Child's Play

Chapter 3

‘Monica Mathews,’ said Pascoe. ‘One conviction for soliciting, fined fifty pounds. When Hector took over that beat from Lewis a few months back, Lewis left him a list of useful addresses. When he knocked on Monica’s door, she automatically offered him the same deal she’d had with Lewis. Our Hector just thought she was bowled over by his natural charm. He’s all shook up to find out the truth.’

Dalziel shook his head in disbelief.

‘That Lewis, happily retired, is he?’

‘With his wife and three kids and part-time security job at the Co-op.’

‘I’ll give him Co-op if ever I run into him,’ said Dalziel grimly.

‘You can hardly blame him for Hector,’ said Pascoe.

‘I can blame him for dipping his wick in police time,’ said Dalziel. ‘Anyway, what’ve we got?’

‘Well, it’s definitely our man. She remembers the scar on his body. She picked him up in the Volunteer about nine o’clock. They had a drink and talked terms. He wanted to know how much for the whole night. She got the impression he wanted somewhere to doss with no questions asked, and he wasn’t averse to having a jump thrown in. Two, in fact. He managed two and promised a third when he got back.’

‘He was taking a risk leaving his gear in her tender care when he went out, wasn’t he?’

‘Not really. The grip was well locked. Also he still owed the second instalment and the grip was security against his return. At the same time, if he found she’d been fiddling with it, she could probably have whistled for her money.’

‘Any useful pillow talk?’

‘Not really. He was very businesslike in advance. During, he just grunted. Afterwards he said nothing till he announced he had an appointment and would be back in one or two hours at the most. She watched him drive away. He went up to the end of Brook Street and turned left on to the main road. She said she got the impression he knew his way around.’

‘Oh aye. Is that significant?’

‘I don’t know, sir. But if you keep on that road it takes you north along here’ — he was pointing at a map of their area on the wall — ‘and you’d pass the road end into Greendale here, and a few miles further on, if you fork left, you come to the Old Mill Inn.’

‘So?’

‘Well, two Huby connections. Troy House in Greendale, and the Huby pub. And it was the Huby will that brought him here, wasn’t it?’

‘So that’s where you’d look for a motive?’ said Dalziel. ‘You’re a great one for a motive, Peter, even if it does sometimes take you round your backside to pick your nose. Me, I start with a body and work backward to find out where it’s been and who with. But you go ahead and try it your way. Talk to 'em at Troy House and this pub. See if there’s owt there for us.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Pascoe, a little cautiously in the face of this sudden approval of his admittedly vague line of thought. ‘You think there might be a connection?’

‘Mebbe. More to the point, I’ve got a report here which says PC Hewlett was driving his patrol car back towards town along that road about one o’clock on Saturday morning. He got stuck behind a green Escort on the bendy stretch between Greendale road end and Stanton Hill.’

‘Did he get the number?’

‘No. The idle bugger was on his way to sign off and all he was interested in was getting by and back here as quickly as possible. I doubt if he’d have paid much heed if there’d been a masked man with a tommy-gun on the roof. He got by it and recalls it kept behind him for a long way after that.’

‘You mean, that’s how Pontelli got here? Followed Hewlett?’

‘Why not? Foreigner with a bullet in him, needs help, sees a cop-car. Why not follow?’

‘Why not blow his horn?’ objected Pascoe.

‘You’ve not read the car report very closely, lad,’ said Dalziel triumphantly. ‘Horn didn’t work. It’s a wonder anything did. Any road, he sees Hewlett distantly turning into our yard and follows suit. Comes to a stop in the corner. Can’t get out of his door because he’s tight against the wall. Slides over to try the passenger door. It’s jammed. Gets down on the floor to try to push it open, passes out and bleeds to death. Is his grip still with Forensic?’

‘Yes, but I doubt if they’ll get much more from it.’

The grip had contained little of interest except some Italian clothes and an Italian passport. Pontelli clearly travelled light.

