‘What?’
‘I spoke to her.’
‘What! I mean, what did she want, sir?’
‘How should I know? She said bugger all to me.’
A tiny, tinny voice was coming out of the earpiece with which Dalziel was massaging his bald spot. Finally he became aware of it.
‘Hello!’ he roared, reducing it to silence. But after introducing himself, he settled down to listen.
‘Well, there’s no help there,’ he said when he had finished. ‘It seems to me as if Sturgeon and Lewis are soon going to have something else in common. They’re both going to be dead.’
The men searched the ground thoroughly for over an hour. Then they searched it again, this time with a metal detector. Only after this second search and after as comprehensive a photographing of the area as was possible outside Hollywood did Backhouse send the order to tow the blue Mini-Cooper away. There was no question of driving it away. The ignition had been left on, the engine was sodden wet and the wheels had buried themselves deep in a morass caused by the recent rains.
Backhouse walked through the gap in the wire and peered down into the clay-pit.
‘I wouldn’t go too near the edge, sir,’ said Constable Crowther, practising what he preached and standing a good two yards back. Always sensitive to local expertise, Backhouse retreated before asking why.
‘If you look over to the other side, sir, you’ll see there’s quite an overhang. Well, that continues all the way round. They gouged deep into the sides before they decided the place was played out.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh, when I was just a lad, sir. I’m from these parts, as you know. There was always trouble with the drainage, I believe. Water coming in, but not finding a way out very easily. Finally they struck an underground stream and that was that. Once they stopped pumping it away, the place just filled up.’
‘It’s deep then?’
‘It is, especially after the rain we’ve been having. Deep and dangerous. Bits of the overhang drop in from time to time. That’s why they’ve got this wire round it. But what’s wire to kids? Or anyone determined to get through?’
‘What indeed?’ said Backhouse staring at the neatly cut gap in the fence. ‘Any fatalities?’
‘Three, sir, that I know of.’
‘Children?’
‘That’s what you’d expect, sir, but the answer’s no. If they’d all been kids, something would have been done about the place long ago. Only one was anything like a child. Boy of sixteen, skylarking with friends round the edge, slipped and fell in. He couldn’t swim.’
‘And the others?’
‘A man and woman, sir. Suicide pact. They were having an affair, but there were difficulties. They both wanted divorces but there was little chance of that. So they talked it over, it seems, then strolled up here one night and jumped in.’
‘Good Lord! Yes, I seem to remember something. About twelve years ago?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘I wasn’t in this area then, of course, but it was in the national Press. Wait now, wasn’t one of them called …’
‘Yes, sir. Mary Pelman. She was married to Mr Angus Pelman.’
‘Well now. There is a thing, Crowther,’ said Backhouse. It was difficult to know whether he was commenting on Crowther’s information or the arrival of the breakdown vehicle which came grinding up the long, wet track from the distant road.
‘We found her almost at once,’ Crowther continued. ‘She came up to the surface. He stopped down in the mud. It took nearly three weeks before they got him out.’
‘Who does it belong to, Crowther?’ asked Backhouse, watching the breakdown truck negotiate itself into position before the Mini.
‘No one, really,’ said Crowther. ‘Mr Pelman owns most of the land on this side, the south. His house is at the back of that ridge over there. Then the land drops away, woodland mainly, down to the village.’
‘The woods behind Brookside Cottage?’ said Backhouse.
‘That’s right. But there’s no direct route. Not for a car. It’d have to come round by the road and up the old track. Three miles about.’
‘Something seems to have come this way pretty regularly,’ said Backhouse, examining the ground carefully. ‘I wonder why? And who would want to cut a gap in the wire?’
‘Can’t say, sir,’ said Crowther. ‘Do you think Hopkins is in there, sir?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’m not even sure if I’d like him to be. It’d be neat, certainly. But I don’t know.’
