An Advancement of Learning

by Reginald Hill

  To be confined in a hairdressing salon on a morning like this would have been a blasphemy beyond anything ever touched upon by Reverend Ronald Rogers.

  But so very differently situated though Miss Scotby and Miss Disney were, they did for a brief time have a thought in common. It was a deep-down thought, almost unacknowledged, certainly never to be brought out into the light of day.

  They each wished someone dead. But for only one of them was the wish to come true that particular day.

  Pascoe was having lunch at the golf club with Detective-Inspector Kent, who in the space of a couple of days had established himself as persona very much grata in the clubhouse. His readiness to admire shots, exchange anecdotes, and sympathize over the malevolence of fate, had won golden opinions from the members.

  Pascoe’s message had in fact been unnecessary. Kent had been going about his legitimate business when it arrived, but he appreciated the thought.

  Sandra Firth had been the only student concerned that Pascoe had been able to pick up quickly. She and Harold Lapping had very soon agreed on the location of the midnight dance. No reference had been made by either to the difference between their two versions, but Pascoe noted with interest that Sandra’s nonchalant air was beginning to wear a bit thin under the amused glances from Harold’s bright eyes.

  The hollow in the dunes where Pearl had found Anita was nearly a quarter of a mile away, almost at the bottom-most end of the golf course.

  ‘Some way from where she left her clothes,’ commented Dalziel.

  ‘Perhaps the killer picked them up and then went after her, knowing she wouldn’t go too far,’ suggested Pascoe.

  ‘Why not just wait near the clothes?’ replied Dalziel.

  ‘Or she might have taken them with her when she ran and have stopped here to get dressed and then he came upon her.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Dalziel. ‘I’m off after some lunch, then I think I’ll watch the cricket. Thanks for your help.’

  He flung the last remark over his shoulder as he strode off back towards the college. Lapping grinned broadly after him, Sandra looked thunder-struck at his apparent callousness.

  Pascoe had been about to follow when Kent had issued his invitation.

  It was a pleasant lunch. Kent had chatted amiably about a variety of subjects, with golf not unbearably predominant. Pascoe who had hitherto regarded the man as a slightly risible example of what not to be in the police-force, found himself enjoying his company. When talk got round to the case (or cases) in hand, he listened appreciatively to Kent’s assessment. He didn’t say anything new, but he missed nothing out either.

  ‘It’s motive we’re after, not murderers. Not yet. Motive. It’s a truism, Sergeant, but it’s true. Find out why and you’ll like as not find out who.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Pascoe, starting on his second pint. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Your astonishingly good health,’ remarked Kent, before carrying on his theorizing. ‘And to find out why, it helps to eliminate why not. Take the girl, for instance. Obvious thing is sex. But he never bothered. Never touched her. Now why not?’

  ‘Perhaps it was a woman,’ suggested Pascoe.

  ‘She’d need to be a hefty one,’ said Kent. ‘No. Something else, I think. Now who’d have a motive for killing her, if it wasn’t just a nut?’

  ‘Fallowfield?’ said Pascoe.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Fallowfield.Lectures at the college. Don’t you know?’

  His new-found respect for Kent began to evaporate. Somehow the man had contrived never to have heard of the relationship between Fallowfield and Anita. It would be Dalziel’s fault partly. He didn’t believe in spoon-feeding his men. Certainly not Kent.

  Pascoe filled him in quickly, efficiently. Kent supped his beer and chewed on his cheese and biscuits with a distantly worried look in his eyes. Finally he swallowed and shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘His mistress?’

  ‘He admits it.’

  Kent began to look really concerned.

  She must have brought out the father feeling in him, thought Pascoe. They can all look so innocent when they’re lying there, dead.

  ‘No,’ said Kent again. ‘She was a virgin.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘It said so in the medical report. A virgin.’

  ‘No,’ said Pascoe in a kindly voice. ‘She hadn’t been sexually assaulted. That’s what it said. Not quite the same thing.’

