'Oh, Father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-
Man when I'm quite
growed
up!'
‘I am,' said Miss Marsh, 'what you might call a bleeder. Not fully haemophiliac in the Romanoff sense, you understand, but once I start, I take a deal of stanching.'
Not just blood either, thought Pascoe who had anticipated a frosty welcome from the ex-nanny but instead found himself drinking Earl Grey and listening to nursery reminiscences which stretched forever like childhood summers. At one point without interrupting her flow she had arisen, gone over to an ornate escritoire which looked as if it would fetch a bob or two at Sotheby's, and taken from a drawer a well filled photograph album. Thereafter her lecture was illustrated, and for the first time Pascoe truly appreciated the Shandean dilemma that present becomes past at a rate faster than past can be retrieved into the present.
Then, just as he despaired of ever introducing his proposed line of questioning, she gave him an entree with an anecdote about the sanguinary consequences of little Tommy Partridge's cute way with a pin.
'That's why you bled so much at Mickledore Hall when you walked into the wardrobe door?' he interposed.
'Indeed yes. If I'd guessed that my little accident was even a scruple in the scales of justice, I would of course have spoken up years ago. But I never knew. As I was saying to your Mr Hiller only yesterday afternoon, I still do not understand how your Mr Tallantire came to ignore the true explanation of the girl's bloodstained hands.'
Pascoe couldn't understand it either, but there were many things beyond his understanding, what he was doing here being one of them.
'I want to know everything Adolf knows,' Dalziel had said. 'So first thing tomorrow you bugger off and talk to Marsh and Partridge.'
Now was the moment when Pascoe, who had no recollection of volunteering his services at all, should have contested the principle instead of weakly raising objections to the practice.
'No use seeing them till Mr Hiller's been, is it?' he said cunningly.
'Naturally. And as he went to see them this afternoon, you'll be OK.'
'How the hell do you know that?' Pascoe had cried.
'I had a look in Adolf's desk diary afore you came tonight,' said Dalziel, waggling his great fingers. 'Computers may bother me but I were brought up on drawers.'
'But I can't just take a morning off . . .'
'I'll cover for you,' said the fat man impatiently. 'I'd ring Partridge and make an appointment. Lords like protocol, it makes 'em feel important. Nannies get lonely and prefer surprise visits.'
Not even sociology lecturers uttered their truisms with such authority as Dalziel, perhaps because his were more likely to be true.
Pascoe glanced at the Bamberg clock which looked genuine, as did many other of her elegant ornaments, if he could trust an eye sharpened by long acquaintance with stolen property lists. She was clearly a collector, or perhaps the rich and powerful showered such gifts upon those who sheltered them from the more nauseating aspects of child-rearing. The clock's gilded hands warned him that the rich and powerful were wont to shower something quite different on those who kept them waiting.
He said, 'And this noise that woke you, was any other explanation found for it, apart from the possibility of its being the fatal shot?'
'Not that I know of. I am sure it must have come either from the room below which was the gunroom, or the room adjacent which was my girls' room, or the room above which was the maid Lowrie's room.'
Perhaps after all it was Partridge banging away! Pascoe frowned to hide the thought from Miss Marsh's Presbyterian eye.
'I should not of course have been in that room. As the senior nanny I should have had the proper nursery room further down the corridor, but as Kohler had her infant twins to care for, I did not insist on precedence.'
'And the other children?'
'Opposite my room and next to the twins was my Tommy. And opposite Kohler and next to my girls were the Stamper children.'
'Who didn't have a nanny?'
'No.' She pursed her lips. 'The worst of combinations for proper child-rearing, I'm afraid. An American and "trade". Sir Arthur, as he is now, had his heart in the right place, but without the background, he was quite unable to distinguish between a kitchen skivvy and a valued family aide. Mrs Stamper in her democratic American way was equally unable to draw a line between mutual respect and over-familiar interference. Thus they had great difficulty in keeping nursery staff. I am no snob, Mr Pascoe, but there are some things it is necessary to be born to.'
Like murder? wondered Pascoe.
He said, 'Do you think Sir Ralph could have killed Pamela Westropp?'
'Certainly,' she said. 'He could have done anything.'
'You sound as if you approve?'
'My approval doesn't come into it. People like Sir Ralph are beyond the judgements of the commonalty, Mr Pascoe. We do not disapprove of an eagle for killing a lamb, or a panther for pulling down a goat.'
'You do if you're a farmer,' said Pascoe. 'So you think he was guilty?'
'I didn't say that. On the whole, I suspect he wasn't.'
'Because of the doubts about Miss Kohler's confession, you mean?'
'Of course not. What has that to do with anything? No, I just feel that if someone like Sir Ralph Mickledore set out to commit a crime, he would not be so incompetent as to let that blundering ox of a policeman come within a thousand miles of him.'
'You didn't find Mr Tallantire very sympathetic, then?'
'No, I did not,' she said sternly. 'He had the manners and the prejudices of a union agitator. It comes as little surprise to learn that he bullied a confession out of that American child and falsified evidence to destroy a man whose simple existence must have filled his soul with envy and resentment.'
She spoke with great passion and Pascoe thought glumly how delighted Hiller must have been to hear such a positive condemnation of his prey.
He said, 'Thank you for your time, Miss Marsh,' and rose.
'But I haven't shown you all my albums,' she said, gesturing to the escritoire drawer which looked crammed with enough material for a Holroyd biography. 'Of course I realize how tedious an old woman's memories must be . . .'
