Reginald Hill - A Killing Kindness

A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

Harper An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Publishers 1980

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Reginald Hill 1980

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN 9780586072516

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN 9780007370252

Version: 2015-06-18

For Dan and Pat

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

The man that lays his hand upon a woman,

Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch

Whom ’twere gross flattery to name a coward.

JOHN TOBIN: The Honeymoon

… it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the few last bubbles, till through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon, and birds with wings wide as a windmill’s sails slowly drifting round it, and over the bank’s rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a current turns me over, and I drift, and still am drifting, and …

What the hell’s going on here! Stop it! This is sick …

Please. Oh God! Be careful you’ll …

Jack! No !

Ohhhh …

See! Look. The lights … please

… fakery … I don’t want

… lights! Mrs Stanhope, Mrs Stanhope, are you all right?

… auntie, are you OK? Please, auntie …

… thank you, love, I’m a bit … in a minute … did I get …

… vicious blackmailing cow and I’ll see …

‘… picking up lots of forget-me-nots. You make me …’

‘Sorry,’ said Sergeant Wield, switching off the pocket cassette recorder. ‘That was on the tape before.’

‘Pity. I thought she was proving that Sinatra really was dead,’ said Pascoe putting down the sergeant’s handwritten transcription of the first part of the recording. ‘Did you switch off there, or what?’

‘Or what, I think. I had the mike in my pocket, nice and inconspicuous. When I jumped up to grab at Sorby it must’ve fallen out and pulled the connection loose. I’m sorry about all this, sir!’

‘Oh no, you’re not,’ said Pascoe. ‘Not yet. When Mr Dalziel comes through that door with the Evening Post in his hand, that’s when you’re going to be sorry.’

Wield nodded gloomy agreement with the inspector, who now studied his report as if seeking some hidden meaning.

Like all Sergeant Wield’s reports, it was pellucid in its clarity.

Calling on Mrs Winifred Sorby in pursuit of enquiries into the murder of her daughter, Brenda, he had found her in the company of her neighbour, Mrs Annie Duxbury. A short time later, Mrs Rosetta Stanhope and her niece, Pauline, had turned up. Mrs Stanhope was known to the sergeant by reputation as a self-professed clairvoyant and medium. It emerged that Mrs Sorby wished Mrs Stanhope to attempt to get in touch with her dead daughter. The sergeant had been pressed to stay and take part. Agreeing, he had excused himself to go out to his car where he had a small cassette recorder. Concealing this under his jacket, he had returned and joined the women round a table in the dead girl’s darkened bedroom. After a while Mrs Stanhope had seemed to go into a trance and finally started talking in a voice completely different from her own. But only a few moments later the door had burst open and Mr Sorby, the dead girl’s father, had entered angrily and brought the seance to an end.

His fury at his wife’s stupidity had been redirected when he became aware of the sergeant’s presence. He had rapidly found a sympathetic ear for his complaints in the local press and by the time a chastened Wield had returned to the station, Pascoe had already fielded several enquiries about the police decision to use clairvoyance in the Sorby case.

‘His wife’s always gone in for that kind of stuff,’ explained Wield. ‘Sorby’s never approved. Naturally she wasn’t expecting him back for a couple of hours.’

‘Perhaps he’s got second sight,’ grunted Pascoe.

He was examining the transcript again. It had taken Wield nearly an hour of careful listening to sort out the confusion of overlapping voices.

‘Let’s get it straight,’ said Pascoe. ‘Mrs Stanhope in her trance voice. That’s clear. Then Sorby arrives and starts shouting. OK?’

‘Yes,’ said Wield. ‘Next – that’s “Please. Oh God,” etc., is the niece, Pauline. “Jack … no!” – that’s Mrs Sorby.’

‘And this great yell?’

‘Mrs Stanhope coming out of her trance. Then the niece again, Sorby going on about fakery, Mrs Sorby asking Mrs Stanhope if she’s all right.’

‘Which she is. Speaking in her normal voice again, right?’

‘Right. And Sorby again. The niece had jumped up and put the light on. Sorby pushed her aside and looked as if he was going to assault Mrs Stanhope. That’s when I got in on the act.’

‘And the rest is silence,’ said Pascoe. ‘That’s apt.’

‘I wish it had all been bloody silence,’ said Wield. He had one of the ugliest faces Pascoe had ever seen, the kind of ugliness which you didn’t get used to but were taken aback by even if you met him after only half an hour’s separation. The advantage of such an arrangement of features was that it normally blanked out tell-tale signs of emotion. But at the moment unease was printed clearly on the creased and leathery surface.

The phone rang.

It was the desk sergeant.

‘Mr Dalziel’s just come in,’ he said. ‘He’s on his way up.’

The door burst open as Pascoe replaced the receiver.

Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel stood there. A long intermittently observed diet had done something to keep his bulging flesh in check, but now anger seemed to have inflated him till his eyes threatened to pop out of his grizzled bladder of a head and his muscles seemed on the point of ripping apart the dog-tooth twill of his suit.