A Killing Kindness

For Dan and Pat

The man that lays his hand upon a woman, 

Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch 

Whom 'twere gross flattery to name a coward.

JOHN TOBIN:
The Honeymoon

Chapter 1

... it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the  water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething,  till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up  drifting with the few last bubbles, till through the glassy  water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon,  and birds with wings wide as a windmill's sails slowly  drifting round it, and over the bank's rim small dark  faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils  sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a  current turns me over, and I drift, and still am drifting,  and . . .

What the hell's going on here! Stop it! This is sick . . .

Please. Oh God! Be careful you 'll.. .

Jack! No!

Ohhhh . . .

See! Look. The lights . . . please

. . . fakery ... I don't want

. . . lights! Mrs Stanhope, Mrs Stanhope, are you  all right?

. . . auntie, are you OK? Please, auntie . . .

. . . thank you, love, I'm a bit... in a minute . . . did  I get.. .

. . . vicious blackmailing cow and I'll see .. .

'. . . picking up lots of forget-me-nots. You make  me . . .'

'Sorry,' said Sergeant Wield, switching off the  pocket cassette recorder. 'That was on the tape  before.'

'Pity. I thought she was proving that Sinatra  really was dead,' said Pascoe putting down the  sergeant's handwritten transcription of the first  part of the recording. 'Did you switch off there,  or what?'

'Or what, I think. I had the mike in my pocket,  nice and inconspicuous. When I jumped up to  grab at Sorby it must've fallen out and pulled  the connection loose. I'm sorry about all this,  sir!'

'Oh no, you're not,' said Pascoe. 'Not yet. When  Mr Dalziel comes through that door with the 
Evening Post
in his hand, that's when you're going  to be sorry.'

Wield nodded gloomy agreement with the inspector, who now studied his report as if seeking some  hidden meaning.

Like all Sergeant Wield's reports, it was pellucid  in its clarity.

Calling on Mrs Winifred Sorby in pursuit of  enquiries into the murder of her daughter, Brenda,  he had found her in the company of her neighbour, Mrs Annie Duxbury. A short time later, Mrs Rosetta Stanhope and her niece, Pauline, had  turned up. Mrs Stanhope was known to the sergeant by reputation as a self-professed clairvoyant  and medium. It emerged that Mrs Sorby wished  Mrs Stanhope to attempt to get in touch with  her dead daughter. The sergeant had been pressed  to stay and take part. Agreeing, he had excused  himself to go out to his car where he had a small  cassette recorder. Concealing this under his jacket,  he had returned and joined the women round a  table in the dead girl's darkened bedroom. After a  while Mrs Stanhope had seemed to go into a trance  and finally started talking in a voice completely  different from her own. But only a few moments  later the door had burst open and Mr Sorby, the  dead girl's father, had entered angrily and brought  the seance to an end.

His fury at his wife's stupidity had been redirected when he became aware of the sergeant's  presence. He had rapidly found a sympathetic ear  for his complaints in the local press and by the  time a chastened Wield had returned to the station, Pascoe had already fielded several enquiries  about the police decision to use clairvoyance in the  Sorby case.

'His wife's always gone in for that kind of stuff,'  explained Wield. 'Sorby's never approved. Naturally she wasn't expecting him back for a couple  of hours.'

'Perhaps he's got second sight,' grunted Pascoe.

He was examining the transcript again. It had taken Wield nearly an hour of careful listening to  sort out the confusion of overlapping voices.

'Let's get it straight,' said Pascoe. 'Mrs Stanhope  in her trance voice. That's clear. Then Sorby arrives  and starts shouting. OK?'

'Yes,' said Wield. 'Next - that's
"Please. Oh God", 
etc., is the niece, Pauline.
"Jack. . . no!"
- that's Mrs  Sorby.'

'And this great yell?'

'Mrs Stanhope coming out of her trance. Then  the niece again, Sorby going on about fakery, Mrs  Sorby asking Mrs Stanhope if she's all right.'

'Which she is. Speaking in her normal voice  again, right?'

'Right. And Sorby again. The niece had jumped  up and put the light on. Sorby pushed her aside  and looked as if he was going to assault Mrs  Stanhope. That's when I got in on the act.'

'And the rest is silence,' said Pascoe. 'That's  apt.'

'I wish it had all been bloody silence,' said Wield.  He had one of the ugliest faces Pascoe had ever  seen, the kind of ugliness which you didn't get  used to but were taken aback by even if you  met him after only half an hour's separation. The  advantage of such an arrangement of features  was that it normally blanked out tell-tale signs of  emotion. But at the moment unease was printed  clearly on the creased and leathery surface.

The phone rang.

It was the desk sergeant.

'Mr Dalziel's just come in,' he said. 'He's on his  way up.'

The door burst open as Pascoe replaced the  receiver.

Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel stood  there. A long intermittently observed diet had  done something to keep his bulging flesh in check,  but now anger seemed to have inflated him till his  eyes threatened to pop out of his grizzled bladder  of a head and his muscles seemed on the point of  ripping apart the dog-tooth twill of his suit.

Like the Incredible Hulk about to emerge, thought  Pascoe.

'Hello, sir. Good meeting?' he said, half rising.  Wield was standing to attention as if rigor mortis  had set in.

'Champion, till I got off the train this end,'  said Dalziel, raising a huge right hand which was  attempting to squeeze the printing ink out of a  rolled up copy of the local paper.

He pretended to notice Wield for the first time,  went close to him and put his mouth next to  his ear.

'Ah, Sergeant Wield,' he murmured. 'Any messages for me?'

