Ruling Passion

by Reginald Hill

  ‘I see,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘But sometimes, if it’s a matter of local mail – things that I’m going to have to deliver anyway, you understand – some people just leave them on the counter or push them through our letter-box.’

  She raised her chin and looked defiantly at Pascoe, who suddenly knew what this was all about. He took the letter Miss Langdale produced from her large pocket and stared down at Colin’s distinctive handwriting. J. K. Palfrey, Esq., The Eagle and Child, Thornton Lacey.

  A flock of thoughts rose and fluttered around Pascoe’s mind. The proper course of action was clear. Take the letter to Backhouse who would then take it to Palfrey and require it to be opened in his presence. If it was not relevant to the inquiry that would be an end to it. But if it was … ! Pascoe did not feel somehow that Backhouse would be keen to let him read it.

  He realized with a start that Miss Langdale was still speaking.

  ‘I was almost at the Eagle and Child this morning when I met Mrs Anderson who told me the news. She picks up everything very quickly, I’m afraid. Normally I pay no heed, but this was different. This was dreadful, dreadful. So I finished my round but kept this letter. Anthea and I have been discussing all day what we ought to do. It’s our duty to deliver the Queen’s mail, you see. But if, as seemed possible in the circumstances, it might cause distress … and in a sense, it had not in fact been posted, had it? So here I am. Will you give me a receipt, please?’

  Her voice was suddenly brisk, businesslike. Pascoe looked round for a piece of paper and a pen. He had made up his mind to open the letter and damn the consequences. Every instinct in his body warned him against it, but told him at the same time how important the letter was. He had to see. This might be his only chance.

  ‘Receipt book’s in the top drawer, Sergeant.’

  It was Crowther, standing quietly in the doorway. His chance had gone.

  ‘Interesting, this,’ said the constable, holding the letter before him after he had efficiently disposed of Miss Langdale. ‘I’d better let the super have it right away. Thanks for taking care of things.’

  He put the letter in his tunic pocket, tidied up the papers on his desk, stared a long moment at the disturbed carbon copy of his notes but did not remove them, and left.

  ‘Damn! damn! damn!’ said Pascoe. But he shuddered to think of the dangerous course he had been about to steer on. The sooner he got back to Dalziel and other people’s losses, the better.

  He went back into the living-room to collect Ellie and take her to the Culpeppers’.

  Chapter 7

  The Culpeppers’ house was an impressive structure. Built in traditional Cotswold stone, its lines and proportions were unequivocally though unobtrusively modern.

  The gardens consisted principally of herbaceous borders and lawns running down to an encirclement of trees. Whether the Culpepper estate extended into the woods was not clear. The lawns themselves were beautifully kept. Only one of them, hooped for croquet, showed any signs of wear. Coming up the drive, Pascoe had glimpsed a bent figure in a bright orange coat slowly brushing away the leaves which the autumn wind had laid on one of the side lawns. A fluorescent gardener, he thought, and prepared himself for anything from a parlourmaid to a full-dress butler when he rang the bell. But it had been Culpepper himself, features etched with well-bred solicitude, who opened the door.

  Pascoe could see that Ellie disliked him at once. He recalled his own reaction to Marianne Culpepper and groaned inwardly at the thought of the evening ahead. Not that much social intercourse would be expected of them, surely. Or sexual either, he added to himself as they were shown into separate bedrooms. The bed at Brookside Cottage with its ornamental pillow came into his mind. Half the local police-force would have seen it. It was a good job he hadn’t been having a bit on the side with the chief constable’s wife.

  The frivolity of the thought touched him with guilt. This was the way grief worked. It could only achieve complete victory for a comparatively short time. But it filled the mind with snares of guilt and self-disgust to catch at all thoughts and emotions fighting against it.

  Ellie felt the same. She had raised her eyebrows humorously at his as Culpepper opened her bedroom door. But it was a brief flicker of light in dark sky.

  The evening’s prospects did not improve when Marianne Culpepper returned. Pascoe heard a car arrive as he was unpacking his over-night case and when he left his room a minute later to collect Ellie, he found her standing at the head of the stairs, unashamedly eavesdropping on a conversation below.

