Her voice broke for a moment and the gypsy queen was gone and for the second time in an hour Pascoe felt the guilt of being embarrassed by the sight of grief.
It was over in a moment.
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree,’ she resumed. ‘No one who knew Pauline did this.’
Pascoe regarded her dubiously.
‘Why so certain, Mrs Stanhope?’ he asked.
‘She told me,’ she replied seriously. ‘Last night.’
Pascoe had to make an effort to stop himself glancing uneasily around. The room suddenly felt much less ordinary and conventional and the bright sunlight falling through the broad window seemed to thicken and curdle.
‘You communicated with her?’ he said.
She suddenly smiled. It was not an unfriendly smile, but not the kind of smile much used between equals. There was something of exasperation in it, and of pity too.
‘We didn’t sit down and have a chat, Inspector,’ she said. ‘But she was here. I felt her. And if she’d known who it was that did it, she’d have let me know.’
‘But,’ objected Pascoe, ‘even if she didn’t know then, surely she knows now.’
‘Then and now’s for the living,’ she said dismissively. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean she would have given me a name, though that’s not impossible. All I meant was, I felt her here and she felt puzzled, uncertain, not like she’d have been if she knew who’d done it and why, when it was done, I mean.’
‘Ah,’ said Pascoe who found this picture of a puzzle-filled afterlife rather distressing. A lifetime as a policeman was enough; an eternity unthinkable. Dalziel with a golden truncheon and blue serge wings! The image thinned the light once more and the room returned to normal.
‘It’s quite unusual for a Romany to be a medium, isn’t it?’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Crystal balls, the tarot, that’s the more usual area, isn’t it?’
‘It’s how the gorgios have portrayed us,’ said the woman. ‘But I’ve known very few chovihanis who used a crystal as more than a prop. Or as something bright to act as a focus for self-hypnosis. Oh, I read the psychic journals, Mr Pascoe! I’m not an educated woman but I’ve lived a gorgio life long enough to pick up some of their knowledge too!’
‘Chovihani. That’s a sort of witch, isn’t it?’
‘You know a bit about our people?’ she said. ‘I felt it when we first met.’
‘I once did a short study at college,’ admitted Pascoe. ‘It was social mainly, about education, fitting into the community, that sort of thing.’
‘Looking for ways to change us, make us like you!’ she said scornfully.
‘Not really,’ said Pascoe. ‘Though some do change. You, for instance. You conformed.’
He didn’t want an argument with this woman, but it seemed important to find out if there was really any more to her than a farrago of superstitions and self-delusions. He found out.
‘Conformed? Me! What a bloody arrogant sod you are, just like the rest! I did anything but. I left my family and I left my people and I left my whole life behind me. That’s conforming, is it? Conforming’s being as daft and as dull and as stupid as you, is it?’
She was frightening in anger. Pascoe decided that on the whole he preferred the imminence of the other world to this.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was stupid, you’re quite right. Absolutely.’
Suddenly she was angry no more.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t all that difficult, anyway. Chovihanis aren’t expected to conform. They do odd, anti-social things. My grandma was one, too. It skipped my mother somehow. But my grandma foretold I would marry a gorgio when I was in my cradle. So it was expected in a way. Everyone knew the prophecy. It made for loneliness. From fourteen on, boys wanted me for their lusts. I was a good-looking girl, can you believe that?’
‘Easily,’ said Pascoe.
‘But not for a wife,’ she went on. ‘If anyone married me, you see, the only way the prophecy could be fulfilled then would be for my husband to die! So I waited for Stanhope.’
She smiled, gently this time, reminiscently.
‘He was worth the waiting. Now you would like to see Pauline’s room.’
She rose abruptly, Pascoe more slowly, impressed again by her powers of anticipation.
