A Killing Kindness

The questioning was still going on, was likely to continue till Christmas. Or the next murder.

‘My sergeant seemed to have heard of your aunt,’ he said cautiously. ‘But he didn’t mention any connection with the Fair.’

‘Mr Wield, you mean. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he? It’s a bit complicated, I suppose. Family history usually is.’

‘Perhaps you could give me a digest, if you think it would be helpful, and if you don’t have to stray much beyond the Norman Conquest,’ said Pascoe.

She grinned.

‘I see where Mr Wield gets his cheek from,’ she said. ‘The thing to understand is that originally Aunt Rose is a Lee on her father’s side, a Petulengro on her mother’s.’

‘You mean the Romany families?’

‘You know something about gypsies?’

‘I’ve read my George Borrow,’ he said with a smile.

‘An expert!’ she said. ‘That must be very useful when it comes to moving them on.’

Pascoe raised his eyebrows and the girl had the grace to look a little embarrassed before carrying on.

It emerged that years earlier, Rosetta Lee, then nineteen, had met, loved and married ex-sergeant Herbert Stanhope, just demobbed from the Yorkshire Rifles and, after five years spent risking his life to protect the old folk at home, not in any mood to take heed of their melancholy warnings. The couple married and lived happily and childlessly until twelve years later when Stanhope’s younger sister turned up pregnant and husbandless and not at all contrite. But she effaced her sin in the best nineteenth-century manner by dying in childbirth, leaving the Stanhopes with Pauline on their hands. Thereafter they lived even more happily for another twelve years till an accident at the railway marshalling yard where Stanhope worked killed him.

‘Aunt Rose knew it was going to happen,’ said Pauline.

‘Why didn’t she stop him going to work?’ enquired Pascoe, trying not to sound ironic.

‘If you know it, then essentially it’s already happened so you can’t possibly stop it,’ said Pauline as if she were talking sense.

‘And you? Do you have this – er – gift too?’

‘Oh no!’ she said, shocked. ‘I’m a fully qualified horoscopist and a pretty fair palmist but I’ve got no real psychic powers. Aunt Rose is different. She’s always had the real gift. Her grandmother was a chovihani, that’s a sort of gypsy witch. She really looked the part, not like Aunt Rose. But Aunt Rose has got the greater gift. She’s a true psychic, that’s the fascinating thing. It’s not just a question of fortune-telling, but she really makes contact. Well, you know that yourself from the other day.’

Pascoe nodded, looking as convinced as he was able.

The girl continued, ‘It was strange how it developed in a gorgio society. Perhaps all the trappings and superstition of Romany life are a limiting factor, you know, they make a little go a long way but stop a lot from going as far as it might. That was what one of the researchers from the Psychic Research Society said.’

‘Your aunt is famous, then?’

‘Oh no!’ said the girl, ‘But she’s well known in interested circles. Really all she wants is a quiet life, but she’d always been willing to help friends out.’

‘For free?’

‘At first. But inflation nibbled away at the pension Uncle Bert left her and she’d had to charge fees to make both ends meet. But she’s very careful in accepting clients.’

Gullibility being high on her list of criteria? wondered Pascoe.

‘Normally she’d have steered clear of a case like Mrs Sorby’s, but Mrs Sorby had been coming to her for years, ever since her mother died. Mr Sorby objected but she still kept coming. Naturally when this awful thing happened, Aunt Rose had to help.’

‘Naturally. What’s your part in all this, Miss Stanhope?’

The girl shrugged.

‘I had an office job, but it was pretty deadly. I’d picked up a lot of things from Aunt Rose, she brought me up, you see. Well, I’m not Romany, so I didn’t have anything of her gift, but I got quite interested in casting horoscopes. It’s pretty scientific that, you only need a very limited degree of sensitivity. Palmistry the same. I got myself properly qualified and gave up the office to work at it full time alongside Aunt Rose. But it’s her I want to talk about, Inspector. That awful newspaper story really upset her.’

Pascoe looked surprised. The Evening Post had been fairly restrained, he thought.

‘It didn’t much please my superintendent either,’ he said.

‘Aunt Rose doesn’t mind helping the police, but this makes her sound like a real sensationalist,’ said the girl, producing a newspaper.

