Child's Play (35 page)

'Well, I expect I glanced at it,' said Pascoe.

'Glanced!
You'll get nowhere by
glancing
, lad. A long hard look at things, that's the only way to profit. Get that, will you? It'll likely be a transfer charge from New Zealand for you!'

Pascoe picked up the phone and listened.

'No, sir,' he said, 'It's for you. Dr Pottle from the Central's Psychiatric Unit.'

Reassuring himself that even if his diagnosis was accurate, at least Dalziel seemed to be seeking professional help, Pascoe left. The fat man now had a long conversation with Pottle who was rather puzzled by this degree of courteous interest from a man whose previous opinion of CID use of psycho-assistance was politely embodied in his overheard comment, 'Them buggers are like weather-forecasters; if the pavement's wet, they can work out it's been raining - just!'

Pottle disposed of with worryingly fulsome thanks, Dalziel read through his notes, grinned like a fox who sees a way into the chicken coop, then turned his attention once more to Pascoe's notes. Shaking his head, he began to make some phone calls of his own.

Wield was drinking his tenth cup of coffee of the day when his doorbell rang.

'Can I come in?' said Pascoe.

'Why not? Like a coffee?'

'If it's no bother.'

'None. I've had a pot boiling since I woke up. I got pissed last night with Mr Dalziel, did he tell you?'

'No,' said Pascoe.

'I needed the coffee first thing to bring me back to life. I've been supping it ever since to stop me going back on the Scotch. Mebbe I shouldn't bother. What do you think?'

The man's voice sounded level and matter-of-fact. His face was as unreadable as ever. But Pascoe felt the tension in him like a fish-taken line.

'Wieldy, I'm sorry,' he said helplessly.

'Sorry? What for?'

'For . . .' Pascoe took a deep breath. 'For thinking I was a friend but not knowing anything about you. For not noticing that you had troubles. For brushing you off when you wanted to talk. And for the boy. I don't know what he meant to you, but I'm sorry for his death and the manner of it.'

The dark, ugly face of the sergeant regarded him with a frowning intensity.

'Dalziel knew about me,' he said.

Pascoe took this as a reproach and held his hand out to the flame like a good martyr.

'Ellie too,' he said. 'Seems I'm the only short-sighted, insensitive sod in town. I'm sorry.'

'Good thing I was able to fool someone,' said Wield unexpectedly. 'Even if it was only a short-sighted insensitive sod.'

Suddenly there were tears stinging at Pascoe's eyes. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose violently.

Wield said, 'Coffee's not that bad, is it?'

'No,' said Pascoe. 'The coffee's fine. It's just guilt, I suppose. I could never take guilt. And I've not had a good morning.'

'Oh aye? What's been going off, then?'

Pascoe said vaguely, 'Oh, this and that. Look, Wieldy, what are you going to do?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, all this must've shaken you up. I'd hate to think you were going to do something daft.'

'Like resigning, you mean? If Mr Watmough gets Tommy Winter's job and finds out what's been going on, I reckon I'll be saved the bother.'

'It's not a disciplinary matter!' declared Pascoe indignantly.

'Being gay? No, it's not. But shacking up with a known criminal, and concealing the relationship when one of my own lads arrests him, that is, wouldn't you say? No, at the very least, Watmough'll have me shunted off out of harm's way, and I didn't join the Force to sit in one box putting filing-cards in another.'

This was one marked change in the man. He'd spoken more in the short time since Pascoe's arrival than he normally managed in half a day.

Pascoe said, 'Perhaps Watmough won't get the job.'

'Mebbe not. The Super doesn't reckon his chances.'

'No,' said Pascoe doubtfully. He was recalling Dalziel's sudden onset of interest in the Deputy Chief Constable's internal directives. The fat man was a pragmatic. Could this mean that despite all his outer confidence in Watmough's failure, secretly he was preparing himself against the man's success?

'Any road, whatever happens, who cares? A man's got to be mad to stay in a job where the public hates you and Maggie Thatcher loves you,' said Wield. 'You didn't answer my question. What went off this morning to upset you? Something to do with the lad's murder, was it?'

His voice was steady.

Pascoe said, 'Just filling in the background, Wieldy. I'm not sure we ought to be talking about it.'

'Frightened I'm going to ride off into town with my six-guns blazing?'

'No. But perhaps
you
are.'

Pascoe's eyes were fixed on the coffee-spoon in Wield's right hand and the sergeant realized with a shock that he'd bent it double with pressure from his thumb.

'Yuri Geller,' he said, straightening it out. 'I stop clocks too. With a face like mine, it's not hard.'

This was the first time Pascoe could recall hearing Wield refer to his unlovely features. Somehow it made up his mind for him and quickly he brought the sergeant up to date on the limited progress so far.

Wield seemed back in full control.

'Still nowt from his dad, then? I'd have thought the bits in the papers would have flushed him out, if nothing else did. Mebbe he'll show up for the funeral.'

'Funeral?'

'Aye. He's going to be buried up here. His grandmother agrees. Couple of days' time.'

Curious, thought Pascoe, the two murder cases colliding in his mind. One funeral where a missing son, perhaps, turns up to mourn a dead mother; now another where a missing father may turn up to mourn a dead son.

'Something bothers me,' said Wield.

'What's that?'

'Why'd Cliff say the station buffet for his meet?'

'Why not?'

'Well, he'd not been anywhere near the railway station, to my knowledge. He came by bus. That's where I met him first, in the bus station cafe.'

'Charley's place?'

'That's right. Going back there I could understand. But switching to the railway buffet . . .'

'Perhaps he thought Vollans was coming through by train from Leeds.'

'And was he?'

'No,' said Pascoe. 'I saw him at the Old Mill Inn later. He had a car. All right, perhaps there was someone else getting off, or getting on a train, is that what you're saying?'

