Arms and the Women

‘Yeah, yeah. Truth is, the world’s had to look after itself over the past couple of months. I’ve been feeling guilty – yes, I know; there I go again – so when Feenie rang about the next meeting, I said why not have it round here?’

‘Feenie? You don’t mean Serafina Macallum, the mad bag lady?’

‘That’s right. Our founder, chair and driving force. How on earth do you know her?’

‘She sold us the bothy. Or at least her lawyer did. We never met her during the negotiations, but I’ve come close to being run down by her several times, both in that clapped-out Land Rover she drives, and on that ancient bike. You’d think she had something against me.’

Ellie concealed the thought that this was probably truer than Daphne guessed. She knew that what Feenie Macallum resented about the break up of her family estate wasn’t losing bits of property but the kind of people she had to lose them to.

Her own ignorance of the details of the Aldermanns’ purchase of a country cottage lay in her knee-jerk disapproval when Daphne had mentioned it a couple of years earlier.

‘Patrick loves to see the kids and their friends enjoying themselves but he does go white when he sees them turning the garden into a football pitch or a badminton court, so I said, Why don’t we buy a chunk of unspoilt countryside which they can then spoil to their hearts’ content,’ she’d said.

And Ellie hadn’t been able to bite back the caustic comment that helping put the price of rural housing out of the reach of other people’s children hardly seemed a proportionate solution to Patrick’s concern for his precious roses.

The cottage hadn’t been much mentioned between them thereafter, and when it was, Ellie hadn’t been able to decide if Daphne’s insistence on calling it the bothy was diplomatic understatement or provocative meiosis. Nor was she really sure whether her own attitude was pure social indignation or part dog-in-the-manger envy.

Now she wished she hadn’t been so quick to make it a no-go area, both conversationally and geographically, as her certainty that Feenie Macallum would have soaked the purchasers for as much as she could get, then put the money to some very good use, would have allowed her to have her cake and eat it.

‘Anyway,’ continued Daphne, ‘she doesn’t look as if she knows what day of the week it is. Ring her up, tell her she’s got it wrong.’

‘Feenie is as sharp as a butcher’s knife,’ retorted Ellie. ‘And there are others concerned and I’ve mucked them about once already. The meeting should have been yesterday, but when I thought I was going to be riding herd on the school outing, I had to ring round everybody and rearrange. Oh God. I forgot to remind Peter they were coming.’

‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘What pleasanter surprise can there be for a hard-working bobby than to come home and find his house full of anarchist do-gooders? So let’s see if we can find a window in your crowded calendar. Lunch sometime later this week? Patrick’s going to some horticultural conference in Holland in the morning, Diana’s down at her cousin’s in Dorset and David’s at the bothy with some sixth-form chums. God, you are lucky to be in the State system. Costs you nothing and they spend most of their time at school, while we pay a fortune and ours are hardly ever there!’

Ellie smiled, but didn’t rise. A wise avenger picks her own payback time. Lunch at Rosemont, which invariably consisted of Marks and Sparks goodies tarted up to look home-made, should provide a good launch pad.

‘That sounds great,’ she said. ‘Any day but tomorrow. We’re going out to Enscombe. They’ve got some kind of menagerie at the Hall. Ed Wield, who lives in the village, was foolish enough to mention it to Rosie and she didn’t leave him alone till he promised to show her round.’

‘Wield? That’s the ugly sergeant, isn’t it? Didn’t you say he was a bit…?’

Daphne made a rocking gesture with her hand.

‘Gay?’ said Ellie. ‘That’s right. Except not a bit. All of him. And despite anything you learned at Sunday School, it doesn’t mean he lies in wait for small children.’

‘Never thought it did,’ said Daphne. ‘He struck me as a very nice man. And I recall Daddy saying that he preferred his curates gay, as it was easier to look after the choir when the curate was around than it was to look after the curate with the Mothers’ Union in full cry. Now I must whizz off and earn my keep. A garden centre caff! The mind boggles.’

‘Regards to Patrick,’ said Ellie. ‘And watch out for greenfly.’

She waved her friend goodbye, noting with self-mocking envy that since last they met she’d changed her car again for a sporty Audi, gave another wave to DC Dennis Seymour, and went back inside.

