Ruling Passion

Chapter 2

Dalziel didn't know whether to be happy or ashamed at the growing frequency of his bouts of lust. In his league of gross appetites, sex had always come a very poor third to whisky and food. Perhaps it was his recently initiated diet which had unbalanced things, but lust had suddenly rocketed to the top, taking him quite by surprise. Also surprising was the cause of it, Ellie Soper in a simple cotton dress which let the sunlight filter through.

He stood up as she approached his table. It was pleasant out here in the little garden of the Jockey with this extra bonus of summer making the Martini sunshades rather less ludicrous than usual.

'Like what you see?' she asked as she sat down. He realized he had been staring.

'It'll be cold in an hour,' he said.

'What will be?'

‘It didn't do to start lusting after subordinates' womenfolk, he thought. Especially when they were sharp-tongued and ill-disposed.

'What'll you drink?' he asked, sitting down abruptly. 'Sam!'

'Yes, Mr Dalziel?' said the barman, appearing with great smartness.

'Gin and tonic,' said Ellie. 'It must be nice to be known.'

'Not always. It's nice here though.' He nodded approvingly at the village of Birkham.

'It's convenient,' said Ellie. 'It's half-way. I like to meet people half-way.'

What am I doing here? wondered Dalziel.

'Now, what are we doing here?' asked Ellie.

'Christ knows,' grunted Dalziel. 'I'm giving an explanation. You might like to think it's an apology.'

'As long as it's just that. I get suspicious when middle-aged men start ringing me up as soon as my boy-friend's gone away for the night.'

'Don't flatter yourself,' said Dalziel. He scratched his armpit. If they thought he was bloody repulsive, he might as well look bloody repulsive.

'It's the inquest tomorrow then.'

'Yes.'

'You know why they've reopened it? Normally nothing'd happen. The police would get a man, he'd be tried, found guilty. The registrar of deaths would put it in his book. Murder, manslaughter, whatever. This lot's different. They'll bring in a verdict of murder and name Colin Hopkins.'

'But why?'

'No one down there thinks the body's ever going to come up. At least it might not. It's hard to do things in law without a body. But they've got three others for the coroner to work on.'

Ellie's drink arrived. The barman looked in mock amazement at Dalziel's still untouched glass.

'On the wagon, Mr Dalziel?'

'I'm being dragged behind, Sam.'

'Well, don't forget, there's a big one in the bottle for you.'

Dalziel waited till he had left their table.

'There was a note, you know. It'll be read. Conclusions drawn. Hopkins named. Everyone sleeps happy in their neighbour's bed.'

'But what if Colin's still alive?' protested Ellie.

'What's the odds? A fake suicide note's as good an admission as a real one.'

'I see,' said Ellie hopelessly. 'Peter thought much the same.'

'He would,' said Dalziel approvingly. 'You know his promotion's through? It'll be official tomorrow.'

'I heard. You're not building up to another warning, are you?'

Dalziel laughed.

'Not really. No. We had a few words about that. I must be getting soft. I can take anything from these lads now. Anything.'

'So I've heard,' said Ellie drily.

'But it made me think. I shouldn't have talked to you on the phone the way I did.

‘No. You bloody well shouldn't.'

'No,’ agreed Dalziel.

'So you're sorry?'

'No point in being sorry. It's past now.'

'Jesus! So?'

'So what?'

'So what are we doing here?'

Abstractedly, Dalziel downed his drink in one swallow then stared at the glass defiantly.

'Listen, I'm good. Of my kind of policeman, I'm probably one of the best Pascoe will ever know. Mind you, I've peed behind too many doors to get much farther. Pascoe, I reckon, of his kind, which looks like being the new kind, can potentially be very good too. Excellent. If I live that long and he keeps going, I could be sirring him before we're finished. So my interest in him is self-interest in a way.'

'You couldn't perhaps like him just a bit as well?' inquired Ellie. She had softened a little but was still very suspicious of this fat bastard.

'He amuses me sometimes,' said Dalziel. 'There's not many as do that.'

'I think I may marry him,' said Ellie thoughtfully.

'Good,' said Dalziel. 'Good. That would be best. I'm glad to hear you say that. Good.'

'Good?' repeated Ellie. 'Why, you fat bastard, that's what you want, isn't it? If you can't get us apart, you might as well get us respectable!'

'I told you I belonged to the old school. There's nowt wrong with a woman that can't be cured by colour telly, wall-to-wall carpeting and a couple of rounds up the spout,' he said with exaggerated coarseness.

