A Killing Kindness

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I was merely expressing surprise at the depth of your knowledge of prehistory,’ he protested speciously.

  She looked sheepish.

  ‘I know about as much as you,’ she admitted. ‘That’s why I wanted the transcript. Thelma was in on the dig, it’s one of her hobbies. I thought she might be able to put me right.’

  ‘A lady of many parts, that one,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mainly untouched by human hand, or so she would have us believe.’

  ‘What on earth can you mean?’ she said, grinning.

  ‘All right,’ he said, opening his briefcase. ‘Here it is. We’ve got a copy at the station, but don’t lose it all the same. Though strictly speaking, it’s hardly an official document! And in return, promise me you won’t let those viragos con you into taking on more than you can cope with. OK?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

  He kissed her again, sternly, and left.

  But as he backed out of the drive he suddenly thought pterodactyls! and chuckled so much he almost hit the milkman.

  Nevertheless something of what Ellie had said must have tickled his subconscious, for when he found himself crawling in the nine o’clock traffic which seemed likely to stretch all the way to ten, almost without taking a conscious decision he turned down a side street and ten minutes later found himself driving through the gates of Charter Park.

  The dry weather had baked the ground so hard that even the odd thunderstorm hadn’t softened it and the turf was very little cut up so far. But it was well worn and strewn with litter like the route of a Blind School paperchase. Pascoe wondered how long the fair would survive. It had changed considerably even in the comparatively few years he had known it.

  Up until the First World War it had been one of the great horse-fairs. There were still people who could recall the days when drovers and gypsies came from all over the North and the roadsides for miles on the approaches to the town were lined with caravans, not the sleek, shining motorized caravans of today, but the old wooden ones, gold and green and red and blue. Gradually during the century, its character had changed in the direction of a pure pleasure fair, but horses had still been sold as recently as the early ’sixties. But there had been growing complaints, not least from the regular fairground people who considered themselves several cuts above the Romanys and objected to their presence on all kinds of grounds, notably their hygienic deficiencies, both human and equine. The Showman’s Guild added its weight to the protests and when a small herd of gypsy ponies broke loose from the Park and trotted through the centre of town, causing several accidents and much indignation, horses were finally banned from Charter Park. There was still a small gypsy presence at the Fair, but the main gypsy encampment was now on a stretch of the old airfield to the south and most of their business was done door-to-door rather than at the fairground.

  So pleasure had won the day, but even the taste for pleasure changes and fairs are limited in the ways they can keep up with these changes. Also, though in the past this had traditionally been the city’s holiday fortnight, and many people still stuck to the habit, many more objected to being told when they should or should not go on holiday. Another decade, thought Pascoe, and the High Fair could well be another casualty in the war for individual rights.

  But at the moment it still covered a great deal of ground. Quiet now, though there was plenty of movement in the caravan park, his mind peopled it with the milling crowds of a hot summer’s night. After ten-thirty when the pubs closed, there would have been a new influx of noisy and not very perceptive pleasure-seekers. Easy for one girl, or one couple, to pass unnoticed here. But how had Brenda Sorby got here in the first place?

  Pascoe walked slowly over the fairground, deep in thought. One possibility was that the girl had met someone she knew on the way home last Thursday night and accepted an invitation to go to the fair. But it was after eleven P.M., so he would have needed to be very persuasive. Perhaps she had simply been offered a lift home and it wasn’t till the car was moving that the Fair had been mentioned. By the time they got here, the storm would have broken, the crowds be heading for home. But that still left the fair people who would be clearing up, mopping up, counting up for another hour or so. So had she just sat in the car for that time? Perhaps she was already dead or unconscious? Perhaps …

  He was walking past a fortune-teller’s tent and the sight of it made him think of Sergeant Wield’s experience the previous day. He had recounted it jokingly to Ellie when he got home but she had not been amused. It strikes me you can do with all the help you can get, she had said. She seemed to be taking these murders very personally. Perhaps an emotional side effect of her condition? He had had more sense than to say so!

  He reached the small landing-stage where the hire-boats were moored.

