The Price of Butcher's Meat

5

After Peter Pascoe set off down the drive, Franny Roote had poured another cup of coffee and rolled his chair into the barn. He pointed a remote control at the LCD panel on the wall and watched as a sharp picture of the entrance gate came into view.

Pascoe’s car appeared.

He nodded approval as he saw Peter looking for the sensor and when he waved at the camera, Roote smiled and waved back.

When the car pulled away, he sipped at his coffee and gave himself over to self-examination. He was not by nature introspective but the instinct of self-preservation had long since persuaded him that knowing himself was the key to successful action. Without being a sociopath, he recognized what might be termed sociopathic elements in his makeup. Society to him was an ocean that could either buoy you up or drive you down. He knew how to work with its currents and tides so that they took him where he wanted to be rather than fight against them and risk ending up beached and exhausted. But this did not mean he felt himself detached from society’s conventions and relationships. His immorality had limits and his amorality stopped a long way short of total indifference to ethical judgments. For him the human race was a source of constant entertainment rather than a pernicious race of odious vermin. There were a few of them who inspired in him feelings of loyalty and of love, and even those he regarded as sideshow monsters he could view with an almost affectionate amusement that occasionally came close to sympathy.

Lady Denham had stood high on his list of monsters but he admired her energy, her uncompromising forthrightness, and, though he was thankful not to have run the risk of becoming its object, her undiminished sexual drive. She was like a great bulbous view-blocking beech tree whose removal opened up all kinds of distant vistas, but whose absence you could still deplore. That she’d had some hold over Lester Feldenhammer he was sure. What it was he hadn’t been able to discover, but he’d back Andy Dalziel to suss it out, if he hadn’t done so already. That was the mark of the man, to know things, after less than a fortnight in Sandytown, that the famous Roote nose had not sniffed out with six months’ start! You had to admire the fat bastard. Okay, like Lady D he belonged to the genus monstrum-and he was ten times more dangerous than she was-but though Roote might fear him, he could not get close to hating him.

But it was neither of these monsters who had triggered this bout of self-examination.

It was Pete Pascoe. No monster this, but a man he’d started by respecting and ended by loving.

Not in any physical sense. He hadn’t been lying when he assured the detective that there was nothing of homoeroticism in his feelings. He knew all about sexual love, the lullings and the relishes of it. This wasn’t it. No, the measure of his feelings for Peter was the pain he felt in having had to lie to him.

Normally in the world according to Franny Roote, success in deceit was a source of delight, a whimsy in the blood, leaving him so limber he felt that, snakelike, he could skip out of his skin. But not this time. He had tried to salve his unease with prevarication-but not necessarily in that order-clever stuff, but he no longer wanted to be clever with Pascoe, he wanted to be open. He had tasted the clean savor of openness and it was addictive. There were monsters enough in the world to play mind games with, but the heart was too soft a ground not to be damaged by such sharp twists and turns.

He longed for an end to deceit and happily the time was now ripe to end it. But not by confession. In his observation and experience of the world, the truth rarely set you free. Indeed it was more likely to get you banged up!

No, by one of those paradoxes he loved, his route to openness lay through that super-subtle labyrinthine hinterland of his mind ruled by Loki, the Nordic spirit of trickery and mischief. He did not doubt that his old familiar would show the right moment, the right place.

Meanwhile, as in all areas of human endeavor, the key to success was information, and not being too scrupulous about how you got it. Every good policeman knew this, and Peter Pascoe was a very good policeman. He hadn’t actually said it, but somehow it was clear that he had access to Charley Heywood’s e-mails, and that he found them useful. Presumably she was using her laptop linked to her mobile. He went to his workstation and from a drawer retrieved the piece of paper bearing her e-mail address and mobile number. He didn’t anticipate meeting any of the problems that accessing Wield’s system at the Hall had given him, and in fact, as he worked, it almost seemed as if Charley, with the arrogance of youth, reveled in her insecurity!

Twenty minutes later he made himself another cup of coffee and settled down to read.