Pascoe's Ghost

by Hill, Reginald;

  He coughed gently and was flattered to note that he immediately had everyone’s attention. He also had for the first time a full frontal of Lightfoot’s shotgun. He reached out, took the barrel fastidiously between thumb and forefinger and moved it aside.

  “Mr. Lightfoot,” he said quietly. “If that weapon is pointed once more at anyone here, and most especially at me, I shall arrest you instantly for threatening behaviour. Lower it and break it!”

  The man gave him a look full of hatred, but obeyed, and Davenport, as though the action held some personal symbolism for him, suddenly stepped away from Ursula and in best vicarial tones said, “Please, everybody, hasn’t this gone far enough? You’re all soaking and it’s mainly my fault. I don’t want pneumonia on my conscience as well. You’re all welcome to dry out at the rectory. Mr. Pascoe, I’d like a private word with you later, if it’s convenient.”

  He was looking at Lightfoot as he spoke these last words and it was the smallholder whose hitherto unblinking gaze shifted first.

  Pascoe made an educated guess at what Davenport was going to tell him. He’d lay odds that a year ago Lightfoot, out on a poaching trip perhaps, had witnessed Rawlinson’s fall from the tower. He had kept out of sight when the vicar descended—he would hardly want to draw the local bobby’s attention to himself—and his curiosity had later been whetted by the discrepancy between what he had seen and the official version. But he’d done nothing about it till the summer when he needed money after the fire. With Kingsley senior’s death, his old source had dried up, but a visit to the vicarage, a few dark hints of deep knowledge (he had the perfect manner for it), and he had found a new supply of funds to tap. What precisely he did know hardly mattered. He emanated evil intent like few men Pascoe had met.

  He made a mental vow that whatever else came out of this extraordinary evening, Arthur Lightfoot was going to get what was coming to him.

  But there were still many other questions to be answered. Obviously Swithenbank had deliberately angled his campaign toward Kingsley, with how much justification was not yet clear. Perhaps he just had a “feeling.” Like Willie Dove had a feeling! Or perhaps he knew more than he had yet said. There was still the dress to be explained. He suddenly felt very tired.

  There had been a general movement to the doorway. Outside the wind still gusted fitfully but for the moment the rain seemed to have stopped. Not that that mattered, Pascoe thought ruefully. He was so damp that nothing short of total immersion could aggravate his condition.

  “Hold on a moment. I don’t think we’re finished here yet!”

  It was Jean Starkey and her words were greeted with a groan of exasperation in which Pascoe joined. He guessed what she was going to say, but he judged that the moment for dramatic revelation was past. What had been an atmosphere of high emotion in a Gothic setting had now become one of damp and discomfort in a draughty church porch. The time had come for warmth and whisky, followed by some hard questioning in a police interview room. He wanted to save his knowledge of the woman’s dress in Kingsley’s bedroom till then.

  But the woman insisted.

  “Tell us about the dress, Boris. You haven’t told us about the dress.”

  “What dress?”

  “The white muslin dress and the big straw hat. Kate’s favourite gear, wasn’t it? How does it come about that you’ve got a woman’s dress hidden in a locked wardrobe in your house?”

  Now the audience’s attention was engaged once more. Kingsley made no effort to deny it but asked indignantly, “How does it come about you know what I’ve got locked up in my house?”

  “It’s true, then?” said Lightfoot, who had been smoulderingly subdued for the past few minutes.

  “Why shouldn’t it be true?”

  Whether because of Pascoe’s threat or out of personal preference, Lightfoot didn’t try to use his gun this time but jumped forward and seized Kingsley one-handed by the throat, bearing him back against the opened door which lay against the wall. No one seemed inclined to interfere, not even when the enraged assailant started using the fat man’s head as a knocker to punctuate his demands, “Where-is-she? Where-is-she?”

  It was constabulary duty time once more. Pascoe stepped forward and said, “That’s enough.”

