Child's Play

by Reginald Hill

Lomas tried to speak, coughed and finally got out, ‘Yes, well, nice to meet you. Lexie, that lift … I’m a bit knackered.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said the girl. ‘'Bye. 'Bye, Mrs Pascoe.’

  ‘'Bye, Lexie,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Ciao, Rod, Lex,’ Pascoe called after them. ‘Odd little thing. How do you know her?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve met her at meetings,’ said Ellie vaguely.

  ‘That’s what meetings are for. You don’t mean she’s a WRAG activist?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ demanded Ellie. ‘Though she’s not, actually. It’s appeal work mainly. She delivers pamphlets, goes out collecting for Oxfam, Save the Children, that sort of thing. Quiet but willing.’

  ‘That’s how I like ’em,’ said Pascoe wistfully. ‘Well, Ell. What’s next on the programme? Hurry on down to Sardi’s and wait for the first reviews?’

  ‘Shut up, creep,’ said Ellie. ‘What happened to all that Big Eileen satirical stuff?’

  ‘I told you, I was afraid of her.’

  ‘You fancied her, you mean! One smile and you were grovelling at her feet.’

  ‘That’s all I could reach,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘So true,’ said Pascoe. ‘So very, very touching and so very, very true!’

  Chapter 2

  It was a week of that motley September weather, uncertain as April’s but much more troubling to the human spirit, when days swing between noons of high summer and frosty midnights, and the shades of municipal trees, heavy and still on sunlit pavements, start to shift and squirm beneath a fragmented moon.

  Cliff Sharman appeared in court on Tuesday morning. He had spent three nights in police custody, as the only address he would give was his grandmother’s flat in East Dulwich, and he hadn’t lived there on any regular basis for at least three years. Questioned, he said he was hitchhiking round the country and had been living rough. Seymour didn’t believe him. He didn’t have the look or the smell of rough living. But it didn’t seem a point worth labouring with rubber truncheons.

  Wield had moved into another stage of his long limbo, no longer waiting for something to happen, for it had happened, but now waiting for a voice - Cliff’s? Watmough’s? Even his own? - to speak the cue for the next scene in this black comedy. At last he felt he really understood this term. Black comedy was when a man stood naked and helpless under a spotlight and felt rather than heard the surrounding darkness crackle with malicious laughter.

  He knew he should have spoken immediately when Seymour brought the boy in, but he had waited instead for the boy to speak. He knew now that he had always waited for others to speak. Waiting was his forte. There was nothing anyone could teach him about waiting.

  Seymour, young, ambitious and not insensitive, was hurt by Wield’s lack of interest in his collar.

  ‘I know he’s probably just a one-offer. I mean, he was going at it so cack-handed, anyone could’ve spotted him …’

  ‘You didn’t,’ interrupted Bernadette.

  ‘I’ve not got eyes in the back of my head!’

  ‘Nor in the front, or is it some fancy step you’re after showing off by getting us out here among the tables?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Seymour, steering her back towards the dance-floor proper. ‘What I mean is, OK, he’s probably not one of the gang we’re after, they’d not employ anyone so useless. All the same, he was a collar, my collar, something to show for a week’s work. And Wield didn’t even give him a second glance, left me to question him all by himself.’

  ‘Oh you poor boy,’ mocked Bernadette. ‘Reverse! Reverse! It’s dancing we’re at, not a route march!’

  Standing in the witness-box giving evidence, Seymour observed that Wield had at least condescended to turn up in court, standing at the back, near the door, inscrutable as something carved on a totem pole with a tomahawk.

  Sharman pleaded guilty, claiming a sudden impulse, wholly unprecedented, wholly regretted.

  Seymour confirmed that nothing was known, the clerk muttered at the magistrate, the Bench conferred. Finally they delivered their judgement, which was that this first offence merited the leniency of a fine, and that, while they had no authority to ride the defendant out of town on a rail, they strongly recommended that he return to London as soon as possible.

  When Seymour glanced to the back of the court, he saw that Wield had already left.

