Recalled to Life (27 page)

Authors: Reginald Hill

Tags: #Mystery

'In that case,' said Dalziel, 'I'd better have another couple of rashers of bacon!'

FOUR

'Papers and precious matters were brought to us .. .

by the strangest bearers you can imagine.'

'Mr Pascoe,' said Percy Pollock. 'Allow me to present Mrs Friedman.'

The woman sitting next to him in the snug of the Blind Sailor was small and grey-haired. She had cherry cheeks, wore wire-rimmed spectacles, and looked more like an advertiser's image of a favourite granny than a retired prison officer. The image fragmented slightly when in reply to Pascoe's, 'Same again?' she pushed her glass at him and said, 'Large gin. Nothing in it.'

Pascoe got straight down to business.

'Mr Pollock tells me you were working at Beddington Jail when your colleague, Daphne Bush, died?'

'When Cissy Kohler killed her, you mean?' Her voice was sharp, incisive, used to command. 'That's right.'

'So you knew them both. Were you on close terms?'

'With Daphne? Pretty close.'

'And with Kohler?'

'You don't get close to prisoners. At least, I didn't. But I knew her well enough.'

'What did you make of her?'

'She lived inside herself, know what I mean? A lot of them do, those that are in for the duration. We shut them in, and they survive by shutting us out.'

'Disturbed, you mean?'

'No. Well, not
disturbing
anyway. She did what she was told, no fuss. But she wasn't creepie with it like some of them. The other prisoners respected her, but she didn't have any special friends.'

'Except Daphne Bush?'

'Oh yes. Daphne.' The woman sipped her gin. She didn't look so cutely grannyish now. Nor so old. Only mid-sixties, Pascoe guessed. And a match for anyone.

'Was
...
is
Kohler lesbian?'

'I'd have said not. But inside that means nothing.'

'I'm sorry?'

She said, 'Everyone needs affection. If you're inside for the duration, you've got to make do, haven't you? Needn't even be physical, but that's where most of the trouble starts, not because of lousy conditions, but because X's best friend is playing too much ping-pong with Y.'

'But Kohler didn't have any special friends, you say?'

'No. Daphne was the first person to break through.'

'How did that happen? Did Bush make the running?'

'Well, she certainly took a fancy to Kohler, I could see that. And when Daphne wanted something, she knew how to make herself very attractive. Bright, entertaining, full of sympathy. Oh yes, she could really turn it on.'

There was an unmistakable note of personal bitterness here.

'And when she turned it off, what was she like?'

‘Immature, selfish, insensitive,' said Friedman promptly. 'It didn't matter how close you felt you were, she could still say or do things which showed she hadn't got the faintest idea what made you tick. Being nasty with people is one thing, we can all manage that. But not knowing how nasty you're being is really dangerous. As she probably found out, poor cow.'

'How far did their relationship go?'

'Did they screw, you mean? I don't know. If they didn't, it wouldn't be for want of Daphne trying, though I got the impression that she was willing to hold her horses in the expectation of a real fling when Kohler got her parole.'

'Did Kohler apply for parole because of her relationship with Bush, do you think?'

'Daphne certainly thought so,' said the woman. 'Me, I'm not so sure. She'd certainly shown no interest before, though she'd been qualified to apply for ages. Perhaps she thought there was too much feeling outside against her, because of the little girl's death. But she was no Hindley, was she? I doubt if more than a handful of people would even have remembered her name after all those years.'

'Any other possible reason why things changed?'

The woman thought and said, 'There was her visitor.'

'What visitor?'

'It was in the summer. The same year. 'Seventy-Six. She never had visitors, not in all the time I knew her. So I noticed this one.'

'Can you recall the name? Or what he looked like?'

She returned his gaze blankly but it wasn't a blank of ignorance.

Shit! He'd sounded too eager. Whatever he imagined he was doing, this woman was negotiating and he'd just bumped up her price. Best to back away from the identity of the visitor for the time being.

He said, 'So after this visit, Kohler started getting friendly with Bush and showing an interest in parole?'

'Yes, but in what order I couldn't say. Except I sometimes wondered if Kohler couldn't have been using Daphne while letting Daph think it was her making all the running.'

'Using her for what?'

Mrs Friedman shrugged. Pascoe again got the feeling of a tactical reservation rather than a refusal. He changed tack.

'So she and Bush were good friends and the parole board were on the point of letting her loose. What happened?'

‘It was a Thursday afternoon, I remember. Free association time. Kohler was alone in her cell. Daphne went in for one of their little heart to hearts. Next thing there's a lot of shouting, then screaming, then a sharp crack, then silence. I was one of the first in. Daphne was lying on the floor, eyes wide open, staring at nothing. There was blood everywhere. Her head had hit the angle of the wall by the door. Or been smashed against it by someone holding her hair, which showed signs of being pulled out at the roots . . .'

'What about Kohler?'

'She just stood there. She said,
I've killed her.
Later when she was asked if she did it on purpose, all she said was.
How can you kill someone and it not be on purpose?
That was it. Another life sentence. When a con kills a screw, she needs the Archangel Gabriel as witness for the defence to get away with it, and maybe not then. Quite right too.'

Pascoe ignored the implication and asked, 'So what do you think caused the quarrel?'

