Deadheads

by Reginald Hill

  Ellie decided to ignore the ideological challenge and said, ‘A rich parson? I thought the virtue of poverty was one the Church forced its employees to embrace?’

  ‘So it does. Fortunately it doesn’t force them to embrace poor wives also. The money was Mummy’s, you see.’

  Her voice had a wistful note as at some remembered sadness. Ellie said brightly, ‘At least it would mean your father could afford a decent housekeeper when you got yourself married.’

  Her effort at cheerfulness failed miserably.

  ‘No. Daddy was dead by then too,’ said Daphne, tears starting to her eyes. ‘It was awful. He was doing so well, he’d become Archdeacon, you see, and he was responsible among other things for checking on church structures in the diocese when there was any question of restoration work and appeals, that sort of thing. He’d gone out to St Mark’s at Little Leven. It was in a really bad state, it seems. And a stone fell from the belfry while he was examining it and killed him.’

  ‘How awful,’ said Ellie, genuinely moved. ‘I’m so sorry. That must have been a terrible thing to bear.’

  Her hand hovered over Daphne’s. She wasn’t sure if physical contact would comfort the woman or merely precipitate a flood of tears and she hated herself for her uncertainty. Fortunately Rose, far removed from adult inadequacies, was ready with a diversion. A passing waitress stooping over the high chair to goo-goo her admiration brought a plateful of cakes within reach of the little girl and she plunged her tiny fist into the mouth of a cream horn with great accuracy and equal enthusiasm.

  Daphne’s distress disappeared in the ensuing confusion and Ellie happily sat back and let her take control, only interfering when she started to wipe Rose’s hand with a napkin.

  ‘Let her lick it off,’ she said. ‘It’ll save on her next feed.’

  It was nearly midday when the two women left the coffee house.

  ‘Which way are you going?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Back to the car. I’m on top of the precinct.’

  ‘Me too. Forty p and vertigo just for parking your car. It’s a mad world,’ said Ellie.

  They made their way back to the main shopping precinct. The youths were still lounging around outside the Job Centre and the old people sitting on the benches round the fountain. Ellie had an unpleasant fantasy that what the youngsters were really doing was forming a queue, forty years long, for a place on one of those benches.

  They travelled up on the lift together. The shoppers’ car park was on the roof of the covered section of the precinct. It was joined by a bridge over the inner ring road to the multi-storey by the bus station. They found that their cars were parked quite close together.

  ‘At least there doesn’t seem to be any damage this time,’ said Daphne after a cursory inspection of her gleaming paintwork.

  ‘They’d need to wash mine before they could scratch it,’ said Ellie. ‘Was this where you were when you got vandalized?’

  ‘No, I was over the bridge in the multi-storey,’ said Daphne.

  ‘I suppose it’s much quieter over there,’ observed Ellie. ‘On this side you’ve got shoppers coming and going all the time.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Daphne, unlocking her car. ‘You need to be a policeman’s wife to think of things like that, though.’

  ‘Do you? How disappointing. I thought I’d worked it out all by myself with my little woman’s mind,’ said Ellie rather more acidly than she’d intended. ‘Next Monday then?’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ said Daphne, getting into her car. She closed the door and wound down the window.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it is your turn and I really don’t mind the Market Caff.’

  But Ellie laughed and said, ‘No, the Chantry’s fine. And if the brat’s going to make a habit of smashing her way into other people’s food, it’s as well to keep her out of range of hot meat pies. Ciao!’

  She watched as the Polo moved away. Daphne was a neat, confident driver.

  And then she set about the complicated business of persuading Rose, who now that she was deprived of her audience of admirers was showing signs of recalcitrance, to let herself be fastened into the baby seat in the rear of the Mini.

  She was still, or rather again, recalcitrant at eleven o’clock that night. Her distant protests were making Pascoe uneasy but Ellie whose ear was now finely tuned to Rose’s various wavelengths diagnosed prima donna bloodymindedness and made him sit still and enjoy his coffee.

