Child's Play

Chapter 5

The Highmore Hotel had started as a boarding-house in a quiet suburban street. Slowly it had started feeding on the houses on either side of it in the once stately Edwardian terrace. By the time the other inhabitants of the street were alerted to the danger, it was too late. Suddenly almost overnight the woodwork of the ‘hotel’ was painted a piccalilli yellow and the whole world could see that the monster was out of control. Now began the downward spiral of private householders rushing to sell their properties and by their own haste and numbers creating the falling market they feared.

A pub on the corner of the street had previously spilled its hungry customers towards the distant main road and its chippies. Now, with heavy traffic towards the Highmore and the neighbourhood’s ever-growing number of multiple occupancies, a Tandoori takeaway plus a chip-bar cum video-rental completed the street’s decline from upward-aspiring Edwardian to dingy 'eighties commercial.

Mr Balder was in fact a very hairy man who made it quite clear that it was no mere kneejerk sense of civic duty that had made him ring the police but a passionately held belief in the right of landlords to get what was coming to them.

‘Fortnight’s rent for his room he owes me,’ he averred. ‘Fortnight’s! What that idiot cashier of mine was thinking of! I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!’

The idiot cashier turned out to be Mrs Balder who had clearly found Mr Ponting a very attractive and persuasive guest.

While Seymour was lifting prints from the room, Pascoe got the story, such as it was, of Pontelli’s stay. A quiet man, kept himself to himself, implied he was a commercial worker for some small London firm starting a selling operation in the North. No visitors. A couple of phone calls out from the hotel pay-phone, but none in till the previous Friday, when there’d been three or four in the afternoon and then a man had called in person at night asking for Mr Ponting.

Age? Hard to say. Youngish; well, twenties, thirties, that sort of thing, or well-preserved forty. He was well wrapped up. No, it wasn’t a cold night, was it? But there had been a threat of rain after a fine day. Hair, lightish brownish. Height, mediumish. Accent, not Yorkshire. Southern maybe. Or posh Scottish.

Pascoe gave up. Seymour appeared with several sets of prints. Balder, who evidently felt they should have gone through the dead man’s pockets and extracted the money for his hotel bill, let his impatience show, and Pascoe coldly wondered how long it was since the fire department had examined his property or the local police his register.

They headed back to town, Pascoe feeling a curious sense of homecoming as they left the Leeds boundary and crossed into mid-Yorkshire territory.

Christ, I really must be getting old! he mused. Next thing, I’ll be nostalgic for Dalziel.

Back at the station, they checked the prints and found one set from the Highmore room which matched the dead man’s. Dalziel was not yet back from his Rotary lunch, so Pascoe sketched out a report, dropped it on the fat man’s desk, and set out with Seymour to Troy House.

‘Funny business, this,’ observed the young constable as they once more left the town.

‘In what way?’ said Pascoe encouragingly. He had moderately high hopes of Seymour.

‘Well, this chap Pontelli says he’s really Huby who was supposed to be killed in the war. And he ends up dead from an old bullet fired by an old German pistol.’

Pascoe sighed and said, ‘That’s it, is it? Better stick to the paso doble if that’s your best shot at detective work.’

Seymour looked and felt hurt at this unkindness. Since his translation from disco to ballroom under the guiding hand of Bernadette McCrystal, he had grown used to cracks about sequins on his socks and yards of tulle, but Pascoe rarely joined in this lumbering jocularity. Seymour had a forgiving nature, however, and as they drove up to Troy House, he said, ‘Look! They’ve got horses.’

‘Donkeys,’ said Pascoe. ‘And that donkey with the horns is a goat.’

Well, pardon me for breathing, thought Seymour.

The door opened before Pascoe could ring.

‘Mr Pascoe?’ said the woman who stood in the threshold. ‘Mr Thackeray said you would be coming.’

‘Miss Keech, I presume. This is Detective-Constable Seymour.’

Miss Keech extended her hand to Pascoe, nodded at Seymour and led them into the house.

She was more grande dame than housekeeper, or perhaps it was much the same thing, thought Pascoe, whose acquaintance with both types was cinematic. She walked rather stiffly, body erect, head high. She had strong grey hair, elegantly coiffured, and was dressed in a long dark burgundy skirt and a blue silk blouse. A faint effluvium of cat or dog laced the air of the entrance hall but was completely absent from the large drawing-room into which they processed.

‘Please be seated. Would you care for some tea?’

