‘You’d swear to it?’ said Pascoe.
‘I told you!’ protested Marsh. ‘I’m dead certain.’
And now Pascoe didn’t say anything but sat and regarded the young man quizzically. Puzzlement, doubt, and then dismay trailed each other across his face.
‘No, what I mean is …’ he began.
‘That’ll do, Marsh. For now,’ said Pascoe.
The youth was removed. Wield nodded his congratulations.
‘Nice admission,’ he said. ‘But …’
‘Let’s have the other,’ said Pascoe.
With Feaver the approach was quite different.
‘We know you and your mates damaged those cars, so you’re not going to waste our time on that, are you?’ snapped Pascoe.
‘No, sir,’ stammered the boy.
‘What’s that. Are you denying it?’
‘No, I was meaning, no, I wasn’t going to waste time, I mean …’
‘You mean, yes, we did damage the cars? Say it!’
‘Yes, we did damage the cars,’ echoed the boy.
‘That’s better. Now I want you to help us. It’ll all be taken into account.’
The pattern was then repeated, Pascoe going so far as the change from one to the other and Wield coming in on the second car. Feaver was emphatic that it was a BMW 528i. The colour was dark blue with silver trim. There’d been twin aerials and to the X and the 9 he’d given Singh he now added a possible 2. Finally Pascoe gave him a piece of paper and told him to write down the names and addresses of the other three youths involved.
When he’d gone, Pascoe said to the sergeant, ‘Anything we missed?’
Wield said, ‘If we’re going to do them for damaging those cars, shouldn’t we have got statements while they were in the mood? Not that I get the impression statements are what you want.’
He let a slight note of reproof come into his voice.
‘No,’ said Pascoe. ‘Fetch ’em both in together.’
This time there were no seats for the young men. They stood at one side of the table while Pascoe regarded them grimly from the other.
‘You’ve both admitted to unlawfully damaging property, to wit, four motor-cars parked in the bus station multi-storey car park. I said you’ve both admitted it,’ he stressed, intercepting an accusing glance from Marsh to Feaver. ‘I’ve checked with Criminal Records and there’s nothing against you in the past, which is in your favour. And also I have an officer in this station who is willing to speak up for your known good characters. Now, because of these considerations, I’m going to take a risk. I’m going to recommend that we proceed no further at this time. This does not mean that the case is closed. The file will remain open for as long as I want it to remain open. You’re on the record now, understand that. And this is the last favour you’ll ever get from me or any other police officer, do you understand that?’
They nodded. Pascoe waited.
‘Yes, sir,’ stuttered Feaver.
Pascoe waited again.
‘Yes,’ said Marsh. ‘Understood.’
‘Right. Now push off. For ever!’
But Jonty Marsh was not so easily cowed. At the door he paused and said, ‘What about all that other business, the cars and all that?’
‘What other business?’ said Pascoe stonily. ‘There was no other business.’
After the door had closed behind the youths, he relaxed and pushed the list of names Feaver had provided towards Wield.
‘See someone from uniformed has a word with these three, will you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Wield. ‘And thanks, on behalf of young Singh, that is.’
‘Thanks for what? What did I do?’ said Pascoe in a surprised tone.
‘Well, for a start you –’ began Wield, then he paused and smiled faintly. ‘Why, nothing. You did nothing at all, sir.’
‘Good. I’m glad that’s settled,’ said Pascoe.
‘Yes, sir. What exactly was it that I was doing, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Sorry about that. But I wanted you to ask all the questions about the other car. I didn’t want to risk directing them.’
‘Towards what?’ asked Wield.
‘Towards details of the car that Daphne Aldermann transferred to. You see it occurred to me that I know somebody who drives an X-registered BMW 528i in dark blue with silver trim and tinted windows. I had a look at it recently. A garage door had fallen on it.’
‘Elgood, you mean?’ said Wield in open surprise.
