“I’m not down on you,” she said. “I just know how much you’ll beat up on yourself when you realize it’s revenge you’re after more than justice.”
“Oh yes? And is it simply justice you want for Carradice, or does being related come into it?”
“I held him in my arms, Pete.”
“He peed on you.”
“Rosie almost washed me away till I got the hang of it,” she said.
“He’s not Rosie,” he said, half angrily.
“I expect he was to someone. The same. You know what I mean.”
He began to see what was really bugging her. She believed in giving their daughter her own space to develop along the lines of her own personality. But what if after all their love, all their care, one of those lines led to an end as unforeseeably sad as Mick Carradice’s?
He looked for words to say, reassurances to offer which wouldn’t sound empty and banal. But she wasn’t done with him yet.
“That CAT stuff in your folder about the bodies, there were some notes attached you’d written yourself. Where did they come from?”
He’d no intention of letting her know he’d burgled Glenister’s office to get the original file but saw no reason to hide the fact that he’d talked to Mary Goodrich.
“And they’d really put the frighteners on her to keep her mouth shut,” he concluded, wanting to underline CAT’s suspicious behavior. As so often, her response leapfrogged his intention to a point he didn’t really want her to reach.
“Oh yes? So if she was so frightened, why did she talk to you?”
“She’s a good citizen,” he said lamely.
She was on him in a flash.
“You mean you found a way to make her talk even more frightening than CAT’s to keep her quiet? What did you use, Pete? A cattle prod?”
He was saved from having to mount what was at best going to be a retreating defense by a sudden fanfare of barking from Tig as he leapt out of his basket and ran into the entrance hall. Only the imminence of Rosie provoked this response. Not that it meant she was at the door, just that she was less than a mile away and getting closer. It was of course impossible for the dog to know this, but he was never wrong.
I live in a house where everyone knows more than I do, thought Pascoe. And in some cases more about me too.
He said, “End of our quiet weekend.”
“I didn’t notice it had started,” said Ellie.
And if the media pack get wind of your relationship with Carradice, you’ll be amazed at how much worse it can get, thought Pascoe. Suddenly home seemed not the best place to be.
“Tell you what,” he said. “All this stuff about terrorism and bombs and assassinations makes the thought of good old-fashioned traditional country entertainment seem rather attractive. Why don’t we compensate Rosie for missing out on her skating trip by accepting Squire Kentmore’s invite to his village fete?”
Ellie looked at him suspiciously. They heard the front door open and Tig’s barking rise to a crescendo.
“Let’s put it to she-who-must-be-obeyed,” said Ellie.
9
THE DECISIVE MOMENT
Kilda Kentmore stood at her bedroom window and watched the cars bumping across the field to the side of her house. This was the overflow car park. Not yet midday and already the main car-park must be full. The fine weather had brought the crowds out. Happily the same fine weather meant the ground surface was hard and firm. Last year it had rained, resulting in the double whammy of fewer visitors and the parking fields churned into a quagmire.
She yawned. For a long time after she’d been widowed, she hadn’t been able to sleep except when completely exhausted, and even then her terrible dreams had usually brought her cold and shaking back to the dark reality of life after very few minutes.
Well, she was over that now. Drink had helped, no denying that. But she was in control. There was a bottle of vodka on her dressing table. She could take a drink from it, or pour it down the loo, or just walk away from it.
That’s control. Running from it isn’t control, and hiding from it definitely isn’t.
Empty words she’d judged them when first she heard them, but they kept coming back till she acknowledged their truth. And the truth of the words that followed.
You need something, pointless denying it. But find something better. I’d guess you’ve got real talent. Use it.
At first this had come across as a clumsy nudge toward sex. Instead she now saw it as a clever nudge toward…not survival, she doubted if survival had ever been an option…but toward meaning, with the bonus en route of her first twelve-hour dreamless sleep from which she’d woken as fresh and bubbly as when she was a girl, with none of that back-of-the-eyes dullness which was the price she paid for punching herself unconscious with alcohol.
