Pascoe's Ghost

by Hill, Reginald;

“Kate was—is—very much her own person, Mr. Pascoe. I was—am—very fond of her. We went out together for a while—nothing serious, all our gang tried various combinations till we settled as we are. I think I got to know her as well as anyone, but there were points beyond which you were not permitted to go.”

  “Physically, you mean?” said Pascoe, acting stupid.

  “Physically you went precisely as far as Kate was in the mood for,” replied Rawlinson drily. “But I mean mentally, emotionally even. She shut you out. It was difficult to guess what she felt about Arthur, even when they were together.”

  “And about the rest of you?”

  “Friendly tolerance.”

  “Even John Swithenbank?”

  “No. No,” said Rawlinson, a spasm crossing his face as he rose suddenly to stretch his leg. “John was different. I’d have said she disliked and despised him with all her heart.”

  “I thought as host you’d have saved me for last, Inspector,” said Boris Kingsley in a hurt voice.

  “Why? Aren’t you ready for me?” asked Pascoe.

  Kingsley laughed.

  “On the contrary, I’m perfectly rehearsed. What do I know about the letter and phone calls? Nothing at all. What do I know about Kate’s disappearance? Ditto. Do I think John might have murdered her? No. Do I think anyone else here tonight might have murdered her? Improbable but not impossible. Who am I not one hundred per cent sure about? Mind your own business.”

  He sat back looking vastly pleased with himself.

  “Why were you left on the shelf, Mr. Kingsley?” asked Pascoe as if the man hadn’t spoken.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Wearton Six. Rawlinson gets his Stella, Swithenbank gets his Kate. Symmetry requires that you end up with Ursula, Mrs. Davenport. But she opts for an outsider.”

  “Hardly an outsider,” protested Kingsley. “Peter spent most of his hols here. And he’s Ursula’s cousin. We knew him almost as well as each other.”

  “Almost,” said Pascoe. “Still, you did end up unattached.”

  “What the devil’s this got to do with anything?” demanded Boris.

  “I don’t know,” said Pascoe. “Probably nothing. But if, say, you didn’t get married because all your life you’d nursed a passionate but unrequited love for Kate Lightfoot, it might mean much.”

  “Who’s been talking to you? Has someone been saying something? Who was it? Geoff?” He sounded genuinely angry.

  “No,” said Pascoe. “That wasn’t one of the things Mr. Rawlinson told me. Where were you a year ago tonight, Mr. Kingsley?”

  The anger subsided and Kingsley shook his head like a boxer who has walked into a sucker punch and now means to take more care.

  “I can’t be sure. I’d need more notice of that question.”

  “I’d have thought by now everyone here had notice of it,” remarked Pascoe drily. “It was the weekend Mr. Rawlinson fell off the church tower. Remember?”

  “Of course. Yes. Dreadful business. I remember wondering …”

  “What?”

  “Mustn’t even hint these things, of course, but Geoff had been behaving rather oddly for some time before. You know, very moody. Self-absorbed.”

  He paused invitingly. Pascoe made a note. He distrusted invitations.

  “You mean he may have been upset because his affair with Kate was coming to some kind of climax, so when they met on the Friday evening he killed her, hid the body and then tried to commit suicide in a fit of remorse?” he asked with mild interest.

  It was a long time since he’d seen a man splutter, but Kingsley spluttered now.

  “Please. No! Don’t say such things!”

  “All right,” said Pascoe indifferently. “What about you? What were you doing that night?”

  “I’ve no idea. I didn’t hear about it till next day, so I wasn’t directly involved. Probably sitting in front of the television at home.”

  “Alone?”

  “If that was what I was doing, yes. Surely people who have the alternative of human conversation never watch television, do they, Inspector? It’s a kind of mental masturbation, essentially a solitary pursuit.”

  He had stopped spluttering. Pascoe yawned widely.

  “Where do you think Kate Swithenbank is now?” he asked through the yawn.

