The Red Herring (25 page)

‘Very little. It was a first offence for the boy who'd stolen the car, and anyway, from what Hans hinted, his father was somebody quite important in local government. As for the rest of them, it was never clearly established that they even knew the car was stolen, so they all got off with a slap on the wrist.'

‘An' a file on them.'

‘And a file on them,' Rutter agreed.

‘But did Reginald Dunn find out about it?'

‘Oh, yes. All the parents were informed.'

It was all starting to make sense, Woodend thought – though the sense it was making was sickening him deep down in the pit of his stomach. ‘Did Kohl tell you the details of Janice's death?' he asked.

‘Yes, he did. She was quite a strong swimmer, apparently. She'd won some local competitions, and was in training for a regional contest. She did her training at the indoor pool on the base, but, of course, she could only do that when there was somebody qualified on duty to supervise her.'

‘Naturally.'

‘The story is that she felt she needed more practice than she was getting, and so, one night, she went to the pool alone.'

‘Why wasn't it locked up?'

‘The man in charge swears that it was.'

‘Then how did she get in?'

‘That's never been satisfactorily established. Anyway, the point is that when she failed to go home at the time she was supposed to, the Dunns raised the alarm. They searched everywhere, including the town outside the base. But, of course, nobody thought to check the swimming pool. They found her the next morning, when they opened up for business. The general opinion seems to be that she got cramp when she was halfway across the pool.'

‘The man's a monster!' Woodend groaned.

‘You really think he killed his own daughter?'

‘I don't want to, but look at the facts. Reginald Dunn's just about the most ambitious man I've ever met in my life. Worse than that – he's convinced himself that it's not a personal ambition which is drivin' him – that he only wants to do well for the good of his country. He went into marriage like a medieval prince––'

‘What do you mean by that, sir?'

‘He married into the right kind of family – an RAF family. An' I don't think that's done him any harm. He's already a squadron leader, an' is all set to move up to wing commander, especially if the war he's been praying for actually comes to pass. Probably havin' a family was part of the plan, too. It gives him stability – makes him look like the kind of man you can rely on. But that's where things started to go wrong for him. He wanted his daughters to shine, because the credit would be bound to reflect on him. But then Janice went off the rails. It was only joyriding in a stolen car the first time, but who was to say where it would lead from there? And would you trust a man to control a squadron of very expensive planes flown by highly trained men when he couldn't even seem to control his own daughter?'

‘So he decided to kill her before she could do his reputation any more damage?'

‘That's how it seems to me.'

‘But wouldn't there be physical evidence of that. Bruising? The signs of a struggle?'

‘Not if he drugged her first. An' even if there
were
some bruises, so what? Athletes are always gettin' bruised. For a doctor to detect foul play, he'd probably have to be lookin' for it – an' what doctor on a carefully guarded air-force base is ever likely to think that he's got a murder on his hands?'

‘But to murder his own child . . .'

‘He won't see it in those terms. He probably justified his actions by convincin' himself that the RAF needs him more than it realises, an' if sacrificin' his daughter was the price of makin' sure that he continued to rise in the Air Force, then it was a price well worth payin'.'

‘And then, once they were back in England, Helen started to go off the rails as well,' Rutter said.

‘Exactly. She was caught shop-liftin'. The school doesn't think her parents know about it, but I'm willing to bet that Dunn does. So he finds himself faced with the same problem again. There's no tellin' what she might do next – what disgrace she might bring on him. But it's even more complicated to deal with this time, because it'll look very suspicious if he stages another drownin' accident. In fact, it'll look suspicious if he stages
any
kind of accident. So he comes up with the idea of pretendin' that some nutter has snatched the poor bloody kid. Nobody can blame
him
for that, can they? If it's anybody's fault, it's the school's for not takin' care of her properly, and the police's for not findin' her in time. Don't you see how all that makes sense?'

‘The other night, when we got the call, we couldn't work out why he was ringing,' Rutter said. ‘It didn't seem to conform to any known pattern.'

