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Then he let the knife fall beside the old woman and set off running up to the house, shouting for his mother.

PART TWO

The rose saith in the dewy morn:

I am most fair;

Yet all my loveliness is born

Upon a thorn.

C
HRISTINA
R
OSSETTI:
Consider the Lilies of the Field

1

DANDY DICK

(Floribunda. Clear pink, erect carriage, almost an H. T.)

Richard Elgood was a small dapper man with tiny feet to which his highly polished, fine leather shoes clung like dancing pumps.

Indeed, despite his sixty years, he advanced across the room with a dancer's grace and lightness, and Peter Pascoe wondered if he should shake the outstretched hand or pirouette beneath it.

He shook the hand and smiled.

'Sit down, Mr Elgood. How can I help you?'

Elgood did not return the smile, though he had a round cheerful face which Pascoe could imagine being very attractive when lit up with good humour. Clearly whatever had brought him here was no smiling matter.

'I'm not sure how to begin, Inspector, though begin I must, else there's not much point in coming here.'

His voice had the ragtime rhythms of industrial South Yorkshire, Pascoe noticed, rather than the oracular resonances of the rural north. He settled back in his chair, put his fingers together in the Dűrer position, and nodded encouragingly.

Elgood ran his fingers down his silk tie as if to check the gold pin were still in position, and then appeared to count the mother-of-pearl buttons on the brocaded waistcoat beneath his soberly expensive business suit.

The buttons confirmed, he flirted with his fly for a moment, then said, 'What I'm going to say is likely libellous, so I'll not admit to saying it outside this room. ‘

‘My word against yours, you mean,' said Pascoe amiably.

He didn't feel particularly amiable. He'd spent much of the previous night in the midst of a rhododendron bush waiting for a gang of housebreakers who hadn't kept their date. There'd been three break-ins recently at large houses in the area, all empty while the owners were on holiday, and all protected by alarm systems which had been circumvented by means not yet apparent to the CID. So a 'hot' tip on Sunday that Monday night was marked down for this particular house had had to be followed up. Pascoe had crawled out of his bush at dawn, returned to the station where, feeling too weary to write his report immediately, he had caught a couple of hours sleep on a camp bed. A pint of coffee in the canteen had then given him strength to complete his report and he'd just been on the point of heading home for a real sleep when Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel had dropped this refugee from a Warner Brothers musical into his lap.

'Please, Mr Elgood,' he said. 'You can be frank with me, I assure you.'

Elgood took a deep breath.

'There's this fellow,' he said. 'In our company. I think he's killing people.'

Pascoe rested his nose on the steeple of his fingers. He would have liked to rest his head on the desk.

'Killing people,' he echoed wearily.

'Dead!' emphasized Elgood, as if piqued at the lack of response.

Pascoe sighed, took out his pen and poised it above a sheet of paper.

'Could you be just a touch more specific?' he wondered.

'I can,' said Elgood. 'I will.'

The affirmation seemed to release the tension in him for suddenly he relaxed, smiled with great charm, displaying two large gold fillings, and produced a matching cigarette case with legerdemainic ease.

'Smoke?' he said.

'I don't,' said Pascoe virtuously. 'But go ahead.'

Elgood fitted his cigarette into an ebony holder with a single gold band. A gold lighter shaped like a lighthouse appeared from nowhere, twinkled briefly and vanished. He drew on his cigarette twice before ejecting it into an ashtray.

'Mr Dalziel spoke very highly of you when I rang,' said Elgood. 'Either you're very good or you owe him money.'

Again he smiled and Pascoe felt the charm again.

He returned the smile and said, 'Mr Dalziel's a very perceptive man. He apologizes again for not being able to see you himself. '

'Aye, well, I won't hide that I'd rather be talking to him. I've known him a long time, you see.'

'He'd probably be available tomorrow,' said Pascoe hopefully.

'No, I'm here now, and I might as well speak while it's fresh in my mind. If Andy Dalziel says you're all right to talk to, then that's good enough for me.'

'And Mr Dalziel told me that anything you had to say was bound to be worth listening to,' said Pascoe, hoping to achieve brevity if he couldn't manage postponement.