Mention of her Liberata meeting reminded her that she’d promised herself to do a bit of preparation. She’d completely neglected this and most other commitments during the past few weeks, but when Feenie Macallum asked questions, a wise acolyte had answers. She went back upstairs and switched on the laptop. There were no visible aftereffects of the coffee and she clicked on Liberata in her Documents and studied the names that came up. These were the women Feenie had allocated to her to be in correspondence with. Most were in prison. All were in trouble. Few were able to reply, so writing to them was often an act of faith. But as Feenie said, even if the letter is intercepted, it tells someone out there that we know these women exist and are victims, and that might make the difference between life and death.

She selected the first on her list, Bruna Cubillas, the first alphabetically but also the first in Ellie’s affections. There’d been replies from Bruna, enough for a real relationship to be established, and written with an intensity of feeling that took Ellie by surprise. She’d mentioned this to Feenie, who’d said, ‘If someone offers you a helping hand when you’re drowning, you grip tight.’

She began to write.

Dear Bruna,

How are you? I am sorry I have not written to you for so long but my life was turned upside down a little while ago.

She paused and tried to think how turned upside down could be rendered in Spanish. She usually made some attempt to translate the more idiomatic bits of her letters, though perhaps by now it wasn’t necessary. Bruna had said she was keen to build on her smattering of English, and asked for some books to help her. Ellie had sent off a boxful, ranging from The House at Pooh Corner to a complete Shakespeare, but what progress she might have made Ellie had no idea. A hasty postscript to Bruna’s last letter had offered a gracias for ‘the book’, meaning presumably the suspicious and repressive prison regime had allowed only one of her boxful through. That was, she worked it out, almost a year ago. Ellie had written several letters since, but her last had been several weeks before Rosie’s illness. She thought ruefully of how flimsy a thing her concern for this poor imprisoned and probably tortured woman thousands of miles away had proved in the presence of immediate and personal pain, but she couldn’t feel guilty. Once, perhaps, but not now. Am I growing more or less selfish?

She returned her attention to the letter.

How much of her recent trauma should she lay out here? Feenie’s words came back to her. ‘Tell them everything about yourself,’ she commanded. ‘However trite, however tragic. That way they’ll know you really care, you’re not just dishing up nourishing broth for the peasants. What you’re doing is letting them know there is a real world still going on beyond their prison walls, there are real people still living their lives beyond the blank faces of their guards and torturers.’

But when Ellie had asked for information about Bruna, Feenie had shaken her head.

‘Best you don’t know,’ she said. ‘These women live under regimes and in circumstances you can’t imagine. Sometimes they are totally innocent, but sometimes they may have done things which you in your ignorance could find hard to understand or justify. All you need to know is that they are suffering cruel and unnatural treatment. It is your task to give them hope. What they give you in return is up to them.’

Ellie began typing again.

My little girl Rosie was taken ill…

The phone rang.

Irritated, she went next door into the bedroom and picked up the receiver.

‘What?’ she bellowed.

‘Charming. I wish I hadn’t bothered.’

‘Daphne, is that you? What’s up? You forget something?’

‘Only how brusque you can be. Listen, I just thought I’d ring you to tell you you’re being watched.’

‘Yes, I know. Dennis Seymour. I thought you said he spoke to you…’

‘Don’t be so dim, Ellie. I don’t mean him. You know those plane trees on that little triangle of no-man’s-land at the corner of your road? Well, I noticed this fellow hanging about there when I drove past earlier. Only then, not knowing anything about yesterday’s punch-up at the Pascoe corral, I didn’t pay much heed. But when I passed the trees just now and saw he was still there, still looking towards your house, I thought, Hello-Hello-Hello, this looks like one for a citizen’s arrest.’

‘Daphne, don’t you dare! Don’t do anything. I’ll get the guy on watch to deal.’

‘So what are you going to do? Run out of the house and point this way? No, listen, untwist your knickers. Count up to a hundred. All I’m going to do is get out of the car and stroll back towards him and distract him with brilliant conversation. When you get to a hundred, then head out to your guardian angel and send him winging this way as quick as he likes. And if chummy here tries to do a runner, I’ll stick my leg out and send him sprawling, a tactic for which I was once renowned in Mid-Yorkshire girls’ hockey circles.’

‘No,’ insisted Ellie. ‘Do nothing. I’ll –’

‘Start counting. One, two, three…’

The phone went dead.