‘Yes. Dandy Dick himself. And I recalled something else. When I talked to him in his office, I told him about your visit to Rosemont allegedly about Mrs Aldermann’s car. And I got the impression then that he might have heard about it from some other source. Who could that be but one of the Aldermanns?’
‘What did he say exactly?’ asked Wield.
Pascoe hesitated. Dalziel would have just replied that it was Elgood’s reference to ‘ugly buggers from the CID’ which put him in mind of the sergeant, but Pascoe was made of flimsier fibre.
‘Oh, just a turn of phrase, something in his tone,’ he said vaguely. ‘Anyway, I’ve checked Elgood’s car number and sure enough it ends with 29.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means,’ said Pascoe slowly, ‘that we can be as sure as dammit that the day before Dandy Dick came round here to complain that he was in line to be murdered by Patrick Aldermann, he’d been shacked up in his seaside cottage with Aldermann’s wife!’
PART THREE
‘It’s my opinion you never think at all,’ the Rose said in a rather severe tone.
LEWIS CARROLL:
Through the Looking-Glass
1
NEWS
(Floribunda. Semi-double flowers, purple-claret, free-flowering through the season.)
Dick Elgood lay on his back, buoyed up by the gently rocking sea and caressed by the hot-fingered sun, and felt at one with the world.
If he raised his head slightly and looked between his feet he could see across fifteen yards of shimmering water and as many more of light buff sand to a green-flecked sandstone cliff on top which stood an ochre-roofed white-walled cottage. It might almost have been Tuscany, but you could stuff Tuscany, and indeed most points east of where he was now, for Elgood. This bit of the Yorkshire coast, barely an hour from his office, was as far as he ever wanted to go.
Twenty years ago when he had bought the cottage, only the chimney stack would have been visible from where he was presently floating. Winter after winter the North Sea darted out cold hands and ripped great fistfuls out of the soft cliff face, undermining it until more of its grassy head came sliding down of its own weight. ‘How long?’ Elgood had asked. ‘Could be there another fifty years,’ opined the estate agent. ‘Could be down in ten,’ warned the surveyor. Elgood had halved the difference and signed the contract. He had no concern for succession and he liked the idea of a building whose lifespan was as doubtful and as limited as a man’s.
Besides, the price was rock-bottom, if that was the right term.
He’d never regretted buying it. Here he came to relax, sometimes in company, sometimes alone. It was the perfect setting for romance; it was the perfect atmosphere for unwinding. Today he had just wanted the delights of solitude. After several days of non-stop negotiations and continuous availability he had finally hammered out an agreement with his work force on the redundancies. It had been hard work, harder than he’d ever known. The turning-point had been yesterday when in a quiet moment with the leader of the works committee he had said, with sincerity as well as with conscious guile, ‘If this doesn’t get settled without a strike, at least your lads’ll have the consolation of seeing me ahead of them in the dole queue.’
The hint had been enough. They had the sense to know that any successor to Elgood was likely to be a much more unpleasant proposition.
So it was settled. And this Tuesday was his own. His therapy. His reward.
Or perhaps not. Dimly through half-closed ey
es he saw the roof of a car flashing in the sun as it parked alongside the cottage.
‘Shit!’ he said, and thought of slipping beneath the surface and swimming out of sight round the corner of the little bay.
But he couldn’t hide for long, and in any case he didn’t care to hide except occasionally from boring colleagues and angry husbands. This car brought trouble or it brought pleasure. He wasn’t used to running from either.
He turned over and with a long easy stroke pulled towards the shore.
As he reached his towel on the sand, he heard a noise and, looking up, he saw his visitor scrambling down the cliff face, a passage made both dangerous and easy by the erosion. Identification didn’t help him decide whether this meant pleasure or trouble. It was Daphne Aldermann.
He saw a tall, rangy woman with long blonde hair casually tied back from a face which sunlight and slight exertion coloured with a simple beauty beyond cosmetic art. Beneath her slacks and checked shirt moved long muscular legs and deep heavy breasts, the memory of which excited Elgood as he towelled himself down.