She led him into a small bedroom. Pascoe regarded it with dismay. It looked as if an amateur burglar had been at it. Drawers hung out of the dressing-table and tallboy, all empty, as was the fitted wardrobe. Their contents seemed to have been stuffed into a variety of plastic rubbish bags which littered the floor. As he watched, Mrs Stanhope began to strip the blankets and linen off the bed and thrust these too into one of the bags.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ demanded Pascoe, bewildered.
‘I thought you had studied the Romani,’ she said. ‘All these things of my dead niece must be destroyed. It is the custom.’
‘But Pauline wasn’t a gypsy,’ protested Pascoe.
‘She was my niece. She lived here. She is dead,’ said the woman in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘While her possessions remain, so must she. I did the same when my Bert died. Even a chovihani has a right to live among the living. I felt her last night. She was lost and puzzled. I may have been a comfort. But soon she may grow angry, resentful, bitter. Such a spirit is not good company. The gypsy way is to seek rest for both the living and the dead.’
There was no answer to this.
Pascoe said, ‘You seem to have guessed we’d want to look through Pauline’s things, so isn’t this a bit premature?’
She picked up a shoe-box from the bedside table.
‘Her letters, diary, address book,’ she said. ‘All that could be of interest to you. But none of it will be of use. I can tell you that. Take them anyway. Make copies and return them, please. They too must go. Also the things she was wearing when she died. Those especially must be destroyed. When can I have them?’
‘They’re in the car,’ remembered Pascoe. ‘I’ll fetch them now.’
He returned a few moments later with the parcel of clothes and personal effects.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Then after a moment’s hesitation, she added abruptly. ‘I still want to help, you understand, like I told you. But it’s harder now.’
‘Because it’s your own, you mean?’
She thought about this for a while, then agreed, ‘Yes. Because it’s my own.’
Pascoe puzzled over this remark as he went downstairs to his car. It seemed to him there might have been a rather strange emphasis in it, though at the same time he recognized that the whole ambience of the flat inclined him to suspicion of strangeness.
My own. In a way Pauline hadn’t been her own, of course. For in a way, her own were the gypsies, particularly the Lees. And after Pauline’s death she had been away on some unlikely family jaunt with Dave Lee.
Could family loyalty – or fear – persuade her to help cover up Dave Lee’s involvement in her niece’s death? It hardly seemed likely. But there was something there, of that he was convinced.
As he was opening his car door he heard his name being called, and Rosetta Stanhope came running after him, breathless and agitated.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘Where’s the rest?’ she demanded.
‘Rest? Rest of what?’
‘The rest of her clothes! The clothes she died in. Those I must have, those are the most important of all!’
‘But you’ve got everything,’ assured Pascoe. ‘Jeans, suntop, underclothes, sandals. I checked them off myself as I signed for them.’
‘Not those, you fool!’ flashed the woman, all gypsy now. ‘The headscarf, the shawl, the skirt. Where are they?’
‘Oh God!’ exclaimed Pascoe. Her theatricality was infectious for he found himself striking his forehead with his open hand. But he meant it.
‘You bloody fool!’ he said to himself. ‘You fool!’
Chapter 16
Sergean
t Wield was an expert typist, a skill he kept well concealed from less dextrous colleagues who would have been quick to attempt to abuse it. Alone in the CID room, he was able to finish his reports on his morning visits to the bank and the Pickersgill household in record time. Now his thoughts turned to Newcastle and Maurice. There was someone else, he was certain. Brief encounters he had suspected before. He avoided them himself, but was willing to tolerate them in Maurice, recognizing that the other lacked his own almost monastic self-discipline. But what he had felt last night was the imminence of someone more dangerous, more permanent.
He sipped at a cold cup of coffee and wondered what he would do. Something. He was not a man to sit back and do nothing.
‘Penny for ’em,’ said Dalziel who had entered the room unobserved. ‘You must be solving at least six of the ten great mysteries of the century, the way you look. What’ve you decided – Jack the Ripper escaped on the Mary Celeste?’
The telephone rang. Wield raised it off the rest.
‘Anything interesting?’ said Dalziel.
‘Not really, sir. Lee created merry hell for a bit after he was brought in. They could hear him at the desk. He was claiming assault. By you.’
