Backlash (17 page)

She opened the outside door, and negotiated her broad hips around the sink, so she was standing in front of the stall door.

She pushed, but the door refused to open.

Or rather, it would open so far and no further, which meant that she could see the left-hand edge of the desired toilet, but could not reach it.

She stepped out into the car park again, and saw Nathan looking down at his watch, as if he were timing how long it took each of them to have a tinkle – which was probably precisely what he
was
doing.

‘I can't open the lavvy door,' she told Nathan.

‘Is it locked?' he asked.

‘No, it's not locked. It's jammed. There's somethin' preventin' it from openin' all the way.'

‘And would you like me to do somethin' about that?' he asked.

‘Yes, please,' she said, hating herself for asking his help, but now desperately in need of a pee.

Nathan stepped inside the toilet, and Ethel followed him.

‘I see what you mean,' he said, when he'd given the door a tentative push. ‘There
is
somethin' preventin' it from openin'. Somethin' quite solid, I'd say.'

‘You're a bit of a genius, on the quiet, aren't you?' Ethel asked innocently.

‘What I need to do is reach round the door with one hand, and try and shift whatever it is that's causing the obstruction, while using the other hand to push on the door,' Nathan said.

His left hand disappeared through the gap.

‘It's something quite soft, but quite solid,' he said. ‘To tell you the truth, it feels a little rubbery.'

‘Maybe it's a very big door stop,' Ethel suggested.

‘No, it's too high for that,' Nathan told her. Then he laughed – unconvincingly. ‘Oh, I see, you were making a joke,' he continued.

‘That's right,' Ethel agreed. ‘I should be on the telly, shouldn't I?'

‘Whatever it is, I think it's giving way,' Nathan said, visibly straining with the effort.

The door suddenly shot open – causing Nathan to almost lose his balance – then bounced back again.

‘I believe I can get far enough inside to see what's causing the obstruction now,' Nathan said, squeezing into the gap between the door and the wall. ‘Oh my God . . . it's . . . it's . . .' he gasped.

He jerked back through the gap.

‘Well,
what
is it?' Ethel asked impatiently.

‘It's . . . it's a woman,' Nathan said. ‘I think she's dead.'

‘Well, if she wasn't before, she will be now, after all that pushin' and shovin' you've done,' Ethel said, enjoying his discomfort.

‘I have to go . . . I need to go outside before I . . .' Nathan said.

He just made it to the door before he doubled up and was violently sick.

Ethel watched him impassively.

Typical man – goin' to pieces in the face of death, she thought. Maybe if you'd laid out your granny, and two of your brothers – like I have – you wouldn't be quite so squeamish.

She had considerably more bulk to manoeuvre than Nathan had, but eventually she managed to get her head around the door and could see what he had seen.

And then she understood why he had vomited.

THIRTEEN

‘
I
t's very fortunate for you the body was found by someone who knows how to keep his head in a crisis,' Nathan Jones told Detective Inspector Colin Beresford. ‘I realized immediately, you see, that you needed to be informed as soon as possible, and, as chance would have it, just at that moment, a car appeared in the distance and I was able to flag it down. The driver, who you'll no doubt want to talk to, works for a company which manufactures surgical boots and . . .'

Beresford had stopped listening a long time ago. Instead, his eyes were following the drama which was being enacted around him, while his mind was processing the possible implications for the investigation that the discovery of the body carried in its wake.

There were a number of official vehicles already at the crime scene, including two patrol cars, an ambulance, Dr Shastri's Land Rover and the small lorry which had brought the heavy police barriers. And now the coach arrived, to take away the ramblers who had all been herded together in one corner of the car park, like lost sheep.

‘Shouldn't you be taking all this down?' Nathan Jones asked, sounding aggrieved.

‘I
am
taking it down,' Beresford lied. ‘There's a small tape recorder in my pocket and a microphone behind my buttonhole.'

‘Damn clever!' Nathan Jones said. ‘Isn't it amazing how small they can make things these days. When I started working in the mill—'

‘I think your bus has just arrived,' Beresford interrupted him.

‘So it has,' Jones agreed, looking vaguely towards the vehicle. ‘But if you'd like me to stay behind . . .'

‘That won't be necessary,' Beresford said.

‘Are you sure?' Jones asked, with a hint of disappointment.

‘You've been very helpful already, and if we need you again, we know where to find you,' Beresford said firmly.

As Jones made his way reluctantly towards the bus, Beresford looked first at the inn and then at the road which ran alongside it.

The nearest village – which, in practical terms, also meant the nearest
house
– was four miles to the south, he calculated. If you were going north, it would be at least six miles before you reached any sign of human habitation. And it was its very isolation which had once been the inn's fortune, he guessed, because in the olden days journeying from one village to the next would have been a protracted process, and by the time the weary traveller reached the Top o' the Moors, he would have been sorely in need of some liquid refreshment.

So why had the killer chosen this spot to dump his victim?

Why, with the whole of the moors to choose from, had he left her in the ladies' toilet of this pub?

And why was what happened last night, which should have been the start of a whole new life for you, such a disaster? asked a tiny, disappointed voice in the corner of his brain.

‘I've no time to think about that now!' he muttered angrily. ‘I've got a murder to investigate.'

And so he had.

But he couldn't entirely ignore the fact that now the investigation was picking up pace, the team would inevitably be spending more time together – and that meant, in turn, that
he
would spending more time with Kate Meadows.

A green Vauxhall Victor pulled up just beyond the police barrier, and a rotund man with a red face climbed out of it. One of the uniformed constables approached him and the two men exchanged a few words, then the constable pointed to Beresford, and the other man nodded.

The fat man walked around the barrier and up to where Beresford was standing.

