‘It seems to me that Milner is giving her all the emotional support that her condition needs.’
‘That is my impression, too. I’m glad of it. And quite why you should think that Milner murdered Darkie Pascoe …’
‘We don’t.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘I wish I could help you, then. But I’m afraid I can’t.’
Behind them, high on the wall, were two portraits in dark oils; not Rembrandtesque, the shadows were mere shadows. And they had the effect of a whole ancestral gallery. It was like talking in the presence of onlookers. Prudhoe had a self-sufficiency that it was going to be very difficult indeed to puncture.
‘I visited Sally Hammond earlier today,’ Kenworthy said.
‘How was she?’
‘I left her in the hands of a physio-therapist.’
‘A placebo,’ Prudhoe said.
‘You think so?’
‘I’m sure of it. There’s nothing much they can do for her. But I’m glad the N.H.S. doesn’t stint such gestures. Her spinal cord, you know, was irremediably damaged.’
‘In the accident?’
‘Accident!’
His tone was sourness rather than contempt.
‘But of course, you won’t have had time to dig out that file yet.’
‘Perhaps you could fill me in.’
‘A nut sheered off in the steering linkage. They hit a tree at forty miles an hour. She was in the passenger seat.’
‘Nasty.’
‘The day after an MoT test.’ Prudhoe let it sink dramatically in.
‘The insurance company must have had something to say about that.’
‘They did. They had to agree that no MoT test is a guarantee of positive performance two minutes after the vehicle is back in circulation. It’s a filter for keeping obvious unroadworthiness off the road, nothing more. The mechanic swore that there was no play in the steering-box when he tested the car. There may not have been.’
‘But you’re implying …’
‘A charge of dangerous driving was brought against Brian Hammond to establish a verdict. It was, of course, thrown out. And certain facts were not mentioned in evidence.’
‘Which you knew about?’
‘As it happens.’
And suppressed? Or were a party to suppressing?’
‘A sin of omission. Nobody asked. And if they had, we could only have made things worse for Sally, who was an innocent party, anyway.’
‘Innocent of what?’
‘Of damned negligence. At least, that’s the lowest at which I would rate it with any certainty. You might be able to make more of it.’
‘Do, please, be explicit.’
‘No. It will come with greater force if you unravel it for yourself.’
‘I haven’t time for parlour games, Mr Prudhoe.’
‘I’m an interested party. And what I tell you is only hearsay. You’ll have to go from me to source, whatever I tell you.’
‘What source?’
‘Go to the Threeways Garage, Pitney St Mary: it’s about eight miles north west of the training area. A small forecourt and service station. The one where Tom Pascoe works.’
‘Does he, by Jove?’
‘Oh, I can see your eyes lighting up. Believe me, that has no sinister significance. Tom Pascoe is a mechanical genius, in one direction only: the internal combustion engine. I’ll tell you this: if my garage couldn’t diagnose a fault first time over, I’d as soon Tom Pascoe looked at it as any man I know. Or not look, listen. He can hear a sickness in a car in ten seconds, whether it’s a whine in a bearing or a stoppage in a compensating jet. He’s worth his weight in radioactive isotopes to the man he’s working for. Oh, and incidentally, they don’t use him for MoT testing. On paper he couldn’t pass an elementary fitter’s entrance test.’
‘But I suppose he did most of the work on Brian Hammond’s car?’
‘No. He didn’t. I may as well tell you but you’ll have to do it all again from scratch, obviously. Hammond’s car had failed its test at Downtown Motors. Two days later, he put it in at Threeways and it passed. Nothing had been done to it in the meanwhile.’
‘So he’d shopped around. It’s not uncommon.’
‘It may not be uncommon, but it’s irresponsible. Either Hammond didn’t believe the Downtown report, or he couldn’t afford to have his car off the road, or he hadn’t the ready cash for stripping the steering down. In my view, he simply lacked the imagination to see what might happen. He sheltered behind a garage that skimped its job.’
‘And none of this came out?’
‘Downtown didn’t come forward. They were not obliged to. Other people who knew kept quiet. Hammond kept mum. Sally, of course, was hors de combat.’
Kenworthy thought it over. ‘Negligence, you said and nothing more sinister?’
‘No. But it hasn’t been investigated. And there could be possibilities.’
‘Well, thank you, Mr Prudhoe. It’s a pity …’
‘That I didn’t set in motion something that might have deprived the Hammonds of their compensation?’
‘I doubt whether it would, in fact.’
‘At the best it would have involved them in a long and harassing wait when they’d plenty of other things to be harassed about.’
The old man leaned forward. ‘You’re talking about this accident that involved the Carver girl?’
‘We are,’ Kenworthy said.
‘I do wish you’d wear your aid, father.’
‘You know it makes me even worse.’
‘What is your main source of information about Yarrow Cross?’ Kenworthy asked.
‘A service rather less closely knit than the C.I.A.’
Perhaps Prudhoe was not entirely humourless. But his lighter remarks were either poker-faced or purely accidental.
