Ruling Passion (24 page)

'That's what worries me, sir.'

'Not to worry, Sergeant. Happens all the time, as we policemen know, eh?'

Dalziel was being diplomatic, Pascoe realized. His lighthearted tone was for Ellie's benefit. But all possible implications of the crime would be  considered. Dalziel talked for some time longer, whether to reinforce his carefree role or whether because he believed in cramming every rift with  ore it was hard to tell. He passed on the latest reports on the Sturgeon case.

Pascoe's reaction was the same as Ellie's.

'Poor sod!'

'Well, he does own the land. He'll probably be able to flog that for enough to stave off the mortgage sharks from his bungalow for a while.  Then I suppose he'll either live off social security or go back to work. He sounds like one of the  independent ones to me. No bloody charity and  all that.'

'It's a hell of an age to be broke,' said Pascoe.

'Any age is. Lewis must've felt the same. The business was right up shit-creek. Cowley's claiming that things are far worse than he imagined.  Says that his partner must have been milking money steadily out of the business account without him knowing.'

'Yes. I was there this morning.' reminded Pascoe.

'So you were. It seems longer. You didn't see that report we got in from that comic Scotsman, though. Jesus! the detail! Nothing new. A bit of  a description of Lewis's girl-friend, obviously seen through lust-coloured spectacles. Very exotic she  sounds, lots of make-up, revealing clothes, big  knockers, just the job for these cold Highland  nights.'

'Is Ellie still there, sir?' asked Pascoe reprovingly.

'Yes. She seems to find our constabulary business very amusing. You sure you're OK? Don't  hang about after you've given your evidence, will  you? We need you here. 'Bye, Sergeant.'

'Hello, love,' said Ellie. 'You take care, will you?'

'Is Dalziel still there?'

'No. He's diplomatically gone for a pee.'

'What the hell were you doing with him tonight? He's not been sticking his nose in again,  has he?'

'Calm down, love,' laughed Ellie. 'No.
Au contraire,
as they say. He wants us to get married.'

'He wants what?'

'Us to marry. You and me, that is, not me  and him!'

'Well thank God for that.'

'I told him I'd think about it.'

'Why not?' said Pascoe. He glanced at his watch. Just after eight. It seemed early still. He shook it to  make sure it was still going.

'Are you still there?' said Ellie.

'Yes. Just checking the time.'

'Oh.' She sounded faintly disappointed. 'I won’t keep you from your sick-bed, love. See you tomorrow.'

'Yes. Sure. Take care now.'

He felt much better, he realized. Only the slightest headache.

He replaced the receiver and looked at his watch  again. He really did feel better.

Chapter 3

'Order! Order!' commanded Angus Pelman. 'We  really must give John a hearing.'

'We give him a hearing every time,’ said the Reverend Matthias. 'I propose an amendment whereby John give us a rest.'

'That's not very Christian of you, Vicar,' said  John Bell. 'I wouldn't put that in the minutes, Marianne. We don't want the vicar defrocked.'

'Order,' said Pelman. He sounded less than his usual forceful self, thought Marianne, glancing at  her watch. This meeting seemed to be going on forever. As usual the main delaying factor was John Bell's anti-pollution campaign.

'Sorry, Mr Chairman,' he said. 'As you know, I've been worried for some time about the stream that runs through the village. Its course is familiar  to you. It runs down from Cobbett's farm, through  Angus's woods, and then follows the line of the  road to the village, passing behind the small development which contains my house. We are all on main drainage, but next to this development, just  fifty yards up stream, are three older cottages  which aren't. Now I have a contact in the Water Board and, with his help, I've been testing the  water over the past week.'

He passed out some photostatted sheets.

'Look at this. Firm evidence of pollution.'

He smiled triumphantly. The others stared at the  sheets.

'I'm sorry, John,' said Pelman, 'but this doesn't mean a damn thing to me.'

'Let me explain

'No. Don't bother. I'll get someone who understands to have a look at them.'

'But the evidence is there! Or if you don't believe in science, go and sniff at that water. Since it  got warm again and the brook level dropped, it's  begun to stink. There must be some deficiency in  the sewage systems of those three cottages.' He  pounded the table in emphasis.

'Why the cottages, John?' asked Matthias. 'The  stream goes back all the way to Cobbett's farm.'

'Yes. But there's only Brookside on the other side of the track up to Angus's house. And anyway, I sampled the water in the woods as well for  comparison.'