The mystery was solved. This was not the Evening Post but that morning’s edition of one of the more lurid national tabloids. Obviously one of the local reporters was a stringer for this rag and knew that provincial standards had very little selling power. Pascoe glanced through the article. Its main source was Mrs Duxbury, the neighbour. She gave a graphic account of what Mrs Stanhope had said before being awoken from her trance. Embellished by Fleet Street licence, the occasion sounded like something out of Dennis Wheatley. Much play was made of the fact that Rosetta Stanhope was also Madame Rashid (Mrs Duxbury again?), fortune-telling in the very fairground where Brenda had been murdered. Not even a perhaps, thought Pascoe. He wondered if Dalziel had seen it yet.

‘Auntie was really upset this morning,’ continued the girl. ‘Too upset to work, so I’ll be on by myself all day.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Pascoe conciliatingly.

‘Don’t be stupid!’ she flashed. ‘It’s not that. It’s Auntie’s reputation. You may be the police but you’ve no right to exploit her name like this.’

‘Reputation?’ said Pascoe, beginning to feel a little irritated. ‘Surely you’re rating all this stuff a little bit high, aren’t you, Miss Stanhope? I mean, that sign outside! Isn’t this just the bottom end of the entertainment business?’

He didn’t want to sound sneering and the effort must have shown for the girl was equally and as obviously restrained in her reply.

‘Aunt Rose is Romany. She’s never turned her back on that all these years she’s lived among gorgios. This used to be mainly a Romany Fair, Inspector. Now what with one thing and another, the only gypsy presence you get here is a couple of tatty stalls and a bit of cheap labour round the fringes. Dave Lee, for instance, his grandfather …’

‘Who’s Dave Lee?’ interrupted Pascoe.

‘I was just talking to him,’ said the girl ‘I suppose he’s a kind of cousin of Aunt Rose’s. His grandfather might have brought two, three dozen horses here, being a big man. Now he helps around the dodgems while his wife sells pegs and bits of lace. He’s not allowed to bring the ponies he still runs anywhere near the park! This tent is the last real link between the fair today and what it used to be for centuries. There was a fortune-teller’s tent on this pitch before there was a police force, Inspector. Not even the big show-people with their roundabouts dare interfere with that. And for nearly fifty years it was run by Aunt Rose’s grandmother. When she died four years ago, that looked like the end. Oh, there were fakes enough who might have taken over, but the Lees have more pride than that. So Aunt Rose stepped in. For a couple of weeks a year she’s back in the family tradition, in the old world.’

‘And which world are you in, Miss Stanhope?’ asked Pascoe.

‘I help as I can,’ she said. ‘Collect the money, look after the props, do a bit of palm-reading when Auntie needs a rest. Yes, I did say props. It wasn’t a slip, so don’t look so smug. Of course most people come into a fortune-teller’s tent at a fairground for the entertainment. But we take it seriously, that’s the important thing.’

She spoke defiantly. Pascoe answered seriously, ‘I hope so, Miss Stanhope. You spoke of protecting your aunt from exploitation just now. I too am employed to stop people being exploited.’

She flushed angrily and said, ‘Auntie was just concerned to bring any comfort she could to that poor woman. We shut up shop here for the afternoon, which lost us money, and Aunt Rose wouldn’t accept any fee from Mrs Sorby. So we’re the only losers, wouldn’t you say, Inspector?’

‘There are all kinds of gain, Miss Stanhope,’ said Pascoe provocatively. ‘I mean in the entertainment world, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there?’

Now she was really angry.

‘Tell me, Inspector,’ she said in a hard, clear voice, ‘I’d say you were a bit younger than Sergeant Wield, right?’

‘A bit,’ he admitted.

‘And yet he is so much pleasanter than you. It looks to me as if the nastier you are in the police force, the higher you’re likely to get. Right? I bet I’m right. Goodbye, Inspector!’

Wait till you meet my boss, thought Pascoe as he left. You don’t know how right you are!

As he drove away he saw in his rear-view mirror the man Dave heading back towards the tent.

Keen for a report on the conversation? he wondered.

But wasn’t everybody fascinated by a connection with a murder case?

He put it out of his mind and hurried towards the station, eager to tell Sergeant Wield he’d got an admirer.

