Pictures of Perfection. Reginald Hill
TWO
‘If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it.’
Less than an hour’s sensible driving from Mid-Yorkshire Police HQ, Enscombe is not remote by modern standards. But as the road began to narrow and the valley sides to steepen, Peter Pascoe felt a disproportionate sense of remoteness.
Everywhere there were signs of man’s presence – the walls built out of stones painfully cleared from the green pastures alongside the shining river, the sheep grazing between them, the whitewashed farmhouses, the road itself – but nowhere was there anything to persuade of man’s permanence. Good old heartless, witless nature seemed lurking everywhere, ready to rush back in the minute man dropped his guard.
Then he rounded a bend and beheld a Vision of Beauty.
He skidded to a halt and walked back to take a closer look. Beyond a pair of elegant wrought-iron gates set in the thickest thorn hedge he’d ever seen, a gravelled drive arrowed across a daffodilled lawn to a distant house which, though partially hidden by topiaried shrubs, looked as foreign to Yorkshire as a Pearly Queen in Barnsley market. No sturdy bield this, using Nature’s materials to resist nature’s onslaughts. Here was Art, naked and unashamed. Built of red, no, almost pink brick, with hipped gables, battered chimney breasts, and a turquoise slated roof along which the creamy ridge tiles seemed to have been piped by a pâtissier, it stood as bold and as bright as a Gay Rights demonstrator outside a rugby league ground.
He approached to stand near the gates which were themselves worthy of close study. Into the flowing scrolled design were woven the word SCARLETTS and the initials J.H. He reached out a hand to caress the sinuous curves.
Next moment a black shape like a young bullock flung itself against the gates, setting the metal rattling and Pascoe staggering back in terror, which was just as well, as a set of teeth like a rip saw sliced the air where his fingers had been.
‘Down, boy!’ growled a harsh female voice, and a woman appeared from behind the thorn hedge.
‘Bloody hell,’ gasped Pascoe. ‘That thing ought to be muzzled!’
‘Muzzle’s no use for keeping off trespassers,’ said the woman. She was grey-haired, of indeterminate age, with a hooked nose and unrelenting eyes.
‘I wasn’t trespassing,’ said Pascoe indignantly.
‘You were touching,’ she said. ‘What’s your business, mister?’
‘I was just admiring the house.’
‘Admiring comes afore coveting,’ she grated. ‘I dare say you was admiring last night as well. Just bugger off or I’ll mebbe let Fop out for a run.’
Fop! If he couldn’t get her under the Fighting Dog legislation, he could certainly have her under the Trades Descriptions Act. But at the moment he could see little alternative to a dignified retreat.
He was moving away when a metallic aubergine cabriolet turned off the road and stopped in front of the gate. The driver stood up and peered over the screen at him. He was at the turn of forty with a mobile, sensual face beneath an aureole of Titian hair. He wore a cordovan jacket which matched his car and round his neck was wound a shot silk scarf just long enough when he drove at speed to give him something of Isadora Duncan’s panache without risking sharing her fate.
In fact the first general impression Pascoe got was of a man who judged his effects carefully.
The second impression was that he knew him from somewhere.
‘And what, pray, may your business be?’
The voice was light, educated, and redolent of the complacency of one who knows that if things of beauty are a joy forever, he’s OK, mate.
‘I’m a policeman,’ said Pascoe, taking the question literally. ‘DCI Pascoe, Mid-Yorks CID.’
‘Good Lord,’ said the man, leaping lightly (yet with a weighty awareness of his light leaping) out of the car. ‘You chaps are taking this seriously. I’m impressed.’
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