A Pinch of Snuff (5 page)

'Chance'd be a fine thing,' she answered. Their gazes locked and after a moment they started to laugh.

'Watch her,' said Crabtree plonking down a tray with a large gin, with whatever it was with, and another four halves. 'She'll have you starring in a remake of the Keystone Cops - naked.'

'I doubt it,' said the woman. 'The Inspector don't approve of us beautiful people. Not like you, Ray. Ray recognizes that police and film people have a lot in common. They exist because of human nature, not in spite of it. But Ray has slain the beast, ambition, and now takes comfort in the arms of the beauty, philosophy. You should try it, Inspector.'

'I'll bear it in mind,' was the smartest reply Pascoe could manage.

'You do. And don't forget my invitation. Homeric's the company, Penelope's the name. I'll be weaving and watching for you, sailor. 'Bye, Ray. Thanks for the drink.'

She rose and returned to her companions.

'Interesting woman,' said Crabtree, regarding Pascoe with amusement.

'Yes. Is she like that through choice or chance?'

'Glandular, they tell me. Used to be a beauty. Now she has to live off eggs and spinach and no good it does her.'

'Tough,' said Pascoe. 'Tell me, Ray, what's a joint like Homeric doing in a nice town like this?'

Crabtree shrugged.

'They have an office. They pay their rates. They give no offence. The only way that most people are going to know what their precise business is would be to see their films, or take part in one of them. Either way, you're not going to complain. Things have changed since I was a callow constable, but one thing I've learned in my low-trajectory meteoric career: if it's all right with top brass, it's all right with me.'

'But why come here at all? What's wrong with the Big Smoke?'

'Dear, dear,' said Crabtree. 'I bet you still think Soho's full of opium dens and sinister Orientals. Up here it's cheaper, healthier and the beer's better. Do you never read the ads?'

'Everyone's talking smart today and putting me down,' said Pascoe. 'Time for another?'

'Hang on,' said Crabtree. 'I'll phone in.'

He returned with another four halves.

'Plenty of time,' he said. 'It's been put back again.'

'When to?'

'Next week.'

'Oh shit,' said Pascoe.

He regarded the half-pints dubiously, then went and rang Ellie again. There was no reply. Perhaps after all she had rung an old boy-friend.

'Left you, has she?' said Crabtree. 'Wise girl. Now, what do you fancy - drown your sorrows or a bit of spare?'

He arrived home at midnight to find a strange car in his drive and a strange man drinking his whisky. Closer examination revealed it was not a strange man but one of Ellie's colleagues, Arthur Halfdane, a historian and once a sort of rival for Ellie's favours.

'I didn't recognize you,' said Pascoe. 'You look younger.'

'Well thanks,' said Halfdane in a mid-Atlantic drawl.

'On second thoughts,' said Pascoe belligerently,
'you
don't look younger. It's your clothes that look younger.'

Halfdane glanced down at his denim suit, looked ironically at Pascoe's crumpled worsted, and smiled at Ellie.

'Time to go, I think,' he said, rising.

Perhaps I should punch him on the nose, thought Pascoe. Man alone with my wife at midnight . . . I'm entitled.

When Ellie returned from the front door Pascoe essayed a smile.

'You're drunk,' she said.

'I've had a couple.'

'I thought you were at a meeting.'

'It was cancelled,’ he said. 'I rang you. You were out. So I made a night of it.'

'Me too,' she said.

'Difference was, my companion was a man,' said Pascoe heavily.

'No difference,' said Ellie. 'So was mine.'

'Oh,' said Pascoe, a little nonplussed. 'Have a good evening, did you?'

'Yes. Very sexy.'

'What?'

'Sexy. We went to see your dirty film. Our interest was socio-historical, of course.'

'He took you to the Calli?' said Pascoe indignantly. 'Well, bugger me!'

'It was all right,' said Ellie sweetly. 'Full of respectable people. You know who I saw there? Mr Godfrey Blengdale, no less. So it must be all right.'

'He shouldn't have taken you,' said Pascoe, feeling absurd and incoherent and nevertheless right.

'Get it straight, Peter,' said Ellie coldly. 'Dalziel may have got you trained like a retriever, but I still make my own decisions.'

