“Don’t say that to Pete Pascoe,” said Dalziel. “If he left a suicide note, I’d know it were forged if there were just one semicolon out of place. Not to worry, but. My reading of you is that if you did decide to write an anonymous letter, any clues it gave wouldn’t be mistakes but deliberate red herrings.”
He seemed to intend it as a compliment.
“You’re saying I’d make a good criminal?” said Charley.
“That’s what it takes to make a good detective,” he said. “Look at me. One gene more or less and I could have been the Napoleon of crime!”
He put his hand under his shirt and looked out to sea with such a lugubrious expression, she laughed out loud.
“If that’s meant to be Napoleon, remind me not to ask for your Jimmy Cagney!”
“Jimmy Cagney? Bit old for you. No, hang on, it’s all them movies your mam loves to watch, right? Sorry, didn’t mean to tread into the personal stuff, but it’s all tangled up in your e-mails, isn’t it? Listen, I’ll give you another one for free, just to prove good faith. Fester and Pet!”
“Who?”
“Dr. Lester Feldenhammer and Nurse Petula Sheldon. You met them at that do in the clinic. And you saw them at the hog roast.”
“That’s right. What about them?”
“Come on, luv. In your e-mails you mention Mary Parker filling you in on Daph having the hots for Fester. And his affections being engaged elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere being Nurse Sheldon? So what are you saying? A crime of passion? Aren’t they a bit old for that?”
“Christ, you really are ageist, aren’t you? Pet and Fester are younger than me, and I can still tear a passion if I put my mind to it. They had a bloody great row at the party that ended with Pet hurling her wine over Daph.”
“Hardly lethal, is it?”
“No, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.”
She shook her head.
“No. A woman chucks wine ’cos she’s pissed off with someone. Killing them takes passionate jealousy, and I can’t see Sheldon being jealous of someone thirty years older than she is. Anyway, sticking her in the hog roast cage suggests intent rather than impulse, doesn’t it?”
He nodded complacently. He was right. She was quick. Pete would probably kill him for giving away confidential info about the case, but he had the feeling that young Heywood would sniff out prevarication like the Holy Inquisition.
He said, “Maybe there was intent. Maybe Pet and Fester were more than just irritated by Daph.”
She said slowly, “Yes, I’ve been wondering about that. If Feldenhammer wanted to stop Daph bothering him, why not simply tell her it was no go? Okay, she was persistent. Most women would have taken the hint when he ran away to Switzerland for six months. And when she followed him out there, why not just say, Enough’s enough, act your age, woman! Unless…”
Dalziel leaned forward and nodded his head encouragingly.
“Unless what?” he said.
“Unless,” said Charley, “unless she had some sort of a hold over him. From the way she set about getting Miss Lee out of Witch Cottage, she clearly wasn’t above a bit of blackmail!”
The Fat Man sat back in his chair and beamed at her.
“If I weren’t promised, Charley, I might ask Stompy for leave to marry thee.”
“If you did, I’d run a lot farther than Switzerland,” she retorted. “Okay, so that’s the conclusion you’ve reached too, so it has to be right! Have you any idea what?”
“Not yet, but I’ll find out. Then we’ll see if what she was using to pull his string were important enough to make him want to cut hers.”
The wail of the ambulance siren came floating up from the town again.
Dalziel let it fade away, then leaned forward in his chair and said, “So what do you think about all this, Minnie?”
Charley turned her head and for the first time observed the small figure hunched up at the end of the terrace. Slowly the girl straightened up, stretched her arms, and yawned, as if just awaking from a deep sleep.
“Sorry?” she said.
The Fat Man clapped his hands together thunderously.
“By God, she’s good, ain’t she, Charley? Maggie Smith, watch out! Come on, luv, you’ve won your Oscar, now you can join the party. Owt you can tell us about poor old Lady Denham, or about any bugger, that might help?”
Minnie, like Charley, didn’t waste time weighing decisions.
Looking fully alert, she scrambled to her feet and came to join them.
“What sort of thing?” she said.
“Anything at all, long as it’s stuff no one else is likely to know.”
Minnie’s face screwed up in concentration for a moment, then she said, “Well, what you were saying about Big Bum…sorry, Lady Denham…and Dr. Feldenhammer, I think she really liked him a lot, ’cos when Miss Watson our head teacher caught Mr. Standfast, our deputy head, doing sex with the dinner lady, she sacked them both, even though she was doing it with Mr. Standfast too.”
Charley looked at her in shocked bewilderment, but Dalziel nodded his huge head as if this made perfect sense and said, “Lady Denham didn’t mind, though?”
“Well, I don’t know if she didn’t mind exactly, but she still kept on liking Dr. Feldenhammer even after she saw him doing it with the Indian lady.”
This was getting seriously weird, thought Charley, and she sent her mind scuttling through her textbooks in search of a subtle psychological technique for getting the girl to open up further.
The Fat Man said, “The Indian lady…,” as if this rang some kind of bell, then he bared his big yellow teeth in the kind of anticipatory rictus that might twitch the jaws of a somnolent crocodile identifying the rhythmic splashing noise that has been disturbing him as the sound of an approaching swimmer.
He said, “Oh aye. Now I remember. Old Fester and the Indian lady. Right! Don’t think Charley knows about her, but. Why don’t you tell her the story?”
Did he really know what Minnie was talking about, or was this just his own personal technique, worked out without benefit of textbooks, for getting the girl to reveal all? The latter, she guessed. The old sod was a lot cleverer than he looked. Not too difficult, of course, when you looked like Cro-Magnon man!
Minnie, reveling in the spotlight, said, “It was my last birthday, Uncle Sid bought me a new bike, a proper one, not a kid’s. Mum said it was too expensive and Uncle Sid said nonsense, he always bought the people he loved best a bike, he thought it should be a family tradition. Anyway, Mum and Dad bought me a digital camera and that was quite expensive.”
“Aye, well, the best deserve nowt but the best, eh?” said Dalziel.
Minnie looked pleased and continued, “I went for a ride along the coast, and after a bit I stopped for a rest and I saw Big Bum…sorry, Lady…”
“Big Bum’ll do, luv,” said Dalziel. “Don’t think she’ll mind now. When is your birthday, by the way?”
“September ninth, next month. I’ll be ten,” she said hopefully.
“I’ll not forget,” said Dalziel. “St. Wulfhilda’s feast day. She were a real smart lass too. Go on with your story.”
“I saw Big Bum’s horse, Ginger. I’d seen her over the hedge earlier. Only now Ginger was just cropping grass. I thought I’d take a picture of him and while I was doing it, Big Bum came up, and I said thank you for your birthday card, but she didn’t look like she knew what I was talking about. Then she asked if she could borrow my camera for a moment. I didn’t really want to let her have it, but she just sort of took it and went off again.”
“Where did she go?”
“Toward the cliff. It’s not very high there, not like North Cliff, more like a big sand dune. And after a few moments she came back and she said she’d need to keep the memory card. I said that meant I wouldn’t be able to take any more photos and she said all right, she’d rent it off me, ten pounds for the day.”
“Ten pounds? And did you get the ten pounds?”
“No, I got fifteen,” said the girl. “Uncle Sid says that when anyone makes an offer always ask for twice as much and never let them knock you down to less than half the extra.”