Ruling Passion

by Reginald Hill

  What he needed was a lead. At the moment there was not a useful thought in his head.

  ‘Stuff it,’ he said, and picked up his morning newspaper which he had not yet had time to open.

  Colin peered out at him from near the bottom of the front page. For a moment he thought it meant they had found him, but it was only an appeal for public help. The short piece on the killings contained nothing new. There were a couple of meaningless quotations from Backhouse and, more surprisingly, a little harangue about the public weal from French, the coroner. Clearly he was a man who liked to be noticed.

  He turned the pages to escape the photograph. Other people’s troubles seemed to start from every column. Explosions, revolution, unemployment, a couple of strikes; a trade union leader in Bradford was accused of corruption; an international footballer had been suspended; a mineral mining company was accused of despoiling bonny Scotland. He looked at the last item more closely. The company was Nordrill; Culpepper’s firm he recalled. Suddenly he was back in Thornton Lacey.

  He crumpled the newspaper in his hands and dropped it into the waste bin. There was a knock at the door and a young head peered cheerfully round.

  ‘Excuse me, Sarge, but there’s a Mr Sturgeon here. Says you’ll be glad to see him.’

  ‘Will I?’ said Pascoe. ‘OK. Show him in.’

  Edgar Sturgeon had been number five in the list of victims. Pascoe remembered him well, partly because he had lost a stamp collection valued at just under a thousand pounds and partly because he hadn’t seemed particularly distressed to find his house burgled on return from holiday. In some people this would have been suspicious but Pascoe couldn’t find it in him to suspect the old man of being bent. They had almost instantly taken a liking to each other – not the kind of reason for quieting suspicion that Dalziel liked, but, in any case, Sturgeon was too comfortably placed to need an insurance fiddle. A self-made man, he had recently retired, having sold out his interest in the local timber-yard he had built up from nothing over forty years. Perhaps he was not quite ready for the life of easy retirement his comfortable wife and her three tortoiseshell cats had planned for him, and Pascoe had suspected from his lively demeanour that he was still putting his business acumen to some profitable use.

  ‘Hello, Mr Sturgeon. Come on in,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Hello, Sergeant Pascoe,’ said the grizzle-haired, thick-set man who slowly entered.

  He looks older, thought Pascoe. And his demeanour was now far from lively.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

  Sturgeon sat down and took an envelope out of his breast-pocket.

  ‘I’ve got some of my stamps back,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Have you indeed? That’s great. Where from?’

  ‘A friend of mine. I saw him at the club on Saturday and he told me he’d bought some stamps for his nephew’s birthday. Coronation set 1953. Couple of quids’ worth. He asked me to take a look to tell him if he’d been done or not.’

  Pascoe looked with interest at the block of four stamps he had shaken carefully out of the envelope. They were unfranked.

  ‘How can you be sure these are yours?’ he asked, after vainly trying to spot any distinguishing feature.

  ‘Them’s mine all right,’ asserted Sturgeon. ‘Give us some credit, lad! I did a little repair job on the big ’un. You can hardly see it, but it means it’s worth precious little. My mate was done! And if you look at the back you can see how they’ve been mounted. They don’t do that nowadays but when I started, you stuck ’em in.’

  ‘I’ll take your word,’ said Pascoe, glad to see the old man a little more lively. ‘This friend, where’d he get them?’

  ‘Etherege and Burne-Jones. Out at Birkham.’

  ‘Birkham? Yes, I know it.’

  Birkham was a village a few miles to the east. It made a useful half-way meeting point for Ellie and Pascoe, particularly as it possessed in the Jockey a very pleasant pub which provided excellent steaks. The only trouble was that, as always, excellence and beauty attracted crowds and Birkham was a fashionable place both to visit and to inhabit. The architectural and gastronomical delights of the place had been examined in a colour supplement article about a year previously and this had naturally increased its popularity.

  It was, thought Pascoe with a small shock of recognition, a kind of Yorkshire Thornton Lacey.

