was examining his reflection in the glass of a Chagall print. 'Christ, this hard water plays hell with your hair.' He had something on his mind. He'd get round to it sooner or later. Pascoe said, 'You want the name of my barber?' Stubbs turned his gaze on Pascoe's head, dropped it slowly to his chain store suit, and said, 'Know how old you are? Same age as me, only a fortnight in it. I punched up your record on the screen.' 'So?' 'So nothing. Maybe the older look's the way to get on round here.' 'You've got to be inconspicuous,' said Pascoe mildly. 'Like your boss? He wears a suit but he's about as inconspicuous as a rapist in a nunnery.' To say whatever he wanted to say, he needed to provoke a reaction. Pascoe said, 'How come you were looking at my record? That's supposed to be confidential.' 'Not once you started sticking your nose into our business.' 'Now hold on,' said Pascoe. 'All right, so I might have got out of line a bit, but that's all sorted between me and Mr Hiller now.' 'Sorted for you maybe,' said Stubbs. 'Listen, I can't stand people who fart and run. Couple of things you ought to get straight about Geoff Hiller. First is, he's dead straight. OK, he'd win no prizes in a charm school, though maybe he'd come out ahead of your Mr Dalziel. But he doesn't work to orders. He got picked for this job because anyone who knows him knows he wouldn't try to cover up police incompetence.' 'And if he found there was something more than police incompetence being covered up?' 'He wouldn't back off from that either,' said Stubbs. 'That's what I mean. You and your boss have gone creeping around behind Geoff's back. Now it's starting to look as if something really nasty might turn up, where are you? Safe in your pits while Geoff's out there in the open, taking the flak.' 'What flak?' ‘I don't know. But that's how I know it's coming. He's loyal to his troops. When the heavy shit starts flying he gets us out of the way.
You've started something, you and that fat bastard, and I just wanted to be sure you knew what you'd done.' 'Now hang about!' said Pascoe, genuinely provoked now. But Stubbs wasn't in the mood for hanging about. The door shut behind him with a bang. ‘Shit,' said Pascoe. He tried to argue with himself that whatever hole Hiller found himself in, he would have reached anyway, unless he hadn't managed to dig up what Dalziel had managed to dig up, in which case it was just as well the Fat Man had gone sneaking about. But still he felt guilty. Finally he reached for the phone and dialled. ‘Hello? I would like to speak to Lord Partridge, please. Tell him it's Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe.' There was a long pause. He pictured his lordship debating whether noble disdain or noblesse oblige was the more profitable reaction. 'Partridge here. How nice to hear from you, Mr Pascoe. How can I help you?' 'You've heard about Miss Marsh?' 'Yes indeed.
Dreadfully sad. Still, time and tide wait for no one, not even Scottish nannies.' 'But they do have considerable control over other natural forces. Conception, for instance. The pathologist's report states conclusively that she never had a child. Not even an abortion.
Was never pregnant.' Now the pause felt as if it might last forever.
'Now what makes you think I might be interested in that rather esoteric piece of information, Mr Pascoe?' said Partridge at last in a level voice. 'I recall you talking about your interest in law and order,' said Pascoe. 'I presume that Miss Marsh, in pursuit of both verisimilitude and profit, presented you with some form of medical bill. An abortion clinic, was it? Or did she go the whole hog and claim to have had the child? That would up the ante considerably. Now you, my lord, are not a simple man, ready to dole out cash on the evidence of a few figures on the back of a fag packet. You would need to see a properly receipted account, and in order to get that, Miss Marsh would have needed an accomplice, possibly a nurse or a clerical worker in the relevant medical establishment. Surely as a big law and order man, you want to see this person brought to justice?' He could hear himself speaking in the measured reasonable voice Dalziel accused him of always using as his flights of fancy spiralled into the inane.
He finished and waited for Partridge to shoot him back to earth with anger, amazement, threats of phoning the Chief Constable, petitioning Parliament, bringing back the cat. What the hell! It was worth it just to know that the old bugger knew that he knew. Also the realization that he'd been doling out cash all these years on the basis of a phantom pregnancy would probably haunt him forever! He heard a sound at the other end of the line. The splutterings of inarticulate rage perhaps? It increased in volume. Now there was no mistaking it. Not rage, but laughter. And not the forced laughter of a man trying to put a good face on things, but the wholehearted laughter that came from relief and genuine amusement. 'Mr Pascoe, I thank you. It was a great kindness, in the midst of your busy life, to find time to ring me.
Many thanks. If you're ever up this way again, do call in. We'll always be glad to see you. Goodbye now.' The phone went dead. 'Well, bugger me,' said Pascoe. There was a discreet cough from the doorway.
