Exit Lines Read online

  REGINALD HILL

  * * *

  EXIT LINES

  A Dalziel and Pascoe novel

  Copyright

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1984

  Copyright © Reginald Hill 1984

  Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780586072530

  Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007374007

  Version: 2015-06-18

  See how the world its veterans rewards!

  Pope: Moral Essays, Epistle 2

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Keep Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  ‘I am just going outside and I may be some time.’

  On a cold and storm-racked November night, while Peter and Ellie Pascoe were still celebrating with wine and wassail the first birthday which their daughter Rose had greeted with huge indifference, three old men, who felt far from indifferent, died.

  Thomas Arthur Parrinder, 71, was aroused for the last time by a warm wetness amid the freezing rain which had been lashing his face for almost four hours. He opened one eye and saw above him, silhouetted vaguely against the dark sky, a long animal head with pricking ears, and he glimpsed also the gleam of tooth and inquisitive eye as the beast stooped down to lick at him once more. His mouth gaped and a rattle that may have been a laugh spilled out with it a single word. ‘Polly!’ No other word passed his lips, and precious little breath either, before an overworked hospital doctor pronounced him (not without some guilty relief) dead on arrival.

  At just about the same time, Robert Deeks, 73, was being hooked back from a long slide to oblivion by the ringing of a distant bell. A little earlier another bell had rung for some considerable time, but that had eventually ceased. At last this new one stopped too. Then a door opened. A voice called out. Other doors. Opening and shutting. Footsteps below, hurrying, scurrying; a voice growing in volume and alarm; footsteps and voice together on the stairs, ascending. He took another lurch back to reality. He was in a bathroom, his own bathroom. To register this was quite a triumph and, thus encouraged, his mind took a further step. He was in the bath! He looked down at the russet-coloured water lapping his chest, grey and flimsy as a sodden newspaper blown against a picket fence. His mind suddenly broke through fact into feeling. It would be a shaming thing to be found in the bath, especially when he had made it so dirty. It was a special old people’s bath with a non-slip bottom and padded grips to help him ease himself in and out. He reached for the grips now, but his nerveless and swollen-knuckled fingers could find no purchase, and even if they had, he knew there was no strength left in his arms to pull himself upright. He let his arms fall. Fact and feeling were beginning to retreat at an even pace. He felt himself slipping away with them. A cry of horror from the open door inhibited the process for one last moment. Slowly he turned his head and saw his daughter in the doorway, paralysed at the shock of seeing him bathed in his own diluted blood. He opened his toothless mouth and said, ‘Charley.’ The next bell to ring was the ambulance bell but he was moving beyond recall towards a more urgent summons by then.

  Philip Cater Westerman (70) felt the rain bouncing off his plastic mac and the wind trying to get under it as he mounted his bicycle and rode out of the car park of The Duke of York. At least the wind was behind him as he turned left towards The Towers. That this narrow, country thoroughfare was called Paradise Road did not strike him yet as ironical. Then he saw lights coming towards him, making nothing of the wind, ripping through the curtain of rain with arrogant ease. The car must have covered a hundred yards in the time he took to cover ten, even with the wind at his back. And in the same instant as the thought, the lights were twisting and brakes screaming in an attempt at evasion both desperate and vain. He was facing the car when he and it almost simultaneously came to a halt. He saw the two front doors burst open and two figures come running towards him, one broad and bulky, the other as tall but thinner. The image remained in his mind, surprisingly powerful, indeed almost analgesic in its strength, as he was hurried to hospital. There, the same harassed houseman who had registered the first two septuagenarians d.o.a. saw that another mile in the ambulance would almost certainly have given him three in a row. As it was, this poor devil was hardly worth preparing for surgery, but the doctor was not yet so advanced in his profession as to be quite certain he was God’s agent, and he set the wheels in motion. As if to confirm this decision, Philip Cater Westerman opened his eyes and said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, old chap,’ said the doctor. ‘Take it easy. Have you right in no time.’

  But no time was precisely what Philip Cater Westerman knew he had.

  ‘Paradise,’ he said reflectively. Then he added with great indignation, ‘Paradise! Driver … fat bastard … pissed!’

  And died.

  In the Pascoe household, the telephone rang.

  Pascoe groaned, Ellie made a face and went to answer it. Pascoe listened at the open door for a moment but when he heard Ellie greet her father, his face relaxed and he returned to his celebratory Marks and Spencer Burgundy. He grinned at his wife on her return, inviting her to share his relief that it hadn’t been the duty sergeant with the once flattering but now fearful message that yet again Mid-Yorkshire CID could not function without its favourite Detective-Inspector.

