They came into a village, clay and thatch cottages huddled round an unimposing but clinically perfect Norman church tower. Stammers turned into a close of some dozen modern council houses.
‘Including four old people’s bungalows. It’s one of the things this county does rather well. But there was more than the usual brouhaha when Emma Pascoe got an allocation. Some people can’t live and let live.’
She came to the door with the match-stick frailty of a body that was carrying on by some scarcely credible fluke. There was a hump between her shoulders that left her head and neck sagging with her face almost parallel to the ground.
But nothing was amiss with Emma Pascoe’s wits. She recognised Derek Stammers as if she had been expecting his visit; yet it was, he said, three or four years since she had seen him.
‘You can’t leave well alone, can you, you people?’
‘I’m not bringing trouble, this time.’
‘That’ll be the day. You’d best come in.’
‘It would be as well.’
Elspeth had made to stay in the car, but Derek thought otherwise.
‘If I’d a W.P.C. handy, I wouldn’t drop in on Emma without a chaperone. But don’t try to talk to her.’
The quarters were roomy enough for them not to overcrowd the place—an L-shaped room with cooking and storage angled off from eating and living. Most of the furnishings were poorish, immediate post-war. The Pascoes had not had much to bring out of Yarrow Cross with them. It was odds and ends, rather than major pieces, that pointed to the past: an ornamental clock with only an hour hand, a scene of classical mythology on its glass panel.
‘Why can’t you let him be? He’s only been out a fortnight.’
‘Who? Darkie, you mean?’
‘Who else? You haven’t come to arrest me, I hope.’ She spoke fluently but damply over toothless gums. If she had dentures, she was not wearing them.
‘I haven’t come to arrest anyone.’
‘He hasn’t been out a fortnight,’ she repeated. ‘And he’s been working since Monday.’
‘Working where?’
‘Catching turkeys.’
‘Sounds a bit seasonal,’ Kenworthy said.
Derek explained. ‘Turkey batteries. Massive scale. Local speciality. They’re trying to create a national demand for turkey all the year round. And someone has to catch the birds in the breeding sheds—ready for slaughter. A labourer catches something like a thousand birds a day. Lungful of feathers. And where’s Sammy these days, Ma?’
‘Still in Essex. And going straight.’
‘I hope Darkie will, this time.’
Stammers had grown out of the years when a new bout of freedom for Darkie Pascoe would have sent a chit round all divisions.
‘How many years of the last twenty has he spent inside, anyway?’
‘Sixteen. If you want it in months and days, I’ve got it written down.’
She moved towards a wad of papers stuffed into an old toast-rack.
Sixteen years: and there wasn’t an offence on the sheet that made an atom of sense: breaking in where there was nothing to take, trying to sell hot loot on the open market, hoping to kip down for a fortnight in a suburban semi while the owners were on holiday. There was nothing of the master-planner about Darkie Pascoe. Stammers was anxious to get rid of the subject; but some patience was still necessary.
‘Sammy’s not been in your hands fifteen years. Tom’s still at the garage. So it must be Darkie you’re after. Like you had him on suspicion in Wymondham market-place when he hadn’t been out a month. You got him a year for that—for standing looking at a fish-stall with his hands in his pockets.’
‘I didn’t. And I’ve told you: I’m not after anybody. Only information.’
‘You want me to put someone else away for you?’
‘No. I want your help to get someone off the hook.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it.’ But her curiosity was stronger than her bitterness. ‘Who is it, then?’
‘Nobody you know. At least, somebody you might have heard of.’
‘What sort of a riddle is that?’
‘Ma, I want you to try to cast your mind back to the early days of the war in Yarrow Cross.’
‘Oh, aye?’
And Stammers was helped to point the conversation. A vertical take-off jet, from the American base at Lakenheath, no stranger to south-west Norfolk, opened its taps somewhere on the sky-line.
‘Much troubled by low flying aircraft, Ma?’
‘We get used to them.’
