Pictures of Perfection

Pascoe took the proffered hand but not the allusion. The shake was firm, warm, dry, and just the right length.

‘As you doubtless know, I’m Justin Halavant. Bayle, the gates.’

Bayle! The woman’s name was as apt as the dog’s wasn’t! As for the man’s, this confirmed his sense of recognition. This was Justin Halavant who edited the Post’s Arts Page and frequently hosted TV’s North Light Show.

‘Leave your car,’ suggested Halavant as the gates rolled open. ‘Hop into mine.’

Pascoe, feeling Fop’s hungry eye upon him, hopped, and Halavant sent the car shooting up the drive at a speed which suggested he might be intending to enter without bothering to get out.

Happily, a deftly controlled skid brought them to a halt parallel to the façade. Pascoe, determined to show no reaction to these automotive histrionics, climbed out and said, ‘Some house! But not exactly the vernacular tradition, is it?’

‘Hardly,’ smiled Halavant. ‘My great-grandfather had it built, partly to disoblige certain of his neighbours, partly to open up this part of darkest Yorkshire to the new light of taste. Basically it’s a Morris design with a few exuberances added by the architect who was a rather wayward pupil of Butterfield’s.’

‘Butterfield? He did the parsonage at Hensall, didn’t he?’

‘You know about such things? Come inside and let me give you the quick tour.’

He led the way through a series of rooms so full of goodies that Pascoe began to feel as he often did in great museums that the total somehow came to less than the sum of the parts. The saving trick he had discovered was to focus on a single item and absorb all it had to offer, otherwise Art became Everest, bloody hard work, and essayed merely because it was there.

He paused in a long drawing-room, blanked his mind, and trawled his gaze around the paintings which crowded the walls. It snagged on a small portrait whose narrow oval frame perfectly echoed the face of its subject. She was a young woman, not beautiful but full of character, with deep brown eyes, a rather long nose, and glowing skin tones. She met his gaze directly but demurely, yet he got a sense of fun, as though laughter were tugging at those modest lips, and wasn’t there just a hint that her left eyelid was drooping in a cheeky wink? He looked closer and the impression was gone.

‘This is nice,’ he said. ‘Does she have a name?’

‘Probably, I don’t recall. Some ancestor, eighteenth-century, of course,’ said Halavant vaguely. ‘Are you specially interested in portraits, Inspector?’

‘No. She just caught my eye. That serious, rather solemn posing expression, yet you get a sense she’s amused, almost on the brink of a wink, so to speak.’

‘What?’ Halavant came to stand alongside him. ‘Yes … yes … perhaps …’

He turned away abruptly and said, ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t offer you any hospitality, but having just got back, I have things to do … so if we could get this business sorted …’

Clearly the tour was over. Time to be a policeman again.

‘What business would that be, sir?’ said Pascoe courteously.

‘The false alarm last night, of course.’

‘Perhaps you could tell me about it, sir.’

‘What can I tell you that you don’t know?’ he said in some irritation, tugging at an old-fashioned bell-pull by the fireplace. ‘I rang Mrs Bayle last night to confirm what time I’d be back today, and she filled me in … ah, Mrs Bayle. This incident last night. Tell us what happened.’

The woman, who had appeared with silent speed and, to Pascoe’s relief, without Fop, said, ‘Bell rang at nine o’clock. I looked through the peephole and when I saw it were him, I opened the door …’

‘Him?’ interjected Pascoe.

‘Him. The constable. Mr Bendish.’

‘Ah,’ said Pascoe noncommittally, but he felt Halavant’s curious gaze on him and guessed he was beginning to suspect something odd here.

Mrs Bayle took the ‘ah’ as an instruction to proceed.

‘I asked what he wanted and he said there’d been a report of a man hanging about, looking suspicious, and had I noticed anything. I said no I hadn’t and good night. But he said he’d better take a look inside just to be sure as it were more than his job was worth, and likely mine too, if Mr Halavant came back and found something missing, and he’d been on the doorstep.’

This sudden flood of words was, Pascoe guessed, a pre-emptive justification of having allowed someone across the threshold in her master’s absence.

‘What happened then?’

‘He took a look around. Everything were in order, so he left.’

‘And you yourself felt no cause for concern?’

She hesitated and said, ‘Well, after he’d gone, I thought mebbe I heard summat outside, more like a nightbird than owt to worry about, but I sent Fop out for a run just in case.’

Pascoe shuddered at the thought and Halavant came in with, ‘And naturally there was nothing. And if there had been, my extremely expensive, police-recommended state-of-the-art security system would have alerted the neighbourhood. Mr Pascoe, forgive me but I get a distinct impression that most of what you’ve just heard is new to you. Now why should that be?’

It was time to come clean, or at least a little less muddied.

‘You’re right, sir,’ he said. ‘To tell the truth, I only stopped to admire your lovely house, and things just went on from there.’

Halavant smiled and said, ‘I wondered why such a senior officer was spending time on a false alarm. Are you in fact in the area on business …?’

‘I’m on my way to Enscombe to have a word with Constable Bendish, so no doubt I’ll get the full story then,’ said Pascoe, seeing no reason to fuel rumour. ‘You know him, do you, sir? Settled in all right, has he? Old village communities can be difficult.’

‘I think you’ll find Enscombe pretty unique,’ said Halavant ambiguously, as well as solecistically. ‘If your visit is in any sense an efficiency check, I would say from what I know of the young man that his devotion to duty has been puritanical, and his eye for the depth of a tyre tread is phenomenal.’

As he spoke he had been gently urging Pascoe to the front door. Pascoe’s mind was full of interesting speculations, but as the door opened and he looked down the long length of unprotected driveway to the distant gates, they were all swept aside by the single basic question: was Fop loose?

He tried to find a way to phrase it that wouldn’t make him sound like a quivering wimp, but the door clunked solidly shut before he could speak.

He set off at high speed, grew ashamed, forced himself to stop and admire a blossoming pear, then strolled to the safety of his car with studied ease.

Once seated and driving, normal service was renewed and all the speculations came flooding back. A puritanical devotion to duty, Halavant said. All the evidence certainly pointed that way. He came off duty at twelve noon yesterday. Twice since then – once when remonstrating with the Hells Angel, and again last night at Scarletts – he had been seen in uniform doing his job. Curious.

He got Control on his radio, asking them to check with CID and with Filmer’s Section Office whether there’d been any report last night of intruders in the grounds of Scarletts, then set off towards Enscombe once more.

His call sign crackled just as he reached the beginnings of the village and he pulled up in front of a steep-roofed single-storey building inscribed Village Hall and Reading Room to acknowledge. Next moment Andrew Dalziel’s voice filled the car like thunder.

‘What’s all this about an incident?’

Pascoe explained.

‘Well, there’s nowt on anyone’s records,’ said Dalziel.

‘That’s a bit odd, don’t you think, sir?’

‘No, I don’t. The lad’s off duty, remember? Gets called out, finds it’s a wind-up, he’s not going to waste more of his own time putting in a report, is he? In fact, it probably decides him to make himself scarce for the rest of his time off. He’ll likely turn up later, all apologetic about not letting Filmer know where he was. End of story.’

‘From what Halavant told me he sounds a lot more conscientious than that,’ said Pascoe. ‘What about the stains in the car?’