But his shock on hearing of Brenda Sorby's death was deep and genuine. He had not heard the news before he left on Friday night and it was a point of honour with him not to read an English paper while on holiday abroad.
Yes, he knew her well. Didn't she often serve him in the bank? Yes, he had seen her that Thursday lunch-time, just before he closed. She had collected and paid for a gentleman's gold signet ring. That was the ring there on the Superintendent's desk, no doubt. And the watch too. A gift for her young man. A nice watch for the money and he had given her a good discount because he liked her. Her engagement ring he had admired. Not an expensive stone and the setting… well, he would have been ashamed to sell such a setting but it was no business of his to dull a young girl's happiness so he had admired it as the most perfect of rings and taken her to the door and waved goodbye to her.
And would never see her again.
His eyes filled with tears and he had to blow his nose before he could sign his statement.
'Grand,' said Dalziel rubbing his hands together. 'Now for Lee. Peter, we should put you back on the beat. I'd forgotten how pretty you looked in uniform.'
Pascoe had been provided with a blue shirt and a pair of uniform trousers while his own gear dried off. He had just escaped from a neighbouring interview room which Lee's wife, four of her children, Silvester Herne, two policemen and Ms Pritchard had turned into a Bedlam cell.
'And I'd forgotten how itchy these trousers were,' he answered, 'Look, sir, I haven't got much sense yet out of that lot. They keep jabbering away at each other in Anglo-Romany every time I think I'm getting somewhere, but here's how it's looking to me…'
Dalziel put a huge finger to his broad lips.
'Later,' he said. 'Lee'll tell us all or I'll personally undo his stitches. That Pritchard thing's still there, is she?'
Pascoe nodded.
'Right,' said Dalziel. 'We'll send Wield in, tell him to be a bit aggressive towards the woman and the kids. That should keep her busy while we do our spot of hospital visiting!'
On their way to the hospital Pascoe said, 'I don't think he did it, sir.'
Dalziel hushed him again, but. with sufficient good humour to make Pascoe believe their conclusions were in accord till they stood by Lee's bedside and the fat man said without any preamble, 'Lee, we're here to charge you with murder.'
'You must be cracked? Who says I killed anyone?' demanded the recumbent man.
'Not a soul,' admitted Dalziel. 'Your wife, kids, mates, not one of 'em is telling us anything. That's your bad luck, lad. You'll need all the talking you can get on your behalf to pull you out of this. We can prove that the money, the watch and the ring were all in Brenda Sorby's handbag when she left the bank that night. They ended up in your caravan. That's what tells us you killed her, lad. We need nowt else.'
Lee twisted uneasily in his bed.
'Look, mister,' he said. 'If I tell yous what really happened, will you look out for me, like?'
Dalziel seized the man's hospital pyjamas lapel and pulled him a little way off the pillow.
'Listen, Lee,' he said viciously. 'I think I know what really happened. You killed her. If you want anyone to believe different, you'd better open your mouth and hope that what comes out flows like…’
A nurse came into the room and paused at the door as she took in the scene.
'Just rearranging his pillows, Sister,' assured Dalziel. 'There we are, Dave. That better? Grand. Off you go, dear. This is private.'
The nurse went out.
Lee said, 'I didn't kill her. She was dead.'
'If you're going to make up a story, at least give it a proper beginning, lad,' said Dalziel wearily. There was one armchair in the room. The fat man slumped into it while Pascoe perched on a hard plastic chair with his notebook on his knee.
'It were the kids,' said Lee. 'It were the kids that saw her.'
It had been round about seven o'clock. Lee had been answering a call of nature by the boundary fence when his four children who had just headed down to the river for a swim came running back, full of excitement, crying there was a woman in the water.
Lee had gone down to investigate. There she was, Brenda Sorby (as he found out later), floating face upwards. He pulled her out, tried what he knew of artificial respiration, but it was useless. Then he noticed the marks on her neck and realized it was not just a simple case of accident.
His eldest boy was sent to summon Silvester Herne, with strict instructions to tell no one else. Herne, as Pascoe had suspected, was not so much the gypsy leader as their cunning counsellor, the man who knew how to fix things. Lee then peered in the water again and saw the woman's handbag. He had fished this out and was just opening it as Herne arrived. Together they discovered the watch, the ring, the wad of notes.
This it was that tipped the scales.
Herne's first advice was to dump the woman back into the river. A gorgio woman, let the gorgios find her. It would do the gypsies in general and Lee, with his record, in particular no good to be mixed up in this. Not that merely returning the body to the water would prevent them from being involved, though. Centuries of experience have taught gypsies that proximity is guilt.
So, on second thoughts, Herne had suggested, it might be better to dump her somewhere more distant.
For the general good.
Also, that way, they could keep the money, the watch and the ring with impunity.
Lee had backed his van up to the hole in the wire and together he and Herne had loaded the body on to it. The children were frightened to silence with all the superstitious threats that arise naturally from Romany lore. And Lee had driven his van back to the fairground where he was working that night.
The intention had been to wait till after dark which came late in early July, and then to put the body back in the river somewhere further downstream beyond Charter Park. But when the storm broke and the fairground cleared, Herne had suggested they gild the lily a bit by transporting it across the river and dropping it into the canal. This served the double purpose of keeping it out of the river which after all ran by the gypsy encampment, and perhaps postponing discovery, as the canal was that much deeper and murkier.
It also provided a group of ready-made suspects in the form of the canal people who, in Herne's opinion, were capable of any crime known to man and some known only to fish.
And that's what they had done. The padlock on the hire-boats had presented no problems to Herne who emerged more and more in Lee's narrative as the moving force behind the whole sequence of events. Only when it came to the question of the money did Lee assert himself. He'd found it. He would keep it safe till the time seemed propitious for a split.
'Which was just as well,' said Dalziel. 'Herne wouldn't have hidden it somewhere so easy to spot.'
'You believe him then?'
'Why not?'
They were hanging around in the corridor outside Lee's room. The consultant surgeon, triumphant from his morning golf, had turned up a few moments earlier and Dalziel after a brief trial of strength had abandoned the field, acknowledging that only fools or heroes challenged consultants on their own ground.
'We haven't found out yet what happened on Wednesday, when he disappeared with Rosetta Stanhope,' said Pascoe.
'Simple. He read, if he can read, or was told what the papers said about that bloody message from the stars…’
'Which turned out to be pretty accurate,' observed Pascoe parenthetically.
'… and he checked with the girl, Pauline, in the morning – you said you saw him chatting to her and because he's a superstitious pagan like the rest of his tribe and he reckoned it wouldn't be long before the spirits were being even more precise about time and place, and the subsequent travels of the dead body, he went round to see Rosetta.'