A Clubbable Woman (22 page)

‘I told her to go into the other room and say she thought he was going to be in there. Not that I needed to coach her, she must have had plenty of practice. But what a turn up, eh?’

‘You’ve never said a truer word, Sergeant. She confirmed everything?’

‘Oh yes. They were at it in the house, then in Felstead’s car on the way to the Club, all the time he was away from the bar. The way they were hanging on to each other when I caught them, it’s very easy to believe.’

Easy to believe? Dalziel asked himself, thinking of Marcus Felstead and trying to revise his mental picture of him. The physical reality couldn’t be changed! Five feet four or five at the most, looking almost as round as he was high, with a balding pate that rose like a monk’s tonsure through an unruly and still retreating fringe.

Then he thought of Gwen Evans. He had always felt he was a bit of an expert on Gwen Evans. He had spent many beery hours just assessing the value of all visible assets, and visualizing the invisible.

That she should spare a first glance, let alone a second, on this man was almost incredible.

But it all fitted. It had been Marcus who turned up at the Evans house on Saturday afternoon when Pascoe was there. He’d played it very cool, they both had. He could imagine the facial contortions, the mouthed warnings, at the front door.

It had also been Marcus who had phoned Connon with the news of Arthur’s visit to the police station. And he, of course, had had it direct from Gwen the minute Arthur left the house.

‘We were both very worried,’ Marcus had said. ‘We’ve got a very great respect for Arthur.’

Dalziel had laughed inwardly when he heard that. Tell that to him when the Celtic red mist’s before his eyes and he’s kicking your head in in a jealous rage, he thought.

But he hadn’t spoken, just gone on listening.

Marcus told everything, reluctantly at first, but more freely after a few minutes. Then when Evans went in to a selection committee meeting, the reason for Connon’s presence that night, Dalziel had had a long talk with Gwen.

They were obviously telling the truth about themselves. Too many details fitted. The affair had been going on for nearly two years.                                                                                  

‘I bet he’s been dying for an audience,’ Dalziel said to Pascoe. ‘It must be hell having a woman like Gwen and not to be able to strut around in public possession. Mark you, it might have worked both ways. Perhaps it was the secrecy that made Marcus acceptable to Gwen, eh? Christ, Arthur was no oil-painting, but he was like the Winged Victory compared with
him!

And where does that place you in the beauty stakes? thought Pascoe. But what’s it matter? Hell, in one day I’ve been jealous of a sour-faced moron like Dave Fernie and of a little tub of lard like Marcus Felstead!

Dalziel shook his head finally in dismissive amazement at the inscrutability of woman.

‘It can’t be true,’ he said. ‘It’s a bloody lie all of it. Only, Marcus wouldn’t dare to tell a lie like that unless it was true.’

‘Irish,’ said Pascoe.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Dalziel.

‘More important,’ said Pascoe, ‘is, where does it leave us? Does it put us any further forward?’

‘It teaches us humility,’ said Dalziel pompously. ‘No other revelation in this case can possibly surprise us after this.’

‘Not even if it turns out to be an intruder?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Not even if your intruder turns out to be Jack the Ripper. I’m off to my bed now. I might even go to church in the morning. Good night.’

He lumbered away shaking his head. Pascoe watched him go with a feeling he was disgusted to find almost resembled affection.

But as he climbed into his own bed in his little two-roomed flat half a mile from the police station his mind was occupied still with the case. He wished he had one of those ‘feelings’ which Dalziel had so efficiently mocked. But he hadn’t.

All he had was the certainty that whatever steps had been taken that day had led them in one direction only.

Backwards.

He switched off the light and fell into an uneasy sleep troubled by dreams in which Gwen Evans, Sheila Lennox and Jenny Connon blended and merged into one.

There were three days left till Christmas. The weather was dark, misty. The sky was low and constantly shifting as different layers of grey and black cloud were dragged around by gusty winds. Guiding stars were rarely seen. In any case, no one had much time to look.

