'You did take in what I said, didn't you?' she interposed. 'All these ramblings of hers are stuff that happened a lifetime ago?'
'You've heard them before?'
'I could join in word for word! This and a dozen other tales she comes out with six times a day like it just happened yesterday.'
'You said you didn't know any Pascoes?'
'Nor I do, not living. Nor her either if truth be told. She were a kid when all this were happening, if it did happen. She picked it all up from letting her lugs flap and keeping her mouth shut. When I first heard it way back, her Aunt Mary weren't the virgin white she's become since, but the older she gets, the older her memories get too, and all she recalls now is what she picked up when she were six or seven.'
'You shut up, our Madge,' ordered the old woman. 'I know more than I ever let on.'
'I don't know about that, Mother, but you certainly let on a lot more than most on us want to know. Are you done, mister? 'Cos if you are, I'll shut that door and try to hang on to the bit of heat you've not let out already.'
Pascoe let the injustice of this pass and said, 'So you can confirm at least from your own recollections of family tradition the truth of what your mother says?'
'That was the tale in our family. Auntie Mary's man had run off with the wife of his cousin who got shot for a coward or something in the war. But there wasn't a Pascoe around here when I was a girl, and there's none now to my knowledge. You never let on it was history you was after.'
She was now openly suspicious. It was, Pascoe felt, time to go. He couldn't resist one last question, suggested mainly because of the confusion of names in his own family.
'Why is your mother called Mrs Quiggins? I mean, shouldn't that be her maiden name?'
It was a mistake he saw at once, implying knowledge there was no reason for him to have.
The daughter looked at him coldly for a moment then said, 'Not that it's any business of yours, but she managed to have me without benefit of clergy, so the 'Mrs' is sort of honorary, ain't that right, Mother? Never had much luck with men, the Quigginses. Now, are you done?'
'Yes,' said Pascoe. 'I'm done. Thank you for your help.'
He stepped back into the cobbled street, feeling the damp cold air like a blessed relief.
Behind him, as if resenting the escape of her audience and trying to lure him back with juicier bait, the old woman's voice screeched, 'I could tell you stories about them Pascoes! Should have shot the whole lot on 'em! Bad blood, that's what they were. Bad blood!'
And even with the door closed and the distance between them growing with each step, he could still hear the woman's eldritch screech as he got into his car.
'Bad blood! Bad blood!' x
The sluices of Death filtered slowly, but they filtered exceeding small, and Gentry displayed his trawl with a smile of satisfaction like moonlight on the Aral Sea.
'Doesn't look much,' said Dalziel.
He was right. On the table were four dishes, three containing coins and one containing some small pieces of metal.
'You are right,' said Gentry, 'though the paucity of material may be in itself as significant as a plenitude.'
'Eh?' said Dalziel with the scornful suspicion of a man being offered a cut-price diamond tiara at a car-boot sale.
'First, the coins,' said Gentry. 'Quite a span. Here we have a real antiquity, a Jacobean groat, that is, a four- penny piece, possibly quite valuable. And here at the other end of the temporal scale, a 1955 penny with, in between and perhaps most interesting of all, seven gold sovereigns.'
He paused for effect.
Dalziel said, 'Fucking marvellous. I'll get on to Missing Persons and see if they've got owt on a 300-year-old miser who's gone walkabout.'
Gentry, whose established response to Dalziel's sarcasm was to take it literally, though whether this was a gambit or just natural pedantry no one had ever determined, said, 'To assume that all these coins, or indeed any of them, spilled from the pockets of the deceased wouldbe rashly predicative. Particularly in view of the evident absence of any pockets.'
'You what?'
'The search of the telluric material continues, but I think I can confidently predict that we are not about to find any traces of the various fibres and fasteners invariably present in human attire, not even any of the nails, leather or lace-eyelets component in footwear.'
Dalziel digested this then said, 'Champion! So it's a very old miser who went around bollock naked and presumably kept his money up his jacksie!'
'Eductions are your department, superintendent,' said Gentry. 'I merely present discoveries and facts.'
'Oh aye? What's these facts then?' said Dalziel peering down at the final dish.
'As you can see there are two pieces of metal. This one is quite clearly part of the clasp of a small purse or wallet or some such receptacle. The other is a mere shard, of what it is not possible to say, though a preliminary examination suggests it may have become fragmented from its original mass by explosive pressure.'
'You mean, like part of a bullet or something?' said Dalziel without enthusiasm.
'If I had meant that, I would have said that,' said Gentry. 'The only other discovery that may or may not be pertinent is of various pieces of masonry which were removed separately, of course, not sluiced. Preliminary examination of the remnants of mortar suggests a structure of some antiquity.'
'Haven't come across an inscription, have you?' asked Dalziel hopefully. 'Something like, 'Here Lies Old Tom, God Rest His Rotten Soul'?'
'An interesting speculation but no, we have seen nothing to suggest this was a tomb.'
'And that's the lot?'
'Except of course for the bones.'
'Bones? I don't see no bones?'
'As instructed, I dispatched all osseous and organic matter directly to Mr Longbottom,' said Gentry frostily.
'Did that include a jawbone?'
'Indeed it did.'
'Well, thank God for small mercies. You got a phone?'
He rang the Path. Lab. but all he got via an assistant who'd been instructed to pass it on verbatim was the message that he would be told what there was to tell as soon as there was anything to tell, and that was likely to be later rather than sooner if the necessary work was further interrupted by unnecessary phone calls.
'Tell him, up yours too,' said Dalziel banging down the phone and glowering at Gentry. His inclination was to exit on a piece of fine abuse but he didn't bother. Why fire Parthian shots at a brick wall?
He went back to his office, finding occasion to shout at nearly everyone he met on his route through the building which wasn't a great number as the first bellow created a shock wave which sent all who heard it scurrying for cover.
Why was he in such a foul mood? he asked himself. A possible murder case that was moving too slow for his liking? Hardly. He'd had far more fretful cases than this, with Desperate Dan on his back and blood and guts everywhere! In fact at the moment, Wanwood apart, there was precious little of any import apart from the usual break-ins, muggings, and assaults, on CID's books.
So what was the problem?
Cap Marvell was the problem, just as she'd been this morning. Then he'd resolved not to go round to her flat for lunch, but somehow he'd ended up going, and he'd got his jollies which he had no complaint about – which in fact were of such a quality that a man might spend a long weekend in Bangkok without finding their equal – but also, without intending to, against all his intentions, and despite his continued silence on the subject of her whisky, he'd got in deeper.
In a way, that bloody Walker lass was to blame. Without her intervention, it would have been interesting to see if the after-bed afterglow would have survived another vegetarian lunch. Instead he'd finished up at the hospital being given orders like he was a… what? Husband?… Hardly! Toy boy?… Jesus!… Partner?… That's what they called 'em nowadays, wasn't it?… Sounded like some tax-fiddling dodge in an iffy company… How about friend?
