A Killing kindness

Chapter 14

Mark Wildgoose's flat was in a district of old Victorian terraces where you were more likely to find nests of students than solitary teachers.

Not that he was solitary when Pascoe arrived. Directed up the stairs by a bearded youth with a beatific smile, he arrived on the first floor landing just as a door opened and a girl emerged. She didn't look to be out of her teens. There was a man behind her and she turned to give him a parting kiss. It was an uninhibited affair on her part, almost exhibitionistic, but his eyes remained open and fixed on Pascoe who after a cursory glance at the other two doors had worked out this must be the one.

The girl finished, slipped past Pascoe and flew down the stairs with the lightness of youth and joy.

The man began to close the door.

'Mr Wildgoose?' said Pascoe.

He nodded.

'I'm Pascoe. Detective-Inspector Pascoe. My warrant card. Could we talk?'

Wildgoose studied the card carefully, then ushered him into what must once have been a morning room. Like good bone structure, its dignified proportions had been able to absorb the ravages of age, neglect and even student taste. It contained an unmade bed, a scarred mahogany wardrobe, a couple of dilapidated armchairs, a table with the remnants of breakfast on it, three folding chairs, a washbasin and an electric hotplate. Some makeshift bookshelves, planks on stacks of bricks, were packed to danger point, and an overspill pyramided in one corner.

Bad to heat in winter, thought Pascoe looking up at the leafily corniced ceiling. But at the moment it was warm enough, too warm in fact, stuffy with a rich mingling of smells. He sniffed. Coffee, perspiration, tobacco…

'There is a bit of a fug,' said Wildgoose, flinging open windows. The girl must have looked up as she left the house for he leaned out and blew a kiss. Pascoe could see his face in the pane of glass.

'It's about your allotment, Mr Wildgoose,' he said, and watched the tension come into the averted face.

But when the man turned, there was nothing but alert frankness there.

Small, dark, sharp, mobile, it was a good face for a French singer of disillusioned but not despairing ballads. The children got more of their looks here than from their mother.

'Wasn't that your wife I met yesterday?' said Wildgoose.

'I believe so.'

'Coincidence?' His eyebrows added their own double question mark.

'Coincidence?' echoed Pascoe. 'A funny thing, coincidences. On the other hand, less funny because less rare than many people believe. It's noticing them that's rare.'

'I don't follow.'

'And you an English teacher,' smiled Pascoe. 'That was a coincidence, wasn't it? I mean you actually taught Brenda Sorby, didn't you?'

'Brenda…?'

'Sorby. Choker victim number three. The girl on your allotment was number two.'

'Not my allotment, Inspector. And no, I can't remember teaching a Brenda Sorby, though I'm willing to accept I did, if you tell me so. Is that it? For coincidences, I mean?'

'Not quite. You drink at the Cheshire Cheese, don't you?'

The man sat down in an armchair and lit a cigarette. His face was thoughtful now. He used the smoke as a mask.

'I have done,' he said.

'What about the fairground, Mr Wildgoose? Have you been to the Fair this year?'

'Yes. I always go. I like fairs.

‘When were you there?'

'Last week. Thursday night if you like.'

He smiled and Pascoe felt irritated. But it had been his own idea to start playing this game. He couldn't blame the other for joining in.

'What about lunch-time two days ago? Wednesday, that is?'

'I think I was out walking,' said Wildgoose after some thought.

'By yourself?'

'I believe so.'

'And where did you walk?'

'Oh, here and there. I expect I strolled along the river bank. It's so pretty down there, don't you think?'

'Along the bank, and through Charter Park, you mean.'

'That's where the river flows, Inspector,' said Wildgoose. 'Now, how are we doing for coincidences?'

He doesn't give a bugger! thought Pascoe. He's mocking me.

Yet there had been something there when we started. Where had they started?

'If you don't mind, I'd like to take a look at your allotment, Mr Wildgoose,' he said abruptly.

That was better. The tension had flickered back momentarily.

'It's a stretch of wasteland, Inspector,' he said lightly. 'I haven't bothered much with it this year. In fact, I'm not sure it's even still mine, officially. The rent could be overdue.

‘All the same, I think I'll have a look,' said Pascoe. 'Would you care to join me?'

