Ruling Passion

PART TWO
Chapter 1

'You look as if you've been shagging a sheep,' said Dalziel with distaste.

Thus spoke the last of the dandies, thought Pascoe, glancing at his superior's shapeless trousers and the military-issue braces, strained dangerously taut over a parabolic waist. But he had to admit that he had brought back with him a lot of white hairs.

'Funny how some dogs lose them but never go bald,' he said brushing ineffectually at his trouser legs.

Dalziel grinned humourlessly and scratched one of the shining deltas on his grey, stubbly pate.

'Not much of a guard-dog,' he said.

'It's a pom,' Pascoe said patiently. 'And they don't leave it in the house when they're on holiday. Not for a fortnight. The RSPCA object.'

'Silly twats,' said Dalziel. 'He'd be two thousand quid better off if there'd been a hungry dog in the house.'The insurance will pay,' said Pascoe indifferently.

'You're not suggesting anything?'

'What? No. Christ, why would he want to try a fiddle like this? Twenty thousand, yes. But this is pin money. You've seen the house?'

'No. But you can't always tell. Still, you're right. It's almost certainly our lad, your lad. I can't see Mr Stan Cottingley piddling in his own kettle.'

The thought amused him and he laughed himself into a fit of coughing into his outsize khaki handkerchief.

He's not well, thought Pascoe suddenly.

I'm not well, thought Dalziel for the tenth time that morning. There was a pain across his chest. It was a broad chest, so it was a broad pain. If there had been anyone to mop his fevered brow and ladle out the nourishing broth, he might have stayed in bed that Monday morning. More probably he would have dismissed such solicitude with his customary brusqueness and come in to work anyway.

He looked at Pascoe gloomily and wondered if he should tell him that his promotion was as good as confirmed. Once again he decided against it. Promotion should mean something, be marked by a drink and a bit of jollity. In present circumstances he doubted if Pascoe would react at all. It would be a pity to waste what was a minor triumph. Pascoe could have achieved inspector status at least twelve months earlier if he had stayed in, or been willing to return to, uniformed duties. But the lad had been adamant. The career of administrator and ideas-man his background seemed to equip him for had not appealed. He wanted to be a detective.

And he wasn't making a bad job of it, thought Dalziel with a creator's pride, as he examined again the meticulously prepared file on the string of burglaries which was the sergeant's main case at present. His own interest was twofold. A single break-in at a private house was rarely enough to involve the majesty of a detective-superintendent. But a long sequence – eleven now, almost certainly all by the same man – began to achieve the status of a major crime. Especially when there was reason to believe the perpetrator would resort to extreme violence if interrupted. At the fifth house a pensioner who did odd-jobs in the neighbourhood had been contracted by the owner to keep an eye on the garden while the family were away. Conscientiously, the old man had turned up late one summer evening to water the borders out of the heat of the sun. A man had emerged from the kitchen door as he passed, almost bumping into him. Without hesitation, the intruder had launched into a violent attack. Only the fact that the old man rode a moped and had not yet removed the crash-helmet he always wore saved him from serious damage. But the force of the blow from what was probably a crowbar left deep indentations in the helmet and was sufficient to stun the wearer.

This was the only sighting of the man there had been and the description was almost useless. But the incident was deeply worrying. All the break-ins had taken place when the houses were empty, usually when the owners were on holiday. If this pattern continued, interruption was unlikely. But if it did happen again, there might be no protective headgear next time.

He tossed aside the file with another string of coughs. Meticulousness was not enough. There was nothing there which turned him in any particular direction. Perhaps Pascoe's mind would be programmed by it to some effect. Himself, he needed something more animal; a scent. He sniffed in unconscious acknowledgement of the thought.

Pascoe, he decided, needed chivvying. It would take his mind off things.

'It's more than twelve thousand now with Cottingley's bits and pieces.'

