Pascal Passion (The Falconer Files Book 4)

by Andrea Frazer

  ‘No comment,’ said Seth Borrowdale.

  ‘You’ve got two kids at the school, haven’t you? Isaac and Jacob? Did one of them let something slip?’

  ‘No comment,’ said Seth Borrowdale.

  ‘Did one of the staff overhear something, or were they told something that allowed them to put two and two together about what you’re up to? Because I know you’re involved in something dodgy, so don’t bother to deny it.’

  ‘No comment,’ said Seth Borrowdale.

  ‘This is a complete waste of police time,’ Falconer decided. ‘We’re leaving now, but I want you down at the station in Market Darley, with your solicitor present, if you want him, at nine o’clock on Monday – no, scrub that, Monday’s a Bank Holiday – on Tuesday morning, and I don’t want any feeble excuses about why you can’t be there. If necessary, I’ll send a car for you. Have you got that?’ The confusion with the days had rather taken the sting out of the tail of his diatribe, but he felt he had got his message across.

  ‘No comment,’ said Seth Borrowdale.

  They left the house without catching sight of Martha again, but they could hear the hum of the vacuum cleaner from the room behind the one they had sat in, so she had obviously dealt with the little matter of a scorched cake.

  On the way out, Falconer had noticed that every surface gleamed from regular polishing, and that everything was clean, tidy, and cared for. That Borrowdale chap had landed himself a good little wife, and definitely didn’t deserve her. Perhaps keeping everything in apple-pie order was her way of shutting out his rather coarse and criminal nature.

  V

  Back in the car Carmichael felt recovered enough from his knock in the nuts to take over the driving again, and asked if they could make a triangle of the return trip to Market Darley so that they could stop in Castle Farthing. There was something he wanted to show the inspector of which he’d be glad of an opinion.

  Falconer had no beef with the suggestion but, as it was just after five o’clock, and they had promised to return to the Ring o’ Bells to talk to the Darlings. ‘Duty before pleasure, Carmichael,’ he intoned in a sepulchral voice, while his sergeant mimed throwing-up over the sill of the open window.

  Ernie Darling answered the quite energetic knocking on the door after a long two or three minutes, which Falconer suspected was deliberate, rather than him being out of earshot. Ernie’s eyes were a little like underdone fried eggs as he gazed up at Carmichael’s impressive height, and bade them enter.

  ‘Breast-fed, were you?’ he enquired in a sarcastic tone and, not waiting for an answer, transferred his gaze to Falconer, with the comment, ‘That’s a National Dried baby if I ever saw one. Spot the difference a mile off, no trouble. Now,’ he turned in their direction as if his previous remarks had not been uttered aloud, made a failed attempt at a smile, and asked them to be seated while he roused Margaret, who had gone upstairs for her afternoon nap.

  Ernie disappeared behind the bar and through a door at the right hand end, from where they could hear him calling , ‘Margaret! Get up, you lazy bitch! The filth are ‘ere! Get yer lazy, fat arse down here so that they can ’ave a good go at yer.’ This second demonstration of Ernie’s contempt for the police went straight over Carmichael’s head, but it was beginning to irritate Falconer, who had little respect for those who sided against the law just because they had a delinquent friend or relative.

  ‘Do feel you can take as much time as you want, Mr Darling. We can sit here all day, being paid in taxpayers’ money from the public purse. You probably make enough here not to have to worry about your tax bill at the end of the year. Just wander on in here at your leisure, and we’ll put our feet up and have a nice little PAID break.’ In fact Falconer suspected that they were standing just the other side of the door from the bar, to see how long they dared spin out their absence.

  This brought results, and the couple soon joined them: a fact that did not escape Falconer’s notice, and only went to prove, in his opinion, that the pair had been waiting to see for how long they could take the piss, as Ernie had done when they had knocked (and knocked, and knocked) on the door for admittance.

  Finally seated round a table – no admittance to a private lounge here – Falconer glanced at Carmichael with his ‘notebook’ look, and commenced questioning them about their son, David.

