Child's Play

Chapter 1

It was mid-morning when Dalziel paid his first visit to Troy House.

He was admitted by a young man in shirtsleeves who identified himself as Rod Lomas and preempted Dalziel’s self-introduction as he led him in to the drawing-room.

‘You’ve heard of me, then?’ said Dalziel.

‘Not to know you argues oneself unknown,’ said Lomas.

Dalziel digested this, then broke wind gently.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Miss Keech at home?’

‘Yes, but she’s unwell, I’m afraid. This business has come as a tremendous shock to her.’

‘Which business?’

‘This business,’ said Lomas, looking at him as if doubtful of his sanity. ‘This murder on our doorstep.’

Dalziel walked to the window and peered in the general direction of the quarter-mile distant hedgerow beneath which Sharman’s body had been found.

‘If that’s your doorstep,’ he said, ‘there’s a donkey crapping on your hall carpet.’

‘Yes. Look, Superintendent, this is the countryside and Troy House is pretty isolated, so the thought of a killer wandering around loose is surely quite enough to upset most old ladies, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Likely you’re right. Did you hear owt last night?’

‘I’ve already made a statement,’ said Lomas impatiently. ‘I heard nothing, saw nothing. Do I have to go through all this again?’

‘For someone who makes his living going through the same old stuff night after night, you’re making a lot of fuss about saying summat twice,’ observed Dalziel.

‘All right,’ sighed Lomas. ‘Catechize me if you must.’

‘Why? Is there summat you want to get off your chest?’

‘But just a second ago …’

‘Grasshopper mind, that’s me. Let’s go up and see the old lady.’

‘Really, no,’ said Lomas. ‘I’ve had the doctor to her and he says she ought to rest.’

But he was talking to Dalziel’s broad back as it vanished through the door. Moving with surprising speed and not-so-surprising instinct, the fat man was already tapping on Miss Keech’s bedroom door by the time Lomas caught up with him.

‘Come in,’ called a slightly quavery voice.

Dalziel opened the door.

‘’Morning, ma’am,’ he said to the old lady in the huge bed. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

He recalled Pascoe’s description of the woman as lively and bright for her years and saw indeed that the morning’s events must have been a shock. The face that turned towards him was pale, the features pinched sharp as though by a killing frost.

Lomas behind him whispered, ‘For heaven’s sake, Superintendent!’

‘I’ll not be long.’

‘But she doesn’t know anything!’

‘About the body, you mean? Mebbe not. But it’s not that body I wanted to ask about. Miss Keech, you were Alexander Huby’s nurse when you first came to Troy House, weren’t you?’

He advanced to the bedside as he spoke.

‘Indeed I was. Nurserymaid to be exact.’

Ill she might be, but there was still an alert gleam in her eyes.

‘Did the boy have any distinguishing marks that you recall? Birthmarks, scars, that sort of thing?’

‘No. None,’ she said without hesitation.

‘To be more precise, did he have a mark on his left buttock, a sort of mole shaped a bit like a maple leaf?’

‘No,’ she said very clearly. ‘He did not.’

‘Thank you, Miss Keech. I hope you get well soon.’

He gravely touched a phantom forelock and left.

‘Is that it?’ inquired Lomas as they descended the stairs.

‘Still wanting to unburden yourself?’ said Dalziel.

‘No!’

‘Well, that’s it for me. I’m off back to town. Some of us work for a living.’

‘All of us!’ said Lomas looking at his watch. ‘I’ve skipped this morning’s rehearsal, but Chung will kill me if I don’t make it this afternoon. Oh, Mrs Brooks, there you are!’

A woman had come through the front door, middle-aged, headscarfed, gap-toothed and squint-eyed.

‘Mrs Brooks cleans for Miss Keech,’ explained Lomas. ‘She said she’d come back and stay with her this afternoon so I can get about my business. Many thanks, Mrs Brooks.’

‘My pleasure, love,’ said the woman, observing Dalziel keenly with her fixed eye. ‘He the police? I thought so. I’ll see if she’ll try a boiled egg for dinner. Here, I wouldn’t like to have the feeding of him!’

With a stomach-churning sweep of the left eye and a rising trill of laughter, she went up the stairs.

‘Excuse me,’ said Lomas, ‘it occurs to me, if you’re going into town …’

‘You’d like a lift? Can’t shake you off, can I, lad? You’re like one of them gropies.’

‘I think — I hope — that possibly you mean groupie,’ said Lomas. ‘And the lift?’

‘As long as you don’t start reciting and frighten me driver,’ said Dalziel. ‘Come on, then! I’ll not hang about.’

‘Why is it that up here no one can offer you a lift without saying that?’ wondered Lomas as he went rushing off in search of his velvet jacket.

Back at the station, Dalziel found Pascoe and Seymour shuffling sheafs of paper like a pair of nervous fan-dancers.

‘Are you going to swallow these after you’ve read them?’ asked Dalziel. ‘Where’s Wield? He can rhyme things off like he’s got a real mind when the fancy takes him.’

