Pictures of Perfection

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was, thought Pascoe later as he ran his mental video of the scene, less like a suspect being interrogated than a young king, Alexander, say, dealing patiently with the complaints of his disaffected satraps.

Wield, anticipating they would move off, said, ‘On your feet, lad,’ and Bendish rose willingly enough but winced as he put weight on his left foot and leaned on the ornate walking stick.

‘What’s up? Sore leg?’

‘It’s a bit stiff,’ admitted the young man.

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Wield.

Obediently Bendish pulled up his left trouser to reveal a neatly repaired jagged gash in his calf.

‘I recognize them stitches,’ said Wield, fingering his ear.

‘I recognize those teeth marks,’ said Pascoe, shuddering. ‘Fop?’

‘That’s right.’

The two younger policemen glanced inquiringly at Dalziel, who said, ‘All right, sit down, lad. We can get the formalities over here as easy as anywhere.’

It was not intended as a kindness. PACE required that a suspect should be interrogated as soon as was humanly possible under properly controlled conditions with a taperecorder running. But Dalziel liked when he could to get his script edited well in advance.

So the young man sat down again and, as there was only room for one on the bench unless their purpose was amatory, the others stayed standing.

‘You’ve not had my letters, then?’ said Bendish. ‘I thought you can’t have had, from what Larry was saying.’

Dalziel, looking irritated to have the initiative wrested from him, said, ‘We’ve seen them now, lad. Only difference they make is whether you’re a bent cop, or were just masquerading as a cop when you committed your crimes. Either way, it’s worth an extra five stretch.’

Pascoe rolled his eyes at this exaggeration but Bendish seemed unaffected by it. He said, ‘I’m sorry that people have been put to a lot of trouble because my letters were delayed. But apart from searching for me to make sure I’m all right, what else are you after, sir?’

Dalziel said, ‘OK, son. You want to play it that way, fine. Let’s get down to cases. Harold Bendish, did you two nights ago by making a false report of a possible intruder gain entrance to Scarletts?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a false report,’ said Bendish. ‘There was an intruder.’

‘Eh?’

‘Yes,’ said the youth, grinning broadly. ‘Me.’

Wield and Pascoe looked expectantly at the Fat Man, waiting for the thunderbolts, but he merely passed a huge hand across his face and went on, ‘While you were inside, you persuaded Mrs Bayle to turn off the alarms, and then your accomplice diverted Mrs Bayle with a telephone call from a mobile phone?’

Bendish considered, nodded, said, ‘Yes.’

‘And while Mrs Bayle was out of the room, you removed a painting from the wall, passed it through the window to your accomplice, took in a copy which you had had prepared, and hung it up in place of the original. Right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And this accomplice was Miss Frances Harding of Old Hall?’

Bendish hesitated, and that hesitation confirmed what Pascoe already knew, that the young man was deeply in love. His only line of defence against these charges was that the painting was Fran’s anyway, and he could hardly advance that without naming the girl. Yet when it came to the point, he found it hard.

He said, ‘It was all my idea …’

‘Oh aye? And she’s little Miss Innocent, is she? Come on, lad. We know all about you two banging away in the garden shed!’ said Dalziel with provocative coarseness.

Bendish flushed the lovely colour Wield recalled from their first encounter, and his fingers whitened around his stick. Quickly, Pascoe said, ‘She left the phone under the window, didn’t she? And you went back for it. And it started ringing …’ (that would have been Guy the Heir trying to call Girlie) ‘… and Mrs Bayle let Fop out …’

‘He got me as I was going over the gate,’ said Bendish, wincing at the memory. ‘There was blood everywhere and my trousers were ruined. Fran was marvellous. She drove us back to the village and then we …’

His voice tailed off. He was still worried about mentioning names, Pascoe realized. Not grassing was as much a problem for cops as for crooks.

‘You went to Corpse Cottage,’ he said. ‘Because that’s where you’d arranged to meet Caddy to hand over the painting so she could remove it from the frame and put Aunt Edwina back in.’

It was obvious when you thought about it, though Bendish was regarding him with awe and even Dalziel and Wield looked impressed.

Encouraged, he pressed on. ‘Fran probably wanted to take you to hospital, but that was going to need far too much explanation. So you said she could patch you up, she had the training and the equipment, and you’d recently updated your tetanus jabs and were still taking a course of antibiotics as a result of your run-in with Guy the Heir.’

‘Have you been talking to Fran?’ demanded the youth. ‘Or Caddy? That’s it. Caddy!’

‘No need. But you needed somewhere to lie up. You couldn’t stay in the cottage, it was too dangerous to smuggle you into the Hall, so …’

He paused. To his audience it may have seemed a rhetorical flourish. In fact it was simply a drying-up. They’d gone to the vicarage, that was clear. But why in the name of God had Lillingstone allowed himself to be sucked into this crazy and criminous business?

God, who is sometimes amused to take the profane use of his name as genuine prayer, decided to take Pascoe off the hook, and gave Harold Bendish a nudge.

