Pascoe's Ghost

by Hill, Reginald;

  “I think I’d like another word with Mr. Davenport before supper,” he said finally.

  With a bit of luck the alcoholic reverend would once more be ripe for the confessional. Pascoe was ready to make a fair guess at what he would say, but like all good detectives he basically distrusted deduction. Evidence without admission was of as doubtful efficacy as works without faith. To hypothesize from clues was fine so long as you remembered the basic paradox that the realities of human behaviour went far beyond the limits of human imagination. Intuition was something else, but you kept it well in check if you worked for Dalziel!

  Swithenbank said, “I’ll fetch him, shall I? You will be fairly quick, though, else Boris’s goodies will get cold.”

  Pascoe said, “As quick as I can, but do start without me.”

  Swithenbank left but Jean Starkey hesitated at the door.

  “Yes?” said Pascoe, shuffling his notes.

  Suddenly he knew what was coming and would have preferred not to receive it at this juncture. But there’s no evading a woman determined to make a clean breast of things.

  “You know that I’m Jake Starr, don’t you?” she said.

  He looked up now. “Clean breast” had been the right image. She was leaning back against the jamb, one knee slightly raised and the foot planted against the woodwork behind her in the traditional street walker’s pose. The red dress seemed to cling more tightly than ever and her nipples, tumescent from the room’s coldness or (could it be?) some more personal sensation, were blatant beneath the taut material.

  He wondered if she was about to make him an offer he would have to refuse and he wondered why the certainty of his refusal didn’t prevent his mouth from going dry and his leg muscles from trembling.

  “Yes, I know it,” he managed to reply.

  She laughed and came and sat down on the chesterfield, but her approach diminished rather than intensified the sexuality of the moment.

  “I told John you’d found out,” she said triumphantly. “He wouldn’t believe me, but I could tell. You were puzzled by me yesterday, but not tonight.”

  He realized now, not without disappointment, that he’d been mistaken and no offer for his silence was going to be made. She was grinning at him slyly as if she could read his thoughts and he said coldly, “You didn’t imagine you could get away with it for ever, did you?”

  “I didn’t imagine I could get away with it at all!” she replied. “It’s no secret. I mean, you get lists of pseudonyms in half a dozen reference books. I even got mentioned in a colour supplement article last May—don’t policemen read the Sunday papers?”

  “Not in Enfield it seems. OK, so you fooled us. Why?”

  She looked at him closely and shook her head in reproach.

  “Nothing sinister,” she said. “It’s just that ever since I started using a male pseudonym, I’ve found it very useful to pretend to be my own secretary. When people ring who don’t know me, it’s useful to be able to say Mr. Starr’s not available, can I take a message? That way I get time to think about offers, check up on things generally; as myself I’m a lousy negotiator, always say yes too quickly, never dream of trying to up the price of a story or an article. As Mr. Starr’s secretary, I pass on the most devastating messages without turning a hair. So when the police contacted me I automatically responded in the same way. Even when I realized it wasn’t about not paying a parking fine, I didn’t let on. I was due in New York the following day and I’d no intention of letting a bumbling bobby delay me. So I made a statement as Jake Starr’s secretary, rang John to find out what the hell was going on, told him what I’d done, and sent another statement as Jake Starr from America. It all seemed a bit of a laugh, really.”

  “A woman goes missing and you’re amused?” said Pascoe.

  “Hold on! I thought she’d merely taken off with some boy-friend. And I was glad. John had seemed to be hedging his bets a bit, I thought. Always on about his marriage being on the rocks but never getting close to doing anything about it. So if she’d made the break, what do you expect from me but a big whoopee!”

  “And later? When she didn’t show up?”

  She shrugged expressively.

  “We got worried, naturally. I couldn’t understand why the police weren’t on to the Jake Starr thing, you really have been pretty inefficient, Inspector. But I could see no profit in doing your work for you. John was being given a rough enough time. So I lay low and hoped that Kate would turn up again. Funny that, isn’t it? I was delighted to learn she’d gone. Now here I was desperate to have her come back.”

