After a working lunch with Dalziel (Sandra had been right — roast beef, carrots and peas) during which he gave the superintendent an account of his talks with Disney and the girl, Pascoe finally managed to track down the senior administrative officer, a long, lugubrious individual called Spinx, whose office contained all the expense records for the college.
Grumbling constantly about the interruption to his day of rest and assuring Pascoe that there wasn’t a hope of such a record being kept for such a time, he unlocked a large store cupboard and began to dig around among a mound of dusty files and folders. Pascoe left him to it.
Fifteen minutes later there was a knock at the study door and Spinx, now very dusty, stood there looking very disappointed.
“Sorry,’ he said.
“That’s all right,’ began Pascoe.
“I was wrong. Here you are. Is that what you wanted?” “Yes. Why yes,’ said Pascoe taking the dog-eared, stained sheet of paper from his hand and looking at it. ‘ you very much.”
“Pleasure. That all? Right.”
Pascoe was reading the sheet before the man had closed the door behind him.
A car allowance had been paid based on the mileage between the college and Chester. He glanced at the copy of Fallowfield’s curriculum vitae which along with those of the rest of the staff he had obtained a couple of days before. Fallowfield had been the senior biology master at Coltsfoot College near Chester which Pascoe knew as one of the modern, reputedly progressive, public schools. The route to Chester would pass, or could be made to pass, conveniently close to south Manchester, to the airport. Somehow Alison Girling’s car had got there, had left the college that foggy night in December and made its way slowly, crawlingly, across the Pennines, while Miss. Girling herself almost certainly lay in a thin cocoon of earth in the hole in the college garden.
But if Fallowfield were at the wheel, then how did he get his own car to Chester? He couldn’t just have left it parked at the college. Even in the holidays there would be a sufficient number of staff, academic, administrative and maintenance, on the premises to notice it. Perhaps someone had. He hadn’t asked. But no; it would have been too wild a risk to take anyway.
And above all, why should Fallowfield have wanted to kill this woman he had just met for the first time? As far as they knew.
It’s all wrong, thought Pascoe gloomily, I’m like Dalziel. It would be pleasant for once to find everything nice and neat. Two murders, one killer, who commits suicide. Bingo! then we could get back to reality and start catching some thieves.
He took the expense sheet out to show Dalziel who had abandoned the shade of the study and taken a couple of chairs and a small folding table out on to the lawn where he sat with deliberate irony about four feet from the hole, now boarded over, in which Miss. Girling had been found.
“Let the buggers see we’re still here,’ he had said. ‘ reckon there’s some here as are dying to see the back of us.”
Now he looked at the expense sheet, shading his eyes from the sun.
That doesn’t help,’ he said as if it was Pascoe’s own personal fault.
“No, sir.”
“He stopped three nights?”
“I noticed that.”
“And he should only have stopped one.”
Whoever it was who had checked the expense sheet had with exquisite parsimony deducted fifteen shillings from the total payable. This was itemized at two nights’ stay in the college, at seven and six per night, which were not chargeable to expenses.
“Cheap,’ said Pascoe. ‘ that what we pay?”
Dalziel ignored him.
“It means he came, unnecessarily in the eyes of the office staff, on the Friday. I wonder why?”
“Is it important, without a motive?”
“You’ve changed your tune, lad.”
Pascoe shrugged.
“I’ve given him up for Girling. But I think he’s a strong runner for Anita.”
“And no connection between the two?”
“No, sir. Coincidence. Or perhaps the connection is merely that the discovery of the body under the statue put the idea of murder before everybody. You could get away with it well, nearly. The body had lain there all those years and might have lain there for ever if it hadn’t been for a turn of fate.”
Dalziel yawned mightily, sunlight glistening off his fillings.
“You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘ know, I’m sick of this place and most of the people in it. I don’t understand it, that’s my trouble. My generation, most of ‘, worked bloody hard, and accepted deprivation, and fought a bloody war, and put our trust in politicians, so our kids could have the right to come to places like this. And after a few days here, I wonder if it was bloody well worth it.”
He was silent. Pascoe felt obliged to say something.
“These places don’t just train people, you know. They help them to grow up in the right kind of mental environment.”
Dalziel looked at him more coldly than ever before.
“I bet you grew up more in your first six months with the force than in the twenty years before.”
Pascoe shrugged again. There were arguments, he knew; but he couldn’t be bothered, didn’t have the energy or inclination, to use them now.
“To get back to the case,’ he said, ‘ now?” The,’ said Dalziel, ”m going to sit here, and see who comes to talk to me. Then I’m going to drive into Headquarters just to liven things up there. As for you, well, there’re just two or three things that bother me still about Fallowfield. Why no note? Who had a go at his cottage before Disney? And why did he come all the way to college before killing himself? Let me know the answers before supper. And then I’ll tell you who killed everybody.”
He closed his eyes and began snoring so realistically that it was hard to tell whether he was really asleep or not.
Some hope, thought Pascoe. This is one that won’t be solved before Christmas. Girling’s perhaps never.
One of Dalziel’s questions kept running through his head. Why did Fallowfield come all the way to college to kill himself? I know the answer to that, he thought. But if he did, he wasn’t telling himself.
Stuff it, he thought and snatched half an hour to read the Sunday papers. There was nothing about the previous night’s events. Too late perhaps. The murders themselves got a bit of space though the dailies had picked most of the meat from the bones. Dalziel was mentioned. They made him sound quite good. I suppose he is quite good, thought Pascoe reluctantly.
Out of the window he saw the fat man stir and stretch himself. It was time, he decided, that he should do the same.
The rest of the afternoon he wasted, talking first to Disney, then to Sandra. Both denied absolutely removing any suicide note. Disney was back in her old form. A couple of hours’ meditation had rinsed any Vestigial traces of guilt from her lily-white soul. Pascoe could have gladly pushed her teeth down her throat, but he had to admit he was convinced by the time he left her. An after-effect of the Disney treatment was that he was twice as rough with Sandra as he might else have been, bringing her close to tears, but again coming away convinced she had been telling the truth.
He then spent more than an hour searching and researching the cottage and, after that, the laboratory. Both searches were doomed to failure, he knew before he started. But something in himself demanded that they should be done again.
When he returned to the study, it was fast approaching dinner time and Dalziel, red as a Victoria plum, had just come back from town. He noted Pascoe’s frame of mind and for once exercised some tact. From somewhere he had obtained a jugful of ice-cubes and a soda syphon. He splashed an ounce of Glen Grant into a glass, followed it with a handful of ice and a jet of soda, and handed it silently to his sergeant.
“No luck?’ he said.
“No.”
