, Mum.'

‘And why is that?'

‘Because it'll make it easier for me to accept it when you don't come home at night.'

‘I've offered to get a transfer if you wanted me to,' Paniatowski said defensively.

‘I
don't
want you to get a transfer. You love your job, and I'm proud of you for doing it – I just want a better idea of what it's like.'

Her daughter was growing up, and the older she got, the harder it would be to shield her completely from the work she did, Paniatowski thought. So maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have her along on the edges of an investigation which, in all probability, would have a happy outcome.

‘If you start to get upset, you must tell me, and we'll leave immediately,' she said sternly.

Louisa grinned. ‘I'll just go to the loo, then I'll be ready,' she said, rushing towards the stairs.

Paniatowski stepped into the hallway to get her coat, and while she was there, she couldn't resist the temptation to look in the hall mirror in order to discover just how much of a ‘dear old mum' she'd actually become.

The face that looked back at her was not half bad, she decided. The blonde hair was still naturally wavy, and if there were any white hairs, they didn't actually show yet. The eyes were still blue and lively and interested. The central European nose – which she had once desperately wished was smaller – had not suddenly shrunk down to standard Whitebridge size, but she had got used to it over the years, and anyway, she knew from the glances she got that most men found it attractive. Her lips were still full, her chin was still firm . . .

‘Don't be so vain, Mum,' Louisa called, from halfway down the stairs.

‘It's nothing to do with vanity – I'm conducting a facial assessment,' Paniatowski replied.

‘Yeah, right,' Louisa said sceptically.

Paniatowski turned –
almost
reluctantly – away from the mirror.

Pulling men would still be no problem for her, if that was what she wanted, she told herself. But she didn't want to pull any man at that moment, and – slightly worryingly – she was not sure she would ever want to pull one again.

There were three of them at this initial meeting – the governor, the chief officer and Baxter. The governor was sitting behind his desk. Baxter and the chief officer were in armchairs which were positioned so that they could see both each other and the man in charge of the prison.

Baxter made a quick assessment of the governor, whose name was Wilton. He was probably in his late fifties, the chief constable guessed. He had an indecisive chin, and had tried – unsuccessfully – to camouflage his bald spot by brushing the longer strands of his thinning grey hair over it. And it was obvious that though he felt an obligation to stick to his chosen career path in the prison service, he would actually have been much happier just pottering about in his back garden.

The governor's chief officer – a man called Jeffries – was a different case entirely. He was around forty and unashamedly bald. He had sharp, intelligent eyes and a hard body. When he'd shaken hands with Baxter, the shake had been perhaps a little firmer than it needed to be, but that – the chief constable thought – was because he was making a point.

‘We are, of course, willing to give your investigation our full cooperation, Chief Constable,' the governor said, ‘and if we are in any way at fault over what happened, I'd be most grateful if you'd draw our attention to it.'

If you're in any way at fault for what happened, then you're already in deep shit, Baxter thought.

But aloud, all he said was, ‘I'd like to ask a few preliminary questions, just so I can get things clear in my mind.'

‘Please feel free to do so,' the governor invited.

‘Let's start with the fact that Templar was
able
to hang himself,' Baxter suggested. ‘Couldn't the pipe which ran across his cell have been boxed in, thus making that impossible?'

The governor glanced at his chief officer for guidance.

‘Yes, the pipe could have been boxed in,' Jeffries said.

‘Then why wasn't it?'

‘I think it comes down to the question of money, doesn't it, sir?' Jeffries asked the governor.

‘Exactly,' Wilton agreed gratefully. ‘We simply don't have the funds to do most of the things we'd like to do. The toilet block is a disgrace and the kitchen facilities are positively medieval, but whenever we put in a request for more money, we're told there's none available.'

Baxter nodded his head, understandingly. ‘Yes, I know what that's like – we have similar problems in the Mid Lancs Constabulary,' he said. ‘Second question – what system do you use for monitoring the prisoners' mental state?'

‘I'm not sure I know what you mean,' the governor confessed.

‘I assume that Templar was exhibiting signs of depression before he hanged himself. Were you made aware of that, Mr Wilton, and if you were, what action did you take?'

Wilton glanced across at his chief officer again.

‘Most of the men in here don't like being in prison, so most of them are depressed for some of the time,' Jeffries said. ‘I dare say most of them even feel suicidal once in a while. Those of us on the other side of the bars sometimes feel that way, too. But if every time one of the cons was feeling a bit down in the mouth we reported the fact to the governor, he'd have no time to carry out any of his pressing and important duties. And let's be honest – even though they might
think
about it, most cons
don't
hang themselves, do they?'

‘No,' Baxter agreed, ‘but Jeremy Templar did.'

‘That was regrettable,' the governor said.

The conversation was all going a little too cosily, Baxter decided. It was time to stir up the murky waters, and see what bobbed to the surface.

‘Was Templar alone in his cell when he topped himself?' he asked.

‘Yes.'

‘And why was that? Was it because of the nature of his crime?'

‘That was indeed the reason,' the governor said. ‘The other prisoners hate sex offenders, and if we'd put him in a cell with any of them, we couldn't have guaranteed his safety.'

‘We couldn't have guaranteed his safety,' Baxter repeated. ‘It seems to me that in terms of guaranteeing his safety
in general
, you did a pretty poor job.'

‘Now, look here—' the governor said, flushing.

‘How many times was he attacked?' Baxter interrupted. ‘Was it three? Or was it four?'

‘It was four,' said Chief Officer Jeffries, who, unlike his boss, still seemed to be completely in control of himself.

‘It's all very well for people like you to come in from the outside and start criticizing us,' the governor said, turning almost scarlet now, ‘but without a completely separate wing for sex offenders –
which we don't have
– there's only so much we can do.'

‘You could, at least, have punished Templar's attackers,' Baxter said. ‘Have you?'

Chief Officer Jefferies' eyes flashed the governor a warning that he should calm down before he said any more, but the governor, like all weak men who find themselves trapped in a corner, chose to ignore it.

‘No, we haven't punished them,' Wilton said, ‘because we have no idea who they are.'

‘Then shouldn't you have made it your business to find out?' Baxter asked. ‘I shouldn't imagine that would be too hard.'

‘Do you have any idea of how a prison actually works, Chief Constable?' the governor demanded. ‘Do you really think that the staff are in total control for twenty-four hours a day?'

‘I certainly think they're
paid
to be in total control for twenty-four hours a day,' Baxter said.

‘We keep a large number of convicted men – many of whom are violent – within these walls while they serve out their sentences,' the governor explained. ‘In general, we manage to curb most of their worst excesses, but we can't watch them all the time, and when we are not watching them, they play by their own rules. That's how it's been since the very first prison was opened centuries ago – and that's how it will
always
be.'

‘You must get heartily sick of people like me coming here and acting as if they know everything already – when in fact there are holes in their knowledge you could drive a double-decker bus through,' Baxter said, suddenly shifting gear again. ‘I'd like to apologize for being so arrogant, and I promise you that I'll be much more circumspect from now on.'

‘That's quite all right,' the governor said, taking out his handkerchief and mopping his brow. ‘We all make mistakes once in a while.'