‘Careful, Simon, she’ll hear you through the wall. It’s done her a lot of good, Simon, and she was very helpful to me. She’s a lot less intense than I am. It made it easier to bridge the gap with Sally from yesterday’s misfire. We were able to talk about trivialities at first. I managed to persuade Sally in the end that we’re all on Edward’s side.’
Elspeth twisted her body to re-arrange the pillows. ‘And I’ve solved the main mystery for you, Simon, the blackmail papers. It’s something that the Pascoe boys hid in the well, after they’d burgled the Prudhoes’Hall. It’s a funny thing, that, because the Prudhoes were always very heavy-handed on the Pascoes: take them to court for a rabbit or a pheasant. But there was never a whisper of a prosecution over this.
‘It’s evidently a paper concerning the take-over by the War Office, something that would show Yarrow Cross just how they were sold up the river. Old Prudhoe could have negotiated a lease for the duration of the war. In fact that was the original intention of the powers that be. But Prudhoe, who was nearly everybody’s landlord, preferred to sell out.’
‘I’m sorry, Elspeth. It won’t do.’
‘Sally is convinced of it.’
‘Emma Pascoe isn’t. I tried it on her. She laughed herself silly.’
‘But there’s more to it than just that, Simon.’
‘There’ll have to be.’
‘Sally’s father was one of the very few who had a small free-holding. Not enough to negotiate in his own right, but situated awkwardly enough to throw a spanner in the works. And he was playing a double game, siding with those who were trying to get up a petition against the deal, but secretly signing deeds alongside Prudhoe. Obviously it was from Prudhoe that the pressure was coming.’
Kenworthy considered it. ‘If that’s the case, I don’t see why they had to bury the stuff. Why not just get on with the mischief-making?’
‘Partly because the Pascoes never had much sense.’
‘Always a rocky explanation. And senseless people are more apt to be impulsive.’
‘Remember that Emma was behind it. And it was partly to wait until the men came back from the war.’
‘It doesn’t seem big enough, to me, Elspeth.’
‘It could be big enough in the context of an insular community like Yarrow Cross, Simon.’
‘And that’s what Sally thinks?’
‘She’s sure of it.’
‘I’m not,’ Kenworthy said. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’
Chapter Eighteen
There was no doubting that Sammy was a Pascoe: the same giant, hangdog frame; the same brow-knitting distrust of the world about him; the same facial suggestion that he would rather bandy thick ears than words. Only in his case there was a certain sandiness about his complexion. There was too much grey in his hair now for one to be certain how ginger he had been. He ran, however, to freckles, which formed great anaemic blobs on the backs of his huge, supine hands.
Kenworthy thought that it was probably a long time since Sammy had been in any kind of fight, or even looked for one. He had not exercised his strength for years. Civilisation had had its way with him in the shape of a car-body paint-shop in which he had worked for twenty years. The routines of shift-working, the statutory stoppages from his pay-packet, the world of shop stewards; strike pay and annual holidays on package night flights from Luton Airport had conditioned his being. His home, image of ten thousand others stretched between the factories and the Thames Estuary, bore witness to his pay-packet and the schooling of his tastes. He had a colour television set on hire, a mass-produced Belgian painting, with yellow willows that looked as if they had strayed from China. He had a shelf containing mostly paperbacks: detective stories of the tougher breed, also a Home Lawyer, a Home Doctor and a cookery book. There was a small garden, with a tiny square of lawn, bleached and stained by incessant dog-droppings, a prefabricated wooden shed and a few rows of radishes, spring onions and lettuce in a keenly tended fine grey tilth. A heap of chimney-sweep’s soot had been left out for weathering.
Sammy’s inspiration to domesticity did not let him out of her sight while Kenworthy and Tabrett were on the premises. This did not worry Kenworthy. He thought, on the whole, that he was likely to learn more from her than from Sammy.
