Dalziel 05 A Pinch of Snuff

by Reginald Hill

  'So I called him over for a chat,' said the woman. 'What about you? Why've you come? Has he done something daft?'

  'Who?'

  'Bri Burkill, of course. There was a hell of a barney late on last night when he got back from the Club.'

  'What time would that be?' enquired Pascoe.

  'Don't know, but I was woke up about two o'clock. There was shouting and screaming and God knows what. It must have been bad for us to hear it. These walls are right thick, not like them sheets of hardboard on the new estate. Well, a bit later, we heard Bri's car start up in the road outside and off he went. He wasn't back this morning. Charlie had to go to work on the back of our Colin's bike.'

  'But you didn't go round till you were going out shopping?' said Pascoe.

  Something of bewilderment in his intonation must have got through.

  'Listen, Inspector,' she said grimly. 'You don't stick your nose in, not unless you're asked. But when she doesn't open the door to the police, I begin to wonder. That's all. But you still haven't said why you're here.'

  'Oh God. I'm sorry,' said Pascoe, acutely embarrassed. 'All this distracted me. Look, Mrs Heppelwhite, it's bad news, I'm afraid. There's been an accident at Blengdale's.'

  'Our Colin?' she said, arms unfolding, hands rising to her cheeks.

  ‘No. Charlie. He's cut himself on one of their saws. Look, it's all right, I mean he's not in danger. They've taken him to the Infirmary. Clint - Colin's with him.'

  'What's he cut, for God's sake?' she demanded.

  'It's his hand.'

  'His hand? You've come round here to tell me Charlie's cut his hand!' she said disbelievingly.

  'It's a serious cut,' said Pascoe. 'What I mean is, his fingers..’

  Now it got to her and that strong square face went rhomboid in shock.

  'Cut off? Oh my God! Why didn't you say? Oh God!'

  Pascoe put out a comforting arm but she shook herself back to something like normality, pushed it aside, and, saying, 'I'll get my coat on,' she disappeared into the house.

  Pascoe turned to the constable.

  'You take Mrs Heppelwhite to the Infirmary, will you? I'll stop here and have a look around next door.'

  With a small sigh which said all that needed to be said about the relativities of detective-inspectors and Panda drivers, he took out his personal radio and explained the situation to his control.

  Pascoe watched them into the car and waited till they'd disappeared round the corner before opening the Burkill gate. As he walked up the narrow concrete path he had a premonition of something nasty waiting for him within. Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

  Perhaps he was just being over-imaginative, he thought as he banged on the door. But he hadn't imagined what he had just heard about Burkill's departure in the night nor about the discovery of his abandoned car. And he hadn't imagined the haggard, unshaven face he had seen that morning. The more striking image of the mutilated hand had temporarily blotted out that pale set face, but it came back to him now and he hammered on the door with greater vigour.

  Still no answer.

  He looked closely at the lock. If necessary, and if the door were not bolted, he could fiddle his way past that easily enough. On the other hand, if last night had been packed full of excitement, household routine had likely gone by the board . . .

  He poked his fingers through the letter-box. He was right. There was a key on a string behind the door and last night it hadn't been wound around the door knob in its 'secure' position. He pulled it out, fitted it, turned it.

  There were no bolts fastened either. The door swung easily open. He went in and closed it behind him.

  For a moment he stood very still in the gloomy hall and listened. Nothing.

  'Hello!' he called. 'Anybody at home?'

  The silence shrugged his words off effortlessly without even giving them the acknowledgement of an echo.

  Pascoe began to search.

  The front room was cold and dead. Old-fashioned furniture, but so little used throughout the years that it might have been genuine reproduction, if anyone were yet genuinely reproducing uncut-moquette discount suites of the fifties. There were chairs for sitting upright in and making formal conversation. Pascoe felt a sudden twinge of memory. He had had his first touch of female pubic hair in such a room as this, sitting in such a chair. He had been pretty upright too.

  The living-room was different. It was a mess; not the deliberately destructive mess which Alice Andover had made of Haggard's study, but an incidental mess. The fire had been allowed to die in the grate and not cleared out. There were unwashed tea-cups on the table.

