Child's Play

Statement made by Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe P. on the something of whatsit in the presence of a cassette-recorder and a bottle of Scotch, half full or half empty depending which way you’re going. Statement made voluntarily, without duress or Dalziel, which some allege are indistinguishable at dusk with the light behind them.

Statement begins. But where? Two years is a long time in a cop’s life, almost as long as two minutes in politics. Better start with the Italians. Most things start there except for them as start with the Greeks. So. The Italians.

At the time, the Italians weren’t very happy about one of their nationals getting shot dead in England and no one getting his wrist slapped for it.

Dalziel said, ‘Tell ’em the silly bugger died of bad parking. They’ll likely understand that.’

The trouble was, Miss Keech ended up as one of Pottle’s patients in the Psychiatric Unit, far beyond confession or interrogation. We told the Italians that the bullets that killed Pontelli and Richard Sharman came from the same gun, but despite the condition of Venice, they obviously like things tidier than that. Perhaps in revenge, they pursued our initial request for information about Pontelli with slow thoroughness, and long after I’d forgotten all about the Huby will, a bulky envelope dropped on my desk.

It contained a detailed account of Pontelli’s life and activities. The curious thing about it was that to all intents and purposes it began in 1946 and didn’t thicken out till the mid-’fifties. Before that it was all hearsay — in other words, what other people had heard the not very forthcoming Pontelli say. On his childhood there was nothing, not even any documentary evidence to support his claim to have been born in Palermo, though the Sicilian investigator made the point that many records were destroyed during the German occupation and the Allied invasion.

I was getting the message now. Some Florentine joker was dropping a super-subtle hint that perhaps Pontelli really wasn’t their concern after all!

I went to Dalziel with the report.

He said, ‘It’s nearly eighteen months, Peter! I don’t have time to be bothered with things that happened eighteen days ago.’

‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Bury it.’

Next day I went to see Eden Thackeray.

There was a new girl in his outer office, sleek, smart, elegantly made-up, sitting in front of a word-processor. The alterations extended into Thackeray’s own room. Dark oak and red leather were out. It was now a silky white and shiny chrome temple of hi-tech.

‘I thought, to hell!’ he explained rather shamefacedly. ‘If the old customers didn’t like it, I’d got newer richer ones who did!’

‘What about Lexie Huby? Didn’t she fit the new image?’

He grew indignant.

‘She’s doing a law degree at Leeds University! Do you know, she got A grades in all her advanced levels, doing them at nights without referring to anybody? I have high hopes of that girl, very high.’

I said, ‘Does she still see Rod Lomas?’

He shrugged and said, ‘How should I know?’

He always looked a bit embarrassed when the Lomas side of the family was mentioned. Rod and his mother had consistently denied any knowledge of Pontelli’s trip to England or his plans to claim the estate, though acknowledging that the late Arthur Windibanks might have put him up to it. As for the woman’s firm identification of the maple-leaf birthmark, she had become very vague about that, smiling sweetly at Dalziel and saying, ‘One sees so many behinds that they all begin to blur into one, don’t they?’

Our hopes of getting them on a fraud charge arising out of their misappropriation of the rental from the Villa Boethius vanished when Eden Thackeray refused to cooperate.

‘We have the reputation of the estate to consider,’ he said primly to Dalziel in my presence. ‘Full restitution has been made.’

The fat man just regarded him closely for a moment, then said, ‘You randy old bugger! I never knew what restitution was till now!’

And poor Thackeray, attempting to look indignant, could only raise a blush.

I showed him the papers from Florence and said he was welcome to them if they were any use.

He thanked me gravely and said he would keep them safely filed though he could see no way in which they could be helpful.

‘There’s still a couple of things unexplained,’ I said provocatively.

‘And so they shall remain,’ he said. ‘This business has brought farce where there should have been decorum, and tragedy where there should have been delight. Soon there shall be an end.’

‘Soon?’ I said. ‘The Court of Chancery’s still considering the case, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean another ten years at least?’

‘The days of Jarndyce and Jarndyce are long past,’ he said. ‘It will be months at most; perhaps even weeks.’

I smiled disbelievingly. On my way out I waved dashingly at the new girl, who nodded back as coolly unimpressed as Lexie Huby had always been. I was glad to see one of her long eyelashes fall off and come to rest like a weary earwig on her damask cheek.

That night I had a confused dream about that eyelash and Thackeray’s office and the whole Huby affair. It was silly. It was ancient history. The intervening months had been crammed with all the long tedium and sharp excitements which make up a CID man’s work. But it was only this case which invaded my dreams. I told Ellie. She said, ‘Guilt.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You’re a sucker for it. It’s people like you that make repressive religious regimes possible. You’re always like this when you reckon you’ve missed something.’

She was, of course, right. She usually is. It’s one of her least attractive characteristics. But she compensates by going wildly wrong when she tries to be too clever.

