Deadheads

2

Wednesday for Pascoe started with the dead.

Tuesday had finished with Dalziel. Pascoe wasn't sure which he preferred.

The fat man had rung shortly after five o'clock. He had listened in silence to Pascoe's description of his interrogation of the two boys. His reaction to the news about Elgood and Daphne Aldermann was almost dismissive.

'It doesn't surprise me,' he said. 'If they put him into intensive care, he'd likely ask for a double-bed. Gives Aldermann a good motive, though. And it begins to make it a bit clearer why Dick got so bloody neurotic about Aldermann.'

'Well, it surprised me,' said Pascoe. 'Ellie's got to know Daphne Aldermann quite well and she doesn't sound the type for a quick hump. You don't think it could be serious between her and Elgood, could it? That might explain a few things.

‘If it is, then Dick doesn't know about it,' said Dalziel emphatically. 'Elgood's only serious about himself. He got frightened for some reason and he wanted reassurance, about the desk-lamp, and about the garage door, and about them two fellows that died. He couldn't go through the coroners' reports himself, could he? Is your missus seeing the Aldermann woman again? She's a sharp lass, your Ellie, even if she does get some daft notions sometimes. Ask her to see what she can winkle out.'

'I believe they'll be having coffee together in the morning,' said Pascoe. 'But I don't think Ellie would take kindly to being asked to winkle things out.'

'Why not?' asked Dalziel with audible bewilderment.

'I'm sure if you asked her, she'd be happy to explain the moral position to you, sir,' said Pascoe firmly.

'The moral position? I thought that was when a lass did it on her back, in the dark, with her eyes closed,' said Dalziel. 'You'll be seeing Elgood again, I suppose?'

'Yes. I rang his office today but he's down at the seaside again, God knows who with this time. His secretary said he has a very busy schedule tomorrow, and would Thursday do. I didn't want to sound too urgent so I said OK.'

'Aye, you're right to watch how you go with Dick. Fornication's no crime, remember that.'

'Wasting police time is,' said Pascoe.

'You still think it's a waste of time?' said Dalziel. 'Well, you may be right. Here's something else to waste your time on then. Another corpse in Aldermann's track. Penny Highsmith mentioned him. Someone who nearly bought Rosemont. Mid-sixties it'd be, after Patrick had done his "O" levels. Edgar Masson was the old lady's solicitor so likely he'd still have been acting for the family, so he should have all the details. Even if he hasn't, that old bugger knows more about other people's business than most other people.'

Pascoe said, ‘Is there anything more?' scribbling wildly.

'Aye. Ask him about the will. I went round to Somerset House today. There was some Kraut here talking about fighting the subversive war. What do them buggers know about fighting wars? They can't remember the last time they won one! So I ducked out. At Somerset House I found out that she died intestate, Auntie Flo.'

'Then there wasn't a will,' said Pascoe smartly.

'I know what intestate means,' said Dalziel heavily. 'I also know that Edgar Masson's not in the habit of letting rich clients get away without paying him for drawing up a will. At some stage, there'd have been one. And talking of wills, after what you told me that accountant fellow, Capstick, said about the Reverend Somerton's accounts being in his office, I thought I might as well take a look at the Rev's will while I was at Somerset House. He had £60,000 to leave, right enough, but he only left £20,000 of it to his daughter. The rest was spread around various good causes, so if Aldermann was expecting riches, he was disappointed!'

'Twenty thou was still a lot of money in 1971,' said Pascoe.

'Sixty thou was near on a fortune,' said Dalziel. 'I'd best be on my way now. There's a seminar going off on the policewoman's role in multi-racial contra-social interaction or something.'

'And you don't want to miss it?' said Pascoe with cautious incredulity.

'Don't be bloody daft!' sneered Dalziel. ‘It'll be over soon and I'm using the bugger's phone who's chairing it. Suspicious bastard even keeps his whisky locked!'

