A Killing Kindness (18 page)

'Well, nothing rightly,' said the old man. 'Lawyers' business, nowt else.'

'What's the trouble?'

'In the first place, no will. In second place, no close relatives, though you can always find one or two who'll make a claim. She was a widow, you see, Mrs Dinwoodie. Husband got killed last  summer at Agricultural Show. You likely read  about it. Run down by a traction engine. It was  in the papers. Then the lass. Alison her daughter.  Just a few months later. Car accident. She was just  a kid. Not a lucky woman, Mrs Dinwoodie.'

Pascoe of course knew most of this. Mary Dinwoodie's friends had been checked as a priority after the murder. But the family had been  non-existent and she had apparently made a determined effort to cut herself off from her acquaintance. Her grief had been very private, rejecting  offers of comfort or companionship. It was a sad  irony that her first positive move in the direction  of human society once more should have taken  her into the Choker's hands.

The Shafton Players had been investigated so closely that Pascoe knew more about some of  them than their spouses did. The possibility of a link between a drama group and the
Hamlet 
calls had not gone unnoticed, but it had certainly remained undiscovered. Individually, the Players had neither motive nor opportunity. Collectively,  they had never done
Hamlet.
So it looked as if  Mary Dinwoodie had just had the misfortune to  be available. Yet Pascoe could not forget Pottle's  insistence that her death was, must be, the key.

'How long have you worked here, Mr Agar?'  he asked.

'Six years. Since I left the farming.'

'What about other help?'

'No one else most of the time,' he said. 'Except I  took a lad on when the missus went away after the lass died. Couldn't do it single-handed. Couldn't  really do it proper with two of us. Before, me and Mr Dinwoodie looked after the trees and  such. Planting, hoeing, all that. Mrs Dinwoodie  helped with the greenhouses, and ran the shop. She'd been a teacher once or summat, so she was  good with paperwork. The lass helped too. She'd  just left school, didn't want to do anything else, an office job or such. She liked to be outside. Her  lad was going to go into farming too.'

'Her lad?'

'Aye. Didn't you know? She'd just married him when they got killed. Same day. It doesn't bear  thinking on. Well, after that, the heart went out of  Mrs Dinwoodie. She went off. Just told me to look  after things and went off. It were all right at first,  but when spring got near, it starts getting busy, so I had to take a lad on, and my daughter-in-law came in to help with the shop. I saw the bank manager  first. He weren't sure but I told him business would  soon be knackered if I didn't and he soon changed  his tune. Even then we were only open weekends.  But we ticked over. And then she came back. I was  that glad to see her! But, oh, she'd mebbe had done  better to stay away for ever.'

There was a catch in the old man's voice. He  really cares, thought Pascoe, and he said, 'You  liked Mrs Dinwoodie?'

'I liked all on 'em, but her the best. She was a  kind woman. She blamed herself for everything.  She said it were her fault they were so close to  that engine at the show. And blamed herself for  letting the lass run off to Scotland to be wed. Well, that were daft, mebbe, and the girl's place was here by her mam's side with her dad only  a few months dead. But at seventeen, what's to fill a lass's head but boys and such? Well, I never  thought I'd see any one of them out, let alone  all three. It doesn't bear thinking on, does it? It  doesn't bear thinking.'

'No, it doesn't,' said Pascoe. 'So now you're in  sole charge?'

'Oh aye. Till things is settled. Lawyers asked  me to stay on. There's two relatives of his, half  cousins or some such thing, down in the South.  Likely they'll get it. Best I can do by myself is  tend the roses and the fruit trees. We sold all the  greenhouse stuff up. Market traders and the like.

They got a bargain. But I couldn't have tended  them and they'd not hire anyone else. Do you  want to look in the house?'

'Yes, please,' said Pascoe, not knowing why.  'But first, I wonder if you've ever seen this chap  around here?'

He passed over the two photographs of Wildgoose.  Agar scrutinized them carefully.

'Nay,' said Agar. 'I don't recall him. Though  that's not to say I've never seen him.'

'But would you say you might have seen him?'

'Not if there was money on it,' said the old man,  adding shrewdly, 'and there'll likely be more than  money on it, eh?'

'Likely,' said Pascoe, retrieving the photos.