'Oh yes,' sneered Pascoe. 'It's working in that elephants' graveyard that does it. All that rational discourse where the failed intellectuals go to die. The sooner they close that stately pleasure-dome down and dump you back in reality, the better!'

'You've got the infection,' she said sadly. 'Workin a leper colony and in the end you start falling to bits.'

'Schweitzer worked with lepers,’ countered Pascoe.

'Yes. And he was a fascist too.'

He looked at her hopelessly. There were other planets somewhere with life-forms he had more chance of understanding and making understand.

'It's your failures I put in gaol,’ he said.

'So, blame education, is that it? All right, but how can it work with kids when intelligent adults can still be so thick!' she demanded.

'I didn't mean that,' he said. He suddenly saw in his mind's eye the girl in the film. The face fell apart under the massive blow. It might all be special effects but the reality beneath the image was valid none the less. If only it could be explained . . .

'There is still, well, evil,' he essayed.

'Oh God. Religion, is it, now? The last refuge of egocentricity. I'm off to bed. I'm driving down to Lincolnshire tomorrow, so I should prefer to pass the night undisturbed.'

She stalked from the room.

'So should I,’ shouted Pascoe after her.

Their wishes went unanswered.

At five o'clock in the morning he was roused from the unmade-up spare bed by Ellie pulling his hair and demanding that he answer the bloody telephone.

It was the station.

There had been a break-in at Wilkinson House, premises of the Calliope Kinema Club. The proprietor had been attacked and injured. Mr Dalziel wondered if Mr Pascoe, in view of his special interest in the place, would care to watch over the investigation.

'Tell him,' said Pascoe. 'Tell him to . . .'

'Yes?' prompted the voice.

'Tell him I'm on my way.'

Chapter 5

The Calli was a wreck.

As far as Pascoe could make out, person or persons unknown had entered by forcing the basement area door which fronted on to Upper Maltgate. They had then proceeded to wreck the house and beat up Gilbert Haggard, not necessarily in that order. That would be established when Haggard was fit enough to talk. A not very efficient attempt to start a fire had produced a lot of smoke, but fortunately very little flame, and a Panda patrol checking shop doorways on Maltgate had spotted the fumes escaping from a first-floor window.

When they entered the house, they had found Haggard on the second-floor landing, badly beaten round the face and abdomen. A combination of the blows and fumes had rendered him unconscious.

Pascoe wandered disconsolately around the house accompanied by a taciturn Sergeant Wield and an apologetic Fire Officer.

'Was there any need to pump so much water into the place?' asked Pascoe. 'My men say there was next to no fire.'

'Can't be too careful, not where there's inflammable material like film about,' said the FO, smiling wanly at the staircase which was still running like the brook Kerith. 'Sorry if we've dampened any clues.'

'Clues!' said Pascoe. 'I'll need frogmen to bring up clues from this lot. Where did the fire start?'

'In a store room on the first floor.There's a couple of filing cabinets in there, and that's where they kept their cans of film as well. Someone scattered everything all over the place, then had the bright idea of dropping a match into it on their way out.'

'Can we get in there without a bathysphere?' asked Pascoe.

The FO didn't answer but led the way upstairs.

There was a sound of movement inside the storage room and Pascoe expected to find either a policeman or a fireman bent on completing the destruction his colleagues had begun. Instead in the cone of light from a bare bulb which had miraculously survived the visiting firemen, he found Maurice Arany.

'Mr Arany,' he said. 'What are you doing here?'

'I own half of this,' said Arany sharply, indicating the sodden debris through which he appeared to have been picking.

'I don't like the look of your half,' said Pascoe. 'You got here quickly.'

Arany considered.

'No,’ he said. 'You got here slowly. I live quite close by. I have a flat above Trimble's, the bakers, on Lower Maltgate.'

'Who called you?' asked Pascoe.

'No one. I am a poor sleeper. I was awake when I heard the fire-engine going up the street. I looked out, became aware they were stopping by the Square, so I dressed and came out to investigate. After the firemen had finished, I came in. No one stopped me. Should they have done so?'

'Perhaps,' said Pascoe. 'I should have thought you would be more concerned with Mr Haggard's health than checking on damage here.'

'I saw him being put in the ambulance. He looked all right,' said Arany indifferently. 'I tried to ring through a moment ago. The phones seem not to be working.'

