‘I’d best be off, sir,’ said Wield. ‘Good of you to spare the time.’
‘Shared not spared, I think,’ said Aldermann. ‘Goodbye now.’
He accompanied Wield and Singh round the side of the house, then diverted to a screened compost heap where he deposited the deadheads and stood looking down at them in quiet contemplation. Wield, glancing back, was reminded of a priest standing alone by a flower-strewn grave after all the mourners had gone. ‘A priest’ wasn’t a bad image. Aldermann’s enthusiasm had something of the inaccessibility of the truly religious mind. The sergeant surprised himself by feeling a sudden surge of envy. For what? Not these huge gardens and that over-large house, certainly. And definitely not his wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor his servants, if he had any besides the jobbing gardeners and probably the occasional char. Perhaps, then, for knowing where his centre lay and daring to act upon that knowledge?
Singh had been reluctant to break in on the rapt sergeant, but now he said, ‘Was it all right me playing with the kiddie, Sarge? I thought it’d give you a bit more chance to suss out her mam.’
Wield regarded the boy in momentary puzzlement, then recalled to mind that of course he had no notion that their visit to Rosemont had anything but the business of Mrs Aldermann’s car behind it. So his move with the little girl had been pretty clever. But the sergeant did not articulate his approval. Instead he said coldly, ‘Enjoy yourself in the sand-pit, did you? We’ll have to see if we can get you posted to permanent school-crossing duty.’
Singh glanced sideways and smiled, ready to share the joke, but the sight of that savage, rough-hewn profile made it hard to believe in Wield’s humorous intent. He felt a strong need for the man’s approval and tried again by saying, ‘That Mrs Aldermann, when I was on traffic duty yesterday morning I saw her down the Market Caff. And you know who she was with? Mr Pascoe’s wife!’
Wield unlocked the car door and slid in behind the wheel.
‘Traffic duty from the Market Caff?’ he said. ‘I hope you’re learning good policing as quick as you’re learning bad habits. Get in if you don’t want to walk back.’
Police Cadet Singh hurried round the car and they drove back to the station in a far from companionable silence.
(Floribunda. Fairly vigorous, coppery gold blooms in clusters of three to five, little fading but needs protection from black spot, sweet-scented.)
Peter Pascoe dandled his daughter, marking the rhythm by chanting in a music-hall Scots accent. ‘De’il and Dalziel begin with ane letter! The de’ils nae guid and Dalziel’s nae better!’
The little girl was much taken by this verse and gurgled happily, but Ellie, coming into the lounge unheard, said, ‘What’s the fat slob been doing now?’
‘That is no way to talk of your daughter,’ said Pascoe sternly.
‘Funny. Not that she doesn’t get called worse than that sometimes. But to get back to Dalziel.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing worse than usual. He’s just still niggling about this Elgood-Aldermann thing. But I can’t get out of him what he expects me to do. Wield went round there last night …’
‘To the Aldermanns’?’
‘Yes. But don’t fret yourself. It was ostensibly about your buddy’s car.’
‘And what did he find?’ asked Ellie, a trifle aggressively. She had mixed feelings about police subterfuge, sometimes seeing it as a threat to the body social, sometimes taking a kind of perverse delight in it which worried her.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said Pascoe hastily, not about to reveal that when Wield had mentioned the locked cabinet, he had picked up the phone and had a long talk with the police pathologist who had reeled off a huge list of potentially lethal chemicals used in garden care, ending by saying, ‘But give me the flesh, and I’ll give you the substance, Inspector. Have you got flesh for me?’
‘Sorry,’ said Pascoe, feeling like a war-time butcher. ‘No flesh. But just off your cuff, is there anything which might leave a man with a known heart condition looking as if he’d had a heart-attack? Or anything that might make a driver with a skinful of booze almost certain to crash?’
‘Well,’ said the pathologist doubtfully, ‘there’s sodium fluoroacetate. Used for killing rats and devilish difficult to get hold of. Lots of symptoms – nausea, mental collapse, epileptiform convulsions – but if no one saw the symptoms, it might pass for a heart-attack if there was a history and no post mortem. As for the other, once a man’s system is invaded by alcohol, it wouldn’t take much to cause confusion. One of the chlorinated hydrocarbons, like chlordane; or an organic phosphate, like parathion; but without flesh …’
That had been that. The reason why there was no flesh was that both Bulmer and Eagles had been cremated. Not that there would really have been a very good case made of exhumation. The lab reports on the garage door and the Anglepoise lamp had revealed no clear evidence of tampering.
‘So there’s nothing to support Elgood’s allegations?’ said Ellie.
‘No, and I’ll tell him so,’ said Pascoe firmly. ‘I’m going to see him tomorrow. I reckon he probably just got a touch of the sun, lying around at that cottage of his. He’ll probably be happy to back off now he’s had a couple of nights to sleep on it. I think this child is wet.’
‘It’s that rhyme about Dalziel,’ said Ellie. ‘Dump her on a newspaper and I’ll fetch a nappy.’
On her return, Ellie said thoughtfully. ‘You’re probably right of course, about Elgood, I mean. But Perfecta doesn’t seem all that healthy a place to work, does it?’
‘Two deaths, one drunk, one heart? About par for the average business firm. I should have thought.’
‘There was someone else a few years back. I met his widow when I was with Daphne, that’s how I know. Burke was the name. He used to work with Aldermann.’
‘Burke?’ said Pascoe. ‘That rings a faint bell.’
‘Does it? Before that mighty computer mind goes to work, I think your daughter would like her nappy changed.’
‘It’s your turn,’ said Pascoe, rising from the floor. ‘I just want to make a phone call.’
He returned a couple of minutes later and Ellie said casually, ‘By the way, you’ll let me know if you change your mind again, won’t you?’
‘About what?’
‘About whether you’re seriously investigating Patrick Aldermann.’
‘Because of seeing his wife, you mean?’
‘I suppose I mean that.’
‘Yes, of course I’d tell you.’
‘So that I’d stop seeing her?’
Pascoe grinned and said, ‘I see tiger-traps. No, so that you’d know. Nothing more.’
‘So you don’t mind me seeing her again?’
‘I mind your asking,’ said Pascoe. ‘Or rather, I’m suspicious of it, as I’m suspicious of anything that smacks of wifely dutifulness. What’s it mean?’
Ellie rose from the happily re-nappied baby and went to open the cupboard of an old oak dresser from which she took a bottle of Scotch and two glasses.
‘Tit for tat, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It struck me that not so long ago I might not even have known that Daphne was the wife of a man you were interested in. You’ve been a lot more forthcoming