  Pascoe nodded approvingly. It was a good story. He had no idea whether he believed it or not, but in the circumstances it was a very good story. He must try some of her books.

  “One more thing,” he said. “Why have you come to Wearton?”

  She warmed herself at the fire, reminding him of Ursula. Two women; similar problems? Then she smiled widely and the problems whatever they were seemed defeated.

  “I changed my mind about doing the police’s job for them,” she said. “Come with me.”

  She rose and took him by the hand like a small child, or a lover, and led him out of the library, across the hall, up the stairs and into a bedroom.

  “Am I to go to bed without any supper?” he asked.

  She laughed and taking up a nail file from a huge mahogany dressing-table, she approached a small oak ward-robe which didn’t match anything else in the room. Sliding the file into the crack between the door and the jamb, she forced it upwards till it met the lug of the lock and made half a dozen sideways twisting movements.

  “Voilà!” she said triumphantly and opened the door.

  “Why did you bother to lock it after you last time?” enquired Pascoe, regarding the scarred woodwork which advertised forced entry like a neon sign.

  She looked hurt.

  “I didn’t want Boris to know I’d been in here,” she said. “But look inside.”

  With a sigh, Pascoe obeyed.

  And the sigh turned into a whistle of appreciation as he spotted the white muslin dress with blue ribbons and the floppy white hat trimmed with cotton roses. In his mind’s eye he saw again the half-photograph he had examined in Arthur Lightfoot’s cottage just a few hours ago.

  “You’ve broken the law, you realize,” he said casually to Jean Starkey, who was standing beside him with the repressed smugness of one who anticipates congratulation.

  “I’ve broken the law?” she began indignantly, but stopped as she heard rapid footsteps on the stairs and a man’s voice calling, “Pascoe! Pascoe!”

  A moment later Swithenbank appeared at the door, his customary calm surface considerably ruffled.

  “Pascoe, you’d better come,” he said urgently. “It’s Peter Davenport. I don’t know what the hell’s going on but he’s been having the most tremendous scene with Ursula and now he’s taken off back towards the church. He seems quite hysterical.

  “Ursula thinks he’s going to kill himself!”

  CHAPTER VIII

  While from a proud tower in the town

  Death looks gigantically down.

  The night had grown wilder during the hours since their arrival. There were flurries of rain in the gusty wind which tore at the clouds and sent bunches of stars scurrying across the sky. The ancient beeches rustled and groaned and swayed like an old Disney forest, and underfoot the long grass laid ankle-twisting traps over the forgotten coach ruts.

  Here once through an alley Titanic

  Of cypress I roamed with my Soul—

  Pascoe found himself jogging to the contrived but controlled rhythm of Poe’s poem. Behind him, impeded by the woman’s dress and shoes, ran Swithenbank and Jean Starkey. Far ahead in the tunnelled darkness he caught an occasional glimpse of a swaying light as though someone were holding a torch.

  At the end of our path a liquescent

  And nebulous lustre was born.

  And there it was, not the pin-prick of a torch but
a distinct glow hazed through the fine mist of rain. Pascoe paused and the pursuing couple came up with him.

  “Someone’s switched the Christmas floodlights on,” said Swithenbank. “God, they’ll have half the village at the church!”

  As though this were a congregation devoutly to be missed, he abandoned the hard-panting woman to Pascoe’s care and sprinted ahead. Hard panting became Jean Starkey, Pascoe suspected, and normally he would have accepted the charge gladly, but he wanted to be at the church on time before the voices of reason and discretion had a chance to prevail.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  A change of note in the heavy breathing and a vague movement of the shadowy head seemed affirmative, so abandoning chivalry and the woman together, he pressed on.

  In the darkness of the great outdoors a very few yards can make the difference between good vision and total obscurity. Suddenly what lay ahead swam into close focus—a gateway, a pair of looming evergreens immediately beyond, and fifty yards further on the bulk of the church, its grey stone silvery in the light which flooded its tower.

