Rreginald Hill: A Killing kindness

The telephone began to ring. It rang thirteen times. Both men ignored it. Finally it stopped, leaving its tone hanging on the air almost as long again.

'My wife, Mr Pascoe,' said Greenall. 'We are Roman Catholics. There was no divorce.'

Both men sighed gently, almost inaudibly, out of a sort of relief in both cases and, as if recognizing this, they exchanged shy smiles, glimmers fading almost as soon as they showed, but establishing a tenuous link for all that.

'Talking of wives, was it yours that talked you down here in the end?' said Greenall. His tone was light, cocktail-partyish, but with a harmonic of strain.

'I'm sorry?'

'She was talking about that seance when she was here last week. She had all kinds of daft ideas about it. But I saw the transcript on the table and I wondered if in the end… That's why of course I had to…'

The phone started ringing again. This time Greenall turned his attention to it, not touching it but staring fixedly at it as though the ceasing of the noise would be the signal of a beginning.

Pascoe took from his pocket the envelope which Gladmann had given him. As expected, it contained the short tape of the Choker's last call and the cassette of Rosetta Stanhope's interrupted seance. There were also several sheets in the linguist's rather self-consciously ornate handwriting.

Pascoe looked, selected, read.

‘The poor quality of this recording makes accurate transcription difficult. Still it seems to me at least possible that the opening passage of the tape could be rendered as follows.

It was Greenall, Greenall, over me, choking. The water then, boiling at first, and roaring, and seething… ‘

The phone stopped ringing.

Greenall said, 'We were happy enough, not deliriously happy, but when does that ever last past the first few months? I was probably more content than Mary. Well, I'd done more, achieved more, relatively speaking. Whenever I felt dissatisfied I just had to look back to when I was a scruffy half-educated kid running round the back streets of Derby. God knows how I even got qualified enough to get into the RAF at the lowest level. But I did. And I did well. I learn fast. Barely ten years later I was commissioned, I was married to Mary. And of course, above all, I was flying.'

He smiled to himself, like a man who remembers glory.

Pascoe said casually, 'This is interesting. You needn't say anything you realize that? It may be used as evidence. I'll keep a record of it unless you prefer to write it yourself.'

It was a pretty feeble version of the correct procedure. And he ought to get Greenall to sign a declaration saying that he had been cautioned and still wanted to make a statement and have someone else write it down for him. But his instinct told him that he must take the minimum risk of fracturing this fragile mood. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far already but after a brief pause the man continued as though Pascoe had not spoken.

'I'd met Mary when I was stationed on Cyprus. She was teaching at the military school there. We liked each other from the first. Marriage might have come eventually, but when she found she was pregnant, it had to come at once. That might have been the trouble. Rushing things is never good. I know that now. But Alison was born and we were happy. Very happy. Once Alison got to school age, though, Mary got restless. She wanted to work again. I didn't like it too much and with me moving around from time to time, it wasn't all that easy anyway. But she insisted on it and when, twice within the space of four or five years, she had to give it up, you'd have thought she was the breadwinner and I was earning the pin-money.'

He shook his head at the incredibility of the thought.

'The second time was when I was posted to Hanover. She even suggested it might be better for Alison's schooling if she and the girl stayed in England for a while. I didn't think it was Alison she was really thinking of. Anyway, she came. And a few months later it looked as if things were turning right for her. One of the teachers at the local British School in Linden fell seriously ill. Mary was ideal for the post. On the spot, fully qualified, with just the right kind of experience. Things seemed to get back together for us for a while after that. There'd been a lot of rowing. She'd even managed to get the girl turned against me. Well, I expect there were faults on both sides. But now, for a time, everything seemed OK.'

He sighed deeply.

'Are you sure you won't have a drink?' he asked suddenly.

'No, thanks. But if you want one…'

'No,' he said emphatically. 'I can take it or leave it. She met Dinwoodie there, you know. He was deputy head, or some such thing. There was also some kind of drama group he was involved in and soon Mary was mixed up in it too. I got a bit concerned about how much of her time it was taking up, but I didn't want to rock the boat, things seemed to be going so well. So I didn't say much. But other people were saying things. Not directly to me. But after a bit you begin to notice silences, intonations. So I started going along myself. I couldn't do it regularly, but I thought if I took an interest, made myself useful with lights and so on… well, I don't know what I thought. Mary wasn't all that enthusiastic, but she didn't seem to mind. They were rehearsing for some local festival; Shakespeare. The Krauts love Shakespeare, God knows why. I didn't want to appear pig-ignorant, so I set out to read a bit myself. They were just doing scenes. Mary and Dinwoodie were doing a bit from Hamlet, the scene when he tells Gertrude what a whore she's been, then kills old Polonius behind the curtain. I read that play through a dozen times. I reckon I knew as much about it as anyone in that damned drama group. I just wanted to impress, you understand. I wasn't really suspicious, not any more. If they'd been doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet perhaps, but somehow with Mary acting as his mother, it didn't seem that there was anything to worry about. Stupid, really, isn't it?'

Pascoe nodded, not quite sure what he was acquiescing to.

'Even when I caught them at it, I didn't do anything rash. I told myself it was just a once-off thing, quickly over. I wasn't going to let her get away with it, of course. She deserved to be punished. I made that quite clear to her. I thought I might send the girl back to England to boarding-school, get her out of the way later. Meanwhile, though, I wanted to keep a low profile. I thought of the scandal it would cause in the mess, I could see all my hard work to get on over the years coming to nothing and, in any case, it was nearly the end of the school year and I knew that Dinwoodie's contract was up and he was returning to the UK. So I let things slide for a while. And the end of term came. And Dinwoodie went. And I came home from a few days on an exercise and found that Mary had disappeared and Alison with her. And after that, well, things went into a spin.'

As he talked now, first hesitations, then often lengthy gaps, began to appear in his speech, but Pascoe was able to fill it in from his long telephone conversation with an RAF records officer who had been extremely cooperative when the Choker case was mentioned.

Greenall had at first attempted to cover up, pretending that his wife and child had gone back to England for a holiday, though clearly not another person at the school or on the station believed this. He himself had returned to the UK on a fortnight's leave which he overstayed when his efforts to track them down were unavailing. This was the first stage in the long downhill slide his career now began to take. It didn't all happen at once. There were plunges and recoveries. He received a letter from his wife, explaining her motives, wanting to put everything on a civilized level. They met in a London hotel lounge to talk things over. The meeting ended with him striking her across the face and rushing across to the reception desk where a young girl, just arrived with her parents, was terrified to be embraced by this demented stranger and dragged towards the door.