He dashed out into the storm and was well dampened in the short time it took to get into his car. The light was so bad now that he switched his headlights on before moving off. Behind him through the rear-view mirror he could see Gladmann standing forlornly in the doorway looking with his old-young-man's face and his plastic mac like the nucleus of a queue outside a porno-cinema.
The storm was at its height as he drove into the old aerodrome. There was no wind and the orange windsock hung heavily from its pole, its fluorescence dulled by the torrential rain. Sheet lightning flickered through canyons of cloud and thunder cracked and rolled like an artillery barrage. There would be no flying today, and precious little drinking either if the absence of cars was anything to go by.
Pascoe glanced at his watch. Nearly twelve-thirty.
He parked as close to the club-house door as he could get and dashed in, realized he'd left his lights on, dashed out again, switched them off and was sodden wet by the time he made his second entrance.
'Thought you'd changed your mind,' said Austin Greenall. 'Welcome. We were just beginning to think the weather had robbed us of all custom today.'
He was sitting on a stool at the bar. Behind it, a barmaid was arranging bottles and glasses.
Glancing significantly at her, Pascoe said, 'May we talk, Mr Greenall?'
'Of course,' said the secretary. 'Come into my office. Would you care for a drink en route? No? All right, this way.'
He led Pascoe into a small airless room with a desk, a filing cabinet and a couple of hard chairs.
'Sit down, Inspector,' he said. 'Now what is it you want to talk about?'
Pascoe sat.
‘We could start with your ex-wife, Mary Dinwoodie,' he said. 'And go on from there.'
The telephone began to ring. It rang thirteen times. Both men ignored it. Finally it stopped, leaving its tone hanging on the air almost as long again.
'My wife, Mr Pascoe,' said Greenall. 'We are Roman Catholics. There was no divorce.'
Both men sighed gently, almost inaudibly, out of a sort of relief in both cases and, as if recognizing this, they exchanged shy smiles, glimmers fading almost as soon as they showed, but establishing a tenuous link for all that.
'Talking of wives, was it yours that talked you down here in the end?' said Greenall. His tone was light, cocktail-partyish, but with a harmonic of strain.
'I'm sorry?'
'She was talking about that seance when she was here last week. She had all kinds of daft ideas about it. But I saw the transcript on the table and I wondered if in the end . . . That's why of course I had to . . .'
The phone started ringing again. This time Greenall turned his attention to it, not touching it but staring fixedly at it as though the ceasing of the noise would be the signal of a beginning.
Pascoe took from his pocket the envelope which Gladmann had given him. As expected, it contained the short tape of the Choker's last call and the cassette of Rosetta Stanhope's interrupted seance. There were also several sheets in the linguist's rather self-consciously ornate handwriting.
Pascoe looked, selected, read.
‘The poor quality of this recording makes accurate transcription difficult. Still it seems to me at least possible that the opening passage of the tape could be rendered as follows.
It was Greenall, Greenall, over me, choking. The water then, boiling at first, and roaring, and seething... ‘
The phone stopped ringing.
Chapter 25
Greenall said, 'We were happy enough, not deliriously happy, but when does that ever last past the first few months? I was probably more content than Mary. Well, I'd done more, achieved more, relatively speaking. Whenever I felt dissatisfied I just had to look back to when I was a scruffy half-educated kid running round the back streets of Derby. God knows how I even got qualified enough to get into the RAF at the lowest level. But I did. And I did well. I learn fast. Barely ten years later I was commissioned, I was married to Mary. And of course, above all, I was flying.'
He smiled to himself, like a man who remembers glory.
Pascoe said casually, 'This is interesting. You needn't say anything you realize that? It may be used as evidence. I'll keep a record of it unless you prefer to write it yourself.'
It was a pretty feeble version of the correct procedure. And he ought to get Greenall to sign a declaration saying that he had been cautioned and still wanted to make a statement and have someone else write it down for him. But his instinct told him that he must take the minimum risk of fracturing this fragile mood. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far already but after a brief pause the man continued as though Pascoe had not spoken.