‘Still ill,’ said Pascoe. ‘Or perhaps,’ correcting himself pedantically, ‘ill again. He showed his face, said he was OK, then off he went again.’

‘That’s right,’ chimed in Seymour. ‘I was bringing him up to date with what’s going off, and he just keeled over. I wanted to call the doctor, but he wouldn’t have it.’

‘We’ll have to make do with paper, then,’ grunted Dalziel. ‘Come on up to my room, Peter, and just bring what you think’s necessary.’

In Dalziel’s room, the fat man poured himself a slug of malt so pale it might pass for water to the uncritical eye.

‘Start,’ he said.

Pascoe began.

‘I’ve been talking to Florence, sir,’ he said.

‘Oh aye? And what did she have to say?’

Dalziel never let the popular prejudice against the obvious interfere with his jokes. He was, however, slightly puzzled when Pascoe laughed appreciatively before going on, ‘Alessandro Pontelli, born Palermo, Sicily 1923, wounded while serving with partisans, hospitalized by Americans near Siena, continued in Tuscany after the war acting as interpreter and courier, first for military authorities, then as things got back to normal for the tourist trade. No criminal record, unmarried, no known family. Flew out of Pisa airport four days before the funeral. At this end we have the immigration record at Gatwick. After that, nothing.’

‘And before that, not bloody much,’ grumbled Dalziel with the sour complacency of one who hadn’t expected anything more from foreigners.

‘We’ve not got much more on our true-blue British boy,’ protested Pascoe.

‘Bugger looked half brown to me,’ said Dalziel. ‘But give.’

‘Sharman, Clifford; age nineteen, born Dulwich, London; address given to court was Flat 29, Leacock Court, East Dulwich, occupied by his grandmother, Mrs Miriam Hornsby, but he hasn’t lived there for more than three years. Various other addresses for social security claims, but nothing permanent or significant. Only previous was that shoplifting fine last week.’

‘What was he doing up here anyway?’ wondered Dalziel. ‘It’s a long way to come just to shoplift.’

‘God knows. He told Seymour he was just hiking around, living rough. Interestingly, Seymour says he didn’t believe him. He didn’t smell right — or ripe. We’ve got the P.M. report already. Mr Longbottom was working late — or early — and still in the cutting mood. Cause of death was confirmed as having his chest crushed by being run over after he’d been beaten up. Oh, by the way, Longbottom says the body looked pretty well scrubbed. Also underwear was clean, apart from soiling caused at time of death, so it sounds as if Seymour could have been right.’

‘So where was he staying?’

‘Don’t know, but we’ll soon find out,’ said Pascoe confidently. ‘Best leads seem to be that his last meal was a toasted cheese sandwich not long before death, he’d recently had anal intercourse, and he was carrying five grammes of pot in a small plastic bag from a local supermarket, so presumably he bought it up here.’

‘They’re selling it in supermarkets now, are they?’

Again Pascoe laughed so appreciatively that all Dalziel’s defence mechanisms went on red alert.

‘Might as well,’ the Inspector said. ‘It’s not difficult to get hold of, but it does cost. Could be that Sharman was flogging his ring to pay for the pot and his boyfriend decided to give him a punching rather than pay up and went too far.’

‘Bloody sight too far,’ grunted Dalziel. ‘Was he on the game, do you reckon?’

Pascoe shrugged.

‘Hard to say, but perhaps his grandmother, that’s Mrs Hornsby, can tell us more. She’s arriving at two by the way, sir. I’ve given instructions for her to be taken straight up to see you as I thought you’d like a chat before you took her to the mortuary …’

‘Whoa!’ shouted Dalziel. ‘So that’s why it’s been laugh-along-with-the-Super time! No sale! Being nice to grieving grannies isn’t my speciality; that’s what we employ smarmy sods with degrees for!’

‘I’m extremely busy with the Pontelli inquiry, sir. I’ve got Seymour sorting through the contents of Mrs Huby’s cabinet, and I’ve still got to see Lomas about why he broke into it.’

‘He’s lunching in the Kemble bar,’ interposed Dalziel. ‘I brought him in with me. Funny young sod, isn’t he? Fancies himself. And not the only one round here. You reckon you’re on to something with these papers, then?’

‘Not really,’ admitted Pascoe. ‘They’re just a rather pathetic record of an obsession. Seymour claims to see a bit of a gap a few years back, but as it coincides with the time the old girl had her first stroke, there would be, wouldn’t there?’

‘But you’ll still waste time chasing after Lomas?’ said Dalziel satirically. ‘You still really believe you’ll find a motive in this Huby will business, do you?’

‘I’m sure there’s something there,’ said Pascoe. ‘I ran everything through CPC …’

‘Oh God. I knew the mighty Wurlitzer would be in on the act!’ growled Dalziel, who regarded the Central Police Computer with a luddite hatred.

‘… and I came up with a few things. John Huby’s bad temper doesn’t just confine itself to kicking stuffed dogs. He has a record for brawling as a young man and more recently he got fined for using excessive violence in ejecting an unwanted customer.’

‘Some bleeding heart on the Bench, I dare say,’ grunted Dalziel.