The trolley was ready and the steam issuing from the teapot spout showed that it was already massing. She must have been watching from the window.

‘Thank you,’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s a lovely house.’

‘You think so?’ said Miss Keech, pouring the tea. ‘I’ve always found it rather barn-like. But it’s been my home now for many years and doubtless will be till I die, so I shouldn’t complain. Buttered scones?’

Pascoe shook his head but Seymour fell to with a will.

‘Yes,’ said Pascoe. ‘I gather that under the terms of your late employer’s will, you are to remain in charge here.’

‘Unless, of course, her son reappears and wishes to make other arrangements,’ said Miss Keech pedantically.

‘You don’t feel this is likely? I mean, you didn’t share Mrs Huby’s faith in her son’s survival.’

‘Mrs Huby was my employer, Inspector. I started as her nurserymaid and I ended as her companion. As a maid, I learnt to be obedient. As a companion, I learnt to be discreet.’

‘But as a friend …’

‘I was never a friend. You don’t pay friends,’ she said sharply.

Pascoe drank his tea and took stock. This was not what he had expected. The rich, snobbish, racist Gwendoline Huby sounded to have been a formidable woman. He had not expected her companion to be other than meek and self-effacing.

He probed further.

‘You mean Mrs Huby was sensitive to the … er … social gap, between you?’

‘Mrs Huby was sensitive to the social gap between her and half her relatives,’ snapped Miss Keech. ‘Starting at her husband. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was not a snobbish thing, you understand. More an aspect of her faith in an orderly universe.’

‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man …’

‘Yes, precisely. She saw no reason to quarrel with the world as God had created it.’

‘Including white supremacy, I gather,’ said Pascoe, recalling the legacy to Women For Empire.

‘She was not political in the strict sense,’ defended Miss Keech, perhaps guilty at her posthumous disloyalty. ‘She sincerely believed that if God put the black people in backward countries and the whites in civilized countries, that was part of his plan.’

‘But the supposed death of her son wasn’t?’

‘No. She persuaded herself not. What I don’t think she could bear was the sense of responsibility …’

‘I’m sorry? From the sound of her, she’d have found someone else to blame surely?’

‘Oh yes. She and Mr Huby certainly blamed each other. She was so proud that he got a commission and everyone could see that he was a gentleman. He was so pleased when he went to do commando training and everyone could see he was a real man. She thought he courted danger to please his father, and he thought she’d made him soft. But inside, I think they both blamed themselves. Parents do, don’t they? Even the most selfish and self-centred. In the dark of the night, all alone, it’s hard to hide from the truth, isn’t it? Mr Huby I think learned to bear it. She never did, and that’s why she couldn’t let him be dead.’

Seymour had his notebook balanced on his knee but he clearly saw no need to divert his hands from the buttery scones to record any of these psychological insights.

‘You’ve obviously thought deeply about this, Miss Keech,’ said Pascoe.

‘Not really,’ she denied, suddenly all brisk and housekeeperish. ‘Now, I presume you’ve come to see me about this man. The one whose photograph appeared in the Evening Post.’

‘Why should you think that?’ wondered Pascoe.

‘Because Mr Thackeray told me,’ she said with a show of exasperation.

Pascoe smiled, produced a copy of the photograph and handed it over.

‘Do you recognize him, Miss Keech?’

‘I would say, without being absolutely sure, that he was the man who interrupted Mrs Huby’s funeral at the graveside. I expect Mr Thackeray described the incident?’

‘Yes, he did,’ said Pascoe. ‘That was the only time you saw him?’

‘It was.’

‘Mr Thackeray felt there was what he called a Huby look about his features. Would you agree?’

‘To some extent,’ she said. ‘A certain coarseness of feature, perhaps, not unlike John Huby, the publican. But nothing of the Lomases, that’s for sure.’

‘We’re trying to trace his movements on Friday night. You weren’t disturbed at all, were you? Unexplained phone calls? Or noises outside?’

‘A prowler, you mean? No, Mr Pascoe. And surrounded as I am by livestock, I think I would have been well warned.’

‘Possibly. Oh, by the way, Mr Thackeray asked me to pick up some papers for him,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mrs Huby’s records of her researches or some such thing.’

‘Yes, he said so. If you would care to follow me, I’ll show you where they are.’