‘It was a low flying aircraft I wanted to ask you about, Ma, one particular one, one that you might possibly remember.’
‘I know.’
‘You know. How do you know? Listen, Ma, I haven’t stopped telling you, yet.’
Kenworthy looked at her and wondered whether her faculties were indeed declining. But there was life and intelligence in her eyes, resentful as they were, blazingly angry, now, behind the folds of flaky skin. ‘I said, didn’t I, you can’t let well alone. Darkie had nothing to do with that.’
‘I’ve told you I’m not talking about Darkie.’
‘If you want to go digging up those years, why don’t you go and ask the Prudhoes? Ask Sally Hammond.’
‘Who’s Sally Hammond?’
She looked at him as if he were trying to tell her some outrageous lie. ‘Well, who else does he come back to see?’
‘Who? To see Sally Hammond? You mean Darkie?’
‘Darkie? What would Darkie be hanging about her for? I mean the airman. You know I mean the airman.’
‘Which airman is that, then?’
She looked as if she might be going to spit. ‘You make me sick,’ she said. ‘How many airmen have you got eating your heart out, then? All the others were killed when they crashed, weren’t they? I said to Darkie, “You have nothing to do with it,” I said. “It’ll bounce back on you”.’
Suddenly tears poured out over her cheeks and she began to sob as she talked. She had been talking to them from an aggressive stance on the hearthrug. Now Elspeth helped her to a chair.
‘Mr Stammers, don’t take Darkie away from me again. He’s always been good to me, has Darkie, kinder than either of the other two, though I’ve seen less of him than I have of them—thanks to you.’
Elspeth helped her to unscrew her handkerchief.
‘Mr Stammers, I’ve always played fair with you. You can’t say I haven’t. In those early days I had to believe, didn’t I, that a short sharp warning couldn’t do them any harm. Well, it did stop the other two. But Darkie’s had sixteen years behind bolts and bars, Mr Stammers, and now you’ve come back to something that happened while I was still calling myself a young woman.’
Stammers had no immediate come-back. Kenworthy sympathised. How could Derek ask any more questions without revealing how little they knew? And the moment she saw that, this old woman was going to clam up irretrievably. She was nothing like as naive as she was trying to make herself seem.
Kenworthy had meant to leave the talking to Stammers. He had honestly intended to stay somnolent in the back seat. Any contribution he might have made would have been a smiling, unobtrusive, side-of-the-mouth suggestion as they drove back along country lanes, well out of hearing of any of the principals.
But he could not resist intrusion now. He was in a position to question from ignorance. It was the essential advantage that Stammers lacked.
‘Mrs Pascoe, you must forgive me. ‘I’ve come new to all this. Down from London, a long way from Yarrow Cross in space and time. Who is Sally Hammond?’
She looked at him in visible uncertainty whether to play along with him or not. His blue eyes exuded deeply human understanding. He had the knack of focusing them beyond the person at whom he was looking, which gave an impression of penetration into depth. Nine-tenths of his success, his detractors said, came from his ability to inspire false confidence.
Elspeth waited with silent breath. She knew that the
human understanding was real, but she did not doubt his ability to make ruthless tactical use of it. Stammers stayed silent, content to withdraw; he might have his faults, and professional jealousy might have figured amongst them in his time, but it was not to the fore now.
Emma Pascoe returned Kenworthy’s gaze, her eyes looking up from their sockets in her effort to hold up her head. For silent seconds they confronted each other in acknowledged challenge.
‘You don’t know who Sally Hammond is?’
Her tone was difficult to analyse. There was more than an element of derision in it, the conscious superiority of sitting on knowledge that is wanted, however trivial it might be. But there was a certain teasing softness, too, a suggestion that she might be wheedled into talking, in her own time and on her own terms. Emma Pascoe had all the marks of a primitive; her outlook must surely be savagely parochial; now, ending her days in this Rural District old folk’s bungalow she was, at twelve miles, probably as far as she had ever been from where she was born. But there was a brute shrewdness in her intelligence, sharpened perhaps by the struggle her brain was having with the wearied flesh.
