Rreginald Hill: A Killing kindness

Pascoe glanced at his watch. Brooding time over, he decided. There was work to be done. He began to retrace his steps.

The fairground was livelier now. Business wouldn't really get under way till much later in the morning, but meantime there were things to be done, machinery to be checked and oiled, canvas covers removed, brass to be polished. At side-stalls like the rifle-range and the hoopla there were the gimcrack prizes to be set out, gun-sights to check in case they had deviated to accuracy, and hoopla rings in case they had stretched to go over the whisky bottle.

By the fortune-teller's tent a young woman in jeans and a yellow suntop was talking to a man in a tartan shirt and brown cords, gaitered militarily above ex-army boots. He was about forty with the knitted brow and dark craggy good looks of a Heathcliff.

They looked at Pascoe as he passed and the man said something.

A moment later Pascoe stopped and turned as the woman's voice called, 'Excuse me!' She had started after him. The man watched for a moment and then strode away towards the trailer park.

'Aren't you one of the policemen?' said the girl. Anyone under twenty-five now qualified as a girl, Pascoe realized ruefully. This one certainly did; fresh young skin, clear brown eyes, luxuriant auburn hair escaping from the green and white spotted bandanna which she had tied around it.

‘That's right,' said Pascoe. 'Does it stand out?'

'I saw you the other day, I think,' said the girl, evading the question. Pascoe nodded. It was likely. He had spent a great deal of time here on Friday afternoon.

'You work here?' he asked.

'Yes,' she said. 'Do you have a moment?'

Without waiting for his answer she set off towards the fortune-teller's tent and lifted the flap.

Pascoe paused before the entrance, partly to establish his independent spirit, partly to read the sign. Madame Rashid, it said, Interpreter of the Stars, Admission 50p. The lettering was pseudo-Arabic and the words were surrounded by a constellation of varying hues and shapes.

'The price of the future's gone up,' he said.

'You should try having a full horoscope cast,' she said seriously. 'Besides, we're not allowed to tell the future.'

'I know,' he said.

'Oh, of course you would. Won't you come in?'

He passed by her under the flap.

It was a bit of a disappointment, reminding him more of a Boy Scout camp than the Eastern pavilion he had half expected. The smell was of damp canvas and trodden grass and the only furniture was a plain trestle table and two folding chairs.

A suitcase lay on the table and she pointed to this as if sensing his disappointment and said, 'It looks better when I get the props out.'

'I'm sure,' said Pascoe. 'What did you want to see me about Miss-er-Rashid?'

She laughed, very attractively.

'No,' she said. 'I'm Pauline Stanhope.'

She held out her hand. He took it. The name sounded familiar.

'And I'm Detective-Inspector Pascoe,' he said.

'I thought you must be. It's about yesterday, Inspector Pascoe. Won't you sit down?'

He unfolded the chairs and they sat opposite each other at the table, as though for an interrogation. Or a fortune-telling. It depended on your point of view.

'Yesterday?'

Yes. Aunt Rose was very upset when she read the paper.'

'Was she?' said Pascoe.

Aunt Rose? Of course, Rosetta Stanhope. And this was the niece.

'Rosetta. Rashid,' he murmured as the enlightenment spread.

'That's right. I'm sorry. I thought you'd know all about us. All those questions.'

'Think of all those answers, Miss Stanhope,' he said sadly. 'Someone has to edit.'

Everyone who worked on the fairground had been questioned, naturally. Everyone who admitted visiting it on Thursday night also. Everyone who lived on the same street as the Sorbys. And the next street. And maybe the next. Everyone who worked with her. Everyone who lived on the streets she would have walked through on her way home from the broken-down car. Everyone who had a barge or a cruiser or a craft of any kind which could have been anywhere on that stretch of the canal that night.

The questioning was still going on, was likely to continue till Christmas. Or the next murder.

'My sergeant seemed to have heard of your aunt,' he said cautiously. 'But he didn't mention any connection with the Fair.'

'Mr Wield, you mean. He's awfully nice, isn't he? It's a bit complicated, I suppose. Family history usually is.'

'Perhaps you could give me a digest, if you think it would be helpful, and if you don't have to stray much beyond the Norman Conquest,' said Pascoe.

She grinned.

'I see where Mr Wield gets his cheek from,' she said. 'The thing to understand is that originally Aunt Rose is a Lee on her father's side, a Petulengro on her mother's.'

'You mean the Romany families?'

'You know something about gypsies?'

'I've read my George Borrow,' he said with a smile.

'An expert!' she said. 'That must be very useful when it comes to moving them on.'

Pascoe raised his eyebrows and the girl had the grace to look a little embarrassed before carrying on.

It emerged that years earlier, Rosetta Lee, then nineteen, had met, loved and married ex-sergeant Herbert Stanhope, just demobbed from the Yorkshire Rifles and, after five years spent risking his life to protect the old folk at home, not in any mood to take heed of their melancholy warnings. The couple married and lived happily and childlessly until twelve years later when Stanhope's younger sister turned up pregnant and husbandless and not at all contrite. But she effaced her sin in the best nineteenth-century manner by dying in childbirth, leaving the Stanhopes with Pauline on their hands. Thereafter they lived even more happily for another twelve years till an accident at the railway marshalling yard where Stanhope worked killed him.

'Aunt Rose knew it was going to happen,' said Pauline.

'Why didn't she stop him going to work?' enquired Pascoe, trying not to sound ironic.

'If you know it, then essentially it's already happened so you can't possibly stop it,' said Pauline as if she were talking sense.

'And you? Do you have this – er – gift too?'

'Oh no!' she said, shocked. 'I'm a fully qualified horoscopist and a pretty fair palmist but I've got no real psychic powers. Aunt Rose is different. She's always had the real gift. Her grandmother was a chovihani, that's a sort of gypsy witch. She really looked the part, not like Aunt Rose. But Aunt Rose has got the greater gift. She's a true psychic, that's the fascinating thing. It's not just a question of fortune-telling, but she really makes contact. Well, you know that yourself from the other day.'

Pascoe nodded, looking as convinced as he was able.

The girl continued, 'It was strange how it developed in a gorgio society. Perhaps all the trappings and superstition of Romany life are a limiting factor, you know, they make a little go a long way but stop a lot from going as far as it might. That was what one of the researchers from the Psychic Research Society said.'

'Your aunt is famous, then?'

'Oh no!' said the girl, 'But she's well known in interested circles. Really all she wants is a quiet life, but she'd always been willing to help friends out.'

'For free?'

'At first. But inflation nibbled away at the pension Uncle Bert left her and she'd had to charge fees to make both ends meet. But she's very careful in accepting clients.'

Gullibility being high on her list of criteria? wondered Pascoe.

'Normally she'd have steered clear of a case like Mrs Sorby's, but Mrs Sorby had been coming to her for years, ever since her mother died.

Mr Sorby objected but she still kept coming. Naturally when this awful thing happened, Aunt Rose had to help.'