Pascoe may have only imagined he heard the splintering of wood before he replaced the phone, but such imaginings in Dalziel's regard were as likely to be hypotheses as fantasies.

He shared the conversation with Wield over a cup of coffee the following morning.

‘It was probably the Commissioner's office,' he concluded. 'He's getting worse as he gets older. And it's getting hard to know where you are with him. Before he went, he told us he didn't want us wasting time on this Aldermann business. Now he seems full of it. Why?'

'He's renewed his acquaintance with Mrs Highsmith,' said Wield significantly, dipping a chocolate-coated digestive into his cup.

'I can't imagine what you mean,' said Pascoe primly. 'That chocolate's melting.'

‘It's the heat. It does that sometimes,' explained Wield. 'He'll be seeing her again?'

'He implied it,' said Pascoe. 'You know, you could achieve the same effect by eating plain biscuits and drinking mocha coffee.'

‘It's a different kind of multi-racial contra-social interaction,' said Wield solemnly. 'Does this mean Mr Dalziel now reckons there's something in all this for us officially?'

Pascoe gestured at his desk which was covered with the stationery of death. Police reports, medical reports, coroners' reports.

'The thing about our modern society,' he mused, 'is that no one passes without leaving a mark any more. If there is anything for us in all this, it ought to be somewhere in all these. Let's try to put things in some kind of order, shall we?'

'Chronological, you mean?'

'There are other kinds of order,' said Pascoe kindly. 'But that'll do for starters. Here we go. 1960. Mrs Florence Aldermann dies of a coronary thrombosis. Medical report is unambiguous. She was still convalescent from an earlier attack. And there are no suspicious circumstances unless we count the intestacy which meant that Penny Highsmith got the entire estate. Now we jump on a decade to the Reverend Oliver Somerton. Skull fractured by a piece of masonry fallen from the belfry of St Mark's Church, Little Leven.'

'Hold on,' said Wield. 'There'll be at least one other in between. This fellow Mr Dalziel mentioned, the one who wanted to buy the house but died.'

'Oh yes. I sincerely hope he'll turn out to have died of old age a hundred miles away,' said Pascoe. ‘I’m seeing the solicitor, Masson, later this morning.'

'I'll pencil in a query,' said Wield.

'Right. Back to the Rev. Suspicious circumstances? All unwitnessed accidents are, ipso facto, suspicious. But there were no pointers to anything definite, and the coroner seemed quite satisfied.'

'Act of God,' said Wield.

'Watch it,' said Pascoe. 'We need all the help we can get. Anyway, that was 'seventy-one. On to 'seventy-six. Mrs Catherine McNeil. Died of bronchial pneumonia which developed after a burst of some particularly virulent influenza. Was that one of the years when there was a lot of it about, Chinese, Siamese, Patagonian or something?'

'I'll try to check,' said Wield. 'How old was she?'

'Seventy-eight.'

'At seventy-eight there's always a lot of it about,' said the sergeant. 'She's the one Aldermann had been robbing and who left him the money?'

'That's her. Aldermann had 'flu himself, I gather. It was during his absence from the office that his little games with Mrs McNeil's money came to light.'

'So he sneezed at her till she got a fatal dose of germs?' said Wield.

Pascoe glared at him.

'Let's leave the debunking jokes to Mr Dalziel, shall we?' he said.

'Just rehearsing, sir,' murmured Wield and the two men grinned at each other.

'That was at the beginning of 'seventy-six. Three and a half years later in September 'seventy-nine, Christopher Burke dies, the first of three casualties at Perfecta where Aldermann had started working on a part-time basis some six months earlier.'

'Burke was the one who fell off a ladder while he was painting his house?'

'That's what I thought,' said Pascoe. 'But the coroner's report says that in fact he'd got a firm in to do the work. That morning they'd been replacing a section of guttering prior to painting the eaves. Burke, it is surmised, ran up the ladder when he came home from work to inspect the repair, it slipped and he broke his neck.'

