Free A Killing Kindness by Reginald Hill Page A

one of the reporters. 'Has there been one yet?'
    'I don't know.' Pascoe smiled. 'You'd better ask your colleague from the Evening Post. His boss gets  them first.'
    One of the TV men caught his sleeve as he turned  away and asked if they could do a filmed interview  in about five minutes.
    ‘I’ll have to check,' said Pascoe.
    'Well, it's not with you, actually. It's Superintendent Dalziel we'd like.'
    Piqued, Pascoe returned to the caravan where he  found Dalziel on the phone which the Post Office  had just connected.
    'The telly men request the pleasure of your  company, sir,' he said when the fat man had  finished.
    'What's up with you, lad? Not photogenic?'
    'Perhaps I don't fill a twenty-six-inch screen,' said Pascoe acidly.
    'What? Put you out, has it, lad?' chortled Dalziel. 'Here's something to put you back in. I've just been talking to Sammy Locke at the Post.'
    'There's been a call?' said Pascoe eagerly.
    'I knew that'd please you, Peter. You reckon you'll get the bugger through these calls, don't you? Well, best of luck. There's two of the sods  at it now!'
    He was wrong.
    By the time Pascoe got home that night there'd been four Hamlet calls.
    The first, at four-forty-two, said, Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch  thick, to this favour she must come.
    The second, at five-twenty-three, said, One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
    The third, at six-fifteen, said, To be, or not to be, that is the question.
    The fourth, at seven-nine, said, The time is out of joint: - 0 cursed spite, that ever I was born to set  it right.
    Ellie, for a change, was in bright good spirits and  Pascoe was so pleased to see this that he restricted  himself to no more than a forty degree roll of the  eyeballs when she announced that she was now the  membership secretary of WRAG. In any case, she seemed much more keen to talk about the Choker.
    'These phone calls. Are they really going to be  any use?'
    'We don't have much else,' said Pascoe, tucking  into his re-heated beef and mushroom pie. 'But  they can't all be the Choker. Sammy Locke's memory of the first voice is a bit vague. He  reckons that two, possibly three, of this lot are  not so very different from it.'
    'You've got all today's calls on tape, you say,'  said Ellie. 'What you want is a language expert to  listen to them.'
    'Good thinking,' said Pascoe, who'd already made the suggestion to Dalziel but wasn't about to be a clever-sticks. 'Anyone in mind?'
    'Well, there's Dicky Gladmann and Drew Urquhart at the College. They impress their students by  working out regional and social backgrounds by  voice analysis.'
    'And are they right?'
    'One hundred per cent usually, I gather. But I think they probably check the records first. Still, they're certainly incomprehensible enough to be  good linguists.'
    Pascoe finished his pie, drew breath and started  in on the apple crumble, also warmed up.
    She wants me to get fat too! he suddenly thought.
    'I'll give them a try. Though they're probably enjoying their little vacation in Acapulco,' he said.  'By the way, you never said, how did la Lacewing respond to your theory about the medium  message?'
    Thought it was a load of crap,' said Ellie  moodily.
    'Did she now? Well well. Let me have the transcript back, won't you?'
    'Yes. And she got pretty close to embarrassing me by talking about you being in charge of  the case.'
    That embarrasses you?'
    'Of course not. No, I mean she was trying to put down some loud-mouthed, fellow called  Middlefield, he's a JP or something, thinks all  murdered women are ipso facto whores. I tell  you what was interesting, though. I gathered  the fellow he was talking to was the manager of  the bank where that other girl worked. The one  on the tape. Or not.'
    'Brenda Sorby. Now that is interesting,' said  Pascoe.
    Later as they lay in bed, Ellie said drowsily. This  poor woman at the fairground. You say she was Rosetta Stanhope's