An hour and a half later they were approaching the village of Hathersage.
With anyone else driving it might have been just an hour later but Rod seemed to think there was an eleventh commandment which read, thou shalt not overtake without a clear mile of empty road ahead, and all speed limits were meticulously observed with a good 2 percent safety margin.
“Do a lot of driving, do you, Rod?” Pascoe had inquired after a while.
“Not since the big pileup,” said the young man tremulously.
Jesus Christ! thought Pascoe in alarm. Then he saw Rod was grinning and realized he was being sent up.
“I know everyone says I’m a bit slow,” said Rod. “But when I got recruited into the firm, I got told that sometimes getting a job done might mean having to break the law, but if I started breaking laws for personal convenience, then I was no good to anybody. Sticking to the Highway Code seems a good way to keep that in mind.”
Pascoe digested this, then said, “Lukasz Komorowski?”
“That’s right. How did you guess?”
“I heard he recruited you. And it sounds like the kind of thing he might say.”
“Yeah, I was really lucky, not just with catching his eye but because that’s more or less the way he was recruited too. I think it pleased him to be offering someone else the chance that he got.”
I was right, thought Pascoe. Despite Freeman’s objection to the word, it really was romantic.
“Wasn’t there a Komorowski something to do with the Warsaw uprising?” he said.
“General Tadeusz, C in C of the Polish Home Army,” replied Rod promptly. “Lukasz’s dad was a half cousin. There were a lot of reprisals against the family. Lukasz is surprisingly unbitter. He says war does things to people, so the trick is to avoid war.”
“Seems a nice guy,” said Pascoe.
“Yes,” said Rod, nodding vigorously. “He is.”
So are they all, all nice guys, thought Pascoe. Lukasz and Bernie and Dave and Sandy and Tim and Rod and probably all of the others who worked in the Lubyanka.
But one of them, if his guess was right, believed that “getting the job done” gave the Templars license to ignore lesser laws such as the one against murder. In the world of Security, reaching that position probably took only a very small step. Deception, betrayal, assassination, torture were after all the tools of their trade, only usable perhaps as last resorts in circumstances of dire necessity, but even admitting that possibility put you on a downward slope.
The police world was very different. You were there to uphold the Law. OK, on occasion you could stretch it, twist it, bend it, even tie it in knots, but once you broke it you weren’t on a downward slope, you were off the edge and falling.
These musings, and others more precise, occupied his mind till Rod brought him back to the world with a triumphant, “This looks like it.”
He looked up to see that they were turning through a gateway which bore a sign reading Kewley Castle 2 miles—unfenced road—please observe 10 mph speed limit, which Rod certainly did, from a considerable distance.
At least, thought Pascoe, it gives me time to enjoy my passenger’s perk and take in the view, which was of attractive moorland, aglow with gorse and rising into shapely hills, good walking country.
The castle itself, however, was as disappointing as Wield had forecast.
Little more than a line of rubble lying behind a modest declivity which had presumably once been a moat, only the broken arch of its ruined gatehouse took the eye, but even that did not hold it long, as Pascoe spotted a movement through the trees of a small copse just beyond the ruin. A man on a white horse emerged. When he saw the car he came to a halt framed against the broken arch. It made a lovely picture, fit for a tapestry woven with bone needles in an older age, a more innocent time.
Then he resumed his advance at a stately canter. Only the fact that the horse had farther to go allowed them to beat it to the house, which stood a few hundred yards behind the ruined castle whose name it bore.
Pascoe got out of the car with some relief. Not the kind he felt when he got out of a car driven by, say, DC Shirley Novello who believed that time spent driving from here to there was wasted time which would have to be accounted for on Judgment Day, but a sense of pleasure at being back in the dangerous world of standing on his own two feet.
He stood for a moment and took in the house, a severe-looking three-storied building in dark gray stone entirely without adornment, apart from a battlemented portico presumably added on to justify the appellation castle. They were in a tarmacked yard formed by a two-story stable block and a barn converted into a triple garage.
“An Englishman’s home,” said Pascoe.
“Probably a lot more convenient than the real thing,” said Rod.
The door of the main house opened and a woman appeared. She was in her late forties, with short dark hair and a classically oval face. She had a full rounded figure and she held herself like a gymnast. She wore a plain gray dress which though not positively a uniform, had something of a uniform about it. Too young to be the mother, judged Pascoe. Housekeeper maybe. Or serving wench? He flashed her his boyish smile and got no response either of expression or word. But when Rod called out, “Hi there,” as if addressing some girl he’d bumped into in a club, he noticed an immediate thawing of her chilly expression under the warmth of the young man’s grin.
Before he could try to take advantage of this, he heard the clop of horse’s hoofs behind him and a voice said, “Can I help you?”
He turned to look up at the rider. He was a man of about thirty, his fine black hair tousled by the wind, his skin weather-beaten. Dark brown eyes regarded Pascoe unblinkingly.
Estate manager, he guessed. Certainly a man of authority. Or maybe that’s just because I’m looking up at him. Someone had said that a man astride a beast is always ridiculous unless he’s fucking it, in which case he’s disgusting as well. Probably Dalziel. But Pascoe always found horsemen a bit intimidating and this one sat with a straightness of back which somehow suggested a superiority more than physical.
“We’re here to see Major Kewley-Hodge,” he said.
“Mr. Kewley-Hodge,” corrected the man. “Is he expecting you?”
“No,” said Pascoe.
“So how do you know he is going to be in?”
To say, I don’t, but it’s a risk I was willing to take in order to catch him unprepared, was not an answer Pascoe felt he could give.
He said, “Is he in?”
“In fact he’s not,” said the man. “I daresay you thought, being wheelchair bound, he can’t get out much.”
“No. In fact I didn’t think that,” said Pascoe evenly. “I understand he is suffering from paraplegia. I have heard nothing of agoraphobia.”
The man smiled and nodded as if approving the answer.
“So if I see him, who shall I say he wasn’t expecting?”
“I’m Chief Inspector Pascoe of Mid-Yorkshire CID, currently attached to the Combined Antiterrorist Unit. And you, sir, are…”
“I’m not in,” said the man. “On, girl.”
The gray moved forward obediently and came to a halt by one of the barns with an opening on the first floor from which protruded an iron bar, presumably intended for a hoist to raise hay into the loft.
From his leather jerkin the man took what looked like a TV remote control and pressed a button. Out of the loft, along the metal bar, ran a square metal box from which depended what looked like a pair of nooses for a double hanging.
Another touch on the remote brought the nooses down a foot or two. The man eased his arms through the loops that Pascoe now saw were part of a harness. The rider fastened a retaining belt across his chest, used the remote to lift himself a fraction and take the weight off the saddle, then spoke to the horse, which moved forward, leaving the rider dangling in air.
He must have used the control again, for out of the open barn door rolled a wheelchair. It came to a halt directly beneath him and he lowered himself into it, released the harness, and sent it back up into the loft.
Then he turned the chair to face Pascoe.
“Now I’m in,” he said. “Good day, Chief Inspector. Luke Kewley-Hodge at your service. Shall we go inside?”