Deadheads

by Reginald Hill

‘Not here,’ said Daphne, ‘If Special Branch haven’t bugged this place for your sake, the WI certainly have for mine. Let’s stroll around, if that’s all right.’

  A slight head movement brought the eager waitress.

  ‘My turn, I think,’ said Daphne, opening her handbag. Then her composure vanished.

  ‘Oh damn!’ she said. ‘With all that fuss, I forgot to pick up my purse anyway. Ellie, would you mind?’

  ‘You can always tell the very rich,’ said Ellie opening her bag. ‘They never carry money.’

  Daphne laughed, but the waitress on her behalf was clearly not amused.

  Elgood caved in quite suddenly. Pascoe was surprised. Even by using the old trick of implying much greater knowledge than he had, he hadn’t been able to sound very knowledgeable. If Elgood had simply stuck to his first story that his intercession on Mandy Burke’s part in the matter of the market lease had been a simple act of charity to ensure that the widow of a former employee didn’t fall on hard times, Pascoe might well have ended up believing him.

  All that he had besides was the business of the car not being parked in the drive and his own recollection of Elgood’s defensively aggressive response when he had tried to associate Burke’s death with those of Eagles and Bulmer.

  Plus, of course, Elgood’s reputation as a Lothario, Mrs Burke’s lively manner, and above all her easy reception of his questioning as though perhaps she had been forewarned.

  But the strongest suspicions are straw to the fire of a respectable citizen’s indignation, and Pascoe was ready to retreat at the first digit of the Chief Constable’s number.

  He pressed his insinuations. The receiver was lifted, the finger poised.

  Then Elgood said wearily, ‘To hell with it. What am I doing? I’m acting like a bloody criminal and I’ve done nowt. I’ll be calling for my lawyer next.’

  He sat down behind his desk and pressed a button on his intercom.

  ‘Miss Dominic,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some coffee, love. Aye, for two.’

  He looked his age suddenly. Sixty and tired. But he managed a wan smile as he spoke.

  ‘You, Pascoe,’ he said, ‘I’ve got you worked out. You’ll not leave this alone, will you? Christ, I started something when I talked to you, didn’t I. Andy Dalziel’s not daft. I could chuck you out of here and you’d be right off round to talk to Mandy Burke again. Right? Of course it’s bloody right. Well, listen. I don’t want that. Not that I’ve done anything criminal, you understand, but I don’t want any aggro, not just at the moment. So what I’m going to tell you now is to get things straight and get you out of my hair. And it’s off the record. Right?’

  The efficient Miss Dominic entered with two cups of coffee on a tray. She set it on the desk, glanced assessingly at Pascoe, and left.

  Pascoe said, ‘It’s not in my power to give you that assurance, sir. Not in advance.’

  Elgood opened a drawer, produced a bottle of almost colourless liquid and poured a shot into each of the coffee cups.

  ‘Plum brandy,’ he said. ‘You can hardly smell it. All right. You decide when you like. Me, I’ll just deny everything! But this is what happened. Yes, you’re dead right. I was having a thing with Mandy Burke. She’d been down to my cottage a couple of times. She was keen, you follow me? Too much for poor old Chris Burke.

  ‘Well, we met by accident that lunch-time. I’d been having a business lunch in the White Rose, I recall. There was me, and our sales director, and Patrick Aldermann was there as well for some reason, and a couple of chaps from the Council. It wasn’t a big deal, fitments for a new old folk’s home or something, but these Council lads like their pound of flesh in the form of best fillet steak. Afterwards the others all went off, but I slipped into the bar to wash the talk out of my throat. And who should be there but Mandy. We had a quick one together and I think we both began to feel our oats, you know how it is. We’d both drunk enough to be a bit reckless, so when she said How about a little ride? I said, Why not? and we went out to the car park and got in her car. I thought she’d be heading for some nice quiet country lane, but no, she just pointed the car homewards. I sobered up pretty quick when I realized where we were going, I tell you! But there was no stopping her, so all I could do was crouch low in the car and hope I wasn’t spotted!

  ‘I had another fit when I came out of her garage round the back of the house and saw the decorators’ stuff, but she said they’d buggered off for the day and we’d be all right. So I went in. Since I was there anyway, there didn’t seem any point in arguing the toss any more!

