Ruling Passion (25 page)

'Get some sleep,' advised Dalziel. 'I'll see you  tomorrow.'

He replaced the receiver and stood in thought for a moment. The television raged in the neighbouring room, but the house still sounded empty. His  stomach rumbled, reminding him of the inroads  Grainger's diet was making on his flesh.

Pascoe's a good lad, he thought. He has his daft  moments, but who doesn't? Most of what he said was worth thinking about. He looked at his watch.  It was only quarter to ten. Worth a call.

Chapter 4

Thornton Lacey was lovely in the morning sunlight, and surprisingly quiet. Ellie glanced at her  watch as she drove down the High Street. She was  too late for the nine o'clock captains of industry. She realized she had been externalizing her own  feelings of tension at the imminent inquest and  had somehow expected the place to be as nervously taut as a Western Frontier town before the  big shoot-out.

Pascoe met her outside Crowther's house and greeted her with a satisfyingly passionate kiss -  satisfying not because she felt much like bed at  the moment but as a reassurance of his physical  well-being. For all that, he looked pale, and she examined the dressing on the back of his head  as though it could tell her something about the  nature of the wound beneath.

'I'm all right,' said Pascoe, who had in fact slept well until about six o'clock, when he had woken with his mind chaotic with thoughts which he had only begun to put into some kind of order. He had  long since acquired the habit (most suggestively amusing to Ellie) of setting out his notebook and  pencil on his bedside table every night so that  intuitions of the night should not be sacrificed to  indolence. It rested in his pocket now.

He led Ellie into the house.

'How about you?' he asked. 'That was an odd  business.'

'Too true, I'm fine. Fat Dalziel had pumped so  much gin into me that I slept like a log. He's quite  a kind old sod, really. He rang me up again later to  check that I was OK.'

'Did he now? About quarter to ten?'

'That's right,' said Ellie surprisingly. 'Why do you ask?'

Pascoe began to laugh. It was a good sound so  Ellie did not interrupt it, puzzled though she was.

'It's the thought of old Uncle Andy phoning about your health!' he explained. 'It's always business with that one.'

Quickly he described his own telephone conversation with Dalziel the previous night. Ellie was  less than rapturous about the implied theory.

'You mean Etherege is a fence?'

'In a small way.'

'And he jumped me last night just to get that  pendant back?'

'Well, not Etherege,' admitted Pascoe. 'He's probably got an alibi.'

'Ah, I see! A good friend of his, you mean, who just happened to think he'd do his mate a handy  turn by putting a bag on my head and shutting me  in a broom cupboard? All for an old pebble?'

'The pebble's the key,' said Pascoe, hastily  retreating from the uncertain ground Ellie was  challenging him on. Quickly he told her about Mrs Cottingley's collection of stones.

'Perfectly safe, really,' he concluded. 'But if you were the first to buy one and he then realized,  as he did, that you were a copper's moll, it's  the kind of thing that might niggle. So when he sees you cavorting with Detective-Superintendent  Fat Dalziel, he decides to act on the spur of the  moment.'

'Who? Not Etherege, you say. Who then?'

'Yes. There's the rub, I'm afraid,' said Pascoe thoughtfully. 'Who else would be sufficiently concerned? Only one answer. The guy who did the  robberies. Which would mean he was in the Jockey last night.'

He laughed.

'Pity Dalziel didn't think of that. He could have  lined all the customers up and made them pee in  a kettle.'

'What?'

'Don't you remember I told you what this villain  did? Well, we had the stuff tested and it turns out  he's a diabetic. A slender lead, but a lead.'

'And he's also the man who murdered that estate agent? Lewis?'

'Probably.'

Ellie shuddered at the memory of the gloomy corridor in the Jockey. Something else connected with the Jockey which she ought to tell Pascoe  nearly surfaced for a moment, then was gone.

'Perhaps I was lucky,' she said.

'Perhaps,' said Pascoe, putting his arm round her  shoulder. 'I think it's nearly time to go.'

