Deadheads

by Reginald Hill

  Ellie decided a quick counter was the best tactic.

  ‘Daphne, I’m sorry. I’ve let myself get into a situation where I’m bound to be wrong, and I admit it, and I’m sorry. But what’s brought all this on? Something must have happened to bring you round here breathing fire. How did you find out about Peter’s interest in your husband for a start?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ said Daphne bitterly. ‘After all, my private life must be an open book to you.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Ellie. ‘Honestly. I’ll cross my heart if you like. I can’t think of any other way of convincing you I’m honest!’

  Daphne looked at her doubtfully, then said, ‘I wonder if I could have a drink? I know it’s a bit early, but I feel rather shaky. I’m not very good at quarrels. I wasn’t brought up to it.’

  ‘Sure. Scotch OK?’

  Ellie took her time preparing the drinks, going to the kitchen in search of ice and polishing the glasses on a clean towel before pouring the Scotch. Her intuition was proved right when she heard Daphne begin to talk even though her back was still to her.

  ‘I heard from Dick Elgood. I mentioned your name to him, making a joke about your being a policeman’s wife. And that’s when he told me.’

  ‘About what?’ said Ellie, pouring the whisky drop by drop as though adding olive oil to a mayonnaise.

  ‘About that stupid complaint he made to the police. And about your husband being in charge of the investigation. He also said that after I told him about that odd-looking CID sergeant coming round to the house to ask questions about my car, he’d let your husband know he’d made a silly mistake and didn’t want things to go any further. But they have gone further, haven’t they? Haven’t they?’

  Now Ellie turned.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe they have. But why or how far I’ve no idea, believe me.’

  She handed over the drink. She’d poured one for herself, well-diluted, to be companionable. She didn’t want it – once this trying scene was over, the rest of those scripts would still require a clear head and a sharp eye to glean the wheat out of the chaff.

  ‘You keep on asking me to believe you,’ said Daphne, sipping at her Scotch.

  ‘I realize I’m not very credit-worthy at the moment,’ said Ellie. ‘But I’m puzzled. Why did Dick Elgood tell you this? Or, going further back, why should you have told Dick Elgood the police had visited you about your car?’

  ‘You don’t know? You really don’t know?’ said Daphne.

  ‘No!’ said Ellie with sufficient emphasis to turn the baby’s head again. ‘I’ve said so!’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you. Because after I parked my car that day, the day it was vandalized, I got into Dick’s car and we spent the day together at his cottage, that’s why!’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Ellie blankly.

  ‘So I told him about the car being vandalized, and I told him about that sergeant visiting the house. I recall he seemed very interested in what he’d said, but I didn’t know why.’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ said Ellie, now feeling herself completely at sea. ‘Daphne, you went to Elgood’s cottage to …’

  Untypically she found the sentence difficult to finish.

  Daphne said in her loud, clear, confident, privately educated voice, ‘Screw is, I think, the word you’re looking for. So you didn’t know? That’s interesting. Which means either that your husband hasn’t told you. Which is also interesting. Or that he doesn’t know either, and you’ve got to make up your mind whether your deep friendship for me permits you to tell him. Which is perhaps the most interesting thing of all.’

  She rose, set down her glass and made for the door.

  ‘Daphne!’ cried Ellie. ‘Please, let’s talk some more.’

  ‘All right, if that’s what you want, but not now,’ said Daphne, very cool and Noel Cowardish. ‘Let’s meet tomorrow morning. In the Chantry. I was going to come along to the Market Caff this morning and tell you what I thought of you, but I funked it. But I’ll feel more confident in the Chantry, won’t I? And you can let me know what you decided, can’t you?’

  It was too good an exit to spoil by pursuit and expostulation. Ellie remained fast in her seat, like a spellbound princess, hearing the front door close and the Polo start up and draw away.

  She imagined she sat quite still during this time but when she finally stirred and looked down at her glass of unwanted Scotch, she discovered it had somehow become completely empty and she felt more than ready for another.