  They’d eaten late. Pascoe had been delayed by the news of another robbery. A local family returning from holiday to their small country house had discovered that despite police-approved locks and burglar alarms, they had been burgled. There had been much indignation. Fortunately there was none waiting for him at home. Cold beef, an Italian salad and a bottle of Soave had not been spoilt by his lateness. Indeed it was the kind of meal which gained something from being consumed with the mild summer evening darkening outside the open french window. Ellie described her day in the kind of detail she tended to despise in other at-home mothers. But stories about her Rosie really were amusing, she assured herself only half ironically.

  ‘And did they charge you for the cream horn?’ enquired Pascoe.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Daphne picked up the tab.’

  ‘Good. You stick to paying in the Market Caff. Let the idle rich cough up in the Chantry!’

  ‘I don’t think she’s all that rich,’ protested Ellie.

  ‘Oh?’ said Pascoe. ‘Didn’t you say her pa was loaded down with ecclesiastical gold, or something?’

  Ellie poured more coffee and said, ‘It was marital rather than ecclesiastical gold, I gather. Presumably Daphne got what was left over from the deserving poor after Pa’s accident, but élitist expenses like school fees, not to mention the upkeep of that mansion, must all eat away at capital, I suppose. Though I presume Aldermann gets a pretty hefty wage packet.’

  ‘Probably. On the other hand he seems to have had a pretty chequered career. There must have been times when he was living largely off capital.’

  ‘Daphne didn’t say much about his career,’ said Ellie. ‘But once the tearful moment was passed, courtesy of the brat, we swapped courtship stories quite happily.’

  ‘Swapped?’ said Pascoe, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh yes. In full frontal detail, naturally. Our Patrick was articled to a firm of accountants in Harrogate who looked after a couple of her father’s church accounts. She’d popped in during her lunch-hour to pick up something for her pa and Patrick was the only person there. They chatted, lunched together, and it went on from there.’

  ‘Her lunch-hour, you said? What was her job?’

  ‘No job,’ grinned Ellie. ‘She was still at school. Sweet seventeen. Swish private school, of course, none of your common or garden comprehensives for Archdeacon Somerton’s only daughter. All went fairly smoothly for a while. Why shouldn’t it? She’d had other boyfriends. But things turned sour six months later on her eighteenth birthday when she announced she and Patrick were engaged to be married. There was opposition from Pa, more to the idea of an early marriage than to Patrick himself, I gather. But various elderly female relatives seem to have got in on the act. Of course, being eighteen, she was theoretically entitled to make her own decisions but you know how nasty things can be made for a kid that age. Then her father died. She obviously still feels guilty that they were at odds when he died. I think she always will.’

  ‘But it didn’t stop her marrying Patrick,’ said Pascoe. ‘This archdeacon – Somerton, did you say? – what did he die of?’

  ‘The church killed him,’ said Ellie dramatically.

  ‘Overwork, you mean?’

  ‘No. A coping stone fell off the belfry of St Mark’s at Little Leven while he was inspecting it. It cracked his skull.’

  Pascoe let out a long whistle.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Awful, but ironic,’ said Ellie.

  ‘I was thinking, fortuitous.’

  ‘
For Daphne, you mean? Come on!’ protested Ellie.

  ‘I meant for Patrick. People do seem to have a habit of shuffling off at his convenience, don’t they? Come to think of it, this is the second one you’ve drawn my attention to. You’re working well!’

  ‘Now look!’ protested Ellie. ‘I just thought I was having a nice gossip about a friend, which as everyone knows is what friends are for, and no harm done. You said you thought all this business was a lot of nonsense, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did, and I do,’ assured Pascoe. ‘But you mean if you thought that anything you told me might help prove that someone – Aldermann, say – was a murderer, you wouldn’t tell me?’

  Ellie considered this.

  ‘No,’ she said doubtfully. ‘But … well, it makes me feel like a grass. What’s worse, I don’t even get paid!’

  Suddenly Rose, whose protest had diminished to a somnolent mumbling, let out a high C followed by a cascade of sobs.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Ellie. ‘Now she really is unhappy.’