Wildgoose stood up. His muscles were aggressively tensed.

'Where'd you get my address from, Pascoe?' he asked. 'Have you been talking to my ex-wife?'

'Your wife, surely? There's no divorce yet, is there?'

'Hardly. But there will be, whatever she thinks. Even the law's delay doesn't last for ever these days.'

Pascoe said, 'The law's delay. That's Hamlet, isn't it?'

'I suppose so. So what?'

'Coincidence, that's all.'

Wildgoose laughed and relaxed and pulled on a cotton jacket over his T-shirt which was not the one described by Ellie, unless he was wearing it inside out.

'Half the cliches in the language are Shakespeare and most of the rest Pope,' he said. 'Not a very valuable coincidence, is it?'

'That's what I've been saying about coincidences all along,' said Pascoe. 'Isn't it?'

As they drove along the road which was the quickest route to Pump Street, Pascoe said, 'Why aren't you coming all over indignant, Mr Wildgoose?'

'Why should I?'

'Well, for a start, you've obviously worked out I've been chatting to your family about you. That would annoy a lot of men. And there'd be very few men indeed who wouldn't get extremely indignant when they realized the police were trying to tie them in with the Choker killings.'

'Including the Choker?'

'Perhaps especially the Choker,' said Pascoe.

'Then perhaps I'm busy establishing my innocence, Inspector,' said Wildgoose calmly. 'If you turn down here, you'll cut off the traffic lights.'

Pump Street consisted mainly of two long rows of terraces opening on to the pavement. One side had been built for railway workers in the mid-nineteenth century, the other, still known as the New Side although identical in style, had been put up speculatively about ten years later as the demand for low-cost housing exploded in this area. What gave Pump Street some individual character and even beauty was the ground contour which had made it easier to build on a curve, and chance had produced an arc fit for a Nash crescent. The allotments were situated in a break in the New Side where a Dornier with its full load had come down one still-remembered night in '41 and reduced a hundred yards of terracing to rubble, and thirty-nine men, women and children to corpses. There was no time for rebuilding then, but gradually the site had been cleared, and eventually planted on, by the garden-less locals eager to plug some of the gaps in their diet. Eventually, after complaints of piracy and landgrabbing, the council stepped in and regularized matters, and so things continued for more than thirty years till the June morning when the death toll rose to forty.

There were two or three old men working on their allotments and they watched with open curiosity as Pascoe and Wildgoose picked their way across to the latter's strip. It was indeed sadly neglected though no more so than half a dozen others.

'Here we are,' said Wildgoose. 'If you seek my memorial, look around you.'

Pascoe bent and examined the furrowed ground. There were potatoes here still, some straggly carrot tops, something which could have been leaf spinach.

'What happened?' he asked.

'A couple of years ago it seemed a good idea. Self-sufficiency. Part of the male menopause.'

'You're a little young for that, surely?'

'Forty,' said Wildgoose. 'I just know a good couturier. And the male menopause has nothing to do with age or physical changes. It has to do with meanings.'

'And you found something more meaningful?'

'Still looking, Inspector.'

Pascoe too was looking. The rickety old shed in which June McCarthy's body had been found stood about twenty-five yards away. As he watched, the door opened and a man emerged. He had a bucket in one hand and a garden fork in the other. Carefully with the economic movements of age and experience he began to unearth some potatoes. This was Mr Ribble, the owner of the shed and the only one of the allotment holders that Pascoe had interviewed personally. A man in his late sixties, he had taken the discovery of the body with a phlegm which was to some extent explained when Pascoe found out that he had cancer of the bowel and had already outlived the surgeon's estimate by eighteen months.

Pascoe turned back to Wildgoose and coldly wondered how such a diagnosis would affect his search for meanings.

'I see you keep your greenhouse locked,' he said. 'Worried about your tomatoes?'

'I kept my tools in there,' said Wildgoose. ‘I didn't really grow much. It came with the allotment. The old boy who had it before me died and it seemed a kindness to pay his missus a couple of quid for the thing. Would you like a look?'

