"He"ll be better left," advised Downey.
"What the f.u.c.k do you know?" said d.i.c.kinson rudely. But when Pedley said, "Arthur"s right, Tommy. Best leave him, for a bit anyway," the chubby miner allowed himself to be led back to the bar where he was soon retailing a lurid version of the incident to eager ears.
Downey resumed his seat, looking anxiously towards the door.
"For Christ"s sake, Arthur, why do you get so het up over a loonie like yon b.u.g.g.e.r?" demanded Satterthwaite.
"His dad were my best friend," said Downey, defensively.
"So you keep telling us when most"d keep quiet about something like that. Or is it just that you think mebbe May Farr"ll become your best friend too if you wet-nurse her daft b.l.o.o.d.y son?"
Downey"s long face went pale but Stella Mycroft said slyly, "Arthur just likes helping people, don"t you, Arthur? Then mebbe they"ll help him."
"Oh, you can talk, then?" said Mycroft. "I didn"t hear you say much when that b.a.s.t.a.r.d were talking to you."
"No need, was there?" said Stella. "A lady doesn"t need to open her mouth, or anything, when she"s got three old- fashioned gentlemen around to defend her honour, does she?"
Satterthwaite snorted a laugh. Downey looked embarra.s.sed. And Gavin Mycroft regarded his wife in baffled fury.
Outside the Welfare, Colin Farr had paused as the night air hit him, taking strength from his legs but doing little to cool the great rage in his head. He looked around as if he needed to get his bearings. The Club was the last building at the western end of the village. After this the road wound off up the valley to a horizon dimly limned against the misty stars. But there were other brighter lights up there, the lights of Burrthorpe Main.
Farr thrust a defiant finger into the air at them then turned towards the town and began to stagger forward.
Soon the old grey terrace of the High Street was shouldered aside by a modern shopping parade. Business, badly hit by the Great Strike, was picking up again, as evidenced by the brightly lit supermarket window plastered like a boxer"s face with loss-leader Special Offers. Farr pressed his forehead against the gla.s.s, enjoying its smooth chill against his fevered skin.
A car drove slowly by, coming to a halt before the Welfare. A stout man got out. He stood on the Club steps rolling a thin cigarette, then instead of going in, he walked along the pavement towards Colin Farr.
"Got a light, friend?" he asked.
"Don"t smoke. Bad for your health," said Farr solemnly.
"You"re an expert, are you?" laughed the man. He was studying Farr"s face closely in the light from the supermarket window. "It"s Mr Farr, isn"t it? From Clay Street?"
"Depends who"s asking."
"Boyle"s the name. Monty Boyle. You may have heard of me. Here"s my card."
He undid his jacket and took a card out of his waistcoat pocket.
"I was thinking, Mr Farr," he went on. "We may be able to do each other a bit of good. I"m supposed to be seeing someone at your Club, but that can wait. Is there somewhere quiet we can go and have a talk, and a coffee too? You look like a man who could use a coffee."
"Coffee," said Farr, studying the card closely. "And somewhere quiet. It"s quiet here. And lots of coffee too."
Boyle followed his gaze into the supermarket where a pyramid of instant coffee dominated the window display.
"Yes," he said with a smile. "But I don"t think they"re open."
"No problem," said Colin Farr.
And picking the man up as if he weighed fifteen pounds rather than fifteen stone, he hurled him through the plate- gla.s.s window.
Fifty yards away the doors of a parked car opened and two uniformed policemen got out. The younger, a constable, ran towards the supermarket. Behind him at a more dignified pace walked a sergeant. The constable grabbed Colin Farr from behind as he stood laughing at the man sprawled amidst the wreck of the coffee pyramid. Farr drove his elbow back into the policeman"s belly and turned to grapple with him.
"Now then, young Colin, behave yourself," said the sergeant reprovingly.
"That you, Sergeant Swift? Don"t go away. I"ll sort you out after I"m done with this b.u.g.g.e.r."
So saying, Farr lifted the constable in the air and hurled him after Monty Boyle.
Sergeant Swift sighed and raised his night stick.