  ‘Shall I go?’ said Pascoe.

  ‘No. Pour us a drink. I’ll see to her. She’s probably just mucked up another nappy.’

  She left the room. Pascoe rose and poured two glasses of brandy. He took his to the open french window and looked out into his garden. No Rosemont, this, but a plot of well-clovered lawn, bordered with thripped and black-spotted roses and bounded by a sturdy beech hedge beyond which rolled open fields. When they bought the house, its situation had been nicely democratic, mid-way between the town and Ellie’s college. Now the college’s pleasant rural site was closing and when (or if) Ellie returned in September, it would be to a hideous midtown building which she asserted made the police station look like the Yorkshire Hilton. Recently Pascoe had been wondering if it might not be sensible to look for a house in town too. It would save the time and expense of travel and be better for all the services necessary to a young man with a growing family.

  But on evenings like this, with the air balmy and a broad-faced moon peering down from a still pale sky, he could imagine nowhere better. No, he didn’t really want to live closer to his work. It was bad enough not being able to get it out of his mind without being within dropinnable distance of the station. Even here and now, brandy in hand and beauty in view, he found his mind idly playing with the circumstances of the Reverend Somerton’s tragic death. A stone from a tower. Like the hammer of God! It would all be fully documented in the coroner’s records, of course. And there couldn’t have been anything suspicious …

  Ellie returned, nursing a still sobbing baby.

  ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘She’s not wet. She seemed a bit frightened. Perhaps she had a bad dream.’

  ‘A bad dream! What on earth can she have to dream about at her age?’ laughed Pascoe. ‘Here, give her to me.’

  He took the child and rocked her in his arms. The sobs continued.

  ‘Perhaps you really have been dreaming,’ he said. ‘Here, I feel a quote coming on. “A” level English, selections from Coleridge. He was always going on about his son. And once, when he awoke in most distressed mood – that doesn’t scan, does it? Then something about an inner pain having made up that strange thing, an infant’s dream. He was right, wasn’t he? What a strange thing an infant’s dream must be. If only you could tell us about it, Rosie.’

  ‘More to the point, what did Coleridge do about it?’

  Pascoe grinned and stepped out of the french window and raised his daughter skywards.

  ‘Peter! What on earth are you doing?’ cried Ellie in alarm.

  ‘What Coleridge did. Showing her the moon.’

  ‘He should have been locked up! And you too. She’ll catch her death. Give her here.’

  ‘No. Wait,’ said Pascoe. ‘Listen.’

  And as they listened the baby’s sobs began to change in key from minor to major till they were unmistakably gurgles of delight and she waved her small fists high towards the hanging moon.

  ‘Eat your heart out, Dr Spock,’ said Pascoe. ‘Me and Coleridge, we’ve got it made.’

  And Ellie, standing at the open window watching and listening to her daughter’s and husband’s delight, suddenly found herself wondering why she should feel it as pain.

  11

  DESPERADO

  (Bush. Vigorous, yellow flower shading to pink, ample foliage, scent faint.)

  From the top floor of the car park, Shaheed Singh had a splendid view over the city. The morning sun etched in every detail and he amused himself by picking out familiar landmarks from this unfamiliar viewpoint.

  Not in fact that it was totally unfamiliar. The city’s main bus station lay at the foot of the multistorey. From it a pedestrian underpass ran beneath the busy ring road to the town centre, on the fringe of which stood the comprehensive where Singh had been educated. Sometimes for a change he and his mates had eschewed the underpass and ridden the elevators to this top level, walked thence across the bridge to the shopping precinct roof-top car park and descended into one of the big stores. There had of course been delays for skylarking, rarely anything more serious than leaning over the bridge parapet and gobbing spit balls on to the cars far below, though occasionally a breakaway group had headed for Woolworths for a spot of shoplifting. Usually Singh had opted out of this, not so much on moral grounds as because, in a city which didn’t have a huge Asian community, he always felt he was the one likely to be spotted and remembered.

