‘And you got this detail via Mr Dalziel, you say?’ said Headingley.
‘Aye. It’ll likely come to nowt. He doesn’t give away easy collars, that bugger! But uniformed’ll do when it’s a case of standing round in the bloody cold, wasting time!’
This analysis of Dalziel’s priorities was too close to the mark to bear discussion, so Headingley went into the clubhouse in search of Major Kassell.
He spotted him instantly, not because of anything particularly military in his appearance, but because he was clearly mine host on this occasion, making sure that guests were minimally inconvenienced by this unfortunate delay, dispensing coffee and/or alcohol among the half-dozen new arrivals, four men, two women, lounging at their ease in the club room.
Kassell was about forty, a strong face with a prominent nose and deepset eyes which seemed always on the move and watchful, even as the mobile mouth twisted in a social smile. He had prematurely grey hair, silky and elegantly coiffured, which far from ageing him seemed to set off the liveliness of his features. He registered Headingley’s arrival at once, and also that his presence had nothing to do with the current situation.
The Inspector stood quietly by the door, knowing that Kassell would be with him shortly.
When he finally broke free from his hostly duties, Kassell did not speak at once but gestured to Headingley to step outside into the narrow passageway.
Headingley introduced himself and stated his business.
Kassell nodded and said, ‘Yes. I’d heard. Dreadful accident. Poor Charlesworth. Must have shaken him up.’
‘I dare say, sir. Though it’s business as usual this morning.’
Kassell looked at him, bushy grey eyebrows raised in surprise.
‘He’s hardly going to close down for a week’s mourning, is he? How can I help, Inspector?’
‘Just routine, sir. Get the facts straight. Did you come out of the restaurant with Mr Charlesworth and Mr Dalziel?’
‘No. I was a little behind them, I recall.’
‘Oh. Why was that, sir?’
‘I can’t see that it matters, but I had a brief word with one of the waitresses.’
About what? wondered Headingley. Didn’t they say something about men with big noses being extra lecherous?
He let none of this show, but went on. ‘So you didn’t actually see the other two getting into their car?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘So you couldn’t say who was driving?’ said Headingley.
‘Now why should I need to say that?’ said Kassell quizzically. ‘Though as a matter of fact, I could.’
‘Really, sir? How?’
‘My car was round the side of the Hall. As I walked to it, their car passed me on its way out of the car park. I gave them a wave.’
‘So you did see who was driving?’
Suddenly Kassell was pure military, stirring up long-forgotten, deep-hidden memories in George Headingley who had served with some discomfort and little distinction as a National Serviceman in Korea.
‘Of course I did. Do you think I’m blind, man?’ snapped the Major.
‘And?’ pursued Headingley doggedly.
‘It was Charlesworth, of course. Who else?’
Peter Pascoe had had no personal experience of military service so Eltervale Camp, the Mid-Yorkshire Infantry’s training depot, aroused no strong emotions in him.
The adjutant, summoned from his pre-lunch drink in the officers’ mess, looked Pascoe up and down, decided he could pass for a gentleman and invited him to return with him for a peg.
Pascoe declined, apologized for his untimely call, and explained the purpose of his visit.
The adjutant, a pock-faced captain called Trott, said, ‘Frostick, you say? Can’t say I recall the name. Sergeant Ludlam’s your man. He knows everything.’
Ludlam turned out to be the sergeant in charge of the Orderly Room, a round son of Leeds, who looked Pascoe up and down, decided he could pass for an NCO, and returned Trott’s compliment after that gentleman had retreated by opining that he knew fuck all.
‘Frostick, Charles,’ he said. ‘He’s the lad whose grandad’s been killed?’
‘That’s right,’ said Pascoe, surprised.
‘His father was on to us this morning asking if we could get his CO in Germany to pass the news on,’ explained Ludlam. ‘I dealt with it. Captain Trott, he don’t take much in at weekends. Sad case. He’ll likely get compassionate. Now, what do you want to know?’