What Dalziel had actually said was, 'I haven't got time to waste on Dandy Dick this morning, but he's bent on seeing someone pretty quick, so I've landed him with you. Look after him, will you? I owe him a favour.'

'I see,' said Pascoe. 'And you repay favours by not letting people see you?'

Dalziel's eyes glittered malevolently in his bastioned face like a pair of medieval defenders wondering where to pour the boiling oil, and Pascoe hastily added, 'What precisely does this chap Elgood want to talk to us about?'

'Christ knows,' said Dalziel, 'and you're going to find out. Take him serious, lad. Even if he goes round the houses, as he can sometimes, and you start getting bored, or if you're tempted to have a superior little laugh at his fancy waistcoats and gold knick-knacks, take him serious. He came up from nowt, he's sharp, he's influential, he's not short of a bob or two, and he's a devil with the ladies! I've bulled you up to him, so don't let me down by showing your ignorance.'

At that moment Dalziel had been summoned to the urgent meeting with the ACC which was his excuse for not seeing Elgood.

'Here, I'll need some background,' Pascoe had protested in panic. 'Who is he, anyway? What's he do?'

But Dalziel had only smiled from the doorway, showing yellow teeth like a reef through sea-mist, 'You'll have seen his name, lad,' he said. 'I'll guarantee that.'

Then he'd gone. Pascoe was still none the wiser, so now he put on a serious, no-nonsense expression.

'Can we get down to details, Mr Elgood? This man we're talking about, he works for your company, you say? Now, your work . . . what does that involve precisely?'

'My work?' said Elgood. 'I'll tell you about my work. I went into the army at eighteen, right at the start of the war. I could've stayed out easy enough, I was down the pit at the time, coal-face, and that was protected. But I thought, bugger it, I can spend the rest of my life hacking coal. So I took the king's shilling and went off to look at the world through a rifle sight. Well, among all the bad times, I managed a few good times, and I wasn't ready to go back down the pit when I came out. I'd put a bit of cash together one way and another, and I had a mate who was thinking the same way as me. We put our heads together to try to work out what'd be best to do. There was a shortage of everything in them years, so there was no shortage of opportunity, if you follow me. In the end, we settled on something to do with the building trade. Reconstruction, modernization, no matter how you looked at it, that was a trade that had to flourish.'

'So you went into building,' said Pascoe, with a sense of achievement.

'Did I buggery!' protested Elgood. 'Do you know nowt about me? Me and my mate thought about it, I admit. But then we stumbled on this little business just about closed down during the war. They made pot-ware. Mainly them old jug-and-basin sets, you'll likely have seen 'em in the antique shops. Jesus, the price they ask! It makes me weep sometimes to think . . .'

'Elgood-ware!' exclaimed Pascoe triumphantly. 'On the lavatory bowls. I've seen it!'

'I've no doubt you have if you've been around these parts long enough to pee,' said Elgood smugly. 'Though them with the name on's becoming collectors' pieces too. Lavs, washbasins, baths, sinks, we did the lot. It was hard to keep up with demand. Too many regulations, too little material, that was the trouble, but once you got the stuff, you stuffed the rules, I tell you. We expanded like mad. Then the technology began to change. It was all plastic and fibreglass and new composition stuff and we needed to refit throughout to keep up. There was no shortage of finance, we were a go-ahead business with a first-class record and reputation, but once the word gets out you're after money, the big boys start moving in. To cut a long story short, we got taken over. We could have gone it alone, I was all for it myself, but my partner wanted out, and I.C.E. made a hell of a generous offer, with me guaranteed to stay in charge. Of course, the name disappeared from the company paper, but so what? I can take you to a hundred places round here where you can still see it. Some people write their names on water, Mr Pascoe. I wrote mine
under
it, mainly, and it's still there when the water runs away!'

Pascoe smiled. Despite Elgood's prolixity and his own weariness, he was beginning to like the man.

'And the company's name. Was it I.C.E. you said?' he asked.

