A Killing kindness

Chapter 24

It didn't take long to identify the body. The name in the wallet was Wildgoose, Pascoe recognized the face instantly, and finally in the interests of bureaucracy Lorraine Wildgoose was asked to make it official.

'Was it suicide?' she asked afterwards, almost casually.

Not unless he could knock himself unconscious, strangle and bury himself, thought Pascoe.

He shook his head.

'No,' he said and when that produced no response, added gently, 'He was killed, I'm afraid, Mrs Wildgoose. But it does mean he probably wasn't the Choker.'

'Does it?' she said indifferently. 'I don't see why.' Then as though making an effort to find a more acceptable response, she added, 'But I'm glad for the children's sake.'

'Well, she's not going to toss herself on to her old man's pyre,' commented Dalziel after a WPC had taken Mrs Wildgoose out to the awaiting car.

'I think she's really broken up inside,’ said Pascoe.

'Like my guts,’ said Dalziel, beating his belly and belching. 'You didn't find out what she was doing early yesterday morning, between say midnight and four A.M.?'

'No,' said Pascoe. 'You don't really believe that… no, I'm sorry, sir. I didn't think.'

'You're probably right. Any road, I've told that lass with her to check as best she can, talk to the kids, that sort of thing. Better safe than sorry. She did hate the poor sod and she looks tough enough. That'd be the best solution too. He's the Choker, runs home for solace after killing the Valentine girl, wife bumps him off and buries him. End of case.'

'And who phones the Evening Post on Saturday afternoon?' wondered Pascoe.

'Who knows? Mebbe we've got a Joker as well as a Choker,' said Dalziel. 'We've got at least four voices on tape so far according to Laurel and Hardy, haven't we?'

'Urquhart and Gladmann,’ said Pascoe. 'Yes. But yesterday afternoon only the Choker knew the girl was dead.'

'The Choker and anyone he might have told before he got himself killed,' urged Dalziel gently. 'What do your experts say about yesterday's voice anyway?'

'Nothing,' said Pascoe who had checked that the envelope was still at the desk. 'They must both be away for the weekend.'

Dalziel snorted his derision for people who had weekends away, a derision which included Wield whose day off it was and who had been heading north on his motorbike too early for even the long arm of Dalziel to haul him in.

Wildgoose had been knocked unconscious by a single blow at the top of the spine, either a very lucky or a very expert punch. Then he had been strangled. The only other point of significance was that he had had sexual intercourse not long before death.

'If we assume that he himself is not the Choker,' said Pascoe in deference to what he felt was probably a merely provocative theory on Dalziel's part, 'then it seems likely that after he left the girl, the Choker, who was perhaps waiting outside, moves swiftly in and kills her. As he leaves in his turn, he runs into Wildgoose who has returned for some reason.'

'Seconds,' said Dalziel ghoulishly.

'The Choker kills him. Carts him away. Presumably he has transport.'

'But why?' interrupted Dalziel. 'Why not leave the body in the house? I mean, why not lug the guts into the kitchen and take off rather than risk meeting someone in the back lane?'

Pascoe started inwardly. Dalziel was full of surprises. Lug the guts. Despite his mockery, had he too been studying Hamlet closely for whatever clues it might contain? Or was it just coincidence? There was no art to read Dalziel's mind in his ten-acre face.

'Perhaps he felt it would spoil the set-up there.' he answered. 'Girl neatly laid out, all decent and proper. Religious almost.'

'Or perhaps he just wanted to trail a red herring,' said Dalziel. 'Make us think that Wildgoose did it.'

'It's another link anyway,' said Pascoe. 'Burying him at the Garden Centre, I mean.'

'Aye, but what's it signify?'

'That's what we're paid to find out, sir,' said Pascoe sententiously.

If that were so, they did not earn their money that Sunday.

In hospital Dave Lee was well enough to work out that perhaps he could trade off his allegations of brutality against Dalziel's accusations of complicity. Ms Pritchard accompanied Mrs Lee during visiting hours and later to the station.

