century manor house, south facing, adorned with but not swamped by gold-heart ivy, not over-large, just right for a gentleman farmer and his family, and, of course, a few necessary servants.
He tried to imagine what a seventeenth-century Ellie would have done about necessary servants and smiled.
Twenty-first-century Ellie certainly wouldn’t approve the single-storey extension on the western side of the building, with its broad expanses of glass through which he could glimpse a swimming pool, but its architect had done his considerable best to preserve the harmony of the place.
As he got out of the car, the house door opened and a man came out. He was in his forties, stockily well- built, with greying black hair just short of a crew cut and a leathery high-cheekboned face.
He came down the steps and said, “You the dick?”
“Some people have called me such,” said Pascoe. “I prefer Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe.”
“Yeah. Thought I recognized you from Kay’s description. I’m Tony Kafka.”
He shook hands with a firm but non-competitive grip.
“So what’s the word on Pal?” he asked. “Suicide, or is there more?”
“What makes you ask that?” said Pascoe.
“Ranking cop coming out of his way to interview the dead man’s former stepmother don’t strike me as routine procedure.”
He set off up the steps towards the door. He walked with a rolling gait like a traditional sailor.
“You’re conversant with routine procedure, are you?” said Pascoe following.
“I read a lot of crime crap,” said Kafka over his shoulder. “And I’ve been in business long enough to know a guy ducking a question when I see one. That guy who came out to the plant was just the same.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Guy with a face to sink a thousand ships. Detective Sergeant I think he was. Turned up just as I was leaving an hour or so ago. God knows what he wanted and neither of them was sharing the info with me.”
Wield had gone to Ash-Mac’s? What the hell for? wondered Pascoe as Kafka led the way across a shadowy heavily wainscoted hall. On a table by the door stood a well-used leather grip.
“In here,” said Kafka, pushing open the door into a long airy reception room where Kay Kafka was sitting on a chaise longue as gracefully as any character in a Jane Austen movie. “Honey, you got a visitor.”
“Mr Pascoe, how nice to see you again,” she said. “Please, sit down.”
“Yeah,” said Kafka. “Over there with your back to the light, that’s the best interrogation position, right? And do you want to grill us both at once or separately?”
“It’s Mrs Kafka I’d like to speak to,” said Pascoe.
Kay said, “You must forgive my husband, Chief Inspector. Tony, if the cabaret’s over, maybe you’d like to organize some drinks? Coffee? Tea? Or something stronger?”
“That’s to check how serious this is,” said Kafka. “If you say, ‘Not while I’m on duty, madam,’ we know we’re in for a rough ride.”
“I think you may have been reading the wrong crime crap,” said Pascoe courteously. “Coffee would be nice. Espresso if at all possible.”
“If at all possible!” echoed Kafka as he left the room. “Only in England…!”
Somewhere a phone was ringing.
Kay said, “Excuse Tony. He thinks he’s putting you at ease.”
“No problem. I love a wag,” murmured Pascoe, sitting down at right angles to the window. “And I’m certainly at ease. Nice house you’ve got, Mrs Kafka.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” she said. “Though not precisely to my taste.”
“No?” said Pascoe, surprised.
“No,” she said firmly. “Tony bought and renovated it long before I married him. I’ve made some adjustments since, but the main structure’s pretty obdurate. As indeed is Tony.”
“My wife would like it,” said Pascoe.
“She would? How is she, by the way? We only met briefly the other night, but she struck me as a pretty capable lady.”
“She’s fine,” said Pascoe. “Look, I’m sorry to be troubling you, but there are a couple of uncertainties surrounding the sad death of your stepson which I thought you might be able to help with.”
She said, “Uncertainties? Yes, I should imagine that when someone chooses to kill himself in such a macabre fashion, there are bound to be uncertainties.”
“Macabre?” said Pascoe. “Shooting yourself is, alas, pretty commonplace.”
“But doing it in a manner which almost exactly replicated his own father’s death seems pretty macabre to me,” she replied.
“I suppose it was,” said Pascoe as if this had never occurred to him. “What do you think was going on in his mind when he chose to do that? Was he making some kind of statement, perhaps?”
“I doubt it. Striking a pose, perhaps.”
“A bit extreme, don’t you think? I mean, people strike poses to draw attention to themselves, but there’s not much point if you can’t enjoy that attention.”
She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t suggesting that as his reason for killing himself. God knows what that was, but once he’d decided to end his life, then, being the way he was, naturally he’d look for some specially dramatic way of making his exit. In fact, I’m not a psychiatrist, but it must take a lot of will power to carry you through from the idea of suicide to the actual execution, and maybe setting up some kind of formal dramatic structure is a good way of keeping you on track.”
“How would you apply that in your first husband’s case?” enquired Pascoe. “I hope you don’t mind me asking.”
“No, I don’t mind. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Pal Senior was very different from his son. He found the striking of poses offensive. He prided himself on his matter-of-factness. He was a man of business and proud of it, and he believed that once you set your mind to a task, you carried it through, no second thoughts allowed. So he wouldn’t need a dramatic structure. He had a shotgun. He used it.”
“Yet there was some artistic presentation involved,” insisted Pascoe. “The volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry on the desk, the particular poem it was open at. How did it go? He scanned it-staggered-dropped the Loop to Past or Present…”
“Past or Period,” she corrected. “Caught helpless at a sense as if His mind were going blind -”
“Doesn’t sound very matter-of-fact to me,” said Pascoe dubiously. “Sounds like a man who feels things slipping out of control. Yet he seemed to do everything very methodically. Why do you think he left the book on his desk?”
This was dangerous ground, he realized. He was questioning a woman about the way her first husband had killed himself with her second about to return any moment. From what little he’d seen of Kafka he didn’t seem like a man who’d react kindly if he found someone had reduced his wife to a tearful breakdown.
But Kay didn’t look as if she was about to weep. Her expression was gravely compassionate rather than sorrow-stricken. It suited her. She was, he acknowledged yet again, and almost with a shock as if he’d somehow missed it before, a truly beautiful woman.
She said, “The poem was a message to me. I gave him the book, and because he knew it was important to me, he really worked hard to come to terms with Emily. But often I’d catch him reading it with a look of exasperated bafflement on his face, like a child asked to study what is yet beyond his ken. He once told me it troubled him that such short poems, often just a scatter of lines, a handful of words, should leave him groping after meaning.”
“Groped up, to see if God was there-Groped backward at Himself,” said Pascoe softly.
She smiled at him, briefly, then went on, “I think that what he was saying to me by leaving the volume open at this poem was, Listen, love, I got this one right in the end. Now I know what this one means . He was offering the only kind of comfort he could think of. I believe he tried to write me a note explaining what was going on in his mind, saying how sorry he was, but found the only words he could use were inadequate. So he chose instead to let Emily describe how he felt for him and, by using her poem, he said he loved me.”
She fell silent. Pascoe was deeply moved. All the nasty things that had been said about this woman sounded in his head now like mere snarls of envy and resentment. Oh yes, she was a pretty good magicker all right.