The greatest money-spending competition on earth was coming to its climax. The streets were thronged all day with compulsive shoppers, intermittently spattered with hard-driven rain and tinted by the glow of festive lighting. And a constant background to everything was the music: carols, pop, sentimental, classical; now near, now far; on tape, on record, and occasionally even issuing from a real, live, human throat.

It was a strange unsettling atmosphere. No one could remain unaffected by it.

Some were hardened by it.

‘I haven’t given or received a Christmas present for more than a dozen years,’ said Dalziel. ‘Bloody idiots.’

Some were softened.

Should I have tried to go home this year? wondered Pascoe guiltily.

Home meant a suburban semi, two hundred miles away, grossly overcrowded for the holiday by his grandmother, his two elder sisters, their unsympathetic husbands and their four even more unsympathetic children, in addition to the normal complement of his parents.

He hadn’t spent a Christmas there for three years. It was nearly time to try it again.

But not this year.

Some were worried by it.

‘He’s looking worse than he did when it all happened,’ said Jenny. ‘Perhaps it’s Christmas. I think they always made a special effort at Christmas. For my sake as well, I suppose. He looks awful.’

‘Is he seeing the doctor?’ asked Antony.

‘No. But I’m going to send for him. He had that knock on his head, I don’t think he’s recovered from that yet.’

‘No,’ said Antony staring out of the window into the front garden.

Some were made hopeful by it.

‘Look, girl,’ said Arthur Evans. ‘I know we’ve had some bad times recently and a lot of it’s been my fault. But let’s make an effort, shall we? It’s Christmas, eh? Let’s see what we can make of ourselves, eh?’

‘Yes,’ said Gwen. But her eyes did not shift from the book she was looking at.

And the atmosphere of hectic unreality made some resolute. Marcus Felstead whistled a Christmas medley to himself as he carefully packed his suitcase.

But in a house in the heart of the Woodfield Estate there was no whistling as a man searched the streets for the fourth time for his child, then finally, belatedly, picked up a telephone and rang the police.

‘It’s happened,’ said Dalziel.

‘What?’ said Pascoe, standing at the threshold of the room.

‘Mickey Annan. Aged eight. One hundred and three, Scaur Terrace, Woodfield. Didn’t get home from school last night. They broke up yesterday, had a bit of a party. It’s the usual story. His parents thought he’d gone to a friend’s house in the next street. He usually does on that night. But this time it was different, they were all going off for Christmas as soon as their kid arrived. So Mickey wasn’t asked. So he wasn’t missed till nearly ten.’

Pascoe raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s late.’

‘They breed ‘em hard in Woodfield. Anyway, they always kid themselves. Never admit that anything can be wrong until they’ve got to.’

‘What’s happening now?’

‘The usual. One of his mates thinks he said he might go up to the Common. Someone had told him there might be some snow there. He was mad keen on snow.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

The Common was the local term used to describe an area of several acres on the western boundary of the Woodfield Estate. It was unfit even for grazing purposes and its main function in human terms was that its near edges provided a useful if unofficial dumping ground for anything and everything. The Common contained a disused quarry, two ponds and a steep-sided stream, all of which had been fenced off after years of complaint. But not even a full-time repair unit could keep up with the constant breaching of the fencing.

‘We’ve got a full-scale search going on now. County are standing by with frogmen.’

‘House-to-house?’

‘No point yet. We’re stretched as it is talking to every kid in the school now that they’re on holiday.’

‘He might have just taken a walk and got lost,’ said Pascoe without conviction. ‘Fell asleep behind a wall or in a shed.’

‘He should have woken up by now.’

‘What would you like me to do?’

‘Look after the walking boys. It’ll take them all morning to cover the kids from the school. By then if nothing’s come out of the search, it’ll be time to start asking everyone questions.’

‘Anyone in particular? Streets, I mean?’

Dalziel looked surprised.

‘Why, you’ll start by asking everyone on the Woodfield Estate, and if we still haven’t found him, we’ll work our way through the rest of town. There’s only eighty-five thousand of them.’

‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe.

‘Think yourself lucky,’ replied Dalziel, shaking a newspaper on his desk. ‘At least they had the plane crash in North Africa this year.’

