Ruling Passion (26 page)

The thought of his usual mid-morning coffee  and two doughnuts set his stomach rumbling.  He'd even been reasonably successful these past  few days in cutting down on the drink, and the  cumulative effect was not one he could foresee  himself becoming resigned to.

He looked around the converted barn in frustrated distaste. His own tastes, so far as they could  be called tastes, in living styles were what was  generally known as old-fashioned. But that was  because they had been formed by the material and  moral aspirations of a working-class family in the  'twenties. This self-conscious pursuit of the aged  was not something he understood. He liked the  old oak table off which he ate his lonely breakfast  (and precious little else since his wife had left him) because it was his and had been his parents'. Probably his grandparents' too; he had no idea how old  it was. It didn't signify. But if he had to get another, it would be something new. This stuff was just  secondhand. Evidence of your own family's use  and misuse was one thing; other people's scars, scratches and grime was something quite different.

No, there was nothing for him here, either professionally or personally. He turned to go, then  on impulse went through the stamp section and  pushed open the office door. He intended only to  leave Etherege with some kind of thinly veiled threat. Dalziel was a man who did not like to feel  mocked.

The significance of what he saw when he opened the door took a moment to sink in. Etherege was  sitting at a table with his jacket off and his left shirt-sleeve rolled up. In his right hand he held a  hypodermic syringe. He looked up angrily at the  intrusion.

'Please wait outside,' he said sharply. Dalziel  didn't move. 'It's all right,' said Etherege, still  sharp, but mocking now as well. 'I'm not having  a fix. It's merely my insulin shot.'

'You're a diabetic,' said Dalziel, stepping into the  room. 'Well, well, well.'

He smiled broadly. This was the morning of the lucky break, after all. He had had things the wrong way round. Etherege wasn't merely the greedy  fence. This was where the action was worked out  in detail. It made much more sense.

'Is it a crime?' asked Etherege. 'Better call a  policeman.'

He really did think he was sitting pretty, thought  Dalziel. He believes we can't touch him. Perhaps  we can't, but we'll have a bloody good try.

He leaned over the antique-dealer and picked  up the insulin pack which lay on the table.

'You know, Mr Etherege,' he said, 'you shouldn't  go around peeing in other people's kettles.'

Etherege became absolutely still. It was almost  possible to see his mind rushing to a realization of  what Dalziel meant.

'The world is full of diabetics,' he said with an  effort at coolness. Dalziel noted the effort, and  looking grim, he placed his hand heavily on the  man's left shoulder.

'Jonathan Etherege,' he intoned. 'I must ask you to accompany . . . Jesus!'

He leapt back, sending a chair, a card-index and an electric kettle crashing to the floor, and  gazed at his wrist. Dangling grotesquely from it  was the hypodermic which Etherege had thrust violently upwards. The sight made him nauseous and quite unfit to deal with the attack that followed. Etherege's knee caught him in the stomach  and drove him back into the sharp edge of a filing cabinet. Memories of the potential - and  realized - violence of the man they had so long been looking for mingled fragmentarily with black  shapes of pain which were trying to join together  and bring complete obscurity.

There were a few seconds' respite, enough for sight impressions to return, albeit blurred and  wavy. Etherege, he realized, hadn't given up the  good work by any means. He had merely been casting around for something to kill him with.  The answer to his problem was a large pot dog.  A King Charles spaniel. Staffordshire-ware. Seven  pounds a pair. Dalziel's grandmother had had a couple till the young Andrew had taken the head  off one with a cricket ball. His mind threw up the absurd thought that this might be its mate come to exact a terrible vengeance.

Later he said that he was given strength by the thought of the amusement it would give his  enemies to hear he'd been done to death with a  china dog. Now it was just the instinct for survival. He drove himself forward under the descending  dog, wrapped his arms around the dealer and grappled him to the floor. For a moment he thought that his mere weight superiority was going to be enough to keep him there, but Etherege's outstretched hands came into contact with the electric  kettle and he brought it crashing round into the side of Dalziel's head. Stunned, he could not prevent himself from being rolled over, but Etherege's  first kick acted as a restorative and when the man drove his foot a second time towards Dalziel's  ribcage, the fat man caught him by the ankle and  pulled him off balance. He fell backwards through  the open door into the shop.