  Culpepper’s neutral tones were audible only as an indecipherable murmur, but his wife’s elegantly vowelled voice carried perfectly. Pascoe was reminded of teenage visits to the local repertory theatre (now declined to bingo) where hopeful young actresses projected their lines to the most distant ‘gods’.

  Even half a conversation was enough to reveal that Marianne Culpepper had no knowledge whatsoever of her husband’s invitation to Pascoe and Ellie. They exchanged rueful glances on the landing. Pascoe moved to the nearest door, opened it and slammed it shut. It might have been more politic to retreat for a while, but Pascoe found himself looking forward to putting all that good breeding below to the test.

  ‘Let’s go down, shall we?’ he said in an exaggeratedly loud voice.

  The Culpeppers presented a fairly united front as introductions took place.

  ‘Didn’t I see you in the village hall this morning?’ asked Marianne of Pascoe. ‘I didn’t realize then. I thought you were just one of the policemen.’

  Oh, I am, I am, thought Pascoe.

  ‘Look,’ the woman went on, ‘I’m terrible sorry about your friends. I hardly knew them, the Hopkinses I mean, but they seemed very nice people.’

  Everyone speaks as if we’ve lost them both, thought Pascoe. Perhaps we have.

  ‘You’ll be tired of expressions of sympathy I know. They become very wearing.’ She paused as though communicating with herself only, then continued. ‘Which brings me to this evening. You are very welcome indeed to our house, but Hartley and I have got our lines crossed somewhere. I’ve asked a couple of friends along to dinner and a few more people may drop in for drinks later. Please, it’s up to you. If you’d rather duck out, have your meal early, and generally avoid the madding crowd, just say so. Don’t be silly about it.’

  The crossed lines cut both ways, Pascoe mixed his metaphors. Hartley knew as little of his wife’s evening invitations as she did of his. Or did he?

  ‘I think we’d like to join in,’ said Ellie, rather to Pascoe’s surprise, though it confirmed his own reaction. The reasons must be very different, however. ‘If we’re not going to be spectres at the feast, that is.’

  ‘Not at all. Good, that’s settled. It’s just a cold collation on Saturdays, but I’d better go and get things organized before I change.’

  She was wearing slacks and a chunky sweater and looked wind-blown, as if she had just returned from some fairly active outdoor activity.

  ‘May I help?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Why not?’ she said with a smile. ‘How are you at carving? Hartley’s a near-vegetarian and doesn’t take kindly to sawing up chunks of dead animals.’

  ‘Are you interested in porcelain?’ asked Culpepper when the two men were alone.

  ‘I know little about it,’ answered Pascoe cautiously. More therapy? he wondered. From Dalziel’s burglars to Culpepper’s culture. I must appear all things to all men.

  ‘My own knowledge is very limited,’ said Culpepper modestly. ‘Come and see my few pieces.’

  He rose, led Pascoe across the entrance hall and unlocked a solid-looking oak door. When he opened it, Pascoe was surprised to see a metal grille, rather like the expanding doors used in old-fashioned lifts. Culpepper inserted another key and the grille slid back of its own accord.

  Whether the value of the collection justified these elaborate precautions Pascoe could not say. The pieces were magnificently displayed. There were no w
indows in the room and the walls were broken by a series of different sized niches which held the porcelain. Each niche had its own light, controlled separately so that it was possible to centre the attention completely on each of the pieces in turn. The only free-standing pieces were two large capped urns which occupied plinths in the middle of the room. They were decorated in the Chinese style but Culpepper assured Pascoe that they were late eighteenth-century English imitations.

  ‘Out of place here, really,’ he said. ‘But they were the first things I ever bought when I discovered I had enough money to start buying.’

  ‘How much is it all worth?’ was all Pascoe could find to say.

  ‘Oh, several thousands,’ said Culpepper vaguely. ‘Much of it is not what the experts might call first-rate. But to me it is irreplaceable and therefore invaluable.’

  He led the way out, crashing the grille door locked behind him.