  When he’d joined the police cadets he’d felt at first that this quality of easy distinction might work to his advantage, but he’d soon changed his mind. The instinctive prejudice and the sheer bloody ignorance he’d encountered had shaken him deeply. On several occasions only his deep-rooted stubbornness had kept him going, the same stubbornness which had resisted all his father’s attempts to persuade him to work in the family business. Now it had become focused on Sergeant Wield. The CID were an enviable elite. The unspeakable Dalziel and the high-flying Pascoe were probably hardly aware of his existence. But Wield was, and Wield obviously rated him as useless. His coldly scornful attitude when he took him along to Rosemont, and indeed on every occasion that they met, made this quite clear. To make Wield admit he was wrong had become the boy’s main ambition.

  And this was why he was here now when he should have been with PC Wedderburn learning the arts of traffic control. The good-natured Wedderburn had readily let him beg off for fifteen minutes on personal grounds, but the fifteen minutes were already up and his clever idea had come to nothing. There’d been a couple of kids who’d got out of the lift five minutes before, but they hadn’t dallied as they made their way across the bridge to the precinct roof-top car park which already looked half full. The multi-storey on the other hand filled from the bottom up and on the top floor there were still only about ten cars parked.

  Singh glanced at his watch. He was late already. He was going to have to salve PC Wedderburn’s ire with gallons of tea and acres of bacon butties. So much for self-promotion to the CID.

  At this moment the lift doors clanged open and debouched five youths in a cacophony of laughter and football supporters’ cries. Singh had plenty of time to recognize two of them as old schoolmates of his, now on the dole, before they spotted him. One of them was a slight thin-faced lad called Mick Feaver, whose uncertainty of demeanour always gave him a not altogether false look of slyness. He had been something of a butt at school and tended to tag along with Jonty Marsh for protection. Marsh was even smaller than Mick Feaver but he had all the swagger of a banty-cock. He was a bold and lively extrovert, always the leader in any chosen activity and with a considerable contempt for the law. So far, he had narrowly avoided serious trouble himself, but took pleasure in boasting how others of his family, notably his elder brother, Arthur, had done time. Typically it was Marsh who spotted Singh first and, equally typically, his reaction was direct and uncomplicated.

  ‘Hey, there’s old Shady!’ he cried.

  He walked up to Singh, with Mick Feaver in hi
s usual pet-dog position a couple of feet behind. The other three, whom Singh only knew by sight, hung a little further back, regarding him suspiciously.

  ‘What’re you doing here, Shady?’ said Marsh. ‘What’s going off?’

  Singh nodded a greeting and said tersely. ‘Stake out.’

  Marsh let out a huge bellow of laughter.

  ‘What’re you staking out then, Shady?’ he demanded.

  Singh mixed truth with fiction and replied. ‘There’s been some mucking about with cars up here, so CID have put a watch on every morning.’

  ‘But you’re not CID,’ protested Marsh, who was no fool. ‘And it’s a daft spot to be standing if you’re supposed to be out of sight!’

  Shaheed Singh smiled, he hoped inscrutably, and improvised wildly.

  ‘Of course I’m not CID, you daft bugger!’ he said in a friendlier voice. ‘I’m just along with them as part of my training. When we saw you lot in the lift, I said I knew you and Mick, so they told me to have a word with you. Saves them breaking cover.’

  Marsh looked doubtful but Mick Feaver clearly swallowed this farrago of nonsense completely and stared around in anxious search of the hidden watchers while the other three, now within earshot, shifted uneasily and muttered among themselves.

  Singh, all too familiar with the symptoms of teenage guilt, exulted behind his superior smile. He’d guessed right! It had been this lot, or some of them at least. The seeds of the idea had been sown when he’d had that embarrassing encounter with his old schoolmates outside the Job Centre. And it had paid off!

  Then suddenly his triumph faded and he felt properly like a policeman for the very first time, as for the very first time he experienced the tension between the private man and the public servant, between the past and the present. It would be great to make his first nick, but it would be an agony he wasn’t yet prepared for to make it at the expense of Jonty and Mick.