'Ivan? Hi! It's Peter Pascoe. How's it going?'
'All the better for the old man being away at this Modern Policing Conference!' replied Detective-Inspector Ivan Skelwith. 'I dare say you're missing Fat Andy too. It's funny, I was just thinking of giving you a ring. Those housebreakers of yours seem to have strayed on to my patch. Some people got back from holiday yesterday evening and found they'd been done. From what the computer chucks up, it sounds like the same lot.'
'Does it now?' said Pascoe, suddenly scenting a self-justifying opening. 'Why don't I drive over and have a look?'
'Time hanging heavy on your hands, is it? All right. When?'
'This afternoon?'
'Christ, you don't hang about! All right. Come before three. That OK? By the way, what was it you were ringing about?'
Pascoe said hesitantly, 'Nothing really. There's a firm of accountants on your patch called Bailey and Capstick. They had a man called Aldermann working for them up until seven or eight years ago. He may have left under some kind of cloud. I just wondered if anything was known.'
'I'll sniff around for you,' said Skelwith. 'Anything I should know about?'
'The faintest smell and you'll be the first to know,' promised Pascoe.
'Fair enough. Till three then.'
Ivan Skelwith was a dark and dapper Lancastrian who claimed to have joined a Yorkshire force because their mean measuring tapes enabled him to scrape in at the minimum height requirement. He greeted Pascoe with pleasure and a cup of tea and some biscuits, which helped make up for the lunch Pascoe had skipped to propitiate his conscience in wasting more time on Aldermann.
They spent the next hour at the burgled house where the m.o. and attendant circumstances seemed exactly the same as Pascoe's burglaries, right down to the "angry householders who as usual were threatening to sue the company who'd sold them their alarm system. The thieves had neutralized this with an expertise which spoke of careful planning. The only unusual feature was that some Virginia creeper which covered the wall on which the external alarm bell was set had been torn away and some plants in the flowerbed immediately below were badly crushed, as if someone or something had fallen on them. There were no helpful footprints or anything of that kind but at least it narrowed the limits within which the break-in must have occurred, for though the damage was not apparent to the casual glance, the owner's one-morning- a-week gardener was able to confirm that the border was untouched when he last called the previous Friday.
'So. A weekend job. Does that help?'
'Not bloody much,' said Skelwith.
Back in his office, they had another cup of tea accompanied this time by jam doughnuts.
Skelwith watched Pascoe devour his enthusiastically and said, 'That's the trouble with marriage. It's all instant sex and gourmet cooking till the kids start coming, then it's do-it-yourself or do without.'
'You look well enough on it,' said Pascoe. 'Four, isn't it? How's that long-suffering wife of yours?'
'Five next January, and she's fine. Now, about that firm of accountants, it's Bailey, Capstick, Lewis and Grey, by the way, only Bailey's been dead twenty years and Capstick retired the year before last. It might have been Lewis and Aldermann, I gather. Their Mr Grey was taken on to replace your Mr Aldermann six years ago and has already attained to a partnership. Mr Aldermann, however, blotted his copybook in some undisclosed way and was lucky merely to lose his job, at least so my informant assures me.'
'Your informant being. .?' enquired Pascoe.
'Our Sergeant Derby. You might've noticed him on the desk. Rumour has it he was here before they found the spa. He certainly knows something about everything in this town.'
'Very useful,' said Pascoe. 'He didn't give any details, I suppose?'
'I'm afraid not. They tend to keep a well-buttoned lip, these accountants, especially when there's been a bit of naughtiness in the double entry. But Derby reckons your best bet is to steer clear of the active part of the firm and go for old Capstick. First, he was absolute master of the business when Aldermann got the push. Secondly, he himself was eased out last year, having reached seventy and suffering badly from gout. He did not take kindly to being "cut off in his prime by striplings." The quotation is, according to Sergeant Derby, from the speech Capstick made at his farewell dinner. Derby does funny voices too.'
'What a splendid man he sounds,' said Pascoe. 'I'm certain he'll have got me an address too.'
'Naturally,' smiled Skelwith. 'Capstick's got this old house out in the sticks where he's kept in his place by a ferocious old housekeeper, it seems. Those who rescue him either by visiting, or better still by removing him, are rewarded with long and often scandalous reminiscences of Harrogate social life over the past half-century. And your luck's holding, as usual, Peter. It's on your way home. The address is Church House, Little Leven.'
Herbert Capstick had been rendered symmetrical by age. The shock of white hair which crowned his head was exactly matched in shade by the swirl of white bandage which swathed his foot. In between, a thin but not emaciated body, clad only in a cotton singlet and a pair of old-fashioned, pocketed rugby shorts, reclined in a huge, deep, upholstered wheelchair at the open door of a jungle-like conservatory.
