Child's Play

by Reginald Hill

  The dark, ugly face of the sergeant regarded him with a frowning intensity.

  ‘Dalziel knew about me,’ he said.

  Pascoe took this as a reproach and held his hand out to the flame like a good martyr.

  ‘Ellie too,’ he said. ‘Seems I’m the only shortsighted, insensitive sod in town. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Good thing I was able to fool someone,’ said Wield unexpectedly. ‘Even if it was only a shortsighted insensitive sod.’

  Suddenly there were tears stinging at Pascoe’s eyes. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose violently.

  Wield said, ‘Coffee’s not that bad, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘The coffee’s fine. It’s just guilt, I suppose. I could never take guilt. And I’ve not had a good morning.’

  ‘Oh aye? What’s been going off, then?’

  Pascoe said vaguely, ‘Oh, this and that. Look, Wieldy, what are you going to do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, all this must’ve shaken you up. I’d hate to think you were going to do something daft.’

  ‘Like resigning, you mean? If Mr Watmough gets Tommy Winter’s job and finds out what’s been going on, I reckon I’ll be saved the bother.’

  ‘It’s not a disciplinary matter!’ declared Pascoe indignantly.

  ‘Being gay? No, it’s not. But shacking up with a known criminal, and concealing the relationship when one of my own lads arrests him, that is, wouldn’t you say? No, at the very least, Watmough’ll have me shunted off out of harm’s way, and I didn’t join the force to sit in one box putting filing cards in another.’

  This was one marked change in the man. He’d spoken more in the short time since Pascoe’s arrival than he normally managed in half a day.

  Pascoe said, ‘Perhaps Watmough won’t get the job.’

  ‘Mebbe not. The Super doesn’t reckon his chances.’

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe doubtfully. He was recalling Dalziel’s sudden onset of interest in the Deputy Chief Constable’s internal directives. The fat man was a pragmatic. Could this mean that despite all his outer confidence in Watmough’s failure, secretly he was preparing himself against the man’s success?

  ‘Any road, whatever happens, who cares? A man’s got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you,’ said Wield. ‘You didn’t answer my question. What went off this morning to upset you? Something to do with the lad’s murder, was it?’

  His voice was steady.

  Pascoe said, ‘Just filling in the background, Wieldy. I’m not sure we ought to be talking about it.’

  ‘Frightened I’m going to ride off into town with my six-guns blazing?’

  ‘No. But perhaps you are.’

  Pascoe’s eyes were fixed on the coffee spoon in Wield’s right hand and the sergeant realized with a shock that he’d bent it double with pressure from his thumb.

  ‘Yuri Geller,’ he said, straightening it out. ‘I stop clocks too. With a face like mine, it’s not hard.’

  This was the first time Pascoe could recall hearing Wield refer to his unlovely features. Somehow it made up his mind for him and quickly he brought the sergeant up to date on the limited progress so far.

  Wield seemed back in full control.

  ‘Still nowt from his dad, then? I’d have thought the bits in the papers would have flushed him out, if nothing else did. Mebbe he’ll show up for the funeral.’

  ‘Funeral?’

  ‘Aye. He’s going to be buried up here. His grandmother agrees. Couple of days’ time.’

  Curious, thought Pascoe, the two murder cases colliding in his mind. One funeral where a missing son, perhaps, turns up to mourn a dead mother; now another where a missing father may turn up to mourn a dead son.

  ‘Something bothers me,’ said Wield.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Why’d Cliff say the station buffet for his meet?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he’d not been anywhere near the railway station, to my knowledge. He came by bus. That’s where I met him first, in the bus station café.’

  ‘Charley’s place?’

  ‘That’s right. Going back there I could understand. But switching to the railway buffet …’

  ‘Perhaps he thought Vollans was coming through by train from Leeds.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘I saw him at the Old Mill Inn later. He had a car. All right, perhaps there was someone else getting off, or getting on a train, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mebbe.’