‘Oh aye. You didn’t go near him, did you?’
‘No, sir. The lad who brought him in was very clear about your instructions. He shut up after a bit.’
‘Good. I’ll get on to him by and by.’ Dalziel belched generously. ‘Answer your phone, lad. Don’t keep the public waiting.’
It was Mulgan from the Northern Bank.
‘Sergeant Wield? I got authority to do that check you asked for.’
‘Oh good. I was going to call later, sir,’ reminded Wield.
‘Yes, I know. But something emerged which I thought you might like to know instantly. Did you find any money on Brenda’s body?’
‘Hang on,’ said Wield. He left his desk and went to a filing cabinet. Dalziel raised his eyebrows but the sergeant ignored him.
‘A little in her purse,’ said Wield. ‘Three pound notes, some coppers. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s just that among her other transactions, she drew a cheque for cash against her own account.’
‘Oh,’ said Wield. ‘Is that normal?’
‘It’s not against the rules, if that’s what you mean, as long as there are funds to cover it. But normally I would expect one of my staff to cash their own cheques at someone else’s till. Safer, if you follow me.’
‘I think so. But there were funds to cover Brenda Sorby’s cheque?’
‘Oh yes. She was a very provident girl. No, it was just the amount that interested me, particularly as I saw no reference to cash in any of the newspaper reports. That morning she drew out two hundred pounds. In five pound notes.’
Wield passed on the news to Dalziel who took the phone from him.
‘Mr Mulgan, Superintendent Dalziel here. Listen, you wouldn’t have the numbers of the notes that Miss Sorby received, would you?’
‘I’m sorry, no. It’s impossible to …’
‘Yes, yes, I understand. But there might be some marks? I mean, often the things I get from my bank look as if they’d been left lying around in a kindergarten!’
‘There might be the odd pencil mark left by a teller when counting them into bundles,’ said Mulgan acidly.
‘And these marks would be identifiable as coming from someone at your bank?’
‘Possibly, but not necessarily,’ said the manager.
‘Right. Thanks a lot, Mr Mulgan. We’ll get back to you.’
He replaced the receiver forcibly.
‘Creepy sod,’ he said.
‘You know him, sir?’
‘Hardly. He just sounds a creepy sod. Like he was chewing a ball-bearing to make himself sound like a chinless wonder. Two hundred pounds, Sergeant! We should have known about this sooner. Good job I sent you this morning.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Wield. ‘It was a good idea of yours to check through the girl’s transactions.’
‘All right, save the satire,’ said Dalziel. ‘You’ll get the credit. Question is, who got the money?’
‘You think this could have just been straight theft after all?’ asked Wield.
‘I think nowt,’ said Dalziel. ‘All I know is that this morning I found one hundred and five pounds hidden away in Dave Lee’s caravan that he can’t account for.’
He smacked a huge fist into a huge palm making a crack like a breaking bone.
‘Let’s go and have a chat with Mr Lee, shall we,’ he said.
It was the penultimate day of the High Fair and Pascoe found things booming everywhere at Charter Park except in the police caravan where Sergeant Brady, attempting to conceal his copy of Penthouse, confirmed that the public seemed to have run out of even the most useless and irrelevant bits of information.
‘Dead as a doornail since I came on after lunch,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Well, don’t let it get you down,’ said Pascoe.
He went into the fairground to talk with Ena Cooper. As he approached the penny-roll stall he had a sense of something not quite right. It took him a second or two to spot what was wrong. The fortune-teller’s tent had disappeared!
‘They came and took it down this morning,’ said Mrs Cooper. ‘Three or four gyppos. Didn’t you know?’
Pascoe was non-committal and Mrs Cooper smiled maliciously. But the smile disappeared when she was questioned about Pauline Stanhope again.
No, she hadn’t mentioned what she’d been wearing when she left the tent just before midday. Why should she? – nobody had asked. Yes, ‘Pauline’ had been wearing the headscarf, the shawl, and the full-length skirt which were the tools of her trade. No, there’d been nothing funny about the way she walked.