‘He must have stayed somewhere while he’s been in England,’ continued Pascoe. ‘He can’t have dossed down with pros every night.’

‘Don’t see why not,’ said Dalziel. ‘Randy buggers, them wops. One thing, Peter. If you reckon this has got something to do with this Huby will, you’d best make up your mind if Pontelli got killed because he was a fraud or because he was genuine.’

‘Yes,’ said Pascoe. ‘I thought I’d have a word with Thackeray, if you don’t mind.’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘Well, I know you’re friends …’

‘Are we? News to me! You talk to whoever you like, lad. By the way, where’s Wield? I’ve not seen him this morning.’

‘No. He rang in sick. He’s been looking really peaky these past few days. We could do with him, though. It leaves us short-handed.’

‘Sick?’ said Dalziel unsympathetically. ‘What’s the bugger got? Some wasting disease? Mebbe he’ll come back handsome! Well, if you’re short-handed, Peter, no use sitting on your arse all day, is it? Get to work, lad, get to work!’

‘He’s on the phone,’ said Lexie Huby. ‘He shouldn’t be long.’

‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ve met, haven’t we? After the play the other night.’

He smiled winningly as he spoke. There were those who thought he had a very winning smile, but this little girl obviously listed him among her losers. She returned his smile with a gaze of owlish indifference through her huge spectacles and began to type.

Suit yourself, thought Pascoe morosely. He shouldn’t feel too hard done to. If she looked about twelve to him, he probably looked about seventy to her. Looked? Some days he felt it! It wouldn’t be long till the male menopause started squeezing his scrotum. The sensible approach was a philosophical jocularity. Middle age is when you start fancying your friend’s daughters; old age is when they look too antique. That was the right note to hit. But sod philosophy! He’d tried it already, but Chief Inspectorship kept on breaking in. He ought to be a DCI by now. His whizzkid curve demanded it. Much longer and he’d be bottom-side of a normal plodding career parabola. What was holding things up? Was it incipient paranoia, or had the DCC really been looking at him rather strangely of late? He’d passed Watmough in the corridor only this morning and the man had actually sniffed in a very marked fashion. Could it be B.O.? He resolved to give himself a really good squirt with that body lotion spray Ellie’s mother had given him at Christmas before he next encountered Watmough.

‘Mr Pascoe. Mr Thackeray’s ready now.’

From the girl’s tone, she had clearly already addressed him once. Bloody hell, she must be thinking the poor old sod’s brain is falling apart.

He stood up and the movement shook the bits of his brain back together again.

‘Huby,’ he said. ‘Your name’s Huby.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And the actor you’re friendly with is called Lomas?’

‘Yes.’

‘My secretary is the late Mrs Huby’s grand-niece, Inspector. Mr Lomas is the son of Mrs Huby’s cousin once removed, Mrs Stephanie Windibanks. I did explain all these family connections to Superintendent Dalziel.’

Who left me to muddle along by myself! thought Pascoe as he went to meet Eden Thackeray who was standing in the doorway of his office.

‘You’ll have to explain it all to me again,’ said Pascoe.

It took more than thirty minutes. Thackeray was determined he was not going to have to repeat himself a third time.

When he had finished, Pascoe said, ‘You knew Mrs Huby very well, I suppose, Mr Thackeray.’

‘I was her solicitor for fifteen years, Mr Pascoe. Before that, my father acted for her. When he died and I became senior partner, Mrs Huby’s affairs were part of my inheritance. But I would not say I knew her well. It took her several years to come to regard me as much more than a usurping office boy.’

Pascoe smiled and said, ‘What kind of woman was she?’

Thackeray looked thoughtful and said, ‘Between ourselves?’

Pascoe nodded and made a big business of putting away his notebook.