'Witnesses?'

'None,' said Pascoe, looking at the report. 'He died between two-thirty and three-thirty. His wife went out at two-thirty and he wasn't home then. She came back an hour later and there he was, spread out across the patio at the back of the house.'

'What about the decorators?' wondered Wield.

'After they'd got the new bit of guttering in, it started raining, so they waited a while and when the weather showed no sign of improving, they went off to an inside job they were doing as well. You know what painters are like.'

'Strange,' said Wield.

'Painters?'

'No. That a man would go up a ladder in the wet. Straight from the office.'

'I thought so too. But it was showery, it seems. Theory is that he arrived home in a dry patch, was surprised not to see the decorators at work, ran up the ladder just to check how much — or how little — they'd done, and that was that.'

‘It's the kind of daft thing you might do,' agreed Wield. 'Especially if you'd had a good liquid lunch down at the Conservative Club, moaning with your mates about what an idle sod the British working man had become.'

Pascoe laughed and said, 'You haven't been talking to my wife by any chance? But it could be worth checking. This and the vicar's are the ones which come closest to being "suspicious" deaths and the more we can disperse the suspicion, the sooner we can forget the whole business.'

'How can you check something like that at this distance?' queried Wield. 'There's no mention of booze in the inquest report, is there?'

'No,' said Pascoe. 'But in the circumstances — accident at home, wife greatly distressed, etcetera — the coroner might be inclined to muffle any hint that the deceased was stoned. It was Mr Wellington presiding, I see. You know him?'

This was in response to a small earth-tremor of Wield's features.

'He once bollocked me for being cheeky under his examination,' said Wield.

'Good. Then as you're old friends, you can chat to him,' said Pascoe.

He made a note on his desk pad.

'Finally, the first two I looked at. Brian Bulmer who crashed his car after the office party last Christmas. Definitely booze there, I'm afraid. No one else involved, no witnesses. He seems to have lost control on black ice and hit a bollard. He was Perfecta's financial director, remember? And at the beginning of May, Timothy Eagles, the chief accountant and Aldermann's chief rival for elevation to the board, had a heart attack. He was found in a washroom by the night security guard doing his first rounds at eight P.M. He was dressed for going home. He'd said goodnight to his secretary who'd left dead on time, leaving him to sign a couple of letters. Presumably he then got ready, felt ill, either in the washroom or perhaps made his way there for a drink of water, collapsed and was unfortunately not discovered till too late for medical help.'

'Aldermann was his assistant, wasn't he?' said Wield. 'Using the same washroom?'

'I believe so. Spell it out, Sergeant.'

Wield said, 'Aldermann on his way home finds Eagles having his attack. Instead of calling for help, he closes the door and goes on his way.'

Pascoe whistled and quoted, 'Thou shalt not kill but needst not strive officiously to keep alive. A bit cold-blooded! You've met him, what do you think? Could he do it?'

‘It's easier than murder,' said Wield.

‘Is it? I'm not sure. The strong human instinct is to help.'

'You try telling that to old ladies who see people peeking out of their windows as they get mugged,' said the sergeant. 'They'd tell you about human instincts!'

Pascoe said, 'I suppose so,' and stared in irritation at the papers strewn across his desk. All this, as Dalziel would say, was neither owt nor nowt and it was beginning to get on his nerves. All he could do was keep digging till either something positive came up or the weight of negatives gave him the excuse to leave off. But all the time he dug he was aware of the danger of causing distress and creating talk without the justification of a result to show for it.

But there was no choice, really. Either you did the job or you didn't. He began ticking off the next stages in his mind — talk to Masson, visit Capstick again, interview Christopher Burke's widow, see Elgood — and let out a long deep sigh.

'You all right, sir?' asked Wield.

'Bloody marvellous,' said Pascoe. it's just that sometimes I get this awful feeling that if I'm not careful, I may turn into a policeman.'