Hill, Reginald - Dalziel and Pascoe 14 - Asking For The Moon (HTML)

by Reginald Hill

  She laughed and said, 'You may be right. I was talking to Boris earlier. He hinted at a surprise but wouldn't say what.

  You know how he loves being mysterious. Perhaps Kate has come back from the . . . wherever she's been.'

  Davenport put down his pen sharply and stood up.

  'Not even Boris would keep back such news just for effect,' he said sternly. 'Poor John. A whole year now. It must have been hell for him.'

  'That depends on what the previous year was like, doesn't it?' said his wife. 'Let's have a drink, shall we? It might warm us up.'

  'All right. What time do we have to go?'

  'Half seven, something like that,' she said vaguely. 'I thought we'd walk it. Along the old drive.'

  'What on earth for?' he protested strongly. 'It looks like rain. And it'll ruin your shoes.'

  'I just feel like the exercise. Besides, it's traditional. Vicars and their ladies must have taken that route when summoned to the Big House for a couple of centuries at least.'

  'Perhaps. It's not a pleasant walk. At this time of year, I mean.'

  He shivered and she regarded him curiously.

  'Shouldn't a vicar know how to put ghosts in their places?'

  she mocked. *

  'What do you mean?'

  'Joke,' she said. 'Though come to think of it, sometimes there does seem a rather excessive amount of noise and move­ment in the churchyard. Not just foxes and owls, I mean, though some of it's so overgrown it could hide a tiger. You really ought to insist that something's done about it, Peter.'

  'Yes, yes. I'll have a word,' he said. 'Let's have that drink.'

  He poured the gin with a generous hand and was pouring himself another before his wife had done more than dampen her full red lips on her first.

  'My name's Pascoe. I'm a police inspector. Could I have a word with you, Mr Lightfoot?'

  Arthur Lightfoot viewed him silently, then went back into the cottage as though indifferent whether Pascoe followed or not.

  Reckoning that if he waited for invitations round here, he was likely to become a fixture, Pascoe went in, closed the door behind him, pursued Lightfoot into a square, sparsely furnished living-room and sat down.

  The room occupied the breadth of the building and Pascoe could see that the uncurtained windows at the back were new and the plaster on the wall had been recently refurbished.

  'You had a fire?' he said conversationally.

  'What do you want, mister?'

  Pascoe sighed. One of the more distressing things about his job was the frequency with which he met Yorkshiremen who made Dalziel sound like something from Castiglione's Book of the Courtier.

  'It's about your sister, Kate. I've got no news of her, you understand,' he added hastily for fear of creating a false optimism.

  He needn't have worried.

  'I need no news of our Kate,' said Lightfoot.

  'I don't understand. You mean you don't want to hear anything about your sister?'

  It was a genuine semantic problem. Lightfoot's face showed a recognizable expression for a moment. It was one of contempt.

  'I mean I need no news. She's dead. I need no bobby to come telling me that.'

  'Well, if you know that, you know more than I do,' rejoined Pascoe. 'What makes you so sure?'

  'A man knows such things.'

  Oh God, that awful intuition again. No, not intuition,

  superstition. This was a medieval peasant who stood before him, but without any feudal inhibitions.

  'We can't be sure,' insisted Pascoe gently. 'Not till ... well, not till we've seen her.'

  'I've seen her.'

  'What?

  'What do you know, mister? Nowt!'

  Lightfoot spoke angrily. It was clearly only the gentler responses that were missing from his make-up.

  'I've heard her voice in the black of night and I've risen from my bed and I've seen her blown this way and that in the night wind,' proclaimed Lightfoot with terrifying intensity.

  Pascoe began to regret that he had sat down as the man loomed over him describing his lunatic visions. Looking for an excuse to get to his feet, he spotted a framed photograph on the mantelpiece.

  'Is this your sister, Mr Lightfoot?' he asked, rising and edging past the man. The picture showed a slim girl in a white dress and a wide-brimmed floppy hat from beneath which a pair of disproportionately large eyes looked uncer­tainly at the photographer. Like a startled rabbit, thought Pascoe unkindly. The background to the picture was a house which could have been The Pines, but identification was not helped by the fact that the print had been torn in half, pre­sumably to remove someone standing alongside the girl.