Ellie thought of kicking him in the crotch. Then she started laughing. She laughed so much that people turned and stared and the dogs in the nearby kennels started barking wildly as though in reply.

'Let's have another drink,' Dalziel said when she had recovered.

'All right. Just one. Peter's going to phone me at eight. We can breathe heavily down the phone before we're married, can't we?'

She started laughing again. This time Dalziel laughed too.

Pascoe slept for an hour and woke up feeling rotten. He got out of bed to take another pill, felt slightly better and decided to ring Ellie. The phone rang a dozen times. No one answered. He glanced at his watch. Seven o'clock. She'd be having dinner. He went back to bed.

Ellie was enjoying herself. Her previous encounters with Dalziel had always been in polarizing situations. This evening they were keeping steadily on neutral ground and she was finding it a pleasant experience. Like football in no-man's-land during a Great War Christmas.

He was talking about Sturgeon.

'There's only one crime and that's being poor,' he asserted.

'Shaw,' said Ellie, through her fourth large gin. Dalziel took it as an expression of drunken agreement.

'You can grade men according to the way they react to being without money,' he continued.

'You're not going to tell me that the more you've had, the worse it is?' asked Ellie suspiciously. 'More sympathy for the rich, that kind of bullshit?'

'Not at all. Some people can take it. Some are so fond of luxury and position they'll do anything to conceal it. Others have been there before and are absolutely resolved they'll never be there again.'

'Scarlett,' said Ellie. Even making allowances for gin, the chatter of people and the howling of dogs, Dalziel couldn't make sense of this.

'O'Hara,' said Ellie. 'End of Gone With The Wind part one before the intermission.'

'Yes,' said Dalziel. 'Great movie. Sturgeon was like this. Not for himself, mind you. For his wife. He decided she would be better off with the insurance money. She didn't think so.'

'Get his money back.'

'What?'

She leaned towards him, exquisite in the darkling air.

'Get his bloody money back. That's what you're paid for, isn't it?'

'I wish it was as easy as that.'

The Fraud Squad's preliminary report had arrived that afternoon. Quite simply, they could find no case to answer, and as Dalziel could find no one to answer this non-existent case, things were at a stand-still.

It appeared that land had been bought, legitimately bought, from the fringes of the Earl of Callander's huge estate near Lochart. It was land fit for little except grazing sheep and by the terms of the sale not usable for anything else either. A fair price had been given. The land agent who negotiated the sale was acting for a Mr Archibald Selkirk about whom he knew nothing except that he had placed at his disposal an amount of money sufficient to cover the land price and expenses.

On the land was a small dilapidated croft. In the record of the sale Archibald Selkirk had inserted after the single mention of the croft the words hereinafter known as Strath Farm.

So the land Edgar Sturgeon had purchased for something like thirty times its original value had legally been the property of Archie Selkirk of Strath Farm.

Where Archie Selkirk was now, or the money for that matter, was impossible to determine. No papers Sturgeon possessed were anything other than strictly legal. The only evidence of fraud was the extortionate price paid by Sturgeon for the land. And, of course, Sturgeon's story.

'So the poor sod's had it!' exclaimed Ellie indignantly.

'Not altogether. If we can trace the man Atkinson, or Selkirk, we'll have something to work on. But our best bet's dead, of course. Lewis.'

'He was definitely in it?'

'Oh yes. None of the land he's supposed to have bought from Selkirk is registered to him. Poor Sturgeon got the lot. It's a good thing in a way.'

'Why?'

'Well, it's his only asset!' said Dalziel with a grin.

Ellie stood up clutching her handbag to her stomach.

'I was right about you,' she said clearly. 'You're a heartless old bastard.'

'Are you going?' asked Dalziel.

'Only to the loo. I'll have another gin when I get back.'

The Jockey's conveniences were misnamed. The gents consisted of a small brick outhouse, a fearful journey on a rainy night. The ladies was inside at least, but at the end of a long, gloomy corridor at some remove from the drinking areas. In rural Yorkshire the age when women didn't drink and men used the wall outside was never far away.

Ellie was half-way down the corridor when she heard a noise behind her. She began to turn her head, but had only moved it through forty-five degrees when something cold and slimily smooth was thrust down over it. At the same time a knee was rammed jarringly against the base of her spine.

She drew her breath to scream and sucked in a mouthful of the cold and smooth material. She felt her handbag being removed from her unresisting fingers. For a moment the attacker's hand moved to her breast but the movement was acquisitive not exploratory and she felt her pendant being torn from her neck at the same time as she was pushed roughly sideways. Her shins struck something hard and metallic and she fell to the ground. A door clicked shut. Then everything was quiet except for her own spasmodic breathing.