'I'd met Mary when I was stationed on Cyprus. She was teaching at the military school there. We liked each other from the first. Marriage might have come eventually, but when she found she was pregnant, it had to come at once. That might have been the trouble. Rushing things is never good. I know that now. But Alison was born and we were happy. Very happy. Once Alison got to school age, though, Mary got restless. She wanted to work again. I didn't like it too much and with me moving around from time to time, it wasn't all that easy anyway. But she insisted on it and when, twice within the space of four or five years, she had to give it up, you'd have thought she was the breadwinner and I was earning the pin-money.'
He shook his head at the incredibility of the thought.
'The second time was when I was posted to Hanover. She even suggested it might be better for Alison's schooling if she and the girl stayed in England for a while. I didn't think it was Alison she was really thinking of. Anyway, she came. And a few months later it looked as if things were turning right for her. One of the teachers at the local British School in Linden fell seriously ill. Mary was ideal for the post. On the spot, fully qualified, with just the right kind of experience. Things seemed to get back together for us for a while after that. There'd been a lot of rowing. She'd even managed to get the girl turned against me. Well, I expect there were faults on both sides. But now, for a time, everything seemed OK.'
He sighed deeply.
'Are you sure you won't have a drink?' he asked suddenly.
'No, thanks. But if you want one . . .'
'No,' he said emphatically. 'I can take it or leave it. She met Dinwoodie there, you know. He was deputy head, or some such thing. There was also some kind of drama group he was involved in and soon Mary was mixed up in it too. I got a bit concerned about how much of her time it was taking up, but I didn't want to rock the boat, things seemed to be going so well. So I didn't say much. But other people were saying things. Not directly to me. But after a bit you begin to notice silences, intonations. So I started going along myself. I couldn't do it regularly, but I thought if I took an interest, made myself useful with lights and so on . . . well, I don't know what I thought. Mary wasn't all that enthusiastic, but she didn't seem to mind. They were rehearsing for some local festival; Shakespeare. The Krauts love Shakespeare, God knows why. I didn't want to appear pig-ignorant, so I set out to read a bit myself. They were just doing scenes. Mary and Dinwoodie were doing a bit from Hamlet, the scene when he tells Gertrude what a whore she's been, then kills old Polonius behind the curtain. I read that play through a dozen times. I reckon I knew as much about it as anyone in that damned drama group. I just wanted to impress, you understand. I wasn't really suspicious, not any more. If they'd been doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet perhaps, but somehow with Mary acting as his mother, it didn't seem that there was anything to worry about. Stupid, really, isn't it?'
Pascoe nodded, not quite sure what he was acquiescing to.
'Even when I caught them at it, I didn't do anything rash. I told myself it was just a once-off thing, quickly over. I wasn't going to let her get away with it, of course. She deserved to be punished. I made that quite clear to her. I thought I might send the girl back to England to boarding-school, get her out of the way later. Meanwhile, though, I wanted to keep a low profile. I thought of the scandal
it would cause in the mess, I could see all my hard work to get on over the years coming to nothing and, in any case, it was nearly the end of the school year and I knew that Dinwoodie's contract was up and he was returning to the UK. So I let things slide for a while. And the end of term came. And Dinwoodie went. And I came home from a few days on an exercise and found that Mary had disappeared and Alison with her. And after that, well, things went into a spin.'
As he talked now, first hesitations, then often lengthy gaps, began to appear in his speech, but Pascoe was able to fill it in from his long telephone conversation with an RAF records officer who had been extremely cooperative when the Choker case was mentioned.
Greenall had at first attempted to cover up, pretending that his wife and child had gone back to England for a holiday, though clearly not another person at the school or on the station believed this. He himself had returned to the UK on a fortnight's leave which he overstayed when his efforts to track them down were unavailing. This was the first stage in the long downhill slide his career now began to take. It didn't all happen at once. There were plunges and recoveries. He received a letter from his wife, explaining her motives, wanting to put everything on a civilized level. They met in a London hotel lounge to talk things over. The meeting ended with him striking her across the face and rushing across to the reception desk where a young girl, just arrived with her parents, was terrified to be embraced by this demented stranger and dragged towards the door.