He would not have recognised her from the description by Hedges at the garage: it was some years since Hedges had seen her. But her nose was thin and pointed; her eyes, set abnormally close together, were of the sort that would give no quarter in any argument concerning ends and means. She would expect to have her will in major issues, never having given way on trivialities. Physically, she was one of those women who could not look well fed, however much they ate. And not having inherited a head-start in sexual attraction, she had not seen it necessary artificially to assume one. The Pascoe couple presumably enjoyed some things together, television soap-operas, and Saturday-nights at the local. Doubtless they were capable of offering each other intimate titillation when they shared the mood.
Kenworthy came straight to a point. ‘When were you last in Norfolk?’
‘We never go to Norfolk.’
‘Not even to look at childhood holiday haunts?’
‘We didn’t have holidays when we were kids.’
This was the tone of voice which Kenworthy had wanted to get Sammy using.
‘But you have holidays these days, all right?’
There was a souvenir German beer mug on the mantelpiece, a costume-dressed Spanish doll, a Chianti bottle.
‘Like I say, you can’t take it with you.’
‘Oh, don’t think I’m blaming you,’ Kenworthy said. ‘I’ve got strong tastes for the homeland myself, but it’s a matter of choice. What I’m thinking is you’d like to keep it that way.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean you’ve done well for yourself, Sammy.’ Kenworthy nodded round the room as if he were jealous of it. ‘You wouldn’t want to lose all this.’
‘And why should I lose it, Mr Kenworthy?’
‘I’m quite sure, actually, you never would. I mean, after all this time, you wouldn’t try running with the wrong lot again. When did you last do time, Sammy?’
Sammy’s wife, her name was Grace, looked as if she were going to make the obvious interruption. Kenworthy wanted her to, but she held her tongue. He quickly discovered that she could influence Sammy without active participation. It was enough for her to be present.
‘That’s a long time ago, now.’ Sammy said.
‘And what was it for?’
The reply was not immediate. And it was softened by the inevitable floating question. ‘We broke into a cinema, didn’t we?’
‘All three of you?’
Sammy did not deny it.
‘Did you like it in the mush, Sammy?’
‘That worn’t too bad.’ He had to show that they had not really got at him. His speech was still bucolic. Kenworthy wondered whether they ribbed him for it in the paint-shop.
‘That wor better than the army. All you had to do was keep your cell clean.’ Sammy suddenly broke into a broad smile; a new angle on a Pascoe. ‘Didn’t reckon the porridge, though. Pig meal, that was. Grade three pig meal. That was on the sacks in the yard outside the kitchen.’
‘Funny,’ Kenworthy said.
‘We didn’t think it was funny.’
‘No, I mean, I seem to have heard all this before. Tommy said he saw that on the sacks.’
‘He said he did. He had it from another bloke in the same cell. It was a story that was going round.’
Five minutes more of this sort of talk, and they’d be good friends. Sammy had not slipped into confident fluency yet. His eyes were still restless, waiting for the trick that they were afraid they would not spot in time.
‘Easy to get Tommy to believe anything, I suppose?’
‘Well, let’s be honest, Mr Kenworthy. I ain’t got a great deal upstairs. None of us had. But I’d a sight more than Tommy. Lard-head: that was Darkie’s na
me for him. That was the one thing Tommy wouldn’t stand for. The times I’ve come between those two.’
‘And Darkie? You let him do the thinking for all three of you, did you?’
This made Sammy ill at ease. He moistened his lips before he answered.’ ‘Tain’t right to be talking about Darkie. Somebody done Darkie in and that i’n’t right.’
‘I’m not trying to get you to say anything about Darkie that you shouldn’t say, Sammy. But let’s face facts. There’s trouble you wouldn’t have been in but for Darkie.’
‘We didn’t have to listen to him.’
‘No. But you often did, didn’t you? Like the night the three of you broke into the Prudhoes’place.’
Sammy was not ready for this. It knocked him off balance. He wasn’t ready with any kind of answer. Kenworthy knew how his mind was working. Here was something that had never been officially found out; and here was a copper who knew all about it, after all this time. Sammy caught a distinct new whiff of pig-meal and he now said a silly thing: something he had read or heard somewhere, something that he had perhaps rehearsed in his mind, in some fantasy or other, something that he said with no tone of conviction whatsoever. ‘I think I’d better have my solicitor here,’ he said.
