A Killing kindness

Chapter 22

Interestingly, a message without a body seemed to stir up Dalziel much more than a message with a body.

'Got them linguists yet?' he demanded of Pascoe for the third time.

'I've sent cars out, told the lads to pick them up as soon as they come home,' said Pascoe. 'But really, all they can tell us is which of the other four, if any, this is. Sounds like (A) to me.'

'Me too,' said Wield. 'Though it's hard to be sure. He sounds different somehow. You know, not so certain of himself. Unhappy.'

'Hell's bells,' said Dalziel. 'He's unhappy! Wait till this hits the papers. They'll give us stick, and not having had the advantage of a public school education, I don't care for stick.'

'No, sir. But the sergeant's right. I've sent for Dr Pottle as well to see what he thinks,' said Pascoe.

Dalziel's shrug, like Atlas getting a bit restless, indicated his opinion of Dr Pottle.

Sergeant Brady came into the Murder Room. He had been checking the missing persons reports. Weekend nights always brought in a good crop of non-returning youngsters.'

'Seven lasses,' said Brady. 'Three turned up very late, looking satisfied, likely. Another two are back as well, only the parents didn't bother to tell us. That leaves two. They sound like they've just taken off to the Smoke. Classic backgrounds, like Mr Pascoe says.'

'Keep after them all the same,' ordered Dalziel, adding when the sergeant left, 'Christ, Peter, what're you doing to Brady? Classic backgrounds! He'll be spelling psychology with two p's and only one k next!'

On cue, the sergeant returned to announce that Dr Pottle was here.

'Hasn't he got a golf-course to go to?' muttered Dalziel.

In fact whatever it was that Pottle did on Saturday afternoons he seemed only too pleased to have been invited away from it. He took the new tape into a neighbouring room and played it through several times.

'You have no body?' he enquired when he had finished.

'No. You think we're likely to get one?' said Dalziel.

'That I can't say. But whether this is your man or not, he certainly sounds to me very disturbed. If we assume that he is the (A) of the previous set of tapes, the change is marked.'

'That's what I thought,' said Wield. 'Unhappier, sort of.'

Pottle looked at him approvingly.

'You have a sensitive ear,' he said.

Wield coughed almost noiselessly into his fist. Pascoe who was beginning to be a keen student of Wieldology noted this down as the equivalent of a flush of pleasure.

'Last time his tone was regretful but resolved, as though he were performing a painful necessity,' continued Pottle.

'This is hurting me as much as it hurts you, you mean?' said Dalziel. 'We had an old sod at school used to say that as he thumped you.'

'Partly that. More being cruel to be kind. Compassionate, almost,' said the doctor. 'As I said in my written report, these are just impressions, but supported, I think, by the treatment of his victims and the tone and content of the telephone calls. Now, here there are two distinct changes. His voice sounds much more distressed, there's not the same authority there as before. And the words he speaks are concerned with himself, not with his victim. Oh God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. He's beginning to find it hard to live with himself, I would say.'

'Would this show in his outer behaviour?' wondered Pascoe.

'Not necessarily. Not yet anyway.'

'More important, does it mean he's less or more dangerous?' demanded Dalziel.

'I can't answer that,' said Pottle.

Dalziel gave an expressive pout of his thick lips and putting his hand into his waistband began to scratch his stomach audibly.

'One last thing,' said Pascoe. 'Suppose that his last killing, that is the last we definitely knew about, had been motivated not by whatever it is that's bugging him deep down, but by a simple desire not to be caught. How would this affect him?'

Pottle lit a cigarette from the one he was already smoking.

'This is a hypothesis, or do you know something?' he asked.

'An educated guess,' replied Pascoe.

'Then I would guess also that his own survival might not be sufficient justification to himself for taking life. Not unless it was definitely a one-off once-for-all-time act.'

'In other words, he might do it, resolved that after this there would be no more killings.'

'Yes.'

'And then if he found there were going to be other killings, that the compulsion was still there…?'

