Pascoe glared at him.
'Let's leave the debunking jokes to Mr Dalziel, shall we?' he said.
'Just rehearsing, sir,' murmured Wield and the two men grinned at each other.
'That was at the beginning of 'seventy-six. Three and a half years later in September 'seventy-nine, Christopher Burke dies, the first of three casualties at Perfecta where Aldermann had started working on a part-time basis some six months earlier.'
'Burke was the one who fell off a ladder while he was painting his house?'
'That's what I thought,' said Pascoe. 'But the coroner's report says that in fact he'd got a firm in to do the work. That morning they'd been replacing a section of guttering prior to painting the eaves. Burke, it is surmised, ran up the ladder when he came home from work to inspect the repair, it slipped and he broke his neck.'
'Witnesses?'
'None,' said Pascoe, looking at the report. 'He died between two-thirty and three-thirty. His wife went out at two-thirty and he wasn't home then. She came back an hour later and there he was, spread out across the patio at the back of the house.'
'What about the decorators?' wondered Wield.
'After they'd got the new bit of guttering in, it started raining, so they waited a while and when the weather showed no sign of improving, they went off to an inside job they were doing as well. You know what painters are like.'
'Strange,' said Wield.
'Painters?'
'No. That a man would go up a ladder in the wet. Straight from the office.'
'I thought so too. But it was showery, it seems. Theory is that he arrived home in a dry patch, was surprised not to see the decorators at work, ran up the ladder just to check how much - or how little - they'd done, and that was that.'
‘It's the kind of daft thing you might do,' agreed Wield. 'Especially if you'd had a good liquid lunch down at the Conservative Club, moaning with your mates about what an idle sod the British working man had become.'
Pascoe laughed and said, 'You haven't been talking to my wife by any chance? But it could be worth checking. This and the vicar's are the ones which come closest to being 'suspicious' deaths and the more we can disperse the suspicion, the sooner we can forget the whole business.'
'How can you check something like that at this distance?' queried Wield. 'There's no mention of booze in the inquest report, is there?'
'No,' said Pascoe. 'But in the circumstances - accident at home, wife greatly distressed, etcetera - the coroner might be inclined to muffle any hint that the deceased was stoned. It was Mr Wellington presiding, I see. You know him?'
This was in response to a small earth-tremor of Wield's features.
'He once bollocked me for being cheeky under his examination,' said Wield.
'Good. Then as you're old friends, you can chat to him,' said Pascoe.
He made a note on his desk pad.
'Finally, the first two I looked at. Brian Bulmer who crashed his car after the office party last Christmas. Definitely booze there, I'm afraid. No one else involved, no witnesses. He seems to have lost control on black ice and hit a bollard. He was Perfecta's financial director, remember? And at the beginning of May, Timothy Eagles, the chief accountant and Aldermann's chief rival for elevation to the board, had a heart attack. He was found in a washroom by the night security guard doing his first rounds at eight P.M. He was dressed for going home. He'd said goodnight to his secretary who'd left dead on time, leaving him to sign a couple of letters. Presumably he then got ready, felt ill, either in the washroom or perhaps made his way there for a drink of water, collapsed and was unfortunately not discovered till too late for medical help.'
'Aldermann was his assistant, wasn't he?' said Wield. 'Using the same washroom?'
'I believe so. Spell it out, Sergeant.'
Wield said, 'Aldermann on his way home finds Eagles having his attack. Instead of calling for help, he closes the door and goes on his way.'
Pascoe whistled and quoted, 'Thou shalt not kill but needst not strive officiously to keep alive. A bit cold- blooded! You've met him, what do you think? Could he do it?'
‘It's easier than murder,' said Wield.
‘Is it? I'm not sure. The strong human instinct is to help.'
'You try telling that to old ladies who see people peeking out of their windows as they get mugged,' said the sergeant. 'They'd tell you about human instincts!'
Pascoe said, 'I suppose so,' and stared in irritation at the papers strewn across his desk. All this, as Dalziel would say, was neither owt nor nowt and it was beginning to get on his nerves. All he could do was keep digging till either something positive came up or the weight of negatives gave him the excuse to leave off. But all the time he dug he was aware of the danger of causing distress and creating talk without the justification of a result to show for it.
But there was no choice, really. Either you did the job or you didn't. He began ticking off the next stages in his mind - talk to Masson, visit Capstick again, interview Christopher Burke's widow, see Elgood - and let out a long deep sigh.
'You all right, sir?' asked Wield.