'I don't know. Mebbe.'

'I'll check the trains arriving and leaving round the time he set up the meeting,' said Pascoe. 'I don't see it as particularly significant, I must say, but if there's anything there, we'll find it.'

'Will you? Well, mebbe you will,' said Wield. 'Another cup of coffee?'

'No, thanks,' said Pascoe. 'I've got to be off. Something I need to check on out of town. Anyway, one dose of this witch's brew's enough for any sane man!'

He spoke unthinkingly.

'Yes,' said Wield. 'I can't spend the rest of my life drinking cups of coffee, can I?

'Peter . . .' His voice did not rise; in fact, it seemed to tremble like the G-string on a fiddle with the vibrations of despair . . . 'you'll find out what happened, won't you? I've got to know before . . . before I can work out what's going to happen to me.'

'Oh shit,' said Pascoe helplessly. 'I'll try, Wieldy. I promise, I'll try.'

Ten minutes later he was breaking the speed limit on the road south to Nottinghamshire.

It hadn't taken too long to discover that a child named Richard Sharman had been in a Nottingham Children's Home from 1947 to 1962. All other information on the child was confidential, he was assured. Unimpressed, Pascoe had sought the right Open Sesame, guessed it wouldn't be the thunder of a murder inquiry, and tried instead the still, sad music of humanity by talking of a dead boy and a lost father who needed to be told of his grief.

It worked, but no treasure was revealed, just the information that Sharman had been an awkward, unfosterable child, that his mother had visited him rarely, and there was no address for her, and that his father had been killed in the war. There was a copy of the child's birth certificate. He had been born on November 29th, 1944 at Maidstone, Kent, and his father was Sergeant Richard Alan Sharman of the Royal Signals.

Delving into Army Records was like excavating in the Valley of Kings - sometimes you struck treasure, but often the tomb was empty. Lieutenant Alexander Lomas Huby, for instance, despite (or perhaps because of) his mother's refusal to accept his death, had left minimal traces of his passing, including a medical record so sketchy as to be little help in confirming his sex let alone charting the contours of his left buttock. Sergeant Sharman was there in detail, however. Born 1917 in Nottingham, blue-eyed, fair-haired, white-skinned, he was measured and weighed to his last inch and final ounce. But the really interesting snippet was that his presumably black widow was still in receipt of her army pension which was sent to the Avalon Retirement Home on the outskirts of Nottingham.

At this point, a phone call to the local police asking that someone visit the old woman would have sufficed. After all, it was most unlikely that she could give any information about her son which would have any bearing on the death of her grandson. But something had stopped him from doing the logical thing. Perhaps the memory of Ellie's recent gibes about his intellectual censor rankled. Perhaps Dalziel's apparent indifference to all his researches was also a provocation. But most certainly, his unassuaged guilt feeling about Wield made it essential for him to follow up even the slenderest lead on this case personally and to hell with logic and rules! Ninety minutes later he was being guided through the bright corridors of the Avalon Home by a nurse clad in a nylon overall which in a twilit lake might have passed for white samite.

'How old is she?' asked Pascoe.

'Early seventies. Not so old by today's standards, but after sixty it's a lottery, isn't it? Some stay young to the end, some seem to
want
to be old. With Mrs Sharman I get the impression it's been her life's ambition since her twenties.'

The nurse spoke cheerfully rather than sourly. Middle aged herself, she looked as if it was her ambition to stay young as long as possible.

Pascoe said, 'How long's she been in the Home?'

'Best part of six years. She obviously wasn't going to rest till she got someone else doing all the work for her! Hello, dear. Here's a gentleman caller for you!'

Mrs Sharman was frail, toothless, swathed in uncomfortable layers of clothing topped with a plaid dressing-gown, and she carried a blackwood knobkerrie with which she supported her weight in motion and her assertions in repose. She gripped it menacingly as he took a seat before her.

'Hello, Mrs Sharman,' said Pascoe.

'What do you want? she demanded.

It was a good question.

'Just to chat,' he said, giving her what Ellie called his little-boy-lost smile.

'I'm seventy-nine,' proclaimed the old woman with a sudden thrust of her knobkerrie towards his crotch.

Alarmed, he pushed back his chair a couple of feet. Behind Mrs Sharman the nurse mouthed, 'Seventy-three.'

'And I've still got my own teeth,' continued the old woman, baring empty gums. 'Only, I've forgotten where I put 'em!'

This was evidently a favourite joke. She laughed so heartily at it that her screeches set up a sympathetic skirling around the conservatory in which they sat, and out beyond into the garden, as though bagpipe should call to bagpipe from lofty mountain to lowly glen in some serial pibroch.

Pascoe joined in the laughter, out of politeness and also because it delayed a moment of some delicacy. He had examined the old woman closely in the past few minutes and there was no way that her visible skin, tanned though it was by age and weather, could be anything but white. He was no expert on the vagaries of miscegenation, but he recalled the old music hall joke about the Chinese girl who presented her husband with a European baby and was told that two Wongs do not make a white.

Cliff Sharman's father, the woman's son, had been described as unequivocally black. Ergo, Sergeant Sharman was not the father. The poor devil had given his all for democracy before he could learn of his wife's exertions in the same field. On the other hand, the woman still had to face the raised eyebrows and sharp intakes of breath when she returned to Nottingham with a black boy. Could there have been enough pressure and prejudice for her to commit the child to a home? Easily! he answered himself. 1945 might have seen Britain ready at last for the political assertion that Jack was as good as his master, but it was still light years away from any meaningful acknowledgement that Black Jack was as good as White Jack.

He said gently, 'Mrs Sharman, I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to talk to you about your husband, Sergeant Sharman.'