A Killing Kindness (30 page)

As he went through the door that led into the  car park, he almost collided with Dicky Gladmann,  clad in a streaming plastic mac.

'Hello there!' said the linguist. 'I say, I've had a listen. Most interesting.'

'Fine,' said Pascoe, turning his collar against the  rain. 'I'm in a bit of a rush. We'll talk later.'

'Well, it's all written down,' said Gladmann,  producing the buff envelope. 'Really, it's been terribly interesting. I'm not sure how significant  it might be . . .'

'I'll let you know,' said Pascoe, taking the envelope and thrusting it into his jacket pocket. 'Many  thanks. We'll be in touch.'

He dashed out into the storm and was well dampened in the short time it took to get into his car. The  light was so bad now that he switched his headlights on before moving off. Behind him through  the rear-view mirror he could see Gladmann standing forlornly in the doorway looking with his old-young-man's face and his plastic mac like the  nucleus of a queue outside a porno-cinema.

The storm was at its height as he drove into  the old aerodrome. There was no wind and the  orange windsock hung heavily from its pole, its fluorescence dulled by the torrential rain. Sheet  lightning flickered through canyons of cloud and  thunder cracked and rolled like an artillery barrage. There would be no flying today, and precious  little drinking either if the absence of cars was  anything to go by.

Pascoe glanced at his watch. Nearly twelve-thirty.

He parked as close to the club-house door as  he could get and dashed in, realized he'd left his lights on, dashed out again, switched them off and  was sodden wet by the time he made his second  entrance.

'Thought you'd changed your mind,' said Austin Greenall. 'Welcome. We were just beginning to  think the weather had robbed us of all custom  today.'

He was sitting on a stool at the bar. Behind it, a  barmaid was arranging bottles and glasses.

Glancing significantly at her, Pascoe said, 'May we talk, Mr Greenall?'

'Of course,' said the secretary. 'Come into my office. Would you care for a drink en route? No?  All right, this way.'

He led Pascoe into a small airless room with a  desk, a filing cabinet and a couple of hard chairs.

'Sit down, Inspector,' he said. 'Now what is it you want to talk about?'

Pascoe sat.

‘We could start with your ex-wife, Mary Dinwoodie,' he said. 'And go on from there.'

The telephone began to ring. It rang thirteen  times. Both men ignored it. Finally it stopped,  leaving its tone hanging on the air almost as long  again.

'My wife, Mr Pascoe,' said Greenall. 'We are  Roman Catholics. There was no divorce.'

Both men sighed gently, almost inaudibly, out  of a sort of relief in both cases and, as if recognizing  this, they exchanged shy smiles, glimmers fading  almost as soon as they showed, but establishing a  tenuous link for all that.

'Talking of wives, was it yours that talked you  down here in the end?' said Greenall. His tone  was light, cocktail-partyish, but with a harmonic  of strain.

'I'm sorry?'

'She was talking about that seance when she  was here last week. She had all kinds of daft ideas  about it. But I saw the transcript on the table and  I wondered if in the end . . . That's why of course  I had to . . .'

The phone started ringing again. This time  Greenall turned his attention to it, not touching  it but staring fixedly at it as though the ceasing of  the noise would be the signal of a beginning.

Pascoe took from his pocket the envelope which  Gladmann had given him. As expected, it contained the short tape of the Choker's last call  and the cassette of Rosetta Stanhope's interrupted  seance. There were also several sheets in the linguist's rather self-consciously ornate handwriting.

Pascoe looked, selected, read.

‘The poor quality of this recording makes accurate transcription difficult. Still it seems to me at  least possible that the opening passage of the tape  could be rendered as follows.

It was Greenall, Greenall, over me, choking. The water  then, boiling at first, and roaring, and seething...
‘

 The phone stopped ringing.

Chapter 25

Greenall said, 'We were happy enough, not deliriously happy, but when does that ever last past the first few months? I was probably more content  than Mary. Well, I'd done more, achieved more,  relatively speaking. Whenever I felt dissatisfied I  just had to look back to when I was a scruffy  half-educated kid running round the back streets of Derby. God knows how I even got qualified  enough to get into the RAF at the lowest level. But I did. And I did well. I learn fast. Barely ten  years later I was commissioned, I was married to  Mary. And of course, above all, I was flying.'

