REGINALD HILL
RECALLED TO LIFE
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

Copyright

Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers in 1992

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Reginald Hill 1992

Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN 9780586217320

Ebook Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN 9780007386239

Version 2015-06-23

Epigraph

‘You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?’

‘Long ago.’

‘You know that you are recalled to life?’

‘They tell me so.’

‘I hope you care to live?’

‘I can’t say.’

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Author’s Note

PART THE FIRST: Golden Age

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART THE SECOND: Golden Bough

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

PART THE THIRD: Golden Apple

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

PART THE FOURTH: Golden Grove

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

PART THE FIFTH: Golden Boy

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

The epigraph and all chapter headings come from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

PART THE FIRST Golden Age

ONE

‘I tell thee that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming.’

It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes; it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guileless girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-Marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz.

It was the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and it is altogether fitting that this crime of which we speak should have been committed in one of Yorkshire’s great country houses, Mickledore Hall, and that its dénouement should have taken place in that most traditional of settings, the Old Library …

The library door burst open. A man came running out. For a second he paused. The main doors stood ajar, spilling golden sunlight across the old flagged floor. He took a half step towards the light, a voice called, ‘Get him!’ and he turned and started up the broad sweeping staircase. He was beautifully balanced, with the tapering figure of an athlete, and his long, easy stride devoured three treads at a time.

A second man came out of the library now, almost as tall as the other, but dark where he was fair, burly and muscular where he was rangy and loose-limbed. He too glanced at the sunlit doorway for a moment. Then with unhurried pace he began to climb the stairs, taking one at a time, heavy lips pulled back from yellowing teeth in the anticipatory rictus of a hungry bear.

On the first-floor landing the fleeing man turned right without hesitation, then right again into the first room he reached. Moments later the burly man arrived in the doorway. The room led through into another, through whose open door a double bed was visible. The fair man made no effort to go any further but stood defiantly by a huge mahogany wardrobe, his shoulders tensed for battle.

‘Nay, Sir Ralph, no more laking. Your fancy woman’s waiting. Murder’s one thing, but you’ll not want accused of bad manners too.’

‘What would a neanderthal like you know about manners?’ sneered the fair man.

‘You’re dead right. Pig ignorant, that’s me. This’d be what you call a dressing-room, is it? I’ll take your word for it, though a dressing-room don’t seem right to me without mud on the floor and a pile of old jockstraps heaving in the corner.’

As he spoke the burly man was moving slowly forward. Suddenly reacting to the danger, the other seized a linen basket which stood by the wardrobe and raised it high as if to hurl it. The top came off, spilling items of male clothing over his head and shoulders.

‘Trying to make me feel at home, Sir Ralph? That’s right good of you,’ the burly man said, grinning.

This gibe finally broke the other’s control. Screaming with rage, he flung the wardrobe door open to impede the burly man’s approach and started dragging clothes off their hangers and hurling them like palms before the advancing feet. Chunky tweeds, elegant evening wear, wool, cotton and finest silk, all alike were crushed beneath that implacable tread till finally the two men stood inches apart.

A hand like a contractor’s grab fell upon the fair man’s shoulder. Instantly, as if its touch were anæsthetic, all life and energy seemed to drain from his limbs and the tense straining body went slack.

‘Walkies,’ said the burly man.

At the foot of the stairs, an older grey-haired man with a lantern jaw was waiting.

‘Well done, lad,’ he said.

‘Shall I cuff him, sir?’

‘I doubt we’ll need to go as far as that, though if he gives any more bother, you can mebbe box his ears.’

The burly man laughed. The old jokes were best, especially when your boss made them.

Outside, the sun was low in the sky but still warm. It cast long shadows from the three police cars standing on the white gravel beneath the terrace. In the rearmost car’s shady interior the pale face of a woman could be seen, wedged between two WPCs. She looked straight ahead, showing no more animation than a death mask.

The uniformed officers took charge of the fair man and led him down from the terrace into the second car. He turned before he got in and looked back, not at the figures above him, but at the house itself, his gaze moving slowly along the whole façade. Then he let himself be pushed into the rear seat.

On the terrace the man with the jaw spoke a few words to his burly subordinate before running lightly down the steps and getting into the leading car. He held his arm aloft through the open window, like a waggon master preparing his train. Then he let it drop forward, the cars began to crunch gravel, and at the same time their bells started to sound and their lights to flash.

Smiling broadly, the burly man stood on the terrace till he could no longer see the flashing lights nor hear the sounding bells.

Then he turned his back on the sun and slowly re-entered the house.

TWO

‘You can bear a little more light?’

‘I must bear it if you let it in.’

Lights.

Some hot, harsh and constant. Others driven at her like snow against a stove-pipe, melting soon as touching.

A shallow platform, one step up.

She takes it, pauses, sways, hears the pause and the sway in the watcher’s breath.

She thinks: So it must have felt for Mick, that first step on to the scaffold.

A hand steadies her. No executioner’s hand, but her saviour’s, Jay’s, cousin Jay Waggs, though she cannot yet think of him as saviour. She clutches her old leather-bound Bible to her skinny breast. He smiles at her, a warm smile in a young face, and a memory is touched of faraway times, faraway places. He urges her forward.

There is a chair. She sits. To her left, a pitcher of water with a glass. To her right, a small vase out of which a spray of freesia raises its hand of glory. Before her, a posy of microphones offering some protection from the flashing bulbs and probing gazes but none from the TV cameras covering her every move, like guns on a prison watchtower.

Mr Jacklin is speaking. Her solicitor. A small grey man who looks so dry that a very little pressure might crumble him to dust. But it is a dryness which kindles to fire at the spark of injustice.

He says, ‘Let me rehearse the situation in case anyone has strayed in from another planet. My client, Miss Cecily Kohler, was tried for the murder of her employer, Mrs Pamela Westropp, in nineteen sixty-three. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Almost from the start, doubts were expressed in some quarters about the safeness of the verdict, but circumstances conspired to make a re-examination of the case virtually impossible until, two years ago, Miss Kohler’s kinsman, Jay Waggs, began to interest himself in the fate of his distant kinswoman, Cissy Kohler. The new evidence he uncovered was first presented to the public in the Ebor television programme Doubt last spring. Now the Home Secretary has at last accepted that there are serious grounds for believing there may have been a gross miscarriage of justice and he has issued a release order pending consideration of the new evidence by the Court of Appeal.

‘Until the decision of that court is officially made public, I cannot of course comment on the legal implications of what has happened. But I can point out the obvious. My client has spent a longer period in jail than any other woman in the annals of English penology. It goes without saying that she will need a proportional period of readjustment to the rigours of freedom. But being aware of the great public interest in the case, she has accepted the recommendation of her advisers that she should attend this press conference in the hope that thereafter she will be permitted a long breathing space free from the importunities of the media.’

‘Does that include Jay Waggs and Ebor television?’ calls a sharp-faced young woman.

Jay Waggs smiles at her and says, ‘One question per paper was the agreement. Is that yours, Sally?’

‘No! Miss Kohler, I’m Sally Blindcrake, Daily Sphere. How did it feel when you heard you were getting out?’

Cissy Kohler speaks so softly not even the posy of mikes can pick it up.

‘Sorry? I couldn’t catch that.’

‘She says she felt nothing,’ says Waggs. ‘Next question.’

‘Nothing?’ insists Blindcrake incredulously. ‘After all those years you’re told you’re innocent, and you feel nothing?’

Kohler raises her head and speaks again, this time loud enough to be heard.

‘I knew it already.’

A pause, then laughter, a ripple of applause.

‘Next,’ says Waggs.

‘Martin Redditch, BBC television. Miss Kohler, you didn’t apply for parole until nineteen seventy-six, though you could have applied earlier. Why was that?’

She frowns and says, ‘I wasn’t ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ shouts someone, but Redditch is pressing on, regardless of the one question limit.

‘But you were ready in ’seventy-six, right. And it looked like you were getting out, till you attacked and killed Officer Daphne Bush in Beddington Prison. At least, you got tried and sentenced for killing her. Or are you claiming to be innocent of that killing too?’

She takes her time, not as if the effort of remembering is painful so much as if the machinery of memory is rusty.

Finally: ‘I killed her,’ she says.

Redditch tries to follow up once more but now Waggs cuts him off.

‘OK, Martin, you got two in. We’ll call it one for each channel. Next!’

‘Norman Proudfoot, Church Times. Miss Kohler, the TV programme mentioned the Bible your mother gave you as a child. I presume it’s that same Bible you’re carrying now. Can you tell us what comfort you have drawn from it during your long imprisonment?’

She looks down at the book still clutched tight against her breast.

‘It helped me look in at myself. Without it, I don’t think I’d have survived.’

This is the longest answer she gives. The questions come thick and fast, some aggressive, some insinuating, some simply inane. All receive the same treatment – a pause followed by a short reply in a soft monotonous voice. Soon Waggs ceases to intervene and relaxes, faintly smiling as the cohorts of the Press dash themselves vainly against the walls of her solitude.

At last the room is silent. Waggs asks, ‘All done?’

Sally Blindcrake says, ‘I know I’ve had my question but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten what it was. How about me closing the circle?’

‘In the interests of balance? Well, that’s certainly a novelty in the Sphere, Sally. OK. Last question.’

‘Miss Kohler. Cecily. Cissy. If you were innocent, why did you confess?’

This time the preliminary pause goes on and on.

Blindcrake says, ‘OK, let me rephrase the question. Not only did you confess, but your alleged confession implicated Ralph Mickledore to such an extent that, along with the other evidence against him, it sent him to the gallows. Was he innocent too?’

Waggs says, ‘OK, Sally, I should have known better. That does it, folks …’

‘No! Hold on. I need an answer, Jay. It was your telly programme that suggested she was so smashed up by little Emily’s drowning that she was fair game for anyone. If she’s innocent, then who’s guilty? And I don’t just mean of the murder. Who was it who twisted her arm till she stuck it up?’

Now Waggs is on his feet, drawing Kohler upright too.

Jacklin leans over to the mikes and says, ‘I cannot allow my client to answer that question outside of a courtroom. We must remember the law of defamation …’

‘Defamation nothing! You can’t defame the dead,’ yells Blindcrake. ‘And isn’t the guy most likely the late Detective-Superintendent Walter Tallantire, then Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID?’

Waggs is urging Kohler off the platform. Any discipline the press conference might have had is rapidly disappearing. Cameramen and reporters jostle each other in their efforts to get near the woman. They spill out of the body of the hall and get between her and the door. The air is filled with a blizzard of flash bulbs and a babble of voices.

‘… What about compensation? … Will you go back to the States? … Are you suing the police? … Is it true you’ve written your memoirs? … How much are they paying? … Have you heard from James Westropp? … What’s his son Philip doing now? … Did you mean to drown the kid? … Is it true you’re going into a nunnery? … Was Daphne Bush your lover? …’

Three uniformed policemen have appeared. They clear a path to the door. One of them flings it open. A camera peers through, momentarily revealing a long corridor in which several men are standing. Then Kohler and Jacklin are through. Waggs turns in the doorway, helping the police to block pursuit. Someone shouts, ‘Hey, Jay. When they make the movie, how about Schwarzenegger playing you?’

Waggs grins and says, ‘Thank you for your courtesy, gentlemen, and ladies. That’s it. End of story.’

He steps back through the door. A policeman pulls it shut behind him.

The scene fades, to be replaced by a close-up of a woman with dead eyes and a mobile lower lip who says, ‘The rest of our programme will be running approximately forty minutes late because of that news conference. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause to viewers …’

THREE

‘Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.’

Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel of Mid-Yorkshire CID stabbed the off-button of the video remote control as if he wanted to drive it through his knee.

‘Bastards!’ he said. ‘Bitch!’

‘The poor woman,’ said Maudie Tallantire.

‘Poor nowt. She were guilty as hell,’ said Dalziel. ‘Three people are dead because of her. I’d have thrown away the key! You save your sympathy for yourself, Maudie. You heard what that newspaper cow said about Wally?’

‘Wally’s been dead nigh on twenty years,’ said Maud Tallantire as if explaining something to a simple child. ‘He’s past harm now and who’d want to harm an old woman like me? Oh, I know the times have changed, and I reckon us old ’uns had the best of it, war and all. Everyone knew where they were going then, and in the years after. But it all went wrong somewhere, Andy. But human nature doesn’t change. At heart people are still as good as ever they were. They’d rather do you a good turn than a bad one. Look at you, Andy, coming all this way just ’cos you got to worrying about me, and no need at all!’

Dalziel shook his head in affectionate exasperation. Anyone who could cite himself as evidence of the basic goodness of human nature was clearly beyond hope. Maudie was over seventy now, grey-haired, slightly lame, but she hadn’t changed in essence from the pretty, amiable and rather vague woman he’d met more than thirty years ago, and very little, if report were true, from the wide-eyed lass who’d married Wally Tallantire back in the ’thirties.

‘Copper’s wife has got to be either tough as old boots to put up with the life, or live in a world of her own so she don’t notice,’ Wally had once confided in him when time and alcohol had matured their relationship. ‘That’s my Maudie. A rare orchid, Andy. She’ll need looking out for if anything ever happens to me. You’ll do that for me, won’t you, lad? Do I have your word on that?’

Dalziel had given his word gladly, but in the event, when Tallantire died of a heart attack shortly before he was due to retire, Maudie proved quite capable of looking out for herself. Within a year she’d moved back to her native Skipton and quickly gathered up the threads of her young life, broken when she’d moved from West to Mid-Yorkshire all those years ago.

Dalziel visited regularly for a while, then intermittently, and in recent years hardly at all. But when he saw the Kohler press conference on the telly, he knew the time had come for another visit.

He’d been going to suggest that Maudie might like to think about staying with friends for a couple of days just in case the Press came prying, but he wasn’t a man to waste breath. Instead he ran his video back a little way, restarted it, and pressed the freeze button when he reached the shot of the corridor through the open door.

‘That fellow there remind you of anyone, Maudie?’

‘The tall one?’ she said looking at the two men touched by his broad forefinger. ‘He’s a bit like Raymond Massey.’

‘No. Someone you know. And I mean the other one. I know who the tall fellow is. Chap called Sempernel. He came sniffing around at the time. Said he were Home Office but he were a funny bugger, no question. You’d not have seen him. But the other one, the skinny runt, remind you of anyone? And don’t say Mickey Rooney, luv!’

‘He doesn’t look a bit like Mickey Rooney,’ said the woman, examining the man closely. ‘He doesn’t really look like anybody, but he does look familiar.’

‘Remember a sergeant called Hiller? Adolf, we used to call him? Wally didn’t care for him and got shut of him.’

‘Vaguely,’ she said. ‘But what would Sergeant Hiller be doing there?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Dalziel grimly. ‘And he’s not a sergeant now. Deputy Chief Constable down south, last I heard. Well, the higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his behind, eh?’