He searched in his pocket for a key while Pascoe examined the greenhouse from the outside. It was very much a homemade affair, more of a converted garden shed than a proper greenhouse. It was glazed with panels of translucent plastic which had the advantage of not being so fragile as glass. In one or two places kids had hurled stones without doing more damage than denting and cracking, easily repaired with transparent tape.

Wildgoose found the key and unlocked the padlock which fastened the door. Pascoe let him go in first. Mrs Wildgoose had been wrong. While you could not see clearly through the plastic, you could certainly distinguish shapes and it would take either irresistible passion or brazen exhibitionism to persuade a couple to fornicate in here. Pascoe did not dismiss the possibility. But it was unlikely that one of the elderly gardeners would not have passed on details of this shadowy entertainment to Sergeant Brady.

The interior of the greenhouse smelt hot and stuffy. There was a rusty spade in one corner, a broken hoe in another. A few earthenware plant pots were stacked along a sagging shelf. Nothing was growing in here, though the mummified remains of some unidentifiable plants crowded together sadly in a propagating tray. The floor was wooden, beginning to rot in places. A couple of sacks were draped across a particularly decayed section. An almost empty plastic bag of some proprietary fertilizer lay alongside them. Pascoe's memory was stirred. Among many other things, the laboratory examination of June McCarthy's clothes had revealed the presence of traces of peat and other fibrous organic material associated with gardening, precisely the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a garden shed.

He wondered whether anyone had bothered to make sure they were definitely present in Mr Ribble's shed.

For Wildgoose to kill her in his greenhouse and then lug the body twenty-five yards across the allotment didn't seem likely. It had been early in the morning, but broad daylight.

Still, when you had nothing, anything was something.

He stooped to pick up the bag.

And smiled with incredulous delight as he saw the small adhesive price tag still clinging to the grubby plastic. The name of the retailer was still on it.

The Linden Garden Centre.

He picked it up carefully.

'You use a lot of this stuff?' he asked.

'In the first flush of enthusiasm, I used everything,' said Wildgoose. 'Soot, blood, horse-shit, sea-weed. Why?'

'And where did you buy your garden stuff, Mr Wildgoose?'

'Where? Hell, wherever I was. Garden shops, market stalls, Woolworth's even. They're very good in Woolworth's these days.'

'Garden centres? This price tag says Linden Garden Centre.'

'I don't remember that. Is it important?'

'It's on the East Coast Road,' said Pascoe. 'Four, five miles.'

'Sorry. I don't recall, for all I know that stuff was here when I took the allotment on. Don't tell me it's a clue!'

For someone who had seemed so bright and alert to every innuendo, he was being very dim about this, thought Pascoe.

'I'd like to take this if I may.'

'I'll need a receipt,' mocked Wildgoose. 'What about a few old plant pots into the bargain?'

The plastic bag was leaking, Pascoe discovered, and the remaining fertilizer was spilling out of it. Picking up one of the old sacks from the floor, he thrust the bag inside.

'Let's go,' he said.

'Where?'

'Why, back to your flat, of course, Mr Wildgoose. Unless I can drop you anywhere else?'

'No, that'll be fine.'

He managed not to sound relieved.

On the drive back, Pascoe stopped by a telephone kiosk, 'to check what my boss wants next,' he explained half grumblingly to Wildgoose.

He stopped a little later to get some cigarettes, then got stuck behind a slow double-decker bus.

'Sorry to have taken up so much of your time,' he said to Wildgoose as he got out of the car in front of the house which contained the flat.

'Always a pleasure,' said Wildgoose. 'Will I see you again?'

'Who knows? Nothing is impossible to coincidence.'

Pascoe watched Wildgoose walk jauntily up the steps to the front door. Then he looked across the street to make sure that there'd been time to carry out his telephoned instructions. Detective-Constable Preece sitting in a dilapidated VW Beetle raised a languid hand. He looked half asleep. Pascoe hoped it was an act.

He drove round the corner and waited. After a couple of minutes the door of the car opened and Preece slid in. He still looked tired.

'OK?' said Pascoe.

Preece passed him a film cartridge.

'I shot off half a dozen,' he said. 'One should be all right. You want me to hang about, sir?'

'Please,' said Pascoe. 'I want to know where he goes, who he talks to.'