She saw a small man with thick greying hair, usually elegantly groomed but now spiky with damp, topping a slightly lopsided face whose characteristically cheerful expression was qualified but not belied by a pair of shrewd, watchful eyes. When she’d first met him she’d regarded him as rather old and faintly comic, but that had soon passed. There had been a moment when she had feared being confronted with an old, pasty-white and scrawny body, but he stripped well, sunshine and exercise keeping him brown and wiry. As for what moved beneath his swimming trunks, she had found nothing to complain of in its sensitivity and vigour, but no memory of it touched her mind as she approached him now.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘This is a nice surprise. How’d you know I was here?’
‘Patrick was talking to Eric Quayle on the phone last night. He said you’d reached an agreement with the unions and that you’d be relaxing down here today.’
‘Talking to Quayle, was he?’
With himself out of the office, it would be a good opportunity for them to arrange a meeting and plan tactics. Elgood felt he could afford to smile at the thought. Each of them imagining he was using the other! And both doomed to get nowhere! The board meeting at which the question of the new financial director would be resolved was only a week away. Elgood was pretty certain that, with his authority confirmed by the successful cutback negotiations, he could now face down Quayle, but he was taking no chances. Yesterday he had made a phone call to London and put into action another little scheme which with a bit of luck would give him enough ammunition to shoot down Aldermann’s nomination once and for all.
‘And you decided that a touch of sunshine and old Dick was just what the doctor ordered?’ he went on. ‘Grand. I’m glad you’ve come.’
He took her hand, ready to draw her towards him if the moment felt ripe. But those powers of empathy which were the basis of his amorous success, and which functioned even when he was physically most aroused, told him she wasn’t ready, so holding her hand lightly in his, he set off for the cottage, saying, ‘Let’s have a coffee and plan our day. How long can you stay?’
She didn’t answer and Elgood chattered on amiably as they clambered up over the chunks of eroded rock and earth which formed a rough flight of steps to the cliff top. Once there he paused by the white-painted stake which he drove into the ground every spring to measure the winter’s deprivation. Sometimes he had had to move it a couple of yards or more, sometimes only a couple of feet. Only once in twenty years had it remained still.
Daphne said, ‘Doesn’t it bother you, that stick? Watching it tap-tap-tapping towards you like a blind man’s cane year after year?’
Elgood laughed and said, ‘That’s a bit fanciful, isn’t it, love? Not to say morbid!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Daphne. ‘It was just the thought of the sea burrowing away underneath. It suddenly seemed so sinister.’
‘Sinister? Well, mebbe it’s different for me, being a miner’s son brought up in a mining village where at any hour, day or night you knew there was someone down there, burrowing away beneath your feet; not the sea, mark you, but your dad mebbe, or your brother, or your best mate; someone, any road, you knew by name. So it doesn’t bother me. In fact, it pleases me being able to sit in the cottage odd times in the winter, listening to the burrowing and sometimes hearing a great rending and a crashing as the earth falls, and knowing it’s only the old sea down there, not me dad, or me brother, or me best mate, nor any poor devil I know by name.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Daphne earnestly. ‘It’s just that it’s so pretty here, but so impermanent.’
‘Not like your husband’s precious Rosemont, you mean? Not even Rosemont will last for ever! There’s worms down there, and moles; mice and rats too, I shouldn’t wonder; all manner of burrowing creatures. And where they burrow was once level ground too, do you ever think of that? Miners know that. Shapes of leaves they find, and shells, and bones, and footsteps too, printed in the very rock half a mile under the earth. Slow change like that makes a man feel like nowt, his existence like the width of an eyelash. Now, if the old sea gets to the cottage before Old Nick gets to me, that’ll make me feel I can live forever!’
Daphne smiled and said, ‘And you accuse me of being fanciful!’
Elgood, his verbal tonic having done the hoped-for trick of relaxing his visitor, said, ‘Let’s go in and get that coffee.’