  ‘I’ll check the trains arriving and leaving round the time he set up the meeting,’ said Pascoe. ‘I don’t see it as particularly significant, I must say, but if there’s anything there, we’ll find it.’

  ‘Will you? Well, mebbe you will,’ said Wield. ‘Another cup of coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ve got to be off. Something I need to check on out of town. Anyway, one dose of this witch’s brew’s enough for any sane man!’

  He spoke unthinkingly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wield. ‘I can’t spend the rest of my life drinking cups of coffee, can I?

  ‘Peter …’ His voice did not rise; in fact, it seemed to tremble like the G-string on a fiddle with the vibrations of despair … ‘you’ll find out what happened, won’t you? I’ve got to know before … before I can work out what’s going to happen to me.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Pascoe helplessly. ‘I’ll try, Wieldy. I promise, I’ll try.’

  Ten minutes later he was breaking the speed limit on the road south to Nottinghamshire.

  It hadn’t taken too long to discover that a child named Richard Sharman had been in a Nottingham Children’s Home from 1947 to 1962. All other information on the child was confidential, he was assured. Unimpressed, Pascoe had sought the right Open Sesame, guessed it wouldn’t be the thunder of a murder inquiry, and tried instead the still, sad music of humanity by talking of a dead boy and a lost father who needed to be told of his grief.

  It worked, but no treasure was revealed, just the information that Sharman had been an awkward, unfosterable child, that his mother had visited him rarely, and there was no address for her, and that his father had been killed in the war. There was a copy of the child’s birth certificate. He had been born on November 29th, 1944 at Maidstone, Kent, and his father was Sergeant Richard Alan Sharman of the Royal Signals.

  Delving into Army Records was like excavating in the Valley of Kings - sometimes you struck treasure, but often the tomb was empty. Lieutenant Alexander Lomas Huby, for instance, despite (or perhaps because of) his mother’s refusal to accept his death, had left minimal traces of his passing, including a medical record so sketchy as to be little help in confirming his sex let alone charting the contours of his left buttock. Sergeant Sharman was there in detail, however. Born 1917 in Nottingham, blue-eyed, fair-haired, white-skinned, he was measured and weighed to his last inch and final ounce. But the really interesting snippet was that his presumably black widow was still in receipt of her army pension which was sent to the Avalon Retirement Home on the outskirts of Nottingham.

  At this point, a phone call to the local police asking that someone visit the old woman would have sufficed. After all, it was most unlikely that she could give any information about her son which would have any bearing on the death of her grandson. But something had stopped him from doing the logical thing. Perhaps the memory of Ellie’s recent gibes about his intellectual censor rankled. Perhaps Dalziel’s apparent indifference to all his researches was also a provocation. But most certainly, his unassuaged guilt feeling about Wield made it essential for him to follow up even the slenderest lead on this case personally and to hell with logic and rules! Ninety minutes later he was being guided through the bright corridors of the Avalon Home by a nurse clad in a nylon overall which in a twilit lake might have passed for white samite.

  ‘How old is she?’ asked Pascoe.


  ‘Early seventies. Not so old by today’s standards, but after sixty it’s a lottery, isn’t it? Some stay young to the end, some seem to want to be old. With Mrs Sharman I get the impression it’s been her life’s ambition since her twenties.’

  The nurse spoke cheerfully rather than sourly. Middle-aged herself, she looked as if it was her ambition to stay young as long as possible.

  Pascoe said, ‘How long’s she been in the home?’

  ‘Best part of six years. She obviously wasn’t going to rest till she got someone else doing all the work for her! Hello, dear. Here’s a gentleman caller for you!’

  Mrs Sharman was frail, toothless, swathed in uncomfortable layers of clothing topped with a plaid dressing gown, and she carried a blackwood knobkerrie with which she supported her weight in motion and her assertions in repose. She gripped it menacingly as he took a seat before her.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Sharman,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.

  It was a good question.

  ‘Just to chat,’ he said, giving her what Ellie called his little-boy-lost smile.

