Sir, said Pascoe, but the sarcasm wasnt yet finished.
So all weve got to do now, sergeant, is work out the most likely nesting ground for albatrosses in Yorkshire. Or condors, maybe. Wasnt there a pair seen sitting on a slag heap near Barnsley? Thats it! And these dark-skinned buggersll be Arthur Scargill and his lads just up from tpit!
Pascoe laughed, not so much at the wit as in relief that Dalziel was talking himself back into a good mood. He had known the fat man for many years now and familiarity had bred a complex of emotions and attitudes not least among which was a healthy caution.
All right, Peter, said Dalziel. This crap apart, whats really happened today?
Nothing much. House to house goes on, but were running out of houses.
And the lad, what about the lad?
Tommy Maggs? I saw him again today while the sergeant was at the Sorbys. It was just about as useful. He sticks to his story. Hes very uptight, but youd expect that.
Why?
Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police visiting him twice daily.
Oh aye, said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at his watch. Well, Ill tell you what well do, he said. Hows your missus?
Pascoes wife, Ellie, was five months gone with their first child.
Fine, shes fine.
Grand, said Dalziel. Thats what you need, Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you down a bit.
He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.
So if shes all right, and my watch is all right, the Black Bulls open and Ill let you buy me a pint.
A pleasure, sir, said Pascoe. But just the one.
Dont be shy. You can buy me as many as you like, said Dalziel.
As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs and said, Youd best come too, sergeant, in case we move on to spirits.
He went chuckling through the door.
Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain and then followed him.
Chapter 2
Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less than four weeks.
The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty, a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town. Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators, Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car accident on an icy Scottish road.
This second tragedy almost destroyed Mrs Dinwoodie. She had left the Garden Centre in the care of her nurseryman and gone off alone. More than three months elapsed before she reappeared. She looked pale and ill but was clearly determined to get back to normality. Ironically it was her first tentative steps in that direction which completed the tragic trilogy.
While the Dinwoodies had made no close personal friends locally, they had not been inactive, their social life being centred on the Shafton Players, the village amateur dramatic group. Mary Dinwoodie had withdrawn completely after her husbands death, but now, pressed by a kindly neighbour, she had agreed to attend the groups annual summer night out. They had had a meal at the Cheshire Cheese, a pub with a small dining-room on the southern outskirts of town. At closing time they had drifted into the car park, calling cheerful goodnights. Mary Dinwoodie had insisted on coming in her own car in case she wanted to get away early. In the event she had stayed to the last and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. The other twenty or so revellers had all set off into the night, in groups no smaller than three. And all imagined Mary Dinwoodie was driving home too.
But in the morning her mini was still in the car park.
And a short time afterwards a farm labourer setting out to clear a ditch not fifty yards behind the Cheshire Cheese found her body neatly, almost religiously, laid out amid the dusty nettles.
She had been strangled, or choked as the labourer informed any who would listen to him, a progressively diminishing number over the next few days.
But the alliteration appealed to Sammy Locke, news editor of the local Evening Post and The Cheshire Cheese Choking was his lead story till public interest faded, a rapid enough process as the labourer could well avow.
Then ten days later the second killing took place. June McCarthy, nineteen, single, a shift worker at the Eden Park Canning Plant on the Avro Industrial Estate, was dropped early one Sunday morning at the end of Pump Road, a long curving street half way down which she lived with her widowed father. Her friends on the works bus never saw her alive again. A septuagenarian gardener called Dennis Ribble opening the shed on his Pump Street allotment at nine-thirty A.M. found her dead on the floor.
She too had been strangled. There were no signs of sexual interference. The body was neatly laid out, legs together, lolling tongue pushed back into the mouth, arms crossed on her breast and, a macabre touch, in her hands a small posy of mint sprigs whose fragrance filled the shed.
There were no obvious suspects. Her father was discovered still in bed and imagining his daughter was in hers. And her fiancé, a soldier from a local regiment, had returned to Northern Ireland the previous day after a weeks leave.
