Death Comes for the Fat Man (25 page)

They were unbreakably linked by tragedy, but just because she shared a name with him and had not yet found the energy to break away from this grace-and-favor existence on the family estate didn’t mean she had to stand by his side at every public occasion. It was time he got himself a wife anyway. Someone like that Pascoe woman, strong, intelligent, 186 r e g i n a l d h i l l

passionate. It was a type he clearly admired. She might not be available, not for the moment anyway, but there must be plenty more like her swimming around, waiting to be trawled in.

She glanced through the window again, and lo and behold, there she was, Ellie Pascoe herself, climbing out of a dusty saloon, with her slim, sharp-eyed husband getting out of the driver’s door, and a young girl and dog spilling out of the back.

Now this was interesting. The woman had looked at her and not much liked what she saw. It had been fun to tease her by feigning to find her husband fuckable. As she’d said good night, she hadn’t thought there was a cat in hell’s chance of Maurice’s stupid suggestion being acted upon. What had happened to bring this about? Which of them had the impulse come from?

Unexpected things come in threes, whether good or bad. You break a cup at breakfast, there’ll be another couple of breakages before supper. You hear from a lost friend in the morning post, another two will emerge out of the mist before the day is out.

A green Skoda with a noisy engine nosed into the same row as the Pascoes. Out of the driver’s door slid a young woman in slacks and a belly-exposing top. Kilda recognized her as Kalim Sarhadi’s fi ancée, Jamila. They’d met before the show the previous night, then sat around talking for what seemed an age while they waited for the police to take statements from the two men and Ellie Pascoe. The identifi cation was confirmed when Sarhadi emerged from the passenger door. Presumably it was her car. He was a poor student, he’d told them last night, making enough money from helping with his father’s taxi business to pay for his fees at Bradford University. She was a secretary in the university registrar’s office, which was how they had met.

Kilda had listened to their self-revelations with the minimum effort necessary to conceal total uninterest, but Maurice had visibly basked in the young woman’s gratitude at his intervention during the threatened attack on Sarhadi. The young couple had also been invited to attend the Haresyke fete, but Kilda would have given even longer odds against their appearance than the Pascoes’.

As she watched, Ellie Pascoe spotted Sarhadi and called out to him.

He turned, looked blank for a second, then recognized her. The two d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 187

groups joined, Pascoe was introduced. The child also. Jamila looked ready to make much of her, but the girl quickly spotted that neither of the newcomers was particularly enthusiastic about the attentions of the small dog and responded with indifferent politeness.

Takes after her mother, judged Kilda. Quick judgments, doesn’t much care if they show. Unlike her husband, whose judgment was probably as keen if not keener but who knew how to mask its conclusions with smiling courtesy.

So, two unlikely events in a morning. She could either sit around and await the third, or forestall fate by creating it.

Only Maurice would really know how unlikely it was that she’d appear at the fete, but that ought to be enough. It might be interesting to see the slim cop again. While she’d done the cool flirtation thing to irritate his bossy wife, there had definitely been the whisper of a connection there.

She walked through her shower, dressed, breakfasted on crisp bread and black coffee, and made for the door.

Here she paused, then turned and ran lightly up the stairs and took her favorite Nikon off the top shelf of the wardrobe where it had been lying gathering dust ever since . . .

She pushed the thought from her mind and checked the battery. It was long dead, but she had plenty of spares in her darkroom.

A fly had buzzed in through the open window and was perched on the rim of the untouched glass of vodka.

“Have this one on me,” she said and a few moments later left her darkroom to go out into the sunshine.

10

Q U E E N O F T H E F E T E

Saturday got off to a bad start. Not all your fault, thought Ellie Pascoe, but you certainly didn’t help. What you need’s a long PIN

you’ve got to enter before you can punch the explosion button!

Rosie’s return had brought truce, and when the child had made it clear that whatever they did that day didn’t matter as long as they all did it together, going to the Haresyke fete began to seem not such a bad idea.

Within half an hour of arrival, it began to seem a very good idea indeed.

