Rreginald Hill: A Killing kindness

'Naturally. What's your part in all this, Miss Stanhope?'

The girl shrugged.

'I had an office job, but it was pretty deadly. I'd picked up a lot of things from Aunt Rose, she brought me up, you see. Well, I'm not Romany, so I didn't have anything of her gift, but I got quite interested in casting horoscopes. It's pretty scientific that, you only need a very limited degree of sensitivity. Palmistry the same. I got myself properly qualified and gave up the office to work at it full time alongside Aunt Rose. But it's her I want to talk about, Inspector. That awful newspaper story really upset her.'

Pascoe looked surprised. The Evening Post had been fairly restrained, he thought.

'It didn't much please my superintendent either,' he said.

'Aunt Rose doesn't mind helping the police, but this makes her sound like a real sensationalist,' said the girl, producing a newspaper.

The mystery was solved. This was not the Evening Post but that morning's edition of one of the more lurid national tabloids. Obviously one of the local reporters was a stringer for this rag and knew that provincial standards had very little selling power. Pascoe glanced through the arlicle. Its main source was Mrs Duxbury, the neighbour. She gave a graphic account of what Mrs Stanhope had said before being awoken from her trance. Embellished by Fleet Street licence, the occasion sounded like something out of Dennis Wheatley. Much play was made of the fact that Rosetta Stanhope was also Madame Rashid (Mrs Duxbury again?), fortune-telling in the very fairground where Brenda had been murdered. Not even a perhaps, thought Pascoe. He wondered if Dalziel had seen it yet.

'Auntie was really upset this morning,' continued the girl. 'Too upset to work, so I'll be on by myself all day.'

'I'm sorry about that,' said Pascoe conciliatingly.

'Don't be stupid!' she flashed. 'It's not that. It's Auntie's reputation. You may be the police but you've no right to exploit her name like this.'

'Reputation?' said Pascoe, beginning to feel a little irritated. 'Surely you're rating all this stuff a little bit high, aren't you, Miss Stanhope? I mean, that sign outside! Isn't this just the bottom end of the entertainment business?'

He didn't want to sound sneering and the effort must have shown for the girl was equally and as obviously restrained in her reply.

'Aunt Rose is Romany. She's never turned her back on that all these years she's lived among gorgios. This used to be mainly a Romany Fair, Inspector. Now what with one thing and another, the only gypsy presence you get here is a couple of tatty stalls and a bit of cheap labour round the fringes. Dave Lee, for instance, his grandfather…'

'Who's Dave Lee?' interrupted Pascoe.

'I was just talking to him,' said the girl 'I suppose he's a kind of cousin of Aunt Rose's. His grandfather might have brought two, three dozen horses here, being a big man. Now he helps around the dodgems while his wife sells pegs and bits of lace. He's not allowed to bring the ponies he still runs anywhere near the park! This tent is the last real link between the fair today and what it used to be for centuries. There was a fortune-teller's tent on this pitch before there was a police force, Inspector. Not even the big show-people with their roundabouts dare interfere with that. And for nearly fifty years it was run by Aunt Rose's grandmother. When she died four years ago, that looked like the end. Oh, there were fakes enough who might have taken over, but the Lees have more pride than that. So Aunt Rose stepped in. For a couple of weeks a year she's back in the family tradition, in the old world.'

'And which world are you in, Miss Stanhope?' asked Pascoe.

'I help as I can,' she said. 'Collect the money, look after the props, do a bit of palm-reading when Auntie needs a rest. Yes, I did say props. It wasn't a slip, so don't look so smug. Of course most people come into a fortune-teller's tent at a fairground for the entertainment. But we take it seriously, that's the important thing.'

She spoke defiantly. Pascoe answered seriously, 'I hope so, Miss Stanhope. You spoke of protecting your aunt from exploitation just now. I too am employed to stop people being exploited.'

She flushed angrily and said, 'Auntie was just concerned to bring any comfort she could to that poor woman. We shut up shop here for the afternoon, which lost us money, and Aunt Rose wouldn't accept any fee from Mrs Sorby. So we're the only losers, wouldn't you say, Inspector?'

'There are all kinds of gain, Miss Stanhope,' said Pascoe provocatively. 'I mean in the entertainment world, there's no such thing as bad publicity, is there?'

Now she was really angry.

'Tell me, Inspector,' she said in a hard, clear voice, 'I'd say you were a bit younger than Sergeant Wield, right?'

'A bit,' he admitted.

'And yet he is so much pleasanter than you. It looks to me as if the nastier you are in the police force, the higher you're likely to get. Right? I bet I'm right. Goodbye, Inspector!'

Wait till you meet my boss, thought Pascoe as he left. You don't know how right you are!

As he drove away he saw in his rear-view mirror the man Dave heading back towards the tent.

Keen for a report on the conversation? he wondered.

But wasn't everybody fascinated by a connection with a murder case?

He put it out of his mind and hurried towards the station, eager to tell Sergeant Wield he'd got an admirer.

Alistair Mulgan sipped his tomato juice carefully. He would have preferred a large gin partly because he wasn't paying and partly because his metabolism seemed to be very sympathetically inclined towards large gins these days. But the Northern Bank did not care to have its staff breathing alcohol over its customers and since becoming acting manager of the Greenhill branch after the manager fell under a bus (nothing to do with alcohol of course) three weeks earlier, Mulgan had determined to set a perfect example. Now nearly forty, he had come a long way from his humble beginnings in rural Derbyshire, but for the past few years had felt that his career was bogged down. Each full week as acting manager had given him hope that the appointment would be made permanent, hope reinforced when clients started inviting him out to lunch. Though even here fate, as usual, had distributed its gifts with grudging hand and instead of the looked-for filet mignon at the White Rose Grill, he had just been offered the choice between chicken-in-the-basket and scampi-in-the-basket at the Aero Club bar.

'First time here, Mulgan?' said his host. 'How d'you like it?'

Mulgan looked round. A group of young men were drinking pints and noisily exchanging gliding experiences. Three women were sitting in a corner beneath a fluorescent notice announcing that Friday and Saturday were disco nights. On the blue emulsioned walls a formation of china Spitfires banked through photographs of smiling young men in flying kit towards an old school clock whose face was ringed in RAF colours. The hands, propeller-shaped, stood at twelve- fifteen.

'It's very nice,' said Mulgan politely.

'Yes, I thought we'd meet here. It's handy for us both and I hate them stuck-up places with their fancy prices. Besides, I'm going up a bit later on, so I'd have to be here anyway. You ever tried it, Mulgan?'

His host was Bernard Middlefield who with his brother John was co-owner and dictator of a small electrical assembly plant on the Avro Industrial Estate. Middlefield Electric was feeling the pinch of the latest credit squeeze and Mulgan guessed that these new friendly overtures in his direction were just so much bread scattered on the waters. He was not offended. Middlefield under his abrupt, loud-mouthed manner was a sharp enough operator. Chicken-in-the-basket today meant that he had been spotted as being possibly worth filet mignon tomorrow. That was one thing about these Yorkshiremen. You knew precisely where you were with most of them.