Ellie didn’t hesitate. She went sprinting down the stairs, out of the house, down the drive, waving and calling to the watching Seymour. He spotted her and started to get out of the car.

‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Stay there! Start up!’

He was, God be thanked, quick-witted enough to obey.

‘Turn, turn, turn! Go, go, go!’ commanded Ellie, scrambling into the passenger seat.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked calmly as he accelerated through a U-turn, getting the car up to sixty in about nine seconds.

‘We’re there!’ she yelled. ‘Stop. Oh, sweet Jesus.’

The car snaked to a halt alongside the plane trees.

A figure slumped against one of them, head thrown back to show a face which was a mask of blood.

‘Call an ambulance,’ cried Ellie, leaping from the car and rushing towards her friend. ‘Daphne, are you all right?’

The woman made a gasping noise which may or may not have been an answer, but at least her eyes were open and she was moving and breathing.

‘Why didn’t you wait?’ Ellie couldn’t stop herself from asking as she knelt to examine the damage. ‘Oh Jesus. What a mess. Is it just your face or are you hurt anywhere else?’

‘…aar…’ gasped Daphne.

‘What? Where?’

‘Car. Bastard took my car. Oh God. Look at the state of this blouse.’

vii

a pint of guinness

‘That’s two days in succession our street’s been full of police cars,’ said Ellie. ‘The neighbours are going to start complaining about you bringing your work home.’

‘They should think themselves lucky I’m not a rock star,’ said Pascoe.

‘We should all think ourselves lucky for that,’ said Ellie.

They were at the hospital, to which Ellie had accompanied Daphne in the ambulance. Pascoe had arrived almost simultaneously. He could see she was seriously stressed, but coping by dint of having someone else to look after. Activity had always been her way of dealing with life’s ambushes.

She’d told him what little she knew. Daphne had gasped out her car number and the policeman on watch had put out an alert. Apart from that, she had on Ellie’s insistence concentrated on using her mouth for breathing.

‘Peter, how’re you doing? You here for Mrs Aldermann?’

Dr John Sowden was an old acquaintance, almost an old friend, of Pascoe’s. They had first met at the intersection of a police and medical case and perhaps because that had marked out so clearly the parameters of their areas of common ground, their friendship had somehow only flourished in miniature, like a bonsai tree.

‘That’s right. How is she?’

‘Fine, considering someone’s given her a fair bang on the nose. Broken but I think we’ll get away without surgery.’

‘Any other injuries?’

‘No. Some shock from the assault and the loss of blood, but nothing that a good night’s rest won’t put right. I’ve got a nurse cleaning her up now, then she’ll be ready to go home. What is it? Your friendly neighbourhood mugging? Were you with her when it happened, Ellie? Can check you out as well, if you like.’

He was looking at the blood on her T-shirt.

‘No, thanks,’ said Ellie. ‘This is Daphne’s. I got there later. I’m fine.’

It wasn’t a complete lie. She consulted her body and mind and found that she felt a lot better than she thought she ought to. Perhaps like a vampire I need blood to feed on, she thought, watching as Pascoe, with an apologetic smile in her direction, drew Sowden a little way along the corridor and spoke to him in a low voice.

When he rejoined her she said, ‘So?’

‘So you heard it all. He wasn’t keeping anything back for my ears only.’

‘Well, I’m pleased about that, else this new, violent doppelgänger of mine might have been tempted to break his nose too.’

But she smiled as she said it. She liked John Sowden. He was pretty sound on issues like abortion and euthanasia and he had a mouth to die for.

A few moments later they were allowed into the treatment room where they found Daphne sitting on the edge of a bed, drinking tea.

She said, ‘Ellie, have you seen the state of me? I shall have to go into purdah for a month at least.’

‘No, you look fine, honestly. You’ll have those English-rose looks back in no time.’

‘An English rose I don’t mind but not when I’m wearing it bang in the middle of my face. Oh God, has anyone been in touch with Patrick? No way I can go to the garden centre like this. They’d probably spray me with an anti-black-spot mixture.’

‘I tried your home number on my mobile,’ said Pascoe. ‘No reply. Give us the name of this garden centre and I’ll make sure he gets a message to come here and collect you.’

‘No, please. Just say I can’t make it to lunch, I’ll see him at home later,’ said Daphne firmly. ‘It’s called Mossy Bank. Thank you, Peter, you’re a darling.’