  ‘To cut a long story short, we enjoyed ourselves for about an hour and I was just saying I ought to be getting back when we heard a noise outside. Well, we thought the decorators had come back. Before I could stop her, Mandy jumped off the bed and ran to the window. She’s like that, never thinks, just acts on the spot. She pulled back the curtain and let out a huge shriek. No wonder. It were like a French farce, there was Chris, like a monkey on a stick, perched on a ladder and peering in!

  ‘I can only guess what’d happened. Perhaps he saw us in town. Perhaps he’d been on to us for a while. Any road, he’d come home, parked his car up the street and walked to his house. He likely checked that Mandy’s car was in the garage, then tried to get into the house, quiet like. But Mandy’s a bit of an old hand at this game, I always reckoned, and she’d slipped the bolts home in the front and back doors, just to be on the safe side. Then, seeing her bedroom curtains drawn and the ladder standing there handy, he decides to climb up it! Jealousy’s a funny thing, Mr Pascoe. These poetic fellows write about men climbing mountains for love. It took jealousy to get old Chris Burke up a ladder! He’d no head for heights and he wasn’t a very nifty mover. Two left feet at the office dance, I’d noticed. Now the shock of seeing Mandy all of a sudden, like, standing there shrieking, stark naked, with me behind her, must have made him jump. The ladder toppled sideways and he went out of sight. I’ll never forget that moment, Pascoe. Never.’

  He shook his head at the memory, finished his coffee, diluted the lees with another shot of plum brandy and downed that also.

  ‘We got down there straight away. He was stone dead. Mandy was hysterical and I wasn’t much better myself. But finally I got her calmed down and we got dressed. Whatever we did, it wasn’t going to help matters if we were discovered running around in the nude, was it? By now it was beginning to dawn on us just how awkward things were. Don’t get me wrong, Pascoe. The man was dead and we were shocked and sorry. He was my colleague, her husband. But he wasn’t a very likeable man, old Chris, not the kind of man you’d mourn for longer than was decent. Neither of us wanted him dead, but now it had happened, neither of us wanted to see ourselves all over the Sundays. The head of I.C.E.’s a Dutchman, a very good-living, religious sort of man. He’d not take kindly to having the Chairman of one of his subsidiaries featured in anything as titillating as this was likely to be. As for Mandy, already she was seeing headlines: DID HE FALL OR WAS HE PUSHED? That sort of thing.

  ‘So when I suggested I should get out of the way, it wasn’t just self-interest, you follow me? It was for both our sakes. No one had come round to the house or tried to ring, so presumably none of the neighbours had spotted anything. I got down in the back of the car, Mandy drove me back into town and then went home and discovered the body. Simple! We didn’t attempt to alter the immediate circumstances of his death at all. He climbed a ladder, he fell off. We just altered the reasons a bit, that’s all. No crime committed, no crime intended. Just a bit of diplomatic rearrangement.’

  He looked at Pascoe as though in search of an acquiescent nod.

  Pascoe said evenly, ‘Everything you did from the moment you failed to call the police was criminal in fact, Mr Elgood. And Mrs Burke, of course, perjured herself at the inquest.’

  ‘Does that count? Legally, I mean?’ asked Elgood naïvely.

  ‘It’s a court of law like any other,’ said Pascoe. ‘And the law doesn’t like being lied to. An
d it tends to regard the suborners of witnesses just as seriously.’

  ‘Suborner?’ said Elgood.

  ‘I presume your assistance to Mrs Burke in setting up her business was an inducement to, or reward for, silence?’

  ‘Bollocks!’ exploded Elgood. ‘No such thing. The bloody woman started talking marriage a couple of months later, so I dropped her pretty bloody quick! The market stall was just something that came up, a sort of farewell present, that was all, something to keep her busy. I’ve had practically nowt to do with her since.’

  ‘But you did ring her and warn her in case I came round, didn’t you?’

  ‘Aye. And I was bloody right to, wasn’t I?’ grumbled Elgood. ‘All right, Inspector, now you’ve got the story. So what happens next?’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to put it all in a written statement, would you?’ asked Pascoe hopefully.