'Thirteen thousand one hundred and thirty-five,' said Pascoe. 'According to the insurance count, that is.'

He glanced at his watch. He had promised to phone Ellie at lunch-time. It was a necessary contact. It might not prove possible to meet at night. Too often in the past he had had to cancel engagements at the last moment. Last Friday, for instance.

'He must be getting rid of the stuff somewhere.'

'The thought had crossed my mind,' sneered Pascoe.

Dalziel rose and stared down at him, removing the thick-rimmed spectacles he wore for reading. It was a menacing gesture.

‘That's far enough, Sergeant,' he said. 'It's been a bad week-end for you. But there hasn't been a civil word from you since you came in this morning. I hope to God you spoke to Cottingley a bit fairer.'

By Dalziel's standards, it was a mildly expressed rebuke, but Pascoe felt a touch of shame.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Sir. I have this feeling of – well – frustration… as if…'

But Dalziel had no desire for a heart-to-heart talk. His pain was worse. Indigestion, he decided with desperate optimism. Too much stodge, not enough exercise. A brisk walk to the chemist's would do him good.

'Get your finger out, Sergeant,' he said wearily. ‘There's some good descriptions there. He can't just be filling his bottom drawer with what he takes. It must turn up somewhere.'

He left. Pascoe should have felt indignant, hurt even. But oddly enough he felt almost affectionate as the sound of coughing receded down the corridor.

'Hello, love. You all right?'

'Fine. Lots of sympathy concealing academic ghoulishness. No reaction from my students, though. They don't believe we have lives separate from them. How was the Fat Man?'

'A bit under the weather, I think. But pretty considerate for him. We're very busy.'

‘That's good. At the moment anyway. But is it late-busy?'

'I don't know. I'll ring when I do.'

'Please. Peter, I dreamt about them last night.'

'Oh, love.'

'We were back in Eskdale. Remember? Only it was Brookside Cottage, not that old grey farmhouse. A thought struck me. Colin might have gone back there.'

'Why?'

'I don't know. Just a thought. It was where my mind took me to get away from them being dead. Understand?'

'I think so.' He was silent for a moment. 'Look, I've got to go now. Sooner I get started, more chance of seeing you tonight.'

'Right. I'll hear from you later. 'Bye.'

"Bye.'

The trouble with most of the stuff Pascoe's burglar got hold of was that it was valuable without being unique. The kind of houses he chose had enough good china, brass, bronze, silver and, occasionally, gold, lying around in one form or another to make his visit worthwhile. Bits of jewellery, cash even, generally quite inadequately locked away, were a frequent perk.

His technique as reconstructed by Pascoe was simple. He chose houses with gardens large enough to provide some kind of seclusion; drove up in his car (they had some completely unhelpful tyre marks); parked out of sight of the road, in the garage sometimes; smashed a window to get in (noise was no object where there was seclusion; on one occasion he had simply chopped down a kitchen door); examined the interior at leisure; filled a suitcase or two with whatever he evaluated highest; and left.

At first the break-ins had been straightforward. The first couple of houses looked as if they hadn't been touched. But an element of despoilation had crept in. Walls were defaced, carpets stained, furniture scarred. At Cottingley's house, the latest in the series, perhaps in acknowledgement of the value of his haul, he had merely left a kettle full of urine. Or perhaps, thought Pascoe, this marked a new direction. Defacation, masturbation even, during thefts of this kind were not uncommon elements in a certain criminal syndrome, frequently associated with great mental and emotional instability. He recalled uneasily the attack on the old man.

None of the stuff had turned up, not locally anyway, so there must be an efficient distribution system. Not that a great deal of it would be clearly identifiable in any case. The latest haul had been typical. A small amount of silver, as valuable melted down as in its present form. Some valuable but not unique glass. Ornaments. Some jewellery. An old clock. And Mrs Cottingley's collection of stones and pebbles, picked up all over the world, as she accompanied her husband on his frequent business trips. Only the clock offered them any real chance.

