But no, they didn't recall seeing her that day, and no, there was nothing they could tell Wield though he got a distinct impression they had lorded it at their Costa Brava hotel on the strength of their intimate connection with the case.
In the bank he was greeted with less enthusiasm. Mulgan, the acting manager, had (according to Pascoe's notes) been genuinely distressed at Brenda's death, but also perhaps a little too concerned that somehow it would reflect on him.
Now, a week later, this personal concern seemed to dominate. About five nine, with brown hair, thick, luxuriant and anointed, he was a good-looking man in a fleshy kind of way. His full cheeks were razored to a roseate glow and gave off strong emanations of one of the more macho aftershaves. Wield's memory was stirred. Maurice had given him a bottle last Christmas, but he had never used it.
He took Wield into his office, an act, so the sergeant felt, more of concealment than courtesy.
'This is very nice, sir,' said Wield, looking appreciatively round the well-proportioned office. 'It's a pretty large establishment. I mean, for a suburban bank.'
'Yes. It was built as the Avro Industrial Estate developed,' said Mulgan. 'Head Office anticipated a lot of business.'
'But didn't get it?'
'Pardon?'
'I meant, you sounded as if things didn't quite work out.'
'Oh no,' said Mulgan with loyal indignation. 'It's very flourishing. Very flourishing.'
Then, relaxing a little, he said, 'Mind you, they're a very conservative lot, your Yorkshire businessmen. You'd be surprised how many of them insist on maintaining their accounts at the main office in the town centre. Not that they couldn't have been persuaded with a little more dynamism perhaps. Well, perhaps it's not too late.'
Wield glanced at his notebook. Mulgan was the acting manager, he saw. They were clearly touching the world of his ambitious dreams.
'So you don't carry many local business accounts?' he said, probing a little further, though for no particular reason.
'Oh yes,' said Mulgan, bridling again. 'Nearly all the local shops.'
'But from the estate?'
'One or two.'
Suddenly seeing a glimmer of a connection, Wield asked, 'Would those include the Eden Park Canning Plant?'
But he was disappointed.
Mulgan shook his head and fiddled impatiently with the blotter on his desk.
'How can I help you, Sergeant?' he asked.
'We're just going over the ground again, sir,' said Wield. 'Routine. Often things come to mind after a few days that get forgotten when everyone's shocked and upset to start with.'
There was a knock at the door and a young girl's head appeared.
'I'm sorry to interrupt,' she said. 'But Mrs Mulgan's here and would like a word.'
'What?' said Mulgan irritably. 'Oh very well, I'll come out. Excuse me.'
'No,' said Wield, getting up. 'You see your wife in here, it's all right. I'll just have a quick chat with any of your staff that aren't too busy.'
Outside the door he saw the girl talking to a thin-faced, rather defeated-looking woman who appeared a good ten years older than Mulgan.
'Thank you, dear,' she said in a fairly broad rural Derbyshire accent. 'You take care of yourself, won't you? I'll go in now, shall I?'
'Excuse me, Miss,' said Wield to the girl before she could move away. He introduced himself and discovered she was Mary Brighouse. She was not bad-looking with a good figure and big brown eyes which moistened as he began to talk about Brenda.
'You were good friends,' said Wield sympathetically.
'We didn't see much of each other outside,' said Mary. 'But I liked her a lot. I was so upset when we heard what had happened, I had to go home. I didn't come back in till Wednesday.'
Wield glanced at his notes from Pascoe's report. The girl had been no help at all and had broken down very early on during questioning. From the look of it, he doubted if he was going to get any further this time. He took her arm and gently led her as far to the back of the bank as they could go.
'That was Mrs Mulgan, was it?' he said lightly. 'Bit of a surprise after meeting your boss.
‘She’s very nice,' said the girl defensively.
'Yes, I'm sure she is,' said Wield. 'I only meant...’
'Yes. I know,' she helped him out. 'They were born in the same village.'
'But he's moved on while in a manner of speaking she hasn't, you mean?' said Wield. 'It's always sad, that.'
