days. I came back on the day that Elizabeth… Betsy went missing. When they found her and I heard her story that she'd been attacked by Benny near Neb Cottage, I thought… I don't know what I thought, but part of it was relief that he must have got out, that he was still alive. The next night I went down to Heck. The water had risen considerably. I could see at once he hadn't got away but he must have made a superhuman effort to pull the chain out of the wall-I could see one of his arms sticking out into the water. A block of stone above the entrance hole had collapsed and trapped it. I reached down into the water and touched his skin. It was cold. I tried to push it back into the cellar but couldn't. So I covered it with bits of rubble and went away.'
'How did that make you feel,' said Pascoe, '-knowing you'd killed him?'
Wulfstan considered this, his lips pursed as though it were some unusual taste he were trying to identify, or a rare wine.
'Sad,' he said finally.
'Sad that you'd killed him?'
'Sad that he'd died without telling me what I wanted to know.'
Pascoe shook his head, but in sorrow, not in disgust. He should perhaps have felt a sense of outrage, but it wasn't there. Not after the past few days.
Dalziel said, 'You done, Peter?'
'Yes.'
'Ivor, you got something more to say?'
Why was he so keen to let the WOULDC have her head? wondered Pascoe. In murder investigations as in motorcars, backseats were not the kind of place you expected to find Andy Dalziel.
'Yes, sir. Just a bit,' said Novello. 'I don't think you felt sad, Mr. Wulfstan. Why should you when you'd got what you were after? With the prime suspect mysteriously disappeared, no one was going to waste any more time looking, were they?'
'Looking for what? For my child?'
'No! For the real killer. He was home and free. And that must have made him really happy.'
She spoke with a force born partly of moral contempt, but mainly of a desire to provoke a response. She's so sure she's right, thought Pascoe sympathetically. She's desperate to be right! This was what Dalziel was at. There were some lessons best learned in public. And one of them was that being a step in front of everyone else was fine until, in your efforts to keep ahead, it became a step too far.
'So how about that, Mr. Wulfstan?' said Dalziel pleasantly. 'Any chance of this being a cover-up 'cos it were you took the little lasses all along?'
Not just a lesson, then. The Fat Man was making sure this time round no possibility, however improbable, didn't get its airing.
Wulfstan wasn't registering horror or indignation, but sheer incomprehension, as if he were being addressed in a foreign language. He looked toward his wife as if in search of an interpreter. She shook her head and said almost inaudibly, 'This is vile… Superintendent, this is just not possible…'
'Well, some bugger thought it was,' said Dalziel. 'Gave us a ring, said to take a closer look at Mr. Wulfstan. Sounded like a woman. Or a man pitched high. How's your falsetto, Mr. Krog?'
Krog said easily, 'Too false to deceive an ear like yours, Mr. Dalziel.'
Tone, expression, body language, were perfectly right. But it was a role, Pascoe detected. A chosen response, not a natural one. Impossible to prove, but he'd have bet his Christmas bonus the Turnip made the call. Which was pretty safe, as cops didn't get bonuses. And he must resist Dalziel's invasive terminology!
Wulfstan, pale before, had turned a dreadful white as he finally admitted the enormity of the accusation. Interestingly, it wasn't Dalziel but Novello, its first mover, that he turned on.
'You stupid sick child,' he grated. 'What do you know about anything?'
She stood up to him.
'I know you've killed one girl,' she snapped back. 'I just want to find out if she was the first.'
She was standing, he was sitting, but it still resembled a David-versus-Goliath tableau as he strained forward in his chair, his face twisted in anger. Very good likeness to the nix now, thought Pascoe, readying himself to intervene.
'Pay her no heed, Walter. Every bugger knows she's talking a load of bollocks. Every bugger save her, that is.'
The phraseology and accent might have been Andy Dalziel's but the voice was Elizabeth Wulfstan's.
She touched Wulfstan's arm, and he subsided. And turning her attention from Novello to Dalziel with a completeness which was like a door shut in the WOULDC'S face, she went on. 'You there, glorrfat, you know this is bollocks. Walter's told you what happened with yon poor lass. It were dreadful, but it were an accident. So why don't I call his solicitor, we'll all go round to the cop shop, you take his statement, then we can all go home. I mean, this is a waste of time, isn't it? I haven't heard any cautions, I don't see any tape recorders. I'm off to Italy tomorrow, and I'd like to get a good night's sleep.'
Dalziel looked at her, and smiled, and shook his head, and murmured, 'Little Betsy Allgood. Who'd have credited it? Little Betsy Allgood turning into a star.'
She scratched her bald head and said, 'Nay, Andy, I've a ways to go yet.'
'Aye, but you'll get there, lass,' he said. 'You've come this far, what's going to stop you now?'
'You, mebbe, if you keep us here all bloody night,' she retorted.
'Nay, you're free to go anytime, Betsy,' he said. 'What's to keep you here? You've done what you set out to do. Come back. Sung your songs. Made your peace. But afore you go, there's a little matter you could help us with.'
He held up his hand. Wield, with that almost telepathic sense of cue which was a necessary survival technique for the Fat Man's acolytes, dipped into the files and papers he was carrying and produced the handwritten blue sheets.
Reactions: Wulfstan indifferent, hardly registering; Krog, blue-eyed, blank-faced innocence; Elizabeth, frowning, gaze flickering over the others as if assessing how the sheets had got into Dalziel's hands; Chloe, head back, eyes closed, the position she'd assumed after her faint denial of the possibility of her husband's involvement; Inger Sandel, on the piano stool, apparently more interested in the keyboard than the conversation…
'Seems you thought later you might have got a bit confused about what happened that night you went after your cat,' said Dalziel. 'Nice to get the record straight.'
'Should've thought, after what we've just heard, you'd got the record straight as you're ever likely to get it,' said Elizabeth.
'There's nowt like hearing it from the horse's mouth.'
She flashed one of her rare smiles.
'That's what you think of my singing, is it?'
'I think you hoped you could close things off here with your singing,' said Dalziel. 'That was the idea, wasn't it? Come back, get it out of your system, quick march into the rest of your life? But the past's like people, luv. They need to be properly buried, else they'll keep coming after you forever. Benny really is back now, so we can give him a proper sendoff. But what about them others? You think some miserable Kraut songs in a disused chapel will do the trick? I don't think so. Ask the Hardcastles. Ask the Telfords. Ask Chloe and Walter here, who've tret you like their own daughter all these years.'
'And she's been a good daughter to me,' proclaimed Chloe Wulfstan, suddenly fully awake. 'A second chance. More perhaps than I deserved. Grief makes you selfish… Oh, God, when I think of the pain she put herself through… Betsy, I'm sorry, I've tried to make amends…'
She was gripping the younger woman's hand and looking at her with desperate appeal to which Elizabeth, however, responded only with a frown.
Pascoe coughed gently. Dalziel glanced at him with something like relief and nodded. They had worked together long enough to have sketched out faint demarcation lines. In Dalziel's words, 'I'll kick 'em in the goolies if you'll shovel the psycho-crap.'
Pascoe said, 'I don't think you need be too hard yourself, Mrs. Wulfstan. You see, I don't think that Betsy's anorexia and bleaching her hair was really an attempt to turn herself into Mary. Or if it was, it wasn't for your sake, certainly not just for your sake. No. It was to turn herself into the kind of daughter she thought her own father would have preferred. Fair haired, slender, attractive, graceful. Everyone thought the short-cropped hair and boyish