  Boris rolled his eyes upward and slapped the arm of his chair.

  “I do wish you’d stop trying to confuse me with these changes of direction,” he said. “They’re irritating without being effective. Unless, of course, your aim is merely to irritate.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  “I’ve no idea. How should I know?”

  “I didn’t say know. I said think. Only one person could really know. Except her brother, of course.”

  “Why him?” said Kingsley sharply.

  “Hadn’t you heard? He’s seen her ghost.”

  Kingsley laughed merrily.

  “What a cretin!”

  “Why do you dislike him, Mr. Kingsley?”

  “Who says I dislike him?”

  “He says. It hardly seems worth denying. I mean, is there anyone who can really be said to like him? I’m just interested in reasons. Irrational Dr. Fell prejudice? Aesthetic repugnance? Or perhaps, like Mrs. Rawlinson, you think he cheated your father?”

  The reaction was astonishing.

  “What the hell do you mean?” demanded Kingsley, his face suddenly twisting in porcine ferocity. “What’ve they been saying to you? Come on, Inspector, spit it out. You’d do well to remember this is my house and you’d be wise to watch what you say!”

  There seemed to be something contradictory in this simultaneous demand for frankness and caution but Pascoe, who had been completely innocent of subtle intent, was not long in finding a hypothesis to resolve the contradiction.”

  “Come on, Mr. Kingsley,” he said with the weary certainty of one who knows exactly what he is doing. “I’m a policeman, remember? That means I’ve a job to do. It also means that I know all about discretion. In any case, there can’t be any question of charges, not now. Not either way.”

  He held his breath and hoped he was making sense. Kingsley’s features gradually resumed a more normal colour and expression.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that it makes me angry, even thinking about it.”

  “How long have you known?” enquired Pascoe, still feeling his way.

  “I never liked the man,” said Kingsley, “but it wasn’t till after Father died. I was going through his papers. The figures told the story. Then there was a diary … well, God, he was wrong, of course. But to suffer like that all those years!”

  “This was how Lightfoot bought his smallholding?” pursued Pascoe.

  “That’s it. And how he’s compensated for its inefficient running ever since! You wouldn’t think he needs money to look at the man! But he’s got expensive habits—drinking, women, too. God, he’d need to pay well to get any half-decent woman near him!”

  Ignoring the curious scale of values this suggested, Pascoe went the whole hog and said, “So Arthur Lightfoot steadily blackmailed your father ever since he discovered he’d been interfering with an under-age girl, to wit, his sister Kate.”

  Kingsley nodded. It seemed to be some relief to the man to hear someone else say it openly.

  “I went to see him, of course, when I realized. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it was going to be bloody extreme!”

  “And.”

  “And he said nothing. Admitted nothing. Denied nothing. He just sat there cleaning that blasted shotgun of his. I ran out of words! There was nothing to do. I couldn’t get him through the law—there was some evidence, but nothing certain enough, and besides even though he was dead, my father had paid for peace and quiet and a good name.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Do, Inspector? Do? I did nothing.”

  Kingsley was now back in full control.

&nbs
p; “I hope one night I may catch him poaching on the bit of land that remains to me. Or that he might catch food poisoning from his own disgusting cooking. Yes, I can only sit and pray for some happy accident.”

  “Like his cottage burning down, for instance?”

  “Yes, that was a real tonic when I heard about it. A pity our fire service is so efficient.”

  “He didn’t come to see you afterwards?”

  Kingsley regarded him shrewdly.

  “Now why on earth should he do that? You’re not suggesting I had anything to do with the fire, Inspector?”

  “Of course not,” smiled Pascoe. “But he’d need money for repairs. He doesn’t sound as if he’d carry much insurance.”

  “You may be right,” said Kingsley indifferently. “He certainly wouldn’t get it here. I only wish he’d had the cheek to try!”

  “And now we come to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” said Pascoe.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Did Kate Swithenbank have any idea what her brother was up to all those years?”

  There was a long silence.

