Away from the excitement of confrontation, the gypsy’s torrential speaking style declined to a reluctant dribble.
‘It’s about last Thursday night,’ said Wield.
‘I’ve told all that.’
‘I read what you said,’ said Wield.
‘Well then.’
‘You said you were at the Fair from eight till eleven, mainly on the dodgems.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t see anyone resembling the dead girl during that time.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t sleep at Charter Park, do you?’
‘No. They stopped the ponies a few years back. Said they were dangerous. Like that short-arse fool.’
‘So you came back here to your caravan at night. How?’
‘I’ve a van. That’s it there. Licensed and insured.’
‘I never suggested it wasn’t,’ said Wield. ‘But I’ll check. I’ve done a lot of checking on you already, Mr Lee.’
‘So?’
‘So I know all about you. You’ve a nasty temper.’
The man shrugged.
‘Against women too. I saw a woman today at your stall. She’d had a nasty crack.’
‘She’s a clumsy bitch.’
‘Yes. Rape too. You’ve not stopped short of that, have you?’
This at last restarted the torrent of words, but not English. Wield said finally, ‘Shut up or I’ll pull your balls off.’
The man subsided, then burst out again. ‘There wasn’t no rape! No conviction! Rape that slut? Stick feathers on a chicken!’
‘All right, all right,’ said Wield impatiently. ‘Where was your van parked?’
‘Behind the stall,’ he answered sullenly.
‘And you just drove back here? Straight back? At eleven?’
‘Eleven, half past. I don’t know. It started raining. We packed the stuff from the stall into the van like every night.’
‘We?’
‘My wife and me. You met her you said. Then back here.’
‘And no doubt she’ll confirm this? And that you then went to bed and slept peacefully all night?’
The man didn’t bother to answer.
‘All right,’ said Wield. ‘Now tell me about Madame Rashid.’
He had a sense at that moment of the gypsy’s receptivity being turned up a notch, though there was no outer physical sign.
‘You know her?’
‘Yes.’
‘In fact she’s a relation of yours, isn’t that so?’
‘She married a gorgio,’ he said. ‘Many years ago.’
‘And her niece. You know her too?’
‘I see her at the park.’
Wield paused. He’d no idea why he’d introduced this line of questioning. It wasn’t going anywhere.
He decided on the heavily significant abrupt conclusion.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’
‘What?’
‘Out.’
The big gypsy got out of the car and shut the door with a force that shook Wield. An older grey-haired man with a ruddy open face who had been hanging around close by approached Lee and exchanged words with him in rapid Romany. Wield leaned out of his window and beckoned to the newcomer.
‘Who’re you?’ he demanded.
‘Me, pal? I’m Silvester. Silvester Herne’s my name, pal.’
‘Are you the boss of this lot? The king or whatever you call it?’
‘Me, pal?’ he said again, looking amazed. ‘Just an old gypsy, just old Silvester.’
‘Well, old Silvester, see if you can get it into your friend’s thick skull. I’m not happy about him. I’ll be back. Meanwhile, get that fence mended, stop them ponies straying. Or you’ll all be in trouble. Right?’
‘Right, pal,’ said Herne, beaming co-operation. ‘Straightaway!’
That was telling them! thought Wield as he drove away, but years of experience had taught him that telling gypsies anything was like talking to the trees. Not that he objected to gypsies as such, though the untidiness of their life made him shudder. If anything, he felt a sneaking sympathy with them as outcasts and envy of them as defiant outcasts. And perhaps there was some atavistic fear in his attitude also. He had certainly been more affected by Rosetta Stanhope’s trance yesterday than he cared to reveal.
He should have gone back to the station but instead he found himself driving to his own flat, where he made himself a cup of tea. It was a gloomy place, he thought dejectedly. Even on the brightest of days the small north-facing windows let little light in. And it was drab and impersonal. Not many people visited him here apart from his married sister and the young nephew whose cassette recorder he had used at the seance. But the secretive element in his make-up drew him to the anonymous and noncommittal in all but the most private areas of life.
