A Killing Kindness (4 page)

Pascoe glanced at his watch. Brooding time over,  he decided. There was work to be done. He began  to retrace his steps.

The fairground was livelier now. Business wouldn't really get under way till much later in the  morning, but meantime there were things to be  done, machinery to be checked and oiled, canvas  covers removed, brass to be polished. At side-stalls  like the rifle-range and the hoopla there were the  gimcrack prizes to be set out, gun-sights to check  in case they had deviated to accuracy, and hoopla  rings in case they had stretched to go over the  whisky bottle.

By the fortune-teller's tent a young woman in  jeans and a yellow suntop was talking to a man in  a tartan shirt and brown cords, gaitered militarily  above ex-army boots. He was about forty with  the knitted brow and dark craggy good looks of  a Heathcliff.

They looked at Pascoe as he passed and the man  said something.

A moment later Pascoe stopped and turned as  the woman's voice called, 'Excuse me!' She had  started after him. The man watched for a moment  and then strode away towards the trailer park.

'Aren't you one of the policemen?' said the  girl. Anyone under twenty-five now qualified as  a girl, Pascoe realized ruefully. This one certainly  did; fresh young skin, clear brown eyes, luxuriant auburn hair escaping from the green and white  spotted bandanna which she had tied around it.

‘That's right,' said Pascoe. 'Does it stand out?'

'I saw you the other day, I think,' said the girl,  evading the question. Pascoe nodded. It was likely.  He had spent a great deal of time here on Friday  afternoon.

'You work here?' he asked.

'Yes,' she said. 'Do you have a moment?'

Without waiting for his answer she set off towards  the fortune-teller's tent and lifted the flap.

Pascoe paused before the entrance, partly to  establish his independent spirit, partly to read the  sign.
Madame Rashid,
it said,
Interpreter of the Stars, Admission 50p.
The lettering was pseudo-Arabic and  the words were surrounded by a constellation of  varying hues and shapes.

'The price of the future's gone up,' he said.

'You should try having a full horoscope cast,'  she said seriously. 'Besides, we're not allowed to  tell the future.'

'I know,' he said.

'Oh, of course you would. Won't you come  in?'

He passed by her under the flap.

It was a bit of a disappointment, reminding  him more of a Boy Scout camp than the Eastern pavilion he had half expected. The smell was  of damp canvas and trodden grass and the only  furniture was a plain trestle table and two folding chairs.

A suitcase lay on the table and she pointed to  this as if sensing his disappointment and said, 'It  looks better when I get the props out.'

'I'm sure,' said Pascoe. 'What did you want to  see me about Miss-er-Rashid?'

She laughed, very attractively.

'No,' she said. 'I'm Pauline Stanhope.'

She held out her hand. He took it. The name  sounded familiar.

'And I'm Detective-Inspector Pascoe,' he said.

'I thought you must be. It's about yesterday,  Inspector Pascoe. Won't you sit down?'

He unfolded the chairs and they sat opposite  each other at the table, as though for an interrogation. Or a fortune-telling. It depended on your  point of view.

'Yesterday?'

Yes. Aunt Rose was very upset when she read  the paper.'

'Was she?' said Pascoe.

Aunt Rose? Of course, Rosetta Stanhope. And  this was the niece.

'Rosetta. Rashid,' he murmured as the enlightenment spread.

'That's right. I'm sorry. I thought you'd know  all about us. All those questions.'

'Think of all those answers, Miss Stanhope,' he  said sadly. 'Someone has to edit.'

Everyone who worked on the fairground had  been questioned, naturally. Everyone who admitted visiting it on Thursday night also. Everyone who lived on the same street as the Sorbys. And  the next street. And maybe the next. Everyone  who worked with her. Everyone who lived on  the streets she would have walked through on her  way home from the broken-down car. Everyone  who had a barge or a cruiser or a craft of any kind  which could have been anywhere on that stretch  of the canal that night.

The questioning was still going on, was likely to  continue till Christmas. Or the next murder.

'My sergeant seemed to have heard of your  aunt,' he said cautiously. 'But he didn't mention  any connection with the Fair.'

'Mr Wield, you mean. He's awfully nice, isn't  he? It's a bit complicated, I suppose. Family history  usually is.'

'Perhaps you could give me a digest, if you  think it would be helpful, and if you don't have  to stray much beyond the Norman Conquest,' said  Pascoe.

She grinned.

'I see where Mr Wield gets his cheek from,'  she said. 'The thing to understand is that originally Aunt Rose is a Lee on her father's side, a  Petulengro on her mother's.'