  Mrs Darling didn’t look capable of answering many questions at all. Her eyes were bloodshot, hung with impressive bags, her colouring was faintly grey, and she was either under the influence of a monster hangover, or suffering from some mortal disease.

  The former proved to be the case, and it wasn’t long before she excused herself and went off to quaff a glass of water, returning to the table with a glass of clear liquid, which she excused as ‘the hair of the dog that bit me’.

  Ernie was sullen in his replies to questions about David’s incarceration, muttering about his son either being framed by the police, or taking the fall for someone else. About his son’s earlier life, he was a little more forthcoming, and it seemed that the young David had been the apple of his father’s eye, and could do no wrong.

  Mr Darling Senior had managed to continue in this vein, keeping his blind eye firmly turned to the wall, until the police started to arrive on the scene, which made things rather difficult for him with his version of his lily-white boy. Slowly, it would seem, his illusions had been peeled away, layer by painful layer over the years.

  In point of fact, even now, he was inclined to blame others for David’s ‘little misfortunes’, and opined that when the lad, ( He was a lad no more, existing as such only in his father’s eyes) came home, he could work in the pub with a view to taking it over when he and Margaret were transferred to that Great Bar in the sky. They were just working here for a decent retirement and to be able to build up a nice little inheritance for their boy.

  Bollocks! thought Falconer, turning sideways and winking at his sergeant, with a most unexpected result. Although Carmichael took impeccable notes, he wasn’t always ‘listening’ as it were, to what he was writing, and Falconer’s wink seemed to have no context, and made him shy in his chair like a compromised virgin, thereafter glaring suspiciously towards his inspector.

  ‘At ease, Carmichael! You missed something there, that I’ll have to explain after we’ve finished here.’

  To say that Margaret Darling did not stand up well to questioning would be a gross understatement. She did not stand up to it at all, and just burst into tears, keeping her fluid level up by constant little nips at her glass of gin.

  Going for blunt rather than gold, Falconer asked her baldly, ‘Do you always drink this much, or has your consumption increased since your son was imprisoned?’

  This elicited another outburst of sobbing and the draining of the glass of spirit from her, but her husband was more informative. ‘She’s been on the sauce for a good while, but not like this. This only started when our David were sentenced. Half the time she’s awake she’s senseless, and half the time she’s supposed to be asleep, she’s wandering around looking for him, imagining he’s a little boy again and they’re playin’ ’ide an’ seek. Get this! I even found ’er out in the street in ’er nightie one night, sleepwalkin’ for Britain. She was only on her way to the school to collect little ’un, thinkin’ he were still six or seven years old. Didn’t remember a thing about it in the morning. An’ all this to-do in the village isn’t helping ’er. She’s drinkin’ even more since that old dame got ’erself killed.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ Falconer thought, as he asked, ‘Can you tell me where you were when Mrs Finch-Edwards was fatally attacked?’ Might as well ask. Not a lot of point, but might as well, just for form’s sake.

  ‘I were in ’ere, servin’ me customers as always, and as for madam ’ere, well, I think she was getting over one of her ‘special’ migraines, weren’t you, dear?’

  ‘Oh, probably. I usually am,’ his wife confirmed, walking carefully towards the bar to refill her glass.<
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  VI

  Back in the car once more, the confusion of Falconer’s wink explained, but neither of them any the wiser for their visit to the pub, Carmichael took the wheel again, and it was only a short while later that the car skirted the end of Castle Farthing’s village green and pulled up outside Jasmine Cottage. As they got out of the car, Falconer asked after the two puppies that Carmichael had recently acquired; one for each of his stepsons.

  ‘They’ve really grown, sir. You won’t recognise them. They eat their heads off, and rough and tumble like a couple of little clowns. The boys just love them, and they’re starting to train them now they’re old enough – the puppies, that is, not the boys. They’re going to take them to proper classes soon, then I said they could enter them in the local pet competitions at some of the village fetes this summer.’

