‘You were supposed to be telling me about Andrew Lofthouse,’ Boyd reminded him. ‘What was he doing while all this was going on?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Cox said, ‘because he wasn’t around.’

  ‘Well, then …’

  ‘Have a bit of patience, laddie, and we’ll get to him,’ Cox said. ‘We all worked our arses off for them three years, but nobody worked as hard – or for such long hours – as Jane. And at the end of it, the business wasn’t just doing well – it was a runaway success. And that’s where Andrew Lofthouse comes into the picture.’

  ‘Ah!’ Boyd said.

  ‘Up to that point, we’d been subcontracting distribution, but then Andrew turns up and suggests Jane might be better off going into partnership with an experienced distributor who owned a first-class fleet. Jane agreed – or rather, she was charmed into agreeing – and the deal was done. But it wasn’t an equal deal by any stretch of the imagination. Andrew got a share of a thriving bottling business, and in return Jane became part-owner of a fleet of lorries that were held together by prayers and chewing gum.’

  ‘The trucks I saw in the yard didn’t look as if they are held together by prayers and chewing gum,’ Boyd said.

  ‘That’s because they’re not,’ Cox told him. ‘They’re all new, bought with company money – bottling company money.’

  ‘Mrs Lofthouse seems to have let her husband walk all over her,’ Boyd said.

  ‘I think she was infatuated by his good looks and charm,’ Cox said.

  ‘And did she ever regret it?’

  ‘If she did, she didn’t tell me,’ Cox said guardedly.

  ‘But you must have been able to tell from the way she looked at him and the way she acted.’

  ‘I mind my own business,’ Cox said, despite the evidence from the earlier conversation that he clearly didn’t. ‘I don’t know how she felt.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll ask her myself what her feelings are,’ Boyd said. ‘Where can I find her?’

  Cox looked down at his desk. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Could she be in her office?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At home?’

  ‘You won’t find her there, either.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Her husband said she was feeling very tired, and she’d gone away for a rest cure.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could have been Bournemouth, or it could have been the South of France.’

  He was so obviously – and awkwardly – lying, that Boyd almost felt sorry for him.

  ‘Have you ever heard of Overcroft House, Mr Cox?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘No,’ Cox replied, then added a totally unnecessary, ‘never.’

  ‘Are you the only one of her original team who knows that she’s in a shelter for battered wives – or do the rest of them know, too?’ Boyd asked.

  For a moment, it actually looked as if Cox was about to burst into tears, then he said, ‘The next time I talk to you, I want the company lawyer present.’

  Mary Barnes looked at the monitor by the front door, and saw that there were two women in police uniforms standing the other side of it. They appeared to be the real thing, but until it was clearly established that was actually what they were, Mary had no intention of opening the door.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘We want to come in,’ said the taller of the two.

  ‘Then you’ll have to post your warrant cards through the letter box,’ Mary said.

  The two women looked at each other questioningly, then the taller one took out her card and pushed it through the slot. The second woman followed suit.

  Mary examined both cards carefully, because in the past estranged husbands had tried all kinds of sneaky tricks to get into Overcroft House, and while none of them had gone so far as to hire women to impersonate police officers, there was a first time for everything.

  The cards looked genuine enough, and Mary opened the door.

  The one whose warrant card identified her as PC Robinson glanced at the brass plaque to the right of the door.

  ‘Are you Ms Kate Meadows MBE?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Mary said, ‘I’m her deputy, Mary Barnes.’

  ‘So where’s Ms Meadows?’

  I wish I knew, Mary thought. When she goes out for the night she’s usually back by the time I wake up in the morning, so that I can be away from here by nine. But it’s early afternoon now, and she’s still not back – and that’s just not like her.

  ‘Ms Meadows is out,’ Mary said, ‘but I’m in charge, and I can deal with any enquiries you might have.’

  ‘We’d like to talk to Jane Lofthouse, if she’s here,’ PC Robinson said. ‘Is she?’

  ‘May I ask you what it’s about?’ Mary said.

  ‘It’s a confidential matter,’ Robinson replied, ‘I can’t tell you anything about it – but I can assure you that it is important.’

  Well, if that was how it was, that was how it was, Mary decided.

  ‘I’ll take you through to the consulting room,’ she said. ‘You can wait for her there.’

  DCI Dawson and Dr Horlick were sitting in the staff rest room at the mortuary. Horlick was smoking an exotic cigarette which Dawson thought was so revolting that even the stink of the chemicals in the dissecting room would have been an improvement.

  ‘So now you’ve finished, what are your conclusions, doc?’ he asked.

  ‘Basically, they’re pretty much what I told you at the scene of the crime,’ Horlick said. ‘Death was instantaneous – or as near as damn it – and was the result of a blow to the head. It occurred sometime between midnight and four o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘Was he clothed or naked when the blow was struck?’ Dawson asked.