  Lightfoot snatched the frame from his hands, a rudeness perhaps more native than aggressive.

  'What do you want?' he demanded once more.

  'I'm on my way to see your brother-in-law,' answered Pascoe, deciding that the more direct he was, the quicker he could make his exit. 'There have been some phone calls, and a letter, suggesting that he knows more about your sister's disappearance than he's letting on. We're eager to find the person who's been making these suggestions.'

  'So you single me out!' said Lightfoot accusingly.

  'No,' said Pascoe. 'I was in Wearton yesterday, and I spoke to Mr Swithenbank then, but I didn't have time to contact

  anyone else. Later on tonight I'm going to see a variety of people at Wear End, Mr Kingsley's house. I thought I'd drop in on you en route, that's all.'

  'You guessed I wouldn't be at t'party then?' said Lightfoot.

  Pascoe looked uncomfortable and Lightfoot laughed like a tree cracking in a strong wind.

  'Yon bugger wouldn't invite me to suck in the air on his land,' he said.

  'Mr Kingsley doesn't care for your company?' said Pascoe redundantly.

  'He cares for nowt but his own flesh,' said Lightfoot. 'Like father, like son.'

  He replaced the photograph on the mantelpiece with a thump that defied Pascoe to touch it again.

  'Is it your brother-in-law that's been torn off the picture?' enquired Pascoe.

  'I wanted none of his face around my house,' said Lightfoot.

  'Why's that?'

  'No reason.'

  'Do you not like him either?'

  'They're all the same, them lot,' said Lightfoot. 'Kate'd be still living to this day likely if she hadn't got mixed up with them.'

  'Surely they were her friends,' protested Pascoe.

  'Friends! What need of friends when there's family? Are you done, Mr Detective? There's others have to work late hours besides t'police.'

  On the doorstep Pascoe turned and said, 'Have you made any calls to Mr Swithenbank or sent the police a letter, Mr Lightfoot?'

  'That's direct,' said Lightfoot. 'I wondered if you'd get round to asking. The answer's no, I haven't. If I knew definite who'd harmed her, I . . .'

  'You'd what?'

  'I'd know, wouldn't I? Do you question Swithenbank so direct?'

  'If the occasion demands,' said Pascoe.

  'Then ask him this. What was he doing skulking around the churchyard at midnight night before last? You ask him.'

  'All right,' said Pascoe. 'As a matter of interest, what were you doing skulking round the churchyard, Mr Lightfoot?'

  The door was shut hard in his face. Pascoe whistled with relief as he strolled through the gate and got into his car. There was something frightening about Lightfoot in a primal kind of way. A man who had commerce with ghosts must be frightening! Though a man so certain of his sister's death might have other reasons for his certainty, and that was more frightening still.

  Behind him in the comfortless cottage Lightfoot returned to the job which Pascoe's arrival had interrupted. Seated at the kitchen table, he oiled and polished the separated parts of his shotgun till he was satisfied. Then he reassembled it and sat motionless for a long time while outside the light faded, rooks beat their way homeward to the nest-dark trees, a light mist drifted out of the dank fields till a wind began
to rise and bore it away and drove the darkness over the land.

  Then Lightfoot stood up, put on a black donkey jacket, set his gun in the crook of his arm and went out into the night.

  Arthur Lightfoot was in many people's minds that night.

  Geoffrey Rawlinson as he shaved in preparation for the party at Wear End found himself thinking of Lightfoot. Even in his democratic teens when as a matter of faith such things were not allowed to matter, he had always been conscious of a vague distaste for calling on Kate at her brother's cottage. There was something so brutishly spartan about the place, and in that atmosphere Kate herself, so unnoticing of or uncaring for the near squalor, seemed a different person. By

  his early twenties, Rawlinson was openly wrestling with the choice he had to make. If he married Kate, he was marrying a Lightfoot. The two major elements of his make-up - the draughtsman's love of order and shape and the naturalist's love of energy and colour - clashed and jarred against each other like boulders in a turbulent sea. His sister looked pity­ingly at him but refused to speak. It had to be his own choice and he was ashamed of himself for having such a superficially Victorian reason for hesitating.

