The Red Herring (24 page)

‘No . . . I . . .'

‘Then, when she came out herself – alone and helpless – about half an hour after closing time, you grabbed her.'

‘I didn't . . . I couldn't . . . !' Cray gasped.

‘Perhaps you knocked her unconscious right at the start, or perhaps that came later. The details don't really matter. You bundled her into your car, and drove out towards Preston. Then one of you strangled her. Which one of you was it, Mr Cray? You? Or Dove?'

‘Neither of us! We didn't . . . we never even thought of––'

‘There's really no point in you taking the blame for something Martin Dove did. Maybe you didn't even know he was going to do it. Perhaps he told you to take a walk, and when you came back she was already dead.'

‘This is crazy!' Cray protested. ‘We're not killers. All we were trying to do was––'

‘You could hang, you know,' the other man interrupted.

‘But we didn't kill her!'

‘Not for that. For the other thing. You'll find when you go on trial – if we ever allow you to get that far – that the judge and jury will have absolutely no pity for you.'

‘If you ever allow us to get that far!' Cray almost screamed.

‘But it doesn't have to happen that way,' the other man said, his voice suddenly soothing and reassuring. ‘If you co-operate with us, I'll make sure that you get an easier time of it than Martin Dove does.'

‘We didn't mean any harm,' Cray sobbed. ‘We knew what we were doing was wrong in the eyes of most people, but we still felt driven to it.'

The other man looked at his watch. ‘I have to be going, but I'll be back,' he said. ‘Use the time between now and my next visit to really think about what you can do to get out of this mess you've landed yourself in.'

He turned and walked to the door.

‘Who are you?' Cray asked anguishedly. ‘Who are you working for?'

The other man smiled. ‘I'm working for justice, decency and the British way of life,' he said. ‘And if you feel the need to put a name to me, then I suppose you could call me Horrocks.'

W
oodend paced Rutter's office with all the anger of a caged and taunted lion.

‘How could I ever have brought myself to apologise to that lyin' bastard Ainsworth?' he demanded for the fifth or sixth time. ‘How could I have allowed rank to stand in the way of me tellin' him what a loathsome shit he is? An' even more to the point, how I could I have let myself leave his office without first beatin' the truth out of him?'

‘It wouldn't have helped the investigation to have you locked up, sir,' Rutter pointed out.

‘But then what
will
help the investigation?' Woodend asked. ‘Find some new leads, Ainsworth said. But we don't need any new leads, because Dove and Cray are our men! They have to be! An' we don't even know where they're bein' held.'

‘Perhaps if we went over Ainsworth's head . . .' Rutter suggested.

‘To who? Chief Constable Henry-bloody-Marlowe? He's a bigger twat than Ainsworth. I'm almost tempted to go the papers with this – let Elizabeth Driver loose on it.'

‘That'd ruin you,' Rutter said.

‘Aye,' Woodend agreed. ‘But it might just save Helen Dunn's life!'

There was a knock on the door, and a uniformed sergeant holding an evidence envelope in his hand entered the room.

‘Sorry to disturb you, sir,' he said to Rutter, ‘but one of my lads found somethin' rather puzzlin' under a bush in the park.'

‘What is it?' Rutter asked.

‘This, sir.'

The sergeant placed the envelope on the desk, and Rutter carefully extracted the contents. It was a child's pencil case – a long, oval one, with a red plastic cover in a tartan design.

‘Open it up, Bob,' Woodend said.

Rutter pulled on the zip, and flipped the case open. Inside the top, written in ball pen in a handwriting which looked remarkably like her sister's, was the name ‘Janice Dunn'.

‘Oh Sweet Jesus,' Woodend said, striking his forehead with the palm of his hand. ‘So Ainsworth was tellin' the truth after all – at least about the kidnappin'.'

‘I don't quite see . . .' Rutter said.

‘It never crossed my mind,' Woodend moaned. ‘I never suspected, even for a minute, that . . . that . . .'

