Ruling Passion

Chapter 4

Back at the office Pascoe found a message on his desk. Sturgeon had rung several times that morning. 'Sounded urgent,' said the note cryptically, 'but wouldn't say what.'

Silly old sod! thought Pascoe. Does he think I've nothing better to do than make stupid bloody telephone calls to Scotland?

But he reached for the phone, at the same time digging into his breast pocket for Sturgeon's scrap of paper. He sorted it out with some difficulty from the large collection of frayed and folded stationery the pocket contained. It was a kind of portable (and permanent) filing cabinet. A sergeant's pay did not encourage the wearing of any great variety of clothes.

The phone rang for more than a minute before it was answered.

'Can you no' wait?' demanded a Scots voice, the owner of which then apparently dropped the receiver to the floor and went back to whatever business had been interrupted. It seemed to involve drawing a metal edge down a sheet of glass.

Eventually he returned and after some coaxing revealed himself as Sergeant Lauder. He was even more reluctant to accept that Pascoe was, in fact, Pascoe; and only an exasperated invitation to him to replace the receiver and make further investigations at Mid-Yorkshire HQ persuaded him to concede the point. As soon as Pascoe mentioned Archie Selkirk of Strath Farm, Lauder's doubts seemed to reassert themselves.

'Is that you?' he demanded. 'Is it you again, man?'

'It's me. Sergeant Pascoe. For God's sake! Can't you understand?'

'No need to blaspheme, whomever you are. Then you're no' the one who phoned yesterday?'

'No, I'm not. If I'd phoned yesterday, I wouldn't be… oh, forget it! What about Archie Selkirk?'

'Ay, well, Archie Selkirk, is it? That's what the one yesterday was asking about too.'

'What?' Pascoe was suddenly interested. 'Didn't he give a name?'

'No. No name.'

'Yorkshire accent?'

'Perhaps. Perhaps. But you all sound much the same to me.'

'Well, what did you tell him?' demanded Pascoe.

'Just the same as I'm going to tell you, Sergeant Pascoe,' answered Lauder, still by his intonation managing to infuse a great deal of incredulity into the last two words.

'And what's that.'

'Simply, there's no such man. Not farming round here, that is.'

'You're sure?'

Lauder indicated by his heavily scornful silence that he was sure.

'And Strath Farm?'

'No.'

'No such farm.'

'Aye.'

'And you told this to the man yesterday.'

'Aye.'

The pips went.

'This must be costing the ratepayers a mint of money,' said Lauder, stung out of monosyllables.

'Aye,' said Pascoe. 'Thanks.'

He pressed the rest, got the dialling tone, and dialled Sturgeon's number.

The old sod must have got impatient and decided to do it himself, thought Pascoe. Why he couldn't do it in the first place, God knows. And why had he rung so urgently that morning?

The phone was still ringing. He glanced at his watch and groaned. Time was marching by and there was work to be done. Sturgeon would have to wait. In any case, he almost certainly knew what Pascoe had to tell him. Though what it could mean teased the mind. But there was a murder waiting to be solved.

He replaced the receiver and set off for the late Matthew Lewis's office.

Dalziel came from behind the screen with all the demureness and probably the total volume of Gilbert's three little maids from school. He pulled himself together as he caught the glint of amusement in the eyes of the solitary witness and removed his instinctively modest hand from his crotch.

'You'd think someone as rich as you could keep this bloody place warm!' he snapped, blowing into his hands. 'Let's get it over with before I freeze to death.'

'Now you know how it feels to be one of those poor bastards you torture in your cells,' grunted Grainger, the doctor.

He and Dalziel were old acquaintances. Each affected to believe the other embodied all the public misconceptions and suspicions of his profession. Secretly they were not altogether convinced this was not in fact true.

Grainger began his examination. It had seemed an excellent opportunity to give Dalziel a thorough overhaul when the other man had made this, his first appointment in half a dozen years. Now, ignoring Dalziel's impatient protests, he took his time as he moved from one part of the test-sequence to the next.

'Do they pay you by the hour?' grumbled the superintendent. 'Look, while I'm here, you might as well make yourself useful. What can you tell me about diabetes? Or didn't they discover it till after you graduated from the barber's shop?'

'You don't think you've got diabetes, do you?' asked Grainger. 'You haven't. God knows what else is wrong with you, but you're not diabetic.'

'Thanks. No. There's someone we're anxious to see and he's got diabetes.'

'How do you know?' asked Grainger. 'Turn over, will you, if you can manage without a lever.'

'He left a kettleful of piss behind him.'

'Jesus!' said Grainger, pausing with his stethoscope poised. 'I thought my job brought me life in the raw.'

'You don't know you're living. Come on then. Diabetes. What can you tell me about our man?'

'It's not as simple as that,' answered Grainger, 'as I'm sure your police-surgeon would be only too pleased to tell you. There are three types of diabetes for a start, Type A, Type B…'

'And Type C. Christ, is that what you spend five years learning? The bloody alphabet?'