  Sod him! he thought. It’s one to me on my record sheet, no matter what that miserable bugger thinks!

  The Pontelli murder investigation was still very much in the information-collecting stage. Eden Thackeray’s identification had been firm and the body, having been taken to pieces for the benefit of pathology, was now reassembled for the benefit of whoever might appear to mourn and bury it. The fatal bullet had been definitely identified as a Luger Pistole 08 which, though it had clearly done damage enough, had not done as much damage as it might, leading the ballistics expert to surmise that the cartridge was perhaps rather ancient and had not been kept in prime condition.

  ‘Weapons like the P 08 were popular war souvenirs, from both wars in fact, and this might well be one of the original rounds some idiot brought back with it,’ he posited.

  The pathologist’s report included the possibly helpful findings that the deceased had had sexual intercourse a few hours before death, that the shot had not been immediately fatal and the deceased lived for at least thirty minutes after the shooting, that he was a man of about sixty in good general health, that he had at some time, at least twenty-five years previously, received serious gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen probably, by the line of puncture scars, from an automatic weapon, and that he had a small but distinctive birthmark on his left buttock, in shape not unlike a maple leaf.

  To this, Superintendent Dalziel was able to add that Alessandro Pontelli had entered the country on a flight from Pisa on August 28th, that he was a resident of Florence, where he was well known in the tourist industry as a freelance courier and accommodation agent. The speed with which Dalziel produced this information was impressive to those who knew nothing of the unofficial inquiries he had put in train at Thackeray’s behest the previous Friday afternoon.

  But this initial momentum was not maintained and by the end of Tuesday, they were no further forward in discovering where Pontelli had been, or what he had been up to, during his sojourn in England. The car, which proved to be beyond all reach of an MOT test certificate, was traced to its last official owner, a Huddersfield schoolteacher, who had traded it in as a deposit on a secondhand Cortina eighteen months before. No doubt a long pursuit through trade-ins, scrap merchants and car-auctions would eventually lead to Pontelli coughing up a hundred quid, but meanwhile the CID cast around for closer, warmer trails.

  Help when it came sprang from uniformed branch, which was not all that unusual. But the shape it took was far from common.

  Police Constable Hector was hard to miss but easy to mistake. Shambling splay-footed along the pavement, his eighty inches reduced to a nearer seventy by curvature of the spine and a fifty per cent retraction of the head between the spiky shoulder-blades, he looked not so much like the law in motion as a reluctant party-goer cheated by a fancy-dress costumier.

  Tonight, however, there was a jauntiness in his step and a light in his eyes which might easily have passed for intelligence. His features too were deceptive, being set in that expression of painful devotion seen on the saints of the Florentine masters, while his lips moved constantly as though in silent prayer. He was in fact counting the numbers of a terrace of once proud but long shabby Victorian houses, a task requiring all his concentration as some had fallen off and he was walking down the odd side, going from big to little.

  Finally he reached No.23, climbed the four steps with scarcely a stumble, entered a long narrow hallway which smelt of Eastern spices and Western detritus, and started up the stairs.

  On the second landing he paused, got his bearings and knocked on one of the three doors. When
no one answered, he opened it cautiously and found himself looking at a lavatory. Selecting one of the other doors, he knocked again. It was opened immediately by a woman in a dressing-gown.

  ‘Is it Tuesday already?’ she said without enthusiasm.

  She turned back into the room. He followed, closing the door carefully behind him and sliding home the bolts. By the time he had finished, the woman had removed her dressing-gown and was lying on top of the rumpled bed, stark naked, her legs splayed. Hector undressed as rapidly as fumbling fingers and a reluctance to take his eyes off the unmoving form on the bed would allow. Ready at last, he advanced eagerly.

  ‘Are you not taking your hat off?’ asked the woman.

  ‘What? Oh aye.’

  Removing his helmet, he fell upon her recumbent body like a starving man upon a steaming platter. Two minutes later he rolled off, replete.