Maudie Tallantire laughed. ‘You don’t change, do you, Andy? Now how about a cup of tea?’

‘Grand. By the way, Maudie, do you still have any of Wally’s personal papers? I seem to recall you said you’d put a lot of stuff together when you moved here just in case there were anything important …’

‘That’s right. And you said you’d look through it some time when you had a moment. But that was donkey’s years ago, Andy. And you never had a moment, did you?’

‘Sorry,’ he said guiltily. ‘You know how it is. But if you’ve still got it, I might as well take a look now.’

‘I’ve probably thrown it out long since,’ she said. ‘It were in an old blue suitcase, one of them little ones which was all we used to need once when we went away. Now it takes a cabin trunk! It’ll be in the boxroom if I’ve still got it, but it’s dusty up there and you don’t want to spoil that nice suit.’

‘I’ll take care.’

She was right about the dust but he spotted the blue case without any difficulty. He picked it up, blew gently, coughed as a dust cloud arose, and went to open the window.

Below in the street, a car drew up. There were two men in it. The one who got out of the driver’s side was youngish, dressed in designer casuals, and his elegantly coiffured head moved watchfully this way and that, as though he had debouched in Indian territory rather than suburban Yorkshire.

But it was the other who held Dalziel’s attention. Thin-faced, bespectacled, dressed in a crumpled black suit a size too large, he stood quite still looking up at the house like a twice repelled rent-collector.

‘Bloody hell. It is Adolf!’ exclaimed Dalziel, stepping back from the window. ‘I should’ve known that bugger’d move quick.’

Shaking the remaining dust from the case, he went quickly and quietly downstairs. Just inside the front door was a small cloakroom. He slipped the case under the hand-basin, closed the door and returned to the living-room as Maudie came out of the kitchen carrying a laden tray.

‘Find what you were looking for, Andy?’

‘No, not a sign,’ he said, removing the video from the recorder and fitting it into a capacious inner pocket. ‘I reckon you must have chucked it out without noticing. No matter. Are them your Eccles cakes I see? You must’ve known I was coming. What was it Wally used to say? Never say nowt good ever came out of Lancashire till you’ve tasted our Maudie’s Eccles cakes!’

He seized one, devoured it in a couple of bites, and was on his third when the doorbell rang.

‘Who can that be?’ said Maudie, with the ever fresh surprise of the northern housewife that someone should be at her door.

She went out into the hallway. Dalziel helped himself to another cake and moved to the lounge doorway to catch the conversation.

‘Mrs Tallantire, you may not remember me, but we have met a long time back. Geoffrey Hiller. I was a sergeant up here for a while when your husband was head of CID.’

‘Hiller? Now isn’t that odd? We were just talking about you. Won’t you step inside, Sergeant? And your friend.’

‘Thank you. Actually, it’s Deputy Chief Constable now, Mrs Tallantire. Of the South Thames force. And this is Detective-Inspector Stubbs.’

‘Ooh, you have done well. Come on through. Andy, it never rains but it pours. Here’s another old friend of Wally’s come visiting.’

Dalziel, back in his chair, looked up in polite puzzlement as the dark-suited man stopped short in the doorway, like a parson accidentally ushered into a brothel. Then the fat man’s face lit up with the joy of a father at the prodigal’s return and he said, ‘Geoff? Is that you? Geoff Hiller, by all that’s holy! How are you, lad? What fettle? By God, it’s good to see you.’

He was on his feet shaking the newcomer’s hand like a bushman killing a snake. Hiller had recovered from his shock and was now regarding Dalziel with wary neutrality.

‘How are you, er, Andy?’ he said.

‘I’m grand. And who’s your friend?’

‘This is Detective-Inspector Stubbs. Stubbs, meet Detective-Superintendent Dalziel, Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID.’

Hiller’s tone underlined the title.

Stubbs held out his hand. ‘Hi. Glad to meet you, Supe.’

‘Supe?’ echoed Dalziel. ‘Up here we drink supe. Or if it’s homemade, we chew it. Will you be staying in West Yorkshire long enough to learn our little ways?’

Stubbs glanced at Hiller, who said, ‘Actually, er, Andy, we’re on our way to your neck of the woods. This is just in nature of a courtesy call on Mrs Tallantire in passing.’

‘I see. In passing Skipton? On your way to Mid-Yorks HQ? From South Thames?’

As he spoke, Dalziel’s finger traced two sides of a rectangle in the air, and he smiled an alligator’s smile.

‘Now that’s what I call courtesy! Maudie, isn’t it nice of Geoff here to come so far out of his way just for old time’s sake? Incidentally, Geoff, I presume you’re expected at my shop? I was talking to the Chief yesterday afternoon and he said nowt.’

‘The Home Office should have phoned Mr Trimble this morning,’ said Hiller.

‘That explains it. It’s my day off, which is why I’m here. Social call on an old friend. Mebbe it’s your day off too?’

‘No,’ said Hiller. ‘Not really. I’m afraid there is a business element to my call, Mrs Tallantire. You may have heard that some question has arisen as to the safety of the verdict in the Mickledore Hall murder case. In fact, Cecily Kohler has been released and the Home Office has ordered an inquiry into the affair. Your late husband, Detective-Superintendent Tallantire, conducted the original investigation and will naturally figure in the inquiry which I have been instructed to take charge of.’

‘Now isn’t that funny? Andy and I were only just now talking –’

‘And you’ve come to warn Maudie that the Press will probably be sniffing around,’ intervened Dalziel. ‘Now that is kind. I leave you in good hands, Maudie. Me, I’d best be off. Geoff, I know it’s not a nice job you’ve got, poking around in other buggers’ rubbish bins, but where’d we be without the garbage collectors, eh? I promise you, you’ll get nowt but cooperation from my department. I’ll see you tomorrow, likely.’

Hiller tried to look suitably grateful but couldn’t get beyond the expression of a postman assured the Rottweiler is just a big softy.

‘Actually, er, Andy, we hope to be in situ later today.’

‘You can be up to your necks in situ for me, Geoff, but it’s my day off, remember? What did you think I was going to do? Head straight back and start shredding the files?’

He laughed, kissed Maudie on the cheek and said, ‘Take care, luv. I’ll see myself out. See you soon.’

He went out, closing the lounge door firmly behind him. As he opened the front door noisily, he reached into the cloakroom, picked up the suitcase and exited with a slam that shook the stained glass panel.

Separating Maudie’s driveway from her neighbour’s was a low brick wall. He leaned over and placed the case behind it. As he reached the gate, he heard the front door open behind him. He turned to see Stubbs coming out. He’d always been a distrustful bastard, that Hiller. It was good to know some things didn’t change.

‘Need something from the car,’ said Stubbs as he joined him.

‘Oh aye? Hair curlers, is it?’ said Dalziel.

As he drove away he saw the inspector return to the house without opening his car. He drove slowly round the block, parked outside Maudie’s neighbour’s and walked briskly up the drive. A window opened as he retrieved the suitcase and he looked up to see a woman viewing him with grave suspicion.

‘Yes?’ she called sharply.

Dalziel pulled the video out of his pocket, and held it up like a votive offering.

‘Are you on line with the Almighty, sister?’ he intoned. ‘Are you plugged in to the Lord? I’ve got a video here that’ll turn your telly into the Ark of the Covenant!’

‘No, thank you!’ she cried in alarm and slammed the window shut.

Shaking his head, he returned to the car.

It was like he’d always thought.

There was no love of religion in West Yorkshire.

FOUR

‘I am not surprised; I knew you were here … if you really don’t want to endanger my existence – go your way as soon as possible and let me go mine. I am busy. I am an official.’

‘An habitual criminal is easy to spot. Ask him, “Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?” and he’ll say, “I was at home in bed reading a book. I can bring six witnesses to prove it.”’

There was a dutiful titter. Perhaps it’s the way I tell them, thought Peter Pascoe.

He looked at the twenty young faces before him. Children of the ’seventies. Adolescents of the ’eighties. Lawmen of the ’nineties. God help them.

He said gently, ‘Who was President Kennedy?’ Pause. A lowering of eyes to avoid catching his. Make the question easier. ‘What country was he president of?’

An uncertain hand crept up.

‘America, sir?’

‘That’s right. Would that be North or South America?’

The irony of superiors is unfair because it forces you to take it literally.

He went on quickly before anyone could try an answer, ‘What happened to him? Well, I told you that. He got shot. Does anyone know the year?’

They probably didn’t know this year! No. That was unfair. He was confusing truth and truism. Everyone remembers what they were doing when Kennedy died. Everyone except a few billion who weren’t born; or didn’t know of his existence, or didn’t give a toss that it was over. Everyone in America, then? Maybe. Probably their kids had the date and data drummed into them with the Pledge of Allegiance. But this lot, why should they be expected to know anything about other people’s myths?

‘Was it nineteen sixty-three, sir?’

‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

He looked at the speaker with disproportionate pleasure. Another hand was waving urgently. Perhaps the floodgates had opened and all his cynical doubts about the ignorance of this generation were going to be washed away. He pointed at the hand-waver, nodded, waited to be amazed.

‘Sir, it’s half past. We’re due in the gym with Sergeant Rigg.’

He knew Sergeant Rigg. A no-neck Welshman with a black belt and a short way with latecomers.

‘You’d better go, then.’

He looked at his notes. He still had three sides to go. Before she left, Ellie had warned him to go easy on the midnight oil. (Trying to offer a pastoral substitute for scarcer emotional goods?) He pushed the distasteful thought away and concentrated on her words.

‘You start by thinking if you speak very slowly you might spin it out for five minutes. You end by gabbling so fast you’re incomprehensible, and even then you’ve still got bucketfuls of pearls left uncast.’

He poured them back into his briefcase and followed the cadets from the room.

‘Pete, how’d it go?’

It was Jack Bridger, the grizzled Chief Inspector in charge of Mid-Yorkshire cadet training programme.

‘So-so. I didn’t find them very responsive.’

Bridger regarded him shrewdly and said, ‘They’re just ordinary lads, not post-grad students. At that age all you think about is fucking and football. Secret is to ask the right questions. Talking of which, sounds like they’re going to be asking some funny questions about this Mickledore Hall business.’

‘They’ve started. Full inquiry. Fellow called Hiller, Deputy Chief from South Thames, is leading it. Turned up yesterday even though the official announcement of the inquiry hasn’t been made yet.’

‘Hiller? That wouldn’t be Adolf Hiller, would it?’

He pronounced the name with a long A.

‘This one’s called Geoffrey, I think. Smallish fellow with crooked teeth. Looks as if he’s stolen his suit.’

‘That’s him! Adolf was just his nickname. He were a sergeant here way back, but not for long. Too regimental for old Wally Tallantire. That’s how he got his nickname. Some joker started changing his name on notices and lists to Hitler, and it soon caught on.’

‘But he couldn’t have been here during the Mickledore Hall case, surely, or he’d not have got this job?’

‘No, it was after that. He got moved around like pass the parcel. He were one of those fellows, you couldn’t fault his work, but you couldn’t thole his company.’

Pascoe said, ‘I never knew Tallantire. What was he like? Cut a few corners, would he?’

‘That’s the way the wind blows, is it? Well, it figures. Scapegoats are like lawyers. The best ’uns is dead ’uns. As for cutting corners, well, Wally would certainly go the shortest way, once he got a target in his sights. And the Mickledore Hall case was his golden hour by all accounts, the one he reckoned he’d be remembered for. But there’s a difference between cutting corners and carving people up.’

‘So you reckon he was straight?’

‘On the whole, I’d say so. I’ll tell you one thing, but. Fat Andy won’t take kindly to anyone casting aspersions. Wally was his big hero, he took Andy under his wing, and it needed a pretty broad wing, believe me!’

Pascoe grinned and said, ‘A bit wild, was he?’

‘Wild? He’s a dormouse to what he were! He’d still be pounding a beat if it weren’t for Wally. But Wally was flying high after the Mickledore case, and Andy flew with him.’

Pascoe mused on these things as he headed back to Headquarters. He tried to imagine Dalziel as a wild young thing in need of protection but all he could get was Genghis Khan in short pants. The image made him smile. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, he felt good.

He turned a corner. Ahead, rearing out of a rough sea of rooftops, he glimpsed the huge grey front of the cathedral tower. His mouth felt dry. He tried to make spittle and swallow but couldn’t. The palms of his hands were sweating so that the wheel felt slimy against them. The tower seemed to be swelling to fill the sky, while the car shrank around him to a biscuit tin. He braked hard, pulled in to the side, felt the wheels hit the kerb. His heart was racing like an engine with a stripped gear. His left hand fumbled for the seat-belt release, his right for the door handle. His fingers felt weak and unconnected with his mind, more vegetable than flesh, but somehow the door was open, the belt released and he swung his legs out of the car. An overtaking cyclist had to swerve sharply to avoid collision. She went on her way, swearing over her shoulder. Pascoe paid no heed. He forced his head between his knees and drew in great ragged breaths. After a while he managed to get some rhythm into his breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth, long, slow inhalations and exhalations. His heart too was slowing, his salivary glands resumed a limited service, and his hands began to feel less like a bunch of radishes bound loosely to his wrists.

When strength returned to his legs, he stood up and walked unsteadily around the car. He forced himself to think about his lecture to the cadets, what he should have told them about criminal investigation, what he shouldn’t have wasted time telling them. The sun was pleasantly warm on his skin, the air tasted good. At last he felt able to get back in and drive away. But he didn’t let his gaze drift up to the skyline again.

A mile away, a van was backing into Pascoe’s spot in the HQ car park. The driver got out and went into the building. Sergeant George Broomfield on the desk said, ‘Can I help you?’

‘Why not? Sergeant Proctor, South Thames. I’m with Mr Hiller’s mob. Got some gear outside in the van. Any chance of a lift?’

His cockney chirpiness grated on Broomfield’s ear, which would have surprised Proctor who came from Ruislip.

‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘Not for a while, any road. I don’t think I’ve got a body free.’

Suddenly Dalziel was there. How a man of his girth could be sudden, Broomfield never knew, but when he wanted he could lurk like a Brazilian striker.

‘George, what are you saying? Cooperation’s the key word here. Isn’t that young Hector I see through there playing with himself? Send him out to help. Fragile stuff, is it, Sergeant?’

Proctor, recognizing the weight of authority, said, ‘Yes, sir. Couple of computers, software, hardware, that sort of thing.’

Broomfield was looking alarmed. Not even a cockney deserved PC Hector, who didn’t break cups when he washed up, he broke sinks.

‘Computers, eh?’ said Dalziel. ‘Then Hector’s your man. Strong as an ox. Hector! Come on out here!’

He stood by the desk till Proctor and the bewildered-looking constable had gone into the car park. Then he said very seriously to Broomfield, ‘These people are our guests, George. We’ve got to take care of them,’ and set off up the stairs.