She picked up the photo of her husband that stood next to the bottle on her dressing table. In it he looked incredibly young and boyish, blond hair blowing in a stiff breeze as he stood in swimming trunks on the beach at Scarborough. Sometimes you had to wait an age for the Cartier-Bresson moment décisif, but occasionally it just happened. Not that she’d had any pretension to being a Cartier-Bresson, but she’d been making some headway out of the shallow waters of fashion photography when it happened. Maybe I should try photojournalism, she’d said to him when he told her the squadron was posted to Iraq. I could specialize in combat photography. Then I wouldn’t have to stay at home. No way, he’d replied, laughing. One crazy in the family’s quite enough. Go for grainy realism if you like, but no way do I want you within a hundred miles of a war zone.
She had photos of him in uniform, standing by his helicopter, and he’d even smuggled her onboard during a training flight and she had shots of him, very focused and professional, at the controls.
These she could not bear to have around her. In fact, until the last few weeks she hadn’t felt the least urge to use her camera equipment. But life—even pointless, unwished for life—is movement, one way or another.
She let her gaze drift from the photo to the mirror. She hadn’t put back on all the weight she’d lost in those first few months, but she was no longer the skeletal figure she had become for a while. OK, a lot of the restored calories might have come out of a bottle, but now this lean, taut body simply looked stripped for action.
She poured herself a glass of vodka. Her choice, her breakfast. Maurice had asked if she would be present at the fete’s official opening on the lawn in front of the big house. She’d replied with a cool, no. In fact, she’d gone on, I doubt if I’ll be in the mood for bucolic jollity at all. They were unbreakably linked by tragedy, but just because she shared a name with him and had not yet found the energy to break away from this grace-and-favor existence on the family estate didn’t mean she had to stand by his side at every public occasion. It was time he got himself a wife anyway. Someone like that Pascoe woman, strong, intelligent, passionate. It was a type he clearly admired. She might not be available, not for the moment anyway, but there must be plenty more like her swimming around, waiting to be trawled in.
She glanced through the window again, and lo and behold, there she was, Ellie Pascoe herself, climbing out of a dusty saloon, with her slim, sharp-eyed husband getting out of the driver’s door, and a young girl and dog spilling out of the back.
Now this was interesting. The woman had looked at her and not much liked what she saw. It had been fun to tease her by feigning to find her husband fuckable. As she’d said good night, she hadn’t thought there was a cat in hell’s chance of Maurice’s stupid suggestion being acted upon. What had happened to bring this about? Which of them had the impulse come from?
Unexpected things come in threes, whether good or bad. You break a cup at breakfast, there’ll be another couple of breakages before supper. You hear from a lost friend in the morning post, another two will emerge out of the mist before the day is out.
A green Skoda with a noisy engine nosed into the same row as the Pascoes. Out of the
driver’s door slid a young woman in slacks and a belly-exposing top. Kilda recognized her as Kalim Sarhadi’s fiancée, Jamila. They’d met before the show the previous night, then sat around talking for what seemed an age while they waited for the police to take statements from the two men and Ellie Pascoe. The identification was confirmed when Sarhadi emerged from the passenger door. Presumably it was her car. He was a poor student, he’d told them last night, making enough money from helping with his father’s taxi business to pay for his fees at Bradford University. She was a secretary in the university registrar’s office, which was how they had met.
Kilda had listened to their self-revelations with the minimum effort necessary to conceal total uninterest, but Maurice had visibly basked in the young woman’s gratitude at his intervention during the threatened attack on Sarhadi. The young couple had also been invited to attend the Haresyke fete, but Kilda would have given even longer odds against their appearance than the Pascoes’.
