'Does it now?' said Pascoe, suddenly scenting a self-justifying opening. 'Why don't I drive over and have a look?'
'Time hanging heavy on your hands, is it? All right. When?'
'This afternoon?'
'Christ, you don't hang about! All right. Come before three. That OK? By the way, what was it you were ringing about?'
Pascoe said hesitantly, 'Nothing really. There's a firm of accountants on your patch called Bailey and Capstick. They had a man called Aldermann working for them up until seven or eight years ago. He may have left under some kind of cloud. I just wondered if anything was known.'
'I'll sniff around for you,' said Skelwith. 'Anything I should know about?'
'The faintest smell and you'll be the first to know,' promised Pascoe.
'Fair enough. Till three then.'
Ivan Skelwith was a dark and dapper Lancastrian who claimed to have joined a Yorkshire force because their mean measuring tapes enabled him to scrape in at the minimum height requirement. He greeted Pascoe with pleasure and a cup of tea and some biscuits, which helped make up for the lunch Pascoe had skipped to propitiate his conscience in wasting more time on Aldermann.
They spent the next hour at the burgled house where the m.o. and attendant circumstances seemed exactly the same as Pascoe's burglaries, right down to the "angry householders who as usual were threatening to sue the company who'd sold them their alarm system. The thieves had neutralized this with an expertise which spoke of careful planning. The only unusual feature was that some Virginia creeper which covered the wall on which the external alarm bell was set had been torn away and some plants in the flowerbed immediately below were badly crushed, as if someone or something had fallen on them. There were no helpful footprints or anything of that kind but at least it narrowed the limits within which the break-in must have occurred, for though the damage was not apparent to the casual glance, the owner's one-morning- a-week gardener was able to confirm that the border was untouched when he last called the previous Friday.
'So. A weekend job. Does that help?'
'Not bloody much,' said Skelwith.
Back in his office, they had another cup of tea accompanied this time by jam doughnuts.
Skelwith watched Pascoe devour his enthusiastically and said, 'That's the trouble with marriage. It's all instant sex and gourmet cooking till the kids start coming, then it's do-it-yourself or do without.'
'You look well enough on it,' said Pascoe. 'Four, isn't it? How's that long-suffering wife of yours?'
'Five next January, and she's fine. Now, about that firm of accountants, it's Bailey, Capstick, Lewis and Grey, by the way, only Bailey's been dead twenty years and Capstick retired the year before last. It might have been Lewis and Aldermann, I gather. Their Mr Grey was taken on to replace your Mr Aldermann six years ago and has already attained to a partnership. Mr Aldermann, however, blotted his copybook in some undisclosed way and was lucky merely to lose his job, at least so my informant assures me.'
'Your informant being . . .?' enquired Pascoe.
'Our Sergeant Derby. You might've noticed him on the desk. Rumour has it he was here before they found the spa. He certainly knows something about everything in this town.'
'Very useful,' said Pascoe. 'He didn't give any details, I suppose?'
'I'm afraid not. They tend to keep a well-buttoned lip, these accountants, especially when there's been a bit of naughtiness in the double entry. But Derby reckons your best bet is to steer clear of the active part of the firm and go for old Capstick. First, he was absolute master of the business when Aldermann got the push. Secondly, he himself was eased out last year, having reached seventy and suffering badly from gout. He did not take kindly to being "cut off in his prime by striplings." The quotation is, according to Sergeant Derby, from the speech Capstick made at his farewell dinner. Derby does funny voices too.'
'What a splendid man he sounds,' said Pascoe. 'I'm certain he'll have got me an address too.'
'Naturally,' smiled Skelwith. 'Capstick's got this old house out in the sticks where he's kept in his place by a ferocious old housekeeper, it seems. Those who rescue him either by visiting, or better still by removing him, are rewarded with long and often scandalous reminiscences of Harrogate social life over the past half-century. And your luck's holding, as usual, Peter. It's on your way home. The address is Church House, Little Leven.'