He’d reached the first landing when he heard the first crash, and its accompanying cry of anguish followed him all the way up to the second.

He smiled and went on his way to Sergeant Wield’s room.

‘Don’t get up,’ he said to the Sergeant who hadn’t moved. ‘The lad not back yet?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Bloody nuisance. I wish he’d not volunteer all the time for these skives.’

Wield, who knew very well that it was Dalziel who had volunteered Pascoe for the cadet lecture (‘right up your street, being a Master of Ceremonies or whatever it is you are’), said nothing.

‘Tell him to drop in when he gets back, will you?’ Dalziel hesitated at the door, then went on, ‘Matter of no importance, but how’s he been looking to you lately?’

‘Bit rough,’ said Wield. ‘He’s not really been himself since that lass jumped off the cathedral tower. It seemed to knock all the stuffing out of him, somehow.’

‘Certainly knocked the stuffing out of her,’ said Dalziel.

He stared hard at Wield’s inscrutably craggy features as though challenging him to reprove his callousness, but the Sergeant just held his gaze unflinchingly.

‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Well, keep an eye on him, eh? I know I can rely on your feminine intuition.’

He went on to his own office, opened a drawer, and took out the glass of Scotch he’d been drinking when he’d noticed the South Thames van pulling into the car park below his window. He was just finishing it when the door burst open and Hiller came in.

‘Well, come on in, Geoff,’ said Dalziel pleasantly. ‘Have a seat. Getting settled in, are you?’

Hiller remained standing.

‘I think it’s time to lay a few ground rules,’ he said. ‘First, in front of other officers, I think we should observe protocol. That means “sir” not “Geoff”, OK?’

‘Fair enough. No Geoffing around,’ said Dalziel.

‘Secondly, Inspector Stubbs tells me he found you in the room allocated to us by your man Pascoe.’

‘Just checking you had everything you need, Geoff. Pascoe’s a good lad but a bit rough at the edges. He might have overlooked a few of the refinements.’

‘I found Mr Pascoe very helpful and obliging,’ said Hiller. ‘But I want to make it clear that my inquiry room, especially now I’ve got my equipment here, is off-limits to all Mid-Yorkshire staff. That includes you, Andy. And especially it includes that moron, Hector. Is he brain-damaged or what?’

‘Hector? He’s reckoned to be one of our high fliers.’

‘He’ll fly high if he comes within kicking distance of my boot,’ said Hiller.

A joke, thought Dalziel. Adolf had really come a long way.

‘That all, is it?’ he inquired politely.

‘Just one more thing. While I was talking to Mrs Tallantire yesterday, she let slip that you’d been asking her about Wally’s personal papers.’

‘Oh aye? Then she’ll have told you that there weren’t any,’ said Dalziel.

‘Yes, that’s what she said you said,’ replied Hiller.

‘You’re not implying I’d try to hide summat as important as that?’ said Dalziel indignantly.

‘I’m implying nothing. I’m saying loud and clear that if I get any proof that you’re attempting to interfere with or obstruct my inquiry in any way, I’ll bury you, Andy.’

‘You’d need to scratch a big hole, Geoff,’ said Dalziel, his fingers mining his groin as if in illustration.

Hiller smiled thinly.

‘I don’t do my own digging any more,’ he said. ‘By the way, I’ve asked Mr Trimble if your DCI Pascoe can act as liaison between us. Like I said before, he seems a sensible sort of fellow, and I think it’s in all our interests to keep things on an even keel.’

‘Right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Pascoe’s your man for even keels. Full of ballast. It’ll be plain sailing with him.’

‘Plain sailing’s what we all want, isn’t it?’ said Hiller.

Dalziel showed him out with all the surface regret of a society host losing a favourite guest. He watched him out of sight along the corridor then he said, ‘You can come out now.’

The door to the storeroom opposite opened and Pascoe emerged.

‘Saw you lurking a few minutes back,’ said Dalziel. ‘Hear all that, did you?’

‘The door was open,’ said Pascoe defensively.

‘Don’t apologize. There’s three things a good copper never passes up on, and one of ’em’s a chance to eavesdrop.’

Pascoe didn’t care to inquire as to the other two. He followed Dalziel into his room and said, ‘In this case, eavesdropping hasn’t left me much the wiser. I’d appreciate being told what’s really going off here.’

‘You’ve stopped reading the papers and watching the telly, have you?’

‘I’ve not had much time recently.’

‘Oh aye? Family all right, are they?’

Why was it so hard to tell Dalziel anything without getting the sense he knew it already? Pascoe said as casually as he could, ‘Fine. Well, in fact, Ellie’s away visiting her mother for a couple of days. And Rosie too, of course. The old girl’s been a bit under the weather. The strain of looking after Ellie’s father. He’s got Alzheimer’s, remember? He’s gone totally now, no memory, never speaks, incontinent, the works. So they got him into a home last month and now Ellie’s gone down just to check her mum’s coping …’

He was talking too much.

Dalziel said, ‘OK, is she?’

‘Yes. I think so. I mean, Ellie rang just to say they’d got there OK …’

A message on his answering machine. ‘Peter, we’ve arrived safely. Rosie sends her love. I’ll ring again tomorrow.’ He hadn’t tried to ring back.

‘Well, it’s an ill wind,’ said Dalziel. ‘Lots of time on your hands now to catch up with what’s going off. You must’ve seen that telly programme yon Yank, Waggs, made, a while back? The one that caused the big stink?’

Pascoe shook his head.

‘Well, no great loss. Them TV twats get carried away. Funny angles, fancy music, all film festival stuff without the titties in the sand. I’ve got a video of it I’ll show you some time, but best for background is this radio thing they did a couple of years back before they started this miscarriage of justice crap. I don’t suppose you heard that either?’

He rummaged in a drawer, brought out an audio cassette.

‘You listen to that. That was the truth for twenty-five years. Now they’re telling us it’s a load of lies.’

Pascoe took the cassette and said, ‘I gather you know Mr Hiller from way back.’

‘Oh aye. He got dumped on us but Wally soon saw him off. I reckon that’s how he’s got on so well. Everyone he worked for’d be so keen to get shot of the bugger, they’d give him a glowing testimonial to get him on his way! Big mistake. You don’t get rid of a snake by pushing it into someone else’s garden. You keep it close where you can stamp on it.’

‘It’s a nice theory,’ said Pascoe. ‘But he must have some ability.’

‘Too true. The ability to dig up whatever bones the Emmies have buried for him and come running back with them, wagging his tiny tail behind him.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Pascoe, baffled. ‘Emmies? I don’t quite follow …’

‘Emmies!’ said Dalziel in exasperation. ‘MI this, MI that. The funny buggers.’

‘The Security Services, you mean? Come on, sir! Why the hell should Security be interested in Mickledore Hall?’

Dalziel shook his head. ‘You’d be better off sniffing glue than going to them colleges. Do they teach you nowt? Think about it! There was a government minister there that weekend, Partridge, Lord Partridge now. And the dead woman’s husband was one of their own. And there was a Yank, Rampling, he’s something important over in the States, and getting more important, by the sound of it. And there was Noddy Stamper, top industrialist, Sir Noddy now, Maggie gave him a knighthood soon as she got in, so you can see what he was made of. Just listen to the tape. It’s all there. Well, soon after it happened this long thin fellow, all sweet and pink, like a stick of Edinburgh Rock, turned up. Name of Sempernel, he said. Osbert Sempernel. Pimpernel, we called him, he were so hard to pin down. Said he was from the Home Office but I reckon if I could have snapped him in half, I’d have found dirty tricks printed all the way through. I saw him again this morning when I were watching the press conference on the box. Hanging around outside with Adolf. It all made sense.’

‘Not to me,’ said Pascoe, sceptically but not overly so. Dalziel’s delusions had an X-certificate habit of fleshing themselves out into reality. ‘Are you saying that Hiller will heap all the blame on Wally Tallantire just because this chap Sempernel tells him to?’

‘Certainly. He’d hang his own granny if the orders came from high enough, especially if it meant getting up another rung of the ladder.’

‘Adolf Eichmann rather than Adolf Hitler, then?’

‘Both,’ said Dalziel. ‘And the bugger’s taken a fancy to you, so mebbe you should start asking questions about yourself. Any road, you’re to act as liaison. Now, you’ll get nowt out of Adolf, but yon primped-up fancy pants might start yapping after a couple of port-and-lemons.’

‘Stubbs? He seems a decent sort of chap.’

‘SS was full of decent sorts of chap,’ said Dalziel. ‘You just keep your ears flapping.’

‘You mean spy?’

‘If that’s what you like to call it.’

Pascoe wrinkled his face in distaste and said, ‘At least I should be glad there’s not a war on. They shoot spies in wartime, don’t they?’

He left, closing the door quietly behind him.

Dalziel reached into the drawer for his whisky, shaking his head sadly. Under his tutelage Pascoe had taken long strides towards becoming a good cop, mebbe even a great one.

But if he didn’t know there was always a war on, he still had a long way to go.

FIVE

‘I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.’

Cissy Kohler lay on a patchwork quilt and thought: The way I feel, this ought to make me invisible. Bits and pieces of past lives, some hers, some not, stitched together in a show of wholeness. Through the chintz curtains she could see the branches of a wych elm swaying in the wind. In the room below she could hear voices but she didn’t strain her ears, for she knew they couldn’t be saying anything that mattered.

‘Charming place,’ said the tall man in the dark suit whose impeccable cut was a foil to a stringy tie which looked as if it had been dropped in a bowl of Brown Windsor and wrung out by hand.

‘Yeah, very quaint,’ said Jay Waggs. ‘How can I help you, Mr Sempernel?’

‘Belongs to Jacklin, I gather? Decent of him to let you have it.’

‘I figure it’ll be on his bill.’

‘What? Oh, quite. These solicitors. But it’s ideal. Good security. Just the one track down. And that wall behind. Perfect.’

He was looking out of the window into the small rear garden.

The cottage stood in the U-shaped nook which some peasant who knew his rights had indented in the twelve-foot boundary wall of an extensive country estate.

‘Perfect,’ agreed Waggs. ‘The wall and the guard, they make Cissy feel really at home.’

‘Ha-ha. Droll. Though the guard, as you call him, is of course positioned here to keep the media hounds out, not to keep Miss Kohler in.’

‘So she’s free to come and go.’

‘But naturally. Within the limits of our agreement, of course, which I do not doubt that Mr Jacklin has spelt out in tedious detail. Nevertheless, let me recap. Miss Kohler’s early release –’

‘Early!’

‘Indeed. HM Government has agreed for humanitarian reasons to anticipate the proper legal process, but not without undertakings on your part. These are principally that Miss Kohler has agreed that neither she nor her advisers will make any public comment, nor publish any form of memoir of this unhappy business, without the approval of the authorities. In return for this undertaking, HM Government has indicated it will offer no resistance to any legitimate claim for compensation.’

‘Big of them.’

‘I think so. Also Miss Kohler has agreed to remain in this country until the completion of the official inquiry into the circumstances leading up to this unfortunate miscarriage.’

‘Which could take years!’

‘No. I assure you matters are moving fast. Deputy Chief Constable Hiller whom you have met has the business in hand and we anticipate a speedy conclusion. Incidentally, Mr Hiller tells me that if by chance Miss Kohler had kept any written record of the events at Mickledore Hall, sight of it, on loan of course, might speed matters up and obviate the need of any further interview with her.’

Waggs laughed.

‘Come on, Sempernel! You know there’s no record. You guys went through her cell like a pack of rats before she got out.’

The long man smiled thinly.

‘The papers seem to think she may have had some ally through whom such a memoir may have been smuggled out to a place of security.’

‘Like me, you mean? Well, I don’t deny that, given the chance, I’d have been glad to help. But I wasn’t and I didn’t.’

‘I’m happy to accept your word on that, Mr Waggs,’ said Sempernel. ‘There are other possible sources of assistance, of course. She was after all inside for a long time, and could hardly avoid forming relationships. The unfortunate Miss Bush, for instance …’

‘That was long before my time,’ said Waggs. ‘The only memoir I’m aware of is in Cissy’s head and I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to pry that out.’

‘No? You’ve met with quite a lot of success so far,’ murmured Sempernel. ‘Rest, quiet, and above all time are great healers. They are all at your disposal here. Enjoy them.’

He made for the door, stooping to avoid the sagging lintel. Beneath it he paused, looking like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house.

‘One last thing,’ he said, ‘Jacklin has, I hope, made it clear that any grant of a Free Pardon will be in respect of the Mickledore Hall affair only. In respect of the killing of Daphne Bush, there is no doubt about Miss Kohler’s culpability. Her release from that sentence is therefore merely under licence which may be revoked in the event of any breach of its terms. You follow me, Mr Waggs?’

‘You mean you’ve got a string you can twitch whenever you feel like it? I follow.’

‘Good.’ Sempernel passed through the doorway and straightened up so that his face was visible only from the long nose down. ‘I’ll say cheerio, then.’

Protected from the Englishman’s watery gaze, Waggs pushed his middle finger into the air as he said, ‘Yeah. Goodbye.’

He watched from the window till he saw the lanky figure negotiate the muddy path, then he picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Mr Jacklin, please. It’s Jay Waggs. Jacklin? Hi. How’re you doing? We’re fine. Yeah, she’s resting. Listen, Sempernel’s been here. Lots of that slippery Whitehall stuff, but all he’s doing is making sure my thick American mind understands the ground rules. Just thought I’d let you know. How are things your end? No change? That’s good. Well, keep in touch. Ciao.’

He listened for a while longer before putting the receiver down. It might be mere neurosis to imagine he heard significant clicks, but Sempernel struck him as a good man to be neurotic around. And if the phone, then why not everywhere?

He went into the kitchen, blew a kiss at the kettle and switched it on.

A few moments later he tapped on the bedroom door and entered with a cup of coffee.

Cissy Kohler had sat up on the bed and was reading her Bible.

‘Thought you might like this,’ he said. ‘It’s not home style, but near as I can get. How’re you feeling?’

She closed the book, laid it on her lap and took the cup.

‘I’m OK.’

‘Sempernel was here.’

‘Who?’

‘The one like a straightened out hairpin. He was just checking we knew the rules.’

She drank her coffee with her eyes closed as though taking in visions with the steam. He studied her face and wondered just how much of what was happening she really grasped. At least, if there were listening ears, it made role-play that much easier.

He said, ‘He was asking about your memoirs, Cissy.’

She opened her eyes.

‘Memoirs?’

‘Yeah. There are these stories in the Press that you wrote up everything that happened at Mickledore Hall, everything that happened afterwards in jail. Somehow you got them smuggled out and they are waiting to be picked up somewhere.’

He knew what the answer would be. They’d had this conversation before.

‘It’s not true,’ she said without heat. ‘They’re making it up.’

