A Killing Kindness (7 page)

The disused section of the airport, where the  urgent weeds and grasses had turned the runway  into crazy paving and a couple of derelict buildings  gaped like dead mouths at the unremembering  sky, was now the site of an unofficial/official gypsy  encampment.

It was 'unofficial' because the local council had  been arguing for years about the need to provide  an official site in the area; it was 'official' because  during the hard months of the winter and during  the two weeks of the High Fair the council and the  police operated a 'no-hassle' policy. But come the spring and come the end of fair fortnight, the  stand-pipes were turned off and the travelling folk  invited to travel. There was a strong lobby in  the gliding club which wanted them cleared off  permanently, claiming that apart from polluting  the nearby river with their sewage, their ponies  (the same which had been banned from Charter  Park) were a menace to gliders and small aircraft landing only a quarter-mile away. The council had erected a picket fence to prevent the ponies from  straying but this was not proving one hundred per  cent effective, as Wield realized when he got out of his car close to the gaudily painted caravans.

Normally the arrival of a stranger would have  been viewed with close suspicious interest, but at this moment all attention was focused on a noisy  and potentially violent confrontation taking place  in the middle of the caravan circle.

On the one side was a group of gypsies with Dave Lee at their head. On the other were two  men, one slight, blond, wirily built, in slacks and  a sports shirt, the other much bulkier and sweating in a thick windcheater and flying helmet. All  around them at a discreet distance stood a circle of  interested women and kids.

The heavier man was wagging a finger that  wouldn't take much bending to make a fist in  Lee's face.

'Listen, you,' he grated in a harsh Yorkshire  accent, 'I see one more bloody pony on the Aero  Club's ground and I'll shoot it, you hear? And  then I'll come and shoot the bugger who owns  it.'

Dave Lee bared brown-stained teeth in a sneer  and answered in an unpunctuated and rather high-pitched gabble. 'Listen mister what's up here you  come here fucking threatening and talking about  some pony which pony show us the fucking pony  and what do you think anyway that ponies have  no fucking sense to get out of the way of those machines more fucking sense than some fucking  idiots who go up in them!'

The wagging finger folded. Wield had recognized  the face beneath the flying helmet. It was Bernard  Middlefield, JP. Not a man he cared for, but not  a bad magistrate from a police point of view. At  least he jumped hard on first offenders, believed  police evidence like Holy Writ, and started from  the useful premise that ninety per cent of what  most social workers said was crap.

It would be interesting but not diplomatic to  witness him thumping the gypsy. The blond man  seemed bent on acting as a peacemaker but there  was no guarantee of his success.

Wield advanced, warrant card at the ready, and  addressed himself to Lee.

'Mr Lee?' he said. 'Can I have a word?'

The big gypsy laughed scornfully and said in the  direction of Middlefield, 'No wonder he wants to  fight when already he's called the cops!'

'Are you the police?' said Middlefield. 'Just in  the nick!'

Wield didn't want to get involved but he had  to hear the tale. The blond man was Austin  Greenall, Chief Flying Instructor of the Aero Club.  He had been manning the launching winch to get  Middlefield's glider airborne when a pony had  come wandering across the path of the accelerating  aircraft and nearly caused an accident. Middlefield  had come straight to the gypsy encampment closely  attended by the secretary.

'Ultimately it's the council that are responsible,  sir,' said Wield. 'They own all this land. You lease  from them, I believe? So keeping fences in repair  is their job.'

'Thanks for nothing,' said Middlefield. 'If I'd got killed, you might have taken heed, is that it? Well,  I'll tell you something, these buggers need sorting  out, and I'm the man to do it. They're anti-social,  dirty and dishonest. I've got my works on the  estate not a quarter-mile from here. When this site's occupied, I double my security staff.
Double  it.
And that costs brass!'

'I'm sorry, sir,' said Wield. 'Unless there's been  a breach of the law . . .'

Middlefield snorted indignantly, turned on his  heel and marched away. Greenall gave an apologetic shrug to Wield, said, 'For God's sake, Mr  Lee, watch those animals of yours,' and went  after him.

'Yorkshiremen!' said Lee. 'Tough buggers, they  think. Always wanting to fight.'