  ‘It’s impossible to say, although it would have made the killer’s task much simpler if he’d been naked, because undressing a dead man is never easy.’ Horlick took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled again, filling the air with the essence of low-grade Turkish brothel at closing time. ‘The body was carefully and thoroughly washed in a disinfectant or cleanser,’ he continued. ‘I can’t tell you exactly what it was off hand, but the lab should be able to tell us. Anyway, whatever it was, it ensured you’ll not be lifting any DNA from that particular corpse.’

  ‘You mentioned the other injuries,’ Dawson said.

  ‘Ah yes. They were inflicted several hours before death. They occurred in two areas – the left foot and the groin. I couldn’t tell you exactly what instrument was used to inflict the foot injury. Perhaps it was the end of a thin iron bar, or the point on the thin arm of a pickaxe. It could even have been a stiletto heel, but I can’t see a big man like Lofthouse just standing there while a woman did that to him. Can you?’

  ‘No,’ Dawson agreed, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘The bruising in the groin area emanates from a small central point, which would seem to support the iron bar theory,’ Horlick continued, ‘unless, of course,’ he chuckled, ‘our hypothetical “lady”, having trodden on him with her heel, kicked him with the toe of her shoe.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor, you’ve been very helpful,’ Dawson said.

  Well, you had to say that – whether it was true or not – he thought.

  Kate Meadows had designed the consulting room herself. It was a cross between a police interview room and a psychiatrist’s office – both of which Meadows had extensive personal experience of. Thus, there was a table, should this be a formal interview, and a set of easy chairs around a coffee table for discussions of a more casual nature. PC Robinson suspected that the easy seating would be more appropriate for this particular situation, but clung to the security of the table anyway.

  When Jane Lofthouse arrived, she was not alone, but instead was accompanied by a pale, nervous young woman who could almost have been called a waif, and was certainly highly pregnant.

  ‘And you are Mrs …?’ Robinson said.

  ‘And I am Mrs what?’ Lizzie Grimshaw asked.

  Robinson sighed. ‘What’s your name, madam?’

  Lizzie glanced over her shoulder, as if looking for the madam that the policewoman was talking to, and then, realizing she was the madam herself, said, ‘I’m Lizzie Grimshaw.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Grimshaw, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay outside while we talk to Mrs Lofthouse,’ Robinson said.

  Lizzie’s bottom lip trembled, and it was obvious that she was finding being so close to a police officer a frightening experience. Then she took a deep breath, and said, ‘No!’

  ‘No?’ Robinson repeated.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ said Lizzie, in a voice which trembled, but somehow also demonstrated absolute determination. ‘It’s never good talking to the bobbies, and I’m not letting Jane do it on her own.’

  ‘You must leave,’ Robinson told her.

  ‘She wants to stay,’ Jane Lofthouse said, looking at the pregnant girl with compassion. ‘Please let her.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ Robinson said, though she didn’t sound very regretful at all.

  ‘Then I don’t want to talk to you either,’ Jane Lofthouse told her.

  Why did they never cover this kind of thing in training school? Robinson thought. And aloud, she said, ‘All right, she can stay. But I won’t be answerable for the consequences.’

  ‘That’s fine with me,’ Jane Lofthouse said.

  She sat down, and Lizzie sat next to her.

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news about your husband,’ Robinson began.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ Jane said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Robinson wondered.

  ‘They wouldn’t send two police officers round here to inform me he’d got a splinter in his thumb, now would they?’ Jane asked. ‘How did he die? Was it an accident?’

  ‘I think we’ll need to wait for the post-mortem report before we can be certain about the cause of death,’ Robinson said cautiously.

  Up until this point, Jane had seemed quite calm, but now tears appeared in her eyes. ‘He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ she asked, in a quivering voice.

  ‘Or it may have been suicide,’ PC Charnley said.

  Robinson gave her less-experienced colleague a look of annoyance, but the damage had already been done.

  ‘He would never have killed himself,’ Jane said, sobbing in earnest now. ‘Whatever happened, he would never have taken his own life.’ She gulped in air as if she thought it was the last breath she’d ever draw. ‘What am I to do?’ she moaned. ‘How will I ever manage without him?’

  It was incredible that a woman who had run away from her violent husband should react like this on hearing of his death, Robinson thought.

  Or maybe it wasn’t! She remembered watching a documentary about the death of Joseph Stalin, the great Russian tyrant who had more than matched Hitler for the number of people who he’d had brutally killed. There had been newsreel film of the inmates of one of his notorious Gulag prison camps. They’d stood in the prison yard – half-starved and badly underdressed for the cruel Siberian winter – and when they heard the news, they had wept and wept until they could weep no more.

  At first, Robinson had thought the newsreel must have been faked, but a friend of hers – who had studied such things – had promised her that they were real. These people might have hated Stalin, the friend explained, but he had so dominated their world that the thought of that world without him terrified them even more than thoughts of their own deaths.

  So maybe that was what had happened here. Maybe Andrew Lofthouse was Whitebridge’s own version of Joseph Stalin, at least in the eyes of his terrorized wife.

