his way through the crowd like an All Black in sight of the line. He caught up with him at the forbidding entrance to a dark narrow house right opposite the Great Tower of the Cathedral.
'Peter,' he said. 'There's something....’
But the door was already opening in response to Pascoe's imperious knocking, and a dark clad figure confronted them with the amazed scorn of a Victorian butler finding trade on his front step.
'What on earth is the meaning of this din?' demanded Canon Horncastle.
'Police,' said Pascoe. 'May we come in?'
As his request was spoken over his shoulder, it seemed to Wield a little redundant. The Canon thought so too, for his thin face flushed like pack ice during a seal hunt and he cried, 'How dare you force your way into my house like this!'
'I'd like to speak to your wife, sir,' said Pascoe.
'My wife!' exclaimed Horncastle as though Pascoe had made an indecent suggestion. 'I assure you of this, Inspector or whatever you are, you will not speak to my wife without a considerably more detailed account of your reasons than you have yet given me.'
‘Thank you for being so protective, Eustace, but I think I'm of an age to make my own decisions.'
The voice came from the head of a brown varnished stairway rising out of the gloomy hall which despite the warmth of the day outside contrived to be damp and chilly. The woman was silhouetted against the light of a landing window and for all Wield could see, she might indeed have been clutching a poison bottle in one hand while with the other she pressed a dagger through her bloodstained nightgown into her ravaged heart. Such Gothic notions seemed entirely appropriate to this sepulchral house and its cadaverous master, but in the event as she descended she proved to be wearing a light grey twinset and a tweedy skirt and carrying nothing more sinister than a pair of spectacles.
Pascoe advanced to meet her. For the third time in the space of less than an hour he was faced with the delicate task of finding out if the woman he was speaking to was on the point of killing herself. With Pam Waterson, he had put the question more or less direct. With Shirley Appleyard he had let his own observations give him the answer. What would be his approach this time? Wield asked himself.
'Could we have a word alone, Mrs Horncastle?' he asked.
'No, you could not.' It was the Canon, his voice thin and dangerous. 'Anything you have to say to my wife will be said in front of me.'
Pascoe scratched his ear and looked interrogatively at the woman. He had no doubt that the Canon opposed the ordination of women and probably didn't much care to see them hatless in church, but this attempt at domestic domination was straight out of Trollope! Surely Victorian values stopped somewhere short of this?
But the woman surprised him.
'Eustace is of course right, Mr Pascoe,' she said quietly. 'There is nothing which can be said to me nor anything which I might say in reply that I would wish to keep from his ears.'
This was either total submission or . . . could it be total war? He looked into her calm features, but found no clue there. Suddenly, however, he was ninety per cent certain she was not his Dark Lady, but he couldn't back off without the missing tenth.
He said, 'Mrs Horncastle, have you ever written any letters to Chief Superintendent Dalziel?'
'No,' she said. 'I have not.'
Her voice carried conviction. But she would say that, wouldn't she? He had to press on.
'These letters were unsigned,' he said.
She saw his drift immediately and half smiled. 'I see you think my association with the Church might have turned me Jesuitical. But no, when I say I have never written to Mr Dalziel, I mean I have never written to him using my own name, or anyone else's name or no name at all. Does that satisfy you?'
Before Pascoe could reply, the Canon's fragile patience snapped.
'This is truly beyond belief,' he cried. 'The Chief Constable shall be apprised of this outrage. How dare you force your way into my house and accuse my wife of writing abusive anonymous letters?'
'I'm sorry, sir, but I've accused your wife of nothing. And why should you think the letters were abusive?'
'Because I have no doubt that that gross man invites his fair share of abuse!' snapped Horncastle. 'If not abusive, then what?'
'That's a good question, Eustace,' said his wife approvingly. 'I should be interested to know what I might be thought capable of, Mr Pascoe. So tell me. Is the correspondence threatening? Inflammatory? Obscene?'
The Canon looked ready to explode again but Pascoe got in quickly, 'In a way, threatening,' he said. 'But not against the Super. Against the writer herself.'
'You mean a threat of suicide?' said Mrs Horncastle. 'The poor woman. I hope with all my heart you find her.'
'You've come here to accuse my wife of threatening suicide?' exclaimed the Canon, attaining a new level of incredulous indignation which his wife obviously felt required explaining.
'There is a special opprobrium attached to suicide in the Church's scale of sins,' she said, in a pedagogic tone. 'My husband would, I think, have preferred obscenity.'
'Dorothy, what has got into you?' said Horncastle in genuine as well as rhetorical amazement. 'I think it best if you go through into the drawing-room while I remove these people from the premises.'
'No, thank you, Eustace,' she said. 'I shall see Mr Pascoe and his friend out. Then I shall return to my room to watch the procession pass. I wouldn't miss it for worlds. I've been helping Chung, you know, Mr Pascoe. I met your wife on several occasions and I enjoyed her company very much.'
