his horn and drove away.
Hay Hall would have been totally unfindable without the help of what he took to be a ploughman workward plodding his weary way and even then it was only because he had the wit to follow the man's gestures rather than his words (right arm shooting out as he said 'sharp left at Five Lanes End') that Pascoe found himself turning through an unmarked and uninviting gateway in a crumbling lichen-pocked wall. The drive was pot-holed worse than Acornboar Mount, the vegetation consisted mainly of dark and dripping conifers and yew, and the whole atmosphere seemed more conducive to the chilly thrills of horror than the slippery blisses of pornography. This supernatural ambience was reinforced when the house itself came into view for now he got a tremendous sense of deja vu. It was a two-storeyed building which not even time and neglect could make beautiful. The ground floor looked as if it had been designed by someone who had a distant acquaintance with Georgian proportion and style, but the first floor, with its lancet windows and Gothic cornices, seemed to have been sliced off some romantic folly and dropped, not very accurately, on to its ill-matched base. Even the unkempt festoons of ivy couldn't hide the join.
Parked in front of the house were two cars and a large van. Pascoe slid his Riley alongside them, still wrestling with this sense of having been here before. It was something he had heard of, but never experienced, and he was surprised at the uneasiness with which it filled him.
'Oh it's you,' said Penelope Latimer from the portico. She came towards him, huge in a white silk trouser suit, and added apologetically, 'Sorry to sound so unwelcoming but I thought it might be the generator truck.'
'I need my exhaust fixed,' said Pascoe.
'Don't we all. Come inside, Peter, isn't it? We can't start anything till the power arrives, so you may detect away, darling, detect away. Anything wrong?'
'It's just this house,' said Pascoe slowly, peering up at the facade.
'Hideous, ain't it? But very useful. No one else will look at it, so we rent it for a song.'
'I've a peculiar notion that I've seen it before,' said Pascoe.
Penelope Latimer laughed beautifully, the kind of spontaneous silvery gurgle that film stars paid thousands to voice coaches for, and her soft frame shook like a snow-filled col touched by the warmth of spring.
'Of course you have, darling. Everyone who's seen a Homeric film has seen Hay Hall. Do step in out of the raw.'
Pascoe felt as relieved and disappointed as most people feel when the apparently supernatural is explained. Droit de Seigneur was the answer. This was the manor to which the lecherous lord had abducted the blushing bride. Which also made it the manor in which the blushing bride had been, perhaps, assaulted.
They passed through an entrance hall with no furniture, tattered wallhangings, a rather elegant curved stairway and creaking floorboards, into an equally dilapidated drawing-room which was occupied by half a dozen people standing around a Calor gas heater drinking coffee from flasks.
'Relax, folks,' said Penny. 'It's only the fuzz. Gerry, my dear, come and be fingerprinted.'
A tall thin man with a scholarly stoop detached himself from the coffee-drinkers and joined Pascoe and the woman. It wasn't just the stoop that was scholarly. He had a thin-featured face, at once vague and ascetic, that would have looked at home at an Oxbridge high table; wire-rimmed spectacles pinched his long nose, and he even wore the baggy grey flannels and ancient sports coat with leather elbows which are the academic's uniform in the popular imagination. His age was about thirty.
'Gerry Toms, Peter Pascoe. Coffee, Peter?'
'No, thanks. Is there anywhere we could talk privately, Mr Toms?'
'We could step into the shooting-room, if you don't mind the cold,' said Toms. He spoke hesitantly with a touch of East Anglia in his voice.
'It shouldn't take long,' said Pascoe.
The director led him via the hall into another, larger room. This one was furnished after a fashion. Drapes had been hung over the windows, a square of carpet laid on the floor in front of the almost Adam fireplace, and on this stood a chaise-longue and a small table set for tea. The final touch was a huge tiger skin rug.
The other end of the room was full of equipment – cameras, some sound recorders and a variety of lights.
'There's no power here, of course,' said Toms. 'That's why we need the generator. It isn't really enough, but a bit of gloom suits most of our scenes and hides the cracks in the plaster.'
'Why do you use the place if it's so inconvenient?' asked Pascoe.
'I didn't say it was inconvenient,' said Toms. 'On balance, it's great. First, we've got the whole house for interiors. Give us an hour and we can have any room looking habitable – on film anyway. And any period. Second, we've got nice private grounds for exteriors. You can't shoot our kind of footage in a public park. Third, it's cheap. Fourth, it's bloody cold, so we get things done quickly. What is it you want to talk to me about, Inspector?'
'A film you made, Droit de Seigneur.'
'Ah yes. A masterpiece of my social commentary period,' said Toms blandly.
'Your what?'
'I was trying to say something about the repression of woman.'
'She didn't look very repressed to me,' said Pascoe, ninety-nine per cent sure that he was being sent up.
'Of course not. The whole thing is a male fantasy, you noticed that, surely? The young husband and the wicked lord are, in fact, the same person. The husband in the end does not rescue the girl; he merely offers her a different form of victimization.'
'That's a fairly cynical view of human relationships,' said Pascoe.
'Then it's one that should recommend itself to you,' answered Toms. 'Cynicism is the basis of law, otherwise why should compassion need to be the better part of justice?'
'Gobbledegook,' said Pascoe with some force.
'Come now. Let us restrict ourselves to matters sexual. A woman comes to your station saying she has been attacked by a man. How do you and your colleagues react? You investigate the man because you believe any man capable of sexually assaulting a woman. You investigate the woman because you believe any woman capable of sexually provoking a man. At the conclusion of your investigations you apportion blame, you don't establish innocence. Am I right? Or am I right?'
Pascoe found himself taking a hearty dislike to Gerry Toms, not so much because of his undergraduate debating manner as because of the impression he gave of intellectual condescension. He quite clearly believed that it needed very little effort on his part to leave a poor policeman floundering in his wake.
'All that's as may be, sir,' he said heavily. 'I can't say I agree with what you say, though I'm not sure I've picked you up right. Any road, what I want to ask you now is about that scene in the film where the young lady gets beaten up.'
'Yes?'
'It's been suggested that at one point in that scene, the young lady really is being beaten up. What do you say to that?'
'I say, how incredible! At which point?'
'When the gent with the metal boxing gloves clips her jaw, sir.' Pascoe watched Toms closely. Having opted to play out the role of dull policeman, he hoped that Toms might be tempted to overact in his desire to impress his stolid audience, but the man merely shook his head.
'And at that point only?' he said. 'But why? Our actresses may not be Royal Shakespeare stuff, but they bleed and bruise just as easily and like it just as little. It's all done with tomato ketchup, Inspector, didn't you know?'
'The suggestion was made, sir, and by someone with claims to expertise,' said Pascoe steadfastly.
'A wife-beater, perhaps? Have you not seen the actress concerned? Linda Abbott, I think it was. Did she have any complaints? Or bruises?'
'None.'
'So what is this all about?' cried Toms, moving now across the thin line which divides the academic from the histrionic.
'It's also been suggested that for this scene there was another actress in the role,' said Pascoe.
'What? By another expert?'
'In a manner of speaking,' said Pascoe, thinking of Ellie standing on the doorstep that morning.
'You'd better change your experts, Inspector,' said Toms, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a nicotine-stained forefinger. 'There was only one woman in that part. Ask anyone who worked on the