'You did what?' said Pelman coldly. 'You must  have been trespassing, you realize that? I don't put  up those signs for nothing.'

'For God's sake!' cried Bell. 'You can't stop people going into your bloody woods, you know. The days of the lord of the bloody manor are long  past, Angus, and it's time you realized it.'

A confusion of voices arose, apparently far in excess of what might reasonably be produced by  the six-member Amenities Committee.

Pascoe and Hartley Culpepper, drinking scotch  in the adjoining room, had till this moment not openly admitted they were listening to the discussion through the not quite closed door. But now  they smiled at each other and Culpepper said, 'It's comforting to know that Westminster is not the only place where democratic debate degenerates  into riotous assembly.'

'I've never been,' said Pascoe. 'To Parliament, I mean. Do you spend much time in the corridors  of power?'

'Sorry?'

'In your job, I mean. I see you're pulling out of Scotland, but Nordrill must need a pretty strong lobby even to get a toe-hold on the National Parks.'

'Yes. Yes, we do. Another drink, or won't your  head take it?'

'I'll manage one more, I think.'

'Here you are,' said Culpepper, handing over a well-filled tumbler. 'Nice place Pelman has got,  hasn't he? He's not a collector, of course. He's far too  busy planting and ploughing and breeding and killing. But if your family stop long enough in one place, you're bound to collect one or two nice things.'

'I suppose so. Have you added to your porcelain  lately?'

'Not a great deal, no. I was at Sotheby's last Wednesday for the Cantley collection sale. One  or two very nice pieces, but a bit beyond my price, I'm afraid. Still, it was pleasant just to look. You can't have everything.'

'I thought it was the collector's creed that you can? The kind of collectors I deal with certainly believe it!'

'Perhaps I should emulate their methods,' said  Culpepper.

It suddenly struck Pascoe that though Culpepper's collecting enthusiasm might stop a long way short  of theft, he had just admitted that while Rose Hopkins was being buried, he had been wandering  around Sotheby's feeding his passion.

Perhaps an hour snatched out of a hard day's work, he thought, trying to be charitable.

The door of the meeting-room opened and the committee members started coming through. They all sounded amiable enough now, observed Pascoe. Sam Dixon gave him a cheerful nod.

'Sorry to keep you waiting,' said Pelman. 'But  duty must be done. Alan, I don't think you've met Sergeant Pascoe. Alan Matthias, our padre.'

'Glad to meet you, Mr Pascoe. I was deeply distressed to hear of your murdered friends.'

Well, he's direct anyway, thought Pascoe. Marianne Culpepper joined them. She looked in surprise at her husband.

'Hartley, I didn't realize you were coming back from town tonight.'

'I did say I wanted to be here for the inquest tomorrow.'

'Did you? I don't recall.'

'Don't let me upset any plans you may have, my  dear,' said Culpepper. 'Mother will look after me,  I'm sure.'

'I'm sure she will. She looks after me very well  while you're away.'

'How do you like it here?' said Pascoe to Matthias in order to fill the slight pause which followed this barely concealed gibe. 'Different from the  valleys.'

'I don't know,' answered the vicar. 'There are dark tunnels beneath the surface wherever you  go -'

'Alan is an allegorical moralist,' said Pelman. 'It's the Welsh disease. Hartley, you're very welcome of course, but was there something special?'

'Nothing important. I just felt like a stroll to get  the London dust out of my lungs.'

'It must be tough at the top!' interjected John Bell. 'I must be off, Angus. Thanks for the drink.  You'll look at that report I prepared, won't you?'

'I'll take it to bed with me,' promised Pelman. 'It may do what Hardisty's pills can't manage. Get  me to sleep!'

A good area for insomniacs, thought Pascoe. He himself felt there would be little difficulty in  getting to sleep. A cloud no bigger than a thumbnail seemed to be floating in his mind. Another drink, and great billows of cumulus would obscure things completely. And if he hung around too long, they might be torn apart by jags of lightning and made terrible by the noise of thunder.

'Would you excuse me too?' he said to Pelman.

'But the night's young. You've only just arrived.'

'Hush, Angus,' reproved Marianne. 'Mr Pascoe's had a nasty bang on the head today. It must have  been a great shock for you. I hope they catch  whoever did it.'

