by Granger, Ann
‘We’re making enquiries about an incident at Balaclava House yesterday.’
Pascal relaxed. ‘Oh, that, yes.’ He glanced at his assistant who was showing signs of lively interest. ‘Best come into the office, then,’ he said. ‘Keep an eye on things, Maureen.’
The assistant looked disappointed.
The office was tiny and cluttered. Pascal took a pile of motoring magazines from a chair and indicated Morton should sit down. He himself perched awkwardly, like a large bird on a fence, on a small, low filing cabinet. It was so dented it looked as if someone had been kicking it with a strong boot.
‘What can I do for you, then?’ asked Pascal affably, but his dark eyes remained watchful.
‘As I said,’ Morton began again. ‘We’re making enquiries into certain events that happened yesterday, at Balaclava House in Toby’s Gutter Lane.’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about all that,’ Pascal interrupted. ‘Not to help you, like. I would if I could,’ he added virtuously. ‘But I never left here all day.’
‘Nevertheless, you do know something, Mr Pascal, because you spread the news of what had happened to others. For instance, you told other parties that you’d seen Mr Bickerstaffe being driven away by a relative, driven past this petrol station. So, why don’t we start there? Or better still, let’s go back and start a bit earlier. Why don’t you tell me exactly what you saw yesterday, especially anything before you saw Mr Bickerstaffe being driven past here.’
‘Before that, nothing much.’ Pascal shrugged. ‘Trade’s been quiet. Maureen and I were in here chatting for a bit. I did a bit of my paperwork.’ Pascal looked disconsolately at the litter of paper on his desk. ‘It gets away from me a bit,’ he confessed.
It gets away from me, too, thought Morton in sympathy. There wasn’t so much difference between his desk and Pascal’s.
‘But I did see old Monty Bickerstaffe walk past here earlier on his way into town. He goes most days, though I don’t pay much attention to him, normally. He’s like part of the landscape. You’ve got to hand it to the old blighter. He walks all the way there and back and it can’t be easy for him. A couple of times, when we’ve been really quiet here, I’ve gone out and called out to him, offering him a lift in. But he’s an obstinate old so-and-so. Unless it’s raining or really cold, he’d rather walk. He says,’ Pascal grinned with a flash of white teeth, ‘it keeps him fit!’
‘What time was this?’ Morton took out his notebook.
‘Oh, about eleven fifteen, morning break time. Maureen had just made us all a cup of coffee.’
‘All?’ Morton asked.
‘Well, me, her and the boy.’
Ah, yes, the car polisher with a guilty conscience. ‘Your son?’ asked Morton.
‘Maureen’s nephew,’ said Pascal.
‘Would Maureen be Mrs Pascal?’
The idea appeared to alarm the garage owner who replied pithily, ‘Not bloody likely!’
‘What was the next thing you saw?’
Pascal shrugged again. ‘Nothing or nothing much, not what I’d call unusual. Suddenly it had got busy, so I wasn’t watching. Trade is like that, one minute dead and the next you’re rushed off your feet. A couple of lorries pulled in. We sell hot pasties and sandwiches, so lorry and van drivers stop by around lunchtime. Then there was a chap who’d got some problem with a rattle under the bonnet. People came by for petrol. It didn’t quieten down again until mid-afternoon.
‘That’s when I saw Monty coming back. It must have been around half past three. He stays in town for what he calls his lunch. It’s mostly liquid and usually he has it in the White Hart. Sometimes in the Rose and Crown. That’s how he spends his day, see? Mid-morning go into town. Mid-afternoon come back. He was carrying his supply of whisky in a plastic carrier bag. I did wave to him yesterday, as it happens, but he didn’t wave back. He’s not sociable, as you might say.