The old man opened the house for him, then  returned to his work. Pascoe went inside. Already the place smelt dank and unlived-in. One of the  downstairs rooms had been turned into an office.  He poked around for a while but found nothing  but a chaos of neglected paperwork. He had no  idea what he might be looking for. It was simply  an exercise in serendipity. Abandoning the office,  he went upstairs.

The girl's bedroom he found hard to bear. It was  untidy, but with the untidiness of youth, as though its owner might be reappearing at any moment. He left it and went into the main bedroom. And here  at last he made a find.

It was a cardboard box tucked away at the back of crowded wardrobe. It was a sad box, full of memories which now lacked a mind to remember them. Christmas cards, birthday cards, many  homemade, inscribed
To Mummy with lots of love  from Alison
in a young round hand, some childish daubs. And a few secondary school reports. Alison  it seemed had attended the Bishop Crump Comprehensive School.

Well, so had thousands of other kids. And  Alison's death had nothing to do with the Choker.  She had died in a car accident in the South of  Scotland. The scrawled initials after the comments  on her English and Drama lessons gave little clue to their author. Of course, mused Pascoe, if Wildgoose  had taught this girl, then there were parent-teacher  evenings, plenty of chance for him to have met the  mother.

He dug deeper and for his pains made one more  discovery. It was a programme on a brown card with scalloped edges to give a kind of parchment effect. On the front printed in Gothic script  were the words
Musik-und-Drama-Fest, Linden, Mai  1973.

That
Linden. The town in Germany. This was  where the Centre's name came from. His schoolboy German was still sufficiently remembered to  identify this as the general programme of a small  amateur festival of music and drama (not difficult!)  and get the gist of most of the promised goodies.  Then an item caught and held his eye.
Scenes  from Shakespeare,
he translated.
By members of a  local drama society,
he guessed.
Plus staff from Devon School.
And there were two directors named, one  German, the other Herr Peter Dinwoodie.

So here it was at last. Not
Hamlet,
but Shakespeare  at least.
Unser Shakespeare.
He'd heard how the Germans admired him to the point of possessiveness.  And Devon School? A touring party? Hardly. More  likely a British Forces School. He'd known a girl  who'd gone out there to teach and he seemed to  recall the schools often had that kind of name, 
Gloucester, Cornwall, Windsor.

Linden, if his geography held as well as his  German, was hard by Hanover. Lots of BAOR  bases round there, so it made some sense.

He went downstairs and asked old Agar if Mary  Dinwoodie and her husband had once been school-teachers in Germany.

'Nay, I know nowt about that,' said the old  man.

Well, it should be easy to check out, thought  Pascoe pocketing the programme.

And at the same time it would be worth checking  if Wildgoose had ever done any teaching abroad.

At Rosetta Stanhope's flat he was admitted quickly, almost as though he were expected. I really must stop endowing her with supernatural powers, he  told himself irritably. Certainly the room in which  he found himself was ordinary enough. There was  a lightly flowered paper on the walls, and the furniture consisted of a three-piece suite in imitation  hide, a large colour TV and a small oak sideboard with a nest of matching tables. The only hint of the  woman's background lay in a large glass-fronted  cabinet almost filling one of the narrower walls  and packed with what Pascoe had no doubt was  fine china.

Rosetta Stanhope herself was dressed like any  housewife doing her chores; she wore a blue cotton overall, moccasins on her feet, and her hair was  tied back with a red silk bandanna. The only  change was in her face where the flesh seemed  more tightly drawn than ever over the fine thin  bones.

'Will you have a cup of tea?' she asked very  correctly. 'I can't offer you strong liquor. There's  none in the place.'

'And I couldn't accept it anyway,' answered  Pascoe even more correctly, though perhaps less  accurately. 'You don't drink alcohol, Mrs Stanhope?'

'I can't afford to get confused, Mr Pascoe,' she  said.

'And your niece? Did she drink?'

'Never here.'

'But elsewhere? A social drink with friends perhaps?'

She regarded him seriously but with no outward sign of distress. Pascoe congratulated himself on  the subtlety of his introduction of the topic.

'Like at the Cheshire Cheese, you mean?' said Rosetta Stanhope.

Pascoe cancelled his congratulations.

'That might be significant,’ he said. 'Did she?'

