Deadheads

6

'Mr Capstick's not at home,' said Mrs Unger in the severe tone of a governess finding it necessary to repeat what should not have needed to be said in the first place.

Pascoe wondered if the old woman was using the phrase literally or conventionally.

'I see,' he said. 'I'm Inspector Pascoe. I was here a few days ago, you may recall.'

The unblinking blue eyes in the old apple-wrinkled face fixed themselves on his forehead as though in search of some authenticating mark. It struck Pascoe that perhaps their peculiarly unnerving quality derived from myopic first sight rather than keen second.

'I talked to Mr Capstick in the conservatory,' he went on. 'You brought me some delicious buttered scones.'

The features relaxed. He had been approved once, and she was not, he guessed, a woman to change her mind very often.

'He's gone to Harrogate,' she pronounced with the intonation of one who might be saying Xanadu. 'One of his cronies came to fetch him.'

So he really wasn't at home. In fact, it suited Pascoe very well. He said, 'Perhaps I could have a word with you, Mrs Unger. It won't take long, I promise you. ‘Her lips puckered fractionally at his presumption. He got the message. It would take precisely the amount of time she condescended to allow. His promises didn't come into it.

But she opened the door wide and stood aside to let him enter. Then, closing the door and bolting it (an instinctive rather than a significant action, he assured himself uneasily) she pushed by him and walked down the hallway to a handsome inner door where the process was repeated save for the ramming home of the bolt.

'Sit down,' she ordered.

Pascoe sat. To his surprise, Mrs Unger immediately withdrew.

Musing on her intentions, he looked around. It was a fair room, a little too square perhaps, and rather too high for its width. An oak sideboard and a large glass-fronted oak bookcase, both solidly mid-Victorian in style, filled the wall to the left of his wing chair which was placed square to an ornate marble fireplace. Daringly, he rose and went to look at the bookcase. Through the diamonds of glass he read some of the titles engraved and gilded on the leather-bound volumes. A taste for Trollope was perhaps forecastable, but Colette came as a surprise.

Behind him there was a rattle and he turned to see that Mrs Unger had entered the room with a wooden tea-trolley which she was now manoeuvring into position alongside the wing chair.

'You'll have some tea,' she said.

It wasn't a question. He guessed that, like Dalziel, she knew what was best for most people. He nodded and said, 'Thank you,' and sank deep into the chair, but not so deep as his heart when his glance lit upon the plateful of buttered scones on the lower tray of the trolley.

Direct attack seemed the best defence.

'I wanted to talk to you about the day the Reverend Somerton was killed, the gentleman who got hit by the stone falling from the tower of St Mark's. Now I know this happened more than ten years ago but I wonder if you remember the day.'

Mrs Unger did not reply. As he spoke, she had poured him a cup of tea. He stirred it and sipped it. The silence continued. With a wan smile he took a plate, helped himself to a scone and bit into it.

'Delicious,' he said.

'It was a Saturday in March. Second Saturday in the month, I seem to recall. It was a real March day, cloudy one minute, clear the next, and blowing a gale all the time.'

This accorded precisely in both date and meteorology with what Pascoe had read in the coroner's report. The windy conditions, it was theorized, had been in part responsible for the falling masonry.

'Mr Capstick wasn't at home that day, I gather?'

'No.'

'But you were?'

'Yes.'

'Was there anyone else here?'

Silence. He took another bite. And another.

'Yes. That young fellow who did the roses was here, I recall,' said Mrs Unger.

In his excitement Pascoe finished the scone and did not hesitate to take another when the old woman flickered her eyes at his empty plate.

'Did the roses, you say? That would be Mr. .?'

He bit.

'Aldermann, his name was. He had a way with flowers, I'll give him that.'

But not with Mrs Unger. Pascoe guessed that Patrick had not been fed with buttered scones.

'What precisely was he doing?' he asked.

'Pruning and planting. March is the time for it, so they say. I told him Mr Capstick was away and he said never mind, he'd do a bit of pruning and planting. I let him into the garden and left him to it.'

'What time did he leave, can you recall?'

'About four o'clock. It started raining cats and dogs; it came sideways in that wind. He shouted that he was off and off he went.'