  ‘I’m seventy-nine,’ proclaimed the old woman with a sudden thrust of her knobkerrie towards his crotch.

  Alarmed, he pushed back his chair a couple of feet. Behind Mrs Sharman the nurse mouthed, ‘Seventy-three.’

  ‘And I’ve still got my own teeth,’ continued the old woman, baring empty gums. ‘Only, I’ve forgotten where I put ’em!’

  This was evidently a favourite joke. She laughed so heartily at it that her screeches set up a sympathetic skirling around the conservatory in which they sat, and out beyond into the garden, as though bagpipe should call to bagpipe from lofty mountain to lowly glen in some serial pibroch.

  Pascoe joined in the laughter, out of politeness and also because it delayed a moment of some delicacy. He had examined the old woman closely in the past few minutes and there was no way that her visible skin, tanned though it was by age and weather, could be anything but white. He was no expert on the vagaries of miscegenation, but he recalled the old music hall joke about the Chinese girl who presented her husband with a European baby and was told that two Wongs do not make a white.

  Cliff Sharman’s father, the woman’s son, had been described as unequivocally black. Ergo, Sergeant Sharman was not the father. The poor devil had given his all for democracy before he could learn of his wife’s exertions in the same field. On the other hand, the woman still had to face the raised eyebrows and sharp intakes of breath when she returned to Nottingham with a black boy. Could there have been enough pressure and prejudice for her to commit the child to a home? Easily! he answered himself. 1945 might have seen Britain ready at last for the political assertion that Jack was as good as his master, but it was still light years away from any meaningful acknowledgement that Black Jack was as good as White Jack.

  He said gently, ‘Mrs Sharman, I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to talk to you about your husband, Sergeant Sharman.’

  ‘What about him?’ demanded Mrs Sharman with sudden suspicion. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Yes, of course, he is,’ said Pascoe reassuringly.

  ‘What do you want to talk about him for? I can’t even remember what he looked like.’

  Her face screwed up into a grimace which he feared was the harbinger of grief.

  He said huskily, ‘I don’t want to upset you …’

  ‘Upset me? Only thing’d upset me was if you told me that the bastard wasn’t dead after all and they wanted me pension back!’

  She put her wizened hand to her lips in a stagey gesture of amazement that she had let this sentiment slip out, but Pascoe doubted if there was much accidental in it.

  He reminded himself that she was old and infirm and that shortly he would be telling her that her grandson was dead. He reminded himself too that she had once been young and fair and turned the heads of men - well, two at least, Sergeant Sharman and the unknown black who had fathered her son. But he found it hard to get through the dislike to the compassion.

  ‘No, he’s dead, all right,’ he said. ‘It’s really your son I wanted to talk about …’

  ‘My son?’ She sat up straight, knobkerrie raised with far from accidental menace. ‘What son? I’ve got no son!’

  This was worse than he had imagined. The poor little bastard had been put out of her mind as well as her life.

  The nurse was looking at him, her eyebrows raised in puzzlement as if to say, are you sure you’ve got this right?

  He resolved to cut through the miasma once and for all.

  He said formally, ‘Mrs Sharman, the records show that you gave birth to a son in November 1944. A certificate to this effect exists in the registrar’s office at Maidstone in Kent, and though it may be inaccurate in naming Sergeant Sharman as the father …’

  The stick came down with a thud, narrowly missing his left foot, but it was a gesture of triumph, not aggression.

  ‘It’s the black bastard you’re talking about, isn’t it?’ she cried. ‘It’s not me you want, sonny, it’s her! She was never his wife. Thought she was, but she had a shock coming to her, just like he’d have had a shock if he’d come back alive and seen what she wanted to pass off as his baby! Oh, you should’ve seen her face! Thought she’d be getting the pension at least, she did! Came to see the family, they never liked me, sweet-talked them round, Richie’s true love and all that baloney even if they weren’t really married, but they wanted to see the baby, didn’t they? Richie’s child, their grandson, and she had to show it. Tried hard enough not to, but you can’t keep a baby hid forever. They’re often dark to start with, she said. It’s the blood being near the surface or some such thing. Oh, it was the blood all right! Three months on and it was black as night, and they wasn’t having that, not being chapel and all.’

