A Killing kindness

They rose. Gladmann took the cassette from the player and slipped it into his pocket.

'Aren't you going to work here?' said Pascoe, taken aback.

‘My dear chap, you must be joking!' said Gladmann. 'Not that it isn't nice. You can hardly see the blood on the walls, can you, Drew, my son? But your equipment's hardly space-age, is it? No, the language lab at the college is the place. And if it seems worthwhile we can even drive across to the university and run it through their sonograph.'

'Well, all right,' said Pascoe. There were, after all, several copies of the tape.

Urquhart said, 'Inspector, I'd like to be sure what you intend. How do you propose to use whatever we tell you?'

'Sceptically, I dare say,' replied Pascoe.

Gladmann hooted, but Urquhart did not smile behind his tangle.

'So long as it's clear I'm not interested in helping the polis find a scapegoat,' he continued.

Pascoe sighed. His own background made him a lot more sympathetic with academic liberalism than most of his colleagues, but he could understand the feeling behind Dalziel's complaint on another occasion, 'If these are the clever buggers, no wonder crime pays!'

'Believe me,' he said, 'a scapegoat's no good. The man we're after is an unbalanced killer. He's not going to stop murdering women just because someone else has been arrested.'

Urquhart did not look wholly convinced but he left without further comment. Gladmann followed, saying, 'My love to the delectable Ellie. We'll be in touch.'

Pascoe closed the door after them and turned his interrogative gaze on Pottle not with a great deal of hope.

The psychiatrist's opening comment confirmed his pessimism.

'Not a great deal to go on yet,' he said.

'Four murders!' expostulated Pascoe. 'Not a bad start, surely?'

'Come now,' said Pottle, amused. 'What's your best chance of catching this fellow?'

Pascoe considered.

'Another murder,' he admitted unwillingly. 'Or at least an attempt. Get him in the act.'

'Quite so. Similarly, though in rather a different way, the more I have, the better results I can hope for. Now, to start with, I am making two assumptions which may turn out to be false. One is that these four deaths have been caused by the same man. The other is that basically in each case the motive has been the same, or at the least an aspect of a single consistent motive. As I say, these assumptions may be false. Indeed, there is much in the evidence as you have laid it before me which suggests that they are false.'

'Such as?' interposed Pascoe.

'The eccentricities of pattern,' replied Pottle. 'They are all young unmarried women – except for Mrs Dinwoodie who is a middle-aged widow. They are found neatly laid out with arms crossed on the chest – except Brenda Sorby who has been dumped in the canal. The murders all take place in circumstances made remote by time of day or location, except for Pauline Stanhope's which occurs in the middle of the day in the middle of a fairground. But it's only by making these two assumptions that I can even begin to pretend I have something to work at. That's where another murder would come in so useful. Better still, two. Then we would begin to have enough trees to make a wood!'

Only the suspicion that this ghoulishness was being used to provoke him in some way kept Pascoe from voicing another protest.

'You'll be the second or third person to know, Doctor,' he said. 'Carry on.'

'Right you are. I summarize, of course. What it would seem to me we have here is an older rather than a younger man, that is, heading away from thirty-five rather than towards it. He is of course unbalanced, but not in the usual pattern of the psychopathic woman-killer, whose murderous impulses tend, as it happens, to become more controllable as he gets older. You must catch your psychopath young. Inspector, if you are to catch him at all. No, this man's motivation does not seem to be based so much on hate as on, I can find no better term, compassion.'

'Compassion? You mean, he kills women because he's sorry for them?' asked Pascoe with interest.

'In a way, yes. There's good case-law here. The impulse to euthanasia is a strong one in all advanced civilizations.'

'But you can't be saying these murders are just a form of euthanasia?'

'Only in the same way that you could say Jack the Ripper's killings were a form of moral protest. In a way, it's strange that there aren't more Choker-type killings than Ripper-type. Euthanasia is, after all, half accepted and by definition involves killing, while punishment for sexual immorality eventually disappears from advanced societies and only ever involved death in primitive ones.'

'The Church used to roast you for buggery,' objected Pascoe.

'Precisely,' said Pottle drily. 'Look, I must go, Inspector. I have work to do. You'll have a written report eventually!'

'Hang on just a minute. The phone messages, the tapes. What about them?'

'Of the taped messages, either (A) or (D) would fit my man, with my money being on the former. The voice seems to me to have that genuinely regretful intonation which fits my ideas. (B) and (C) sound far too delighted with it all. But it's the first of the messages received that really needs looking at.'

'You mean I say, we will have no more marriages?'

'That's it. You know how it goes on? Those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are.'

'Yes, I know. So far we've had one widow, three spinsters. We're still waiting for Mrs Right to come along.'

Pascoe had a nice line in ghoulishness himself.

'Perhaps that's the way to look at it, Inspector. Odd thing, marriage and engagements. Often kept very secret. I assume you've checked very carefully indeed to see if Pauline Stanhope was engaged? The other two girls were, and very recently too.'

'You think that…'

'No, I offer no conclusions, Inspector. But a woman widowed can still be regarded from a certain point of view as a married woman. After all, she retains the title. I should be very interested, if I were you, to know why poor Mrs Dinwoodie should of all the married ladies in the world be the one singled out (if you'll excuse the expression) to be killed. Now I must go.'

After he had left, Pascoe sat for a while and wondered whether it were really possible for a man to go around killing people out of compassion. One, yes. That he could understand. Someone near and dear who was suffering greatly. But strangers? And compassion for what? He should have asked that.

But he couldn't sit here all day, thinking. It was leg work that solved cases, not metaphysical speculation.

He headed first for the suburban estate where the Wildgoose family lived. He knew Mark Wildgoose would probably not be there but he had no other address for the man and, though he might have been able to track him down via the school authorities, this gave him an excuse to talk to the woman.

Lorraine Wildgoose was in the front garden passing a small electric rotary mower over the lawn. She switched it off at his approach and nodded when he introduced himself.

'Yes, I know,' she said.

'Oh? We haven't met, have we?'

'No. I saw your photo when I called on Ellie yesterday. Come into the house.'

He followed her. She wore a thin cotton skirt and a brief halter whose shifts as she stooped to disconnect the mower lead gave no hint of a limit to her deep sun tan. The observation was quite objective. Pascoe felt no sensual tingle at these mammary glimpses. There was an intensity of expression on her thin, slightly pock-marked face which precluded any suspicion of prick-teasing and suggested that any man showing an interest in her had better lead with his head, in a manner of speaking.

'Mrs Wildgoose, I'd like to have a word with your husband. I understand he's not living with you any more.'

'Would you like a drink?' she said. 'Coffee or something harder? A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have got either. We were into organic eating in a big way. That's when he got interested in the allotment. That's what you'll want to talk to him about.'