  But it went further than simple neglect.

  A chair was overturned. The onyx-framed clock lay on the carpet by the door, its green stone cracked and its innards spilling out. Above it on the wall was a dent where it had struck with some force. The fire-iron stand had been overturned and the poker lay some distance away. Pascoe stooped and examined it carefully but he did not touch it.

  The kitchen was just untidy. There was a cupboard under the stairs. Pascoe peered in there too, with difficulty suppressing a whistle to keep his spirits up. It contained mops, brushes and left-over pieces of carpet preserved against an irremovable stain or irreparable burns.

  That just left upstairs.

  As he slowly mounted the narrow staircase Pascoe found himself thinking of the private eye in Psycho searching the household. A quick rushing attack from a maniac wouldn't give him much chance of defence. Best would be to turn his inferior situation to advantage and, instead of retreating, bend his shoulder into his assailant's belly and hurl his body down the stairs. They did it all the time in cowboy films.

  But he reached the landing without trouble. It was only a few feet square with four doors leading off it. Three of them were ajar.

  Those first, thought Pascoe.

  A bedroom, single bed, all the insignia of modern girlhood: viz. cuddly toys; a pink panther nightgown-holder; posters of three pop-groups Pascoe had never heard of; a red plastic record-player; ditto transistor radio; comic-strip magazines; a wardrobe; cheap clothes but plenty of them; three pairs of suicidal wedges. All the evidence of parental indulgence, thought Pascoe mentally totting up costs.

  The bed had been lain on but not slept in.

  Next a bathroom. He looked at the wash-basin and the towels. They were just like any other wash-basin and towels.

  A bedroom-cum-boxroom. There was a bed in it, but it had almost disappeared beneath a mound of household lumber. Pascoe probed the heap of suitcases and cardboard boxes. Nothing.

  Which left the closed door.

  Taking a deep breath, he slowly turned the handle and pushed it open.

  It was almost a relief to see the body on the bed.

  Chapter 22

  The first rule was to look without touching.

  The woman was lying diagonally across the bed, face down, her left arm dangling over the edge. Her fingers pointed to a wide stain on the pink carpet. Her legs were bent away beneath her. A shoe remained on her right foot while the other was bare. There were spatters of blood on the pillow.

  Pascoe let out his breath in a deep sigh and slowly approached.

  At the bedside he knelt on one knee to make identification positive. It was Deirdre Burkill all right even though he could only see the back of her head, half a cheek and one eye.

  A waste, he thought. It ends like this. All that hope. The world lay all before them. The future is terror.

  He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed his brow as if to eradicate the thought.

  When he took it away, the single eye opened and was watching him. Pascoe fell backwards in his fright.

  'You a priest as well as a policeman?' said Deirdre Burkill, rolling over on her back. 'It's a doctor I need, thank you very much.'

  She wasn't joking. Her face was badly bruised and grazed. The other eye couldn't have opened, so swollen was the surrounding flesh, her nose had been bleeding and
flakes of congealed blood still clung to her upper lip, while the lower lip had a nasty split and from the way she clasped her arms around her ribs, Pascoe surmised she was in pain there too, either from bruising or a fracture.

  Her breath stank of vodka. The half-empty bottle had fallen from her dangling hand and rolled beneath the bed, leaving the sinister stain on the carpet.

  'I'll get an ambulance,' said Pascoe.

  'No you bloody well won't,' said Deirdre. 'I'm not going anywhere looking like this. Oh God, I feel right sick. You couldn't make us a cup of tea?'

  Pascoe went downstairs to the kitchen. While the kettle was boiling, he went quietly out to his car and reported in, asking Control to get word of what he'd found to Dalziel.

  When he went back upstairs with the tea-tray, he found the woman had washed her face and was sitting in front of her dressing-table mirror trying to conceal the damage with make-up.

  'For God's sake!' he expostulated. 'It's antiseptic you want, not powder.'

  'Got to look right,' she said. 'That's all you sods'll let us have, our faces.'