What he needed was a lead. At the moment there was not a useful thought in his head.

'Stuff it,' he said, and picked up his morning newspaper which he had not yet had time to open.

Colin peered out at him from near the bottom of the front page. For a moment he thought it meant they had found him, but it was only an appeal for public help. The short piece on the killings contained nothing new. There were a couple of meaningless quotations from Backhouse and, more surprisingly, a little harangue about the public weal from French, the coroner. Clearly he was a man who liked to be noticed.

He turned the pages to escape the photograph. Other people's troubles seemed to start from every column. Explosions, revolution, unemployment, a couple of strikes; a trade union leader in Bradford was accused of corruption; an international footballer had been suspended; a mineral mining company was accused of despoiling bonny Scotland. He looked at the last item more closely. The company was Nordrill; Culpepper's firm he recalled. Suddenly he was back in Thornton Lacey.

He crumpled the newspaper in his hands and dropped it into the waste bin. There was a knock at the door and a young head peered cheerfully round.

'Excuse me, Sarge, but there's a Mr Sturgeon here. Says you'll be glad to see him.'

'Will I?' said Pascoe. 'OK. Show him in.'

Edgar Sturgeon had been number five in the list of victims. Pascoe remembered him well, partly because he had lost a stamp collection valued at just under a thousand pounds and partly because he hadn't seemed particularly distressed to find his house burgled on return from holiday. In some people this would have been suspicious but Pascoe couldn't find it in him to suspect the old man of being bent. They had almost instantly taken a liking to each other – not the kind of reason for quieting suspicion that Dalziel liked, but, in any case, Sturgeon was too comfortably placed to need an insurance fiddle. A self-made man, he had recently retired, having sold out his interest in the local timber-yard he had built up from nothing over forty years. Perhaps he was not quite ready for the life of easy retirement his comfortable wife and her three tortoiseshell cats had planned for him, and Pascoe had suspected from his lively demeanour that he was still putting his business acumen to some profitable use.

'Hello, Mr Sturgeon. Come on in,' he said with a smile.

'Hello, Sergeant Pascoe,' said the grizzle-haired, thick-set man who slowly entered.

He looks older, thought Pascoe. And his demeanour was now far from lively.

'What can I do for you?' he asked.

Sturgeon sat down and took an envelope out of his breast-pocket.

'I've got some of my stamps back,' he said flatly.

'Have you indeed? That's great. Where from?'

'A friend of mine. I saw him at the club on Saturday and he told me he'd bought some stamps for his nephew's birthday. Coronation set 1953. Couple of quids' worth. He asked me to take a look to tell him if he'd been done or not.'

Pascoe looked with interest at the block of four stamps he had shaken carefully out of the envelope. They were unfranked.

'How can you be sure these are yours?' he asked, after vainly trying to spot any distinguishing feature.

'Them's mine all right,' asserted Sturgeon. 'Give us some credit, lad! I did a little repair job on the big 'un. You can hardly see it, but it means it's worth precious little. My mate was done! And if you look at the back you can see how they've been mounted. They don't do that nowadays but when I started, you stuck 'em in.'

'I'll take your word,' said Pascoe, glad to see the old man a little more lively. 'This friend, where'd he get them?'

'Etherege and Burne-Jones. Out at Birkham.'

'Birkham? Yes, I know it.'

Birkham was a village a few miles to the east. It made a useful half-way meeting point for Ellie and Pascoe, particularly as it possessed in the Jockey a very pleasant pub which provided excellent steaks. The only trouble was that, as always, excellence and beauty attracted crowds and Birkham was a fashionable place both to visit and to inhabit. The architectural and gastronomical delights of the place had been examined in a colour supplement article about a year previously and this had naturally increased its popularity.

It was, thought Pascoe with a small shock of recognition, a kind of Yorkshire Thornton Lacey.

