Dalziel 06 A Killing Kindness

by Reginald Hill

  Reacting against the thought, he picked up his phone and dialled Maurice's business number in Newcastle. But when the phone was answered he replaced it without speaking. They had an agreement. All contact to be private except in extreme emergency. This was no emergency though somehow it felt as if there might be an emergency in the offing, like an area of low pressure over the Atlantic on the telly weather chart.

  When he finally drank his tea it was quite cold and he saw with dismay that he had been sitting totally abstracted for more than an hour. It was after three-thirty.

  He left the flat hurriedly. Pascoe was going to want to know how he'd spent his time. He would not be pleased. As for Dalziel . . .

  At least he ought to be able to say he'd spoken to Pauline Stanhope.

  He drove back to Charter Park, but swore under his breath when he saw the chair with the BACK SOON sign still outside Madame Rashid's tent. What the hell did SOON mean to a fortune-teller?

  It ought to mean something.

  Suddenly uneasy, he pushed the chair aside and opened the flap.

  It was dark inside, dark and musty. The triangle of light from the opening fell across a plain trestle table.

  'Oh Jesus,' said Wield.

  He took two steps forward. Looked down. Retreated. As he pulled the flap down and replaced the chair with the sign a pair of young girls approached. One said boldly while the other giggled, 'Are you the fortune-teller, mister?'

  'No,' said Wield. 'She's gone.'

  'When will she be back?'

  He gestured at the sign, then hurried away towards his car to radio for assistance.

  BACK SOON. But from where?

  Across the trestle table, her legs dangling off one end but her arms neatly crossed over her breast, lay the body of Pauline Stanhope.

  She had been strangled.

  Chapter 7

  'Not a good advert, this,' said Dalziel. 'Like a butcher getting food poison.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Pascoe, though his more exact mind found the analogy imprecise and therefore dissatisfying. He didn't say so, but wondered what the newspapers might make of a murder in a fortune-teller's tent.

  The press were imminent, of course. The discovery of a crime by an experienced officer gives the police a head start in getting their investigation under way free from public or professional interference. But once they start, the news speeds like a run on the pound even from sites much more sequestered than a busy fairground. A rope barrier had been erected around the tent to keep the public back. The police doctor had examined the body briefly, pronounced the girl dead, probable cause strangulation, probable time two to four hours earlier. Next, at Pascoe's suggestion, because of the smallness of the internal area, a single detective had been sent in on hands and knees, armed with a high-powered torch and a plastic bag, to pick over every inch of the floor space before the photographer and fingerprint men further trampled the already well crushed grass. Another couple of men were put to examining the turf in the environs of the tent, but the passage of so many feet there made it a token gesture.

  Next, photographs were taken from all angles, sketches made, distances measured. Then the fingerprint boys, who had been dusting the chair and notice outside, moved in and did the chair and table inside with the body still in situ. Finally, after Dalziel had stood and looked phlegmatically at the corpse for a few minutes, he gave the order for it to be slid into its plastic bag and taken to the mortuary where the clothes would be carefully removed and despatched to the lab for examination.

  Now the print men did the rest of the table before it and the chairs were also packaged and despatched to the lab.

  While all this was going on, a police caravan had been towed into the car park and here already statements were being taken for the second time in a week from the fairground people, with particular attention paid to those whose stalls or entertainments were within sighting distance of the tent.

  Of these, the sharp-faced woman on the penny-roll stall was the most positive. Her name was Ena Cooper.

  'Just before twelve she went. I told the ugly fellow. No, I didn't speak, well, she weren't all that close, like, and we was busy. Things don't really pick up while afternoon, but you get a lot of kids round late morning and the roll stalls are always popular with the kids. No, I didn't see her come back, I went across to our Ethel's, she's got a hot-dog stand by the Wheel, for a bite to eat later on, so she could have come back then. About two o'clock, just after the ugly fellow was here the first time. I was away mebbe forty-five minutes. No, it's no use asking him. He's so short-sighted he can hardly see the pennies. Kids cheat him rotten when I'm not here!'