‘The earwig on the damask cheek is the clue,’ she said in her best Freudian manner. ‘It’s the worm in the bud, you see. Conscience, the curious mole, nibbling away. Something you’ve left undone.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said with confidence, for suddenly I knew all about the earwig on the damask cheek. Or thought I did. I had to send for Seymour the next day to be sure. He thought I was mad but was bright enough not to let it show too much. Also under pressure he turned out to have something like perfect recall. I’d noticed this before when he made reports. I complimented him fulsomely and he went away bewildered but content.

Now I had a theory but nothing to test it in. Then three months or so later, I read in the Post that the Chancery judge had indeed pronounced as quickly as Thackeray had forecast. He had ruled that the waiting period in the Huby will was inequitable. PAWS, CODRO and WFE could have their money instantly.

Ellie went into her indignant harangue about the iniquities of giving vast sums to cats, officers’ widows, and fascists. I made a few phone calls and a week later I was sitting in a small stuffy room next to the office of George Hutchinson, general manager of the Leeds Head Branch of the Yorkshire Commercial Bank.

I felt curiously nervous and when the door opened, I jumped to my feet like a twenty-year-old in search of a loan for a motorbike.

Hutchinson said, ‘Would you mind stepping in here, Miss Brodsworth? There’s someone who’d like a word.’

A young woman stepped inside and regarded me incuriously with hard blue eyes. Behind her, Hutchinson caught my eye and beckoned, but I didn’t want to be diverted at that moment and I closed the door firmly in his face.

Then I faced Sarah Brodsworth. With her tight blonde curls, rosebud lips and blouse-straining bosom, she should have been very attractive, but I did not find her so.

I reached forward and gently squeezed her left breast.

‘Hello, Lexie,’ I said.

The breast felt very real and for one awful moment I thought I’d got it wrong. My mind was already accelerating through apologies to Brodsworth, explanations to Ellie, and pleas in mitigation to the judge, when the girl replied, ‘Hello, Mr Pascoe. And what can I do for you?’

I said, ‘Let’s sit down.’

We sat opposite each other on either side of a small desk.

I said, ‘Lexie, I’m sorry.’

I don’t know why I said it, but it was what I felt.

She said, ‘How did you know?’

‘I should have known two years ago, I ignored evidence.’

‘What evidence?’

‘The evidence of my own eyes, for a start. First time I saw your sister, Jane, she was wearing a low-cut sweater. What I saw down there had to be real! Then my constable found the wig and the falsies …’

‘He was in my room? Illegally, of course,’ she said.

‘Let’s say accidentally. And he thought it was Jane’s room. But I should’ve known when he said he’d found the stuff behind some books. Jane doesn’t look the booky type to me.’

‘That sounds a bit élitist,’ she said. ‘Everyone reads.’

‘Milton, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, a History of Grand Opera?’ I said. ‘My constable was amazed at what he could recall when I prodded him. I could have checked with Jane, of course. But I didn’t want to worry her.’

‘Instead you lay in wait for me here today and squeezed my tit? That was brave of you.’

I said, ‘Do you want to tell me about it, Lexie.’

She shrugged and said, ‘If you want to hear. I had a poke around Thackeray’s not long after I started there. They thought I was a bit of an idiot, so no one took much notice if I popped up in odd places. Just thought I’d got lost. I went through Aunt Gwen’s file. I’d been hearing about her fortune all my life so I thought I’d take a look and see how much there really was. I was amazed, I’ve got to admit. I’d thought there’d be a few thousand, but I could see at a glance there must be over a million! Then I saw where it was going. PAWS, CODRO, WFE. It didn’t seem fair somehow. In fact it seemed wrong. Especially WFE. I’d heard Aunt Gwen mention them and I knew what they were about.

‘I thought about it a long time. Then I rang Mrs Falkingham. I invented the name Sarah Brodsworth and told her I was a student and that I’d heard about WFE and thought it sounded interesting. She was delighted to have someone to talk to and invited me to tea. It struck me I’d better change my appearance. It’d be daft to find that Aunt Gwen had shown her a photo of me or something. Not that that was very likely, but it was silly taking risks. All I did that first time was to clip dark lenses over my specs, put on a lot of make-up, wear a beret and stick a lot of tissues into my bra! I felt really stupid! But as things developed between me and Mrs Falkingham, I started to do the job properly. I even got tinted contact lenses, which I realized after was silly as I couldn’t use them normally. But at least there wasn’t much chance of my being recognized, was there?’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘There wasn’t. So you infiltrated WFE?’

‘That’s not a word I’d use,’ she said. ‘I joined and started helping the old lady. I quite liked her. She was daft but harmless, and a lot nicer with it than Great Aunt Gwen. Yes, I liked her. I was sorry when she died last year, but it did make things a bit easier.’