Chapter 4

Alistair Mulgan sipped his tomato juice carefully. He would have preferred a large gin partly because he wasn’t paying and partly because his metabolism seemed to be very sympathetically inclined towards large gins these days. But the Northern Bank did not care to have its staff breathing alcohol over its customers and since becoming acting manager of the Greenhill branch after the manager fell under a bus (nothing to do with alcohol of course) three weeks earlier, Mulgan had determined to set a perfect example. Now nearly forty, he had come a long way from his humble beginnings in rural Derbyshire, but for the past few years had felt that his career was bogged down. Each full week as acting manager had given him hope that the appointment would be made permanent, hope reinforced when clients started inviting him out to lunch. Though even here fate, as usual, had distributed its gifts with grudging hand and instead of the looked-for filet mignon at the White Rose Grill, he had just been offered the choice between chicken-in-the-basket and scampi-in-the-basket at the Aero Club bar.

‘First time here, Mulgan?’ said his host. ‘How d’you like it?’

Mulgan looked round. A group of young men were drinking pints and noisily exchanging gliding experiences. Three women were sitting in a corner beneath a fluorescent notice announcing that Friday and Saturday were disco nights. On the blue emulsioned walls a formation of china Spitfires banked through photographs of smiling young men in flying kit towards an old school clock whose face was ringed in RAF colours. The hands, propeller-shaped, stood at twelve-fifteen.

‘It’s very nice,’ said Mulgan politely.

‘Yes, I thought we’d meet here. It’s handy for us both and I hate them stuck-up places with their fancy prices. Besides, I’m going up a bit later on, so I’d have to be here anyway. You ever tried it, Mulgan?’

His host was Bernard Middlefield who with his brother John was co-owner and dictator of a small electrical assembly plant on the Avro Industrial Estate. Middlefield Electric was feeling the pinch of the latest credit squeeze and Mulgan guessed that these new friendly overtures in his direction were just so much bread scattered on the waters. He was not offended. Middlefield under his abrupt, loud-mouthed manner was a sharp enough operator. Chicken-in-the-basket today meant that he had been spotted as being possibly worth filet mignon tomorrow. That was one thing about these Yorkshiremen. You knew precisely where you were with most of them.

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Mulgan. ‘What kind of plane do you fly?’

‘Plane? Not a plane, Mulgan. Do you never look up from that desk of yours? It’s gliders we fly here. Though planes have been known to land, isn’t that right, Austin? Alistair Mulgan. This is Austin Greenall, our CFI, that’s Chief Flying Instructor, secretary, and master of all trades.’

‘As you see,’ said the man who had taken the place of the middle-aged woman who had been behind the bar to start with. ‘Except cooking. We’re short-handed today. Summer flu, would you believe! Jenny has to keep an eye on the kitchen too, so if there’s anything else you require from the bar, I’m your man.’

‘No, thanks. These’ll do us. I’m flying and Mr Mulgan’s got to keep his head clear else he’ll get his sums wrong at the bank.’

‘I thought I recognized you,’ said Greenall. ‘The Club account’s there.’

‘Watch him,’ said Middlefield to Mulgan. ‘He’ll be wanting to screw some money out of you for another couple of planes if he can.’

‘The Club does own some planes already, then?’ said Mulgan.

‘A plane. We’ve got a Cub we use for towing but it’s long past its best. And there’s a Cherokee owned by a consortium of local businessmen, Mr Middlefield included. No, it’s the gliding that keeps us going. Just.’

‘But not if you have your way, eh, Austin? He’s only been here five minutes and he’s got ambitions to turn us into Heathrow.’

‘Hardly. I just think there’s a lot that can be done to improve facilities and attract members.’

‘As long as you keep in mind it’s not like Surrey up here. We know what we like and we like value for money. How’s our grub coming on? Take a look, there’s a good chap.’

Greenall smiled amiably and left the bar.

In the corner Ellie Pascoe said to Thelma Lacewing, ‘Why doesn’t your secretary hit him with a bottle?’

‘Middlefield’s on the committee, also a JP,’ said Thelma. ‘But mainly he’s a reactionary shit. For instance, trying to get the weekend discos stopped on the grounds that they breed immorality. I keep a very close eye on that sod, I tell you.’

The two women made a striking contrast. Ellie was long-limbed, mobile, though the taut line of her athletic figure was now slackened by the contours of pregnancy; black-haired, grey-eyed, and with a face that after thirty-odd years was handsome rather than pretty, and her chin gave promises of determination her character kept. Thelma’s face had the frank wide-eyed pensive beauty that goes with folded wings and flowing white robes and that a monk might dream of without sin. She was a dental hygienist.