  Cooper, her husband, nodded melancholy agreement. He'd seen nowt, heard nowt.

  Loudspeaker appeals were made to the crowd requesting anyone who had visited Madame Rashid's tent earlier that day to come forward, but so far without success.

  Notable by his absence was Dave Lee. After Wield had described his encounter that afternoon, he was sent to pick the gypsy up and bring him in for questioning. At the same time, Dalziel sent a man round to the Wheatsheaf Garage to check the movements of Tommy Maggs.

  Pascoe nodded approvingly. Investigation is ninety per cent elimination. In his mind, Maggs was almost completely in the clear as far as Brenda Sorby's death was concerned, and he didn't see the young man as a psychopathic mass murderer. But the obvious has got to be seen to be done.

  When he was bold enough to utter these thoughts to Dalziel, the fat man grunted, 'Oh aye?'

  A policewoman had been sent to tell Rosetta Stanhope the tragic news. Pascoe had steered her out of the office earlier that afternoon, with assurances that they would certainly consider her kind offer of psychic assistance.

  Later he had been summoned to Dalziel's office where the fat man was conferring with Detective Chief Inspector George Headingley who was in charge of the Spinks' warehouse case. This was now murder. The watchman had died in hospital that morning, and Headingley was in search of more manpower. They had gone over the staff dispositions together and seen how tautly stretched they were. Then Pascoe had mentioned Rosetta Stanhope's offer of help and frivously wondered if they might not take it up.

  'Aye,' said Dalziel. 'She can try to make contact with the ACC for a start. That bugger's been dead from the neck up for years!'

  They had all laughed. And not long afterwards Wield had phoned with his news.

  Now Pascoe awaited uneasily the arrival of the dead girl's aunt. She would have to be taken to the mortuary for a formal identification of the body. It was always an unpleasant business, and though Rosetta Stanhope had impressed him as a strong-willed albeit rather eccentric character, experience had taught him there was no way of forecasting reactions.

  He felt almost relieved when the policewoman called in with the news that Mrs Stanhope was not at home so she had stationed herself outside her flat to await her return.

  Shortly afterwards Wield returned to say that Dave Lee had gone off in his van right after the sergeant's visit. No one knew, or at least was telling, his destination.

  Finally the DC sent to check on Tommy Maggs arrived, also unaccompanied. Maggs had not returned to work after the dinner break and there was no reply to repeated knockings at the door of his home.

  'Check with the neighbours,' ordered Dalziel. 'See if he's contacted his parents at work. Find out who his doctor is. Sergeant Wield, you've got Lee's van number? Right. Put out a call. Peter, you go and deal with the press, will you? You're better at shooting shit than anyone else.'

  'Thanks,' said Pascoe. 'What do I tell them?'

  'What you know, which, unless you're holding something back, is bugger all.'

  'They'll be keen to know if it's the Choker again,' said Pascoe.

  'Won't know that till the PM. And then we'll only know it's a Choker!'

  'It looks a pretty clear case,' protested Pascoe. 'I mean, compared with the Sorby girl . . .'

  'You think so? We'll have to see,' said Dalziel.

>   The old bastard thinks he's on to something, thought Pascoe. Or perhaps he just likes being contrary.

  The journalists who had gathered at the fairground were not just local. Word had spread, and there were even a couple from London already, though it emerged that they had travelled up attracted by the clairvoyance story, and Pauline Stanhope's murder was just a bonus. In the car park, a television crew were unshipping their cameras. They would get some good atmospheric footage if nothing more, thought Pascoe. The fairground amusements, after a brief hiatus, were back to full steam, whirling, glittering, blaring. Did the laughter, the music, the excited shrieking hold perhaps a more than usually strident note of hysteria? wondered Pascoe. It was almost indecent, but at the same time it was inevitable. Death, the biggest barker of them all, had gathered together a huge crowd and the fair people could hardly be expected to ignore this opportunity. It wasn't even as if Pauline Stanhope was one of their own. Nor Rosetta, for that matter. Once a year they joined the show while the rest of them formed a shifting but constant community.