'These houses have got a lane running down the back,' said Preece diffidently.

'Sorry,' said Pascoe. 'You're on your own. You'll just have to hope he comes out of the front. Or be in two places at the same time. Do your best. Which is to say, please don't lose him. And Preece. It doesn't bother me if you don't sleep in your own bed. But make bloody sure you sleep in your own time. OK? Enjoy yourself.'

Preece nodded and left. As he walked away he thought, Christ! He may be politer than Dalziel but he's just as fucking impossible!

Pascoe decided to short-circuit normal lines of communication and drive round to the police labs himself. These were a fairly recent acquisition, very up to date and a source of such pride to the Chief Constable that he tended to skirt round the fact that shortage of space in the congested city centre had obliged them to be built some considerable distance from the central police HQ. An efficient shuttle service had been devised and all officers were given strict instructions that this was the only channel to be used.

Thus Pascoe was greeted frostily by the duty officer, a fat, normally jolly man called Harry Hopper.

'You know this is against regulations,' he said.

'Oh Christ. Is it? I'm sorry, Harry,' said Pascoe. 'It's a fair cop then. You'd better complain to my boss. Andy Dalziel, that is. I'll take what's coming to me.'

'There's no need to threaten me,' grumbled the other. 'All right. What do you want?'

'This developed. A couple of prints of each,' said Pascoe, handing over the cartridge. Alongside it, he laid the sack containing the fertilizer. 'And this to be given the treatment. I'll hang on for the photos if it's not going to take too long, which I'm sure it's not. And if you could rustle me up a copy of the lab reports on June McCarthy and on the garden shed she was found in, it'll give me something to look at and stop me getting impatient.'

Hopper went away, returning some time later with the reports and a smile.

'Everyone's very busy,' he said. 'Some stuff had just come in from your Mr Dalziel – for urgent attention, it was marked, but I told 'em if he gets impatient we'll just have to explain that you have priority, was that all right?'

'Bastard,' said Pascoe.

He sat down and studied the reports. At first things looked hopeful. The fibres of fertilizer on June McCarthy's clothing were identified as probably belonging to one of three proprietary brands and one of these was the same as that found in Wildgoose's greenhouse. But a quick glance at the report on the examination of Mr Ribble's shed revealed that there was a bag of the mixture in question stored there. It was both reassuring and disappointing to find that the reports were models of thoroughness. It had been a long shot that such a discrepancy might exist and have gone unnoticed, but such things did happen.

Still, the reports didn't disprove that she might have been in the greenhouse, thought Pascoe, seeking a tortuous comfort. And there was that odd air of a recent clear-out about it. Worth sending a team in to give it the full treatment? Not without Dalziel's say-so, he decided. The press would be on to it like a flash and who knows what kind of shit Wildgoose might be provoked into flinging about.

The photographs arrived. A couple of them, one side, one full face, were good enough to identify Wildgoose from.

'How's it going?' enquired Hopper. 'Getting anywhere?'

'If we are, it's too slow for human perception,' said Pascoe. 'Thanks a lot Harry.'

'A pleasure. But like sex at my age, not one to be repeated too frequently. Here, you might as well take this, it's marked for you. Final report on that last lot of clothes. Pauline Stanhope's.'

Pascoe took the sheet of paper and ran his eyes down it.

'Anything?' he asked.

'Bugger all,' said Hopper. 'It's all wrapped up for next-of-kin as soon as you care to release it.'

Pascoe thought a moment.

'All right,' he said. 'Look, I'm going to be seeing her aunt. I'll take it with me. Better than just having it pushed into her hands by some anonymous bobby.'

He signed for the small bundle of clothes and the box containing Pauline Stanhope's watch and other personal effects.

'Poor kid,' said Hopper. 'I've got one of my own, just turned twenty. They think they know it all, jobs, key of the door, getting engaged next month, but they're just kids still. I wouldn't dare tell her, but she's so bloody defenceless really. I mean, they need protection, Peter. Get this bastard and get him quick, will you?'

'We'll try,' said Pascoe. 'We'll try.' He glanced at his watch. 'But not till after lunch,' he added.

And wondered as he walked away how long it took for protective cynicism to seep to the deep heart's core.