  When Lightfoot showed no sign of agreeing, Pascoe punched him in the kidneys and stepped swiftly back. The blow was a light one and Lightfoot swung round as much in surprise as pain. Kingsley, released, staggered out of the church holding his throat, but he could have suffered no real damage for he was able to scream, “I’ll tell you why I’ve got the clothes! It’s Kate’s ghost, you superstitious cretin! Do you really think anything would come back from the grave to an animal like you in that sty of a cottage?”

  He even managed a derisive laugh but it stuttered off into a fit of coughing.

  “You’d better explain yourself, I think, Mr. Kingsley,” said Pascoe, putting himself between the fat man and Lightfoot.

  Though the man was genuinely angry, Pascoe could see the quick calculation in his face. He wasn’t about to admit anything illegal, but what was illegal about a practical joke?

  “He had it coming to him, that bastard,” snarled Kingsley, adding weakly, “It was just a kind of joke.”

  “To convince him that the sister he loved was dead and he was partly responsible? Very amusing,” said Pascoe. “But hardly a one-man show? You must have had a leading lady.”

  He let his eyes run down Kingsley’s corpulent figure.

  “You mean, it were play-acting?” said Lightfoot, who seemed far more affected by this news than by Pascoe’s punch.

  “That’s right,” said Kinglsey with malicious satisfaction. “If ever a man deserved to be haunted, it was you.”

  “Play-acting!”

  “But where does the acting end, the truth begin?” said Swithenbank. A trifle melodramatic, thought Pascoe, but a good question nevertheless.

  “There’s still one theory untested, Inspector. Remember the tomb I mentioned? The resting place of the Aubrey-Beesons, the old squires of the Wear?

  And I said—’What is written, sweet sister,

  On the door of this legended tomb?’

  She replied—‘Ulalume—Ulalume—

  ’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’”

  He held aloft a large metal ring with several keys which chimed together as he shook it.

  “I can’t get it out of my mind that perhaps by accident when I chose that poem, I was closer than I knew to the truth. What say you, Boris? I’m going to take a look before I leave this churchyard tonight. Are you coming, Inspector? Anyone for menace?”

  There was a note of hysterical bravado in his voice which caused the others to stir and draw closer together. He took a few paces down the path towards the old lychgate, which itself was not visible, though the wind-swayed arch of cypress trees loomed dark against the grey wash of the sky. Suddenly the wind dropped altogether; the sough and scrape of branches, the rustle of dried leaves among the headstones, the buffets of violent air against the old stones of the tower, all these sounds ceased and were succeeded by a silence so complete that the screech of the lych-gate opening might have been heard had it been twice the distance.

  No one moved.

  No one spoke.

  Out of the dark at the end of the path a figure was emerging with the strange marking-time approach of someone on a film screen. It was a woman, slight of form and light of step, for she came forward with scarcely a sound, her loose white dress floating softly about her.

  Swithenbank, a few yards ahead of the rest, was first to speak.

  “Who’s there?” he called uncertainly. “Who is that?”

  “Hello, John,” returned a soft, distant voice. “Arthur, is that you?”

  Pascoe felt himself shouldered violently aside.

  “More play-acting!” bellowed Lightfoot.

  The gun came up, the barrel locked and the cartridge exploded all in an instant.

  The woman’s
form swayed and fell without a sound, making such a small heap on the ground that Pascoe would scarcely have been surprised to find nothing there but a white muslin dress.

  But the world of physical reality was not to be denied by churchyards and tombs and arches of cypress.

  It was a woman who lay there. Swithenbank knelt at her head, horror and amazement on his face. Lightfoot took one fleeting look but needed no more. Pascoe paused for a second to check the pulse, then plunged into the darkness after him, but stopped when he heard the second shot. Some things there was no need to rush towards.

  Ah! what demon has tempted me here?

  Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—

  This misty mid-region of Weir—

  Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,

  This ghoul-haunted woodland of Wier.

  CHAPTER X

  Thank Heaven! the crisis—

  The danger is past.

  “It was like the last act of Hamlet Meets Dracula,” said Pascoe.

  Some things were far too serious for anything but flippancy.

  “And they’re both dead?” repeated Inspector Dove at the other end of the line.