Funny man, thought Pascoe as he went swiftly and efficiently to work. Is it just a cover like we all put up? Or does he really not feel these things? What a man to spend Christmas with! I’d be better off at home with all those kids!

By midday the Common had been turned over with meticulous care, the pools dragged and the frogmen sent down. As far as Mickey Annan was concerned, the result was absolutely negative. But lots of other things were brought up. A list was always made on these occasions and Pascoe glanced quickly down it. A small part of his mind was still on the unidentified weapon in the Connon case. But there was nothing here which rang a bell. The usual household expendables, a suitcase containing some fairly valuable pieces of pewter (dumped by mistake? or stolen and dumped in fear?) and, an item which made Pascoe whistle slightly, two guns. But he had no time for idle speculation. A large-scale map of the Woodfield Estate lay before him. He still had to complete his detectives’ schedules.

It was one-thirty before he had any lunch. He ate it alone in the police canteen.

Mickey Annan now went to the back of his mind. He had taken part in the search that morning for a while, talked to some of the children from the school, as well as helping to organize the house-to-house. But he knew it was a routine, automatic business, none the less essential for all that, and nine times out of ten effective. Mickey Annan would probably be found very soon. It was after the finding that the real work began, and Pascoe was not a man given to anticipating events. Except in the line of business.

His thoughts drifted back to the Connons. The missing boy wasn’t really interfering with the progress of the Connon case, because the progress only existed in theory. Investigations were still proceeding, but unless Dalziel had some private little line well hidden from everyone else, the phrase was as empty as it sounded.

The only thing that was any clearer to him now than it had been when he started was his picture of the murdered woman. It wasn’t a very complete one. She seemed to have been a reasonable kind of mother to Jenny; at least she hadn’t stimulated any of the strong resentments which seemed to lie uneasily dormant in most daughters, especially those very fond of their fathers. And she seemed to have made Connon a bearable kind of wife. But she had told him his daughter had been fathered by another man and she had tried to separate him from his main interest in life, the Club. Add to this that she was a vain woman with a streak of snobbery, but one who had made a friend of Alice Fernie (who herself was unlikely to pick her friends haphazardly); that she was a man-hunting, high-life-loving girl who had shown no desire to keep up her connection with her old stamping-grounds; and finally, that she apparently received obscene letters with equanimity, merely folding them up and putting them away like love-letters sentimentally preserved; add all these things together and you had a woman who was as incomprehensible as women traditionally are.

Over his coffee, Pascoe toyed with permutations of possibilities in which Felstead or Evans had written the letter (
all
the letters?), in which Mary Connon had a lover (someone at the Club? Noolan? Jesus! Or what about Bruiser Dalziel? Joke); in which Connon swung a metal bar held like a spear into his wife’s forehead (jealous rage? didn’t fit. Careful plan? but was he so cold-blooded a man as
that?).

He’d been along all these paths before. They led nowhere yet, except to fantasy in which Gwen Evans held a crow-bar to Mary’s head and Alice Fernie struck it home with a sledge-hammer while Mary, unheeding, watched the television.

He sighed and returned mentally to the canteen. There was other work to be done. Connon would have to wait. Mary was dead. There was still the faintest of chances that Mickey Annan might still be among the living.

Connon was angry when the doctor arrived, but even in anger he didn’t lose the moderation of speech or manner which Antony now recognized as his main characteristic.

‘I didn’t send for you, Doctor,’ he said.

‘Just a checking-up call,’ replied McManus cheerily. ‘Just because you don’t send for me doesn’t mean you don’t need me any more.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Connon. ‘You’ve had a wasted journey.’

‘It’s a good way to waste it, then. But I’ll be the judge of how fine you are. You don’t look so hot to me.’

Connon did not look well. He seemed to be visibly losing weight. His cheek-bones were prominent and the paleness of the skin stretched over them was accentuated by the darkness which ran like a stain round his eyes.

‘Come along, then, and let’s take a look at you,’ said McManus.

Connon had enough of himself left to give Jenny a sardonically accusing glance as he left the room with the doctor.

‘He knows it was you,’ said Antony.