A Killing Kindness
‘Altogether an enjoyable performance, one of Mr Hill’s best’ Financial TimesWhen Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet. The career of the Yorkshire Choker is underway.If Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he is downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant.Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums – it’s all a load of nonsense as far as he is concerned, designed to make a fool of him.And meanwhile the Choker strikes again – and again…
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REGINALD HILL
A KILLING KINDNESS
A Dalziel and Pascoe novel
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1980
Copyright © Reginald Hill 1980
Reginald Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN 9780586072516
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN 9780007370252 Version: 2015-06-18
For Dan and Pat
Contents
Epigraph
Also by the Author
The man that lays his hand upon a woman,
Save in the way of kindness, is a wretch
Whom âtwere gross flattery to name a coward.
JOHN TOBIN: The Honeymoon
⦠it was green, all green, all over me, choking, the water, then boiling at first, and roaring, and seething, till all settled down, cooling, clearing, and my sight up drifting with the few last bubbles, till through the glassy water I see the sky clearly, and the sun bright as a lemon, and birds with wings wide as a windmillâs sails slowly drifting round it, and over the bankâs rim small dark faces peering, timid as beasts at their watering, nostrils sniffing danger and shy eyes bright and wary, till a current turns me over, and I drift, and still am drifting, and â¦
What the hellâs going on here! Stop it! This is sick â¦
Please. Oh God! Be careful youâll â¦
Jack! No!
Ohhhh â¦
See! Look. The lights ⦠please
⦠fakery ⦠I donât want
⦠lights! Mrs Stanhope, Mrs Stanhope, are you all right?
⦠auntie, are you OK? Please, auntie â¦
⦠thank you, love, Iâm a bit ⦠in a minute ⦠did I get â¦
⦠vicious blackmailing cow and Iâll see â¦
â⦠picking up lots of forget-me-nots. You make me â¦â
âSorry,â said Sergeant Wield, switching off the pocket cassette recorder. âThat was on the tape before.â
âPity. I thought she was proving that Sinatra really was dead,â said Pascoe putting down the sergeantâs handwritten transcription of the first part of the recording. âDid you switch off there, or what?â
âOr what, I think. I had the mike in my pocket, nice and inconspicuous. When I jumped up to grab at Sorby it mustâve fallen out and pulled the connection loose. Iâm sorry about all this, sir!â
âOh no, youâre not,â said Pascoe. âNot yet. When Mr Dalziel comes through that door with the Evening Post in his hand, thatâs when youâre going to be sorry.â
Wield nodded gloomy agreement with the inspector, who now studied his report as if seeking some hidden meaning.
Like all Sergeant Wieldâs reports, it was pellucid in its clarity.
Calling on Mrs Winifred Sorby in pursuit of enquiries into the murder of her daughter, Brenda, he had found her in the company of her neighbour, Mrs Annie Duxbury. A short time later, Mrs Rosetta Stanhope and her niece, Pauline, had turned up. Mrs Stanhope was known to the sergeant by reputation as a self-professed clairvoyant and medium. It emerged that Mrs Sorby wished Mrs Stanhope to attempt to get in touch with her dead daughter. The sergeant had been pressed to stay and take part. Agreeing, he had excused himself to go out to his car where he had a small cassette recorder. Concealing this under his jacket, he had returned and joined the women round a table in the dead girlâs darkened bedroom. After a while Mrs Stanhope had seemed to go into a trance and finally started talking in a voice completely different from her own. But only a few moments later the door had burst open and Mr Sorby, the dead girlâs father, had entered angrily and brought the seance to an end.
His fury at his wifeâs stupidity had been redirected when he became aware of the sergeantâs presence. He had rapidly found a sympathetic ear for his complaints in the local press and by the time a chastened Wield had returned to the station, Pascoe had already fielded several enquiries about the police decision to use clairvoyance in the Sorby case.