The Reverend's corpse had been discovered by the local vicar at four forty-five on his return from the reception of a wedding he'd officiated at earlier in the afternoon. He had arranged to rendezvous with Oliver Somerton at four P.M., but had been delayed.

Reading between the lines, Pascoe guessed that the reception had been a lively and well-liquored affair.

Finishing his second scone, he said, 'Could I take a look around the garden?'

Silently she led him out of the room, through the conservatory in which Capstick had been placed like some delicate Eastern plant, and into the garden.

'Thank you,' he said.

He walked swiftly across the lawn towards the thicket of boundary-marking shrubs over which rose the tower of St Mark's. There were rhododendrons here in full bloom, their colours vying with the richness of two or three lilac trees, but their scent unable to compete with the heaviness of half a dozen clumps of lavender which had been allowed to spread widely. Indeed, the whole of the shrubbery looked as if it had been left untended for several seasons now and the little path which wound its way through the bushes was overhung by their branches. Pascoe shouldered his way through till he arrived at a small gate in the cypress hedge. It was hinged to a rotting post by a circlet of wire which rain and dew had rusted to an autumnal brown. Beyond stretched the rough untended grass of an old graveyard, broken by stones whose inscriptions were eroded and obscured by time and weather and the tiny scrabbling fingers of innumerable lichens.

He forced the gate open with difficulty. Clearly the Capstick household used other routes to heaven. Treading with apologetic lightness across the graves of Little Leven's ancient dead, he made his way to the church and, after a small effort of recall, found himself at the spot where the Reverend Oliver Somerton had been struck down by a piece of consecrated stone. Uneasily he peered up at the tower, but all looked secure enough now. He presumed the Archdeacon's death had given a boost to the restoration fund if nothing else.

Here at this side of the church he was quite out of sight of the main gate and the tiny village beyond. The only sign of habitation was the roof of Capstick's house and those of his immediate neighbours, unless of course one counted the tombstones. Looking at them rising from the gentle ripple of the long grass, Pascoe realized he had no sense of neglect. The old gave way to the new always, and death did not stop the process. Men died and life went on in the space they vacated. For a while their remains were marked by clean, smooth obelisks with sharp-edged lettering, and it was right that the grass around these should be razed and flowers laid at their feet. But as the new became old and the survivors in their turn came to rest, it was also right that the old stones should be absorbed into the landscape as surely as the remains they marked were absorbed into the deep, dark strata of the earth.

Something whizzed past his head and hit the flagged path beside him. Startled, he stepped back and looked up. High above, a beaked head cocked itself to one side as though resetting its aim.

'Thanks for the thought anyway,' said Pascoe, looking at the white splash on the flagstone and recalling that it was supposed to be lucky to be hit by a bird-dropping. He glanced at his watch. It was time to go. There were other scenes of death to be visited, other metaphysical meditations to be meditated, miles to go before he could sleep. Miles to go.

By the time he reached No. 12, The High Grove, the home of Mrs Mandy Burke, widow of Christopher Burke, one-time assistant to the Chief Accountant of Perfecta Ltd, Pascoe was no longer in the meditative mood. For a start Mrs Unger's scones, impervious even to a lunchtime pint of best Yorkshire bitter, lay heavy on his stomach. Next, the pink and white lozenges of ornamental stone which formed the patio on which Mr Burke had met his end were in no wise as atmospheric as the worn grey flags where the Archdeacon had been struck down, nor did the pebble-dashed rear wall of No. 12 with its puce-painted window-frames soar into the imagination in quite the same way as the dark tower of St Mark's Church.

And finally, instead of the quiet company of the ancient dead, Pascoe was entertained by the presence of the Widow Burke whose antiquity was unassessable beneath the cosmetic art of mid-Yorkshire's best beauticians, but whose quickness was never in doubt.

'This is where he fell, Inspector, or Peter, may I call you Peter?' she said. 'This is the very spot.'

She pointed with all the dramatic style of those stately-home guides who point to the very spot, often marked by ineradicable bloodstains, where some unfortunate scion of the noble family now living off the entrance fees met his end. There was no bloodstain here, only a tray on which stood a glass and a jug of what looked like iced lemon squash.

At least, thought Pascoe, she had had the good taste not to cover 'the very spot' with the sun-bed from which his insistent finger on the front doorbell had at last summoned her.

