The Dead Hand of History (4 page)

When asked by friends, or members of the general public, about their work, these journalists would invariably say that they gained more real satisfaction from doing their current jobs than they could ever hope to achieve from reporting the news at a national level. They would say it – and some of them would even manage to smile and sound sincere – but they were lying through their teeth.

The truth was that when they read the bylines of reporters working in London, they found the taste of bile welling up in their mouths. And that when they were forced to cover yet another wedding, christening or Women's Institute cake-making competition, they yearned to scream out that none of this mattered – that there were
real
stories out there waiting to be covered.

And so it was that when one of these real stories actually broke close to home they felt their pulses quicken – because this story just might be
the
story which would lift them out of the provincial furrow which they had been so painstakingly and grudgingly ploughing for so long, and finally elevate them to the position they rightly deserved.

All of which explained why, when they spotted the bright red MGA approaching, a collective quiver ran through them.

‘Where do you think she's going to end up parking that flashy motor of hers?' asked Mike Traynor, who worked for the Lancashire
Evening Chronicle
, as he surveyed the still-available spaces.

‘Now she's seen us all standing here, she might decide it might be wisest not to stop at all,' replied Lydia Jenkins, the rising star at BBC Radio Whitebridge. ‘She might just drive out again.'

Traynor dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. ‘If you think that, Lydia, then you don't really know our Monika,' he said.

Without any noticeable decrease in speed, the MGA swung in a wide and easy arc around the hacks, then, finally slowing down, slid effortlessly into a narrow space some distance from them.

The reporters, who had all been bunched together until this point, broke ranks and ran – with various degrees of efficiency, speed and grace – towards the newly parked car.

Monika Paniatowski watched the pack of baying news hounds approach her with an assumed look of mild interest on her face – and a totally unplanned feeling of mild disquiet beginning to simmer in her stomach.

Though she'd hoped that the press would be kept in blissful ignorance for just a little while longer, it was now plain that they already knew
something
had happened.

It was, she supposed, almost inevitable that they
would
have got a whiff of the fact that something was afoot, given the number of bobbies who'd been involved in the operation on the river bank. But even allowing for that, she was determined that she wouldn't go into the details of what that something actually
was
until she was good and ready.

The reporters finally drew level with her.

‘Tell us about the hand!' Lydia Jenkins screamed as she waved her microphone vaguely in the right direction. ‘Do you know who it belongs to yet, Chief Inspector?'

The mild disquiet in Paniatowski's stomach rapidly transformed itself into a bubbling broth.

‘The hand?' she repeated. ‘What hand?'

The reporters looked first at each other, and then back at her. ‘You're surely not denying that a hand was found down by the river, are you?' Mike Traynor asked, incredulously.

‘I'm neither denying nor confirming
anything
,' Paniatowski said. ‘When I want to issue a statement, you'll be called to the press room, just as you always were in the past.'

But she was thinking, God, I sound so stiff – so formal and ill-at-ease. I'm sure Charlie would have handled it better.

‘Is it a
woman
's hand?' one of the reporters called out.

‘What happened to the
rest
of her?' another shrieked.

‘As I said, I'll be issuing a statement later,' Paniatowski said, trying – and failing – to sound a little more natural.

‘Will you be calling on DCI Woodend for help, Chief Inspector?' a third reporter wondered.

Great! Monika thought. Bloody great! Will I be calling on Charlie for help? That's
just
what I wanted to hear!

The middle managers were gathered around the large table in Warren Tompkins' office, and sat in silence – almost holding their collective breath – while Tompkins himself took a leisurely gaze out of the window at the bread-delivery vans parked below.

Tompkins turned to face the team. He was a heavily built man, but one who knew how to use his excess weight to its best advantage. With his customers – especially the important ones – he was a jovial fat man, a friendly uncle figure who charmed them, and left them with the feeling that he was much more concerned about their interests than he was about his own. With his employees, however, the flab became a mountain of malice which threatened – if they displeased him in any way – to roll over on them and bury their careers.

‘Five years ago, I was a sergeant-cook in the army,' he announced. ‘A sergeant-cook, for Christ's sake!'

The middle managers nodded, in a way which they hoped their boss would view as both serious and interested. But it wasn't an easy trick to pull off, because they had heard this same story countless times before, and they could pretty much have delivered the rest of it themselves.

‘And look at me now,' Tompkins continued. ‘I own this bakery, lock, stock and barrel. It's a big business by a lot of people's standards – and a lot of people would say that the sergeant-cook had done very well for himself. But I don't see it that way at all. For me, it's only the start.'

He paused, and the managers all nodded again.

‘And how did I build up this big business of mine?' Tompkins asked.

The other managers turned towards the dispatches supervisor – whose turn it was to respond – and right on cue, his raised his hand.

‘Yes?' Tompkins said.

‘By playing by no rules but your own, sir,' the dispatches supervisor said dutifully.

‘By playing by no rules but my own,' Tompkins repeated. ‘And that's how I want
you
to play it.'

(Once, a year earlier, the assistant personnel officer had said, ‘You mean that you want us to play it by
our
own rules, sir?' He had intended it as no more than a joke, but when he received his dismissal notice at the end of the week, it had no longer seemed the least bit funny. Since then,
everybody
had stuck to the script that Tompkins had dictated.)

‘I'm not saying you should do anything that might be described as dodgy,' Tompkins told them. ‘In fact, if I find you cutting corners, you're for the chop. But I
am
saying that if you play it right along the straight and narrow, you'll never meet your quotas – and if that happens, you're out as well. Have I made myself clear?'

