A Clubbable Woman. Reginald Hill

it, though he probably wouldn’t admit to it if he did. Pascoe would know. He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit. Or … leave school at sixteen, start as office boy. You can be assistant personnel manager by the time you’re forty. If you’re lucky. And if the general manager is a big rugby fan.

      I’d better be getting down to Jenny. Poor Jenny. I wish I knew how hard this has hit her. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we should get away for a bit. Where? What on? There’s not all that much spare in the account. All this costs a bit. Even if you haggled over headstones. Now if I’d gone first, Mary’d have been sitting pretty. But what kind of man insures against his wife’s death?

      At least they can’t say I killed her for profit. But it’d be nice to get away. Soon. When things had quietened down. It’d be nice to get far, far away. To somewhere as unlike this as possible.

      Back to the desert.

      Over twenty years earlier, Connon had been sent to join his unit in Egypt at the start of his National Service. He had only been out there a couple of months when the regiment returned home, and at the time the few weeks he spent there seemed to consist of nothing but endless liquid motions of the bowels. He had been as delighted as the rest to return to England and it was this period that saw the blossoming of his rugby career. He had played only a couple of times since leaving school but now he became quickly aware of the advantages traditionally enjoyed by the athlete in His Majesty’s forces. His natural talent exploded into consummate artistry in these conditions and only the simultaneous service, as officer, of the current Welsh stand-off kept him out of the Army XV.

      But something of his brief acquaintance with the desert did not easily die. It remained with him as dreams of luxury hotels in the remote Bermudas haunt some men. He read anything he could get hold of on the desert. Any desert. He collected colour brochures and handouts from the travel agents. Fifteen days in Morocco. Three weeks in Tunisia. Amazing value. But always too much for him.

      In any case the desert Connon really wanted to visit was not in any of the brochures, not even the most expensive. He recognized it by its absence, that is, he knew what he wanted was something out of the reach of a camera; something untranslatable into colour photography and glossy paper. He wanted rock that had absorbed terrible, endless heat for a million years, that had writhed in infinitely slow violence till its raw bowels lay on the surface, yet without a single movement noticed by man. He wanted sand which rose and fell like the sea, but so slowly that it was only when it drowned his own civilization that a man recognized its tides.

      It was a vision he confided to no one. Least of all Mary, who had found his collection of travel brochures nuisance enough.

      Perhaps Jenny …

      Hs saw that she had got out of the car again and was standing against the bonnet looking up towards him. Otherwise the car park was now completely empty.

      He began to walk towards her.

      ‘I wasn’t going to ask her anything,’ repeated Pascoe. ‘Not then. Not there. I felt sorry for her. Just standing there. She looked, I don’t know, helpless somehow.’

      This, he thought, is a turn up for the book. Bruiser Dalziel lecturing me on tact and diplomacy. It was like Henry the Eighth preaching about marital constancy.

      ‘Well, watch it. We don’t harry people at funerals. At least not unless we think they did it. And we don’t think young Jenny Connon did it, do we?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      ‘You checked, of course?’

      ‘Of course. She was nearly a hundred miles away. We know that.’

      ‘It’s about all we bloody well do know. The only thing we make any progress with is the list of things we don’t know. Item: who had a strong motive to kill her? No one we know, not even the great Connie as far as we know.’

      ‘Strength of motive is in the mind of the murderer, sir.’

      ‘Confucius, he bloody well say. To continue. Item: what did he kill her with? A metal object or at least an object with a metal end, cylindrical in shape, long enough to be grasped probably with both hands and smashed right between the eyes of a victim who sits there smiling and doesn’t even try to duck.’

      ‘The pathologist’s report did say that Mrs Connon had unusually fragile bones, sir. Perhaps we’re overestimating the strength needed.’

      ‘So what? Thanks for nothing. And Mary Connon fragile? I don’t believe it. It couldn’t be true. With tits like those she’d have broken her collar-bone every time she stood up. To continue again. Item: who saw anything suspicious or even anyone anywhere near the house that night? Not a soul. Not even the eyes and ears of the Woodfield Estate, your friend Fernie. All he can swear is that Connon was rolling drunk. Which Connon can disprove with con-bloody-siderable ease.’

      ‘It does fit with Connon’s account, though. About his giddiness, I mean. Makes his story that bit stronger, don’t you think? And our doctor did find signs of a slight concussion. He’s still seeing his own man, too. I checked.’

      Dalziel slammed his fist so hard on the desk that Pascoe broke his rule of stony non-reaction to his superior and started in his chair.

      ‘I’m not interested in the bloody man’s health. If he’s innocent, he can drop dead tomorrow for all I care.’

      ‘A sentiment that does you credit, sir. But there is one thing about this injury to Connon that’s a little bit odd.’

      ‘What’s that, and why isn’t it in your report?’ asked Dalziel suspiciously.

      ‘Apparently irrelevant. But I felt you might like it, sir.’

      Dalziel licked his lips and looked as if the task of strangling Pascoe personally and instantly might not be unattractive.

      ‘It’s just that when I was down at the Club, I talked among others to a chap called Slater.’

      ‘Fat Fred. I know him.’

      ‘Slater remembered Connon being laid out. But, he added casually and as far as I could see without malice, that he reckoned the boot that did the damage belonged to Evans, his own captain. He seemed to think it was just a case of mistaken identity.’

      ‘Fred would. He’s thick as pigshit, that one. But Arthur Evans isn’t made that way. He plays hard, but he’d never put the boot in.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘So Fred Slater should start wearing his glasses on the field. Or better still, give up. It’s indecent a man that size exposing himself in public. I don’t know how his wife manages him.’

      He chuckled to himself at the thought and murmured, ‘Levers, I should think.’

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Sergeant,’ he said quietly, ‘is there anything we’ve left undone which we ought to have done?’

      ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

      ‘Right. Then somewhere, in some area we are covering, or have covered, lies the clue.’

      ‘The clue?’

      ‘There’s always a clue, boy. Don’t you read the Sunday papers? All this started somewhere and it wasn’t Boundary Drive. Or if it was, we’re not going to get much help there. Now where’s our best bet?’

      Pascoe spoke like a bored actor who was thinking of things other than his lines.

      ‘At the Club.’

      ‘That’s right. I think I’ll just drop in there tonight. No, tomorrow. That’s a training night. They’ll all be there. Socially, I mean, for a pot of ale. If there’s anything known, they’ll tell me by chucking-out time. They’ll tell me.’