'Not that I know of,' said the woman. 'And I  think I'd have known. It was funny. She was not  my blood, not my flesh, but she grew to me like a  daughter. Closer perhaps. Daughters grow up, turn  away, despise their parents even. I've seen it many  times. Trouble, misunderstanding, separation. Like poor Brenda Sorby and her father. But Pauline  grew closer to me as she got older and when the  time came for her to make her own choice of life,  instead of turning away, she turned towards me.  No one knew her father, but I sometimes think he  could not have been
gorgio.'

She nodded emphatically, for a moment every inch the gypsy queen.

'But she would have friends of her own age, a  life of her own,' urged Pascoe.

'Of course she did,' said Mrs Stanhope. 'She was  a nice ordinary attractive young lass. People liked  her, she made friends easy . . .'

Her voice broke for a moment and the gypsy queen was gone and for the second time in an  hour Pascoe felt the guilt of being embarrassed by  the sight of grief.

It was over in a moment.

'You're barking up the wrong tree,' she resumed. 'No one who knew Pauline did this.'

Pascoe regarded her dubiously.

'Why so certain, Mrs Stanhope?' he asked.

'She told me,' she replied seriously. 'Last night.'

Pascoe had to make an effort to stop himself glancing uneasily around. The room suddenly felt much less ordinary and conventional and the  bright sunlight falling through the broad window  seemed to thicken and curdle.

'You communicated with her?' he said.

She suddenly smiled. It was not an unfriendly  smile, but not the kind of smile much used between  equals. There was something of exasperation in it,  and of pity too.

'We didn't sit down and have a chat, Inspector,'  she said. 'But she was here. I felt her. And if she'd  known who it was that did it, she'd have let me  know.'

'But,' objected Pascoe, 'even if she didn't know
then,
surely she knows
now.'

'Then
and
now'
s for the living,' she said dismissively. 'Anyway, I didn't mean she would have given me a name, though that's not impossible.  All I meant was, I
felt
her here and she felt puzzled,  uncertain, not like she'd have been if she knew who'd done it and why, when it was done, I  mean.'

'Ah,' said Pascoe who found this picture of a  puzzle-filled afterlife rather distressing. A lifetime as a policeman was enough; an eternity unthinkable. Dalziel with a golden truncheon and blue  serge wings! The image thinned the light once  more and the room returned to normal.

'It's quite unusual for a Romany to be a medium, isn't it?' he said, leaning back in his chair. 'Crystal balls, the tarot, that's the more usual area, isn't it?'

'It's how the
gorgios
have portrayed us,’ said the  woman. 'But I've known very few
chovihanis
who  used a crystal as more than a prop. Or as something  bright to act as a focus for self-hypnosis. Oh, I  read the psychic journals, Mr Pascoe! I'm not  an educated woman but I've lived a
gorgio
life  long enough to pick up some of their knowledge too!'

'Chovihani.
That's a sort of witch, isn't it?'

'You know a bit about our people?' she said. 'I  felt it when we first met.'

'I once did a short study at college,' admitted  Pascoe. 'It was social mainly, about education,  fitting into the community, that sort of thing.'

'Looking for ways to change us, make us like  you!' she said scornfully.

'Not really,' said Pascoe. 'Though some do change. You, for instance. You conformed.'

He didn't want an argument with this woman,  but it seemed important to find out if there was  really any more to her than a farrago of superstitions and self-delusions. He found out.

'Conformed? Me! What a bloody arrogant sod  you are, just like the rest! I did anything but.  I left my family and I left my people and I left  my whole life behind me. That's conforming, is  it? Conforming's being as daft and as dull and as  stupid as you, is it?'

She was frightening in anger. Pascoe decided  that on the whole he preferred the imminence of  the other world to this.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'It was stupid, you're quite right. Absolutely.'

Suddenly she was angry no more.

'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'It wasn't all that difficult, anyway.
Chovihanis
aren't expected to conform. They do odd, anti-social things. My grandma  was one, too. It skipped my mother somehow.  But my grandma foretold I would marry a
gorgio 
when I was in my cradle. So it was expected in  a way. Everyone knew the prophecy. It made for  loneliness. From fourteen on, boys wanted me  for their lusts. I was a good-looking girl, can you  believe that?'