He shook his mind free from the thought and concentrated on Messrs Etherege and Burne-Jones. He knew their shop, a converted barn, by sight but had never been inside. To a policeman's eyes, all second-hand shops, whether claiming to deal in 'antiques' or 'junk', were suspect. They provided the best and most obvious outlet for stolen property. But in his experience, a fashionable establishment like the one at Birkham was less likely to be used for this than its urban counterpart. The opportunities for legal dishonesty in the selling of 'antiques' were too great to make fencing a worthwhile risk.

'What will you do?' asked Sturgeon.

'We'll take a look, of course. See if there's anything else of yours there. You say you were shown the stamps on Saturday night? Why didn't you get in touch yesterday?'

Sturgeon shrugged.

'It didn't seem worth spoiling your week-end,' he said.

Pascoe stood up and crossed to a filing cabinet which he opened and peered into.

‘That was kind of you,’ he said after a while. If his voice sounded strange, Sturgeon obviously did not notice. He sat staring dully at the desk before him.

He's not interested in the stamps, thought Pascoe suddenly. There's something else.

He extracted a file from the open drawer.

'We have an inventory of your stuff here, Mr Sturgeon,' he said. 'Now this would be item 27, wouldn't it?'

Sturgeon looked and nodded. Quickly and efficiently Pascoe drafted out a statement for the man to sign. But when he had done so, he seemed reluctant to leave.

'Sergeant,' he said. 'Could you do something for me?'

'Depends what is,' said Pascoe.

Sturgeon produced a piece of paper. It had a name and address written on it. He passed it to Pascoe who read it without enlightenment.

Archie Selkirk, Strath Farm, Lochart, Nr Callander.

'Lochart's a village in Perthshire,' said Sturgeon, speaking quickly as if eager to get the words out. 'There's a police-sergeant stationed there. It'll be like it is in the villages round here – everyone knowing everyone else's business. Could you ring this sergeant and ask him what he knows about that man?'

'Archie Selkirk?' said Pascoe thoughtfully. 'I'm not sure, Mr Sturgeon. What is it you want to find out?'

'Nothing,’ said Sturgeon. 'Nothing in particular. Just anything that might be known. Can you help?'

'Well, I'll see what can be done. But people have got a right to privacy, you know, Mr Sturgeon. The police force can't just be used as an information centre. We've got to have some reason for making inquiries.'

Sturgeon stood up, pushing his chair back angrily.

'If you can't help, you can't help,' he snapped and made for the door.

'Hold on!' said Pascoe. 'I said I'd see what I could do.'

'Please yourself,' said Sturgeon stonily and left, closing the door forcefully behind him.

Pascoe took a couple of steps after him, then 'Shit!' he said and sat down. His business was crime. Today he would stick to it and leave the social therapy to others.

He thrust Sturgeon's piece of paper into his breast pocket and went down to the canteen for lunch.

He had a hard but totally unproductive afternoon. Paperwork seemed to come at him from all sides and his one excursion into the outside world proved fruitless too. The 'closed' sign was up in the premises of Etherege and Burne-Jones at Birkham and he had a flat tyre on the journey back. He changed the wheel in record time, determined that at least the evening was going to remain unspoilt.

His haste turned out to be unnecessary. When he rang Ellie at five-thirty to say it looked as if he was going to be able to get away that evening, she answered in a voice distant with fatigue.

'I'm whacked, Peter,' she said. 'It just came on this afternoon. I had to send a class away. They probably reckon I'm pregnant. Or at the menopause, more likely.'

Her effort at lightness failed miserably.

'Have you seen a doctor?' asked Pascoe anxiously.

'Hell, no. I got some pills from the college sick-bay. Guaranteed to knock me out.'

'Pills? Don't you think you should…'

'Oh, stop fussing!' she snapped in irritation. 'We've got a trained nurse here and she only doles out two of these things at a time, so there's not much risk of an overdose.'

