A Pinch of Snuff (19 page)

'Another of your mates,' sneered Burkill. 'Official snouts.'

'Oh go and get fucked,' said Pascoe wearily and turned away. Wield was at his elbow.

'You ready for off, Sergeant?'

'Yes, sir. You haven't forgotten our car's back at the Branderdyke?'

'Oh Christ. Well, I'm certainly not asking Johnny Hope for a lift back!' said Pascoe. 'I'll treat us to a taxi.'

As they made for the door, Burkill grasped his arm.

'Look, I'm sorry,' he said. 'We need to talk to someone about Sandra. Could you get in touch with this chap for us?'

'All right,' said Pascoe. 'I'll ring him tomorrow.'

Outside as they walked through driving rain not even Wield's news that according to Johnny Hope Haggard had been promised the running of Godfrey Blengdale's new Country Club at Holm Coultram College could dislodge from Pascoe's mind the hopeless longing to be in a job, and in a part of the world, where kindness was not met with suspicion, and love and taxis filled the sunlit streets.

Chapter 15

'What,' said Ellie, looking incredibly fetching propped up against the kitchen door with uncombed hair and face still puffy with sleep, 'the hell are you doing at this hour in the morning?'

Pascoe paused in mid-cornflake to look at his watch. It was five forty-five.

'I'm sorry. Did I wake you?'

'Yes. I just thought you'd gone off for your fifteenth pee. Why don't you drink Scotch?'

'I don't know. I don't really want anything and in these places when you don't really want anything, they give you beer. I thought I told you last night I'd be up at the crack.'

'Maybe you did. I was tired, you were incoherent. God, it's cold.'

'It's not surprising. I saw a stripper last night who ended up with more on than you.'

'If it bothers you,' said Ellie retreating into the hall and reappearing wearing his oldest raincoat.

It changed her from Titian Venus to Central European refugee.

'I'll have some of that coffee. Where are you going? View a corpse? Torture a suspect?'

'I'm going to see a dirty film being made,' said Pascoe with some satisfaction.

'God, Peter, you're becoming an obsessive! What are you trying to prove?'

'I can't understand,' said Pascoe, 'why no one else but me thinks it's important. And Shorter.'

'Your Danish Dentist? You make a fine pair.'

'A girl may have been badly injured. Even killed.'

'May
have been. Shorter
may
have had a motive for starting all this. And you checked out the actress.'

'You
said there were two of them,' protested Pascoe.

'I
may
have been wrong. But even if I'm not, even if all that was for real and not just a ketchup job, you're still getting obsessed by a single symptom when there's a whole disease to cure.'

'I deal in symptoms,' said Pascoe.

'Wrong,' said Ellie. 'There's nothing clinical about you, my love. Wrong profession, medicine. The Church, that's more your style. Priest-like task of pure ablution round earth's human shores. Bloody Shelley.'

'Bloody Keats.'

'Same thing,' she said. 'You're a pure ablutionist. And like most priests, you're obsessed with sex, when it's
sexism
you should be after.
That's
the disease.'

He pushed back his chair and stood up.

'You should have a word with Ms Lacewing,’ he said. 'She's got plans.'

'I intend to,’ she said. 'Didn't I tell you she rang? We're meeting for lunch today?'

'Oh God. Liberated gossip!' he said. 'My raincoat, please.'

'But you hardly ever wear this raincoat,' grumbled Ellie as she removed it.

'Nor,' he said looking at her appreciatively, 'do you.'

As he backed out of the gate, she was standing naked on the doorstep, waving everything at him. He peeped his horn and drove away.

Hay Hall would have been totally unfindable without the help of what he took to be a ploughman workward plodding his weary way and even then it was only because he had the wit to follow the man's gestures rather than his words (right arm shooting out as he said 'sharp left at Five Lanes End') that Pascoe found himself turning through an unmarked and uninviting gateway in a crumbling lichen-pocked wall. The drive was pot-holed worse than Acornboar Mount, the vegetation consisted mainly of dark and dripping conifers and yew, and the whole atmosphere seemed more conducive to the chilly thrills of horror than the slippery blisses of pornography. This supernatural ambience was reinforced when the house itself came into view for now he got a tremendous sense of
deja vu.
It was a two-storeyed building which not even time and neglect could make beautiful. The ground floor looked as if it had been designed by someone who had a distant acquaintance with Georgian proportion and style, but the first floor, with its lancet windows and Gothic cornices, seemed to have been sliced off some romantic folly and dropped, not very accurately, on to its ill-matched base. Even the unkempt festoons of ivy couldn't hide the join.