‘Between ourselves, she was a pretty awful kind of woman,’ said Thackeray. ‘Overbearing, rude, opinionated and snobbish. She could also be charming, entertaining and considerate, but only on feast days or to members of the Royal Family. Her pretensions to culture started and finished with a passion for Grand Opera. She was politically naïve, which is a polite way of saying she was a natural Fascist. She found it hard to forgive the Tories for conniving at the giving away of India and she sat glued to her television set during the Falklands crisis in the firm belief that after the task force had mopped up the Argies, it would carry on its cleaning crusade wherever frogs, wogs or reds pretended to rule the waves. She treated her animals better than her relatives and she squandered what little she did have of unselfish, altruistic human affection on one crazy obsession which ruined her own life, soiled the lives of others, and brought us all to this present unhappy situation.’

‘You should have been a barrister,’ said Pascoe. ‘That was a pretty powerful speech for the prosecution. It’s this obsession of hers I’m interested in. Was it based purely on a mother’s intuition or did she actually educe evidence that her son might in fact have survived? What, in other words, are the facts?’

‘I can be of very little help to you there, Inspector,’ said Thackeray. ‘I gathered from remarks she let slip from time to time that she never gave up the active investigation of her son’s disappearance, but our firm was only peripherally involved. Perhaps this was because her investigations had to be clandestine while her husband was alive, and she found it hard to get out of the habit. Or perhaps it was because she recognized my own strong scepticism and my father’s before me.’

‘Her husband didn’t share her hope, then?’

‘No, indeed. He bore with her, and perhaps even had a faint glimmer himself, till the war was over and the POW camps had all been accounted for. Then, so my father told me, he gave commands that his son was not to be mentioned except as dead. He had a memorial tablet put up in St Wilfrid’s at Greendale and a service was held. Mrs Huby was too ill to attend.’

‘But she paid heed to his wishes? He must have been a pretty strong-willed fellow too,’ said Pascoe.

‘It was a battle of giants,’ said Thackeray. ‘He was a truly hard man, Sam Huby. But she had the one weapon most ladies keep up their sleeves to administer the coup de grâce.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Longevity, Inspector. Look around you. The graves are full of men and the cruise-liners full of widows.’

Pascoe laughed out loud.

‘You know how to keep a chap cheerful,’ he said. ‘You said just now your firm had little to do with Mrs Huby’s actual researches, but you must have drawn up the will?’

‘Indeed yes. Many years ago.’

‘Did you approve of the will?’

‘That is not a proper question,’ said Thackeray. ‘So this is not a proper answer. No, I did not. I pressed for such modification as I could, but she was adamant about the main clause and I saw no reason to lose the firm a profitable account.’

‘No question of balance-of-the-mind-disturbed?’

‘Not when she made her will, certainly.’

‘But later, you think there was?’ pressed Pascoe, catching a lawyer’s quibble.

‘In the past three years, perhaps. She had a stroke, you know. She was seriously ill for a little while, but made a remarkable recovery, except that now she spoke quite openly of a psychic conspiracy to keep her son from her. Who the conspirators were was never quite clear, but according to the old girl they’d sent a black demon as a pretended emissary from her son but she had seen through the deception and dismissed him. Don’t ask me how, but the victory, as she called it, reaffirmed her confidence that Alexander was alive. But, fearful of being incapacitated again, she framed an advertisement to be placed in the Italian papers saying she was seriously ill and inviting anyone with information to contact me. This advertisement I caused to be placed in the Italian press two months ago when she had her second stroke. When Pontelli approached me, he produced a copy of the advertisement from La Nazione.'’

‘I see. Were there any other responses to the advert?’ inquired Pascoe.

‘Naturally. We are talking about human beings, Inspector. In both our trades we know that rogues abound. Mainly they consisted of people who wrote claiming to have information about the whereabouts of Alex and offering to sell it.’

‘What did you do with them?’

‘I replied with a photograph asking if they were certain the mature man they knew and the young man on the photo could be the same person.’

‘I should have thought they’d have all passed that test,’ laughed Pascoe.

‘Indeed they did. One hundred per cent positive identification. Happily the photograph I sent them was a snapshot of myself aged twenty and looking as unlike Alex Huby as you can imagine!’

‘Clever,’ said Pascoe sincerely. ‘But Pontelli, I gather, was convincing.’