  Joe, the boatman, was not there yet for which Pascoe was grateful. He was the kind of surly suspicious Yorkshireman who at birth probably examined his mother’s breast closely for several minutes before accepting the offer. But at least he made a definite witness.

  No, he didn’t recognize the photo of Brenda Sorby. No, there was no boat unaccounted for. No, there was no one who had come back alone.

  Forced to admit that the sudden storm had brought the boaters back in a bit of a rush, he grudgingly conceded that a foursome might have come back as a threesome. But no singles, and he’d seen ’em all. Rain or no rain, he checked the gear in each boat before refunding the two pound deposit; and all deposits had been returned.

  But the Choker must have used a boat. The nearest bridge giving access to the isthmus was a mile downstream, too far to risk carrying a body. In any case, why come so far to dump it?

  The only alternative was that the Choker was one of the barge people, a theory approved by Andy Dalziel who tended to lump all people who lived itinerant lives together as ‘dirty gyppos’. Pascoe, however, had done a paper at university on the education of ‘travelling children’ in England and knew that the attitudes and lifestyles of the different societies varied considerably. Fairground and circus folk, for instance, were generally speaking much concerned about their children’s schooling, and where they could afford it, often sent them to private boarding-schools. Gypsies on the other hand were much more suspicious of ‘the system’, and much more conscious of their independence from it, a consciousness which made integration of their children into any conventional school much more difficult. The barge people in the same way had once presented an even greater problem, but one which had been in part solved by time and the disappearance of their way of life as canal traffic ceased to be economically viable. There were signs of a resurgence recently and no doubt, thought Pascoe, the problem too would return.

  Meanwhile he had ensured that everyone in any kind of craft on the canal that night was traced and interviewed. All had been in company, all reasonably alibied, none had heard anything. In any case the signs were that the girl had been put into the water from the bank, not a boat. There were traces of mud on her dress corresponding to that in a shallow groove in the bank close by the place where the body was found.

  Pascoe glanced at his watch. Brooding time over, he decided. There was work to be done. He began to retrace his steps.

  The fairground was livelier now. Business wouldn’t really get under way till much later in the morning, but meantime there were things to be done, machinery to be checked and oiled, canvas covers removed, brass to be polished. At side-stalls like the rifle-range and the hoopla there were the gimcrack prizes to be set out, gun-sights to check in case they had deviated to accuracy, and hoopla rings in case they had stretched to go over the whisky bottle.

  By the fortune-teller’s tent a young woman in jeans and a yellow suntop was talking to a man in a tartan shirt and brown cords, gaitered militarily above ex-army boots. He was about forty with the knitted brow and dark craggy good looks of a Heathcliff.

  They looked at Pascoe as he passed and the man said something.

  A moment later Pascoe stopped and turned
as the woman’s voice called, ‘Excuse me!’ She had started after him. The man watched for a moment and then strode away towards the trailer park.

  ‘Aren’t you one of the policemen?’ said the girl. Anyone under twenty-five now qualified as a girl, Pascoe realized ruefully. This one certainly did; fresh young skin, clear brown eyes, luxuriant auburn hair escaping from the green and white spotted bandanna which she had tied around it.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Pascoe. ‘Does it stand out?’

  ‘I saw you the other day, I think,’ said the girl, evading the question. Pascoe nodded. It was likely. He had spent a great deal of time here on Friday afternoon.

  ‘You work here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  Without waiting for his answer she set off towards the fortune-teller’s tent and lifted the flap.

  Pascoe paused before the entrance, partly to establish his independent spirit, partly to read the sign. Madame Rashid, it said, Interpreter of the Stars, Admission 50p. The lettering was pseudo-Arabic and the words were surrounded by a constellation of varying hues and shapes.

  ‘The price of the future’s gone up,’ he said.

  ‘You should try having a full horoscope cast,’ she said seriously. ‘Besides, we’re not allowed to tell the future.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, of course you would. Won’t you come in?’

  He passed by her under the flap.

  It was a bit of a disappointment, reminding him more of a Boy Scout camp than the Eastern pavilion he had half expected. The smell was of damp canvas and trodden grass and the only furniture was a plain trestle table and two folding chairs.