Herbert Capstick had been rendered symmetrical by age. The shock of white hair which crowned his head was exactly matched in shade by the swirl of white bandage which swathed his foot. In between, a thin but not emaciated body, clad only in a cotton singlet and a pair of old-fashioned, pocketed rugby shorts, reclined in a huge, deep, upholstered wheelchair at the open door of a jungle-like conservatory.
The old woman who had escorted Pascoe through the house frowned disapprovingly at Capstick and withdrew. She hadn't spoken more than two words, listening to Pascoe's request for an interview in silence, then leaving him standing on the doorstep while she vanished inside. On her return she had beckoned to him and led him through a gloomy drawing-room into the miasmic conservatory.
The ferocious housekeeper, guessed Pascoe.
Capstick said in a high, precise voice, 'Mrs Unger has all the merits of her class and situation. She distrusts equally sunshine and strangers. You would probably be more comfortable, Mr Pascoe, if you moved that chair outside and sat in the sun. I should dearly love to join you but this is as far as I dare go without putting myself in the way of punitive reprisals such as lumpy custard and stewed greens. I hope you don't mind talking through the doorway. It should give something of the quality of the confessional to our exchanges, which in view of your profession may be not inappropriate. Which of my many embezzlements over the past sixty years do you wish to discuss, Inspector?'
Beneath the apparently uncombed or perhaps simply uncombable white hair, grey eyes rounded interrogatively in a wrinkled, leonine face, and full lips smiled.
Pascoe returned the smile, took a deep breath, and said, 'Not your embezzlements, Mr Capstick, but Patrick Aldermann's.'
'Ah,' said Capstick. 'Patrick. You have, of course, spoken with him about this matter?'
'No. I haven't as a matter of fact,' said Pascoe uncomfortably. 'I've only met him once, very briefly.'
'Yet to me, whom you have not met at all, you are quite willing to broach the subject openly, without preamble? Strange. Perhaps you have been preadvised of my frank, disingenuous nature, my upright character?'
'Perhaps,' said Pascoe.
'Or is it, perhaps, that you have been told that old Capstick is so tired of his own company out here in God's heart-land all day, not to mention a touch of senile dementia, that he has started talking to the sparrows and may be easily persuaded to almost any verbal indiscretion?'
Pascoe took a chance and laughed.
'I see I have been misinformed,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I'm here quite unofficially, Mr Capstick. I can't even hint a threat that I may have to return some day officially. At the moment, though I can never be entirely off-duty, I am merely trying to satisfy my own curiosity. Shall I go on? Or shall I just go?'
Before Capstick could reply, Mrs Unger returned bearing a large tea-tray with folding legs. She stood in front of Pascoe and waited till, catching on belatedly, he unfolded the legs. She set the tray before him and left. It held, besides the teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl and two cups, a plateful of buttered scones.
'Mrs Unger has decided to approve you,' murmured Capstick. 'The buttered scones are the sign. Tea she would bring were my visitor Adolf Hitler. But buttered scones are a sign of special grace. She will be sorely distressed if you do not eat the buttered scones. On the other hand, I should warn you that you will be sorely distressed if you do. This is a dilemma. Such dilemmas cannot be unknown to you in your profession; moments when loyalty to those you work for clashes with loyalty to those you work with. You follow me, Pascoe?'
'I think so,' said Pascoe.
'I had one s
uch moment some years ago with Patrick Aldermann. I am not sure I may not be having just such another one now. Can you reassure me?'
Pascoe poured tea for both of them and said, 'I'm not sure I can. But what I can say is that the only reason on earth I would see for doing anything to harm Mr Aldermann would be if so doing might prevent harm to someone less able to defend himself. I'm sorry if that's not enough.'
He looked uneasily at the ill-omened scones. Then, seizing one boldly, he took a bite.
'Yes, I think that's quite enough, Mr Pascoe,' said Capstick. 'One bite will not harm you. If you care to take the rest and put them on the bird table in the middle of the lawn, we shall be entertained as we talk. The birds appear to be immune, I hasten to add.'
Pascoe took the scones to the bird table, not without an uneasy glance back to see if any curtains were twitching indignantly in the old house. But all seemed still. The well-tended lawn ran down to a thicket of flowering shrubs, including many richly-bloomed bush roses, bounded by a tall cypress hedge beyond which Pascoe could see the tower of the church which gave the house its name. Presumably it was St Mark's church and presumably that was the very tower from which the stone had fallen to crack open the Reverend Somerton's skull.
