Yes, thought Ellie. If you're a good honest Yorkshire lad, with shoulders like an ox-yoke and fists like hams.
And Wield, whose mind sorted out connections like Bradshaw, said, 'Same name as that guard that got killed up at Redcar.'
'Wendy's brother,' said Ellie. 'Worked down Burrthorpe Main from leaving school till after the Strike. But when they started cutting back and cutting back, he was one of the first to accept terms and go. They fell out over it. Wendy said that none of them should let themselves be bought off. Mark said that he had a wife and three small children to think about. He took the money, got a job as a security guard and moved up to Redcar. Wendy didn't see him again till after they closed Burrthorpe completely. Then it struck her that she was letting those bastards at Westminster cut her off from her own flesh and blood too. So she went visiting. Earlier this year. It was fatted-calf time. They made her more than welcome. The kids were delighted to get their auntie back. Her sister-in-law who is completely apolitical was delighted to have an ally in the old Yorkshire struggle to keep the man of the house in his rightful place. And Mark wanted her to move up to the Northeast and start her life again. She went back to Burrthorpe and spent a few weeks thinking about it, but she'd just made her mind up to go when the news came about the animal rights raid. And Mark's death.'
She paused to take a sip of beer.
Dalziel was staring at her unblinkingly. He sees where this is going, she thought.
'She was devastated. Naturally. She'd found her brother again, and lost him forever, all within a matter of weeks. She wasn't all that much concerned with who'd killed him, not at first. For someone with her background she had surprising confidence in the police. They'd get someone, he'd be tried, convicted, sent down for ten years maybe. It wouldn't stop her sister-in-law from being a widow or her nephews from being fatherless. Or herself from being adrift in a world which no longer made much sense. It wasn't till the second raid, the one at Wanwood in the summer, which the papers said bore all the hall-marks of the same group, that it really got to her that whoever killed her brother was alive, and well, and carrying on business as usual. She read Peter's name in the paper as the officer in charge of the investigation. And she came to see me.'
She was addressing herself purely to Peter now.
'I hadn't had any contact with her since… not for ages. All she wanted now was to know if there was any hope of an arrest. I said I couldn't talk about your work with anyone not in the Force. She told me why she wanted to know. Then I said I'd ask you.'
'And did you?' he asked.
'Didn't need to. You came home that night really down. Said you were getting nowhere and that Andy here had told you to wind things down and put it on the shelf till something broke to reactivate it. If I'd had to ask, or if the case was going on, I'd have told you everything then. But there was no need.'
No need to bring up Wendy Walker and Burrthorpe and all its attendant pain.
'So I saw Wendy again and told her, no, there wasn't likely to be an arrest. She went away. A few days later she was back. She asked me if I had any contact with anyone in the animal rights movement. I said, yes, I knew a couple of people, but not the sort who'd be involved in violence, if that's what she meant. She said, it didn't matter. All she wanted was an introduction. She wanted to get in, establish her credentials, get a reputation as an extremist, and hopefully pick up some lead to the group which had killed her brother. She was convinced it was Yorkshire based, with the two known raids being where they were.'
'And you encouraged her in this?' said Pascoe.
'I told her it was crazy. And pointless. I told her that almost certainly the police would have their own undercover operators in the movement already, and if they hadn't come up with a lead, what chance was there that she would? But she was adamant. This is what she wanted, all that she wanted. I could see that she needed something. Like I say, she was totally adrift. Everything had gone…
'She still had her brother's family,' said Pascoe.
'She'd been back to see them,' said Ellie. 'There was a fellow there, helping with the garden, that kind of thing. Not living in, in fact nothing else happening yet, her sister-in-law assured her. But she didn't deny she had hopes. They spoke honestly, woman to woman. Wendy couldn't blame her, as a woman. But as a sister… well, at the very least she felt this was yet another development which left her on the outside. She needed something to keep her life moving forward. So I said I'd have a word with someone I knew. And I spoke to Cap Marvell.'
Dalziel said, 'Are you saying you told her all this? Any of this?'
'No. I told her everything else about Wendy's background but nothing of this. I told her that Wendy was disillusioned with politics and left-wing radicalism and wanted a new cause without all the human ambiguities of the old one. Cap said to send her along. That's all I did. Except that I promised Wendy to keep this to myself. And in return she promised if ever anything broke or looked like breaking, she'd contact me before pursuing it further.'
She leaned forward and said directly to Peter, 'In the remote contingency she did find out something, I wanted to make sure that nothing could happen which might embarrass or compromise you.'
He smiled and drooped the eyelid furthest from Dalziel in a wink which said, 'It's OK, I know that.'
'And what did she find out?' asked Dalziel.
She gave him her full attention now.
'I've no idea. Like I said, she called the day after they found those bones at Wanwood. I got the impression something had come up the previous night, or maybe it had been confirmed the previous night – '
'Something?' he interrupted.
'Nothing as firm as definite proof, else she'd have come straight out with it,' Ellie assured him. 'But something she wanted to talk over with me, a piece of behaviour perhaps, or something she'd overheard one of the others say… I really don't know…'
'But something definitely connected to the previous night?' he insisted.
Ellie put her fingers over her eyes in the effort of remembering.
'I thought she looked pale… well, paler than usual, and I suggested that finding those bones must have shaken her up… and she said, no it wasn't that… and she mentioned when they got inside the building, something about Cap Marvell running riot… then Peter came in. But she did say before she left it was probably all in her imagination.'
She spoke reassuringly, then asked herself why the hell am I offering the Fat Man reassurance? Like telling a pit bull you weren't going to hurt him!
He said, 'And you were expecting to see her at the party? To talk about this?'
'Right. Well, not at the party maybe but I'm sure while I was giving her a lift home, she'd have brought it up…'
'Did you say owt about this to anyone else?'
'No! Well, except…'
'Yes?'
'I may have said something to Cap about Wendy wanting to talk to me. I mean, look, to be honest, I never felt altogether right about landing Wendy on her as a kind of spy. OK, Cap's not a close friend, and this kind of stuff she's got herself into strikes me as a diversion from much more serious issues – get the big things right, and we get everything right – but for all that, it worried me because it was a bit… sneaky. Sorry, that sounds childish, but it's the right, the appropriate, word.'
A picture of Miss Martindale's wry smile flashed into her mind.
'So you were paving the way for a full admission in case anything Wendy might have come up with brought the whole business into the open,' said Peter.
Oh, how well you know me, my husband. But no need to spell out my moral ambiguity quite so plainly!
'Right,' she said.
'But clearly,' he went on, 'at no point did it ever enter your mind that Cap Marvell herself might be an object of Wendy's suspicions? Otherwise she's the last person you'd have said anything to. Right?'
So he too was in the reassure-Dalziel business. Oh, that tender blossom, that rathe primrose, needing protection from the cold blasts of suspicion playing on his new-found lady love. Could Cap Marvell really be mixed up in the Redcar business? Could antic chance have made her introduce Wendy to the woman who'd killed her brother? Dafter things happened on television. And what did she really know about Cap anyway? Wasn't her gut reaction that she was non-violent based more on the social assumption that ladies of Marvell's class didn't go around breaking skulls than on any real psychological insight? And how would Andy Dalziel react to the growing suspicion
