Deadheads (22 page)

'Thanks for the thought anyway,' said Pascoe, looking at the white splash on the flagstone and recalling that it was supposed to be lucky to be hit by a bird-dropping. He glanced at his watch. It was time to go. There were other scenes of death to be visited, other metaphysical meditations to be meditated, miles to go before he could sleep. Miles to go.

By the time he reached No. 12, The High Grove, the home of Mrs Mandy Burke, widow of Christopher Burke, one-time assistant to the Chief Accountant of Perfecta Ltd, Pascoe was no longer in the meditative mood. For a start Mrs Unger's scones, impervious even to a lunchtime pint of best Yorkshire bitter, lay heavy on his stomach. Next, the pink and white lozenges of ornamental stone which formed the patio on which Mr Burke had met his end were in no wise as atmospheric as the worn grey flags where the Archdeacon had been struck down, nor did the pebble-dashed rear wall of No. 12 with its puce-painted window-frames soar into the imagination in quite the same way as the dark tower of St Mark's Church.

And finally, instead of the quiet company of the ancient dead, Pascoe was entertained by the presence of the Widow Burke whose antiquity was unassessable beneath the cosmetic art of mid-Yorkshire's best beauticians, but whose quickness was never in doubt.

'This is where he fell, Inspector, or Peter, may I call you Peter?' she said. 'This is the very spot.'

She pointed with all the dramatic style of those stately-home guides who point to the very spot, often marked by ineradicable bloodstains, where some unfortunate scion of the noble family now living off the entrance fees met his end. There was no bloodstain here, only a tray on which stood a glass and a jug of what looked like iced lemon squash.

At least, thought Pascoe, she had had the good taste not to cover 'the very spot' with the sun-bed from which his insistent finger on the front doorbell had at last summoned her.

Strangely, the news that he was a police officer had seemed to eradicate rather than exacerbate her annoyance at being disturbed. Modern middle-class attitudes to the police usually stimulated an instant expression of grave distrust followed by a demand for warrants to be flashed and business clearly stated before the threshold was crossed. Instead she'd flung open the door to him, invited him to walk through and had evinced neither surprise nor reluctance to talk when he had diffidently referred to her late husband.

'Shall we stay out here to chat?' she said. 'One can hardly afford to miss such divine weather, can one? There's a deckchair in the garage if you can find it. I'll get you a glass. I'm sure you're dying of thirst. Won't be a moment!'

With a promissory smile, she went back into the house. Pascoe took the chance of being alone to get his bearings. He recalled the High Grove estate vaguely from his own house-hunting days. It had just been completed and he and Ellie had taken a quick look, which was all they'd needed. Not that it was bad as such up-market development went. There were three types of detached property, arranged in groups of five as though the builder believed in the mysterious properties of the quincunx. The Burke house was a Chatsworth second only in size and luxury to the Blenheim. This particular group of Chatsworths backed on to a bunch of Hardwicks which were two-bed, two-recep (or three-bed, one-recep) bungalows. It had been a Hardwick that the Pascoes had been persuaded to examine, a pleasure denied the owners of the Chatsworths by a seven-foot-high length of pastel green composition screening (based, Pascoe recollected the agent's blurb, on an Italian cloister design), plus whatever vegetation had matured at the foot of the Chatsworths' longish lawns. Presumably, however, a man up a ladder would be visible from the bungalows.

He entered the garage through a side door. It held a Volvo estate, the back of which was packed with what he took to be wares intended for her market stall - straw mats, cane baskets, bead curtains, silk flowers, that kind of thing. Cardboard boxes containing similar items were piled up in the small area of space left by the Volvo's length. Among all this colonial cane, he found a good old English deckchair.

He was still wrestling it into submission when the Widow Burke returned with a tall glass which she proceeded to fill with the inviting-looking iced squash.

The chair suddenly fell into shape.

'Sit,' she commanded, handing him the glass.

He sat, and she removed the wraparound robe she must have wrapped around when summoned to the door, and subsided not ungracefully into her sunbed.

Without the robe, the question of her age became more accessible of inductive reasoning. This suntanned skin certainly did not cover the firm muscular flesh of youth, but neither had age scored and puckered the smooth veneer with its excoriating frosts. Beneath the narrow bikini-top, her breasts arched as much as they spread and the contour of her stomach was Cotswoldian rather than Pennine.