  He shook his mind free from the thought and concentrated on Messrs Etherege and Burne-Jones. He knew their shop, a converted barn, by sight but had never been inside. To a policeman’s eyes, all second-hand shops, whether claiming to deal in ‘antiques’ or ‘junk’, were suspect. They provided the best and most obvious outlet for stolen property. But in his experience, a fashionable establishment like the one at Birkham was less likely to be used for this than its urban counterpart. The opportunities for legal dishonesty in the selling of ‘antiques’ were too great to make fencing a worthwhile risk.

  ‘What will you do?’ asked Sturgeon.

  ‘We’ll take a look, of course. See if there’s anything else of yours there. You say you were shown the stamps on Saturday night? Why didn’t you get in touch yesterday?’

  Sturgeon shrugged.

  ‘It didn’t seem worth spoiling your week-end,’ he said.

  Pascoe stood up and crossed to a filing cabinet which he opened and peered into.

  ‘That was kind of you,’ he said after a while. If his voice sounded strange, Sturgeon obviously did not notice. He sat staring dully at the desk before him.

  He’s not interested in the stamps, thought Pascoe suddenly. There’s something else.

  He extracted a file from the open drawer.

  ‘We have an inventory of your stuff here, Mr Sturgeon,’ he said. ‘Now this would be item 27, wouldn’t it?’

  Sturgeon looked and nodded. Quickly and efficiently Pascoe drafted out a statement for the man to sign. But when he had done so, he seemed reluctant to leave.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Could you do something for me?’

  ‘Depends what is,’ said Pascoe.

  Sturgeon produced a piece of paper. It had a name and address written on it. He passed it to Pascoe who read it without enlightenment.

  Archie Selkirk, Strath Farm, Lochart, Nr Callander.

  ‘Lochart’s a village in Perthshire,’ said Sturgeon, speaking quickly as if eager to get the words out. ‘There’s a police-sergeant stationed there. It’ll be like it is in the villages round here – everyone knowing everyone else’s business. Could you ring this sergeant and ask him what he knows about that man?’

  ‘Archie Selkirk?’ said Pascoe thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure, Mr Sturgeon. What is it you want to find out?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Sturgeon. ‘Nothing in particular. Just anything that might be known. Can you help?’

  ‘Well, I’ll see what can be done. But people have got a right to privacy, you know, Mr Sturgeon. The police force can’t just be used as an information centre. We’ve got to have some reason for making inquiries.’

  Sturgeon stood up, pushing his chair back angrily.

  ‘If you can’t help, you can’t help,’ he snapped and made for the door.

  ‘Hold on!’ said Pascoe. ‘I said I’d see what I could do.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Sturgeon stonily and left, closing the door forcefully behind him.

  Pascoe took a couple of steps after him, then ‘Shit!’ he said and sat down. His business was crime. Today he would stick to it and leave the social therapy to others.

  He thrust Sturgeon’s piece of paper into his breast pocket and went down to the canteen for lunch.

  He had a hard but totally unproductive afternoon. Paperwork seemed to come at him from all sides and his one excursion into the outside world proved fruitless too. The ‘closed’ sign was up in the premises of Etherege and Burne-Jones at Birkham and he had a flat tyre on the journey back. He changed the wheel in record time, determined that at least the evening was going to remain unsp
oilt.

  His haste turned out to be unnecessary. When he rang Ellie at five-thirty to say it looked as if he was going to be able to get away that evening, she answered in a voice distant with fatigue.

  ‘I’m whacked, Peter,’ she said. ‘It just came on this afternoon. I had to send a class away. They probably reckon I’m pregnant. Or at the menopause, more likely.’

  Her effort at lightness failed miserably.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ asked Pascoe anxiously.

  ‘Hell, no. I got some pills from the college sickbay. Guaranteed to knock me out.’

