Pascoe's Ghost

by Hill, Reginald;

  “You don’t happen to have a note of the secretary’s name, do you?”

  “Yes. I’ve got a statement from her here. I’m sorry, Pete, we could have sent you photo-copies of all this stuff but knowing how much your boss hates paper, I thought the brief digest would do. Jean Starkey. Miss Jean Starkey. There we are. Now tell me what this is all about.”

  “With pleasure,” said Pascoe. “I’ve just been on to our library where they have useful things like a Writers’ Who’s Who. Jake Starr is a pseudonym. And no prizes for guessing that the real name is Jean Starkey. But there’s more. Miss Starkey’s a very personable blonde who at this very moment is in Wearton visiting Swithenbank. And it didn’t look like business to me!”

  Dove whistled.

  “That leaves us with a bit of egg on our face, doesn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “Does it get us much farther forward, though?”

  “Try this,” said Pascoe. “If somehow Swithenbank did contrive to have his missus in the boot when he drove north that afternoon, with Starkey alibi-ing him, he had all the time in the world to dispose of the body somewhere a long, long way from Enfield. Naturally he’d want somewhere as safe as possible. What if his childhood memories put him in mind of the perfect hiding-place up here?”

  “Hidden cave, secret passage, that sort of thing?” said Dove, making it sound like something out of Enid Blyton, much to Pascoe’s irritation.

  “OK then. Where do you think she is?” he asked. “Stuffed up the chimney in his flat?”

  “First place we looked,” laughed Dove. “Thanks for ringing, Pete. It could be helpful and at least it gives you something better to do than chasing cows out of cornfields. Keep up the good work and let’s know when he’s planning to come back, then I’ll see what a bit of real pressure can do. Anything else I can do for you?”

  He can do for me! thought Pascoe indignantly. As he flicked through the pages of his notebook, his eye fell on his question-marked words. Never mind what Dalziel said, everyone had one good intuitive guess coming and even Dalziel would reckon this was in a good cause.

  He made a mental choice, crossed out one of the words and said in a studiously casual voice, “Just one thing. Kate Swithenbank’s last reported sighting was at the hairdresser’s. Did anyone ask what she had done there?”

  There was a pause and a rustling of papers.

  “It’s not here if they did,” said Dove. “Any particular reason?”

  ‘Just part of the steady plod us yokels go at,” said Pascoe. “I don’t really imagine that you lot have overlooked anything. Else.”

  “Get stuffed,” said Dove. “I’ll see if I can find out. Cheers now.”

  “Cheers.”

  Pascoe sat back in his chair and felt pleased with himself. His social science degree enabled him to regard such phenomena as inter-regional rivalries with academic objectivity. On the other hand you couldn’t get away from it, there was something very pleasant about getting one up on those smart-alec sods in London. Dalziel would, in his own phrase, be chuffed to buggery.

  There was still the problem of tactics. There was no question now of sending Sergeant Wield to Wearton. This was his affair, right to the bitter end. The question was when? And how?

  The answer came from the most unexpected source.

  His telephone rang and the constable on the exchange said a Mr. Swithenbank would like to speak to him.

  “Put him on,” commanded Pascoe.

  “Inspector, glad to have caught you.”

  His voice sounded higher, lighter on the telephone.

  “I was just thinking about you, Mr. Swithenbank.”

  “I’m flattered. And I about you. A thought struck me—you hinted a desire, or rather an intention, of talking about this business with my old acquaintance in the village. Are you still keen?”

  “It’s on my schedule,” said Pascoe cautiously.

  “The thing is, Boris Kingsley is having a little get-together at the Big House tomorrow evening. I was just going to ring him to make it OK to take Miss Starkey along with me. All my old chums will be there. So it occurred to me, if you’d like to take them all in one fell swoop, I’m sure Boris wouldn’t mind. He’s always had a taste for cheap fiction and a real life detective questioning his guests in the library would be right up his street.”