Dalziel felt lucky as he drove out to Birkham.  If Pascoe were right and Etherege was doing a  bit of fencing, Andrew Dalziel was the man to  lean on him. He could be sympathetic.
People are  bound to take advantage of a man in your position.
Promissory.
You tell us what you know and I'll see you  all right. A nod's as good as a wink, eh?
Threatening.
There's a murder involved here, you know. Withholding  information can get you ten years.

But first he had to establish that this wasn't  just something dreamed up by a man who'd been  knocked on the head. He'd play the customer to  start with. Have a look round. Size up the man.

He was quite looking forward to it.

It was about time he had a break. There was  all that stolen property unrecovered, a murder  unsolved, Sturgeon's forty thousand sunk without  a trace - all these things somehow linked as well. One good break could settle the lot. Perhaps he was  on his way to it now. He began to whistle a selection from
Oklahoma!
bursting into off-key song  when he reached 'Oh what a beautiful morning!'

'I realize, Mr Backhouse, that it might not be  desirable for you to give us a detailed account  of your investigations into these tragic and terrible deaths, but insofar as anything you have  discovered might relate directly to this present  court's business, we would be grateful to hear of  it.'

French's tone was reasonable, deferential almost,  but the gaze he fixed on Backhouse over his reading spectacles had something of defiance in it.

Pascoe looked round the crowded schoolroom.  The desks had all been stacked outside in the corridor, but it still bore the unmistakable signs  of its normal, more innocent function. Children's paintings adorned the walls and a chart immediately behind Backhouse demonstrated that Celia was the tallest in the class, taller even than James and Antony. Poor Celia. He hoped that time would  redress the balance for her.

Backhouse was explaining with his usual combination of efficiency and courtesy that he was not  yet able to contribute very much officially to the  proceedings.

Ellie nudged Pascoe.

'Where's Pelman?' she whispered.

He glanced round the room again. The Culpeppers  were there; the Dixons, Bells, Hardistys; the sisters  Langdale from the post office; Jim Piss Palfrey;  Anton Davenant making notes, but no Pelman.

'He'll have work to do, I suppose. Why?'

'Nothing. Something I remembered. Hang on.'

French had finally succeeded in what had clearly  been his aim, to have the note found in the abandoned car introduced into the evidence.

'It has been established that this note is written  in the hand of Colin Hopkins, husband of the  deceased woman?'

'Yes,' said Backhouse.

'And that his fingerprints are on it?'

'Yes.'

'Thank you. It is not generally the practice of this court to have notes written in such circumstances read aloud, but in this case I think it may be in  the public interest to depart from practice. Such  a crime as this arouses feelings of horror and  revulsion in everyone, but among those who live  in proximity to the scene of the crime, it must  also arouse trepidation and fear of repetition. It  is the task of this court to allay such fears where  possible.'

French coughed twice and began to read from the paper before him. Pascoe shut down his hearing and turned his thoughts elsewhere, but phrases  kept on coming through . . .
here for ever, ever must  I stay ... a naked lover, bound and bleeding ... all is calm in this eternal sleep . . .

'Pope,' whispered Ellie.

'What?'

'Pope. The poet. He's quoting Pope.'

She was holding his hand tightly, and he felt she was trying to keep the words intoned by French  in a dry, unemotive, literary context, far removed from the rain-lashed car bumping and skidding its way towards the stinking quarry pool.

'Oh, Peter,' she said. 'It's
Eloisa to Abelard!'

She stood up and left. There was no outburst of  tears, nothing dramatic at all. It was as if she had  remembered an appointment elsewhere.

With an apologetic glance at French, Pascoe followed. He caught up with her in the playground.

'Don't you see,' she said. 'That poem would come to mind because of us. In some way he  must have thought about us at the end.'

She clung to him, sobbing now. Pascoe held  her close but could not enter into her mood of  emotional abandonment.

'You mean, because we were coming for the week-end and one of his little jokes was to compare us with two medieval lovers, an eighteenth-century poem on the subject would come to mind  after he'd murdered his wife, two close friends, and  decided to commit suicide?'

'For God's sake, Peter, do you have to be so  precise and analytical about everything,' she cried,  pushing him away. But the tears had stopped.

'This poem, it's years since I looked at Pope, what  form does it take?'

