Authors: Reginald Hill
'Park this somewhere nice and safe, lad,' ordered Pascoe, climbing out. 'I'll be in Canon Horncastle's house. Come on, Wieldy.'
Clutching the file and his newspaper, Wield found himself once more in pursuit of Pascoe who was shouldering his way through the crowd like an All Black in sight of the line. He caught up with him at the forbidding entrance to a dark narrow house right opposite the Great Tower of the Cathedral.
'Peter,' he said. 'There's something....’
But the door was already opening in response to Pascoe's imperious knocking, and a dark clad figure confronted them with the amazed scorn of a Victorian butler finding trade on his front step.
'What on earth is the meaning of this din?' demanded Canon Horncastle.
'Police,' said Pascoe. 'May we come in?'
As his request was spoken over his shoulder, it seemed to Wield a little redundant. The Canon thought so too, for his thin face flushed like pack ice during a seal hunt and he cried, 'How dare you force your way into my house like this!'
'I'd like to speak to your wife, sir,' said Pascoe.
'My wife!' exclaimed Horncastle as though Pascoe had made an indecent suggestion. 'I assure you of this, Inspector or whatever you are, you will not speak to my wife without a considerably more detailed account of your reasons than you have yet given me.'
‘Thank you for being so protective, Eustace, but I think I'm of an age to make my own decisions.'
The voice came from the head of a brown varnished stairway rising out of the gloomy hall which despite the warmth of the day outside contrived to be damp and chilly. The woman was silhouetted against the light of a landing window and for all Wield could see, she might indeed have been clutching a poison bottle in one hand while with the other she pressed a dagger through her bloodstained nightgown into her ravaged heart. Such Gothic notions seemed entirely appropriate to this sepulchral house and its cadaverous master, but in the event as she descended she proved to be wearing a light grey twinset and a tweedy skirt and carrying nothing more sinister than a pair of spectacles.
Pascoe advanced to meet her. For the third time in the space of less than an hour he was faced with the delicate task of finding out if the woman he was speaking to was on the point of killing herself. With Pam Waterson, he had put the question more or less direct. With Shirley Appleyard he had let his own observations give him the answer. What would be his approach this time? Wield asked himself.
'Could we have a word alone, Mrs Horncastle?' he asked.
'No, you could not.' It was the Canon, his voice thin and dangerous. 'Anything you have to say to my wife will be said in front of me.'
Pascoe scratched his ear and looked interrogatively at the woman. He had no doubt that the Canon opposed the ordination of women and probably didn't much care to see them hatless in church, but this attempt at domestic domination was straight out of Trollope! Surely Victorian values stopped somewhere short of this?
But the woman surprised him.
'Eustace is of course right, Mr Pascoe,' she said quietly. 'There is nothing which can be said to me nor anything which I might say in reply that I would wish to keep from his ears.'
This was either total submission or . . . could it be total war? He looked into her calm features, but found no clue there. Suddenly, however, he was ninety per cent certain she was not his Dark Lady, but he couldn't back off without the missing tenth.
He said, 'Mrs Horncastle, have you ever written any letters to Chief Superintendent Dalziel?'
'No,' she said. 'I have not.'
Her voice carried conviction. But she would say that, wouldn't she? He had to press on.
'These letters were unsigned,' he said.
She saw his drift immediately and half smiled. 'I see you think my association with the Church might have turned me Jesuitical. But no, when I say I have never written to Mr Dalziel, I mean I have never written to him using my own name, or anyone else's name or no name at all. Does that satisfy you?'
Before Pascoe could reply, the Canon's fragile patience snapped.
'This is truly beyond belief,' he cried. 'The Chief Constable shall be apprised of this outrage. How dare you force your way into my house and accuse my wife of writing abusive anonymous letters?'
'I'm sorry, sir, but I've accused your wife of nothing. And why should you think the letters were abusive?'
'Because I have no doubt that that gross man invites his fair share of abuse!' snapped Horncastle. 'If not abusive, then what?'
