Deadheads (3 page)

The gardeners had already got down to their essential preparations for work by the time Aldermann joined them. Art was heading up to the house to beg a kettle of water and cajole whatever was spare in the way of biscuits or cake out of Daphne or Diana; Brent was leaning against the van smoking a butt end; the dwarf Peter had vanished; and Dick, now a grizzled fifty-five-year-old, was studying which of the two keys he held would open the huge padlock which he opened every Tuesday and Wednesday of the year from March to November.

'Mr Caldicott,' said Aldermann. 'A quick word. Someone went into my greenhouse yesterday and they left the inner door ajar. It's essential that both doors are closed and that there's never more than one open at a time.'

'But there was only one left open, you said,' replied Caldicott with a note of triumph.

'Yes, but the other would have to be opened to get out, or, indeed, when I went in, so then they'd both be open, wouldn't they?' said Aldermann patiently. 'In any case, there's no need that I see for anyone to enter the greenhouse.'

Art returned from the house bearing water and a biscuit tin.

'Mrs Aldermann says, will you be long?' he said cheerfully.

Aldermann nodded an acknowledgment and made for the house. Behind him, Caldicott tried the wrong key.

Aldermann's daughter and his wife were already sitting in the dusty green Cortina. Normally Daphne Aldermann drove her daughter to school in her own VW Polo, but two days earlier it had been scratched by vandals in a car park and had had to be taken in for a respray

'Sorry,' said Aldermann, sliding into the driving seat. 'I wanted a word with Caldicott.'

'And I wanted to get to school in time to have a word with Miss Dillinger,' said Daphne with a frown, but only a slight one. She was used to coming second to horticulture.

'The postman's been,' she said. 'There were some letters for you. I've put them in the glove compartment in case you have a quiet moment during the day.'

'I'll see if I can find one,' he murmured and set the car in motion.

Daphne Aldermann gazed unseeingly over the extensive gardens of Rosemont as the Cortina moved down the gravelled drive. She was a good-looking woman in that rather toothy English middle-class way which lasts while firm young flesh and rangily athletic movement divert the eye from the basic equininity of the total bone structure. Four years younger than her husband, she still had some way to go. She had married young, announcing her engagement on her eighteenth birthday to the mild perturbation of her widowed father, a Church of England Archdeacon with fading episcopal ambitions. A wise man, he had not exerted his authority to break the engagement but merely applied his influence to stretching it out as long as possible in the hope that it would either prove equal to the strain, or snap. Instead, death had snapped at him, and his objections and presumably his ambitions had been laid to rest with him in the grave.

After a short but distressingly intense period of mourning, Daphne had embraced the comforts and supports of marriage. Her elderly relatives had not approved the haste. There had been talk and reproving glances and even some accusatory hints, though with that magnanimity for which upper-middle-class High Anglicans are justly renowned, a comfortable majority agreed that Daphne's contribution to her father's untimely death had been one of manslaughter by distraction rather than murder by design.

Happily Daphne, even in the guilt of grief, was clear-headed enough to feel conscientiously disconnected from the slab of rotten masonry which, falling from the tower of the sadly neglected early Perpendicular parish church he was inspecting with a view to launching a restoration appeal, had dispatched the Archdeacon. Now, twelve years and two children later, she too was aware she had many blessings to count, but close communion with her husband was not one of them. He wore around him an unyielding carapace of courtesy against which her anxieties beat in vain. Perhaps 'carapace' was the wrong image. It was more like an invisible but impenetrable time-capsule that he inhabited, which hovered in, but did not belong to, simple mortal linear chronology. He treated the future as if it were as certain as the past. It was odd that in the end such certainties should have driven her to the edge of panic. And over.

The leaky byways which formed their winding route from Rosemont were awash with morning sunshine, but clouds were waiting above the main trunk road and by the time they entered the stately outer suburb in which St Helena's stood, the sky was black. Aldermann regarded it with the complacency of one whose application of systemic insecticide the previous evening would already have been absorbed into the capillaries of his roses.

Daphne said, 'Oh bother.'

'I can easily wait and drive you into the town centre,' offered Aldermann, thinking she was referring to the weather.

'Thanks, but don't worry. I rather fancy the walk and I'm sure it'll only be a shower. No, it was that lot I was oh-bothering about.'