‘Next thing was, a couple of police cars went past and turned up there. So after that, I kept an eye out. That’s how, later, I saw Mrs Harwell drive by in her little Mazda MX-5. I recognised the car first of all, because there isn’t another blue one like that around here. I saw Mrs Harwell was driving and old Monty was sitting alongside her, looking pretty fed up. I thought, hello! Something’s wrong. He wouldn’t be leaving the place, otherwise. Monty and that old ruin of a house, it’s like a tortoise and its shell. Take him out of it and he’ll likely die. So then I decided to ring Gary Colley. Colleys are his neighbours and they might know something. I got young Gary on his mobile. He told me someone had found a stiff at Balaclava. Well, the dead ’un wasn’t old Monty, because I’d seen him alive and well. So someone else had croaked, but don’t expect me to tell you who.’ Pascal thrust out his jaw pugnaciously.
Morton frowned. Gary, if he’d been telling the truth, should not yet have known anything about a dead body when Pascal rang him. Gary had told Jess Campbell he was on his way into town. According to Dave Colley, it was much later, early evening, long after Monty had been driven away, that Grandma C had walked up the lane and seen the hearse leave; and returned with the news to the rest of the family. That, so Dave reckoned, was the first they’d heard of a death. Blasted Colleys, fumed Morton silently, you couldn’t rely on anything they said.
‘Go on,’ he said to Pascal.
‘That’s it,’ the garage owner replied. ‘Except that later on I saw the cop cars go by again, back into town.’
‘Did you pass the news on before or after that?’ Morton wanted to get his mental timetable straight before he tackled the Colleys again.
Pascal looked puzzled. ‘Pass it on? Why do you keep saying I passed it on like I was the bloody town crier? I told Maureen and the boy, if that’s what you mean.’ He pointed to the window and the garage forecourt. ‘That one, out there.’
Morton wondered briefly if ‘the boy’ had a name. ‘No one else?’ he prompted.
Pascal’s brow cleared. ‘Rosie Sneddon stopped by for petrol and I told her. Sneddon’s Farm is further down the lane. I reckoned they’d want to know if anything odd was happening down the road from them. They’re pretty isolated on the farm and if I hear someone is wandering around up to no good, or I see a dodgy-looking vagrant or two, well, I naturally let the Sneddons know of it. It’s the neighbourly thing to do. I can’t remember exactly what time I told her. But it was before the cop cars went past back into town. A quarter past six, something like that? Don’t ask me to give you a closer guess than that.’
‘Fair enough,’ agreed Morton. There was no reason why Pascal should have checked the clock when he spoke to Rosie. His telling her the startling news was understandable, too. In country terms, the Sneddons were neighbours of the garage, itself quite isolated here on the roadside. ‘They’d let you know, too?’ he suggested. ‘If they saw anything suspicious?’
Pascal nodded. ‘Reckon they would.’
‘Is your petrol station here open at night?’
Now Pascal shook his head firmly. ‘No. We close at nine p.m. sharp weekdays, five p.m. on Sundays. If I were to stay open later than that I’d have to employ extra staff. My outgoings for wages are high enough already. I have to pay a chap to mind the till after Maureen’s taken herself off home. Nine to five, she works, days. He works evenings, five to nine. That’s only half the hours but he seems to think he ought to be paid the same as her. He says it’s because he works unsocial hours. But there you are, nobody works for peanuts these days. Even that lad out there expects a decent wage, for all he’s learning a trade here, too. Besides, we wouldn’t do much business after that time of night. It wouldn’t be cost effective. Sundays I have to manage on my own unless my sister-in-law can come in for a couple of hours.’
‘You don’t live here, or near here?’ The business did not appear to have any accommodation attached but there might be a cottage tucked away at the rear.
But Pascal was shaking his head. ‘I live five miles away in Weston St Ambrose; so does Maureen – and the boy. Nobody lives
around here except down in Toby’s Gutter Lane and that’s only Colleys, Sneddons and old Monty.’
‘You say,’ Morton began, and Pascal began to look a little apprehensive again, ‘that you and the Sneddons operate a sort of neighbourhood watch scheme. You phone them, or let them know, of anything unusual hereabouts, and they’d do the same for you. Neither Mr or Mrs Sneddon has phoned you about a car?’