‘Why don’t you ask her herself who she is?’
Kenworthy refused to be tempted into the obvious. ‘I gather she was the young lady who waved to the airman,’ he said inconsequentially.
‘Sitting on the window-sill in her nightdress. Sally Carver she was, in those days. She’d have waved to an angel, if he’d dropped from the skies wearing uniform. It was in the Carver blood.’
Her eyes glittered, a plea to be pressed. But Kenworthy also knew how to tease.
‘Did you wave to the airman too?’ he asked her. And Emma Pascoe laughed, an unexpected mixture of cynicism and pure amusement.
‘I waved to a Volunteer, long before the first war. Only he didn’t come back looking for me.’
‘But the airman came for Sally?’
She could not help being scornful of his ignorance. ‘He was too late, wasn’t he? And he got into trouble for it—though nothing like the trouble he’s in this time.’
Again, Kenworthy chose to leave a major issue unexplored. The surrounding villages knew, of course, about the death of the lance-corporal; but it was interesting, to say the least, that the old woman had pin-pointed Milner.
Kenworthy let it slide; that horse would find its own way home in time, its bridle dangling. He hoped the point would not be lost on Derek. ‘He was too late, was he? But he did succeed in contacting her?’
‘You’d better ask her.’
‘I shall.’
‘Well, then.’
They looked at each other, stalemate threatened. But if Kenworthy was prepared to let the dialogue flag, the old woman wasn’t.
‘I could strike a bargain, Mr Londoner, for what I know about Sally Hammond.’
‘Kenworthy’s my name. And you couldn’t, because I’m not allowed to make bargains. I might be more efficient, in the short run, if they’d let me. But I’m glad they don’t. It would complicate life.’
‘How complicate it?’
‘When I’ve finished with a case I want to move on to the next without having to remember a new set of rules. And I like people to know where they stand with me, just as they know where they stand with you.’
‘They do that,’ she said.
Again a short silence. Kenworthy was winning: she was puzzled by him.
‘So you’ll be off to see Sally Hammond?’ she said at last.
‘If I can find her.’
‘That won’t be hard. Anyone can tell you—except him.’ A scornful dart of the eyes towards Derek. ‘Perhaps he’s never thought of looking. It takes a Londoner. You’ll find she’s changed, Mr Kenworthy. She’s not Sally Carver any more.’
‘No?’
‘She’s got what she deserved. And I say that, not knowing what might happen to me one day.’
‘Enigmatic,’ Kenworthy said.
‘That’s a big word, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘It means talking in riddles.’
‘I don’t have to talk in riddles, Mr Kenworthy.’
‘I know you don’t.’
Then Kenworthy seemed suddenly to change his mind about the whole issue; he smiled, he relaxed, he appeared to relent on all fronts. ‘All right. I’ll make no promises. But I will at least ask your price.’
‘Leave my Darkie out of it.’
‘That would be easier to consider if I knew just where he came into it.’
Emma Pascoe’s eyes had been restlessly shifting. Now they looked keenly into his. A truth had dawned on her, and she laughed: a cronish cackle that must have been rooted in poetic satisfaction.
‘You just don’t know, do you? You just don’t.’
‘No. I just don’t.’
‘Well, bloody well find out, then.’
Kenworthy got up and moved towards the door. ‘All right, we will. We’ll be back. What time did you say Darkie finishes work? Derek, I think you’ll be able to deal with him without my help, won’t you?’
Emma came over to him and grasped his wrists in fingers that were brittly thin but unexpectedly warm. ‘Don’t take Darkie away again. He’s done nothing this time.’
‘Perhaps it would help if you got Darkie to come and see us, then he can tell us just how big a nothing it is.’
