The Ring of Death (12 page)

‘What do you mean?' Quinn asked, his tone hovering somewhere between aggression and suspicion.

‘But he
didn't
have a job to go to, did he?' Paniatowski continued. ‘At least, no job that we've got any record of – no job the
tax man
knows about.'

Quinn said nothing.

‘But job or no job, he had his rent to pay every week,' Paniatowski continued. ‘And there were his daily boozing costs to cover, even if he did most of that boozing with a generous mate. And yet he hadn't bothered to register as unemployed, which meant he couldn't even draw the dole. Don't you find that just a little bit strange, Mr Quinn?'

‘Never thought about it,' Quinn said, unconvincingly.

‘So where
did
his money come from?' Paniatowski asked.

‘I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't involved at all,' Quinn told her – and the moment the words were out of his mouth, it was clear from the expression on his face that he regretted them.

‘Nothing to do with
what
?' Paniatowski demanded. ‘Not
involved
with what?'

‘Listen, I've just lost my best mate, and I'm devastated,' Quinn said. ‘All I want is a bit of peace and quiet.'

‘So that you can reflect on his life and death?'

‘Yes, if you like.'

‘Fair enough,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘You'll get lots of peace and quiet in a cell at the local nick.'

Quinn blinked, as if he was finding it hard to follow this new turn their conversation was taking.

‘What are you . . . what are you talking about?' he asked.

‘You've got a simple choice to make,' Paniatowski told him. ‘You can either talk to me now, or I can arrest you for being drunk and disorderly – in which case you talk to me later.'

‘You bloody bitch!' Quinn muttered, half-under his breath.

‘Yes, you're right, that's just what I am,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘A bloody bitch with a set of handcuffs in her pocket. So what's it to be?'

Quinn looked longingly at the door.

He wanted to make a dash for it, Paniatowski thought, but he wasn't yet
quite
drunk enough to persuade himself he'd be able to make it.

‘What do you want to know?' Quinn asked, turning slightly so he was facing the bar again.

‘I want to know about this job of Andy Adair's – the one that you had nothing to do with.'

‘Look, don't ask me to talk about that,' Quinn pleaded. ‘I promise you, I would if I could – but I just can't.'

‘
Why
can't you?'

‘Because it's not just about Andy. There's other people involved – and if I snitch on them, my life won't be worth living.'

Other people!

Paniatowski wondered whether it was Forsyth himself who'd put the frighteners on Quinn.

Probably not.

Forsyth's approach was too subtle – too nuanced. An ex-soldier like Quinn would likely respond better to the threat of physical force, delivered by one of the spy's henchmen.

‘Once you come out in the open with what you know – once I've got it all down on record – neither the army nor the intelligence service will dare touch you,' she said.

‘What are you talking about?'

Paniatowski sighed. ‘Listen, why pretend, when you're not fooling anybody – least of all me? After Adair left the army – if, indeed, he actually
did
leave the army at all – he was recruited to do some kind of work for the intelligence service in the Whitebridge area.'

‘Was he?' Quinn asked.

Paniatowski stamped her foot impatiently. ‘For God's sake, Mr Quinn, you
know
he was. That's the little job of his that you had nothing to do with.'

And yet, even as she spoke the words, she was beginning to have her doubts. Quinn really
did
look as if he had no idea what she was talking about – and she was far from convinced that he was that good an actor.

‘You've got it all wrong,' the ex-soldier said. ‘Andy wasn't working for the intelligence service, he was working for . . .'

‘For . . .?'

‘I'm not saying.'

Maybe he
was
that good an actor after all, Paniatowski thought. But
if
he was, it was taking him a great deal of effort to maintain the front, and if she pushed a little harder it might just collapse.

‘Have you ever considered the possibility that by keeping quiet you could be putting
yourself
in danger?' she said.

‘How do you mean?' Quinn asked.

He looked so
genuinely
bewildered that Paniatowski was tempted to give it up then and there.

Then she remembered other interrogations she had conducted, and how, just as everything had looked hopeless, the suspect had suddenly caved in.

‘How might
you
be in danger?' she ploughed on. ‘Well, if it
was
the IRA who executed your mate Andy . . .'

‘The IRA!' Quinn exclaimed. ‘Yes, I suppose it
could have
been them, couldn't it!'

‘Is this the first time that possibility's crossed your mind?'

‘Well, yes,' Quinn admitted.

‘Even though you were both paratroopers in Northern Ireland? Even though you were both involved in the Bloody Sunday massacre?'

‘There was a sniper at Derry Corner,' Quinn said sullenly. ‘We were fired on first. We were only defending ourselves.'

‘Even so, there must have been times when you thought the IRA might try to get its revenge for what you'd done,' Paniatowski said. ‘But not this time, you didn't,' she mused. ‘Now why
was
that? Could it be because you already had other ideas about who might have done it?'

From the expression on Quinn's face, she knew she had hit the nail right on the head; knew both that the ex-soldier was no kind of actor
at all
, and that he
did
have his own theories about who had killed his best friend – and why they might have done it.

‘Well?' she demanded.

Being backed into a corner seemed to have given Quinn renewed strength, and now he held out his hands, palm down, in front of him.

‘If you're going to arrest me, do it now,' he growled like a wounded animal. ‘And if you're
not
going to arrest me, you can piss off!'

ELEVEN

T
he Meteorological Office had warned of heavy rain overnight – and, for once, had almost got it right. There were thunderstorms on the Pennine Hills, with sheet lightning which could be clearly seen from both the Lancashire Moors and Yorkshire Dales. But though threatening clouds did mass over Whitebridge under the cover of darkness, they had still not decided whether to open up or not when a wandering wind took them in its grip and shunted them out to sea, leaving the sun to rise on a perfect late summer day.

