Reginald Hill - A Killing Kindness

‘Aye,’ said Dalziel. ‘She can try to make contact with the ACC for a start. That bugger’s been dead from the neck up for years!’

They had all laughed. And not long afterwards Wield had phoned with his news.

Now Pascoe awaited uneasily the arrival of the dead girl’s aunt. She would have to be taken to the mortuary for a formal identification of the body. It was always an unpleasant business, and though Rosetta Stanhope had impressed him as a strong-willed albeit rather eccentric character, experience had taught him there was no way of forecasting reactions.

He felt almost relieved when the policewoman called in with the news that Mrs Stanhope was not at home so she had stationed herself outside her flat to await her return.

Shortly afterwards Wield returned to say that Dave Lee had gone off in his van right after the sergeant’s visit. No one knew, or at least was telling, his destination.

Finally the DC sent to check on Tommy Maggs arrived, also unaccompanied. Maggs had not returned to work after the dinner break and there was no reply to repeated knockings at the door of his home.

‘Check with the neighbours,’ ordered Dalziel. ‘See if he’s contacted his parents at work. Find out who his doctor is. Sergeant Wield, you’ve got Lee’s van number? Right. Put out a call. Peter, you go and deal with the press, will you? You’re better at shooting shit than anyone else.’

‘Thanks,’ said Pascoe. ‘What do I tell them?’

‘What you know, which, unless you’re holding something back, is bugger all.’

‘They’ll be keen to know if it’s the Choker again,’ said Pascoe.

‘Won’t know that till the PM. And then we’ll only know it’s a Choker!’

‘It looks a pretty clear case,’ protested Pascoe. ‘I mean, compared with the Sorby girl …’

‘You think so? We’ll have to see,’ said Dalziel.

The old bastard thinks he’s on to something, thought Pascoe. Or perhaps he just likes being contrary.

The journalists who had gathered at the fairground were not just local. Word had spread, and there were even a couple from London already, though it emerged that they had travelled up attracted by the clairvoyance story, and Pauline Stanhope’s murder was just a bonus. In the car park, a television crew were unshipping their cameras. They would get some good atmospheric footage if nothing more, thought Pascoe. The fairground amusements, after a brief hiatus, were back to full steam, whirling, glittering, blaring. Did the laughter, the music, the excited shrieking hold perhaps a more than usually strident note of hysteria? wondered Pascoe. It was almost indecent, but at the same time it was inevitable. Death, the biggest barker of them all, had gathered together a huge crowd and the fair people could hardly be expected to ignore this opportunity. It wasn’t even as if Pauline Stanhope was one of their own. Nor Rosetta, for that matter. Once a year they joined the show while the rest of them formed a shifting but constant community.

He stonewalled the questions for ten minutes. As he’d anticipated, they were most eager for confirmation that this was a Choker killing.

‘What about the Hamlet calls, Inspector?’ asked one of the reporters. ‘Has there been one yet?’

‘I don’t know.’ Pascoe smiled. ‘You’d better ask your colleague from the Evening Post . His boss gets them first.’

One of the TV men caught his sleeve as he turned away and asked if they could do a filmed interview in about five minutes.

‘I’ll have to check,’ said Pascoe.

‘Well, it’s not with you, actually. It’s Superintendent Dalziel we’d like.’

Piqued, Pascoe returned to the caravan where he found Dalziel on the phone which the Post Office had just connected.

‘The telly men request the pleasure of your company, sir,’ he said when the fat man had finished.

‘What’s up with you, lad? Not photogenic?’

‘Perhaps I don’t fill a twenty-six-inch screen,’ said Pascoe acidly.

‘What? Put you out, has it, lad?’ chortled Dalziel. ‘Here’s something to put you back in. I’ve just been talking to Sammy Locke at the Post .’

‘There’s been a call?’ said Pascoe eagerly.

‘I knew that’d please you, Peter. You reckon you’ll get the bugger through these calls, don’t you? Well, best of luck. There’s two of the sods at it now!’

He was wrong.

By the time Pascoe got home that night there’d been four Hamlet calls.

The first, at four-forty-two, said, Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come .

The second, at five-twenty-three, said, One may smile, and smile, and be a villain .

The third, at six-fifteen, said, To be, or not to be, that is the question .

The fourth, at seven-nine, said, The time is out of joint: – O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right .

Ellie, for a change, was in bright good spirits and Pascoe was so pleased to see this that he restricted himself to no more than a forty degree roll of the eyeballs when she announced that she was now the membership secretary of WRAG. In any case, she seemed much more keen to talk about the Choker.

‘These phone calls. Are they really going to be any use?’

‘We don’t have much else,’ said Pascoe, tucking into his re-heated beef and mushroom pie. ‘But they can’t all be the Choker. Sammy Locke’s memory of the first voice is a bit vague. He reckons that two, possibly three, of this lot are not so very different from it.’

‘You’ve got all today’s calls on tape, you say,’ said Ellie. ‘What you want is a language expert to listen to them.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Pascoe, who’d already made the suggestion to Dalziel but wasn’t about to be a clever-sticks. ‘Anyone in mind?’

‘Well, there’s Dicky Gladmann and Drew Urquhart at the College. They impress their students by working out regional and social backgrounds by voice analysis.’

‘And are they right?’

‘One hundred per cent usually, I gather. But I think they probably check the records first. Still, they’re certainly incomprehensible enough to be good linguists.’

Pascoe finished his pie, drew breath and started in on the apple crumble, also warmed up.

She wants me to get fat too! he suddenly thought.

‘I’ll give them a try. Though they’re probably enjoying their little vacation in Acapulco,’ he said. ‘By the way, you never said, how did la Lacewing respond to your theory about the medium message?’

‘Thought it was a load of crap,’ said Ellie moodily.

‘Did she now? Well well. Let me have the transcript back, won’t you?’

‘Yes. And she got pretty close to embarrassing me by talking about you being in charge of the case.’

‘That embarrasses you?’

‘Of course not. No, I mean she was trying to put down some loud-mouthed, fellow called Middlefield, he’s a JP or something, thinks all murdered women are ipso facto whores. I tell you what was interesting, though. I gathered the fellow he was talking to was the manager of the bank where that other girl worked. The one on the tape. Or not.’

‘Brenda Sorby. Now that is interesting,’ said Pascoe.

Later as they lay in bed, Ellie said drowsily. ‘This poor woman at the fairground. You say she was Rosetta Stanhope’s niece?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then maybe she’ll get in touch with her. I mean, they must have been close.’

‘Maybe,’ said Pascoe. ‘We’ll call you in if it happens.’

She dug her elbow in his ribs and soon her breath steadied into the regularity of sleep.

Pascoe found sleep difficult, however, and when it did come, it came in fits and starts and flowed shallowly over a rocky bed. Ellie was partly responsible by putting the thought of Pauline Stanhope into his mind, but she would have been there anyway. He always slept badly the night before attending a post-mortem and tomorrow he was due at the City Mortuary at nine A.M. to attend the last forensic rites on the body of Pauline Stanhope.