They both rose at the same time and as they looked at each other they knew that their roles had reversed. Through Dalziel's being a tide of  terrible anger was running fast and free, driving  out the aches and pains. Casually he pulled out  from his wrist the remains of the hypodermic and  dropped them to the floor.

'Now, Mr bloody Etherege,' he said, and stepped  forward.

Etherege turned and ran, but his over-filled shop hindered rapid movement. The ceramic display-case went crashing down as he blundered past. A grandfather clock by Barraclough fell into Dalziel's path and chimed its last as the fat man trod carelessly on the disembowelled works.

Etherege, realizing he could not make the door, took to the heights, bounding desperately across  chairs and tables, cabinets and bureaux. The late  Victorians took it well, but much damage was  inflicted on earlier pieces, especially when Dalziel  followed.

His simple unambiguous aim now was to hurt  Etherege. He did not know where this incredibly  violent desire stemmed from, nor did he care to  investigate. It was as if the repressed violence of three decades in the police force had finally  asserted its right to exist.

Etherege knew it and the knowledge made him incredibly agile. As Dalziel cumbersomely surmounted a mahogany dresser, the dealer skipped  lightly across a set of genuine fake Chippendale  dining-chairs and made for the door which opened as he reached it. A man and woman stood there,  blocking the exit and gazing in amazement at the scene before them. Etherege perforce hesitated and  next moment Dalziel was on him.

He pushed him across a table and began driving blows into his body and face. The man offered no  defence, hardly seemed to be conscious.

'Look here,' said the newly arrived customer, stepping forward, but stepping more rapidly back  when he saw Dalziel's expression.

Something deep inside, however, was telling  him he must stop. This was wrong. He had never  lost his temper like this in his life.

There was a disturbance behind him and someone seized him by the shoulder.

'Get the police!' said a man's voice and he felt  himself being pulled back from Etherege.

The fury came back. He turned and saw an  indignant-looking man in his late thirties. Dalziel did not care for the look or the touch of him. He  balled his fist and smacked into the stranger's face  with all the strength he could muster.

Chapter
5

The first thing Pascoe did on reaching Brookside  Cottage this time was to search the place. Lounge,  dining-room and scorch-marked kitchen; then  upstairs through the bedrooms, bathroom and  junk-room. When he was satisfied that he was  alone, he returned to the lounge and began to run  his eye along the bookshelves. What he wanted wasn't there, and he turned away in disappointment and stood thoughtfully looking around.

'The bureau!' he said aloud. It was a nice piece of  furniture and when he found it was locked he felt  some compunction about breaking into it. But one  thing he had learned from Dalziel was that once  you launched yourself on a course of action, you  followed it through with force and determination  to no matter how bitter an end.

The lock yielded easily to the knife borrowed  from the kitchen. He nodded in satisfaction as  be picked up the book and pushed back on the  writing-paper ledge. Quickly he thumbed through it and nodded again. It was always nice to be right.  He'd learned that from Dalziel too. Or perhaps  what the fat man had said was that it was nice  to be always right. He was an egotistical bastard.  But Pascoe wished he were here now.

He sat down for a while and applied his mind  to the problem. It wasn't a problem at all really, he finally admitted. The facts as he saw them  suggested a theory. It was a theory. It was a  theory he could easily test. It would also be easy  to pick up the phone and ring Backhouse, but that  wasn't the way. Not this time.

With a sigh he rose and went out into the  garden. He stood beside the sundial for a moment  and looked down. The carpet in the dining-room  still had the dark, disfiguring stains on it, but out  here rain and dew and sunlight and the cycle of  growth had left no trace on the thrusting green  shoots.