'I see what you're getting at, Mr Pascoe,' said Pottle. 'Yes, that could explain the change of tone here in this message. If he has killed again because his compulsion, he now knows he may be tempted to kill again for his survival. And that is what he finds it hard to contemplate.'

'Hold on, now,' said Dalziel. 'If he killed that girl on the fairground just to protect himself, surely it's the call that followed that murder which should be full of this unhappiness your sensitive ears are picking up.'

'Oh no,' said Pottle. 'His motivation would have been sufficient at the time to justify himself thoroughly. Therefore he would be most meticulous about his cover-up.'

'Cover-up?'

'That's right. By laying the girl out as he did and by making the phone-call in the same tone and terms as before, he was attempting to misdirect you into pursuing him as the motiveless Choker still.'

'Which is what you hinted at in the first place, sir,' reminded Pascoe.

'Aye, I know,' muttered Dalziel. 'But I always get suspicious of my good ideas when clever buggers start supporting them. Well, thank you, Doctor. You've been very helpful.'

Pottle closed his notebook so firmly that an ashy emanation puffed out of his hands like fumes from a censer. He is after all our society's high-priest, thought Pascoe. The ungodly Dalziel had already turned away.

'He doesn't care for "clever buggers", I see,' murmured Pottle. 'And yet… how clever is he himself? Of the other, I have no doubts.'

'Oh, he knows a hawk from a handsaw,' said Pascoe lightly. 'Any more thoughts on why Hamlet, Doctor?'

'The first lady is the key, I believe,' said Pottle, making for the door. 'Had she been a little older, and had she remarried after her husband's death, and had she got a son who was a thirty- five-year-old adolescent…'

'She had a daughter who died,' said Pascoe.

'That might be significant. But you'll need powers other than mine to establish that connection, Inspector. Good day to you.'

'Inspector Pascoe,' bellowed Dalziel as the door closed behind the psychiatrist.

Pascoe went to the table behind which the fat man was sitting, viewing with distaste its paper-strewn surface.

'There's too many people just hanging around here,' he said fretfully. 'It's like just after pub closing-time in a brothel.'

'Some brothel,' said Pascoe. 'The girl we're all waiting for is dead.'

'I'll believe that when I see it,' said Dalziel. 'Meanwhile, there's things to be done. The fair finishes tonight. They'll be packing up in the morning, so I'm sending a team down there just in case there's any last-minute memories or anything turns up when the council start raking in the rubbish. Next, I'm fed up with all these wiseacres farting about with these tapes. Let's get something really useful out of 'em. Every man connected with this case, I want his voice on tape. It can be by agreement or by stealth, I don't mind. Sergeant Wield's a dab hand at working with a microphone up his nostrils aren't you, Sergeant? Then we'll see if these sodding experts can actually say if it was one of this lot on the telephone, right?'

He glared at Pascoe as if defying him to recall that this had been his own suggestion only an hour earlier.

'Excellent idea, sir,' said Pascoe. 'I'll do Wildgoose. I want another word with that sod anyway.'

'And I'll have another chat with Mr Mulgan,' said Sergeant Wield who had been studying the linguists' report with great interest.

'Talking of Mulgan, was there anything on that list of the Sorby girl's transctions?' enquired Dalziel.

Guiltily, Wield took it out of his pocket and handed it over.

'Forgot all about it, sir,' he confessed. 'What with the bother at the encampment and all.'

Dalziel grunted and glanced down the list. Because it was half-day closing, a lot of the local traders had been putting their takings in during the afternoon, including M. Conrad, the jeweller. Also, he noticed, there had been a deposit made on behalf of the Aero Club account and a large sum withdrawn from the Middlefield Electronic account.

He frowned.

'She was wearing her engagement ring that day, wasn't she?' he said.

Pascoe and Wield exchanged glances.

'I think so,' said Wield. 'Why, sir?'

'Nothing. You're getting me as loopy as the rest of you. Go on, bugger off and get some work done, will you?'

