as 'startled', with its probably artificial honey-blondeness modulating into a certainly artificial magenta at the extremities. She was wearing a flouncy black blouse and a very short, very creased straight pink skirt, candy-striped leg-warmers and shoes straight out of the Inquisitor's instrument box. Yet despite all these aesthetic disadvantages, there was somewhere in the girl a current of vitality which leapt out and touched Pascoe as their eyes met and was just as quickly switched off as she looked away.
This, he presumed, was the Gregorys' daughter, Charley Frostick's affianced bride. Frostick was regarding her with the kind of expression he probably reserved for dogs caught crapping on his green concrete.
'Hello, Andrea,' said Mrs Frostick. 'Has your mam told you? Charley's coming home for his grandad's funeral.'
'Yeah, she said,' replied the girl in a flat, lifeless tone perhaps caused less by lack of enthusiasm than fear of cracking the mask. 'How are you, Mrs Frostick? Sorry to hear about your old dad.'
'Thank you, dear,' said Mrs Frostick.
'Have you got a moment?' said Mrs Gregory. 'I'd like a word.'
'Teeny! Teeny! Where are you, woman! I want my dinner! Where's my dinner!'
The voice came streaming out of the door behind her.
She turned and called, 'It's not time yet, Dad! Jeff! Can't you see to Dad? Jeff!'
'He'll not hear,' said the girl. 'He'll be down the garden.'
'I'm just going to make the Inspector here a cup of coffee, Mabel,' said Mrs Frostick. 'I'll pop round later, shall I?'
'Oh, all right,' said Mrs Gregory. 'That'll do. That'll be best.'
She sounded relieved as though postponing some unpleasantness. But before she could withdraw, Andrea said impatiently, 'What's up with you, Mam? Honestly, you'd think you were going to say something dreadful. It's nowt to do with you or anyone else anyway, is it? All she wants to say, Mrs Frostick, is when Charley comes home, I'm going to tell him I don't want no more waiting, I want to get married straight off.'
'Straight off, Andrea?' said Dolly Frostick. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean now, this week, while he's home, straight off.'
'But… I don't know… I mean there's the church, you'd need a licence, and I'm not sure if he's allowed to get married just like that…'
'Register office,' said the girl. 'I'm not bothering with no church, and my dad wouldn't want to cough up anyway.'
'But the Army…'
'They haven't bought him, body and soul, have they? His life's still his own,' retorted the girl with at last a flash of animation to confirm the existence of that hidden electricity Pascoe had sensed but was beginning to suspect he had mistaken. 'They've got houses over there in Germany, you know; they don't live in trees. There’s married quarters. Charley wrote about them in his letters.'
'You'd want to go back with him?' asked Mrs Frostick, amazed.
'Well, I wouldn't want to stay on here by myself,' said Andrea.
'Are you in trouble, girl? In the club?' interposed Frostick tersely.
'No, I'm bloody not!' exclaimed the girl. 'Grow up. No one gets in trouble nowadays.'
'So what's the hurry all of a sudden?' demanded Frostick. 'Charley's got his way to make. I thought you'd decided to wait till he got posted back here? At the earliest? And that'd be a sight too early to my way of thinking!'
This last comment looked set to provoke the girl into some extreme of passion, but her mother intervened.
'She's lost her job,' she said wretchedly.
'Lost her job? Now we're getting to it!' exclaimed Frostick. 'What've you been getting up to, girl?'
'Nothing! I just got fed up. Slave labour it is there. The hotel's shut down till Easter, so there's just the restaurant and they want me working in there day and night. It's just boring, that's what it is. And they're probably glad to be saving my wages, not that there's much to be saved. Stupid pair of twats. Think they're God's gift!'
This confusion of reasons did not impress Frostick, who got straight to the heart of the matter as he saw it.
'I've got it! No job, nowhere to live, so you'll have to come back here which you don't much like, do you? So you think you'll jump on our Charley's back, don't you?'