‘That’s what I told him. But if there were any memoirs, Cissy, it’d make things a lot easier for me. The book, the film …’

‘Which book? Which film?’ She regarded him blankly.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said gently. ‘It’s early days. We’ll talk when you’re rested.’

‘How long will we stay here, Jay?’ she asked suddenly. ‘You said we’d go home soon. You said –’

This was dangerous. He cut her off, saying, ‘We will, Cissy, I promise. Just as soon as Mr Sempernel says it’s OK. Don’t you like it here?’

She shook her head and said, ‘Not much.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t know. It feels so old … so English …’

‘Yeah. It shouldn’t be for long. You rest now, OK?’

Her cup was empty. He took it from her hands and she lay back on the patchwork quilt, with her hands crossed over the old leather Bible on her stomach. Her eyes were still open but he got no impression that they were seeing him. In fact he had a strange feeling that if he stayed here much longer he would stop seeing her.

He turned and left the room.

SIX

‘Now come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.’

Sod’s Law.

How many times on his way home late to a loving family and a hot dinner had he been waylaid by Dalziel and more or less frogmarched down to the Black Bull?

This evening there was no sign of the Fat Man. He met Wield on the stairs and said, ‘Fancy a quick half?’

‘Sorry, it’s my karate night.’

On the next landing he hesitated, then went down the corridor to the inquiry team’s room. A mahogany plaque had been screwed to the door. On it in large black Roman was printed DEPUTY CHIEF CONSTABLE HILLER, with underneath in golden Gothic, KNOCK AND WAIT.

Pascoe knocked and waited.

Inspector Stubbs opened the door. Over his crêpe-de-chine’d shoulder Pascoe could see the green flicker of computer screens.

‘Thought you might like an intro to our local,’ he said. ‘The beer’s good enough to make the meat pies seem almost edible.’

‘Love it, but not tonight,’ said Stubbs regretfully. ‘Mr Hiller wants us to get all this stuff into the system before we knock off.’

He opened the door wider to reveal Sergeant Proctor surrounded by what Pascoe assumed were the Mickledore Hall files.

‘’Evening, guv,’ said the sergeant. ‘Who does your filing, then – a grizzly bear?’

Stubbs frowned, but Pascoe, recalling the state of his own records if ever Dalziel got among them, could not take offence.

‘Some other time, then,’ he said.

There was nothing to stop him going to the Black Bull alone, but if he was going to be a solitary drinker, he might as well do it in the privacy of his own home.

He heard his phone ringing as he parked the car but it had stopped by the time he got into the house and there was no message on his machine. He checked through his mail in search of Ellie’s hand.

Nothing.

He poured himself a beer and sat down to read the paper. Good news was obviously no news. His glass was empty. He went to fill it, opened instead a can of soup and cut a hunk of bread. This he ate standing at the kitchen table. Then he went into the garden, pulled up a few weeds, wandered back into the house, poured another beer, switched on the television, and watched the end of a documentary on homelessness. Twice he got up to check that the phone was working.

Finally he remembered Dalziel’s tape.

He switched off the TV and put the cassette into his tape deck, pressed the start button and sat back to listen.

An announcer’s voice first, blandly BBC.

‘And now the last in our series The Golden Age of Murder in which crime writer William Stamper has been positing that the Golden Age of crime fiction, usually regarded as artificial, unrealistic, and escapist, may have had closer links with real life than the critics allow.

‘So far he has examined crimes from each of the first five decades of the century. Now finally we arrive at the ’sixties and a case in which we will see that William Stamper has a very special interest. The Mickledore Hall murder.’

Now came music, sort of intellectually eerie. Bartok perhaps. Then a male voice, light, dry, with an occasional flattened vowel giving a hint of northern upbringing …

‘It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes, it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guileless girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-Marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz.

‘It was the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-three, and it is altogether fitting that this crime of which we speak should have been committed in one of Yorkshire’s great country houses, Mickledore Hall, and that its dénouement should have taken place in that most traditional of settings, the Old Library.

‘If a Hollywood designer were asked to build a set for such a scene in an Agatha Christie film, it would probably turn out something like the library of Mickledore Hall.

‘Imagine a desk the size of a ping-pong table standing on a carpet the size of a badminton court. Scattered around are various chairs, stylistically unrelated except in so far as their upholstery has the faded look of the coat of a very old terrier. One wall is embrasured with three deep window bays hung with dusty velvet curtains, while the other three are lined with towering bureaux behind whose lozenged bars rot a thousand books, untouched by little save time, for the Mickledores were never famed for their intellectuality.

‘In nineteen sixty-three the incumbent baronet seemed cast in the traditional mould of Mickledore men, tall, blond, handsome, athletic, with an exuberant manner that might in a lesser man have been called hearty.

‘Yet there was another side to Ralph Mickledore – Mick to his friends – as evidenced perhaps by his close friendship with that most unhearty of men, James Westropp. At his trial, the defence projected him as the perfect type of English eccentricity, a country squire who ran his estate as if the twentieth century hadn’t arrived, with Shire horses pulling his ploughs, a water-mill grinding his grain, and poachers offered the choice of a Mickledore boot up the bum or a Mickledore beak on the Bench.

‘It was, however, a very different picture that the prosecution inked in. Victorian values might be the order of the day at the Hall, but away from Yorkshire, Sir Ralph came across as a Restoration roué. Nightclubs, casinos, racetracks, the grey area where the haut monde overlapped with the demi-monde, here was his urban habitat. The gap between his two lifestyles was presented not as harmless eccentricity but as black hypocrisy. And by the end of nineteen sixty-three, juries were very ready to think the worst of their social superiors, though, as we shall see, it was not this cynicism alone which helped confer on Ralph Mickledore the unenviable distinction of being the last man to hang in Mid-Yorkshire.

‘The house party assembled on Friday, August the second, for a long weekend taking in the following Monday, which was then the now defunct August Bank Holiday. The great and the good were all spilling out of London after the almost unbearable melodrama of the Stephen Ward trial. Though he once provided not the least sensational headlines in this most sensational of years, Dr Ward may have faded completely from some listeners’ minds, so perhaps a little potted history would go down well here as an entrée to the main course.

‘In March that year, John Profumo, the Minister of War (in those less mealy-mouthed days we had not yet invented Ministers of Defence) had resigned after it emerged that he had lied to Parliament when denying allegations of an improper relationship with a young woman named Christine Keeler. The impropriety was more than simply sexual. Miss Keeler was also alleged to have been the mistress of Captain Yuri Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché known by British Security to be an officer of the KGB. Such a link, however tenuous, between a Government Minister and an enemy agent, was clearly undesirable. But it was the lie to his colleagues that broke him.

‘The man who had introduced both Profumo and Ivanov to Keeler was a London osteopath and artist, Dr Stephen Ward, who besides manipulating the bones and painting the portraits of many highly placed people, also, it was alleged, provided more intimate services. Amid spiralling rumours of upper class debauchery on a scale to inspire a new Satyricon, Dr Ward was finally brought to trial at the end of July on three charges of living on the earnings of prostitution, and two concerned with procuring minors.

‘On Wednesday July the thirty-first, which seemed likely to be the trial’s final day, the court and the nation were shocked to learn that Ward had taken an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night and was critically ill. Despite this news, the judge summed up, the jury deliberated, and in mid-morning a verdict was delivered of Guilty on two of the immoral earnings charges, Not Guilty on the rest.

‘Sentencing was postponed till Dr Ward should have recovered. When the house party assembled two days later he was still lying unconscious in his hospital bed and it can scarcely be doubted that up and down the country there were many who prayed he would never rise from it.

‘I am not, of course, suggesting that there were any such among the arrivals at Mickledore Hall that day.

‘The house party fell some way short of that ideal constitution a fashionable host might have aimed at. Mickledore himself was unmarried, but his only “spare” guest was a man. Children were not usually included in such weekend gatherings, but Mickledore liked kids in the same way he liked dogs and the three couples who made up the guest list mustered eight between them, plus two nannies. And a final oddity; while the tradition admitted of, perhaps even encouraged, the inviting of a token American, this group had no less than three in it, or four if you counted one of the nannies.

‘But let’s get down to details.

‘The “spare” guest was Scott Rampling, a young US Embassy official, formally attached to the legal department though his subsequent career has been only loosely linked with legality.

‘The three couples were the Westropps, James and Pamela, plus their infant twins, Philip and Emily, in the care of their nanny, Cecily Kohler: the Partridges, Thomas and Jessica, plus their children Alison (three), Lætitia (seven), Genevieve (nine), and Tommy (twelve), in the care of their nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh: and finally, the Stampers, Arthur and Marilou, plus their nannyless kids, Wendy who was seven, and William who was eight.

‘That’s right. William Stamper, age eight. No coincidence. During that never-to-be-forgotten weekend at Mickledore Hall when the last of the Golden Age murders took place, I was truly there.

‘From a child’s viewpoint, the Hall was paradise. Inside there were attics full of marvellous junk. Outside there were woods, stables, a tennis court, an island with a lake and a couple of canoes, and a haunted folly. And there were only two rules; one, you didn’t go canoeing without supervision, and two, you became invisible and inaudible after six o’clock in the evening. Personally, I could have stayed there forever.

‘For most adults, however, a long weekend was probably quite enough. The atmosphere had something in it of a muscular public school. Non-stop activity was the order of the day, and slacking the unforgivable sin. My father loved it, perhaps because he worshipped the public school ethos with an apostate’s fervour. He should have been the perfect type of self-made Yorkshire businessman, forever advertising his humble origins and trumpeting his triumph over privilege and private education. Instead he used his growing wealth to purchase a place in the clubs and councils of the upper crust whose manners and mœurs he cultivated to the point of parody. Above all things he hated to be reminded that his growing business empire was based on the success of his first venture, Stamper Rubber Goods of Sheffield. I believe that in some areas of South Yorkshire condoms are still referred to as Stampers, and of course it was a mixed blessing for him to be awarded the upper class sobriquet of “Noddy”.

‘My mother was very different. Of the trio of American women present (the others being Pam Westropp and Cecily Kohler), she came from the “best” background, being a Bellmain of Virginia, no less, which was the nearest to aristrocracy my father dared aim at in his early years. Yet despite her breeding, she remained attractively unsophisticated, a wide-eyed innocent abroad whose unaffected enthusiasms often embarrassed my father, but no one else, for by knowing where her true home was, she was at home anywhere.

‘A very different type of American was Scott Rampling. Born in the urban sprawl of LA, he was a young man in a hurry to reach the rosy future he never doubted lay ahead of him. He had got to know Mickledore during one of his frequent visits to the Westropps in Washington and renewed the acquaintance when posted to London in ’sixty-one. After the events of that sensational weekend, he vanished from the scene and indeed the country with positively indecent speed, and the infrequency with which his name appeared in newspaper reports of the case and the trial suggests a considerable calling-in of cross-Atlantic favours.

‘The Partridges were as English as Rampling was American, to the manner and manor born. The family owned a goodly proportion of the North Riding, having preferred acres to earldoms as reward for their loyalty to the Stuart cause in the seventeenth century, and to the anti-Stuart cause in the eighteenth. It was not till Thomas’s retirement from active politics that a Partridge finally got a peerage, though as the noble lord says in his lively autobiography, In A Pear Tree, he would have preferred land if it had still been on offer. In nineteen fifty-five he had been elected Conservative member for the seat whose boundaries pretty well coincided with his own. By nineteen sixty-three he was a junior minister in the War Office, widely tipped for promotion in the next reshuffle. Then the sky fell in. He was too closely associated with his immediate master and long-time mentor, John Profumo, for comfort; his name kept coming up in the huge stew of rumours bubbling around Westminster all that spring and summer; and all poor Partridge wanted to do now was keep his head well below the rim of the cauldron.

‘His wife, Jessica, née Herdwick, fifth daughter of the Earl of Millom, was a formidably horsey lady with a great facility for breeding both champion chasers and handsome children. Her fifth (child, that is) was well on its way that weekend.

‘The Partridge nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh, had every qualification and quality then admired in her profession. In her mid-thirties, she stood about five feet four, but looked taller in her immaculate starched uniform because of her unyielding erectness of posture, a physical trait she extended into her attitude on matters of etiquette, expression, punctuality, probity, and even diet. You never left your crusts when Miss Marsh was at table.

‘The other nanny, Cecily Kohler, was quite different, more like a big sister than an agent of divine providence. She wore no uniform; indeed she even sometimes appeared in jeans, which were then not the universal garment they have since become. When she joined in our water sports, which as an expert canoer she often did, she was likely to end up as wet and tousled as the rest of us. Even her voice was a delight, for in it we heard the authentic accent of all that was most glamorous to our young imaginations. (We had no power to look ahead and see that the ’sixties were about to start swinging, with our own boring country at the very fulcrum of the mad intoxicating whirl.) We loved her because she loved us, and when I think of her, I still see the flushed and laughing face of a young woman, with russet hair blown across her brow in beautiful confusion. I have no art to link that image with the pallid skin, hollow cheeks and desperate, dark-ringed eyes of the woman I last saw being pushed into a police car outside Mickledore Hall.

‘I have deliberately left her employers, the Westropps, to the end because they are the most difficult to characterize. James Westropp must have been, indeed I presume still is, the best connected commoner in the land, a distant cousin of the Queen’s, and, as a magazine article on him at the time of the tragedy put it, within three deaths of a title whichever way he looked. It might have been expected that such connections would have hauled him up the diplomatic career ladder very quickly, but his apparent lowly status was explained in the same article. Westropp was no career diplomat with his sights on an ambassador’s mansion. He worked for the Service that dared not speak its name, which was the coy way they put such things in those days. It could be argued that his sojourn in the States, like perhaps Rampling’s in the UK, was a mark of excellence. You only send your best to spy on your friends. His marriage we may assume was a love match. Pamela Westropp was a penniless American widow with a three-year-old son and no rating on the social register. She was very attractive. She was also wilful, witty, mad-cap, moody, impulsive and obstinate, a mix of qualities which can be fascinating or repellent, depending whether you’re buying or selling.

‘The best man at the Westropps’ wedding was Ralph Mickledore, who improved the acquaintance of his friend’s new wife during the course of many extended visits over the next four years. By then of course the twins had arrived, and with them, Cecily Kohler. How soon her special relationship with “Mick” Mickledore developed is open to speculation, but some old girlfriend of hers dug up by the papers at the time of the trial recalled she had been adamant when she took the job that she wasn’t going to work abroad, so clearly something happened to change her mind.

‘These, then, were the actors. Let us move on to the act.

‘The single great pastime of a Mickledore weekend was shooting things. Male guests could expect to find themselves within minutes of arrival standing up to their ankles in mud destroying whatever the law permitted them to destroy at the time of year, even if it were only rabbits and pigeons.

‘Female guests were permitted a short settling-in period, after which they were expected to be as keen for the slaughter as their menfolk.

