'Wasting police time is,' said Pascoe.
'You still think it's a waste of time?' said Dalziel. 'Well, you may be right. Here's something else to waste your time on then. Another corpse in Aldermann's track. Penny Highsmith mentioned him. Someone who nearly bought Rosemont. Mid-sixties it'd be, after Patrick had done his 'O' levels. Edgar Masson was the old lady's solicitor so likely he'd still have been acting for the family, so he should have all the details. Even if he hasn't, that old bugger knows more about other people's business than most other people.'
Pascoe said, ‘Is there anything more?' scribbling wildly.
'Aye. Ask him about the will. I went round to Somerset House today. There was some Kraut here talking about fighting the subversive war. What do them buggers know about fighting wars? They can't remember the last time they won one! So I ducked out. At Somerset House I found out that she died intestate, Auntie Flo.'
'Then there wasn't a will,' said Pascoe smartly.
'I know what intestate means,' said Dalziel heavily. 'I also know that Edgar Masson's not in the habit of letting rich clients get away without paying him for drawing up a will. At some stage, there'd have been one. And talking of wills, after what you told me that accountant fellow, Capstick, said about the Reverend Somerton's accounts being in his office, I thought I might as well take a look at the Rev's will while I was at Somerset House. He had ?60,000 to leave, right enough, but he only left ?20,000 of it to his daughter. The rest was spread around various good causes, so if Aldermann was expecting riches, he was disappointed!'
'Twenty thou was still a lot of money in 1971,' said Pascoe.
'Sixty thou was near on a fortune,' said Dalziel. 'I'd best be on my way now. There's a seminar going off on the policewoman's role in multi-racial contra-social interaction or something.'
'And you don't want to miss it?' said Pascoe with cautious incredulity.
'Don't be bloody daft!' sneered Dalziel. ‘It'll be over soon and I'm using the bugger's phone who's chairing it. Suspicious bastard even keeps his whisky locked!'
Pascoe may have only imagined he heard the splintering of wood before he replaced the phone, but such imaginings in Dalziel's regard were as likely to be hypotheses as fantasies.
He shared the conversation with Wield over a cup of coffee the following morning.
‘It was probably the Commissioner's office,' he concluded. 'He's getting worse as he gets older. And it's getting hard to know where you are with him. Before he went, he told us he didn't want us wasting time on this Aldermann business. Now he seems full of it. Why?'
'He's renewed his acquaintance with Mrs Highsmith,' said Wield significantly, dipping a chocolate-coated digestive into his cup.
'I can't imagine what you mean,' said Pascoe primly. 'That chocolate's melting.'
‘It's the heat. It does that sometimes,' explained Wield. 'He'll be seeing her again?'
'He implied it,' said Pascoe. 'You know, you could achieve the same effect by eating plain biscuits and drinking mocha coffee.'
‘It's a different kind of multi-racial contra-social interaction,' said Wield solemnly. 'Does this mean Mr Dalziel now reckons there's something in all this for us officially?'
Pascoe gestured at his desk which was covered with the stationery of death. Police reports, medical reports, coroners' reports.
'The thing about our modern society,' he mused, 'is that no one passes without leaving a mark any more. If there is anything for us in all this, it ought to be somewhere in all these. Let's try to put things in some kind of order, shall we?'
'Chronological, you mean?'
'There are other kinds of order,' said Pascoe kindly. 'But that'll do for starters. Here we go. 1960. Mrs Florence Aldermann dies of a coronary thrombosis. Medical report is unambiguous. She was still convalescent from an earlier attack. And there are no suspicious circumstances unless we count the intestacy which meant that Penny Highsmith got the entire estate. Now we jump on a decade to the Reverend Oliver Somerton. Skull fractured by a piece of masonry fallen from the belfry of St Mark's Church, Little Leven.'
'Hold on,' said Wield. 'There'll be at least one other in between. This fellow Mr Dalziel mentioned, the one who wanted to buy the house but died.'
'Oh yes. I sincerely hope he'll turn out to have died of old age a hundred miles away,' said Pascoe. ‘I’m seeing the solicitor, Masson, later this morning.'
'I'll pencil in a query,' said Wield.
'Right. Back to the Rev. Suspicious circumstances? All unwitnessed accidents are, ipso facto, suspicious. But there were no pointers to anything definite, and the coroner seemed quite satisfied.'
'Act of God,' said Wield.
'Watch it,' said Pascoe. 'We need all the help we can get. Anyway, that was 'seventy-one. On to 'seventy-six. Mrs Catherine McNeil. Died of bronchial pneumonia which developed after a burst of some particularly virulent influenza. Was that one of the years when there was a lot of it about, Chinese, Siamese, Patagonian or something?'
'I'll try to check,' said Wield. 'How old was she?'
'Seventy-eight.'
'At seventy-eight there's always a lot of it about,' said the sergeant. 'She's the one Aldermann had been robbing and who left him the money?'
'That's her. Aldermann had 'flu himself, I gather. It was during his absence from the office that his little games with Mrs McNeil's money came to light.'
'So he sneezed at her till she got a fatal dose of germs?' said Wield.