Strangely, the news that he was a police officer had seemed to eradicate rather than exacerbate her annoyance at being disturbed. Modern middle-class attitudes to the police usually stimulated an instant expression of grave distrust followed by a demand for warrants to be flashed and business clearly stated before the threshold was crossed. Instead she'd flung open the door to him, invited him to walk through and had evinced neither surprise nor reluctance to talk when he had diffidently referred to her late husband.

'Shall we stay out here to chat?' she said. 'One can hardly afford to miss such divine weather, can one? There's a deckchair in the garage if you can find it. I'll get you a glass. I'm sure you're dying of thirst. Won't be a moment!'

With a promissory smile, she went back into the house. Pascoe took the chance of being alone to get his bearings. He recalled the High Grove estate vaguely from his own house-hunting days. It had just been completed and he and Ellie had taken a quick look, which was all they'd needed. Not that it was bad as such up-market development went. There were three types of detached property, arranged in groups of five as though the builder believed in the mysterious properties of the quincunx. The Burke house was a Chatsworth second only in size and luxury to the Blenheim. This particular group of Chatsworths backed on to a bunch of Hardwicks which were two-bed, two-recep (or three-bed, one-recep) bungalows. It had been a Hardwick that the Pascoes had been persuaded to examine, a pleasure denied the owners of the Chatsworths by a seven-foot-high length of pastel green composition screening (based, Pascoe recollected the agent's blurb, on an Italian cloister design), plus whatever vegetation had matured at the foot of the Chatsworths' longish lawns. Presumably, however, a man up a ladder would be visible from the bungalows.

He entered the garage through a side door. It held a Volvo estate, the back of which was packed with what he took to be wares intended for her market stall — straw mats, cane baskets, bead curtains, silk flowers, that kind of thing. Cardboard boxes containing similar items were piled up in the small area of space left by the Volvo's length. Among all this colonial cane, he found a good old English deckchair.

He was still wrestling it into submission when the Widow Burke returned with a tall glass which she proceeded to fill with the inviting-looking iced squash.

The chair suddenly fell into shape.

'Sit,' she commanded, handing him the glass.

He sat, and she removed the wraparound robe she must have wrapped around when summoned to the door, and subsided not ungracefully into her sunbed.

Without the robe, the question of her age became more accessible of inductive reasoning. This suntanned skin certainly did not cover the firm muscular flesh of youth, but neither had age scored and puckered the smooth veneer with its excoriating frosts. Beneath the narrow bikini-top, her breasts arched as much as they spread and the contour of her stomach was Cotswoldian rather than Pennine.

Mid-forties, Pascoe assessed. And well worth a second look.

She spotted the second look and smiled her understanding.

'Cheers,' she said.

'Cheers,' said Pascoe, taking a long pull at his lemon squash. It hit the back of his unprepared throat like lava and he spluttered eruptively. The basic dilutant was not water, but vodka. At least this provided some explanation of her manner.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I should have warned you. Is it true you're not allowed to drink on the job?'

'Only in moderation,' said Pascoe, placing the glass firmly on 'the very spot'.

'Me too,' she said, drinking, and eyeing him over the rim of the glass in what should have been an embarrassingly ludicrous parody of a 'twenties Hollywood vamp, but wasn't.

Pascoe said firmly, 'About Mr Burke.'

She said, is it the insurance company or has someone been making naughty phone calls?'

'Pardon?' said Pascoe.

'You must have some reason for wanting to talk about poor old Chris after all this time. I was just wondering if there was any way I could get it out of you.'

She laughed as she spoke, vodka-moist lips drawing back from good white teeth.

‘It's really just routine, Mrs Burke,' said Pascoe lamely.

'Mandy,' she said, if you're not going to be frank, you can at least be friendly. Don't think me callous, Peter, but I'm well over it now, you see. Life goes on. I'm all for life. Not everyone is, you know. It's a great jostling race, but all the fun's in keeping on running. They'll have to knock me off the track before I let anyone get past, but Chris now, he was just my age yet he acted like my father sometimes. Forty did it for him, he got to forty and somewhere in his mind a little clock went ping! like a kitchen timer, telling him he was now into middle age, and in six months that's what he became — middle-aged!'

'Yet he went running up a high ladder in the middle of the afternoon,' observed Pascoe, glancing up at the eaves. 'I shouldn't have fancied it.'

