Dalziel And Pascoe: Pictures Of Perfection Part 9

'I understand you observed a policeman's hat on a statue.'

'What?' Her eyes turned from his face to the window as she looked across at the bookshop. 'Ah, you've been talking to Edwin Digweed.'

'Listening,' said Wield, and was rewarded with an understanding smile. 'He said you'd mentioned it to him. Didn't seem like a secret, so he pa.s.sed it on to me for what it's worth.'

'Quite right too,' she said. 'I'd probably have mentioned it myself when Sergeant Filmer got round to me.'

Wield, not too impressed by this sudden display of civic dutifulness, said, 'So you'd heard the Sergeant was asking questions?'

'It's a small place,' she said.

'Depends if you count the moors,' said Wield. 'Now about this hat.. .'

'Oh my G.o.d! That's incredible! Don't let him go!'

The outburst came from a young woman in a paint-stained smock who'd appeared at an interior door. Wield just had time to register full parted lips and huge dark eyes under a torrent of richly black hair before she turned away and he heard footsteps racing up a flight of stairs.

'My sister, Caddy,' said Kee. 'You must excuse her. She doesn't waste much time on social niceties.'

The footsteps returned cut by half, as she took the stairs two or three at a time. Then she was back in the gallery clutching a sketching pad and a pencil.

'I've got to have your face, do you mind? It's amazing. Do you live round here? I'd love to do a portrait, would you be interested?'

All the time the pencil was speeding over the paper.

'Caddy, for heaven's sake!' said Kee in that tone of reproof underpinned with pride that parents use when their kids are being intrusively precocious. 'This is Sergeant Wield. It seems PC Bendish has gone missing.'

'Probably off chasing rustlers or something. Sergeant, OK, if you're hot on a scent, I can see how sittings could be a problem, but if I could take a few pics? I can work off photos, not the same, of course, but at least they don't want to talk or pick their noses. OK? Great, don't go away.'

The flying footsteps routine was repeated.

'Sorry again,' said Kee. 'Don't let her bother you if you'd rather not. But she is good.'

'These hers?' said Wield, studying a selection of watercolours. 'Very nice. She's good on sheep, isn't she?'

'No, not those,' said Kee. 'They're Beryl Pottinger's, our school head teacher. They sell surprisingly well. Tourists like a nice view of somewhere they've been. Those are Caddy's up there.'

Wield looked and said, 'Oh aye', which was the nearest his natural courtesy as well as his native reticence would let him come to 'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l!' From Mrs Pottinger's placid pastorals to Caddy Scudamore's lurid landscapes was perhaps a small step for an artist, but it was a mighty leap over a high cliff for a man whose walls were hung with Victorian prints of Gilbert and Sullivan characters.

Caddy was back with a camera which seemed to have a will of its own, clicking and winking and winding itself on with minimal outside interference. Wield began to feel uneasy. Both privately and professionally his instinct had long been to keep himself in the background, and this degree of attention was without doubt threatening. When the camera was replaced with a camcorder, he felt it was time to retreat.

'This statue. You couldn't show me where it is, could you?' he said pleadingly to Kee.

She looked at the ledger, looked at his face, took pity, switched off the calculator and said, 'Why not?'

'I'll come too,' said Caddy. 'I need to get him in motion.'

'Oh no you won't,' said her sister firmly. 'This is a place of business, remember?'

'You could have fooled me,' said Caddy sulkily. She was, observed Wield with a critically neutral eye, one of those rare women on whom sulkiness is becoming. When she pouted, her full lips rounded into a moist pink funnel a hetero could pour his soul into.

'Oh well, I'd better get these developed, then,' she said, and vanished up the stairs once more.

'Caddy, you will listen for the doorbell, won't you?' called Kee after her, but got no reply.

'I might as well give up,' she said to Wield with the resignation of use. 'Once she gets in that darkroom, she doesn't hear a thing.'

'She develops her own, does she?' said Wield.

'Oh yes. Don't be deceived by the impression she gives of chaos on the hoof. Like a lot of kids nowadays, she manages to have one foot in Bohemia and the other in high tech without showing any sign of doing the splits.'

The pride was there again, strong and unmistakable. You needed to be a pretty well-balanced character and have a firm sense of your own worth to tolerate the demands of wayward talent in a younger sister, thought Wield.

As they left the Gallery the young cyclist Wield had noticed the day before came to a silent halt before them.

'h.e.l.lo, Jason,' said Kee neutrally. 'Do you want something?'

'Caddy. Got something for her.'

'I'm afraid she's too busy now,' said Kee.

The youth regarded her with strangely unfocused eyes. She returned his gaze as steadily and stood her ground in front of the door.

Wield, whose eyes had been taking in the young man's sub-military garb and the shotgun clipped to his crossbar, said, 'You got a licence for that gun, lad?'

'Yes,' said Toke without looking at him. 'Later, then.'

He moved swiftly away.

Wield said, 'Hold on... !' but Kee interrupted, it's OK, Sergeant. He does have a licence. In fact he's probably got a licence for all the weapons he's got.'

'All.. . ? How many does he have, then?'

'A whole armoury, according to local rumour. But I've never seen them, so don't take what I say as gospel.'

'You don't like the lad, but?'

She shrugged and said, 'He's a bit weird. And he's got a thing about Caddy. I don't like weird men having a thing about my kid sister.'

They set off at a brisk pace up the High Street.

As the hill began to climb she pointed to a narrow driveway off to the right just below the church.

'That takes you round to Corpse Cottage where Mr Bendish lives. Then it climbs up the hill to the vicarage.'