Reacting against the thought, he picked up his phone and dialled Maurice’s business number in Newcastle. But when the phone was answered he replaced it without speaking. They had an agreement. All contact to be private except in extreme emergency. This was no emergency though somehow it felt as if there might be an emergency in the offing, like an area of low pressure over the Atlantic on the telly weather chart.
When he finally drank his tea it was quite cold and he saw with dismay that he had been sitting totally abstracted for more than an hour. It was after three-thirty.
He left the flat hurriedly. Pascoe was going to want to know how he’d spent his time. He would not be pleased. As for Dalziel …
At least he ought to be able to say he’d spoken to Pauline Stanhope.
He drove back to Charter Park, but swore under his breath when he saw the chair with the BACK SOON sign still outside Madame Rashid’s tent. What the hell did SOON mean to a fortune-teller?
It ought to mean something.
Suddenly uneasy, he pushed the chair aside and opened the flap.
It was dark inside, dark and musty. The triangle of light from the opening fell across a plain trestle table.
‘Oh Jesus,’ said Wield.
He took two steps forward. Looked down. Retreated. As he pulled the flap down and replaced the chair with the sign a pair of young girls approached. One said boldly while the other giggled, ‘Are you the fortune-teller, mister?’
‘No,’ said Wield. ‘She’s gone.’
‘When will she be back?’
He gestured at the sign, then hurried away towards his car to radio for assistance.
BACK SOON. But from where?
Across the trestle table, her legs dangling off one end but her arms neatly crossed over her breast, lay the body of Pauline Stanhope.
She had been strangled.
Chapter 7
‘Not a good advert, this,’ said Dalziel. ‘Like a butcher getting food poison.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Pascoe, though his more exact mind found the analogy imprecise and therefore dissatisfying. He didn’t say so, but wondered what the newspapers might make of a murder in a fortune-teller’s tent.
The press were imminent, of course. The discovery of a crime by an experienced officer gives the police a head start in getting their investigation under way free from public or professional interference. But once they start, the news speeds like a run on the pound even from sites much more sequestered than a busy fairground. A rope barrier had been erected around the tent to keep the public back. The police doctor had examined the body briefly, pronounced the girl dead, probable cause strangulation, probable time two to four hours earlier. Next, at Pascoe’s suggestion, because of the smallness of the internal area, a single detective had been sent in on hands and knees, armed with a high-powered torch and a plastic bag, to pick over every inch of the floor space before the photographer and fingerprint men further trampled the already well crushed grass. Another couple of men were put to examining the turf in the environs of the tent, but the passage of so many feet there made it a token gesture.
Next, photographs were taken from all angles
, sketches made, distances measured. Then the fingerprint boys, who had been dusting the chair and notice outside, moved in and did the chair and table inside with the body still in situ. Finally, after Dalziel had stood and looked phlegmatically at the corpse for a few minutes, he gave the order for it to be slid into its plastic bag and taken to the mortuary where the clothes would be carefully removed and despatched to the lab for examination.
Now the print men did the rest of the table before it and the chairs were also packaged and despatched to the lab.
While all this was going on, a police caravan had been towed into the car park and here already statements were being taken for the second time in a week from the fairground people, with particular attention paid to those whose stalls or entertainments were within sighting distance of the tent.
Of these, the sharp-faced woman on the penny-roll stall was the most positive. Her name was Ena Cooper.
‘Just before twelve she went. I told the ugly fellow. No, I didn’t speak, well, she weren’t all that close, like, and we was busy. Things don’t really pick up while afternoon, but you get a lot of kids round late morning and the roll stalls are always popular with the kids. No, I didn’t see her come back, I went across to our Ethel’s, she’s got a hot-dog stand by the Wheel, for a bite to eat later on, so she could have come back then. About two o’clock, just after the ugly fellow was here the first time. I was away mebbe forty-five minutes. No, it’s no use asking him. He’s so short-sighted he can hardly see the pennies. Kids cheat him rotten when I’m not here!’