  He stonewalled the questions for ten minutes. As he'd anticipated, they were most eager for confirmation that this was a Choker killing.

  'What about the Hamlet calls, Inspector?' asked one of the reporters. 'Has there been one yet?'

  'I don't know.' Pascoe smiled. 'You'd better ask your colleague from the Evening Post. His boss gets them first.'

  One of the TV men caught his sleeve as he turned away and asked if they could do a filmed interview in about five minutes.

  ‘I’ll have to check,' said Pascoe.

  'Well, it's not with you, actually. It's Superintendent Dalziel we'd like.'

  Piqued, Pascoe returned to the caravan where he found Dalziel on the phone which the Post Office had just connected.

  'The telly men request the pleasure of your company, sir,' he said when the fat man had finished.

  'What's up with you, lad? Not photogenic?'

  'Perhaps I don't fill a twenty-six-inch screen,' said Pascoe acidly.

  'What? Put you out, has it, lad?' chortled Dalziel. 'Here's something to put you back in. I've just been talking to Sammy Locke at the Post.'

  'There's been a call?' said Pascoe eagerly.

  'I knew that'd please you, Peter. You reckon you'll get the bugger through these calls, don't you? Well, best of luck. There's two of the sods at it now!'

  He was wrong.

  By the time Pascoe got home that night there'd been four Hamlet calls.

  The first, at four-forty-two, said, Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.

  The second, at five-twenty-three, said, One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

  The third, at six-fifteen, said, To be, or not to be, that is the question.

  The fourth, at seven-nine, said, The time is out of joint: - 0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.

  Ellie, for a change, was in bright good spirits and Pascoe was so pleased to see this that he restricted himself to no more than a forty degree roll of the eyeballs when she announced that she was now the membership secretary of WRAG. In any case, she seemed much more keen to talk about the Choker.

  'These phone calls. Are they really going to be any use?'

  'We don't have much else,' said Pascoe, tucking into his re-heated beef and mushroom pie. 'But they can't all be the Choker. Sammy Locke's memory of the first voice is a bit vague. He reckons that two, possibly three, of this lot are not so very different from it.'

  'You've got all today's calls on tape, you say,' said Ellie. 'What you want is a language expert to listen to them.'

  'Good thinking,' said Pascoe, who'd already made the suggestion to Dalziel but wasn't about to be a clever-sticks. 'Anyone in mind?'

  'Well, there's Dicky Gladmann and Drew Urquhart at the College. They impress their students by working out regional and social backgrounds by voice analysis.'

  'And are they right?'

  'One hundred per cent usually, I gather. But I think they probably check the records first. Still, they're certainly incomprehensible enough to be good linguists.'

  Pascoe finished his pie, drew breath and started in on the apple crumble, also warmed up.

  She wants me to get fat too! he suddenly thought.

  'I'll give them a try. Though they're probably enjoying their little vacation in Acapulco,' he said. 'By the way, you never said, how did la Lacewing respond to your theory about the medium message?'

  Thought it was a load of crap,' said Ellie moodily.

  'Did she now? Well well. Let me have the transcript back, won't you?'

  'Yes. And she got pretty close to embarrassing me by talking about you being in charge of the case.'

  That embarrasses you?'

  'Of course not. No, I mean she was trying to put down some loud-mouthed, fellow called Middlefield, he's a JP or something, thinks all murdered women are ipso facto whores. I tell you what was interesting, though. I gathered the fellow he was talking to was the manager of the bank where that other girl worked. The one on the tape. Or not.'

  'Brenda Sorby. Now that is interesting,' said Pascoe.

  Later as they lay in bed, Ellie said drowsily. This poor woman at the fairground. You say she was Rosetta Stanhope's niece?'

  That's right.'

  'Then maybe she'll get in touch with her. I mean, they must have been close.'

  'Maybe,' said Pascoe. 'We'll call you in if it happens.'

  She dug her elbow in his ribs and soon her breath steadied into the regularity of sleep.