  Pascoe thought about it, felt the silence growing long enough to be significant and decided he didn’t mind. After all, Swithenbank mustn’t be allowed to think the law was so easily organizable.

  “Deep thoughts, Inspector,” said Swithenbank. “Penny for them.”

  “Something about Greeks bearing gifts,” replied Pascoe. “Yes, I think that might prove very useful, Mr. Swithenbank. Thank you.”

  “Oh good. Why don’t you call here about seven and then you can have a drink and a chat with Mother before we set out.”

  “Fine,” said Pascoe. “’Bye.”

  “Cheeky bugger,” he said to the replaced telephone. You had to admire the man’s nerve, he thought with a smile. Setting him up like Hercule Poirot.

  Then his eyes fell on the still open volume of Poe and he pulled it towards him and read:

  And I cried—“It was surely October

  On this very night of last year

  That I journeyed—I journeyed down here—

  That I brought a dread burden down here—”

  He glanced at his desk calendar. Tomorrow was Saturday, 14 October.

  “Cheeky bugger,” he said again. But there was no humour in his voice this time.

  CHAPTER IV

  From childhood’s hour I have not been

  As others were.

  1

  “And she caught him by his garment saying, Lie with me.”

  Peter Davenport was so engrossed in what he was writing that he had not heard his wife come into the study and he started violently as she grabbed his cardigan.

  Ursula laughed.

  “Wrong text, dear?” she said. “It might produce a livelier sermon than some of your recent efforts.”

  “It might,” he agreed, smiling with an effort. “I’m sorry, my dear, I’m just a bit busy and there might not be time later …”

  “For what? I should have listened when they told me a counter-tenor was a kind of eunuch.”

  She shivered violently and drew her thin silken robe more closely around her.

  “You’ll catch your death. Here, take my cardigan.”

  “And he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out. No, you keep it. You must be frozen to the marrow sitting here. God, when are they going to do something about the heating in this place? Or flog it and put us in a nice cosy semi?”

  In the summer the big Victorian rectory was a source of delight to Ursula most of the time. Then she could enjoy the role of vicar’s wife, enjoy supervising the annual garden party on the huge bumpy lawn, enjoy entertaining various ladies’ committees in the cool, airy drawing-room, enjoy discussing with them the recipe for her famous seed cake (purchased at Fortnum and Mason’s whenever she went to London), enjoy their resentment of her, their memory of her wild young days, their suspicion that their husbands still lusted after her. And on long warm summer evenings as hostess to more secular groups of friends, she enjoyed throwing open the french windows and leading them into the garden after dinner, walking barefoot across the lawn, laughing and talking and sometimes turning from vicar’s wife to essential Eve and back again within the compass of a cloud’s passage across the moon or the circumvention of a rhododendron bush.

  But when summer’s date was done, the draughty old rectory quickly grew chill beyond the reach of its antiquated radiators or the economic flame at the back of its huge open fireplace. She was not altogether joking when she told Boris Kingsley she slept with him for warmth whenever Peter was away at one of his choir concerts, though in truth she had no more real idea of the reason than she had of her reason for marrying her cousin eight years earlier. Perhaps she had needed to show Kate Lightfoot a
nd John Swithenbank that their alliance meant nothing to her. But she lacked the temperament for self-analysis, managing to find even in the worst day something that made the next day seem worth waiting for. She knew there was something wrong between her and her husband, even had a notion of what that something was, but had no solution to offer for the problem other than to wait and see and enjoy herself as best she could along the way.

  Peter Davenport on the other hand believed he understood all too well his reasons for marrying Ursula and had long since recognized them as inadequate and selfish. But other more pressing matters had been occupying his mind and his conscience in recent months. Like Ursula, he had lived from day to day, but unlike her, he felt an impulsion to definitive, even desperate action, which he could not resist much longer.

  “I’ve got nothing to wear tonight,” she averred.

