'Six years. Since I left the farming.'
'What about other help?'
'No one else most of the time,' he said. 'Except I took a lad on when the missus went away after the lass died. Couldn't do it single-handed. Couldn't really do it proper with two of us. Before, me and Mr Dinwoodie looked after the trees and such. Planting, hoeing, all that. Mrs Dinwoodie helped with the greenhouses, and ran the shop. She'd been a teacher once or summat, so she was good with paperwork. The lass helped too. She'd just left school, didn't want to do anything else, an office job or such. She liked to be outside. Her lad was going to go into farming too.'
'Her lad?'
'Aye. Didn't you know? She'd just married him when they got killed. Same day. It doesn't bear thinking on. Well, after that, the heart went out of Mrs Dinwoodie. She went off. Just told me to look after things and went off. It were all right at first, but when spring got near, it starts getting busy, so I had to take a lad on, and my daughter-in-law came in to help with the shop. I saw the bank manager first. He weren't sure but I told him business would soon be knackered if I didn't and he soon changed his tune. Even then we were only open weekends. But we ticked over. And then she came back. I was that glad to see her! But, oh, she'd mebbe had done better to stay away for ever.'
There was a catch in the old man's voice. He really cares, thought Pascoe, and he said, 'You liked Mrs Dinwoodie?'
'I liked all on 'em, but her the best. She was a kind woman. She blamed herself for everything. She said it were her fault they were so close to that engine at the show. And blamed herself for letting the lass run off to Scotland to be wed. Well, that were daft, mebbe, and the girl's place was here by her mam's side with her dad only a few months dead. But at seventeen, what's to fill a lass's head but boys and such? Well, I never thought I'd see any one of them out, let alone all three. It doesn't bear thinking on, does it? It doesn't bear thinking.'
'No, it doesn't,' said Pascoe. 'So now you're in sole charge?'
'Oh aye. Till things is settled. Lawyers asked me to stay on. There's two relatives of his, half cousins or some such thing, down in the South. Likely they'll get it. Best I can do by myself is tend the roses and the fruit trees. We sold all the greenhouse stuff up. Market traders and the like.
They got a bargain. But I couldn't have tended them and they'd not hire anyone else. Do you want to look in the house?'
'Yes, please,' said Pascoe, not knowing why. 'But first, I wonder if you've ever seen this chap around here?'
He passed over the two photographs of Wildgoose. Agar scrutinized them carefully.
'Nay,' said Agar. 'I don't recall him. Though that's not to say I've never seen him.'
'But would you say you might have seen him?'
'Not if there was money on it,' said the old man, adding shrewdly, 'and there'll likely be more than money on it, eh?'
'Likely,' said Pascoe, retrieving the photos.
The old man opened the house for him, then returned to his work. Pascoe went inside. Already the place smelt dank and unlived-in. One of the downstairs rooms had been turned into an office. He poked around for a while but found nothing but a chaos of neglected paperwork. He had no idea what he might be looking for. It was simply an exercise in serendipity. Abandoning the office, he went upstairs.
The girl's bedroom he found hard to bear. It was untidy, but with the untidiness of youth, as though its owner might be reappearing at any moment. He left it and went into the main bedroom. And here at last he made a find.
It was a cardboard box tucked away at the back of crowded wardrobe. It was a sad box, full of memories which now lacked a mind to remember them. Christmas cards, birthday cards, many homemade, inscribed To Mummy with lots of love from Alison in a young round hand, some childish daubs. And a few secondary school reports. Alison it seemed had attended the Bishop Crump Comprehensive School.
Well, so had thousands of other kids. And Alison's death had nothing to do with the Choker. She had died in a car accident in the South of Scotland. The scrawled initials after the comments on her English and Drama lessons gave little clue to their author. Of course, mused Pascoe, if Wildgoose had taught this girl, then there were parent-teacher evenings, plenty of chance for him to have met the mother.
He dug deeper and for his pains made one more discovery. It was a programme on a brown card with scalloped edges to give a kind of parchment effect. On the front printed in Gothic script were the words Musik-und-Drama-Fest, Linden, Mai 1973.
That Linden. The town in Germany. This was where the Centre's name came from. His schoolboy German was still sufficiently remembered to identify this as the general programme of a small amateur festival of music and drama (not difficult!) and get the gist of most of the promised goodies. Then an item caught and held his eye. Scenes from Shakespeare, he translated. By members of a local drama society, he guessed. Plus staff from Devon School. And there were two directors named, one German, the other Herr Peter Dinwoodie.
So here it was at last. Not Hamlet, but Shakespeare at least. Unser Shakespeare. He'd heard how the Germans admired him to the point of possessiveness. And Devon School? A touring party? Hardly. More likely a British Forces School. He'd known a girl who'd gone out there to teach and he seemed to recall the schools often had that kind of name, Gloucester, Cornwall, Windsor.
Linden, if his geography held as well as his German, was hard by Hanover. Lots of BAOR bases round there, so it made some sense.
He went downstairs and asked old Agar if Mary Dinwoodie and her husband had once been school-teachers in Germany.
'Nay, I know nowt about that,' said the old man.
Well, it should be easy to check out, thought Pascoe pocketing the programme.
And at the same time it would be worth checking if Wildgoose had ever done any teaching abroad.
At Rosetta Stanhope's flat he was admitted quickly, almost as though he were expected. I really must stop endowing her with supernatural powers, he told himself irritably. Certainly the room in which he found himself was ordinary enough. There was a lightly flowered paper on the walls, and the furniture consisted of a three-piece suite in imitation hide, a large colour TV and a small oak sideboard with a nest of matching tables. The only hint of the woman's background lay in a large glass-fronted cabinet almost filling one of the narrower walls and packed with what Pascoe had no doubt was fine china.
Rosetta Stanhope herself was dressed like any housewife doing her chores; she wore a blue cotton overall, moccasins on her feet, and her hair was tied back with a red silk bandanna. The only change was in her face where the flesh seemed more tightly drawn than ever over the fine thin bones.
'Will you have a cup of tea?' she asked very correctly. 'I can't offer you strong liquor. There's none in the place.'
'And I couldn't accept it anyway,' answered Pascoe even more correctly, though perhaps less accurately. 'You don't drink alcohol, Mrs Stanhope?'
'I can't afford to get confused, Mr Pascoe,' she said.
'And your niece? Did she drink?'
'Never here.'
'But elsewhere? A social drink with friends perhaps?'
She regarded him seriously but with no outward sign of distress. Pascoe congratulated himself on the subtlety of his introduction of the topic.
'Like at the Cheshire Cheese, you mean?' said Rosetta Stanhope.
Pascoe cancelled his congratulations.
'That might be significant,’ he said. 'Did she?'
'Not that I know of,' said the woman. 'And I think I'd have known. It was funny. She was not my blood, not my flesh, but she grew to me like a daughter. Closer perhaps. Daughters grow up, turn away, despise their parents even. I've seen it many times. Trouble, misunderstanding, separation. Like poor Brenda Sorby and her father. But Pauline grew closer to me as she got older and when the time came for her to make her own choice of life, instead of turning away, she turned towards me. No one knew her father, but I sometimes think he could not have been gorgio.'