indifferently.
‘All right,’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s twelve now. Have your lunch, then with your vigour fully restored go and cross the lady’s palm with silver. Either lady, depending whether you prefer mutton or lamb.’
I must stop this nudge-nudge, wink-wink bit, he thought as Wield left. I’m getting more like Dalziel every day!
A few moments later the phone rang. It was the desk sergeant.
‘There’s a lady here wants a word with someone in CID, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a Mrs Rosetta Stanhope.’
‘What? Oh, look, Sergeant Wield probably wants to speak with her anyway, so let him sort it out, will you? He should be on his way out any moment now.’
‘He just went past, sir. I don’t think he noticed the lady. He seemed in a bit of a hurry.’
‘The bastard!’ swore Pascoe. ‘He’s opted for lamb. All right. Wheel her in.’
Rosetta Stanhope had adapted well to her chosen environment. In her late fifties, her hair tightly permed with just the suggestion of a blue rinse, dressed in a stylishly cut grey suit with toning shoes and handbag, she could have chaired a WI meeting or opened a flower show without remark. Only a certain rather exotic stateliness of bearing and darkness of skin which even a carefully layered mask of make-up could not disguise hinted at her origins.
Her voice was quiet, a little hoarse, perhaps; the result of twisting her vocal cords to produce her spirit voices? wondered Pascoe.
‘I met your niece this morning,’ said Pascoe. ‘You haven’t seen her?’
The woman considered, then smiled.
‘You’re quite right, Mr Pascoe. I wouldn’t do Madame Rashid dressed like this. And I wouldn’t go home specially to change just to impress a policeman.’
Pascoe was impressed. She’d cut right to the source of his question. Not that you needed to be a mind-reader, but it was a good policeman’s trick.
‘So you’ve left your niece in charge of the future?’
Lucky old Wield.
‘I didn’t feel able today,’ she said. ‘I don’t put on a show. It’s got to be right.’
‘What about Pauline?’
Mrs Stanhope made an entirely un-English moue of dismissal.
‘Palmistry,’ she said. ‘It’s a craft. You learn it.’
Pascoe decided to do a bit of short-cutting himself.
‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get an apology out of us, Mrs Stanhope. It wasn’t our doing. A denial perhaps, but I tried that yesterday and you saw the report. I’m sorry it upset you.’
‘I’m not upset, Inspector,’ she said. ‘Don’t heed our Pauline. She probably told you I’m not very practical? Well, I’m practical enough to let her think so. She needs to be looking after folks, that one. It probably comes of never knowing her mother.’
‘You brought her up from birth, I believe,’ said Pascoe. ‘I’m surprised she doesn’t regard you as her mother.’
‘She did when she was young, poor mite. But she had to be told. I remember she was twelve and casting her own horoscope. It wouldn’t come right. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Bert and me had always decided to tell her. It was a relief in a way.’
‘Why so?’
‘She knew about me and my background. I’m proud of it, why not? And Bert always used to joke that he’d stolen me from the gypsies. Pauline and me, we got very close, but I could see it was a bit difficult for a young lass thinking she’d got a gypsy mother but not feeling of the blood, if you follow. It were odd, but when we told her, it seemed to bring us even closer together.’
‘And finally she joined that side of the family business?’
‘She could hardly become an engine-driver, could she, even in this age,’ said Rosetta Stanhope lightly.
‘I believe it’s possible,’ said Pascoe, suddenly picturing Thelma Lacewing wiping her brow with an oily rag on the footplate of the ‘Flying Scotsman’. ‘But tell me, Mrs Stanhope, if you’re not here to complain, threaten, or cast a gypsy’s curse, why have you come?’
She leaned forward and tapped his desk significantly. Or perhaps she was knocking on wood?
‘I was upset last night, Inspector. Not by the paper, though that irritated me. I was upset by the contact I’d made with that poor girl. I hardly slept. I just kept on getting impressions; no, not visions or words, nothing definite like that; but, like colours and feelings. I let Pauline think it was just the newspaper report that had upset me. I wanted to think things out for myself.’
‘So what do you want, Mrs Stanhope?’
She opened her youthfully clear brown eyes in big surprise.
‘I want to do what that Evening Post said I was doing already,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to help you with your enquiries.’
When Sergeant Wield reached Charter Park the fairground was doing good business. It was a fine sunny day with just enough breeze to cool a fevered brow and send little puffs of cloud, picturesque to the point of artificiality, drifting across the deep blue cyclorama above. The green of the grass and trees, the sparkling band of the river, the bright brash music of the steam organ, all these combined to produce a pleasantly euphoric sensation in the sergeant’s breast which he allowed to surface in the form of a light almost soundless whistle through gently pursed lips.
His reaction when he reached the fortune-teller’s tent and found the flap closed and a folding chair pushed against it to which was pinned a card saying BACK SOON was disappointment, but it was a purely professional emotion. Pascoe’s winks and nods about Pauline Stanhope’s fancy for him were seeds on the stoniest of ground. Wield’s self-containment and reticence were not linked, as the amateur psychologist might have guessed, to his fearsome appearance. They derived from his early recognition that the best way to conceal one thing was to conceal all things, to have so many secrets that the only important one would not be suspected. And this was that he was wholly and uncompromisingly homosexual. In the police, the usual circular syndrome applied. Homosexuals were disapproved of because they were blackmail risks because they were secretive because they were disapproved of …
Ten years earlier Wield had found himself growing increasingly fond of a man called Maurice Eaton, a Post Office executive who was even more anxious than Wield about the damage an open liaison might do to his career. But they had reached the stage of discussing setting up house together in Yorkshire when Eaton was offered a promotion in the North-East. To Wield, the move had seemed tragic at the time, but soon a routine of weekends in Newcastle and holidays abroad had been established which, while it was not without its tensions and dangers, had proved viable for a decade. But though having the centre of his emotional life a hundred miles away had made him ‘safe’, it also made him a bit of a cypher. Institutions do not like what they do not understand and now he was stuck at sergeant with younger men like Pascoe leapfrogging over his head.
Eventually something would give, he felt it in his bones. Meanwhile, on with the job.
The stall closest to the fortune-telling tent was an old fashioned ‘penny-roll’ at which coins were rolled down grooved ramps to land on a numbered chequer board, winning the amount stated if the coin fell plumb in the middle of a square. The man in charge shrugged indifferently, but his sharp-featured helpmeet believed she had seen Pauline leave about twenty minutes earlier. So BACK SOON could mean an hour or so yet.
He ought to get back to the station. He felt a little guilty at the way he had turned a blind eye to Rosetta Stanhope