He returned to his chair by the open door. Without further preamble, the old man began to talk.
'Patrick Aldermann was articled with my firm in 1968 or it might have been 1969. He was not outstanding in accountancy terms, but he was quiet, respectful, attentive and once you got beneath the rather bland shell, interesting and likeable. At least I found him so. Also I had known his uncle, or rather his great-uncle, Edward Aldermann. He had also been an accountant and a very successful one. He made the money which reconstructed Rosemont where young Patrick now lives. He was a quiet man too, but very pleasant when you got to know him. His wife drove him, of course. She drove him to make more money and she drove him to buy that rambling place which was far too large for the two of them. Well, he had her there, of course. He rebuilt the house for her but he rebuilt the garden for himself, and it was big enough for him to hide in. Still, she got him in the end, they usually do. But when his heart gave out, he was in his garden, thank God, pruning his roses. So, by one of life's curious ironies, was she. Interesting, that. Perhaps his ghost appeared to her and frightened her to death! I've often speculated!
'Patrick, now, he loved to talk, and listen to me talking, about old Eddie. It was funny. I don't suppose he'd met him more than a dozen times and then only on short visits. But he loved the old boy as if he'd been his own father. You know he changed his name, of course? He was articled with us when he attained his majority and it was almost the first thing he did. I am no longer Highsmith, he announced. The name is Aldermann. It was all legally done, deed-poll, the lot. Some people thought it odd, I found it rather touching. There are relationships of the spirit, don't you think, as real as those of the blood. Certainly, however you explain it, young Patrick had inherited Eddie's love of gardens and his way with them, especially with roses. You know, I've got roses here planted by both the gardening Aldermanns. You see that Mrs Sam McGredy over there?'
Pascoe followed the pointing finger. It seemed to be aimed at a rather angular and emaciated bush which nevertheless had several rich coppery pink blooms glowing on it like gemstones on a dowager's neck.
'Eddie planted that there more than thirty years ago, and another half-dozen too, brought on from cuttings in his own garden. It's old now, far too old. Roses age too, Mr Pascoe, just like humans. It was old and weak a dozen years ago. I doubt if I ever tended them properly, I'm a looking gardener rather than a working one. Also I'm a sentimentalist. I don't much like pulling up things that have given me pleasure over such a long time. But when I showed them to young Patrick, he had no such inhibitions. A lot of these ought to go, he said. And go they did. He dug them out, then prepared the earth. I would have just bunged the new ones in the hole left when I dug out the old ones, but he dug and raked and added God knows what and left it to settle. The old must give way to the new, he said, but the new has to deserve it. And it did, wouldn't you agree? Look at those Pascalis and Peer Gynts, those Ernest Morses and King's Ransoms. There's consolation there for all life's failures, wouldn't you say?'
Again Pascoe looked. The names meant little to him but the rainbow of blooms round the margin of the garden certainly thrilled the eye. And behind it at the bottom, the dark, sharp-cut shape of the cypress hedge with the churchyard beyond. Suddenly he had a moment of strange empathy with the old man, sitting here gazing out on this last blaze of colour with the knowledge that it would fade, but the cypress would always be there, unchanging and waiting.
'But you kept one of the old roses?' he said 'Whose idea was that?'
'What? Oh, the Mrs Sam. Both of us, I think. There was no argument. My sentimentality and Patrick's ... I don't know what. Reverence, perhaps? Eddie would have been amused, perhaps even embarrassed, by the status Patrick accorded him. I believe that's why the boy went in for accountancy, you know. He had no gift for it, no real talent. But he wanted to do what his great-uncle had done.'
Pascoe who had been glancing surreptitiously at his watch saw the opening and moved swiftly in.
'Was that the reason that he had to leave the firm? Inefficiency?'
Capstick smiled and shook his head.
'Oh no. He was never inefficient. He'd have done very well, been a partner now. No, Mr Pascoe. I will not, of course, repeat this before witnesses, but he proved to be dishonest.'