'Industrial Ceramics of Europe, that means,' said Elgood. 'The UK domestic division's my concern. Brand name Perfecta.'

'Of course,' said Pascoe. 'I've driven past the works. And it's there that these er-killings are taking place?'

'I never said that. But
he's
there. Some of the time.'

'He?'

'Him as does the killings.'

Pascoe sighed.

'Mr Elgood, I know you're concerned about confidentiality. And I can understand you're worried about making a serious allegation against a colleague. But I've got to have
some
details. Can we start with a name?
His
name. The one who's doing the killings.'

Elgood hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind.

Leaning forward, he whispered, 'It's Aldermann. Patrick Aldermann.'

2

BLESSINGS

(Hybrid tea.Profusely bloomed, richly scented, strongly resistant to disease and weather.)

Patrick Aldermann stood in his rose-garden, savoured the rich bouquet of morning air and counted his
Blessings.

There were more than a dozen of them. It was one of his favourite HTs, but there were many close rivals:
Doris Tysterman,
so elegantly shaped, glowing in rich tangerine;
Wendy Cussons,
wine-red and making the air drunk with perfume;
Piccadilly,
its gold and scarlet bi-colouring dazzling the gaze till it was glad to alight on the clear rich yellow of
King's Ransom.

In fact it was foolish to talk of favourites either of variety or type. The dog-roses threading through the high hedge which ran round his orchard filled him with almost as much delight as the dawn-red blooms of the huge
Eos
bush towering over the lesser shrubs which surrounded it. It was beginning to be past its best now as June advanced, but the gardens of Rosemont were geared to bring on new growth and colour at every season so there was little time for regret.

He strolled across a broad square of lawn which was the only part of the extensive garden which fell short of excellence. Here his son David, eleven now and in his first year at boarding-school, played football in winter and cricket in summer. Here his daughter Diana, bursting with a six-year-old's energy, loved to splash in the paddling pool, burrow in the sand-pit and soar on the tall swing. There would be a time when these childish pleasures would be left behind and the lawn could be carefully brought back to an uncluttered velvet perfection. Something lost, something gained. Nature, properly viewed, ruled by her own laws of compensation. She was the great artist, though permitting man sometimes to be her artisan.

Now in his early thirties, Patrick Aldermann presented to the world a face unscarred by either the excoriant lavas of ambition or the slow leprosies of indulgence. It was a gentle, almost childish face, given colour from without by wind and weather rather than from within. His characteristic expression was a blank touched with just a hint of secret amusement. His deep brown eyes in repose were alert and watchful, but when his interest was aroused, they opened wide to project a beguiling degree of innocence, frankness and vulnerability.

They opened wide now as his daughter appeared on the terrace outside the french windows and shouted shrilly over the fifty yards that separated them, 'Daddy! Mummy says we're ready to go now or else I'll be late and Miss Dillinger will be unpleased with me.'

Aldermann smiled. Miss Dillinger was Diana's teacher at St Helena's, a small private primary school which made much use in its advertising of the word
exclusive.
Miss Dillinger's expression of displeasure,
I am unpleased
, had passed into local monied middle-class lore.

'Tell Mummy I just want a word with Mr Caldicott, then we'll be on our way.'

He'd seen the Caldicotts' old green van bumping along the drive round the side of the house and coming to a halt beside the brick built garden store. His great-aunt, Florence, would have been not unpleased to learn that old Caldicott had been carried off some few years after herself by septicaemia brought on by first ignoring, then home-treating, a nasty scratch received during his gardening duties. But gangling Dick had taken over the business and, in partnership with the delinquent Brent, had dignified it with the title 'Landscape Gardeners', and Patrick Aldermann now paid more for the firm's services two days a week than Aunt Flo had paid old Caldicott full time for a month. They did have greater overheads, of course, including a pair of occasional assistants, a tall youth in his mid-twenties who answered to Art and a miniature Caldicott, in his mid-teens and almost dwarfish of stature, who generally refused to answer to Pete. Aldermann's wife, Daphne, able on occasion to turn a nice phrase, referred to them as Art
longa
and Peter
brevis.