'Not me,' said Wield. 'I want to talk.'

They went to sit in the sergeant's car. Gypsies don't invite strangers, especially policemen, readily into their caravans and though the day was  balmy, Wield knew that if he talked with Lee  out of doors, he would quickly inherit the circle  of curious kids.

Away from the excitement of confrontation, the gypsy's torrential speaking style declined to  a reluctant dribble.

'It's about last Thursday night,' said Wield.

'I've told all that.'

'I read what you said,' said Wield.

'Well then.'

'You said you were at the Fair from eight till  eleven, mainly on the dodgems.'

'Yes.'

'And you didn't see anyone resembling the dead  girl during that time.'

'That's right. ‘You don't sleep at Charter Park, do you?'

'No. They stopped the ponies a few years back.  Said they were dangerous. Like that short-arse  fool.'

'So you came back here to your caravan at  night. How?'

'I've a van. That's it there. Licensed and insured.'

'I never suggested it wasn't,' said Wield. 'But I'll check. I've done a lot of checking on you already,  Mr Lee.'

'So?'

'So I know all about you. You've a nasty temper.'

The man shrugged.

'Against women too. I saw a woman today at  your stall. She'd had a nasty crack.'

'She's a clumsy bitch.'

'Yes. Rape too. You've not stopped short of that,  have you?'

This at last restarted the torrent of words, but  not English. Wield said finally, 'Shut up or I'll pull  your balls off.'

The man subsided, then burst out again. 'There  wasn't no rape! No conviction! Rape that slut?  Stick feathers on a chicken!'

'All right, all right,' said Wield impatiently.  'Where was your van parked?'

'Behind the stall,' he answered sullenly.

'And you just drove back here? Straight back?  At eleven?'

'Eleven, half past. I don't know. It started raining. We packed the stuff from the stall into the van like  every night.'

'We?'

'My wife and me. You met her you said. Then  back here.'

'And no doubt she'll confirm this? And that you  then went to bed and slept peacefully all night?'

The man didn't bother to answer.

'All right,' said Wield. 'Now tell me about Madame Rashid.'

He had a sense at that moment of the gypsy's  receptivity being turned up a notch, though there  was no outer physical sign.

'You know her?'

'Yes.'

'In fact she's a relation of yours, isn't that so?'

'She married a
gorgio,'
he said. 'Many years  ago.'

'And her niece. You know her too?'

'I see her at the park.'

Wield paused. He'd no idea why he'd introduced  this line of questioning. It wasn't going anywhere.

He decided on the heavily significant abrupt  conclusion.

'All right,' he said. That's it.'

'What?'

'Out.'

The big gypsy got out of the car and shut the  door with a force that shook Wield. An older  grey-haired man with a ruddy open face who  had been hanging around close by approached Lee and exchanged words with him in rapid Romany.  Wield leaned out of his window and beckoned to  the newcomer.

'Who're you?' he demanded.

'Me, pal? I'm Silvester. Silvester Herne's my name, pal.'

'Are you the boss of this lot? The king or whatever you call it?'

'Me, pal?' he said again, looking amazed. 'Just  an old gypsy, just old Silvester.'

'Well, old Silvester, see if you can get it into your  friend's thick skull. I'm not happy about him. I'll be back. Meanwhile, get that fence mended, stop  them ponies straying. Or you'll all be in trouble.  Right?'

'Right, pal,' said Herne, beaming co-operation.  'Straightaway!'

That was telling them! thought Wield as he  drove away, but years of experience had taught  him that telling gypsies anything was like talking  to the trees. Not that he objected to gypsies as  such, though the untidiness of their life made him shudder. If anything, he felt a sneaking sympathy  with them as outcasts and envy of them as defiant outcasts. And perhaps there was some atavistic fear in his attitude also. He had certainly been more  affected by Rosetta Stanhope's trance yesterday than he cared to reveal.

He should have gone back to the station but instead he found himself driving to his own flat,  where he made himself a cup of tea. It was a gloomy place, he thought dejectedly. Even on the  brightest of days the small north-facing windows  let little light in. And it was drab and impersonal.  Not many people visited him here apart from  his married sister and the young nephew whose  cassette recorder he had used at the seance. But  the secretive element in his make-up drew him to  the anonymous and noncommittal in all but the  most private areas of life.