He smiled to himself, like a man who remembers glory.

Pascoe said casually, 'This is interesting. You needn't say anything you realize that? It may be  used as evidence. I'll keep a record of it unless you  prefer to write it yourself.'

It was a pretty feeble version of the correct  procedure. And he ought to get Greenall to sign a declaration saying that he had been cautioned and  still wanted to make a statement and have someone else write it down for him. But his instinct  told him that he must take the minimum risk of fracturing this fragile mood. For a moment he  thought he'd gone too far already but after a brief  pause the man continued as though Pascoe had  not spoken.

'I'd met Mary when I was stationed on Cyprus. She was teaching at the military school there. We liked each other from the first. Marriage might have come eventually, but when she found she  was pregnant, it had to come at once. That might  have been the trouble. Rushing things is never  good. I know that now. But Alison was born and  we were happy. Very happy. Once Alison got to  school age, though, Mary got restless. She wanted  to work again. I didn't like it too much and with me moving around from time to time, it wasn't all  that easy anyway. But she insisted on it and when,  twice within the space of four or five years, she  had to give it up, you'd have thought she was the breadwinner and I was earning the pin-money.'

He shook his head at the incredibility of the  thought.

'The second time was when I was posted to  Hanover. She even suggested it might be better for Alison's schooling if she and the girl stayed in  England for a while. I didn't think it was Alison she  was really thinking of. Anyway, she came. And a few months later it looked as if things were turning right for her. One of the teachers at the local British  School in Linden fell seriously ill. Mary was ideal  for the post. On the spot, fully qualified, with just  the right kind of experience. Things seemed to get  back together for us for a while after that. There'd  been a lot of rowing. She'd even managed to get  the girl turned against me. Well, I expect there  were faults on both sides. But now, for a time,  everything seemed OK.'

He sighed deeply.

'Are you sure you won't have a drink?' he asked  suddenly.

'No, thanks. But if you want one . . .'

'No,' he said emphatically. 'I can take it or leave  it. She met Dinwoodie there, you know. He was  deputy head, or some such thing. There was also  some kind of drama group he was involved in  and soon Mary was mixed up in it too. I got  a bit concerned about how much of her time  it was taking up, but I didn't want to rock the  boat, things seemed to be going so well. So I  didn't say much. But other people were saying  things. Not directly to me. But after a bit you  begin to notice silences, intonations. So I started  going along myself. I couldn't do it regularly, but  I thought if I took an interest, made myself useful with lights and so on . . . well, I don't know what  I thought. Mary wasn't all that enthusiastic, but  she didn't seem to mind. They were rehearsing  for some local festival; Shakespeare. The Krauts  love Shakespeare, God knows why. I didn't want to appear pig-ignorant, so I set out to read a bit  myself. They were just doing scenes. Mary and  Dinwoodie were doing a bit from
Hamlet,
the scene  when he tells Gertrude what a whore she's been,  then kills old Polonius behind the curtain. I read that play through a dozen times. I reckon I knew  as much about it as anyone in that damned drama  group. I just wanted to impress, you understand.  I wasn't really suspicious, not any more. If they'd  been doing a scene from
Romeo and Juliet
perhaps,  but somehow with Mary acting as his mother, it  didn't seem that there was anything to worry  about. Stupid, really, isn't it?'

Pascoe nodded, not quite sure what he was  acquiescing to.

'Even when I caught them at it, I didn't do anything rash. I told myself it was just a once-off thing,  quickly over. I wasn't going to let her get away with it, of course. She deserved to be punished.  I made that quite clear to her. I thought I might  send the girl back to England to boarding-school, get her out of the way later. Meanwhile, though,  I wanted to keep a low profile. I thought of the  scandal it would cause in the mess, I could see  all my hard work to get on over the years coming  to nothing and, in any case, it was nearly the end of the school year and I knew that Dinwoodie's  contract was up and he was returning to the UK.  So I let things slide for a while. And the end of  term came. And Dinwoodie went. And I came  home from a few days on an exercise and found that Mary had disappeared and Alison with her. And after that, well, things went into a spin.'