Parked in front of the house were two cars and a large van. Pascoe slid his Riley alongside them, still wrestling with this sense of having been here before. It was something he had heard of, but never experienced, and he was surprised at the uneasiness with which it filled him.

'Oh it's you,' said Penelope Latimer from the portico. She came towards him, huge in a white silk trouser suit, and added apologetically, 'Sorry to sound so unwelcoming but I thought it might be the generator truck.'

'I need my exhaust fixed,' said Pascoe.

'Don't we all. Come inside, Peter, isn't it? We can't start anything till the power arrives, so you may detect away, darling, detect away. Anything wrong?'

'It's just this house,' said Pascoe slowly, peering up at the facade.

'Hideous, ain't it? But very useful. No one else will look at it, so we rent it for a song.'

'I've a peculiar notion that I've seen it before,' said Pascoe.

Penelope Latimer laughed beautifully, the kind of spontaneous silvery gurgle that film stars paid thousands to voice coaches for, and her soft frame shook like a snow-filled col touched by the warmth of spring.

'Of course you have, darling. Everyone who's seen a Homeric film has seen Hay Hall. Do step in out of the raw.'

Pascoe felt as relieved and disappointed as most people feel when the apparently supernatural is explained.
Droit de Seigneur
was the answer. This was the manor to which the lecherous lord had abducted the blushing bride. Which also made it the manor in which the blushing bride had been, perhaps, assaulted.

They passed through an entrance hall with no furniture, tattered wallhangings, a rather elegant curved stairway and creaking floorboards, into an equally dilapidated drawing-room which was occupied by half a dozen people standing around a Calor gas heater drinking coffee from flasks.

'Relax, folks,' said Penny. 'It's only the fuzz. Gerry, my dear, come and be fingerprinted.'

A tall thin man with a scholarly stoop detached himself from the coffee-drinkers and joined Pascoe and the woman. It wasn't just the stoop that was scholarly. He had a thin-featured face, at once vague and ascetic, that would have looked at home at an Oxbridge high table; wire-rimmed spectacles pinched his long nose, and he even wore the baggy grey flannels and ancient sports coat with leather elbows which are the academic's uniform in the popular imagination. His age was about thirty.

'Gerry Toms, Peter Pascoe. Coffee, Peter?'

'No, thanks. Is there anywhere we could talk privately, Mr Toms?'

'We could step into the shooting-room, if you don't mind the cold,' said Toms. He spoke hesitantly with a touch of East Anglia in his voice.

'It shouldn't take long,' said Pascoe.

The director led him via the hall into another, larger room. This one was furnished after a fashion. Drapes had been hung over the windows, a square of carpet laid on the floor in front of the almost Adam fireplace, and on this stood a chaise-longue and a small table set for tea. The final touch was a huge tiger skin rug.

The other end of the room was full of equipment - cameras, some sound recorders and a variety of lights.

'There's no power here, of course,' said Toms. 'That's why we need the generator. It isn't really enough, but a bit of gloom suits most of our scenes and hides the cracks in the plaster.'

'Why do you use the place if it's so inconvenient?' asked Pascoe.

'I didn't say it was inconvenient,' said Toms. 'On balance, it's great. First, we've got the whole house for interiors. Give us an hour and we can have any room looking habitable - on film anyway. And any period. Second, we've got nice private grounds for exteriors. You can't shoot our kind of footage in a public park. Third, it's cheap. Fourth, it's bloody cold, so we get things done quickly. What is it you want to talk to me about, Inspector?'

'A film you made,
Droit de Seigneur.'

'Ah yes. A masterpiece of my social commentary period,' said Toms blandly.

'Your what?'

'I was trying to say something about the repression of woman.'

'She didn't look very repressed to me,' said Pascoe, ninety-nine per cent sure that he was being sent up.

'Of course not. The whole thing is a male fantasy, you noticed that, surely? The young husband and the wicked lord are, in fact, the same person. The husband in the end does not rescue the girl; he merely offers her a different form of victimization.'

