Pascoe did not speak but instinctively stood up, disliking their proximity. She looked up at him coldly.
“I fear you too are one of the new generation, young man. If you wish me to make a written statement, I shall be in my room. I have done nothing I am not proud of.”
She strode energetically away between the trees, across the grass.
“What was all that about?’ asked Sandra, fully recovered from her emotional scene, and very interested.
“Mainly about Mr. Fallowfield. Look, Sandra, he’s dead now. He can’t be harmed, except by people like Miss. Disney who’ll be sniping at his memory for ever. What do you know about him? She, Disney, says he was an evil influence. Was he? Or any kind of influence?” She shook her head thoughtfully.
“I don’t know much. This is just my first year, you see. When I first came, I was all dewy-eyed, innocent. A habitual church-goer, you know, the social thing. That’s how I got in good with Disney to start with.
Then I started getting involved a bit with Franny and his lot.”
She glanced at Pascoe under lowered eyelids.
“This is confidential, is it? I wouldn’t like… “
“Absolutely,’ said Pascoe. A policeman’s fingers are always crossed, he thought.
“Well, they were — are — fun. Sometimes a bit weird. And sometimes
… well, we did the usual thing, you know. Drank a bit, smoked a bit of pot; there was one night when we got hold of some acid. It seemed fantastic to me. And I had this thing about Franny. Still have, I suppose.”
She spoke so lowly, Pascoe had to strain to hear her. But he did not interrupt.
“You asked about Mr. Fallowfield. Well, I got the impression that he had once been pretty close to the group in some way, I don’t know. A kind of Socratic figure, I suppose, showing the light. But he wasn’t any longer.
And all this business about him and Anita was somehow mixed up with this, I don’t know how. That was one of the sacred mysteries of the group, reserved for members of the inner sanctum only.”
She laughed as she said this, but with a slight trace of bitterness.
“You never made the inner sanctum?”
The? No. Newly-come, that was me. Good for the preliminary lay, but not yet ready for the full initiation. And Franny’ll be gone next year… hell, this place will be dead without him!”
She looked around desperately. What’s the man’s secret? asked Pascoe enviously. Disney should think herself lucky he didn’t fancy her!
He began sorting out some words of kind reassurance to offer Sandra, but she prevented them by glancing at her watch.
“Hell. Nearly lunch time. They’re dead traditional here. Roast and two veg. whatever the weather. Phew!”
She wiped her brow with the back of her hand.
“Remember. Confidential, eh? See you.” “See you,’ said Pascoe. That’s how I lose all my witnesses, he thought.
I start being kind and they just bugger off.
After a working lunch with Dalziel (Sandra had been right — roast beef, carrots and peas) during which he gave the superintendent an account of his talks with Disney and the girl, Pascoe finally managed to track down the senior administrative officer, a long, lugubrious individual called Spinx, whose office contained all the expense records for the college.
Grumbling constantly about the interruption to his day of rest and assuring Pascoe that there wasn’t a hope of such a record being kept for such a time, he unlocked a large store cupboard and began to dig around among a mound of dusty files and folders. Pascoe left him to it.
Fifteen minutes later there was a knock at the study door and Spinx, now very dusty, stood there looking very disappointed.
“Sorry,’ he said.
“That’s all right,’ began Pascoe.
“I was wrong. Here you are. Is that what you wanted?” “Yes. Why yes,’ said Pascoe taking the dog-eared, stained sheet of paper from his hand and looking at it. ‘ you very much.”
“Pleasure. That all? Right.”
Pascoe was reading the sheet before the man had closed the door behind him.
A car allowance had been paid based on the mileage between the college and Chester. He glanced at the copy of Fallowfield’s curriculum vitae which along with those of the rest of the staff he had obtained a couple of days before. Fallowfield had been the senior biology master at Coltsfoot College near Chester which Pascoe knew as one of the modern, reputedly progressive, public schools. The route to Chester would pass, or could be made to pass, conveniently close to south Manchester, to the airport. Somehow Alison Girling’s car had got there, had left the college that foggy night in December and made its way slowly, crawlingly, across the Pennines, while Miss. Girling herself almost certainly lay in a thin cocoon of earth in the hole in the college garden.
But if Fallowfield were at the wheel, then how did he get his own car to Chester? He couldn’t just have left it parked at the college. Even in the holidays there would be a sufficient number of staff, academic, administrative and maintenance, on the premises to notice it. Perhaps someone had. He hadn’t asked. But no; it would have been too wild a risk to take anyway.
And above all, why should Fallowfield have wanted to kill this woman he had just met for the first time? As far as they knew.
It’s all wrong, thought Pascoe gloomily, I’m like Dalziel. It would be pleasant for once to find everything nice and neat. Two murders, one killer, who commits suicide. Bingo! then we could get back to reality and start catching some thieves.
He took the expense sheet out to show Dalziel who had abandoned the shade of the study and taken a couple of chairs and a small folding table out on to the lawn where he sat with deliberate irony about four feet from the hole, now boarded over, in which Miss. Girling had been found.
“Let the buggers see we’re still here,’ he had said. ‘ reckon there’s some here as are dying to see the back of us.”
Now he looked at the expense sheet, shading his eyes from the sun.
That doesn’t help,’ he said as if it was Pascoe’s own personal fault.
“No, sir.”
“He stopped three nights?”
“I noticed that.”
“And he should only have stopped one.”
Whoever it was who had checked the expense sheet had with exquisite parsimony deducted fifteen shillings from the total payable. This was itemized at two nights’ stay in the college, at seven and six per night, which were not chargeable to expenses.
“Cheap,’ said Pascoe. ‘ that what we pay?”
Dalziel ignored him.
“It means he came, unnecessarily in the eyes of the office staff, on the Friday. I wonder why?”
“Is it important, without a motive?”
“You’ve changed your tune, lad.”
Pascoe shrugged.
“I’ve given him up for Girling. But I think he’s a strong runner for Anita.”
“And no connection between the two?”
“No, sir. Coincidence. Or perhaps the connection is merely that the discovery of the body under the statue put the idea of murder before everybody. You could get away with it well, nearly. The body had lain there all those years and might have lain there for ever if it hadn’t been for a turn of fate.”
Dalziel yawned mightily, sunlight glistening off his fillings.
“You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘ know, I’m sick of this place and most of the people in it. I don’t understand it, that’s my trouble. My generation, most of ‘, worked bloody hard, and accepted deprivation, and fought a bloody war, and put our trust in politicians, so our kids could have the right to come to places like this. And after a few days here, I wonder if it was bloody well worth it.”
He was silent. Pascoe felt obliged to say something.
“These places don’t just train people, you know. They help them to grow up in the right kind of mental environment.”
Dalziel looked at him more coldly than ever before.