Ruling Passion (15 page)

'You'd think someone as rich as you could keep this bloody place warm!' he snapped, blowing into  his hands. 'Let's get it over with before I freeze to  death.'

'Now you know how it feels to be one of those poor bastards you torture in your cells,' grunted  Grainger, the doctor.

He and Dalziel were old acquaintances. Each affected to believe the other embodied all the public misconceptions and suspicions of his profession.  Secretly they were not altogether convinced this was not in fact true.

Grainger began his examination. It had seemed an excellent opportunity to give Dalziel a thorough overhaul when the other man had made  this, his first appointment in half a dozen years. Now, ignoring Dalziel's impatient protests, he took his time as he moved from one part of the test-sequence to the next.

'Do they pay you by the hour?' grumbled the superintendent. 'Look, while I'm here, you might as well make yourself useful. What can you tell me about diabetes? Or didn't they discover it till after you graduated from the barber's  shop?'

'You don't think you've got diabetes, do you?' asked Grainger. 'You haven't. God knows what  else is wrong with you, but you're not diabetic.'

'Thanks. No. There's someone we're anxious to see and he's got diabetes.'

'How do you know?' asked Grainger. 'Turn over, will you, if you can manage without a lever.'

'He left a kettleful of piss behind him.'

'Jesus!' said Grainger, pausing with his stethoscope poised. 'I thought
my
job brought me life in  the raw.'

'You don't know you're living. Come on then. Diabetes. What can you tell me about our man?'

'It's not as simple as that,' answered Grainger, 'as I'm sure your police-surgeon would be only  too pleased to tell you. There are three types of  diabetes for a start, Type A, Type B . . .'

'And Type C. Christ, is that what you spend five  years learning? The bloody alphabet?'

'. . . and Type AB,' continued Grainger, unperturbed. 'Type A's the most popularly known form,  though by no means the commonest. If you've  got Type A it means you're dependent on insulin injections for the rest of your life. It usually  manifests itself in young people. Classified symptoms are excessive hunger and thirst and frequent  urination.'

'In a kettle,' said Dalziel, interested.

'That might be a symptom of something to a  psychologist, not to me,' said the doctor. 'Sit up. My God, what a gut you've got, Andy. If you were  going to get diabetes, it'd be Type B. It usually doesn't strike till middle-age and the victims are  nearly always overweight. It's the most common  form of the disease and is usually treated orally rather than through insulin injections.'

'You mean they drink the stuff?'

'No! Insulin's got to be injected. They take something else, a hypoglycaemic agent - that means  something which lowers the amount of sugar in  the blood.'

'And Type AB?'

'Stress diabetes. This is a form bought on by  an undue emotional or physical stress. People in  their thirties or forties get it. Symptoms in its mild  form are much for Type B, only the victim's not overweight. On the contrary, he's often underweight. But violent stress can bring on a violent  reaction and make the patient insulin-dependent,  for a while at least. Stand up now.'

Dalziel obeyed, groaning.

'Well, you've been a great help. We're looking  for a thin man of thirty or forty, or a fat man of  forty or fifty, or a thin or fat man of almost any  age at all.'

'It could be a woman,' suggested the doctor.

'Get stuffed. Look, for God's sake, how long are  you going to be? I've got work to do.'

'Another twenty minutes. Here, that is,' answered  Grainger. 'Then I've fixed up for you to be X-rayed  at the hospital. You'll be done by tea-time.'

'What the hell do you think I've got?' demanded  Dalziel with an aggression meant to be comic.

But he heard in his voice the frightened plea of  the suspect demanding to be told the nature of the  charge.

Lewis and Cowley Estates
was the kind of firm which  did not put the prices of its property in the window.  Rare for Yorkshire, thought Pascoe. They generally  liked a price-tag on everything. Brass was a matter  of general public concern.

The 'closed' sign was up in the velvet-curtained  window, but he could see movement inside. He  rapped sharply on the door. And again after a few  seconds.

A thin-faced man appeared, stared assessingly  at Pascoe for a moment, decided rightly that as a  potential customer he did not promise much, and  gesticulated at the 'closed' sign.

For answer Pascoe produced his warrant-card,  pressed it to the glass and imitated the man's  gesture.

