A pinch of snuff

Pascoe paused in mid-cornflake to look at his watch. It was five forty-five.

'I'm sorry. Did I wake you?'

'Yes. I just thought you'd gone off for your fifteenth pee. Why don't you drink Scotch?'

'I don't know. I don't really want anything and in these places when you don't really want anything, they give you beer. I thought I told you last night I'd be up at the crack.'

'Maybe you did. I was tired, you were incoherent. God, it's cold.'

'It's not surprising. I saw a stripper last night who ended up with more on than you.'

'If it bothers you,' said Ellie retreating into the hall and reappearing wearing his oldest raincoat.

It changed her from Titian Venus to Central European refugee.

'I'll have some of that coffee. Where are you going? View a corpse? Torture a suspect?'

'I'm going to see a dirty film being made,' said Pascoe with some satisfaction.

'God, Peter, you're becoming an obsessive! What are you trying to prove?'

'I can't understand,' said Pascoe, 'why no one else but me thinks it's important. And Shorter.'

'Your Danish Dentist? You make a fine pair.'

'A girl may have been badly injured. Even killed.'

'May have been. Shorter may have had a motive for starting all this. And you checked out the actress.'

'You said there were two of them,' protested Pascoe.

'I may have been wrong. But even if I'm not, even if all that was for real and not just a ketchup job, you're still getting obsessed by a single symptom when there's a whole disease to cure.'

'I deal in symptoms,' said Pascoe.

'Wrong,' said Ellie. 'There's nothing clinical about you, my love. Wrong profession, medicine. The Church, that's more your style. Priest-like task of pure ablution round earth's human shores. Bloody Shelley.'

'Bloody Keats.'

'Same thing,' she said. 'You're a pure ablutionist. And like most priests, you're obsessed with sex, when it's sexism you should be after. That's the disease.'

He pushed back his chair and stood up.

'You should have a word with Ms Lacewing,’ he said. 'She's got plans.'

'I intend to,’ she said. 'Didn't I tell you she rang? We're meeting for lunch today?'

'Oh God. Liberated gossip!' he said. 'My raincoat, please.'

'But you hardly ever wear this raincoat,' grumbled Ellie as she removed it.

'Nor,' he said looking at her appreciatively, 'do you.'

As he backed out of the gate, she was standing naked on the doorstep, waving everything at him. He peeped his horn and drove away.

Hay Hall would have been totally unfindable without the help of what he took to be a ploughman workward plodding his weary way and even then it was only because he had the wit to follow the man's gestures rather than his words (right arm shooting out as he said 'sharp left at Five Lanes End') that Pascoe found himself turning through an unmarked and uninviting gateway in a crumbling lichen-pocked wall. The drive was pot-holed worse than Acornboar Mount, the vegetation consisted mainly of dark and dripping conifers and yew, and the whole atmosphere seemed more conducive to the chilly thrills of horror than the slippery blisses of pornography. This supernatural ambience was reinforced when the house itself came into view for now he got a tremendous sense of deja vu. It was a two-storeyed building which not even time and neglect could make beautiful. The ground floor looked as if it had been designed by someone who had a distant acquaintance with Georgian proportion and style, but the first floor, with its lancet windows and Gothic cornices, seemed to have been sliced off some romantic folly and dropped, not very accurately, on to its ill-matched base. Even the unkempt festoons of ivy couldn't hide the join.

Parked in front of the house were two cars and a large van. Pascoe slid his Riley alongside them, still wrestling with this sense of having been here before. It was something he had heard of, but never experienced, and he was surprised at the uneasiness with which it filled him.

'Oh it's you,' said Penelope Latimer from the portico. She came towards him, huge in a white silk trouser suit, and added apologetically, 'Sorry to sound so unwelcoming but I thought it might be the generator truck.'

'I need my exhaust fixed,' said Pascoe.

'Don't we all. Come inside, Peter, isn't it? We can't start anything till the power arrives, so you may detect away, darling, detect away. Anything wrong?'

'It's just this house,' said Pascoe slowly, peering up at the facade.

'Hideous, ain't it? But very useful. No one else will look at it, so we rent it for a song.'

'I've a peculiar notion that I've seen it before,' said Pascoe.

Penelope Latimer laughed beautifully, the kind of spontaneous silvery gurgle that film stars paid thousands to voice coaches for, and her soft frame shook like a snow-filled col touched by the warmth of spring.

'Of course you have, darling. Everyone who's seen a Homeric film has seen Hay Hall. Do step in out of the raw.'

Pascoe felt as relieved and disappointed as most people feel when the apparently supernatural is explained. Droit de Seigneur was the answer. This was the manor to which the lecherous lord had abducted the blushing bride. Which also made it the manor in which the blushing bride had been, perhaps, assaulted.

They passed through an entrance hall with no furniture, tattered wallhangings, a rather elegant curved stairway and creaking floorboards, into an equally dilapidated drawing-room which was occupied by half a dozen people standing around a Calor gas heater drinking coffee from flasks.

'Relax, folks,' said Penny. 'It's only the fuzz. Gerry, my dear, come and be fingerprinted.'

A tall thin man with a scholarly stoop detached himself from the coffee-drinkers and joined Pascoe and the woman. It wasn't just the stoop that was scholarly. He had a thin-featured face, at once vague and ascetic, that would have looked at home at an Oxbridge high table; wire-rimmed spectacles pinched his long nose, and he even wore the baggy grey flannels and ancient sports coat with leather elbows which are the academic's uniform in the popular imagination. His age was about thirty.

'Gerry Toms, Peter Pascoe. Coffee, Peter?'

'No, thanks. Is there anywhere we could talk privately, Mr Toms?'

'We could step into the shooting-room, if you don't mind the cold,' said Toms. He spoke hesitantly with a touch of East Anglia in his voice.

'It shouldn't take long,' said Pascoe.

The director led him via the hall into another, larger room. This one was furnished after a fashion. Drapes had been hung over the windows, a square of carpet laid on the floor in front of the almost Adam fireplace, and on this stood a chaise-longue and a small table set for tea. The final touch was a huge tiger skin rug.

The other end of the room was full of equipment – cameras, some sound recorders and a variety of lights.

'There's no power here, of course,' said Toms. 'That's why we need the generator. It isn't really enough, but a bit of gloom suits most of our scenes and hides the cracks in the plaster.'

'Why do you use the place if it's so inconvenient?' asked Pascoe.

'I didn't say it was inconvenient,' said Toms. 'On balance, it's great. First, we've got the whole house for interiors. Give us an hour and we can have any room looking habitable – on film anyway. And any period. Second, we've got nice private grounds for exteriors. You can't shoot our kind of footage in a public park. Third, it's cheap. Fourth, it's bloody cold, so we get things done quickly. What is it you want to talk to me about, Inspector?'

'A film you made, Droit de Seigneur.'

'Ah yes. A masterpiece of my social commentary period,' said Toms blandly.

'Your what?'

'I was trying to say something about the repression of woman.'

'She didn't look very repressed to me,' said Pascoe, ninety-nine per cent sure that he was being sent up.