Death Watch (10 page)

You don't need to – he's got
VD
! Beresford thought. He wouldn't have come here if he hadn't.

But aloud, he said, ‘All we're interested in is Thornton's movements yesterday afternoon.'

The administrator consulted the file. ‘He signed in at half-past one, and signed out again at a quarter to four.'

‘And there's no chance that he could have nipped out for an hour in the middle?'

‘If he had done so, my staff would have noticed it and reported it to me immediately,' the administrator replied. ‘I run a very tight ship, you know. The doctors are not here to be at the beck and call of the patients. Rather it is for the patients to make themselves available for when the doctors can find the time to treat them. And once he's signed in, no patient is allowed to leave the building before he's had his allotted treatment.'

Well, that was clear enough, Beresford thought.

If he'd been invited to sit down when he'd entered the office, he would have stood up at his point and held out his hand to the administrator, but since no such offer had been made – and he was consequently still standing – he simply said, ‘Well, thanks for your help.'

He was almost at the door when the administrator said, ‘There's one more thing, Mr Beresford.'

Beresford turned. ‘Yes?'

‘Since you're already here, why not take advantage of the fact and let me arrange for you to have a check-up?'

‘That won't be necessary,' Beresford said, with frosty dignity.

The administrator made a disapproving clucking noise with her tongue.

‘You men!' she said, almost contemptuously. ‘You all think you're so clever, don't you? That's probably why it comes as such a shock to you when you find out that you've been infected.'

‘The
reason
that it won't be necessary is because I'm a vir—' Beresford began. Then he stopped himself, horrified at what he'd very nearly confessed to the woman. ‘The
reason
it won't be necessary is because I'm always very careful,' he amended.

‘That's what they all say,' the administrator told him.

Beresford beat a hasty retreat, and only really slowed down when he was clear of the clinic altogether. He took a list out of his pocket, and placed a tick next to Cedric Thornton's name.

‘One down, seven to go,' he told himself.

Since Bob Rutter had announced the previous evening that he intended to immerse himself in witness statements the next day, it had fallen to Monika Paniatowski to take over the job of supervising the uniformed constables who were searching the corporation park. As a result, she had been forced to drag herself from her bed at an ungodly hour, and had driven to the park while still suffering from a hangover of gigantic proportions, which the brooding – and solitary – excesses of the night before had brought on.

The hangover was still with her now, two hours later, and when she lit up a cigarette to see if it might somewhat assuage her pain, she discovered it tasted like dried buffalo dung.

She had very little hope that this extensive search would produce anything of real value, she told herself, as she attempted to ignore the pounding in her head. After all, how likely was it that a man who was smart enough to abduct a girl from a park in broad daylight –
without being seen
– would also have been stupid enough to leave something behind that would connect him with that abduction?

It was at that moment – almost as if fate had been reading her mind and decided to have some fun with her – that one of the constables searching in the bushes called out, ‘Sergeant Paniatowski!'

‘Yes?'

‘I think I've found something!'

The constable was standing a few feet away from where the scuff marks in the earth indicated that the struggle between the girl and her kidnapper had taken place, and when Paniatowski approached him, he pointed – with great excitement – at one of the bushes.

‘Under there,' he said.

Paniatowski crouched down. There was definitely something lying among the roots. She could not get a very clear view of it, because of the obstruction caused by the leaves, but she could tell that it was dark brown and possibly rectangular. And one thing was clear – whatever it eventually turned out to be, it certainly wasn't natural.

As she pulled on her gloves, she noted that her heart was suddenly beating faster, and that her headache had all but disappeared. She stretched her arm through the foliage, and felt her fingertips brush against the object. She took careful hold of it, between her thumb and forefinger, and slowly withdrew the arm.

What she was holding, she discovered, was a man's leather wallet. It looked expensive, and from the condition it was in, it was clear that it had not been lying under the bush for long.

The corporation bus depot was a three-minute drive from the Boulevard, the Boulevard itself being the point at which most of the service buses started and ended their routes. The depot consisted of a large hanger-like building, in which most of the buses were parked after they'd finished their service for the day, and a patch of concrete on which vehicles were parked between rush hours. One end of the hanger contained the cleaning tunnel, and at the other end was the garage.

Beresford found the whole complex slightly scruffy – and not a little depressing. But at least he was unlikely to meet anyone there who'd accuse him of having venereal disease, he consoled himself.

There were three mechanics on duty. They were all small dark men with bald spots, and Beresford found himself wondering if being tall and blonde was a disqualification for crawling under a bus.

‘So you want to know about Peter Mainwearing, do you?' one of the mechanics said in answer to Beresford's question.

He was speaking loudly – almost shouting. He had to, in order to be heard over the noise of the radio, which was playing at full blast and echoing all around the whole garage.

‘Yes, Peter Mainwearing,' Beresford agreed, shouting himself. ‘Could you turn the noise down a bit?'

‘Why?' the mechanic screamed back. ‘Is it bothering you?'

‘No, not really, but I think it's about to burst my eardrums,' Beresford told him.

The mechanic shrugged, walked over to the radio, and switched it off. For a moment or two, Beresford's ears compensated for the sudden loss of sound by hissing loudly. Then they settled down.

‘Yes, Peter was here yesterday,' the mechanic said, when he returned to the spot where Beresford was standing. ‘We had this problem with one of our buses, you see. The bugger just wouldn't start, and we had no idea why. Peter sorted it out. What that man can do with an engine has to be seen to be believed.'

‘And he was here
all
afternoon?' Beresford asked.

‘Not
all
afternoon, no,' the mechanic said.

Beresford felt a sudden tingle of excitement. If he could break Mainwearing's alibi, he told himself, it would more than make up for the humiliation he had felt in the VD clinic.