'So do I,’ said Pascoe. 'Yes, I think I've overestimated my powers of recovery. Do forgive me. Good night. Good night.'

He left quickly, feeling very faint. It passed off  in the evening air and he drove down the long  track to the road following the tail-lights of Bell's  car. Culpepper had at least turned the immediate approach to his house into a proper drive, but Pelman as a working land-owner obviously  accepted bumps, ruts and puddles as part of the facts of existence. He drove carefully to preserve  his car-springs, but the lining of his head proved  much more sensitive to the lurchings of the vehicle and he had to stop before he reached the  road.

Pelman's woods stretched darkly to his right, and to the left about fifty yards away he could  see the lights of the group of cottages whose owners were so suspect in John Bell's eyes. Faintly among all the other night sounds he could hear the murmur of water. It must be the contentious stream. Presumably a culvert of some kind carried  it beneath the ridge of land bearing the lane to Pelman's house.

He opened the car door and stepped out for  a breath of fresh air. It was a disappointment, smelling none too fresh. But he did not feel like  resuming his journey straightaway. He leaned  back against the car-bonnet and let images crowd  uncensored into his mind.

Places - Thornton Lacey, Birkham, Lochart. The  dead - Rose, Timmy and Carlo, Matthew Lewis,  Sturgeon almost. The missing - Colin, Archie  Selkirk, Atkinson. The betrayed - Mrs Lewis,  Culpepper. The enigmatic - Davenant, Etherege.

Etherege. Why did he think of Etherege? Because of Birkham. Too much was happening around  Birkham. Too much? An antique shop which had sold a few quids' worth of stolen stamps. That  wasn't much. What else? The Jockey, of course. Ellie had been attacked. Connection? Ellie was  known to be connected with one fairly minor  policeman, himself. Then she turns up with the big fish, Dalziel. Touching pitch and being defiled.

The image amused. He climbed back into his car, his mind working too hard now to be affected by Pelman's lane, and drove rapidly to Crowther's  telephone.

'Why aren't you in bed?' demanded Ellie.

'I've just got up for a moment,' lied Pascoe. 'Listen, love. Dalziel said that one of the things you lost tonight was a pendant. Would that be the  one I bought in Birkham?'

'Yes, I'm afraid it was,' said Ellie. 'Why do you  ask?'

'I'm not sure,' said Pascoe.

'There's something rattling round your nasty suspicious mind,' said Ellie - 'Hang on. There's  something I can tell you about it which might  or might not help. That bit of rock certainly wasn't a local pebble like the chubby fellow in the shop said. One of the geologists at college was admiring  it. I think he fancies me. Anyway he said it was  some kind of bloodstone probably originating from South America. Which makes the local craftsman angle a bit fishy! They probably came in a job lot from Buenos Aires!'

'You are beautiful,' said Pascoe. 'Beautiful! I  love you!'

'You must have been hit harder than you think,'  said Dalziel. 'Let's get this straight. You reckon that Mrs Cottingley's collection of bits of stone has  been passed to Etherege who polishes 'em, sticks  'em in a bracelet or whatever, and flogs them in  his shop?'

'Why not? It'd make a perfect outlet for unidentifiable stuff. Or nearly unidentifiable.'

'Unidentifiable,' grunted Dalziel. 'You can't identify a lump of rock.'

'You can say wherever else it was picked up, it  wasn't Yorkshire!'

'You might be able to, if you had it! And this  is why you think your lass was attacked? For the  pendant?'

'It's possible.'

'You've been watching too much telly,' said  Dalziel. In the background, Pascoe could hear Dalziel's own television set blaring away, but diplomatically he said nothing.

'Well,' resumed Dalziel. 'If you're thinking it was Etherege as robbed your girl, you'd better  think again.'

'I never said

'Because I called at his shop when I was on my way to meet Miss Soper. I had those stamps.  Sturgeon wasn't able to say yea or nay about them, so I thought as I was passing I'd have a look in. Anyway, he wasn't there, but an old bird who looks after his house for him told me he was at a sale in Durham somewhere, not expected back  till late.'

'It was just an idea,' said Pascoe dispiritedly. All their bright ideas seemed to be leading nowhere in  this case. Dalziel's suggestion about a kennels being  the source of information about empty houses had  proved fruitless too. It was in fact true that all the people robbed had owned animals, but a variety of kennels were used and in at least one case,  Lewis's, the dog had been away on holiday with  the family.