On their way to the hospital Pascoe said, 'I don't think he did it, sir.'
Dalziel hushed him again, but. with sufficient good humour to make Pascoe believe their conclusions were in accord till they stood by Lee's bedside and the fat man said without any preamble, 'Lee, we're here to charge you with murder.'
'You must be cracked? Who says I killed anyone?' demanded the recumbent man.
'Not a soul,' admitted Dalziel. 'Your wife, kids, mates, not one of 'em is telling us anything. That's your bad luck, lad. You'll need all the talking you can get on your behalf to pull you out of this. We can prove that the money, the watch and the ring were all in Brenda Sorby's handbag when she left the bank that night. They ended up in your caravan. That's what tells us you killed her, lad. We need nowt else.'
Lee twisted uneasily in his bed.
'Look, mister,' he said. 'If I tell yous what really happened, will you look out for me, like?'
Dalziel seized the man's hospital pyjamas lapel and pulled him a little way off the pillow.
'Listen, Lee,' he said viciously. 'I think I know what really happened. You killed her. If you want anyone to believe different, you'd better open your mouth and hope that what comes out flows like…’
A nurse came into the room and paused at the door as she took in the scene.
'Just rearranging his pillows, Sister,' assured Dalziel. 'There we are, Dave. That better? Grand. Off you go, dear. This is private.'
The nurse went out.
Lee said, 'I didn't kill her. She was dead.'
'If you're going to make up a story, at least give it a proper beginning, lad,' said Dalziel wearily. There was one armchair in the room. The fat man slumped into it while Pascoe perched on a hard plastic chair with his notebook on his knee.
'It were the kids,' said Lee. 'It were the kids that saw her.'
It had been round about seven o'clock. Lee had been answering a call of nature by the boundary fence when his four children who had just headed down to the river for a swim came running back, full of excitement, crying there was a woman in the water.
Lee had gone down to investigate. There she was, Brenda Sorby (as he found out later), floating face upwards. He pulled her out, tried what he knew of artificial respiration, but it was useless. Then he noticed the marks on her neck and realized it was not just a simple case of accident.
His eldest boy was sent to summon Silvester Herne, with strict instructions to tell no one else. Herne, as Pascoe had suspected, was not so much the gypsy leader as their cunning counsellor, the man who knew how to fix things. Lee then peered in the water again and saw the woman's handbag. He had fished this out and was just opening it as Herne arrived. Together they discovered the watch, the ring, the wad of notes.
This it was that tipped the scales.
Herne's first advice was to dump the woman back into the river. A gorgio woman, let the gorgios find her. It would do the gypsies in general and Lee, with his record, in particular no good to be mixed up in this. Not that merely returning the body to the water would prevent them from being involved, though. Centuries of experience have taught gypsies that proximity is guilt.
So, on second thoughts, Herne had suggested, it might be better to dump her somewhere more distant.
For the general good.
Also, that way, they could keep the money, the watch and the ring with impunity.
Lee had backed his van up to the hole in the wire and together he and Herne had loaded the body on to it. The children were frightened to silence with all the superstitious threats that arise naturally from Romany lore. And Lee had driven his van back to the fairground where he was working that night.
The intention had been to wait till after dark which came late in early July, and then to put the body back in the river somewhere further downstream beyond Charter Park. But when the storm broke and the fairground cleared, Herne had suggested they gild the lily a bit by transporting it across the river and dropping it into the canal. This served the double purpose of keeping it out of the river which after all ran by the gypsy encampment, and perhaps postponing discovery, as the canal was that much deeper and murkier.
It also provided a group of ready-made suspects in the form of the canal people who, in Herne's opinion, were capable of any crime known to man and some known only to fish.
And that's what they had done. The padlock on the hire-boats had presented no problems to Herne who emerged more and more in Lee's narrative as the moving force behind the whole sequence of events. Only when it came to the question of the money did Lee assert himself. He'd found it. He would keep it safe till the time seemed propitious for a split.
'Which was just as well,' said Dalziel. 'Herne wouldn't have hidden it somewhere so easy to spot.'
'You believe him then?'
'Why not?'
They were hanging around in the corridor outside Lee's room. The consultant surgeon, triumphant from his morning golf, had turned up a few moments earlier and Dalziel after a brief trial of strength had abandoned the field, acknowledging that only fools or heroes challenged consultants on their own ground.
'We haven't found out yet what happened on Wednesday, when he disappeared with Rosetta Stanhope,' said Pascoe.
'Simple. He read, if he can read, or was told what the papers said about that bloody message from the stars…’
'Which turned out to be pretty accurate,' observed Pascoe parenthetically.
'… and he checked with the girl, Pauline, in the morning – you said you saw him chatting to her and because he's a superstitious pagan like the rest of his tribe and he reckoned it wouldn't be long before the spirits were being even more precise about time and place, and the subsequent travels of the dead body, he went round to see Rosetta.'
The door opened, the consultant emerged trailing clouds of interns, nodded distantly at Dalziel and went on his way.
'Very grand seigneur,' observed Pascoe.
'They'll find the bugger pissed in his Daimler one of these days and then it'll be hello Andy!' said Dalziel philosophically. 'Let's get back to it.'
The superintendent's forecast of Lee's actions on the Wednesday proved remarkably accurate. Rosetta Stanhope was summoned, still smelling of smoke. She largely subtantiated the story, though in her version it became apparent that a minor form of kidnapping had taken place, in that she had been picked up by Lee in his van as she left her flat and driven north while in a round-about way he explained his involvement with the Sorby case. At first she had thought he was confessing to the murder and that had kept her quiet. They had indeed ended up in a camp in Teesdale where the presence of some elderly relatives and some mechanical trouble with the van had persuaded her to spend the night. She had rung her flat, not been too bothered when she couldn't get Pauline at first, tried again much later, began to be concerned, and woken up the following morning to learn from the radio of her niece's death.
Loyalty to Lee had prevented her from attempting to use her gifts to help the police as she had volunteered to Pascoe, but now the truth about Brenda Sorby was out, – she repeated her offer vehemently.
Dalziel shrugged when Pascoe told him.
'You want to cross her palm with silver, that's up to you, lad. But don't let it get into the papers. And don't make a claim on your expenses sheet!'
The children, after being absolved from their vow of silence by their father who was now only too eager for them to talk, had chattered away merrily to Wield who lubricated their vocal cords with cream cake and ginger beer from the canteen. They had heard someone moving away through the sallows along the river bank just before they found the lady. Pressed for more details they had indicated to Wield, who was now a great favourite, that whatever he wanted them to have seen – large, small, fair, dark, man, woman, orang-utan – was OK with them. Mrs Lee and Ms Pritchard were present throughout the questioning, the former indifferent now that the men had given their approval, the latter vociferously alert to any hint of police pressure. Finally Wield pointed at her and said to the children, 'Was this figure anything like that lady.'
'Yes,' said the eldest after close scrutiny. 'I think it was her, mister.'
'No,' shouted the littlest carried away by this imaginative game. 'She's the lady that was in the water!'