The managers nodded again.

‘Right, you can go,' Tompkins said curtly.

The managers rose to their feet, and as they walked towards the door they tried to convey the impression that their eagerness to leave was more related to a desire to return to the work they loved than to an urge to quickly put the maximum distance between themselves and their boss.

One man, however, remained seated, and seemed perfectly happy to do so. His name was Dick Cutler, and he was in his mid-thirties. He had a bullet-shaped head, and a jagged scar running along his left cheek which was a souvenir of his thuggish youth. His official title within the Tompkins Organization was Assistant Maintenance Manager, but he knew very little about maintenance and a great deal about intimidation. He was, in fact, the company's attack dog – its hatchet man. He had been with Tompkins from the start, and the organization's success was due, in no small part, to his efforts.

Once the rest of the managers had left – the last one closing the door firmly behind him – Tompkins turned his attention to Cutler.

‘I wanted to ask you, in general terms, about that thing we were discussing the other day,' he said.

‘You mean the—' Cutler began.

‘I mean the
thing
,' Tompkins interrupted.

‘Right,' said Cutler, who did not count either quick-thinking or subtlety among his talents. ‘The
thing
.'

‘Well?' Tompkins demanded. ‘When's it going to start?'

Cutler grinned, and the scar on his cheek puckered. ‘It's already started,' he said.

Though Charlie Woodend had been both her hero and her mentor, Monika Paniatowski had always considered his habit of pacing up and down the office to be slightly over-dramatic. Now, filling his shoes for the first time, she not only understood why he'd done it, but found herself doing exactly the same thing. But what she still
didn't
understand was how he'd appeared to have all the space in the world for his agitated perambulations, while she herself seemed to be constantly running the risk of banging into the furniture.

She tried to clear her mind for more important matters, but all that did was to shift her attention from the desks and filing cabinets and focus it instead on an irritating scratching noise which had been coming from beyond her office door for some time.

No, not from
beyond
it, from the actual door itself – about halfway up.

What
was
the bloody noise?

She stopped pacing, and looked out of the window. She had hoped the reporters would already have left the scene, but they were still there, bunched around her car.

‘Who tipped them off about the hand, Colin?' she demanded. ‘Was it the man who found it – the one who was walking the dog?'

DI Colin Beresford shook his head. ‘He swears he hasn't talked to
anybody
– and I believe him.'

So it had to be somebody on the Force, Paniatowski thought. Somebody, perhaps, who resented her for getting her promotion.

Well, that certainly narrowed it down!

The scratching at the door continued.

‘There's not a dog
out there
, is there?' Paniatowski asked.

Colin Beresford grinned. ‘Shouldn't think so, boss. Not unless it's a very
big
dog.'

Paniatowski lit a cigarette.

She was smoking too much, she told herself – but there were good reasons for it.

‘Why?' she wondered.

‘What do you mean – why?' Beresford asked. ‘Why did a case like this have to land on your desk on your first day?'

Paniatowski shook her head. ‘No, not that. Although, now you mention it, God knows I'd have preferred a nice little armed robbery or a cosy domestic murder over a crime which is so sensational – so bloody
gothic
– that the press have already started watching every move I make.'

‘Then what
did
you mean?'

‘Why did the killer – if he
has
actually killed her – cut the woman's hand off? And even if he had a good reason for doing it – at least, good enough to satisfy the workings of his own twisted mind – why did he then put it in a plastic bag and leave it down by the river?'

‘Beats me,' Beresford admitted. And then he looked a little shamefaced, and added, ‘Sorry, that doesn't help very much, does it?'

‘He could have buried the hand on the moors,' Paniatowski continued. ‘Or lit a bonfire and burnt it. Or since he was already
by
the river, he could have simply thrown it into the water. But he didn't do any of those things, did he? And I'm wondering why.'

‘Maybe it was because he wanted the hand to be found?' Colin Beresford suggested.

‘But that just leads us to yet another
why
,' Paniatowski said. ‘
Why
did he want it found?'

Maybe because he's playing some sick kind of game with the police, she thought. Or worse – maybe because he's playing some sick kind of game with
me
, personally!

‘How's work going with setting up the operations centre?' she asked her inspector.

‘The phones are being installed, we've put in requests for detective constables to be drafted in from other areas in the division and the whole thing should be operational within an hour.'

Paniatowski nodded. ‘Good. And once it
is
operational, I'd like you to run it yourself, Colin.'

‘If you don't mind, I'd much rather work with you, Mon . . . ma'am,' Beresford said.

There was something in both the words themselves, and in their tone, that seemed to strike a raw nerve with Paniatowski.

‘Oh, for God's sake!' she said.

‘I beg your pardon, ma'am?'

‘I'm not an inspector any more – and you're not a sergeant. In case you haven't noticed, we've joined the grown-up world now – so we have to start acting like we're grown-ups ourselves.'

‘Yes, ma'am,' Beresford muttered, looking down at the floor.

‘I'm sorry, Colin, I shouldn't have put it like that,' Paniatowski said, as a wave of guilt washed over her. ‘What I
meant
to say was that I need someone I can really trust in the operations centre – and that means you.'

‘Thank you, ma'am,' Beresford said.

‘We've been through a lot together, you and me,' Paniatowski said. ‘Cases we thought we'd never solve. Cases where we've put our own jobs on the line, so we
could
solve them.'

‘That's true, ma'am.'

‘So when we're alone together like this, there's no need to keep calling me “ma'am” as if you were a trained parrot.'