“Who knows? For a change, we were really moving when it happened. I guess they’ll be doing a two-mile jigsaw to put the poor devil together again. Time of the year for suicides, it seems. First Pal, now this. Don’t they say such things go in threes? Who’s next, I wonder?”
She went to him and put her arms around him. He stood quite still in the embrace, neither responding to it nor attempting to move from it.
In the entrance hall the old American long-case clock began to strike midnight. Tonight its brassy chime sounded particularly triumphant, as if to say, At last I’ve got someone to hear.
March 22nd, 2002
1 870
It was the kind of spring morning to make a young man’s fancy turn to thoughts of new baked bread and homemade marmalade, while Ellie Pascoe’s matutinal kiss was more than usually passionate, resulting in Peter Pascoe arriving late at work, but lighter of step and lighter of heart than usual.
The lightness of step was not enough to get him past Paddy Ireland’s ground-floor office undetected, and the lightness of heart didn’t last long either.
“Morning, Pete,” said the inspector. “Got a letter here. Think it must be yours.”
“Got my name on it, you mean?” asked Pascoe.
“Not exactly.”
He turned toward his desk and stood pointing at an envelope like the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come inviting Scrooge to look at his own headstone.
The envelope bore a local postmark with yesterday’s date and was addressed in crude block capitals to THE MACIVER MURDER ENQUIRY POLICE CID MID-YORKSHIRE
“It says Maciver,” Pascoe objected. “We’ve agreed that’s your business.”
“It says murder,” retorted Ireland. “That’s CID business.”
“I see you opened it all the same. What’s the message?”
Ireland picked up a clear plastic evidence bag containing a sheet of A4 paper.
Printed on it in the same hand that had written the address was the number 870.
“What’s this?” said Pascoe. “A date? A hymn number? An alternative solution to the mystery of Life, the Universe and All That?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Ireland. “I don’t do riddles. Pete, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seemed to me out at Moscow you had some real doubts about this business.”
“All of which have faded away, like the youth of the heart and the dew in the morning. I am a doubt-free zone. By Order. Even if I were burning up with doubt, I hardly think this would have poured oil upon it. Dotty anonymous letters full of specific accusation with lurid detail are par for the course after a suicide, so there’s certainly no need to get our knickers in a twist about a number.”
He offered the bag to Ireland, who ignored it as he opened a file on his desk.
“Got the post mortem report,” he said. “Confirms death by gunshot.”
“Self-inflicted?”
“They found nothing to suggest different. Except maybe traces of diazepam in Maciver’s system.”
“Diazepam?” The second half of the twentieth century had put drugs in all their forms firmly on the detective curriculum and Pascoe did not need to reach for his pharmacopoeia to know that diazepam was used in the treatment of nervous disorders, its best known commercial manifestation being valium. “How much?”
“You can read it yourself,” said Ireland, turning the file towards Pascoe, who didn’t even glance at it as he said, “Paddy, this is for the coroner, not me. Most likely explanation is Maciver took a valium tablet to steady his nerves before he blew his head off. Fairly commonplace. Probably had a stiff drink too. Were there traces of alcohol?”
Ireland nodded.
“There we go then.”
“They found alcohol in his blood. We didn’t find a glass in that room. I’ve double-checked the SOCO report and photos. No glass.”
“So he washed the drug down with a drink straight from the bottle.”
“No bottle either.”
“So he did it in his car on the way to Moscow. And if there’s no bottle in his car, he tossed it out of the window. Or maybe he had a drink in the kitchen. Come to think of it, when I was there yesterday, I noticed a couple of glasses looked like they’d been used recently.”
“He used two glasses for his drink then? And the bottle?”
“That’s for you to work out, Paddy.”
“Sounds more like your line of country,” said Ireland stubbornly. “Look, at least read the post mortem report, then you can initial the file, just to keep the record straight. And you might as well initial that you’ve seen the letter too. Then I’ll be covered if things go pear-shaped.”
He smiled as he spoke to take the edge off the implicit threat. Irritated, Pascoe picked up the file and the evidence bag and bore them upstairs to his own office where he tossed them into his in-tray and tried to concentrate on other matters.
But the tragedy at Moscow House kept rattling around his head.
Last night, Ellie had asked him about the case and he’d told her it was out of his hands, making a comic story of himself and Wield being summoned to the head’s study. He’d been rather taken aback when she’d said, “Maybe the trouble is you’d much rather it were murder than suicide, Peter.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
“Perhaps because you find murder much easier to deal with.”
He’d lain in bed thinking about this. And she was right of course, damn her.
OK, most murder involved huge human tragedy, but you could usually sideline this in the wholehearted pursuit of the perpetrator. It was the murderer’s state of mind you tried to reconstruct in your efforts to get close to him or her. This was cerebral work. No matter how deeply the effort to get inside the killer’s psyche engaged your emotions, it was still your intellect calling the shots.
But when you got to thinking about the mental condition of someone who was so deep in darkness that death was the only escape route, then you were chasing your own soul’s tail round and round. He had woken this morning with the image of Pal Maciver slipping his toe through the noose of string still in his mind till Ellie had banished it in most delightful fashion.
Now it was back.
Stop it! he admonished himself. Put it out of your mind. Diazepam
… it meant nothing… he’d offered a perfectly good explanation to Ireland. As for the letter, clearly the work of some malicious trouble maker who couldn’t even be bothered to invent some good juicy accusations!
870… it was meaningless… 870…
He closed his eyes and tried to relax into free association. After a while he found that 870 was being partnered by another number, equally obscure.
1062.
Where the hell had that come from?
Then he remembered.
He stood up and stooped to unlock his cupboard and from it took the bin liner containing the relicts of Pal Senior’s suicide. From it he plucked the volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. It was still open at the blood-spattered page containing poem 1062.
He turned the protesting pages back till he came to poem 870: Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for
The “Golden Fleece”