Before he left the station, Pascoe put a copy of the latest tape in an envelope and addressed it to Gladmann or Urquhart in case either should surface before his return. Then, as an afterthought, he dropped in the Rosetta Stanhope cassette with a copy of Wield's transcription and a note with the vague query, 'What do you make of this?'

Wildgoose's milk and paper still remained uncollected. Pascoe contemplated burglary but was deterred by the appearance of a neighbour, a hairy young man apparently dying of consumption, who told him in a series of wheezy grunts that he'd heard Wildgoose go out last night but hadn't heard him return. Deterred from his criminal intents by the young man's presence, if not his information, Pascoe left.

He thought of going round to see Lorraine Wildgoose. But it didn't seem likely that the man would be there and he felt he ought to be careful about feeding the woman's obsession.

No, the girl, Andrea Valentine, seemed the best bet. Preece had gathered that the parents were due back this weekend, so perhaps Wildgoose was having a last fling round there. He got in his car and headed for Danby Row.

He spotted the house and drove slowly past. There was no sign of life. The milk was on the doorstep here too, which meant that the parents almost certainly had not returned and the happy couple if they were indeed inside were still probably making each other happy.

He turned at the end of the street and drove back. Dalziel, he thought, wouldn't have driven past the first time. Young girl screwing around with her middle-aged and married schoolteacher – her parents had a right to know. Pascoe's softness wasn't doing anyone any good, least of all the girl.

To some extent Pascoe had to agree. Certainly he'd been as kind as he could. Theoretically, suspecting that Wildgoose might have dumped the remains of his cannabis crop in Danby Row, he ought to have gone in there the previous day, searching it out and slapping a possession charge so hard on the girl that she'd try to ease the pain by agreeing to witness the more serious charge of cultivation and distribution against Wildgoose.

That's what he should have done. But he hadn't. Still, don't get uptight about it, he told himself philosophically as he leaned on the doorbell. It was impossible to be a cop and not break the rules. And in the great scheme of things perhaps his being soft on cannabis compensated for the readiness of some of his colleagues to drive home their arguments with a fist in the gut.

There was no answer here either. He didn't want to attract the neighbour's attention, so he went round the side of the house. At the front there had only been a paved rectangle with a homesick magnolia in the middle of it. Behind, however, a long narrow garden, made private and well-nigh impenetrable by profusion of competing shrubs, stretched down to a wall with a green-shrouded door in it, presumably leading into a back lane.

Pascoe rapped on the rear door. There was no response, so he tried the handle. It turned and the unlocked door swung creakingly open.

He stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen – marble sink, solid fuel stove, a wooden clothes pulley hanging from the ceiling, blue and white lavatorial tiles everywhere. The Valentines obviously didn't spend their money on home improvements. If the parents' attitudes were like their home, they'd have a fit when they found out what little Andrea had been getting up to.

'Hello!' called Pascoe opening the interior door. 'Anyone home?'

His voice echoed up the stairwell, gloomy with brown paint and dark green flocked wall paper.

'Hello,' he called again, but more softly now, not expecting an answer.

Yet there was someone or something here, he felt it, and his heart was suddenly tight with dread. He found himself thinking of Wield pulling back the tent-flap and stepping inside. What he had found there had taken him completely by surprise. But perhaps the anticipated horror is even worse.

Oddly, it wasn't. It was anti-climactic, a relief almost. He pushed open another door. It led into a shadowy sitting-room. There on a threadbare chaise-longue lay Andrea Valentine. She was wearing only a short towelling wrap, but it had been decently arranged to effect maximum coverage. Her slippered feet were together and her hands were crossed on her breast. On the third finger of her left hand glowed a bright red stone set in a circlet of silver.

Pascoe touched the hand. It was quite cold. He looked for a moment at the blood-suffused face and knew the regrets and self-accusations that the sight was stirring up for him.

It was no time for them now.

Ignoring the telephone in the hallway he went out of the house the way he had come in and spoke rapidly and urgently into his car radio.

Then he returned inside to wait.