Ruling Passion (12 page)

This was the only sighting of the man there had  been and the description was almost useless. But  the incident was deeply worrying. All the break-ins  had taken place when the houses were empty,  usually when the owners were on holiday. If this  pattern continued, interruption was unlikely. But  if it did happen again, there might be no protective  headgear next time.

He tossed aside the file with another string of  coughs. Meticulousness was not enough. There was nothing there which turned him in any particular direction. Perhaps Pascoe's mind would  be programmed by it to some effect. Himself, he  needed something more animal; a scent. He sniffed  in unconscious acknowledgement of the thought.

Pascoe, he decided, needed chivvying. It would take his mind off things.

'It's more than twelve thousand now with  Cottingley's bits and pieces.'

'Thirteen thousand one hundred and thirty-five,' said Pascoe. 'According to the insurance  count, that is.'

He glanced at his watch. He had promised to  phone Ellie at lunch-time. It was a necessary contact. It might not prove possible to meet at night.  Too often in the past he had had to cancel engagements at the last moment. Last Friday, for instance.

'He must be getting rid of the stuff somewhere.'

'The thought had crossed my mind,' sneered  Pascoe.

Dalziel rose and stared down at him, removing the thick-rimmed spectacles he wore for reading.  It was a menacing gesture.

‘That's far enough, Sergeant,' he said. 'It's been a  bad week-end for you. But there hasn't been a civil  word from you since you came in this morning. I  hope to God you spoke to Cottingley a bit fairer.'

By Dalziel's standards, it was a mildly expressed  rebuke, but Pascoe felt a touch of shame.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Sir. I have this feeling of -  well - frustration . . . as if . . .'

But Dalziel had no desire for a heart-to-heart  talk. His pain was worse. Indigestion, he decided  with desperate optimism. Too much stodge, not  enough exercise. A brisk walk to the chemist's  would do him good.

'Get your finger out, Sergeant,' he said wearily. ‘There's some good descriptions there. He can't just  be filling his bottom drawer with what he takes. It  must turn up somewhere.'

He left. Pascoe should have felt indignant, hurt  even. But oddly enough he felt almost affectionate as the sound of coughing receded down the  corridor.

'Hello, love. You all right?'

'Fine. Lots of sympathy concealing academic ghoulishness. No reaction from my students,  though. They don't believe we have lives separate  from them. How was the Fat Man?'

'A bit under the weather, I think. But pretty  considerate for him. We're very busy.'

‘That's good. At the moment anyway. But is it  late-busy?'

'I don't know. I'll ring when I do.'

'Please. Peter, I dreamt about them last night.'

'Oh, love.'

'We were back in Eskdale. Remember? Only it  was Brookside Cottage, not that old grey farmhouse. A thought struck me. Colin might have  gone back there.'

'Why?'

'I don't know. Just a thought. It was where my  mind took me to get away from them being dead.  Understand?'

'I think so.' He was silent for a moment. 'Look,  I've got to go now. Sooner I get started, more  chance of seeing you tonight.'

'Right. I'll hear from you later. 'Bye.'

"Bye.'

The trouble with most of the stuff Pascoe's burglar  got hold of was that it was valuable without being  unique. The kind of houses he chose had enough  good china, brass, bronze, silver and, occasionally, gold, lying around in one form or another to make  his visit worthwhile. Bits of jewellery, cash even,  generally quite inadequately locked away, were a  frequent perk.

His technique as reconstructed by Pascoe was  simple. He chose houses with gardens large enough  to provide some kind of seclusion; drove up in  his car (they had some completely unhelpful tyre marks); parked out of sight of the road, in the  garage sometimes; smashed a window to get in  (noise was no object where there was seclusion;  on one occasion he had simply chopped down a  kitchen door); examined the interior at leisure;  filled a suitcase or two with whatever he evaluated  highest; and left.

At first the break-ins had been straightforward.  The first couple of houses looked as if they hadn't been touched. But an element of despoilation had  crept in. Walls were defaced, carpets stained, furniture scarred. At Cottingley's house, the latest  in the series, perhaps in acknowledgement of the  value of his haul, he had merely left a kettle  full of urine. Or perhaps, thought Pascoe, this  marked a new direction. Defacation, masturbation even, during thefts of this kind were not  uncommon elements in a certain criminal syndrome, frequently associated with great mental and emotional instability. He recalled uneasily the  attack on the old man.