'I didn't mean… all I said was…’

'OK, Peter. I'm sorry, love. I'm beat. All I want is a dose of oblivion, a nice, effective, SRN-measured dose. Would you mind if we scrubbed round this evening? Hell, we'd just sit and look miserably at each other anyway. What can you talk about when there's only one thing to talk about? No news yet?'

'Nothing.'

'Well. No news is…'

'… no news. That's all.'

'Yes. Ring me tomorrow, will you?'

'Yes. Look, Ellie, let's have lunch together. I'm going to be out at Birkham in the morning. It’s not so far for you to come. We'll have a bowl of soup at the Jockey.'

'OK. About one; that suit? Good. 'Bye.'

'Bye, love.'

He replaced the receiver thoughtfully.

'What's the attraction at Birkham? Apart from the soup.'

Dalziel was standing at the door. You had to admire the way the man made no effort to conceal his eavesdropping. Or perhaps you didn't have to admire it at all. It was no use protesting about it, that was certain.

Quickly he filled him in on the day's events.

'Precious bloody little,' he grunted. 'If we got paid by results, there'd be a lot of hungry buggers in this building tonight.' He coughed ferociously into his large khaki handkerchief.

'I'd see about that cough, sir,' suggested Pascoe diffidently.

'Would you now?' said Dalziel. 'Well, Sergeant, as you seem to be at a loose end tonight, you can stroll me quietly down to the Black Eagle and buy me some medicine. George, you coming?'

The inspector thus addressed as he moved past the door in his raincoat didn't pause in his stride.

'Not tonight, thanks, sir,' his voice receded. 'Urgently expected at home.'

Pascoe admired him. It took a good man to keep going when Dalziel spoke. Perhaps that was the quality he lacked, which would keep him a sergeant all his days.

'The girl, she's all right?' asked Dalziel as they stepped out into the cool evening air.

'Yes, thanks.'

'Good. She seemed tough enough.'

Dalziel had met Ellie during an investigation at the college where she lectured, the same investigation which had brought Ellie and Pascoe almost reluctantly together again after years without contact. Pascoe was still not certain about the depth and strength of their relationship. They met regularly, slept together when they felt like it (which meant when Ellie felt like it: Pascoe nearly always did), but their intimate talk was always of the shared past, never a shared future. The week-end at Thornton Lacey had seemed in prospect something of a proving ground. It might still turn out to have been so.

But the relationship between Dalziel and Ellie was clear enough. They did not like each other. Each was the other's bogeyman, monstrous and against nature – Dalziel the brute with power and Ellie the woman with brains. Pascoe sometimes felt it would be very easy to find himself crushed to death between them.

'I had a word with Backhouse earlier. He was cagey, but he's no further forward.'

Dalziel made it sound as if in Backhouse's place he would have been a great deal further forward.

'There's not much he can do, sir,' said Pascoe, deciding he might as well go along with this we-can-discuss-the-case-coolly therapy. 'Not until they find Colin.'

'If he did it. Which seems likely. What seems likely is usually what happened. Though there is one thing.'

What the one thing consisted of was not to be immediately revealed. They passed through the saloon bar door of the Black Eagle as Dalziel spoke. The barman stood with the telephone to his ear.

'Just a minute,' he said. ‘For you, Mr Dalziel.'

Dalziel listened with nothing more than a couple of grunts and one long cough.

'Right,' he said finally. 'Send a car.'

He replaced the receiver firmly. Pascoe looked at him expectantly.

'Just in time for a drink,' said Dalziel. 'Two scotches, Tommy. Quick as you like.'

'We're going out,' stated Pascoe.

'Right. Good job your bit of fluff's tired. Cheers.'

He downed his scotch in one.

'Laddo's been at it again,' he continued. 'Only this time he was interrupted.'

'You mean we've got a witness?' asked Pascoe hopefully.

'No. From the sound of it we've got a corpse.'