A Clubbable Woman

by Reginald Hill

  Pascoe touched his arm.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ he said. For a moment it looked as if Evans might resist, then he let himself be led to the sofa where he sat down quietly with his head between his hands and began to cry.

  Pascoe left him and ran lightly upstairs. It was his business to make sure that Gwen Evans was not still here. Arthur had obviously had the same idea. Every door was open, even wardrobes and cupboards, and all the lights were on.

  He looked into the wardrobes and through the drawers in the dressing-table and tallboy.

  She had packed well. Hardly a feminine article remained.

  The same in the bathroom. Only, there on its side on top of the medicine chest was an unstoppered bottle. He picked it up. It was empty. He read the label, then turned and ran downstairs three at a time.

  Arthur Evans was still on the sofa, only now he was sitting limp with his head resting against the arm. His eyes were closed and his breathing noisy.

  Pascoe turned back to the hall, picked up the telephone and dialled.

  ‘Ambulance,’ he said. ‘Quick.’

  ‘How was I to know,’ said Pascoe defensively, ‘that there were only two tablets in the bottle? Anyway he must have had about half a bottle of whisky.’

  ‘You do not pump out a man’s stomach because he’s drunk half a bottle of scotch,’ said Dalziel. ‘If you did, half the top men in this town would be swallowing rubber tubes every weekend. Christ, your common sense should have told you. Evans isn’t your romantic suicide type, he’s your find-‘em-and-mash-‘em type. He’ll have you on his list now.’

  ‘I hope they’ve gone a long way,’ said Pascoe. ‘They seem to have taken everything. Felstead’s landlady says he told her that he definitely wouldn’t be coming back. They’re almost certainly in his car. Is it worth sending out a call?’

  Dalziel shook his head emphatically.

  ‘Nothing whatsoever to do with us, Sergeant. If a woman runs away from her husband that’s their business. Our only concern is if and when Arthur catches up with them. I can’t see him sitting down for a quiet civilized three-cornered discussion.’

  Like you did? wondered Pascoe. Some hope! You and Evans are brothers under the thick skin.

  ‘What did he say about meeting Mary Connon, that’s the important thing,’ went on Dalziel.

  Pascoe tried to stop himself stiffening to a seated attention position and couldn’t quite manage it.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘That is, I didn’t actually ask him. I mean, how could I? The occasion didn’t arise.’

  He wished his voice didn’t sound quite so childishly defensive in his own ears, but Dalziel seemed happy enough with his explanation.

  ‘It’ll keep,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s so important that it won’t keep. Or if it is, and you keep it too long, it stops being important, and that’s much the same thing. Look at the time! There’s nothing more for us here. Come on!’

  He stood up and took his coat from the chair over which it had been casually thrown.

  ‘Well, help me on with it, lad,’ he said to Pascoe. ‘And hurry up. The most dangerous moment of a policeman’s life is the time between getting his coat on and getting out of the station. You never know what’s just coming in through the door.’

  Just coming in through the door at that very minute was Detective-Constable Edwards. He was very wet.

  ‘Where’ve you been, then?’ asked the desk-sergeant aggressively.

  ‘Out,’ said Edwards with a nerve sharpened by cold and more than an hour in the company of Mrs Kathy Grogan. ‘Is the super still in?’

  Entry to the Grogan household had not been easy. Mrs Grogan had wisely taken note of the many warnings issued to householders, especially the elderly living on their own, to examine carefully the credentials of all callers before admitting them.

  It took Edwards’s warrant card, two library tickets, a pay-slip and a snapshot of himself and his fiancee on the beach at Scarborough to win him admittance. The snapshot was the clincher. The girl, Mrs Grogan told him, had the look of her late sister.

  Once her doubts had been satisfied and the door unchained and unbolted, her attitude was one of reproachful expectancy.

  ‘So you’ve come at last,’ she said. ‘You take your time don’t you?’

  ‘Pardon?’ he said.