‘No. It was hang ’em, flog ’em, castrate ’em, Mrs Jones JP. Even she thought that throwing the customer through the windscreen of his own car was excessive. Nothing on the other Hubys. Rod Lomas, assorted motoring offences and one possession charge. Hash. They found it on him at Heathrow. He managed to persuade them it was for his own use, not for re-sale. Nothing on his mother except …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, her husband was the Arthur Windibanks who was involved in the big holiday homes scandal in the 'seventies. He got out of it by running his car off the Autostrada. There was a convenient fire at the company’s London office, all papers burnt, so there was no way of tying her in, but I gather it was a narrow squeak.’

‘Aye, she’s a cool one,’ admitted Dalziel. ‘I went down to the morgue with her yesterday afternoon to look at Pontelli’s bum. That’s it, she said. I’d recognize it anywhere. Never cracked her face! Incidentally, Miss Keech says that no such blemish existed on young Alexander’s lily-white body. With Huby that makes two for, one against. Who’s lying?’

Pascoe frowned and said, ‘Why should Keech lie?’

‘At the moment she’s got a sinecure for life, which mightn’t be all that long from the look of her this morning. Mebbe she’s afraid that if Pontelli does turn out to be the lost lad, she’d be out in the cold.’

‘That’d mean she was pretty quick-thinking when you asked her the question this morning.’

‘You said you thought she was pretty sharp.’

‘She wasn’t ill in bed when I saw her. All right, let’s put it the other way. Why should the others lie?’

‘How about, they’re the heirs if Pontelli is Huby and dies intestate?’ said Dalziel cunningly.

Pascoe shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. They’re equal closest relations of the old lady, that’s true, but it’s different with Alexander. John Huby’s a full cousin, Windibanks is something removed.’

‘You’re sure?’ said Dalziel distrustingly. ‘Better check it out with Thackeray. One thing I’m sure of, lying or not, that Windibanks woman wouldn’t have opened her mouth without good cause.’

‘No. I wonder …’ Pascoe postponed his idea until he could test it and returned to the main track once more.

‘I also ran Goodenough,’ he said. ‘He’s down as a suspected sympathizer with some of the more extreme animal protection groups. Nothing concrete, but his views have got him into hot water with the ruling council at PAWS.’

‘Scraping the barrel, aren’t you, Peter?’ said Dalziel.

‘Extremism tends to overflow,’ said Pascoe. ‘Some more scrapings. WFE are on a Special Branch list of right-wing fellow traveller groups.’

This had surprised him. It had also occurred to him to wonder if the list which WRAG had got and which he’d been so satirical about might not also have emanated from Special Branch. Perhaps there was a mole, perhaps there was a controlled leak, or perhaps some leftie hacker was into the police computer.

It was a packet of microchips he was not about to open.

‘And …?’ said Dalziel.

‘Nothing on Mrs Falkingham except a lot of memsahib background. And on Miss Sarah Brodsworth, nothing whatsoever at all.’

‘You make that sound like a triumph, lad,’ growled Dalziel.

‘Well, it could be. I ran the White Heat lot Wield was on about. He was right. Infiltration’s their game. Getting into the system — schools, local Tory parties, voluntary agencies. They like the odd outburst, such as this anti-Chung campaign, just to keep up their status in the wider spectrum of right-wing extremism. But generally it’s heads down, let’s work from within. So someone like Brodsworth could very well be a plant, slipped into WFE at the first sniff of money, and left to take root till the cash comes through.’

‘And they’d kill Pontelli to get him out of the way, you think? What a mind you’ve got, lad!’

‘Worth checking, though?’

‘Aye. Check away. Listen, Goodenough said he met that journalist, Vollans, at Mrs Falkingham’s place. He seems to be sniffing around this Brodsworth woman’s background too. Might be worth seeing if he’s come up with anything. These newspaper ferrets aren’t bound down by rules and regulations like us. Also they can afford bigger bribes. HALLO!’

The bellow was directed into the telephone which he had snatched up at first ping.

‘Yes? Who? What? What … what? Oh, Wat-mough! DCC … yes, sir, I know you’re the DCC. What can I do for you, sir? Well, I’m right busy just now … all right, sir, soon as I can, sir.’

He replaced the receiver.

‘Rover the Wonder Dog,’ he said. ‘Now what’s he want? I wonder …’

He picked up the receiver, jiggled the rest, then said, ‘Hello, Herbert. DS Dalziel here. How’s your missus? Grand! Look, I’m just checking on a call for the DCC, just a matter of timing, it’d be this morning about … aye, that’s the one. Grand. Thanks a lot.’

He replaced the receiver, grinning ferociously.

‘Rover had a whistle from the Challenger about half an hour ago,’ he said. ‘I reckon it’s find-the-fairy time. It’s his interview next Wednesday and he’ll be crapping himself in case something comes up to upset the apple-cart. All right, Peter, I can see you’re eager to be off. I’ll grapple with Grannie when she turns up, but I’ll not forget you owe me one. Meanwhile, I’d best not keep laughing boy waiting else his tiny mind’ll forget what he wants to see me about!’