His shadow was on the dial and he stood aside to  see where the point of the gnomon fell, but an edge of white cloud trailed across the sun momentarily  and he did not wait until it cleared. Instead he  went down to the stream and with little difficulty  leapt across it into Pelman's woods. The water was  slow-moving and not very deep, but beautifully clear for all that. Long water-grasses wavered in it,  pointing downstream, and he followed their directions. For twenty or thirty yards it was possible to  walk parallel with the stream, but then the trees  began to close in on either side, and the tangle of briar and whin forced him either to move farther  out into the woods or to descend the banks of the  stream itself. Unhesitatingly he chose the latter.

At first he attempted to stay dry-shod by treading  carefully along a narrow margin, but this soon  disappeared and after the first immersion of his  feet he bothered no more but trod boldly on.

Soon the end of his journey was in sight, the ridge of land which carried the track up from  the road to Pelman's house. The culvert which  carried the stream under the track was visible  as a dark semi-circle above the water's surface which sparkled in even the few rays of sunshine  penetrating the vault of trees.

Pascoe stopped about thirty yards away. A tremendous lethargy seemed to have gripped his  leg-muscles, as though the stream had bathed  his feet in some slow poison. The woods were full of noises which asserted themselves now that  the splashing of his progress down the stream had  ceased. Birds called sharply, musically, warningly, languorously; leaves rustled in the breeze, still a  rich sound though the parchment edge of autumn  was beginning to be heard; a bee murmured by;  and somewhere in front of him he heard, or imagined he heard, the buzzing of many flies.

Then came a sound he hadn't imagined. Something moved among the trees to his left. He crouched low against the bank and remembered  walking up the lane to Culpepper's, hearing the Passage of his pursuer through the night.

Cautiously he raised his head above the level  of the bank and glimpsed a figure moving slowly towards the stream. Too quick a glimpse for identification, but long enough to recognize the object the man carried before him, carefully, like in a Holy  Day procession.

A shotgun.

Pascoe began to move. It was foolish. It was  bound to cause noise. But it was beyond him to lie quietly against the bank while the gun-bearer  approached. After a few steps, he realized that  even the little care he was exercising was just a waste of time. The noise he was making sounded  tremendous, like a herd of cows splashing through  a ford. He began to run in real earnest.

'Who's there?' called a voice.

He had to get out of the water-course. The trees on the voice's side were thinner, but he didn't  fancy clambering up there. Instead he tore at the  sallows which grew like a fence on the other side and pulled himself up.

'Stop!' commanded the voice.

If, thought Pascoe, if once I can get a few nice trees between me and him, if once I can head him down to the road, if once I can get back to the  village, that'll be it; no lone investigations for me, I swear it, God, make a bargain, please, if once . . .

Behind him the shotgun spoke, a curiously undramatic noise, something whipped along the  side of his head, he turned and slid slowly back  down the bank into the water.

On the opposite bank, about thirty yards upstream,  the smoking gun in his hands, was Angus Pelman.

Was that one barrel of two? wondered Pascoe. Will he have to reload?

But it didn't matter. For gloriously, wonderfully, there were other voices in the woods and Backhouse appeared behind Pelman, and Ellie  came leaping into the water towards him with  love and terror in her face.

Curiously, he did not feel too bad till they told  him that he had been hit by a small branch splintered from a tree by the shotgun blast. It was then  he recalled what he was doing here.

'If you go on up to the culvert,' he told  Backhouse slowly and clearly, 'and look inside,  I think you'll find Colin's body.'

Then he knelt on the soft cushion of rich leaf  mould and was very sick.

'You know,' said Dr Hardisty, 'dressing your wounds is becoming a habit.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe.

'I'm normally a very discreet kind of man,  minding my own business,' continued the doctor.  'But do you mind me, on this occasion asking what  the hell's going on?'

They were back at the Crowthers'. Pascoe had  not the least desire to talk further to the doctor, and he shot an appealing glance at Ellie who politely  but firmly took the man to the door.

'You did that well,' Pascoe said.

'I know,' she said.

They spoke no more for a while. They had stayed  in the woods until one of Backhouse's men armed  with a torch had penetrated the dark barrel of the culvert. When his shout of mingled discovery and  aversion had reached them, they had gone away  and let themselves be driven back to the village.

'How did you know?' asked Ellie finally.