'Well, it's supposed to be a letter from the girl  Eloisa after they've been separated. Peter Abelard  was castrated, you knew that? She's in a nunnery  or some such place, but the fire's still there. It's a  very passionate poem.'

'A strange choice. Look, love, I want to pushoff for a while and work something out. Do you  mind?'

One of Ellie's many virtues was that she knew when not to object.

'All right. I'm all right, I'll go back in now.'

'Fine. One thing. What are you going to say about Pelman?'

'Well, it's not about him really, not directly anyway. It's just that I remember something more about that holiday in Eskdale. That awful farmer  who kept hanging round, the one who rented us  the place? Well, he lived by himself and the locals  in the pub said that his wife had run off with one  of his farmhands a few years earlier. No one ever  saw them again.'

Pascoe grasped the railings of the playground with both hands and stared unseeingly at the sunlit field on to which the school buildings backed.

'You're right,' he said. 'I remember. And didn't Colin, and Tim, I think, haunt him one night when they were a bit stoned? They dressed up in sheets  and ran down the fellside behind his farmhouse as he was driving home.'

'That was it,' said Ellie, smiling widely. 'I remember.'

For a moment they were all alive again.

'I'll go now,' said Pascoe gently. 'See you later.'

'All right.'

She watched him stride athletically across the yard and through the gate. Something made her  call after him, 'Take care!' but she didn't think he heard. Incongruously she now remembered  what she should have told him about the Jockey. But it would keep. This morning had to be got  through first.

'I don't know much about antiques,' said Dalziel,  'but I know what I like.'

'Really?' said Jonathan Etherege, a smile spreading over his round pleasant face. 'I can only hope  you have an expensive lack of taste. Would you  like to browse?'

'Aye,' said Dalziel, enjoying his fat philistine  role. Role? he thought.
I am a
fat philistine!

But the thought merely added to his enjoyment.

'Been in the business long, Mr Etherege?' he asked, as he strolled around the antiques section  of the shop checking the articles he saw against  a mental list of stolen property. It was a matter of  routine rather than hope.

'Long enough,' said Etherege. 'I started in the scrap business and worked my way down.'

'You're very frank,' said Dalziel. 'Why do you  say
down?’

'Half a joke.'

'And the other half?'

'Well, if I'm selling you a couple of hundred-weight of lead-piping, you know the going price  and either want it or don't. With this stuff everyone thinks in terms of value. It's not just a matter of so much a hundredweight.'

'I still don't follow why you said
down,'
grunted

Dalziel, trying unsuccessfully to open the top drawer of a handsome Victorian desk. Etherege leaned over, pulled, and the drawer slid effortlessly open.

‘Price is always above value, sir,' he said. 'So it  must be down.'

'Too bloody clever for me,' said Dalziel. 'Still you sound like an honestly dishonest man. You like brass, eh?'

'I've been without it,' said Etherege. 'I won't be  again if I can help it.'

'No. This all local work?'

They had moved into the craft section.

'A lot of it. Fancy a basket for your wife? Or a horse brass?'

'For my wife? Not very complimentary,' said  Dalziel. He could see no sign of anything like the  pendant Ellie had described. He began to poke  among the ornaments displayed on a large wooden  tray.

'Very nice,' he said. 'But I'd like something for  the neck. No, not a collar either. A whatsit.'

'A pendant?' suggested Etherege. 'We have a couple here. A simple rather plain design, if you like that sort of thing.'

'No. No,' said Dalziel. 'Something a bit more  decorative than that.'

'I'm sorry. We did have some rather nice ones with local stones in a ceramic setting, but, alas,  they've all gone now,' answered Etherege. 'Such  a pity.'

He knows, thought Dalziel suddenly. The sod  knows. He knows who I am and what I'm after. Shit! If he's that sharp, it's going to be difficult to  touch him.

He looked at his watch. It might be worthwhile  getting a search warrant and really turning this  place over. But he doubted it.

Etherege was looking at his watch too.

'Will you excuse me a moment?' he said. 'Feel free to poke around as much as you like.'

Cheeky bastard, thought Dalziel, as he watched  Etherege disappear into what looked like a small office behind the stamp display. He's probably  gone off for his elevenses so I can convince myself  there's nothing here.