pump bromide into their potatoes. Take a look at this.’
He tossed the PM report over the desk.
‘Take Seymour back to Swain’s house and see what you can find. I doubt it’ll be much, though. He didn’t look to me like a user. A night in the cells and it’d have started to show. Also he’d have been a lot keener to contact his brief to get him out. As for her, if she set out to screw her way back to LA, she’s not likely to have left a cache of scag under the floorboards. But there may be traces. And if he knew, then maybe he can point us at the pusher.’
‘Right, sir,’ said Pascoe. ‘By the way, these letters you were so concerned about. I thought I’d –’
‘Sod the bloody letters,’ said Dalziel irritably. ‘We’re here to sort out crooks, not piss around with hysterics! I’m surprised at you for wanting to waste my time!’
Half an hour later Pascoe drove into Currthwaite, a village in danger of being annexed into a suburb, albeit a pretty plush suburb. On the town side the invasion was practically complete with the old rolling parkland now dotted with a range of well fortified high-class executive dwellings. Even when he entered the village proper between a Norman church in mellow York stone and a blockhouse chapel in angry brick, the High Street cottages were signalling their surrender with window-boxes without and Sanderson curtains within, and everywhere he looked he saw the greenwellied conquerors marching their labradors in a non-stop victory parade.
Moscow Farm at the far end of the village showed signs of having fallen to the same attack. Snow-cemed, window-boxed, double-glazed, burglar-alarmed, sauna’d, showered, and centrally heated, it bore as much relation to an old working farmhouse as Washington Heights to Wuthering Heights. But when he looked out of the french window at the rear, Pascoe saw there had been an active resistance movement, for the old farmyard after being prettied into a patio had regressed into a builder’s yard.
‘I bet the rest of the village don’t much like it,’ said Seymour. ‘Not with the kind of prices they’re asking round here.’
‘You’re into the property market, are you?’ asked Pascoe.
‘Want to be. I got engaged.’
‘Congratulations. To Bernadette, I take it?’
Bernadette McCrystal was the Irish waitress whose debilitating influence Dalziel so deplored. Pascoe had met and liked her, though he doubted if marrying her was going to herald halcyon weather in Seymour’s voyage through life.
‘Of course,’ said Seymour a touch indignantly.
‘I’ll buy you a drink. Now let’s get on.’
Ninety minutes later to Seymour’s undisguised relief they had found nothing.
‘I didn’t fancy going back to the Super with a barrowload of coke.’
‘Still time,’ observed Pascoe. ‘Out there is where they’ll keep the barrows. I’ll take a look. I’d like a word with his secretary anyway. You take one more look round here.’
He went out into the yard. It was enclosed on two sides by wings of old agricultural buildings, stables, barns and byres, which, red-tiled and white-painted, had something of an almost Mediterranean look in the thin February sunlight. It was a delusion soon shattered as he stepped out into the chilly air.
The firm’s business office was in what must once have been a hayloft above the byre which was now used as a garage. It was reached by a flight of external stairs which Pascoe would not have fancied in icy weather.
He knocked at the door and went in. Behind a desk reading a paperback whose cover promised a bodice-ripper but whose title claimed Jane Eyre, sat a young woman he knew to be Swain’s secretary. She had emerged briefly on their arrival, but on spotting Seymour whom she’d met on his first visit, she had retreated to Mr Rochester.
‘Hello,’ said Pascoe. ‘Busy?’
She rested her book against the typewriter on her desk and said, ‘Can I help you?’
She was rather square-featured and plumply built, had straight brown hair, almost shoulder length, wore no discernible make-up and spoke in a husky contralto voice with a strong local accent.
Pascoe picked up the book and examined the illustration which showed a terrified young woman whose bodice was undoubtedly ripped fleeing from a burning house in whose doorway stood a Munster-like figure.
‘I don’t remember that bit,’ he said.
‘Makes you want to read the book,’ she explained. ‘More than them bloody teachers ever did.’
It was a point, perhaps two.
He put the book down on the typewriter and looked around. He found he was shivering slightly. The house had been warm and he’d taken off his topcoat, but here, despite a double-barred electric wall heater, the atmosphere was still dank and chilly. The woman at the desk on second inspection proved to be less plump than he’d thought. She had insulated herself with at least two sweaters and a cardigan.
‘It’s a bit nippy in here,’ he said, touching the whitewashed wall. The stones were probably three feet thick and colder on the inside than on the out. ‘With all that room in the house, you’d have thought Mr Swain would have had his office in there rather than out here.’
‘Mrs Swain wouldn’t have it,’ said the woman.
‘Did he tell you that?’
She considered.
‘No,’ she said.
‘How do you know, then?’
She considered once more, then said indifferently, ‘Don’t know, but I know.’
Pascoe sorted this out. Surprisingly it made sense.
‘How long have you been working here, Miss … I’m sorry …?’
‘Shirley Appleyard. And it’s Mrs.’
‘Sorry. You look so young,’ he said with full flarch. It was like shining a torch into a black hole.
‘I’m nineteen,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here two years.’
‘Do you like it?’
She shrugged and said, ‘It’s a job. Better than nowt, these days.’
‘Yes, they’re hard to come by,’ said Pascoe, switching to the sympathetic concerned approach. ‘You did well, there was probably a lot of competition.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I got it because me dad’s Mr Swain’s partner.’
‘Mr Stringer, you mean? That’s handy,’ said Pascoe.
‘You mean I should give thanks to God for being so lucky? Don’t worry, I get told that at least twice a day and three times on Sundays.’
She spoke with a dull indifference worse than resentment. Pascoe, as always curious beyond professional need, said, ‘I met your father this morning. He seemed a little out of sorts …’
‘You mean he didn’t strike you as being full of Christian charity?’ she said with an ironic grimace. ‘He’s not that kind of Christian. Didn’t you notice the chapel over from the church as you came through the village? Red brick. That’s Dad. All the way through.’
Pascoe smiled and said, ‘You live in the village still? With your parents?’
‘Aye. Holly Cottage. That’s it you can see at the corner of the field.’
Pascoe looked out of the window. Visible through the open end of the yard was a small cottage about fifty yards away.
‘You’ve not far to come,’ he said. ‘Your husband lives there too, does he?’
‘He’s away working, if it’s any of your business,’ she retorted with sudden anger. ‘And what’s