‘Let’s get down to business,’ she said. ‘Ellie, are you going to sink cow-like into the placid, man-pleasing, expectant-mother role, or are you going to cut your brain off from your belly and start doing some real work for WRAG?’

‘Depends what you mean by real work,’ said Ellie.

The third woman spoke. This was Lorraine Wildgoose, teacher of French at a local comprehensive school. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and intense eyes. Her hair was at fag end of an old freak-out cut and her figure had the kind of thinness that derives from nerves rather than diets.

‘Vacancies in all areas,’ she said. ‘Typing, telephoning, tea-making.’

‘Propagandizing, preaching, protesting,’ murmured Thelma.

‘Not to mention subverting, suborning, and sabotaging,’ added Lorraine.

‘I rather fancied assailing, assaulting, and assassinating,’ said Ellie, not to be outdone. ‘But seriously, look, I want to help, but also I want some time to write. I’m into another novel. I’ve finally got over my feelings of failure with the first. I mean twenty-two publishers can’t be wrong! And I really want to get this new one sorted out before this.’

She patted her stomach disgustedly.

‘We’ve all got calls on our time,’ flashed Lorraine. ‘Two kids, a pending divorce and an unbalanced husband takes a bit more of your time than a couple of neatly turned paragraphs.’

This unexpected outburst brought a hiatus in the conversation which was filled by the timely arrival of Greenall with their baskets of food. At the bar the discussion seemed to be getting a little heated too.

‘Well, you know your own employees best, I dare say,’ Middlefield was saying. ‘But give me leave to know something too. When you’ve been on the bench a bit, you get to read between the lines. I mean, just look at the facts. A field behind a pub! A shed on an allotment! The canal bank! Not the kind of places you’d look to meet the vicar’s wife, are they?’

‘I can assure you, Brenda Sorby was as nice and decent a young woman as you could hope to meet,’ protested Mulgan, his rather fleshy face pinking with indignation or embarrassment.

‘That’s how they all seem,’ scoffed Middlefield. ‘You see a bit more of the world in my line than yours, I dare say.’

‘You’re not saying those poor women deserved what happened to them?’

‘Don’t be daft! But them as take chances can’t complain overmuch when things go wrong.’

‘Those women certainly can’t complain, can they?’ said Thelma in a clear, carrying voice.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Middlefield turning on his stool to view her. ‘Oh, it’s you, Miss Lacewing.’

‘I’ll just fetch the tartare sauce,’ murmured Greenall. He retreated to the kitchen.

‘I suppose you might say that unaccompanied women coming to places like this take the chance of overhearing primitive sexist prejudices being expressed by loud, ill-informed men,’ continued Thelma.

‘I expect I know as much about it as you, young woman,’ said Middlefield grimly.

‘Really? Perhaps we ought to put the police in touch with you, then. Fortunately one of my friends is married to one of the officers on the case. Ellie, perhaps you’ll pass the word to your husband that Mr Middlefield knows more than he has yet been willing to volunteer.’

Ellie smiled warily. There weren’t many people left in the world who could embarrass her, but Thelma was certainly one of them. Which was probably why, as Peter had theorized, she allowed her the moral ascendancy.

Greenall had emerged from the kitchen with two more baskets which he placed before the two men at the bar, saying blithely, ‘Here you are. Piping hot.’

Thelma turned back to her friends, completely unruffled. That’s what I envy too, thought Ellie. I get all pink and abusive.

‘Is your husband really on the case?’ asked Lorraine Wildgoose.

Ellie nodded.

‘Are they getting anywhere?’ pursued the woman rather intensely.

‘I’m not sure. I expect so,’ said Ellie cautiously.

Lorraine Wildgoose looked as if she might be going to say something more and Ellie’s heart sank at the prospect of having to listen to an attack on the police, no matter which of the many possible forms it took. But Thelma, as if spotting the danger, said lightly, ‘What about all this clairvoyant help?’

‘You read about that?’ said Ellie, relieved. ‘Listen, I’ve got a theory. I pinched a transcript of what this woman actually said from Peter. It might interest you in your archaeological hat.’

She produced the transcript and was holding forth when Greenall returned with the tartare sauce.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, putting the sauce on the sheet of paper in front of Thelma.

‘Don’t do that, Austin!’ she said. ‘You may offend the spirits.’

