A Killing kindness

Chapter 15

Pascoe didn't enjoy his lunch.

Using the justification that the road to the village of Shafton outside which the Linden Garden Centre was situated could (with a detour of a mere six or seven miles) be said to pass his door, he decided to surprise Ellie by eating at home.

His sense of injury at finding she was out intensified when he discovered the larder was almost bare.

A piece of antique cheese and a wrinkled apple later, he continued on his way. The deserted appearance of the Garden Centre did not improve his mood.

It was a medium-sized operation, centred upon an old stone-built farmhouse which looked to be in need of repair. There were two long greenhouses abutting on what had once been a byre but was now a garden shop. Two or three acres of land were under cultivation, mainly to rose-bushes plus a few rows of fruit trees and ornamental shrubs.

Even the bright sunshine could not disguise the sense of neglect there was about the place.

Someone was moving behind the house and Pascoe headed in that direction. It was an old countryman with a wheelbarrow in which was a sackful of what looked like bonemeal. He walked slowly past Pascoe, saying out of the corner of his mouth, 'Place is closed.'

'So I see,' said Pascoe, falling into step beside him. 'Who are you?'

The old man didn't answer straightaway. He had a skin as hard, brown and cracked as the sun-baked earth he walked on, and his eyes which were the faded blue of hydrangea remained fixed unblinkingly on his load as though he were walking a high wire.

Impatiently Pascoe produced his warrant card and thrust it under the man's nose.

'Police,' he said.

'I know that.'

'You mean, you know me?' said Pascoe, non-plussed.

'The way you walk. Talk. I know that,' said the old man.

'Do you mind telling me who you are?' said Pascoe wearily. 'Please.'

The old man stopped, rested the barrow and sat on its edge between the shafts.

'Agar,' he said. 'Ted Agar.'

'And what's happened here, Mr Agar.'

'Since she got herself killed, you mean?'

'Yes, since then.'

Pascoe perched himself on a stack of ornamental slabs. He was, he realized with an amusement which helped dissipate his ill-humour, very much in the interviewee's seat – about six inches lower than Agar who had the sun at his back.

'Well, nothing rightly,' said the old man. 'Lawyers' business, nowt else.'

'What's the trouble?'

'In the first place, no will. In second place, no close relatives, though you can always find one or two who'll make a claim. She was a widow, you see, Mrs Dinwoodie. Husband got killed last summer at Agricultural Show. You likely read about it. Run down by a traction engine. It was in the papers. Then the lass. Alison her daughter. Just a few months later. Car accident. She was just a kid. Not a lucky woman, Mrs Dinwoodie.'

Pascoe of course knew most of this. Mary Dinwoodie's friends had been checked as a priority after the murder. But the family had been non-existent and she had apparently made a determined effort to cut herself off from her acquaintance. Her grief had been very private, rejecting offers of comfort or companionship. It was a sad irony that her first positive move in the direction of human society once more should have taken her into the Choker's hands.

The Shafton Players had been investigated so closely that Pascoe knew more about some of them than their spouses did. The possibility of a link between a drama group and the Hamlet calls had not gone unnoticed, but it had certainly remained undiscovered. Individually, the Players had neither motive nor opportunity. Collectively, they had never done Hamlet. So it looked as if Mary Dinwoodie had just had the misfortune to be available. Yet Pascoe could not forget Pottle's insistence that her death was, must be, the key.

'How long have you worked here, Mr Agar?' he asked.

'Six years. Since I left the farming.'

'What about other help?'

'No one else most of the time,' he said. 'Except I took a lad on when the missus went away after the lass died. Couldn't do it single-handed. Couldn't really do it proper with two of us. Before, me and Mr Dinwoodie looked after the trees and such. Planting, hoeing, all that. Mrs Dinwoodie helped with the greenhouses, and ran the shop. She'd been a teacher once or summat, so she was good with paperwork. The lass helped too. She'd just left school, didn't want to do anything else, an office job or such. She liked to be outside. Her lad was going to go into farming too.'

'Her lad?'

'Aye. Didn't you know? She'd just married him when they got killed. Same day. It doesn't bear thinking on. Well, after that, the heart went out of Mrs Dinwoodie. She went off. Just told me to look after things and went off. It were all right at first, but when spring got near, it starts getting busy, so I had to take a lad on, and my daughter-in-law came in to help with the shop. I saw the bank manager first. He weren't sure but I told him business would soon be knackered if I didn't and he soon changed his tune. Even then we were only open weekends. But we ticked over. And then she came back. I was that glad to see her! But, oh, she'd mebbe had done better to stay away for ever.'