That was the last contact for some time. Mary clearly decided, probably for a combination of religious and personal reasons, that disappearance was a better bet than any remedy of the law. Perhaps to keep their heads down, perhaps because the mid-seventies was a very bad time for expatriate teachers to try to filter back into the home system, they decided to abandon education for cultivation and went into the Garden Centre business. Certainly if they maintained any contact with the RAF world at all, reports of Greenall's condition would not have encouraged them to let him know their whereabouts. Drink and a growing oddness of behaviour patterns had resulted in first the loss of his flying status, then, after a period of breakdown, discharge on medical grounds.
All this over a period of nearly three years.
'So,' said Greenall, 'I woke up one morning and found I was back in civvy street. No wife, no daughter, no commission, no career. And no flying. I had to get that back to start with. Do you understand? Down here even when I was on the crest of the wave, I always felt there was something, I don't know, sort of pulling me back to where I started. Up there, it was different. Still is. Up there I was . . . am . . .'
'King of infinite space?' offered Pascoe.
'Yes. Right. That's it. King of infinite space. So I did an instructor's course. Just basic stuff. Work on trainers, that kind of thing. I knew I would never get back in the big boys again, but this way at least I got my feet off the ground. And there was work in it. I got a job down at a flying club in Surrey. Twice the size of this. I really enjoyed it, all of it, even the ground staff side.'
His speech, mirroring his mental recovery, had begun to flow freely again. Pottle would explain this, thought Pascoe. And probably advise me to listen carefully for the return of disjunction.
'And did you see your wife again in this time?'
'Neither saw nor heard from her,' said Greenall. 'When I got myself together, I started looking. I played your game, detective that is. Not an easy business, is it? I went to the address on that one letter, but it was a boarding-house, no forwarding address. I tried local schools, then the Department of Education. They couldn't or wouldn't help. No, it wasn't easy.'
'Police?' suggested Pascoe. 'Did you try them?'
'Why?' said Greenall, surprised. 'It had nothing to do with the police. In the end, I stopped trying. I didn't give up, you understand. Just settled to play a waiting game. I knew that somehow, one day, something . . . well, I was right. There in the paper, just a paragraph. Tragic accident. Man chewed to death by machine at Agricultural Show. Mr Peter Dinwoodie. Leaving wife, Mary; daughter, Alison. Pure chance. But more than chance. The paper I saw it in was months out of date. I'd rented a small cottage. There was a coal fire. I used newspaper to light it and during the summer the papers just piled up. I'd missed the item when it first appeared, last summer. But one cold January morning this year I was making spills of paper to use as kindling, and there it was. Pure chance? I didn't think so.
'I was better at detective work this time. I thought about it for a week or two. All I had was one paragraph. Agricultural Show. So I came up to Yorkshire and started a search via the press. It was very easy. There were more details in the Yorkshire Post. I got the town and the name of the Garden Centre. Linden. That made me almost certain. But I had a look through back numbers of the local evening paper when I got here, and there was a photograph. Dinwoodie. I should have felt triumphant but I didn't. Sick almost. I nearly headed back south there and then. But I'd come this far . . . this far . . .
'That night I went out to the Garden Centre.
'Mary was alone. She was surprised to see me, but not too surprised. We sat and talked. I told her about myself, put her at her ease, told her I bore no grudges. It got late. Alison wasn't home. Mary said perhaps I should come back the next day, but I was getting a bit concerned. She was barely seventeen, a child still. I didn't like the idea that she was being kept out till all hours. Then we heard a car. I looked out of the window. I could see her in the passenger seat. She and the driver were in a pretty tight clinch you know, hands everywhere. I wanted to go out, but Mary wouldn't let me. A bit later Alison came in. God, what a change! I mean, all right, it was six years since I'd seen her, but she was still my girl, still just a child. But the clothes she had on, the hair-do, the make-up! And on her hand, on her left hand, a ring. She didn't notice me at first, she was so excited, waving this ring at her mother, saying she was engaged.