‘It was Caddy who suggested the Vicar,’ he said. ‘Larry … well, Larry’s got this thing about her. Everybody knows only he thinks they don’t. So once she explained all about the school and everything … and I think it helped that it was one in the eye for Justin Halavant as the Vicar’s been a bit narked with him ever since word got out about the pass he made at Caddy …’

‘Hang about!’ commanded Dalziel. ‘The school and everything …?’

‘Oh aye,’ said Wield, who saw no reason why Pascoe should grab all the detective kudos. ‘They were stealing the picture so they could sell it and get enough money to save the school, I thought everyone knew that. I expect the idea started when the Vicar gave young Fran her gran’s journal and she read about Job Halavant picking the painting up cheap. And I expect it were Caddy who spotted it at Scarletts …’

‘It was the frame,’ said Bendish. ‘She was in Fran’s room one day talking about the illustrations she were doing for Mr Digweed’s edition of the Journal, and she looked at Aunt Edwina and said she knew where there was a frame exactly the same as that, only the picture in it looked to be worth a hell of a lot more. One thing led to another …’

‘And you all ended up in a conspiracy to rob,’ said Dalziel, eager to bring proceedings back down to earth and start arresting people. ‘Grand. Mr Pascoe, would you care to …?’

But Pascoe, with i’s still to dot and t’s to cross, took the enormous risk of ignoring him.

He said, ‘The next morning Mr Lillingstone took the uniforms, or at least one and a half uniforms, to the dry cleaners in town, popped into Marks and bought a pair of trousers of the same colour to replace the torn ones, and went to Corpse Cottage to put them in the wardrobe. Only he didn’t realize that not only was the hunt already up for you, Harry, but also Halavant had spotted the substitution and worked out who must have taken it. Lillingstone lied quite well for a vicar. Funny what a man will do for love, isn’t it, Harry? I mean, that’s what got you into this mess, isn’t it? Love? All for love?’

He spoke gently, almost sadly, not at all mockingly.

Dalziel made a noise like a dog trying to bring up a bit of bone that had got stuck in its throat.

Bendish gave him a look which was composed equally of scorn and pity.

He said seriously, ‘If you’ve read my letters I thought you’d have understood. Of course I love Fran so much I’d do anything for her. But I hope I’d have done this anyway, because it needed doing. It was too important not to do.’

‘For crying out loud!’ exclaimed Dalziel. ‘You stole a sodding picture, you didn’t stop World War Three!’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Bendish. ‘I did something to help the village keep its school without having to sell the Green. Maybe ultimately that’ll help tip the balance, one more kid getting a decent education, one more place keeping out the concrete. I don’t know. All I know is that if things are perfectible, if things really can get better, then we’ve all got to start where we’re at. I tried to give myself a bit of lift-off by joining the police. It seemed to make sense. If you want to influence society, go where there’s a chance of getting a bit of clout. I should have learned up in Newcastle. It didn’t work out there but I just blamed myself.’

‘Whereas it’s actually the police force’s fault?’ said Pascoe, interested.

‘No. Not as such. Look, I gave it another try down here. I tried to be what everyone told me a good cop should be, so that ultimately I could fit in and really help. Enscombe seemed so together, so very much itself, that I felt I should be able to make it work here if I could make it work anywhere. But after a while it began to feel just like it felt up in Newcastle, I was going nowhere, nothing was happening, and that’s when you start wondering if maybe the reason there’s so much crap in the world is that that’s the natural state of things, and you begin to suspect that even in a place like this, if you probe too far beneath the surface, you’ll find it bubbling around down there, the old unchangeable primaeval crap we all came from and we’re all going back to. I got very depressed. Then I met Fran, and that changed things completely for me personally. I knew I had to leave the Force, of course. It was the wrong place for me. I saw now that in a perfect world we wouldn’t need the police, so there was no way I could work towards that perfection while I was actually part of one of the main symbols of imperfection, was there?’

‘You know,’ said Dalziel, ‘could be I’m wrong about you, lad. You spout that stuff in court and mebbe you won’t get banged up in jail for five years, they’ll just throw you into a psycho ward for life! Now, Chief Inspector Pascoe, this being your case, strictly speaking, if you haven’t forgotten the words, would you like to arrest Mr Bendish, or shall I?’

‘Don’t you think we ought to talk to the others concerned?’ said Pascoe. ‘I mean, Mr Halavant hasn’t yet made a formal complaint. And if in fact this picture does indeed really belong to Fran …’

Wield, seeing that the Fat Man was getting close to apoplexy, looked at his watch and said, ‘They’ll likely all be at the Squire’s Reckoning, sir. I get the impression no one in these parts misses out on a free feast, not when Miss Creed’s been doing the baking.’

The angry blood hesitated, hung in suspense, then began to retreat from Dalziel’s face.

‘I’m glad there’s still one of you can talk some sense,’ he said. ‘On your feet, lad. Let’s go and see if this Reckoning’s all it’s cracked up to be!’