  He thought bitterly of the stuffed wardrobes upstairs, then dismissed the uncharitable thought. Ursula had been eager to put her inherited money into the common pool; he had resisted. He was glad he had. At least that couldn’t be held against him.

  “It’ll be very informal, surely,” he said.

  “Informal doesn’t mean scruffy,” she retorted.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Lexicographers the world over would agree with you. Who’s going to be there anyway?”

  “The usual lot,” she said. “The usual conversations, the usual tedium.”

  “Isn’t John going to be there?” he asked.

  She looked at him sharply.

  “What difference will that make?”

  “A breath of fresh air from the great outside world.”

  She laughed and said, “You may be right. I was talking to Boris earlier. He hinted at a surprise but wouldn’t say what. You know how he loves being mysterious. Perhaps Kate has come back from the … wherever she’s been.’

  Davenport put down his pen sharply and stood up.

  “Not even Boris would keep back such news just for effect,” he said sternly. “Poor John. A whole year now. It must have been hell for him.”

  “That depends on what the previous year was like, doesn’t it?” said his wife. “Let’s have a drink, shall we? It might warm us up.”

  “All right. What time do we have to go?”

  “Half seven, something like that,” she said vaguely. “I thought we’d walk it. Along the old drive.”

  “What on earth for?” he protested strongly. “It looks like rain. And it’ll ruin your shoes.”

  “I just feel like the exercise. Besides, it’s traditional. Vicars and their ladies must have taken that route when summoned to the Big House for a couple of centuries at least.”

  “Perhaps. It’s not a pleasant walk. At this time of year, I mean.”

  He shivered and she regarded him curiously.

  “Shouldn’t a vicar know how to put ghosts in their places?” she mocked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Joke,” she said. “Though come to think of it, sometimes there does seem a rather excessive amount of noise and movement in the churchyard. Not just foxes and owls, I mean, though some of it’s so overgrown it could hide a tiger. You really ought to insist that something’s done about it, Peter.”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll have a word,” he said. “Let’s have that drink.”

  He poured the gin with a generous hand and was pouring himself another before his wife had done more than dampen her full red lips on her first.

  2

  “My name’s Pascoe. I’m a police inspector. Could I have a word with you, Mr. Lightfoot?”

  Arthur Lightfoot viewed him silently, then went back into the cottage as though indifferent whether Pascoe followed or not.

  Reckoning that if he waited for invitations round here, he was likely to become a fixture, Pascoe went in, closed the door behind him, pursued Lightfoot into a square, sparsely furnished living-room and sat down.

  The room occupied the breadth of the building and Pascoe could see that the uncurtained windows at the back were new and the plaster on the wall had been recently refurbished.

  “You had a fire?” he said conversationally.

  “What do you want, mister?”

  Pascoe sighed. One of the more distressing things about his job was the frequency with which he met Yorkshiremen who made Dalziel sound like something from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.

  “It’s about your sister, Kate. I’ve got no news of her, you understand,” he added hastily for fear of creating a false optimism.

  He needn’t have worried.

  “I need no news of our Kate,” said Lightfoot.

  “I don’t understand. You mean you don’t want to hear anything about your sister?”

  It was a genuine semantic problem. Lightfoot’s face showed a recognizable expression for a moment. It was one of contempt.

  “I mean I need no news. She’s dead. I need no bobby to come telling me that.”

  “Well, if you know that, you know more than I do,” rejoined Pascoe. “What makes you so sure?”

  “A man knows such things.”

  Oh God, that awful intuition again. No, not intuition, superstition. This was a medieval peasant who stood before him, but without any feudal inhibitions.

  “We can’t be sure,” insisted Pascoe gently. “Not till … well, not till we’ve seen her.”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  “What?”

  “What do you know, mister? Nowt!”

  Lightfoot spoke angrily. It was clearly only the gentler responses that were missing from his make-up.