The man stepped back, turned and seemed to be  saying something to whoever was in the office with  him. Then he opened the door.

'Mr Cowley?' asked Pascoe.

'Yes?'

'Detective-Sergeant Pascoe, sir. May I come in?'

Cowley was in his early thirties. He was excessively lean and hungry-looking and he carried his head thrust forward aggressively, putting Pascoe in  mind of a beefeater's pike.

'Is it about Matthew? I talked to some of your  people yesterday, you know. At length.'

Pascoe stepped by him into the front-office. No vulgar counter here, but a scattering of comfortable chairs and low tables on which gleamed copies  of
Country Life
and
Vogue.
Three doors opened off  this area, one marked
Mr Lewis,
another
Mr Cowley,
while the third, the central one, was unmarked  and presumably led to their secretary's office.

'I won't take long,' said Pascoe. 'Shall we sit  down?'

Cowley glanced towards the door of his room  which was slightly ajar. Pascoe courteously suspended his buttocks six inches above the nearest  chair and looked up expectantly. Like a dog waiting for a biscuit.

'Oh, all right,' said Cowley.

With an audible sigh of relief, Pascoe sank into  the soft leather.

'But make it quick, will you? I do have a client  with me at the moment.'

Pascoe felt slightly disappointed the man had admitted someone else was here. Part of the joy of  being a detective was having something to detect.

'Business goes on?' he murmured sadly. 'Of  course; it must. I'll try not to keep you, sir. Now, as I understand it, Mr Lewis drove down from Scotland on Monday to attend a business conference?'

'That's right.'

'I see. Now, at the conference there were yourself, and Mr Lewis and . . . ?'

'And no one. That was it.'

'Really?' said Pascoe, infusing just a touch of  polite surprise into his voice. 'Your secretary, perhaps?'

'No.'

'No. I see. But she would be here . . . somewhere?'

He waved his hand vaguely towards the central office. He always enjoyed this vague-young-man-from-the-Foreign-Office role.

'No. Monday's our staff half-day. We don't fit  in with the shops. That way our girls can go  shopping.'

'And shopkeepers can go house-hunting? Convenient. So there were the two of you only?'

'I've told you,' said Cowley, exasperated. 'What's  the difficulty?'

'No difficulty. I merely wondered, if just the  two of you were involved, why not conduct your conference on the phone? Why break into Mr  Lewis's holiday like this? I know how much I  value my two weeks' peace and quiet, ho ho.'

'Do you? Well, Matt liked to work. In any case,  he was up and down to Scotland half a dozen times  a year. He owns - owned - a cottage there, so it  was no skin off his nose coming back.'

'A cottage. Nice. Well, I take your point, Mr  Cowley, but it still must have been a fairly important matter.'

'Not very. It needed a quick decision, that was  all.'

'A business matter?'

'Of course.'

'Routine, but urgent? Timewise, I mean.'

'That's it. You've got it. Now, please, Sergeant, could we get on?'

'Of course. Just another minute, sir.'

Another minute spread to ten. Pascoe could not really say why he was trying to niggle this man, except that his air of chronic impatience seemed to invite such treatment, just as some people look so self-effacing and humble, it is difficult not to tread  on them.

But after ten minutes, all Pascoe had was the mixture as before, and Cowley's annoyance was reaching legitimately large proportions. At last  Pascoe beat a strategic retreat, feeling he had  wasted his time. Despite this, he wasted another  fifteen minutes sitting in his car thirty yards up  the road until Cowley too came out accompanied  by a grey-haired, stocky man in an old tweed  suit. Pascoe had never seen him before. It didn't  seem very likely he would ever see him again.  He glanced at his notebook which held the names  and addresses of Lewis and Cowley's two secretary/typists. Doubtless they would be enjoying  their unexpected day off, perhaps a little worried about the job now with half their employers dead.

He shut the notebook with a snap and leaned  his head hard against the cool glass of the windscreen. It was so easy. So easy to forget what a  death could mean to other people. For all he  knew, there could have been a close relationship  between Lewis and his secretary. Sexual perhaps;  such things were commonplace. Or perhaps she  just liked him, admired him, shared jokes with him. What did it matter? What did matter was that he, Detective-Sergeant Peter Pascoe, should not so  easily brutalize in his mind people he had not met.