'I had to say something. I didn't want to spoil our reunion, but I had to say something. She was quiet at first, much more surprised than Mary. Pleased to see me, I thought, but also accusing. As if it had all been my fault. And wilful. Like her mother. She said she wanted to get married soon. Married? What did she know of life? A child. She said this boy was down here doing some kind of agricultural course. They'd met at the show where Dinwoodie had been killed. Irony. Even dying, he did me a bad turn. Soon he'd be finished, going back up to the Borders somewhere, and he wanted Alison to go with him. I said it was absurd. Legally she was still my daughter. I had my rights still. They let them choose for themselves when they're eighteen now. Stupid, isn't it? But there was still a year to go. And there was no way she was going to get my permission!'
But she didn't need it, thought Pascoe. One parent's agreement was enough now. Christ, why didn't people check what the latest state of the law was?
'Well, there was a row, of course,' resumed Greenall. 'Alison flew out of the room. Mary, however, seemed to be much more sensible about the situation. We talked and in the end I went away, satisfied that an understanding had been reached. It was far too early to talk about a reconciliation, but at least I felt we understood each other. How wrong can you be?'
Pascoe's pen was flying over the sheets of his notebook, yet he was making a great effort to keep it legible. This was an iron to strike while hot. This was not going to be a statement which would easily bear the delays of careful typing. Greenall's signature at the bottom of each handwritten page was going to be the first consideration.
‘I couldn't get back for nearly a fortnight, and then just an overnight stay. Alison wasn't there. Staying with friends, said Mary. A long-standing commitment. I accepted it. Why not? We all had our own lives, we weren't a family again. Not yet. But I had hopes. I'd seen an advert in one of the journals. They wanted a secretary/instructor at the local Aero Club. It wasn't - isn't - a patch on the place I was at in Surrey and the job was much more of a general dogsbody from the sound of it, but I thought it might be worth a look. I said nothing to M
ary, but I sent off for details.
'Then next time I came, there was no one at the house. There'd been heavy snow, you recall. It was a foot deep or more. The Garden Centre was closed, of course. And the house was empty. I went back to Surrey, not knowing what to do. I was worried sick. I'd not told a soul anything about this, so I couldn't even talk things over with anyone. I was in a dream for a couple of days. Then the phone rang. I'd given Mary my number and it was her. I knew it was her before I picked it up, and I knew it was bad news. Well, she was almost matter of fact about it. Against my will, against my rights, she'd encouraged Alison to run off with this boy.
They'd been married in Scotland. And now they were dead.
'I don't know what I said. I don't know how long she listened. She was to blame, I knew that. Yet I could understand how utterly her life must have been destroyed. And Alison's death was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Yet in a way it might be a sort of blessing, it seemed, for when I thought of all the agony and disillusion being married so young must have piled up for her, or being married at all for that matter, in a way this quick, sudden death . . .'
He took a deep breath.
'I thought of Hamlet again, suddenly, the first time in six years. What women could be, what they let themselves be, what they make of us . . . I tried to get in touch with Mary again. I wanted to explain, reprove, convince, I wanted to show her what she was, make her recognize - well, I wanted all kinds of things. But she wasn't there. And when I came up again, the Centre was still piled high with snow and she still wasn't there.
'So I applied for the job here. Don't ask me why. Just to be close, I suppose. To be ready. I got it, of course. In March I started. I kept away from Shafton. I guessed that Mary might be frightened of seeing me. If she came back and found there'd been someone around asking after her, she might take off again. But once or twice a week I'd ring the house in the evening, just to see if there was an answer. There never was. Meanwhile I got down to the job of putting this place on its feet. It was hard work, but I enjoy hard work. And I get on with people. I like people, Mr Pascoe. I like them a lot. That's why it's been so . . . hard.'
Dalziel 06 A Killing Kindness Page 23