"Sorry, lad, I can"t wait," he said and brought it down with moderate force and perfect aim on the base of Farr"s neck. Then he held out his arms to catch the young man"s body as he fell into a darkness deeper and blacker than riding the pit.
Chapter 5.
"And how was the people"s poet today?"
"Sorry?"
"The young man in your cla.s.s whose literary style you so admired."
"He wasn"t there," said Ellie.
"Oh dear. A drop-out. I wondered why I found you so glum. h.e.l.lo, Rosie, my love! How"s life in the University creche? Have they got you on to nuclear physics yet?"
Pascoe picked up his daughter and held her high in the air to her great delight.
"No, not a drop-out," said Ellie. "He couldn"t be there because he"s in jail."
"Jail? Good Lord."
Pascoe replaced Rose on the sofa and sat down beside her.
"Tell me all," he said.
"He was in some kind of fracas with a policeman. I a.s.sume it was the kind of horseplay which, if indulged in with another miner, would have got his wrist slapped. With a cop, of course, it amounts to sacrilege."
"You a.s.sume that, do you?" mused Pascoe. "Is it an a.s.sumption based on evidence? Or, like that of the Virgin Mary, on faith and a dearth of eye-witnesses?"
Ellie"s indignation was not to be diverted to the conspiracy of clerics, attractive target though it was.
"An educated guess," she retorted. "As for evidence, I rather thought you might have mentioned the case to me before this, or does it come under Official Secrets?"
"On the contrary. a.s.saults on police officers are, alas, so commonplace that they can go pretty well unnoticed, even in the Force. Like accidents to miners. As long as they don"t put a man in hospital for more than a few hours, who cares? But you must have had his mates" version?"
"Not really," admitted Ellie. "He"s the only one from his pit, so the others have only known him since he came on the course. One of them saw a paragraph about the case in his local paper."
"So where is he from, this whatsisname?"
"Farr. Colin Farr. He works at Burrthorpe Main."
"Burrthorpe. Now that rings a bell. Of course. Both mysteries solved."
"I didn"t know there was even one."
"Mystery one. Why did it ring a bell? That was where one of the kids went missing that Watmough put in the Pickford frame. And our beloved ex-DCC never missed a chance of dragging the Pickford case into his many farewell speeches."
"You mean this man Pickford murdered a Burrthorpe child?"
"Possibly. They never found her body. But Pickford"s suicide gave Watmough the chance to load several unsolved child-molestation cases on to him, plus the Pedley girl"s disappearance. Must have helped the serious- crime statistics a lot."
"Jesus!" said Ellie. "How comforting! And what was the other mystery? You said there were two."
"Oh yes. Mystery two. Why don"t I know about the a.s.saulted copper? Because Burrthorpe"s in the South Yorks area, that"s why! Only just, mind you. Another quarter-mile and it would be on our patch, but as it is, the battered bobby is not one of Mid-Yorkshire"s finest, therefore I know nothing."
"How typically parochial!" mocked Ellie. "How far is it? Twenty miles?"
"Nearer thirty, actually. That"s quite a long way for your lad to come, isn"t it? He must be very keen to get out of Burrthorpe Main once a week."
"He"s certainly found an ingenious way of staying out even longer, hasn"t he?" said Ellie, a little over-savagely.
"Yes, dear. You don"t know anywhere round here where a hungry policeman could get a meal, do you?"
Ellie rose and went to the door.
"It"s salad," she said as she pa.s.sed through. "I was a bit pushed."
Pascoe leaned over and looked down at his daughter who returned his gaze from wide unblinking blue-grey eyes.
"OK, kid," he said sternly. "Don"t play innocent with me. You"re not leaving this sofa till you tell me where you"ve hidden the rusks."
Next morning Pascoe, finding himself with a loose couple of minutes as he drank his mug of instant coffee, dialled the number of South Yorkshire Police Headquarters, identified himself and asked if Detective-Inspector Wishart was handy.
"h.e.l.lo, cowboy!" came the most unconstabulary greeting a few moments later. "How"s life out on the range? Got running water yet?"