  ‘A virgin. It said she hadn’t been assaulted that night. And it said she was still a virgin. I should know. I read the bloody thing to the super.’

  Pascoe froze, his glass in mid-air.

  ‘You read it to him?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t he look at it himself?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not when I was there. You know he hates to be bothered reading things himself. Always gets someone else to do it if he can,’ said Kent defensively.

  ‘A virgin? You’re sure?’ said Pascoe, adding ‘Sir’ as he saw Kent react to his tone.

  ‘Yes! But listen, Sergeant …’

  Pascoe carefully put his beer on the table and stood up.

  ‘Thanks for the lunch, sir. I’d better be getting back now.’

  Swiftly he moved out of the room before Kent could reply. It might have been a kindness to let him do his own reporting to Dalziel. But one kindness a day was enough for the likes of Kent.

  Someone shouted at him as he marched across a beautifully kept green, and he broke into a trot.

  Dalziel wouldn’t be pleased. Kent would have some explaining to do.

  But that would be nothing to the explaining that Dalziel would surely expect from Mr Sam Fallowfield.

  ‘The reason the English love cricket,’ said George Dunbar in his loud, guttural voice, ‘is that it structures their bloody indolence.’

  ‘Or masks their machinations,’ added Henry Saltecombe.

  ‘Oh aye. You all like to think you’re so bloody clever,’ sneered Dunbar.

  Looking round, Pascoe had to agree with Dunbar’s theory, much as he disliked the man. The thinly delineated oval of spectators, some in brightly striped deckchairs, others recumbent in the grass, was positively Keatsian in its projection of indolence. But, he thought, as in all great works of art, realism alone did not do the work; realism only existed at a single level. What was needed for art was the living symbol at the centre, and the almost motionless white-clothed figures inside the oval were precisely that symbol. Yes, it was more than just a demonstration of indolence, it was an act of worship.

  But Pascoe also saw with a policeman’s jaundiced eye; and that part of his mind was very ready to accept the hypothesis that machinations were being masked.

  Roote, for instance, and that little gaggle of students almost hidden in the tall grass at the end of the oval farthest away from the pavilion. They looked as if they were merely enjoying the innocent pleasures of sun on flesh. A bit perhaps of the less innocent pleasures of flesh on flesh. But nothing more. Yet he wished he could listen in on their talk.

  Or Miss Disney. Her deckchair as upright as it would go, her long skirt pulled challengingly low over her short, chubby legs. Her face showed nothing except the usual indignation at life’s insults it always seemed to bear. She spoke to a passing girl, Sandra what’s-‘er-name, who paused, obviously reluctant even at a distance, shook her head twice, answered briefly, and moved on towards the Roote group. The Disney basilisk gaze shot after her, but, happily, she did not look round. What had been said? What was she now thinking? And why, even as Pascoe watched, did she stand up and stride purposefully away?

  Or Halfdane, still to be talked with, but now reclining elegantly between two deckchairs in which Ellie and Marion Cargo were competing in a whose-leg-goes-farthest competition. Ellie, he felt, was just inching ahead, but looked to have little in reserve. Perhaps he should stroll over and talk to them, but if Ellie still had ambitions in the Halfdane
area, he was unwilling to butt in. Or worse still, despite the previous night, appear as a competitor. Though why it should be worse still, as memories of the previous night flooded back, he could not really imagine. In any case, the point was, what was really going on inside those three minds?

  Or Jane Scotby, listening with the obvious dislike sometimes called deep interest to Mrs Landor’s sparrowy voice twittering from under the eaves of a broad-brimmed hat, which was supplemented by a fringed parasol of golf-umbrella dimensions. The principal himself sat slightly apart, though still in his wife’s penumbra, and viewed the two women thoughtfully. Perhaps, thought Pascoe, he and Scotby are busily deceiving poor Mrs Landor and even now are throbbing with frustrated lust after a brief passionate embrace behind the pavilion.

  The thought made him smile but his policeman’s eye continued on its beat and the next tableau it paused at swung him whole-heartedly towards Henry Saltecombe’s view of the situation.

