'… no news. That's all.'
'Yes. Ring me tomorrow, will you?'
'Yes. Look, Ellie, let's have lunch together. I'm going to be out at Birkham in the morning. It’s not so far for you to come. We'll have a bowl of soup at the Jockey.'
'OK. About one; that suit? Good. 'Bye.'
'Bye, love.'
He replaced the receiver thoughtfully.
'What's the attraction at Birkham? Apart from the soup.'
Dalziel was standing at the door. You had to admire the way the man made no effort to conceal his eavesdropping. Or perhaps you didn't have to admire it at all. It was no use protesting about it, that was certain.
Quickly he filled him in on the day's events.
'Precious bloody little,' he grunted. 'If we got paid by results, there'd be a lot of hungry buggers in this building tonight.' He coughed ferociously into his large khaki handkerchief.
'I'd see about that cough, sir,' suggested Pascoe diffidently.
'Would you now?' said Dalziel. 'Well, Sergeant, as you seem to be at a loose end tonight, you can stroll me quietly down to the Black Eagle and buy me some medicine. George, you coming?'
The inspector thus addressed as he moved past the door in his raincoat didn't pause in his stride.
'Not tonight, thanks, sir,' his voice receded. 'Urgently expected at home.'
Pascoe admired him. It took a good man to keep going when Dalziel spoke. Perhaps that was the quality he lacked, which would keep him a sergeant all his days.
'The girl, she's all right?' asked Dalziel as they stepped out into the cool evening air.
'Yes, thanks.'
'Good. She seemed tough enough.'
Dalziel had met Ellie during an investigation at the college where she lectured, the same investigation which had brought Ellie and Pascoe almost reluctantly together again after years without contact. Pascoe was still not certain about the depth and strength of their relationship. They met regularly, slept together when they felt like it (which meant when Ellie felt like it: Pascoe nearly always did), but their intimate talk was always of the shared past, never a shared future. The week-end at Thornton Lacey had seemed in prospect something of a proving ground. It might still turn out to have been so.
But the relationship between Dalziel and Ellie was clear enough. They did not like each other. Each was the other's bogeyman, monstrous and against nature – Dalziel the brute with power and Ellie the woman with brains. Pascoe sometimes felt it would be very easy to find himself crushed to death between them.
'I had a word with Backhouse earlier. He was cagey, but he's no further forward.'
Dalziel made it sound as if in Backhouse's place he would have been a great deal further forward.
'There's not much he can do, sir,' said Pascoe, deciding he might as well go along with this we-can-discuss-the-case-coolly therapy. 'Not until they find Colin.'
'If he did it. Which seems likely. What seems likely is usually what happened. Though there is one thing.'
What the one thing consisted of was not to be immediately revealed. They passed through the saloon bar door of the Black Eagle as Dalziel spoke. The barman stood with the telephone to his ear.
'Just a minute,' he said. ‘For you, Mr Dalziel.'
Dalziel listened with nothing more than a couple of grunts and one long cough.
'Right,' he said finally. 'Send a car.'
He replaced the receiver firmly. Pascoe looked at him expectantly.
'Just in time for a drink,' said Dalziel. 'Two scotches, Tommy. Quick as you like.'
'We're going out,' stated Pascoe.
'Right. Good job your bit of fluff's tired. Cheers.'
He downed his scotch in one.
'Laddo's been at it again,' he continued. 'Only this time he was interrupted.'
'You mean we've got a witness?' asked Pascoe hopefully.
'No. From the sound of it we've got a corpse.'
Chapter 2
It was one-thirty when Pascoe arrived at the Jockey at Birkham. The pub was situated alongside a boarding kennels and the resident dogs howled accusingly at him as he parked his car.
Ellie had finished her soup and was tearing the heart out of a steak pie, signs of a good appetite which pleased him as he made his apologies and refilled her glass.
'I thought you said you were going to be in Birkham this morning,' she complained.
'Something came up.'
Dropping his voice, he quickly sketched out what had happened the previous evening. Matthew Lewis, forty-three, senior partner in a firm of estate agents, had been called back from a late holiday in Scotland to attend to some urgent business. He had finished at his office at four-thirty. Deciding he was too exhausted to face the long drive north that evening, he made for home.
A neighbour had seen him turn in to the drive of his handsome ranch-style bungalow at ten past five. At five-thirty, the neighbour, Mrs Celia Turvey, had gone to the front door of Lewis's house with a parcel she had taken in for him from the postman. The front door was open. No one answered her calls. She went into the house and discovered Lewis lying dead in the lounge.
Pascoe talked calmly, objectively, about the case, keeping a close eye on Ellie's reactions. It was a good thing to have her interest like this. But it would be easy to let this new act of violence spill over into the emotional area of their own weekend. The momentum of the case had carried him unquestioningly along for most of the previous evening. But when Mrs Lewis, travel-weary and pale beyond despair, had arrived with her two young children, he had turned away and left rather than run the risk of having to speak to her.
He did not tell Ellie this. Nor did he tell her that Matthew Lewis's head had been beaten so badly that slivers of bone from his fractured skull were found buried deep inside his brain. He kept the affair at the level of a problem, as much for his own sake as for hers. But the targetless anger he had felt in Thornton Lacey was beginning to scratch demandingly at whatever cellar-door of his being contained it.
Ellie too had sombre-coloured news. She had been in touch with Rose's parents in Worksop and discovered that the body had been released to them and the funeral was taking place the following day.
'That's quick,' commented Pascoe.
'It's not something to be put off,' said Ellie. 'With the funeral done, there's some chance of starting to live again. Can you go? It's not that far.'
'I'll try,' said Pascoe. 'Of course, we're very busy.'
'Oh, stuff your precious bloody job!' said Ellie, standing up. 'Are you finished? Let's get some air.'
They strolled in silence along the road outside the pub, arriving eventually at the old barn which bore the sign David Burne-Jones and Jonathan Etherege – Antiques. This had been his original reason for meeting Ellie in Birkham, but there had been no time that morning to visit the shop. He had intended to call there later, after Ellie had departed, but now, as she stopped and peered through the open doorway, he said nothing but waited to see what she would do.
'Fancy a browse?' she asked.
'Anything you say.'
They went in. Sitting, and managing to look comfortable, on a Victorian chaise-longue was a man who seemed just to have finished a picnic lunch and was cleaning his teeth on an apple. About forty-two or -three, he had a round, cheerful face which matched his general shape. Fat if you disliked him, otherwise just chubby, thought Pascoe, leaving his own judgement still in the balance.
'Afternoon,' he said. 'Anything in particular you, want?'
'Just browsing,’ said Ellie.
'Be my guest. Let me know if you come across anything half decent among the junk.'
The shop was divided into three sections. The largest contained furniture, the next local craftwork, and third and smallest, a mere couple of display cabinets, stamps and coins.
Pascoe peered closely at these, laboriously trying to set them against a mental check list.