He pursed his full lips as though the word had a sour taste.
'It was totally unexpected,' he went on. 'He was doing well. He had married a charming young girl, they had a child, he gave the impression of being perfectly happy. My only slight concern for him was the upkeep of that huge house. The rates alone must have been crippling to a young man still on a modest salary. And he kept it and the gardens immaculately. I'd talked to him about it when he was living there alone, but he just smiled and changed the subject. At least now, with a wife and child, and perhaps more to come, the place would begin to fill up and serve its function. Also, of course, it seemed likely the girl would have a bit of money of her own and that would help keep them going till he reached his own full earning capacity. Look, there goes your tea!'
Startled, Pascoe looked round to see an undulation of birds, ranging from sparrows and tits to starlings and blackbirds, feeding off the buttered scones.
'Patrick made a good impression on clients too,' resumed the old man. 'That quiet, undemonstrative manner of his inspired confidence. He was managing various minor accounts more or less by himself and a couple of our customers had asked specifically if he could deal with their business, which is always rather flattering. One of these was an old lady, Mrs McNeil, a widow who lived on a substantial pension and made a hobby out of worrying about the investment of her capital, and very tedious it was dealing with her constant demands to take her money out of this and put it into that, with none of it ever staying anywhere long enough for it to do much good. I pushed her off on to Patrick as often as I felt able and I was quite delighted when she asked if young Mr Aldermann could take over the account altogether.
'Well, I suppose I glanced over his shoulder a couple of times in the first eighteen months, then I glanced no more. Whenever I bumped into old Mrs McNeil, she sang his praises. Nothing was too much trouble for him, she said. Her investments had never been in such a healthy state. She bought Patrick birthday and Christmas presents, I recall, the kind of presents old ladies buy for young men, thick sweaters to protect him against the draughts in our chambers, and rubber galoshes to keep out the damp. It was quite an office joke. Then one day, ironically, because despite Mrs McNeil's best efforts he had caught the 'flu, he was not in the office when the old lady called. She was full of concern for Patrick and wondered whether she ought to call to see him. I shuddered at the thought of the poor boy lying defenceless in bed with Mrs McNeil trying to minister to him, and put her off
mainly by the argument that she seemed to be full of cold herself and really ought not to risk aggravating young Mr Aldermann's condition. And to divert her further, I obtained her file from Patrick's office and began to discuss her investments with her, giving her the chance to sing Patrick's praises.
'Now as she talked and I looked, I began to sense there was something not quite right. Nothing specific, and nothing, I believed at that moment, very serious; the result probably of inexperience and being constantly badgered by Mrs McNeil. I had on occasion myself blinded her with science to give the impression I was doing the stupid thing she wanted me to do while in fact doing something else, or nothing at all. So after she'd gone, I went through the whole file very carefully with a view to doing Patrick a favour, nothing more.
'What I discovered devastated me. The whole thing was a charade. As he'd moved her monies hither and thither, he'd dropped off various amounts in the process, never very large individually, but over the three or four years he'd been managing the account amounting to about two-thirds of the whole. It was ingenious, but it was insane. Discovery was inevitable sooner or later. His only hope would have been if he'd had expectations of acquiring the money elsewhere and replacing it.'
Capstick paused and shook his old lion's head gloomily. As if she had been waiting near by for such a hiatus in his speech, Mrs Unger appeared, nodded approvingly at the empty plate, and removed the tea-tray.
After she'd gone, Pascoe said to the old man, 'And what did you do when you realized what had been going on?'
Capstick sighed and said, 'For a couple of days, nothing. I wanted to think, and Patrick was on his sick bed, remember. But on the third day, having ascertained by telephone that he was out of bed, I went to see him. I put it to him bluntly that I knew he'd been embezzling Mrs McNeil's money. He offered neither denial nor excuse, but sat regarding me with that air of quiet, controlled interest I knew so well. I told him that the first step I proposed was to inform the client, Mrs McNeil, of what had taken place. I would also assure her that the firm would indemnify her against however much of the loss proved unrecoverable. And I would offer her my full cooperation in the event of a police investigation.'
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