  ‘You don’t muck about much, do you?’ said the woman.

  ‘Don’t I?’ said Hector, who couldn’t imagine what ‘mucking about’ would entail.

  ‘Not much,’ said the woman, beginning to get dressed.

  It was three months since Hector had appeared at her door, introducing himself as the new community policeman. She had thought he was a funny-looking bugger then, but had offered him the same arrangement she’d had with his predecessor, and it had worked out well enough, no hassle for her and a weekly bang for him.

  There were, however, threats more perilous than officialdom and she reckoned she was earning protection there too. Mind you, as in this case the threat seemed to have been quite literally destroyed, she might do better to keep quiet. But whoever had done the destroying was still out there somewhere, and she’d come to the conclusion that the sooner she shared what little she knew with the law, the less chance there was of anyone wanting to make sure she kept it to herself.

  She picked up a copy of Monday’s Post.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This picture of that chap they found dead outside the cop-shop at the weekend.’

  The location of the body had caused much simple mirth locally.

  ‘Oh aye,’ said Hector, struggling to master the mechanism of his zip. ‘Foreigner.’

  This, uttered as if in total explanation of the killing, was the sum total of what Hector had picked up about the case from station gossip.

  ‘Foreigner, were he? Well, foreign or not, I reckon he were here on Friday night.’

  ‘Here?’ said Hector incredulously.

  ‘Aye, that’s what I said,’ replied the woman, offended at this implied doubt of her veracity. ‘He left his bag.’

  Hector paused in the contorted position of one who found it difficult to think and fasten his fly at the same time.

  ‘But what were he doing here?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Doing? What do you think he were doing?’ said the woman impatiently. ‘Same as you, you daft bugger.’

  ‘Same as me?’ he said, amazed. ‘You mean you let someone else do it too?’

  And the two of them regarded each other from twin but unbridgeable peaks of incomprehension, their faces lit by a wild surmise.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Monica Mathews,’ said Pascoe. ‘One conviction for soliciting, fined fifty pounds. When Hector took over that beat from Lewis a few months back, Lewis left him a list of useful addresses. When he knocked on Monica’s door, she automatically offered him the same deal she’d had with Lewis. Our Hector just thought she was bowled over by his natural charm. He’s all shook up to find out the truth.’

  Dalziel shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘That Lewis, happily retired, is he?’

  ‘With his wife and three kids and part-time security job at the Co-op.’

  ‘I’ll give him Co-op if ever I run into him,’ said Dalziel grimly.

  ‘You can hardly blame him for Hector,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘I can blame him for dipping his wick in police time,’ said Dalziel. ‘Anyway, what’ve we got?’

  ‘Well, it’s definitely our man. She remembers the scar on his body. She picked him up in the Volunteer about nine o’clock. They had a drink and talked terms. He wanted to know how much for the whole night. She got the impression he wanted somewhere to doss with no questions asked, and he wasn’t averse to having a jump thrown in. Two, in fact. He managed two and promised a third when he got back.’

  ‘He was taking a risk leaving his gear in her tender care when he went out, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Not really. The grip was well locked. Also he still owed the second instalment and the grip was security against his return. At the same time, if he found she’d been fiddling with it, she could probably have whistled for her money.’

  ‘Any useful pillow talk?’

  ‘Not really. He was very businesslike in advance. During, he just grunted. Afterwards he said nothing till he announced he had an appointment and would be back in one or two hours at the most. She watched him drive away. He went up to the end of Brook Street and turned left on to the main road. She said she got the impression he knew his way around.’

  ‘Oh aye. Is that significant?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. But if you keep on that road it takes you north along here’ - he was pointing at a map of their area on the wall - ‘and you’d pass the road end into Greendale here, and a few miles further on, if you fork left, you come to the Old Mill Inn.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, two Huby connections. Troy House in Greendale, and the Huby pub. And it was the Huby will that brought him here, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So that’s where you’d look for a motive?’ said Dalziel. ‘You’re a great one for a motive, Peter, even if it does sometimes take you round your backside to pick your nose. Me, I start with a body and work backward to find out where it’s been and who with. But you go ahead and try it your way. Talk to 'em at Troy House and this pub. See if there’s owt there for us.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ said Pascoe, a little cautiously in the face of this sudden approval of his admittedly vague line of thought. ‘You think there might be a connection?’