Dalziel, encountering them in the vestibule, refused a private audience, listened impatiently for a couple of minutes, got the drift and bellowed, 'You do what you bloody well like, my girl. Me, I've got more important things to occupy myself with. Like murder. Like the Choker.'

'You don't seem to be doing so well in that field either,' said the solicitor coolly.

'No, I'm not,' snarled Dalziel. 'And one reason why I'm not is that your client, if that's what he is, came as near as damn to catching this man in the act. And instead of getting hold of the police, he robbed the victim. And hid the body. And misled the police. And delayed the investigation. And probably made a large contribution to at least two more women and one man getting killed in the past five days. You tell him that, love. And if you don't care to, mebbe I'll come in and shout it down his ear-hole till his stitches pop!'

‘There's no need to get excited,' said Ms Pritchard.

'You couldn't excite me on a desert island, love,' said Dalziel.

'That wasn't exactly conciliatory,' said Pascoe as they moved rapidly away.

'You don't conciliate that sort,' said Dalziel. 'Make 'em think you're a thick, racist, sexist pig. Then they underestimate you and overreach themselves.'

'Ah,' said Pascoe and wondered privately what strange self-image Dalziel kept locked away in his heart.

Thereafter it was a day of routine. Plain-clothes men going from house to house in Shafton village, checking whereabouts, taking statements; lines of men in dark blue moving slowly through the bands of red and yellow and pink and orange and white in the rose field, stooping and searching like gleaners after the harvest; Pascoe sitting in the Murder Room going painstakingly through every statement as it came in; Dalziel moving slowly around in threatening anger, like a tornado distantly glimpsed in a mid-West landscape and fled by all who saw it.

The taxi-driver who had taken Wildgoose and Andrea Valentine to the Aero Club was finally found.

The man who had taken them from the Club had been easier to track because his company was known. He had already made a statement saying that, after first directing him to Danby Row, they had changed their minds and asked to be dropped in Bright Avenue which ran at right-angles to Danby Row. As this gave access to the lane which ran behind the girl's house, it was presumed they had used the back entrance to avoid attracting attention.

The earlier driver had picked them up from Wildgoose's flat about nine-forty-five. They were both quite high, but he got the impression that it was the girl who wanted to be going out while the man was less enthusiastic. The girl had instructed him to drive to the Aero Club.

Dalziel now insisted on a check being made on the alleged whereabouts of every man concerned with the case between midnight and two A.M. on Saturday morning. He even got the man on duty at the hospital to confirm that Lee and Ron Ludlam were safely tucked up in bed all night. He himself did the check on Alistair Mulgan and Bernard Middlefield. The bank manager had watched the midnight movie on television by himself. His wife had gone to bed to read, had heard the television noise as she lay there and was able to confirm that her husband had come to bed as soon as the film finished at one-thirty.

'Good film, was it?' said Dalziel.

Mulgan cleared his throat and then gave a detailed resume of the plot. Dalziel was not impressed. The picture had been shown at least twice before. But, while Danby Row was within walking distance, just, to get Wildgoose's body to the Garden Centre needed a car and Mrs Mulgan was adamant that the car had not left the garage which was next door to her bedroom in the bungalow.

Bernard Middlefield was approached rather less directly. Dalziel couldn't see him as a killer, certainly not of the kind described by Dr Pottle. But he was a customer at Brenda Sorby's bank, his company works were next to the Eden Park Canning Plant where June McCarthy had been employed, and he had been at the Aero Club the night Andrea Valentine was killed. So Dalziel treated him as a witness and only obliquely enquired about his own movements that night.

It emerged that he had stayed on after the disco finished. He hadn't noticed Wildgoose and the girl leave in particular, though he had said goodnight to Thelma Lacewing.

'What time would that be?' wondered Dalziel.

'Eleven. Eleven-fifteen. I don't know exactly.'