  ‘Do I look bloody daft!’ said Elgood. ‘Listen, I’ve told you this so you can stop sniffing around, stirring things up. It’s not a good time for trouble.’

  ‘You mean your Dutch boss wouldn’t like it?’

  ‘A bit of scandal just now could seriously weaken my position,’ said Elgood. ‘Particularly when it’s both juicy and comic.’

  ‘Not to mention criminal,’ said Pascoe. ‘And this is why you choked me off when I came round to see you about the Aldermann business?’

  ‘Partly,’ said Elgood. ‘But also, like I’ve said, because I realized I was just being stupid about that. Why do you keep niggling away at it, for God’s sake, Pascoe? You haven’t really come across anything to make you suspicious, have you?’

  ‘Your own behaviour has been enough for that, wouldn’t you say, Mr Elgood?’ said Pascoe, rising and proffering his hand. ‘I’ll have to talk over what you’ve just told me with my superiors, I’m afraid.’

  ‘As long as you remember I’ve told you nowt,’ said Elgood, shaking his hand. ‘And Mandy Burke won’t talk to you with a witness present either.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Pascoe. ‘Oh. One last thing before I go. What was it that Mrs Aldermann said to you that made you suspicious of her husband in the first place?’

  Elgood shook his head sadly.

  ‘Nothing. I’ve told you. Nothing. Just leave it, Pascoe. Please.’

  ‘He was attentive. Interested. Amusing. All in a rather old-fashioned way. Old too, yes, but old-fashioned is how it struck me. Not fuddy-duddy. Certainly not that! But playing to rules that predated this modern permissive make-your-choice-you’re-a-free-agent stuff. Very sexy with it? Six inches shorter and thirty years older than me – I would never have believed it possible! I suppose, perhaps, I wanted a father-figure, but that’s no excuse. And I did drink a lot of wine that lunch-time. But even that usually makes me sleepy rather than randy!’

  Daphne laughed, then put her hand over her mouth, half in embarrassment as though she’d started laughing in church.

  In fact, she almost had. She and Ellie were sitting on a bench set on a small green formed where a crescent of red-and-cream bricked almshouses reached its arms out possessively as if to embrace a little age-blackened tall-steepled church, built in 1669 to replace one destroyed three years earlier when a local lunatic, jealous of Yorkshire’s good name, had decided to start a fire which would be to London’s as a pitch-link to a taper. The fire had gone no further than the medieval church. God had sent his rain to put it out, the City Fathers had rebuilt in a more Protestant mould in thanksgiving, and two hundred years later their Victorian successors had added charity to piety in the form of the almshouses.

  It formed a pleasant quiet backwater within a hundred yards of the city’s main shopping streams, too quiet for some of the old people who lived in the crescent (now an official civic sheltered-housing project), who complained, half-jocularly, that it was a bit too convenient for the boneyard most of them could see from their sitting-room windows.

  ‘Are things bad with you and Patrick?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘No. Or rather I don’t know. I never thought about it until recently. We seemed to move along in such a tranquil state. Patrick’s so unworried about things. You know that feeling, when you’re sitting in the sun at a table in some Italian square and you’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, and you feel perfectly at one with the world? Well, Patrick seems to be like that permanently!’

  ‘That doesn’t sound a bad way to be,’ said Ellie.

  ‘To be, perhaps. To live with is different. It’s all right when you’re in the moment too. But moments like that pass. A breeze comes up, you get a little chilly, there’s the dishes to wash, you’re woken up in the night by your daughter’s bad cough, your period comes, you’re reminded in a hundred different ways that life is movement. And yet there he is, your helpmeet, your husband, back there somewhere, quite content, quite still! After a while it stops being an irritant, it becomes a worry.’

  ‘And you ease your worry by jumping into bed with a sixty-year-old Don Juan?’ said Ellie.

