Deadheads

'Back to the car. I'm on top of the precinct.'

'Me too. Forty p and vertigo just for parking your car. It's a mad world,' said Ellie.

They made their way back to the main shopping precinct. The youths were still lounging around outside the Job Centre and the old people sitting on the benches round the fountain. Ellie had an unpleasant fantasy that what the youngsters were really doing was forming a queue, forty years long, for a place on one of those benches.

They travelled up on the lift together. The shoppers ‘car park was on the roof of the covered section of the precinct. It was joined by a bridge over the inner ring road to the multi-storey by the bus station. They found that their cars were parked quite close together.

'At least there doesn't seem to be any damage this time,' said Daphne after a cursory inspection of her gleaming paintwork.

'They'd need to wash mine before they could scratch it,' said Ellie. 'Was this where you were when you got vandalized?'

'No, I was over the bridge in the multi-storey,' said Daphne.

'I suppose it's much quieter over there,' observed Ellie. 'On this side you've got shoppers coming and going all the time.'

'I suppose so,' said Daphne, unlocking her car. 'You need to be a policeman's wife to think of things like that, though.'

'Do you? How disappointing. I thought I'd worked it out all by myself with my little woman's mind,' said Ellie rather more acidly than she'd intended. 'Next Monday then?'

'I'll look forward to it,' said Daphne, getting into her car. She closed the door and wound down the window.

'Look,' she said, 'it is your turn and I really don't mind the Market Caff.'

But Ellie laughed and said, 'No, the Chantry's fine. And if the brat's going to make a habit of smashing her way into other people's food, it's as well to keep her out of range of hot meat pies. Ciao!'

She watched as the Polo moved away. Daphne was a neat, confident driver.

And then she set about the complicated business of persuading Rose, who now that she was deprived of her audience of admirers was showing signs of recalcitrance, to let herself be fastened into the baby seat in the rear of the Mini.

She was still, or rather again, recalcitrant at eleven o'clock that night. Her distant protests were making Pascoe uneasy but Ellie whose ear was now finely tuned to Rose's various wavelengths diagnosed prima donna bloodymindedness and made him sit still and enjoy his coffee.

They'd eaten late. Pascoe had been delayed by the news of another robbery. A local family returning from holiday to their small country house had discovered that despite police-approved locks and burglar alarms, they had been burgled. There had been much indignation. Fortunately there was none waiting for him at home. Cold beef, an Italian salad and a bottle of Soave had not been spoilt by his lateness. Indeed it was the kind of meal which gained something from being consumed with the mild summer evening darkening outside the open french window. Ellie described her day in the kind of detail she tended to despise in other at-home mothers. But stories about her Rosie really were amusing, she assured herself only half ironically

'And did they charge you for the cream horn?' enquired Pascoe.

'I've no idea. Daphne picked up the tab.'

'Good. You stick to paying in the Market Caff. Let the idle rich cough up in the Chantry!'

'I don't think she's all that rich,' protested Ellie.

'Oh?' said Pascoe. 'Didn't you say her pa was loaded down with ecclesiastical gold, or something?'

Ellie poured more coffee and said, 'It was marital rather than ecclesiastical gold, I gather. Presumably Daphne got what was left over from the deserving poor after Pa's accident, but elitist expenses like school fees, not to mention the upkeep of that mansion, must all eat away at capital, I suppose. Though I presume Aldermann gets a pretty hefty wage packet.'

'Probably. On the other hand he seems to have had a pretty chequered career. There must have been times when he was living largely off capital.'

'Daphne didn't say much about his career,' said Ellie. 'But once the tearful moment was passed, courtesy of the brat, we swapped courtship stories quite happily.'

'Swapped?' said Pascoe, raising his eyebrows.

'Oh yes. In full frontal detail, naturally. Our Patrick was articled to a firm of accountants in Harrogate who looked after a couple of her father's church accounts. She'd popped in during her lunch-hour to pick up something for her pa and Patrick was the only person there. They chatted, lunched together, and it went on from there.'

'Her lunch-hour, you said? What was her job?'

'No job,' grinned Ellie. 'She was still at school. Sweet seventeen. Swish private school, of course, none of your common or garden comprehensives for Archdeacon Somerton's only daughter. All went fairly smoothly for a while. Why shouldn't it? She'd had other boyfriends. But things turned sour six months later on her eighteenth birthday when she announced she and Patrick were engaged to be married. There was opposition from Pa, more to the idea of an early marriage than to Patrick himself, I gather. But various elderly female relatives seem to have got in on the act. Of course, being eighteen, she was theoretically entitled to make her own decisions but you know how nasty things can be made for a kid that age. Then her father died. She obviously still feels guilty that they were at odds when he died. I think she always will.'

'But it didn't stop her marrying Patrick,' said Pascoe.

'This archdeacon - Somerton, did you say? - what did he die of?'

'The church killed him,' said Ellie dramatically.