  ‘Come along in, then. It’s draughty out here. Gets right under my skirts if you’ll excuse the expression. If I’ve written to the Council once about that front door, I’ve written fifty times. I told her next door you’d be coming, but I didn’t think you’d be so long about it. If this is what you’re like when you are anxious I wouldn’t like to wait for you when you’re not.’

  The small living-room she took him into was made even smaller by the amount of stuff she had in there. Every ledge and shelf was crowded with ornaments of one kind or another, most of them bearing some civic inscription ranging geographically from ‘A gift from Peebles’ to ‘A souvenir of Ilfracombe’.

  Mrs Grogan, Edwards decided, was strongly attached to the past. He knew very well the dangers of any allusions to any of these articles, but the mere unavoidable act of looking at them was more than enough for his hostess.

  He reckoned he had done well to get away with two cups of tea and forty minutes of reminiscence before an opening arose to thrust in a question.

  ‘Mrs Grogan,’ he said, ‘you said before that you thought we were anxious to see you …”

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You said that.’

  Did I?’ he asked, half ready to believe anything.

  ‘Yes. Here. Look, I’ll show you.’

  She dived into a pile of newspapers which lay in an untidy stack beneath her chair and after a short search, triumphantly produced a neatly folded paper which she handed to Edwards.

  He looked down at it and found himself reading an account of Mary Connon’s death.

  Mrs Grogan’s gnarled and knuckle-swollen finger was interposed between his eyes and the paper. The meticulously clear and polished nail came to rest on a line near the end of the story.

  ‘The police are anxious to interview anyone who may have walked or driven along Boundary Drive between seven and nine on the night in question.’

  ‘But that means,’ Edwards began to explain, then pulled himself up with a smile.

  ‘I’m sorry we’ve taken so long to get round to you, Mrs Grogan, but we’ve been very busy. Now, I understand then that you did take a walk down Boundary Drive on that night?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course I did. I always do. I go to my nephew’s for tea on Saturday afternoons and if the weather’s not too bad I get off the bus in Glenfair Road and walk down the Drive. It saves me threepence on the fare that way. My nephew thinks I stay on the bus right into the estate, but I don’t always. It would worry him if he knew. This won’t have to come out in court, will it?’

  ‘We’ll try to keep it quiet,’ Edwards assured her.

  ‘Well, I’d just got opposite that poor woman’s house, and I glanced up at it. I always look at the houses as I walk by them. It’s really interesting. And then I saw the man.’

  ‘The man.’

  ‘Yes. I saw him quite clearly. A man.’

  ‘Mr Connon?’ suggested Edwards.

  ‘Oh no. Not him. I saw his picture in the paper. It wasn’t him. Someone quite different.’

  ‘Evans,’ interjected Dalziel when Edwards reached this part of his story.

  ‘Probably,’ agreed Pascoe gloomily.

  ‘Evans?’ asked Edwards.

  ‘Yes. Arthur Evans. He was round there that night. I’ve talked to him about it.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Edwards disappointedly. ‘I didn’t know. I suppose you asked him, sir, what he was doing up the tree?’

  ‘Up the tree? Up what tree?’ said Pascoe, his interest revived.

  ‘No. We didn’t ask him that, Constable,’ said Dalziel. ‘Do go on.’

  Edwards finished his story rapidly. Mrs Grogan had seen a man half way
up the sycamore tree in the Connons’ front garden. Despite the darkness and the distance, she claimed she saw him quite distinctly and, taking Edwards to her own window, she gave him a convincing demonstration of the excellence of her eyesight.

  ‘What did you do then?’ asked Edwards.

  ‘What should I do? Nothing, of course. It’s none of my business. I always look at the houses as I walk past, and I see a lot of things odder than that, but it’s not my business, is it? No, it wasn’t until I read about the murder in the paper that I thought any more about it. And when it said you were anxious to see me, I’ve been waiting ever since. I’ve even missed going out a couple of nights.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Edwards gently. ‘Next time why don’t you come down to see us, to hurry us along a bit? Ask for Mr Dalziel if you do.’

  But he didn’t put that bit in his report.