‘All right, if you think you need him. I can’t think why you should, though.’
A strained situation. Sammy was desperately afraid of ruining his chances by whatever he said next. He did not trust Kenworthy. Why the hell should he? Sammy did not really trust anyone, except Grace, he even thought he knew how to deceive her. At work, Sammy often did not speak from the beginning to the end of the week. He never had an opinion at a shop-floor meeting; there were men who took the mickey out of him, when he talked at tea-breaks. When they were on holiday, he did not trust his fellow passengers. People were quick to poke fun at Sammy.
It was better than the old days, anyway; he’d learned and remembered a lot of things from the old days.
And Kenworthy’s presence here, sitting on the settee with his raincoat unbuttoned, was just too real a reminder of the old days, something that Sammy did think he could have forgotten by now.
All of which, approximately, occurred to Kenworthy too, as he sat looking at Sammy. He still waited for Sammy to speak. But Sammy could not overcome his diffidence.
‘You don’t think Prudhoe’s going to lay a complaint after all these years, do you?’ Kenworthy said at last.
Sammy still could not decide his next thing to say. Once, as a young man in amateur theatricals, Kenworthy had forgotten his part, had stood on the stage for an eternity, staring out into a dark bowl dotted with white shirts and pale faces, utterly incapable of finding a word to say. He knew how Sammy felt.
Grace came to the rescue. ‘You’ve got to tell the man, Sammy. He knows.’
Illogical. It would have made sense if she’d said, ‘He knows, no need to tell the man,’ Kenworthy mused. This point had often occurred to him, because it was a point that interrogations often reached. How daft could people be, when you were getting the better of them with stupid questions?
Oh, come on, Kenworthy! Get on with it! Help the poor bugger. Ask him something he can answer. You can’t expect the poor clot to tell the tale from scratch.
Grace was watching her husband expectantly; letting him know telepathically, perhaps, what he might expect from her afterwards if he were to muff it. Perhaps she was even trying to will a sign of tenderness across the room to him.
‘Why did you break into the Hall, anyway, Sammy? What were you after?’
‘Darkie had often talked about it. House full of gold, he said it was.’
‘And was it?’
‘Not that I saw. I mean, for anyone who knew anything about it, there was stuff worth taking—vases and things, paintings, silver. Well, anyone could tell which of the silver was worth having, and which bits would have got us found out. But stuff like that, you had to know how to get rid of it. I mean, Mr Kenworthy, in the Prudhoes’place we were out of our class.’
‘So what did you take?’
And this stemmed Sammy’s flow again. He could not see his way out of a damning admission.
‘Honestly, Mr Kenworthy, we were there out of curiosity more than anything else. Tommy and I were, anyway. I can’t speak for Darkie. Nobody ever knew what was going on in Darkie’s head. We wanted to see if there really was gold all over the house.’
This rang true. It was the key to the Pascoes’mentality in their vintage years. It came from their basic relationship with authority. Through their glass darkly, it seemed to them that if a thing was illegal, or discouraged by society, then it must work to their advantage. That was why society was against it; because society wanted the pickings for itself.
‘So what did you actually take, Sammy?’ Pity to browbeat the poor sod like this. But this hurdle had to be crossed.
‘Well … money,’ Sammy said at last. ‘That’s all we were after all the time, really.’ He glanced furtively at Grace, needing her approval. Had he said too much already? Sammy was completely lost. He hated Kenworthy and the likes of Kenworthy. And yet there were things about Kenworthy that made him seem a decent chap, the sort of chap who might be good company in a boozer.
‘Did you get any?’ Kenworthy asked. ‘Any money?’
‘There worn’t a great deal. Course, the Prudhoes were away, worn’t they? Else we wouldn’t have been in there, would we?’
‘How much?’ Kenworthy insisted.
This was how you’d know that Kenworthy was not just a chap in a boozer. He was a copper, wanting the naked facts, the ins and outs of a cat’s arse-hole. You’d no sooner answered one question than he came up with another.