'Is that right?' said Wield, pausing, it's well hidden.'

'Do you want to take a look? We can carry on up to the vicarage and get into the churchyard that way.'

'The vicarage is round there too, is it?'

'Higher up, on the same level as the church.'

Wield said, 'No, we'll just go the regular way. I'll leave the cottage till later.'

When I've not got a sharp-eyed civilian in tow, he added mentally, and then caught those sharp eyes smiling at him as though he'd spoken aloud.

They climbed the hill till they drew level with the War Memorial.

Wield paused. It was in the form of a Celtic cross with the simple inscription For the Fallen of the Parish of Ens...o...b.. with two lists of names, alphabetical and without rank, one for 1914-18, the other for 1939-45.

'You had some bother last Armistice Day,' he said.

'Yes. When they gathered for the service, they found someone had spilt blood over the cross. Animal blood. You were asking about Jason Toke. It was Jason that did it. Everyone knew.'

'Toke?' said Wield. 'He's a funny-looking anti-war protester.'

'How very observant of you,' said Kee. 'He is, as he looks, quite obsessed with things military. Just like his brother.'

'There's another?'

'Was. Warren. A couple of years older than Jason. A year ago last Christmas he got blown up in Northern Ireland. That's when Jason started turning weird. One symptom was he wanted the Parish Council to put Warren's name on the War Memorial. He got extremely upset when they wouldn't.'

Wield ran his eye down the list of names.

'There's a Toke there already. Two.'

'Oh yes. They're all here if you look. Tokes and Wapshares. Hogbins and Guillemards, Digweeds and Halavants, all the old local families. A roll of honour or a testament to futility, depending how you look at it.'

'No question how Toke looked at it,' said Wield. 'How come he hasn't joined up?'

'Perhaps even the Army draws a line. No, that's unfair. It's just as likely to be a reluctance to leave his mother alone. They're very close.'

'That's all right, then,' said Wield. 'So your only real objection to Toke is he fancies your sister? Can't blame him for that.'

He spoke sincerely. Even lacking the equipment tuned to that particular wavelength, he had no trouble picking up the signal.

'Yes,' she said not without pride. 'Caddy's very attractive.'

'So you don't really think Toke could be positively dangerous?' he pressed.

She said, 'Who knows what anyone is capable of if pushed in the wrong direction, Sergeant? Even a policeman.'

They had walked up the hill and now they entered the churchyard. It was extremely well kept, gra.s.s razed, weeds strimmed, moss and lichen carefully removed from the headstones to leave even the oldest inscriptions legible.

'Someone works hard,' Wield observed.

'We know how to take care of our dead,' said Kee.

The same names he'd seen on the War Memorial were repeated here, though the democracy of its alphabetic listing was absent, with Tokes and Hogbins packed close together under simple slabs radiating away from the marble ma.s.s of the Guillemard mausoleum, over which brooded an intricately carved version of the bird he'd noticed on their coat of arms.

'What is that thing?' he asked.

'Heraldically it's a halcyon which in mythology guaranteed calm seas when it was brooding on its floating nest. Its real-life equivalent is the kingfisher. According to tradition, i.e. Guillemard propaganda, there were kingfishers nesting along the Een when the first Guillemards settled here in ten-sixty-something, and as long as they continue there, the family will enjoy halcyon days.'

'Must be pleased there's one here at the moment,' said Wield, recalling Mrs Pottinger.

'My, what sharp eyes and ears you have, Sergeant,' she said smiling.

Wield smiled back, thinking how nice it was to get information without having to suffer Digweed's savage putdowns.

When they reached the entrance to Green Alley he pointed to the lintel and asked, 'What's Fuctata non Perfecta mean?'

'Depends who you ask. Fuctata means painted or rouged, and by extension forged or counterfeit. It's either feminine singular or neuter plural. Thus the family will tell you it means either things which are painted cannot be perfect, or a rouged woman has got something to hide. In either case the implication is that the Guillemards play by the rules, what you see is what you get.'

'What if I ask in the village?'

'There are some who might go along with the Guillemards' claim to honesty by a.s.suring you it means we're not perfect, we're a bunch of phonies!'

'And you, miss?'

'At the moment I'm rather in sympathy with the answer you'd get from the habitues of the Morris just before closing time.'

'Which is?'

'Fuctata non Perfecta means f.u.c.k you, Jack, we're all right! Ah, here we are.'

She led the way into a small clearing. The fitful wind twitched the clouds and let a meagre ration of spring sunshine filter through the arching shrubs to light up the blossom of an old laurustinus leaning rather wearily against a little stone bench.

'How very odd,' murmured Kee, letting her gaze drift all round the glade. 'I'm afraid it's gone.'

'What? The hat?' said Wield.

'Not just the hat. The whole dashed statue!'

CHAPTER VIII.

'Miss H. is an elegant pleasing pretty-looking girl, about nineteen, I suppose, or nineteen and a half, or nineteen and a quarter, with flowers in her head and music at her finger ends.'

Frances Harding, having escorted Pascoe to the door, looked ready to flee back into the house. The sun, happening to break through the clouds at this moment, touched her face, letting Pascoe see clearly what before he'd only got a vague impression of. Unsure and self-effacing she might be, but now it struck him as the uncertainty of spring, and he guessed there was a definite self here to efface. Her eyes, when not cast modestly down, were bright with intelligence and blue as the ribbon which tied back her hair. For a moment he was reminded of someone. Girlie perhaps? Or the Squire? He didn't think so.

He said, 'Could you show me where the walled garden is?'