He was very good at gossip. A right old woman, Dalziel had called him once. Wield had smiled bleakly.
'Yes, and it's not just the job either,' Mary replied, eyes clear again, voice confidentially lowered.
'It never stops there,' agreed Wield without much idea what he was agreeing to.
'No. There's some men think a bit of power gives them all sorts of rights. And he's only acting, after all.'
'I know,' said Wield, suddenly with her. 'It can be very embarrassing, that kind of thing. I mean, what's a bit of a giggle at the office party can cause a lot of unpleasantness when it's out of place. Has it bothered you a lot?'
'Not really,' she said. 'Well, it wasn't really me, just sometimes he'd say something. It was more . . .'
Her eyes filled again.
The door of Mulgan's office opened and Wield had no time for sympathy now.
'You mean, it was more Brenda?'
'Oh yes,' she said with fast-fading coherence. 'I think he asked her out a couple of times and he was always calling her into the office or standing behind her, really close, like. She said that now she had an engagement ring, perhaps it would . . .' The memory was too much for her.
'Sergeant Wield!' called Mulgan.
'Blow your nose, love,' said Wield. 'Then go and wash your face. You're a good girl.'
He patted her on the arm and returned to the manager's office where he studied his digest of Pascoe's interview notes once more. He felt disappointed. The inspector hadn't got on to Mulgan's lech for Brenda, but his customary thoroughness had led him to check the acting manager's whereabouts between ten and midnight that night. He had been at home. Confirmed by his wife. Wield frowned.
'I hope you haven't been upsetting Miss Brighouse again,' said Mulgan. 'We've had to do without her for half the week already.'
'She seems a very sensitive sort of girl,' said Wield.
'Yes. Now what else can I do for you, Sergeant? We are extremely busy.'
'I'm sorry. I should have called outside banking hours,' said Wield.
'We do work then also,' said Mulgan acidly.
'I'm sure you do.'
Wield closed his notebook with a snap.
'I'll tell you what you can do for us, sir,' he said. 'Is it possible to check back and see what business Brenda dealt with that day, when she was at the counter, I mean?'
'It's possible. But why on earth should you want that?' wondered Mulgan.
Wield looked mysterious. It wasn't difficult. It was a mystery to him. But he wanted a bit of time to think things over.
Mulgan gave him more.
'I'd need to get authority from Head Office,' he said. 'It would mean revealing banking information, you see.'
'That's all right, sir. No rush. I'll call back later, if I may. Or if I don't get back in working hours, stick it in your briefcase and someone can pick it up from your home.'
He rose and took his leave before the man could raise an objection.
Outside in the car he tried to consider possible burgeonings of the seeds he had sown that morning, but all he could think of was the bittersweet tang of Mulgan's aftershave.
Chapter 12
Dr Pottle and the two linguists sat and listened to the tapes of the four telephone messages which had followed Pauline Stanhope's murder.
Pascoe had provided them with a typed transcript with the Hamlet references for good measure.
(A) Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. (Act 5, Scene
1)
(B) One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. (Act 1, Scene 3)
(C) To be, or not to be, that is the question. (Act 3, Scene 1)
(D) The time is out of joint: - 0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right. (Act 1, Scene 3)
This was the order in which they had been received. Sammy Locke, the Evening Post news editor, felt that (A) and (D) came nearest to his memory of the voice which he had heard on the first two occasions. But which of the two (if there were two, they sounded very alike to Pascoe) it was, he couldn't say. Pascoe had not felt it necessary to pass this information on to the linguistic experts.
After the tape had been played for the fifth time, there was a long silence. Pottle lit another cigarette and scribbled some notes. Pascoe looked interrogatively at the linguists who were looking interrogatively at each other.