‘Jessica Partridge was as good a shot as most men and a lot better than my father, who suffered some heavy ribbing for his ineptitude. It didn’t help that my mother, though not keen on killing things, had done a lot of skeet shooting in her youth and was a pretty fair shot. It was Pam Westropp who was the real dunce. She had no moral objections but very low motor skills, often forgetting to reload or attempting to fire with the safety on. And when she did get it right she rarely hit anything she aimed at.

‘But not for this was she spared the rigours of the sport. And no one was spared its responsibilities, prime among which was that each guest took care of his or her own weapon, cleaning it after each shoot before replacing it on its chain in the gunroom.

‘At some point after dinner Mickledore would ask in his best Orderly Officer fashion if they’d all done their fatigues. It was no use lying. The last thing he did before going to bed was check the gunroom and if he found anything not in order, he did not hesitate to haul the culprit, regardless of sex or standing, out of bed to put matters right.

‘The gunroom was situated at the far eastern end of the guest corridor on the first floor, and was also reachable by a side stair ascending from the old kitchen hall which was used as a gathering and disrobing point for shooting parties, thus keeping muddy boots and dripping oilskins out of the main body of the house.

‘The same stair continued up to the second floor where the children and their nannies slept.

‘The gunroom was heavily panelled, windowless, and had a double door. Guests were issued with Yale keys for the outer door, while the larger key for the inner mortice lock was concealed on a narrow ledge above the inner door. After cleaning, guests were expected to replace their weapons on the wall rack, and secure them with a self-locking hasp which pivoted to fit just above the trigger guard. Only Mickledore had a key to unlock these hasps. In other words, guests put their guns away but could not take them out again unaided by their host.

‘The weekend had started early, everyone having contrived to arrive by Friday lunch-time. We had all been to Mickledore Hall before, so no time was wasted by either children or adults in learning the rules. The older children spent most of the afternoon having a super time on the lake with Cissy Kohler, while Miss Marsh sat on the bank, knitting and looking after the two infants. The adults too seem to have had a good time if my memory of the atmosphere and Lord Partridge’s of the events can be relied on. I should say now that nothing I have read in the lengthy chapter on that weekend in his lordship’s memoirs In A Pear Tree is contradicted by my own recollection, though naturally for much of the time we moved in mutually exclusive spheres.

‘For us children, Saturday started where Friday had left off, only better. But for the adults things had taken a downturn. We felt it in our brief contact with them in the morning and, like wise children, we made ourselves scarce. Lord Partridge in his memoirs recalls a sense of fractiousness, of barely repressed irritation, of hidden meanings, with Pamela Westropp at its centre. With hindsight he guesses her real anger was aimed at Mickledore, and, unable to contain it, she did her best to conceal its object by scattering its manifestations indiscriminately, though, as was to be expected, her husband came in for more than his fair share.

‘It was, of course, too early in the year for any serious shooting, but the whole party, male and female, were taken on a tour of the estate and given the chance to blast away at whatever Mickledore designated as vermin. Fresh air and killing things did surprisingly little to improve their spirits. And when they returned to the house in the late afternoon they heard the news that Stephen Ward had died.

‘The previous night, according to Partridge, as if by mutual agreement no one had mentioned the Profumo affair or the Ward trial. Saturday night was different. Pamela Westropp wouldn’t leave the subject. She went on about the hypocrisy of the British Establishment which had hounded him to his death. And she said, “Of course, Mick, you knew him pretty well, didn’t you?”

‘“I suppose I did,” said Mickledore, unperturbed. “But then so did a lot of us here, I imagine.”

‘He looked around as he spoke. Westropp as usual gave nothing away. My father, I would guess, attempted to look as if he’d been a long-time member of the Ward/Cliveden set. Rampling said cheerfully, “Hell, yes, I met the guy, but it was one of your judges that introduced me. I’d have paid more heed if I’d known he was the top people’s pimp!” And Partridge himself, who’d met Ward several times but naturally wasn’t anxious to advertise the fact in view of recent events, kept quiet and hoped he wasn’t being got at.

‘But clearly it was Mickledore who was Pam’s chosen target.

‘“I suppose you think he deserved everything he got?” she pursued.

‘“I think he broke the one law of the tribe he wanted to belong to,” said Mickledore.

‘“Which was?”

‘And Mickledore laid his finger across his lips.

‘Some time later, it was certainly after eleven for they all remember having heard the stable clock strike, Mickledore made his usual inquiry about “gun fatigues”. Pam Westropp said defiantly that no, she hadn’t cleaned hers, and was she expected to wash her own dinner dishes too? Nevertheless, after another couple of drinks she said she supposed she’d better get it over with, and stood up. Her husband rose too, rather unsteadily, having stuck doggedly to Mickledore’s coat tails during a wide-ranging tour of the delights of his cellar. It took a hard head and a pair of hollow legs to keep up with Mick when he was in the drinking mood. According to Westropp’s later statement, he went upstairs with his wife, offered to help her clean her gun, was told she was quite capable of performing her own menial tasks, staggered into his bedroom, got undressed, fell into bed and knew no more till awoken by the disturbance later on.

‘Downstairs, Jessica Partridge was ready for bed too, but her husband said he was looking forward to a game of billiards with Mickledore. Warning him not to disturb her, Jessica left accompanied by my mother, Marilou. My father, who liked to claim he needed less sleep than ordinary mortals, said he fancied a stroll around the estate with his pipe, a mode of behaviour he probably picked up from the novels of Dornford Yates.

‘Scott Rampling asked if he could phone the States and Mick told him to use the phone in the study which was in the East Wing. According to his statement, confirmed by Mickledore’s phone bill, Rampling was in conversation with America for the next hour and a half at least.

‘Meanwhile my father claimed he had been tempted by the fine moonlit night to walk further than he intended. He took no heed of time, except that he heard the stable clock strike midnight not too long after he set out on his perambulations. This clock, incidentally, had – presumably still has – the loudest bell I’ve heard outside Westminster. Mickledore through long usage was untroubled by it, but weekends of haggard faces over the breakfast table had finally persuaded him to fit a device which switched the chimes off between midnight and eight A.M. So, it wasn’t till he got back to the house that my father, who never wore a watch on the grounds that he made time work for him, was able to confirm that it was after one.

‘He met Mickledore and Partridge coming out of the billiard room. Mickledore, who’d sent Gilchrist, his butler, to bed after dinner, went off to check the house was secure, while the other two went upstairs together.

‘Outside Partridge’s bedroom they paused to finish off their conversation. Mickledore appeared at the far end of the same corridor, having ascended the side stairs, and opened the outer door of the gunroom. After a few moments he approached them, looking concerned. The key to the inner door was not in its customary place on the ledge. He had his own personal key, of course, but when he tried to use this, it would not go far enough into the hole to turn, and when he peered through the keyhole, he could see another key already in the lock from the inside.

‘The other two went with him to the gunroom to check. Mickledore was right. They could see the key quite clearly. Back along the corridor Jessica Partridge emerged to ask what all the row was, in tones loud enough to rouse my mother. Scott Rampling appeared on his way to bed. Soon they were all gathered outside the gunroom, all except the Westropps. Mickledore went and banged on their door but had to go in through the dressing-room before he could rouse Westropp. It took some time to penetrate his alcoholic torpor, but when he realized his wife was the only person on the guest floor unaccounted for, he flung himself against the gunroom door in a vain effort to break it down. But his efforts must at least have loosened the key in the inner lock, for now when he seized Mickledore’s key and thrust it into the hole, he was able to turn it and the door swung slowly open …’

The phone shrilled like an owl in a haunted tower. Pascoe, startled as if he too had been dragged from deep sleep, grabbed it, said, ‘Hello, this is …’ and couldn’t remember his number.

‘Peter, are you all right?’ It was Ellie’s voice, close and concerned.

‘Yes, fine. Hang on.’ He switched off the tape. ‘Sorry, I was listening to something. How’s things? How’s your mum? Your dad? Rosie?’

‘Rosie’s fine. I tried to ring earlier so she could have a talk to you, but I couldn’t be bothered to talk to that bloody machine. She’s asleep now. If you ever get home early enough, maybe you could ring …’

He could sense the effort not to sound reproving.

He said, ‘Of course I will, I promise. And your mum, how’s she?’

There was a silence. He said, ‘Hello? You still there?’

‘Yes. She’s … Oh, Peter, I’m so worried …’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing really … except … Peter, I’m terrified it’s all happening again. I thought it was just physical, you know, the strain of looking after Dad, and she’s always had these circulatory problems, and the arthritis, and I thought that once things settled down … Well, in herself, physically I mean, she doesn’t seem too bad … but she’s started forgetting things … she’d forgotten we were coming though we’d just spoken on the phone that morning … and this morning I heard her calling Rosie Ellie …’

‘That can happen to anyone,’ said Pascoe confidently. ‘I’ve done it myself. As for forgetting things like phone calls, if I don’t make a note of everything instantly, that’s it, gone for ever.’

The silence again. Then: ‘I hope you’re right. Maybe I’m over-sensitive because of Dad.’

‘That’s right. Have you seen him?’

‘I went today. I’d forgotten how awful it is, looking into a face you know, being looked at by eyes that don’t know you … I came out feeling like … I don’t know … like it was all my fault somehow …’

‘For God’s sake! How do you work that out?’ demanded Pascoe, dismayed to hear such fragile uncertainty in her voice.

‘I don’t know … using them as an excuse, maybe … that’s what I’ve done, isn’t it? Saying I thought I should come down here for a few days because I wanted to make sure Mum was coping … doing the concerned daughter bit when all I was really looking for was a place to lie low … like getting out of something by saying you’ve got the ’flu, then really getting the ’flu like it was a judgement, only far worse … not thinking about her at all really …’

‘Well, let’s think about her now, shall we?’ said Pascoe sharply.

Again silence, the longest yet. Her voice was calmer when she finally spoke.

‘So I’m doing it again, you reckon? Getting in the spotlight instead of sticking to my bit part. Yes, you could be right.’

‘Forget right,’ said Pascoe. ‘Only in this case, maybe you should just go for best-supporting-actress for a while. Look, why not get your mum to come up here for a while? Or I could steal a couple of days’ leave and come down there.’

She thought for a while, then said, ‘No. Mum wouldn’t come, I know that. Remember I tried to get her away after Dad went into the home and she wouldn’t budge. She knows it’s hopeless but she thinks she’s got to stay close.’

‘So, shall I come down?’

‘Peter, believe me, I’m tempted, but I don’t want to get things all mussed up together. I’ve used them once as an excuse to get away and I don’t want to find I’m using them as an excuse again to step back … Look, I know I’m putting this badly but we both know we’ve reached an edge, OK, so it’s dangerous, but at least the view is clear … God, even my metaphors are … what’s the opposite of euphemistic? Look, I’d better go now. I can promise Rosie you’ll ring early enough to speak to her, can I?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Pascoe. ‘Take care. Love to your mum. And Rosie. And you.’

‘Peter, Christ, I’m a selfish cow, this has been all about me and I’ve not asked anything about you, how you’re coping, what you’re eating, all the wifely things. You’re not living off those dreadful pies at the Black Bull, are you? You’ll end up like Fat Andy. Incidentally, I see they’ve released that poor woman your mob fitted up nearly thirty years ago. Plus ça change and all that.’

‘Plus ça change,’ echoed Pascoe. ‘I’ll prepare answers to satisfy your wifely curiosities next time. After I’ve finished eating this pie. Good night, love.’

He put the phone down. His mind was wriggling with thoughts like an angler’s bait tin. He poured a long Scotch and took it out into the garden where he watched scallop-edged clouds drift across the evening sky like thought bubbles in some divine cartoon, but he couldn’t read the message.

Old troubles, other people’s troubles, were better than this.

He went back inside, ran the cassette back a little, and started listening once more.

SEVEN

‘It is extraordinary to me … that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is ever in the way.’

‘… and the door swung slowly open.

‘Westropp had clearly feared the worst and the worst was what he found. His wife lay sprawled beside a fallen stool with a gaping hole in her ribcage. In front of her on the table was a shotgun. Properly speaking this table was a workbench, fitted with a vice. Mickledore liked to fill his own cartridges, do his own repairs. The others scarcely had time to register that a loop of wire had been passed through the trigger guard of the gun with its loose ends locked tight in the jaws of the vice before Mickledore had manhandled Westropp out of the room.

‘“Noddy, get the women out of here. Scott, take care of James. Tom, you come with me.”

‘And drawing Partridge after him, he went back into the gunroom and closed the door.

‘We have a first-hand account of what took place then from Lord Partridge’s memoirs, In A Pear Tree, published last month.

‘The dislodged key was lying on the floor. Mickledore stooped to pick it up. Partridge went to the workbench. On it lay a scrap of paper with a note scrawled on it in Pamela Westropp’s unmistakable hand.

‘It read: … it’s no good – I can’t take it – I’d rather destroy everything.

‘The following exchange then took place.

PARTRIDGE: Oh God, what a dreadful business.

MICKLEDORE: Yes. Time for maximum discretion, I think. You know what the Press can make of an accident like this.

PARTRIDGE: Accident? How can you call it an accident when …

MICKLEDORE: (taking the note from him and putting it in his pocket) Because accidents are merely tragic, while suicides are scandalous, and we must protect James and his family, and I mean all of his family, from any hint of scandal.

PARTRIDGE: But I am a Minister of the Crown …

MICKLEDORE: Exactly. And you’ve not been having such a good press lately, have you? Neither your Party nor the Palace will thank you for dumping another scandal on their doorstep. Look, I’m not suggesting anything truly illegal, just a little tidying up. You’ve seen nothing in here except a dead woman, right? Now you push off and do some phoning, you know the right people. Say Pam’s been found dead, an accident you think, but you recommend maximum discretion. I’ll take care of things in here. Go on. Get a move on. You know it’s best.

‘And off went Partridge. He claims he rang a colleague in London to ask for advice and the advice he received was to contact the police immediately, which was what he did. By the time Detective-Superintendent Tallantire arrived, the loop of wire had vanished like the note.

‘We may never know just how much pressure was put on Tallantire to tread warily. What we do know from his evidence at the trial is that he discounted the accident theory almost immediately. The gun was in perfect working order and it was physically almost impossible to contrive a situation in which Pamela could have fired it by accident as it lay across the workbench with its muzzle pressed against her chest. Then a sharp-eyed forensic man drew his attention to a slight scratch across the trigger and he himself found in the bench drawer a loop of wire with corrugations in its loose ends exactly matching the teeth of the vice.

‘Now he concentrated all his attention on Mickledore and Partridge. The others could get away with being vague about what they actually saw in their brief glimpse into the gunroom, but these two had been in there for some time.