  “He died instantly. Well, he would, his head was mostly missing.”

  Pascoe remembered his promise that he would see that Lightfoot got what was coming to him.

  “He doesn’t sound much of a miss,” said Dove cynically.

  “He was a blackmailer twice over,” agreed Pascoe. “Though now he’s dead, Davenport won’t need to talk and Kingsley’s backtracking like mad. There’ll be more tight mouths around Wearton than at a lemon-suckers’ convention. Not that it matters. My guess is that Stella Rawlinson played the ghost. She hated the Lightfoots and Kingsley may or may not have been screwing her into the bargain.”

  “Into the what?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  Pascoe found that he was sick of the jokes and the lightness. It was eight-thirty in the morning. He had got home at three but been unable to sleep. Dalziel had observed his arrival at the station with nothing more expressive than an upward roll of his eyes, then suggested that even southern pansies should be awake by this time and he might as well put Dove in the picture.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dove.

  “So am I,” said Pascoe. “I’m a bit knackered. It’s all turned out so badly. This Lightfoot, he seems to have been a nasty bit of work all round. But he loved his sister. God, even that sounds like the cue for a crack!—and it shouldn’t have come to this. Not for anyone. He was the only one she asked for in the ambulance. Arthur, Arthur, all the time.”

  “And she said nothing else before she died?”

  “Not a thing. The only people she’d spoken to were Swithenbank’s mother and Kingsley’s housekeeper. She must have gone straight to Arthur’s cottage when she arrived. We found her stuff there. Arthur was out, of course. She rang Swithenbank. His mother answered. She was flabbergasted naturally, told her about the party, asked where she’d been but got no answer. Kate went up to Wear End, learned from the housekeeper that everyone had taken off towards the church, so she set off after them along the old drive.”

  “Where the hell had she been?” asked Dove in exasperation. “You say you found some things of hers at Lightfoot’s. Any clue there?”

  “Nothing obvious,” said Pascoe wearily. “At first glance it looks about the same as that list of things she took when she left Swithenbank last year. But it doesn’t matter much now, does it?”

  “I suppose not. Well, we were dead wrong about Swithenbank. Thank God I stopped this side of pulling his floorboards up! Still, you can’t win ’em all.”

  “No,” said Pascoe.

  “Cheer up, Pete, for God’s sake! You sound like it’s all down to you. It was just an ‘assist,’ remember? You can’t legislate for maniacs!”

  “I know. I just feel that if I’d handled things differently …”

  Dalziel had come into the room with a sheet of paper in his hand and when he heard Pascoe’s remark, the eyes rolled again. It was like a lesson with the globes in an eighteenth-century schoolroom.

  “Pete, it wasn’t your job to find out where she’d gone. That was our job, it’s down to us. Like I say, OK, we missed out. I feel bad about it, but not too bad. I mean, Christ, she came back and we still don’t know where the hell she’s been! It’s our fault. How could you be expected to work it out if we couldn’t? Can’t!”

  “Too bloody true!” bellowed Dalziel, who had come close enough to eavesdrop on Dove’s resonant voice.

  “What’s that, Pete? Someone there with you?”

  “Mr. Dalziel’s just come in,” said Pascoe hastily. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  “You do that, old son. I’m avid for the next instalment. I used to think it was just a joke about you lot north of Watford having bat-ears and little bushy tails, but now I’m not so sure. Love to Andy-Pandy! Cheerio now!”

  Pascoe put down the phone.

  “I don’t know what he’s got to be cheerful about,” said Dalziel malevolently. “Or what you’ve got to be miserable about either.”

  “Two people dead,” said Pascoe. “That’s what.”

  “And that’s your fault?”

  “Not court-of-law my fault. Not even court-of-enquiry my fault,” said Pascoe. “It’s just that, I don’t know, I suppose … I was enjoying it! Secretly, deep inside, I was enjoying it. Big house, interviews in the library, chasing up to the churchyard, stopping the vicar from jumping, uncovering all kinds of guilty secrets—you know I was thinking, gleefully almost, wait till I get back and tell them about this! They’ll never believe it!”