‘Oh yes. He didn’t write, of course. Just turned up to discover, he claimed, that he was too late and his mother was dead. Hence his dramatic appearance at the funeral.’

‘Not so convincing now we know he had been in the country for a week beforehand,’ said Pascoe.

‘He admitted that, said he had vacillated, uncertain how best to proceed. He claimed to have rung up Troy House to ask after his mother’s health on three occasions and on the last was told she was dead. Miss Keech confirms there were calls of inquiry from people she did not always identify.’

‘And Pontelli was persuasive?’

‘Oh yes. He had certainly done his homework. Date of birth, details of family, schooling, Troy House — he trotted out enough to give me pause, but when I started asking about his reasons for staying away all these years, he grew agitated, tapped his head, said something about long-suffering and a time of healing, and left very abruptly, saying he would be in touch again soon.’

‘Leaving you half convinced?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Oh no. It takes more than that even to half convince a lawyer!’

The phone rang. Lexie Huby told Thackeray there was a call for Pascoe. He took it at the solicitor’s desk while the other man courteously pretended to be examining the view from the window.

It was Dalziel.

‘Peter, that picture of Pontelli’s been run in some of the other papers in the Challenger group and we’ve had a call from Leeds. Owner of the Highmore Hotel says he reckons our boy was there for two weeks registered as Mr A. Ponting of London. Did a bunk last Friday, they reckon, with a fortnight’s bill outstanding. I’ve cleared it locally for you to drive over there and chat to this fellow, name of Balder. OK?’

‘I suppose so, but I want to go out to Troy House, and then to the Old Mill …’

‘Get 'em on the way back, you’ve got all day,’ growled Dalziel. ‘You’re not the only one who’s busy, you know. I’ve got landed with a Rotary lunch. Them things go on most of the afternoon. Then it’ll be back to the grindstone. I’ve found out that this PAWS fellow, Goodenough, and the Windibanks woman are still staying at the Howard Arms. Interesting they should still be hanging around, isn’t it? I thought I’d better stroll round and have a chat.’

And I bet it just happens to coincide with licensing hours! thought Pascoe viciously.

He said, ‘I’d better take some prints in the hotel room just to be one hundred per cent sure. Could you ask Seymour to get a box of tricks and meet me back at the station? In fact, he can drive me. My own car’s knocking a bit and I don’t want to risk getting stuck in the Leeds rush.’

‘Seymour? I suppose you can have him,’ grumbled Dalziel. ‘It’s a bloody nuisance yon bugger Wield skiving off.’

‘Wield. Oh yes. Glad you mentioned him,’ said Pascoe provocatively. ‘Thought I’d drop in on my way home tonight, see how he is. Want to go halves on a bunch of grapes?’

‘Bunch of bananas more likely!’ said Dalziel. ‘Tell him the organ grinder would like his monkey back! Cheers!’

The phone slammed down. Pascoe carefully replaced his receiver and greeted Thackeray with the sunny smile of a man who is ashamed of his own murderous thoughts.

‘Incidentally,’ he said. ‘What sort of records did Mrs Huby keep of her search for her son?’

‘I’ve really no idea,’ said Thackeray. ‘It was a very personal thing for her. I believe there’s a filing cabinet in the study at Troy House full of her private stuff. All her business and financial papers were kept here or at her accountant’s, of course. Normally the next of kin would sort out the personal things, but in this case … well, I suppose it will fall to me as executor in the end.’

‘Yes. Perhaps I could collect them for you, save you the bother of a trip …’ murmured Pascoe. ‘I’d like to look myself.’

‘But don’t want to bother with a warrant,’ suggested Thackeray. ‘Of course. I’ll tell Miss Keech you’re coming, shall I? What time?’

‘Oh, it’ll be four, four-thirty, I should think. Thank you, Mr Thackeray. Good day.’

As he left he tried the winning smile on the little secretary again but the big spectacles merely flashed light at him, then darkened as she bowed her head once more to the typewriter.