As they wandered round the stalls in the warm sunshine, she saw her husband relaxing into a condition as close to his old self as he’d been since the Mill Street explosion. Meeting Sarhadi and his fi ancée had helped. He seemed to take to the young man, and as for Jamila, the company of a bright and attractive young woman rarely failed to regress him to the lively, laughing student he’d been when Ellie first met him.

Ellie was able to enjoy the transformation with no hint of jealousy.

She liked the girl herself, and more importantly it was clear the girl thought the sun shone out of her fiancé’s big brown eyes. Jamila, she discovered, was third-generation British and in her speech and dress was so indistinguishable from her Anglo-Saxon coevals, that Ellie wondered how this went down with traditionalists at the mosque.

A firm believer that the first step to finding answers was to ask questions, she said casually, “God, I wish I still had the figure to wear a top like that.”

“You look great to me,” said Jamila with a pleasing sincerity.

“Thank you kindly, but once you get a bulge, even if it’s still bike tire rather than the full Michelin, I think it’s best to keep it under wraps.”

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 189

“Maybe, but a lot of the oldies down the mosque would reckon I’m far too skinny. They love a bit of bulging.”

“So you don’t get any aggro for the way you dress?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “All the time, but not from my family, and that’s all that matters to me. Of course I wouldn’t go near the mosque looking like this. Next week I’ll be wearing the full trad kit for my wedding.

That should take the bangers by surprise.”

“The bangers?”

“Headbangers. That’s what I call these lads who creep around Sheikh Ibrahim like he’s a prophet or something. Kalim says I shouldn’t provoke them but they don’t bother me. Anyway, they’re all blow. They rattle on about how I ought to be disciplined for the way I dress and talk, but the Sheikh keeps them in order ’cos I’m Kalim’s girl.”

“So Kalim and the Sheikh are close?” probed Ellie, remembering the young man’s defensive attitude about Al-Hijazi on
Fidler’s Three
.

“Sort of,” said the young woman hesitantly. “A lot of the time they’re right in each other’s face about politics. He’s funny, the Sheikh.

Sometimes he sounds like he wants to set a torch to most of the West, other times he’s even more laid back than my dad.”

“So you don’t think there’s anything in what some of the papers say about him encouraging his followers to commit terrorist acts?”

The girl did not reply straightaway and Ellie thought she’d over-stepped the mark but it seemed Jamila was only getting her thoughts together.

“I think what Kal says about him is likely right. He doesn’t encourage the bangers to break the law, but some of them are brain-dead enough to imagine he does, and mebbe he ought to take more care of that.”

“Ellie,” called Pascoe. “Do you know where Rosie’s got to?”

“I thought you were watching her,” said Ellie. “Sorry, Jam, we’d better fi nd her.”

“She can’t come to much harm here,” said the girl reassuringly.

“It’s not her I’m worried about,” said Ellie. “We’ll probably see you two later.”

It didn’t take long to locate their daughter, as the fete wasn’t all that extensive. The setup was deliciously old-fashioned, not in any self-190 r e g i n a l d h i l l

conscious retro fashion but because this was the way they’d been doing things for years and no one saw any good reason to change. A crowd of kids had attracted Rosie to a stall where for twenty pence you got three chances to precipitate one of the village schoolteachers into a trough of water by hitting a wooden lever with a well-aimed rubber ball. Rosie’s daily routine of hurling Tig’s ball as far as possible for at least an hour had built up a good throwing action. Her first success won raptur-ous cheers from the watching children, redoubled when Tig, imagining this was all for his benefit, plunged into the water alongside the drenched pedagogue. By the time her parents tracked her down, she had repeated her success twice, and her many new friends were ready to elect her Queen of the Fete.

She didn’t want to be parted from them and sent her parents on their way, having made it clear she found their concern agonizingly embarrassing.

“Reminds me of you,” said Pascoe as they walked away. “Willful, loud-mouthed, anti-authoritarian . . . ouch!”

They made no special effort to seek out Maurice Kentmore but a little later, as they paused before the bottle stall, Ellie did wonder aloud if maybe he wasn’t there.

“Probably declares the show open, then retreats for a sherry in his library, leaving a couple of mastiffs at the front door to repel the mal-odorous peasantry,” said Pascoe.