Cooper, her husband, nodded melancholy agreement. He’d seen nowt, heard nowt.
Loudspeaker appeals were made to the crowd requesting anyone who had visited Madame Rashid’s tent earlier that day to come forward, but so far without success.
Notable by his absence was Dave Lee. After Wield had described his encounter that afternoon, he was sent to pick the gypsy up and bring him in for questioning. At the same time, Dalziel sent a man round to the Wheatsheaf Garage to check the movements of Tommy Maggs.
Pascoe nodded approvingly. Investigation is ninety per cent elimination. In his mind, Maggs was almost completely in the clear as far as Brenda Sorby’s death was concerned, and he didn’t see the young man as a psychopathic mass murderer. But the obvious has got to be seen to be done.
When he was bold enough to utter these thoughts to Dalziel, the fat man grunted, ‘Oh aye?’
A policewoman had been sent to tell Rosetta Stanhope the tragic news. Pascoe had steered her out of the office earlier that afternoon, with assurances that they would certainly consider her kind offer of psychic assistance.
Later he had been summoned to Dalziel’s office where the fat man was conferring with Detective Chief Inspector George Headingley who was in charge of the Spinks’ warehouse case. This was now murder. The watchman had died in hospital that morning, and Headingley was in search of more manpower. They had gone over the staff dispositions together and seen how tautly stretched they were. Then Pascoe had mentioned Rosetta Stanhope’s offer of help and frivously wondered if they might not take it up.
‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘She can try to make contact with the ACC for a start. That bugger’s been dead from the neck up for years!’
They had all laughed. And not long afterwards Wield had phoned with his news.
Now Pascoe awaited uneasily the arrival of the dead girl’s aunt. She would have to be taken to the mortuary for a formal identification of the body. It was always an unpleasant business, and though Rosetta Stanhope had impressed him as a strong-willed albeit rather eccentric character, experience had taught him there was no way of forecasting reactions.
He felt almost relieved when the policewoman called in with the news that Mrs Stanhope was not at home so she had stationed herself outside her flat to await her return.
Shortly afterwards Wield returned to say that Dave Lee had gone off in his van right after the sergeant’s visit. No one knew, or at least was telling, his destination.
Finally the DC sent to check on Tommy Maggs arrived, also unaccompanied. Maggs had not returned to work after the dinner break and there was no reply to repeated knockings at the door of his home.
‘Check with the neighbours,’ ordered Dalziel. ‘See if he’s contacted his parents at work. Find out who his doctor is. Sergeant Wield, you’ve got Lee’s van number? Right. Put out a call. Peter, you go and deal with the press, will you? You’re better at shooting shit than anyone else.’
‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘What do I tell them?’
‘What you know, which, unless you’re holding something back, is bugger all.’
‘They’ll be keen to know if it’s the Choker again,’ said Pascoe.
‘Won’t know that till the PM. And then we’ll only know it’s a Choker!’
‘It looks a pretty clear case,’ protested Pascoe. ‘I mean, compared with the Sorby girl …’
‘You think so? We’ll have to see,’ said Dalziel.
The old bastard thinks he’s on to something, thought Pascoe. Or perhaps he just likes being contrary.
The journalists who had gathered at the fairground were not just local. Word had spread, and there were even a couple from London already, though it emerged that they had travelled up attracted by the clairvoyance story, and Pauline Stanhope’s murder was just a bonus. In the car park, a television crew were unshipping their cameras. They would get some good atmospheric footage if nothing more, thought Pascoe. The fairground amusements, after a brief hiatus, were back to full steam, whirling, glittering, blaring. Did the laughter, the music, the excited shrieking hold perhaps a more than usually strident note of hysteria? wondered Pascoe. It was almost indecent, but at the same time it was inevitable. Death, the biggest barker of them all, had gathered together a huge crowd and the fair people could hardly be expected to ignore this opportunity. It wasn’t even as if Pauline Stanhope was one of their own. Nor Rosetta, for that matter. Once a year they joined the show while the rest of them formed a shifting but constant community.