She rose and the two men followed, Seymour with a regretful back glance at the cream cake which his determined onslaught on the scones had so far prevented him from sampling. They went down the long hallway and entered a book-lined room which was like a Disney design for the Athenaeum, in that all the deep leather-bound chairs were occupied by sleeping animals. A huge black labrador stretched along a Chesterfield opened one sagacious eye, owned an inmate, and went back to sleep without disturbing the small tabby kitten snoring between his shoulder blades.

‘Here’s where she kept her personal papers,’ said Miss Keech, pointing to a two-drawered filing cabinet resting on a table in one corner. ‘I have the key somewhere.’

Pascoe said, ‘I don’t think you’ll need a key, Miss Keech.’

Reaching forward one finger, he pulled open the top drawer.

‘Dear me,’ said the woman. ‘I’m sure it was locked.’

‘Indeed, it probably was,’ said Pascoe.

It was an old cabinet with a simple lock. A thin knife inserted between the drawer and the frame could easily push the catch aside. A couple of scratches on the edge of the drawer convinced Pascoe this was what had happened.

He said, ‘When did you last look in here, Miss Keech?’

‘To my knowledge, it’s only been opened once since Mrs Huby’s death. Mr Thackeray’s clerk came to collect any financial papers relating to the estate and he wanted to see what was in here. I opened it for him, he glanced through, said there didn’t seem to be anything there for the accountant, and I locked it up again.’

‘I see. Seymour, still got that printing kit in the car? Good. Dust around here, will you? But wipe your fingers first. You’re like an EEC butter mountain. Miss Keech, you don’t have a photograph of Mrs Huby’s son I could see, do you?’

‘Of course, Inspector. This way.’

She led him out of the study and up the stairs.

Oh God, thought Pascoe. She’s going to open up one of those rooms they have in the old movies. It’ll be just like he left it all those years ago. Toys and books and teenage decoration; slippers by the bed and coverlet turned down; the only doubt is whether it will be kept scrupulously clean or thick with dust and draped with cobwebs!

So vivid was his mental picture that the reality was almost disappointing. The unlocked door opened on a smallish bedroom perfectly clean and tidy, with its sash window raised to admit a freshening draught of bright air. A faintly pathetic touch was provided by a pair of neatly folded pyjamas on the quilted counterpane. Pascoe regarded these while Miss Keech approached an old-fashioned mahogany wardrobe. It said much for the self-conditioning of his gothic anticipation that it took a good thirty seconds for him to start wondering why these putative relicts of 1944 should bear a modern brand label with a European size and the interesting information that the material was 65 % polyester and 35 % cotton.

He turned to discover Miss Keech mounting a chair to reach a pair of old suitcases on top of the wardrobe.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me.’

‘It’s the bottom one,’ she said.

The top one appeared to be empty. More interestingly, it had a modern Alitalia flight label stuck to it.

Pascoe said casually, ‘Miss Keech, has anyone been using this room?’

‘Why yes, of course. But don’t worry, he won’t mind. He’s such a nice boy.’

Boy?

Pascoe recollected the dead man. It had been a long time since he was a boy!

‘Who is he?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry. Didn’t I say? It’s Mr Lomas. Rodney Lomas. He’s appearing at the Kemble, you know, in Romeo and Juliet. He wanted me to go to the first night, but I don’t go out much in the evenings. To be honest, I don’t much care for Shakespeare either, and there was a good thriller I wanted to see on the television.’

‘Yes, I know. The Killers,' said Pascoe sadly. ‘So Mr Lomas is staying here, is he? I didn’t know that. That means you needn’t have relied on the animals to protect you from a prowler on Friday night. You had a young fit man to take care of you.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, as if put out by the implication that she needed taking care of. ‘Rod wasn’t here on Friday.’

‘You mean, he didn’t move in till later?’ said Pascoe, recalling seeing the young man in the Black Bull on — when was it? — Thursday lunchtime.

‘No. He came last Wednesday. But he rang me up on Friday night to say he was spending the night with a friend.’

‘Locally, would that be?’ inquired Pascoe casually.

‘He didn’t say, but in Leeds I presumed. The silly boy ran out of change and had to reverse the charge, and the operator said Leeds.’

Pascoe digested this as he opened the old case.

‘Why did you put Mr Lomas in this room, Miss Keech?’ he wondered.

‘Why? Well, simply because it was the only bedroom in the house which has been kept cleaned and aired and fit for instant occupation. He arrived unexpectedly and I saw no reason not to use it.’

‘Surely Mrs Huby’s old room …’ murmured Pascoe.