  Pascoe poured the tea.

  'I've got a doctor coming,' he said. 'If you want your own doctor, I'll arrange for that too. But I thought the sooner we had you looked at, the better.'

  She shrugged indifferently and winced.

  'Brian did this?' said Pascoe casually.

  'It weren't self-inflicted,' she answered.

  'Where's Sandra, Mrs Burkill?' pursued Pascoe.

  'Out. At a friend's, I expect. She'll be all right, that one.'

  'When did she go out?'

  'Last night. This morning. If I'd any sense I'd have made a run for it too. But I've never seen reason for running from what you don't respect.'

  She laughed bitterly.

  'Would you like to tell me exactly what happened?' asked Pascoe gently.

  She lit a cigarette from a packet in the dressing-table drawer and coughed raucously.

  'Why not?' she said. 'I don't mind much who knows. You were here last night. You know the state you left us in. Well, I calmed down after a bit. I don't know why I got so upset. Kids, you should expect it of them nowadays. Me, I was sixteen before I even kissed a lad. I've made up for it since, but what you do when you're grown up's your own business. They've no childhood now. Babies one minute, talking mucky the next. I don't know.'

  She sipped her tea reflectively, wincing as the hot cup touched her swollen lip.

  'There she was, pregnant. All right, so she'd been seduced or led astray or whatever you like to call it. But unless they hold you down, you've still got to lie there and let it happen. Well, I kept my temper then, I had to, Brian would have killed her if he'd got going. When I saw her last night, though, with that Clint, it were too much. But for all that I'd made up my mind to say nowt to Brian. But when he came in about one o'clock, he knew summat was up.'

  'How?' asked Pascoe.

  'You do nowt round here without every bugger knowing,' said Deirdre Burkill. 'Someone in the street'd go down to the Club later on and mention, dead casual like, that they'd seen the rozzers at our door. Well, I just said you'd wanted a word with Sandra, check her statement. Up he goes to her room, all indignant.'

  'Surely she'd be asleep.'

  'Not her. She was lying on her bed, playing records. When her dad came in looking annoyed, she must have thought I'd told him about her and Clint. Well, she jumps up and starts shouting the odds, silly little fool, and Bri soon catches on. He really goes wild now. He's always spoiled her rotten and he'd even convinced himself that she’d got put in the club all innocent-like. But he couldn't see his way round this. So he clouted her. Just the once. But it were enough.'

  'Enough for what?' prompted Pascoe.

  'Enough to make her start blabbing,' said Deirdre. 'I didn't know she knew. I'd always been that careful.'

  'About what?'

  'She blamed me, you see. Thought I'd set her dad on her. So she told him. I can't blame her.'

  'For what?' demanded Pascoe in exasperation.

  'For telling Bri about me and Charlie,' snapped the woman.

  'Telling him what about you and Charlie?' asked Pascoe stupidly.

  She looked at him in surprise, turning first to amusement and then to pain as her smile stretched her battered flesh.

  'You and Charlie? Charlie Heppelwhite?' said Pascoe, incredulous.

  'I don't mean Chaplin,' said the woman wearily. 'Yes, me and Charlie Heppelwhite. Long thin Charlie. Poor old Charlie. Poor old Deirdre.'

  She began to cry.

  Dalziel arrived with the doctor who was the same one summoned to attend Shorter.

  'What happens to people when you're around?' he asked.

  'Oh, an attack of this, an attack of that,' said Pascoe.

  He and Dalziel went into the cold unwelcoming front parlour.

  'Takes me back,' said Dalziel, looking around.

  You too, thought Pascoe. Is nothing sacred?

  'What's up then?' asked the fat man, sprawling on the sofa and scratching his groin with an expression of sensuous reminiscence on his face. It disappeared as Pascoe spoke.

  'So, he found out at last,' said Dalziel. 'That explains why he's gone missing.'

  'At last?' said Pascoe, raising his eyebrows.

  'Aye. Didn't you know? I thought everyone knew! Everyone save Bri and Betsy, of course, and I'm not sure about her. Well, it figures, doesn't it? You don't leave an active, handsome woman like that to her own devices night after night, not unless you've fitted a time-lock. What did she tell you?'