  Then Ursula told him one morning the news she had learnt the previous night and he realized to his amazement that his sense of critical choice had been fallacious.

  Now he lived in a framework of meticulous order which he felt both as a scaffolding and a cage.

  But even now, even when he regretted the past most passionately, the memory of Arthur, spooning stew into his mouth at the kitchen table with the encrusted sauce bottle and the curded milk bottle on guard before him, made Rawl­inson twitch with distaste.

  But that memory was just a mental feint to keep his mind from contemplating - as now he did, looking into his own reluctant eyes in the shaving mirror - the events of a year ago, and the pain, mental and physical, he had suffered since that dreadful night.

  Stella Rawlinson thought of Arthur, too, and wondered for the thousandth time, with a cold self-analysis which had noth­ing to do with control, why the humiliation of a fourteen-year-old girl should lay marks on her which persisted throughout womanhood. It was not unusual for a pubescent girl to have a crush on her best friend's elder brother. Nor could it be too unusual that recognition of this should cause dismissive and hurtful amusement. But rarely could this amusement be couched in such terms or such circumstances as to create a hatred stretching beyond maturity.

  Only one other person had ever been aware of what she suffered. What were best friends for? But a sharing is as likely

  to mean a doubling as a halving, she had long ago decided. It was a mistake to be rectified if possible, certainly not one to be repeated. So even with her husband she kept her peace and when he showed signs of wanting to commit the same error of confidence, she turned away.

  And Boris Kingsley, too, thought of Arthur as he arranged the chairs and filled the decanters in his library. But he thought of many other things besides as he opened the wardrobes in his bedroom and dressed for his party.

  And for a while as his guests arrived he thought of nothing but making them welcome. He didn't like most of them but there are less expensive ways of manifesting dislike than over your own drink in your own house, so he smiled and chatted and poured till a clock chimed and he glanced anxiously at his watch.

  Then he smiled again but this time secretively, excused himself, closed the door firmly behind him, and picked up the telephone.

  CHAPTER V

  >

  The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of 'Mother'.

  'You've met my mother?' said Swithenbank.

  'Briefly,' said Pascoe. 'How do you do?'

  He shook hands with the woman and wondered if he was being conned. Surely this wasn't the woman he had spoken to outside the house the previous day. There had been some­thing distinctive . . . yes, her hair had been a sort of purpley-blue, not the rich auburn of the woman before him.

  'You approve my coiffure, Mr Pascoe?' she said and he realized he was staring.

  'Very nice,' he said. 'It's very . . . becoming.'

  'I changed it at my son's behest,' she said. 'He didn't care for my last colour, did you, John?'

  'It seemed inappropriate,' said Swithenbank.

  'And this?' said his mother, striking a little pose with her left hand behind her head. 'Is this appropriate?'

  'If not to your age, at least to your genus,' he said drily. 'I'll leave you to it, Inspector, and put the finishing touches to my own coiffure. Mother, Mr Pascoe might like a drink.'

  'What would we do without our children to teach us manners?' wondered Mrs Swithenbank. 'Scotch, Inspector?'

  'Please. Some water. Your daughter-in-law went to the hairdresser's on the day she disappeared.'

  It was not quite the way he had intended to open the interview but Mrs Swithenbank was not quite the woman he had expected. She took the transition with the ease of a steeplechaser spotting that the ground fell away on the other side of the hedge.

  'Did she now? That would be a year ago today, you mean, Inspector?'

  'That's right. Though it was a Friday last year.'

  'Yes, I've always found that rather confusing. Though it's nice to have one's birthday shifting around, it's easier to miss. Not that birthdays bother me yet. I had John young, of course. And he looks older than he is. Here's your drink, Mr Pascoe. Do you find me absurd?'

  'I don't think so,' said Pascoe gravely.

  'Not just a trifle?'

  He considered.

  'No,' he said. 'Amusing, yes. But not absurd.'

  'Good. Neither do I. What did Kate have done at the hairdresser's?'