‘From Robert Whittle, mainly, one of our tenant farmers, and I don’t hesitate to say, our right-hand man. Dispossessed of his living at the same time as I was of mine. And one of my platoon sergeants, over the operative years. So I brought him over here with us. He still goes back quite often. He has hundreds of relatives.’
‘They were flint-knappers for generations,’ the old man said. Intermittently, his hearing seemed to be faultless. But his son continued as if there had been no interruption.
‘You are welcome to go and see him. You met him on the steps as you were coming in. I think you would find him a very open individual, an irrepressible talker, with a fund of anecdotes, many of them pointless, about what it amuses him to call the royal and ancient days. Perhaps I should warn you in advance that his loyalty is unimpeachable. What he will tell you will be no whit different from what you learn from me.’
Again, was this dubious facetiousness; or was it a warning? There was something twisted and brooding in this fellow. Kenworthy was doubly glad now that he had not come privateering to this hearth. The consequences could have been historic.
‘One wonders,’ the old man said, ‘if the eminent policeman of today knows what a flint-knapper is.’
‘Roughly, I think,’ Kenworthy said. But the old man did not return his smile. No one had smiled since Kenworthy had come into the house.
‘I was talking to a Norfolk colleague only the other day, and he wasn’t sure whether there’s a practitioner or two still left in Brandon.’
‘Were there any other major questions, Chief Superintendent?’ The younger Prudhoe was not interested in flint-knappers.
‘I don’t think so, at this stage, thank you.’
‘And do you want to go over and see Whittle? I’ll come over with you, if you like. It’s not all that easy to find in the dark.’
‘Thank you, but I hardly think …’
Mervyn Prudhoe came to the steps with Kenworthy, stood leaning on his stick with its handle turned forwards from him, the opposite way from which most men would hold it. Only a little thing; was it part of an elitist pose?
Chapter Eleven
Kenworthy arrived back to Elspeth at the White Hart without having fitted in an evening meal. But the night porter, looking as if the feat was worth the tip of a life-time, managed to produce a bottle of light ale, well and truly chambré. And, miraculously, there was a small plate of flimsy ham sandwiches which another resident, now in bed, had ordered and forgotten.
The residents’lounge was now deserted: armchairs in turquoise brocade. A storage heater, behind the genuine andirons of the pseudo open hearth, was barely taking the chill off the room.
‘Sally can talk, Simon.’
More than once, Elspeth had listened to a total stranger’s life-story on a three-penny bus-ride—and that without asking questions. Kenworthy closed his eyes: he was not really tired; or, at least, if he was, it was in a pleasant fashion.
‘It never was a show-piece village, Simon. Not a wall, not a cruck, not a gable-end worth bringing a tourist from the main road. Mostly red brick and clay lump. Even the church was hardly worth seeing: mostly nineteenth-century reconstruction. And as the building, so the population. Two flint-knappers …’
‘Ah!’
‘But mostly agricultural labourers. Undemanding. Satisfied. A land-owner’s dream. Not a union member among them. And if their wages were poor, they didn’t seem to think they had the right to have it otherwise. Their cottages weren’t bad. No sewers, of course. Electricity and piped water came very late in the thirties. But the Prudhoes kept the roofs in good repair. The gardens were spacious and the Carvers had a bigger patch than most: hardly enough to be labelled a small-holding, but enough for a hen-run, a pen of turkey poults, their own goat.
‘And that’s how almost everybody lived, with varying degrees of green-fingery. It was the rhythm of the land that shaped their lives. There was one seriously committed poacher: a man called Reynolds. Some said that he was the grandfather of the Pascoe boys, but Sally doesn’t think so.
‘There were two pubs: the Angel and the Flintstone, in traditional enmity, probably because neither landlord could make a living from his barrelage. Some men stuck to one tap-room all their drinking lives; others changed their allegiance from time to time. The Pascoe brothers were the only ones to get themselves barred from both houses simultaneously.’
‘I suppose it could be considered idyllic—in retrospect.’
‘Perhaps. Cottages smelling of the warmth of oven doors being opened. But they were certainly all the puppets of the Prudhoes. The place had a soul, that’s how Sally put it, but it hadn’t a will of its own. It didn’t even seem to want one. They paid Prudhoe their rent and though they had to put it in his agent’s hands, it was given back to them for two weeks every Christmas, providing that their book was clean.
‘Prudhoe was Chairman of the Parish Council and its members were all his nominees. They never needed an election. Members were co-opted by a self-perpetuating nucleus.’
‘An enlightened despot. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be.’
‘A despot, yes, Prudhoe I mean, not you. But enlightened? I’m not so sure. Neither is Sally. The old man had quirks and he could be immovable. He had a thing about telephone kiosks, for example, and he scotched any attempt to petition for one in the village. He didn’t like buses, and had a devil of a fight with the Traffic Commissioners when they wanted to route a service through the village. He lost that battle and women wanting to shop in town no longer had to walk two miles each way to the Threeways in all weathers.’
Elspeth took a tiny sip of Simon’s beer.
‘They seem to have been contented, though. There were fun and games with Prudhoe invariably the master of ceremonies: a harvest supper that was an affair for the whole village, an annual concert, a children’s sports, a summer fete for the Church of England Children’s Homes, a ham, beer and cheese supper for the cricket team. Even the club ground was in a corner of the estate. He bought them their pavilion and kept it repaired and decorated.’