‘That what, sir?'

‘Don't you
know
?' Woodend asked exasperatedly. ‘Isn't it bloody obvious, lad?'

One of the bastards he had in detention would crack soon, the man who sometimes called himself Jack Horrocks thought as he walked through the main door of Whitebridge Police Headquarters. Oh yes, either Cray or Dove – or possibly both of them – would cave in and give him all the grisly details he needed. And why? How could be so sure? Because he saw them for what they were – nothing but a pair of amateurs!

How he despised them for that – for being dilettantes, for having the temerity to ever believe that they could play in the Big Boys' league.

Yet at the same time, he acknowledged the fact that for a man like himself – a man in a hurry, a man who wished to rise to the top of his particular ladder with the greatest possible speed – pathetic wretches like Cray and Dove were just the kind of fodder he needed to feed off.

Horrocks came to a smart, almost military halt in front of the duty sergeant's desk. ‘Where can I find DS Paniatowski?' he asked.

The sergeant looked up from his ledger. ‘Are you Mr Horrocks, sir?' he asked.

‘That's right.'

‘Sergeant Paniatowski called in a couple of hours ago. Said she was at the library.'

‘Which is just where she was supposed to be.'

‘Said she'd had a sudden attack of gastro-enteritis. Well, to be honest, what she actually said was that she was shittin' and pukin' all over the place. Said I should apologise to you for her, but that she was goin' to have to go home. Hopes she'll be fit enough to be back at work in the mornin'.'

‘Could you call her for me?' Horrocks asked.

‘Certainly, sir.'

But all the sergeant got for his trouble was the engaged tone.

‘Probably taken the phone off the hook so she can get a decent sleep,' he said, replacing the receiver on its cradle.

‘Yes, that's probably exactly what she's done,' Horrocks agreed.

Actually, he was not at all displeased about Paniatowski's sudden illness, he told himself. He had needed her at the start of this investigation, because she was the one who knew about the initial spadework. And very valuable that knowledge had been, too. She had mentioned the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire to him, and that had set him off on Cray's trail. But he'd got Cray now, and so Paniatowski had really become superfluous to requirements.

Besides, he was starting to have serious doubts about her as a possible recruit for his network. True, she was both intelligent and ambitious, but she seemed to lack the degree of compliance he demanded from an agent. So perhaps it was best all round that she had suddenly become indisposed. Her attack of gastro-enteritis should keep her out of the way for at least twenty-four hours, and by the time she was up on her feet again he could be well away from this provincial backwater and back in London, where really important things were happening.

Woodend had been prepared to deal with Squadron Leader Dunn if that was what was necessary, but it certainly smoothed his path for him that it was Mrs Dunn who answered the front door instead.

‘Have you found her?' the woman gasped.

‘Not yet,' Woodend replied, allowing his voice to express more optimism than he was actually feeling.

Margaret Dunn nodded fatalistically, as if she expected no other answer – as if, in her mind, she had already selected the clothes which she would wear for her daughter's funeral.

‘If you want to speak to my husband, I'm afraid he's out,' she said. ‘He didn't want to go, of course – he'd much rather had stayed here with me, waiting for news – but there's a big flap on at the base.'

A big flap, Woodend repeated silently.

The words did not come naturally from Margaret Dunn's mouth. They were certainly her husband's words – and possibly also her father's – but they were not hers. She should never have married someone in the services.

‘I'm sure you can help me just as much as he could,' Woodend said.

‘Me?' Margaret Dunn asked, as if she were surprised that anyone could consider her to be of any use for anything.

‘Aye,' Woodend agreed. ‘I wanted to ask you about Helen's pencil case – or rather, Helen's pencil
cases
. She does have two, doesn't she, although one of them didn't originally belong to her?'

‘I bought a green one for Helen, and a red one for Janice,' Mrs Dunn said. ‘After . . . after Janice's accident, Helen asked if she could have her sister's pencil case. I think she wanted it because it would remind her of Janice.'