  ‘Pills? Don’t you think you should …’

  ‘Oh, stop fussing!’ she snapped in irritation. ‘We’ve got a trained nurse here and she only doles out two of these things at a time, so there’s not much risk of an overdose.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … all I said was …’

  ‘OK, Peter. I’m sorry, love. I’m beat. All I want is a dose of oblivion, a nice, effective, SRN-measured dose. Would you mind if we scrubbed round this evening? Hell, we’d just sit and look miserably at each other anyway. What can you talk about when there’s only one thing to talk about? No news yet?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well. No news is …’

  ‘… no news. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes. Ring me tomorrow, will you?’

  ‘Yes. Look, Ellie, let’s have lunch together. I’m going to be out at Birkham in the morning. It’s not so far for you to come. We’ll have a bowl of soup at the Jockey.’

  ‘OK. About one; that suit? Good. ’Bye.’

  ‘Bye, love.’

  He replaced the receiver thoughtfully.

  ‘What’s the attraction at Birkham? Apart from the soup.’

  Dalziel was standing at the door. You had to admire the way the man made no effort to conceal his eavesdropping. Or perhaps you didn’t have to admire it at all. It was no use protesting about it, that was certain.

  Quickly he filled him in on the day’s events.

  ‘Precious bloody little,’ he grunted. ‘If we got paid by results, there’d be a lot of hungry buggers in this building tonight.’ He coughed ferociously into his large khaki handkerchief.

  ‘I’d see about that cough, sir,’ suggested Pascoe diffidently.

  ‘Would you now?’ said Dalziel. ‘Well, Sergeant, as you seem to be at a loose end tonight, you can stroll me quietly down to the Black Eagle and buy me some medicine. George, you coming?’

  The inspector thus addressed as he moved past the door in his raincoat didn’t pause in his stride.

  ‘Not tonight, thanks, sir,’ his voice receded. ‘Urgently expected at home.’

  Pascoe admired him. It took a good man to keep going when Dalziel spoke. Perhaps that was the quality he lacked, which would keep him a sergeant all his days.

  ‘The girl, she’s all right?’ asked Dalziel as they stepped out into the cool evening air.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Good. She seemed tough enough.’

  Dalziel had met Ellie during an investigation at the college where she lectured, the same investigation which had brought Ellie and Pascoe almost reluctantly together again after years without contact. Pascoe was still not certain about the depth and strength of their relationship. They met regularly, slept together when they felt like it (which meant when Ellie felt like it: Pascoe nearly always did), but their intimate talk was always of the shared past, never a shared future. The week-end at Thornton Lacey had seemed in prospect something of a proving ground. It might still turn out to have been so.

  But the relationship between Dalziel and Ellie was clear enough. They did not like each other. Each was the other’s bogeyman, monstrous and against nature – Dalziel the brute with power and Ellie the woman with brains. Pascoe sometimes felt it would be very easy to find himself crushed to death between them.

  ‘I had a word with Backhouse earlier. He was cagey, but he’s no further forward.’

  Dalziel made it sound as if in Backhouse’s place he would have been a great deal further forward.

  ‘There’s not much he can do, sir,’ said Pascoe, deciding he might as well go along with this we-can-discuss-the-case-coolly therapy. ‘Not until they find Colin.’

  ‘If he did it. Which seems likely. What seems likely is usually what happened. Though there is one thing.’

  What the one thing consisted of was not to be immediately revealed. They passed through the saloon bar door of the Black Eagle as Dalziel spoke. The barman stood with the telephone to his ear.

  ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘For you, Mr Dalziel.’

  Dalziel listened with nothing more than a couple of grunts and one long cough.

  ‘Right,’ he said finally. ‘Send a car.’

  He replaced the receiver firmly. Pascoe looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Just in time for a drink,’ said Dalziel. ‘Two scotches, Tommy. Quick as you like.’

  ‘We’re going out,’ stated Pascoe.

  ‘Right. Good job your bit of fluff’s tired. Cheers.’

  He downed his scotch in one.

  ‘Laddo’s been at it again,’ he continued. ‘Only this time he was interrupted.’

  ‘You mean we’ve got a witness?’ asked Pascoe hopefully.

  ‘No. From the sound of it we’ve got a corpse.’