He stonewalled the questions for ten minutes. As he’d anticipated, they were most eager for confirmation that this was a Choker killing.
‘What about the Hamlet calls, Inspector?’ asked one of the reporters. ‘Has there been one yet?’
‘I don’t know.’ Pascoe smiled. ‘You’d better ask your colleague from the Evening Post. His boss gets them first.’
One of the TV men caught his sleeve as he turned away and asked if they could do a filmed interview in about five minutes.
‘I’ll have to check,’ said Pascoe.
‘Well, it’s not with you, actually. It’s Superintendent Dalziel we’d like.’
Piqued, Pascoe returned to the caravan where he found Dalziel on the phone which the Post Office had just connected.
‘The telly men request the pleasure of your company, sir,’ he said when the fat man had finished.
‘What’s up with you, lad? Not photogenic?’
‘Perhaps I don’t fill a twenty-six-inch screen,’ said Pascoe acidly.
‘What? Put you out, has it, lad?’ chortled Dalziel. ‘Here’s something to put you back in. I’ve just been talking to Sammy Locke at the Post.’
‘There’s been a call?’ said Pascoe eagerly.
‘I knew that’d please you, Peter. You reckon you’ll get the bugger through these calls, don’t you? Well, best of luck. There’s two of the sods at it now!’
He was wrong.
By the time Pascoe got home that night there’d been four Hamlet calls.
The first, at four-forty-two, said, Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.
The second, at five-twenty-three, said, One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
The third, at six-fifteen, said, To be, or not to be, that is the question.
The fourth, at seven-nine, said, The time is out of joint: – O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.
/> Ellie, for a change, was in bright good spirits and Pascoe was so pleased to see this that he restricted himself to no more than a forty degree roll of the eyeballs when she announced that she was now the membership secretary of WRAG. In any case, she seemed much more keen to talk about the Choker.
‘These phone calls. Are they really going to be any use?’
‘We don’t have much else,’ said Pascoe, tucking into his re-heated beef and mushroom pie. ‘But they can’t all be the Choker. Sammy Locke’s memory of the first voice is a bit vague. He reckons that two, possibly three, of this lot are not so very different from it.’
‘You’ve got all today’s calls on tape, you say,’ said Ellie. ‘What you want is a language expert to listen to them.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Pascoe, who’d already made the suggestion to Dalziel but wasn’t about to be a clever-sticks. ‘Anyone in mind?’
‘Well, there’s Dicky Gladmann and Drew Urquhart at the College. They impress their students by working out regional and social backgrounds by voice analysis.’
‘And are they right?’
‘One hundred per cent usually, I gather. But I think they probably check the records first. Still, they’re certainly incomprehensible enough to be good linguists.’
Pascoe finished his pie, drew breath and started in on the apple crumble, also warmed up.
She wants me to get fat too! he suddenly thought.
‘I’ll give them a try. Though they’re probably enjoying their little vacation in Acapulco,’ he said. ‘By the way, you never said, how did la Lacewing respond to your theory about the medium message?’
‘Thought it was a load of crap,’ said Ellie moodily.
‘Did she now? Well well. Let me have the transcript back, won’t you?’
‘Yes. And she got pretty close to embarrassing me by talking about you being in charge of the case.’
‘That embarrasses you?’
‘Of course not. No, I mean she was trying to put down some loud-mouthed, fellow called Middlefield, he’s a JP or something, thinks all murdered women are ipso facto whores. I tell you what was interesting, though. I gathered the fellow he was talking to was the manager of the bank where that other girl worked. The one on the tape. Or not.’
A Killing Kindness Page 6
