Pascoe put his hand on the old man's shoulder and brought him to a halt.
'Please, Mr Agar. Tell me everything you know,' he said.
It wasn't much. Shortly before Dinwoodie's death, Alison had met a boy, a nice lad, just eighteen, down from the Borders to do a six-month course at the Yorkshire Agricultural Institute. Their relationship had intensified after and probably as a result of her stepfather's death and they had been eager to get married. But somehow Alison's real father had emerged on the scene just about now. Still legally the girl's guardian, his permission was needed for an under-age marriage in England, and he was making a fuss about giving it. So Mary Dinwoodie had not raised any objection when her prospective son-in-law proposed taking Alison back to Scotland with him and marrying her there after she had the necessary residential qualifications.
She had gone up to the wedding, taken a train back to Yorkshire after the ceremony and was met at her house by the news that the honeymooners' car had skidded on the wintry roads only twenty miles after setting out and the young couple were both killed.
'Like I said, she went off after that. To stay with friends, she said, but I reckon she was off by herself and it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd killed herself. But I took care of the place as best I could, and the bank helped to keep the accounts straight, and then, lo and behold, last month she comes back, and it looks as if we can mebbe get things on a proper basis. Well, you know the rest, mister. Better if she'd stayed away forever. Better mebbe if she had killed herself even.'
The sky was completely veiled in cloud now and Pascoe felt the first splashes on his cheek, big warm drops that burst ripely as they struck.
'You should have told someone this before, Mr Agar,' he said.
'Should I? I never thought. It seemed of no account somehow, what with her dead. No account.'
'And the man's name? Mrs Dinwoodie's first husband. Alison's father.'
'Nay, I know nothing of that, mister,' said Agar, 'nothing more than what I've told you. Nothing more.'
Back at the station he found that Dalziel was out. This suited him very well. There was a driving urgency in him which rendered him impatient of diversions for explanations and hypotheses. Ignoring Wield's curious glances, he went to his own office, picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with the SCEA in London.
It took a few minutes to track down Captain Casey.
'Hello again,’ she said. 'I didn't expect you so soon.'
'Me neither. Look, that school in Linden, the Devon – do you have a complete list of staff? What I'm particularly interested in is other people who resigned in 1973.'
'You're lucky, I haven't sent the file back yet,' she said. 'Hold on a sec. Here we are. You want the lot?'
'Just the resignations to start with,' he said.
Besides Dinwoodie there were only another two, and only one of these a woman.
'Now, do you want the whole list?'
'No thanks,' he said slowly. 'I think this'll do.'
He replaced the receiver and carefully drew a ring round the woman's name.
Mary Greenall.
Then he picked up the telephone again.
'I want the Air Ministry,' he said. 'I want the section that deals with personnel records.'
Twenty minutes later he came out of his room, the sense of urgency pulsing stronger than ever. He found Wield and asked, 'Mr Dalziel back yet?'
'Not yet,' said the sergeant.
'Damn.'
'Are you on to something, sir?' asked Wield.
Pascoe hesitated, then said firmly. 'Yes. It may open up the whole damn thing. I'm almost certain.
‘Listen, I'm going out now. Tell Mr Dalziel I'll be at the Aero Club. That's it. The Aero Club.'
It was silly. There was no need for all this rushing. But he felt impelled to it. Perhaps if there'd been a bit more rushing early on and a little less painstaking, step-by-stepping…
As he went through the door that led into the car park, he almost collided with Dicky Gladmann, clad in a streaming plastic mac.
'Hello there!' said the linguist. 'I say, I've had a listen. Most interesting.'
'Fine,' said Pascoe, turning his collar against the rain. 'I'm in a bit of a rush. We'll talk later.'
'Well, it's all written down,' said Gladmann, producing the buff envelope. 'Really, it's been terribly interesting. I'm not sure how significant it might be…'
'I'll let you know,' said Pascoe, taking the envelope and thrusting it into his jacket pocket. 'Many thanks. We'll be in touch.'
He dashed out into the storm and was well dampened in the short time it took to get into his car. The light was so bad now that he switched his headlights on before moving off. Behind him through the rear-view mirror he could see Gladmann standing forlornly in the doorway looking with his old-young-man's face and his plastic mac like the nucleus of a queue outside a porno-cinema.
The storm was at its height as he drove into the old aerodrome. There was no wind and the orange windsock hung heavily from its pole, its fluorescence dulled by the torrential rain. Sheet lightning flickered through canyons of cloud and thunder cracked and rolled like an artillery barrage. There would be no flying today, and precious little drinking either if the absence of cars was anything to go by.
Pascoe glanced at his watch. Nearly twelve-thirty.
He parked as close to the club-house door as he could get and dashed in, realized he'd left his lights on, dashed out again, switched them off and was sodden wet by the time he made his second entrance.
'Thought you'd changed your mind,' said Austin Greenall. 'Welcome. We were just beginning to think the weather had robbed us of all custom today.'
He was sitting on a stool at the bar. Behind it, a barmaid was arranging bottles and glasses.
Glancing significantly at her, Pascoe said, 'May we talk, Mr Greenall?'
'Of course,' said the secretary. 'Come into my office. Would you care for a drink en route? No? All right, this way.'
He led Pascoe into a small airless room with a desk, a filing cabinet and a couple of hard chairs.
'Sit down, Inspector,' he said. 'Now what is it you want to talk about?'
Pascoe sat.
‘We could start with your ex-wife, Mary Dinwoodie,' he said. 'And go on from there.'
The telephone began to ring. It rang thirteen times. Both men ignored it. Finally it stopped, leaving its tone hanging on the air almost as long again.
'My wife, Mr Pascoe,' said Greenall. 'We are Roman Catholics. There was no divorce.'
Both men sighed gently, almost inaudibly, out of a sort of relief in both cases and, as if recognizing this, they exchanged shy smiles, glimmers fading almost as soon as they showed, but establishing a tenuous link for all that.
'Talking of wives, was it yours that talked you down here in the end?' said Greenall. His tone was light, cocktail-partyish, but with a harmonic of strain.
'I'm sorry?'
'She was talking about that seance when she was here last week. She had all kinds of daft ideas about it. But I saw the transcript on the table and I wondered if in the end… That's why of course I had to…'
The phone started ringing again. This time Greenall turned his attention to it, not touching it but staring fixedly at it as though the ceasing of the noise would be the signal of a beginning.
Pascoe took from his pocket the envelope which Gladmann had given him. As expected, it contained the short tape of the Choker's last call and the cassette of Rosetta Stanhope's interrupted seance. There were also several sheets in the linguist's rather self-consciously ornate handwriting.
Pascoe looked, selected, read.
‘The poor quality of this recording makes accurate transcription difficult. Still it seems to me at least possible that the opening passage of the tape could be rendered as follows.
It was Greenall, Greenall, over me, choking. The water then, boiling at first, and roaring, and seething… ‘
The phone stopped ringing.