There was a catch in the old man's voice. He really cares, thought Pascoe, and he said, 'You liked Mrs Dinwoodie?'

'I liked all on 'em, but her the best. She was a kind woman. She blamed herself for everything. She said it were her fault they were so close to that engine at the show. And blamed herself for letting the lass run off to Scotland to be wed. Well, that were daft, mebbe, and the girl's place was here by her mam's side with her dad only a few months dead. But at seventeen, what's to fill a lass's head but boys and such? Well, I never thought I'd see any one of them out, let alone all three. It doesn't bear thinking on, does it? It doesn't bear thinking.'

'No, it doesn't,' said Pascoe. 'So now you're in sole charge?'

'Oh aye. Till things is settled. Lawyers asked me to stay on. There's two relatives of his, half cousins or some such thing, down in the South. Likely they'll get it. Best I can do by myself is tend the roses and the fruit trees. We sold all the greenhouse stuff up. Market traders and the like.

They got a bargain. But I couldn't have tended them and they'd not hire anyone else. Do you want to look in the house?'

'Yes, please,' said Pascoe, not knowing why. 'But first, I wonder if you've ever seen this chap around here?'

He passed over the two photographs of Wildgoose. Agar scrutinized them carefully.

'Nay,' said Agar. 'I don't recall him. Though that's not to say I've never seen him.'

'But would you say you might have seen him?'

'Not if there was money on it,' said the old man, adding shrewdly, 'and there'll likely be more than money on it, eh?'

'Likely,' said Pascoe, retrieving the photos.

The old man opened the house for him, then returned to his work. Pascoe went inside. Already the place smelt dank and unlived-in. One of the downstairs rooms had been turned into an office. He poked around for a while but found nothing but a chaos of neglected paperwork. He had no idea what he might be looking for. It was simply an exercise in serendipity. Abandoning the office, he went upstairs.

The girl's bedroom he found hard to bear. It was untidy, but with the untidiness of youth, as though its owner might be reappearing at any moment. He left it and went into the main bedroom. And here at last he made a find.

It was a cardboard box tucked away at the back of crowded wardrobe. It was a sad box, full of memories which now lacked a mind to remember them. Christmas cards, birthday cards, many homemade, inscribed To Mummy with lots of love from Alison in a young round hand, some childish daubs. And a few secondary school reports. Alison it seemed had attended the Bishop Crump Comprehensive School.

Well, so had thousands of other kids. And Alison's death had nothing to do with the Choker. She had died in a car accident in the South of Scotland. The scrawled initials after the comments on her English and Drama lessons gave little clue to their author. Of course, mused Pascoe, if Wildgoose had taught this girl, then there were parent-teacher evenings, plenty of chance for him to have met the mother.

He dug deeper and for his pains made one more discovery. It was a programme on a brown card with scalloped edges to give a kind of parchment effect. On the front printed in Gothic script were the words Musik-und-Drama-Fest, Linden, Mai 1973.

That Linden. The town in Germany. This was where the Centre's name came from. His schoolboy German was still sufficiently remembered to identify this as the general programme of a small amateur festival of music and drama (not difficult!) and get the gist of most of the promised goodies. Then an item caught and held his eye. Scenes from Shakespeare, he translated. By members of a local drama society, he guessed. Plus staff from Devon School. And there were two directors named, one German, the other Herr Peter Dinwoodie.

So here it was at last. Not Hamlet, but Shakespeare at least. Unser Shakespeare. He'd heard how the Germans admired him to the point of possessiveness. And Devon School? A touring party? Hardly. More likely a British Forces School. He'd known a girl who'd gone out there to teach and he seemed to recall the schools often had that kind of name, Gloucester, Cornwall, Windsor.

Linden, if his geography held as well as his German, was hard by Hanover. Lots of BAOR bases round there, so it made some sense.

He went downstairs and asked old Agar if Mary Dinwoodie and her husband had once been school-teachers in Germany.

'Nay, I know nowt about that,' said the old man.

Well, it should be easy to check out, thought Pascoe pocketing the programme.

And at the same time it would be worth checking if Wildgoose had ever done any teaching abroad.

