A Walk With the Dead by Sally Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

knew as well as she did where to search – but he was drawing her into the process as a professional courtesy, and she appreciated that.
    â€˜The old mills are a good starting point, sir,’ she suggested.
    And so they were. The mills had thrived when cotton was king in Lancashire, but had been abandoned for years. They were now so easy to gain access to that it was commonplace for bodies to be discovered in one or another of them, and though most of the dead eventually turned out to be tramps who had died of natural causes, Paniatowski herself had been involved in three investigations in which mills had either been the actual location of murders or the places where the victims were dumped.
    â€˜Where else should we be looking?’ Potter asked.
    â€˜The river bank,’ Paniatowski replied, remembering her first case as a DCI, in which a severed hand had turned up on the bank. ‘Also the canal tow path. Essentially, anywhere that members of the general public
could
go if they chose to – but usually don’t.’
    The chief superintendent nodded his agreement. ‘This is clearly a job for the uniformed branch, so I won’t be requiring your assistance during the actual search,’ he said, ‘but I would like you and your team standing by, in case there’s a negative outcome.’
    Or to put it another way, Paniatowski thought, in case the unhappy girl – who she had last seen wearing a flounced pink dress – turned up dead.
    â€˜I’ve already notified my team, sir,’ she said aloud. ‘In fact, I’ve arranged to meet them at lunchtime.
    The superintendent smiled. ‘And that meeting will be taking place in the public bar of the Drum and Monkey, will it?’
    Paniatowski grinned. ‘That’s right. It’s where we seem to do our best thinking, sir.’
    â€˜So I’ve heard,’ the superintendent told her.
    The main wing of Dunston Prison was connected to the administrative block by a short tunnel, which had heavy steel doors at either end. The wing was four storeys high, rectangular in shape, and had a central patio. Internal walkways ran around the top three stories, and a suicide net had been stretched over the entire patio at second-floor level.
    Baxter and Chief Officer Jeffries arrived in the wing just as the prisoners from the third floor were slopping out, and they stood in the patio, watching a stream of men clanking down the metal stairs and gingerly carrying their buckets towards the toilet block.
    â€˜Just look at it,’ Jefferies said, as the prisoners passed by them. ‘What a waste of officer manpower. We’re highly trained personnel, you know. And what do we end up doing, for at least an hour a day? We end up standing and watching the prisoners slopping out!’
    Baxter nodded, but said nothing.
    â€˜The problem isn’t that this prison was built in the time of Queen Victoria – which it was,’ Jeffries continued. ‘It’s the fact that we’re keeping these men under conditions that even the Victorians would never have tolerated.’
    â€˜Is that right?’ Baxter asked neutrally.
    â€˜It is,’ Jeffries confirmed. ‘The Victorian idea of punishment was that when you locked a man away, you really locked him away. He wasn’t allowed to fraternize with the other prisoners. He was in his cell for most of the day, and even when he was given exercise time, wasn’t permitted to talk to the other prisoners. The only people he did get to talk to were the guards and the prison chaplain.’
    â€˜And you approve of that system, do you?’ Baxter asked.
    â€˜Of course I don’t approve of it,’ Jeffries said. ‘It was inhuman.’ He paused. ‘Mind you, under that system, they never had trouble with prison gangs, like we do these days.’ Another pause. ‘But the point I was trying to make was that each of these cells was designed to hold