They were an ill-assorted pair. Dicky Gladmann was a small dapper man, fortyish, with bright blue eyes and demi-mutton-chop whiskers, dressed in an old tweed jacket with a red bandanna trailing from his breast pocket and a spoor of gravy running down his old something-or-other tie. The other, Drew Urquhart, was much younger. A small, round, rosy-cheeked face showed fitfully through a dark tangle of beard like a robin in a holly bush. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he seemed to have little liking for his surroundings.
'Well, we'll see what we can do, shall we?' said Gladmann in a self-parodyingly fruity upper-class voice.
'I suppose so,' said Urquhart, broad Scots, not Glasgow but somewhere close.
They rose. Gladmann took the cassette from the player and slipped it into his pocket.
'Aren't you going to work here?' said Pascoe, taken aback.
‘My dear chap, you must be joking!' said Gladmann. 'Not that it isn't nice. You can hardly see the blood on the walls, can you, Drew, my son? But your equipment's hardly space-age, is it? No, the language lab at the college is the place. And if it seems worthwhile we can even drive across to the university and run it through their sonograph.'
'Well, all right,' said Pascoe. There were, after all, several copies of the tape.
Urquhart said, 'Inspector, I'd like to be sure what you intend. How do you propose to use whatever we tell you?'
'Sceptically, I dare say,' replied Pascoe.
Gladmann hooted, but Urquhart did not smile behind his tangle.
'So long as it's clear I'm not interested in helping the polis find a scapegoat,' he continued.
Pascoe sighed. His own background made him a lot more sympathetic with academic liberalism than most of his colleagues, but he could understand the feeling behind Dalziel's complaint on another occasion, 'If these are the clever buggers, no wonder crime pays!'
'Believe me,' he said, 'a scapegoat's no good. The man we're after is an unbalanced killer. He's not going to stop murdering women just because someone else has been arrested.'
Urquhart did not look wholly convinced but he left without further comment. Gladmann followed, saying, 'My love to the delectable Ellie. We'll be in touch.'
Pascoe closed the door after them and turned his interrogative gaze on Pottle not with a great deal of hope.
The psychiatrist's opening comment confirmed his pessimism.
'Not a great deal to go on yet,' he said.
'Four murders!' expostulated Pascoe. 'Not a bad start, surely?'
'Come now,' said Pottle, amused. 'What's your best chance of catching this fellow?'
Pascoe considered.
'Another murder,' he admitted unwillingly. 'Or at least an attempt. Get him in the act.'
'Quite so. Similarly, though in rather a different way, the more I have, the better results I can hope for. Now, to start with, I am making two assumptions which may turn out to be false. One is that these four deaths have been caused by the same man. The other is that basically in each case the motive has been the same, or at the least an aspect of a single consistent motive. As I say, these assumptions may be false. Indeed, there is much in the evidence as you have laid it before me which suggests that they are false.'
'Such as?' interposed Pascoe.
'The eccentricities of pattern,' replied Pottle. 'They are all young unmarried women - except for Mrs Dinwoodie who is a middle-aged widow. They are found neatly laid out with arms crossed on the chest - except Brenda Sorby who has been dumped in the canal. The murders all take place in circumstances made remote by time of day or location, except for Pauline Stanhope's which occurs in the middle of the day in the middle of a fairground. But it's only by making these two assumptions that I can even begin to pretend I have something to work at. That's where another murder would come in so useful. Better still, two. Then we would begin to have enough trees to make a wood!'
Only the suspicion that this ghoulishness was being used to provoke him in some way kept Pascoe from voicing another protest.
'You'll be the second or third person to know, Doctor,' he said. 'Carry on.'
'Right you are. I summarize, of course. What it would seem to me we have here is an older rather than a younger man, that is, heading away from thirty-five rather than towards it. He is of course unbalanced, but not in the usual pattern of the psychopathic woman-killer, whose murderous impulses tend, as it happens, to become more controllable as he gets older. You must catch your psychopath young. Inspector, if you are to catch him at all. No, this man's motivation does not seem to be based so much on hate as on, I can find no better term, compassion.'
'Compassion? You mean, he kills women because he's sorry for them?' asked Pascoe with interest.