‘I have moved in there myself, Mr Pascoe,’ she said briskly. ‘My own bedroom I now use as a dressing-room. I am not a sentimentalist, nor do I believe in ghosts. The old clothes belonging to both Mrs Huby and her son I have cleared out and donated to the WVS for charitable distribution. Some photographs and other memorabilia which were kept in this room I put into that case.’

It was a collection pathetic in every sense. Christening mug, baby bootees, school reports, a school cap, examination certificates — all the mileposts of childhood were here. Also there were photographs, framed, loose and in an album, plus several cardboard cylinders containing yards of schoolboys in tiers outside a grey castellated building. Here it was then, a record for all who cared to view it, of the progress of Alexander Lomas Huby from the comfort of the cradle to the edge of the grave.

Such was Pascoe’s grim thought as he looked at the last of the photographs which showed a young man in a subaltern’s dress uniform, smiling, half-embarrassed, at the camera.

There was an echo of someone there.

Suddenly he caught it clear. The little girl in Thackeray’s office; something about the eyes and the shape of the head; but above all the same quality of uncertain reserve.

But there was no way of translating these young features into that waxen mask lying in the mortuary.

‘I’ll hang on to this photograph if I may,’ said Pascoe. ‘Shall we go down?’

Seymour had finished his dusting and had found a couple of good prints on the cabinet where a man might rest his left hand while sliding a knife into the gap with his right.

‘Miss Keech, would you mind letting my constable take your prints just for elimination purposes?’ inquired Pascoe.

‘My fingerprints? How exciting. I’ve seen them do it on the television. Would you like to come through to the drawing-room, young man? We’ll be more comfortable there.’

She looked sternly at the animals who had clearly decided the newcomers were harmless and continued to sleep soundly in their chairs.

‘And Seymour,’ Pascoe added softly as Miss Keech left the room, ‘pop upstairs afterwards, second bedroom on the left, dust around in there. Don’t leave any traces, though.’

‘Right on,’ said Seymour ethnically.

Alone, Pascoe started to examine the contents of the filing cabinet. There were a number of cardboard wallets each marked with a year starting at 1959, and three older-looking undated wallets. Pascoe started with these and found, as he had guessed, the record of Alexander Huby’s death, starting with the telegram which regretted that he was reported missing in action.

Slowly he pieced the story together. Early in 1944 Huby had joined his unit in Palermo, Sicily. The Allies were making slow progress north against heavy German resistance on the mainland, but by May, the enemy were falling back from the Gustav Line, south of Rome, to the Gothic Line from Pisa to Rimini. Huby was put in charge of a four-man team whose job it was to land on the Tuscan coast north of Leghorn, make contact with local partisans, send back surveillance reports on German troop movement, and be picked up five days later. A corvette dropped them in heavy seas at the appointed time and that was the last that was seen of them.

There was no radio contact, they failed to make their pick-up rendezvous, and a leaking and capsized dinghy of the type used in the operation was spotted floating in the sea some thirty miles away.

Lack of any report of contact from the partisans, or of prisoners being taken from the Red Cross, made it almost certain that the five men had died before reaching the shore. Huby’s CO wrote consolingly if conventionally, and as far as the army was concerned, that was that.

Pascoe looked at the silver-framed photograph he had placed before him. The young soldier smiled uncertainly back. Anything less like the deadly commando of Pascoe’s boyhood comics was hard to imagine. Perhaps — in fact, certainly — appearances deceived. He must have volunteered for the job, met the selection criteria, and passed the doubtless extremely rugged training course.

‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ said Pascoe.

Next followed correspondence between Mrs Huby and the War Office, the Red Cross, the War Graves Commission, the American Occupation Authority in western Italy, her local Member of Parliament, and a host of other individuals and bodies whom the desperate woman saw as straws to grab at. It was repetitiously pathetic on her side, politely formal on theirs.

Pascoe skipped on through the files, came across a reference to ‘the enclosed photograph’, tracked back a couple of bundles and came across the original.

It was from a 1945 Picture Post and showed Allied troops driving through the city of Florence to the ecstatic greeting of its citizens. Among the crowd lining the pavement, someone (Mrs Huby presumably) had ringed a single face. It was ill-defined and slightly out of focus; a man, pensive and watchful rather than joyously enthusiastic, though this might have been an effect of light, shadow and distance rather than a reflection of his feelings; a face which in shape and proportions bore some resemblance to the face in the silver frame and in which love and loss could very easily trace the exact lineaments of Alexander Lomas Huby.