Middlefield was even vaguer about the time of his own departure. He'd had a couple of drinks with Greenall while the bar-helpers cleared up. Then, after they had gone, he had finally called it a night. He had then driven home, a distance of about three miles, arriving in time to join his wife in watching the last part of the same film that Mulgan was so well acquainted with.

Greenall whom Dalziel consulted later was able to be more precise. It had been nearly a quarter to one before Middlefield had left.

'I offered to drive him myself,' said Greenall. 'He was OK, you understand, but he'd put away quite a lot of Scotch. He got a bit huffy at that and I had to make a joke of it. But he drove away very steadily, I noticed. I remember thinking he was more likely to attract attention going at that rate than speeding!'

So, a sedate three miles – say ten minutes at the outside. It fitted, thought Dalziel not without relief. If there'd been any doubt, the next step would have been an examination of the boot of the JP's Mercedes, which would have meant coming into the open. Dalziel didn't give a bugger for anyone, but he knew who he wanted his friends to be.

In the middle of the afternoon Wield appeared. Quizzed about this devotion to duty on his day off, he shrugged, said he'd heard about the discovery of Wildgoose's body on the radio and thought he'd better check in to see if he could help.

'What a bloody miserable existence the poor sod must have,' commented Sergeant Brady to anyone who cared to listen. 'Nothing better to do than come in here on his Sunday off. What he needs is a short-sighted woman!'

Wield did not hear this, would not have reacted if he had. All his emotion for that day had been spent in a stormy scene in Maurice's Newcastle flat. Their usual roles had been reversed. Maurice, the more effervescent extrovert of the two, had tried to play it cool. Yes, there was somebody else, an interesting young chap who worked in the Borough Surveyor's office. Wield would like him. He was coming to lunch. Why didn't Wield stay on and have a drink and meet him?

And Wield, the calm, controlled, inscrutable Wield, had exploded in a wild, near hysterical fury which had amazed and frightened himself almost as much as it did his friend. He had left and made the normally two-hour journey back in seventy-five minutes. For two hours he had sat in his room examining the new vistas of violence his morning's experience had opened up for him. And finally he poured the tumblerful of whisky which had been standing before him back into the bottle untouched and went to work.

But there was little to do, just routine, nothing happening, no leads developing.

And when at six o'clock Gladmann appeared, full of the marvellous couple of days he had spent with rich and generous friends in their cottage on the coast, Pascoe thrust the envelope with the tape into his hands, said 'Sod it!' out loud, and went home, feeling, as he told Ellie, as if he'd spent the entire Sabbath at a very long and very tedious church service where the preacher's text had been It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows.

It still felt pretty vain the next morning. Monday mornings normally don't mean much to policemen. If anything, they bring a sense of relief. The incidence of crime shoots up at weekends, much of it petty, it's true, but all of it time-consuming. But this Monday, all the Monday morning feelings they had skipped for so long seemed to be lying in wait for those working on the Choker case.

The papers were full of comment, nearly all critical. An editorial in the Yorkshire Post wondered heretically if it might not be time to ask the Yard for assistance. Dr Pottle telephoned first thing to say that he had been invited to take part in a chat show on television and he wanted to be clear about what he should and shouldn't say.

'He thinks he knows something important?' queried Dalziel incredulously. 'Why hasn't the silly bugger told us, then?'

Pascoe removed the hand which he had pressed very firmly over the mouthpiece and said, 'Mr Dalziel says he can see no reason not to rely on your professional discretion, Doctor.'

'That's kind of him. By the way, have the papers got it right? This man, Wildgoose – you believe the Choker killed him to cover up his latest murder?'

'More or less. How does that fit with your profile?' asked Pascoe.

'Very well,' said Pottle. 'The killing of the girls he can clearly justify to himself. Even a one-off cover-up killing. But a second opens up the possibilities of a third, a fourth, indeed an infinitude. And that, if, as I posit, he is a man of conscience, must be very distressing.'