And it was naked facts that Sammy disliked talking about. He remembered how, after that cinema job, the detective in the witness-box had read from his notebook the exact amount, down to the last half-penny, that they’d found in the cash-box. These bastards always wanted it bang to rights.
‘Fifteen bob,’ he said. ‘Well, fifteen and a tanner. That’s all Tommy and I had. Darkie was supposed to have had the same.’ He’d said it now. This must surely be the end of the paint-shop, the garden the radishes and the garden shed. Sammy was certain now that he’d be going with Kenworthy and this other rozzer when they got up to go. And Grace was sitting there fuming, because he’d put his foot in it, because of something that he ought to have said differently.
‘Did Darkie always do the sharing out?’ Kenworthy asked.
‘We wouldn’t have been in half the things we were, if it hadn’t been for Darkie.’
‘Did he often swindle you, when it came to whacking out the takings?’
‘We didn’t know half the time what he was doing to us.’
‘But you never thought of doing anything about it, you and Tommy?’
‘Tommy and Darkie would have been at each other’s throats all the time, if I hadn’t been there to come between them. Then we had to watch it, the old woman wouldn’t hear a thing wrong about Darkie.’
‘You found some papers in the Prudhoes’ place, didn’t you, Sammy? I want to hear about them.’
‘Ain’t nothing I can tell you, Mr Kenworthy. I never got to know about them papers. Nor did Tommy.’
‘Just where did you find them?’
‘They were in a desk, weren’t they? An old desk. Well, I know now, you’d call it an antique. Like … like, you might say, a kid’s desk, in a school, with a sloping lid, that you could write on. Only it was nice, you know, not like a school desk, all nicely inlaid, with mother of pearl and that. Darkie had to smash it open to get in. I didn’t have any hand in that, Mr Kenworthy. I didn’t smash anything up. Darkie and Tommy, they were always for wrecking any place, before we left it. I remember the way Darkie prised open that lid. You could hear the hinges being torn out. In the end, the whole lid split right across. And then, when we got inside, there were lots of little drawers and things, all locked. That’s where Darkie found the papers.’
A
valuable piece. And Prudhoe, himself a member of the bench, hadn’t even laid an information.
‘What sort of papers?’
‘I told you, I never knew anything about them.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘They were in a big envelope. With sealing wax on it.’
‘And Darkie looked at them there and then?’
‘He brought them home to show the old woman.’
‘And what did she say about them?’
‘She said there was a bloody fortune there for the lot of us. Only if we could wait a year or two, they’d go up no end in value. I’ve never seen her quite like it. I’ve never seen her so happy. She was bloody dancing for joy. Then she and Darkie had a lot of secrets about it. They often did, Darkie and the old girl. Tommy and I didn’t get a look in. Then she and Darkie had a row. We didn’t know the ins and outs of it, except that they had different ideas about how they were going to handle the stuff when the time came. Oh, Christ, it was bloody terrible. Tommy and I crept out of the bloody house, kept out of the bloody way. Then Darkie got hold of that envelope, and me and Tommy had to go with him, and we stowed it away, behind some bricks at the top of the well.’
‘But you must have had some idea of what sort of papers they were. Darkie must have told you something about them, if only to keep you quiet.’
‘There was something to do with land deeds. Something about selling the village.’
Square one.
‘That’s all he knows,’ Grace Pascoe said. ‘That’s all even I’ve ever been able to get out of him. Give him a rest, Mr Kenworthy.’
Kenworthy turned and looked at her: the thin, fleshless nose that scarcely seemed to separate her eyes. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand, Mrs Pascoe. Whatever was in these documents, Darkie did the family out of it; and as things turned out, did them out of it for good. Only recently he’s taken a chance to sell them off, no doubt at a knockdown price, to this airman. And yet Darkie was his grandma’s favourite to the very end.’
‘Birds of a feather,’ she said. ‘She admired Darkie, even when he was going against her. And who’s to tell, with that woman? One minute she was egging them on, the next she was shopping them with you lot. All according to the way the wind blew. What’s going to happen now? To Sammy, I mean?’
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