‘You concentrate on looking after those nearest and dearest. Like me.’
‘But Watmough was mainly admin after he came back to us,’ pointed out Pascoe. ‘Not even the Challenger can make his time here interesting.’
‘I wish I could be as sure, lad,’ said Dalziel. ‘But forewarned is forearmed …’
‘That’s why you’ve been ruining my records!’ exclaimed Pascoe.
‘They were a bit mixed up,’ said Dalziel reprovingly. ‘You want to watch that. Well, mebbe you’ll turn out to be right and it’ll all be a storm in a piss-pot after all. But one thing I know for sure. If Lobby Lud says anything out of place about me, I’ll hit him so hard with his clock, his head’ll chime for a fortnight!’
He left like a mighty rushing wind.
Behind him Pascoe sat down and mused a little space. There were tiny clouds no bigger than a man’s hand on several of his horizons. They might of course come to nothing or even break in blessings on his head. But when Dalziel got nervous, his colleagues did well to twitch.
And when Ellie started talking about going down mines, it was perhaps time to start looking beneath the surface himself.
First, though, he owed Alex Wishart a phone call.
The Scot listened in silence, then said, ‘Well, I don’t see how he can harm us by anything he says. He would hardly want to, would he? It was his triumph and you don’t rain on your own parade. You’re worried in case he takes a little side-swipe at Fat Andy, is that it? Mind you, from what I’ve heard, he’s got it coming to him. Watmough’s no genius, but he always struck me as a decent kind of man and an efficient enough cop.’
‘Dalziel took against him. I think Watmough dropped him in the mire way back when they were both sprogs.’
‘Doesn’t just look like an elephant, eh? Well, I wasn’t on the Pickford case myself, but perhaps I’ll have a wee glance through the records just in case. Thanks for tipping me the wink, Peter. I’ll be in touch.’
He kept his word quicker than Pascoe expected. Early the same afternoon the phone rang.
‘Peter, I’ve been looking at the Pickford files. You’ve probably worked out yourself that your own involvement is only through the Tweddle child.’
Annie Tweddle, aged seven, had been found strangled and assaulted in a shallow grave in a wood about ten miles from the Mid-Yorks village in which she lived. There were no leads, and the case had been shelved for eighteen months when Mary Brook, eight, had been abducted from a park in Wakefield in South Yorkshire and later found buried on the Pennine moors. She too had been strangled after being sexually assaulted. A few months later, little Joan Miles of Barnsley had gone missing and the worst was feared. But now there was a common factor. Among the reams of statements taken in both cases there were references to a blue car, probably a Cortina, being seen in the vicinity. All similar cases over the past few years were reactivated. South, under Watmough, began to go through the computer print-outs of all registered owners of blue Cortinas in the area.
Then Tracey Pedley, the Burrthorpe child, had vanished too. Once more a blue car figured in the witness statements. And a week later a blue Cortina was found in a country lane near Doncaster with a length of washing-machine hose running from the exhaust into the rear window.
Inside was the body of Donald Pickford and a long incoherent letter in which he confessed by name to several killings and by implication to several more. Clinching evidence that this was not just some compulsive confessor driven by his madness to the ultimate authentication came in a set of detailed directions which led to the grave of Joan Miles in a marshy nature reserve only a mile away. Annie Tweddle was mentioned by name. Tracey Pedley wasn’t. But once it was established that Pickford was likely to have been in the area at the time she vanished, she was put down with a few others as a probable victim.
‘We did have to establish Pickford’s alibi, or rather the lack of it, in the Pedley case, I think.’
‘Yes, but that was hardly important,’ said Wishart reprovingly. ‘I was just trying to sort out where, if anywhere, you might be vulnerable to a bit of criticism.’
‘I suppose Watmough could make a few snide remarks about us having got nowhere with the Tweddle investigation,’ said Pascoe dubiously. ‘But in fairness to the man, he never made any such cracks when he was here, and God knows, he was provoked enough!’
‘So, no need to lose any beauty sleep, eh? Or ugly sleep in Andy’s case. Before you ring off, Peter, there was one other thing. Insignificant, I’m sure, but it might interest you. I gave my old mate, Sergeant Swift, a ring. He was at Burrthorpe all through the Pedley case and through the Strike too, so what he doesn’t know about the place isn’t worth knowing. It was Swift who had the doubtful pleasure of arresting that lad, Farr, you were asking about. Now, when I told him about the Challenger printing Mr Watmough’s memoirs, he told me that our friend Monty Boyle hadn’t been put off by his encounter with that window. He’d been back a couple of times, buying drinks and asking questions, though he’s given a wide berth to the Farr boy!’
‘Asking questions about the Pedley girl, you mean? Well, that figures. Incidentally, was there any special reason why he should have approached Farr or was it pure accident?’
‘He claimed it was just an accident at the time, but now Swift knows what he’s up to, he reckons different.’
‘But Farr can’t know anything about the girl’s disappearance or the Pickford case,’ said Pascoe. ‘You said he was away at sea till the Christmas before the Strike and the Pickford business blew up that September, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Wishart. ‘He was away, but his father wasn’t. Billy Farr was the last person to see, or admit seeing, Tracey alive. In fact, he was in the frame for a bit. He was an old friend of the Pedleys, it seems, and had taken a real shine to the little girl. He often used to take her off for walks, him, her, and his dog. They’d gone brambling that day up in … let’s see, here it is … Gratterley Wood, that runs along a ridge to the south of the village and there’s a track runs up to it behind the Miners’ Welfare Club where Tracey’s father was – still is – steward. Mrs Pedley expected them back about five for the little girl’s tea. But, according to Farr, Billy Farr that is, they were back within half an hour, about four o’clock. He said he wasn’t feeling too well, and that’s why instead of taking the girlie in as he usually did, he left her in the lane at the back of the club, just a few yards from the kitchen door. Trouble was, no one else saw her and there was no sighting of Billy Farr himself till he got home just before six, by which time the Pedleys were getting a bit agitated. Farr said he’d just been walking around by himself. Evidently he was like a man demented when he heard the girlie was missing, though demented with what wasn’t clear to a lot of people.’
‘Guilt, you mean?’
‘There’s nowhere like a mining village for gossip,’ said Wishart. ‘Naturally there was a big search for the girl. They found her bramble pail in the woods on a path running down to the road about a quarter-mile outside the village. There were a couple of sightings of a blue car parked off the road, but one of them was by Billy Farr’s best friend, so that didn’t carry all that much weight. Watmough certainly looked long and hard at Farr for a couple of days, then Pickford topped himself, and it was roses, roses, all the way for Mr Watmough and his modern investigative techniques which, we were assured, had pressurized Pickford into his suicide.’
‘So