From his suite in the Royal Victoria, Mr Forsyth looked up at the clear blue sky, and allowed himself a rare moment of reflection.

The problem with the general public's perception of the intelligence service, he thought, was that, one way or another, they invariably got it wrong. There were those who saw spies as incompetent bunglers, forever tripping over their own feet and achieving nothing, and those who saw them as evil men, with an almost superhuman cold-bloodedness and unlimited power.

The truth, as with most generalizations, lay somewhere in the middle. Agents
did
make mistakes – some of them monumental ones – but they were never the clowns they were portrayed as in the spoof movies. And though it was sometimes necessary to have impediments to national security liquidated, such a course of action was a last resort, and could sometimes rebound very badly on the career of the man who had initiated it.

This operation in Whitebridge was a case in point. It had been made necessary by a mistake – for which he partly blamed himself – but resolving the difficulty was by no means as simple as an uninformed outsider might assume.

The detective constable who Monika Paniatowski had assigned to watch him was just one example of the complexity involved. Having the young man removed was certainly an option – and one which he could probably, in the long term, justify to his masters in Whitehall – but once you decided to knock over one domino, you ran the real risk that the rest of them would tumble down as well. And anyway, knocking the dominoes over was not at all what the game was about – the trick was to move them to a different position without anyone even realizing they had been moved.

He found his thoughts turning to Monika Paniatowski. Though he was well aware that she loathed him, he was really quite fond of her. It was not so much her physical appearance he admired, as her spirit. It presented him with a challenge. It made the game a little more interesting. Of course, he might have to crush it in the end, but there would even be a guilty pleasure in doing that.

Forsyth wondered – briefly – if his own sexual impotence had anything to do with his attitude to Paniatowski.

Then he rang room service, and ordered himself a hearty breakfast.

Even in the later stages of her illness, his mother had loved a blue sky, Colin Beresford reminded himself, as he looked out of the window. Of course, he quite accepted she might not even have known it was a
sky
at all – might just have regarded it as a soothing shade of colour in a universe she could no longer come to grips with – but even that must have been
some
consolation to her.

He wondered how Yvonne, the woman he had met the previous evening, was feeling that morning.

Had she woken up depressed, weighed down by her complete failure to pull him?

Or had she, on the other hand, woken up next to a man – a beefy, self-assured man who had not worried for a second about what would happen once they'd got undressed?

‘I have to do something about my life,' he said to the walls of his bedroom. ‘I can't go on like this.'

When this case was over, he promised himself, he
would
do something about it. Once they had the killer safely in custody, he would make a determined effort to overcome his reticence.

Yet as he was brushing his teeth, it seemed to him that there was at least one small part of his brain which hoped that solving the murder would take a long, long time.

Sir William Langley strode through the gardens of Ashton Court, his home, with a squire-like swagger which he could not entirely carry off.

The Court, located a few miles outside Whitebridge, had begun life as a medieval manor house, though additions over the next few hundred years had quite obscured its origins. It stood in extensive grounds, tended by a small army of gardeners whose successful battle against the thin moorland soil had resulted in a series of linked gardens which
Lancashire Life
had once described as ‘quite stunning'. There was a river running through the property with excellent fishing, and the grouse moor which abutted the estate could always be relied on to provide a rewarding day's shoot.

All in all, it was a stately pile, and if any of Sir William's weekend house guests went away with the impression that it had been owned by his family for countless generations, well, that was certainly not due to anything that
he
had explicitly said.

It was Sir William's habit to inspect his gardens early in the morning, while the dew still lay heavy underfoot, and that morning was no exception. Following the same route he always did, he first visited his rose garden. The glasshouses were next, but having no real feel for nature, he gave the fruit and flowers growing in them little more than a cursory inspection. That task completed, he strolled around the edge of the artificial lake, heading towards what was really his favourite part of the grounds – his collection of statues.

The statues Sir William owned could be roughly divided into three distinct groups.

The first group, bought on the recommendation of people who knew about these things, were very modern, and though there were times when they seemed to him to be no more than pieces of scrap metal randomly welded together, he wisely kept his opinion to himself.

The second group were very old, and had come from Greece, Italy and various other spots around the Mediterranean with a reputation for an antique past. When he'd seen his initial purchase in this group for the first time, Sir William had wondered aloud if the ravages of the centuries could be disguised by a little skilful repair work, but his ‘experts' had positively blanched at the suggestion, and so the statues remained chipped and cracked, which, he supposed, at least proved they
were
old.

He'd taken advice from no one on the purchase of his third group of statues, and – perhaps for that reason – they were his favourites. They reminded him of the municipal statues he'd seen as a child – and indeed, many of them
were
those same statues. The one of John Bright, the great radical reformer, had dominated the space in front of Whitebridge Town Hall, until the council had decided it stood in the way of progress. The equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, raised as the result of a public subscription, had been a feature of the corporation park until a few years earlier. Peel, Gladstone, he had them all, and when he looked up at them, he liked to think that their firm, resolute jaws reminded him of his own.

It was as he approached his Queen Victoria that he noticed a new statue which he couldn't, for the life of him, remember buying. Nor could he think of what would have possessed him to purchase the sculpture of a naked man on his hands and knees – because, really, though avant-garde art was all very well in its place, there had to be
some
limits imposed by good taste. And even if
had
bought it, he would surely have ordered a plinth, too, instead of merely dumping it on the ground like that.