'You mean the Romany families?'

'You know something about gypsies?'

'I've read my George Borrow,' he said with  a smile.

'An expert!' she said. 'That must be very useful  when it comes to moving them on.'

Pascoe raised his eyebrows and the girl had the  grace to look a little embarrassed before carrying on.

It emerged that years earlier, Rosetta Lee, then  nineteen, had met, loved and married ex-sergeant  Herbert Stanhope, just demobbed from the Yorkshire  Rifles and, after five years spent risking his life to  protect the old folk at home, not in any mood  to take heed of their melancholy warnings. The  couple married and lived happily and childlessly  until twelve years later when Stanhope's younger  sister turned up pregnant and husbandless and  not at all contrite. But she effaced her sin in  the best nineteenth-century manner by dying in  childbirth, leaving the Stanhopes with Pauline  on their hands. Thereafter they lived even more  happily for another twelve years till an accident  at the railway marshalling yard where Stanhope  worked killed him.

'Aunt Rose knew it was going to happen,' said  Pauline.

'Why didn't she stop him going to work?' enquired  Pascoe, trying not to sound ironic.

'If you know it, then essentially it's already happened so you can't possibly stop it,' said Pauline as  if she were talking sense.

'And you? Do you have this - er - gift too?'

'Oh no!' she said, shocked. 'I'm a fully qualified  horoscopist and a pretty fair palmist but I've got  no real psychic powers. Aunt Rose is different.  She's always had the real gift. Her grandmother was a
chovihani,
that's a sort of gypsy witch. She  really looked the part, not like Aunt Rose. But  Aunt Rose has got the greater gift. She's a true  psychic, that's the fascinating thing. It's not just a  question of fortune-telling, but she really makes  contact. Well, you know that yourself from the  other day.'

Pascoe nodded, looking as convinced as he was  able.

The girl continued, 'It was strange how it developed in a
gorgio
society. Perhaps all the trappings  and superstition of Romany life are a limiting  factor, you know, they make a little go a long  way but stop a lot from going as far as it might.  That was what one of the researchers from the  Psychic Research Society said.'

'Your aunt is famous, then?'

'Oh no!' said the girl, 'But she's well known  in interested circles. Really all she wants is a  quiet life, but she'd always been willing to help  friends out.'

'For free?'

'At first. But inflation nibbled away at the pension Uncle Bert left her and she'd had to charge  fees to make both ends meet. But she's very careful  in accepting clients.'

Gullibility being high on her list of criteria?  wondered Pascoe.

'Normally she'd have steered clear of a case  like Mrs Sorby's, but Mrs Sorby had been coming  to her for years, ever since her mother died.

Mr Sorby objected but she still kept coming.  Naturally when this awful thing happened, Aunt  Rose had to help.'

'Naturally. What's your part in all this, Miss  Stanhope?'

The girl shrugged.

'I had an office job, but it was pretty deadly.  I'd picked up a lot of things from Aunt Rose,  she brought me up, you see. Well, I'm not  Romany, so I didn't have anything of her gift,  but I got quite interested in casting horoscopes.  It's pretty scientific that, you only need a very  limited degree of sensitivity. Palmistry the same.  I got myself properly qualified and gave up the  office to work at it full time alongside Aunt  Rose. But it's her I want to talk about, Inspector. That awful newspaper story really upset  her.'

Pascoe looked surprised. The
Evening Post
had  been fairly restrained, he thought.

'It didn't much please my superintendent either,'  he said.

'Aunt Rose doesn't mind helping the police, but  this makes her sound like a real sensationalist,' said  the girl, producing a newspaper.

The mystery was solved. This was not the
Evening  Post
but that morning's edition of one of the more  lurid national tabloids. Obviously one of the local  reporters was a stringer for this rag and knew  that provincial standards had very little selling  power. Pascoe glanced through the arlicle. Its main source was Mrs Duxbury, the neighbour.  She gave a graphic account of what Mrs Stanhope  had said before being awoken from her trance.  Embellished by Fleet Street licence, the occasion  sounded like something out of Dennis Wheatley.  Much play was made of the fact that Rosetta  Stanhope was also Madame Rashid (Mrs Duxbury  again?), fortune-telling in the very fairground  where Brenda had been murdered. Not even a 
perhaps,
thought Pascoe. He wondered if Dalziel  had seen it yet.

'Auntie was really upset this morning,' continued the girl. 'Too upset to work, so I'll be on  by myself all day.'