Forgetting Crowther’s injunction, he strolled back towards the edge, thinking of the odd, enigmatic note found in the car. It was back at HQ now undergoing the most rigorous examination. Fingerprints, handwriting, type of paper, all would be subjected to the closest scrutiny. But the state of mind of the writer was what interested Backhouse. Could it be read as a confession and the last desperate cry of a man about to drown himself? It might well be. Hopkins seemed to have been something of an original. Perhaps the opinion of that other highly individual young man, Sergeant Pascoe, might be worth seeking. If it could be obtained without sparking off some kind of explosion.
The breakdown truck was advancing from the bosky tunnel into which the Mini had reversed. He turned to watch it. It wasn’t possible for the truck to turn towards the track until the car was clear of the undergrowth. Therefore it came straight towards him. For a frightening second he thought it wasn’t going to stop, but the driver began to spin the wheel round a good twenty feet away. In any case, it could hardly come through the small gap in the wire.
One of the truck’s wheels lost its grip on the soft ground momentarily and began to spin. Foolishly the driver revved up and the next minute both were spinning wildly.
Half-wit, thought Backhouse, staggering slightly for some reason. Fainting fit? he wondered. The first warnings of a stroke? It was frightening, as if the ground were moving under him.
‘Superintendent!’ yelled Crowther.
Backhouse, still surprised, stepped towards him, then turned his step into a leap, as beyond all dispute the ground moved.
Crowther seized him by the hand and dragged him violently away from the quarry. Quite unnecessary, Backhouse thought, as he turned and looked back. It was a goood two seconds before a long section of earth, including the bit on which he had been standing, slid undramatically out of sight into the depths below. It was difficult to see any difference. If it hadn’t been for the posts supporting the wire leaning drunkenly out into space it would have been impossible to detect that anything had happened.
‘Get this thing out of here before it causes any more damage!’ commanded Backhouse, pointing at the truck.
‘If he’s under that little pile, sir, he’ll be hard to find,’ said Crowther.
‘We’ll find him, never fear,’ said Backhouse. ‘If he was buried under a mountain, we’d find him.’
‘Hello! Peter?’ said Ellie uncertainly, standing at the open front door.
‘Hello, love,’ said Pascoe, stepping into the hallway. ‘Come on in.’
Ellie entered, still looking puzzled, and followed him into a comfortable sitting-room furnished in a period-less old-fashioned style.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Or more important, what are we doing here? This isn’t a subtle way of setting the scene for a marriage-proposal, is it? Because if this is your idea of home, I refuse!’
‘It’s not bad,’ protested Pascoe. ‘Very cosy.’
‘So it’s cosy! It also reeks of a-woman’s-place-is-in-the-home. You’ve got a very Victorian paterfamilias look about you.’
‘There are worse fates,’ said Pascoe.
‘What are we doing here, Peter?’
‘Looking for cats. Or rather a cat. I’ve got the other two locked in the kitchen. Let me explain.’
‘I wish you would.’
Pascoe had called to see Mavis Sturgeon in hospital. She was confined to bed, but much more alert now. Her main
concern had naturally been for her husband, but she seemed ready to accept assurances that he was all right, but too weak to be visited even had she been fit. Pascoe had delicately probed to see if there were anything she could tell him, but the names of Cowley and Atkinson meant nothing to her. Lewis she had read about in the paper and she had an idea he was a member of the Liberal Club which Edgar had belonged to for more than forty years. She confirmed that her husband had been withdrawn and irritable for the past week or more, following a period of unexplained high spirits and excitement.
‘I was worried about his retirement at first,’ she said. ‘He missed the business a lot. But then he seemed to come round, start taking an interest in things. I thought that … I thought …’
She blinked back tears. Pascoe intervened swiftly.
‘Do you know where he might have been going today?’ he asked.
‘No. That’s what makes it so odd. He’d no reason at all to be on that road. I’ve never liked that road, never. Always accidents, always something.’
Pascoe had risen to go, making an automatic promise to do anything he could to help and being surprised to find himself instantly put to the test.