‘Tallantire applied pressure and Partridge quickly broke. The recent scandals had not performed the miracle of curing politicians of lying, but they were alert as they’d never been before to the perils of being caught in a lie. So he showed a modest confusion, apologized for an error of judgement and told the truth. Mickledore showed no confusion, made no apology, but freely admitted his attempts to make the death look accidental and suggested that a patriot and a gentleman could have done no other.

‘Tallantire ignored the slur and asked for the note. A brief comparison with other examples of her writing convinced him it was in her hand.

‘A lesser man, faced with a body in a locked room, a suicide note, a device for firing a shotgun with its muzzle pressed against the chest, plus any amount of testimony to the dead woman’s unnaturally agitated state of mind that evening, might easily have bowed out at this stage, probably congratulating himself on his skill in so soon detecting an upper class attempt to close ranks and pervert the course of justice.

‘But not Tallantire. It is not clear at what point he became genuinely suspicious. Lord Partridge suggests that initially Tallantire’s refusal to accept the obvious was due to no more than one of those instant mutual antipathies that spring up between people. He theorizes that Mickledore saw Tallantire as a plodding boor without an original thought in his head, and that the latter regarded the former as an upper class twit who imagined that his background and breeding put him above the law.

‘If this theory is right, then Mickledore’s was the larger error. And he compounded it by trying to pressurize the police into doing their work with maximum speed and minimum inconvenience to his household and guests.

‘Only a fool tries to hurry a mule or a Yorkshireman.

‘Tallantire dug his heels in and insisted on interviewing in detail every adult in the Hall.

‘The guests, all of whom had rooms along the same corridor, gave him very little. James Westropp, Jessica Partridge and my mother had all gone quickly to sleep. The two women recollected hearing the midnight chimes, but Westropp had been too fatigued for even that noise to penetrate his slumbers. Downstairs, Partridge and Mickledore had played billiards equally undisturbed, while Rampling had been chatting to America and my father had been strolling the grounds.

‘Tallantire moved up to the second floor. Here, directly above the guests on the first floor, the children and their nannies were housed, while to the rear of the house the Gilchrists, butler and housekeeper, had their flat.

‘Cissy Kohler was unable to help. Indeed she was in a state of such agitation that she was hardly able to speak without tears starting to her eyes, a condition attributed by most to her closeness to the bereaved twins. By contrast, Miss Marsh was her usual calm self. Her nose was badly bruised and when Tallantire opened the interview by commenting upon it, she explained that something had woken her in the night, a noise, and thinking it might be one of the children, she had jumped out of bed in the dark. Unfortunately in her newly awoken state she had forgotten she wasn’t in her room at Haysgarth, the Partridge family home, and walked straight into a wardrobe. As her room was almost directly over the gunroom, the time and nature of this noise became important. All she could say was that it was a single, not a continuous or repeated sound, it hadn’t originated so far as she could ascertain from the children, and it was not long before the midnight chimes sounded.

‘The Gilchrists had heard nothing and the butler made it clear that in his opinion things had been better arranged in the old days when no policeman under the rank of Chief Constable would have been allowed in the Hall through the front door.

‘The other live-in servants, Mrs Partington, the cook, and Jenny Jones and Elsbeth Lowrie, the two maids, all of whom had their quarters on the top floor, were less superior but just as helpful. Jones, a well-starched angular girl, contrived to give the impression that she knew more than she was going to tell, but Tallantire was inclined to put this down to a kind of asexual teasing to make herself interesting.

‘All this had eaten deep into Sunday. One can imagine the damage-limitation efforts that were going on along the Westminster-Buckingham Palace axis. So far the media had been kept completely in the dark. The Sunday papers were of course full of Stephen Ward’s death and didn’t miss this chance to rehash the whole sorry story and its attendant rumours. The most sensational of these related to the identities of what had come to be known as The Man in the Mask and The Man with No Head. The former was a figure who, naked except for a leather mask, acted as a waiter at pre-orgiastic banquets and invited guests to punish him if his service didn’t come up to scratch. The latter referred to a photograph of a naked man from which the head had been deleted. Along with most of his colleagues, Thomas Partridge had been posited by the gutter press as a candidate for both roles, and he was very keen to distance himself from this new scandal as soon as possible. So when the police returned on Monday morning, the Partridge family were all packed up and ready to leave.

‘That would not be possible, Tallantire told him. Not until he had interviewed the children.

‘Partridge exploded. He was a formidable man when roused and his dressing-down of Tallantire was audible all over the Hall. But Tallantire was adamant. He, we now know, had been ordered to wrap this affair up before the Bank Holiday was over, and he wasn’t going to let it go till he was sure he’d covered every possible angle.

‘The row was at its height with the outcome still in doubt when one of Tallantire’s minions appeared and whispered something in his master’s ear that made the Superintendent leave the room with the scantiest of apologies.

‘His gut feeling that there was more here than met the eye had made Tallantire grasp at straws. Interviewing the children was one of these. Jenny Jones was another. Just in case there was more to her knowingness than the desire of drabness to be colourful, he had sent his most personable young officer to talk to her again.

‘He had struck gold. Resentment, envy, moral outrage, or just a desire to please, had made Jones reveal that her fellow maid, Elsbeth Lowrie, had had one of the guests in her room that night. Nor was this the first time such a thing had happened, and it wasn’t right that she, Jenny, had to do the brunt of the work while Elsbeth was in Mickledore’s employ simply because she was no better than she ought to be.

‘Elsbeth, a shapely blonde girl who looked like every wicked squire’s vision of a healthy young milkmaid, had seen no reason to tell the police the truth on Sunday, but she saw even less to keep on lying today. She freely admitted that from time to time she entertained some of Mickledore’s guests, but only those she fancied, and not for money, that wouldn’t be right, though she did acknowledge that her pay packet often contained what she ingenuously described as “a kind of Christmas bonus”, a phrase which won her the caption A Christmas Cracker in some tabloid photographs.

‘Her guest on Saturday night had been none other than the Right Honourable Thomas Partridge, MP. He had come to her just before midnight (that clock again) and left possibly an hour later, she couldn’t be certain.

‘Like a good politician, Partridge did not deny the undeniable, apologized sweetly for his recent ill temper, and offered full cooperation of himself and his family in return for the exercise of maximum discretion.

‘Tallantire like a good Yorkshireman said nowt, and instructed his officers to start interviewing the children.

‘We, as you may imagine, were fascinated by all these comings and goings. My sister Wendy and I had formed a close alliance with the two elder Partridge girls. Their brother, Tommy, newly entangled in the weeds of pubescence, regarded us scornfully as noisy kids, and the other children were of course not yet of an age to enjoy the delights of midnight feasts and doctors-and-nurses. But four children between seven and nine is the nucleus of an intelligence service far more efficient than MI5 and there was little that we missed, though much we couldn’t understand.

‘We four were interviewed by a male detective with a WPC by his side. She, I think, would have preferred to see us one at a time but he was the better psychologist and knew you were likely to get much more out of a relaxed and mutually disputatious group. Also the fact that there were four of us made it easier for him to shut our mothers out, though I doubt if he’d get away with that nowadays.

‘I can’t remember his name, but his face remains clear, broad and hard, with eyes like rifle sights and a mouth like Moby Dick’s. But when he spoke it was very gently. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, reached them towards me and said, “Smoke?” and I was his forever. I wanted to take one but didn’t quite dare and he said, “Later, mebbe. I always fancy a bull’s-eye myself this time in the morning.” And he took out a huge bag of bull’s-eyes and passed these round instead.

‘After that we were old friends. The girls clearly thought he was wonderful, but it was me he spoke to mainly, very man to man, always glancing at me to confirm anything they said. It was easy to tell him that we hadn’t been sleeping as we should have been, but instead had gathered in the room Wendy and I shared for a midnight feast. “And did you hear or see owt?” he asked. By this time I’d have gladly made something up to please him, but as it turned out, the truth was enough. Yes, we’d heard a noise and I’d peeped out through the door, fearing that one of the two nannies was on to us, and at first I thought that my fears were right for I saw Cecily Kohler hurrying down the corridor towards me, but she went right past, presumably to her own room, for I heard a door open and shut. Which end of the corridor was she coming from? he wanted to know. The end where the side stairway was, I told him. And how did she look? “Sort of pale and sea-sick,” I remember saying. “Oh, and she had blood on her hands.”

‘I tossed that in almost casually. To an eight-year-old, all adult behaviour is in a sense incomprehensible. What are we to make of people who have the power to do anything, yet who spend so little time eating ice-cream and going on the Big Dipper? Also nannies were, in our privileged echelon of society, the great clearer-uppers. You wet your bed, you brought up your supper, you grazed your knee, nanny would sort it out. Even I knew this, though presently nannyless because of my father’s constitutional inability to keep servants.

‘So a bloodstained nanny was not necessarily remarkable.

‘None of the girls had seen her – they’d been cowering out of sight. But I stuck to my story and when they went to Cecily Kohler’s room they found confirmation of it in traces of blood in her washbasin and on a towel, blood which was of the same group as Pamela Westropp’s.

‘But of Kohler herself and her young charges, there was no sign.

‘You should recall that this was still not a murder inquiry. The room had been locked and there was plenty of evidence to support suicide. But up till now, if there had been a crime, no one had an alibi except for Partridge and Mickledore; and now with Elsbeth’s testimony that had vanished also. One has the feeling that Tallantire, like some intuitive scientist, had made a mighty leap forward to his results and was now faced with the tedious task of filling in the necessary logical process between.

‘The Superintendent delayed talking to Mickledore till the interviews with the children were done. Then he bluntly accused Sir Ralph of acting as Partridge’s pimp, a word I had to look up later in the big dictionary. Mickledore smiled and said that in civilized circles, people were mature enough to make their own decisions and he had merely acted out of loyalty to a friend, a concept he did not expect a policeman to be familiar with.

‘Tallantire asked him how he spent this time of loyalty while his friend was copulating with the servants (the big dictionary really got some use that day!) and Mickledore replied that he had gone to the library, fetched a book and sat and read in the billiard room till Partridge reappeared.

‘It was in the library that Tallantire had established his unofficial HQ, which is why I can be so precise about this and other conversations. The deep-bayed windows with the full-length velvet curtains provided an ideal hiding-place for an inquisitive child, though at this remove I can no longer be sure what I heard then and what I have learned subsequently, but in a short space that Monday morning there were several phone calls, which produced a variety of reaction in Tallantire from anger to exultation. Presumably among them were the two technical reports which were so fiercely contested during the trial. In the opinion of one pathologist, the path of the wound was slightly downwards, not, as would be expected from such a form of suicide, horizontal or slightly upward. And experiments at the police lab suggested that after the first barrel was fired, the shock to the victim plus the gun’s recoil would make it unlikely that enough pressure could be maintained to fire the second.

‘Now at last Tallantire had cause beyond gut-feeling to treat this as a murder inquiry.

‘“I want Kohler!” he snarled at the hard-faced man. “Why the hell is it taking so long to find her?”

‘They left the library. Fearful of missing something, Wendy and I followed. Outside we could see policemen everywhere. Tallantire started to talk to a uniformed inspector while our friend with the bull’s-eyes walked out to the end of the rickety old jetty projecting into the lake. He seemed to be staring out at the little island in the middle of the water. It was covered with willows whose trailing branches formed a natural screen around its banks. Cissy Kohler had called it Treasure Island and we had enjoyed a marvellous game out there with her on Saturday while Miss Marsh had sat in a chair on the lawn and looked after the younger kids.

‘Now I walked a little way along the jetty and stared out towards the island too. I saw it first. Under the screen of willows was the shallow crescent of a canoe. I hurried forward eager to gain kudos from my new friend, but he must have spotted it himself.

‘He put his hands to his mouth to form a megaphone and in the loudest voice I ever heard issue from human lips he bellowed, “MISS KOHLER!”

‘At that cry every bird within half a mile seemed to rise squawking into the air. Then just as quickly everything went still. All the human figures round the margin of the lake froze. Even the very wind in the trees died away. And slowly, as if summoned by the call rather than propelled by human hand, the prow of the canoe swung out from under the willows. We could see quite clearly the outline of the woman though the children were not visible.

‘Then the hard-faced man shouted again.

‘“Come in! Your time is up!”

‘I began to laugh because that was what the man called at the boating pond in the park near where we lived. But what happened next wasn’t funny, though no two witnesses seemed to see the same thing. Some said Cissy Kohler tried to swing back under the willows. Others said she drove the paddle into the water in an effort at flight to the further bank. Still others claimed that she deliberately flipped the canoe over as if opting for death by water rather than the risk of it by rope. To my young eyes she just seemed to get entangled in the trailing branches, then capsized.

‘The man at the end of the jetty let out a very rude word my mother would not let me say, kicked off his shoes, hurled himself into the water, and headed out to the island at a tremendous crawl. Out by the canoe we could see only one head, Kohler’s. Then it vanished as she dived. Up she came with something in her arms. She tried to right the canoe with one hand but couldn’t manage it, and when the policeman reached her, he found her clinging to the hull with what turned out to be the child, Philip, in her arms. Now the policeman dived and dived, while his colleagues ran to the boathouse and launched the other canoe and an old duck punt. By the time they got to the island, he’d brought up the little girl, Emily. But it was too late.

‘They were all rushed to the nearest hospital some fifteen miles away. There it was confirmed. The little boy would be all right. But Emily was dead.

‘At the trial the defence lawyer tried to suggest that Superintendent Tallantire acted with brutal insensitivity in forcing Cissy Kohler to leave hospital and return to Mickledore Hall to be interrogated, but there were plenty of witnesses to prove that the young American refused to let herself be hospitalized, and this left only a choice of the Hall or a police interview room. And as in the public’s eyes the question was simply whether Cissy Kohler had killed the child by selfish carelessness or incidentally in an attempt at self-destruction, there was little sympathy to be whipped up for her.

‘She was driven back to Mickledore Hall early that Bank Holiday afternoon, allowed time to change from the hospital robe into clothes of her own, then Tallantire, despite some protests from my mother, went to start the interrogation.

‘From start to finish, it took the best part of five hours. Soon that room became the atmospheric centre of the house. A woman police officer was summoned, but for long periods she stood on duty at the door while Tallantire remained alone with the woman. Food was sent in, but came out untouched. From time to time the Superintendent emerged, but Kohler never. The first time he appeared he looked exultant, as if he were making rapid progress, but thereafter his mood changed. Sometimes his voice would be heard raised in anger and sometimes a woman’s sobbing was clearly audible through the closed door. At no time did Kohler have a solicitor present, though the woman officer confirmed that she was given the opportunity. Tallantire spent most of his time out of the room making or taking telephone calls. Alas, despite my best endeavours, I couldn’t get in a position to overhear any of these, but after his final conversation, about five o’clock, he looked as if a great load had been lifted from his mind. He went back into the bedroom and finally emerged about fifty minutes later looking weary but triumphant, like a man who has brought his argosy through heavy seas into a safe haven.

