At Rosetta Stanhope's flat he was admitted quickly, almost as though he were expected. I really must stop endowing her with supernatural powers, he told himself irritably. Certainly the room in which he found himself was ordinary enough. There was a lightly flowered paper on the walls, and the furniture consisted of a three-piece suite in imitation hide, a large colour TV and a small oak sideboard with a nest of matching tables. The only hint of the woman's background lay in a large glass-fronted cabinet almost filling one of the narrower walls and packed with what Pascoe had no doubt was fine china.
Rosetta Stanhope herself was dressed like any housewife doing her chores; she wore a blue cotton overall, moccasins on her feet, and her hair was tied back with a red silk bandanna. The only change was in her face where the flesh seemed more tightly drawn than ever over the fine thin bones.
'Will you have a cup of tea?' she asked very correctly. 'I can't offer you strong liquor. There's none in the place.'
'And I couldn't accept it anyway,' answered Pascoe even more correctly, though perhaps less accurately. 'You don't drink alcohol, Mrs Stanhope?'
'I can't afford to get confused, Mr Pascoe,' she said.
'And your niece? Did she drink?'
'Never here.'
'But elsewhere? A social drink with friends perhaps?'
She regarded him seriously but with no outward sign of distress. Pascoe congratulated himself on the subtlety of his introduction of the topic.
'Like at the Cheshire Cheese, you mean?' said Rosetta Stanhope.
Pascoe cancelled his congratulations.
'That might be significant,’ he said. 'Did she?'
'Not that I know of,' said the woman. 'And I think I'd have known. It was funny. She was not my blood, not my flesh, but she grew to me like a daughter. Closer perhaps. Daughters grow up, turn away, despise their parents even. I've seen it many times. Trouble, misunderstanding, separation. Like poor Brenda Sorby and her father. But Pauline grew closer to me as she got older and when the time came for her to make her own choice of life, instead of turning away, she turned towards me. No one knew her father, but I sometimes think he could not have been gorgio.'
She nodded emphatically, for a moment every inch the gypsy queen.
'But she would have friends of her own age, a life of her own,' urged Pascoe.
'Of course she did,' said Mrs Stanhope. 'She was a nice ordinary attractive young lass. People liked her, she made friends easy…'
Her voice broke for a moment and the gypsy queen was gone and for the second time in an hour Pascoe felt the guilt of being embarrassed by the sight of grief.
It was over in a moment.
'You're barking up the wrong tree,' she resumed. 'No one who knew Pauline did this.'
Pascoe regarded her dubiously.
'Why so certain, Mrs Stanhope?' he asked.
'She told me,' she replied seriously. 'Last night.'
Pascoe had to make an effort to stop himself glancing uneasily around. The room suddenly felt much less ordinary and conventional and the bright sunlight falling through the broad window seemed to thicken and curdle.
'You communicated with her?' he said.
She suddenly smiled. It was not an unfriendly smile, but not the kind of smile much used between equals. There was something of exasperation in it, and of pity too.
'We didn't sit down and have a chat, Inspector,' she said. 'But she was here. I felt her. And if she'd known who it was that did it, she'd have let me know.'
'But,' objected Pascoe, 'even if she didn't know then, surely she knows now.'
'Then and now' s for the living,' she said dismissively. 'Anyway, I didn't mean she would have given me a name, though that's not impossible. All I meant was, I felt her here and she felt puzzled, uncertain, not like she'd have been if she knew who'd done it and why, when it was done, I mean.'
'Ah,' said Pascoe who found this picture of a puzzle-filled afterlife rather distressing. A lifetime as a policeman was enough; an eternity unthinkable. Dalziel with a golden truncheon and blue serge wings! The image thinned the light once more and the room returned to normal.
'It's quite unusual for a Romany to be a medium, isn't it?' he said, leaning back in his chair. 'Crystal balls, the tarot, that's the more usual area, isn't it?'
'It's how the gorgios have portrayed us,’ said the woman. 'But I've known very few chovihanis who used a crystal as more than a prop. Or as something bright to act as a focus for self-hypnosis. Oh, I read the psychic journals, Mr Pascoe! I'm not an educated woman but I've lived a gorgio life long enough to pick up some of their knowledge too!'
'Chovihani. That's a sort of witch, isn't it?'
'You know a bit about our people?' she said. 'I felt it when we first met.'
'I once did a short study at college,' admitted Pascoe. 'It was social mainly, about education, fitting into the community, that sort of thing.'
'Looking for ways to change us, make us like you!' she said scornfully.
'Not really,' said Pascoe. 'Though some do change. You, for instance. You conformed.'
He didn't want an argument with this woman, but it seemed important to find out if there was really any more to her than a farrago of superstitions and self-delusions. He found out.
'Conformed? Me! What a bloody arrogant sod you are, just like the rest! I did anything but. I left my family and I left my people and I left my whole life behind me. That's conforming, is it? Conforming's being as daft and as dull and as stupid as you, is it?'
She was frightening in anger. Pascoe decided that on the whole he preferred the imminence of the other world to this.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It was stupid, you're quite right. Absolutely.'
Suddenly she was angry no more.
'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'It wasn't all that difficult, anyway. Chovihanis aren't expected to conform. They do odd, anti-social things. My grandma was one, too. It skipped my mother somehow. But my grandma foretold I would marry a gorgio when I was in my cradle. So it was expected in a way. Everyone knew the prophecy. It made for loneliness. From fourteen on, boys wanted me for their lusts. I was a good-looking girl, can you believe that?'
'Easily,' said Pascoe.
'But not for a wife,' she went on. 'If anyone married me, you see, the only way the prophecy could be fulfilled then would be for my husband to die! So I waited for Stanhope.'
She smiled, gently this time, reminiscently.
'He was worth the waiting. Now you would like to see Pauline's room.'
She rose abruptly, Pascoe more slowly, impressed again by her powers of anticipation.
She led him into a small bedroom. Pascoe regarded it with dismay. It looked as if an amateur burglar had been at it. Drawers hung out of the dressing-table and tallboy, all empty, as was the fitted wardrobe. Their contents seemed to have been stuffed into a variety of plastic rubbish bags which littered the floor. As he watched, Mrs Stanhope began to strip the blankets and linen off the bed and thrust these too into one of the bags.
'What on earth are you doing?' demanded Pascoe, bewildered.
'I thought you had studied the Romani,' she said. 'All these things of my dead niece must be destroyed. It is the custom.'
'But Pauline wasn't a gypsy,' protested Pascoe.
'She was my niece. She lived here. She is dead,' said the woman in a matter-of-fact tone. 'While her possessions remain, so must she. I did the same when my Bert died. Even a chovihani has a right to live among the living. I felt her last night. She was lost and puzzled. I may have been a comfort. But soon she may grow angry, resentful, bitter. Such a spirit is not good company. The gypsy way is to seek rest for both the living and the dead.'