  As they entered the living room from the tiny box of a hall, two little boys flung themselves at Carmichael, delighted at his unexpected appearance, and two furry little bundles attached themselves, one to each of Falconer’s trouser legs, and began to climb him, making tiny growling noises in their throats as they scaled the perilous heights of his lower half. He managed to resist the urge to swat the pair of them off, and was very relieved when Carmichael’s wife, Kerry, came to his rescue, plucking them off him and rubbing them against her face, making little cooing noises as she did so.

  ‘I thought you said they’d grown, Carmichael. They’re still microscopic,’ Falconer commented, to save himself from swearing with annoyance. He could see a pulled thread on one of his trouser legs, and they had not been cheap.

  ‘They’re nearly twice the weight they were when you last saw them, sir.’

  ‘What? Four ounces each instead of two?’ For Carmichael, tower of a man that he was, had chosen to buy a Chihuahua and a tiny Yorkshire terrier, both of which were still puppies, but which would never look like fully-grown dogs, however old they got.

  ‘Ha ha, sir! Should’ve gone to Lens-Savers: they’re getting huge!’

  Falconer wondered what the tiny scraps thought of the head of the household, but was not feeling mean enough to ask. Carmichael had forgotten all about his ‘doo-berries’ in his exuberance at being with his family.

  ‘What is it you want to show me, Carmichael. I’ve got to hook up with Green and Starr when we got back, to see how they got on with their game of ‘hunt the skewer’.

  ‘It’s this dresser, sir, over on the far wall.’

  Falconer took at glance over at it, and saw what appeared to be a very trendy dresser, with the latest distressed paintwork look. ‘Very nice, Carmichael! I bet that cost you a pretty penny.’

  ‘Not even one penny!’ Carmichael beamed with pride as he embarked on the story of the dresser. It was sweet, really, for him to think his boss would be interested, but he was that sort of person: the sort that wants to show how happy things make them, and what things make them happy.

  ‘The dresser was part of the stuff we kept from Crabtree Cottage,’ he began. [1] ‘The paint was an unused pot from the shed. I painted it, then distressed it myself. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s lovely, Carmichael.’

  ‘They call the style “sub-lux”,’ he announced with pride.

  ‘I think you’ll find that they call it “shabby chic”, Sergeant. Shall we go?’ Falconer was feeling quite distressed himself, with Carmichael’s cavalier misuse of language so far that day.

  VII

  PC Green and PC Starr were already back at the station, such as it was, writing up their notes. ‘Any luck?’ asked Falconer, before going upstairs to his own makeshift office.

  PC Starr sighed, and said, ‘Yes! In just about every kitchen, in the houses that had someone over fifty living in them. The older half of the group had bought them when they first got married, the younger half had got them from their mothers or their grans. I never want to see another skewer as long as I live.’

  ‘You want to hope you never see one as up-close as Audrey Finch-Matthews did,’ was the inspector’s wry comment, and it made PC Green look up, annoyed at the man’s flippancy in front of a woman, commenting, ‘Hey!’

  ‘Green!’ answered Falconer, acknowledging his presence. ‘Would you like to tell me why you’re sporting a rather spectacular black eye?’

  Green lowered his gaze again, saying nothing; a pale imitation of Seth Borrowdale.

  ‘It was all my fault,’ offered PC Starr, blushing with embarrassment.

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘We went for a drink together at lunchtime, down at the Coach and Horses. You know. that old dive with the low ceilings, that still stinks of tobacco after all this time? It’s sort of been taken over as the coppers’ pub, since we’ve moved here, and there was a student from the Poly working weekends behind the bar.’

  ‘French,’ interjected Green, lifting his head and leering. ‘Lovely bit o’ skirt.’

  ‘Anyway, Merv doesn’t know any French, so I told him a sentence to say to her, if he wanted to get to know her better,’ admitted Starr, becoming even redder.

