The files said that Charley Frostick was a fair soldier, a good shot, reliable and conscientious, possibly NCO material.
'The only black he put up was getting back late a couple of mornings,' he said.
'Mornings?' said Pascoe. 'I thought you soldier boys were all tucked up safe and sound by nine P.M.?'
'You've got the wrong decade, mister,' said Ludlam. 'During the basic training period, it's very strict and regimental. Once they've passed out, however, they're like the rest of us – as long as you're spick and span on first parade, which in his case'd be seven-thirty A.M., you're OK.'
'You mean he could have been sleeping at home during that time – how long was it?'
'Just a couple of weeks before he went on draft. Could've been sleeping where he wanted,' grinned the Sergeant. 'Tell you who'll know more than me. Sergeant Myers of our regimental police.'
'Well, really, I don't know if I need to bother him,' said Pascoe, glancing at his watch.
'No bother. He'll be down at the guard house. You've got to go past it on your way out, I'll stroll along with you.'
Sergeant Myers and a couple of his minions, all distinguished by their white webbing, were sitting round a heat-pulsating stove, drinking pint mugs of tea. Conversation halted at the sight of Pascoe but Ludlam quickly reassured them he was harmless.
'It's all right, Micky,' he said, grinning. 'It's not the brass. I just thought you might like to meet a real cop.'
Neither Myers nor his colleagues seemed very impressed.
Myers, an ill-tempered-looking man with wire-rimmed spectacles, said, 'One of our lot in trouble, is it?'
'Not the way you think,' said Ludlam. 'Do you remember Charley Frostick, last draft? His grandad was done in last night, you'll be reading about it in the papers likely. The Inspector here's seeing about getting him back on compassionate.'
It didn't sound a likely story, but it was well-intentioned, Pascoe assumed, and he nodded his agreement.
'What happened?' asked Myers.
'He was attacked in his bath,' said Pascoe. 'Presumably in the course of a robbery.'
'Poor old sod. How'd they kill him?'
'Well, he was beaten and stabbed and half drowned,' said Pascoe. 'But in the end I suppose his heart just gave out.'
Myers shook his head,
'Layabouts,' he said savagely. 'Give 'em to us for a few weeks, we'd soon straighten them out.'
Ludlam said, 'You had to straighten young Frostick out, didn't you? Wasn't he getting back at all hours?'
'That's right. He was screwing the arse off some bint worked in a hotel, isn't that right, Corporal Gillott?'
The man addressed, a lance-corporal with a ramrod straight back so that even sitting down he seemed to be at attention, pulled at his ragged brown moustache and said, 'That's what I heard, Sarge.'
'Didn't you never meet her, Norm?' asked the third r.p., a burly full corporal with heavy jowls. 'I thought you was a bit of a mate of Frostick's, letting him sneak in late, and that.'
'What's this? What's this?' demanded Myers sharply. 'I'll have no favourites round here, so you'd best be sure what you're saying, Corporal Price!'
'Only joking, Sarge,' said Price, grinning maliciously at Gillott. 'I saw her once at a camp dance. Painted like a fairground sideshow she was, but I wouldn't have minded rolling my penny down her chute!'
'Less of that, less of that,' ordered Myers. 'Show some respect. Anything else we can do, Inspector?'
Pascoe, always interested in crime and punishment, said, 'What do you get for being late?'
'First offence, couple of days' jankers,' said Myers.
'Which reminds me. Corporal Gillott, isn't it time you was out there, checking on our customers?'
Gillott stood up. Could a man really be as straight as that without some artificial aid? wondered Pascoe.
'What'll I have them doing this afternoon, Sarge?' he asked, each syllable glottally stopped so the words came out like the sound of a typewriter.
'Leaves,' said the sergeant. 'There's leaves all over the fucking place. Come nightfall, I don't want to see a fucking leaf anywhere around this camp.'
'Come nightfall, you can't see anything anywhere,' said Ludlam, laughing.
He and Pascoe followed the lance-corporal out and watched him marching smartly away.
'Well, there's our police for you,' said Ludlam. 'Remind you of your mob, do they? No, don't answer that!'
Pascoe made for his car. He was beginning to feel strangely shut in, the same kind of feeling he had when his work took him into a prison. That was probably unfair. No doubt a monastery would have much the same effect.
He said as he unlocked his door, 'How long have you been in the Army, Sergeant?'
'Me? We'll have been together now for twenty years come next spring,' said Ludlam. 'I haven't made up my mind yet whether to make a career of it!'
Pascoe laughed with the man. It did occur to him to wonder if advancement to sergeant was the best a lively intelligent man could hope for over twenty years in the Army, but it would have been crass to put the question. However, a more general philosophical query did seem in order.
'Twenty years,' he said. 'Before the big unemployment. Tell me, Sergeant, what motivated men to sign on in your day?'
The sergeant leaned down to the open window and with wide-eyed surprise at being asked such an obvious question said, 'Why, patriotism, Inspector. Pure and simple patriotism!'
Chapter 11
'Sack, Sack!… Pray you give me some sack!'
As Pascoe switched off his engine in The Duke of York car park, the passenger door opened and George Headingley slid in.
'Thought it was you,' he said. 'I'd just about given you up. Look, I'm on my way to The Towers to see this Warsop woman. Then I thought I'd go on to Paradise Hall. Why don't you come along? In fact, why don't you drive me, seeing as you're sitting there with your engine warm.'
'I've got work of my own, remember?' protested Pascoe. 'And what about my lunch?'
'Oh, I'm sure they'll let you at the left-overs at Paradise Hall,' said Headingley. 'And you wouldn't like it in the Duke anyway. They've taken against cops there since last night. I don't know who's been putting ideas in their heads – Ruddlesdin, likely – but they're muttering about drunken policemen already. Come on, let's go!'
With an exaggerated sigh, Pascoe let in the clutch and drove out of the car park, turning left along the narrow winding country road known locally as the Paradise Road.
It took its name from the Hall, five miles away, and the Hall, rather disappointingly, took its name not from the naughty antics which local tradition insisted used to go on there, but from the Paradise family who built it in the mid-eighteenth century. The Towers two miles closer was a half-hearted gesture in the direction of Victorian Gothic. Rumour had it that its last private owner, an old lady who died in the mid-'thirties, had been so incensed by a quarrel she'd had with the owners of Paradise Hall that she had willed her own property to the local authority with the intention that it should be used as a lunatic asylum. What she seemed to have in mind was some sort of Yorkshire Bedlam from which shaven-headed madmen would escape from time to time to swarm all over her neighbour's grounds. Happily, provision for the mentally handicapped in the district was already good, and with plans for future development well advanced, The Towers looked like being a white elephant till a legal ruling was obtained which permitted the authority to ignore the specific terms of the will so long as the building was dedicated to the ends of community care in a much more general sense.
And so it had become what was basically an old people's holiday home, providing short breaks in the countryside for inhabitants of city centre retirement homes and also for old people living with their families who needed somewhere to stay while the family had a break.