It was Wishart"s little joke to affect belief that Mid-Yorks was a haven of rural tranquillity in which the only crimes to ruffle the placid surface of CID life were rustling and the odd bit of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. Any note of irritation in Pascoe"s response would only result in an unremitting pursuit of the facetious fancy, so he said amiably, "Only downhill. In fact things are so quiet here I thought I"d give myself a vicarious thrill by talking to a real policeman about some real action."
"Wise move. Anything in particular, or shall I ramble on generally while I"m beating up these prisoners?"
"You could fill me in on one Colin Farr, of Burrthorpe. He got done for thumping one of your finest last week."
"Oh. Any special reason for asking, Peter?" said Wishart suspiciously.
"It"s all right," laughed Pascoe. "I"m not doing a commando raid. It"s personal and unofficial. My wife knows him, in a tutorial capacity, I hasten to add. She was concerned that he"d missed one of her cla.s.ses, that"s all."
"Blaming it on the police in general and you in particular, eh?" said Wishart, who had the shrewdness of a Scots lawyer which is what his family would have preferred him to be. "Burrthorpe, you say? Indian territory that. It was almost a no-go area during the Strike. You"ll remember the great siege? They just about wrecked the local cop- shop. I believe they"ve rebuilt it like a fortress. There"s a sergeant there I"ve known for years. I"ll give him a buzz if you can hang on."
"My pleasure," said Pascoe.
In the ensuing silence Pascoe cradled the phone on his shoulder and burrowed in the bottom drawer of his desk in search of a packet of barley sugars he kept there. Man could not live on health food alone. When he surfaced, he found himself looking into the questioning gaze of Andrew Dalziel. Usually the fat man came into a room like an SAS a.s.sault team. Occasionally, and usually when it caused maximum embarra.s.sment and inconvenience, he just materialized.
"Busy?" said Dalziel.
"Yes," said Pascoe, carefully letting the barley sugar slip back into the drawer.
"Won"t bother you, then. I just want a look at your old records. Mine are a mess."
He peered towards Pascoe"s filing cabinets, with the combative expectation of a new arrival at the Dark Tower. Pascoe, who knew why his superior"s records were in a mess (if he couldn"t find anything, he shook the offending file and shouted threats at the resultant shower of paper), rose in alarm. The phone was still silent.
"Was it something in particular, sir?" he said.
"I"m not just browsing if that"s what you mean," growled Dalziel. The Ka.s.sell drugs case will do for starters. I know you weren"t concerned directly but I know too you"re a nosey b.u.g.g.e.r, so what have you got?"
What"s he doing digging up old bones? wondered Pascoe as he put the phone on the desk and went to the cupboard in which he stored his personal records.
"Thanks, lad. I"ll keep an ear open for you, shall I?"
Sticking his head out of the cupboard, Pascoe saw that Dalziel was in his seat with the telephone at his ear, taking the paper off a barley sugar.
"That"s OK," he said with studied negligence, it"s not really important."
"It better had be, lad," said Dalziel sternly. "Official phones these are. Some b.u.g.g.e.r rang Benidorm last week and no one"s confessing. Wasn"t you, was it? No. Not cultural enough for you, Benidorm. Can you find it?"
Pascoe resumed his search, spurred on by the need to get Dalziel out before the need arose to explain his query to South.
"Got it," he said in dusty triumph a moment later. But it was too late.
"h.e.l.lo," said Dalziel in a neutral voice which, probably deliberately, might have pa.s.sed for Pascoe"s. "Go ahead."
He listened for a moment then exploded. "Ripper! What do you mean he"s a ripper? No, this isn"t Peter. This is Dalziel. And who the f.u.c.k are you? You"re not speaking from Benidorm, are you?"
He listened a while longer then pa.s.sed the phone to Pascoe.
"Inspector Wishart from South," he said. "Says your man"s a ripper down Burrthorpe Main. Gave me a nasty shock, that. This the Ka.s.sell stuff? I"ll take good care of it, lad."
"Yes, sir." said Pascoe, who foresaw already the dog-eared, beer-stained state in which his lovely records were likely to return to him. "Official inquiry, is it, sir?"
From the door Dalziel flashed him a smile as rea.s.suring as a crack in new plaster.
"As official as yours, I expect, lad."
He went out. Pascoe said, "The coast"s clear."