“Did I hear the word
sherry
? There was a rather nice bottle of amontillado somewhere. It’s great to see you both again. I’m so glad you decided to come.”

Kentmore in his shirt sleeves emerged from beneath the stall, flourishing a large bottle of Windsor sauce which he handed to a small woman who examined the sell-by date with a jay’s beady eye before paying an absurdly small sum and moving off.

“Now that amontillado,” he said. “Ah, here we are. I can recommend it, as I donated it myself. It’s marked up at two quid. At that price I’m tempted to buy it back!”

Pascoe was no great fan of amontillado but he felt guilty that Kentmore might have caught more of his comment than the word
sherry
.

d e a t h c o m e s f o r t h e fa t m a n 191

As he paid he said, “Are you on here all day?”

“Neglecting my squirely duties of twirling my mustachios and ogling the milkmaids, you mean?”

So he had heard. Oh well. At least he was smiling about it.

“Nothing so responsible, I fear,” the man went on. “I am the lowest of the low, a general dogsbody. I wander around and whenever a stall minder wants a break, I step into the breach. Out of which I am about to step, as I see Miss Jigg returning. You two fancy a sit-down and a snack? Our local ladies could bake for Old England.”

They followed him to a refreshment tent. He sat them down at a table in the open air, vanished inside, and returned with a small tray on which rested a teapot, milk jug, cups and saucers. Behind him came a pretty girl, well worth an ogle, carrying a much larger tray with sandwiches and cakes.

Pascoe sampled the cakes. Kentmore hadn’t oversold the baking ladies. They were delicious. Then a hand rested lightly on his shoulder and Kilda’s voice said, “Peter, Ellie, isn’t this nice? Maurice, I see they’ve worked you off your feet already.”

“Kilda, you’ve surfaced,” said Kentmore. “I was just thinking about sending a search party down to your house.”

The woman gave Pascoe’s shoulder a last little squeeze then slipped onto a chair, putting her camera on the table.

Your house,
Pascoe noticed. Ellie too, but she liked her assurances double sure.

“You live in the village, do you, Kilda?” she said.

“No. On the estate. You’d see the cottage as you drove into the car park. They call it the Gatehouse, but the gate’s long gone. Maurice was kind enough to offer it to Chris and me when we got married.

Inertia has kept me there since I became a widow. I keep on thinking I must move on, but it will probably take an eviction order to shift me.”

Kentmore said, “You know the house is yours as long as you want it, Kilda.”

There was an awkward pause of the kind Ellie was expert at fi lling when she felt like it. This time she just sat quietly and waited to see how far it would stretch.

192 r e g i n a l d h i l l

Not far, was the answer. There were two interruptions in quick succession. First an anxious matron summoned Kentmore to deal with some crisis. Then Rosie appeared, followed by a dripping Tig, with the news that she wanted to enter him in the terrier race but the stupid organizers required adult supervision of each entrant in case of trouble.

Trouble, thought Pascoe, looking at Tig, who was clearly in a state of delirious excitement, is what they were likely to get.

Ellie looked at her husband who held up a wedge of lemon meringue pie as evidence he was otherwise engaged.

“All right,” she said in response to Rosie’s impatient tug. “I’m coming.”

Pascoe watched them move away then pushed the cakes invitingly toward Kilda.

She smiled and shook her head.

“You can’t be dieting,” said Pascoe.

“I could be wearing a very tight corset,” she said.

“I don’t think so. That’s the first thing they teach us to spot at detective school.”

“What’s the second?”

“That’s it, the whole curriculum in a nutshell, guaranteeing what the Great British Press tells the great British Public we are, a bunch of hopeless plods.”

“That sounds bitter.”

“It was meant to sound funny,” said Pascoe.

“I’d understand bitter. Being blown up in the line of duty and no one getting arrested for it would make me bitter too. How’s your friend in hospital doing?”

“Just the same. I should go to see him sometime this weekend.”

“You don’t sound keen.”

“He’s in a coma. It just seems, I don’t know, like going through the motions.”

“At least you get to see him,” she said.

He recalled what had happened to her and felt a little pang of shame. At least Andy was alive. To be told you were never going to see again someone you loved . . . he recalled once more his feelings when the TV screen had gone blank last night and shivered.