'In a way, yes. There's good case-law here. The impulse to euthanasia is a strong one in all advanced civilizations.'
'But you can't be saying these murders are just a form of euthanasia?'
'Only in the same way that you could say Jack the Ripper's killings were a form of moral protest. In a way, it's strange that there aren't more Choker-type killings than Ripper-type. Euthanasia is, after all, half accepted and by definition involves killing, while punishment for sexual immorality eventually disappears from advanced societies and only ever involved death in primitive ones.'
'The Church used to roast you for buggery,' objected Pascoe.
'Precisely,' said Pottle drily. 'Look, I must go, Inspector. I have work to do. You'll have a written report eventually!'
'Hang on just a minute. The phone messages, the tapes. What about them?'
'Of the taped messages, either (A) or (D) would fit my man, with my money being on the former. The voice seems to me to have that genuinely regretful intonation which fits my ideas. (B) and (C) sound far too delighted with it all. But it's the first of the messages received that really needs looking at.'
'You mean I say, we will have no more marriages?'
'That's it. You know how it goes on? Those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are.'
'Yes, I know. So far we've had one widow, three spinsters. We're still waiting for Mrs Right to come along.'
Pascoe had a nice line in ghoulishness himself.
'Perhaps that's the way to look at it, Inspector. Odd thing, marriage and engagements. Often kept very secret. I assume you've checked very carefully indeed to see if Pauline Stanhope was engaged? The other two girls were, and very recently too.'
'You think that . . .'
'No, I offer no conclusions, Inspector. But a woman widowed can still be regarded from a certain point of view as a married woman. After all, she retains the title. I should be very interested, if I were you, to know why poor Mrs Dinwoodie should of all the married ladies in the world be the one singled out (if you'll excuse the expression) to be killed. Now I must go.'
After he had left, Pascoe sat for a while and wondered whether it were really possible for a man to go around killing people out of compassion. One, yes. That he could understand. Someone near and dear who was suffering greatly. But strangers? And compassion for what? He should have asked that.
But he couldn't sit here all day, thinking.
It was leg work that solved cases, not metaphysical speculation.
He headed first for the suburban estate where the Wildgoose family lived. He knew Mark Wildgoose would probably not be there but he had no other address for the man and, though he might have been able to track him down via the school authorities, this gave him an excuse to talk to the woman.
Lorraine Wildgoose was in the front garden passing a small electric rotary mower over the lawn. She switched it off at his approach and nodded when he introduced himself.
'Yes, I know,' she said.
'Oh? We haven't met, have we?'
'No. I saw your photo when I called on Ellie yesterday. Come into the house.'
He followed her. She wore a thin cotton skirt and a brief halter whose shifts as she stooped to disconnect the mower lead gave no hint of a limit to her deep sun tan. The observation was quite objective. Pascoe felt no sensual tingle at these mammary glimpses. There was an intensity of expression on her thin, slightly pock-marked face which precluded any suspicion of prick-teasing and suggested that any man showing an interest in her had better lead with his head, in a manner of speaking.
'Mrs Wildgoose, I'd like to have a word with your husband. I understand he's not living with you any more.'
'Would you like a drink?' she said. 'Coffee or something harder? A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have got either. We were into organic eating in a big way. That's when he got interested in the allotment. That's what you'll want to talk to him about.'
'You do your own gardening now?' said Pascoe whose response to obliquities was always oblique. 'It's quite a job.'
He was looking out of a french window which opened on to the back garden. A small patio led on to a rectangle of lawn some fifty feet deep bordered by roses and ornamental shrubs.
'I always did. He showed no interest till he decided he wanted to dig it up to plant beans and ginseng. That's when I put my foot down, so he got the allotment. I feel responsible for that girl's death.'
This was too fast for Pascoe.
'That drink,' he said. 'It's early but I'm quite thirsty. Perhaps a small beer.'
She went out into the kitchen and returned with a pint can and two tumblers.
Dalziel 06 A Killing Kindness Page 10