  ‘Valuable or not, I wish more people would take the precautions you do with their property,’ said Pascoe, thinking of the ease with which his current burglar had been helping himself to small fortune. This time last night he had been working on the case. It seemed barely credible.

  Dinner went quite well. Ellie and Marianne seemed to have taken to each other, though Pascoe would not have seen either as the other’s ‘type’. The guests, John and Sandra Bell, were a pleasant enough couple in their mid-thirties, he extrovert, outspoken, nearly hearty; she pretty, much quieter but far from subdued. The name touched a chord in Pascoe’s mind. But it was only when the conversation, carefully vetted and censored for his and Ellie’s benefit, came round to the local water pollution controversy that he recalled noticing Bell’s name in the Amenities Committee minutes. He was a staunch down-streamer, and complained bitterly that the village brook was being polluted upstream by careless management of the cesspool drainage which many of the local properties still relied on. Culpepper, eating an egg mayonnaise with green salad, pushed his plate away from him with an expression of distaste.

  ‘John, please,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘You’re making Hartley nauseous and must be boring his visitors stiff.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bell, grinning at Ellie. ‘Forgive me. It’s all right for the idle rich on this side of the village. They can be objective. But that stream runs at the bottom of my garden and I’ve got a young son. He catches enough without getting typhoid. But never fear. I have a plan. The next Amenities Committee meeting may get a surprise.’

  He winked conspiratorially as Marianne began clearing away the plates.

  The first after-dinner guest arrived as they were drinking their coffee. Marianne let him in. There was a perceptible interval before she returned with Angus Pelman. Pascoe assumed the time was spent in warning the man about the strangers in the house.

  Pelman made no attempt to avoid the subject of the killings.

  ‘Any news of Hopkins?’ he asked brusquely after being introduced.

  ‘I think not,’ intervened Culpepper diplomatically. ‘I wonder, Miss Soper, if you would care to see my collection of porcelain?’

  ‘Oh, blast your porcelain, Hartley. Miss Soper isn’t a child to have her mind diverted by a bag of sweets.’

  Culpepper turned away and busied himself removing the foil cap from a fresh bottle of scotch. One two-thirds full stood in full view on the sideboard. Marianne glanced over at him with a faint pucker of worry between the eyes.

  ‘We’re all shocked by what’s happened,’ Pelman continued. ‘They were nice people, our neighbours, members of our community.’

  ‘Which not everybody made them particularly welcome to,’ murmured Culpepper. ‘Let me freshen your drink, Mr Pascoe.’

  ‘Meaning?’ demanded Pelman.

  ‘That business at the Eagle, for a start,’ replied Culpepper.

  ‘That was between JP and the Hopkinses,’ intervened Bell. ‘Nothing to do with anyone else. They were well out of it. It’s a much better pint at the Anne, and cheaper too.’

  He grinned amiably, the pourer of oil on troubled waters.

  ‘Who’s JP?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Palfrey, the owner of the Eagle and Child,’ said Marianne Culpepper.

  ‘Who, blameworthy though he is, should not be allowed all the blame,’ said her husband blandly. ‘And there were other things besides. Eh, Pelman?’

  There was a ring at the front door bell.

  ‘Hartley, would you answer that?’ said Marianne, separating the antagonists. She tried to consolidate the forced armistice by changing the conversation and Pelman seemed much readier to accept this from her.

  ‘If this weather keeps up, we’ll get some good riding tomorrow. Are you going out, John?’

  ‘No such luck. I haven’t reached Hartley’s stage of executive elevation yet. I still have to bring my work home with me. Besides, Sandra says riding gives you a big bum.’

  ‘John!’ protested his wife. But she met Marianne’s quizzical gaze with the unruffled smile of one whose own buttocks were as compact as a boy’s.

  ‘What is your job, Mr Bell?’ asked Pascoe, trying to sound unlike a policeman. Nowadays he was never sure when he succeeded.

  ‘I’m sales director of Nuplax, the kitchen utensil people. In Banbury.’

  ‘That sounds very high-powered.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll do. But it’s small time compared with Hartley. He’s a top finance man with the Nordrill group.’