‘You’re doing a bit of table rapping, are you?’ he said. ‘Be careful. It’s Mr Middlefield you don’t want to offend!’

‘It’s OK. This is police business,’ said Thelma. ‘My friend is a Mrs Detective-Inspector. These are official documents.’

Greenall picked up the transcript and pretended to rub it with his sleeve, murmuring at the same time, ‘By the by, Middlefield’s threatening to drop in at the disco on Friday on a fact-finding tour.’

‘Is he? I may join him. Thanks, Austin. Join us for a drink later?’

‘I’d love to, but another time. I’ve got things to do and his lordship’s got to be launched after lunch. Per ardua ad astra, as they say.’

He left and Ellie fluttered her eyebrows at Thelma.

‘Now he seems nice, Thelma.’

‘He’s bearable,’ she said noncommittally. ‘When he came six months ago I thought Christ, another ex-RAF wizard-show chauvinist pig. But he was a nice surprise. I think he’s got genuine sympathy with the feminist position.’

‘I bet,’ grinned Ellie.

‘That, if I may say so, is the kind of crack that comes from too close an association with the racist, sexist constabulary.’

‘Is that so? And perhaps you’ll now explain how you come to be rolling around with evident pleasure in this male chauvinist sty,’ said Ellie.

‘Why, to overcome my fear of flying, of course,’ said Thelma, wide eyes wider with surprise. ‘Now let’s eat. Ellie, you’ve nearly finished your drink. Would you like something else? A quart of warm milk, perhaps.’

Ellie giggled girlishly.

‘You’ll think I’m silly,’ she said coyly. ‘But being like this and all, I get these funny urges, you know how we mothers-to-be are, and whenever I eat scampi and get put down at the same time, I’ve just got to have a couple of glasses of Dom Perignon. It brings up the wind so nicely!’

Chapter 5

Andy Dalziel, according to much of his acquaintance, had a very simplistic approach to life. He saw everything as either black or dark blue. In this they were mistaken. Life was richly coloured for the fat man; full of villainy and vice, it was true, but with shifting shades and burning pigments, like Hogarthian scenes painted by Renoir.

Pascoe understood this. ‘He detects with his balls,’ he had once told Ellie gloomily.

To Pascoe’s rational mind, there was still some doubt whether Brenda Sorby’s murder was truly in sequence with the other two strangulations.

‘She wasn’t laid out like the other two,’ he said. ‘In fact the body was hidden, whereas with the others, the killer obviously wanted it to be found. Also, to let herself be picked up at that time of night (and there had to be a car – she wasn’t going to walk five miles to the canal!), it had to be someone she knew.’

Dalziel wasn’t much interested. He knew it was part of the sequence. But he didn’t mind exploding a younger colleague.

‘Mebbe she just scrambled away and fell in. He wouldn’t be about to jump in after her, would he? Or mebbe he left her for dead, all neatly laid out, and she recovered enough to roll over. Splash! Or mebbe he was disturbed and just slipped her over the edge, not wanting her to be found while he was still so close in the vicinity. And as for the car, mebbe he pulled her into it, threatened her with a knife, even knocked her out. Or mebbe it was someone she’d trust without knowing him, a copper, say. What were you doing that night, Peter?’

Laughter (Dalziel’s). End of discussion.

Curiously, the one thing which seemed to confirm the superintendent’s judgement that Brenda’s death was linked with the others, he had treated most dismissively.

‘Anyone can make a phone call,’ he said. ‘And everyone’s got a Complete Shakespeare. I’ve got a Complete Shakespeare!’

Pascoe sat in his office and studied the pathologist’s reports which he knew almost off by heart. All three women had been strangled by someone using both hands. The bruising on their necks indicated this and the cartilage in the area of the voice boxes was fractured to a degree which demonstrated the violence and strength of the attack. But the pathologist was adamant that Brenda Sorby had not been quite dead when she went into the water … all over me, choking, the water, all boiling at first, and roaring, and seething … Pascoe shook the medium’s taped words out of his mind and went on with his reading.

There was a degree of lividity down the left side which was unusual for a corpse taken from the water, but it could be explained by the fact that the body seemed to have been wedged in the debris by the canal bank rather than rolling free in the current. Also (another difference from the previous cases) there was some bruising around and underneath the breasts, possibly indicating a sexual assault, though the lacerations caused by the barge propeller had made examination difficult in this area. Elsewhere there was no indication of sexual interference.