  Jane had quietened down a little, and was hugging herself and sobbing quietly.

  Lizzie Grimshaw had one hand on Jane’s head, and was gently stroking her hair. She looked up at the two police officers.

  ‘Does Jane need to identify the body?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Robinson said.

  ‘But does she need to do it right now?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Robinson conceded. ‘As next-of-kin she will need to formally identify the body at some point, but since she’s so obviously upset …’

  ‘Then I think you’d better go,’ Lizzie said. ‘I can handle it from here.’

  It was incredible that this waif – who didn’t look like she could even handle herself – could take control of the situation, Robinson thought, but she quite clearly had.

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ Robinson said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie replied, but it was an abstract acknowledgement at best, because all her attention was now focussed on Jane Lofthouse, and when the two police officers left the room, she probably didn’t even notice.

  SEVEN

  If there had been a sun, it would have set at four thirty-two, but all that actually happened was that the dark sky which had been hanging over Whitebridge all day got even darker.

  Monika Paniatowski went over to the fridge, and removed the bottle of Zubrowka Polish vodka, which had been chilling since lunchtime. She took a glass from the cupboard, poured herself a small shot, and knocked it back immediately. She would slow down after this – she always did – but that first drink hitting her stomach, and announcing that there was a new sheriff in town, was a sensation not to be missed.

  She looked down at the glass in her hand, and smiled. Her ancestors, she supposed, would have immediately slung the empty glass into the fireplace, but she would have looked pretty stupid flinging her empty glass against the radiator. Besides, it would make a hell of a mess, and unlike those ancestors of hers, she didn’t have a small army of moujiks waiting to clean up after her.

  She could have had another drink within the rules she had set herself, but she didn’t. Instead, she returned the bottle to the fridge, and walked back to the kitchen table. Her photograph album sat squarely in the centre of the table. She didn’t know why she had taken it out of the drawer – she almost couldn’t remember doing so – but there it was, and she supposed there could be no harm in looking at it now.

  It was by no means a comprehensive visual biography of her life. There were no photographs of her earlier childhood in Poland, because they had all been abandoned (along with everything else the family owned) when the Germans invaded and her father was killed in battle. There were no pictures of the years that followed, because she and her mother had been refugees in wartime Europe (often hiding in ditches and living off raw turnips straight from the fields) and there had been little opportunity to collect souvenirs.

  The third part of her story was also totally unrepresented – those years between her mother marrying her stepfather, Arthur Jones, and her mother’s death – those years when, once she had reached puberty, Jones would force his attentions on her nearly every night. Such pictures had existed, because her mother and Jones had put up pretence of being a normal loving family, but Monika had burned all the prints and all the negatives the day they came into her possession – and she had never regretted it.

  And so the albums actually started a few weeks after Bob Rutter’s suicide, when the formal adoption papers had been certified, and she had become – in the eyes of the law – mother to Bob’s daughter Louisa. Monika’s excitement – her sheer bloody joy – was reflected not only in the obvious loving care behind each shot but also in the amazing number of pictures of a grinning Louisa there were.

  There were a few photographs of her old boss – solid dependable Charlie Woodend – and his wife – the solid, dependable, Joan Woodend – and a couple of shots of Colin Beresford, but there were none of … none of … none of any other adults.

  ‘None of my lovers!’ she said aloud, annoyed with herself for trying to avoid the words.

  But it was hardly surprising she had not chosen to retain those memories. She had not had many affairs in over three decades – less than could be counted on the fingers of two hands – yet three of her lovers had taken life (she refused to call any of the three of them truly murderers, though, strictly speaking, that was exactly what they were).

  None of the other affairs had ended exactly well, either.

  Had that been her fault?

  Or had God – her all-forgiving God – been punishing her for that first affair with Bob, a married man?

  If that was the case, she had no complaints, because she knew that what she had done had been a terrible thing – and what was even worse was that she could not bring herself to regret it.

  She turned the page, and there were the twins. Everyone who knew her back at the time of her pregnancy had wondered who the father was, but only three people had actually known the truth – which was that they had been conceived when she was raped by three bikers.

  The first person to know had been her gynaecologist, who had initially kept it secret because he had sworn a Hippocratic Oath to do so, and now kept it secret because he was dead.

  The second was Dr Shastri, the police doctor. She had urged Monika to report the rape – had pointed out that it was her duty. Paniatowski had known that, but had said nothing, because she also knew that if word ever got out, her career would effectively be over. Now Shastri had moved back to India, and taken her part of the secret with her.

  And the third person who had known had been Kate Meadows. When it had become plain to her that her boss planned to keep quiet about the attack, she had jumped on her motorbike and ridden away. She was gone for two days, and when she returned she brought with her three already-withering skin sacks which contained the bikers’ testes.

  Paniatowski had not been entirely sure how she felt about this. She was against vigilante justice in principle, but somehow, when you’d been the victim of a brutal and cowardly rape, your convictions were not always quite as strong as they had been.