Reacting against the thought, he picked up his  phone and dialled Maurice's business number in Newcastle. But when the phone was answered he  replaced it without speaking. They had an agreement. All contact to be private except in extreme  emergency. This was no emergency though somehow it felt as if there might be an emergency in  the offing, like an area of low pressure over the  Atlantic on the telly weather chart.

When he finally drank his tea it was quite cold  and he saw with dismay that he had been sitting  totally abstracted for more than an hour. It was  after three-thirty.

He left the flat hurriedly. Pascoe was going to want to know how he'd spent his time. He would  not be pleased. As for Dalziel . . .

At least he ought to be able to say he'd spoken  to Pauline Stanhope.

He drove back to Charter Park, but swore under  his breath when he saw the chair with the
BACK  SOON
sign still outside Madame Rashid's tent. What  the hell did
SOON
mean to a fortune-teller?

It ought to mean something.

Suddenly uneasy, he pushed the chair aside and  opened the flap.

It was dark inside, dark and musty. The triangle  of light from the opening fell across a plain trestle table.

'Oh Jesus,' said Wield.

He took two steps forward. Looked down. Retreated. As he pulled the flap down and replaced  the chair with the sign a pair of young girls  approached. One said boldly while the other giggled, 'Are you the fortune-teller, mister?'

'No,' said Wield. 'She's gone.'

'When will she be back?'

He gestured at the sign, then hurried away  towards his car to radio for assistance.

BACK SOON
. But from where?

Across the trestle table, her legs dangling off one end but her arms neatly crossed over her breast, lay the body of Pauline Stanhope.

She had been strangled.

Chapter 7

'Not a good advert, this,' said Dalziel. 'Like a  butcher getting food poison.'

'Yes, sir,' said Pascoe, though his more exact  mind found the analogy imprecise and therefore  dissatisfying. He didn't say so, but wondered what  the newspapers might make of a murder in a  fortune-teller's tent.

The press were imminent, of course. The discovery of a crime by an experienced officer gives  the police a head start in getting their investigation under way free from public or professional  interference. But once they start, the news speeds  like a run on the pound even from sites much  more sequestered than a busy fairground. A rope  barrier had been erected around the tent to keep  the public back. The police doctor had examined  the body briefly, pronounced the girl dead, probable cause strangulation, probable time two to four hours earlier. Next, at Pascoe's suggestion,  because of the smallness of the internal area, a single detective had been sent in on hands  and knees, armed with a high-powered torch  and a plastic bag, to pick over every inch of  the floor space before the photographer and  fingerprint men further trampled the already  well crushed grass. Another couple of men were  put to examining the turf in the environs of the  tent, but the passage of so many feet there made  it a token gesture.

Next, photographs were taken from all angles,  sketches made, distances measured. Then the  fingerprint boys, who had been dusting the chair  and notice outside, moved in and did the chair  and table inside with the body still
in situ.
Finally,  after Dalziel had stood and looked phlegmatically  at the corpse for a few minutes, he gave the order  for it to be slid into its plastic bag and taken  to the mortuary where the clothes would be carefully removed and despatched to the lab for  examination.

Now the print men did the rest of the table  before it and the chairs were also packaged and  despatched to the lab.

While all this was going on, a police caravan had been towed into the car park and here  already statements were being taken for the second time in a week from the fairground people, with particular attention paid to those whose stalls or entertainments were within sighting distance of the tent.

Of these, the sharp-faced woman on the penny-roll stall was the most positive. Her name was Ena  Cooper.

'Just before twelve she went. I told the ugly fellow. No, I didn't speak, well, she weren't all that close, like, and we was busy. Things don't  really pick up while afternoon, but you get a lot  of kids round late morning and the roll stalls are  always popular with the kids. No, I didn't see her  come back, I went across to our Ethel's, she's got a  hot-dog stand by the Wheel, for a bite to eat later  on, so she could have come back then. About two  o'clock, just after the ugly fellow was here the first time. I was away mebbe forty-five minutes. No,  it's no use asking
him.
He's so short-sighted he  can hardly see the pennies. Kids cheat him rotten  when I'm not here!'