Deadheads

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘They seem to have done a good job on the car.’

‘They should do for the money. And they make you pay on the spot nowadays. No cash, no car. It’s very uncivilized.’

He frowned slightly, lifted Diana to the ground and said, ‘The rain’s brought off one or two petals, I see.’

‘Well, let them lie for a while,’ Daphne said firmly. ‘I’ll get us a drink and you can unwind from your hard day at the office.’

She went into the house and he removed his jacket, draped it over the back of a wrought-iron garden chair and sat down. Distantly the front doorbell sounded. A couple of minutes later, Daphne returned bearing a martini’d tray and accompanied by two men, or rather a man and a boy. The boy was in uniform, the man in a dark suit. Other claims to distinction were the boy’s Indian beauty and the man’s Caucasian ugliness.

‘Darling,’ said Daphne setting the tray down on the iron table which matched the chairs, ‘these gentlemen are from the police.’

Aldermann rose courteously.

‘How can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Actually, it’s me they want to see,’ said Daphne. ‘It’s about the car being vandalized. We needn’t disturb you, darling. Would you like to come back into the house, Sergeant? You did say sergeant?’

‘That’s right, ma’am. Detective-Sergeant Wield. And this is Police Cadet Singh,’ replied Wield without much enthusiasm.

Singh flashed them a white-toothed smile. Daphne had already recognized him as the boy she had seen in the market café but he had shown no sign of recognizing her. Perhaps whites all look alike to Asians, she thought.

Wield who didn’t want to be separated from Aldermann after so short an encounter was about to spin his prepared line of perhaps your husband might be able to corroborate one or two points when the man saved him the trouble by saying, ‘You won’t disturb me, darling. And I’d be interested to hear what the police are doing, and to help if possible.’

‘Very kind, sir,’ said Wield, pulling a garden chair towards him and posing his buttocks over it while he looked enquiringly at Daphne.

She let out a small sigh and sat down.

Wield followed suit. Singh remained standing till Wield nodded significantly at him, when he sat a little distance from the other three and emulated the sergeant by producing a notebook.

‘I hadn’t realized this would be a CID matter,’ said Aldermann. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Thank you, no, sir,’ said Wield. ‘To tell the truth, sir, CID wouldn’t normally be involved with a bit of one-off car bashing, but this is threatening to become an epidemic. Also we like an experienced officer to show our cadets the ropes in all departments of police work.’

Patrick Aldermann smiled faintly and Wield wondered if he were explaining too much. He put on his most serious dedicated look which could usually make children weep and strong men avert their gaze, but Aldermann’s cool brown eyes never flickered and the smile remained.

Wield returned his attention to the wife and said ponderously, ‘Now, ma’am. Your car is a VW Polo, registration AWG 830T. On Monday of this week you parked it in the Station Street multi-storey car park. This was at what time?’

‘Oh, nine-fifteen, something like that. I dropped my daughter off at her school and then just drove straight into town to do some shopping.’

‘In fact, you did a whole day’s shopping, is that right, ma’am? You didn’t come back to your car till after three o’clock.’

‘That’s right,’ laughed Daphne. ‘I got rather carried away.’

‘One of those expensive days the ladies give us from time to time, eh, sir?’ responded Wield, smiling at Aldermann. The invitation to a shared domestic laugh came from Wield’s lips like a pop-song from the Delphic oracle. It was an incongruity which went far deeper than his unprepossessing exterior. Sergeant Wield was, and, having never received the hypothesized conditioning treatment of a good public school education, presumed he always had been, unrepentantly homosexual. He guarded the secret from all but those few whose relationship with him depended on a knowledge of it, not because he felt guilt or shame but because he felt (a) that his business was his business, and doubted (b) that the mid-Yorkshire force was yet ready for a fairy fuzz. Occasionally he made believe that next time Dalziel growled bad-temperedly Right, Sergeant, what have you got for me? he would jump on his knee and offer him a kiss, but the golden rays of such sunny fancies never touched the pits and promontories of his no-man’s-land of a face.

Aldermann affected to take the remark seriously, saying, ‘If it were one of those days, Sergeant, I haven’t seen the results yet.’

‘Window-shopping mainly, was it?’ laughed Wield. ‘No harm done then. Except to your car. When you got back you found it had been badly scratched?’

He glanced at his notebook which he held close to his face in the palm of his hand to conceal the fact that it was his diary and almost empty.

‘And you immediately reported this to the police,’ he continued, as a statement not a question, but Daphne replied carefully. ‘The police were already there. Someone else had found their car damaged and reported it.’

‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Wield glancing at the diary again. ‘Now, when you parked the car that morning, did you see anything odd? Anyone hanging about for instance.’

‘No, no one,’ she said.

Aldermann said, ‘It’s hardly likely that these vandals would already have been lurking at nine-fifteen A.M., is it, Sergeant?’

His tone was one of polite enquiry.

Wield looked once more at his diary which contained nothing more helpful than the information that the following Sunday was the 2nd after Trinity, 3rd after Pentecost and Father’s Day. He said, ‘We’re not yet sure of the time the damage was actually done, sir.’

‘But surely there have to be limits?’ pursued Aldermann. ‘Between the latest time of parking of a subsequently damaged car and the earliest time of complaint, for instance. Unless this lunatic was picking them off one by one throughout the day.’

‘Well, that’s always a possibility, sir,’ said Wield as if the suggestion had been seriously intended. ‘Were there many other cars about when you parked, ma’am?’

‘Hardly any,’ said Daphne promptly.

‘No? Of course, you were parked on the roof, weren’t you? The first couple of floors fill up pretty quick with business people, I suppose. But there must still have been a lot of room on the next four floors at nine-fifteen.’

‘I always park on the roof,’ said Daphne promptly. ‘I’m not very fond of enclosed spaces, nor am I a particularly good reverser. So, open air and no other cars to hit, that’s my ideal.’

‘No other cars?’ said Wield. ‘You were the first on the roof park?’

‘I might have been,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember. Does it matter?’

No, thought Wield. It didn’t matter in the least. His little plan of getting a close look at Aldermann at home without rousing any suspicions was not working very well. At the very least he must be arousing the suspicion that he was a half-wit. Even Police Cadet Singh had stopped writing every word that was said in his book and was making faces at the little girl.

‘Won’t keep you much longer,’ he said. ‘Tell me, Mrs Aldermann, is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to do you a bad turn?’

‘By damaging my car, you mean?’ said Daphne in surprise. ‘But it wasn’t just my car, was it?’

‘I know that,’ said Wield. ‘But according to our officers on the spot, the scratchings on your car might have been words.’

‘Words?’ said Aldermann. ‘You mean a message.’

‘Not exactly, sir. The second possible word was cow. This would suggest the vandal knew you were a woman, madam.’

‘Well, I did leave an old hat I carry around in case it rains on the rear sill,’ said Daphne. ‘So it wouldn’t need a detective to work out it was a woman’s car, would it?’

‘What,’ said Aldermann pleasantly, ‘was the first possible word, Sergeant?’

‘Hard to say, sir,’ said Wield uncomfortably, thinking that Dalziel, for instance, would not have found the four letters in the least hard to say.

‘If it were aimed specifically at my wife, then why did the vandal damage other cars? And didn’t you say there’d been an epidemic of this recently?’

This was too sharp for comfort and all Wield could manage in reply was the stock, ‘We have to cover every possibility, sir.’