'Elgood, you mean?' said Wield in open surprise.
'Yes. Dandy Dick himself. And I recalled something else. When I talked to him in his office, I told him about your visit to Rosemont allegedly about Mrs Aldermann's car. And I got the impression then that he might have heard about it from some other source. Who could that be but one of the Aldermanns?'
'What did he say exactly?' asked Wield.
Pascoe hesitated. Dalziel would have just replied that it was Elgood's reference to 'ugly buggers from the CID' which put him in mind of the sergeant, but Pascoe was made of flimsier fibre.
'Oh, just a turn of phrase, something in his tone,' he said vaguely. 'Anyway, I've checked Elgood's car number and sure enough it ends with 29.'
'Which means?'
'Which means,' said Pascoe slowly, 'that we can be as sure as dammit that the day before Dandy Dick came round here to complain that he was in line to be murdered by Patrick Aldermann, he'd been shacked up in his seaside cottage with Aldermann's wife!'
PART THREE
LEWIS CARROLL:
1
NEWS
Dick Elgood lay on his back, buoyed up by the gently rocking sea and caressed by the hot-fingered sun, and felt at one with the world.
If he raised his head slightly and looked between his feet he could see across fifteen yards of shimmering water and as many more of light buff sand to a green-flecked sandstone cliff on top which stood an ochre-roofed white- walled cottage. It might almost have been Tuscany, but you could stuff Tuscany, and indeed most points east of where he was now, for Elgood. This bit of the Yorkshire coast, barely an hour from his office, was as far as he ever wanted to go.
Twenty years ago when he had bought the cottage, only the chimney stack would have been visible from where he was presently floating. Winter after winter the North Sea darted out cold hands and ripped great fistfuls out of the soft cliff face, undermining it until more of its grassy head came sliding down of its own weight.
'How long?' Elgood had asked.
'Could be there another fifty years,' opined the estate agent.
'Could be down in ten,' warned the surveyor.
Elgood had halved the difference and signed the contract. He had no concern for succession and he liked the idea of a building whose lifespan was as doubtful and as limited as a man's
Besides, the price was rock-bottom, if that was the right term. He’d never regretted buying it. Here he came to relax, sometimes in company, sometimes alone. It was the perfect setting for romance; it was the perfect atmosphere for unwinding. Today he had just wanted the delights of solitude. After several days of non-stop negotiations and continuous availability he had finally hammered out an agreement with his work force on the redundancies. It had been hard work, harder than he'd ever known. The turning-point had been yesterday when in a quiet moment with the leader of the works committee he had said, with sincerity as well as with conscious guile, if this doesn't get settled without a strike, at least your lads'll have the consolation of seeing me ahead of them in the dole queue.'
The hint had been enough. They had the sense to know that any successor to Elgood was likely to be a much more unpleasant proposition.
So it was settled. And this Tuesday was his own. His therapy. His reward.
Or perhaps not. Dimly through half-closed eyes he saw the roof of a car flashing in the sun as it parked alongside the cottage.
'Shit!' he said, and thought of slipping beneath the surface and swimming out of sight round the corner of the little bay.
But he couldn't hide for long, and in any case he didn't care to hide except occasionally from boring colleagues and angry husbands. This car brought trouble or it brought pleasure. He wasn't used to running from either.
He turned over and with a long easy stroke pulled towards the shore.
As he reached his towel on the sand, he heard a noise and, looking up, he saw his visitor scrambling down the cliff face, a passage made both dangerous and easy by the erosion. Identification didn't help him decide whether this meant pleasure or trouble. It was Daphne Aldermann.
He saw a tall, rangy woman with long blonde hair casually tied back from a face which sunlight and slight exertion coloured with a simple beauty beyond cosmetic art. Beneath her slacks and checked shirt moved long muscular legs and deep heavy breasts, the memory of which excited Elgood as he towelled himself down.
She saw a small man with thick greying hair, usually elegantly groomed but now spiky with damp, topping a slightly lopsided face whose characteristically cheerful expression was qualified but not belied by a pair of shrewd, watchful eyes. When she'd first met him she'd regarded him as rather old and faintly comic, but that had soon passed. There had been a moment when she had feared being confronted with an old, pasty-white and scrawny body, but he stripped well, sunshine and exercise keeping him brown and wiry. As for what moved beneath his swimming trunks, she had found nothing to complain of in its sensitivity and vigour, but no memory of it touched her mind as she approached him now.
'Hello, love,' he said. 'This is a nice surprise. How'd you know I was here?'
'Patrick was talking to Eric Quayle on the phone last night. He said you'd reached an agreement with the unions and that you'd be relaxing down here today.'