‘Easier to rob her, you mean?’

Lexie Huby regarded me curiously.

‘There was no question of robbing her,’ she said patiently. ‘The money wasn’t going to Mrs Falkingham and she was far too scrupulous ever to have used a penny for herself. No, all I meant was that after she died, I was left solely in charge of WFE. I had only myself to worry about. No one could get at her any longer.’

‘You mean like Henry Vollans and White Heat?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You knew about Vollans?’

‘At first I just thought he was a nosey journalist. That was worrying enough. Then I began to get a sense that it wasn’t just a story he was after. He was sounding me out. So I sounded him out too.’

‘And finally, you reached an understanding,’ I said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He didn’t mention you when he did his deal with the law, did he?’ I said not without bitterness.

In my opinion, Vollans should’ve been done for murder. But in the end he’d pleaded to manslaughter and got sent down for seven years. There is no such thing as plea bargaining in English law, but the list of White Heat members covering all four estates which Vollans had provided must have influenced somebody somewhere.

‘He wanted us to stay friends,’ said Lexie.

‘You write to him in jail.’

‘You’ve checked? Yes, the occasional note.’

‘And he sits there looking forward to getting out and sharing the loot, is that it?’ I said

‘I expect so. Why do you sound so put out?’

‘Because I think that, having got the money, you’re going to be Lexie Huby again full time and Vollans is going to find that his friend Sarah Brodsworth has vanished from the face of the earth! In time he may even work out that it was you who turned him in.’

‘You think so?’

‘Who else could it have been that rang Mr Dalziel?’

She nodded.

‘You’re right of course. I’d got a date with Vollans the night the coloured lad was killed. He didn’t turn up. Then I found out he was the reporter due to meet Sharman the next day and I got to wondering.’

‘How did you find out all this stuff?’ I asked.

‘I was Eden Thackeray’s secretary, remember? Everything that came into that office came through me. I led Vollans on a bit. He always thought I must be fronting for some other extremist lot, so when I started swapping nigger-bashing stories with him, he wasn’t surprised. He as good as admitted killing Sharman. So I rang you lot and let you sort it out.’

‘Like a good citizen,’ I said. ‘And also it got Vollans out of the way of your little scheme, didn’t it? Very handy.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Having him sniffing around didn’t make it any easier for me to make sure I got full control of the money.’

‘Yes. At last. The money. Why did you do it, Lexie?’

I realized I was hoping she’d find some form of excuse for herself. I was even willing to hint a couple of possible mitigating factors. I said, ‘Was it because you felt your family had been cheated? Was it to help your dad?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, amused. ‘I warned Dad he were daft to rely on any money coming from the old girl, but he never paid any heed to anyone else, least of all me! But I wasn’t worried about him, not even when he went ahead with all them extensions on borrowed money. I know my dad better than anyone, Mr Pascoe. If he doesn’t get what he wants one way, he’ll get it another. No use going against him. I learnt that early on. Have you been out to the Old Mill recently? Most of the work’s finished now, without a penny of Huby money to help him. He’s bullied and bribed and done half the work himself but he’s got there and the place is doing well, believe me. You know what really brings the people in? It’s Dad himself! He’s rude, he’s vulgar, he’s sometimes downright abusive, but they love it! What the regulars like best is watching newcomers’ faces when he gets on about Aunt Gwen’s will and ends up by booting Gruff-of-sodding-Greendale up the chimney. They think he’s still really mad about it, but he got past that long ago. It’s part of the show now. He’s even had Gruff reupholstered twice to keep him looking realistic!’

Her pride in her father was touching. Also it struck me how like him she herself was. If she didn’t get a thing one way, she had the drive and wit to get it another, whether it was higher education or her great-aunt’s money.

‘I’m glad he’s doing well.’

‘Yes. And now he’ll be getting the money Mr Goodenough promised him if the will got overturned,’ said Lexie. ‘So everything’s grand down at the Old Mill.’

‘So,’ I said ‘the money is just for you. How did you think you could get away with it?’

‘With what?’

‘Fraud.’ I spelt it out. ‘Misappropriation of funds. I’m sure the Fraud Squad will have half a dozen other charges. Not forgetting impersonation.’

‘By me? Who of?’

‘Sarah Brodsworth,’ I said.

‘But she is me,’ said Lexie. ‘I even changed my name by deed-poll when I got to eighteen. There’s no problem. I’m officially Alexandra Sarah Brodsworth-Huby. How can I impersonate myself?’

‘Don’t quibble,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t become you. Your aunt had a purpose for this money. There is no way in which you will be able to claim it came into your possession legally.’

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be. But it’s not in my possession.’

‘Transferring it to a Swiss account isn’t going to alter matters, Lexie,’ I said. ‘Who advised you? Lomas?’

‘Why do you mention him?’