'… and Type AB,' continued Grainger, unperturbed. 'Type A's the most popularly known form, though by no means the commonest. If you've got Type A it means you're dependent on insulin injections for the rest of your life. It usually manifests itself in young people. Classified symptoms are excessive hunger and thirst and frequent urination.'

'In a kettle,' said Dalziel, interested.

'That might be a symptom of something to a psychologist, not to me,' said the doctor. 'Sit up. My God, what a gut you've got, Andy. If you were going to get diabetes, it'd be Type B. It usually doesn't strike till middle-age and the victims are nearly always overweight. It's the most common form of the disease and is usually treated orally rather than through insulin injections.'

'You mean they drink the stuff?'

'No! Insulin's got to be injected. They take something else, a hypoglycaemic agent – that means something which lowers the amount of sugar in the blood.'

'And Type AB?'

'Stress diabetes. This is a form bought on by an undue emotional or physical stress. People in their thirties or forties get it. Symptoms in its mild form are much for Type B, only the victim's not overweight. On the contrary, he's often underweight. But violent stress can bring on a violent reaction and make the patient insulin-dependent, for a while at least. Stand up now.'

Dalziel obeyed, groaning.

'Well, you've been a great help. We're looking for a thin man of thirty or forty, or a fat man of forty or fifty, or a thin or fat man of almost any age at all.'

'It could be a woman,' suggested the doctor.

'Get stuffed. Look, for God's sake, how long are you going to be? I've got work to do.'

'Another twenty minutes. Here, that is,' answered Grainger. 'Then I've fixed up for you to be X-rayed at the hospital. You'll be done by tea-time.'

'What the hell do you think I've got?' demanded Dalziel with an aggression meant to be comic.

But he heard in his voice the frightened plea of the suspect demanding to be told the nature of the charge.

Lewis and Cowley Estates was the kind of firm which did not put the prices of its property in the window. Rare for Yorkshire, thought Pascoe. They generally liked a price-tag on everything. Brass was a matter of general public concern.

The 'closed' sign was up in the velvet-curtained window, but he could see movement inside. He rapped sharply on the door. And again after a few seconds.

A thin-faced man appeared, stared assessingly at Pascoe for a moment, decided rightly that as a potential customer he did not promise much, and gesticulated at the 'closed' sign.

For answer Pascoe produced his warrant-card, pressed it to the glass and imitated the man's gesture.

The man stepped back, turned and seemed to be saying something to whoever was in the office with him. Then he opened the door.

'Mr Cowley?' asked Pascoe.

'Yes?'

'Detective-Sergeant Pascoe, sir. May I come in?'

Cowley was in his early thirties. He was excessively lean and hungry-looking and he carried his head thrust forward aggressively, putting Pascoe in mind of a beefeater's pike.

'Is it about Matthew? I talked to some of your people yesterday, you know. At length.'

Pascoe stepped by him into the front-office. No vulgar counter here, but a scattering of comfortable chairs and low tables on which gleamed copies of Country Life and Vogue. Three doors opened off this area, one marked Mr Lewis, another Mr Cowley, while the third, the central one, was unmarked and presumably led to their secretary's office.

'I won't take long,' said Pascoe. 'Shall we sit down?'

Cowley glanced towards the door of his room which was slightly ajar. Pascoe courteously suspended his buttocks six inches above the nearest chair and looked up expectantly. Like a dog waiting for a biscuit.

'Oh, all right,' said Cowley.

With an audible sigh of relief, Pascoe sank into the soft leather.

'But make it quick, will you? I do have a client with me at the moment.'

Pascoe felt slightly disappointed the man had admitted someone else was here. Part of the joy of being a detective was having something to detect.

'Business goes on?' he murmured sadly. 'Of course; it must. I'll try not to keep you, sir. Now, as I understand it, Mr Lewis drove down from Scotland on Monday to attend a business conference?'

'That's right.'

'I see. Now, at the conference there were yourself, and Mr Lewis and…?'

'And no one. That was it.'

'Really?' said Pascoe, infusing just a touch of polite surprise into his voice. 'Your secretary, perhaps?'

'No.'

'No. I see. But she would be here… somewhere?'

He waved his hand vaguely towards the central office. He always enjoyed this vague-young-man-from-the-Foreign-Office role.

'No. Monday's our staff half-day. We don't fit in with the shops. That way our girls can go shopping.'

'And shopkeepers can go house-hunting? Convenient. So there were the two of you only?'

'I've told you,' said Cowley, exasperated. 'What's the difficulty?'

'No difficulty. I merely wondered, if just the two of you were involved, why not conduct your conference on the phone? Why break into Mr Lewis's holiday like this? I know how much I value my two weeks' peace and quiet, ho ho.'

'Do you? Well, Matt liked to work. In any case, he was up and down to Scotland half a dozen times a year. He owns – owned – a cottage there, so it was no skin off his nose coming back.'

'A cottage. Nice. Well, I take your point, Mr Cowley, but it still must have been a fairly important matter.'

'Not very. It needed a quick decision, that was all.'

'A business matter?'

'Of course.'

'Routine, but urgent? Timewise, I mean.'

'That's it. You've got it. Now, please, Sergeant, could we get on?'

'Of course. Just another minute, sir.'