Mid-forties, Pascoe assessed. And well worth a second look.

She spotted the second look and smiled her understanding.

'Cheers,' she said.

'Cheers,' said Pascoe, taking a long pull at his lemon squash. It hit the back of his unprepared throat like lava and he spluttered eruptively. The basic dilutant was not water, but vodka. At least this provided some explanation of her manner.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I should have warned you. Is it true you're not allowed to drink on the job?'

'Only in moderation,' said Pascoe, placing the glass firmly on 'the very spot'.

'Me too,' she said, drinking, and eyeing him over the rim of the glass in what should have been an embarrassingly ludicrous parody of a 'twenties Hollywood vamp, but wasn't.

Pascoe said firmly, 'About Mr Burke.'

She said, is it the insurance company or has someone been making naughty phone calls?'

'Pardon?' said Pascoe.

'You must have some reason for wanting to talk about poor old Chris after all this time. I was just wondering if there was any way I could get it out of you.'

She laughed as she spoke, vodka-moist lips drawing back from good white teeth.

‘It's really just routine, Mrs Burke,' said Pascoe lamely.

'Mandy,' she said, if you're not going to be frank, you can at least be friendly. Don't think me callous, Peter, but I'm well over it now, you see. Life goes on. I'm all for life. Not everyone is, you know. It's a great jostling race, but all the fun's in keeping on running. They'll have to knock me off the track before I let anyone get past, but Chris now, he was just my age yet he acted like my father sometimes. Forty did it for him, he got to forty and somewhere in his mind a little clock went
ping!
like a kitchen timer, telling him he was now into middle age, and in six months that's what he became - middle-aged!'

'Yet he went running up a high ladder in the middle of the afternoon,' observed Pascoe, glancing up at the eaves. 'I shouldn't have fancied it.'

'That's because you're a mere youngster,' she said firmly. 'Checking up on workmen's part of the middle-age syndrome. Value for money. He had a good head for figures, Chris, but not much for heights.'

'Yes, he was an accountant, wasn't he?' said Pascoe, spotting the opening.

'That's right. Perfecta. They make bathroom fittings and such like,' she said. 'You should take a look in my bathroom, Peter, I have everything.'

'Yes,' said Pascoe. ‘in your evidence at the inquest, you mentioned the bathroom, I believe. You said you had a shower before you went out.'

'Oh yes,' she answered. 'So I did. I recall thinking later that perhaps it happened while I was actually in the shower. You can't hear a thing in there - telephone, doorbell,
nothing.
And I wouldn't look out on to the patio before I left. Perhaps he was lying there already. Somehow that made it all seem so much worse.'

The coroner had recorded laconically 'break' at this point. Presumably Mrs Burke had been overcome. Even now her handsome face was shadowed.

‘It wouldn't have made any difference,' said Pascoe gently. 'He died instantly, I gather.'

'Yes, that was a comfort,' she replied, dabbing at her eyes, smiling bravely, and taking a long drink, isn't it warm today? Why don't you take your jacket off?'

'No. I must be going shortly,' said Pascoe. 'When you found him, was there any sign that anyone else had been with him?'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'Well, a couple of glasses, for instance,' said Pascoe holding up his own. She tried to refill it, but he moved it back hastily and she topped up her own instead.

'No. Nothing like that. I recall I put the car in the garage, came out of the door straight on to the patio, and there he was. No sign that there'd been anyone else here. Why should there have been? I mean, if there had been, they would have said, surely?'

'Yes, of course,' said Pascoe. 'Tell me, as a matter of interest, did Mr Burke socialize much with his colleagues at Perfecta? Mr Elgood? Or Mr Eagles? Or Mr Aldermann, say?'