  Two elderly gentlemen, one corpulent, bald, jolly, the other spare, white-haired, straw-boatered, their heads, wreathed in cigar smoke, nodding like mountain peaks through the mist as some piece of action in the central ritual caught their attention, their hands clapping, once, twice, even three times in moments of wild excitement; old friends relaxing together watching the youngsters carrying on in ancient, revered tradition.

  One was Captain Ernest Jessup, chairman of the governors. The other was Superintendent Andrew Dalziel.

  Of one thing Pascoe was convinced - however involved in a ritual of indolence the others might really be, here at least there were mental machinations a-plenty.

  Not a bad sort of chap, Jessup was thinking. Self-made of course, with the stitching poorly concealed, but there was nothing wrong with that. He himself belonged to a service with a long tradition of advancement through merit. And at least the fellow could relax. He had feared total interruption of his afternoon’s cricket when Landor had introduced the man. Not that he wouldn’t have been willing to talk with Dalziel all day and all the next day too if it promised to help get to the bottom of this business.

  But all was going well, it seemed. The assistant chief’s confidence in the man seemed justified (though he had been less than warm about his personal merits) and their conversation so far had been restricted to the field-changes between overs. It looked like being a good game.

  What a bloody way to spend an afternoon! groaned Dalziel to himself. Rugby he could enthuse over, soccer could move him deeply, but these flannelled fools moved to a music too refined for his coarse ears. And the deckchair! A direct descendant of the rack out of the Iron Maiden!

  He had not yet recovered from Pascoe’s news about the dead girl. That had come dangerously close to being a blunder. He didn’t normally make blunders. He prided himself on being able to extract from all the usual scientific twaddle in these reports the few important facts. These generally confirmed his own observations and deductions. Or often there were none at all.

  Pascoe would have noticed and subtly drawn his attention to it. But stuff Pascoe! He didn’t want a kind of constabulary Jeeves hanging around all the time. Yet if poor Pascoe were to be stuffed, then what of Kent? Lash him naked in a deck-chair with his back to the eighteenth green at St Andrews during the Open? It would bear further thought.

  As for the information itself, that the accusation made against Fallowfield by Anita Sewell could not possibly have been true, the implications were far from clear. Fallowfield’s reason for admitting the truth of the accusations, or at least that part of them which said he had been knocking the girl off for a couple of years, would bear investigation. But he had no intention of rushing in like the bear he was popularly reputed to be. With a bit of luck he’d run into Fallowfield during the course of the afternoon, though there was no sign of him yet.

  But this old goon on his right had to be kept happy for a while. He had been quite unable to remember a single thing about the meeting at which Miss Girling had made her last public appearance. He probably had difficulty remembering the way home, thought Dalziel savagely and quite unjustly. But he had agreed to telephone the clerk to the governors who had promised to dig through the records and send any pertinent information to the college that afternoon.

  Meanwhile an hour and a half, two wickets, and thirty-eight runs had trickled away with agonizing slowness. But despite his discomfort and his boredom, Dalziel had felt curiously enervated and quite unable to rise from his chair to do something useful. In any case everyone was here, everyone that mattered. Nearly everyone. Big wheels were moving elsewhere, and all those who had left the college since Girling’s death were being traced and interviewed. But Dalziel was somehow certain the solution was here somewhere.

  ‘Well hit, sir!’ boomed Jessup. ‘I think that’s our man, Superintendent.’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. Very promising,’ said Dalziel.

  ‘By the pavilion. The man with the minutes,’ said Jessup patiently. ‘Let’s go and see.’

  The shade of the pavilion was a relief. Dalziel realized his shirt was wringing with sweat; Jessup on the other hand in his absurd hat looked quite cool as he glanced through the papers he had been given.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t bring anything back at all, except very vaguely. Certainly nothing which might help you, Superintendent. Though I see now why it was so late in the term. It was an appointments meeting and obviously we hadn’t been able to convene the full interviewing panel earlier in the term. Miss Girling would be eager to get things like this done as soon as possible, before the good candidates got offers elsewhere, you understand.’