  A suitcase lay on the table and she pointed to this as if sensing his disappointment and said, ‘It looks better when I get the props out.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Pascoe. ‘What did you want to see me about Miss-er-Rashid?’

  She laughed, very attractively.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m Pauline Stanhope.’

  She held out her hand. He took it. The name sounded familiar.

  ‘And I’m Detective-Inspector Pascoe,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you must be. It’s about yesterday, Inspector Pascoe. Won’t you sit down?’

  He unfolded the chairs and they sat opposite each other at the table, as though for an interrogation. Or a fortune-telling. It depended on your point of view.

  ‘Yesterday?’

  Yes. Aunt Rose was very upset when she read the paper.’

  ‘Was she?’ said Pascoe.

  Aunt Rose? Of course, Rosetta Stanhope. And this was the niece.

  ‘Rosetta. Rashid,’ he murmured as the enlightenment spread.

  ‘That’s right. I’m sorry. I thought you’d know all about us. All those questions.’

  ‘Think of all those answers, Miss Stanhope,’ he said sadly. ‘Someone has to edit.’

  Everyone who worked on the fairground had been questioned, naturally. Everyone who admitted visiting it on Thursday night also. Everyone who lived on the same street as the Sorbys. And the next street. And maybe the next. Everyone who worked with her. Everyone who lived on the streets she would have walked through on her way home from the broken-down car. Everyone who had a barge or a cruiser or a craft of any kind which could have been anywhere on that stretch of the canal that night.

  The questioning was still going on, was likely to continue till Christmas. Or the next murder.

  ‘My sergeant seemed to have heard of your aunt,’ he said cautiously. ‘But he didn’t mention any connection with the Fair.’

  ‘Mr Wield, you mean. He’s awfully nice, isn’t he? It’s a bit complicated, I suppose. Family history usually is.’

  ‘Perhaps you could give me a digest, if you think it would be helpful, and if you don’t have to stray much beyond the Norman Conquest,’ said Pascoe.

  She grinned.

  ‘I see where Mr Wield gets his cheek from,’ she said. ‘The thing to understand is that originally Aunt Rose is a Lee on her father’s side, a Petulengro on her mother’s.’

  ‘You mean the Romany families?’

  ‘You know something about gypsies?’

  ‘I’ve read my George Borrow,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘An expert!’ she said. ‘That must be very useful when it comes to moving them on.’

  Pascoe raised his eyebrows and the girl had the grace to look a little embarrassed before carrying on.

  It emerged that years earlier, Rosetta Lee, then nineteen, had met, loved and married ex-sergeant Herbert Stanhope, just demobbed from the Yorkshire Rifles and, after five years spent risking his life to protect the old folk at home, not in any mood to take heed of their melancholy warnings. The couple married and lived happily and childlessly until twelve years later when Stanhope’s younger sister turned up pregnant and husbandless and not at all contrite. But she effaced her sin in the best nineteenth-century manner by dying in childbirth, leaving the Stanhopes with Pauline on their hands. Thereafter they lived even more happily for another twelve years till an accident at the railway marshalling yard where Stanhope worked killed him.

  ‘Aunt Rose knew it was going to happen,’ said Pauline.

  ‘Why didn’t she stop him going to work?’ enquired Pascoe, trying not to sound ironic.

  ‘If you know it, then essentially it’s already happened so you can’t possibly stop it,’ said Pauline as if she were talking sense.

  ‘And you? Do you have this – er – gift too?’

  ‘Oh no!’ she said, shocked. ‘I’m a fully qualified horoscopist and a pretty fair palmist but I’ve got no real psychic powers. Aunt Rose is different. She’s always had the real gift. Her grandmother was a chovihani, that’s a sort of gypsy witch. She really looked the part, not like Aunt Rose. But Aunt Rose has got the greater gift. She’s a true psychic, that’s the fascinating thing. It’s not just a question of fortune-telling, but she really makes contact. Well, you know that yourself from the other day.’

  Pascoe nodded, looking as convinced as he was able.

  The girl continued, ‘It was strange how it developed in a gorgio society. Perhaps all the trappings and superstition of Romany life are a limiting factor, you know, they make a little go a long way but stop a lot from going as far as it might. That was what one of the researchers from the Psychic Research Society said.’

