Exit Lines

‘See you tomorrow night, then,’ he said. ‘Love to the old folk.’

It was nearly ten o’clock, a lateness explained though possibly not justified by the hour at which he’d finally got to bed. Pascoe assured himself that the lie-in had been necessary in the interests of his personal efficiency, but he wondered whether he’d have chanced it if he hadn’t suspected Dalziel was going to have other things on his mind that morning than checking on his staff.

His first stop was the hospital where he found that Longbottom, the pathologist, presumably eager to take advantage on the golf-course of the bright November day which had succeeded the stormy night, had already started on Robert Deeks.

A native of Yorkshire whom education had deprived of his accent but not of the directness which usually accompanied it, Longbottom summed up his findings in simple non-technical language.

‘You can try murder, but it’ll probably end as manslaughter,’ he said. ‘Injuries to the head and face caused by slapping and punching. Possibly by someone wearing a leather glove. Injuries to neck, shoulders and scalp caused by narrow-bladed double-edged knife with a sharp point. None of these injuries severe enough to be fatal of itself. But he was old and frail. I’m surprised he was still living by himself, really. Cause of death, in lay terms, shock. Oh, and there was a bit of bathwater in his lungs. He must have gone under a couple of times.’

‘Been forced under, you mean.’

‘Could be,’ said Longbottom. ‘Why not? I presume whoever knocked him about was trying to force something out of him. Certainly wasn’t self-defence. But that’s your problem, Inspector. Now, let’s see. What else do we have?’

He checked a list.

‘Road accident and a broken hip with death from exposure? No urgency there, I presume. I’ll leave them over for a rainy day.’

‘I think,’ said Pascoe hesitantly, ‘though it’s nothing to do with me directly, that an early report on the road accident would be appreciated.’

‘Oh?’ said Longbottom. ‘All right. If I must, I must.’

‘And as a matter of interest,’ pushed Pascoe, ‘the other one, I happened to see him last night. His right hip was broken, I believe, as a result of a fall. And he’s got a nasty bruise on the left side of his head which Dr Sowden seemed to think could have been caused in the same fall. I’d be interested in your opinion.’

‘Trying to get me to drop a colleague in it, Inspector?’ said Longbottom, smiling thinly. ‘Dr Sowden? Young man, rather pretty?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I know him. Good face for a doctor. Fatigue just makes it a bit more romantically haggard. Let’s have a look.’

Thinking that Longbottom’s rather frighteningly sallow and bony features perhaps explained his decision to concentrate on the dead rather than the living, Pascoe followed him to where an attendant, sensitive to his master’s wishes, had already produced Thomas Arthur Parrinder’s cadaver.

Longbottom ran his fingers along the fractured hip and studied the contusion through a magnifying-glass.

‘Thinking of assault, are you?’ he said.

‘It’s a conditioned reflex,’ said Pascoe.

‘Any special reason?’

‘No,’ admitted Pascoe. ‘As far as I know there’s no evidence of robbery or of any other person being involved.’

‘As far as you know?’ repeated Longbottom sarcastically. ‘So this is another one that’s really nothing to do with you? You must find time hanging heavy on your hands, Inspector. Or do you just want to prove Dr Sowden is fallible?’

Pascoe considered this. He didn’t think it was true, but when it came down to it, he wouldn’t be too troubled if he undermined that young man’s confidence, and it might even persuade him to greater discretion in the Westerman business.

‘If you could just tell me your opinion,’ he said.

‘No opinion without proper examination,’ said Longbottom. ‘That’s one of the few perks of working with corpses. But you might care to examine the ground where he fell and see if you can find a stone or some other solid protuberance at least two inches in diameter. Or is that someone else’s business?’

At the hospital inquiry desk, Pascoe discovered that Mrs Dolly Frostick had discharged herself an hour earlier. This was a nuisance as it meant he would have to make another diversion to see her at home.

Home, he discovered from the hospital records, was 352, Nethertown Road, a ribbon development of nineteen-thirties semis running alongside the main easterly exit route from the city. In front of the house, like a matchseller’s tray, a tiny square of green-tinged concrete was set with boxes of roses and other ornamental shrubs. This geometric artificiality contrasted strangely with the front of 352's Siamese twin, 354, where an untended lawn and flower-beds had been allowed to run riot, and summer’s profusion lay wrecked but not drowned by the storms of winter.

A small man with a thin moustache and a discontented face answered his ring.

‘Yes?’ he said aggressively.

Pascoe introduced himself with the aplomb of one used to being greeted as something between a brush-salesman and a Jehovah’s Witness.

The man was Alan Frostick and while part of his aggression sprang from a natural instinct to defend his wife, a great deal of it seemed to be chronic and indiscriminate.

‘You’ll not have caught anyone yet?’ he said as he closed the door behind Pascoe with a last glower at his concrete garden. ‘More stick, that’s what’s needed. More stick.’

Whether the extra stick was to be applied to the criminals or to the police was not clear. A door whose woodwork had been painted over with brown varnish, into which a wood grain pattern had then been combed, opened into a main sitting-room where two women sat. Mr Frostick had at least not made the little man’s common matrimonial error of biting off more than he could chew. His wife was a good inch shorter than he was, a not unhandsome woman in her forties, perhaps even a pocket Venus in her day, but now haggard with grief and fatigue. Her friend, introduced as Mrs Gregory from next door, looked to be in much the same state, though whether this was sympathetic or merely coincidental did not at first emerge.

Mrs Gregory offered to make a cup of tea. Alan Frostick sat on the sofa next to his wife and put a comforting arm around her shoulder.

‘Make it quick, will you?’ he said. ‘She’s been upset enough.’

‘Yes,’ said Pascoe. ‘Of course. Mrs Frostick, could you tell me what happened last night? I believe you tried to ring your father earlier in the evening?’

‘That’s right,’ said the woman in a reassuringly firm and controlled voice. ‘About half past six. Alan had just had his tea. I always like to ring him if I haven’t been able to get round in the day.’

‘Do you go round most days?’ inquired Pascoe.

‘When I can. It’s two bus rides away, you see, so it’s not always convenient. It used to be all right a couple of times a week maybe, but for the last year or so, since he had his turn…’

‘His turn?’

‘Yes. He was ill, had to go into hospital. When he came out, he stayed with us for a bit till he was fit again. But he was never the same.’

‘But he became fit enough to go back to his own home?’

‘He wanted to,’ interrupted Frostick. ‘That’s what he was always saying. Only place for a man is his own home. He wanted to go back.’

Mrs Frostick nodded agreement.

‘That’s when we put the phone in…’

‘And the bath,’ interrupted her husband. ‘Don’t forget that bath.’

‘Yes, dear. But it was the phone that was most important. It meant I could keep in touch easily. And Mrs Spillings next door was very good at keeping an eye on him. Anyway, when he didn’t answer at first, I wasn’t bothered. He might easily have gone down the road for a paper. And even when I tried again later on and still got no reply, I wasn’t too worried. He usually has a bath on a Friday evening and he can never hear the phone in the bathroom. But by the time it got to eight o’clock, I was getting worried.’

‘You didn’t think of phoning one of the neighbours?’

‘Well, Tracey, that’s Mrs Spillings, doesn’t have the phone. In fact there’s no one in the Lane with it that I know well enough to bother. So I thought I’d best get myself round there. It was a terrible night but I was lucky with the first bus. Well, it stops just opposite and you can almost see it coming from our front window.’

‘I see. You went by bus,’ said Pascoe. There was a wooden garage beside the house and he felt sure he’d glimpsed a car through the partially opened door.