  ‘What price my intruder now, sir?’ asked Pascoe, with some slight jubilation.’

  ‘It depends who he is,’ said Dalziel thoughtfully. ‘And if he is. It’s late now. And dark. Sergeant, first thing in the morning, you exercise your limbs round at Connon’s and see what you’re like at climbing trees. And I’ll do a bit of sick-visiting, and go and talk to my old mate, Arthur, again. But watch yourself. Listen to that wind.’

  And a few miles away Antony heard the boughs of the sycamore tree sawing together and watched the sinister patterns moved by the wind across the frosted glass of the bathroom window. He put his toothbrush down and rinsed his mouth out. Then moving quietly along the landing in his bare feet, he came to Jenny’s bedroom door.

  It made a small noise as he opened it and he paused.

  ‘Jenny,’ he whispered.

  There was a little silence, then the sound of movement in the bed as she sat up. He could see her faintly, whitely.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  They’re looking very pleased with themselves this morning, thought Pascoe. Even from this angle.

  ‘This angle’ was almost ninety degrees. He had left the comparative safety of the platform of the step-ladder and was now clinging to what felt like a dangerously pliable branch of the tree.

  Below him, hand in hand, staring up with lively interest, were Jenny and Antony.

  Looking up, it had seemed no height at all. Looking down corrected the illusion, so instead he applied his mind to the business in hand.

  If there had been a man up the tree on the night of Mary Connon’s death - and a conversation with Kathy Grogan earlier that morning had convinced him, though her interpretation of the written word might be naively literal, there was nothing wrong with her senses, then that man could have been there for only one of three purposes.

  Unless he was a bird-watcher, he told himself. Joke. No, either he was up here to have a good look through one of the windows. In which case he’d be disappointed. Only if he really craned his neck sideways could he see anything of the front bedroom windows and then not enough to make the effort worthwhile. Of he wanted to get over the fence into the back garden. Which would be easy enough. Oops! Christ, nearly did it myself without trying. Or he was trying to get in through the one window in the house which was approachable from the tree side.

  The bathroom. Frosted glass. No good for your keen voyeur with an eye for detail, not even with the curtains open, blurred white shapes, very frustrating.

  So, decided Pascoe, if it was the window he was after, he was trying to get in.

  It was too much to hope that any sign of human presence in the tree would have survived two and a half wintry weeks. Not unless the climber had been wearing hobnailed boots. None the less Pascoe examined the likely branches conscientiously and as always in such cases, the satisfaction of expectation was a disappointment.

  Then he selected what looked like the safest route to the window and edged his way carefully out along the chosen branches. A sharp gust of wind set the whole tree in motion and he clung on desperately like a sailor in the rigging, remembering Dalziel’s jocular injunction to ‘watch himself.

  One thing’s certain, he told himself, it wasn’t fat Dalziel who climbed up this tree. Or anyone built like him. I reckon I’m about the limit. I reckon also I’ve reached the limit.

  He was as near to the window as he felt he could get without falling. There was nothing to be seen. Again he had expected nothing. One of the first things that had been done when the police arrived at the house was to examine all windows and doors for signs of forcible entry. There had been nothing. There was still nothing.

  The wind rose again, and again he tried to combine safety with dignity, thinking of the watchers below. And elsewhere. He had seen a few curtains moving in neighbouring houses.

  It was time to descend, he decided, and began to move backwards, fixing his eyes on the wall of the house in his determination not to look down. Then he stopped moving and kept on staring. At first he thought it was merely the effect of looking too hard, and he blinked his eyes twice. But it was still there.

  Just below the windowsill on the vertical brick there was something which looked like a footprint. Not much of a footprint, more of a toe-print. But it was there. As if someone scrabbling desperately for a hold had used even the little frictional grip pressure against the vertical could give.

  Wind and height forgotten, Pascoe swung down from the tree like a gymnast.

  Jenny’s hair was blowing wildly all over her face, evading all the effort of her hand to restrain it. She was beautiful.

  ‘Have you found anything. Sergeant?’ she asked, pitching her voice high to get over the wind.

