A Killing Kindness

by Reginald Hill

  On cue, the sergeant returned to announce that Dr Pottle was here.

  ‘Hasn’t he got a golf-course to go to?’ muttered Dalziel.

  In fact whatever it was that Pottle did on Saturday afternoons he seemed only too pleased to have been invited away from it. He took the new tape into a neighbouring room and played it through several times.

  ‘You have no body?’ he enquired when he had finished.

  ‘No. You think we’re likely to get one?’ said Dalziel.

  ‘That I can’t say. But whether this is your man or not, he certainly sounds to me very disturbed. If we assume that he is the (A) of the previous set of tapes, the change is marked.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Wield. ‘Unhappier, sort of.’

  Pottle looked at him approvingly.

  ‘You have a sensitive ear,’ he said.

  Wield coughed almost noiselessly into his fist. Pascoe who was beginning to be a keen student of Wieldology noted this down as the equivalent of a flush of pleasure.

  ‘Last time his tone was regretful but resolved, as though he were performing a painful necessity,’ continued Pottle.

  ‘This is hurting me as much as it hurts you, you mean?’ said Dalziel. ‘We had an old sod at school used to say that as he thumped you.’

  ‘Partly that. More being cruel to be kind. Compassionate, almost,’ said the doctor. ‘As I said in my written report, these are just impressions, but supported, I think, by the treatment of his victims and the tone and content of the telephone calls. Now, here there are two distinct changes. His voice sounds much more distressed, there’s not the same authority there as before. And the words he speaks are concerned with himself, not with his victim. Oh God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. He’s beginning to find it hard to live with himself, I would say.’

  ‘Would this show in his outer behaviour?’ wondered Pascoe.

  ‘Not necessarily. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘More important, does it mean he’s less or more dangerous?’ demanded Dalziel.

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ said Pottle.

  Dalziel gave an expressive pout of his thicks lips and putting his hand into his waistband began to scratch his stomach audibly.

  ‘One last thing,’ said Pascoe. ‘Suppose that his last killing, that is the last we definitely knew about, had been motivated not by whatever it is that’s bugging him deep down, but by a simple desire not to be caught. How would this affect him?’

  Pottle lit a cigarette from the one he was already smoking.

  ‘This is a hypothesis, or do you know something?’ he asked.

  ‘An educated guess,’ replied Pascoe.

  ‘Then I would guess also that his own survival might not be sufficient justification to himself for taking life. Not unless it was definitely a one-off once-for-all-time act.’

  ‘In other words, he might do it, resolved that after this there would be no more killings.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then if he found there were going to be other killings, that the compulsion was still there …?’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at, Mr Pascoe,’ said Pottle. ‘Yes, that could explain the change of tone here in this message. If he has killed again because of his compulsion, he now knows he may be tempted to kill again for his survival. And that is what he finds it hard to contemplate.’

  ‘Hold on, now,’ said Dalziel. ‘If he killed that girl on the fairground just to protect himself, surely it’s the call that followed that murder which should be full of this unhappiness your sensitive ears are picking up.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Pottle. ‘His motivation would have been sufficient at the time to justify himself thoroughly. Therefore he would be most meticulous about his cover-up.’

  ‘Cover-up?’

  ‘That’s right. By laying the girl out as he did and by making the phone-call in the same tone and terms as before, he was attempting to misdirect you into pursuing him as the motiveless Choker still.’

  ‘Which is what you hinted at in the first place, sir,’ reminded Pascoe.

  ‘Aye, I know,’ muttered Dalziel. ‘But I always get suspicious of my good ideas when clever buggers start supporting them. Well, thank you, Doctor. You’ve been very helpful.’

  Pottle closed his notebook so firmly that an ashy emanation puffed out of his hands like fumes from a censer. He is after all our society’s high-priest, thought Pascoe. The ungodly Dalziel had already turned away.

  ‘He doesn’t care for “clever buggers,” I see,’ murmured Pottle. ‘And yet … how clever is he himself? Of the other, I have no doubts.’