None of the stuff had turned up, not locally  anyway, so there must be an efficient distribution system. Not that a great deal of it would be  clearly identifiable in any case. The latest haul had  been typical. A small amount of silver, as valuable  melted down as in its present form. Some valuable  but not unique glass. Ornaments. Some jewellery.  An old clock. And Mrs Cottingley's collection of  stones and pebbles, picked up all over the world,  as she accompanied her husband on his frequent business trips. Only the clock offered them any real  chance.

What he needed was a lead. At the moment  there was not a useful thought in his head.

'Stuff it,' he said, and picked up his morning  newspaper which he had not yet had time to open.

Colin peered out at him from near the bottom of the front page. For a moment he thought  it meant they had found him, but it was only  an appeal for public help. The short piece on  the killings contained nothing new. There were a  couple of meaningless quotations from Backhouse  and, more surprisingly, a little harangue about the public weal from French, the coroner. Clearly he  was a man who liked to be noticed.

He turned the pages to escape the photograph.  Other people's troubles seemed to start from every column. Explosions, revolution, unemployment, a  couple of strikes; a trade union leader in Bradford  was accused of corruption; an international footballer had been suspended; a mineral mining company was accused of despoiling bonny Scotland. He  looked at the last item more closely. The company  was Nordrill; Culpepper's firm he recalled. Suddenly he was back in Thornton Lacey.

He crumpled the newspaper in his hands and  dropped it into the waste bin. There was a knock  at the door and a young head peered cheerfully  round.

'Excuse me, Sarge, but there's a Mr Sturgeon  here. Says you'll be glad to see him.'

'Will I?' said Pascoe. 'OK. Show him in.'

Edgar Sturgeon had been number five in the list  of victims. Pascoe remembered him well, partly  because he had lost a stamp collection valued at  just under a thousand pounds and partly because  he hadn't seemed particularly distressed to find his  house burgled on return from holiday. In some  people this would have been suspicious but Pascoe  couldn't find it in him to suspect the old man of  being bent. They had almost instantly taken a  liking to each other - not the kind of reason  for quieting suspicion that Dalziel liked, but, in  any case, Sturgeon was too comfortably placed  to need an insurance fiddle. A self-made man, he  had recently retired, having sold out his interest in  the local timber-yard he had built up from nothing  over forty years. Perhaps he was not quite ready  for the life of easy retirement his comfortable wife and her three tortoiseshell cats had planned for  him, and Pascoe had suspected from his lively  demeanour that he was still putting his business  acumen to some profitable use.

'Hello, Mr Sturgeon. Come on in,' he said with  a smile.

'Hello, Sergeant Pascoe,' said the grizzle-haired,  thick-set man who slowly entered.

He looks older, thought Pascoe. And his demeanour was now far from lively.

'What can I do for you?' he asked.

Sturgeon sat down and took an envelope out of  his breast-pocket.

'I've got some of my stamps back,' he said flatly.

'Have you indeed? That's great. Where from?'

'A friend of mine. I saw him at the club on  Saturday and he told me he'd bought some stamps for his nephew's birthday. Coronation set 1953.  Couple of quids' worth. He asked me to take a  look to tell him if he'd been done or not.'

Pascoe looked with interest at the block of four  stamps he had shaken carefully out of the envelope. They were unfranked.

'How can you be sure these are yours?' he  asked, after vainly trying to spot any distinguishing  feature.

'Them's mine all right,' asserted Sturgeon. 'Give  us some credit, lad! I did a little repair job on the  big 'un. You can hardly see it, but it means it's  worth precious little. My mate was done! And if  you look at the back you can see how they've been  mounted. They don't do that nowadays but when  I started, you stuck 'em in.'

'I'll take your word,' said Pascoe, glad to see the  old man a little more lively. 'This friend, where'd  he get them?'

'Etherege and Burne-Jones. Out at Birkham.'

'Birkham? Yes, I know it.'

Birkham was a village a few miles to the east. It made a useful half-way meeting point for  Ellie and Pascoe, particularly as it possessed in  the Jockey a very pleasant pub which provided  excellent steaks. The only trouble was that, as  always, excellence and beauty attracted crowds and Birkham was a fashionable place both to  visit and to inhabit. The architectural and gastronomical delights of the place had been examined in a colour supplement article about a year  previously and this had naturally increased its  popularity.