Aldermann had already observed 'that lot' with some slight curiosity as he slowed down outside the large Victorian villa which had been converted into St Helena's School. The 'lot' consisted of four women each carrying a hand-painted placard which read variously: WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE PAYING FOR? WHAT PRICE EQUALITY? PRIVATE SCHOOLS = PUBLIC SCANDALS and, at more length, ST HELENA FOUND THE TRUE CROSS, THE REST OF US ARE BEARING IT. Two of the women were carrying small children in papoose baskets.

Aldermann drove slowly along a row of child-delivering Volvos till he found a kerbside space.

'Isn't it illegal?' wondered Aldermann as he parked. 'Obstruction, perhaps?'

'Evidently not. They don't get in the way and they only speak if someone addresses them first. But it could upset the children.'

Aldermann looked at his daughter. She did not seem upset. Indeed she looked very impatient to be out of the car. She also looked very pretty in her blue skirt, blue blazer with cream piping, cream blouse, and little straw boater with the cream and blue ribbon.

'As long as they don't try to talk to them,' he said. 'Goodbye, dear.'

He kissed his wife and daughter and watched as they walked along the pavement together. As forecast, none of the picketing group made any movement more menacing than a slight uplifting of their placards. At the school gate, Daphne and Diana turned and waved.

Aldermann waved back and drove away, thinking that he was indeed a well-blessed man. Even the rain which was now beginning to fall quite heavily was exactly what the garden needed after nearly a fortnight of dry weather. He switched the windscreen-wipers on.

Daphne Aldermann coming out of St Helena's fifteen minutes later did not feel quite so philosophical about the rain. Her talk with Miss Dillinger, albeit brief, had isolated her from potential lift-givers just long enough for the kerbside crowd of cars to have almost entirely disappeared.

Turning up the collar of her light cotton jacket, she put her head down into the rising wind and, hugging the shelter of the pavement trees, headed townwards. There was a car still parked about fifty yards ahead, a green Mini some five or six years old. A woman was leaning over the front seat putting a baby of about nine months into a baby seat at the rear. The woman was long-limbed, athletically slender, with short black hair and positive, clear-cut features which just stopped this side of wilfulness. There was something familiar about her and Daphne smiled hopefully as she completed her task and straightened up at her approach.

The woman regarded her with clear grey eyes and a half smile as the rain came lashing down.

'You look as though you'd like a lift,' she said.

'Thanks awfully. That's really most kind of you,' said Daphne, making round to the passenger door with no further ado. But as she stooped to get in, her eye caught something on the rear seat under the baby. Upside down, the words
St Helena
jumped out at her. It was a protest placard.

'It's all right,' said the woman behind the wheel. 'No proselytizing. Just a lift. But it's up to you.'

She started the engine. The wind wrapped damp fingers around Daphne's trailing leg.

She pulled it in and shut the car door.

'What a lovely little boy,' she said brightly, nodding at the blue-clad baby who nodded back as the car accelerated over a bumpy patch of road.

'No,' said the driver.

'No?'

'Little, I'll grant you. But not lovely. And not a boy. My daughter, Rose.'

'Oh, I'm sorry.'

'Don't be. It's a nice test of anti-stereotyping.'

'Really? Well, I still think she's lovely.'

The woman rolled her grey eyes briefly, but Daphne caught the contumely. It was not a safe way in which to treat an Archdeacon's daughter.

'And you,' she resumed with increased brightness. 'Are you Rose's mother? Or her father?'

The woman looked at her in surprise, then threw back her head and laughed so fervently that the car did a little chicanery on the straight road, and Rose, stimulated by either the movement or the laughter, suddenly chortled merrily.

'Mother,' said the woman. 'I'm Ellie. Ellie Pascoe.'

'Daphne Aldermann,' said Daphne. 'How d'you do?'

'How d'you do,' said Ellie gravely. 'You know, I came out so quick this morning that I didn't have time for any breakfast. Do you fancy a coffee and a bacon buttie?'

'Why not?' said Daphne, determined to meet boldness with boldness.

'Why not, indeed?' said Ellie, and laughed again.

3

YESTERDAY

(Floribunda. Multitudinous tiny lilac-pink flowers with an olde-worlde fairy-tale air.)