There were letters to the editor of Picture Post and, once discovered, to the photographer who supplied the picture. There were letters to the authorities, military and civil, in Florence. And finally, in 1946 there were letters to the main newspapers in Italy instructing them to place the enclosed advertisement in their personal columns in both Italian and English. It was a simple appeal for Alexander Huby or anyone knowing his whereabouts to get in touch with his mother at Troy House, Greendale, mid-Yorkshire, UK. There was a reward.

Here the early files ended. Pascoe could have guessed what had happened even without Eden Thackeray’s confirming testimony. By 1946 Sam Huby’s little store of hope was utterly depleted. His son was dead. His wife’s desperate belief he tolerated till she placed these advertisements. Doubtless the promise of reward had brought replies, most of them blatantly fraudulent — probably all of them, in his eyes. Enough was enough. He had said No more! And his will had been strong enough to hold sway, or at least drive her underground, for the next thirteen years till his death.

Once Sam Huby was safely interred, the old obsession so long repressed burst out with renewed vigour. This was where the regular yearly files began. The spate of letters recommenced, coupled now with personal visits both to the relevant offices in London and to Italy. Investigation agencies, both English and Italian were employed. Pascoe read a selection of their reports which appeared scrupulous in their detailed nil-returns and ultimately in their blunt assertion that they doubted if they could hope to achieve anything in this matter.

The woman’s dogged refusal to accept the obvious was both heroic and lunatic. The Picture Post photograph apart, there was not in forty years a single scrap of anything resembling evidence that her son had survived, unless you counted (as she did) reports from assorted ‘sensitives’ that they could find no trace of him ‘on the other side’ but that they had strong visions of someone very like him working in an olive grove, or that their divining pendulums always swung violently across the map of Europe towards Tuscany.

There was a tapping at the door. Pascoe put the papers he was studying back in the file and called, ‘Come in!’

Miss Keech appeared with a tray newly replenished with tea and toasted muffins. Pascoe wanted neither but, guessing that Seymour had devised the task as a means of keeping the woman out of his hair while he worked upstairs, he thanked her kindly and did not demur when she offered to pour his tea and butter his muffin.

As he chewed at the luscious dough, he said butterily, ‘Did you assist Mrs Huby in her investigations, Miss Keech?’

‘Directly, only by typing and ordering her correspondence,’ she replied. ‘Indirectly, by remaining here and taking care of the animals while she was pursuing her researches elsewhere.’

‘She seems to have spent a lot of time and presumably money on this.’

‘I assumed so. The money, I mean. I have never had, or desired to have anything to do with Mrs Huby’s accounts,’ she said rather tartly. ‘Time I know about. She spent a regular period in London and abroad each year until she had her first stroke. This was immediately after returning from a visit to Italy and thereafter she no longer went abroad. She did not trust foreign medicine. She was obsessed by the fear of finding herself in a hospital run by Catholic nuns with black doctors.’

Pascoe smiled and said, ‘Yes, Mr Thackeray told me about this fear of black men. Something about black devils masquerading as Alexander. It must have been hard for you to cope with. You nursed her, I believe.’

Her face went still and pale as if at an unpleasant memory and suddenly she looked very old indeed.

‘It was not always easy,’ she said with little inflection.

‘Will you give me a receipt for whatever you take, Inspector?’

‘Of course,’ he said, a little surprised.

‘You see, I am after all only a custodian and in the end accountable,’ she said.

Seymour entered as Pascoe was writing the receipt. His eyes lit up at the sight of the muffins and he seized one avidly.

As they left the house, Pascoe glanced at his watch and said, ‘We should get to the Old Mill Inn just at opening time, Seymour. Shall I ring ahead and tell them to start buttering the teacakes?’

‘No, this’ll do me till supper,’ grinned Seymour, licking his fingers.

‘I hope you haven’t got your prints all over the car,’ said Pascoe. ‘And talking of prints, any luck?’

‘A bit,’ said Seymour. ‘There were a few of Miss Keech’s prints on the cabinet, but a lot that weren’t. And at a casual glance, these look to me just the same as the ones all over that room upstairs.’

‘You reckon so? I wonder. Do ghosts leave prints, Seymour?’

‘Why not?’ said the redhead cheerfully. ‘All them chilly fingers running up and down your spine!’

Pascoe groaned quietly and said, ‘Just drive me to the Old Mill Inn.’