Sammy Locke at the Evening Post read the brief accounts in the national dailies on Monday, looked for an angle and finally composed a headline reading CHOKER AGAIN?
He had just done this when the phone rang. A mans voice said without preamble, I say, we will have no more marriages.
Locke was not a literary man, but his secretary, having recently left boring school after one year of a boring A level course, thought she recognized a reference to one of the two boring texts she had struggled through (the other had been Middlemarch).
Thats Hamlet, she announced. I think.
And she was right.
Act 3, Scene 1. I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face and you make youselves another; you jig, you amble, and nickname Gods creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, Ill no more ont; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriages; those that married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go.
Sammy Locke did not know his Shakespeare but he knew his news and after a little thought he removed the question mark from his headline and rang up Dalziel with whom he had a drinking acquaintance.
Daziel received the information blankly and then consulted Pascoe, whose possession of a second-class honours degree in social science had won him the semi-ironical status of cultural consultant to the fat man. Pascoe shrugged and made an entry in the log book.
And then came Brenda Sorby.
She was just turned eighteen, a pretty girl with long blonde hair who worked as a teller in a suburban branch of the Northern Bank. A picture had emerged of a young woman with the kind of simplistic view of life which is productive of both great naïveté and great resolution. She had told her mother that she would not be home for tea that Thursday evening, and she had been right. After work she was having her hair done, and then she planned to take advantage of the new policy of Thursday night late closing by some of the city centre stores to do some shopping before meeting her boy-friend.
And then came Brenda Sorby.
She was just turned eighteen, a pretty girl with long blonde hair who worked as a teller in a suburban branch of the Northern Bank. A picture had emerged of a young woman with the kind of simplistic view of life which is productive of both great naïveté and great resolution. She had told her mother that she would not be home for tea that Thursday evening, and she had been right. After work she was having her hair done, and then she planned to take advantage of the new policy of Thursday night late closing by some of the city centre stores to do some shopping before meeting her boy-friend.
This was Thomas Arthur Maggs, Tommy to his friends, aged twenty, a motor mechanic by trade and an amiable but rather feckless youth by nature. He had got into a bit of trouble as a juvenile, but nothing serious and nothing since. Brendas father disapproved of almost everything about Tommy and his circle of friends, but was restrained from being too violent in his opposition by Mrs Sorby, who opined that it was best to let these things run their course. They did, until the night of Brendas eighteenth birthday which she celebrated with a party of friends at the towns most pulsating disco. She returned home happy, slightly merry and wearing a rather flashy engagement ring. Jack Sorby exploded at Brenda for her stupidity, at Tommy for his duplicity, at his wife for her ill-counsel, at himself for taking heed of it. He subsided only when his threats to throw his daughter out were met by the calm response that in that case she would start living with Tommy that very night.
A truce was agreed, a very ill-defined truce but one which Jack Sorby felt had been treacherously and unilaterally shattered when on that Friday morning only four days later he rose to discover his daughter had not come home the previous night. Once again, all Mrs Sorbys powers of restraint were called upon to prevent him setting off for the Maggses household only a mile away and administering to Tommy the lower-middle-class Yorkshiremans equivalent of a horsewhipping. Curiously, his genuine if rather over-intense concern for his daughter did not admit any explanation of her absence other than the sexual.
Winifred Sorby had a broader view of her daughter, however. As soon as her husband had left for the local rating office where he was head clerk, she had rung the bank. Brenda was usually there by eight-thirty. She had not yet appeared. At nine, she tried again. Then, putting on a raincoat because, despite the promise of a fine summer day, she was beginning to feel a deep internal chill, she went round to Tommy Maggss house.
There was no reply, no sign of life.
The Maggses all worked, a helpful neighbour told her. And, yes, she had seen them all go off at their usual time, Tommy included.
Mrs Sorby went to the police.
