Devices & Desires

He called out: 'Aren't you polluting the beach?'

Pascoe turned to him and spoke for the first time, shouting above the roar of the fire. 'What does it matter? We're polluting the whole bloody planet.'

Dalgliesh shouted back: 'Shove some shingle on it and leave it until tomorrow. It's too windy for a bonfire this evening.'

He had expected Pascoe to ignore him, but to his surprise the words seemed to recall his companion to reality. The exultation and vigour seemed to drain out of him. He looked at the fire and said dully: ‘I suppose you're right.'

There was a spade and a rusty shovel down by the pile of rubbish. Together the two men scooped up a mixture of shingle and sand and flung it on to the flames. When the last red tongue had died with an angry hiss Pascoe turned and began scrunching his way up the beach towards the cliff. Dalgliesh followed. The question he had half feared -Are you here on purpose? Why do you want to see me? -was unspoken and apparently unthought.

In the caravan Pascoe kicked the door shut and slumped down at the table. He said: 'Want a beer? Or there's tea. I'm out of coffee.'

'Nothing, thanks.'

Dalgliesh sat and watched as Pascoe groped his way over to the refrigerator. Returning to the table, he wrenched open the seal, threw back his head and poured the beer down his throat in an almost continuous stream. Then he slumped forward silent, still clutching the tin. Neither spoke and it seemed to Dalgliesh that his companion hardly knew that he was still there. It was dark in the caravan and Pascoe's face across the two feet of wood was an indistinguishable oval in which the whites of the eyes gleamed unnaturally bright. Then he stumbled to his feet, murmuring something about matches, and a few seconds later there was a scrape and hiss and his hands stretched towards the oil lamp on the table. In its strengthening glow his face, beneath the dirt and smudges of smoke, looked drained and haggard, the eyes dulled with pain. The wind was shaking the caravan, not roughly but with a regular gentle sway as if it were being rocked by an unseen hand. The sliding door of the end compartment was open and Dalgliesh could see, on the narrow bed, a pile of female clothes topped with a jumble of tubes, jars and bottles. Apart from this, the caravan looked tidy but denuded, less a home than a temporary, ill-equipped refuge, but holding still the unmistakable milky and faecal smell of a child. The absence of Timmy and his dead mother filled the caravan as it did both their minds.

After minutes of silence Pascoe looked up at him: 'I was burning all my PANUP records out there with the rest of the rubbish. You probably guessed. It was never any use. I was only using PANUP to pander to my own need to feel important. You more or less said so that time I called at the mill.'

'Did I? I hadn't any right to. What will you do now?'

'Go to London and look for a job. The university won't extend my grant for a further year. I don't blame them. I'd prefer to go back to the north-east but I suppose London offers me more hope.'

'What sort of job?'

'Any job. I don't give a damn what I do as long as it makes money for me and is no possible use to anyone else.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'What happened to Timmy?'

'The local authority took him. They got a Place of Safety Order or something of the sort. A couple of social workers came for him yesterday. Decent enough women, but he didn't want to go with them. They had to tear him screaming from my arms. What sort of a society does that to its children?'

Dalgliesh said: 'I don't suppose they had any choice. They have to make long-term plans for his future. After all, he couldn't have stayed here indefinitely with you.'

'Why not? I cared for him for over a year. And at least I would have had something out of all this mess.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'Have they traced Amy's family?'

'They haven't had much time, have they? And when they do I don't expect they'll tell me. Timmy lived here for over a year but I'm of less account than the grandparents he never saw and who probably don't give a damn about him.'

He was still holding the empty beer can. Twisting it slowly in his hands he said: 'What really gets to me is the deception. I thought she cared. Oh, not about me, but about what I was trying to do. It was all pretence. She was using me, using this place to be near Caroline.'

Dalgliesh said: 'But they can't have seen very much of each other.'

'How do I know? When I wasn't here she probably sneaked out to meet her lover. Timmy must have spent hours alone. She didn't even care for him. The cats were more important than Timmy. Mrs Jago has taken them now. They'll be all right. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons she used to go out blatantly telling me that she was off to meet her lover in the sand dunes. I thought it was a joke, I needed to believe that. And all the time she and Caroline were out there together making love, laughing at me.'

Dalgliesh said: 'You've only got Reeves's evidence to suggest they were lovers. Caroline could have been lying to him.'

'No. No, she wasn't lying. I know that. They used us both, Reeves and me. Amy wasn't – well, she wasn't undersexed. We lived here together for over a year. On the second night she – well, she did offer to come to my bed. But it was just her way of paying for board and lodging. It wouldn't have been right then for either of us. But after a time I suppose I began to hope. I mean, living here together, I suppose I grew fond of her. But she never really wanted me to be near her. And when she came in from those Sunday walks I knew. I pretended to myself that I didn't but I knew. She looked exultant. She was shining with happiness.'

Dalgliesh said: 'Look, is it really so important to you, the affair with Caroline, even if it is true? What you had here together, the affection, friendship, comradeship, caring for Timmy, does all that go for nothing because she found her sexual life outside the walls of this caravan?'

Pascoe said bitterly: 'Forget and forgive? You make it. sound so easy.'

'I don't suppose you can forget, or perhaps even want to. But I can't see why you have to use the word forgive. She never promised more than she gave.'

'You despise me, don't you?'

Dalgliesh thought how unattractive it was, the self-absorption of the deeply unhappy. But there were questions he still had to ask. He said: 'And she left nothing, no papers, no records, no diary, nothing to say what she was doing on the headland?'

'Nothing. And I know what she was doing here, why she came. She came to be near Caroline.'

'Did she have any money? Even if you fed her she must have had something of her own.'

'She always had some cash but I don't know how she got it. She never said and I didn't like to ask. I know she didn't draw any welfare payments. She said she didn't want the DHSS snooping round here to check whether we were sleeping together. I didn't blame her. Nor did I.'

'And she got no post.'

'She got postcards from time to time. Pretty regularly really. So she must have had friends in London. I don't know what she did with them. Threw them away I suppose. There's nothing in the caravan but her clothes and make-up and I'm going to burn those next. After that there'll be nothing left to show that she was ever here.'

Dalgliesh asked: 'And the murder. Do you think that Caroline Amphlett killed Robarts?'

'Perhaps. I don't care. It doesn't matter any more. If she didn't, Rickards will make her a scapegoat, her and Amy together.'

'But you can't really believe that Amy connived at murder?'

Pascoe looked at Dalgliesh with the frustration and anger of an uncomprehending child. 'I don't know! Look, I really never knew her. That's what I'm telling you. I don't know! And now that Timmy's gone I don't really care. And I'm in such a muddle, anger at what she did to me, at what she was, and grief that she's dead. I didn't think you could be angry and grieving at the same time. I ought to be mourning her but all I can feel is this terrible anger.'