Pascoe stepped aside to make the call and Ellie sat on the bed next to her friend and put her arm around her.

‘Watch out for blood,’ said Daphne. ‘This blouse is ruined.’

‘It’ll come out,’ said Ellie. ‘And I’m well spattered already.’

‘Are you? Let me see. Oh, I’m sorry. I hope it’s not one of your best.’

Ellie, knowing well Daphne’s view that baggy T-shirts, especially those printed with subversive messages, were the nadir of style and taste, laughed out loud and said, ‘I’ll insist that you personally buy me an exact replacement in the market. So, my girl, what the hell did you think you were playing at, provoking this hoodlum? He might have had a knife or a gun or anything.’

‘Didn’t see why you should have all the fun. But why is it when a snotty-nosed Trot like you mixes with the lowlife, you get to kick them in the balls, while a respectable Tory lady like me ends up in hospital?’

Before Ellie could answer, Pascoe rejoined them, saying, ‘That’s done. Daphne, I hope you haven’t been telling Ellie your tale because you’re just going to have to tell it to me again.’

‘She was just going to start,’ said Ellie.

‘I was just going to tell you it was all your fault, actually,’ said Daphne. ‘I had it all sorted. I was going to stroll up to this fellow and distract his attention. Then while he had his back turned on your house (after the count of one hundred, remember?), you were going to get your guardian angel to come scooting along to make an arrest. Except that just as I got to him, you came belting out of your driveway, waving your arms and screaming at that poor policeman in the car. Naturally my man realized something was up and turned to make his getaway. Equally naturally, I attempted to grapple with him and keep him there. Upon which he nutted me, I think is the phrase. It’s something I’ve often seen on the telly and I’ve always assumed its effect was a touch exaggerated, like people in Westerns being hurled backwards when someone shoots them. Now I know better. It’s a funny thing how much closer I’ve got to the realities of lowlife since I met you, Ellie.’

‘It’s another funny thing,’ said Ellie, ‘that now you can’t talk down your nose, you sound almost normal.’

‘Daphne,’ said Pascoe quickly. ‘This man, can you describe him?’

‘Well, he was furtive, you know. Perhaps not so much furtive as simply loitering. That’s what made me notice him, though, as I told Ellie. I wouldn’t really have paid any attention if she hadn’t told me about her dreadful experience of yesterday…’

As Daphne Aldermann got older, she sounded more and more like an archdeacon’s daughter, thought Pascoe. Or rather the way you expected an archdeacon’s daughter to sound in an old black and white play, circumlocutory and slightly prissy, with audible inverted commas appearing round any modernism. She should have been a judge. Or at least a magistrate. Yes, she was precisely the type of woman who, despite valiant efforts to broaden the selectorate, still dominated on the magisterial bench. Not that she’d ever shown the slightest ambition in the direction so far as he knew. And while she might make bath sound like an American novelist, she could pronounce the shibboleth which got you admitted to Ellie’s friendship so there had to be more to her than met the eye. Which was probably true of her husband also. A quiet, charming man who lived for roses, he had been in the frame for not one but several apparently accidental deaths. Nothing was ever proved, and in his company Pascoe blushed to recall his suspicions. And yet… and yet…

‘Could you describe him, please, Daphne?’ he said.

‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I’m jabbering a bit, aren’t I? First time I’ve been assaulted, you see. Comes as a shock, especially when the motive isn’t sexual. No, that’s a stupid thing to say, it would obviously have been a much greater shock if he’d then gone on to rape me. What I mean is, he just nutted me as if… well, as if I were a man.’

‘Not an English gentleman then?’ murmured Pascoe, winning a Medusa glare from Ellie. ‘Sorry.’

‘No. You’re right. I mean, I’m not saying he wasn’t English, or British anyway. As Ellie keeps on telling me, we’re a rainbow society now. But he certainly wasn’t Anglo-Saxon. He was dark, not negroid, just well-grilled, like Ellie. I wish I tanned like that but with my colouring all you get’s a splotchy pink. Still, they say nowadays it’s bad for you, too much sun, gives you skin cancer… not that I’m suggesting for one moment, dear, that you’re in danger of that. No, I’m sure in your case it’s all down to natural pigmentation…’

‘Putting aside the interesting question of Ellie’s ethnic origins,’ said Pascoe, ‘you’re saying this fellow was well-tanned? Hair?’