  ‘Mebbe. More to the point, I’ve got a report here which says PC Hewlett was driving his patrol car back towards town along that road about one o’clock on Saturday morning. He got stuck behind a green Escort on the bendy stretch between Greendale road end and Stanton Hill.’

  ‘Did he get the number?’

  ‘No. The idle bugger was on his way to sign off and all he was interested in was getting by and back here as quickly as possible. I doubt if he’d have paid much heed if there’d been a masked man with a tommy-gun on the roof. He got by it and recalls it kept behind him for a long way after that.’

  ‘You mean, that’s how Pontelli got here? Followed Hewlett?’

  ‘Why not? Foreigner with a bullet in him, needs help, sees a cop-car. Why not follow?’

  ‘Why not blow his horn?’ objected Pascoe.

  ‘You’ve not read the car report very closely, lad,’ said Dalziel triumphantly. ‘Horn didn’t work. It’s a wonder anything did. Any road, he sees Hewlett distantly turning into our yard and follows suit. Comes to a stop in the corner. Can’t get out of his door because he’s tight against the wall. Slides over to try the passenger door. It’s jammed. Gets down on the floor to try to push it open, passes out and bleeds to death. Is his grip still with Forensic?’

  ‘Yes, but I doubt if they’ll get much more from it.’

  The grip had contained little of interest except some Italian clothes and an Italian passport. Pontelli clearly travelled light.

  ‘He must have stayed somewhere while he’s been in England,’ continued Pascoe. ‘He can’t have dossed down with pros every night.’

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ said Dalziel. ‘Randy buggers, them wops. One thing, Peter. If you reckon this has got something to do with this Huby will, you’d best make up your mind if Pontelli got killed because he was a fraud or because he was genuine.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pascoe. ‘I thought I’d have a word with Tha
ckeray, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Why should I mind?’

  ‘Well, I know you’re friends …’

  ‘Are we? News to me! You talk to whoever you like, lad. By the way, where’s Wield? I’ve not seen him this morning.’

  ‘No. He rang in sick. He’s been looking really peaky these past few days. We could do with him, though. It leaves us short-handed.’

  ‘Sick?’ said Dalziel unsympathetically. ‘What’s the bugger got? Some wasting disease? Mebbe he’ll come back handsome! Well, if you’re short-handed, Peter, no use sitting on your arse all day, is it? Get to work, lad, get to work!’

  ‘He’s on the phone,’ said Lexie Huby. ‘He shouldn’t be long.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ve met, haven’t we? After the play the other night.’

  He smiled winningly as he spoke. There were those who thought he had a very winning smile, but this little girl obviously listed him among her losers. She returned his smile with a gaze of owlish indifference through her huge spectacles and began to type.

  Suit yourself, thought Pascoe morosely. He shouldn’t feel too hard done to. If she looked about twelve to him, he probably looked about seventy to her. Looked? Some days he felt it! It wouldn’t be long till the male menopause started squeezing his scrotum. The sensible approach was a philosophical jocularity. Middle age is when you start fancying your friend’s daughters; old age is when they look too antique. That was the right note to hit. But sod philosophy! He’d tried it already, but Chief Inspectorship kept on breaking in. He ought to be a DCI by now. His whizzkid curve demanded it. Much longer and he’d be bottom-side of a normal plodding career parabola. What was holding things up? Was it incipient paranoia, or had the DCC really been looking at him rather strangely of late? He’d passed Watmough in the corridor only this morning and the man had actually sniffed in a very marked fashion. Could it be B.O.? He resolved to give himself a really good squirt with that body lotion spray Ellie’s mother had given him at Christmas before he next encountered Watmough.