Feeling rather foolish that he had already learned all he wanted to know, i.e. that Charley Frostick was definitely in Germany, Pascoe said vaguely, ‘Oh, just a bit of background. What kind of lad he is, that kind of thing. Routine.’
The Sergeant regarded him shrewdly.
‘Routine, eh?’ he said. ‘There’s no such beast for you buggers. Let’s see what the files say, shall we?’
The files said that Charley Frostick was a fair soldier, a good shot, reliable and conscientious, possibly NCO material.
‘The only black he put up was getting back late a couple of mornings,’ he said.
‘Mornings?’ said Pascoe. ‘I thought you soldier boys were all tucked up safe and sound by nine P.M.?’
‘You’ve got the wrong decade, mister,’ said Ludlam. ‘During the basic training period, it’s very strict and regimental. Once they’ve passed out, however, they’re like the rest of us – as long as you’re spick and span on first parade, which in his case’d be seven-thirty A.M., you’re OK.’
‘You mean he could have been sleeping at home during that time – how long was it?’
‘Just a couple of weeks before he went on draft. Could’ve been sleeping where he wanted,’ grinned the Sergeant. ‘Tell you who’ll know more than me. Sergeant Myers of our regimental police.’
‘Well, really, I don’t know if I need to bother him,’ said Pascoe, glancing at his watch.
‘No bother. He’ll be down at the guard house. You’ve got to go past it on your way out. I’ll stroll along with you.’
Sergeant Myers and a couple of his minions, all distinguished by their white webbing, were sitting round a heat-pulsating stove, drinking pint mugs of tea. Conversation halted at the sight of Pascoe but Ludlam quickly reassured them he was harmless.
‘It’s all right, Micky,’ he said, grinning. ‘It’s not the brass. I just thought you might like to meet a real cop.’
Neither Myers nor his colleagues seemed very impressed.
Myers, an ill-tempered-looking man with wire-rimmed spectacles, said, ‘One of our lot in trouble, is it?’
‘Not the way you think,’ said Ludlam. ‘Do you remember Charley Frostick, last draft? His grandad was done in last night, you’ll be reading about it in the papers likely. The Inspector here’s seeing about getting him back on compassionate.’
It didn’t sound a likely story, but it was well-intentioned, Pascoe assumed, and he nodded his agreement.
‘What happened?’ asked Myers.
‘He was attacked in his bath,’ said Pascoe. ‘Presumably in the course of a robbery.’
‘Poor old sod. How’d they kill him?’
‘Well, he was beaten and stabbed and half drowned,’ said Pascoe. ‘But in the end I suppose his heart just gave out.’
Myers shook his head.
‘Layabouts,’ he said savagely. ‘Give ‘em to us for a few weeks, we’d soon straighten them out.’
Ludlam said, ‘You had to straighten young Frostick out, didn’t you? Wasn’t he getting back at all hours?’
‘That’s right. He was screwing the arse off some bint worked in a hotel, isn’t that right, Corporal Gillott?’
The man addressed, a lance-corporal with a ramrod straight back so that even sitting down he seemed to be at attention, pulled at his ragged brown moustache and said, ‘That’s what I heard, Sarge.’
‘Didn’t you never meet her, Norm?’ asked the third r.p., a burly full corporal with heavy jowls. ‘I thought you was a bit of a mate of Fro
stick’s, letting him sneak in late, and that.’
‘What’s this? What’s this?’ demanded Myers sharply. ‘I’ll have no favourites round here, so you’d best be sure what you’re saying, Corporal Price!’
‘Only joking, Sarge,’ said Price, grinning maliciously at Gillott. ‘I saw her once at a camp dance. Painted like a fairground sideshow she was, but I wouldn’t have minded rolling my penny down her chute!’
‘Less of that, less of that,’ ordered Myers. ‘Show some respect. Anything else we can do, Inspector?’
Pascoe, always interested in crime and punishment, said, ‘What do you get for being late?’
‘First offence, couple of days’ jankers,’ said Myers. ‘Which reminds me. Corporal Gillott, isn’t it time you was out there, checking on our customers?’