'That's a good question, Eustace,' said his wife approvingly. 'I should be interested to know what I might be thought capable of, Mr Pascoe. So tell me. Is the correspondence threatening? Inflammatory? Obscene?'
The Canon looked ready to explode again but Pascoe got in quickly, 'In a way, threatening,' he said. 'But not against the Super. Against the writer herself.'
'You mean a threat of suicide?' said Mrs Horncastle. 'The poor woman. I hope with all my heart you find her.'
'You've come here to accuse my wife of threatening suicide?' exclaimed the Canon, attaining a new level of incredulous indignation which his wife obviously felt required explaining.
'There is a special opprobrium attached to suicide in the Church's scale of sins,' she said, in a pedagogic tone. 'My husband would, I think, have preferred obscenity.'
'Dorothy, what has got into you?' said Horncastle in genuine as well as rhetorical amazement. 'I think it best if you go through into the drawing-room while I remove these people from the premises.'
'No, thank you, Eustace,' she said. 'I shall see Mr Pascoe and his friend out. Then I shall return to my room to watch the procession pass. I wouldn't miss it for worlds. I've been helping Chung, you know, Mr Pascoe. I met your wife on several occasions and I enjoyed her company very much.'
'I'm glad,' smiled Pascoe.
'Dorothy! Did you hear what I said? The drawing-room. At once. I have a great deal I want to say to you.'
The Canon looked more animated than Pascoe had ever seen him.
His wife said thoughtfully, 'And I have something I want to say to you, dear. Chung said the time would come and I didn't really believe her. But she was right, I think. She's truly marvellous, isn't she, Mr Pascoe? Without her, I might indeed have been writing letters, if not to Mr Dalziel, certainly on the same subject as that poor woman.'
'Dorothy, do you hear me? I forbid you to go on talking to this man!'
It was the last desperate cry of a shaman who begins to suspect his magic staff has got dry rot.
Dorothy Horncastle wrinkled her nostrils like an animal testing the wind for danger. Then she smiled joyously.
'I hear you, Eustace,' she said. 'But I'm afraid I can no longer obey. Let me see; what was it that Chung said? Oh yes ... I remember. Eustace, why don't you go and screw yourself?'
It was a magic moment but it was flawed for Pascoe by being the moment also when any last scintilla of doubt vanished. Dorothy Horncastle was not the Dark Lady. Which meant if the threat of that last letter were serious that he had failed.
He wasn't even permitted to watch, the final collapse of the Canon whose self-image was fracturing like a cartoon cat running into a brick wall. Wield was pulling at his arm and saying urgently, 'I think there's something you ought to take a look at. I dare say it's nowt as you must've seen it already, only after reading them letters, well, it fits so well...’
He was thrusting the
Evening Post
souvenir edition into Pascoe's hands.
Pascoe read, impatiently at first, and then incredulously; and for a while the disbelief on his face brought relief to Wield's.
Then he seized the Dark Lady file from Wield's hands and began to riffle through it.
'No, it can't be,' he said. 'It can't.'
He took out the last letter and scanned it despairingly.
'Mrs Horncastle,' he said. 'These words,
not for all the world, tower and town, forest and field,
do they mean anything to you?'
'They sound familiar,' said the woman. 'Let me see. Yes, I'm pretty sure they are from one of the Mystery plays. That's right. The Temptation. The Devil takes Christ up to the top of the Temple and first of all tells him to prove his godhead by jumping. Then he claims to have all the world to wield, that is to rule, tower and town, forest and field, and offers this to Christ in return for his homage.'
'The top of the Temple, you say? Oh God,' cried Pascoe. 'Oh God.'
CHAPTER THREE
Once more they were running, forcing their way through the dense-packed crowds and across the narrow street up which a roar came funnelling like a tidal bore to signal the passage of the procession through the old gateway into the close.
The cathedral steps were crowded and the great oak doors with their double frieze of intricate carving in which the sacred was embraced by the profane, were firmly shut. Wield split off to the left, Pascoe to the right, and for once the symbols proved correct for within a few seconds of leaving the crowds behind as he explored behind the view-defying buttresses along the side of the building, he found a small low door which yielded to his touch.