'That's because you're a mere youngster,' she said firmly. 'Checking up on workmen's part of the middle-age syndrome. Value for money. He had a good head for figures, Chris, but not much for heights.'

'Yes, he was an accountant, wasn't he?' said Pascoe, spotting the opening.

'That's right. Perfecta. They make bathroom fittings and such like,' she said. 'You should take a look in my bathroom, Peter, I have everything.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe. ‘in your evidence at the inquest, you mentioned the bathroom, I believe. You said you had a shower before you went out.'

'Oh yes,' she answered. 'So I did. I recall thinking later that perhaps it happened while I was actually in the shower. You can't hear a thing in there — telephone, doorbell, nothing. And I wouldn't look out on to the patio before I left. Perhaps he was lying there already. Somehow that made it all seem so much worse.'

The coroner had recorded laconically 'break' at this point. Presumably Mrs Burke had been overcome. Even now her handsome face was shadowed.

‘It wouldn't have made any difference,' said Pascoe gently. 'He died instantly, I gather.'

'Yes, that was a comfort,' she replied, dabbing at her eyes, smiling bravely, and taking a long drink, isn't it warm today? Why don't you take your jacket off?'

'No. I must be going shortly,' said Pascoe. 'When you found him, was there any sign that anyone else had been with him?'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'Well, a couple of glasses, for instance,' said Pascoe holding up his own. She tried to refill it, but he moved it back hastily and she topped up her own instead.

'No. Nothing like that. I recall I put the car in the garage, came out of the door straight on to the patio, and there he was. No sign that there'd been anyone else here. Why should there have been? I mean, if there had been, they would have said, surely?'

'Yes, of course,' said Pascoe. 'Tell me, as a matter of interest, did Mr Burke socialize much with his colleagues at Perfecta? Mr Elgood? Or Mr Eagles? Or Mr Aldermann, say?'

'My, you do know a lot, don't you?' she said admiringly. 'I thought, the moment I saw you, there's a man who knows a lot. Let me see. Elgood, no. He was friendly enough but only in a bossish sort of way. Tim Eagles and his wife we swapped dinners with a couple of times a year. As for the other, Aldermann, the one who got his job, Chris reckoned nothing of him. There'd been talk of some trouble when he was in private practice, I believe, but it wasn't that. Chris wasn't a man for gossip. Very strict moralist, Chris. Old Testament judgements, but he had to see for himself, he wouldn't condemn without he had the firm evidence before his very eyes. But he didn't care for Mr Patrick Aldermann. He said he was superfluous to requirement, even as a part-timer. It was a fix, he said, and Chris didn't care for fixes.'

'Did he complain about Mr Aldermann?'

'You mean officially? Oh, I expect so. He would hold his peace till he was certain about something, but then there was no holding him. He would make his view known even if it meant half the country knowing his business. Oh bother. The jug's empty. It just evaporates in this heat, you know. I'm going to make myself some more. Why don't you unbutton and have a swallow or two with me?'

She stood up, swayed, placed a hand on Pascoe's shoulder to steady herself and let gravity direct the heavy bombs of her breasts towards his upturned face. Alarmed, he slipped sideways out of the deckchair, going down on one knee in the process.

'Careful!' she said anxiously. 'You haven't torn your trousers, have you? Never mind if you have. I'm a demon with a needle. I can stitch you up and send you home so your wife wouldn't notice you'd been mended.'

'No, no, it's fine,' Pascoe assured her. 'I'll have to be on my way. Many thanks, Mrs Burke.'

'Mandy,' she said. 'Call again. Or drop by my little boutique in the market. Mandy's Knick-Knacks. I can always find something interesting for a friend.'

'Perhaps I will,' he said, ‘isn't the market open today?'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'But I roasted there all morning and decided my assistant could manage by herself this afternoon. It's all right when you're young and skinny, but when there's a bit more upholstering, the sweat just runs off you.'

She shook herself gently as if to demonstrate the phenomenon.

Pascoe smiled and retreated, not without relief. But as he drove away he was surprised by an uneasy feeling that, drunk and gamesome though she had been, and though he had resisted all her offers, even of running repairs with needle and thread, yet she had somehow managed to stitch him up in some not yet definable way.