'An educated guess? I'd say that Daphne started fantasizing about the future and Kohler finally made it clear that once she was out, that was that, all Daphne was getting from her was a nice card every Christmas. So Daphne turned nasty and started throwing dirt at her, only being Daphne, she had no idea of just how hurtful whatever weapon she'd got would be to Kohler. She flipped and hit out.'

'With intent to kill?'

The woman shrugged and said, 'Like I say, it doesn't matter.'

'What was she like after the trial?'

'I only saw her once. They soon transferred her from Beddington, naturally. But I got the impression she'd gone back inside herself, like this time she wanted to bury herself so deep, no one would ever get to her again."

'But someone or something did,' said Pascoe. 'She's finally out.'

'Yes, I thought about it when I heard. And I thought: Well, something did get to her once, no reason why that something shouldn't have got to her again. And I doubt it has much to do with any television do-gooder.'

'I'd be interested to hear your theories, Mrs Friedman," Pascoe said.

She tapped her empty glass significantly on the table. Pascoe reached for it but she slid it away from him towards Pollock. He took it, rose and made for the bar.

Now she leaned across the table towards Pascoe. Behind the granny specs her eyes were black as coal and twice as hard. It was haggle time and she didn't want any witnesses.

She said, 'I gather from Mr Pollock this is by way of being private business rather than strictly speaking an official police matter.'

'Dual status, you might say,' said Pascoe carefully. 'Why do you ask?'

‘Information's like medicine, Mr Pascoe,' she said. 'Private costs more than National Health. In fact if you wait for National Health, it can sometimes take so long, it's hardly worth the bother.'

He said, 'What are we talking about, Mrs Friedman?'

She said, 'Suppose Kohler had used Daph as a post-box so she could write to someone outside without anyone inside knowing officially.'

'I'm supposing,' said Pascoe.

'Suppose someone wrote back care of Daph. And suppose someone knew where to lay hands on that letter. What would you think that might be worth, Mr Pascoe?'

Pascoe smiled. Now he knew he was haggling, he wasn't going to fall into the error of over-eagerness again.

'Not a lot,' he said. 'A fifteen-year-old letter? Can't have been all that valuable, else it would have been sold off long ago.'

'Perhaps it got saved up for a rainy day.'

'That's possible,' admitted Pascoe. 'But look at it this way. For a long while now, ever since that Yank, Waggs, started stirring things, there's been a lot of media interest in Kohler. If this letter had any real value, whoever's got it would have flogged it to telly or the tabloids for about a hundred times more than a poor off-duty cop could afford.' He finished his half-pint of bitter and said, 'I'd better be off. Another half-hour and I'll be back on duty and I don't want to be around here then, do I, Mrs Friedman, in case I get a whiff of something not quite kosher.'

Percy Pollock, spotting a lull in conversation, came across and put her gin in front of her. She drank without looking at him and he retreated to the bar. Pascoe watched her face. She gave nothing away there, but she didn't need to. He'd sat at too many interview tables not to follow the thought process without a visual aid.

He said, very sympathetically, 'You've tried the media, haven't you? But you got a dusty answer. Only you don't want to admit it, because you reckon that would knock my offer right down into the basement. Am I right?'

She smiled now, more like dressed-up wolf than granny.

'You're not daft,' she said. 'But you're not quite right. Yes, I rang the
Sphere
some time back, when the interest in Kohler started. I didn't mention the letter, though. Just wondered if they'd be interested in paying for an old prison officer's reminiscences, no names, no pack drill. We set up a meeting.'

'And?'

'And the next day I got a phone call from a man who said he was in the Home Office Department dealing with pensions. It was nothing he said, just an inquiry about length of qualifying service. But when we got that sorted he chatted on, all very friendly, about how he was sure I knew I was still bound by the Secrets Act and that any breach of confidentiality would certainly mean loss of pension rights and possible prosecution.'

Pascoe whistled. 'So you forgot about the tabloids? Very wise. Someone at the Home Office must have big ears.'

'And big muscles,' she said grimly. 'The Pension Department don't have that kind of clout, I tell you. And I've been thinking ever since, if they were putting the screws on at that sort of level just on account of a few reminiscences, then that letter must be really valuable.'

'In which case you should think yourself lucky they don't know about it,' said Pascoe, who was beginning to suspect it was something he didn't really want to know about either. 'So you reckon it's really valuable? Except that you haven't got anyone you dare try to sell it to, which makes it worthless.'

'I've got you,' she said.

'Maybe. How much are you asking?'

She looked at him like a pork butcher in a meat market.

'Five hundred,' she said.

'Come on! Who do you think I am?'

'Mebbe you should speak to your Mr Dalziel. You're only his rep, Percy tells me.'

'Does he?' said Pascoe. 'Then perhaps he's also told you that if Mr Dalziel had come himself, by now he'd not only have had that letter in his pocket, he'd likely have had your pension too!'

From her reaction, it appeared that at the very least Pollock had suggested he would be a much softer option, for she said immediately, 'All right. Four hundred.'

'One,' said Pascoe.

'Three.'

‘One-fifty.'

'Two-fifty. And I'll tell you what. You can see the letter and if you don't think it's of any interest, give me it back with a tenner for my trouble and we'll forget the whole thing.'

It was an offer hard to refuse, though his heart sank at the bill of expenses he was going to present Dalziel with.

He said, 'I'll need chapter and verse. What I mean is, I want to know the lot, how you got hold of it, everything you know about the circumstances surrounding it.'