  The wrought metal gate hung open between its two stone posts. Pascoe leapt lightly through on to a neglected weed-snagged gravel path which curved among a forest of mossy and sometimes drunkenly angled tombstones. Leaning against one of these was a figure which might have been taken for an exuberant mason’s impression of Grief had it not moved and said, “Pascoe!”

  His recognition of Rawlinson was almost instantaneous but that “almost” had his skin crawling chilly.

  “Give us a hand,” said Rawlinson, groaning as he pushed himself up from the headstone. “I came out in such a hurry, I forgot my stick and the leg’s gone.”

  “Look,” said Pascoe. “Shouldn’t you hang on here till I can rustle up a stretcher?”

  “For Christ’s sake, man! Peter’s up that fucking tower! I’ve got to get there!”

  Dalziel would not have let such an opportunity pass, but Pascoe knew he was of more tender and humane stuff than his gross superior.

  It was this knowledge that made him regard himself with some surprise and distress as he took half a step backwards from Rawlinson’s grasping hand and said coldly, “Why? Why have you got to get there?”

  “Why? Because it’s my fault,” the man cried in anguish. “I was as much to blame. And I said I forgave him, but he knew I didn’t. Knowing that, where could he turn for help?”

  Pascoe nodded. He felt rather disappointed. The picture was going to show a frightened rabbit after all.

  “He didn’t find you by accident,” he said. “He was up on the tower with you. He pushed you.”

  “No, no, that was an accident,” insisted the distraught man. “Please help me while there’s still time.”

  “Come on,” said Pascoe, suddenly full of self-disgust, an emotion which won the wholehearted support of Jean Starkey, who had arrived soon enough to catch the drift of the exchange and who now said to him as she lent her strength to getting Rawlinson upright, “That was a shitty thing to do.”

  “Don’t you preach at me, lady,” he snapped back. “Not you.”

  In silence, supporting Rawlinson between them, they made their way to the church.

  Here Kingsley came to meet them.

  “Thank God you’re here,” he said to Pascoe with what sounded like genuine relief. “He’s on top of the tower. He’s locked the stair door behind him and he won’t speak to anyone.”

  “Who put that floodlight on?” demanded Pascoe.

  “I did,” said Kingsley rather proudly. “It’s just used at Christmas really but I thought …”

  “Switch the bloody thing off!” commanded Pascoe, easing Rawlinson against an old rugged cross. “Leave the outer porch light on. Then see if you can break the tower door open.”

  “It’s five hundred years old,” said Kingsley, shocked.

  “Then with a bit of luck it’ll have woodworm,” said Pascoe. “Hurry!”

  A moment later the bright light faded, leaving the tower as a black monolith while those below stood in the gentler glow which spilled out of the church porch.

  “Why’ve you switched it off?” demanded Ursula. She looked wild and distraught, her gown sodden, her makeup smeared like an action painting by the driven rain. All her sexuality had gone, whereas even in the stress of the moment Pascoe had noted under the floodlight the amazing things dampness was doing to Jean Starkey’s scarlet dress.

  “If he looked down, all he’d be able to see was the glare,” said Pascoe. “Like being on a stage. We don’t want him to feel he’s on a stage. I want him to be able to see us—and what he’s likely to hit. And I don’t want a crowd here either. Now tell me, has he said anything?”

  “No, not a word.”

  “But he’s definitely up there?”

  “Yes. We nearly caught up with him. He had to unlock the outer door of the church.”

  “Where was the key to the tower?”

  “Hanging up in the porch with all the other keys.”

  “Is the outer door always locked?”

  “It has been since last year, since Geoff’s accident. But what’s all this got to do with getting Peter down from there?” Ursula demanded angrily.

  She was right, thought Pascoe guiltily. He must keep his eyes on the rabbit for the moment and forget the goose.

  He took the woman by the arm and led her unresisting to where Rawlinson was standing by the cross peering helplessly upwards.

