A Killing Kindness (13 page)

He took Wield into his office, an act, so the  sergeant felt, more of concealment than courtesy.

'This is very nice, sir,' said Wield, looking  appreciatively round the well-proportioned office.  'It's a pretty large establishment. I mean, for a  suburban bank.'

'Yes. It was built as the Avro Industrial Estate  developed,' said Mulgan. 'Head Office anticipated  a lot of business.'

'But didn't get it?'

'Pardon?'

'I meant, you sounded as if things didn't quite  work out.'

'Oh no,' said Mulgan with loyal indignation. 'It's  very flourishing. Very flourishing.'

Then, relaxing a little, he said, 'Mind you,  they're a very conservative lot, your Yorkshire businessmen. You'd be surprised how many of  them insist on maintaining their accounts at the  main office in the town centre. Not that they couldn't have been persuaded with a little more  dynamism perhaps. Well, perhaps it's not too  late.'

Wield glanced at his notebook. Mulgan was the acting manager, he saw. They were clearly touching the world of his ambitious dreams.

'So you don't carry many local business accounts?'  he said, probing a little further, though for no  particular reason.

'Oh yes,' said Mulgan, bridling again. 'Nearly all the local shops.'

'But from the estate?'

'One or two.'

Suddenly seeing a glimmer of a connection, Wield asked, 'Would those include the Eden Park  Canning Plant?'

But he was disappointed.

Mulgan shook his head and fiddled impatiently  with the blotter on his desk.

'How can I help you, Sergeant?' he asked.

'We're just going over the ground again, sir,'  said Wield. 'Routine. Often things come to mind after a few days that get forgotten when everyone's  shocked and upset to start with.'

There was a knock at the door and a young girl's  head appeared.

'I'm sorry to interrupt,' she said. 'But Mrs Mulgan's here and would like a word.'

'What?' said Mulgan irritably. 'Oh very well, I'll come out. Excuse me.'

'No,' said Wield, getting up. 'You see your wife  in here, it's all right. I'll just have a quick chat with  any of your staff that aren't too busy.'

Outside the door he saw the girl talking to a  thin-faced, rather defeated-looking woman who  appeared a good ten years older than Mulgan.

'Thank you, dear,' she said in a fairly broad  rural Derbyshire accent. 'You take care of yourself, won't you? I'll go in now, shall I?'

'Excuse me, Miss,' said Wield to the girl before  she could move away. He introduced himself and  discovered she was Mary Brighouse. She was not  bad-looking with a good figure and big brown  eyes which moistened as he began to talk about  Brenda.

'You were good friends,' said Wield sympathetically.

'We didn't see much of each other outside,' said  Mary. 'But I liked her a lot. I was so upset when  we heard what had happened, I had to go home.  I didn't come back in till Wednesday.'

Wield glanced at his notes from Pascoe's report.  The girl had been no help at all and had broken  down very early on during questioning. From the  look of it, he doubted if he was going to get any further this time. He took her arm and gently led her  as far to the back of the bank as they could go.

'That was Mrs Mulgan, was it?' he said lightly.  'Bit of a surprise after meeting your boss.

‘She’s very nice,' said the girl defensively.

'Yes, I'm sure she is,' said Wield. 'I only meant...’

'Yes. I know,' she helped him out. 'They were  born in the same village.'

'But he's moved on while in a manner of speaking she hasn't, you mean?' said Wield. 'It's always  sad, that.'

He was very good at gossip. A right old woman,  Dalziel had called him once. Wield had smiled  bleakly.

'Yes, and it's not just the job either,' Mary  replied, eyes clear again, voice confidentially lowered.

'It never stops there,' agreed Wield without  much idea what he was agreeing to.

'No. There's some men think a bit of power  gives them all sorts of rights. And he's only acting,  after all.'

'I know,' said Wield, suddenly with her. 'It can  be very embarrassing, that kind of thing. I mean,  what's a bit of a giggle at the office party can cause  a lot of unpleasantness when it's out of place. Has  it bothered you a lot?'

'Not really,' she said. 'Well, it wasn't really  me, just sometimes he'd say something. It was  more . . .'

Her eyes filled again.

The door of Mulgan's office opened and Wield  had no time for sympathy now.