Another minute spread to ten. Pascoe could not really say why he was trying to niggle this man, except that his air of chronic impatience seemed to invite such treatment, just as some people look so self-effacing and humble, it is difficult not to tread on them.

But after ten minutes, all Pascoe had was the mixture as before, and Cowley's annoyance was reaching legitimately large proportions. At last Pascoe beat a strategic retreat, feeling he had wasted his time. Despite this, he wasted another fifteen minutes sitting in his car thirty yards up the road until Cowley too came out accompanied by a grey-haired, stocky man in an old tweed suit. Pascoe had never seen him before. It didn't seem very likely he would ever see him again. He glanced at his notebook which held the names and addresses of Lewis and Cowley's two secretary/typists. Doubtless they would be enjoying their unexpected day off, perhaps a little worried about the job now with half their employers dead.

He shut the notebook with a snap and leaned his head hard against the cool glass of the windscreen. It was so easy. So easy to forget what a death could mean to other people. For all he knew, there could have been a close relationship between Lewis and his secretary. Sexual perhaps; such things were commonplace. Or perhaps she just liked him, admired him, shared jokes with him. What did it matter? What did matter was that he, Detective-Sergeant Peter Pascoe, should not so easily brutalize in his mind people he had not met.

He glanced at his book once more. Marjory Clayton, 13 Woodview Drive. Not far from old Sturgeon's place, if his geography were right. He ought to look in and have a word with Sturgeon while he was out that way.

But first things first. He let in the clutch and set off for Woodview Drive.

Sturgeon had been heading steadily south for the past half-hour. He knew he wasn't going fast enough, but his right foot seemed weightless, not able to cope with the job of depressing the accelerator. Ferrybridge and its great cooling towers, the Age of Industry's version of Stonehenge, had moved slowly by a few minutes earlier. The Doncaster bypass was not far ahead, and then the road would split, giving a choice between the Al and the Ml, two great alimentary tracts via which the north voided its products into London.

London still had a sinful sound to him. True, in his sixty-eight years he had been there a couple of dozen times, perhaps more; but always it was the first time he recalled, and his old grandmother who had never been farther south than Newark sewing his purse to his woollen vest as a precaution against pickpockets.

But now the days of such precautions were by. He smiled at the double irony of the thought and glanced at his watch. Mavis, his wife, would be getting home soon. She was rarely late back from shopping because she did not like to leave the cats. Though of course she would not think the house would be empty. But it wouldn't perturb her, not Mavis. Not at first. She'd set about making his tea with swift, deft, long-practised movement. He owed her much. She'd married beneath her, so her relatives had said or plainly hinted. There'd been a bit of brass there. But he'd never taken any; he had shown them; by his own efforts with his own hands. He had shown them.

It had started raining, a fine misty rain out of which a slow lorry suddenly appeared ahead, snapping him back to the present. He swung out sharply to overtake. Behind him a blue van, breaking the speed-limit on the outside lane, bore down on him relentlessly, flashing its lights.

He stamped on the accelerator now, finding his strength. The Rover leapt forward, the loose seat-belt buckle swinging noisily against the door. In a few seconds his speed had doubled.

It was all a question of timing really. He suddenly felt optimistic. It was the right thing to do, there was no alternative. The thing was to do it right. He opened his mouth in triumphant song. The road glistened damply.

Behind him, the driver of the blue van watched in disbelieving horror the beginnings of the skid. This couldn't be happening just because he had flashed his lights. It couldn't be!

The road here was slightly raised above the level of the surrounding countryside. The car slid gracefully off the hard surface, struck the grass-verge, then flipped sideways and over down the embankment.

By the time the van-driver halted and made his way to the car, everything was quite, quite still.

The royal-blue Mini-Cooper, backed deep into a tunnel of hawthorn and briar, was still too. The small boy approached it carefully. He had been observing it just as carefully from his hiding-place for. the past ten minutes. At last he was satisfied that it was just as unoccupied as it had been the first time he noticed it two days earlier.

The boy had very good reason for not wishing to be observed. Of all the places his kill-joy parents proscribed, this was placed under their most severe proscription. To be found here would be to risk the most dreadful punishments. The reason lay fifteen yards or so behind him where the sheer walls of the old clay-pit, rimmed now with a double thickness of barbed-wire, fell fifty feet to the opaque waters below.

He'd reached the car and peered in. It was, as expected, empty. But the key was in the ignition which meant that whoever owned it might not be far away. Yet he was certain its position had not changed since he first spotted it. All in all, it was worth taking the risk of looking inside.

Disappointingly it contained little of interest. A sheet of paper had been left on the passenger seat with a lot of writing on it. But he couldn't make a great deal of sense of it.

Rain spattered on the windscreen. It was time to go. He walked back towards the clay-pit and through the gap in the wire to peer down once more at the water. If the rain really got going again, would the surface of the water ever reach the top? It was an interesting speculation, but the growing co-operation of the rain-clouds made him cut it short and retreat. It was a useful gap, this. Eventually someone would notice and repair it, but not many people came this way.

Like the car, it was his secret for the moment.

Wet but happy, he began to make his way home to the village.