The name of Tommy Maggs immediately roused some interest.
At eleven-fifteen the previous night a Panda car crew had been attracted by the sight of an old rainbow-striped mini with its bonnet up and a young man apparently trying to beat the engine into submission with a spanner.
Investigation revealed that it was indeed his own car which had broken down and, despite all his professional ministrations (for it was Tommy Maggs), refused to start. A strong smell of drink prompted the officers to ask how Tommy had spent the evening. With his girl-friend, he told them. She, irritated by the breakdown and being only half a mile or so from her home which was where theyd been heading, had set off on foot.
Had they been in a pub?
No, assured Tommy. No, they definitely hadnt been in a pub.
But you have been drinking, suggested one of the policemen emerging from the interior of the mini with an almost empty bottle of Scotch in his hand.
A breathalyser test put it beyond all doubt. Tommy was taken to the station for a blood test. His protestations that he had not taken a drink until after the breakdown evoked the kindly meant suggestion that he should save it for the judge. The police doctor was occupied elsewhere looking at a night watchman whod had his head banged in the course of a break-in and it was well after one A.M. before Tommy was released, a delay which was later to stand him in good stead. By this time it was raining heavily and constabulary kindness was once more evidenced by a lift in a patrol car going in the general direction of his home.
When the police approached him the next day at the Wheatsheaf Garage, his place of work, he assumed it was on the same business and his story came out again perhaps a little more rounded this time. A quiet romantic drive with his fiancée, the breakdown, Brendas departure on foot, his own frustration and the taking of a quick pull on the bottle to soothe his troubled nerves prior to abandoning the useless bloody car and walking home.
When he realized the true nature of their enquiries, however, his agitation was intense. The police took a statement, then went on to the bank. No one had heard of or seen Brenda since she left the previous evening, but there had been a couple of attempts to get her on the telephone earlier that morning, apart from Mrs Sorbys, that was.
By lunch-time, the police were taking things very seriously. Jack Sorby had created a diversion by going round to the Wheatsheaf Garage and attempting to assault Tommy who by this time was too miserable and demoralized to defend himself. Fortunately, the police arrived almost simultaneously and established peace. Tommy wasnt up to much except repeating his story mechanically but at least they solved the mystery of the other phone calls. He had made them, he admitted. When asked why, he said with a brief flash of his customary liveliness, To get her to back up my fucking story about the drink, of course.
This made sense to Pascoe, who since the two stranglings had been told by Dalziel to keep an eye on all female attacks or disappearances. While it didnt actually confirm Tommys version of the evening, it helped a lot; or it meant he was ten times more cunning than he looked.
What finally took Tommy off the hook was the last thing anybody wanted the discovery of the body. It was not pleasant. Right through the heart of the city, a straight line alongside the shallow and meandering river, ran the old canal, a relict of the last century and little used since the war until the holiday companies began to sell the delights of inland cruising in the sixties and commercial interests began to react to soaring fuel costs in the seventies. It was a barge that quite literally brought Brendas body to light. Riding low with a cargo of castings, the barge was holding the centre of the channel when a careless cruiser forced it over towards the bank. The bargee swore with proverbial force as the bottom bumped and the propeller stuttered, thinking hed caught some sizeable bit of rubbish dumped in the murky waters.
Switching off the engine he hurried to the stern and peered over. At first he was just aware that the dark brown water was imbued with a richer stain. Then as he saw what came drifting slowly to the surface, he began to swear again but this time as a kind of pious defence.
The pathologist was able to confirm that all the mutilations on the body were caused by the action of the propeller and had nothing to do with the girls death. She had been strangled but had not been dead, though possibly moribund, when she entered the water. Asked when death occurred, he refused to be more definite than not less than twelve, not more than twenty hours. Pressed, he became irritable and talked about special circumstances such as the high temperature of the canal water and the opening up of the chest and lungs by the propeller. Pascoe, long used to the imprecisions of science, had looked for other evidence of timing.