  ‘And was the word coucher contained in this sentence, Starr?’ asked Falconer, trying to stop his mouth twitching.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she mumbled. ‘And he said it to her, and she landed him one right in the eye, even though he was in uniform. She just didn’t care, and gave him a fourpenny one, as my gran would’ve called it. I have apologised – to both parties,’ she said, a woeful expression on her face.

  It was Carmichael who started laughing first, and Falconer left the three of them to it, as his sergeant launched into the tale of his own mishap that afternoon, without even knowing whether it had bruised or not, and causing further hilarity when he offered to show them.

  It was good that they’d shared a laugh together, for the mood was to turn much more sombre before the weekend was out. Maybe they were feeling fey.

  Back at his desk Falconer looked up the number, and made a call to Detective Inspector Plover of the Standchester Police. He wouldn’t have felt comfortable if he hadn’t followed up on the Graingers’ story. At the mention of their name, the disembodied voice that was Plover sighed deeply, and just said, ‘Don’t get involved with her. She seems to have an A-Level in getting herself into dangerous situations.’

  ‘I don’t think there’ll be any of that sort of thing on this case, Plover. She’s only on holiday in Shepford Stacey for a few days.’

  ‘Don’t trust her. Don’t trust her an inch. If there’s anything dangerous going on, that’s where you’ll find her – right in the middle of it. She led me a right merry dance last year, keeping information to herself, and going off sleuthing without telling me first.’

  ‘I get the idea, Inspector, and thanks for the warning, but there’ll be nothing like that up here. She’s planning to spend the rest of her time here sightseeing, so I doubt I’ll come across her again.’

  ‘Oh, you will, Falconer; you mark my words. You will!’

  Falconer terminated the call, having formed the opinion that the Standchester inspector sounded like a man who has waited all his life for something to happen, only to find that it has been accidentally left off the agenda, to be replaced by a meddling member of the public, currently staying in Shepford Stacey.

  With a smile at the lugubrious predictions of his colleague from the coast, Falconer set to, to list his suspects: there certainly seemed to be plenty of them. Getting something down on paper always helped him to get things into perspective, and gain a better understanding of what had actually happened. There were plenty of characters to choose from, and he was at his desk until seven o’clock, scratching away with his pen, with occasional pauses for thought.

  [1] See Death of an Old Git

  Chapter Seven

  Sunday 3rd April

  I

  If he was not in the office, or out and about on a case, Sunday was a day that Falconer found difficult to fill. A free Saturday could be passed with food shopping, a little window shopping, and changing o
ne’s library books, but Sunday, even though all the shops were open now, and it was supposed to be the same as any other day, simply was not: it was different, and curiously empty on occasion.

  Before he started on his planned work, however, he remembered that he wanted to know about the empty house next to Blacksmith’s Terrace, and dialled The Rectory’s number with little hope of success, as this was Easter Day. To his surprise, Ruth Lockwood answered the summons after only three rings.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘I do remember who lived there. It was an elderly lady called Fanny – short for Frances: Fanny Anstruther, if my memory serves me correctly – who went into a nursing home … probably, at least: I don’t know for sure. But the place has been empty for quite a while now, and we assume it will go up for sale either when she dies, or the funds from it were needed to pay her fees. I’m afraid I’ve no idea of next-of-kin, but it’s hardly going to impinge on your investigation, is it?’

  It wouldn’t. Falconer just liked to know just who and what he was dealing with, and he couldn’t discount the occupier, or previous occupier of Copse View, until he knew who that person was, or had been. This information meant one person less for him to chase up, question, and consider as a killer, and that was OK by him.

  This Sunday he had brought all the case notes home, and was going through the reports and interviews, making notes, correlating and condensing, to give him a definitive suspect list, and there sure were a lot of people who harboured some sort of grudge against Audrey Finch-Matthews.

  His pen raced across sheet after sheet of paper, with an occasional pause to screw up a piece, and toss it towards the waste paper bin. After a couple of hours, he had more or less what he wanted on paper, and fetched a cork board from the garage. Although they used boards at the office, he liked to have one of his own at home, where he might be able to see things from a different angle, without any interruptions from other officers or the telephone.