  Chapter 2

  It was one-thirty when Pascoe arrived at the Jockey at Birkham. The pub was situated alongside a boarding kennels and the resident dogs howled accusingly at him as he parked his car.

  Ellie had finished her soup and was tearing the heart out of a steak pie, signs of a good appetite which pleased him as he made his apologies and refilled her glass.

  ‘I thought you said you were going to be in Birkham this morning,’ she complained.

  ‘Something came up.’

  Dropping his voice, he quickly sketched out what had happened the previous evening. Matthew Lewis, forty-three, senior partner in a firm of estate agents, had been called back from a late holiday in Scotland to attend to some urgent business. He had finished at his office at four-thirty. Deciding he was too exhausted to face the long drive north that evening, he made for home.

  A neigbour had seen him turn in to the drive of his handsome ranch-style bungalow at ten past five. At five-thirty, the neighbour, Mrs Celia Turvey, had gone to the front door of Lewis’s house with a parcel she had taken in for him from the postman. The front door was open. No one answered her calls. She went into the house and discovered Lewis lying dead in the lounge.

  Pascoe talked calmly, objectively, about the case, keeping a close eye on Ellie’s reactions. It was a good thing to have her interest like this. But it would be easy to let this new act of violence spill over into the emotional area of their own weekend. The momentum of the case had carried him unquestioningly along for most of the previous evening. But when Mrs Lewis, travel-weary and pale beyond despair, had arrived with her two young children, he had turned away and left rather than run the risk of having to speak to her.

  He did not tell Ellie this. Nor did he tell her that Matthew Lewis’s head had been beaten so badly that slivers of bone from his fractured skull were found buried deep inside his brain. He kept the affair at the level of a problem, as much for his own sake as for hers. But the targetless anger he had felt in Thornton Lacey was beginning to scratch demandingly at whatever cellar-door of his being contained it.

  Ellie too had sombre-coloured news. She had been in touch with Rose’s parents in Worksop and discovered that the body had been released to them and the funeral was taking place the following day.

  ‘That’s quick,’ commented Pascoe.

  ‘It’s not something to be put off,’ said Ellie. ‘With the funeral done, there’s some chance of starting to live again. Can you go? It’s not that far.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Pascoe. ‘Of course, we’re very busy.’

  ‘Oh, stuff your precious bloody job!’ said Ellie, standing up. ‘Are you finished? Let’s get some
air.’

  They strolled in silence along the road outside the pub, arriving eventually at the old barn which bore the sign David Burne-Jones and Jonathan Etherege – Antiques. This had been his original reason for meeting Ellie in Birkham, but there had been no time that morning to visit the shop. He had intended to call there later, after Ellie had departed, but now, as she stopped and peered through the open doorway, he said nothing but waited to see what she would do.

  ‘Fancy a browse?’ she asked.

  ‘Anything you say.’

  They went in. Sitting, and managing to look comfortable, on a Victorian chaise-longue was a man who seemed just to have finished a picnic lunch and was cleaning his teeth on an apple. About forty-two or -three, he had a round, cheerful face which matched his general shape. Fat if you disliked him, otherwise just chubby, thought Pascoe, leaving his own judgement still in the balance.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘Anything in particular you, want?’

  ‘Just browsing,’ said Ellie.

  ‘Be my guest. Let me know if you come across anything half decent among the junk.’

  The shop was divided into three sections. The largest contained furniture, the next local craft-work, and third and smallest, a mere couple of display cabinets, stamps and coins.

  Pascoe peered closely at these, laboriously trying to set them against a mental check list.

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in stamps?’ said Ellie, appearing at his shoulder.

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ murmured Pascoe. And vice versa.

  They wandered back into the craft section. He picked up an ashtray thrown by some local potter.

  ‘You can steal better at the Jockey,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve often thought of it,’ said the apple-eater, who had wandered up behind them unnoticed.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Pascoe, putting down the ashtray hastily.

  ‘No need,’ grinned the man. Pascoe grinned back, making up his mind. Anyone who could laugh at his own business deserved to be chubby.