'You mean, it was more Brenda?'

'Oh yes,' she said with fast-fading coherence. 'I think he asked her out a couple of times and he  was always calling her into the office or standing  behind her, really close, like. She said that now she  had an engagement ring, perhaps it would . . .' The  memory was too much for her.

'Sergeant Wield!' called Mulgan.

'Blow your nose, love,' said Wield. 'Then go and wash your face. You're a good girl.'

He patted her on the arm and returned to the  manager's office where he studied his digest of  Pascoe's interview notes once more. He felt disappointed. The inspector hadn't got on to Mulgan's  lech for Brenda, but his customary thoroughness  had led him to check the acting manager's whereabouts between ten and midnight that night. He had been at home. Confirmed by his wife. Wield  frowned.

'I hope you haven't been upsetting Miss Brighouse  again,' said Mulgan. 'We've had to do without her  for half the week already.'

'She seems a very sensitive sort of girl,' said  Wield.

'Yes. Now what else can I do for you, Sergeant?  We are extremely busy.'

'I'm sorry. I should have called outside banking hours,' said Wield.

'We do work then also,' said Mulgan acidly.

'I'm sure you do.'

Wield closed his notebook with a snap.

'I'll tell you what you can do for us, sir,' he said.  'Is it possible to check back and see what business Brenda dealt with that day, when she was at the  counter, I mean?'

'It's possible. But why on earth should you want  that?' wondered Mulgan.

Wield looked mysterious. It wasn't difficult. It  was a mystery to him. But he wanted a bit of time  to think things over.

Mulgan gave him more.

'I'd need to get authority from Head Office,'  he said. 'It would mean revealing banking information, you see.'

'That's all right, sir. No rush. I'll call back later,  if I may. Or if I don't get back in working hours, stick it in your briefcase and someone can pick it  up from your home.'

He rose and took his leave before the man could raise an objection.

Outside in the car he tried to consider possible  burgeonings of the seeds he had sown that morning, but all he could think of was the bittersweet  tang of Mulgan's aftershave.

Chapter 12

Dr Pottle and the two linguists sat and listened to  the tapes of the four telephone messages which had followed Pauline Stanhope's murder.

Pascoe had provided them with a typed  transcript with the
Hamlet
references for good  measure.

(A)
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour  she must come.
(Act 5, Scene 1)

(B)
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. 
(Act 1, Scene 3)

(C)
To be, or not to be, that is the question.
(Act  3, Scene 1)

(D)
The time is out of joint: - 0 cursed spite,  that ever I was born to set it right.
(Act 1,  Scene 3)

This was the order in which they had been  received. Sammy Locke, the
Evening Post
news editor, felt that (A) and (D) came nearest to his  memory of the voice which he had heard on the  first two occasions. But which of the two (if there 
were
two, they sounded very alike to Pascoe) it was,  he couldn't say. Pascoe had not felt it necessary to pass this information on to the linguistic experts.

After the tape had been played for the fifth time, there was a long silence. Pottle lit another cigarette and scribbled some notes. Pascoe looked  interrogatively at the linguists who were looking  interrogatively at each other.

They were an ill-assorted pair. Dicky Gladmann  was a small dapper man, fortyish, with bright blue  eyes and demi-mutton-chop whiskers, dressed in  an old tweed jacket with a red bandanna trailing  from his breast pocket and a spoor of gravy running  down his old something-or-other tie. The other,  Drew Urquhart, was much younger. A small,  round, rosy-cheeked face showed fitfully through  a dark tangle of beard like a robin in a holly bush.  Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he seemed to have little liking for his surroundings.

'Well, we'll see what we can do, shall we?'  said Gladmann in a self-parodyingly fruity upper-class voice.

'I suppose so,' said Urquhart, broad Scots, not  Glasgow but somewhere close.

They rose. Gladmann took the cassette from the  player and slipped it into his pocket.

'Aren't you going to work here?' said Pascoe,  taken aback.

‘My dear chap, you must be joking!' said  Gladmann. 'Not that it isn't nice. You can hardly  see the blood on the walls, can you, Drew, my son?  But your equipment's hardly space-age, is it? No,  the language lab at the college is the place. And if it seems worthwhile we can even drive across to the  university and run it through their sonograph.'