'So Dandy Dick's finally gone doolally,' repeated Detective Chief Superintendent Andrew Dalziel, apparently much taken by the assonance and alliteration.

'I didn't say that,' protested Pascoe.

'Look, lad,' said Dalziel, 'you spent the best part of yesterday morning with the man. Have them gold fillings finally rotted his brain or not? It wouldn't surprise a lot of folk. There's always been something not quite right about Elgood. Not marrying, and all those fancy waistcoats.'

'Queer, you mean?' said Pascoe

Dalziel looked at him in disgust.

'Don't be daft,' he said. 'He's tupped more typists in his in-tray than you've had hot dinners. There's many won't use a lav with his name on it for fear it makes a grab at them. No, he's just a bit eccentric, that's all. Nothing you'd look twice at in one of them walking adenoids from Eton; but from a miner's lad out of Barnsley, you expect plain dressing, plain speaking, and likely a plain wife and six plain kids.

‘He must be a great disappointment to all his friends,' agreed Pascoe. 'But he didn't strike me as at all unbalanced yesterday. I think he was genuinely reluctant to be making the accusation. He got it out very quick in general terms to start with, almost as though he wanted to commit himself. After that, it took a bit more time, but mainly because, once there was no going back, he relaxed and reverted to what by your account is his more normal mode of speaking.'

'Oh aye, he goes round the houses like a milkman's horse, Dick,' said Dalziel.

Pascoe smiled. His stomach suddenly rumbled and he recalled that he had missed his breakfast that morning. Ellie had been in a hurry, and when he discovered the cause and hinted a doubt whether a picket line was the right place for a nine-month-old-baby, what little time there might have been for the preparation of toast and coffee had been consumed in a heated discussion. Very heated, though not quite at flaming row temperature. Rain beat at the window of Dalziel's office. He hoped that Ellie wasn't still striding round somewhere with a banner above and little Rosie behind, dripping in her papoose basket. His stomach rumbled again.

'You should get up early enough to eat a cooked breakfast,' commented Dalziel. 'You're like something out of Belsen. Me, I was built up on eggs and rashers.'

He beat his stomach complacently and belched. Diets had failed to make any inroads on his waist and recently he had taken to citing his stoutness as evidence of health rather than the cause for concern his doctor believed.

'I should hope to learn from your example, sir. Now, about Elgood, what do you want me to do?'

It was a blunt question, arising from Pascoe's determination not to be left with the responsibility for examining or ignoring Dandy Dick's allegations.

'Let's have an action re-play of what you've got so far,' said Dalziel, leaning back and closing his eyes.

Pascoe risked a long-suffering sigh and said in a rapid and expressionless voice, 'The two alleged victims are Brian Bulmer, Perfecta's financial director, and Timothy Eagles, the Chief Accountant. Bulmer died in a car accident after the office Christmas party. No other vehicles involved, icy road, and his bloodstream showed up at nearly two hundred over the limit. Eagles had a heart attack in a washroom next to his office. The cleaner found him dead.'

'What's Dick say Aldermann's got to do with this?' interrupted Dalziel.

'I was getting to that. Aldermann was drinking with Bulmer at the party, or rather plying him with drink, according to Elgood. And he shared the washroom with Eagles.'

'Post mortem reports?'

'In Bulmer's case, death from multiple injuries, and the alcohol level noted. In Eagles's case, no post mortem. There was a previous history and his doctor was content to issue the certificate. No chance of back-tracking. They're both ash now.'

'Just as well, mebbe,' said Dalziel, yawning, 'Motive?'

Pascoe said, 'Ambition. Or rather, money.'

'Make up your mind!'

'Well, he doesn't reckon Aldermann's interested enough in his work to be ambitious, but he thinks he needs more money. Getting on the Board would shove his income up considerably.'

'But he must have known that he'd be competing against his immediate boss, this fellow, Eagles,' said Dalziel. 'Why not knock Eagles off first?'

'Elgood had worked all that out. His theory is that what Aldermann was after initially was just Eagles's job. He saw his chance to get Bulmer out of the way which would probably mean Eagles's elevation, leaving a gap for Aldermann to fill. It wasn't till after Bulmer's death, when certain anti-Elgood elements on the Board started talking about nominating Aldermann merely in order to annoy and embarrass the Chairman, that he got the scent of a bigger prey.'