  Ellie did not return his smile, so he returned her worried frown.

  ‘Trouble?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure. It was Dad, ringing up to wish Rose a happy birthday.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s the second time. He came on the line when Mum rang this morning.’

  ‘He’s so proud of his granddaughter, he wants to do it twice,’ said Pascoe. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I said it was nice of him t
o do it twice and he seemed puzzled. Then Mum came on.’

  ‘And did she wish Rose happy birthday again too?’

  ‘No,’ said Ellie in exasperation. ‘She just said to take no notice of Dad, he’d be forgetting his own head next!’

  ‘Sensible woman, your mother,’ said Pascoe.

  ‘’Tis distance lends approval to the view,’ said Ellie ironically. ‘But she sounded worried. Dad hasn’t really been right since that bad turn he had two years ago. Mum didn’t say anything, but I can tell. Peter, I think I ought to pop down there and check things out.’

  Down there was Orburn, a small market town south of Lincoln, about eighty miles away.

  ‘Why not?’ said Pascoe expansively. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow would suit me,’ said Ellie. ‘If that’s all right? They haven’t seen Rose for a bit. It’s been awkward for them since Dad gave up the car. I’d stay the night. It’s too far there and back in a day with the baby. Would you mind?’

  Pascoe sipped his wine reflectively and said, ‘You know, if you really let yourself go and give it all you’ve got, you could easily shatter your own record for getting close to asking my permission! Now, that would be nice. But I’d need the request in writing, else who’s going to believe it?’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Ellie. ‘I’m merely consulting your convenience.’

  ‘Let’s keep Andy Dalziel out of this,’ grinned Pascoe. ‘Hadn’t you better consult your mum’s too?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll ring her back now,’ said Ellie, retreating through the door.

  ‘And this time, leave the phone off the hook,’ called Pascoe after her. ‘If I’m going to be deprived of my marital rights tomorrow, I claim double ration tonight.’

  But before Ellie could reach the phone, it rang.

  He heard Ellie give the number, there was a pause, then she said, ‘All right, Sergeant Wield. I’ll get him.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Pascoe. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Chapter 2

  ‘See in what peace a Christian can die.’

  ‘Back door,’ said Wield. ‘Glass panel broken. Key in lock. Hand through. Open. Easy.’

  Sergeant Wield was in fine telegraphic style. He also seemed to have been practising not moving his lips, so that the words came out of his slant and ugly face like a ritual chant through a primitive devil-mask.

  Pascoe put the unkind thought aside as best he could, which was not very well. His resentment at being called out had not as yet been assuaged by explanation. Wield had been even more economic of words on the phone and when Pascoe had hinted a complaint shortly after his arrival at 25, Welfare Lane, in the middle of a Victorian terrace which even Betjeman might have hesitated to save, the Sergeant by the flicker of an eye inside the devil-mask had underlined the inhibiting presence of Constable Tony Hector.

  PC Hector had been the first officer on the scene and was therefore a potential source of illuminating insights. Unfortunately he was to Pascoe the last person he would have wished first. His principal qualification for the police force seemed to be his height. He was fully six feet six inches upright, though at some stage in his growth he had reached a level of embarrassment which provoked him to shave off the six inches by curving his spine forward like a bent bow and sinking his head so far between his shoulders that he gave the impression that he was wearing a coathanger beneath his tunic. He was one of a trio of young constables whom Detective-Superintendent Dalziel had unkindly nicknamed on their arrival two months earlier Maggie’s Morons, suggesting that their recruitment into the force was more the result of Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies than a natural vocation. Twice already Pascoe had had occasion to see Hector in action and Dalziel’s judgment had still to be refuted. But Pascoe was a kindly, sympathetic man and had not altogether given up on the youth.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he now invited the constable.

  ‘Sir?’ – with a puzzled note.

  ‘About what happened. Tell me what you found when you got here,’ said Pascoe slowly and distinctly to make sure he was heard above the inappropriately loud din of a television set coming from the house next door.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said Hector, producing his notebook and coughing discreetly behind his hand. ‘I came on duty at six P.M. on Friday, November …’

  ‘No, no,’ said Pascoe. It was, of course, Hector’s fondness for the orotund constabulary style which had driven Wield so far towards telegraphese. ‘From when you got here. And in your own words, please.’

  ‘These are my own words, sir,’ said Hector, brandishing his notebook with the beginnings of indignation.