  Deirdre had offered no explanations or analysis - why should she? - but the picture had emerged quite clearly. Night after night, her husband would be off down the Club. Charlie Heppelwhite would come round to say, would she like a lift? And when they got back, Charlie would see her safely into the house. Probably Charlie used to moan about it at first, always having her along, and Betsy probably gave him the rough side of her tongue whenever he moaned. Until one day . . . How do these things happen? Who decided? Who cares! Whenever Charlie went round, there would be contact from then on. A kiss or a caress, if it was just a matter of saying the car was ready. But doubtless there were other things to do, the coals to bring in, a shelf to fix, a fridge to repair, little neighbourly things, little unremembered acts. Ah, how ingenious is the human mind in pursuit of pleasure!

  'So what exactly happened after Sandra had blown the whistle?' asked Dalziel.

  'Deirdre heard it all from the bottom of the stairs. She should have got out if she'd got any sense, but she didn't. She's a brave woman in a funny kind of way. Burkill came downstairs and she backed off into the living-room. He was right on the edge, but oddly enough I think what got to her in the end was that he didn't want to believe it, not because of her, but because of Charlie. So it ended up with her almost having to persuade him that she'd been unfaithful. Well, she succeeded. He went berserk, you saw the room. She made it upstairs to the bedroom, Sandra was screaming and shouting, she remembers, then Burkill really laid one on her and knocked her out. When she woke up the house was empty. She crawled downstairs and poured some vodka into her. Then she staggered back upstairs and drank some more to wash down some tranquillizers to deaden the pain.'

  'Had Sandra gone with her dad?' asked Dalziel.

  'She doesn't know. After what happened, she didn't much care. The pills and the booze combined soon put her to sleep. ‘Till the brave prince came and woke her with a caution,’ said Dalziel.

  'That's it,’ said Pascoe. 'There was something else, though. I got a pretty full version of the speech she made to Bri before the thumping got properly under way.'

  'And?'

  'Among other things he'd been screaming at her that she was no fit mother for Sandra and that it was no wonder the girl had got into trouble. So she retaliated by telling him about the lass and Clint in the garden shed.'

  'That was natural,' observed Dalziel.

  'Yes, but she went on to suggest that as Charlie ha
d been coming round to bang her regularly, what was to stop him having a go at Sandra too?'

  'She said that?' asked Dalziel. 'My God!'

  'Yes. She was sorry she'd said it, mind you. Partly because she thought after it wasn't fair to Charlie, but mainly because that's what really started the thumping, but I've been thinking ever since she talked to me and . . .'

  'Go on,' prompted Dalziel.

  'Well, suppose it was true.'

  'Well, well, well,' said Dalziel. 'I'm with you. So now it's not Clint who's framed your mate, Shorter. It's his dad!'

  'Yes. Look, it makes a lot more sense,' urged Pascoe. 'All right, I admit Clint might not have the gumption to try to pass the buck like that, but Charlie Heppelwhite's a different kettle of fish.

  He'd know that anything was better than getting Bri Burkill on his track.'

  'Hang on a minute,’ said Dalziel ponderously. 'Let's just make sure we know exactly where we are. Burkill beats up Deirdre because she admits his best friend's been screwing her. He then starts believing the same friend may have been having a go at his daughter. So what now? If I read you right, you reckon Burkill goes down to the Club, lets himself in, sits brooding and boozing till morning, finds he's left his lights on and his battery's flat, so off he walks to Blengdale's to chat to Charlie?'

  'Right,' said Pascoe.

  'Except,' said Dalziel. And paused.

  There was something splendidly Ciceronian about Dalziel's 'except'. A single word left hanging, ungrammatically, in the air. And amidst the serried ranks of senators a small sough of intaken breath, then utter silence as they concentrated all their attention on the next eloquent weighty sentence to emerge from that eloquent weighty figure, statuesque at the centre of the tessellated floor.

  'Except it's all balls,’ said Dalziel.