“However,” he resumed, “it would seem that mitigation is unnecessary as, if your digest of the investigation is accurate, nothing of Pal Junior’s accusations against his stepmother or insinuations against Mr Dalziel ever troubled the official record.”
“No, sir. There’s certainly nothing in the file, no signed transcript of the tape and no reference to it, and there was no mention of any of this at the inquest either.”
“No problem then,” said Pascoe briskly. “So here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re agreeable, that is. You’re going to forget you heard this tape. Both times.”
Just a little reminder that the Fat Man didn’t have a monopoly of divine omniscience.
“Which tape?” she asked.
“Don’t jump the gun,” he said. “Before amnesia sets in, I’d be interested to hear your reactions to it. Anything at all.”
She shrugged.
“I’ve met none of these people. I can’t even make an educated guess as to whether there’s anything in what Maciver said. As to why he changed his mind about hurling all these accusations around, well, in a straight fight, Cambridge undergrad versus the Super, I know where my money would be. But how about you, sir? Weren’t you around at the time?”
Pascoe shook his head.
“Sick leave. We established that last night when it became apparent that this latest suicide was a carbon copy of the old one.”
“That’s you off the hook then, sir.”
Pascoe opened a drawer and slid the cassette into it.
“What hook would that be, Detective?” he said briskly.
“Hook, sir?” said Novello, interpreting the signal. “Who said anything about a hook? Shall I take this stuff back down to the store now?”
“No,” said Pascoe. “Stick it in that cupboard there. I’ll pass it on to Mr Ireland later.”
“Mr Ireland?”
“Yes. Once we’re completely satisfied no crime’s been committed, a suicide, copycat or not, becomes Uniformed’s baby.”
“And are we completely satisfied, sir?”
Pascoe hesitated his answer. The trouble was he still didn’t know if his reluctance to say yes was caused by anything more than an objection to the Fat Man steamrollering him off the case.
But he didn’t doubt that in the apophthegms of the wise from Confucius to Rochefoucauld he could find many variations on the theme that men who try to stop steamrollers end up flat. Presumably Pal Maciver Junior too had tasted the sadness of Dalziel’s might. All that passion and hate in his recorded statement, yet none of it had ever got on to the public record.
So what did he do now? He suspected-no, he was certain-that he’d already stepped over the line drawn by Dalziel’s instruction to tidy this up and dump it on Paddy Ireland. There was danger in probing further, but was there any point?
Novello was watching him closely. He got the feeling she was following his thought processes even more closely. He remembered as a teenager climbing up on to the high board at the municipal swimming pool and changing his mind when he realized just how high it was. Then his nervous eye had spotted a couple of girls he knew who’d just come in and were looking up at him. So he’d dived.
Happily he was long past such adolescent needs to prove himself.
He said, “You know what? I think it might be useful to have a look at the scene by daylight.”
She smiled secretly but he saw it. And he recalled that when, after a descent which seemed to go on forever, he’d hit the water in a belly flop that almost stunned him, one of the girls had dived in and helped him to the side.
No use showing off unless you could carry it off.
He said, “It would be useful to have a fresh pair of eyes along…” paused, then went on, “I’ll just see if Sergeant Wield is in,” and reached for his phone.
“Not till later, sir,” said Novello. “I told you he’d got the morning off.”
“So you did,” said Pascoe. “In that case, I suppose you’d better come along, Shirley.”
Already he was feeling ashamed of his pettiness.
“OK,” said Novello. “Shall I drive?”
This was a telling riposte, thought Pascoe as he blew his nose to conceal his alarm. He recalled the one previous time he’d travelled, folded like a foetus, in the front seat of Novello’s Fiat Uno. She’d driven like Jehu on a bad prophet day and his abiding memory was of being far too close both to the road and to God.
Self-preservation overcame political correctness. He said firmly, “No, we’ll go in my car.”
And got that secret thought-reading smile again.
8 ASSIGNATION
The fog had lain thick on Enscombe village all night but it hadn’t inhibited the dawn chorus, and Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield had been further cheered by the returning memory that he wasn’t due in at work till after lunch. It would have been nice to share a lie-in with his partner, Edwin Digweed, but that was not to be. The Yorkshire Antiquarian Bookdealers Association’s annual symposium was starting at the Golden Fleece Hotel that evening and, as the member closest to the action, Digweed had taken on the job of making sure that everything was ready for the delegates’ arrival.
Observing that Wield’s good cheer seemed to have declined a little over breakfast and putting it down to his own unavoidable absence on his friend’s morning off, he apologized again before he left, adding, “Look, you pass the road end. Why don’t you call in and we’ll have lunch together? My treat.”
“And my pleasure,” said Wield.
In fact his apparent depression of spirits had had nothing to do with Edwin’s absence, but was merely a retrospectively pensive mood provoked by the news on local radio of Palinurus Maciver’s death in Moscow House the previous night.
By midday, with the sun soaring high in an almost cloudless sky, and the fog and the chill of the previous night vanished like a dream, he was in no mood for retrospection, and as he rode his Thunderbird along the narrow road that led out of Eendale, he sang in a voice to make a rook wince, “The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine.”
Normally his speed of choice would have blown the words back down his throat, but today he was moving at a pace sedate enough, if not to let him enjoy the scent of the flowers as he passed, at least to take in the full beauty of the landscape which in a single night seemed to have shrugged off the debilitations of winter and risen refreshed to garb itself in the clean bright fabrics of spring.
Eventually the road emerged from the steep-sided valley into a flatter, more conventionally pastoral landscape still very attractive in its variety of vernal greens. A couple of miles ahead lay the junction with the main east-west arterial, the fastest way into town for a man in a hurry, which was what Wield usually was as he found himself increasingly reluctant to leave Enscombe village of a morning. Today, however, he turned off to the left about a mile before the arterial junction, entering what to the casual tourist looked like a pleasant minor country road. But this too had once enjoyed the hustle and bustle and self-importance of a major thoroughfare before the road improvers of the sixties discovered a better, more Roman line for the main east-west route.
Those with farms or houses along the old main road had been mightily relieved to learn that the new highway wasn’t going to affect them except by rendering their everyday lives a lot more peaceful. Only the owner of the Golden Fleece, the old coaching inn at Gallow’s Cross, had been dismayed, and rightly so. With the passing trade which had been the Fleece’s life blood for a century and a half now coursing with ever-increasing force two miles to the south, the Fleece had rapidly declined to a run-down country pub with only its incongruous dimensions to remind anyone of the glory days.
Then, just as rumours gathered strength that it was to be demolished completely to make way for an