‘I'm the landlord,' he said, without preamble. ‘What a bloody mess!'

‘It is,' Beresford agreed. ‘Since you've only just arrived, I take it you don't live over the pub.'

‘Not at this time of year, no,' the landlord agreed. ‘We're very busy in the late spring, the summer and early autumn – there's hundreds of people out on the moors for the day when the weather's nice – and that's when we use the flat over the pub. But when it gets towards the back end of the year, trade's sluggish at lunchtime and virtually non-existent at night, so we tend to sleep in our own home, which is in Honnerton.'

‘You've been told the body was found in the ladies' toilets, have you?' Beresford asked.

‘I have.'

‘Before you left last night, did you lock it?'

‘No, I didn't. I knew the Ramblers would be passing this way, you see – Nathan Jones has been reminding me of the fact every couple of days – so I left them open.'

‘But you don't normally leave them unlocked?'

‘I shouldn't,' the landlord said cagily.

‘But you do?'

The landlord looked a little worried. ‘This won't get back to the brewery, will it?'

‘No,' Beresford assured him. ‘It won't get back to the brewery.'

‘I sometimes forget to lock the toilets,' the landlord admitted.

‘Forget – or can't be bothered?' Beresford pressed him.

‘Can't be bothered, I suppose,' the landlord admitted. ‘I mean to say, this place is miles away from anywhere, and there's nobody here when I go home. I could probably leave the pub unlocked as well, for that matter. Not,' he added hastily, ‘that I do.'

‘Who's likely to know about your arrangements?' Beresford asked.

‘I imagine it would be dozens of people,' the landlord said. ‘Possibly even scores.'

And given that the landlord seemed to be such a chatty soul by nature, it probably
was
scores, Beresford decided.

‘Why did the killer leave the body here?' the landlord asked. ‘Why give me the aggravation?'

‘Yes, that was very thoughtless of him,' Beresford agreed. ‘But I think he probably chose this spot because it was so isolated – because he knew no one was likely to either see him or disturb him.'

‘But why my ladies' toilet?' the landlord whined.

‘Ah,' said Beresford, who had just worked it out, ‘that's because he wanted to make sure that the body was found fairly quickly.'

‘And why would he want that?' the landlord asked, now more curious than aggrieved.

‘Now that
is
a good question,' Beresford said.

Paniatowski and Meadows had seen the ambulance arrive from their vantage point in the waiting room at the police morgue, and had watched the stretcher bearers carry the covered body into the dissecting room. As yet, though, they had not been allowed to take a look at the actual corpse itself.

‘I shall require a few minutes alone with my latest companion, and only after that can I allow members of the constabulary the privilege of a viewing,' Dr Shastri had said.

And Paniatowski had merely nodded, for though the doctor looked as delicate as a soft summer flower, she was, in point of fact, as hard as nails – and in this morgue there was no question that her word was law.

‘You may come through now,' Shastri said from the doorway. ‘And if I were you, I would steel myself beforehand, because it is not a pretty sight.'

The girl – and it was definitely a
girl
– was lying naked on the dissection table. Her legs and arms were scarred with an extensive criss-cross pattern of paper-thin cuts. The girl's breasts had suffered a similar fate, yet, strangely, the rest of her trunk displayed absolutely no sign of injury.

‘Jesus!' Paniatowski said.

She gazed at the dead girl's face – she'd been so young! – and her mind began to play tricks with her, moving the girl's jawline a little, making the eyes slightly larger and the nose a little less pointed, until the face had been transformed into Louisa's.

That was just the sort of thing that Charlie Woodend, her old boss, had done, she remembered. He, too, had been unable to view a corpse impersonally, but had, in his mind, transformed the slab of dead meat lying before him into a person he might have known. He'd told Paniatowski that this trick – which was, in reality, not a trick at all, since he had no choice about performing it – was nothing but a curse on him. But he would not have had it cast off even if he could have, because he knew it made him a better policeman.

And I wouldn't give it up, either, Paniatowski told herself. Because it makes
me
a better bobby, too.

She looked down at the dead girl again. She knew it
wasn't
her daughter. Louisa was safely in school, struggling with her French verbs or licking the corner of her mouth as she grappled with a particularly difficult equation.

So of course it wasn't Louisa – but it could have been!

Paniatowski felt the bile rising in her throat. It wouldn't do to spew up her guts in front of her new sergeant, she thought – but it was going to take a real effort of will to avoid it.

She forced herself to focus her mind on the girl who was dead, rather than the girl who could have been. If this was Grace, then she had walked the same streets as Denise, who had been attacked with a razor by a man who the other girls now called the Ripper.

Had the same man done this?

Had he found the courage, on his own territory, that he had lacked on the street?

‘These could be razor wounds, couldn't they?' she asked.

‘No, they couldn't,' Shastri replied. ‘If they had been made by a razor, they would have been fairly uniform, whereas most of these wounds are deeper in the middle than they are at their edges. And by applying the same logic, we can virtually rule out knives.'

‘So if they weren't made by a razor and they weren't made by a knife, what in God's name were they made by?'

‘I think that they're whip marks.'

‘You can do all that with a
whip
?' Paniatowski asked.

‘If you have the right
kind
of whip, and know exactly how to handle it,' Shastri said, matter-of-factly. ‘Her tormentor's job was made easier, of course, by manacles, evidence of which you can clearly see in the abrasions on her wrists and ankles. The skin has been scraped away, not so much by the manacles themselves as by the twisting and turning she did in an effort to escape. But, of course, there was no escape.'

‘
I want to chain your hands above your head so tightly that you are forced to stand on tiptoe
,' the man with the razor had told Denise
. ‘I want to see your naked skin glistening in the candle light. And then I want to whip you!
'