  ‘Yes, I know. But you’re not in the witness-box. I mean, just talk to me as you’d talk to your … to your …’ Pascoe tailed away helplessly. Friends? Father? However he ended his sentence it was going to sound ridiculous.

  ‘Self,’ interposed Sergeant Wield. His eyes met Pascoe’s and the Inspector had to resist an urge to giggle, an urge he quelled by recollecting that a particularly unpleasant murder had occurred a few feet above his head not very long before.

  The thought also made him feel guilty about his sense of grievance at being called out.

  Am I getting callous, or what? he wondered.

  ‘Go on, son,’ he said to Hector.

  ‘Well, sir, when I got here, I found Mrs Frostick and a lot of other people …’

  ‘Hold on. Who’s Mrs Frostick?’

  ‘Mrs Frostick is Mr Deeks’s daughter, sir. Mr Deeks is the deceased, of this abode.’

  Pascoe looked sharply at Hector, hoping to see the gleam of intelligent life in his eyes which would mean he was sending him up. But all was earnest blankness.

  ‘And these other people? Who were they?’

  ‘Neighbours mainly, I think, sir.’

  ‘Think? You’ve got their names and addresses, haven’t you?’

  Hector’s head sank a little further between his shoulders. Perhaps it was fully retractable, like a tortoise’s.

  ‘Some of them, sir,’ he said. ‘It was all a bit confused. A lot of people had come rushing in when Mrs Frostick called for help …’

  ‘Called? You mean, literally, called?’

  Again the blank yearning after understanding.

  Wield said, ‘There is a telephone, as you saw, sir. But Mrs Frostick seems to have been a bit hysterical and after she found her father she ran out into the street, yelling and banging at neighbours’ doors.’

  ‘Neighbours’ doors? Several doors? So there would have been several neighbours? And also anyone casually strolling by who might have been attracted by the commotion?’

  ‘It’s a nasty night, sir,’ said Wield. ‘Not many pedestrians, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘No. Well, all these people, some of whose names you have, what were they doing?’

  ‘Some of them were upstairs with the deceased …’

  ‘Was he, by then?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Deceased.’

  Another inch of retraction.

  ‘He didn’t look good, sir.’

  ‘The murdered man did not look good,’ murmured Pascoe, tasting the phrase with a kind of sad pleasure. ‘So, some were upstairs. Some I presume were downstairs …’

  ‘Yes, sir. Comforting Mrs Frostick, making her cups of tea, and that sort of thing, sir.’

  ‘In the living-room, was that?’

  ‘Mrs Frostick was in the living-room,’ said Hector, screwing up his face in search of preciseness. ‘The tea was being made in the kitchen. That’s where the oven is, so they’d have to make it there. Mr Deeks was on his bed, in his bedroom. There’s only one bedroom, at the front. The other bedroom’s the bathroom. Converted.’

  Keen to spot glimmers of hope, Pascoe said with the same approval as if he’d been talking about Castle Howard, ‘You’ve got the geography of the house sorted, then.’

  The head emerged a little and Hector said, ‘Yes, sir. Well, it’s just like my Auntie Sheila’s in Parish Road round the corner, except th
at she had a bathroom extension built out over the wash-house in the yard.’

  ‘An extension? Excellent!’ approved Pascoe. ‘To return to Welfare Lane, what did you do when you got here?’

  ‘Well, I had a look around, sir, then I went outside to call for assistance.’

  ‘I see. You had a look around. And what did you see? I presume you saw something?’

  The blank was shot through with agony now, the agony of not asking, ‘Like what?’ Pascoe looked at him wriggling, wished he could unhook him and throw him back, sighed and said, ‘You say you went outside to call assistance.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I thought reception would be better and it were a bit crowded in the house with all them people,’ complained Hector.

  Pascoe gave up. It was clear that like the useless lamp-post he resembled, the young constable was not going to cast any useful light.

  ‘Thanks, Hector,’ he said. ‘That’ll do for now. Stop on the front door, will you, and help keep the sightseers away. Oh, and I’ll want a list of everyone you found in the house when you arrived. Heads of families will do where you didn’t have time to make a comprehensive census.’

  Looking puzzled, relieved, and also slightly disappointed, Hector departed.

  Wield and Pascoe exchanged glances.

  ‘Well, at least he was pretty quickly on the scene,’ defended Pascoe, compensating for his final sarcasm.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Wield stolidly. ‘He was just in the next street when the call went out. Having a cup of tea at his auntie’s, I suspect.’

  ‘You’d better tell me everything, Sergeant.’

  And with the look of one who had been expecting to do no less ever since he found PC Hector on the scene, Wield began.