'What's he say?' asked Dalziel when Pascoe replaced the receiver.

'He says the Choker's probably sorry about killing Wildgoose.'

'Je-sus,' said Dalziel.

At ten A.M. the phone rang.

Wield took it. He looked unusually pale this morning and there were deeper shadows than usual in the canyons of his eyes.

'For you, sir,' he said to Pascoe. 'The Service Children's Education Authority.'

'Probably want their degree back,' muttered Dalziel. 'Obtaining by fraud.'

It was a woman, friendly, apologetic. She introduced herself as Captain Casey.

'Sorry this wasn't dealt with more promptly,' she said. 'But like most government offices, it's difficult to find anyone but half-wits round the place after lunch-time on Friday. I expect it's the same in the police.'

'All the time,' said Pascoe. 'What can you tell me, please?'

'Everything. Or at least all you asked for. Yes, there was a Peter Dinwoodie on the staff of Devon School. He resigned at the end of Summer Term, 1973. He hasn't been employed in any of our schools since. Nor does he seem to have had a job in the public sector in this country. I rang the DES to check. Thought you might like to know.'

'That was kind of you,' said Pascoe.

'Amends for the delay,' said Captain Casey. 'Now, you also asked whether his wife was employed at the same school, Mr Pascoe. No, she wasn't. In fact, according to our records, Mr Dinwoodie was a bachelor when last he worked for us.'

'Bachelor? Not married, you mean?' said Pascoe foolishly.

'I often do mean that when I say bachelor,' she said pleasantly.

'You're certain?'

'Our records are.'

'Well, thank you very much, Captain.'

'Hang on,' she said. 'You also wanted to know if a Mark Wildgoose had ever taught in Germany. The answer is no, definitely not. By the way, I saw that name in the newspaper this morning. A man murdered. Is it anything to do…'

'Thank you, Captain Casey,' said Pascoe firmly. 'Thanks a lot.'

'Oh well. Any time,' she said. 'Before lunch on Friday that is. Cheerio!'

'What was all that about?' asked Dalziel who had been watching Pascoe's reactions.

'More mystery,' said Pascoe.

When he had outlined the call, Dalziel said, 'Yes, well, all right. So he got married later, when he got back to the UK. What about it?'

'There was a daughter,' said Pascoe. 'She was killed in a car crash early this year. She was seventeen.'

He watched as Dalziel deliberately counted on his fingers.

'I'm with you,' said the fat man. 'But so what? He married a widow.'

'I don't think so,' said Pascoe. 'Something the old man said. Agar. It struck me at the time, but I didn't know why. I think I'll have another word with him, if that's OK, sir.'

'It's better than having you wandering around here, being cryptic,' said Dalziel. 'But when the blinding flash comes, I'd like to be among the first to know.'

As though it had been specially ordered for fair fortnight, the fine weather which had begun to break up the day before was now definitely at an end. It was still warm, but in the eastern sky great ridges of violet-tinged cloud blocked out the sun and as he drove slowly by the empty expanse of Charter Park, seagulls driven inland by the still distant storm floated covetously over the heads of the council workmen clearing up the debris. There would be a couple of policemen hovering too in case anything relevant was discovered, but Pascoe reckoned that the seagulls had a better chance.

Heading for Shafton took him directly towards the storm and the air was quite dark by the time he reached the Garden Centre. He had Agar's home address, but he slowed as he approached the Centre and saw that his judgement had been right. There in the rose field was a solitary figure with a hoe, carefully repairing the damage done by yesterday's line of searching coppers.

The old man glanced up as Pascoe approached but did not pause in his work.

'Big feet some of you lads have,' he said, heeling a loosened root into the earth.

'They had to look,' said Pascoe.

'I dare say.'

'Looks like rain,' said Pascoe, falling into slow step alongside him.