‘Yes, of course. Sorry, I mean it was black, cut short, I don’t mean shaven, not like those – do they still call them bovver boys?’

‘The term is, I believe, a trifle passé,’ said Pascoe. ‘So, short hair. Moustache? Beard?’

‘Yes, now I come to think of it, he did have a moustache,’ said Daphne. ‘Not a big one. Short too. Like his hair. In fact, he was very neat generally, almost dapper. He would have made a very good head waiter at a decent restaurant.’

Was she taking the piss? He glanced at Ellie, who gave him her sardonic smile. She had once advised him, not much point in mocking Daphne when she’s so much better at it herself. But it was hard to resist the temptation. And she seemed to enjoy it in a harmlessly flirty kind of way. Harmless because there wasn’t the slightest sign he turned her on, and he himself had never gone overboard on English roses, who, in a metamorphosis which might have been of interest to Ovid, often seemed to age into English horses.

Whatever, the technique finally got him a pretty good description. Not very big, five-six, five-seven maybe, slim build, thin face, sharp-nosed, wearing a dark-blue lightweight jacket of good cut (Daphne had an eye for clothes), well-pressed light-grey slacks without turn-ups, wine-coloured loafers (this with a moue of distaste), an open-necked powder-blue shirt, and a gold chain with some sort of medallion round his neck.

‘Excellent,’ said Pascoe. ‘Hang on.’

He raised Control on his mobile and passed on the description. In return he was told that the Audi had been found.

‘That’s quick,’ said Pascoe.

‘Didn’t get far. Leyburn Road. A shopping parade. You know it, sir?’

‘Know it? I owe money there.’

It was five minutes’ drive from his house, ten minutes’ walk via the recreation ground.

‘Who’s there?’ he asked.

‘Sergeant Wield.’

That was good. Everything would be in smooth running order.

‘Pass him the description,’ said Pascoe, unnecessarily, he was sure, but he said it anyway. Ellie, who’d picked up the gist, was hissing something at him.

‘What?’

‘The car, is it OK?’

For a second the words who the hell cares about the sodding car? formed in his mind. But the answer was too obvious for them to get near his lips. Ellie cared. Not about the car, but about the fact that her friend had been hurt acting, albeit unasked, on her behalf. Her concern about the car was, literally, a damage-limitation exercise.

‘Is the Audi OK?’ he asked.

‘Far as we know, no problem. Just neatly parked.’

‘Thanks.’ He switched off and said, ‘The Audi’s parked in Leyburn Road. It looks fine.’

‘That’s something, isn’t it, Daph?’

Daphne managed a smile at her friend and said, ‘Yes, that’s something.’

She doesn’t give a damn either, thought Pascoe. But she understands what Ellie’s on about.

He said, ‘OK if we move on? This guy, did he speak at all?’

‘Not a word. What in the circumstances do you think he might have found to say?’

‘Well, something like, Take that, you bitch, when he hit you.’

‘Take that, you bitch? Really, Peter, you’re so old-fashioned sometimes. No, he said nothing, or nothing I heard. What I did hear was my Audi revving up and I thought, the bastard’s stealing my car.’

‘You’d left the key in the ignition?’

‘Yes, and my mobile phone on the dash. Is that still there, by the way? No, of course you won’t know. Stupid of me, now I come to think of it. If I’d got chummy to the car, he’d have been dead suspicious soon as he realized I could have rung for help, wouldn’t he?’

‘Not as suspicious as he’d have been when he turned the key and the engine started first time,’ smiled Pascoe. ‘I’ll check out the phone. There’ll be a car waiting to take you home soon as you’re ready.’

He left Daphne in Ellie’s care and went out. Dennis Seymour was waiting for him in the corridor, looking anxious. Reason told him his watching brief hadn’t extended to covering all Mrs Pascoe’s friends and acquaintance, but he knew from personal experience that in the matter of a man’s family, reason did not always apply. But Pascoe was not in the accusing mood.

He said, ‘So, Dennis. You been racking your brains for me?’

‘Yes, sir. Sorry. Nothing more than what I told you. Like I said, I took a note of every vehicle that went along the street while I was on watch. Nothing acting suspiciously. Control’s checked the numbers. Nothing dodgy. All good citizens, nothing known.’