  ‘Oh, he knows a hawk from a handsaw,’ said Pascoe lightly. ‘Any more thoughts on why Hamlet, Doctor?’

  ‘The first lady is the key, I believe,’ said Pottle, making for the door. ‘Had she been a little older, and had she remarried after her husband’s death, and had she got a son who was a thirty-five-year-old adolescent …’

  ‘She had a daughter who died,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘That might be significant. But you’ll need powers other than mine to establish that connection, Inspector. Good day to you.’

  ‘Inspector Pascoe,’ bellowed Dalziel as the door closed behind the psychiatrist.

  Pascoe went to the table behind which the fat man was sitting, viewing with distaste its paper-strewn surface.

  ‘There’s too many people just hanging around here,’ he said fretfully. ‘It’s like just after pub closing-time in a brothel.’

  ‘Some brothel,’ said Pascoe. ‘The girl we’re all waiting for is dead.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Dalziel. ‘Meanwhile, there’s things to be done. The fair finishes tonight. They’ll be packing up in the morning, so I’m sending a team down there just in case there’s any last-minute memories or anything turns up when the council start raking in the rubbish. Next, I’m fed up with all these wiseacres farting about with these tapes. Let’s get something really useful out of ’em. Every man connected with this case, I want his voice on tape. It can be by agreement or by stealth, I don’t mind. Sergeant Wield’s a dab hand at working with a microphone up his nostrils aren’t you, Sergeant? Then we’ll see if these sodding experts can actually say if it was one of this lot on the telephone, right?’

  He glared at Pascoe as if defying him to recall that this had been his own suggestion only an hour earlier.

  ‘Excellent idea, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’ll do Wildgoose. I want another word with that sod anyway.’

  ‘And I’ll have another chat with Mr Mulgan,’ said Sergeant Wield who had been studying the linguists’ report with great interest.

  ‘Talking of Mulgan, was there anything on that list of the Sorby girl’s transctions?’ enquired Dalziel.

  Guiltily, Wield took it out of his pocket and handed it over.

  ‘Forgot all about it, sir,’ he confessed. ‘What with the bother at the encampment and all.’

  Dalziel grunted and glanced down the list. Because it was half-day closing, a lot of the local traders had been putting their takings in during the afternoon, including M. Conrad, the jeweller. Also, he noticed, there had been a deposit made on behalf of the Aero Club account and a large sum withdrawn from the Middlefield Electronic account.

  He frowned.

  ‘She was wearing her engagement ring that day, wasn’t she?’ he said.

  Pascoe and Wield exchanged glances.

  ‘I think so,’ said Wield. ‘Why, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. You’re getting me as loopy as the rest of you. Go on, bugger off and get some work done, will you?’

  Before he left the station, Pascoe put a copy of the latest tape in an envelope and addressed it to Gladmann or Urquhart in case either should surface before his return. Then, as an afterthought, he dropped in the Rosetta Stanhope cassette with a copy of Wield’s transcription and a note with the vague query, ‘What do you make of this?’

&
nbsp; Wildgoose’s milk and paper still remained uncollected. Pascoe contemplated burglary but was deterred by the appearance of a neighbour, a hairy young man apparently dying of consumption, who told him in a series of wheezy grunts that he’d heard Wildgoose go out last night but hadn’t heard him return. Deterred from his criminal intents by the young man’s presence, if not his information, Pascoe left.

  He thought of going round to see Lorraine Wildgoose. But it didn’t seem likely that the man would be there and he felt he ought to be careful about feeding the woman’s obsession.

  No, the girl, Andrea Valentine, seemed the best bet. Preece had gathered that the parents were due back this weekend, so perhaps Wildgoose was having a last fling round there. He got in his car and headed for Danby Row.

  He spotted the house and drove slowly past. There was no sign of life. The milk was on the doorstep here too, which meant that the parents almost certainly had not returned and the happy couple if they were indeed inside were still probably making each other happy.