‘I just thought he might have inherited some of his father’s expertise about fund-laundering,’ I sneered.

She said, ‘How’d a nice lady like Mrs Pascoe get herself married to a mind like yours?’

For the first time I got angry.

‘Don’t try to be smart with me, young girl,’ I said grimly, launching into my Dalziel impersonation. ‘You think it’s all a game, don’t you? A little play with you in the lead? You should’ve been the family actor, Lexie. From what I’ve seen of Lomas you could knock him into a cocked hat, which is probably where he belongs! Well, your next big part will be in court. What’s it to be? Simple little Lexie Huby, the office mouse? No, that’ll hardly do, not now you’re almost a fully-fledged solicitor. How about, clever Miss Huby, the self-educated working class lass, who’s overcome all obstacles and reads poetry and listens to opera? But when I tell them that behind the poetry and the opera, there’s a blonde wig and a pair of false boobs and a sharp little, greedy little mind at work, they’ll look closer at you then, Lexie, and save their applause for the judge who sends you down.’

She said, amused, ‘My wig’s better than his, I think. But you’ve not got it quite right, Mr Pascoe. The poetry and the opera, yes, I acknowledge that, and I couldn’t live without ’em. But I’ve known for a long time that behind the poetry and the music there’s a world full of horrible, ugly things that can’t be disguised, that can hardly be avoided.’

‘Unless you’ve got the money to build a big enough barrier,’ I concluded for her. ‘And that’s your justification?’

‘What do I need with money?’ she snapped suddenly. ‘I need money like my dad needed it. It was thinking he needed it that nearly ruined him. Knowing he wasn’t getting it just put him on the right road. Like Rod. He’ll never be a great actor, mebbe, but unless someone gives him a lot of money, he’ll have to work so hard he’ll become a very good one.’

‘And you?’ I said, somewhat taken back.

‘Oh yes. Money’d spoil me too,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to cheat to get it, Mr Pascoe. I can’t see any trick to making a lot of money if that’s what you want. It’s a talent I’ll have to be on my guard against as long as I live, I suspect. Here take a look at this. I’ve got a class to go to, and I’ve wasted too much time here already.’

She thrust a piece of paper at me.

On it the Yorkshire Commercial Bank acting on behalf of the East African Famine Relief Fund acknowledged receipt from the accredited representatives of Women For Empire of six hundred and eighty-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-four pounds and thirty-eight pence.

‘Do me a favour,’ she said. ‘Stick it in this envelope and post it for me, will you? I’ll not have much time to get down to the Post Office now you’ve made me so late.’

She handed me an envelope, I glanced down at it.

It was addressed to Henry Vollans, c/o HM Prison, Wakefield, Yorkshire.

‘Lexie,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I thought that …’

‘Yes,’ she said, and grinned. It was like an internal light being switched on and for the first time through the outer layer of disguise I could see the unmistakable and true Lexie Huby.

I said, ‘Was this what you planned from the start?’

‘Planned? No plans, Mr Pascoe,’ she said. ‘I’m getting to the age of plans now, because that’s how adults get things done, but I wasn’t an adult when all this started. I don’t know. Mebbe it started when I was a child and I first heard about Alexander, about him being dead, and not dead. I never liked Great Aunt Gwen but I could see how desperately she wanted Alex not to be dead, and I thought of all the other mothers who wanted their children not to be dead, well, not thought, because that means plans, doesn’t it, but imagined, that’s the child’s way, imagination, play …’

‘But death?’ I said. ‘What could death mean to a child?’

She said, ‘Death? Not much. Not then; not now. What is it? You here, I there; you stopping, I going on? Unimaginable! But I can imagine dying and the fear of it. The love of it too. I can imagine …’

Pascoe pressed the stop button and then ran the tape back to the beginning. He’d listened to it three times already and the final section was still as harrowing as it had been when first he’d heard it in that stuffy bank office. Lexie had seemed almost to be speaking in a trance induced by the intensity of her own imaginings. It struck him that this power to project herself so deep into the minds and feelings of others might prove a double-edged weapon. To a child, such imaginings were principally play; to an adult, along with valuable insights, they must bring a terrible vulnerability. He would watch little Lexie Huby’s progress with interest and with concern. Meanwhile he found himself vulnerable to a question of conscience.

This was, did his approval of the direction in which Gwendoline Huby’s money had been diverted give him the right to conceal his knowledge of its diversion?

He knew what Ellie would say. ‘Right? It wasn’t a matter of right. It was your duty to do nothing!’

He could guess what Dalziel would say. ‘Bury it. But if that lass is going to practise law round here, don’t let her forget she owes you a favour!’

Sod ’em all! When it came down to it, there was only one person whose judgment he could rely on absolutely.

He pressed the erase button on the cassette, locked the whisky bottle in his desk, and went home to talk to Rosie.