  'Shampoo. Cut. And she bought a wig.'

  Dove had phoned through with the information at lunch-time, admitting as cheerfully as ever that perhaps a year earlier they should have been asking questions about a frizzy blonde as well as a straight brunette.

  Pascoe was not one to kick a man when he was down but he had no qualms about applying the boot to someone as reluctant to fall as Dove.

  'This could knock your Swithenbank fixation into little pieces, Willie,' he had said. 'She could have got to the other end of the country without being noticed.'

  'And stopped unnoticed? Bollocks,' Dove had replied. 'All it means is she could have left the flat without being spotted and been picked up somewhere else by Swithenbank, who knocked her off on his way north. Keep at it, Pete. You're doing good. For a provincial!'

  'Did your daughter-in-law habitually wear wigs?' he now asked Mrs Swithenbank.

  'Never to my knowledge. She had longish straight hair. Reddish brown, a rather unusual colour. She hadn't changed the style much since she was a girl. She wasn't a one for following fashions, not in her clothes either. Always the same kind of dress, whites and creams, soft materials, loose-fitting - she hated constraint of any kind. But she always managed to look right. What colour was the wig, by the way?'

  'Platinum blonde.'

  'Never,' said Mrs Swithenbank emphatically. 'I can't imagine that . . . unless you mean she could be walking around somewhere -disguised as a blonde.'

  'Any idea why she might do that?' enquired Pascoe.

  'She was a strange girl in many ways,' answered the woman slowly. 'There was something about her - a kind of feyness. There were three girls in John's gang, Kate, Ursula Rawlin­son and Stella Foxley. Kate was the ugly duckling. The other two ... I gather you'll be meeting them tonight so perhaps I shouldn't anticipate your reactions . . .'

  'A kind thought,' said Pascoe, 'but I'll just be chatting. It's not an identity parade! Please go on.'

  'You'd have thought the other two would have walked away with all the boys. Ursula was a big well-made girl, full of life - still is! Stella - well, she was pretty too, but in a rather stiff kind of way. It was strange; before the village

  drama group folded up, she used to appear in nearly every production and on
the stage she really came to life, but off it she's always been . . . no, perhaps the competition she offered was a lot less stiff, but she was still much prettier! And Ursula! As I say, she was the belle. Little Kate Lightfoot with her skinny body and big frightened eyes, she faded away alongside her. Yet..."

  'Yes?' prompted Pascoe.

  'You know how it is when you're young, Mr Pascoe. There's always a lot of chopping and changing of boyfriends and girl-friends in any group. I used to think Ursula called the tune, passing on her discarded beaux to Kate or stealing hers if the fancy took her. But eventually I began to wonder if the reverse weren't true!'

  'And what did you decide?'

  'Nothing,' said Mrs Swithenbank, sipping her scotch. 'Kate always did things too quietly to give the game away. She moved around like a ghost! And Ursula, though she might behave as if her brains were in her brassiere, had far too much sense to make a fuss,'

  'Were you surprised when your son married Kate?' asked Pascoe.

  She looked at him reprovingly as though the question were too impudent to be answered, but when Pascoe put on his rueful look, she said, 'John had already been working for Colbridge's in London for two years. He seemed to be break­ing links with his Wearton friends, though if he had got engaged to Ursula, I should not have been surprised. In fact I might even have been pleased. She has many good solid qualities. I sometimes think she may have regretted her mar­riage, too.'

  'As your son regretted his?' said Pascoe.

  'As I regretted it, Inspector,' she said acidly. 'John has never by word or sign indicated that he had any regrets. And I can't give you any good reason for my own regrets, except perhaps the unhappiness of this past year. I never knew my daughter-in-law well enough to understand her. I tried, but

  I couldn't get close to her. I even started buying flowers and vegetables from her brother after the marriage, to sort of integrate the families, and that required an effort of will, I tell you. Have you met him? He's real Yorkshire peasant stock with something a little sinister besides. His family were all farm labourers, good for nothing, but, God knows how, he bettered himself and runs a smallholding in the village. I stopped going there a couple of months after Kate dis­appeared. I couldn't bear the way he looked at me.'