Pascal shook his dark head slowly. ‘No. What car would that be?’
‘Last night Mr Sneddon woke to hear a car being driven past his farm, on Toby’s Gutter Lane, very late. It was going towards Shooter’s Wood. Then he fell asleep again. This morning he discovered someone, joyriders or others, had pushed a car down into the old quarry, just beyond the woodland, and torched it. I’ve been down in the quarry and had a look at it myself. It’s still smouldering.’
‘Is it, now?’ said Pascal, after a pause. ‘Little buggers, those joyriding kids. No, they didn’t call me about that. They might have done any other time, mind you. Any funny business with cars is of interest to me! But very likely they didn’t bother, not with the other news to think about, the business at Balaclava.’
‘Probably,’ Morton agreed amiably. ‘Mrs Sneddon apparently didn’t hear the car during the night. Only her husband did.’
The garage owner was showing signs of impatience. ‘I don’t know what all this is about. Asking me about Balaclava makes sense, yes. Asking me about a car that was torched in the middle of last night when I wasn’t here and no one told me about before you came in here, that doesn’t make sense to me at all. Yesterday I told Rosie – Mrs Sneddon – I’d seen poor old Monty driven off by that tough cookie of a niece of his, and that there was a stiff found at his house. That’s what I knew. Now you tell me about a burned-out car, dumped by some joyriders from town, and expect me to know about that, too. Well, I don’t.’
‘If they were joyriders,’ Morton went on imperturbably, ‘and they torched the car they’d taken in the quarry, they had a long walk back home, didn’t they? Assuming they came from town?’
‘They’d have to come from town,’ said Pascal immediately. ‘They didn’t come from Weston St Ambrose. I’m not saying we don’t have our tearaways there, but I’d know if someone had had a car stolen yesterday. It’s only a village and news gets around. Someone would’ve told me about it last night when I got home, or this morning, as I was getting ready to leave.’
He paused and screwed up his face in thought. ‘You’re right, though. Whoever took it, had to get home.’ His expression brightened. ‘Here, perhaps they had two cars. Pete thought he heard one car but he was half asleep, you said, so perhaps there were two? The thieves torched one and they all piled into the other and drove it back to town, where they dumped it somewhere else. Why don’t you ask your uniform lot if any cars have been reported stolen or if any other car has been found dumped?’
‘We’ll be doing that,’ Morton told him. ‘Well, that’s all for now, Mr Pascal. ‘Thank you very much for your help.’ Morton closed his notebook, to Pascal’s evident relief. ‘If I think of anything else, I’ll be in touch.’
Pascal stopped looking relieved. ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said.
Outside the boy had disappeared. ‘Don’t worry, my son,’ murmured Morton. ‘I’ve got an eye on you. You needn’t bother hiding away!’
Pascal watched his visitor go from within his minimart. After a glance to check that Maureen was safely busy, he went back to his office and quietly closed the door. He picked up the phone. A brief conversation followed, finishing with Pascal saying irritably, ‘Of course I didn’t say anything! Do you think I’m daft or something? No, I can’t do anything about it. I can’t get in there. The police will have sealed it off. I’m not breaking in, if the cops come back, they’d realise it. No – no – we’ll just have to hope no one finds it.’
He replaced the receiver and stood, staring down at it. ‘Damn . . .’ he said softly.
They had ended the day still not knowing the identity of their corpse but Carter had been cautiously optimistic that they soon would.
‘Probably someone will come forward tomorrow or the day after,’ he said to Jess as they left the building that evening and headed towards the car park. ‘A well-dressed, well-set-up bloke like that, someone’s got to miss him.’
Jess hadn’t mentioned to him that Morton had been far less optimistic.
‘He might be a foreigner,’ the sergeant had said gloomily earlier.
‘His clothes look as if they were bought here,’ said Jess, ‘although, I admit, it’s hard to tell from the labels nowadays. Everything’s made abroad. But they look English.’