It was Wield with a cardboard folder in his hands and a faint smile on his craggy features. 'Trouble?' he said. 'No. But that's the trouble,' said Pascoe. Such antilogy required explication. Wield listened, sighed, and said, 'You can't leave it alone, can you?' 'If Partridge had got mad, maybe I could.' 'But he sounded relieved? Well, he's got a problem off his hands, hasn't he? With Marsh's death, I mean.' He knew that before I rang him. Maybe he knew it before anyone rang him.'
Wield whistled and said, 'Hold on. You start saying things like that without evidence and you really are in trouble.' 'The description of Marsh's visitor fits,' said Pascoe stubbornly. 'Only like Hiller's jacket,' mocked Wield. 'Tallish? Greyish hair? British warm? Quick glimpse from behind? It'd make a great line-up! In any case, if he killed her, the news that she'd conned him all these years, so he didn't need to kill her anyway, would hardly send him over the moon, would it?' 'You'd think not.' Pascoe laughed. 'Odd thing is, I quite like the old sod. I picked on him because he was the only target I had. As old Tory lords go, he's not so bad. I've been reading his autobiography. I reckon on the whole he does more good than harm, which is more than you can say about most ex-politicians.' 'Knows how to blow his own trumpet, does he?' said Wield sceptically. 'Naturally.
But, oddly enough, it's at its most muted when he mentions his charity work; you know, like he wants to publicize the charity, not himself.
This Carlake Trust that's getting the royalties from the book, well, it seems he hands his House of Lords Attendance allowance straight over to them too. But he doesn't make a big deal of it, just mentions it in passing.' 'Funny kind of thing for him to get involved with,' mused Wield. 'Why so?' 'Nowt really, except that people like Partridge must get a lot of requests to sponsor charities and they usually pick on summat they've a personal link with, like cancer appeals if your missus dies of it, or heart if you've had an attack.' 'So why should Partridge be so interested in an organization that runs homes for kids so badly handicapped their parents couldn't face bringing them up..
.?' The two policemen were looking at each other in wild surmise.
'When did he first get interested?' demanded Wield. 'Hang on,' said Pascoe, turning pages. 'If I remember right, Partridge was in almost from the start. It's his support that has built the Trust up into a national charity… here it is. 'When I first met Percival Carlake, he was running a single home, created from his family house near Dunfermline in Fife…' And that was, let me see, 1971. It fits!
And they've now got over twenty homes all over the country, mainly due to Partridge's support.' 'Conscience money?' 'More than money, Wieldy.
Bloody hard work. Oh, that cunning woman! She fixes things with a mate in, say, Edinburgh, I bet it was Edinburgh, that's where she came from. All she plans to start with is to get a bit of pocket money, and a birth costs more than an abortion. Perhaps she's going to say it was a stillbirth, but her mate tells her about some other woman at the same clinic or hospital or whatever who's just had a dreadfully handicapped child. She cannot or won't look after it, and the kid's going to the Carlake Home. Marsh sees a chance for a really long-term stranglehold on Partridge. Saying she'd had a healthy kid and put it out to adoption was too risky. Partridge might have got too interested. Checking up would have been easy. But a child like this 'There'd still be records.' 'Sure. Mother's name. Say she's called Smith. Marsh tells Partridge she used the name Smith to hide her shame. Gets all the forged receipts made out in the name Smith. And once Partridge accepts it, she's got him for life.' 'So he starts taking an interest in Carlake's work to ease his conscience?' Wield frowned. 'You'd think a man who was that bothered would have said,
'Stuff it,' and simply admitted to the kid. He was out of politics by then, wasn't he?' 'He still had Lady Jessica to worry about,' said Pascoe. 'You think she knew?' 'The way she talked about Marsh, she knew something. Anyway, Wieldy, this is all speculation. I'll pass it on to Hiller, but it's a dead end for me, as you'll no doubt be relieved to hear.' 'Not quite a dead end,' said Wield. Pascoe looked at the Sergeant keenly. There was no gleaning anything from that fallow face, but his ear was finely attuned to the modes of his voice.
'In what particular respect?' he inquired. ‘If you're right about Miss Marsh, it shows there's nowt much she'd not have done to earn a bit of extra bread,' said Wield. 'What have you been up to, Wieldy? Don't tell me that you've forgotten to practise all that stuff you were preaching?' 'Not exactly. I just thought it might be interesting to get a look at the alumni (is that the word?) of Beddington College in nineteen seventy-six. This is it. See anything