It took her several minutes to realize that she was lying among the buckets in a cleaning store-cupboard, that over her head had been a plastic carrier-bag and, most mercifully, she was alone.

The door turned out to be without a handle on the inside and it took another five minutes to attract attention.

'You've been a long time,' said Dalziel.

'A funny thing happened to me on the way to the loo,' she began.

Pascoe had been sleeping well the second time round. Mrs Crowther's knock woke him from a rather soothing dream in which he was pursuing Pelman slowly round the Kruger National Park.

'I wouldn't have woken you,' said Mrs Crowther, 'only it's your young lady, Miss Soper, and if she don't speak to you she's going to think you're dead.'

It took several minutes to convince Ellie that he was in fact far from death's door, but finally she rather grudgingly accepted the fact.

'It's been a hell of a night so far then,' she said. 'I've been attacked too.'

'What!'

'Yes. A violent assault on my way to the loo in the Jockey. I'm probably dreadfully bruised. And then I was robbed.'

She told the story lightly, but Pascoe was extremely worried.

'Look, love, if they got your keys, you shouldn't stay there alone.'

'Oh, I'm not alone. I'm well protected.'

'Who by?' asked Pascoe with sudden suspicion.

'That very perfect gentle knight – who else? Superintendent Dalziel. He's hovering. I think he'd like a word.'

'Evening, Sergeant. Been in the wars again? Mr Backhouse'll be getting ideas we can't handle ourselves up here.'

'What's the form on this business, sir?' demanded Pascoe impatiently.

'God knows. Accident? Someone saw his chance in the pub, made a grab, then probably drove off home. No one noticed a thing of course!'

'What's been taken?'

'Precious little. A few quid. Toilet stuff. Her pendant. Nothing very valuable, Miss Soper assures me. It seems her men friends don't run to diamond bracelets and strings of pearls.' He laughed throatily. 'It hardly seems worth the effort, does it?'

'That's what worries me, sir.'

'Not to worry, Sergeant. Happens all the time, as we policemen know, eh?'

Dalziel was being diplomatic, Pascoe realized. His lighthearted tone was for Ellie's benefit. But all possible implications of the crime would be considered. Dalziel talked for some time longer, whether to reinforce his carefree role or whether because he believed in cramming every rift with ore it was hard to tell. He passed on the latest reports on the Sturgeon case.

Pascoe's reaction was the same as Ellie's.

'Poor sod!'

'Well, he does own the land. He'll probably be able to flog that for enough to stave off the mortgage sharks from his bungalow for a while. Then I suppose he'll either live off social security or go back to work. He sounds like one of the independent ones to me. No bloody charity and all that.'

'It's a hell of an age to be broke,' said Pascoe.

'Any age is. Lewis must've felt the same. The business was right up shit-creek. Cowley's claiming that things are far worse than he imagined. Says that his partner must have been milking money steadily out of the business account without him knowing.'

'Yes. I was there this morning.' reminded Pascoe.

'So you were. It seems longer. You didn't see that report we got in from that comic Scotsman, though. Jesus! the detail! Nothing new. A bit of a description of Lewis's girl-friend, obviously seen through lust-coloured spectacles. Very exotic she sounds, lots of make-up, revealing clothes, big knockers, just the job for these cold Highland nights.'

'Is Ellie still there, sir?' asked Pascoe reprovingly.

'Yes. She seems to find our constabulary business very amusing. You sure you're OK? Don't hang about after you've given your evidence, will you? We need you here. 'Bye, Sergeant.'

'Hello, love,' said Ellie. 'You take care, will you?'

'Is Dalziel still there?'

'No. He's diplomatically gone for a pee.'

'What the hell were you doing with him tonight? He's not been sticking his nose in again, has he?'

'Calm down, love,' laughed Ellie. 'No. Au contraire, as they say. He wants us to get married.'

'He wants what?'

'Us to marry. You and me, that is, not me and him!'

'Well thank God for that.'

'I told him I'd think about it.'

'Why not?' said Pascoe. He glanced at his watch. Just after eight. It seemed early still. He shook it to make sure it was still going.

'Are you still there?' said Ellie.

'Yes. Just checking the time.'

'Oh.' She sounded faintly disappointed. 'I won’t keep you from your sick-bed, love. See you tomorrow.'

'Yes. Sure. Take care now.'

He felt much better, he realized. Only the slightest headache.

He replaced the receiver and looked at his watch again. He really did feel better.