The old woman who had escorted Pascoe through the house frowned disapprovingly at Capstick and withdrew. She hadn't spoken more than two words, listening to Pascoe's request for an interview in silence, then leaving him standing on the doorstep while she vanished inside. On her return she had beckoned to him and led him through a gloomy drawing-room into the miasmic conservatory.
The ferocious housekeeper, guessed Pascoe.
Capstick said in a high, precise voice, 'Mrs Unger has all the merits of her class and situation. She distrusts equally sunshine and strangers. You would probably be more comfortable, Mr Pascoe, if you moved that chair outside and sat in the sun. I should dearly love to join you but this is as far as I dare go without putting myself in the way of punitive reprisals such as lumpy custard and stewed greens. I hope you don't mind talking through the doorway. It should give something of the quality of the confessional to our exchanges, which in view of your profession may be not inappropriate. Which of my many embezzlements over the past sixty years do you wish to discuss, Inspector?'
The ferocious housekeeper, guessed Pascoe.
Capstick said in a high, precise voice, 'Mrs Unger has all the merits of her class and situation. She distrusts equally sunshine and strangers. You would probably be more comfortable, Mr Pascoe, if you moved that chair outside and sat in the sun. I should dearly love to join you but this is as far as I dare go without putting myself in the way of punitive reprisals such as lumpy custard and stewed greens. I hope you don't mind talking through the doorway. It should give something of the quality of the confessional to our exchanges, which in view of your profession may be not inappropriate. Which of my many embezzlements over the past sixty years do you wish to discuss, Inspector?'
Beneath the apparently uncombed or perhaps simply uncombable white hair, grey eyes rounded interrogatively in a wrinkled, leonine face, and full lips smiled.
Pascoe returned the smile, took a deep breath, and said, 'Not your embezzlements, Mr Capstick, but Patrick Aldermann's.'
'Ah,' said Capstick. 'Patrick. You have, of course, spoken with him about this matter?'
'No. I haven't as a matter of fact,' said Pascoe uncomfortably. 'I've only met him once, very briefly.'
'Yet to me, whom you have not met at all, you are quite willing to broach the subject openly, without preamble? Strange. Perhaps you have been preadvised of my frank, disingenuous nature, my upright character?'
'Perhaps,' said Pascoe.
'Or is it, perhaps, that you have been told that old Capstick is so tired of his own company out here in God's heart-land all day, not to mention a touch of senile dementia, that he has started talking to the sparrows and may be easily persuaded to almost any verbal indiscretion?'
Pascoe took a chance and laughed.
'I see I have been misinformed,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I'm here quite unofficially, Mr Capstick. I can't even hint a threat that I may have to return some day officially. At the moment, though I can never be entirely off-duty, I am merely trying to satisfy my own curiosity. Shall I go on? Or shall I just go?'
Before Capstick could reply, Mrs Unger returned bearing a large tea-tray with folding legs. She stood in front of Pascoe and waited till, catching on belatedly, he unfolded the legs. She set the tray before him and left. It held, besides the teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl and two cups, a plateful of buttered scones.
'Mrs Unger has decided to approve you,' murmured Capstick. 'The buttered scones are the sign. Tea she would bring were my visitor Adolf Hitler. But buttered scones are a sign of special grace. She will be sorely distressed if you do not eat the buttered scones. On the other hand, I should warn you that you will be sorely distressed if you do. This is a dilemma. Such dilemmas cannot be unknown to you in your profession; moments when loyalty to those you work for clashes with loyalty to those you work with. You follow me, Pascoe?'
'I think so,' said Pascoe.
'I had one such moment some years ago with Patrick Aldermann. I am not sure I may not be having just such another one now. Can you reassure me?'
Pascoe poured tea for both of them and said, 'I'm not sure I can. But what I can say is that the only reason on earth I would see for doing anything to harm Mr Aldermann would be if so doing might prevent harm to someone less able to defend himself. I'm sorry if that's not enough.'
He looked uneasily at the ill-omened scones. Then, seizing one boldly, he took a bite.
'Yes, I think that's quite enough, Mr Pascoe,' said Capstick. 'One bite will not harm you. If you care to take the rest and put them on the bird table in the middle of the lawn, we shall be entertained as we talk. The birds appear to be immune, I hasten to add.'
Pascoe took the scones to the bird table, not without an uneasy glance back to see if any curtains were twitching indignantly in the old house. But all seemed still. The well-tended lawn ran down to a thicket of flowering shrubs, including many richly-bloomed bush roses, bounded by a tall cypress hedge beyond which Pascoe could see the tower of the church which gave the house its name. Presumably it was St Mark's church and presumably that was the very tower from which the stone had fallen to crack open the Reverend Somerton's skull.