A Killing Kindness (19 page)

'Easily,' said Pascoe.

'But not for a wife,' she went on. 'If anyone  married me, you see, the only way the prophecy  could be fulfilled then would be for my husband  to die! So I waited for Stanhope.'

She smiled, gently this time, reminiscently.

'He was worth the waiting. Now you would like  to see Pauline's room.'

She rose abruptly, Pascoe more slowly, impressed  again by her powers of anticipation.

She led him into a small bedroom. Pascoe regarded  it with dismay. It looked as if an amateur burglar had been at it. Drawers hung out of the  dressing-table and tallboy, all empty, as was the  fitted wardrobe. Their contents seemed to have  been stuffed into a variety of plastic rubbish bags  which littered the floor. As he watched, Mrs Stanhope began to strip the blankets and linen off the bed and thrust these too into one of the  bags.

'What on earth are you doing?' demanded Pascoe,  bewildered.

'I thought you had studied the Romani,' she  said. 'All these things of my dead niece must be  destroyed. It is the custom.'

'But Pauline wasn't a gypsy,' protested Pascoe.

'She was my niece. She lived here. She is dead,'  said the woman in a matter-of-fact tone. 'While  her possessions remain, so must she. I did the same  when my Bert died. Even a
chovihani
has a right to  live among the living. I felt her last night. She was  lost and puzzled. I may have been a comfort. But  soon she may grow angry, resentful, bitter. Such  a spirit is not good company. The gypsy way is to  seek rest for both the living and the dead.'

There was no answer to this.

Pascoe said, 'You seem to have guessed we'd  want to look through Pauline's things, so isn't this  a bit premature?'

She picked up a shoe-box from the bedside table.

'Her letters, diary, address book,' she said. 'All  that could be of interest to you. But none of it  will be of use. I can tell you that. Take them  anyway. Make copies and return them, please.  They too must go. Also the things she was wearing when she died. Those especially must be destroyed.  When can I have them?'

'They're in the car,' remembered Pascoe. 'I'll  fetch them now.'

He returned a few moments later with the parcel  of clothes and personal effects.

'Thank you,' she said. Then after a moment's  hesitation, she added abruptly. 'I still want to  help, you understand, like I told you. But it's  harder now.'

'Because it's your own, you mean?'

She thought about this for a while, then agreed,  'Yes. Because it's my own.'

Pascoe puzzled over this remark as he went downstairs to his car. It seemed to him there might have been a rather strange emphasis in  it, though at the same time he recognized that  the whole ambience of the flat inclined him to suspicion of strangeness.

My own.
In a way Pauline hadn't been her own,  of course. For in a way, her own were the gypsies,  particularly the Lees. And after Pauline's death she had been away on some unlikely family jaunt with  Dave Lee.

Could family loyalty - or fear - persuade her  to help cover up Dave Lee's involvement in her niece's death? It hardly seemed likely. But there  was something there, of that he was convinced.

As he was opening his car door he heard his  name being called, and Rosetta Stanhope came running after him, breathless and agitated.

'What's the matter?' he asked.

'Where's the rest?' she demanded.

'Rest? Rest of what?'

'The rest of her clothes! The clothes she died in. Those I must have, those are the most important of all!'

'But you've got everything,' assured Pascoe.  'Jeans, suntop, underclothes, sandals. I checked  them off myself as I signed for them.'

'Not those, you fool!' flashed the woman, all  gypsy now. 'The headscarf, the shawl, the skirt.  Where are they?'

'Oh God!' exclaimed Pascoe. Her theatricality was infectious for he found himself striking his  forehead with his open hand. But he meant it.

'You bloody fool!' he said to himself. 'You fool!'

Chapter 16

Sergeant Wield was an expert typist, a skill he kept well concealed from less dextrous colleagues who would have been quick to attempt to abuse  it. Alone in the CID room, he was able to finish his reports on his morning visits to the bank and the Pickersgill household in record time. Now his thoughts turned to Newcastle and Maurice. There was someone else, he was certain. Brief  encounters he had suspected before. He avoided them himself, but was willing to tolerate them in Maurice, recognizing that the other lacked his own almost monastic self-discipline. But what he  had felt last night was the imminence of someone  more dangerous, more permanent.