‘It’s her cats. The neighbours will feed them, she knows, but she’d be happier if they went into their usual kennels. So I said I’d take them. And as it’s no job for a singlehanded man, I left the message for you.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Why did you ring me earlier?’ asked Pascoe casually.
‘Oh, nothing. I just felt like a chat,’ she replied.
‘I gather you had one with Dalziel.’
‘We talked.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He advised me of my constitutional rights. And duties. And suggested strongly that a woman’s place was around the home. Particularly the bedroom.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s find that cat, shall we?’
Ellie took a china ashtray from the mantelpiece and rattled it energetically against the wall. Ten seconds later a sleek ginger shape slid casually from beneath the chair on the arm of which Pascoe was squatting. The animal purred as Ellie picked him up.
‘Well done, St Francis. What’s the secret?’
‘Make a sound like a rattling food-dish and these creatures will come from miles away. Otherwise, if they don’t feel like it, you can coax and threaten all night without results.’
‘They remind me of you.’
‘That’ll cost you a steak.’
‘See what I mean?’
This slightly unreal, consciously superficial relationship was maintained all the way to the kennels which conveniently turned out to be the ones behind the Jockey at Birkham.
A man was unloading trays of meat and made-up pet food from a blue van as they came out of the office. His van proclaimed that he was Jim Jones, Purveyor of High Class Pet Food.
‘Does it make you hungry?’ asked Pascoe.
‘No. But I am.’
He glanced at his watch. It was just on six-thirty.
‘Not too early? Then let’s be first in the Jockey. You don’t deliver there as well, do you?’ he added jocularly to the petfood man who had stood aside to let them past.
He didn’t answer, but merely stared unblinkingly at Pascoe and shook his head. Take a joke seriously and you take the wind out of anybody’s sails, thought Pascoe, disconcerted. It was one of Dalziel’s favourite tricks.
They weren’t the first in the pub, but were the first to order their steaks. Ellie drank her lager thirstily, then sat toying with the pebble pendant Pascoe had bought her.
‘Peter,’ she said, ‘when I talked to Dalziel he warned me about putting you on the spot.’
‘He did what?’
‘You know. He said that I should be careful about sharing information with you as a friend that might possibly cause you difficulties as a policeman. If Colin got in touch with me, for instance, wanting help.’
‘Has he?’ asked Pascoe flatly, staring into his glass.
‘No, he hasn’t. But it made me think, what he said. I’ve been worrying at it ever since. He’s wrong, you know. I’ve just decided that. Fat Dalziel is wrong.’
‘Put it in writing,’ said Pascoe with a smile.
‘Hell, I’m not gone on the complete honesty bit. Some things are better kept quiet. But not for the reasons that Dalziel gave. Not so that you can grow up into a nice fat superintendent like he is.’
‘I agree,’ said Pascoe. ‘That’s not at all a good reason for not telling me something. Though I’ll want to look more closely at these other things that are better kept quiet.’
‘ You might be shocked!’ she said lightly. ‘The real reason I rang you this afternoon was something rather odd. After you dropped me in town I didn’t make straight back to college. I had nothing on there and anyway I felt like being among a lot of people after this morning. So I shopped for a couple of hours. Then, about four it must have been, I set off back. I came through Birkham, of course, and stopped to have another wander round the antique shop. But it was shut.’
‘Not a very keen trader, our Mr Etherege,’ commented Pascoe. ‘Who, by the way, has just come into the bar.’
Etherege seemed to be well known and entered immediately into a cheerful exchange of greetings with the landlord and other drinkers.
‘Anyway,’ said Ellie, ‘I was just getting back into the car, when another car pulled up behind me. I thought I recognized it, bright red Citroën. Out jumps Anton Davenant, greets me warmly and says he is just on his way to see me at college.’
‘Interesting,’ said Pascoe. ‘What the hell did he want that he couldn’t have got when we met him this morning?’
