'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.'
'I didn't mean… all I said was…’
'OK, Peter. I'm sorry, love. I'm beat. All I want is a dose of oblivion, a nice, effective, SRN-measured dose. Would you mind if we scrubbed round this evening? Hell, we'd just sit and look miserably at each other anyway. What can you talk about when there's only one thing to talk about? No news yet?'
'Nothing.'
'Well. No news is…'
'… no news. That's all.'
'Yes. Ring me tomorrow, will you?'
'Yes. Look, Ellie, let's have lunch together. I'm going to be out at Birkham in the morning. It’s not so far for you to come. We'll have a bowl of soup at the Jockey.'
'OK. About one; that suit? Good. 'Bye.'
'Bye, love.'
He replaced the receiver thoughtfully.
'What's the attraction at Birkham? Apart from the soup.'
Dalziel was standing at the door. You had to admire the way the man made no effort to conceal his eavesdropping. Or perhaps you didn't have to admire it at all. It was no use protesting about it, that was certain.
Quickly he filled him in on the day's events.
'Precious bloody little,' he grunted. 'If we got paid by results, there'd be a lot of hungry buggers in this building tonight.' He coughed ferociously into his large khaki handkerchief.
'I'd see about that cough, sir,' suggested Pascoe diffidently.
'Would you now?' said Dalziel. 'Well, Sergeant, as you seem to be at a loose end tonight, you can stroll me quietly down to the Black Eagle and buy me some medicine. George, you coming?'
The inspector thus addressed as he moved past the door in his raincoat didn't pause in his stride.
'Not tonight, thanks, sir,' his voice receded. 'Urgently expected at home.'
Pascoe admired him. It took a good man to keep going when Dalziel spoke. Perhaps that was the quality he