As she watched, Ellie Pascoe spotted Sarhadi and called out to him. He turned, looked blank for a second, then recognized her. The two groups joined, Pascoe was introduced. The child also. Jamila looked ready to make much of her, but the girl quickly spotted that neither of the newcomers was particularly enthusiastic about the attentions of the small dog and responded with indifferent politeness.
Takes after her mother, judged Kilda. Quick judgments, doesn’t much care if they show. Unlike her husband, whose judgment was probably as keen if not keener but who knew how to mask its conclusions with smiling courtesy.
So, two unlikely events in a morning. She could either sit around and await the third, or forestall fate by creating it.
Only Maurice would really know how unlikely it was that she’d appear at the fete, but that ought to be enough. It might be interesting to see the slim cop again. While she’d done the cool flirtation thing to irritate his bossy wife, there had definitely been the whisper of a connection there.
She walked through her shower, dressed, breakfasted on crisp bread and black coffee, and made for the door.
Here she paused, then turned and ran lightly up the stairs and took her favorite Nikon off the top shelf of the wardrobe where it had been lying gathering dust ever since…
She pushed the thought from her mind and checked the battery. It was long dead, but she had plenty of spares in her darkroom.
A fly had buzzed in through the open window and was perched on the rim of the untouched glass of vodka.
“Have this one on me,” she said and a few moments later left her darkroom to go out into the sunshine.
10
QUEEN OF THE FETE
Saturday got off to a bad start. Not all your fault, thought Ellie Pascoe, but you certainly didn’t help. What you need’s a long PIN you’ve got to enter before you can punch the explosion button!
Rosie’s return had brought truce, and when the child had made it clear that whatever they did that day didn’t matter as long as they all did it together, going to the Haresyke fete began to seem not such a bad idea.
Within half an hour of arrival, it began to seem a very good idea indeed.
As they wandered round the stalls in the warm sunshine, she saw her husband relaxing into a condition as close to his old self as he’d been since the Mill Street explosion. Meeting Sarhadi and his fiancée had helped. He seemed to take to the young man, and as for Jamila, the company of a bright and attractive young woman rarely failed to regress him to the lively, laughing student he’d been when Ellie first met him.
Ellie was able to enjoy the transformation with no hint of jealousy. She liked the girl herself, and more importantly it was clear the girl thought the sun shone out of her fiancé’s big brown eyes. Jamila, she discovered, was third-generation British and in her speech and dress was so indistinguishable from her Anglo-Saxon coevals, that Ellie wondered how this went down with traditionalists at the mosque.
A firm believer that the first step to finding answers was to ask questions, she said casually, “God, I wish I still had the figure to wear a top like that.”
“You look great to me,” said Jamila with a pleasing sincerity.
“Thank you kindly, but once you get a bulge, even if it’s still bike tire rather than the full Michelin, I think it’s best to keep it under wraps.”
“Maybe, but a lot of the oldies down the mosque would reckon I’m far too skinny. They love a bit of bulging.”
“So you don’t get any aggro for the way you dress?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “All the time, but not from my family, and that’s all that matters to me. Of course I wouldn’t go near the mosque looking like this. Next week I’ll be wearing the full trad kit for my wedding. That should take the bangers by surprise.”
“The bangers?”
“Headbangers. That’s what I call these lads who creep around Sheikh Ibrahim like he’s a prophet or something. Kalim says I shouldn’t provoke them but they don’t bother me. Anyway, they’re all blow. They rattle on about how I ought to be disciplined for the way I dress and talk, but the Sheikh keeps them in order ’cos I’m Kalim’s girl.”
“So Kalim and the Sheikh are close?” probed Ellie, remembering the young man’s defensive attitude about Al-Hijazi on Fidler’s Three.
“Sort of,” said the young woman hesitantly. “A lot of the time they’re right in each other’s face about politics. He’s funny, the Sheikh. Sometimes he sounds like he wants to set a torch to most of the West, other times he’s even more laid back than my dad.”
“So you don’t think there’s anything in what some of the papers say about him encouraging his followers to commit terrorist acts?”