  ‘Interviewing?’ said Dalziel sharply. ‘For what?’

  ‘A post, of course. It was a short list, only three. For a lectureship in the Biology Department.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Dalziel, unceremoniously removing the papers from Jessup’s hand.

  Quickly he flicked through them till he found what he wanted. A list of three names. One stood out as though embossed on the paper.

  Samuel Fallowfield.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, moving quickly out of the pavilion leaving Jessup tugging his moustache in exasperation.

  Dalziel’s cry of ‘Sergeant!’ as he strode round the outer oval of spectators almost certainly caused the fall of the third wicket. But by the time the angry batsman had returned to the pavilion, Dalziel had disappeared in the direction of the sea and only Pascoe’s head was visible as he went in hot pursuit.

  Chapter 12

  For many are wise in their own ways that are weak for government or counsel; like ants, which is a wise creature for itself, but very hurtful for the garden.

  SIR FRANCIS BACON

  Op. Cit.

  The dismissed batsman was not the only one who noticed Dalziel’s sudden departure. Halfdane and his two female consorts did.

  ‘Perhaps he’s off for a swim,’ he suggested. ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ said Ellie, watching Pascoe picking himself up from among the daisies.

  She stretched herself voluptuously, back arched, breasts at maximum projection, legs at maximum exposure.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind myself,’ she added, watching Halfdane carefully. She saw she had his interest.

  Something’s happened to me recently, she thought. Suddenly I’m a huntress! I’ve been eyeing this poor bastard hungrily for a month or so now. Then last night; that was me. And what do I want anyway, for God’s sake? Some memories for a lonely old age? Or something permanent? It’s too late for that with PC Pascoe, even if he doesn’t know it yet. And I’m not really going about it the right way with this one. Any lasting erection must have a firm foundation, so they say.

  She giggled at herself, let her body relax and pulled her skirt down.

  ‘Do you think they’d miss us if we did?’ said Marion Cargo from the other chair.

  Quietly confident! groaned Ellie inwardly.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Halfdane. ‘Anyway we might see the bold gendarmes again and I want a word w
ith Ellie’s mate. Let’s get our things.’

  Ellie’s mate! Perhaps Pascoe was the only hope after all. The beach might tell. It was ground of her own choosing. In or out of the water she knew she was physically superb.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  Landor rose to adjust his wife’s parasol against the threatening manoeuvres of the sun. He had met her and courted her in the long winter of 1947. Curled up deep in an armchair before a roaring fire, or muffled against the snow in layers of clothing which permitted only the slight pale oval of her face to show, she had appealed deeply to his protective instincts. They had married in the spring and the tremors of doubt he had felt even then had been confirmed in every summer thereafter.

  He looked at Jane Scotby and received from her a cold impersonal smile in return. She had resented him deeply when he first took up the post, he suspected. But he had met the senior tutor on the beach one morning more than a year ago, perilously perched on the back of a huge brown horse, her face slightly flushed with excitement, her eyes brighter than ever. It had seemed odd at first, almost ludicrous, till he realized how completely in control she was. And the beast was no milk-horse, it terrified the life out of Landor. The meeting had subtly changed their relationship.

  His wife on the other hand controlled nothing, not even the running of the household. Lunch today had been all right. Salad and strawberries were difficult to spoil.

  ‘That young policeman was most brusque this morning, I felt,’ she said, watching Dalziel and Pascoe depart. ‘The police are not what they were.’

  Landor caught Scotby’s bright blue eyes again. She gave no sign of any reaction to his wife’s inanities, for which he was grateful. But comfort was pleasant, it was good to be comforted from time to time.

  He watched Ellie Soper and Marion Cargo sinuously rise from their deckchairs, helped by young Halfdane.

  He sighed deeply, felt the gaze on him of both the women by his side, and turned his sigh into a yawn. Comfort would be nice, but not at the expense of discretion. He glanced over his shoulder back to the complex of buildings which formed the college. That was his comfort. Nothing could come between him and that.