  “And if she did, what then, Inspector?”

  “What indeed, Mr. Kingsley? Something perhaps that some people might call a motive.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  Jesus! thought Pascoe. They time their interruptions here better than a French farce!

  “Come in,” called Kingsley.

  A wizened old head with eyes like a blackbird’s thrust itself round the door.

  “Can ah see thee about t’supper?” it demanded.

  “Just coming, Mrs. Warnock,” said Kingsley.

  The blackbird’s eyes regarded Pascoe unblinkingly for twenty seconds, then the head withdrew.

  “Hostly duty calls,” said Kingsley, rising. “Motive, you say? Hardly for me, though. I mean, I didn’t find out about Lightfoot’s bit of nastiness till six months after Kate disappeared, did I?”

  “So you say, Mr. Kingsley,” agreed Pascoe.

  “But as for the others, well, I’ll leave you to find your own motives there, you’re clearly so good at it. Must fly now. Work up an appetite, dear boy. I’ll send Ursula in, shall I? That should start the juices running!”

  “Boris seemed very pleased to get away from you,” said Ursula, rippling into the red leather armchair. “What were you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Pascoe. “He was on occasion a trifle obscure. Though he seemed to find no difficulty in accepting that someone in your little group might have been capable of murdering Kate Swithenbank. But he wouldn’t say who he had in mind.”

  “Me,” said Ursula promptly.

  “Really? Why should he think that?”

  “He likes playing Noel Coward, does Boris, but in fact he’s terribly straightforward and conventional. His wisdom is proverbial in the strict sense. I mean his mind works in maxims. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned has all the ring of eternal truth to Boris.”

  “Meaning you have been scorned by … ?”

  “John Swithenbank, of course. And it’s true. I was furious. But only for a time.”

  “How long a time?”

  “Till the wedding. John so clearly regarded the whole business as farcical and whatever Kate regarded it as just as clearly had nothing to do with all those loving vows they made at the altar. Resentment has to have an object. I seemed to have lost mine on that day.”

  “So you don’t think the marriage was happy?” said Pascoe.

  “What’s happy?”

  “I don’t know what, but I know where. It’s somewhere this side of either running off or committing murder,” said Pascoe.

  She didn’t seem to feel this required any answer. She was probably right, he thought. He was beginning to see possibilities but the problem was like one of those trick drawings beloved of psychologists—sometimes he saw a rabbit and sometimes he saw a goose. A frightened rabbit that had nothing to do with the missing woman, or a Christmas goose being led to an early slaughter.

  “Why do you think he married her?”

  “She wanted him to.”

  She spoke as if this should have been obvious. Was it an answer? There were women, and men, too, in whom volition and achievement appeared contiguous. This Kate Lightfoot was emerging as a formidable woman.

  “And Kate, why should she wish to marry a man she didn’t love, perhaps even like?”

  Ursula leaned forward and opened her arms and knees to the electric fire. Pascoe shuddered but not from the cold.

  “John offered her an escape route from Wearton.”

  “Why should she need that?” he asked. “No one was keeping her prisoner.”

  “Strictly speaking, no. But she had no training, no employment. She left school and looked after Arthur’s cottage, that was all. She’d been doing it for years, and taking care of the business paperwork, too. She was surprisingly ignorant of the world in many ways. She asked my advice once …”

  “About what?” interrupted Pascoe.

  “Getting away, of course. She wanted to go to London. I told her there were two ways for a country girl to go to London, as a typist or as a tart. Unless, that is, she could find some nice well-heeled fellow and marry him! Next thing she and John were engaged.”

  Ursula laughed ruefully and rubbed her hands together, then crossed her arms and rubbed her bare shoulders, making a sound which Pascoe found very disturbing.

  “That was, what? Nine, ten years ago?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  “And since their marriage, what have your relations with her been?”

