'Not those, you fool!' flashed the woman, all gypsy now. 'The headscarf, the shawl, the skirt. Where are they?'
'Oh God!' exclaimed Pascoe. Her theatricality was infectious for he found himself striking his forehead with his open hand. But he meant it.
'You bloody fool!' he said to himself. 'You fool!'
Chapter 16
Sergeant Wield was an expert typist, a skill he kept well concealed from less dextrous colleagues who would have been quick to attempt to abuse it. Alone in the CID room, he was able to finish his reports on his morning visits to the bank and the Pickersgill household in record time. Now his thoughts turned to Newcastle and Maurice. There was someone else, he was certain. Brief encounters he had suspected before. He avoided them himself, but was willing to tolerate them in Maurice, recognizing that the other lacked his own almost monastic self-discipline. But what he had felt last night was the imminence of someone more dangerous, more permanent.
He sipped at a cold cup of coffee and wondered what he would do. Something. He was not a man to sit back and do nothing.
'Penny for 'em,' said Dalziel who had entered the room unobserved. 'You must be solving at least six of the ten great mysteries of the century, the way you look. What've you decided – Jack the Ripper escaped on the Mary Celeste?'
The telephone rang. Wield raised it off the rest.
'Anything interesting?' said Dalziel.
'Not really, sir. Lee created merry hell for a bit after he was brought in. They could hear him at the desk. He was claiming assault. By you.'
'Oh aye. You didn't go near him, did you?'
'No, sir. The lad who brought him in was very clear about your instructions. He shut up after a bit.'
'Good. I'll get on to him by and by.' Dalziel belched generously. 'Answer your phone, lad. Don't keep the public waiting.'
It was Mulgan from the Northern Bank.
'Sergeant Wield? I got authority to do that check you asked for.'
'Oh good. I was going to call later, sir,' reminded Wield.
'Yes, I know. But something emerged which I thought you might like to know instantly. Did you find any money on Brenda's body?'
'Hang on,' said Wield. He left his desk and went to a filing cabinet. Dalziel raised his eyebrows but the sergeant ignored him.
'A little in her purse,' said Wield. 'Three pound notes, some coppers. Why do you ask?'
'It's just that among her other transactions, she drew a cheque for cash against her own account.'
'Oh,' said Wield. 'Is that normal?'
'It's not against the rules, if that's what you mean, as long as there are funds to cover it. But normally I would expect one of my staff to cash their own cheques at someone else's till. Safer, if you follow me.'
'I think so. But there were funds to cover Brenda Sorby's cheque?'
'Oh yes. She was a very provident girl. No, it was just the amount that interested me, particularly as I saw no reference to cash in any of the newspaper reports. That morning she drew out two hundred pounds. In five pound notes.'
Wield passed on the news to Dalziel who took the phone from him.
'Mr Mulgan, Superintendent Dalziel here. Listen, you wouldn't have the numbers of the notes that Miss Sorby received, would you?'
'I'm sorry, no. It's impossible to…'
'Yes, yes, I understand. But there might be some marks? I mean, often the things I get from my bank look as if they'd been left lying around in a kindergarten!'
'There might be the odd pencil mark left by a teller when counting them into bundles,' said Mulgan acidly.
'And these marks would be identifiable as coming from someone at your bank?'
'Possibly, but not necessarily,' said the manager.
'Right. Thanks a lot, Mr Mulgan. We'll get back to you.'
He replaced the receiver forcibly.
'Creepy sod,' he said.
'You know him, sir?'
'Hardly. He just sounds a creepy sod. Like he was chewing a ball-bearing to make himself sound like a chinless wonder. Two hundred pounds, Sergeant! We should have known about this sooner. Good job I sent you this morning.'
'Yes, sir,' said Wield. 'It was a good idea of yours to check through the girl's transactions.'
'All right, save the satire,' said Dalziel. 'You'll get the credit. Question is, who got the money?'
'You think this could have just been straight theft after all?' asked Wield.
'I think nowt,' said Dalziel. 'All I know is that this morning I found one hundred and five pounds hidden away in Dave Lee's caravan that he can't account for.'
He smacked a huge fist into a huge palm making a crack like a breaking bone.
'Let's go and have a chat with Mr Lee, shall we,' he said.
It was the penultimate day of the High Fair and Pascoe found things booming everywhere at Charter Park except in the police caravan where Sergeant Brady, attempting to conceal his copy of Penthouse, confirmed that the public seemed to have run out of even the most useless and irrelevant bits of information.
'Dead as a doornail since I came on after lunch,' he said. 'Nothing at all.'
'Well, don't let it get you down,' said Pascoe.
He went into the fairground to talk with Ena Cooper. As he approached the penny-roll stall he had a sense of something not quite right. It took him a second or two to spot what was wrong. The fortune-teller's tent had disappeared!
'They came and took it down this morning,' said Mrs Cooper. 'Three or four gyppos. Didn't you know?'
Pascoe was non-committal and Mrs Cooper smiled maliciously. But the smile disappeared when she was questioned about Pauline Stanhope again.
No, she hadn't mentioned what she'd been wearing when she left the tent just before mid-day. Why should she? – nobody had asked. Yes, 'Pauline' had been wearing the headscarf, the shawl, and the full-length skirt which were the tools of her trade. No, there'd been nothing funny about the way she walked.
As for seeing anyone go into the tent before the 'girl' left, yes, like she'd said already, there'd been a few that morning, she couldn't say how many.
Pascoe knew there'd been four at least, two pairs of women who had come forward instantly to compete for the honour of a 'last sighting'. The winners, a pair of teenage girls, had attended at eleven-fifteen A.M. and had been very impressed by Madame Rashid's accuracy and optimism.
Pascoe thanked Mrs Cooper and turned away, taking one last look at the circle of anaemic grass which marked where the tent had been. His romantic imagination would have liked to see it as some kind of enchanted ring, haunted by a ghost pleading for the rest that only revenge could give her. But if anything it looked like a green on a miniature golf-course. People strolled across it, uncaring or unaware that their substance was intersecting whatever insubstantial re-run of a murdered girl's last moments might be taking place there. Perhaps one of them would have a vision like those women at Versailles. Certainly it was beginning to feel as if only some supernatural intervention could carry them any further forward. Could Dalziel be persuaded to cross Rosetta Stanhope's palm with silver?
Back at the caravan he dented Brady's phlegm by asking if he'd noticed the scene of the crime being removed. He then left the sergeant With the task of getting together some men to search the fairground for the missing clothes. Not that he had much hope. The Choker would have needed only a second to step out of the dress in the lee of one of the sideshows and the thin cotton fabric would have rolled up to almost nothing. Then, if he had his wits about him which in one sense at least he clearly did, he would have taken the dress far away from the park before dumping it, or even burning it.
And Brady made the prospect even less hopeful by telling him that the rubbish skips had been emptied the previous day by the cleansing department.
'After you've looked round here, you'd better get down to the dump, hadn't you?' suggested Pascoe amiably. 'Just the job for a hot day!'