'My, you do know a lot, don't you?' she said admiringly. 'I thought, the moment I saw you,
there'
s a man who knows a lot. Let me see. Elgood, no. He was friendly enough but only in a bossish sort of way. Tim Eagles and his wife we swapped dinners with a couple of times a year. As for the other, Aldermann, the one who got his job, Chris reckoned nothing of him. There'd been talk of some trouble when he was in private practice, I believe, but it wasn't that. Chris wasn't a man for gossip. Very strict moralist, Chris. Old Testament judgements, but he had to see for himself, he wouldn't condemn without he had the firm evidence before his very eyes. But he didn't care for Mr Patrick Aldermann. He said he was superfluous to requirement, even as a part-timer. It was a fix, he said, and Chris didn't care for fixes.'

'Did he complain about Mr Aldermann?'

'You mean officially? Oh, I expect so. He would hold his peace till he was certain about something, but then there was no holding him. He would make his view known even if it meant half the country knowing his business. Oh bother. The jug's empty. It just evaporates in this heat, you know. I'm going to make myself some more. Why don't you unbutton and have a swallow or two with me?'

She stood up, swayed, placed a hand on Pascoe's shoulder to steady herself and let gravity direct the heavy bombs of her breasts towards his upturned face. Alarmed, he slipped sideways out of the deckchair, going down on one knee in the process.

'Careful!' she said anxiously. 'You haven't torn your trousers, have you? Never mind if you have. I'm a demon with a needle. I can stitch you up and send you home so your wife wouldn't notice you'd been mended.'

'No, no, it's fine,' Pascoe assured her. 'I'll have to be on my way. Many thanks, Mrs Burke.'

'Mandy,' she said. 'Call again. Or drop by my little boutique in the market. Mandy's Knick-Knacks. I can always find something interesting for a friend.'

'Perhaps I will,' he said, ‘isn't the market open today?'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'But I roasted there all morning and decided my assistant could manage by herself this afternoon. It's all right when you're young and skinny, but when there's a bit more upholstering, the sweat just
runs
off you.'

She shook herself gently as if to demonstrate the phenomenon.

Pascoe smiled and retreated, not without relief. But as he drove away he was surprised by an uneasy feeling that, drunk and gamesome though she had been, and though he had resisted all her offers, even of running repairs with needle and thread, yet she had somehow managed to stitch him up in some not yet definable way.

7

EMOTION

(Hybrid perpetual.Beautifully formed flowers, opening from tight buds, pale foliage.)

Sergeant Wield was privately convinced that the whole Aldermann business was a load of time-wasting crap, and a morning spent catching up on CID paperwork followed by a hasty lunch in an overcrowded, overheated pub, had sent him to his interview with Mr Wellington, the coroner on the Burke inquest, in a far from happy mood.

Wellington was now retired, a dried-up stick of a man with a strong belief in all those virtues, such as temperance, chastity and respect for authority, which time recommends to the old. But if the years had blunted his appetite, they had done little for his temper.

'Wield? Wield? I remember you. You were saucy with me once, young man. In my own court! I reprimanded you. Severely.'

'That's right, sir,' said Wield and pressed on to the matter of Burke. There was no joy here either. Wellington was indecisive only about whether to be more offended by the suggestion that Burke, a man of notorious sobriety, might have been drinking, or that he himself, a man of notorious probity, might have played down such a fact. A lecture followed on the inadequacies of modern policemen, the immorality of modern youth, and the immaturity of modern coroners. Musing on the delights of giving evidence at an inquest on Mr Wellington himself, Wield was almost past the station desk when the duty sergeant's call brought him to a halt.

'Young Singh was asking after you,' he said. 'Seemed to think it was urgent.'

'Did he?' said Wield sourly. 'Where's he at?'

'I think he's down in the canteen,' said the sergeant. 'Said he was hot. You wouldn't think these darkies would feel it like us, would you?'

Wield grunted, and thought that perhaps a cup of tea would cool his own fevered brow, not to mention his simmering temper. He went down to the canteen. It was almost empty, with no sign of Singh. A DC on his way out said he thought the cadet had gone further down the corridor to the locker-room.

His irritation resurfacing, Wield walked the extra twenty yards and pushed open the door. But he didn't go in.

At the far end of the room, naked to the waist, Singh was bent over a washbasin, splashing the running water on to his chest and arms and gently crooning the latest sentimental hit.

The muscles of his slight, flawless torso moved like light on a pool under a wintry sky. Wield caught his breath, holding perfectly still against the door-frame, but the boy sensed there was someone there and turned.