  “Excellent,” she said promptly. “Why? You don’t really think I killed her, do you? I used to see her a couple of times a year in Wearton, and on the odd occasion I saw her in London. She was always the same, me too, I hope. I enjoyed her company and she never had occasion to push me around. No, that’s the wrong phrase. There was never anything Kate wanted me to do except be myself, so I never got taken over.”

  “And your feelings for Mr. Swithenbank?”

  “I’m very fond of John,” she said. “I might have had an affair with him if he’d suggested it, but he never did. And Kate never showed the slightest interest in Peter.”

  “What about your brother?” enquired Pascoe. “Did she ever show any interest there?”

  Now her expression turned cold as though the electric fire had been switched off.

  “I’m sure you’ve discovered they were once very close, Inspector,” she said. “But I’m equally sure you know that Geoff has the perfect alibi for that weekend. He was lying in hospital half dead.”

  “Yes. Did you notice anything odd in his behaviour before the accident?”

  “Odd? No. Why do you ask?”

  “Just that Mr. Kingsley said he was rather moody at that time. That’s all.”

  She laughed.

  “Boris! The great psychologist now! It must do dreadful things to your ears, having to admit so much rubbish.”

  Pascoe decided the time was ripe for a hard push.

  “I think you’re being rather unkind to Mr. Kingsley,” he said. “After all, it was he who took care of your husband tonight.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked fiercely.

  “Nothing, except that he got him out of the way when he started drawing attention to himself. He brought him to talk to me. Mr. Kingsley seemed to feel your husband wanted to get something off his chest.”

  That was stretching things a bit but Boris was big enough to look after himself.

  “He said what? Then obviously Boris was talking even more stupidly than he usually does.” She stood up abruptly. “I’ll go and have a word with him and with Peter. That is, if you’re finished with me, Inspector?”

  There was clearly no way that he was going to get her to stay—the words were a challenge, not a request for permission to leave—so Pascoe shrugged philosophically.

  At the door she paused.

  “One thi
ng I will tell you about Kate. She was the same in London as she was in Wearton. If she wanted out and I think she did, she wasn’t just going to walk off alone into the great unknown. There’d have to be someone to go with or go to.”

  “From what I’ve heard of her, I agree,” said Pascoe. “Which means, if she came to Wearton …”

  “What?”

  “Well, the Wearton men seemed to be all alive and well and still living in Wearton. So, unless she’s locked in an attic somewhere …”

  The anger left her face.

  “Yes, I see that,” she said softly. “I don’t think … no, not that.”

  The door closed quietly behind her.

  Pascoe studied his notes for ten minutes. They were sketchy. He tended to use his book as some men use a pipe—to occupy the hands, permit significant pause and accentuate dramatic gesture. Much of his scrawl meant nothing. But as he jumped from one page to the next, his mind traced a line between the points where his scrawls quavered into sense and a shape began to form. But he still couldn’t see if it were a goose or a rabbit.

  He was interrupted by a discreet tap on the door.

  “Come in, Miss Starkey,” he called.

  When she entered, smiling and saying, “Wow, that was clever. Wasn’t that clever, John?”

  Swithenbank, close behind, agreed.

  “I knew he was clever the first time I laid eyes on him,” he said.

  “You two seem very pleased with yourselves,” said Pascoe.

  “We’ve been watching their faces after you’d finished with them,” said Swithenbank, “and they’ve all looked so wrought up, I’ve been certain you’ve got something out of them.”

  “And that’s what you’ve come to tell me?”

  “No,” said the woman. “Boris says supper will soon be ready. A trifling foolish banquet which some ancient crone is slowly hauling up from the kitchen. I think he’s hoping that between the hors-d’œuvres and the cheese you will reveal all and sent the guilty party screaming out of the window into the police net you’ve doubtless cast around the house.”

  “It’s no joking matter, Jean,” said Swithenbank, frowning.

  She made a mock penitential face but slipped her hand into his and gave it an affectionate squeeze as though to express real apology.

  Pascoe sighed and wondered what to do. It was like being a blacksmith surrounded by hot irons. Which should he strike first?