  He turned at the end of the street and drove back. Dalziel, he thought, wouldn’t have driven past the first time. Young girl screwing around with her middle-aged and married schoolteacher – her parents had a right to know. Pascoe’s softness wasn’t doing anyone any good, least of all the girl.

  To some extent Pascoe had to agree. Certainly he’d been as kind as he could. Theoretically, suspecting that Wildgoose might have dumped the remains of his cannabis crop in Danby Row, he ought to have gone in there the previous day, searching it out and slapping a possession charge so hard on the girl that she’d try to ease the pain by agreeing to witness the more serious charge of cultivation and distribution against Wildgoose.

  That’s what he should have done. But he hadn’t. Still, don’t get uptight about it, he told himself philosophically as he leaned on the doorbell. It was impossible to be a cop and not break the rules. And in the great scheme of things perhaps his being soft on cannabis compensated for the readiness of some of his colleagues to drive home their arguments with a fist in the gut.

  There was no answer here either. He didn’t want to attract the neighbour’s attention, so he went round the side of the house. At the front there had only been a paved rectangle with a homesick magnolia in the middle of it. Behind, however, a long narrow garden, made private and well-nigh impenetrable by profusion of competing shrubs, stretched down to a wall with a green-shrouded door in it, presumably leading into a back lane.

  Pascoe rapped on the rear door. There was no response, so he tried the handle. It turned and the unlocked door swung creakingly open.

  He stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen – marble sink, solid fuel stove, a wooden clothes pulley hanging from the ceiling, blue and white lavatorial tiles everywhere. The Valentines obviously didn’t spend their money on home improvements. If the parents’ attitudes were like their home, they’d have a fit when they found out what little Andrea had been getting up to.

  ‘Hello!’ called Pascoe opening the interior door. ‘Anyone home?’

  His voice echoed up the stairwell, gloomy with brown paint and dark green flocked wall paper.

  ‘Hello,’ he called again, but more softly now, not expecting an answer.

  Yet there was someone or something here, he felt it, and his heart was suddenly tight with dread. He found himself thinking of Wield pulling back the tent-flap and stepping inside. What he had found there had taken him completely by surprise. But perhaps the anticipated horror is even worse.

  Oddly, it wasn’t. It was anti-climactic, a relief almost. He pushed open another door. It led into a shadowy sitting-room. There on a threadbare chaise-longue lay Andrea Valentine. She was wearing only a short towelling wrap, but it had been decently arranged to effect maximum coverage. Her slippered feet were together and her hands were crossed on her breast. On the third finger of her left hand glowed a bright red stone set in a circlet of silver.

  Pascoe touched the hand. It was quite cold. He looked for a moment at the blood-suffused face and knew the regrets and self-accusations that the sight was stirring up for him.

  It was no time for them now.

  Ignoring the telephone in the hallway he went out of the house the way he had come in and spoke rapidly and urgently into his car radio.

  Then he returned inside to wait.

  Chapter 23

  It was the story as before.

  The girl had been strangled and then laid out with limbs and features arranged to conceal the violence of her death as much as possible. She had been killed between midnight and two A.M.

  A unique feature was that this girl had had sex shortly before dying. There were no signs of force.

  In a shoe-box at the back of her wardrobe they found what they took to be the remnants of Wildgoose’s Indian hemp harvest.

  All over the house, they found his fingerprints or at least prints which corresponded with those they found all over his flat.

  But these were the only trace of the man they found.

  Pascoe went to see Lorraine Wildgoose.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

  He tried to by-pass the question, but she was not easy to by-pass, so he told her.

  ‘You’ll want to look around,’ she said. ‘To make sure I’m not hiding him. Jesus!’

  Feeling foolish, Pascoe looked. Fortunately the children were both out.

  ‘You don’t seem very surprised. Or shocked,’ he suggested.

  ‘What do you want, hypocrisy?’ she asked fiercely. ‘Who put you on to him in the first place?’

  ‘It’s still only surmise,’ he urged gently. ‘We just want to talk to him.’

  ‘What do you mean, surmise?’

  ‘All right, the evidence points that way, but we’ve got to talk to him first. If he does get in touch, you’ll let us know?’