At Rosetta Stanhope's flat he was admitted quickly, almost as though he were expected. I really must stop endowing her with supernatural powers, he told himself irritably. Certainly the room in which he found himself was ordinary enough. There was a lightly flowered paper on the walls, and the furniture consisted of a three-piece suite in imitation hide, a large colour TV and a small oak sideboard with a nest of matching tables. The only hint of the woman's background lay in a large glass-fronted cabinet almost filling one of the narrower walls and packed with what Pascoe had no doubt was fine china.

Rosetta Stanhope herself was dressed like any housewife doing her chores; she wore a blue cotton overall, moccasins on her feet, and her hair was tied back with a red silk bandanna. The only change was in her face where the flesh seemed more tightly drawn than ever over the fine thin bones.

'Will you have a cup of tea?' she asked very correctly. 'I can't offer you strong liquor. There's none in the place.'

'And I couldn't accept it anyway,' answered Pascoe even more correctly, though perhaps less accurately. 'You don't drink alcohol, Mrs Stanhope?'

'I can't afford to get confused, Mr Pascoe,' she said.

'And your niece? Did she drink?'

'Never here.'

'But elsewhere? A social drink with friends perhaps?'

She regarded him seriously but with no outward sign of distress. Pascoe congratulated himself on the subtlety of his introduction of the topic.

'Like at the Cheshire Cheese, you mean?' said Rosetta Stanhope.

Pascoe cancelled his congratulations.

'That might be significant,’ he said. 'Did she?'

'Not that I know of,' said the woman. 'And I think I'd have known. It was funny. She was not my blood, not my flesh, but she grew to me like a daughter. Closer perhaps. Daughters grow up, turn away, despise their parents even. I've seen it many times. Trouble, misunderstanding, separation. Like poor Brenda Sorby and her father. But Pauline grew closer to me as she got older and when the time came for her to make her own choice of life, instead of turning away, she turned towards me. No one knew her father, but I sometimes think he could not have been gorgio.'

She nodded emphatically, for a moment every inch the gypsy queen.

'But she would have friends of her own age, a life of her own,' urged Pascoe.

'Of course she did,' said Mrs Stanhope. 'She was a nice ordinary attractive young lass. People liked her, she made friends easy…'

Her voice broke for a moment and the gypsy queen was gone and for the second time in an hour Pascoe felt the guilt of being embarrassed by the sight of grief.

It was over in a moment.

'You're barking up the wrong tree,' she resumed. 'No one who knew Pauline did this.'

Pascoe regarded her dubiously.

'Why so certain, Mrs Stanhope?' he asked.

'She told me,' she replied seriously. 'Last night.'

Pascoe had to make an effort to stop himself glancing uneasily around. The room suddenly felt much less ordinary and conventional and the bright sunlight falling through the broad window seemed to thicken and curdle.

'You communicated with her?' he said.

She suddenly smiled. It was not an unfriendly smile, but not the kind of smile much used between equals. There was something of exasperation in it, and of pity too.

'We didn't sit down and have a chat, Inspector,' she said. 'But she was here. I felt her. And if she'd known who it was that did it, she'd have let me know.'

'But,' objected Pascoe, 'even if she didn't know then, surely she knows now.'

'Then and now' s for the living,' she said dismissively. 'Anyway, I didn't mean she would have given me a name, though that's not impossible. All I meant was, I felt her here and she felt puzzled, uncertain, not like she'd have been if she knew who'd done it and why, when it was done, I mean.'

'Ah,' said Pascoe who found this picture of a puzzle-filled afterlife rather distressing. A lifetime as a policeman was enough; an eternity unthinkable. Dalziel with a golden truncheon and blue serge wings! The image thinned the light once more and the room returned to normal.

'It's quite unusual for a Romany to be a medium, isn't it?' he said, leaning back in his chair. 'Crystal balls, the tarot, that's the more usual area, isn't it?'

'It's how the gorgios have portrayed us,’ said the woman. 'But I've known very few chovihanis who used a crystal as more than a prop. Or as something bright to act as a focus for self-hypnosis. Oh, I read the psychic journals, Mr Pascoe! I'm not an educated woman but I've lived a gorgio life long enough to pick up some of their knowledge too!'

'Chovihani. That's a sort of witch, isn't it?'

'You know a bit about our people?' she said. 'I felt it when we first met.'

'I once did a short study at college,' admitted Pascoe. 'It was social mainly, about education, fitting into the community, that sort of thing.'

'Looking for ways to change us, make us like you!' she said scornfully.

'Not really,' said Pascoe. 'Though some do change. You, for instance. You conformed.'