'Check that,' Pascoe said to Wield. 'See what's wrong with them. Probably an excess of moisture.'

Turning back to Arany, he said, 'It would be useful, Mr Arany, if you could check if there's anything missing from the house.'

'That's what I'm doing,' said Arany, dropping the goulash of charred paper and shrivelled celluloid he held in his hands. 'Of course, I cannot answer for Gilbert's apartments. But on this floor and in the club rooms, I think I can help.'

'Well, start here,' said Pascoe. 'Anything missing?'

'Who can tell? So much is burned. We kept old files of business correspondence here. Nothing of importance.'

'And the films?'

'And the films. Yes, they are finished. Still, the insurance will cover that.'

'Someone's going to be disappointed,' said Pascoe, looking at the mess. 'They won't show those again.'

'There are plenty of prints,' said Arany carelessly. 'I'll go and check the other rooms.'

He went out as the sergeant returned. Wield waited till he was gone before saying, 'The phone wire was cut, sir.'

'Inside or out?'

'Inside.By the phone in the study. Both the other phones in the house are extensions.'

'Let's look upstairs,' said Pascoe.

Haggard had been found lying outside his bedroom door which was two doors down the landing from the study. In between was a living-room which had been comfortably if shabbily furnished with two chintz-covered armchairs and a solid dining table. Now the chairs lay on their sides with the upholstery slashed. The table's surface was scarred and a corner cabinet had been dragged off the wall.

'What's through there?' asked Pascoe, pointing at a door in the far wall.

'Kitchen,' said Wield, pushing it open.

It was a long narrow room, obviously created by walling off the bottom five feet of the living-room at some time in the not-too-distant past. The furnishings were bright and modern. Pascoe walked around opening cupboards. One was locked, a full-size door which looked as if it might lead into a pantry.

'Notice anything odd?' he asked in his best Holmesian fashion.

'They didn't smash anything in here,' said Wield promptly.

'All right, all right. There's no need to be so clever,' said Pascoe. 'Probably they just didn't have time.'

The bedroom was in a mess too, but it was the study which really caught his attention, perhaps because he had seen it before the onslaught.

Everything that could be cut, slashed, broken or overturned had been. Only the heavier items of furniture remained unmoved, though drawers had been dragged from the desk and the display cabinet had been overturned. Pascoe's attention was caught particularly by the shredded curtains and he examined them thoughtfully for a long time.

'Anything, sir?' asked Wield.

'Something, perhaps, but I really don't know what. They must have made some noise. Who lives next door?'

'Just two old ladies and their cats. They sleep on the floor below, I think, and they're both as deaf as toads. They've lived there all their lives, and they're both in their seventies now. I gather the vigilantes were dead keen to recruit them for their anti-Calli campaign, but it was no go.'

'Didn't they mind the Club, then?'

'They are, or were, very thick with Haggard. The elder, Miss Annabelle Andover, acted as a part-time matron while the school was on the go, and I get the impression that he's been at pains to keep up the connection. You know, chicken for the cats, that kind of thing. If it ever did come to a court case, it'd be useful for him to be able to prove his immediate neighbours didn't object to the Club.'

'Which they don't? It's a bit different from a school!'

'I can't really say, sir,' said Wield. 'Old ladies, old-fashioned ideas, you'd say. But you never know.'

'Well, we'd better have a chat in case they did notice anything. But at a decent hour. Let's check on Haggard first. Then I reckon we've earned some breakfast.'

At the hospital they learned that Haggard, though intermittently conscious, was not in a fit state to be questioned so they had bacon sandwiches and coffee in the police canteen before returning to the Club.

Arany was still there.

'Anything missing yet?' asked Pascoe.

'Not that I have found,' said Arany. 'Some drink from the bar, perhaps. It is hard to say, so much is broken.'

'Well, keep at it. Perhaps you could call down at the station later, put it down on paper.'

'What?' enquired Arany. 'There is nothing to put.'

'Oh, you never can tell,' said Pascoe airily. 'First impressions when you arrived, that kind of thing. And by the way, would you bring a complete up-to-date list of members with you? Come on, Sergeant. Let's see if the Misses Andover are up and about yet.'