As he talked now, first hesitations, then often  lengthy gaps, began to appear in his speech, but  Pascoe was able to fill it in from his long telephone  conversation with an RAF records officer who had  been extremely cooperative when the Choker case was mentioned.

Greenall had at first attempted to cover up,  pretending that his wife and child had gone back to  England for a holiday, though clearly not another  person at the school or on the station believed this.  He himself had returned to the UK on a fortnight's  leave which he overstayed when his efforts to track them down were unavailing. This was the first  stage in the long downhill slide his career now  began to take. It didn't all happen at once. There  were plunges and recoveries. He received a letter from his wife, explaining her motives, wanting  to put everything on a civilized level. They met  in a London hotel lounge to talk things over. The meeting ended with him striking her across  the face and rushing across to the reception desk where a young girl, just arrived with her parents, was terrified to be embraced by this demented  stranger and dragged towards the door.

That was the last contact for some time. Mary clearly decided, probably for a combination of  religious and personal reasons, that disappearance  was a better bet than any remedy of the law. Perhaps to keep their heads down, perhaps because the mid-seventies was a very bad time for expatriate teachers to try to filter back into the home system, they decided to abandon education for cultivation and went into the Garden Centre business.  Certainly if they maintained any contact with the RAF world at all, reports of Greenall's condition  would not have encouraged them to let him know  their whereabouts. Drink and a growing oddness of  behaviour patterns had resulted in first the loss of  his flying status, then, after a period of breakdown,  discharge on medical grounds.

All this over a period of nearly three years.

'So,' said Greenall, 'I woke up one morning and found I was back in civvy street. No wife, no daughter, no commission, no career. And no  flying. I had to get that back to start with. Do  you understand? Down here even when I was  on the crest of the wave, I always felt there was something, I don't know, sort of pulling me back  to where I started. Up there, it was different. Still  is. Up there I was . . . am . . .'

'King of infinite space?' offered Pascoe.

'Yes. Right. That's it. King of infinite space. So I did an instructor's course. Just basic stuff. Work on  trainers, that kind of thing. I knew I would never  get back in the big boys again, but this way at least  I got my feet off the ground. And there was work  in it. I got a job down at a flying club in Surrey.  Twice the size of this. I really enjoyed it, all of it,  even the ground staff side.'

His speech, mirroring his mental recovery, had begun to flow freely again. Pottle would explain this, thought Pascoe. And probably advise me to  listen carefully for the return of disjunction.

'And did you see your wife again in this time?'

'Neither saw nor heard from her,' said Greenall. 'When I got myself together, I started looking. I played your game, detective that is. Not an easy  business, is it? I went to the address on that one  letter, but it was a boarding-house, no forwarding  address. I tried local schools, then the Department  of Education. They couldn't or wouldn't help. No,  it wasn't easy.'

'Police?' suggested Pascoe. 'Did you try them?'

'Why?' said Greenall, surprised. 'It had nothing to do with the police. In the end, I stopped trying. I  didn't give up, you understand. Just settled to play  a waiting game. I knew that somehow, one day,  something . . . well, I was right. There in the paper, just a paragraph. Tragic accident. Man chewed to  death by machine at Agricultural Show. Mr Peter  Dinwoodie. Leaving wife, Mary; daughter, Alison.  Pure chance. But more than chance. The paper I saw it in was months out of date. I'd rented a small  cottage. There was a coal fire. I used newspaper to  light it and during the summer the papers just piled up. I'd missed the item when it first appeared, last summer. But one cold January morning this year I was making spills of paper to use as kindling, and  there it was. Pure chance? I didn't think so.

'I was better at detective work this time. I  thought about it for a week or two. All I had was one paragraph. Agricultural Show. So I came  up to Yorkshire and started a search via the press.  It was very easy. There were more details in the 
Yorkshire Post.
I got the town and the name of  the Garden Centre.
Linden.
That made me almost  certain. But I had a look through back numbers of the local evening paper when I got here, and  there was a photograph. Dinwoodie. I should have felt triumphant but I didn't. Sick almost. I nearly  headed back south there and then. But I'd come  this far . . . this far . . .