  Pascoe found sleep difficult, however, and when it did come, it came in fits and starts and flowed shallowly over a rocky bed. Ellie was partly responsible by putting the thought of Pauline Stanhope into his mind, but she would have been there anyway. He always slept badly the night before attending a post-mortem and tomorrow he was due at the City Mortuary at nine A.M. to attend the last forensic rites on the body of Pauline Stanhope.

  Chapter 8

  The police pathologist was a swift, economical worker who never took refuge in the kind of ghoulish heartiness with which some of his colleagues sought to make their jobs tolerable. Pascoe was glad of this. He liked to enter an almost trance-like state of professional objectivity on these occasions and had already offended the Mortuary Superintendent and the nervous new Coroner's Officer by his brusque response to their efforts at socialization.

  The pathologist examined the neck first before asking the Superintendent to remove the clothes which were then separately packaged and sent on their way to the laboratory. After a further careful examination of the naked body, turning it over on the slab so that nothing was missed, the pathologist was ready to make the median incision. As the scalpel slipped through the white skin, the Coroner's Officer swayed slightly. This was his first time, Pascoe had gathered from the man's nervy conversation with the Mortuary Superintendent. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a notebook, and tapped the man on the shoulder.

  'Borrow your pen a moment?' he asked brusquely.

  'Yes, of course,' said the man.

  Pascoe scribbled a few notes, then returned the implement.

  'Thanks,' he said. 'You'd better have it back. Your need's greater than mine. Your boss is a stickler for detail in all these forms, isn't he?'

  The man managed a pale grin, then began writing at a furious rate.

  After a while Pascoe took his own pen from his pocket and followed suit.

  There was another disturbance, more obvious this time, about thirty minutes later.

  Voices were heard distantly upraised. After a while the door opened and a porter came in and spoke quietly to the Mortuary Superintendent who relayed the information to Pascoe.

  'There's a woman outside with a man. She says she's the girl's aunt and she's making a fuss about seeing the body.'

  Pascoe looked at the cadaver on the examination table. The sternum and frontal ribs had been removed and the omentum cut away so that he
art, lungs and intestine were visible.

  The pathologist continued with his work, undisturbed by the interruption.

  'I'll sort it,' said Pascoe.

  He went out of the examination room, through the storage room, into a small reception area, where a clerk was holding Rosetta Stanhope at bay.

  With her, to Pascoe's surprise, was Dave Lee.

  'Mr Pascoe,' she said, 'they say my niece is here. I've a right to see her, haven't I? I'm entitled. I want to see her.'

  Emotion was giving her voice rhythms and resonances from her childhood, forcing them up through the heavy overlay of conventional urban Yorkshire.

  'You can't stop her, mister,' said the man. 'It's her niece.'

  'I'm sorry, Mrs Stanhope,' said Pascoe quietly. 'There's an examination going on just now. When it's all over we'll make arrangements, I promise you.'

  'You've no right to stop her,' said the man belligerently. 'Like she says, she's entitled.'

  'I don't think you'd want to see her now, Mrs Stanhope,' said Pascoe. 'Please. Later. It's for the best.'

  'You mean, they're cutting her up?' asked the woman.

  'There has to be a post-mortem,' said Pascoe gently.

  She nodded and Pascoe took her arm and led her through the door of the Superintendent's office. The clerk looked uncertain at this procedure but Pascoe who knew all about social dynamics said to him, 'Get us a cup of tea, will you?' and he went away quite happily feeling his function reinforced.

  'We tried to get hold of you last night,' said Pascoe after Rosetta Stanhope had sat down. There were only two chairs in the room and Pascoe took the other, leaving Dave Lee to stand awkwardly and with ill grace by the window.

  'I went away,' she said.

  'You didn't say anything about going away when we talked yesterday lunch-time,' said Pascoe. 'Unexpected, was it?'

  'Yes. Unexpected. I left a note in the flat for Pauline.'

  Her voice choked as she spoke the girl's name. Pascoe looked at her carefully. She was wearing the same grey suit as on the previous day, only it wasn't quite so smart now, a little crumpled, a little awry and straggly.