Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill

spectres at the feast,  that is.'
    'Not at all. Good, that's settled. It's just a cold collation on Saturdays, but I'd better go and get  things organized before I change.'
    She was wearing slacks and a chunky sweater and looked wind-blown, as if she had just returned  from some fairly active outdoor activity.
    'May I help?' asked Ellie.
    'Why not?' she said with a smile. 'How are  you at carving? Hartley's a near-vegetarian and doesn't take kindly to sawing up chunks of dead  animals.'
    'Are you interested in porcelain?' asked Culpepper when the two men were alone.
    'I know little about it,' answered Pascoe cautiously. More therapy? he wondered. From Dalziel's  burglars to Culpepper's culture. I must appear all  things to all men.
    'My own knowledge is very limited,’ said Culpepper modestly. 'Come and see my few pieces.'
    He rose, led Pascoe across the entrance hall and unlocked a solid-looking oak door. When he  opened it, Pascoe was surprised to see a metal  grille, rather like the expanding doors used in  old-fashioned lifts. Culpepper inserted another key  and the grille slid back of its own accord.
    Whether the value of the collection justified  these elaborate precautions Pascoe could not say. The pieces were magnificently displayed. There  were no windows in the room and the walls were  broken by a series of different sized niches which  held the porcelain. Each niche had its own light,  controlled separately so that it was possible to  centre the attention completely on each of the  pieces in turn. The only free-standing pieces were  two large capped urns which occupied plinths in  the middle of the room. They were decorated in  the Chinese style but Culpepper assured Pascoe  that they were late eighteenth-century English  imitations.
    'Out of place here, really,' he said. 'But they  were the first things I ever bought when I discovered I had enough money to start buying.'
    'How much is it all worth?' was all Pascoe could  find to say.
    'Oh, several thousands,' said Culpepper vaguely.  'Much of it is not what the experts might call  first-rate. But to me it is irreplaceable and therefore  invaluable.'
    He led the way out, crashing the grille door  locked behind him.
    'Valuable or not, I wish more people would take  the precautions you do with their property,' said  Pascoe, thinking of the ease with which his current  burglar had been helping himself to small fortune.  This time last night he had been working on the  case. It seemed barely credible.
    Dinner went quite well. Ellie and Marianne  seemed to have taken to each other, though  Pascoe would not have seen either as the other's  'type'. The guests, John and Sandra Bell, were a  pleasant enough couple in their mid-thirties, he  extrovert, outspoken, nearly hearty; she pretty, much quieter but far from subdued. The name  touched a chord in Pascoe's mind. But it was  only when the conversation, carefully vetted  and censored for his and Ellie's benefit, came  round to the local water pollution controversy  that he recalled noticing Bell's name in the  Amenities Committee minutes. He was a staunch  down-streamer, and complained bitterly that the  village brook was being polluted upstream by  careless management of the cesspool drainage which many of the local properties still relied on.  Culpepper, eating an egg mayonnaise with green  salad, pushed his plate away from him with an  expression of distaste.
    'John, please,' said Mrs Bell. 'You're making Hartley nauseous and must be boring his visitors stiff.'
    'I'm sorry,’ said Bell, grinning at Ellie. 'Forgive  me. It's all right for the idle rich on this side of the village. They can be objective. But that  stream runs at the bottom of my garden and  I've got a young son. He catches enough without  getting typhoid. But never fear. I have a plan. The next Amenities Committee meeting may get  a surprise.'
    He winked conspiratorially as Marianne began clearing