police forces to call on the aid of clairvoyants when they are baffled,’ he read. ‘I leave a normal English CID unit doing its job. I come back and suddenly it’s the Mid-Yorkshire precinct and we’re baffled! No wonder Kojak’s bald.’
Pascoe risked a smile. Lots of things made Dalziel angry. Not having his jokes appreciated was one of them.
The fat man hooked a chair towards him with a size ten foot and sat down heavily.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
For answer, Pascoe shoved Wield’s report towards him.
He read it quickly.
‘Sergeant.’
‘Sir!’
‘Oh, stop standing there as if you’d crapped yourself,’ said Dalziel wearily.
‘Think I may have, sir,’ said Wield.
This tickled Dalziel’s fancy and he grinned and belched. There had obviously been a buffet bar on the train.
‘How’d it happen you had a recorder in your car, lad? Not normal issue these days, is it?’
‘No, sir,’ said Wield. ‘It’s my nephew’s. It’d gone wonky so I’d been having it repaired.’
‘That was kind of you,’ said Dalziel approvingly. ‘At an electrical shop, you mean?’
‘Not exactly, sir,’ said Wield, uncomfortable again. ‘It’s Percy Lowe who services the radio equipment in the cars. He’s very good with anything like this.’
‘Oh aye. In his own time and with his own gear, I suppose,’ said Dalziel sarcastically.
‘He did a good job on your electric kettle, sir,’ said Pascoe brightly.
Dalziel edged nearer the corner of the desk to scratch his paunch on the angle.
‘Let’s hear what the spirits had to say, then,’ he commanded.
He followed Wield’s transcript closely as the tape was played again.
‘Now that’s what I call helpful,’ he said when it was done. ‘That makes it all worthwhile. Here’s us thinking Brenda Sorby was killed after dark when all the time the sun was shining, and that she was chucked into our muddy old canal that’s so thick Judas bloody Iscariot could walk on it, and all the time it was some nice crystal-clear trout stream!’
‘Sir,’ said Pascoe, but the sarcasm wasn’t yet finished.
‘So all we’ve got to do now, sergeant, is work out the most likely nesting ground for albatrosses in Yorkshire. Or condors, maybe. Wasn’t there a pair seen sitting on a slag heap near Barnsley? That’s it! And these dark-skinned buggers’ll be Arthur Scargill and his lads just up from t’pit!’
Pascoe laughed, not so much at the ‘wit’ as in relief that Dalziel was talking himself back into a good mood. He had known the fat man for many years now and familiarity had bred a complex of emotions and attitudes not least among which was a healthy caution.
‘All right, Peter,’ said Dalziel. ‘This crap apart, what’s really happened today?’
‘Nothing much. House to house goes on, but we’re running out of houses.’
‘And the lad, what about the lad?’
‘Tommy Maggs? I saw him again today while the sergeant was at the Sorbys’. It was just about as useful. He sticks to his story. He’s very uptight, but you’d expect that.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, his girl-friend murdered and the police visiting him twice daily.’
‘Oh aye,’ said Dalziel doubtfully. He glanced at his watch. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said. ‘How’s your missus?’
Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, was five months gone with their first child.
‘Fine, she’s fine.’
‘Grand,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’s what you need, Peter. A babby around the house. Steady you down a bit.’
He nodded with the tried virtue of a medieval bishop remonstrating with a wild young squire.
‘So if she’s all right, and my watch is all right, the Black Bull’s open and I’ll let you buy me a pint.’
‘A pleasure, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘But just the one.’
‘Don’t be shy. You can buy me as many as you like,’ said Dalziel.
As he passed Wield, he dug a finger into his ribs and said, ‘You’d best come too, sergeant, in case we move on to spirits.’
He went chuckling through the door.
Pascoe and Wield shared a moment of silent pain and then followed him.
Brenda Sorby was the third murder victim in less than four weeks.
The first had been Mary Dinwoodie, aged forty, a widow. Disaster had come in the traditional three instalments to Mrs Dinwoodie. Less than a year earlier she and her husband and their seventeen-year-old daughter had been happily and profitably running the Linden Garden Centre in Shafton, a pleasant dormer village a few miles east of town. Then in a macabre accident at the Mid-Yorkshire Agricultural Show, during a parade of old steam traction engines, one of the drivers had suffered a stroke, his machine had turned into the spectators, Dinwoodie had slipped and next thing his crushed and lifeless body was lying on the turf. Five months later, his daughter too was crushed to death in a car accident on an icy Scottish road.
This second tragedy almost destroyed Mrs Dinwoodie. She had left the Garden Centre in the care of her nurseryman and gone off alone. More than three months elapsed before she reappeared. She looked pale and ill but was clearly determined to get back to normality. Ironically it was her first tentative steps in that direction which completed the tragic trilogy.
While the Dinwoodies had made no close personal friends locally, they had not been inactive, their social life being centred on the Shafton Players, the village amateur dramatic group. Mary Dinwoodie had withdrawn completely after her husband’s death, but now, pressed by a kindly neighbour, she had agreed to attend the group’s annual summer ‘night out’. They had had a meal at the Cheshire Cheese, a pub with a small dining-room on the southern outskirts of town. At closing time they had drifted into the car park, calling cheerful goodnights. Mary Dinwoodie had insisted on coming in her own car in case she wanted to get away early. In the event she had stayed to the last and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly. The other twenty or so revellers had all set off into the night, in groups no smaller than three. And all imagined Mary Dinwoodie was driving home too.
But in the morning her mini was still in the car park.
And a short time afterwards a farm labourer setting out to clear a ditch not fifty yards