It was, thought Pascoe with a small shock of  recognition, a kind of Yorkshire Thornton Lacey.

He shook his mind free from the thought and  concentrated on Messrs Etherege and Burne-Jones.  He knew their shop, a converted barn, by sight but  had never been inside. To a policeman's eyes, all  second-hand shops, whether claiming to deal in  'antiques' or 'junk', were suspect. They provided  the best and most obvious outlet for stolen property. But in his experience, a fashionable establishment like the one at Birkham was less likely  to be used for this than its urban counterpart. The  opportunities for legal dishonesty in the selling  of 'antiques' were too great to make fencing a  worthwhile risk.

'What will you do?' asked Sturgeon.

'We'll take a look, of course. See if there's anything else of yours there. You say you were shown  the stamps on Saturday night? Why didn't you get  in touch yesterday?'

Sturgeon shrugged.

'It didn't seem worth spoiling your week-end,'  he said.

Pascoe stood up and crossed to a filing cabinet  which he opened and peered into.

‘That was kind of you,’ he said after a while.  If his voice sounded strange, Sturgeon obviously  did not notice. He sat staring dully at the desk  before him.

He's not interested in the stamps, thought Pascoe  suddenly. There's something else.

He extracted a file from the open drawer.

'We have an inventory of your stuff here, Mr  Sturgeon,' he said. 'Now this would be item 27,  wouldn't it?'

Sturgeon looked and nodded. Quickly and efficiently Pascoe drafted out a statement for the man  to sign. But when he had done so, he seemed  reluctant to leave.

'Sergeant,' he said. 'Could you do something  for me?'

'Depends what is,' said Pascoe.

Sturgeon produced a piece of paper. It had a  name and address written on it. He passed it to  Pascoe who read it without enlightenment.

Archie Selkirk, Strath Farm, Lochart, Nr Callander.

'Lochart's a village in Perthshire,' said Sturgeon,  speaking quickly as if eager to get the words out.  'There's a police-sergeant stationed there. It'll be  like it is in the villages round here - everyone  knowing everyone else's business. Could you ring  this sergeant and ask him what he knows about  that man?'

'Archie Selkirk?' said Pascoe thoughtfully. 'I'm  not sure, Mr Sturgeon. What is it you want to  find out?'

'Nothing,’ said Sturgeon. 'Nothing in particular.  Just anything that might be known. Can you  help?'

'Well, I'll see what can be done. But people have  got a right to privacy, you know, Mr Sturgeon. The  police force can't just be used as an information  centre. We've got to have some reason for making  inquiries.'

Sturgeon stood up, pushing his chair back  angrily.

'If you can't help, you can't help,' he snapped  and made for the door.

'Hold on!' said Pascoe. 'I said I'd see what I  could do.'

'Please yourself,' said Sturgeon stonily and left,  closing the door forcefully behind him.

Pascoe took a couple of steps after him, then  'Shit!' he said and sat down. His business was  crime. Today he would stick to it and leave the  social therapy to others.

He thrust Sturgeon's piece of paper into his  breast pocket and went down to the canteen for  lunch.

He had a hard but totally unproductive afternoon. Paperwork seemed to come at him from all  sides and his one excursion into the outside world  proved fruitless too. The 'closed' sign was up in the  premises of Etherege and Burne-Jones at Birkham  and he had a flat tyre on the journey back. He  changed the wheel in record time, determined that  at least the evening was going to remain unspoilt.

His haste turned out to be unnecessary. When  he rang Ellie at five-thirty to say it looked as if he  was going to be able to get away that evening, she  answered in a voice distant with fatigue.

'I'm whacked, Peter,' she said. 'It just came  on this afternoon. I had to send a class away.  They probably reckon I'm pregnant. Or at the  menopause, more likely.'

Her effort at lightness failed miserably.

'Have you seen a doctor?' asked Pascoe anxiously.

'Hell, no. I got some pills from the college sick-bay. Guaranteed to knock me out.'

'Pills? Don't you think you should . . .'

'Oh, stop fussing!' she snapped in irritation.  'We've got a trained nurse here and she only  doles out two of these things at a time, so there's  not much risk of an overdose.'