  “I’ve heard her voice in the black of night and I’ve risen from my bed and I’ve seen her blown this way and that in the night wind,” proclaimed Lightfoot with terrifying intensity.

  Pascoe began to regret that he had sat down as the man loomed over him describing his lunatic visions. Looking for an excuse to get to his feet, he spotted a framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

  “Is this your sister, Mr. Lightfoot?” he asked, rising and edging past the man. The picture showed a slim girl in a white dress and a wide-brimmed floppy hat from beneath which a pair of disproportionately large eyes looked uncertainly at the photographer. Like a startled rabbit, thought Pascoe unkindly. The background to the picture was a house which could have been The Pines, but identification was not helped by the fact that the print had been torn in half, presumably to remove someone standing alongside the girl.

  Lightfoot snatched the frame from his hands, a rudeness perhaps more native than aggressive.

  “What do you want?” he demanded once more.

  “I’m on my way to see your brother-in-law,” answered Pascoe, deciding that the more direct he was, the quicker he could make his exit. “There have been some phone calls, and a letter, suggesting that he knows more about your sister’s disappearance then he’s letting on. We’re eager to find the person who’s been making these suggestions.”

  “So you single me out!” said Lightfoot accusingly.

  “No,” said Pascoe. “I was in Wearton yesterday, and I spoke to Mr. Swithenbank then, but I didn’t have time to contact anyone else. Later on tonight I’m going to see a variety of people at Wear End, Mr. Kingsley’s house. I thought I’d drop in on you en route, that’s all.”

  “You guessed I wouldn’t be at t’party then?” said Lightfoot.

  Pascoe looked uncomfortable and Lightfoot laughed like a tree cracking in a strong wind.

  “Yon bugger wouldn’t invite me to suck in the air on his land,” he said.

  “Mr. Kingsley doesn’t care for your company?” said Pascoe redundantly.

  “He cares for nowt but his own flesh,” said Lightfoot. “Like father, like son.”

  He replaced the photograph on the mantelpiece with a thump that defied Pascoe to touch it again.

  “Is it your brother-in-law that’s been torn off the picture?” enquired Pascoe.

  “I wanted none of his face around my house,” said Lightfoot.


  “Why’s that?”

  “No reason.”

  “Do you not like him either?”

  “They’re all the same, them lot,” said Lightfoot. “Kate’d be still living to this day likely if she hadn’t got mixed up with them.”

  “Surely they were her friends,” protested Pascoe.

  “Friends! What need of friends when there’s family? Are you done, Mr. Detective? There’s others have to work late hours besides t’police.”

  On the doorstep Pascoe turned and said, “Have you made any calls to Mr. Swithenbank or sent the police a letter, Mr. Lightfoot?”

  “That’s direct,” said Lightfoot. “I wondered if you’d get round to asking. The answer’s no, I haven’t. If I knew definite who’d harmed her, I …”

  “You’d what?”

  “I’d know, wouldn’t I? Do you question Swithenbank so direct?”

  “If the occasion demands,” said Pascoe.

  “Then ask him this. What was he doing skulking around the churchyard at midnight night before last? You ask him.”

  “All right,” said Pascoe. “As a matter of interest, what were you doing skulking round the churchyard, Mr. Lightfoot?”

  The door was shut hard in his face. Pascoe whistled with relief as he strolled through the gate and got into his car. There was something frightening about Lightfoot in a primal kind of way. A man who had commerce with ghosts must be frightening! Though a man so certain of his sister’s death might have other reasons for his certainty, and that was more frightening still.

  Behind him in the comfortless cottage Lightfoot returned to the job which Pascoe’s arrival had interrupted. Seated at the kitchen table, he oiled and polished the separated parts of his shotgun till he was satisfied. Then he reassembled it and sat motionless for a long time while outside the light faded, rooks beat their way homeward to the nest-dark trees, a light mist drifted out of the dank fields till a wind began to rise and bore it away and drove the darkness over the land.