  ‘Give us a hand with the steps,’ he said to Antony. ‘Over here.’

  Together they moved the step-ladder right up against the wall. The earth was soft here and the feet of the ladder began to sink as he ascended.

  ‘Hang on,’ he grunted to Antony and clambered quickly to the top. The bathroom windowsill was not far above his head. He stood on his toes and peered up towards it.

  ‘Look out!’ cried Antony, and the steps lurched violently sideways.

  But he was smiling as they helped him out of the herbaceous border.

  It was definitely a print, most probably made by the toe of a rubber-soled sports-shoe; a tennis-shoe, perhaps, or basket-ball boot.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Jenny anxiously.

  ‘He looks a bit dazed,’ said Antony. ‘It was the soil. One of the legs just went down as if it was on quicksand.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Pascoe, rather light-heartedly. ‘Take me to my leader.’

  Jenny and Antony looked at each other dubiously.

  ‘Come inside and have a cup of tea,’ suggested Jenny. ‘Or a drop of Daddy’s scotch.’

  She took him by the arm and led him unresistingly into the house.

  ‘Hello,’ said Connon, looking at the sergeant’s earth-stained suit. ‘Had a fall?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about, sir,’ replied Pascoe. ‘Winded me a bit that’s all. May I use your phone?’

  ‘Of course. Any luck with your tree?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Pascoe enigmatically, then seeing Jenny’s look of enquiry, he relented and added, ‘I think there may be a footprint.’

  ‘On the windowsill?’

  ‘On the wall.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Connon. ‘No one could get in there. And the window was fastened in any case.’

  Pascoe didn’t answer but went out to the phone. Jenny looked worriedly at her father. Today he looked paler than ever.

  ‘I wish they could have left this alone till Christmas was over,’ she whispered to Antony. He squeezed her shoulder and went out into the hall after Pascoe who was just replacing the receiver.

  ‘He’s out,’ said Pascoe, more to himself than Antony. ‘He’ll ring here when he gets back.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Antony. ‘Forgive me if I seem to be playing the amateur sleuth once again, but something else occurred to me the other day, which might or might not be of interest to you.�
��

  ‘Let’s have it,’ said Pascoe. ‘Every little helps. Shall we go into the other room?’

  ‘Well no,’ said Antony, it would make my explanation easier if we stepped outside.’

  Two minutes later Antony returned to the lounge.

  ‘Has he gone?’ asked Jenny, who was sitting on the arm of her father’s chair.

  ‘No. He’s in the garden again. But he sent me in to ask you something. You know a girl called Sheila Lennox?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wants to know if you know where she works.’

  Thirty minutes later the three of them were still sitting in the lounge.

  ‘I hope he’s going to pay for his telephone calls,’ said Jenny.

  ‘It’s a little price to pay to see the great detective’s great detective at work,’ said Antony.

  Connon sat with his hand pressed to the side of his brow.

  ‘Have you got your headache again, Daddy?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘No. Not really. Just a little. It’ll pass.’

  ‘Oh, I wish …’ but the front-door bell interrupted Jenny’s wish.

  Antony rose, but they heard the door being opened before he left the room.

  ‘How do you do, Sergeant?’ boomed a familiar voice.

  ‘Oh God,’ groaned Jenny, ‘it’s Fat Dalziel.’

  ‘The gang’s all here,’ intoned Antony.

  In the dining-room, Pascoe was speaking swiftly, persuasively to Dalziel who listened intently.

  ‘All right,’ he said when the sergeant had finished. ‘I’ll buy it. Let’s ask him now, shall we? Where’s he work?’

  ‘He doesn’t today. It’s Christmas Eve, remember? He finished early for Christmas. That’s why I left word for you to come here.’

  ‘That makes it easier. Come on.’

  Pascoe hung back, his memories of training thronging his mind.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call up a little support? Just in case.’

  Dalziel laughed contemptuously.

  ‘A strapping young lad like you? Not to mention me, the terror of seven counties. You must be joking. Anyway, it might still be a lot of hogwash. Let’s ask.’