'That's a fairly cynical view of human relationships,' said Pascoe.

'Then it's one that should recommend itself to you,' answered Toms. 'Cynicism is the basis of law, otherwise why should compassion need to be the better part of justice?'

'Gobbledegook,' said Pascoe with some force.

'Come now. Let us restrict ourselves to matters sexual. A woman comes to your station saying she has been attacked by a man. How do you and your colleagues react? You investigate the man because you believe any man capable of sexually assaulting a woman. You investigate the woman because you believe any woman capable of sexually provoking a man. At the conclusion of your investigations you apportion blame, you don't establish innocence. Am I right? Or am I right?'

Pascoe found himself taking a hearty dislike to Gerry Toms, not so much because of his undergraduate debating manner as because of the impression he gave of intellectual condescension. He quite clearly believed that it needed very little effort on his part to leave a poor policeman floundering in his wake.

'All that's as may be, sir,' he said heavily. 'I can't say I agree with what you say, though I'm not sure I've picked you up right. Any road, what I want to ask you now is about that scene in the film where the young lady gets beaten up.'

'Yes?'

'It's been suggested that at one point in that scene, the young lady really
is
being beaten up. What do you say to that?'

'I say, how incredible! At which point?'

'When the gent with the metal boxing gloves clips her jaw, sir.' Pascoe watched Toms closely. Having opted to play out the role of dull policeman, he hoped that Toms might be tempted to overact in his desire to impress his stolid audience, but the man merely shook his head.

'And at that point only?' he said. 'But why? Our actresses may not be Royal Shakespeare stuff, but they bleed and bruise just as easily and like it just as little. It's all done with tomato ketchup, Inspector, didn't you know?'

'The suggestion was made, sir, and by someone with claims to expertise,' said Pascoe steadfastly.

'A wife-beater, perhaps? Have you not seen the actress concerned? Linda Abbott, I think it was. Did she have any complaints? Or bruises?'

'None.'

'So what is this all about?' cried Toms, moving now across the thin line which divides the academic from the histrionic.

'It's also been suggested that for this scene there was another actress in the role,' said Pascoe.

'What? By
another
expert?'

'In a manner of speaking,' said Pascoe, thinking of Ellie standing on the doorstep that morning.

'You'd better change your experts, Inspector,' said Toms, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a nicotine-stained forefinger. 'There was only one woman in that part. Ask anyone who worked on the film.'

'I notice you don't suggest looking at the film itself,' said Pascoe.

'Why not? Look away!' said Toms. 'I'll sit and look with you.'

'You have a print of the film, sir?' asked Pascoe.

'I think not. They'll all be out, I expect.'

'All?'

'We usually make a couple of prints, sometimes three. It depends on the kind of demand we envisage.'

'And in this case?'

For the first time the shadow of a smile appeared on Gerry Toms's face.

'Two only, I think. You see, I'm realistic. This kind of social allegory isn't altogether what the modern cineaste is looking for. Yes, there were two, I now recall. But only one survives. I remember there was some trouble, a consignment went astray at our distributors. It sank without a trace. It's the kind of people one has to employ these days. So the only surviving print is the one you must have seen. Presumably it's moved on elsewhere now. Never fear. It will be easy to catch it up.'

'Not too easy, sir,' said Pascoe. 'I'm afraid that's gone too. There was a fire at the Calliope Kinema Club where it was showing. Perhaps you heard about it?'

'No, I didn't. Good lord, that means, unless the last copy surfaces, it's goodbye
Droit de Seigneur.
Or perhaps I should say
Adieu.'

'You don't seem worried,' said Pascoe.

'Why should I be? A film director writes on water, Inspector. And besides, that period of my life is dead. Now I'm into escapism. Symbolic romance.'

'Elinor Glyn?' enquired Pascoe.

'What? Oh, I see,' said Toms glancing at the tiger skin rug and nodding approvingly, as at a sharp pupil. 'No, but nearly right. We're doing a little squib loosely based on the tales of Baroness Orczy. It's about a group of noble ladies who are smuggled out of the shadow of the guillotine disguised as
filles de joie
in a travelling brothel. We're calling it
The Scarlet Pimp.'