‘He probably chose the first eleven, too.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Everything he organised was very disciplined, very proper. Everything had its place. If some young blood fancied himself as a comic in the village hall, old Prudhoe auditioned him first, to make sure there was nothing to embarrass the Mothers’Union. A Cavalier at home and a Roundhead in the market-place, that’s what Sally called him. There were high jinks, but they were high jinks to order. The Cricket Supper was the night for almost obligatory beer-swilling; and the women who had waited at table had to retire to the washing up before the first of the toasts.
‘And that’s the milieu that Sally grew up in in the thirties. I haven’t got a very clear picture of her family life, she wasn’t at her most informative when talking about her own father and mother. Involuntarily, I mean; she wasn’t at all loath to talk about them, but they just didn’t come over. Either she was idealising them out of conventional loyalty, or she was too close to them to be objective.’
Kenworthy pushed away his empty sandwich plate. There were things he wanted to know quickly: what had happened when Sally found out about Milner? Had any significant news filtered through from Derek? He would have to get on the official net within the next half-hour. But he forced patience on himself; he hadn’t seen Elspeth enjoying herself like this for years.
‘Both dead?’ he said, still referring to the Carver parents.
‘Yes. Her father was an older man; as staid in his way as old Prudhoe, though on a different level, of course, and without pomposity. A quiet man, but capable of a kind of childish fun in his way. He died during the war: pneumonia, following his annual winter bronchitis. His wife lived until the mid-fifties, an unhappy widow. Sally was fond of her, is a bit mixed-up about her, perhaps because it wore a bit thin while she was living with her as an unmarried mother. More about that in a minute. She was not an easy woman, and after her husband’s death, she couldn’t settle to anything. But while he was still alive, and Sally was growing up, she was a woman of standards: she liked books, pictures, poems clipped out of weekly papers—trivial things, mostly—Beet-hoven waltzes on the cottage piano, things that did not find their way into other homes in Yarrow Cross. She had a flair for better things though, Sally says, she was never articulate about them.
‘There was no outstanding reason why the Carvers should be considered better than anyone else in the community. Superiority was not a creed that young Sally was ever taught; indeed, airs were anathema in the household in the years when the child was feeling for her identity. But airs were not the same thing as grace and dignity. There was a discipline about the home that extended beyond the demands of routine, peace and quiet.
‘The “superiority” of Mrs Carver was nothing that she sought or claimed. But it was something that the village accorded her, unspoken and unanalysed.’
‘Like Sally in that ward,’ Kenworthy suggested.
‘I think that’s just it. But there was one woman in the village who didn’t subscribe to the popular trend.’
‘Emma Pascoe.’
‘It’s easy for us, Simon, to have got a wrong picture of Mrs Pascoe, at least, one at variance with Sally’s impressions. When Derek took us to talk to her, there was only one attitude that we could take. We saw an old woman to be respected because she’s still self-contained beyond the age that most of us will reach, to be handled with care because she’s physically fragile. To be agreed with partly out of sentiment, partly out of courtesy, partly out of fear of what an emotional hurt might do to her There are things about her that we found amusing and laudable: but will-power can be mere wilfulness, whimsicality may be sheer bloodymindedness.’
‘Sally has certainly talked you round.’
‘Only because what she told me was credible and real. You must remember, S
imon, that it’s years since Sally saw Mrs Pascoe. She’s ready to believe in the near-decrepitude, but she hasn’t actually seen it. She only remembers a very different person: a loner who brought up three grandsons to be criminals.’
‘Derek told us that she often co-operated with him.’
‘Tactics that, Simon, not moral vision. What nearly drove her to the end of her tether was to see them grow up as stupid criminals. And she had a hatred of Sally’s mother that went back deeper than any village history that Sally ever knew.’
‘What form did this hostility take?’
‘Malicious gossip. Making parties. There was a group of crones who were very much under Emma’s thumb, though they didn’t always hold their ground when she wasn’t actually there in the middle of them.’
‘Speaking of the Pascoes I must get on to the Yard to send me a sergeant down from B Division, somebody who can read a poem in a nut and bolt.’
‘You’re on to something?’
‘Something that has at least to be eliminated.’
Kenworthy got up and examined the thermostat controls of the heater, fiddled with a knob, but produced no noticeable difference.
‘I’m taking too long,’ Elspeth said.
‘Not at all. Truth lurks behind details.’
‘We come to summer 1940, then.’
‘Ah!’
‘Remember what it meant to us?’
Simon had been motor-cycle borne, a sergeant back from Dunkirk, troops thin on the ground along the south coast. Blue skies, hot sunshine. Battle of Britain dog-fights and vapour trails. Elspeth had come down sometimes at weekends. He had found her a bed in an erstwhile seaside boarding house. Against the backcloth of the unknown, invasion believed imminent, the threatened end of all known values, he had courted her. She was seventeen. Her parents thought she ought not to be travelling about Kent on her own. Sunday afternoons, corn ripening on the downs.
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