Rreginald Hill: A Killing kindness

'He did a good job on your electric kettle, sir,' said Pascoe brightly.

Dalziel edged nearer the corner of the desk to scratch his paunch on the angle.

'Let's hear what the spirits had to say, then,' he commanded.

He followed Wield's transcript closely as the tape was played again.

'Now that's what I call helpful,' he said when it was done. 'That makes it all worthwhile. Here's us thinking Brenda Sorby was killed after dark when all the time the sun was shining, and that she was chucked into our muddy old canal that's so thick Judas bloody Iscariot could walk on it, and all the time it was some nice crystal-clear trout stream!'

'Sir,' said Pascoe, but the sarcasm wasn't yet finished.

'So all we've got to do now, sergeant, is work out the most likely nesting ground for albatrosses in Yorkshire. Or condors, maybe. Wasn't there a pair seen sitting on a slag heap near Barnsley? That's it! And these dark-skinned buggers'll be Arthur Scargill and his lads just up from t'pit!'

Pascoe laughed, not so much at the 'wit' as in relief that Dalziel was talking himself back into a good mood. He had known the fat man for many years now and familiarity had bred a complex of emotions and attitudes not least among which was a healthy caution.

'All right, Peter,' said Dalziel. 'This crap apart, what's really happened today?'

'Nothing much. House to house goes on, but we're running out of houses.'

'And the lad, what about the lad?'

‘Tommy Maggs? I saw him again today while the sergeant was at the Sorbys'. It was just about as useful. He sticks to his story. He's very uptight, but you'd expect that.'

'Why?'

'Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police visiting him twice daily.'

'Oh aye,' said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at his watch. 'Well, I'll tell you what we'll do,' he said. 'How's your missus?'

Pascoe's wife, Ellie, was five months gone with their first child.

'Fine, she's fine.'

'Grand,' said Dalziel. 'That's what you need, Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you down a bit.'

He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.

'So if she's all right, and my watch is all right, the Black Bull's open and I'll let you buy me a pint.'

'A pleasure, sir,' said Pascoe. 'But just the one.'

'Don't be shy. You can buy me as many as you like,' said Dalziel.

As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs and said, 'You'd best come too, sergeant, in case we move on to spirits.'

He went chuckling through the door.

Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain and then followed him.

Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less than four weeks.

The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty, a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town. Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators, Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car accident on an icy Scottish road.

This second tragedy almost destroyed Mrs Dinwoodie. She had left the Garden Centre in the care of her nurseryman and gone off alone. More than three months elapsed before she reappeared. She looked pale and ill but was clearly determined to get back to normality. Ironically it was her first tentative steps in that direction which completed the tragic trilogy.

While the Dinwoodies had made no close personal friends locally, they had not been inactive, their social life being centred on the Shafton Players, the village amateur dramatic group. Mary Dinwoodie had withdrawn completely after her husband's death, but now, pressed by a kindly neighbour, she had agreed to attend the group's annual summer 'night out'. They had had a meal at the Cheshire Cheese, a pub with a small dining-room on the southern outskirts of town. At closing time they had drifted into the car park, calling cheerful goodnights. Mary Dinwoodie had insisted on coming in her own car in case she wanted to get away early. In the event she had stayed to the last and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. The other twenty or so revellers had all set off into the night, in groups no smaller than three. And all imagined Mary Dinwoodie was driving home too.

But in the morning her mini was still in the car park.

And a short time afterwards a farm labourer setting out to clear a ditch not fifty yards behind the Cheshire Cheese found her body neatly, almost religiously, laid out amid the dusty nettles.

She had been strangled, or 'choked' as the labourer informed any who would listen to him, a progressively diminishing number over the next few days.

But the alliteration appealed to Sammy Locke, news editor of the local Evening Post and 'The Cheshire Cheese Choking' was his lead story till public interest faded, a rapid enough process as the labourer could well avow.

Then ten days later the second killing took place. June McCarthy, nineteen, single, a shift worker at the Eden Park Canning Plant on the Avro Industrial Estate, was dropped early one Sunday morning at the end of Pump Road, a long curving street half way down which she lived with her widowed father. Her friends on the works bus never saw her alive again. A septuagenarian gardener called Dennis Ribble opening the shed on his Pump Street allotment at nine-thirty A.M. found her dead on the floor.

She too had been strangled. There were no signs of sexual interference. The body was neatly laid out, legs together, lolling tongue pushed back into the mouth, arms crossed on her breast and, a macabre touch, in her hands a small posy of mint sprigs whose fragrance filled the shed.

There were no obvious suspects. Her father was discovered still in bed and imagining his daughter was in hers. And her fiance, a soldier from a local regiment, had returned to Northern Ireland the previous day after a week's leave.

Sammy Locke at the Evening Post read the brief accounts in the national dailies on Monday, looked for an angle and finally composed a headline reading CHOKER AGAIN?

He had just done this when the phone rang. A man's voice said without preamble, 'I say, we will have no more marriages.'

Locke was not a literary man, but his secretary, having recently left boring school after one year of a boring 'A' level course, thought she recognized a reference to one of the two boring texts she had struggled through (the other had been Middlemarch).

'That's Hamlet,' she announced. 'I think.'

And she was right.

Act 3, Scene 1. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face and you make youselves another; you jig, you amble, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriages; those that married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.

Sammy Locke did not know his Shakespeare but he knew his news and after a little thought he removed the question mark from his headline and rang up Dalziel with whom he had a drinking acquaintance.

Dalziel received the information blankly and then consulted Pascoe, whose possession of a second-class honours degree in social science had won him the semi-ironical status of cultural consultant to the fat man. Pascoe shrugged and made an entry in the log book.

And then came Brenda Sorby.