'Dalziel here.'
'Hello, Andy. Derek Backhouse here.'
'So they said.' Dalziel's voice fell a long way short of enthusiasm. 'It's been a long time. And you must be after a bloody big favour, to be ringing on a Saturday morning.'
'No favour,' said Backhouse. 'I'm ringing from the station at Thornton Lacey. I've got one of your men here. A Sergeant Pascoe.'
Pascoe!' said Dalziel, livelier now. 'He's not been crapping in the street again, has he?'
'Sorry?'
'Joke,' sighed Dalziel. 'What's the problem?'
'Nothing really. He's down here visiting some old friends.'
'So?'
'So when he arrived this morning, three of the old friends were dead. Shotgun at close range.'
Now there was a long silence.
'Christ,' said Dalziel finally. Another silence.
'That's rough,' said Dalziel. 'I don't think he's got enough old friends left to spare three.'
Backhouse made a moue of distaste at the callousness of the comment, though he thought he detected a hint of real concern in the intonation. But he might have been mistaken.
'Anyway,' said Backhouse, 'I'm just interested in confirming that he and Miss Soper didn't arrive till this morning.'
'She's with him, is she?' grunted Dalziel.
'You know her?'
'Vaguely. Hey listen, my lad, you're not thinking Pascoe had anything to do with this, are you?'
'Just checking, Andy. He says he got held up on a case last night.'
'Too true, he did. He wasn't best pleased, but he's a dutiful lad. He was here till about nine-thirty. Then we had a drink till closing. That suit you?'
'I think so. We haven't had the PM yet, but the doctor was very certain it happened last evening. I wasn't really concerned about the sergeant, but I wanted to be sure. He may be a great help to us.'
'Now watch it!' said Dalziel threateningly. 'We've got work to do here too, you know. Nothing glamorous like a multi-murder, but someone's got to catch thieves. And I need Pascoe. He's due back Monday. I'll expect him Monday.'
'We do have experienced detectives of our own,' said Backhouse drily. 'No, the way he can help is with his knowledge of the missing man.'
'Missing man?'
'Didn't I say? We're one light. The host, the man whose cottage it is, Colin Hopkins. Your sergeant's special mate.'
‘I see,' said Dalziel. 'You reckon him for it, then?'
'I'd like to talk with him,' said Backhouse cautiously.
‘I bet!! Anyway, what you're saying is you want Pascoe to help pin this on his mate? You're asking a bit much, aren't you?'
'It was his friends who died,' said Backhouse quietly.
'Well, he's a good lad. Is he there? I'd better have a word.'
What kind of grudging condolence did he propose? wondered Backhouse.
'He's with Miss Soper at the moment. She is badly shocked.'
'Later then. But I want him Monday. Right? I'll look for you on the telly!'
Bloody old woman, thought Dalziel as he replaced the receiver. He scratched the back of his left calf methodically from top to bottom, but derived no relief. The itches you scratch are internal, someone senior enough to dare had once told him. He looked with distaste at the mound of files on his desk. Suddenly they seemed trivial. Stupid twats who spent good money on pretty ornaments, then didn't take the trouble to look after them properly. Somewhere in that lot there was a pattern, a flawed system. There was always a flaw. A man lay at the bottom of that pile and they'd find him in the end. But today, this moment, it seemed trivial.
It was a rare feeling for him. He wasn't a man who took his work lightly. But now he stood up and went in search of someone to drink a cup of tea with and talk about football or politics.
The enormity of what had happened had not struck Ellie for some time after her return to the cottage. She had not gone into the building but made her way along the side of the white-washed garage into the garden. At the bottom of the dew-damp lawn, audible though not visible, ran a stream in a deep cutting, shaded by alders and sallows. The murmuring water, the morning-fresh garden unheated yet by the lemon sunlight, the flight of a white- browed blackbird from a richly laden apple-tree, all helped to make unreal the tableau formed by the man on his knees by the dead woman at the foot of the sundial. Only the gnomon of the dial, cutting the fragrant air like a shark's fin, seemed to be of menace.
Something shone, brighter than dewdrops, in the grass around the body. Pieces of broken glass. Her first concern was intimate, domestic. Pascoe's trousers might be torn or, worse, his knees cut.
She knew, and had known since she first looked from the window, that Rose was dead. Calling for an ambulance was a gesture, the drowning swimmer's last clutch at the crest of the wave that will sink him. The ugliness of it, visible now as Pascoe laid the woman on the grass once more, was the greater shock. But even that she assimilated for the moment as she turned back to the cottage, looking for the others. Pascoe stopped her before she went in through the open french window.
But it had been too late to stop her seeing what lay inside.
The police-station at Thornton Lacey was merely the front ground-floor section of the pleasant detached house in which Constable John Crowther and his wife lived and which they would give up with great reluctance when Crowther reached retiring age in a couple of years. Neither he nor his wife was particularly impressed by the arrival of major crime in their little backwater. There was nothing in it for the constable except trouble. At this late stage in his career, not even personal solution of the crime and apprehension of the criminal could bring him promotion. But he was a conscientious man and, unasked, was already preparing for the superintendent a resume of all local information he felt might be pertinent.
His wife, a craggy woman whose outward semblance belied her good-heartedness, took one look at Ellie on her arrival at the station and led her into the kitchen for tea and sympathy. Ellie had deteriorated rapidly under the treatment (a necessary process, well understood by Mrs Crowther) and by the time Pascoe came away from Backhouse, she had been given a mild sedative by the doctor and removed to a bedroom.
Doctor Hardisty, a rangy, middle-aged man whose unruly grey hair gave him a permanently distraught look, met Pascoe at the kitchen door. They had encountered once already at Brookside Cottage.
'You all right?' he now asked diffidently.
'Fine,' said Pascoe. It wasn't altogether a lie. The act of signing the coolly formulated statement had produced a temporary catharsis. Momentarily the morning's discoveries had been reduced to the status of a 'case'. He even found himself prompted to question the doctor about his examination of the bodies, but decided against it. Hardisty was the local man, living and practising in the village. By now the bodies would be on their way to the mortuary and the probing knife of the pathologist.
By now Timmy and Carlo and Rose would be on their way…
He nipped the thought off smartly.
'Miss Soper?' he asked. 'How is she?'
'Resting upstairs. I've given her something.'
'May I see her?'
'If she's awake. It's straight ahead on the landing.'
Pascoe turned and began to climb the stairs.
Ellie opened her eyes as he came through the door. Her dress was draped tidily over a chair and she lay under a patchwork quilt in her slip.
'OK, love?' said Pascoe, taking her hand.
'Doped to the back teeth,' she said. 'I don't want to sleep. It's always worse remembering when you wake up.'