Once inside, he dispatched Daphne to the small kitchen while he got dressed. For his age, he knew he was well preserved. In athletic motion such as swimming, or in the sultry build-up to – or the torpid wind-down from – the act of love he was happy to stand examination. But however well preserved his body, at sixty, he was not prepared to let it be a still target for the cool appraisal of an uncommitted woman’s eyes.
And Daphne, he guessed, was now uncommitted. In fact, he doubted if she’d ever been anything else.
Her first words as she brought the tray of coffee into the simply but comfortably furnished living-room confirmed this without ambiguity.
‘Dick, I wanted to tell you that it’s over between us.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Elgood. A postcard would have done as well, he thought. One of his rules was never to resist a woman who said she wanted to finish. Either she meant it, in which case resistance would be foolish. Or she didn’t mean it, in which case resistance would be what she wanted and therefore insane.
So he said easily, ‘Well, drink your coffee, love, and here’s a toast. To friendship. We had a good day and hurt no one. So no need for guilt or recriminations.’
He smiled at her over his coffee cup, and wished her long gone. Hard experience in the past had taught him that the most unexpected successes often turned out to be the most troublesome. His success with Daphne Aldermann had been one of the most unexpected he had ever known.
He had met her shortly after Aldermann had joined the firm as part-time assistant to that awkward bugger, Chris Burke. It had been an act of charitable patronage for old time’s sake. And chatting up the wife had been an act of instinct for the sake of keeping his hand in. His instinct also marked her down as a non-starter, but he didn’t know how not to try.
It had been second nature to him to hint in a manner so subtle as to be easily deniable that Daphne’s beauty as much as Aldermann’s deserts had won him Burke’s job. And again as he stood in a corner with her at the bunfight after Timothy Eagles’s funeral, even though by now the battle of the Board was well under way, he had not been able to resist hinting that Aldermann’s permanent elevation to the Chief Accountant’s job might well depend on Daphne’s bonny blue eyes. This was the mere rhetoric of flirtation, artificial and hollow. But to his surprise there was a response, or rather a reaction, for later he doubted if she really paid much heed to his amorous hints at that time. But she certainly reacted to the mention of jobs and salaries. She had something on her mind. Suddenly businesslike, he had suggested
that perhaps here at a funeral feast was not the place to talk. They had met for a lunch-time drink a couple of days later, and again the following week. The atmosphere remained businesslike with an undertone of honest friendship. Elgood had been uneasy because uncertain. Part of him saw the meetings as a means of getting inside information on Aldermann’s unsteady finances which might be useful in the forthcoming battle. Part of him saw these meetings as erotic foreplay. And another part, whose location he had not been able to discover, had taken to waking him in the night and telling him his behaviour was indecent, immoral and squalid.
So he had tried to tell her at their last lunch-time meeting that her husband had the Chief Accountant’s job simply because he was there, not because Elgood wanted him to have it, and that he personally was doing all he could to stop him getting on the Board. And later that same Friday afternoon he had the same kind of clarification session with Aldermann, ending with those suggestive words, Over my dead body!
That had to be that, he thought. It had come as a complete surprise when, on the Sunday afternoon, Daphne had rung him in a state of some agitation, wanting to talk. He’d been planning to go down to the cottage the following morning to compensate for a weekend largely given over to company matters. He had suggested they meet in the car park and drive down together. She had hesitated, then finally agreed. He hadn’t really been certain she would turn up until the moment she climbed into his car with the look of an apprentice spy.
They talked generally on the drive down. She was no longer certain why she had come, and he could see that. He didn’t push, just let her talk. He showed her round the cottage, then they walked on the beach. The sky was overcast, the water a still grey. A straightforward seduction scenario would have had Elgood suggesting a nude swim, but today the script was still unwritten. He heard with puzzlement that Aldermann still seemed completely optimistic about his future. In a strange way, his presence was with them; his certainties, his placidity, his contentment moved with the gigantic understrength of the quiet sea against which their own doubts and worries and dismays, no matter how large and solid they seemed, stood with only the delusory resistance of the soft-stoned cliff.
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