  6

  CLYTEMNESTRA

  (Hybrid musk. Crinkled pinky-yellow blooms, leathery leaves, of a spreading bushy habit, excellent in Autumn.)

  ‘Mr Capstick’s not at home,’ said Mrs Unger in the severe tone of a governess finding it necessary to repeat what should not have needed to be said in the first place.

  Pascoe wondered if the old woman was using the phrase literally or conventionally.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I’m Inspector Pascoe. I was here a few days ago, you may recall.’

  The unblinking blue eyes in the old apple-wrinkled face fixed themselves on his forehead as though in search of some authenticating mark. It struck Pascoe that perhaps their peculiarly unnerving quality derived from myopic first sight rather than keen second.

  ‘I talked to Mr Capstick in the conservatory,’ he went on. ‘You brought me some delicious buttered scones.’

  The features relaxed. He had been approved once, and she was not, he guessed, a woman to change her mind very often.

  ‘He’s gone to Harrogate,’ she pronounced with the intonation of one who might be saying Xanadu. ‘One of his cronies came to fetch him.’

  So he really wasn’t at home. In fact, it suited Pascoe very well. He said, ‘Perhaps I could have a word with you, Mrs Unger. It won’t take long, I promise you.’

  Her lips puckered fractionally at his presumption. He got the message. It would take precisely the amount of time she condescended to allow. His promises didn’t come into it.

  But she opened the door wide and stood aside to let him enter. Then, closing the door and bolting it (an instinctive rather than a significant action, he assured himself uneasily) she pushed by him and walked down the hallway to a handsome inner door where the process was repeated save for the ramming home of the bolt.

  ‘Sit down,’ she ordered.

  Pascoe sat. To his surprise, Mrs Unger immediately withdrew.

  Musing on her intentions, he looked around. It was a fair room, a little too square perhaps, and rather too high for its width. An oak sideboard and a large glass-fronted oak bookcase, both solidly mid-Victorian in style, filled the wall to the left of his wing chair which was placed square to an ornate marble fireplace. Daringly, he rose and went to look at the bookcase. Through the diamonds of glass he read some of the titles engraved and gilded on the leather-bound volumes. A taste for Trollope was perhaps forecastable, but Colette came as a surprise.

  Behind him there was a rattle and he turned to see that Mrs Unger had entered the room with a wooden tea-trolley which she was now manoeuvring into position alongside the wing chair.

  ‘You’ll have some tea,’ she said.

  It wasn’t a question. He guessed that, like Dalziel, she knew what was best for most people. He nodded and said, ‘Thank you,’ and sank deep into the chair, but not so deep as his heart when his glance lit upon the plateful of buttered scones on the lower tray of the trolley.

  Direct attack seemed the best defence.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the day the Reverend Somerton was killed, the gentleman who got hit by the stone falling from the tower of St Mark’s. Now I know this happened more than ten years ago but I wonder if you remember the day.’

  Mrs Unger did not reply. As he spoke, she had poured him a cup of tea. He stirred it and sipped it. The silence continued. With a wan smile he took a plate, helped himself to a scone and bit into it.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said.

  ‘It was a Satu
rday in March. Second Saturday in the month, I seem to recall. It was a real March day, cloudy one minute, clear the next, and blowing a gale all the time.’

  This accorded precisely in both date and meteorology with what Pascoe had read in the coroner’s report. The windy conditions, it was theorized, had been in part responsible for the falling masonry.

  ‘Mr Capstick wasn’t at home that day, I gather?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was there anyone else here?’

  Silence. He took another bite. And another.

  ‘Yes. That young fellow who did the roses was here, I recall,’ said Mrs Unger.

  In his excitement Pascoe finished the scone and did not hesitate to take another when the old woman flickered her eyes at his empty plate.

  ‘Did the roses, you say? That would be Mr …?’

  He bit.

  ‘Aldermann, his name was. He had a way with flowers, I’ll give him that.’

  But not with Mrs Unger. Pascoe guessed that Patrick had not been fed with buttered scones.