'Listen,' flared the girl. 'I can get plenty of jobs easy. I've got contacts, you get noticed in a job like mine. So mebbe I won't go with Charley. But mebbe I will too, if I want to. He'll want to. It's him that proposed to me. We're engaged, or don't you remember?'
With a courage which Pascoe could not but admire, she stood up to Frostick and waved her left hand in front of his face. Beneath that eggshell of make-up fluttered a fully formed she-hawk! On her third finger glittered what looked like a not inexpensive cluster of diamonds, reminding Pascoe of the problem of Bob Deeks's money. Frostick glared at the finger as if he'd have liked to bite it off and exclaimed, 'Yeah, engaged! It was the worst day's work he ever did. The very worst!'
Looking as if he was about to explode, Frostick turned away and marched into the house. Pascoe followed him.
'Excuse me, Mr Frostick,' he said. 'I won't stay for coffee, I'm a bit busy, but if I could just use your bathroom…'
'That bloody girl! She's a trollop, you could see it when she were still at junior school, a trollop! Did you see the state of her? I wouldn't have let any girl of mine go around like that! She'd have been out, I tell you. Out!'
'I gathered she was out,' said Pascoe undiplomatically. 'Not living at home, I mean.'
'No, not her, not with the old man in there to look after. Help her mam, that one? No way! She's a decent woman, Mabel, and she gets no help from any side. When they had to move the old lad downstairs, Andrea said that was it, she was off as soon as she could find somewhere to go. I wasn't sorry to hear it – not that she told me, like, but her mam told my Dolly – I thought she might get herself right away, out of our Charley's road. But she only goes as far as that hotel, chambermaid come waitress, that's what she is; supposed to be a classy place and they take on the likes of her…'
'Hold on,' said Pascoe, for whom this was ringing a bell. 'Which hotel was it?'
'That Paradise Hall place. Living in, that was the attraction, getting away from home; she'd not do that kind of work at home, I can't see her doing it properly away! When Charley joined up I thought, grand, at least he'll be out of the way now. I was worried she'd pester him into getting married soon as he'd finished his training, but he'd got sense enough to see that wasn't on. I never thought I'd be glad to see our lad go abroad, but I tell you I wasn't sorry. I reckoned that even if he didn't find himself someone else, she wasn't the kind to hang around without getting hold of some other mug. But now she's got herself sacked, nowhere to live except at home, and if I know Andrea, she's not the one to put up with that. So it'll be our Charley who has to suffer. Our Charley!'
Frostick had worked himself up into a fine frenzy. Pushing past Pascoe, he rushed back out of the front door, eager to rejoin the fray.
It was too good a chance to miss. Three minutes later, breathing rather hard, Pascoe had checked the Frosticks' wardrobe, the second bedroom (obviously Charley's), the spare room and the cupboard under the stairs without finding any sign of a pair of boots.
He went into the kitchen, tried the cupboard beneath the sink just on the off-chance. No luck. Outside in the back garden, which consisted of five yards of patio in pink and beige flagstones and one yard of border planted with dwarf conifers, stood a neat shed in green plastic. What implements a man with a garden like this kept in his garden shed teased the imagination, and it was in a spirit of philosophical rather than constabulary inquiry that Pascoe let himself out of the kitchen and moved across the patio.
The answer was… nothing! The hut was as empty as on the day of its erection. Its function was simply symbolic. But was it a last rude gesture at the whole idea of the suburban garden which Frostick had so manifestly triumphed over? Or was it the last piece in a jigsaw of self-delusion? Did Frostick really believe he had a garden? Or that others would believe he had one? Mystery!
Pascoe at this moment became aware he wasn't alone.
Just beyond the wire fence in the hugely neglected next-door garden, seated on an upturned grass-box almost invisible amid the grass it could never hope to contain, was a man smoking a cigarette. He was in his