‘You know it wouldn’t help—it wouldn’t help Darkie. You might not know, but he does. He knows that Darkie hasn’t the sense to speak up for himself, can’t open his mouth without landing himself in trouble. That’s how it’s been all along. That’s how he earns his living, tricking men like my Darkie into getting themselves put away for three quarters of their natural life.’
Derek shrugged off the onslaught. ‘Darkie’s been stupid all his life. And what have you ever done to help him? Have you ever told him that a job wasn’t safe to touch? Don’t you know how senseless he’s always been? Last time I talked to Darkie—and it’s a long time ago now, years—I told him: if he had a cast-iron alibi, he’d talk his way out of it.’
‘You’ve always picked on him.’
‘I’d say he’s always picked on me. Just couldn’t keep from under my feet.’
They came away. As he was reversing his car in the village close, Derek sighed. ‘I don’t think we should be too impressed by Emma Pascoe’s innuendoes.’
‘Nor should we underestimate them. We know there’s a connection between Milner and Darkie. That’s progress.’
‘But Emma doesn’t know what Darkie’s up to half the time. There was a time when she wasn’t past setting jobs up for the lads—and fencing stuff for them—till she found out the hard way she couldn’t trust them.’
‘I’d like to see Darkie’s record, chapter and verse.’
‘You shall.’
Stammers pulled up in a lay-by and asked over the car radio for the sheet to be photostatted and delivered to his home that evening. He also set his sergeant on the trail of Sally Hammond, née Carver.
‘Should be a matter of desk routine. And I’m grateful for your help, Simon. If time hangs heavy on your hands tomorrow, you’re welcome to chat up anyone you like. Lack of official standing might even be an advantage.’
‘Distinctly.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t like.’ Elspeth spoke from the back of the car.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘Edward Milner talked about being knocked about, on one of his previous encounters. I didn’t think we went in for that kind of thing.’
‘We don’t, not in my department, we don’t. I was nothing in those days; a mere nothing. I don’t know who authorised that—well, authorised is the wrong word.’
‘Blind eye to the telescope,’ Kenworthy said.
‘And, as Milner told you, it was the opposite of helpful.’
‘That man!’ It might have been Milner who was Elspeth’s brother. ‘The last man on earth to whom you or anybody else should have shown violence.’
‘I’ve already said, I didn’t.’
/> ‘And you didn’t kick up a fuss about it, either.’
Kenworthy felt obliged to bring in a more whimsical note. ‘The last man on earth—how often has he been the villain in your book, Derek?’
‘Seldom. Story-book stuff. Come back to the man you first thought of. That’s nearer my experience.’
‘And mine. But there have been exceptions.’
‘There’s one thing I would ask you.’ Stammers looked over his shoulder to take in Elspeth as well as Simon. Don’t talk to Diana about this. Case-work bores her. And frightens her too, sometimes.’
It was not until they were in their bedroom, getting ready for the evening meal, that Elspeth added her own postscript to this. ‘And he wouldn’t care for her to think that he was indebted to you for ideas or suggestions. I mean, not that Derek would mind. But I imagine that dear Di gets a bit repetitive at times. Is Derek a good policeman, Simon?’
‘A very good policeman indeed, I’d say.’
‘You’re not just being charitable?’
‘I don’t think so. We’re different, he and I. But if you set me down in his corner of the plain, I doubt whether I’d have got as far up the mountain as he has. In my world, there’s more than one route up the scree. Derek’s had to make it up the only track that was open to him. That means he must be damned good.’
‘But he’s lacking something, isn’t he? What is it, Simon? Imagination? And yet I’ve known him all these years, in so far as you can be said to know anyone, even your baby brother—three whole years between us! And I’d not have said that his imagination …’
‘Time!’ Kenworthy said. ‘That’s what he lacks. I mean, it seems to me that he’s trying to administer a department and still apply himself to all the detail. That doesn’t work these days, even in these wilds.’
‘It doesn’t leave him time for Diana, does it?’
‘Time to love her, you mean? I don’t mean make love to her.’
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