  ‘What precisely was he doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Pruning and planting. March is the time for it, so they say. I told him Mr Capstick was away and he said never mind, he’d do a bit of pruning and planting. I let him into the garden and left him to it.’

  ‘What time did he leave, can you recall?’

  ‘About four o’clock. It started raining cats and dogs; it came sideways in that wind. He shouted that he was off and off he went.’

  The Reverend’s corpse had been discovered by the local vicar at four forty-five on his return from the reception of a wedding he’d officiated at earlier in the afternoon. He had arranged to rendezvous with Oliver Somerton at four P.M., but had been delayed.

  Reading between the lines, Pascoe guessed that the reception had been a lively and well-liquored affair.

  Finishing his second scone, he said, ‘Could I take a look around the garden?’

  Silently she led him out of the room, through the conservatory in which Capstick had been placed like some delicate Eastern plant, and into the garden.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  He walked swiftly across the lawn towards the thicket of boundary-marking shrubs over which rose the tower of St Mark’s. There were rhododendrons here in full bloom, their colours vying with the richness of two or three lilac trees, but their scent unable to compete with the heaviness of half a dozen clumps of lavender which had been allowed to spread widely. Indeed, the whole of the shrubbery looked as if it had been left untended for several seasons now and the little path which wound its way through the bushes was overhung by their branches. Pascoe shouldered his way through till he arrived at a small gate in the cypress hedge. It was hinged to a rotting post by a circlet of wire which rain and dew had rusted to an autumnal brown. Beyond stretched the rough untended grass of an old graveyard, broken by stones whose inscriptions were eroded and obscured by time and weather and the tiny scrabbling fingers of innumerable lichens.

  He forced the gate open with difficulty. Clearly the Capstick household used other routes to heaven. Treading with apologetic lightness across the graves of Little Leven’s ancient dead, he made his way to the church and, after a small effort of recall, found himself at the spot where the Reverend Oliver Somerton had been struck down by a piece of consecrated stone. Uneasily he peered up at the tower, but all looked secure enough now. He presumed the Archdeacon’s death had given a boost to the restoration fund if nothing else.

  Here at this side of the church he was quite out of sight of the main gate and the tiny village beyond. The only sign of habitation was the roof of Capstick’s house and those of his immediate neighbours, unless of course one counted the tombstones. Looking at them rising from the gentle ripple of the long grass, Pascoe realized he had no sense of neglect. The old gave way to the new always, and death did not stop the process. Men died and life went on in the space they vacated. For a while their remains were marked by clean, smooth obelisks with sharp-edged lettering, and it was right that the grass around these should be razed and flowers laid at their feet. But as the new became old and the survivors in their turn came to rest, it was also right that the old stones should be absorbed into the landscape as surely as the remains they marked were absorbed into the deep, dark strata of the earth.

  Something whizzed past his head and hit the flagged path beside him. Startled, he stepped back and looked up. High above, a beaked head cocked itself to one side as though resetting its aim.

  ‘Thanks for the thought anyway,’ said Pascoe, looking at the white splash on the flagstone and recalling that it was supposed to be lucky to be hit by a bird-dropping. He glanced at his watch. It was time to go. There were other scenes of death to be visited, other metaphysical meditations to be meditated, miles to go before he could sleep. Miles to go.

  By the time he reached No. 12, The High Grove, the home of Mrs Mandy Burke, widow of Christopher Burke, one-time assistant to the Chief Accountant of Perfecta Ltd, Pascoe was no longer in the meditative mood. For a start Mrs Unger’s scones, impervious even to a lunch-time pint of best Yorkshire bitter, lay heavy on his stomach. Next, the pink and white lozenges of ornamental stone which formed the patio on which Mr Burke had met his end were in no wise as atmospheric as the worn grey flags where the Archdeacon had been struck down, nor did the pebble-dashed rear wall of No. 12 with its puce-painted window-frames soar into the imagination in quite the same way as the dark tower of St Mark’s Church.