  She was getting so excited that Pascoe became alarmed that she was about to have a fit. Then he focused on her coldly gleeful eyes and ceased to be alarmed.

  Leaning forward, he said quietly but distinctly into her left ear, ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Mr Pascoe!’ protested the nurse, rising.

  He ignored her.

  ‘I just want the bare story, Mrs Sharman,’ he said. ‘Save the entertainment for your friends. Just give me the history. If you can’t, I’ve no doubt there are others who will.’

  This threat was enough. Better to be a simple broadcasting machine than to be switched off altogether.

  The story was old as time and sad as old bones.

  A hasty wartime marriage followed by instant separation and, Pascoe guessed, on the woman’s part almost as instant infidelity. Returning from North Africa in 1943, Sharman had found a situation which had prompted him to seek an instant legal separation and institute divorce proceedings. A decree nisi had been granted but before it could be made absolute, news of Sharman’s death in action had come. Shortly afterwards the woman claiming, and probably believing, herself to be Sharman’s wife had contacted the family, who were obliged to tell her that their son’s earlier marriage had not been legally dissolved and therefore all pension rights devolved on the first wife. Whatever sympathy and financial help might have been offered to the second quickly vanished with the realization that the child she had borne could not be Sharman’s.

  ‘So what became of her?’ asked Pascoe.

  ‘How should I know?’ said the old woman indifferently. ‘Her kind usually do all right, don’t they?’

  Pascoe rose slowly. Possibly, indeed probably, there was some saving grace in this rag-bag of antique malice, but for once he could not find in himself the energy to seek it out. Was he at last entering the third condition of the human soul? Optimism; pessimism; cynicism.

  ‘Welcome aboard,’ he could hear Dalziel saying. ‘Quarters are comfy, victuals not bad, and the company’s grand!’

  Feeling empty, he thanked the nurse and left.

  Chapter 9

  Stephanie Windibanks was a swift, efficient packer. Her
husband had once remarked on this unshared talent and she had replied tartly that it came easily when you were married to a man who made a habit of staying at hotels he couldn’t afford. Arthur had laughed. There were few things that failed to amuse him. Triumph or disaster were received with equal amusement, and another grand plan.

  Suddenly she found there were tears in her eyes at the memory.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ she called, stooping over her case.

  The door opened, footsteps sounded heavily behind her and a voice boomed, ‘Going off somewhere, luv?’

  ‘Superintendent Dalziel,’ she said. ‘I thought you were the porter.’

  ‘Knock knock knock,’ said Dalziel. ‘Nice room. They do you well here.’

  ‘What do you want, Superintendent?’

  ‘Just confirmation,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘Then I suggest you see a bishop,’ retorted the woman smartly.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Dalziel who believed in sinking smart-alecs in explanation. ‘Bishop? Is that the manager? You mean, he could help?’

  ‘Help with what?’ said Mrs Windibanks, too nimble to be pinned down to explanation of her repartee.

  ‘I don’t know. Mebbe he saw you.’

  ‘Saw me doing what?’

  ‘Going into Mr Goodenough’s room last Friday night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shall I ask him?’

  ‘You may do what you want, Mr Dalziel,’ said the woman. ‘I meanwhile will get myself back to civilization as soon as may be possible.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Dalziel. ‘To help. See, the thing is, if I can be sure of where you were last Friday night when you say you were in your room but weren’t answering the telephone, then I’ll not be worried if you shove off, will I? And if it turns out you were in Goodenough’s room, that kills two birds with one stone, doesn’t it?’

  She stood in front of him and regarded him unblinkingly.

  ‘You’ve spoken to Mr Goodenough, have you?’