‘I wondered that too. The only thing I could think of was your absence!’
‘Flattering. OK. What did he say?’
‘I’m not really sure. He seemed to be feeling his way, if you know what I mean. He talked about Colin and the others, particularly Timmy. Evidently he met him when Timmy was working at the Common Market HQ in Brussels and Davenant was doing some kind of gastronomic architectural Grand Tour.’
‘Then Timmy comes back and takes up with Carlo again. Interesting.’
‘I thought so too. I began to wonder whether he was in fact in the district completely by accident.’
‘That,’ said Pascoe, ‘is the kind of nasty thought only policemen are supposed to have.’
‘Dalziel would be pleased. But I did begin to wonder after a while if Colin might have been in touch with him and he was sounding me out to see whether a policeman’s paramour was to be trusted.’
‘And was she?’
‘Evidently not. He said nothing anyway. He did seem very interested in the book Colin was working on, but I couldn’t tell him a thing about that. Perhaps Colin’s worried about his manuscript and notes?’
‘Wherever Colin is,’ said Pascoe unemotionally, ‘he’ll have a lot more to worry him than the health of his manuscript. So you rang me to chat?’
‘That’s right. Davenant was still with me, he’d just popped into the loo. I thought you’d like to know.’
Their steaks arrived and with them Etherege. He didn’t sit down but stood looking down at them, a gin in one hand and a small bottle of tonic in the other.
‘Hello again,’ he said with a smile. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I just wondered about those stamps.’
‘We haven’t been able to have them examined yet, I’m afraid,’ said Pascoe, thinking of poor old Sturgeon, critically ill, perhaps by now even dead.
‘Not to worry. No hurry. Pop in and buy the lady another present some time! Cheers.’
He turned and left them.
‘Not a bad idea,’ said Ellie.
‘At his prices?’ Pascoe sampled his steak and nodded appreciatively.
‘Careful,’ warned Ellie. ‘Jones the Cat Meats has just come in.’
He glanced at the bar. She was right. The po-faced man had just entered.
Pascoe grinned.
‘Well, if they use him here,’ he said, ‘all I can say is how nice to be one of Mrs Sturgeon’s cats!’
Dalziel meanwhile was still in his room, sipping a cup of tea with only half his usual quantity of sugar and unenthusiastically contemplating an evening without potatoes.
The phone rang.
‘I’m sorry to have been so long, Superintendent, but there was some urgent business came up.’
‘Trouble in the glen?’ said Dalziel sourly.
‘Aye. Something of that. Now, the man Atkinson at the hotel, he’s your man surely, fits the description to a “t”.’
‘Good. Anything else?’
‘Well, no address, I regret to say. They let him put just “London” in the registration book, I’m afraid. I’ve had a wee word with the manager, and things will be stricter now, I promise you.’
‘That makes me very happy.’
‘Guid. Guid. Now, Superintendent, he’s been there a few times. I have a note of the dates; only for a few days at a time, and not on holiday, it seems. At least he didna act like a man on holiday.’
‘How did he act?’
‘Like a businessman, they say. And from something the reception lassie heard him say one day, it seems he might be connected with the Nordrill Mining Company.’
‘Who the hell are they?’
‘Well, if you lived up here, you wouldna need to ask.’
‘Sergeant, if you lived down here, you’d bloody well feel the need to answer! Get a move on.’
‘Aye. They’re one of these companies that are going around everywhere these days, it seems, sinking test shafts to see what’s worth ploughing up the earth for. You may have read about them in Wales and the Peak District in England? Well, we have the same trouble.’
‘And Atkinson’s probably working for them?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Well done, Lauder,’ said Dalziel. ‘Just give me those dates and you can get back to the peat fire.’
The phone rang once more before Dalziel could leave. He listened for a long while without offering to interrupt.
‘Right,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, I’ll tell him. Good night.’
But not tonight, he thought, glancing at his watch. He’ll be out with that girl. Let them enjoy themselves tonight if they could.
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