‘His relief made him for once ignore my lurking presence.

‘“That’s it,” he said to the hard-faced man. “She’s coughed. We’re home and dry.”

‘We can only guess at what stage all the detailed information which provided Mickledore’s motive came into Tallantire’s possession, but I suspect much of it must have been confirmed during that last phone call. The details, of course, provided the Press with enough columns to refurbish the Parthenon, but briefly the facts were these.

‘Pamela Westropp and Cecily Kohler, employer and employee, were equal in one respect. They both loved Mickledore with an obsessive passion, the former to the point where she would bear no rival near the throne, let alone on it, the latter to the point where she would do anything for him.

‘Mickledore in his man-about-town mode had run up huge gambling debts against the security of the estate. In his country squire mode, he had wooed and won the daughter of the Laird of Malstrath, a first-generation title purchased along with several thousand acres of grouse moor by George MacFee, a second-generation whisky millionaire. Mick’s motive was simple. He anticipated that her portion would pay off his debts and save the estate. But there was a problem. Despite George MacFee’s alcoholic background and social aspirations, he was a devout member of one of the stricter Scottish sects whose reaction to news of his prospective son-in-law’s sexual and economic excesses was as predeterminable as if it had been written in the Good Book.

‘The engagement was to be made public the following weekend at Malstrath Keep, the castle which went with the lairdship. Pamela had to be told. Presumably Mickledore hoped that he could persuade her that this marriage of convenience need not interfere with their affair. But he knew enough about women in general and Pam in particular to recognize that Pam had hopes that went deeper than this. True, the fact that the Westropps were Roman Catholic made divorce difficult, but she was working on it. So the ever practical Mickledore prepared a contingency plan.

‘Perhaps the pleasant atmosphere of that first day gave him hope that all might yet be well. At some point, probably just before they all went off to bed, he got Pam alone and broke the news.

‘I doubt if her immediate reaction was encouraging. But all hope vanished the next day when he got a note from her. We only know for certain the few words that survived, but Superintendent Tallantire’s reconstruction must surely be pretty close.

Mick, I’ve thought about it all night and it’s no good – I can’t take it – I’d rather destroy everything – if you go ahead with this I’ll make sure George MacFee knows all about us – and about your debts – believe me – I’ll do it – let’s talk again I beg you –

‘Her behaviour during the day got more and more eccentric. Mickledore knew he had no time to lose. And he also saw that with a little bit of editing, Pam had put a very useful suicide note into his hand.

‘But now, in the best Golden Age tradition, he made his one mistake. It is hard to understand why a man desperate to rid himself of one troublesome woman should do so by putting himself at the mercy of another. Perhaps he let himself be swayed by his certainty, confirmed by Cissy’s own admission, that she resented his affair with Pam far more than she did the prospect of his loveless marriage to the Scottish heiress.

‘Whatever the reason, he invoked her help, not foreseeing that the bloody reality of the deed, plus the drowning of Emily Westropp, would so demoralize her as to make her putty in the hands of a ruthless and determined man like Walter Tallantire.

‘“What now, sir?” said the hard-faced man. “Back to the station with both on ’em?”

‘But Tallantire smiled and said, “Not yet. He likes to play at being a real throwback, so let’s do things properly in the old style. Tell Sir Ralph and his guests that I’d like to see them all in the library in half an hour.”

‘So there it is. Because of Tallantire’s active dislike of Mickledore plus a mordant sense of irony, the last of the Golden Age murders was to end in proper Golden Age style, with the suspects assembled in the library for the final dénouement.

‘In fact there was no lengthy unknotting. Oh yes, I was there too. With such advance notice it was easy for me to collect Wendy and get ourselves well hidden in the folds of those musty-smelling velvet curtains across the deep bay.

‘Tallantire was straight to the point, speaking with the ponderous certainty of a man who has destroyed doubt.

‘“I regret to tell you that Mrs Westropp’s death was neither accident nor self-slaughter. I believe she was murdered.”

‘I heard the gasps. I could feel the shock. Then someone, I believe it was Partridge, said, “But the room was locked from the inside!”

‘“I don’t think so. True, a key was left on the inside, but not inserted so far that it interfered with the turning of a key on the outside.”

‘“But it wouldn’t turn,” I heard my father say. “I tried the thing myself. The keyhole was blocked till we shook the inside key loose.”

‘“I don’t think so,” repeated Tallantire. “I’ve tried to turn a key on the outside with the inner key fully inserted, and you’re right, sir, it won’t turn. On the other hand, I bounced myself as hard as I could against that door for a quarter of an hour and I never managed to shake the inside key loose. Conclusion? The inside key was never fully inserted.”

‘“But dammit, how do you explain that we couldn’t turn the key?” demanded my father.

‘“Simple,” said Tallantire. “It must have been the wrong key. One near enough the original to deceive the casual glance, but with a little bit filed off a couple of teeth perhaps, that’s all it would take.”

‘“But when Westropp tried it –”

‘“He was given the right key,” said Tallantire.

‘And now the full implication of what he was saying must have dawned. There was a moment of complete silence.

‘Then Tallantire said, “Perhaps I should tell you that this has gone beyond speculation. We have a full and detailed confession from one of the perpetrators of this terrible crime …”

‘He paused for breath or effect, then went on, “Miss Cecily Kohler. She has cooperated fully and we are now taking her into town for further questioning. Sir Ralph, I must ask you to accompany us as I believe you also may be able to help us in our inquiries.”

‘If it was Tallantire’s intention to provoke a guilty reaction in the best tradition, he must have been overwhelmed by his own success.

‘Mickledore said, “What? You say that Cissy …? But she … oh Christ, this is crazy!”

‘And then he was running.

‘There was so much noise and confusion that I risked a peep. Mickledore was through the library door, Tallantire was shouting, “Stop him!” The bull’s-eye policeman went in pursuit, there was the noise of receding footsteps, then some other kind of noise upstairs. Then silence.

‘Tallantire said, “Ladies, gentlemen, I assume you will be leaving the house shortly. Please make sure that you leave your contact address with one of my officers before you do so, as there may be other questions I need to put to you. Thank you for your cooperation. Good day.”

‘And so he left. Wendy and I were by this time both very excited and very frightened. Though not fully understanding everything, we knew that this had been one of those strange adult occasions at which our presence was strictly forbidden, so we did not dare move yet. There was utter silence in the library but it was the silence of shock, not the silence of emptiness. Through the window we could see three police cars parked before the house. At the rear window of the third car I spotted a pale, pale face which I thought I recognized as Miss Kohler’s. Then after a while Mickledore came out of the main door between two policemen who led him to the second car. He half-turned before he got in, as if to take a last look at the Hall. Then he was pushed into the car. Finally Tallantire appeared and got in the front passenger seat of the leading vehicle.

‘Now the grim procession set off. There was no obstacle they could have anticipated for several miles but, perhaps as a last gesture of triumph over a way of life and a set of people I’m sure he despised, Superintendent Tallantire switched on the flashing lights and warning bells. I watched them glide away down the long drive, lost sight but not sound of them as they dropped down to the tree-lined river, glimpsed the lights once more as they climbed the winding road up the far hillside. Then they passed over the crest and soon the bellnotes were buried deep in the next valley glades and it was as quiet outside the Hall as within.

‘Thus ended my direct involvement with the Mickledore Hall murder case. As I said at the beginning, it was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes; the best because, though perhaps Cissy Kohler wanted her rival out of the way, it was not this that made her join the murder plot but a deep, altruistic and ultimately destructive love for a worthless man; and the worst, because Mickledore’s only motive was cold, calculating, selfish greed. Perhaps you don’t think best is a superlative to apply to murder, whatever the motive. But remember this. Cissy Kohler was young and she was foolish and though she helped take a life, in a very real way she has given her own life in exchange. I only knew her briefly as a nanny before she turned into a murderess, but it was long enough to recognize that she loved us too, the children, and we all thought she was marvellous. That’s what I remember now – her love. Children need it in abundance, and where it is given abundantly, we never forget, and should always be ready to forgive.

‘Sir Ralph Mickledore was hanged on January the fourteenth, nineteen sixty-four. The following year the death penalty for murder was completely abolished, but even a few more months, with a Labour Government back in power, would probably have saved him. Cecily Kohler’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. In nineteen seventy-six, within sight of being released on parole, she killed a prison wardress with whom it was alleged she had been having a lesbian relationship. Once again found guilty of murder, she is still in prison, having served the longest continuous period of imprisonment recorded for a woman in the annals of British legal history.

‘So ends this series, The Golden Age of Murder. Raymond Chandler said that Hammett took murder and gave it back to the people it really belonged to. But he deliberately missed the point that the class-ridden world of the British Golden Age is based on a reality at least as strong as his mean streets. The Golden Age crime novel to me makes the snobbery of British society laughable, while the hard-boiled thriller makes the violence of American society enjoyable. In which case, who then can claim the moral high ground?

‘But philosophical debate has not been my aim in these programmes. What I have wanted to show is that the society which produced the kind of complex, artificial, snobbish detective fiction known as Golden Age produced real life murders to match, carefully planned and cunningly executed by men and women who knew that by taking the lives of others, they were putting their own at risk.

‘Do I sound almost nostalgic? If so, for what? For nineteen sixty-three? Perhaps. It is an occupational hazard of amateur historians to see watersheds everywhere, but it seems to me not unfitting that a year which saw the death of the last romantic US president and the destruction of a British government for trying to evade its own moral responsibilities, should also have housed the Mickledore Hall murder case.

‘After this, to catch the public imagination crime had to be extremely bestial or involve a great deal of money. As events later the same year showed, it was soon to be possible to steal two million pounds and become a folk hero even if you bludgeoned someone to death in the process. Up to nineteen sixty-three it was still possible for thinking men to believe in progress. A just war had been fought and won, and this time the result would be, if not a land fit for heroes, at least a society fit for humans. We who grew up in the ’sixties and ’seventies and came to our maturity in the dreadful ’eighties have seen the destruction of that dream without ever having had the joy of dreaming it.

‘So, is it surprising that I should be nostalgic for an age that still had hope? And is it reprehensible if my nostalgia should even embrace what was surely the last great murder mystery of the Golden Age?’

EIGHT

‘The things you see here are things to be seen, and not spoken of.’

When the tape finished Pascoe went out into the garden and looked at the emergent stars. He’d been wrong about other people’s troubles. They weren’t a diversion, merely an addition.

How long the phone rang before it pierced his dullness he didn’t know. He rushed back inside and snatched it up.

‘You took your time. Not in bed already, are you?’ said Dalziel.

‘No. I’ve been listening to that tape.’

‘Oh aye? What do you think?’

‘You never told me you were personally involved.’

‘What makes you say that? Stamper never mentioned my name.’

‘You got described. Once seen, never forgotten.’

‘Ha-ha. I wish you had been in bed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Then you’d have had to get up. I want you down here straight away.’

‘Why?’ said Pascoe. ‘I’m not a dog, comes when you whistle … Shit!’

The phone was dead. In any case his aggression was unconvincing. What was the alternative? A couple more hours of his own company till he felt tired enough to risk the waking horrors of sleep? He went out almost cheerfully.

As he got out of his car in the HQ car park, he was surprised to see that Dalziel’s space was empty and even more surprised when the Fat Man detached himself from the shadow of a parked van. There was something almost furtive about the movement and furtiveness sat uneasily on that bulk. He beckoned Pascoe towards the entrance.

‘’Evening, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘Any particular reason why we’re going on like a couple of burglars rather than the city’s finest?’

‘Funny you should say that,’ said Dalziel.

He led the way in, pausing as if to check there was no one about before starting up the stairs. On the first landing he once more checked that the corridor was empty before moving swiftly along it and stopping before the door upon which Hiller’s mahogany name plaque hung. Pascoe’s curiosity turned to concern as Dalziel inserted a key.

‘Hang on a sec,’ he said.

‘Belt up and get yourself in quick,’ hissed Dalziel.

He was pushed into the room and the door closed quietly behind him. It was pitch dark. He took a tentative step forward and caught his shin against a chair.

‘Stand still,’ ordered Dalziel, and next moment a small desk lamp came on, its light reflected in three computer screens with the greening pallor of a three-day corpse.

Pascoe said with quiet vehemence. ‘Now hold on, sir, I said I’d keep a friendly eye on Mr Hiller, but that stops well short of breaking and entering.’

‘Who’s broke owt?’ demanded Dalziel. ‘And what’s the world coming to if the head of CID can’t enter any room he likes in his own station?’

‘Fair enough. But I don’t see why a man who can enter anything he likes should need any assistance from an ordinary mortal like me.’

‘Don’t get cheeky, lad,’ said Dalziel sternly. ‘And give me some credit. If it were just desk drawers or a filing cabinet I wanted into, you could be lying all alone in your pit, feeling sorry for yourself. No, it’s them bloody things I need help with.’

He banged his fist in frustration on the keyboard of one of the computers. Pascoe winced.

‘You know all about these things, don’t you? You went on that course and you’re always shooting your mouth off about us not using them enough. Right, here’s your chance to give me a practical demo of how useful they’d be.’

‘At the right time in the right place, I’ll be glad to,’ said Pascoe. ‘At this time the right place for me is bed. Good night, sir.’

He turned towards the door. And froze.

He could hear footsteps in the corridor. They reached the door. And passed on.

Dalziel, as if he’d heard nothing, said, ‘All right, lad, I’ll not beg. You bugger off home and I’ll see what I can do meself. Man who can play the bagpipes shouldn’t have much trouble with one of these jobs.’

He flexed his huge fingers over a keyboard, like a plumber about to start an eye operation with a wrench. Pascoe groaned, knowing, and knowing that Dalziel knew too, that any attempt at interference by a non-initiate would be unconcealable.

‘Move over,’ he said.

Hope that Hiller might have made access difficult was soon dashed. The man obviously believed that a good lock and his name on a door were security enough. The poor sod had been away from Dalziel too long.

‘What do you want to know?’ asked Pascoe.

‘Everything yon bugger knows.’

Pascoe sighed and said, ‘This isn’t an old-fashioned interrogation. I can’t just thump it and ask it to cough up the lot. And even if I could, God knows how long it’d take to spew it all out, and you’ve only got me for five minutes, and that’s not negotiable.’

‘All right,’ said Dalziel. ‘Main thing I’d like to know is where Kohler’s shacked up now.’

The implications of this were too frightening for discussion. Pascoe hit the keys, half hoping it might prove impossible to access Hiller’s program, but addresses were clearly not classified as restricted information.

‘There you are,’ he said tearing off the print-out. ‘Now let’s go.’

‘You said five minutes,’ objected Dalziel. ‘Let’s have every bugger’s address, all them as were at Mickledore Hall that weekend.’

‘Why should they be in here?’

‘I know Adolf.’