'No sir,' said Wield. 'Not that I know of.'

'Not even from the other bloody side!' bellowed  Dalziel. He looked as if he was about to thump the  sergeant with the paper.

'It's all a mistake, sir,' interposed Pascoe hastily.

‘Mistake? Certainly it's a bloody mistake. I go down to Birmingham for a conference.
Hello Andy, 
they all say.
How's that Choker of yours
? they all  say.
Fine,
I say.
All under control,
I say.
That
was  the bloody mistake! You know what it says here  in this rag?'

He unfolded the paper with some difficulty.

'It has long been common practice among American  police forces to call on the aid of clairvoyants when they  are baffled,'
he read. 'I leave a normal English CID  unit doing its job. I come back and suddenly it's  the Mid-Yorkshire precinct and we're baffled! No  wonder Kojak's bald.'

Pascoe risked a smile. Lots of things made Dalziel  angry. Not having his jokes appreciated was one  of them.

The fat man hooked a chair towards him with  a size ten foot and sat down heavily.

'All right,' he said. 'Tell me.'

For answer, Pascoe shoved Wield's report towards  him.

He read it quickly.

'Sergeant.'

'Sir!'

'Oh, stop standing there as if you'd crapped  yourself,' said Dalziel wearily.

'Think I may have, sir,' said Wield.

This tickled Dalziel's fancy and he grinned and  belched. There had obviously been a buffet bar on  the train.

'How'd it happen you had a recorder in your car,  lad? Not normal issue these days, is it?'

'No, sir,' said Wield. 'It's my nephew's. It'd gone  wonky so I'd been having it repaired.'

'That was kind of you,' said Dalziel approvingly.  'At an electrical shop, you mean?'

'Not exactly, sir,' said Wield, uncomfortable  again. 'It's Percy Lowe who services the radio  equipment in the cars. He's very good with anything like this.'

'Oh aye. In his own time and with his own gear,  I suppose,' said Dalziel sarcastically.

'He did a good job on your electric kettle, sir,'  said Pascoe brightly.

Dalziel edged nearer the corner of the desk to  scratch his paunch on the angle.

'Let's hear what the spirits had to say, then,' he  commanded.

He followed Wield's transcript closely as the tape  was played again.

'Now that's what I call helpful,' he said when it  was done. 'That makes it all worthwhile. Here's us  thinking Brenda Sorby was killed after dark when  all the time the sun was shining, and that she was  chucked into our muddy old canal that's so thick  Judas bloody Iscariot could walk on it, and all the  time it was some nice crystal-clear trout stream!'

'Sir,' said Pascoe, but the sarcasm wasn't yet  finished.

'So all we've got to do now, sergeant, is work  out the most likely nesting ground for albatrosses  in Yorkshire. Or condors, maybe. Wasn't there a  pair seen sitting on a slag heap near Barnsley? That's it! And these dark-skinned buggers'll be  Arthur Scargill and his lads just up from t'pit!'

Pascoe laughed, not so much at the 'wit' as in  relief that Dalziel was talking himself back into a  good mood. He had known the fat man for many  years now and familiarity had bred a complex of  emotions and attitudes not least among which was  a healthy caution.

'All right, Peter,' said Dalziel. 'This crap apart,  what's really happened today?'

'Nothing much. House to house goes on, but  we're running out of houses.'

'And the lad, what about the lad?'

‘Tommy Maggs? I saw him again today while  the sergeant was at the Sorbys'. It was just about  as useful. He sticks to his story. He's very uptight,  but you'd expect that.'

'Why?'

'Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police  visiting him twice daily.'

'Oh aye,' said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at  his watch. 'Well, I'll tell you what we'll do,' he  said. 'How's your missus?'

Pascoe's wife, Ellie, was five months gone with  their first child.

'Fine, she's fine.'

'Grand,' said Dalziel. 'That's what you need,  Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you  down a bit.'

He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval  bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.

'So if she's all right, and my watch is all right, the  Black Bull's open and I'll let you buy me a pint.'

'A pleasure, sir,' said Pascoe. 'But just the one.'

'Don't be shy. You can buy me as many as you  like,' said Dalziel.

As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs  and said, 'You'd best come too, sergeant, in case  we move on to spirits.'

He went chuckling through the door.

Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain  and then followed him.

Chapter 2

Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less  than four weeks.

The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty,  a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three  instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year  earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably  running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a  pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town.  Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire  Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam  traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a  stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators,  Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed  and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months  later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car  accident on an icy Scottish road.

This second tragedy almost destroyed Mrs Dinwoodie. She had left the Garden Centre in the care  of her nurseryman and gone off alone. More than three months elapsed before she reappeared. She  looked pale and ill but was clearly determined to  get back to normality. Ironically it was her first  tentative steps in that direction which completed  the tragic trilogy.

While the Dinwoodies had made no close personal friends locally, they had not been inactive,  their social life being centred on the Shafton Players, the village amateur dramatic group. Mary  Dinwoodie had withdrawn completely after her  husband's death, but now, pressed by a kindly  neighbour, she had agreed to attend the group's  annual summer 'night out'. They had had a meal  at the Cheshire Cheese, a pub with a small dining-room on the southern outskirts of town. At closing  time they had drifted into the car park, calling  cheerful goodnights. Mary Dinwoodie had insisted  on coming in her own car in case she wanted to get  away early. In the event she had stayed to the last  and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. The other  twenty or so revellers had all set off into the night,  in groups no smaller than three. And all imagined  Mary Dinwoodie was driving home too.