  And finally, instead of the quiet company of the ancient dead, Pascoe was entertained by the presence of the Widow Burke whose antiquity was unassessable beneath the cosmetic art of mid-Yorkshire’s best beauticians, but whose quickness was never in doubt.

  ‘This is where he fell, Inspector, or Peter, may I call you Peter?’ she said. ‘This is the very spot.’

  She pointed with all the dramatic style of those stately-home guides who point to the very spot, often marked by ineradicable bloodstains, where some unfortunate scion of the noble family now living off the entrance fees met his end. There was no bloodstain here, only a tray on which stood a glass and a jug of what looked like iced lemon squash.

  At least, thought Pascoe, she had had the good taste not to cover ‘the very spot’ with the sunbed from which his insistent finger on the front doorbell had at last summoned her.

  Strangely, the news that he was a police officer had seemed to eradicate rather than exacerbate her annoyance at being disturbed. Modern middle-class attitudes to the police usually stimulated an instant expression of grave distrust followed by a demand for warrants to be flashed and business clearly stated before the threshold was crossed.

  Instead she’d flung open the door to him, invited him to walk through and had evinced neither surprise nor reluctance to talk when he had diffidently referred to her late husband.

  ‘Shall we stay out here to chat?’ she said. ‘One can hardly afford to miss such divine weather, can one? There’s a deckchair in the garage if you can find it. I’ll get you a glass. I’m sure you’re dying of thirst. Won’t be a moment!’

  With a promissory smile, she went back into the house. Pascoe took the chance of being alone to get his bearings. He recalled the High Grove estate vaguely from his own house-hunting days. It had just been completed and he and Ellie had taken a quick look, which was all they’d needed. Not that it was bad as such up-market development went. There were three types of detached property, arranged in groups of five as though the builder believed in the mysterious properties of the quincunx. The Burke house was a Chatsworth second only in size and luxury to the Blenheim. This particular group of Chatsworths backed on to a bunch of Hardwicks which were two-bed, two-recep (or three-bed, one-recep) bungalows. It had been a Hardwick that the Pascoes had been persuaded to examine, a pleasure denied the owners of the Chatsworths by a seven-foot-high length of pastel green composition screening (based, Pascoe recollected the agent�
�s blurb, on an Italian cloister design), plus whatever vegetation had matured at the foot of the Chatsworths’ longish lawns. Presumably, however, a man up a ladder would be visible from the bungalows.

  He entered the garage through a side door. It held a Volvo estate, the back of which was packed with what he took to be wares intended for her market stall – straw mats, cane baskets, bead curtains, silk flowers, that kind of thing. Cardboard boxes containing similar items were piled up in the small area of space left by the Volvo’s length. Among all this colonial cane, he found a good old English deckchair.

  He was still wrestling it into submission when the Widow Burke returned with a tall glass which she proceeded to fill with the inviting-looking iced squash.

  The chair suddenly fell into shape.

  ‘Sit,’ she commanded, handing him the glass.

  He sat, and she removed the wrap-around robe she must have wrapped around when summoned to the door, and subsided not ungracefully into her sunbed.

  Without the robe, the question of her age became more accessible of inductive reasoning. This suntanned skin certainly did not cover the firm muscular flesh of youth, but neither had age scored and puckered the smooth veneer with its excoriating frosts. Beneath the narrow bikini-top, her breasts arched as much as they spread and the contour of her stomach was Cotswoldian rather than Pennine.

  Mid-forties, Pascoe assessed. And well worth a second look.

  She spotted the second look and smiled her understanding.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Pascoe, taking a long pull at his lemon squash. It hit the back of his unprepared throat like lava and he spluttered eruptively. The basic dilutant was not water, but vodka. At least this provided some explanation of her manner.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have warned you. Is it true you’re not allowed to drink on the job?’

  ‘Only in moderation,’ said Pascoe, placing the glass firmly on ‘the very spot’.

  ‘Me too,’ she said, drinking, and eyeing him over the rim of the glass in what should have been an embarrassingly ludicrous parody of a ’twenties Hollywood vamp, but wasn’t.