  ‘Your aunt is famous, then?’

  ‘Oh no!’ said the girl, ‘But she’s well known in interested circles. Really all she wants is a quiet life, but she’d always been willing to help friends out.’

  ‘For free?’

  ‘At first. But inflation nibbled away at the pension Uncle Bert left her and she’d had to charge fees to make both ends meet. But she’s very careful in accepting clients.’

  Gullibility being high on her list of criteria? wondered Pascoe.

  ‘Normally she’d have steered clear of a case like Mrs Sorby’s, but Mrs Sorby had been coming to her for years, ever since her mother died. Mr Sorby objected but she still kept coming. Naturally when this awful thing happened, Aunt Rose had to help.’

  ‘Naturally. What’s your part in all this, Miss Stanhope?’

  The girl shrugged.

  ‘I had an office job, but it was pretty deadly. I’d picked up a lot of things from Aunt Rose, she brought me up, you see. Well, I’m not Romany, so I didn’t have anything of her gift, but I got quite interested in casting horoscopes. It’s pretty scientific that, you only need a very limited degree of sensitivity. Palmistry the same. I got myself properly qualified and gave up the office to work at it full time alongside Aunt Rose. But it’s her I want to talk about, Inspector. That awful newspaper story really upset her.’

  Pascoe looked surprised. The Evening Post had been fairly restrained, he thought.

  ‘It didn’t much please my superintendent either,’ he said.

  ‘Aunt Rose doesn’t mind helping the police, but this makes her sound like a real sensatio
nalist,’ said the girl, producing a newspaper.

  The mystery was solved. This was not the Evening Post but that morning’s edition of one of the more lurid national tabloids. Obviously one of the local reporters was a stringer for this rag and knew that provincial standards had very little selling power. Pascoe glanced through the article. Its main source was Mrs Duxbury, the neighbour. She gave a graphic account of what Mrs Stanhope had said before being awoken from her trance. Embellished by Fleet Street licence, the occasion sounded like something out of Dennis Wheatley. Much play was made of the fact that Rosetta Stanhope was also Madame Rashid (Mrs Duxbury again?), fortune-telling in the very fairground where Brenda had been murdered. Not even a perhaps, thought Pascoe. He wondered if Dalziel had seen it yet.

  ‘Auntie was really upset this morning,’ continued the girl. ‘Too upset to work, so I’ll be on by myself all day.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Pascoe conciliatingly.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ she flashed. ‘It’s not that. It’s Auntie’s reputation. You may be the police but you’ve no right to exploit her name like this.’

  ‘Reputation?’ said Pascoe, beginning to feel a little irritated. ‘Surely you’re rating all this stuff a little bit high, aren’t you, Miss Stanhope? I mean, that sign outside! Isn’t this just the bottom end of the entertainment business?’

  He didn’t want to sound sneering and the effort must have shown for the girl was equally and as obviously restrained in her reply.

  ‘Aunt Rose is Romany. She’s never turned her back on that all these years she’s lived among gorgios. This used to be mainly a Romany Fair, Inspector. Now what with one thing and another, the only gypsy presence you get here is a couple of tatty stalls and a bit of cheap labour round the fringes. Dave Lee, for instance, his grandfather …’

  ‘Who’s Dave Lee?’ interrupted Pascoe.

  ‘I was just talking to him,’ said the girl ‘I suppose he’s a kind of cousin of Aunt Rose’s. His grandfather might have brought two, three dozen horses here, being a big man. Now he helps around the dodgems while his wife sells pegs and bits of lace. He’s not allowed to bring the ponies he still runs anywhere near the park! This tent is the last real link between the fair today and what it used to be for centuries. There was a fortune-teller’s tent on this pitch before there was a police force, Inspector. Not even the big show-people with their roundabouts dare interfere with that. And for nearly fifty years it was run by Aunt Rose’s grandmother. When she died four years ago, that looked like the end. Oh, there were fakes enough who might have taken over, but the Lees have more pride than that. So Aunt Rose stepped in. For a couple of weeks a year she’s back in the family tradition, in the old world.’