As for seeing anyone go into the tent before the ‘girl’ left, yes, like she’d said already, there’d been a few that morning, she couldn’t say how many.
Pascoe knew there’d been four at least, two pairs of women who had come forward instantly to compete for the honour of a ‘last sighting’. The winners, a pair of teenage girls, had attended at eleven-fifteen A.M. and had been very impressed by Madame Rashid’s accuracy and optimism.
Pascoe thanked Mrs Cooper and turned away, taking one last look at the circle of anaemic grass which marked where the tent had been. His romantic imagination would have liked to see it as some kind of enchanted ring, haunted by a ghost pleading for the rest that only revenge could give her. But if anything it looked like a green on a miniature golf-course. People strolled across it, uncaring or unaware that their substance was intersecting whatever insubstantial re-run of a murdered girl’s last moments might be taking place there. Perhaps one of them would have a vision like those women at Versailles. Certainly it was beginning to feel as if only some supernatural intervention could carry them any further forward. Could Dalziel be persuaded to cross Rosetta Stanhope’s palm with silver?
Back at the caravan he dented Brady’s phlegm by asking if he’d noticed the scene of the crime being removed. He then left the sergeant with the task of getting together some men to search the fairground for the missing clothes. Not that he had much hope. The Choker would have needed only a second to step out of the dress in the lee of one of the sideshows and the thin cotton fabric would have rolled up to almost nothing. Then, if he had his wits about him which in one sense at least he clearly did, he would have taken the dress far away from the park before dumping it, or even burning it.
And Brady made the prospect even less hopeful by telling him that the rubbish skips had been emptied the previous day by the cleansing department.
‘After you’ve looked round here, you’d better get down to the dump, hadn’t you?’ suggested Pascoe amiably. ‘Just the job for a hot day!’
On his return to the station he was held up at the entrance to the car park by the emergence of an ambulance. He watched it move quietly down the service road, turn into the main traffic stream and was interested to note t
hat only then did its lights start flashing and bells clanging.
Entering, he went straight up to Dalziel’s room.
‘Where the hell have you been hiding?’ demanded the fat man.
‘What’s up? I saw an ambulance.’
‘You don’t know? God, you’ll go far. Lily-white hands,’ sneered Dalziel. ‘They’ve just carted Lee off to hospital, all right?’
Pascoe was not offended by his superior’s tone. He’d grown accustomed to his style and besides, he could see the fat man was worried.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. I had a few words with him. He just kept on moaning about this pain. I thought he was shooting the shit so I …’
‘Yes, sir,’ prompted Pascoe.
‘I just yelled at him,’ said Dalziel. ‘What do you think I did? Next thing, he’s lying on the floor. Well, then I called the quack. He says it could be appendix, he’s not sure. Those bastards never are! So we got an ambulance.’
‘You were alone when you questioned him, sir?’
‘Yes,’ said Dalziel.
Pascoe thought for a moment. He’d never seen his superior quite so ill at ease before.
‘You’ll have called the ACC, sir?’ he said.
‘That twat! Why should I want to call him?’
‘Before someone else does,’ said Pascoe. ‘Excuse me.’
He went downstairs. Wield was ahead of him, studying the logged entries of the Lees’ admission.
‘Trouble?’ said the sergeant.
‘If we all do our duty, we’ll come to no harm,’ said Pascoe. ‘Let’s have a look at the chimney.’
He whistled when he saw the book.
‘That’s a long time.’
‘And he was complaining from when he arrived. Said he’d been punched,’ said Wield.
‘The woman, she’s still here?’ asked Pascoe. ‘Jesus! Get her out, get her down to the hospital, you go with her. And hang about there. Take a WPC to keep an eye on her, you watch him. They’re both in police custody still, right?’
Back in Dalziel’s office he found the fat man talking on the phone.
A Killing Kindness Page 15