He sipped at a cold cup of coffee and wondered  what he would do. Something. He was not a man  to sit back and do nothing.

'Penny for 'em,' said Dalziel who had entered the room unobserved. 'You must be solving at least six of the ten great mysteries of the century, the way you look. What've you decided - Jack the  Ripper escaped on the
Mary Celeste?'

The telephone rang. Wield raised it off the rest.

'Anything interesting?' said Dalziel.

'Not really, sir. Lee created merry hell for a bit after he was brought in. They could hear him at the desk. He was claiming assault. By you.'

'Oh aye. You didn't go near him, did you?'

'No, sir. The lad who brought him in was very clear about your instructions. He shut up after a  bit.'

'Good. I'll get on to him by and by.' Dalziel  belched generously. 'Answer your phone, lad.  Don't keep the public waiting.'

It was Mulgan from the Northern Bank.

'Sergeant Wield? I got authority to do that check  you asked for.'

'Oh good. I was going to call later, sir,' reminded  Wield.

'Yes, I know. But something emerged which I thought you might like to know instantly. Did you  find any money on Brenda's body?'

'Hang on,' said Wield. He left his desk and went to a filing cabinet. Dalziel raised his eyebrows but  the sergeant ignored him.

'A little in her purse,' said Wield. 'Three pound  notes, some coppers. Why do you ask?'

'It's just that among her other transactions, she  drew a cheque for cash against her own account.'

'Oh,' said Wield. 'Is that normal?'

'It's not against the rules, if that's what you mean, as long as there are funds to cover it. But  normally I would expect one of my staff to cash  their own cheques at someone else's till. Safer, if  you follow me.'

'I think so. But there were funds to cover Brenda Sorby's cheque?'

'Oh yes. She was a very provident girl. No, it was just the amount that interested me, particularly as I saw no reference to cash in any of the newspaper  reports. That morning she drew out two hundred  pounds. In five pound notes.'

Wield passed on the news to Dalziel who took  the phone from him.

'Mr Mulgan, Superintendent Dalziel here. Listen, you wouldn't have the numbers of the notes that Miss Sorby received, would you?'

'I'm sorry, no. It's impossible to . . .'

'Yes, yes, I understand. But there might be some marks? I mean, often the things I get from my  bank look as if they'd been left lying around in  a kindergarten!'

'There might be the odd pencil mark left by a teller when counting them into bundles,' said  Mulgan acidly.

'And these marks would be identifiable as coming from someone at your bank?'

'Possibly, but not necessarily,' said the manager.

'Right. Thanks a lot, Mr Mulgan. We'll get back  to you.'

He replaced the receiver forcibly.

'Creepy sod,' he said.

'You know him, sir?'

'Hardly. He just sounds a creepy sod. Like he was chewing a ball-bearing to make himself sound  like a chinless wonder. Two hundred pounds, Sergeant! We should have known about this sooner.  Good job I sent you this morning.'

'Yes, sir,' said Wield. 'It was a good idea of yours to check through the girl's transactions.'

'All right, save the satire,' said Dalziel. 'You'll get  the credit. Question is, who got the money?'

'You think this could have just been straight theft after all?' asked Wield.

'I think nowt,' said Dalziel. 'All I know is that this morning I found one hundred and five pounds hidden away in Dave Lee's caravan that he can't  account for.'

He smacked a huge fist into a huge palm making  a crack like a breaking bone.

'Let's go and have a chat with Mr Lee, shall we,'  he said.

It was the penultimate day of the High Fair and Pascoe found things booming everywhere at Charter Park except in the police caravan where Sergeant Brady, attempting to conceal his copy of 
Penthouse,
confirmed that the public seemed to have run out of even the most useless and irrelevant bits of information.

'Dead as a doornail since I came on after lunch,'  he said. 'Nothing at all.'

'Well, don't let it get you down,' said Pascoe.

He went into the fairground to talk with Ena Cooper. As he approached the penny-roll stall he had a sense of something not quite right. It took  him a second or two to spot what was wrong. The  fortune-teller's tent had disappeared!

'They came and took it down this morning,'  said Mrs Cooper. 'Three or four gyppos. Didn't  you know?'

