A Walk With the Dead (6 page)

Well, if that
had
been the tactic, it had backfired, because he was now more determined than ever to stay exactly where he was.

He crossed his temporary office/bedroom, and opened the door. He was not surprised to see Chief Officer Jeffries standing in the corridor outside. In fact, he would have been surprised if the man
hadn't
been there.

‘Good morning, Mr Baxter,' Jeffries said. ‘I hope you had a good night's sleep.'

‘I slept like a log,' Baxter lied. ‘Do you just happen to be passing, Chief Officer Jeffries, or have you been standing out here waiting for me?'

‘I've been waiting for you,' Jeffries said. ‘I'm here to escort you down to breakfast.'

‘An important man like you shouldn't have to hang around in corridors as if he was a mere errand boy,' Baxter prodded, to see what reaction he'd get.

‘I haven't been here long,' Jeffries replied, stony faced. ‘Shall we go down to breakfast now?'

‘Is it a good breakfast?' Baxter asked.

‘It's an excellent breakfast.'

‘Sausages, bacon, fried eggs, fried bread – the works?'

‘The works.'

Baxter pretended to consider it.

‘It's certainly a tempting offer,' he said finally, ‘but my doctor's told me that if I don't stay off the fried food, I'm heading for an early grave. So, on balance, I think I'll skip breakfast and take a look around the prison.'

‘You don't
have
to have the full works, if you don't want to,' Jeffries pointed out. ‘You could just settle for cornflakes.'

‘To tell you the truth, I'm not at all hungry.'

Jeffries frowned. ‘You are
expected
in the canteen.'

‘I dare say I am,' Baxter agreed, ‘but I've always found that you learn more by going to the places where you're
not
expected. Let's go and take a look at the main wing, shall we?'

‘If you insist, Mr Baxter,' Jeffries said, in a tight voice.

‘I do insist, my old son,' Baxter said. He patted the other man on the shoulder. ‘And by the way, since I'm here in an official capacity, I'd prefer it if you addressed me as Chief Constable.'

‘I'll try to remember that,' Jeffries replied, not even attempting to sound convincing.

A heavy grey sky hung depressingly over the Whitebridge police headquarters car park, and in the car park itself stood two dozen police officers who had had other plans for that Sunday morning.

The plans had been as varied as the officers were themselves. Some had been expecting to take the field in the fiercely contested Sunday football league. Others had made promises to their kids that they'd take them out for the day – or sworn to their wives that they'd finally get around to repapering the back bedroom. A few of the single men had been anticipating a fairly heavy lunchtime drinking session, and a handful of the more devout had even intended to put on their best suits and go to church. Now – as a result of early morning phone calls – all those plans had turned to ashes, and the men stood around stamping their feet to ward off the cold, and waiting to be told what to do next.

DCI Paniatowski and Chief Superintendent Tom Potter stood side by side at the far end of the car park, waiting for the police transit vans to emerge from the garage.

‘Assuming that the little lass decided to sleep rough last night, she'll have woken a bit stiff this morning, but she's young, and it shouldn't have done her any permanent harm,' Potter said.

Yes, assuming Jill
had
slept rough the previous night, that was probably the case, Paniatowski thought.

But there was another possibility – one never spoken of at the start of this kind of search, but hanging over the whole operation like a thick choking black cloud – that she hadn't noticed the cold (or anything else for that matter) because she was already dead.

‘The men I've called in will be reinforced by firemen, relatives and neighbours, so we should have a search party of close to a hundred,' the superintendent continued. ‘Now, the only question is what the search's focus should be. Where do you think we should be looking, Chief Inspector?'

He didn't really need an answer, Paniatowski thought – he knew as well as she did where to search – but he was drawing her into the process as a professional courtesy, and she appreciated that.

‘The old mills are a good starting point, sir,' she suggested.

And so they were. The mills had thrived when cotton was king in Lancashire, but had been abandoned for years. They were now so easy to gain access to that it was commonplace for bodies to be discovered in one or another of them, and though most of the dead eventually turned out to be tramps who had died of natural causes, Paniatowski herself had been involved in three investigations in which mills had either been the actual location of murders or the places where the victims were dumped.

‘Where else should we be looking?' Potter asked.

‘The river bank,' Paniatowski replied, remembering her first case as a DCI, in which a severed hand had turned up on the bank. ‘Also the canal tow path. Essentially, anywhere that members of the general public
could
go if they chose to – but usually don't.'

The chief superintendent nodded his agreement. ‘This is clearly a job for the uniformed branch, so I won't be requiring your assistance during the actual search,' he said, ‘but I would like you and your team standing by, in case there's a negative outcome.'

Or to put it another way, Paniatowski thought, in case the unhappy girl – who she had last seen wearing a flounced pink dress – turned up dead.

‘I've already notified my team, sir,' she said aloud. ‘In fact, I've arranged to meet them at lunchtime.

The superintendent smiled. ‘And that meeting will be taking place in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey, will it?'

Paniatowski grinned. ‘That's right. It's where we seem to do our best thinking, sir.'

‘So I've heard,' the superintendent told her.

The main wing of Dunston Prison was connected to the administrative block by a short tunnel, which had heavy steel doors at either end. The wing was four storeys high, rectangular in shape, and had a central patio. Internal walkways ran around the top three stories, and a suicide net had been stretched over the entire patio at second-floor level.

Baxter and Chief Officer Jeffries arrived in the wing just as the prisoners from the third floor were slopping out, and they stood in the patio, watching a stream of men clanking down the metal stairs and gingerly carrying their buckets towards the toilet block.

‘Just look at it,' Jefferies said, as the prisoners passed by them. ‘What a waste of officer manpower. We're highly trained personnel, you know. And what do we end up doing, for at least an hour a day? We end up standing and watching the prisoners slopping out!'