  “I believe it,” said Dalziel. “And I’d have done much the same in your shoes. You did it right. The only thing you couldn’t know was that she was alive. That’s what you call a paradox, you philosophers with degrees and O levels, isn’t it? If you’d known she was alive, she’d be alive! But you didn’t. You couldn’t!”

  “Someone should have done,” said Pascoe. “They should have looked harder.”

  “Too true,” said Dalziel with grim satisfaction. “Cases like these, you follow up every line. One line they didn’t follow.”

  “What?”

  Dalziel scratched his backside on the corner of the desk, a frequent preliminary to one of his deductive tours de force, which one of his more scurrilous colleagues had categorized as the anal-lytical approach.

  “What was Swithenbank doing on the day his missus disappeared?”

  “The Friday, you mean?”

  “Aye.”

  Pascoe opened his notebook at the page on which he’d first started jotting down notes on the Swithenbank case.

  “He was at a farewell party at lunch-time.”

  “Who for?”

  “One of his assistants.”

  “Name?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said Pascoe.

  “Cunliffe. David Cunliffe,” said Dalziel triumphantly. “Thought you’d have known that.”

  “It wasn’t in any of the papers Enfield sent me,” said Pascoe defensively.

  “Bloody right it wasn’t,” said Dalziel with relish. “They’ve a lot to answer for. This fellow was heading for the good life, back to Mother Earth, do-it-yourself, all that crap, right?”

  “Yes. Up in the Orkneys, I think.”

  “That’s right,” said Dalziel. “One of the little islands. Him, a few natives, a lot of sheep; and his wife.”

  “His wife?”

  “Oh yes. Only, suppose she wasn’t his wife! They don’t take kindly to living in sin up there, so it’d be better for community relations to call her his wife. But suppose that on that Friday your Kate packed her few things, put on her new blonde wig and set off for the Orkneys!”

  Pascoe shook his head to fight back the waves of fatigue, and something else, too.

  “Why the wig?” he asked.

  “She was meeting her boy-friend at King’s Cross, on the train. She had the wit to guess t
here might be a mutual acquaintance there to see him off and she didn’t want to be spotted. As it happened, the whole bloody party came along, including hubby, so she was very wise. Imagine, there’s Swithenbank shooting all that shit about how he wished he had the guts to up and leave everything, meaning his missus, for a better life, and there she is sitting only a few carriages away, doing just that!”

  “Oh Christ,” said Pascoe. “Is this just hypothesis, or have you checked it out?”

  “What do you think I am, bloody Sherlock Holmes?” exploded Dalziel. “No, there’s no way any of us could have worked out any of that. It was up to Dove and his mates, as I’ll make bloody clear! What we’ve got is this. Arrived this morning.”

  He handed Pascoe the sheet of paper he had been carrying.

  It was a request for assistance from Orkney Police HQ in Kirkwall. They were holding one David Cunliffe on suspicion of murdering his “wife,” whom he now claimed was not his wife but Katherine Swithenbank, formerly of Wearton in the county of Yorkshire, where, he suggested, it was most likely she would return after leaving him.

  It was clear the Orkney constabulary had no great faith in his claim. No one had seen her leave the small island on which their croft was situated. No one had spotted her on the ferry from Stromness or on a plane from Kirkwall Airport. Pascoe got a distinct impression that the croft which Cunliffe had so lovingly repaired was now being taken down again, stone by stone, and the land which he had tilled was now being dug over again, spadeful after hard-turned spadeful.

  “She was a right little expert at the disappearing trick,” said Dalziel admiringly. “When she gets fed up she just packs her bag and goes. And no one ever notices!”

  “Someone noticed this time,” said Pascoe.

  “Belt up! Think on—there’s going to be some red faces this morning! Which do you want to do—Enfield or Orkney? Best you do Orkney; Dove’ll try to shrug it off, well, the bugger won’t shrug me off in a hurry!”

  He sounded really delighted, as though the whole of the Wearton business had been arranged just so that he could crow over the inefficiency of the effete south.