'Oh no, no,' he assured her, and paid for his politeness with a conducted tour of the photo-lined hall on his way out. She didn't actually say, 'There's my last Duke on the wall,' but got pretty close.
'Now this is one of my favourites,' she cried as he managed to get his hand on the doorknob. 'Some of my young gentlemen and myself when I was at Beddington.'
'Beddington?' he said in astonishment.
'Yes. I went as housemother there after I left the Partridge employ. I fancied a little change.'
By now his mind had made the adjustment from Beddington, the women's prison, to Beddington College, the public school. He looked at the photo just to make sure. Miss Marsh sitting at a garden table surrounded by half a dozen young lads. Before she could start on a life history of each, he said rapidly, 'Wasn't it Beddington Prison that Kohler served the first part of her sentence in?'
'Was it? How strange. The College is, naturally, at a considerable remove from the prison, though by an interesting coincidence it was the same distinguished architect who designed both buildings. There is a significant pattern in such things if we look for it, don't you agree, Mr Pascoe?'
He nodded vigorously and opened the door. He would have agreed with anything to get out of there.
In the street he stood and looked up at the elegant Georgian town house so tastefully converted into six elegant flats that only the multiple bell push showed it was no longer the home of some rich Harrogate gentleman. Nannying must be a profitable business - unless of course the apartment too was a grace and favour perk from her grateful employers.
Perhaps he was in the wrong business. He tried to imagine himself and Dalziel in starched blouses pushing prams together through the park. But instead of bringing a smile to his face, it brought a picture of Rosie into his mind and with it a heart-constricting certainty that he was never going to see her again. He could feel all the symptoms of panic starting. He tried to recall the techniques for controlling them but instead found himself running drunkenly down the street towards a distant phone-box. He had to ring, had to hear her voice; his sanity, his very life, depended on it. But by the time he reached the box, it was passing. He still wanted to talk to his daughter, but knew now that he mustn't, that he could not trust himself not to let his terror trickle down the line and infect her.
But the temptation was still strong and to block it he picked up the receiver and dialled the Mid-Yorkshire number.
'CID,' he said. 'Hello. That you, Wieldy? Peter Pascoe here.'
'Oh,' said Wield's voice without much enthusiasm. 'Where are you?'
'Harrogate. Look, do me a favour. There's a Mavis Marsh lives in a flat here. Find out how much rent she pays, and how much she should. No, not urgent. Just idle curiosity.'
And an excuse for ringing. He gave the address once. With Sergeant Wield you never had to repeat yourself.
'You going to be long?' wondered Wield.
'Rest of the morning certainly.'
'Anything I should know about?'
'Hasn't Him Upstairs told you?' fenced Pascoe, uncertain what form Dalziel's 'cover' might have taken.
'Haven't seen him. Seems he rang in first thing and said his grandmother had been taken ill and he had to go and see her.'
'His
what?’
'That's what I thought. If he ever had a granny, which I doubt, she must be seriously dead by now.'
'And he left no message for me?'
'Not for you. About you. Said you'd rung him in the night with a bad toothache and you might be a bit late as you'd likely need an emergency dental appointment. Your dentist in Harrogate, is he?'
So much for the promised cover. It was pathetic, except that to a man who could use a sick granny as grounds for bunking off, a dental appointment might shine like the brightest heaven of invention.
He glanced at his watch. He was going to be late for a lord, adding discourtesy to deception. Pulling the wool over a garrulous nanny's eyes was one thing, but this was really going naked into the conference chamber. Dalziel's rather surprising dip into the epic past came to his mind. What was it Aeneas carried to get him into, and out of, the nether regions? A golden bough, that was it.
'You still there?' demanded Wield's voice in his ear.
'Yes, but I shouldn't be,' said Pascoe. 'See you later.'
He stepped out of the box. The street, though it was called something Grove, was quite devoid of trees. But he could see a sign saying
T
HE
G
ROVE
B
OOKSHOP
. He had read somewhere that if you approached a writer with his grandmother's head in one hand and his latest book in the other, you were sure of a genial welcome.
In the shop they said, yes, they had a copy of
In A Pear Tree
, it was £12.95, and no, the paperback hadn't been published yet, there'd been an unexplained delay.
Groaning with the natural pain felt by most educated Englishmen at parting with money for books when the libraries are full of them, Pascoe paid.
TWO
'Is your hand steady enough to write?'
'It was when you came in.'
Two hundred and fifty miles to the south, Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel was also confronting the high cost of literature.
He rarely read crime novels, but bookstall advertising had left a subliminal impression that the genre had more Queens than Solomon, so when he rang the bell of William Stamper's St John's Wood flat, he anticipated the epicene, and would not have been dismayed by drag.
Instead the door was opened by a burly man in a balding woollen dressing-gown, his unshaven face pouched and pallid with what Dalziel's expert eye identified as the effect of a serious hangover.
' 'Morning, lad. Like a ciggy, or do you still prefer bull's-eyes?'
'I'm sorry . . .' said Stamper, blinking hard. His reopened eyes looked at air. Somewhere behind him Dalziel's voice said, 'If this is what writing does to you, I'd give it up and get a real job. Kitchen in here? You look like you need a coffee almost as much as me. Ever travel Intercity? Every time you lift your cup, they hit a bump so's you throw the stuff over your shoulder. Best place for it, I reckon.'
'Who the hell are you?' demanded Stamper.
'You've forgotten me already?' said Dalziel, amazed. He paused in his task of spooning large quantities of instant coffee into half pint mugs to produce his warrant card. 'Detective-Superintendent Dalziel. But you can call me Uncle Andy.'