'We can do with it,' said Agar. 'But that lot looks like it's going to come down cats and dogs, and any of these plants that're not firmly set can easy be toppled.'

'Well, I won't keep you back,' said Pascoe. 'It was just that last Friday when we talked you said something that didn't really register till later. You said that Mrs Dinwoodie blamed herself for letting her daughter run off to Scotland to be married. Now Mrs Dinwoodie as a widow would be solely responsible for her daughter while she was still a minor. If she agreed to the wedding, why did the girl have to go to Scotland?'

The old man paused.

'I said that? Well, mebbe I shouldn't have. But there's no harm to be done now. The lass, Alison, she weren't Mr Dinwoodie's daughter. No, she used the name, but she weren't his daughter. I knew, but only at the end when there was trouble and I heard 'em talking. Mrs Dinwoodie knew she could trust me.'

Pascoe put his hand on the old man's shoulder and brought him to a halt.

'Please, Mr Agar. Tell me everything you know,' he said.

It wasn't much. Shortly before Dinwoodie's death, Alison had met a boy, a nice lad, just eighteen, down from the Borders to do a six-month course at the Yorkshire Agricultural Institute. Their relationship had intensified after and probably as a result of her stepfather's death and they had been eager to get married. But somehow Alison's real father had emerged on the scene just about now. Still legally the girl's guardian, his permission was needed for an under-age marriage in England, and he was making a fuss about giving it. So Mary Dinwoodie had not raised any objection when her prospective son-in-law proposed taking Alison back to Scotland with him and marrying her there after she had the necessary residential qualifications.

She had gone up to the wedding, taken a train back to Yorkshire after the ceremony and was met at her house by the news that the honeymooners' car had skidded on the wintry roads only twenty miles after setting out and the young couple were both killed.

'Like I said, she went off after that. To stay with friends, she said, but I reckon she was off by herself and it wouldn't have surprised me if she'd killed herself. But I took care of the place as best I could, and the bank helped to keep the accounts straight, and then, lo and behold, last month she comes back, and it looks as if we can mebbe get things on a proper basis. Well, you know the rest, mister. Better if she'd stayed away forever. Better mebbe if she had killed herself even.'

The sky was completely veiled in cloud now and Pascoe felt the first splashes on his cheek, big warm drops that burst ripely as they struck.

'You should have told someone this before, Mr Agar,' he said.

'Should I? I never thought. It seemed of no account somehow, what with her dead. No account.'

'And the man's name? Mrs Dinwoodie's first husband. Alison's father.'

'Nay, I know nothing of that, mister,' said Agar, 'nothing more than what I've told you. Nothing more.'

Back at the station he found that Dalziel was out. This suited him very well. There was a driving urgency in him which rendered him impatient of diversions for explanations and hypotheses. Ignoring Wield's curious glances, he went to his own office, picked up the telephone and asked to be connected with the SCEA in London.

It took a few minutes to track down Captain Casey.

'Hello again,’ she said. 'I didn't expect you so soon.'

'Me neither. Look, that school in Linden, the Devon – do you have a complete list of staff? What I'm particularly interested in is other people who resigned in 1973.'

'You're lucky, I haven't sent the file back yet,' she said. 'Hold on a sec. Here we are. You want the lot?'

'Just the resignations to start with,' he said.

Besides Dinwoodie there were only another two, and only one of these a woman.

'Now, do you want the whole list?'

'No thanks,' he said slowly. 'I think this'll do.'

He replaced the receiver and carefully drew a ring round the woman's name.

Mary Greenall.

Then he picked up the telephone again.

'I want the Air Ministry,' he said. 'I want the section that deals with personnel records.'

Twenty minutes later he came out of his room, the sense of urgency pulsing stronger than ever. He found Wield and asked, 'Mr Dalziel back yet?'

'Not yet,' said the sergeant.

'Damn.'

'Are you on to something, sir?' asked Wield.

Pascoe hesitated, then said firmly. 'Yes. It may open up the whole damn thing. I'm almost certain.