‘An' which one does Helen actually use?' Woodend asked.

‘Both of them.'

‘Not at the same time?'

‘No, of course not. I think that she uses her own mostly, but when she's . . . when she's feeling particularly lonely, she uses Janice's.'

‘An' which one was she usin' yesterday?'

‘I didn't see it, because it was in her briefcase. Is it important? I can go upstairs and check which one is there now, if you want me to.'

‘No, it doesn't really matter,' Woodend lied. ‘An' I wouldn't go mentionin' any of this to your husband, if I was you.'

‘No?'

‘No. What with havin' to deal with both the distress he must be feelin' over your daughter's disappearance
an'
the flap at the base, he's got enough on his plate at the moment.'

Monika Paniatowski made good time on the first stretch of her journey, thanks mainly to using the recently opened M6 motorway. But the going was considerably slower after she left it, and by the time she was clear of central Birmingham she was already well behind the schedule she had set herself.

Not that it really mattered, she thought, as she cut across country to join the busy A6. A schedule only had real significance when it was leading towards a definite aim, and she had no more than the vaguest idea of what she would do once she reached London.

Perhaps the whole idea of travelling down to the capital was crazy, she pondered, as her foot pressed down more heavily on the accelerator pedal and her eyes scanned the near distance for signs of police traffic vehicles waiting in ambush for drivers like her.

But what other choice did she have than to go down to London? None at all! Because she was tired of playing by the rules that no one had bothered to explain to her, in a game where she did not even know what the prize was.

She had learned a great deal from working with Cloggin'-it Charlie Woodend, and one of the most important lessons had been that to look at the present without also examining the past was like treating a photograph as if it were a living person.

Nobody came without a personal history. And it was that history which made them the kind of people they were, and determined how they would react in any particular situation. Which was why it was pointless to pretend, as Horrocks seemed to be doing, that Verity Beale simply had no past – that she had suddenly appeared in Lancashire, a few months earlier, already fully-formed.

Or perhaps he didn't really think that at all, she told herself. Perhaps he only wanted
her
to think that – was trying to con her into believing that one snapshot in the life of Verity Beale was the whole picture.

Well, if that
was
the way his mind was working, he was in for a shock. Because she was not the kind of detective to spend her time feeding her brain with dusty library files while there was a chance to sink her teeth into the juicy meat of real evidence.

T
he air in Bob Rutter's office was thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and desperation.

‘Why would he do it?' Woodend asked anguishedly. ‘Has all the pressure he's been under tipped him over the edge? Has he gone completely insane? Because if he hasn't, I just can't see what the hell he thinks he'll get out of it.'

‘You're certain you're right about him?' Rutter asked cautiously. ‘You're absolutely sure that there couldn't be some other rational explanation for the pencil case?'

‘I'd like there to be,' Woodend confessed. ‘Honest to God, I would. But I can't think of one. Can you?'

‘No,' Rutter answered. ‘No, I can't.'

‘So he has to be the one, doesn't he?'

The sound of the phone ringing made both of them jump like frightened rabbits. Rutter reached for it. ‘Yes?' he said. ‘Oh, hello, Hans. How are you?' He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Inspector Kohl,' he told Woodend. ‘He says he's got something interesting for us.'

The chief inspector nodded, and found himself wishing that the British police could be half as efficient as the Germans seemed to be.

‘Yes?' Rutter said into the phone. ‘Yes, I see . . . You're sure of that? . . . What? . . . You've seen the reports yourself?'

The conversation lasted for three or four minutes, and when Rutter finally put the phone down, his face was grim.

‘Even before the base commander reported Janice Dunn's death to them, the German police
already
had a file on her,' he said.

‘A file? On a kid? What, in God's name, for?'

‘She'd made friends with some German lads who were just a bit older than she was. One of them stole a car, and they all went off for a joyride. Naturally, Germany being Germany, they were caught before they'd gone more than a couple of miles.'

‘An' what did the German police do about it?'