  ‘If possible I’ll crack the bastard’s skull and bring him in personally,’ she said.

  Pascoe regarded her uneasily. Was she fit to be left alone?

  ‘Is there anyone you could go to? Parents perhaps. You and the children,’ he began.

  ‘Go? Why?’

  ‘For the children’s sake, I mean,’ he said quickly. ‘Once the press get on to it, they’ll be round here straightaway. And they have the same notions of delicacy as a pack of wolves.’

  ‘I’m beyond sensitivity, Mr Pascoe,’ she said.

  ‘But not your children, perhaps.’

  ‘You may be right,’ she said more soberly. ‘Thanks for the advice.’

  ‘If you do go, let us have an address,’ said Pascoe. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Wildgoose.’

  He was glad to get away, less glad when he returned to Danby Row and found the Valentines had just returned from their holiday. They were a tiny couple, at first fragile in grief, but then growing fierce in anger and inclined to talk as if the police were the perpetrators rather than the investigators of the crime. Neighbours were summoned to placate them, neighbours who had already been questioned and had heard nothing unusual from inside the house the previous night though one thought she may have heard a rustling in the garden as she summoned her cat shortly after midnight.

  The same woman had seen Wildgoose visit the house a couple of times, but only in daylight and never staying long enough for ‘anything to happen’. Sin, she clearly thought, needed working at.

  So Wildgoose had been most discreet, a sensible trait in a man of his profession. The sedated Valentines knew him only as one of Andrea’s teachers. The suggestion that he might have been having an affair with their daughter seemed to take them aback almost as much as the murder.

  Pascoe sneaked away now to ring Ellie. It was six o’clock already and he could see a long night unwinding before him.

  There was a worrying delay before she answered the phone, but she assured him she’d just been sunbathing in the garden.

  ‘People used to hire light aeroplanes to fly overhead in the hope of glimpsing my naked flesh,’ she said in self-mockery. ‘Now they use radar t
o avoid hitting it. What’s new with you, darling?’

  He was reluctant to puncture her light mood, but he couldn’t stop her listening to the news on the radio.

  ‘Oh Peter,’ she said after he had told her. ‘How old do you say? Oh Jesus. And Mark Wildgoose is definitely your man?’

  ‘He’s certainly top of the list at the moment!’

  ‘Poor Lorraine. I must ring her.’

  ‘Don’t use up too much sympathy. I’ve just seen her. She’s got a bad case of the I-told-you-so’s.’

  ‘She has to cover up somehow. Peter, listen, I don’t know if you’ve found out yet or if it’s useful, but I can tell you where Mark Wildgoose was last night. Presumably that poor girl too.’

  ‘You can? Well, come on, Sherlock!’

  ‘It was Thelma. She was round here today. We were talking about Lorraine and she said that last night she’d seen Lorraine’s husband at the disco at the Aero Club. There’s one every Friday and Saturday night, evidently.’

  ‘And Thelma goes to discos!’ said Pascoe disbelievingly.

  ‘Why not? But no, not really. This was different. There’s been a bit of trouble recently, suggestions that kids under eighteen were buying the hard stuff, that sort of thing. Well, Bernard Middlefield JP, you probably know him, he’s on the Club committee and he took it on himself to conduct a personal investigation. Thelma heard about this and she doesn’t much care for Middlefield or his attitudes, so she took it on herself to turn up too and provide an objective check on his conclusions.’

  ‘Objective!’ snorted Pascoe. ‘And Wildgoose?’

  ‘She noticed him late on. He didn’t do much dancing. In fact she said he didn’t seem too happy. Well, surrounded by sixteen-year-olds mainly from his own school, who’d blame him?’

  ‘He could have stayed at home with a good book. Anyway, thanks, love. We’d have got there soon enough, but this saves a bit of leg-work. Now look, just take me when I come, OK? Don’t wait up if you get tired. You’re sure you’re all right now?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said irritably. ‘Take care, Peter. Don’t beat up anyone I wouldn’t beat up.’