Myers shook his head,
'Layabouts,' he said savagely. 'Give 'em to us for a few weeks, we'd soon straighten them out.'
Ludlam said, 'You had to straighten young Frostick out, didn't you? Wasn't he getting back at all hours?'
'That's right. He was screwing the arse off some bint worked in a hotel, isn't that right, Corporal Gillott?'
The man addressed, a lance-corporal with a ramrod straight back so that even sitting down he seemed to be at attention, pulled at his ragged brown moustache and said, 'That's what I heard, Sarge.'
'Didn't you never meet her, Norm?' asked the third r.p., a burly full corporal with heavy jowls. 'I thought you was a bit of a mate of Frostick's, letting him sneak in late, and that.'
'What's this? What's this?' demanded Myers sharply. 'I'll have no favourites round here, so you'd best be sure what you're saying, Corporal Price!'
'Only joking, Sarge,' said Price, grinning maliciously at Gillott. 'I saw her once at a camp dance. Painted like a fairground sideshow she was, but I wouldn't have minded rolling my penny down her chute!'
'Less of that, less of that,' ordered Myers. 'Show some respect. Anything else we can do, Inspector?'
Pascoe, always interested in crime and punishment, said, 'What do you get for being late?'
'First offence, couple of days' jankers,' said Myers.
'Which reminds me. Corporal Gillott, isn't it time you was out there, checking on our customers?'
Gillott stood up. Could a man really be as straight as that without some artificial aid? wondered Pascoe.
'What'll I have them doing this afternoon, Sarge?' he asked, each syllable glottally stopped so the words came out like the sound of a typewriter.
'Leaves,' said the sergeant. 'There's leaves all over the fucking place. Come nightfall, I don't want to see a fucking leaf anywhere around this camp.'
'Come nightfall, you can't see anything anywhere,' said Ludlam, laughing.
He and Pascoe followed the lance-corporal out and watched him marching smartly away.
'Well, there's our police for you,' said Ludlam. 'Remind you of your mob, do they? No, don't answer that!'
Pascoe made for his car. He was beginning to feel strangely shut in, the same kind of feeling he had when his work took him into a prison. That was probably unfair. No doubt a monastery would have much the same effect.
He said as he unlocked his door, 'How long have you been in the Army, Sergeant?'
'Me? We'll have been together now for twenty years come next spring,' said Ludlam. 'I haven't made up my mind yet whether to make a career of it!'
Pascoe laughed with the man. It did occur to him to wonder if advancement to sergeant was the best a lively intelligent man could hope for over twenty years in the Army, but it would have been crass to put the question. However, a more general philosophical query did seem in order.
'Twenty years,' he said. 'Before the big unemployment. Tell me, Sergeant, what motivated men to sign on in your day?'
The sergeant leaned down to the open window and with wide-eyed surprise at being asked such an obvious question said, 'Why, patriotism, Inspector. Pure and simple patriotism!'
Chapter 11
'Sack, Sack!… Pray you give me some sack!'
As Pascoe switched off his engine in The Duke of York car park, the passenger door opened and George Headingley slid in.
'Thought it was you,' he said. 'I'd just about given you up. Look, I'm on my way to The Towers to see this Warsop woman. Then I thought I'd go on to Paradise Hall. Why don't you come along? In fact, why don't you drive me, seeing as you're sitting there with your engine warm.'
'I've got work of my own, remember?' protested Pascoe. 'And what about my lunch?'
'Oh, I'm sure they'll let you at the left-overs at Paradise Hall,' said Headingley. 'And you wouldn't like it in the Duke anyway. They've taken against cops there since last night. I don't know who's been putting ideas in their heads – Ruddlesdin, likely – but they're muttering about drunken policemen already. Come on, let's go!'
With an exaggerated sigh, Pascoe let in the clutch and drove out of the car park, turning left along the narrow winding country road known locally as the Paradise Road.
It took its name from the Hall, five miles away, and the Hall, rather disappointingly, took its name not from the naughty antics which local tradition insisted used to go on there, but from the Paradise family who built it in the mid-eighteenth century. The Towers two miles closer was a half-hearted gesture in the direction of Victorian Gothic. Rumour had it that its last private owner, an old lady who died in the mid-'thirties, had been so incensed by a quarrel she'd had with the owners of Paradise Hall that she had willed her own property to the local authority with the intention that it should be used as a lunatic asylum. What she seemed to have in mind was some sort of Yorkshire Bedlam from which shaven-headed madmen would escape from time to time to swarm all over her neighbour's grounds. Happily, provision for the mentally handicapped in the district was already good, and with plans for future development well advanced, The Towers looked like being a white elephant till a legal ruling was obtained which permitted the authority to ignore the specific terms of the will so long as the building was dedicated to the ends of community care in a much more general sense.
And so it had become what was basically an old people's holiday home, providing short breaks in the countryside for inhabitants of city centre retirement homes and also for old people living with their families who needed somewhere to stay while the family had a break.
Philip Westerman had been one of the former. He had been coming to The Towers for four years now and was during his stays a popular visitor to The Duke of York.
Headingley filled Pascoe in on his morning's work, taking his interest for granted. Pascoe who had promised himself not to get involved felt to some extent trapped, but recognized that it was a trap of his own rather than Headingley's setting.
'So Kassell confirms that Charlesworth was driving,' he said hopefully. 'There you are. Nice, respectable witness. Cut and dried.'
'You'd think so,' said Headingley. 'Only he knew all about the accident without me telling him. Now, the Post doesn’t appear till this afternoon, so who's been talking to whom?'
Pascoe shot him a glance.
'You're not suggesting collusion, are you?'
Headingley shrugged.
'What's in it for him?' he asked. 'Could've been Ruddlesdin again, though Kassell didn't mention being bothered by the Press.'
'Anyway, what's your line with this Mrs Warsop?' asked Pascoe.
'Just listen to her story. Hope she's a bit vague. And try to suggest politely that she really ought to keep her big mouth shut!'
In fact, it turned out that Mrs Warsop had a rather small mouth with a tendency to purse up as she considered any question closely before offering a well expressed and far from vague answer.
She was in her late thirties, a small erect woman with black hair bound severely back from a not unattractive face. She reminded Pascoe of the kind of Victorian governess who gets the master of the house in the last chapter.
She would also make an excellent witness in court, coroner's or Crown.
She repeated the story she had first told Ruddlesdin the night before. Standing in the entrance of the hotel, waiting for her friend, she had observed Dalziel get into the driving seat of his car and drive it away. She was adamant that it was in fact Dalziel she had seen.
'I had observed him earlier in the restaurant. He was with two other men whom I do not know personally but who have been pointed out to me on other occasions as Major Kassell from Haycroft Grange, and a bookmaker called Charlesworth whose betting shops seem to clutter up most shopping precincts in town.'
'And why did you observe Mr Dalziel, as you put it? ‘asked Headingley with a slight edge of sarcasm. He soon
