A Killing Kindness

At six o’clock on Friday the news editor of the Evening Post picked up his phone.

‘I must be cruel, only to be kind,’ said a voice.

The line went dead.

The news editor yelled for his secretary.

Chapter 3 (#ulink_26ca86a9-8265-5226-8895-b2717855a314)

Ellie Pascoe was not enjoying the rich rewarding experience of pregnancy.

At roughly the halfway point she was still suffering the morning sickness which should have died away a month earlier and was already experiencing the backache and heartburn which might decently have waited till a month later.

‘For Christ’s sake don’t make soothing noises,’ she said as she returned pale-faced to the breakfast table. ‘I’m having a baby, not turning into one.’

Pascoe, warned, returned to his cornflakes and said lightly, ‘You shouldn’t have bought the ticket if you didn’t want the trip.’

‘I didn’t know it meant the end of civilization as I know it,’ she said grimly.

‘At least you don’t have to go to work,’ said Pascoe.

They were well into July and the long vacation had begun at the college where Ellie lectured.

‘It’s the students who get the holiday, not us,’ she retorted. This was an ancient tract of disputed land, full of shell holes. Pascoe made a tactical withdrawal.

‘Can I have the butter, please?’

‘If by that you mean that if I’d taken your advice and resigned last term I wouldn’t need to be thinking about next September’s courses then let me remind you that, first, I personally need the work and, secondly, we personally need the money and, thirdly, that women having fought for centuries to get the meagre rights they’ve got, including the right not to lose their jobs because some careless fellow puts them up the stick, I am not about to renounce those rights just because you’re feeling all patriarchal and protective. Excuse me.’

When she came back, Pascoe said, ‘Thank God I didn’t ask for the marmalade,’ but she didn’t respond.

‘What are you doing today?’ he asked as he finished his coffee.

‘I’m going to be sick at the Aero Club,’ she said.

‘Good God,’ he said, alarmed. ‘You’re not taking up gliding, are you?’

‘No. Just having lunch there. They do a chicken-in-the-basket. Today they might see it there twice.’

‘Come on,’ said Pascoe. ‘It can’t be that bad. Can it? And why the Aero Club? Not your normal stamping ground.’

‘I’m meeting Thelma.’

‘Lacewing? You surprise me. I shouldn’t have thought it was her scene either.’

‘And what do you know about Thelma’s scene?’

‘Me? Nothing. Nothing at all,’ said Pascoe uninterestedly.

He had good reason for sounding uninterested in Thelma Lacewing. First she was the leading light of WRAG, the Women’s Rights Action Group which put the law a very poor second to its principles; secondly, he had recently helped to put her uncle, a respected local businessman, away on a pornography charge; thirdly, he (in a purely aesthetic sense of course) rather fancied her and sometimes thought she might rather fancy him.

‘Anyway, her scene or not, it’s her idea,’ continued Ellie. ‘I promised that when the summer vac came and I had more time, I’d take some of the secretarial work off Lorraine Wildgoose’s plate.’

‘But you said it was only students who got holidays,’ protested Pascoe.

‘Oh, go to work!’ said Ellie disgustedly. ‘See if you can stop that lunatic from killing more than half a dozen women today.’

As he finished his toast, he said crumbily, ‘Wildgoose. That rings a little bell. Do I know her?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ellie. ‘Though she’s all the things you admire in a woman. Forty, ferocious, teaches French and is in the middle of a rather unpleasant marital shipwreck.’

Pascoe shuddered and rose from the table.

When he returned with his briefcase ready for departure, Ellie was immersed in the newspaper.

‘Hey, there’s a little bit here about fat Andy calling in a clairvoyant.’

‘Oh God. Let me see.’

He looked at the paper and said in relief. ‘It’s just a couple of lines and I don’t think he gets the Guardian anyway.’

‘Perhaps not. But just think how large it’s likely to be printed in the tabloids! It’s a good story. At least, you made it sound like a good story last night.’

‘Don’t!’ he said, kissing her.

‘Peter,’ she said thoughtfully when he’d finished, ‘that transcript of the tape you showed me. Can I borrow it?’

‘Why on earth should you want that?’

‘Well, it’s just come back to me. I woke up in the night and I was lying there thinking and I got this brilliant idea, you know how you do. About that woman in the trance. Well, I know you said it can’t have anything to do with what actually happened, but I was remembering, last year the museum organized a dig in Charter Park, do you remember, at the bottom end beyond the War Memorial. Our historians were involved. It was the Roman Level they were interested in, but they took one section of the trench much deeper just to see. It was clear there’d been a settlement thereabouts for as long as men have been settling.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Pascoe. ‘So what?’

‘So suppose when you die, time shifts? Well, why not? It certainly stops, doesn’t it? Briefly for a moment as she dies, she goes back. You know they say your life flashes before you as you drown? So, it’s a cliché, but it’s what people who’ve been saved from drowning have said. Suppose it’s not just your life but the whole of life. And once you’re beyond yours, you’re beyond the point of being saved.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Pascoe, disturbed by what for Ellie was an untypical flight of fantasy. ‘So …?’

‘So for a moment, that girl is out of our time and into, say, the early Mesolithic period. The water runs clear. And because of the time shift, it’s still daylight. And those faces, what did she say, “like beasts at their watering,” small wary brown-skinned people, Cresswellians perhaps, or some tribe of prehistoric man. And the birds she saw, pterodactyls perhaps.’

‘Jesus!’ said Pascoe.

‘All right. Be dismissive. But it seems to me that this famous open mind you’re always yapping about is about as open as a bank on Saturday.’

‘I was merely expressing surprise at the depth of your knowledge of prehistory,’ he protested speciously.

She looked sheepish.

‘I know about as much as you,’ she admitted. ‘That’s why I wanted the transcript. Thelma was in on the dig, it’s one of her hobbies. I thought she might be able to put me right.’