Inside, it was dark and still, with an impression of something waiting and listening, as though the great old church was straining to catch the sound of the approaching procession which it had not heard for over a hundred years.
No time for fanciful reflection, none for respect either. He sprinted with sacrilegious haste down a side aisle through a disapproving forest of columns till he reached the doorway to the Great Tower.
This too was open, and from vast space filled with vibrations of infinity, he moved into the stifling confines of a spiral stair filled only with the heat and harsh rasp of his own breathing.
It was a totally enclosed stairway with no lucent points of reference, and after a couple of moments Pascoe felt as if he were running on a treadmill, ever aspiring, ever low. But his mind was fuelled with fragments of thought which kept his legs pumping away.
. . . her father was a Scot who went to Malaya as a young padre during the troubles of the post-war era ... for a serving officer to marry a Chinese girl at this time, perhaps at any time, was an act of social self-destruction . . .
Self-destruction. He knew all about self-destruction! Why hadn't he shown more interest in Ellie's article? Why hadn't he encouraged her to talk about it?
. . . the family moved to the UK after Malaya achieved independence ... the Reverend Graham obtained a sprawling parish in west Birmingham . . . what his parishioners thought when they first met their new vicar's wife and young daughter is not recorded . . .
Suddenly there was light. The spiral broke on a narrow landing at the furthermost point of which was a small lancet window, scarcely more than a loophole really, but it admitted the blessed gold of the sun. He staggered to it, sucking at the fresh air. It was too narrow and the wall too thick to let him look down, but he could see straight out over the roofs of the town and so gauge how disappointingly low he still was. He turned his back on the light and plunged again into the timeless spaceless hopeless helix.
... at boarding-school she started acting . . . her greatest joy was in the holidays when she went on camping trips with her parents in the Border country which had been her father's birthplace . . .
It was he decided a nightmare. He was not really here, he was safe in bed at home, and one last thrust of his aching legs would drive him through the surface of this awful dream into the familiar world of the warm duvet, the white curtains with the blue flowers silhouetted by the first rays of dawn, and by his side, Ellie, soft-breathing, as neat and orderly in sleep as she was loose-limbed and sprawling awake, as though all her natural rebelliousness vanished when she closed her eyes and some deep-seated longing for order and conformity took over. Ellie, whose souvenir article he should have been the first to read, who had been picked to write it so that he would be the first!
. . . she was eighteen and just about to start drama school when her mother died. It was her father's suggestion that she should take her mother's name. 'Eileen Chung,' he told her, 'will be able to get away with things that Eileen Graham never could!' But, Chung adds, they both knew it wasn't just a showbiz decision. It was a way of extending the dead woman's existence for both of them . . .
Light again! The surface of the dream or the surface of reality was close. This light seeped down from above and grew stronger with every muscle-straining step. Up there somewhere was an open door. But open on to what?
... at twenty-six she was devastated when her father died, and she threw herself into her work with that unremitting energy which is the hallmark of everything she does . . . How old is Chung? I'm afraid that I cannot tell you, for in the only bit of coyness I encountered in this refreshingly frank and open woman, she refused to say! And why would she? For everyone who knows her is agreed that, like the great dramas she produces, time is meaningless in the case of someone as complete, as talented, as unique as Eileen Chung. We in Mid-Yorkshire are very lucky to have her. We should take care that we treasure her according to her worth, and when, as they surely will, pressures come upon her to leave us for new challenges elsewhere, we owe it to ourselves to make it very hard for her to go . . .
He burst through the doorway into the dazzle of the midday sun and reeled with the heat and the light and the joy of it. He caught at the door frame to steady himself and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was still and no longer dazzled. And he was looking at Chung.
She was leaning backwards against the shallow parapet, looking towards him with a welcoming smile, beautiful beyond the scope of brush or pen.
She called, 'Hello, Pete, baby. I was beginning to think no one would make it.'
'Chung. Hi.'
He began to move towards her. She shook her head slightly. He stopped.