'Well, all right,' said Pascoe. There were, after all, several copies of the tape.

Urquhart said, 'Inspector, I'd like to be sure what  you intend. How do you propose to use whatever  we tell you?'

'Sceptically, I dare say,' replied Pascoe.

Gladmann hooted, but Urquhart did not smile  behind his tangle.

'So long as it's clear I'm not interested in helping  the polis find a scapegoat,' he continued.

Pascoe sighed. His own background made him  a lot more sympathetic with academic liberalism  than most of his colleagues, but he could understand the feeling behind Dalziel's complaint on  another occasion, 'If these are the clever buggers,  no wonder crime pays!'

'Believe me,' he said, 'a scapegoat's no good.  The man we're after is an unbalanced killer. He's  not going to stop murdering women just because  someone else has been arrested.'

Urquhart did not look wholly convinced but he left without further comment. Gladmann followed, saying, 'My love to the delectable Ellie.  We'll be in touch.'

Pascoe closed the door after them and turned his  interrogative gaze on Pottle not with a great deal  of hope.

The psychiatrist's opening comment confirmed  his pessimism.

'Not a great deal to go on yet,' he said.

'Four murders!' expostulated Pascoe. 'Not a bad  start, surely?'

'Come now,' said Pottle, amused. 'What's your  best chance of catching this fellow?'

Pascoe considered.

'Another murder,' he admitted unwillingly. 'Or at least an attempt. Get him in the act.'

'Quite so. Similarly, though in rather a different  way, the more I have, the better results I can hope for. Now, to start with, I am making two  assumptions which may turn out to be false. One  is that these four deaths have been caused by the  same man. The other is that basically in each case the motive has been the same, or at the least an aspect of a single consistent motive. As I say, these  assumptions may be false. Indeed, there is much in  the evidence as you have laid it before me which  suggests that they are false.'

'Such as?' interposed Pascoe.

'The eccentricities of pattern,' replied Pottle. 'They are all young unmarried women - except  for Mrs Dinwoodie who is a middle-aged widow.  They are found neatly laid out with arms crossed  on the chest - except Brenda Sorby who has been  dumped in the canal. The murders all take place in circumstances made remote by time of day or location, except for Pauline Stanhope's which occurs in the middle of the day in the middle of  a fairground. But it's only by making these two  assumptions that I can even begin to pretend I have something to work at. That's where another  murder would come in so useful. Better still, two. Then we would begin to have enough trees to make  a wood!'

Only the suspicion that this ghoulishness was being used to provoke him in some way kept Pascoe from voicing another protest.

'You'll be the second or third person to know,  Doctor,' he said. 'Carry on.'

'Right you are. I summarize, of course. What it would seem to me we have here is an older rather than a younger man, that is, heading away from thirty-five rather than towards it. He is of  course unbalanced, but not in the usual pattern of  the psychopathic woman-killer, whose murderous  impulses tend, as it happens, to become more  controllable as he gets older. You must catch your  psychopath young. Inspector, if you are to catch  him at all. No, this man's motivation does not  seem to be based so much on hate as on, I can  find no better term, compassion.'

'Compassion? You mean, he kills women because  he's sorry for them?' asked Pascoe with interest.

'In a way, yes. There's good case-law here. The impulse to euthanasia is a strong one in all  advanced civilizations.'

'But you can't be saying these murders are just a form of euthanasia?'

'Only in the same way that you could say Jack the Ripper's killings were a form of moral protest.  In a way, it's strange that there aren't more Choker-type killings than Ripper-type. Euthanasia  is, after all, half accepted and by definition involves  killing, while punishment for sexual immorality eventually disappears from advanced societies and  only ever involved death in primitive ones.'

'The Church used to roast you for buggery,'  objected Pascoe.

'Precisely,' said Pottle drily. 'Look, I must go,  Inspector. I have work to do. You'll have a written  report eventually!'

'Hang on just a minute. The phone messages,  the tapes. What about them?'

'Of the taped messages, either (A) or (D) would  fit my man, with my money being on the former.  The voice seems to me to have that genuinely  regretful intonation which fits my ideas. (B) and  (C) sound far too delighted with it all. But it's the  first of the messages received that really needs  looking at.'