The girl did not reply straightaway and Ellie thought she’d over-stepped the mark but it seemed Jamila was only getting her thoughts together.
“I think what Kal says about him is likely right. He doesn’t encourage the bangers to break the law, but some of them are brain-dead enough to imagine he does, and mebbe he ought to take more care of that.”
“Ellie,” called Pascoe. “Do you know where Rosie’s got to?”
“I thought you were watching her,” said Ellie. “Sorry, Jam, we’d better find her.”
“She can’t come to much harm here,” said the girl reassuringly.
“It’s not her I’m worried about,” said Ellie. “We’ll probably see you two later.”
It didn’t take long to locate their daughter, as the fete wasn’t all that extensive. The setup was deliciously old-fashioned, not in any self-conscious retro fashion but because this was the way they’d been doing things for years and no one saw any good reason to change. A crowd of kids had attracted Rosie to a stall where for twenty pence you got three chances to precipitate one of the village schoolteachers into a trough of water by hitting a wooden lever with a well-aimed rubber ball. Rosie’s daily routine of hurling Tig’s ball as far as possible for at least an hour had built up a good throwing action. Her first success won rapturous cheers from the watching children, redoubled when Tig, imagining this was all for his benefit, plunged into the water alongside the drenched pedagogue. By the time her parents tracked her down, she had repeated her success twice, and her many new friends were ready to elect her Queen of the Fete.
She didn’t want to be parted from them and sent her parents on their way, having made it clear she found their concern agonizingly embarrassing.
“Reminds me of you,” said Pascoe as they walked away. “Willful, loud-mouthed, anti-authoritarian…ouch!”
They made no special effort to seek out Maurice Kentmore but a little later, as they paused before the bottle stall, Ellie did wonder aloud if maybe he wasn’t there.
“Probably declares the show open, then retreats for a sherry in his library, leaving a couple of mastiffs at the front door to repel the malodorous peasantry,” said Pascoe.
“Did I hear the word sherry? There was a rather nice bottle of amontillado somewhere. It’s great to see you both again. I’m so glad you decided to c
ome.”
Kentmore in his shirt sleeves emerged from beneath the stall, flourishing a large bottle of Windsor sauce which he handed to a small woman who examined the sell-by date with a jay’s beady eye before paying an absurdly small sum and moving off.
“Now that amontillado,” he said. “Ah, here we are. I can recommend it, as I donated it myself. It’s marked up at two quid. At that price I’m tempted to buy it back!”
Pascoe was no great fan of amontillado but he felt guilty that Kentmore might have caught more of his comment than the word sherry.
As he paid he said, “Are you on here all day?”
“Neglecting my squirely duties of twirling my mustachios and ogling the milkmaids, you mean?”
So he had heard. Oh well. At least he was smiling about it.
“Nothing so responsible, I fear,” the man went on. “I am the lowest of the low, a general dogsbody. I wander around and whenever a stall minder wants a break, I step into the breach. Out of which I am about to step, as I see Miss Jigg returning. You two fancy a sit-down and a snack? Our local ladies could bake for Old England.”
They followed him to a refreshment tent. He sat them down at a table in the open air, vanished inside, and returned with a small tray on which rested a teapot, milk jug, cups and saucers. Behind him came a pretty girl, well worth an ogle, carrying a much larger tray with sandwiches and cakes.
Pascoe sampled the cakes. Kentmore hadn’t oversold the baking ladies. They were delicious. Then a hand rested lightly on his shoulder and Kilda’s voice said, “Peter, Ellie, isn’t this nice? Maurice, I see they’ve worked you off your feet already.”
“Kilda, you’ve surfaced,” said Kentmore. “I was just thinking about sending a search party down to your house.”
The woman gave Pascoe’s shoulder a last little squeeze then slipped onto a chair, putting her camera on the table.
Death Comes for the Fat Man Page 19