Deadheads (7 page)

'Even that must be almost a full-time job,' said Wield.

'It occupies the centre of my life, yes,' agreed Aldermann. 'But there's plenty of room round the edges for earning a living. Not that I don't sometimes dream of being able to give all my attention here. What harm does it do a man, I wonder, when the harsh facts of existence hinder him from growing steadily into the fullness of his own nature?'

The brown eyes turned on Wield, not watchful now but vulnerably wide and full of frank, guileless innocence, yet arousing in the sergeant the uneasy feeling that Aldermann had somehow penetrated to the very heart of his own double existence.

'You may be right, sir,' he said. 'That's a fine-looking instrument.'

He nodded at the pruning knife and felt angry with himself for the deliberate cutting off of this potentially productive shoot of personal philosophy. It was a small act of cowardice, almost certainly unnecessary, but none the better had it been necessary. Defence too can be habit-forming. It is aroused by threat. It can be activated when no threat is intended. And it sometimes continues when there's nothing left to defend. For almost a year now, since a long-established relationship had died on him, he had led a life of hermit-like celibacy. There were no roses at the centre of his existence, just a dark, destructive hiding place in which there was no longer even anything hiding.

Aldermann smiled as if he understood every thought in the sergeant's mind and said, 'Yes, I prefer it to secateurs. It belonged to my great-uncle, though curiously I was shown how to use it by my great-aunt who was strongly concerned for the good appearance of the gardens. So was my great-uncle, of course, but his motivation was not to impress others, but to express love. Removing the dying blooms is a sad but necessary task. Naturally a lover of the plants will want to use the quickest and kindest instrument available.'

He held the knife up as he spoke, in a gesture close to a chivalric salute, and the sunlight caught its curved and silvery blade.

'Now, let me see; the miniatures! Of course, that's what you want to see, isn't it? Over here. I don't have very many but you may get some ideas for your box. This
Baby Masquerade
is very pretty. The flowers change colour as they develop which would be interesting in a window. I prefer it as a miniature, myself. At full size, it's a little too garish for my taste.'

'I like the look of these,' said Wield, finding the man's enthusiasm infectious. 'What are they?'

'You have a good old-fashioned taste, I see,' said Aldermann approvingly. 'Those are dwarf polyanthas. That
Baby Faurax
is terribly pretty, don't you think?'

Wield looked down at the clusters of tiny lavender and violet pompoms and nodded. They certainly appealed to him much more than the full-sized heavy-headed bushes. They brought into his mind a cottage garden with a stream running through it and a low-roofed building in glowing Cotswold stone.

He realized he was recalling a holiday cottage where he and his lost lover had spent a joyous fortnight many years before.

'Diana! Come in now, dear!'

Mrs Aldermann's voice pushed the memory from his mind. She was standing on the terrace. From the swing came a token protest, but Police Cadet Singh swept the little girl up on to his shoulders and bore her laughing and chattering towards the house.

'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.

7

COPPER DELIGHT

(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 about your work since I stopped mine.'

Ellie had been, in fact still officially was, a lecturer in the social science department of the local Liberal Arts College. The period of her maternity leave was now expired but as there had not been much for her to do at this fag-end of the academic year, by mutual agreement she had merely made a token return by undertaking some examination marking. Ironically, her resumption of 'work' was in reality likely to be quickly followed by a resumption of being out of work, as the following year the college's pleasant country site was to be sold off and the staff lumped with the staff of the local town-based College of Technology in an Institute of Higher Education. Most of the courses Ellie was interested in teaching would disappear, and as it was rumoured that the local authority were offering trading stamps to staff willing to become voluntarily redundant, Ellie was contemplating perpetual retirement with whatever compensation she was entitled to, so that she could settle to finishing her second novel (the first having remained obstinately unpublished).

'So I've gone gabby?' said Pascoe. 'I'll have to watch that.'

Ellie set his whisky down beside him and sipped her own.

'Faced,' she continued, 'with a choice between regarding this new garrulity as a rather tardy recognition of my strong intellect, rational judgment and complete trustworthiness, and taking it as a condescending, sexist attempt to give the little woman a sop for having to vegetate at home all day, rooted by the brat, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.'

'You hear that, Rose?' said Pascoe, picking up the baby and holding her face up to his. 'My life has not been in vain. I may not have much, but I have the benefit of the doubt.'

'Renegotiate on a weekly basis,' added Ellie. 'This week I've taken into account that Andy Dalziel is obviously being an even bigger pain in the arse than usual.'

'Not bigger,' corrected Pascoe. 'Different. I get worried about him sometimes. At his best he's been a great cop. But times are a-changing.'

'And he's not changing with them? Well, when the dinosaurs had to go, they had to go. And there in the wings ready to take over is
Homo erectus!

'You flatter yourself,' grinned Pascoe.

'But you are ready to take over, aren't you, Peter?' said Ellie thoughtfully. 'I don't mean Andy's job specifically, but you do feel the dinosaurs have been hanging on just a bit too long, don't you?'

'Do I? Mebbe so. But I also worry about them. I mean, I sometimes even suspect Fat Andy's got some powers of self-awareness, and deep down grasps what's going on. Perhaps this is why he's seemed a bit uncertain lately. Then other times I'm certain he's just making sure
I
look the idiot in all this daft Aldermann business. With a bit of luck, it'll all blow over before he gets back.'

'He's going away? Andy?'

'Oh yes. I forgot to tell you. Obviously the ACC thinks Andy's got to bend to the modern world too. He summoned him yesterday to say that circumstances were preventing him from attending the conference at the Yard next week, so he wanted Andy to be our representative.'

'Not this conference on community policing in mixed societies? The one the Yanks are coming to?'

'Not to mention Frogs, Krauts and Dagoes, as Dalziel puts it,' said Pascoe.

'God help us all. Dalziel will have them going home to train in the use of tactical nuclear weapons!'

The baby, annoyed at not being central to the conversation, gave a sudden struggle in Pascoe's arms.