  Pascoe looked impressed to conceal his ignorance. Nordrill he had heard of. An up-and-coming oil and mining consortium often in the news. But just what such a job meant in terms of responsibility and reward he could not conceive.

  ‘That must be worth a few bob,’ he said knowingly.

  ‘It keeps him comfortable. Eh, Marianne?’

  Bell’s gesture included the woman as well as the unostentatious luxury of the room. Marianne smiled, but with little humour.

  ‘I didn’t realize Nordrill were centred in the Midlands,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Oh, they’re not. But London’s no distance with a decent car and a pied-à-terre if you don’t fancy the drive back.’

  Lucky old Hartley, thought Pascoe.

  Lucky old Hartley re-entered accompanied by Dr Hardisty who, from the length of time they had taken, must have been giving as well as receiving information. With him was his wife, either younger or better preserved, with the brisk movements and reassuring smile that Pascoe associated with the nursing profession. It seemed a probable guess.

  They hardly had time to express anxiety over Ellie’s well-being and regret over Rose’s death, at the same time studiously avoiding any reference to Colin, before the bell rang once more. This time Marianne went and after the inevitable delay, reappeared by herself.

  ‘Hartley,’ she said quietly. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  Culpepper left the room. Pascoe wandered over to the sideboard and freshened his drink generously. He was a firm believer in the social maxim from each according to his ability and there was evidence of a great deal of ability here.

  Bell joined him.

  ‘Does Palfrey do most of the social liquor trade round here?’ Pascoe asked, holding the bottle of scotch like a conversation piece.

  ‘Christ, no!’ said Bell with his likeable grin. ‘The odd bottle when you’re stuck, perhaps. But who’s going to pay his prices when you can get the same stuff for 15p less in town? Don’t let our outward affluence deceive you, Mr Pascoe. Hartley may have an antique superior wine-merchant tucked away in the City, but the rest of us still push trolleys round the supermarkets.’

  ‘Big of you to refuse to take advantage of your wealth,’ said Pascoe, softening the comment with his own likeable grin. He had no desire to antagonize Bell. And he did want to talk about Palfrey. Why, he wasn’t sure. Personal antipathy? Well, he had no official standing in this case, so the presence of personal prejudice could for once be ignored.

  ‘How does Palfrey fit into the local scheme of things?’ he went on. But his policeman’s voice must have sounde
d through.

  ‘You’re very interested in old JP,’ commented Bell curiously. ‘Is it because of the row? If so, I really don’t think I should comment. Not during a casual chat in a friend’s house.’

  Being without official standing clearly cut both ways. Pascoe tried another smile. It didn’t feel quite as likeable as the last.

  ‘Why JP?’ he asked. ‘Just his initials?’

  Or is there some bloody masonic oath which prevents you from answering that?

  Bell laughed.

  ‘Yes, they are his initials.’ He glanced around and dropped his voice. ‘But they do service for other things besides. He’s got ambitions to get on to the bench. God help all petty offenders if that happens! But they really stem from our vicar. He’s a nice little Welshman, just one step out of the coalmine. He recalls in the old days in his village, a local copper-smelting firm hired a man to go around the streets every morning with two great buckets on a yoke. Everyone would empty their jerries into them!’

  He laughed so heartily that the others stopped talking and turned to look. Like a disturbance at a funeral, thought Pascoe, surprised to find himself feeling embarrassed.

  ‘They used the stuff in some process at the copper-works,’ explained Bell. ‘Anyway, this man was known familiarly as Jim Piss! And the vicar, after his first taste of the bitter at the Eagle when Palfrey took over, told the story. The name stuck, but for politeness’s sake, it became JP.’

  Very droll, thought Pascoe. But it took him no further forward. He wasn’t even very sure in which direction forward lay.

  The Culpeppers were in the room again, he observed. But there had been no noticeable addition to the company. Which might or might not be odd.

  Ellie was talking to the Hardistys and looking desperate. Pascoe could see why. Medical solicitude emanated from them almost visibly. He appproached to effect a rescue, but it proved unnecessary.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ she said to the medical twosome. ‘I think I’ll have an early night.’