Gillott stood up. Could a man really be as straight as that without some artificial aid? wondered Pascoe.
‘What’ll I have them doing this afternoon, Sarge?’ he asked, each syllable glottally stopped so the words came out like the sound of a typewriter.
‘Leaves,’ said the sergeant. ‘There’s leaves all over the fucking place. Come nightfall, I don’t want to see a fucking leaf anywhere around this camp.’
‘Come nightfall, you can’t see anything anywhere,’ said Ludlam, laughing.
He and Pascoe followed the lance-corporal out and watched him marching smartly away.
‘Well, there’s our police for you,’ said Ludlam. ‘Remind you of your mob, do they? No, don’t answer that!’
Pascoe made for his car. He was beginning to feel strangely shut in, the same kind of feeling he had when his work took him into a prison. That was probably unfair. No doubt a monastery would have much the same effect.
He said as he unlocked his door, ‘How long have you been in the Army, Sergeant?’
‘Me? We’ll have been together now for twenty years come next spring,’ said Ludlam. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to make a career of it!’
Pascoe laughed with the man. It did occur to him to wonder if advancement to sergeant was the best a lively intelligent man could hope for over twenty years in the Army, but it would have been crass to put the question. However, a more general philosophical query did seem in order.
‘Twenty years,’ he said. ‘Before the big unemployment. Tell me, Sergeant, what motivated men to sign on in your day?’
The sergeant leaned down to the open window and with wide-eyed surprise at being asked such an obvious question said, ‘Why, patriotism, Inspector. Pure and simple patriotism!’
Chapter 11
‘Sack, Sack!… Pray you give me some sack!’
As Pascoe switched off his engine in The Duke of York car park, the passenger door opened and George Headingley slid in.
‘Thought it was you,’ he said. ‘I’d just about given you up. Look, I’m on my way to The Towers to see this Warsop woman. Then I thought I’d go on to Paradise Hall. Why don’t you come along? In fact, why don’t you drive me, seeing as you’re sitting there with your engine warm.’
‘I’ve got work of my own, remember?’ protested Pascoe. ‘And what about my lunch?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll let you at the left-overs at Paradise Hall,’ said Headingley. ‘And you wouldn’t like it in the Duke anyway. They’ve taken against cops there since last night. I don’t know who’s been putting ideas in their heads – Ruddlesdin, likely – but they’re muttering about drunken policemen already. Come on, let’s go!’
With an exaggerated sigh, Pascoe let in the clutch and drove out of the car park, turning left along the narrow winding country road known locally as the Paradise Road.
It took its name from the Hall, five miles away, and the Hall, rather disappointingly, took its name not from the naughty antics which local tradition insisted used to go on there, but from the Paradise family who built it in the mid-eighteenth century.
The Towers two miles closer was a half-hearted gesture in the direction of Victorian Gothic. Rumour had it that its last private owner, an old lady who died in the mid-’thirties, had been so incensed by a quarrel she’d had with the owners of Paradise Hall that she had willed her own property to the local authority with the intention that it should be used as a lunatic asylum. What she seemed to have in mind was some sort of Yorkshire Bedlam from which shaven-headed madmen would escape from time to time to swarm all over her neighbour’s grounds. Happily, provision for the mentally handicapped in the district was already good, and with plans for future development well advanced, The Towers looked like being a white elephant till a legal ruling was obtained which permitted the authority to ignore the specific terms of the will so long as the building was dedicated to the ends of community care in a much more general sense.
And so it had become what was basically an old people’s holiday home, providing short breaks in the countryside for inhabitants of city centre retirement homes and also for old people living with their families who needed somewhere to stay while the family had a break.
Philip Westerman had been one of the former. He had been coming to The Towers for four years now and was during his stays a popular visitor to The Duke of York.
Headingley filled Pascoe in on his morning’s work, taking his interest for granted. Pascoe who had promised himself not to get involved felt to some extent trapped, but recognized that it was a trap of his own rather than Headingley’s setting.
‘So Kassell confirms that Charlesworth was driving,’ he said hopefully. ‘There you are. Nice, respectable witness. Cut and dried.’