  “Listen,” he said. “I think I know why he’s up there, but I’m not sure what’ll bring him down. You’d better tell me. Is it just the drink talking? I mean, when the rain and the cold sobers him up, will he come down of his own accord?”

  Brother and sister exchanged glances.

  “No,” said Ursula. “Drinking’s an escape. The soberer he gets the worse it’ll be.”

  “I guessed so,” said Pascoe. “Then you two had better talk to each other fast. Whatever you know, you’ve both got to know it, because he’s got to know you both know it.”

  Ursula managed to raise a wan smile.

  “That’s a lot of knowing.”

  Pascoe regarded her seriously.

  “Too much for you?”

  She shook her head, then to her brother said gently, “Geoff, I’m a good guesser. And I’m Peter’s wife.”

  Rawlinson rubbed the rain off his face or it may have been tears. Then he began to talk rapidly, in a confessional manner.

  “When he used to come and stay with us, we always shared a bed. Some time, it must have been in our early teens, I don’t remember, but one summer when he came, well, we’d always played and wrestled before like boys do, only now puberty was well under way and we started exciting ourselves and each other with talk and pictures. For me, I believe for most adolescents if it happens, it was just a sort of marking time. I’d have been terrified to go near a girl but that was always the image I had in my mind. Later, as I got older and started making dates with girls, I wanted to stop. It would have been earlier but for Peter; but in the end we did stop. We did our college training, settled down to our careers. I got married, John and Kate got married and finally Ursula and Peter married. I was delighted. I liked him, we were close friends, our childhood was far behind us, then last year …”

  “It was after the harvest supper, wasn’t it?” interrupted Ursula with the certainty of revelation.

  Rawlinson nodded glumly, unsurprised that she knew.

  “Yes. We were clearing up together, alone. I was … unhappy. Well, that’s my affair. I talked to Peter. He touched me. And what we did seemed natural, innocent almost. Till next day. I was so full of guilt it almost choked me. I couldn’t believe it of myself. The only thing to do seemed to be to pretend it hadn’t happened. I made sure I was never alone with Peter during the next couple of weeks. He made no sign that anything was between us, and when he told me about the owls in the tower, I didn’t think twice about asking if I could go up there at night. The first three nig
hts I was by myself, getting them accustomed to my presence. The fourth, that was the Friday, he came up with a flask of coffee for me. What happened then—well, all you need to know is the falling was pure accident. My own fault. I was stupid. But stupid or not, it did this …”

  He slapped his damaged leg in anger and frustration.

  “We’ve got to get him down,” he said desperately. “Yes, I’ve blamed him for this and he knows it. But I never wished the same on him. Never!”

  Pascoe was looking at the woman. She put her arm round her brother’s shoulder.

  “It’s OK, Geoff. It’s OK. I know, I know. Or at least I guessed. It’s OK.”

  “And your husband, have you talked about it with him?” asked Pascoe.

  “No, not directly. It’s a myth, isn’t it, that everything’s solved by bringing it out in the open? We have a kind of jokey relationship about sex. It’s a delicate balance but we keep it, we keep it.”

  She sounded desperate for reassurance.

  “Something’s upset the balance,” urged Pascoe gently.

  “Yes, I know. Three or four months ago something, I don’t know what. And tonight. Perhaps it’s something to do with you being at Boris’s!”

  She flashed this at him furiously as though delighted to have found a target.

  “My God!” cried Rawlinson, who’d never taken his eyes off the tower. “He’s there!”

  Pascoe screwed up his eyes against the now driving rain. The figure leaning over the parapet could have been part of the stonework, some graven saint, so still and indistinct it was.

  “Peter! Peter!” screamed Ursula, cupping her hands in an effort to hurl her words skywards. So strong was the wind now that Pascoe doubted if anything but the thin edge of that cry sounded aloft the tower. His training told him he should already have summoned the fire brigade, at least got them on stand-by. But this story could destroy those concerned just as much as the fall could destroy Davenport.

  A figure darted from the church porch. It was Swithenbank, excited but controlled.