He was right. The printer spewed out address after address, balking only at James Westropp.

‘This is grand,’ said Dalziel, watching the printouts roll off. ‘Fit one of these in the station bog and think of the saving. Now what about …?’

‘What about nothing. This is the end.’

Pascoe set about tidying up. There was a chance this illicit access might go unnoticed and he wanted to maximize it.

‘Stick that stuff under your jacket, for God’s sake!’ he told Dalziel, who was clearly prepared to wander round the station trailing clouds of print-out paper.

Their roles were now reversed. It was Pascoe, made furtive by fear, who checked the corridor was empty.

‘Right, let’s go,’ he said.

Dalziel seemed to take forever locking the door and Pascoe was in an agony of impatience lest they should be discovered at this final moment.

‘Right,’ said the Fat Man finally. ‘Let’s get out of here before you faint. You’re as nervous as a curate on his first choirboy.’

Pascoe didn’t reply. He was looking aghast at the mahogany plaque. Through the first ‘l’ of Hiller’s name ran a cross-bar turning it to Hitler.

‘I might have known!’ he cried. ‘It was you!’

He licked his finger and rubbed at the bar but the ink was indelible.

Dalziel drew him gently away, saying, ‘Can’t have Adolf thinking we’d lost our sense of humour. You eaten tonight? You’ve got to look after yourself even though the cook’s away. Tell you what. I’ll treat you to a fish supper and we can eat it at my place while we talk about what to do next. We’ll go in your car. I didn’t bring mine. Less evidence I’ve been here tonight, the better.’

‘Whereas I don’t count?’

‘Nay, lad. Your great advantage is, you’re beneath suspicion!’

They stopped at a chippie a few streets from Dalziel’s house. He was obviously well known here, raising two fingers as he went through the door and being served immediately over the head of a thickset youth who said, more in puzzlement than complaint, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Doctor,’ said Dalziel. ‘It’s an emergency. I’ve got a fish diabetic in the car.’

When they got to Dalziel’s house they found it had been burgled.

It was the usual job. Kitchen window smashed, drawers ransacked.

‘Portable radio, brass carriage clock, gold cufflinks, ten quid in loose change,’ said Dalziel after a quick scout round. ‘Draw that curtain to keep out the draught and let’s get stuck into our haddock afore it gets cold.’

He deposited a ketchup bottle and two cans of beer on the kitchen table, sat down and began to unwrap his fish and chips.

‘Aren’t you going to …?’

‘What? Ring the station and drag half the squad round here to scatter dust over me haddock and chips? You know the score, lad. Five per cent clear-up on your normal opportunist break-ins, so what’s the odds on this?’

Pascoe slowly unwrapped the newspaper round his fish. It was the local Evening Post and he found himself looking at the weekly Crime Round-up column where the trivia of brawls and burglaries enjoyed a mayfly’s exposure. Here was an explanation of Dalziel’s cynicism. But not of its phrasing.

He chewed a chip and said, ‘Why should the odds be any worse on clearing up this job?’

‘’Cos it weren’t opportunist and it weren’t a break-in,’ said Dalziel promptly. ‘Probably came in through the front door, smashed that window as an afterthought on the way out.’

Pascoe went to the window and examined it, went through into the entrance hall and looked at the front door.

‘What makes you say that?’ he asked, returning to his seat in the kitchen. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Me neither. You’ve got to give credit where it’s due. Are you not going to eat that haddock?’

‘If it wasn’t just a straight break-in, what were they after?’ insisted Pascoe.

Dalziel, who had rapidly devoured his own fish, broke a bit off Pascoe’s and put it in his mouth.

‘Wally Tallantire’s papers, I’d guess,’ he said chewily.

‘What? But Mrs Tallantire said there weren’t any. Didn’t she?’

‘Adolf’s not the trusting type,’ said Dalziel sadly.

‘But I don’t believe he’s the burgling type either.’

‘No, he’d not do owt as chancy as that. But he’d mebbe pass on his thoughts to them as would.’

‘You mean this security connection you’ve dreamt up?’ Pascoe laughed incredulously. ‘You’re telling me they’d set up a break-in just to have a look for some non-existent papers?’

‘Who said they were non-existent?’

‘You mean you have got them? This gets worse. Just what the hell are you playing at?’

‘Playing at? Don’t know what you mean,’ said Dalziel, helping himself to more fish.

‘Concealing evidence. Stealing computer files. For Christ’s sake, what are you dragging me into?’

‘You make everything sound so sodding sinister! All I’m trying to do is protect a mate’s reputation. You’d do the same, wouldn’t you?’

‘If it was worth protecting, maybe,’ said Pascoe savagely.

‘Oh aye? How about if I said your Ellie’s a mixed-up cow who’s finally found an excuse to run off to her mam? Whoops, watch it, lad. You wouldn’t hit a man who’s left you some haddock, would you?’

Pascoe found he was standing with his fists balled. He tried to unclench them, found he couldn’t.

‘What was that in aid of?’ he said softly.

‘Just showing that sticking up for a mate’s got nowt to do with truth. Even if Wally turned out as guilty as hell, I’ll still smack any bugger that says so.’

Pascoe’s hands relaxed.

‘All right, Socrates,’ he said. ‘But it’s not as simple as that.’

‘Never is, not in life, but law’s different. “Guilty or not guilty?” – “Please, m’lud, it’s not as simple as that.” Christ, the judge would hit the ceiling, then cling on up there so he could shit on you from a great height! No, our Adolf won’t be perhapsing around with this one, not when there’s no bugger to answer back.’

‘There’s you.’

‘Aye, there is, isn’t there? Story of my life, answering back.’

‘Perhaps you’d better start answering me,’ said Pascoe, resuming his seat.

‘Sure you want to know? Ignorance might be your best defence.’

‘It never has been with you,’ said Pascoe.

‘True. You’re much better off knowing and lying,’ said Dalziel. ‘So ask away.’

Pascoe chewed on a cold chip. Dalziel had lied about leaving him some haddock. And what else?

He said, ‘It’s back to basics. That tape’s filled me in on the authorized version, but I need to be brought up to date on the revised version too. I missed the telly programme and didn’t pay much heed to the newspaper reports. So what happened to make the powers-that-be admit an error?’

‘Jay Waggs happened for starters. He’s a bit of a chancer by the sound of it. Media man, try his hand at anything, but always on the lookout for the shortcut to the big time. He claims to be a distant relative of Kohler’s and says he was brought up on these stories of Cousin Cissy who disgraced the family and was locked up in the Tower of London. He researched the case, came over here, got permission to visit her, and, according to him, became convinced there’d been a miscarriage of justice. He got some backing from Ebor television because of the Yorkshire connection and made a programme about the case. I’ve got it on video.’

Dalziel rose and put a cassette into his video machine.

‘Dead giveaway, that,’ he said as he pressed the start button. ‘First thing any self-respecting burglar nicks nowadays is your VTR. Another beer?’

‘Why not?’ said Pascoe resignedly.

He caught the can Dalziel tossed him and pulled the ring opener as the screen bloomed into colour.

It was a slick, well made programme. Its pluses were Mickledore Hall, now a National Trust property with its decoration and furnishing virtually unchanged from ’63, and Waggs himself, who came across with a uniquely American combination of brashness, sincerity and charm. Its big minus was the almost total absence of direct contribution from those present during the fatal weekend. To compensate, Lord Partridge’s memoirs were extensively quoted; there was a distant glimpse of Elsbeth Lowrie, now a buxom farmer’s wife, feeding hens; and in a rather grisly interview, Percy Pollock, the public hangman, now a frail white-haired septuagenarian, testified that Ralph Mickledore had gone to the scaffold protesting his innocence.

‘He would, wouldn’t he? interposed Dalziel.

‘Shh,’ said Pascoe, for at last, after assertion and argument, it looked as if they were getting down to evidence.

This took the form of an interview with the one Mickledore Hall guest willing or able to appear. It was Mavis Marsh, the Partridges’ nanny. Far from the stiff and starchy figure of William Stamper’s recollection, the woman who appeared on the screen was elegantly dressed and attractive, relaxing very much at her ease in a luxurious armchair in a room which looked like an illustration from an interior decorator’s brochure.

In voice-over Jay Waggs said, ‘I met Mavis Marsh in her Harrogate apartment and asked her to tell me what she recalled of that night.’

Miss Marsh spoke in a light clear voice with a genteel Morningside accent.

‘I was on the second floor, and my bedroom was directly above the gunroom. I went to bed early and fell asleep almost at once. I don’t know exactly how long I’d been asleep when something woke me up –’

‘What was it?’ interrupted Waggs.

‘I don’t know. A sort of crash –’

‘Could it have been a gunshot?’

‘Possibly, though of course I didn’t think of that at the time.’

‘Was any attempt made later to reproduce the sound? I mean, for instance, did the police experiment by firing a shot in the gunroom to test your reaction?’

‘No. There was some talk of it, I recollect, but it never came to anything.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I suppose they’d got Cecily Kohler’s confession by then, so thought it would be a waste of time.’

‘OK. So you heard a noise. What then?’

‘My first thought was naturally of the children, and I jumped out of bed very quickly. I suppose I forgot where I was and headed for where the door would have been in my room at home, I mean at Haysgarth, the Partridge family seat. The result was, I walked into a wardrobe and banged my nose.’

‘What did you do then?’

She looked amused and said, ‘I did what any normal person would have done. I yelled out and sat down on the bed. My nose felt as if it were broken, and it was certainly bleeding, I stanched it with some tissues from my bedside table, then I went to the door.’

‘You found it all right this time?’

‘I rarely repeat a mistake,’ she said with a sudden acidity that gave a glimpse of the stern nanny beneath the sophisticated surface. ‘And besides, I’d switched on the light by now. I went into the corridor and I saw Miss Kohler.’

‘Cissy? What was she doing?’

‘She was standing outside her room.’

‘As if she’d just come out, you mean? Like maybe she’d been disturbed by the same noise as you?’

‘Possibly. In fact, very probably. But when she saw me she came straight to me. I must have looked a ghastly sight. My nosebleeds always produce a disproportionate amount of blood. She made me go back to my room and lie on the bed while she cleaned me up. She was very efficient, I recollect, which is what I would expect from a trained nanny. She assured me no bones were broken and told me to lie on my back with a cold compress on my nose till the bleeding had completely stopped. Then she left me to rest.’

‘So when William Stamper saw her in the corridor with blood on her hands, it was probably your blood?’

‘It would seem very likely, yes.’

‘Did you tell this to Superintendent Tallantire?’

‘I can’t honestly remember but I would assume so.’

‘It doesn’t appear in your signed statement.’

‘I naturally left it to the police to decide what was and what was not relevant.’

‘But later, didn’t you feel you ought to speak out …?’

Miss Marsh fixed Waggs with a gaze that would have stopped apples falling.

‘Speak out about what, pray? A murder had been committed. Miss Kohler had confessed to being Sir Ralph’s accomplice in its commission. We were all in a state of considerable shock. I had told the police all that I knew.’

‘But when it became apparent at the trial that the prosecution were making such a lot of Miss Kohler’s appearance in the corridor with blood on her hands, blood of the same group as Pamela Westropp, Group B, which is of course your group too, didn’t you then feel some unease?’

‘Had I known of this, I might have done, though the fact of her confession must still have told heavily against her. But at the time of the trial I was in Antigua. Lord Partridge, Mr Partridge as he was then, took his family out there to his cousin’s estate to avoid media harassment almost immediately after leaving Mickledore Hall. He had to return because of his parliamentary duties, of course, but his wife and I and the younger children remained abroad till January.’

‘Didn’t you follow the trial on the radio or in the newspapers?’

‘No, we did not. What had happened at Mickledore Hall was not a topic Lady Partridge cared to discuss. Total abstention seemed the best course.’

‘And the defence made no attempt to talk with you?’

‘There was a letter from some lawyers. I took advice from my employers and replied that I was unable to add anything to my statement.’

‘But now you know all the facts of the trial, all the details of evidence, how do you feel about things, Miss Marsh?’

The camera closed in on the nanny till her face filled the screen. Her complexion stood up very well to the close scrutiny and the eyes that focused unblinkingly on the lens were clear and hard as diamonds.

‘If the verdict depended at all on the evidence of the blood, then clearly it was in error and ought to be set aside.’

‘And the confession?’

She made an impatient gesture.

‘She was young, possibly immature. Anyone who has had to deal with children professionally will know that their propensity for denying obvious truths is matched only by their readiness to admit to obvious falsehoods. They do it out of misunderstanding sometimes, and sometimes they do it out of a desire to please. But most often they do it out of simple irrational fear.’

‘But she didn’t retract.’

‘Of course not. Why, having chosen what clearly seemed to her the lesser of two terrors, should she now once more put herself in the way of the greater? If you can’t see that, young man, then clearly you yourself are obtuse enough to make a policeman!’

‘My God,’ breathed Dalziel. ‘I’d love for her to have the changing of my nappies.’

The programme finished a few moments later with a passionate plea from Waggs for the case to be re-examined and justice to be done at last. Dalziel looked at Pascoe and said, ‘Well?’

‘Why didn’t you do a gun test?’

‘We did. But we did it while the stable clock was chiming. You couldn’t hear a bloody thing outside the room.’

‘But the noise that awoke Miss Marsh …?’

‘Probably was the kids. Or she dreamt it. Wally weren’t worried about it.’

‘Why?’ asked Pascoe, then answered his own question. ‘Because it was too early. Because Mickledore was still downstairs with Stamper getting ready for his stroll and Partridge for his gallop. Because if he had planned the murder, he would know the ideal time to commit it was while the stable clock was chiming. So he wasn’t interested in Marsh’s accident because its timing was wrong. Understandable, I suppose. But how the hell could he justify ignoring the explanation of Kohler and the blood?’

‘She didn’t tell him,’ said Dalziel. ‘Don’t ask me why, but she never mentioned Kohler.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Because I’m sure Wally would’ve done something about it!’ snarled Dalziel.

‘All right. But if he decided that Mickledore used the clock as cover for the gunshots, then how do you tie in Kohler wandering around upstairs with bloodstained hands before midnight?’

‘Who said it was before midnight? There were four kids larking about upstairs. Stamper said it was before the chimes struck that he saw Kohler, true. But one of the girls said the chimes were actually striking and the other two said they’d struck already. Can’t trust kids’ evidence.’

‘Not unless it suits you,’ said Pascoe.

‘Ha-ha. Forget the kids. What do you reckon to what you’ve seen as reason for letting Kohler loose?’

‘Not a lot,’ admitted Pascoe. ‘With the Appeal Court, the longer it takes, the harder it gets. I reckon the Hartlepool monkey would be hard put to get a pardon now.’

‘So?’

‘So there’s probably more than we’ve heard about. Maybe something the powers-that-be prefer to keep out of the public gaze.’

‘And what kind of thing might that be?’

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