Pascoe was non-committal and Mrs Cooper smiled  maliciously. But the smile disappeared when she  was questioned about Pauline Stanhope again.

No, she hadn't mentioned what she'd been wearing when she left the tent just before mid-day. Why should she? - nobody had asked. Yes,  'Pauline' had been wearing the headscarf, the  shawl, and the full-length skirt which were the  tools of her trade. No, there'd been nothing funny  about the way she walked.

As for seeing anyone go into the tent
before
the  'girl' left, yes, like she'd said already, there'd been a few that morning, she couldn't say how many.

Pascoe knew there'd been four at least, two pairs  of women who had come forward instantly to  compete for the honour of a 'last sighting'. The  winners, a pair of teenage girls, had attended at  eleven-fifteen
A.M
. and had been very impressed  by Madame Rashid's accuracy and optimism.

Pascoe thanked Mrs Cooper and turned away,  taking one last look at the circle of anaemic  grass which marked where the tent had been.  His romantic imagination would have liked to see it as some kind of enchanted ring, haunted  by a ghost pleading for the rest that only revenge  could give her. But if anything it looked like a  green on a miniature golf-course. People strolled  across it, uncaring or unaware that their substance was intersecting whatever insubstantial re-run of  a murdered girl's last moments might be taking  place there. Perhaps one of them would have a  vision like those women at Versailles. Certainly it  was beginning to feel as if only some supernatural  intervention could carry them any further forward.  Could Dalziel be persuaded to cross Rosetta Stanhope's palm with silver?

Back at the caravan he dented Brady's phlegm by  asking if he'd noticed the scene of the crime being removed. He then left the sergeant With the task of  getting together some men to search the fairground  for the missing clothes. Not that he had much hope.  The Choker would have needed only a second to  step out of the dress in the lee of one of the sideshows and the thin cotton fabric would have  rolled up to almost nothing. Then, if he had his  wits about him which in one sense at least he  clearly did, he would have taken the dress far away from the park before dumping it, or even  burning it.

And Brady made the prospect even less hopeful  by telling him that the rubbish skips had been  emptied the previous day by the cleansing department.

'After you've looked round here, you'd better get down to the dump, hadn't you?' suggested  Pascoe amiably. 'Just the job for a hot day!'

On his return to the station he was held up at the  entrance to the car park by the emergence of an  ambulance. He watched it move quietly down the  service road, turn into the main traffic stream and  was interested to note that only then did its lights  start flashing and bells clanging.

Entering, he went straight up to Dalziel's room.

'Where the hell have you been hiding?' demanded  the fat man.

'What's up? I saw an ambulance.'

'You don't know? God, you'll go far. Lily-white  hands,' sneered Dalziel. 'They've just carted Lee off to hospital, all right?'

Pascoe was not offended by his superior's tone.  He'd grown accustomed to his style and besides,  he could see the fat man was worried.

'What happened?'

'Nothing. I had a few words with him. He just  kept on moaning about this pain. I thought he was  shooting the shit so I . . .'

'Yes, sir,' prompted Pascoe.

'I just yelled at him,' said Dalziel. 'What do you  think I did? Next thing, he's lying on the floor.  Well, then I called the quack. He says it could be  appendix, he's not sure. Those bastards never are!  So we got an ambulance.'

'You were alone when you questioned him,  sir?'

'Yes,' said Dalziel.

Pascoe thought for a moment. He'd never seen his superior quite so ill at ease before.

'You'll have called the ACC, sir?' he said.

'That twat! Why should I want to call him?'

'Before someone else does,' said Pascoe. 'Excuse  me.'

He went downstairs. Wield was ahead of him, studying the logged entries of the Lees' admission.

'Trouble?' said the sergeant.

'If we all do our duty, we'll come to no harm,'  said Pascoe. 'Let's have a look at the chimney.'

He whistled when he saw the book.

'That's a long time.'

'And he was complaining from when he arrived.  Said he'd been punched,' said Wield.

'The woman, she's still here?' asked Pascoe.  'Jesus! Get her out, get her down to the hospital, you go with her. And hang about there. Take a  WPC to keep an eye on
her,
you watch
him.
They're  both in police custody still, right?'

Back in Dalziel's office he found the fat man talking on the phone.