Baxter nodded, but said nothing.

‘The problem isn't that this prison was built in the time of Queen Victoria – which it was,' Jeffries continued. ‘It's the fact that we're keeping these men under conditions that even the Victorians would never have tolerated.'

‘Is that right?' Baxter asked neutrally.

‘It is,' Jeffries confirmed. ‘The Victorian idea of punishment was that when you locked a man away, you really locked him away. He wasn't allowed to fraternize with the other prisoners. He was in his cell for most of the day, and even when he was given exercise time, wasn't permitted to talk to the other prisoners. The only people he did get to talk to were the guards and the prison chaplain.'

‘And you approve of that system, do you?' Baxter asked.

‘Of course I don't approve of it,' Jeffries said. ‘It was inhuman.' He paused. ‘Mind you, under that system, they never had trouble with prison gangs, like we do these days.' Another pause. ‘But the point I was trying to make was that each of these cells was designed to hold one man – and that, remember, was in Victorian times, when conditions for most people were a lot rougher than they are now.'

‘I imagine they were,' Baxter said.

‘So we have cells which the Victorians considered were just about good enough for
one
prisoner, and we're putting two or even three men in them now, because we don't have any choice in the matter. And if one of those men has the shits in the middle of the night, the others have to live with the stink until morning slopping out time.'

‘I know what you're doing,' Baxter said quietly.

‘Do you?' Jeffries asked, with a hint of aggression in his voice. ‘Then why don't you explain to me exactly what that is.'

‘You're trying to show me what strain you're all under – the prisoners as well as the guards. You hope that by doing that, you'll get me to make allowances for the fact that things don't always go as they should do.'

‘And will you?' Jeffries asked.

‘I'm not some academic who's just stepped out of his ivory tower and expects everything beyond that tower to be perfect,' Baxter said. ‘I live in the real world. I run a police force that operates within a flawed system, and I accept that certain corners have to be cut and certain regulations ignored in order to make that system work. So sometimes, when I see there are things not being done exactly by the book, I deliberately look the other way.'

‘That's a sensible attitude,' Jeffries said.

‘But there are principles I have to stick by, and actions that I can't ignore,' Baxter continued. ‘I will not tolerate my officers taking bribes, intimidating witnesses or doing favours for their mates, for example, and if they cross any of those lines, there are no second chances – they're out of the force and probably in gaol.'

‘That's all very interesting, but I'm much more interested in finding out how you'll apply these “principles” of yours to this prison,' Jeffries said.

‘Oh, that's very simple,' Baxter told him. ‘If there's nothing your men could have done to prevent Jeremy Templar's suicide, they're in the clear, and if there was something they could have done, then they're not.'

‘We've already explained that there weren't the funds to box in all the pipes,' Jeffries said.

‘And I accept that,' Baxter countered. ‘I also accept that if a man really wants to kill himself, he'll eventually find a way, however careful those around him are.'

‘In that case, I don't see why you're here at all,' Jeffries said.

‘Don't you?' Baxter asked. ‘Then perhaps I'd better explain it to you. Templar committed suicide because he found life intolerable, and the reason he found life intolerable was because of the attacks on him by other prisoners. So the real question is – could your men have prevented those attacks?'

‘I don't think that
is
the real question,' Jeffries said.

‘Then what is?'

‘The real question is not whether they could have prevented those
four
attacks – it's how many more attacks on him there
might have
been if my lads hadn't been doing the best they could in nearly impossible circumstances. And we'll never know the answer to that – because if something didn't happen, you can't prove it was ever going to.'

He had a point, Baxter admitted. And maybe he was right – maybe his men, rather than being
inefficient
, had been as efficient as was possible in the circumstances. But at this stage of the inquiry, it was far too early to reach any such conclusion.

‘Who fills in the time sheets?' he asked the chief officer.

‘What do you mean by time sheets?' Jeffries replied evasively.

‘I mean the sheets on which you keep a record of which officer is on duty at which particular time.'

‘That would be me – or one of the junior officers working under my supervision,' Jeffries admitted.

‘I'd like to see all the ones relating to the times Jeremy Templar was attacked,' Baxter said.

‘I don't really see the point of that,' Jeffries replied.

‘You will – if you really put your mind to it,' Baxter promised him.

There was no sign on the corner table in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey to say that it was reserved, but then there didn't need to be. The regular customers got vicarious pleasure from seeing DCI Paniatowski and her team in deep and urgent discussion on – say – a Tuesday night, and then reading about her making an arrest in the evening newspaper on Wednesday. They knew she wasn't
their
bobby – that she was nobody's bobby but her own – but occasionally, when they gently pointed non-regulars to another table, they could not help feeling a little pride over the fact they were, in some small way, contributing to the investigation.

The whole team was at the table that Sunday lunchtime, and Paniatowski looked at them all with the fondness of a mother hen who knows she has raised some very fine chicks.

There was DI Colin Beresford, whom she had worked with since he had been a young detective constable, and she had been a sergeant. A big, solid man in his early thirties, he was her best friend, and though he had almost gone off the rails in their last investigation, she would trust him with her life.

There was fresh-faced and film-star-handsome DC Jack Crane, who she sometimes thought of as barely out of nappies, while fully acknowledging the fact that she would not be in the least surprised if she ended up working for him.

And there was DS Kate Meadows, the newest member of the team, and her bagman. Kate was still something of a mystery. She had a sex life that Paniatowski couldn't even begin to comprehend, but was gradually learning to accept. She had the cavalier investigative style of someone who was working for her own amusement, rather than because she needed the money. And she had an expensive taste in clothes that she should never have been able to indulge on a DS's salary. A mystery then – but a bloody fine bobby, for all that.