He glanced at his book once more. Marjory Clayton, 13 Woodview Drive. Not far from old  Sturgeon's place, if his geography were right. He  ought to look in and have a word with Sturgeon while he was out that way.

But first things first. He let in the clutch and set off for Woodview Drive.

Sturgeon had been heading steadily south for the past half-hour. He knew he wasn't going fast  enough, but his right foot seemed weightless,  not able to cope with the job of depressing the  accelerator. Ferrybridge and its great cooling towers, the Age of Industry's version of Stonehenge,  had moved slowly by a few minutes earlier. The  Doncaster bypass was not far ahead, and then  the road would split, giving a choice between the  Al and the Ml, two great alimentary tracts via which the north voided its products into London.

London still had a sinful sound to him. True, in  his sixty-eight years he had been there a couple of  dozen times, perhaps more; but always it was the  first time he recalled, and his old grandmother who had never been farther south than Newark sewing his purse to his woollen vest as a precaution against  pickpockets.

But now the days of such precautions were by.  He smiled at the double irony of the thought and  glanced at his watch. Mavis, his wife, would be  getting home soon. She was rarely late back from shopping because she did not like to leave the cats.  Though of course she would not think the house  would be empty. But it wouldn't perturb her, not  Mavis. Not at first. She'd set about making his  tea with swift, deft, long-practised movement. He  owed her much. She'd married beneath her, so her relatives had said or plainly hinted. There'd been  a bit of brass there. But he'd never taken any; he  had shown them; by his own efforts with his own  hands. He had shown them.

It had started raining, a fine misty rain out of  which a slow lorry suddenly appeared ahead, snapping him back to the present. He swung out sharply  to overtake. Behind him a blue van, breaking the  speed-limit on the outside lane, bore down on him  relentlessly, flashing its lights.

He stamped on the accelerator now, finding  his strength. The Rover leapt forward, the loose  seat-belt buckle swinging noisily against the door.  In a few seconds his speed had doubled.

It was all a question of timing really. He suddenly  felt optimistic. It was the right thing to do, there  was no alternative. The thing was to do it right. He  opened his mouth in triumphant song. The road  glistened damply.

Behind him, the driver of the blue van watched  in disbelieving horror the beginnings of the skid.  This couldn't be happening just because he had  flashed his lights. It couldn't be!

The road here was slightly raised above the  level of the surrounding countryside. The car slid gracefully off the hard surface, struck the grass-verge, then flipped sideways and over down the  embankment.

By the time the van-driver halted and made his way to the car, everything was quite, quite still.

The royal-blue Mini-Cooper, backed deep into a  tunnel of hawthorn and briar, was still too. The  small boy approached it carefully. He had been  observing it just as carefully from his hiding-place for. the past ten minutes. At last he was satisfied  that it was just as unoccupied as it had been the  first time he noticed it two days earlier.

The boy had very good reason for not wishing  to be observed. Of all the places his kill-joy parents  proscribed, this was placed under their most severe  proscription. To be found here would be to risk  the most dreadful punishments. The reason lay  fifteen yards or so behind him where the sheer  walls of the old clay-pit, rimmed now with a double thickness of barbed-wire, fell fifty feet to  the opaque waters below.

He'd reached the car and peered in. It was, as  expected, empty. But the key was in the ignition which meant that whoever owned it might not be  far away. Yet he was certain its position had not  changed since he first spotted it. All in all, it was  worth taking the risk of looking inside.

Disappointingly it contained little of interest. A  sheet of paper had been left on the passenger seat  with a lot of writing on it. But he couldn't make  a great deal of sense of it.

Rain spattered on the windscreen. It was time  to go. He walked back towards the clay-pit and  through the gap in the wire to peer down once  more at the water. If the rain really got going  again, would the surface of the water ever reach  the top? It was an interesting speculation, but the  growing co-operation of the rain-clouds made him  cut it short and retreat. It was a useful gap, this. Eventually someone would notice and repair it,  but not many people came this way.

Like the car, it was his secret for the moment.