‘You’d think so,’ said Headingley. ‘Only he knew all about the accident without me telling him. Now, the Post doesn’t appear till this afternoon, so who’s been talking to whom?’
Pascoe shot him a glance.
‘You’re not suggesting collusion, are you?’
Headingley shrugged.
‘What’s in it for him?’ he asked. ‘Could’ve been Ruddlesdin again, though Kassell didn’t mention being bothered by the Press.’
‘Anyway, what’s your line with this Mrs Warsop?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Just listen to her story. Hope she’s a bit vague. And try to suggest politely that she really ought to keep her big mouth shut!’
In fact, it turned out that Mrs Warsop had a rather small mouth with a tendency to purse up as she considered any question closely before offering a well expressed and far from vague answer.
She was in her late thirties, a small erect woman with black hair bound severely back from a not unattractive face. She reminded Pascoe of the kind of Victorian governess who gets the master of the house in the last chapter.
She would also make an excellent witness in court, coroner’s or Crown.
She repeated the story she had first told Ruddlesdin the night before. Standing in the entrance of the hotel, waiting for her friend, she had observed Dalziel get into the driving seat of his car and drive it away. She was adamant that it was in fact Dalziel she had seen.
‘I had observed him earlier in the restaurant. He was with two other men whom I do not know personally but who have been pointed out to me on other occasions as Major Kassell from Haycroft Grange, and a bookmaker called Charlesworth whose betting shops seem to clutter up most shopping precincts in town.’
‘And why did you observe Mr Dalziel, as you put it?’ asked Headingley with a slight edge of sarcasm. He soon regretted it.
‘Because of his vulgar and boisterous behaviour,’ she replied with distaste. ‘He was extremely loud and he kept on patting the waitress’s person, though I must say she did not look the type to be offended. I had no idea, of course, as I observed this behaviour, that this noisy boor was in fact a senior police officer.’
Headingley tried his best, suggesting that a view through a glass doorway into a dark car park could easily lead to error. To which the woman replied that the front of the hotel was very adequately lit and as she had actually stepped outside to take a breath of air in the shelter of the entrance porch, th
e obstacle of glass did not apply.
A big-boned, open-faced woman came into the room and said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Mrs Warsop, but Mr Toynbee’s complaining about the soup again, and Cook’s busy with the pudding. Could you spare a moment, do you think?’
This was Miss Day, the matron of The Towers, responsible for the health care and social well-being of the residents while Mrs Warsop, officially designated bursar, was in charge of the catering and general maintenance administration. Pascoe sensed the kind of antagonism between the two women which usually manifested itself in delicate and serpentine borderlines between areas of responsibility.
‘You would think Mr Toynbee was accustomed to the Dorchester,’ observed Mrs Warsop. ‘Yes, I’ll speak to him. I think these gentlemen are finished?’
‘Just one more thing, Mrs Warsop,’ said Pascoe. ‘Did you see Major Kassell go out into the car park after the other two men?’
She considered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There were just the two of them. The other man must have remained in the dining-room, I suppose.’
‘And how long was it before you finally got away yourself?’
‘Five minutes, perhaps,’ she said.
‘Your friend kept you waiting,’ observed Pascoe. ‘You were in the same car?’
‘Yes. I drove her home, but not along the road which goes past The Towers, if that’s what you’re wondering. It was more convenient to go in the other direction towards the south by-pass and get back into town that way. I had just returned to The Towers when that newspaperman turned up with his questions. It seemed to be my duty to answer them honestly.’
She stared at Pascoe as if expecting him to challenge this. Then, with a dismissive nod, she left.
‘Very efficient lady, that, I should think,’ said Headingley.
‘Oh yes, she’s certainly that,’ said Miss Day without enthusiasm. ‘Poor Mr Westerman! It’s really knocked me back.’
‘It must have put a damper on the others too,’ said Pascoe.
‘The residents? Yes, I suppose so. Though in a funny way, a death often rather bucks them up, as long as they aren’t too close to whoever it is!’
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