‘That's because it
doesn't
,' Woodend said. ‘He wants to be above suspicion himself, so he has to create the very clear impression that there really is a nutter out there. An' what better way to do it than by ringin' the bobby in charge of the investigation?'

‘And that's where the pencil case comes in.'

‘Exactly. He had to have some proof that the nutter who he was pretendin' to be had actually got the girl. The pencil case gave him that proof. He'd been plannin' to send it to me long before he actually snatched the girl.'

‘So what happened?' Rutter asked. ‘How did it come to end up under a bush in the park?'

‘I don't know,' Woodend admitted. ‘Maybe Helen lost it in a struggle – though I can see no reason why she
would
have struggled with her own father. So maybe, instead, she started to sense that somethin' was wrong, an' threw the pencil case under the bush as a means of tippin' us off. But the details don't really matter. What
is
important is that when Dunn got her to wherever he was takin' her, he discovered that she didn't have the pencil case with her anymore. So what was he to do?'

‘He could have sent us something else,' Rutter suggested.

‘Like what?'

Rutter shrugged. ‘Her skirt? One of her socks?'

‘I'm sure he thought of it,' Woodend agreed. ‘An' then he probably realised that anybody could lay his hands on a bit of school uniform, an' even her mother probably couldn't say that it was definitely Helen's. No, the pencil case was better. The pencil case was personal and unique. The problem was, he didn't have it. But he knew where he could lay his hands on another one – in Helen's bedroom.'

‘But if what you're saying is true – if the kidnapper really is her father – then keeping her alive would be a huge risk.'

‘I know,' Woodend agreed gravely.

‘So you think he's probably killed her already?'

‘What I'm
prayin'
is that he's not yet been able to steel himself to murderin' her. But if he
has
already killed one of his daughters, then I don't really see what's holdin' him back from killin' the other.'

Rutter put his head in his hands. ‘So what do we do now?' he asked. ‘We can't just pull Dunn in and beat the truth out of him, can we?'

‘If I thought it would help us find Helen alive, that's precisely what I'd do – even if it meant me goin' to prison myself,' Woodend said. ‘But it wouldn't do any good. However much we hurt him, Dunn wouldn't come clean, because if he did he'd have lost everything.'

‘So what
are
we going to do?'

‘The only thing we
can
do is keep him under round-the lock surveillance, an' hope that he leads us to her.'

‘That's not
much
of a hope, is it?' Rutter asked.

‘No,' Woodend agreed. ‘It isn't.'

M
onika Paniatowski walked up to the pleasant Edwardian terraced house which was listed as Verity Beale's address on her driving licence, and knocked confidently. There was the sound of two sets of footsteps – one plodding, the other scuffling – in the hallway, then the front door opened to reveal a woman in late middle age and a small boy. The woman was holding firmly on to the boy's reluctant hand, and from the identical sulky expressions on their faces, it was obvious that they were related.

Paniatowski smiled. ‘You must be Verity's mum,' she said. ‘What a pleasure to meet you at long last. I'm Elaine. Elaine Pardoe.'

The woman frowned. ‘Elaine who?'

‘Elaine Pardoe,' Paniatowski said brightly. ‘Surely Verity's mentioned me to you? I shall be very offended if she hasn't.'

‘I don't know who you are – and I don't know who this Verity is, either,' the woman said.

Paniatowski laughed, then stepped back to examine the number on the door. ‘But there must be some mistake,' she said. ‘This is the address Verity gave me, and she's always answered my letters, so she must have received them, mustn't she?'

‘Nanna!' the small boy cried.

‘Shut up, Cedric!' the woman said, glancing briefly down at him, then turning her attention back to Paniatowski. ‘I've lived here ever since I got married, which is nearly thirty years ago now and––'

‘Nanna!' the small boy insisted.