‘How long
was
he here?' the detective constable asked.

The mechanic thought about it. ‘He arrived at around eleven o'clock,' he said finally.

‘
Around
eleven o'clock?' Beresford repeated. ‘Can't you be more precise than that?'

The mechanic shrugged. ‘Afraid not. But it can't have been more than ten or fifteen minutes before or after.'

‘And what time did he leave?' Beresford asked, almost holding his breath in anticipation.

‘Three o'clock,' the mechanic said.

‘Give or take ten or fifteen minutes one way or the other?' Beresford suggested.

‘Three o'clock,' the mechanic repeated firmly. ‘On the dot.'

‘You seem very vague about the time he arrived,' Beresford said. ‘Why is that?'

‘Simple,' the mechanic replied. ‘Since we had no idea of how to go about the job before he turned up, we thought we might as well sit back and have a game of cards. Then, when he did get here, we packed away the cards and set to work.'

‘And you didn't check your watch to see what time it was?'

‘Wear a watch on this job, and you'll ruin it. Mine goes into my locker the minute I get to work.'

‘And yet, despite the fact that your watch was still in your locker, you're certain that he left at
exactly
three o'clock. How is that possible?'

‘Simple again. The afternoon play was just coming on the wireless. It's my favourite programme, and I remember saying to Peter that I was glad we'd got the job finished, because that meant I could listen to it in peace.' The mechanic paused. ‘Here, I haven't got Peter in trouble, have I?'

‘No,' Beresford promised, ‘you haven't got him in trouble.'

He was telling the truth. The girl's watch had been smashed at two minutes past three, and even if it had been wrong by a few minutes, that still put Peter Mainwearing in the clear – because there was no way he could have reached the corporation park before twenty past three at the earliest.

‘There's times when I've thought about being a bobby myself,' the mechanic said.

You'd have to grow at least another three inches first, Beresford thought, but all he said aloud was, ‘Oh yes?'

‘I mean, from what I've heard, it's an easy life.'

‘Easy?' Beresford repeated.

‘Well, for a start, the pay's not bad, is it? And you don't have to get your hands dirty, do you?'

Why did other people always seem to think that bobbies had such a cushy time of it, Beresford wondered.

‘You're right that
most of the time
we don't have to get our hands dirty,' he agreed. ‘Of course, there are always the occasions when you have to pull what's left of a body out of a car wreck. That can be messy. Then again, we sometimes get into fights and have blood spattered all over us – usually our own.'

But the mechanic was not about to allow his illusions to be shattered by cold hard reality.

‘Still, every job's got its drawbacks, and there are big compensations in yours, aren't there?' he asked, winking broadly at him.

‘I don't know you mean,' Beresford said.

‘Course you do. You get called out to visit a house that's been burgled. Right?'

‘Right.'

‘The lady of the house is still very upset about what's happened, you comfort her as best you can, and before you know it, you're in bed together. You won't deny that kind of thing goes on, will you?'

The mechanic wouldn't believe him if he did, Beresford thought. So why even try to disillusion him?

‘Yes, it's happened,' he said, feeling, for once in his life, like a real man of the world.

The mechanic licked his lips. ‘How many times?' he asked.

In for a penny, in for a pound, Beresford told himself. ‘Lots of times,' he said. ‘So many that, if I'm honest, I've almost lost count.'

He was seeing more of that part of his wife's world outside the home in a single day than he had seen in the rest of their married life put together, Martin Stevenson thought as he approached the Crown and Anchor, a pub very close to Whitebridge Police Headquarters.

He stepped through the door into the saloon bar, and knew immediately that he would not like the Crown. It was too barnlike, too gaudy, too noisy – and though it would have been inaccurate to describe it as actually
dirty
, its standards of cleanliness fell below those of the establishments he would normally choose to patronize.

Rosemary was sitting at a table in the centre of the room. She was wearing her uniform, and had her arm deliberately stretched out so that her sergeant's stripes were clearly visible to anyone who looked. She had a cigarette balanced in the corner of her mouth, and a pint of bitter in her hand.

‘Did you see him?' she asked, the second that her husband had sat down opposite her.

‘This is a strange place to meet,' Stevenson said, looking around him as if to confirm his initial impressions of the bar.

‘Strange? What do you mean by that? There's nothing strange about it. It's perfectly normal.'

‘Then perhaps what I really meant to say was that it's an “inappropriate” place,' Stevenson told her.

‘Inappropriate?' his wife echoed. ‘How?'

‘Well, we so rarely have the chance to get together in the daytime that I'd have thought you'd have chosen somewhere nicer.'

‘This is where we drink,' Rosemary said, as if it required no more explanation than that.

‘
We
?'

‘Me and my lads.'

‘And how long have you been smoking?'

‘I only do it at work.'

‘Why?'

‘Because everybody else does.'

‘I don't see what that has to do with—'

Rosemary interrupted him with a heavy sigh. ‘Listen, Martin,' she said, ‘the way to get on in the Force is to blend in – to be just like everybody else. If I didn't chain-smoke and knock back ale like there was no tomorrow, my lads would think I was being stuck-up and stand-offish.'

‘Does this Sergeant Paniatowski, who you always seem to be going on about, do the same?'

‘She smokes.'

‘But she doesn't drink pints?'

‘I sometimes think you listen far too carefully to what I say, Martin,' Rosemary said.

‘Most women would be more than happy that their husbands listened to them.'

‘And I often get the impression that you start analysing my words the moment they're out of my mouth.'

‘That's not true. I—'

‘Martin!'

‘Perhaps I do analyse them – sometimes,' Stevenson admitted. ‘It's an occupational hazard, and I'm very sorry about it.'

From the expression on Rosemary's face, it was clear that the apology had not pleased her.