Morton had stuck to his theory. ‘He could still be a foreigner. The country is full of people who’ve arrived fairly recently. So he’s bought himself a set of togs since arriving. He decided he wanted to blend in.’
‘Is this your idea or Milada’s?’ asked Jess, referring to Morton’s Czech girlfriend.
‘I don’t discuss my work with Milada,’ retorted Morton loftily.
Jess had grinned and Morton stalked off homeward in a huff.
Now she was home herself, letting herself into her Cheltenham flat with a sigh of relief. Sometimes she regretted living a solitary life. One of the drawbacks was having to defend it constantly to her mother. But then, her mother couldn’t understand Jess’s wish to join the police force. When she moved to CID and announced it proudly down the phone in a call home, her news was met with a wail of dismay. Her promotion to inspector was grudgingly approved but only to be followed by, ‘It’s all very well getting to a senior position, Jessica, but it will frighten a lot of men off.’ Jess’s reply, that ‘they must be pretty insecure sort of men, then’, did not find favour. ‘You were always one for the clever answer,’ said her mother, adding, ‘and see where it’s got you!’ It was easy, Jess thought, to sympathise with Tansy.
But tonight, coming into the quiet flat, with everything just as she’d left it that morning, she savoured her pressure-free solitary home life after a busy and often frustrating day. Her pleasure was cut short when she saw the red light on the phone blinking an ominous welcome.
‘Not work . . .’ she groaned, pressing the ‘Play’ button. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d been called out again straight away.
‘Hi, Jess!’ said Tom Palmer’s recorded voice cheerfully. ‘Fancy going out for a pint and a curry? Or, failing that, a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine?’
She could easily ring and tell him no. Tom wouldn’t be offended. Theirs wasn’t that sort of relationship. But maybe Tom had had a gruesome day’s work and needed to unwind. He, too, lived alone. A friend in need is a friend indeed, as the saying went.
Jess called the pathologist’s mobile number. ‘Got your message,’ she told him. ‘Yes, I would. I’d prefer Italian tonight, I think. Where?’
‘Meet you at the usual place in The Promenade in about an hour?’
An hour later, Jess had showered and changed. Generally revitalised, she was sitting opposite Tom at an outside table, studying the menu. It wasn’t quite as warm for outside dining as it ought to have been, but it was still a fine evening. People were strolling by and the little tables under the trees looked so attractive, they’d decided to go for it. Tom, his mop of black hair tousled as he rubbed it as an aid to concentration, was inclined to a pasta option. Jess, who ate quite a lot of pasta in her flat, this being one of the few things she could cook (and in a hurry), was tempted towards the pollo alla griglia.
Most people, seeing them, would have assumed them to be a couple. But they weren’t. They were, as Tom had once put it, ‘fellow refugees’. The brutal fact was that Jess’s occupation (face it, her mother was right) made a lot of people uneasy. So did his. Both of them found it stymied social chitchat to a remarkable degree.
‘I can understand it, in my case,’ Tom had confessed. ‘What do you do for a living? they ask me merrily. “I dissect corpses,” I tell them. That’s w
hen they start sidling away from me and reaching for the garlic.’
‘In my case,’ Jess had explained, ‘they think I’m hell bent on ferreting out their secrets. I’ve come to the conclusion that half the population harbours guilty knowledge.’
The result had been a friendship of colleagues that worked extremely well. The one thing Jess was determined on was that her mother should never find out about it. Seeing them here for example (God forbid!), she would scent romance. But it’s not romance, she thought wryly; I only hope it never becomes desperation. (Although that was unfair to Tom, who was excellent company.)
When they’d ordered, Tom raised his glass of wine. ‘Cheers!’
Jess responded.
‘I’m not going to talk shop.’ Tom set down his glass. ‘But with regard to that stiff you called me out to yesterday . . .’
Jess groaned. ‘Go on . . .’ Then she brightened. ‘Hey? Do you know already what he died of?’