  ‘I thought you’d be more help than this,’ said Daphne accusingly.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’

  ‘And perhaps we should get it straight. I didn’t jump. I moved hesitantly, uncertainly. It was stupid, but you know what put me in Dick’s way to start with? My desire to talk about Patrick! I wanted to know how things were at work. I’d detected signs of a change in recent weeks, a sort of suppressed excitement, or unease, I couldn’t tell which, he never shared it with me. I’d begun to wonder if his contentment mightn’t all be a front and perhaps things were seriously wrong somewhere in his life. I see now it must have looked like manna from heaven to Dick. I didn’t know to start with, of course, that he’d already decided to block Patrick’s promotion to the board! We met for drinks a couple of times, usually at lunch-time. He never put a foot wrong. A hand occasionally, just brushing me half accidentally, or a sympathetic squeeze of the arm, or the knee. I knew there was desire there too, don’t mistake me. I didn’t mind it. I suppose I even responded to it. But it was still innocent.’

  Ellie’s ears pricked at the choice of word, but she had sense enough not to make it an issue.

  ‘To do Dick justice,’ Daphne continued, ‘he never made a direct proposition, though perhaps he was clearing the decks, so to speak, the Friday before I went to the cottage when we had a lunch-time drink together and he suddenly spelt it out that he was actively opposing Patrick’s elevation to the board. He said he was sorry if I’d been relying on this financially, but I had to understand, he didn’t think Patrick was the man for the job. I brooded about this all Saturday. I’d never really thought of our having money problems. I vaguely knew how large our expenses were. And I suppose I vaguely wondered how Patrick managed to get by with no apparent trouble on what I assumed couldn’t be a huge salary. But that Sunday, when I’d been more than usually irritated by that secret-happy manner of his, I let fly. I still wasn’t really worried, you understand. I knew there’d be some investment income, from Patrick’s own capital and also from the money I’d inherited from Daddy. Patrick had taken charge of it when we married and tied it up, so I thought, in some long-term high-yield investment. All I wanted was to pierce his shell, to get some kind of response out of him.

  ‘Well, I got more than I bargained for.

  ‘He told me without batting an eyelid that my little inheritance hadn’t existed as such for seven or eight years. It had just been eaten away by necessary capital expenditure! I couldn’t believe it! I asked about his own money. There’d been some other money left to him by some old client at Capstick’s. He told me that had gone too and that in fact as far as capital went, we had precious little to fall back on. And he admitted that even with his salary as Chief Accountant since Mr Eagles died, it was difficult to make ends meet. You have to understand he spoke with no anxiety whatsoever!

  ‘I demanded to know how we could go on living at the rate we did. He said that, yes, it was hard, but he had every confidence in the future. In fact, things should be loo
king up very soon now. I screamed at him that if he imagined he was just going to walk on to the Perfecta board, he had another think coming. He looked puzzled and said that getting on the board would be nice and he could see no real obstacle, but even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I was furious now, furious and a bit frightened. I asked him how the hell he, an accountant, could justify continuing to live in a house as large as Rosemont with all those gardens to maintain when we could solve our problems of income and capital at a blow by selling up and moving to somewhere more manageable.

  ‘That got to him at last. It must have been the mention of selling Rosemont that did it. Not that he got angry or anything. He just went on very earnestly about how something had always come up in the past to maintain his position at Rosemont and that he had every reason to believe all future obstacles would fade away with similar ease.

  ‘I was sick at heart. All this meant to me was that he’d conned himself into believing the seat on the board was his. I rang Dick. I had to talk to him, I said. He suggested we should spend next day together. We arranged to meet in the car park. I’d heard stories about his seaside cottage, of course, but I didn’t see this as a lovers’ tryst. I was frightened by what seemed to me to be Patrick’s lack of balance. Also, of course, I was bloody furious that he’d spent all my money without a by-your-leave!

  ‘So Monday morning came, I met Dick, we headed for the coast.’

  She fell silent. Two old ladies circumambulating the green paused to admire Rose noisily, and to deplore silently this upstart occupation of their personal bench.

  ‘At what stage,’ enquired Ellie casually, ‘did it seem better for your financial deliberations to be carried on in bed.’

  The two old women moved on, one indignantly, one reluctantly.

  ‘I don’t know. It just happened. I suppose I drank a lot. I know I talked a lot. It was funny; as I talked, I began to see what Patrick had meant. Things had tended to fall his way, if you looked back. He could almost be forgiven for his stupid optimism. I started off by wanting to complain about him, yet I ended up half defending him!’