‘The bogeyman comes and gets little boys who can't be quiet when they should be,' the woman said. ‘I've brought all my children up here,' she continued, addressing Paniatowski again. ‘I've never had anybody living here but my own family, not even during the war.'

‘Perhaps I have got the number wrong, after all,' Paniatowski said dubiously. ‘Maybe Verity lives somewhere else down this street.'

‘I've told you, there's nobody called Verity lives around here,' the woman said, with growing impatience.

‘But you must have seen her,' Paniatowski persisted. ‘She's in her mid-twenties. A very attractive girl. She's got flaming red hair, all the way down to her shoulders.'

The woman sniffed. ‘I go up to the Artillery Arms once in a while,' she said. ‘Just for a glass of port, you understand. It's on doctor's orders.'

‘And you've seen her in there?'

‘Up until a few months ago, there was a young woman with long red hair in the pub nearly every night. But there's no point in asking me her name, because I don't know it.'

‘You never heard anyone else call her anything?'

‘I never got close enough to her for that. I'm particular who I rub shoulders with.'

‘Was there something wrong with her?' Paniatowski asked.

The woman turned to her grandchild again. ‘Cover both your ears, Cedric,' she said.

‘I can't when you're holdin' my hand,' the boy pointed out.

‘Then cover the one that you can cover,' his grandmother told him. She waited until the boy had done as instructed, then said to Paniatowski, ‘We get a lot of soldiers drinking in the Artillery Arms.'

‘I suppose you must, with being so close to the barracks,' Paniatowski said.

‘I'm pleasant enough to them myself – they're protecting Queen and country, when all's said and done – but I've always been careful never to let myself get
too
familiar with them.'

‘And this woman with the red hair did?'

‘It's not my place to say, especially if she's a friend of yours,' the woman said. ‘You're not listening, are you, Cedric?'

‘No, Nanna.'

‘But if you leave the pub with a different man every night, then you're bound to get yourself talked about, aren't you?'

‘You're probably right,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘You said she was there every night until a few months ago. Do you happen to remember exactly when it was she stopped going?'

‘Not exactly, no. But I'd say it was somewhere towards the end of the summer.'

Or to put it another way, just before Verity Beale first appeared in Whitebridge, Paniatowski thought.

‘Well, it's obvious to me now that my old friend Verity never actually lived here at all,' she said, ‘which is strange because I could have sworn that she said it was Raglan Road.'

‘Raglan Road!' the woman repeated. ‘This is
Ruskin
Road. Raglan Road's five or six streets away from here.'

Paniatowski gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘I am a dizzy thing, aren't I?' she said. ‘Fancy getting the names mixed up like that. Sorry to have bothered you unnecessarily.'

‘It's no trouble,' the other woman said, without much conviction. ‘You can unplug your ears now, Cyril.'

Squadron Leader Dunn lowered himself on to his living-room sofa and took a measured sip of the whisky and soda he held in his right hand. He had never much cared for alcohol, but he had noticed early in his career that men who did not drink at all tended to be viewed with suspicion by their fellow officers. And now drinking had become so much a part of the persona he'd created for himself that he indulged even when he was not being observed by others.

He found his mind – unbidden and unwilled – turning to thoughts of Woodend. When they'd first met, he'd seen the chief inspector as no problem at all. Even the way the man dressed – in that ridiculous hairy sports coat of his – had seemed to indicate that he had neither the discipline nor the self-respect to pose much of a threat. But that feeling of security had not lasted long. Woodend had asked questions about Janice – questions which a small-town policeman should never have thought to ask – and as loath as he was to admit it, Dunn was forced to accept the fact that the man was not a run-of-the-mill policeman.

That wouldn't have mattered if everything had gone strictly according to plan, because even a smart cop, as it now appeared Woodend was, would not have seen through the smokescreen that should have been thrown up. But everything
hadn't
gone according to plan. The pencil case, which had been a cornerstone of the whole operation, had somehow gone missing, forcing him to improvise by using the one he'd found in Helen's bedroom. And that had been a big mistake, he realised now.