‘Listen, I'm going out now. Tell Mr Dalziel I'll be at the Aero Club. That's it. The Aero Club.'

It was silly. There was no need for all this rushing. But he felt impelled to it. Perhaps if there'd been a bit more rushing early on and a little less painstaking, step-by-stepping…

As he went through the door that led into the car park, he almost collided with Dicky Gladmann, clad in a streaming plastic mac.

'Hello there!' said the linguist. 'I say, I've had a listen. Most interesting.'

'Fine,' said Pascoe, turning his collar against the rain. 'I'm in a bit of a rush. We'll talk later.'

'Well, it's all written down,' said Gladmann, producing the buff envelope. 'Really, it's been terribly interesting. I'm not sure how significant it might be…'

'I'll let you know,' said Pascoe, taking the envelope and thrusting it into his jacket pocket. 'Many thanks. We'll be in touch.'

He dashed out into the storm and was well dampened in the short time it took to get into his car. The light was so bad now that he switched his headlights on before moving off. Behind him through the rear-view mirror he could see Gladmann standing forlornly in the doorway looking with his old-young-man's face and his plastic mac like the nucleus of a queue outside a porno-cinema.

The storm was at its height as he drove into the old aerodrome. There was no wind and the orange windsock hung heavily from its pole, its fluorescence dulled by the torrential rain. Sheet lightning flickered through canyons of cloud and thunder cracked and rolled like an artillery barrage. There would be no flying today, and precious little drinking either if the absence of cars was anything to go by.

Pascoe glanced at his watch. Nearly twelve-thirty.

He parked as close to the club-house door as he could get and dashed in, realized he'd left his lights on, dashed out again, switched them off and was sodden wet by the time he made his second entrance.

'Thought you'd changed your mind,' said Austin Greenall. 'Welcome. We were just beginning to think the weather had robbed us of all custom today.'

He was sitting on a stool at the bar. Behind it, a barmaid was arranging bottles and glasses.

Glancing significantly at her, Pascoe said, 'May we talk, Mr Greenall?'

'Of course,' said the secretary. 'Come into my office. Would you care for a drink en route? No? All right, this way.'

He led Pascoe into a small airless room with a desk, a filing cabinet and a couple of hard chairs.

'Sit down, Inspector,' he said. 'Now what is it you want to talk about?'

Pascoe sat.

‘We could start with your ex-wife, Mary Dinwoodie,' he said. 'And go on from there.'

The telephone began to ring. It rang thirteen times. Both men ignored it. Finally it stopped, leaving its tone hanging on the air almost as long again.

'My wife, Mr Pascoe,' said Greenall. 'We are Roman Catholics. There was no divorce.'

Both men sighed gently, almost inaudibly, out of a sort of relief in both cases and, as if recognizing this, they exchanged shy smiles, glimmers fading almost as soon as they showed, but establishing a tenuous link for all that.

'Talking of wives, was it yours that talked you down here in the end?' said Greenall. His tone was light, cocktail-partyish, but with a harmonic of strain.

'I'm sorry?'

'She was talking about that seance when she was here last week. She had all kinds of daft ideas about it. But I saw the transcript on the table and I wondered if in the end… That's why of course I had to…'

The phone started ringing again. This time Greenall turned his attention to it, not touching it but staring fixedly at it as though the ceasing of the noise would be the signal of a beginning.

Pascoe took from his pocket the envelope which Gladmann had given him. As expected, it contained the short tape of the Choker's last call and the cassette of Rosetta Stanhope's interrupted seance. There were also several sheets in the linguist's rather self-consciously ornate handwriting.

Pascoe looked, selected, read.

‘The poor quality of this recording makes accurate transcription difficult. Still it seems to me at least possible that the opening passage of the tape could be rendered as follows.

It was Greenall, Greenall, over me, choking. The water then, boiling at first, and roaring, and seething… ‘

The phone stopped ringing.