'I'm sorry about that,' said Pascoe conciliatingly.

'Don't be stupid!' she flashed. 'It's not that. It's Auntie's reputation. You may be the police  but you've no right to exploit her name like  this.'

'Reputation?' said Pascoe, beginning to feel a  little irritated. 'Surely you're rating all this stuff a  little bit high, aren't you, Miss Stanhope? I mean,  that sign outside! Isn't this just the bottom end of  the entertainment business?'

He didn't want to sound sneering and the effort  must have shown for the girl was equally and as  obviously restrained in her reply.

'Aunt Rose is Romany. She's never turned  her back on that all these years she's lived  among
gorgios.
This used to be mainly a Romany  Fair, Inspector. Now what with one thing and another, the only gypsy presence you get here is  a couple of tatty stalls and a bit of cheap labour  round the fringes. Dave Lee, for instance, his  grandfather . . .'

'Who's Dave Lee?' interrupted Pascoe.

'I was just talking to him,' said the girl 'I suppose  he's a kind of cousin of Aunt Rose's. His grandfather might have brought two, three dozen horses  here, being a big man. Now he helps around the  dodgems while his wife sells pegs and bits of lace.  He's not allowed to bring the ponies he still runs  anywhere near the park! This tent is the last real  link between the fair today and what it used to be  for centuries. There was a fortune-teller's tent on  this pitch before there was a police force, Inspector.  Not even the big show-people with their roundabouts dare interfere with that. And for nearly  fifty years it was run by Aunt Rose's grandmother.  When she died four years ago, that looked like the  end. Oh, there were fakes enough who might have  taken over, but the Lees have more pride than that.  So Aunt Rose stepped in. For a couple of weeks a  year she's back in the family tradition, in the old  world.'

'And which world are you in, Miss Stanhope?'  asked Pascoe.

'I help as I can,' she said. 'Collect the money, look after the props, do a bit of palm-reading when  Auntie needs a rest. Yes, I did say
props.
It wasn't a  slip, so don't look so smug. Of course most people  come into a fortune-teller's tent at a fairground for the entertainment. But
we
take it seriously, that's  the important thing.'

She spoke defiantly. Pascoe answered seriously,  'I hope so, Miss Stanhope. You spoke of protecting your aunt from exploitation just now. I too am employed to stop people being exploited.'

She flushed angrily and said, 'Auntie was just  concerned to bring any comfort she could to that  poor woman. We shut up shop here for the afternoon, which lost us money, and Aunt Rose  wouldn't accept any fee from Mrs Sorby. So we're  the only losers, wouldn't you say, Inspector?'

'There are all kinds of gain, Miss Stanhope,' said Pascoe provocatively. 'I mean in the entertainment  world, there's no such thing as bad publicity, is  there?'

Now she was really angry.

'Tell me, Inspector,' she said in a hard, clear  voice, 'I'd say you were a bit younger than Sergeant  Wield, right?'

'A bit,' he admitted.

'And yet he is so much pleasanter than you. It  looks to me as if the nastier you are in the police  force, the higher you're likely to get. Right? I bet  I'm right. Goodbye,
Inspector!'

Wait till you meet my boss, thought Pascoe as  he left. You don't know how right you are!

As he drove away he saw in his rear-view mirror  the man Dave heading back towards the tent.

Keen for a report on the conversation? he wondered.

But wasn't everybody fascinated by a connection  with a murder case?

He put it out of his mind and hurried towards  the station, eager to tell Sergeant Wield he'd got  an admirer.

Chapter 4

Alistair Mulgan sipped his tomato juice carefully. He would have preferred a large gin partly because he wasn't paying and partly because his  metabolism seemed to be very sympathetically  inclined towards large gins these days. But the  Northern Bank did not care to have its staff  breathing alcohol over its customers and since  becoming acting manager of the Greenhill branch  after the manager fell under a bus (nothing to  do with alcohol of course) three weeks earlier,  Mulgan had determined to set a perfect example.  Now nearly forty, he had come a long way from  his humble beginnings in rural Derbyshire, but  for the past few years had felt that his career was  bogged down. Each full week as acting manager  had given him hope that the appointment would  be made permanent, hope reinforced when clients started inviting him out to lunch. Though  even here fate, as usual, had distributed its gifts with grudging hand and instead of the looked-for filet mignon at the White Rose Grill,  he had just been offered the choice between  chicken-in-the-basket and scampi-in-the-basket  at the Aero Club bar.