He didn't want an argument with this woman, but it seemed important to find out if there was really any more to her than a farrago of superstitions and self-delusions. He found out.

'Conformed? Me! What a bloody arrogant sod you are, just like the rest! I did anything but. I left my family and I left my people and I left my whole life behind me. That's conforming, is it? Conforming's being as daft and as dull and as stupid as you, is it?'

She was frightening in anger. Pascoe decided that on the whole he preferred the imminence of the other world to this.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It was stupid, you're quite right. Absolutely.'

Suddenly she was angry no more.

'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'It wasn't all that difficult, anyway. Chovihanis aren't expected to conform. They do odd, anti-social things. My grandma was one, too. It skipped my mother somehow. But my grandma foretold I would marry a gorgio when I was in my cradle. So it was expected in a way. Everyone knew the prophecy. It made for loneliness. From fourteen on, boys wanted me for their lusts. I was a good-looking girl, can you believe that?'

'Easily,' said Pascoe.

'But not for a wife,' she went on. 'If anyone married me, you see, the only way the prophecy could be fulfilled then would be for my husband to die! So I waited for Stanhope.'

She smiled, gently this time, reminiscently.

'He was worth the waiting. Now you would like to see Pauline's room.'

She rose abruptly, Pascoe more slowly, impressed again by her powers of anticipation.

She led him into a small bedroom. Pascoe regarded it with dismay. It looked as if an amateur burglar had been at it. Drawers hung out of the dressing-table and tallboy, all empty, as was the fitted wardrobe. Their contents seemed to have been stuffed into a variety of plastic rubbish bags which littered the floor. As he watched, Mrs Stanhope began to strip the blankets and linen off the bed and thrust these too into one of the bags.

'What on earth are you doing?' demanded Pascoe, bewildered.

'I thought you had studied the Romani,' she said. 'All these things of my dead niece must be destroyed. It is the custom.'

'But Pauline wasn't a gypsy,' protested Pascoe.

'She was my niece. She lived here. She is dead,' said the woman in a matter-of-fact tone. 'While her possessions remain, so must she. I did the same when my Bert died. Even a chovihani has a right to live among the living. I felt her last night. She was lost and puzzled. I may have been a comfort. But soon she may grow angry, resentful, bitter. Such a spirit is not good company. The gypsy way is to seek rest for both the living and the dead.'

There was no answer to this.

Pascoe said, 'You seem to have guessed we'd want to look through Pauline's things, so isn't this a bit premature?'

She picked up a shoe-box from the bedside table.

'Her letters, diary, address book,' she said. 'All that could be of interest to you. But none of it will be of use. I can tell you that. Take them anyway. Make copies and return them, please. They too must go. Also the things she was wearing when she died. Those especially must be destroyed. When can I have them?'

'They're in the car,' remembered Pascoe. 'I'll fetch them now.'

He returned a few moments later with the parcel of clothes and personal effects.

'Thank you,' she said. Then after a moment's hesitation, she added abruptly. 'I still want to help, you understand, like I told you. But it's harder now.'

'Because it's your own, you mean?'

She thought about this for a while, then agreed, 'Yes. Because it's my own.'

Pascoe puzzled over this remark as he went downstairs to his car. It seemed to him there might have been a rather strange emphasis in it, though at the same time he recognized that the whole ambience of the flat inclined him to suspicion of strangeness.

My own. In a way Pauline hadn't been her own, of course. For in a way, her own were the gypsies, particularly the Lees. And after Pauline's death she had been away on some unlikely family jaunt with Dave Lee.

Could family loyalty – or fear – persuade her to help cover up Dave Lee's involvement in her niece's death? It hardly seemed likely. But there was something there, of that he was convinced.

As he was opening his car door he heard his name being called, and Rosetta Stanhope came running after him, breathless and agitated.

'What's the matter?' he asked.

'Where's the rest?' she demanded.

'Rest? Rest of what?'

'The rest of her clothes! The clothes she died in. Those I must have, those are the most important of all!'

'But you've got everything,' assured Pascoe. 'Jeans, suntop, underclothes, sandals. I checked them off myself as I signed for them.'

'Not those, you fool!' flashed the woman, all gypsy now. 'The headscarf, the shawl, the skirt. Where are they?'

'Oh God!' exclaimed Pascoe. Her theatricality was infectious for he found himself striking his forehead with his open hand. But he meant it.

'You bloody fool!' he said to himself. 'You fool!'